tmp_48d41530aaad86c106555e2e52630fd9_VLf2O0.fixed.tidied

by Scott Andrews

  And then Caroline was back, pressing into his hand something heavy wrapped in cloth. “My opera glasses,” she whispered. “They’re very fine. Father had them custom made. Now, let us go before someone wakes.”

  Clutching the bundle, Jabey followed her down hallway and stairs, where he waited while Caroline draped a dark cloak over her nightie. Then she led him past the kitchen and though a side door that she closed behind her.

  “How do we get there?” she said.

  For a moment he only stared at her, this rich girl just asking to be nabbed and ransomed. And then he shrugged and took out the paper he’d pulled from the ganger kid’s unwilling fingers. On it were the quick-drawn figures—a gemstone inked in crimson and three bronze lamps.

  “What curious pictures,” Caroline said. “What are they?”

  “That’s the street,” Jabey said, pointing to the gem. “I don’t know what the other’s for.”

  He didn’t want to go. Now, with the bundle heavy in his hand and the figures on the paper to direct him, he wanted to drop it all and run, below maybe, to make his home with the rats.

  But Yol’d find him, even if another runner didn’t turn him in. He had to come up sometime. Jabey fingered his neck, the scars there reminding him of matters more pressing than old memories—or tagalong istocrat girls.

  “Let’s go,” he muttered.

  At the drain Caroline balked, peering down between the bars. “Is it safe?”

  He lowered himself to the ground and shimmied through the gap. “Safe is in your rich house. Go back if you want.”

  A pause, and then she was scrabbling down beside him.

  ~ ~ ~

  Once he had to pull her aside into a crumbling outlet when he heard the telltale of a runner scrambling past, ferrying message or cargo. Another time he took her hand and they ran by a sideway and the squeaking rats nested there. Caroline didn’t let go of him after they were past.

  Eventually she said, “I don’t understand why you like it here.”

  “Like? I got no say in it. Go up above, the real men’ll catch me, right enough.”

  “Are they—are they worse than the things down here?”

  “Only the ones that’d like to beat me. Or shoot me. Or lock me up for being a runt.”

  “A runt?”

  “A tinyman.”

  She shivered next to him, from his words or from the chill. “It sounds like Father,” she said. “I’m sorry we’re like that.”

  “Sorry?” He choked back a laugh. “You’re a rich muck’s little girl. What do you care?”

  “I care. It’s not good manners, or good sense either, to provoke fairy-folk. Besides, I’m rather more like them than most, don’t you think? I’m so small. I asked Father once if my mother was a fairy. I thought that might account for it.”

  “And?” Jabey said, after a pause.

  “And she wasn’t, I suppose. Anyway, Father was terribly angry. I think he was afraid. That’s why I want to go with you. Father’s afraid of something to do with Faerie, and I want to know what it is.”

  “Better you be afraid too, then.”

  “Perhaps, but I’m not.”

  “Not even now?”

  A couple of deep breaths beside him, and then, “No. Not even now.”

  And then they were crossing a plank into a sewer line he’d never run before. At the next storm drain he had to sniff at the sluggish air and listen to faraway drips before he could decide the turn to take. The air was stranger here; through the familiar sewage stench floated other odors—bitter, sick-sweet, acrid. The drain holes were few and their bars sturdy, though every so often they passed port doors in the tunnel sides, all clamped shut.

  At a drain hole with two broken bars Jabey climbed up loose bricks and gingerly pushed his way out.

  “Is it Faerie?” asked Caroline.

  “Shh!” he hissed as he stared at the street beyond.

  Belying its name, the dark quarter was radiant with the colored glow of dozens of windows. Draped in costumes sublime and hideous, men and women lurched past the windows and burst from wide-swinging doors. Above painted faces there sprouted plumage half again as high as their bodies, and tails of lizards and tigers and peacocks swept behind them.

  Caroline pushed up beside Jabey. “It is Faerie,” she breathed, staring at the spectacle. “Guess you’re seeing things after all,” Jabey said, still looking. Something in the crowd’s loose swagger was familiar. “They’re soaked. Come on. They got no eyes for us.”

  Bright-hued lanterns lined the streets on both sides, leaving no shadows in which to hide. Instead Jabey and Caroline wound their way amongst the revelers, who were too busy singing, shouting, and spilling pungent brew on one another to pay them any attention. The street ended in a wall disguised by some means of gauze and foam. Jabey boosted Caroline to the top and climbed over himself, and on the other side all was stillness and darkness again, save only for plain yellow streetlamps and the occasional candle in an upstairs window.

  At the first cross street dim lamps shone green and gold—emerald, and perhaps topaz, Caroline said. They followed Emerald until they came to lamps of deep crimson that Caroline opined were garnet. They settled the question of which direction the “3rd lamp” should be counted from by starting off in one direction “until we reach the end—then we can count coming back.” But they didn’t need to. A few blocks before the street lost itself in labyrinthine alleyways, they came to a shop front with bright windows and three lamps glowing over the door.

  Jabey looked at Caroline, shook his head. “I know this kind of place. It’s a gang lair—or a club, I guess. They got plenty of uses for a little rich’s daughter, and you wouldn’t like any of them.”

  “But this is Faerie,” she said. “I can’t stop just because I’m afraid. Besides, you said you have business? Then surely you have safe passage—and I shall, too, in your company.”

  “Not this time,” he said. “Here, get out of the light.” He pointed behind a rubbish barrel. Scowling, Caroline huddled in its shadow.

  “Now don’t move. You’re staying out here and hiding until I get back. Or don’t you want to go home sometime?” As she began to reply, he turned and stalked up to the door.

  No one stopped him; few even turned to look as he came in. He was put in mind of Rat Hold, but it was not the same. Where Rat Hold’s walls displayed skin-clad women in garish colors, these walls were paneled in wood. Rat Hold’s tables were sopping with cheap beer by this hour, but here were only single glasses of a reddish drink, some still half-full, with no evidence anywhere of bottles or kegs. And in Rat Hold at this moment there were surely the personal posses of two or three or even more of the thug chiefs, each jovial or surly as the booze took him. Here the faces all were somber.

  He stared for so long that someone glanced at him and said, “You’ve brought a message?”

  “Sloan.” he mumbled. “I’m looking for Sloan.”

  Soon the sneering half-grown kid from the square was chivvying him along through the tables, through the thick sweeping curtains, and into an alcove behind another curtain, even thicker, so that when it was drawn to behind him the outside murmur was hushed.

  Another moment, and the curtain swept open and closed again around a thin, pale-faced man in a suit and a string tie. He eyed Jabey from beneath stark black eyebrows and motioned him to a circle of chairs around a low table.

  “You realize you are in a peculiar position?” the man said. “The number of individuals beginning their employment in this district after the age of five or six years is remarkably small.” One eyebrow arched. “Much like the number of tinymen at liberty to seek employment.”

  “‘At liberty’ is a manner of speaking, Mister,” Jabey said, lifting his chin.

  “I thought it might be,” said Sloan. “If I may?”

  Jabey shivered as Sloan’s cool fingers brushed against his neck, pausing at the scars. “I was lackey boy to a ganger named Yol for a long while.”
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br />   “Until quite recently, I would guess.”

  Jabey met his eyes. “Yeah.”

  Sloan dropped his hand and nodded as if this were expected. “If you would show me the item you brought—the token, as it were, of your eagerness to join my enterprise.”

  It came to Jabey that he’d never looked at these glasses in proper light; what if they were just a cheap shiny? But the sudden sharp panic receded as he pulled them from his pocket and unwrapped the linen. They were indeed a tiny pair of opera glasses, with a simplicity and a heft about them that suggested expense.

  “How very interesting,” said Sloan, taking them from him. “You understand that I do not personally secure raw material?” he said. “And of course, if the child is dead or grown they are only a token, but even so. . . .”

  Caroline. They were Caroline’s glasses.

  Jabey’s nails dug into his palms. A ‘token,’ right. And he was a tinyman, he knew what good tokens were to the dark quarter’s shapers-flesh, what manner of gimmickry they could do without even touching a person, so long as they had a handkerchief or a snip of hair. Stupid muck, what’d he been thinking? Not thinking, that was it.

  Sloan was patting at his pockets, finally bringing out an instrument with a gauge at its end, scented faintly of oil. He held the instrument to the glasses. “The child is indeed alive. Yet the reading is irregular. . . .” He frowned and pulled a different gauge from his pocket, this one with tines jutting from its end, and held the glasses beneath the tines. “You are either a fool or far more subtle than I guessed.”

  Had it been any old gang chief maybe Jabey’s bravado could have held, but it melted under Sloan’s glare. “Mister, I guess I’m a fool, because I got no idea what you’re saying.”

  “Haven’t you?” But it didn’t sound like an accusation.

  And then the curtain opened and a man huge but blank-eyed stood there, his massive hand engulfing Caroline’s. A bogey. He intoned, “Delamander says, ‘This girl says she’s with your visitor.’”

  “Increasingly curious,” said Sloan. “Leave her here. Tell Delamander, ‘Sloan says, “Post an alert, and keep an eye on the borders. Security is over-loose.”‘“

  The man walked out.

  “Young lady, if you will kindly sit beside your associate here. May I ask how you come to be here, and with what purpose?”

  Caroline curtsied and sat. “Mr. Jabey brought me, sir. We made a bargain. I gave him my opera glasses”—she pointed—”and he brought me to his country.”

  “His country?”

  “She thinks I’m an elf or such-like,” said Jabey miserably.

  “And I always wanted so much to visit Faerie.”

  “Faerie, indeed,” said Sloan. “May I ask your name?”

  “Caroline Elisabeth Morrowbridge, sir.”

  “Morrowbridge. Morrowbridge—I could vow I was familiar with the name. Your parents. . . ?”

  “My father’s Jonathan Standish Morrowbridge. My mother was Ellen Gainsborough before she married Father, but she’d dead now.”

  “Morrowbridge. Of course. And it explains the peculiar reading.” Sloan glanced at his instrument. “Not peculiar at all, actually. What a marvelous coincidence it all is, don’t you agree?”

  Caroline sat at the edge of her chair, silent, eyes bright. Jabey shook his head. “Look here, Mr. Sloan, I’m looking for a place to courie, as you like, and any other odd bits a tinyman might do. I didn’t mean nothing by bringing you those bungy glasses, nor by bringing this girl here, either, which I sure didn’t mean to do. If you’ve no mind to tell, that’s fine by me, sir, but just you know I don’t know nothing you don’t tell me.”

  Sloan raised an eyebrow. “A wise attitude—a pity more don’t take it.” He turned to Caroline. “Perhaps you would enjoy a tour of Faerie?”

  What about the job, Jabey wanted to ask. Was he in? Did he even want to be in? Gangers were no cheerful companions, but they were as good as kin next to clubbers, who were known for being sheer uncanny—which seemed a fair enough estimate of Sloan.

  Not that he’d a choice between Sloan and any old ganger. It was Sloan or Yol.

  He followed them out reluctantly, twitching at every sound behind him.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sloan led them through warehouse rooms full of rabbits, rooms where goats bawled and lank-tailed monkeys screeched. He gave Caroline an apple to feed a pair of sheep bleating and milling in their pen. He led them strolling through laboratories thick with the same sharp odors that filled the sewers below.

  Jabey scanned each new room for familiar benches or shelves, for the particular water-stained ceiling that he remembered clearest of anything in this place because he’d spent so much time staring up at it, months and months as they drained the growth out of him.

  Finally they came to the room he knew, the high-beamed laboratory crowded with benches, instruments, and rows of vats. Sloan swept his hand towards one and said, “And here, as you can see, is how we begin the process of making tinyman.”

  Caroline turned to Sloan, eyes huge. “You make them?”

  “Certainly. Your associate Mr. Jabey was destined to be a full-sized man, once.”

  Jabey jammed his fists deeper in his pockets. He dared not look in the vat, where the baby slept. This part of the dark quarter he knew quite well; could never unknow, however he’d like to. The bogeys standing over the vats were the same that had tended him, the huge mindless men who spoke only others’ words. They’d never spoken any to him.

  “Then how did you make him small?” Caroline was saying.

  “We’ve certain methods that we find quite satisfactory.”

  “Trade secrets,” Jabey said, amazed at the mildness in his voice. “They don’t tell outside folk.”

  “The techniques would bore you,” said Sloan. “However, the principle is simple enough. You, as a living entity, enjoy certain quantities of which you are almost surely unaware: quantities such as the general health of your body, the amount of growth you will experience over your lifetime, the vast complicated sum of your intelligence.

  “Imagine yourself a beaker.” He dipped a nearby glass in the vat’s blue fluid. “Here you are. And here is something else—something entirely lifeless, completely inanimate.” He held up another glass, empty. “What a simple matter it is to pour some of you into some of it.” Fluid sloshed into the empty glass. “A tinyman was a full glass once, but we poured most of his growth into something else. . . useful.”

  What sort of useful? What was it they’d cheated him to make?

  And what was this ache in his hands, as though they would snap out and strangle Sloan of their own accord?

  “You mean Mr. Jabey is an ordinary man? He’s only—” Caroline paused, searching for the word. “He’s only made?” She peered around at Jabey, eyes glimmering with tears. “He isn’t of the fairy-folk?”

  Sloan didn’t seem to hear. “There is one more thing I should particularly like to show you, Ms. Morrowbridge,” he said. “This way, please.”

  Caroline gave Jabey a last forsaken look and followed, turning her head away when he caught up to her. He buried his hands in his pockets and stomped ahead. Dumb rich’s girl, he shouldn’t oughta expect anything else from her.

  Beyond was another hallway lined with doors, in each a window criss-crossed with bars. At one of these Sloan set a wide, shallow-stepped ladder and held Caroline’s hand as she climbed it. Jabey pushed up beside her.

  Through the window was a child’s nursery, very small, wallpapered and wood-floored and carpeted with a colorful rug. In the bed slept a girl somewhat smaller than Caroline.

  “Why is she here?” Caroline said.

  “A man has requested a simulacrum of his late beloved,” said Sloan. “We procured an unwanted girl infant, and have since been molding her flesh in the desired pattern. But of course she would grow at the rate of any ordinary child if we did not supplement that growth with, shall we say, the contents of someone else’s beaker.”r />
  “So you shall have another tinyman?”

  “Who can say? Human growth is costly. This man offered us a source of his own, rather than pay the fee we asked, and we must extract the growth indirectly, via tokens and potions—an inefficient method. Perhaps he will decide sometime soon that the usual growth rate is sufficient.” A slight cough. “I am not sure he will even see the project through. He is rather a nervous man.”

  Jabey looked at the sleeping girl, doubtless accustomed to her tiny world and the people staring at its window. He had been her once—only he had never grown, and she would. Maybe. So someone else would be the tinyman. . . .