The Culture (IX.)

Rhiel's house was always humid with bodies: tattooed and slump-jawed gargoyles sitting sentinel on a bare mattress on the floor, watching with glazed hunger while others sat at the edge of Rhiel's computer desk rolling blunts that they dipped and passed. Their women lay about them in the smoke, hunched over their pregnant bellies and bitching for empty bottles in which to flick tufts of ash. They did not speak but with each other. They had grown there, shadows of the den.