It always seemed to end up the same when she sought her own pleasure – something very different from when she was merely doing it for the money. Her job made it hard for her to meet normal men, certainly stopped her having a decent relationship. Her visible disfigurement didn’t help either, that blistering down the right side of her face.

But this was her night off, and she had wanted a fling to make her feel better. She so much wanted to feel close to someone, had wanted that for so long.

In her younger days, she had known the world was cruel, how people judged you by first appearances. How that childlike prejudice against the unnatural could continue into adulthood as people merely found a way of better hiding their revulsions.

She pushed herself off him slowly, and then reached for her dressing gown. Walking over to the window, she looked out across the spires and bridges of Villjamur as if she was now trying to put the greatest possible distance between the two of them. In the opposite corner of the room, covered canvases of various sizes were stacked against the wall. She could still smell the chemicals from the painting she had begun yesterday evening.

‘Wow,’ he said at last. ‘By Bohr, you’re amazing.’

She now gazed at the bruised skies hanging over the city, the last of the rain driving lightly across its architecture. Lifting the window sash, she could hear a cart being drawn across the cobbles, could smell the scent of larix trees from the forest to the north. She looked up and down Cartanu Gata and the Gata Sentimental, alongside the art gallery – a place where she doubted her own paintings would ever hang. People merged with shadows, as if they became one. Directly under her window, a man stumbled in and out of her vision, his sword scraping against the wall. For some reason she couldn’t understand, each of these qualities of the city merely heightened her sense of loneliness.

‘Your body… I mean, you move so well,’ he was saying, still praising her performance like they often did when it was clear they had little in common.

She eventually spoke. ‘Tundra.’

‘Sorry?’

‘In the tavern, last night – the lines you used to get me back here. I suppose politicians are good with words. You said my body is like the tundra. You said I had perfect, smooth white skin, like drifts of snow. You even said that my breasts are as dramatic as the crests of snow banks. You admired my breasts and my smooth skin. You said I was like ice incarnate. Yes, you fed me lines as awful as that. But what about my face?’

She immediately ran her hand along her terrible scar.

‘I said you’re a very attractive woman.’

‘Horses can be attractive, councillor.’ She glanced back at him. ‘But what’s my face like?’

‘Your face is lovely, Tuya.’

‘Lovely?’

‘Yes.’

He lifted his head up to take a better look at her as she dropped her gown to the floor. She knew what his reactions would be as the dreary light seemed to gather momentum on her bare skin. She reached over to a tabletop, picked up a roll-up of arum weed, but she waited until certain he was no longer looking at her before she lit it. The intense smell of its smoke wafted across the room, drifted out the window.

Still in vague shadow to his vision, she walked over to the bed, offered him the weed. He involuntarily grabbed her wrist, rubbed it gently between his fingers and thumb. His gaze was weak-willed and pathetic.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘Delicious.’

‘Prove it, Councillor Ghuda,’ she said, climbing on his smile, watching him submit.

The roll-up fell to the floor, exploding ashes across the tiles.

Later, when he had fallen asleep again, she thought about their conversation just before he drifted off.

He talked a lot, which was unusual for a man after sex. She reflected deeply on what he had said, about the details that he had gone into.

He had shocked her.

A man in his important position should surely refrain from talking so much, but he was probably still rather drunk. They had been drinking vodka for much of the dawn. He didn’t leave her until the sun was higher in the vermilion sky, the city fully awake, and her breath sour from alcohol. When he did, there was no fond goodbye, no intimate gesture. He had simply slipped on his Council robes and walked out the door.

But it wasn’t his casual exit that caused her upset, it was the words he had spoken before he slept, those simple statements he had maybe or maybe not meant seriously.

Already his words were haunting her.

Afterwards, as he did frequently, Councillor Ghuda imagined his own cuckolding.

Four years ago it had started, four years since he realized that he couldn’t invest all his emotions in one person, in his wife. He had caught her, Beula, in bed with her lips at work on a soldier from the Dragoons, and the image pursued him – his personal poltergeist – constantly undermining him. His sense of value in the world hung in the air like an unanswered question, and as a man he was unmade.

Sleeping with prostitutes helped his state of mind.

It was a fantasy, at first, an escape – then something more, a need for tenderness and cheap thrills with another woman. When he lost himself in the bad lines and the awkward over-stylized gestures, he managed to scramble something of an identity together. After the act, the women he paid for would watch him absent-mindedly whilst wiping themselves down with a towel to remove any traces of him from their body. These women would not love him, and the words they spoke were not their own, but Tuya, the woman from last night, seemed almost genuinely affectionate, as if in Villjamur, a city of introverts, two introverts could find a sense of belonging – if only for a night.

Ghuda looked up as the skies cleared, red sunlight now skidding off the wet cobbles, and the streets appeared to rust. He stepped from the shelter of the doorway into the relative brightness of the morning. He needed to get to the Council Spire to start the day’s work.

Whether it was a symptom of his guilt, he didn’t know, but he felt certain he was being watched. He never requested a guard to escort him anywhere, in fact usually slipped away before one might appear.

There was much to deal with for the day ahead. Primarily he had to deal with the increasing refugee problems: the labourers from elsewhere that were flocking to Villjamur to survive the coming ice age.

People were heading to the various irens to trade and shop, overseen by soldiers from the Regiment of Foot, who patrolled along the streets in pairs. It was a trenchant policy of safety he’d personally initiated to ease the citizens’ concern in these anxious times. You didn’t want general panic to set in, even though the public fear of crime was more intense than its current levels actually warranted.

Up the winding roads and passageways, he continued.

On the way he encountered an elderly man sitting on a stool with a sign beside him that said ‘Scribe – Discretion Guaranteed’. With one palm resting flat on the small table to one side, he sipped a steaming drink with a contented look on his face. There were quite a few of these men around the city, writing love letters or death threats on behalf of those who couldn’t write themselves, including those whose fingers had been broken by the Inquisition. Ghuda speculated on what he might write to Tuya, the redhead he had just spent the night with. What would he say to her? That he would like to fuck her some more because she was so good at it? That was hardly the basis of an ongoing relationship.

The incline had become a strain on Ghuda’s legs, so for a while he rested on a pile of logs heaped outside one of the terraced houses. Again, he had the uneasy sensation that someone was watching him. He looked around at the quiet streets, then up at the bridges. Perhaps someone was looking down at him.