Guernica is a small resort town on Whale-Fish Island, on the southern shore of the Arfean Strait. In distant, glorious times, Guernica grew around Bezdez, one of the Delta’s oldest scholarly monasteries, or universities. It built itself a beautiful town hall of carved stone and set a silver spire with a golden cuckoo upon its high tower. But after the monks and students of Bezdez were accused of studying forbidden forces and properties, the university was closed and abandoned, and Guernica swiftly declined. In the 820s the Children’s Sea came to the city walls and stopped directly beneath Vasily I Street, which consequently became an embankment.

In the 870s the prince of Yavros, Professor Yavorov, revived the university at Bezdez and opened an adjoining clinic for people with severe disorders of the soul. Its patients and visitors included famous, wealthy, and noble figures from all over Varvarossa. Guernica flourished again, becoming a fashionable health resort with expensive sanatoria beside the milky-blue waters of the Children’s Sea. The reverse of these happy changes was a new, proverbial meaning for the city’s name. Now, when something appeared beautiful and prosperous but contained madness and darkness within, people said meaningfully, ‘That’s Guernica.’ And if things looked bad even on the surface, they said, ‘That’s Bezdez.’

‘Jelly Shores’

A café at 2 Vasily I Street, Guernica. The Shores served four kinds of ice cream: chocolate, pistachio, ‘zo-zoi’, and plombir. It stood on the edge of town, at the end of the street, with its ‘back’ to a spruce thicket and its shop window facing the open sea. There Lefty could wait for a chance meeting with Margarita.