Diana was upside-down. It was as if she were suspended by her feet, but she was utterly still. She was not facing him, so he could see her bare white back, the narrow taper of its ribcage and delicate shoulder blades standing out. He could not imagine her face, no matter how much he tried to fix it in his mind. Her hair was down, a great river of spider-silk against the velvet dark; he reached out and took a lock of it in his hand, gentle, watching it sift through his fingertips. Then he came closer and, weaving both his hands through her hair, buried his face in it, breathing in the scent of rose oil and laudanum.
“Anatole,” she said in a distant and muffled voice, “this is not your dream.”
The light extinguished itself and Diana with it, and the blackness that swept over him was warm and damp like a cellar. The smell of laudanum turned to oudh, then to dirt, then coppery like blood or sulfur or both; without knowing what, he felt the shadow of something fall over him, felt someone come to stand behind him with soundless bare feet. Little breaths on the back of his neck, stirring his hair. The smell of gore was strong enough to gag him.
Cold hands with slender fingers slipped over his. They took his wrists with practiced firmness and raised his arms in front of him. “You forsook all this,” said a woman’s voice. “Why?”
“Wasn’t mine,” he murmured, not sure what he was talking about.
The little fingers knit through his, moved his hands in the air with delicate motions. “I can show you how to do what you’ve forgotten. It’s quite easy.” He strained to see, but there was no light at all. “It doesn’t matter who you were. You’re one of us: your hands and tongue remember, even if your soul does not.”
“I feel sick.”
“It’s because you’re guilty.” The voice now sounded peculiarly like the Constable Inspector’s, and the fingers gripped his hands hard enough to bruise them. “You’re a guilty degenerate, and you’re living on borrowed time. But you’re no wick, you’re no passive – you’re no damn plowfoot anymore. You’ve picked your bed, and yet you continually refuse to lie in it. It’s time you started acting like what you are.”
“I’m not anything. I can’t do anything.”
“Clearly.”
His breath caught in his throat and he retched, trying to wrest himself free. A crack split the air – the hands wrenched his hard enough to break his wrists. Gestures in the dark. His head spun, and he was aware that his lips were moving, that he was speaking some language he couldn’t understand. He felt the air sink, felt his lungs flutter and draw in something greasy and thick. Then he felt a million eyes on him, like the fabric of the universe had turned its attention to him, and the air was conflagration – the smell of burning flesh, his own –
Thomas’ apartment was dim; the shutters were closed tight, the moth-eaten drapes drawn so that only a few slats of dim, shifting light writhed on the floorboards. He’d tumbled out of the bed and caught himself on the chair, back bruised from the jabbing springs, muscles tight and spasming. There was a grimy metal bowl sitting on the chair – this wasn’t the first bad night he’d had – and he promptly vomited into it. His hands fumbled white-knuckled on the edges of the wooden seat.
“Clock it,” he choked, gasping and fumbling his way back to the bed, where he sat hunched over his knees. “I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of this city. I gotta go. I gotta go.”
I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta – He whispered the mantra to the half-light, whispered it till he stopped quaking in his bones. How? He had enough ging squirreled away under the bed by now, surely. Take a ship on the Arova, straight down to Old Rose. Figure out where to go after that. Stow away somewhere if he had to. Clocking swim to Hox, if that was his only option.
He spread out his hands on his knees, looking at them. He tried to picture them in the midst of alien gesticulation, tried to hear himself speaking parlor tricks, summoning up sparks. Making sense of the chicken-scratch in that book he’d taken. The one that was under the bed, now, under the box of money.
Butterflies in his stomach. Was it fear, or was it something else?
He had to get some fresh air. He ambled over to the window, banging his shin against the cabinet in the process and hissing profanities under his breath. With wild hands he swept aside the drapes, flung open the shutters, felt the whip of winter sting his face –
– and came face to face with the old woman who lived just across the street. She was sitting in her own open window, spinning, and because of the leaning tenements their apartments were barely two feet apart. She busied herself about her work, but for just a second as he opened the window, he saw her leaned out, as if she were listening. His lips twitched and peeled back from his yellowing teeth, and he snarled in Anatole’s most authoritative baritone, “Get the fuck out of my business. For once in your clock-stopping, miserable life.”
She was up and had slammed the shutters in moments.
Scrunching himself up so he’d fit, he hauled himself up onto the lip of the window, leaning his shoulders out into the cold and lighting a cigarette. Looking down onto the streets below, onto the few pitiful natti scurrying out in the morning shadows, scurrying through the dimness in their rags. He blew smoke out into the brisk breeze, frowned down. Little people doing little things.
Little people who were born and lived and died, who were born again, who lived again, who died again.
“Alioe hates me. They all do,” he murmured between drags. “Well. I hate them, too.” Then he started laughing – feverish, mirthless giggling – laughing so hard he nearly dropped his smoke.
He’d spent the last of his money arranging this, instead of catching the earliest boat to Old Rose. He’d reasoned it out in his head – ultimately, what else was he going to do? – but it wasn’t so much a matter of reasoning; he wasn’t going to fill the gaping hole inside himself in Old Rose, or in Bastia, or in any other place he’d disappear to. He certainly wasn’t going to fill it in the Soot District. Tom Cooke had only ever known one way of life, and he couldn’t see himself doing anything else. He’d puzzled over it for awhile, planned out which palms to grease, thought long and hard over what to write (and whom to pay to write it, since his handwriting left a lot to be desired). The path was full of variables, but the destination wasn’t. In all that time, there was no doubt about the kov Tom wanted, ultimately, to get in touch with.
There was only one man – golly, to be precise – that fit all Tom’s needs to a tee. He couldn’t go waltzing to any of his human and wick contacts, not looking like this, and he certainly couldn’t rub elbows with galdori high society. Once you narrowed it all down, his options started looking blonder and more nine-fingered by the minute. That was the way things were. He didn’t like it none, but he couldn’t think of anybody else who straddled the line with quite so much finesse.
He’d managed to arrange the meeting at the Toy Lantern, on a chilly night in mid-Achtus (when he’d heard the toft was going to be in town). He’d cleaned himself up as much as he could – he’d worn his best, if still plain, clothes; he’d tied back his hair, given himself a clean shave. He thought he still looked like a pale shadow of Vauquelin, like a Vauquelin that had crawled out of his grave and propped himself up in a chair, but that couldn’t be helped.
Now Cooke sat tucked away in a corner of the Lantern’s interior, breathing in the scents of incense and tobacco; in the dense smoke, he could see candlelight-limned shapes of patrons bent over their glasses, sprawled on the floor on pillows and thick-woven Mugrobi rugs, sharing shisha pipes. Nearby, a woman – a wick, Tom wagered, by her sky-blue hair – stared at a candleflame, pupils unfocused, tracing the lip of a glass of chan with one finger.
On the stage, surrounded by stirring lanterns and a mesmerized band, a woman with a pile of blonde hair – it glistened like spider-silk in the gloom, like something from a dream – sang in an unusually, but pleasingly, deep voice. She danced, and her slim, dark dress danced with her.
Only to hear echoes in reply.
Darling, I remain, in solitude and pain
And all Vienda now can hear me cry...”
An old classic, but the band was playing Mugrobi instruments: he saw an ’oud and a qānūn, and some others that he didn’t recognize. Her voice lilted pleasantly around some sort of flute. Tom was sitting in wait, smoking and sipping Jeodre – enough to make him a little looser, a little less tense, than he usually was – and watching her sing.
On the table, beside the candle, sat a box of cigars – wrapped pleasantly with a little ribbon.
He took another drag on his cigarette, blew out smoke – then saw somebody approaching through the gloom. A familiar shape, he reckoned. Leaning forward, he waved the smoke away, raising his glass in greeting. “Far’ye?” He gave a thin, hard little smile, then gestured broadly at himself. “You know who I am? I reckon I can give you three guesses, but the first two don’t count. Go ahead and gawk, if you like. Everyone does.”
He scooted the cigar box forward a couple of inches.
“Hessean. Little birdie told me you’re fond of these in particular. Like to be considerate.”