by Dan Abnett
The place was busy, thronging with patrons, many of whom had come through from the dining room to take a digestif after their supper. The air was full of voices and the waft of obscura smoke, but it was not lively, like a city tavern, or the busy dining hall without. There was a reserve here, a languor, as though these conversations were slow and involved matters of philosophy rather than the empty blather of drinkers finding evening recreation. Servitors, worked in brass and robed in green, weaved through the throng, serving trays of drinks and platters of food.
We took a booth to the side from where we could observe a decent part of the lounge. A servitor brought us joiliq in small, patterned glasses, and small plates of griddled gannek smeared with mustard, and kethfruit flesh dipped in salt.
We watched.
I was intrigued by the clientele and their heady conversations.
‘Is that Crookley?’ I asked, eyeing a heavyset man who was sitting beneath a painting of the Tetrachtys, locked in conversation with a small woman in grey.
‘No,’ Eisenhorn replied. ‘Crookley is taller, less meat on him.’
I am skilled at observation. It was part of my training. While caring to maintain the role of the prim young lady Violetta Flyde, I scanned the crowd, noting this visage and that, seeing whom I might recognise, and who it might be useful to recognise on another day. I saw a bearded caravan master from the Herrat, holding forth with three men – one who seemed to be a meek scholam master, another who was clearly a humble rubricator from his ink-stained hands, and a third who would not have seemed out of place at the head of a Heckaty Parish killgang.
At another table, three nurse-sisters from the Feygate Lazarhouse sat in silence, sharing a bottle of mint wine, identical in their tight-belted grey serge habits and white coifs. They did not speak or look at each other, and their tired faces read blank. I wondered if they were here by mistake, or if this was simply their nearest hostelry, and they tolerated the decadent society each evening for the sake of a restorative drink.
Beside the bar stood an elderly man with quite the longest arms and legs I have seen. He gangled awkwardly, as if he had never quite mastered the lengths to which his skinny frame had grown. He was dressed in a dark tailcoat and trousers, and peered through a silver pince-nez as he scribbled in a notebook. Alongside him at the bar, but apparently not of the elderly man’s company, for they exchanged no words, sat a small, sad old man who was evidently blind. He sipped at drinks that the bartender slid into his grasp so he might find them.
I noted many others. I noted, too, any indication of weapons on their persons: a bulging pocket here, an underbelt there, a stiffness of posture that hinted at a concealed knife-girdle or disguised holster. I had no expectation that the evening would turn untoward, but if it did, I had already mapped the dangers, and knew from which directions threats would come.
Just before the lights started to flash, I saw two people at the side door, talking urgently. One was a young gentleman of means in a pinstriped suit and over-robe. The other was a woman in a rust-coloured gown. I was drawn by the quiet animation of their conversation. Though I could not hear the words, their manner was somewhat agitated, as if some serious personal matter was being discussed that was quite different in tone from the meandering debate in the rest of the salon.
The woman made a gesture of refusal, then turned to leave by the side door. The man took her arm – gently – to dissuade her, but she shook him off and stepped out. As she passed beneath the low lamp of the side door, I saw her profile, and felt at once that I knew her from somewhere.
But then she was out, and gone into the street, and the salon lights were flashing on and off.
Gurlan Lengmur, the patron of the establishment, stepped up onto the small stage and nodded to the barman, who ceased flicking the light switches now that attention and quiet had been achieved.
‘My friends,’ said Lengmur, ‘welcome to this evening’s diversion.’
His voice was soft and buttery. He was a small man, refined and well dressed, but otherwise quite bland in appearance, a fact that seemed to bother him, for his dark hair was shaved on the right side and then turned over long on the crown in a huge, oil-dressed lick as the latest society fashion prescribed. I felt he had embraced this modern style less because it was modish and more because it afforded his person some specific feature of interest.
‘There will be taroche later, in the back room,’ he said, ‘and then a talk by Master Edvark Nadrich on the significance of the Uraeon and the Labyrine in Early Angelican tomb sites. Those of you who have heard Master Nadrich’s talks before will know to expect a riveting and educational treat. Afterwards, then, an open discussion. First, though, on this small stage, Mamzel Gleena Tontelle, the feted voicer, will share her mediumship with us.’
There was a warm round of applause, and some clinking of butter knives against the rims of glassware. Lengmur stepped back, extending a gesture of welcome as he bowed his head, and handed up onto the foot-stage a dowdy woman in a pearl-grey silk dress of a style that had been out of fashion for some decades.
Her plump face was pinched. I guessed her age to be about fifty years. She accepted the amiable applause with a nod and a gentle sweep of her hand.
‘Her dress,’ Eisenhorn whispered. ‘Styled old to remind us of generations past. A common trick.’
I nodded. Mamzel Tontelle indeed looked like a society lady from the glittering ballrooms of the previous century, a time when Queen Mab had been a grander place. I had seen such things in pict-books. Even her mannerisms had something of the old-fashioned about them. This was an act, a role, and I had a great interest in those who performed roles well. She had, I think, applied some costuming powder to her skin and dress.
‘Powdered like a ghost,’ Eisenhorn grumbled. ‘Voicers call it “phantomiming”, and it’s yet another stale conceit.’
Mam Tontelle had done herself up like some mournful shade, the light powder making it seem as though she had stood, unmoving, through the passage of decades as dust settled upon her. It was understated and, for my part, I thought it most amusing.
She clasped one hand to the shelf of her bosom and spread the fingers of the other across her brow, furrowing in concentration.
‘There is a boy here,’ she said. ‘A small boy. I see the letter “H”.’
In the crowd, some shaking of heads.
‘Definitely a boy,’ Mamzel Tontelle continued. Her voice was thin and colourless. ‘And the letter “H”. Or perhaps a “T”.’
‘Cold reading,’ muttered Eisenhorn. ‘The oldest trick of all. Fishing for reception.’
And of course it was. I saw it for what it was, and shared Eisenhorn’s scepticism, but not his disdain. I had always been charmed by such distractions, and was entertained to watch an actor at work. More so, a trickster who was, through performance, fabricating something out of nothing.
Mam Tontelle tried another letter, a ‘G’, as I remember, and a man at the back took her up on it, and presently had become convinced that he was receiving a message from his godson, long dead. The man was quite astounded by this, though he had provided all the facts that had made it convincing, offering them innocently in response to Mam Tontelle’s deft suggestion.
‘He was young when he died. But ten years old.’
‘Eight,’ the man replied, eyes bright.
‘Yes, I see it. Eight years. And drowned, poor soul.’
‘He fell under a cart,’ the man sighed.
‘Oh, the cart! I hear the rattle of it. It was not water upon the poor child’s lips, but blood. He loved so a pet, a hound or–’
‘A bird,’ murmured the man, ‘a little tricefinch in a silver cage. It could sing the song of the bells at Saint Martyr’s.’
‘I see the silver bars, and bright feathers too,’ said Mam Tontelle, hand to head as if in exquisite pain from a migraine, ‘and so it sings…
’
And so it continued. The man was beside himself, and the crowd much impressed. I could tell Eisenhorn was quickly losing patience. But we had not come to watch the voicer ply her tricks, nor had we come to hear a lecture or have our taroche read.
We were here to find an astronomer who had either gone mad, or had seen a great secret that many in the city would kill to learn.
Or possibly both.
CHAPTER 2
Of a visitation
His name was Fredrik Dance. For many years, his prodigious gifts as a magos mathematicae had taken him across the entire Scarus Sector, lecturing at the finest academic institutions, and publishing a series of important works on astromathematic application. Eventually, he had retired to Sancour, where his polymath genius in the sciences had led to him holding the office of Astronomer Elect in the court of the Prefect, Baron Hecuba, whose palace lay in the north of the city. Then he had left office, in circumstances that were not entirely clear, and shortly thereafter published another work entitled Of the Stars in the Heaven (with ephemeris).
This had been privately issued, and had found no audience, but Medea Betancourt had turned up a copy on a remainder stall in the Toilgate market, and brought it to Eisenhorn’s attention. You must remember that Eisenhorn’s small team had been in Queen Mab for over twenty years, conducting a painstaking investigation, and in that time, all manner of small evidences had been discovered, pursued and then discarded.
But the book had been unusual. Written in Low Gothic, with a parallel text in formal Enmabic, it purported to be an accurate gazette of the constellations visible from Sancour, in both northern and southern hemispheres. The details it presented, however, had very little to do with the actual facts in the night sky. Eisenhorn initially dismissed this as the work of a madman or incompetent, until Medea pointed out certain curious details, not the least of which was Dance’s significant credentials as a mathematical savant, and a capable and learned observer.
To expand, our work on Sancour pursued many things, chiefly the Yellow King, but also the concept of a ‘City of Dust’ that lay close by, invisible, a shadow-twin of Queen Mab.
I had grown up believing the City of Dust was a myth, and if it wasn’t a myth, then it was a ruined and antique place that lay somewhere beyond the Crimson Desert. But as I had become embroiled in the intrigue between Cognitae and Ordos and any manner of other factions, I had learned there was more than myth to it.
Eisenhorn said that the so-called City of Dust was an ‘extimate’ space, which is to say an artificial non-place, quite real, that existed outside our reality and, so to speak, overlapped the physical. So, if you might imagine, Queen Mab and its twin were simultaneous, occupying the same location, but present to each other only as ghosts. As I did, you will find this notion quite fantastical and without merit, along with Eisenhorn’s insistence that he had once entered just such a place, on a world called Gershom, but I ask your indulgence, for now I too have seen it. For a brief time, during a visit to the house called Feverfugue, out beyond the dreary expanse of the city district known as Wastewater, I entered the extimate space, and saw that it was real. I was in Queen Mab and yet I was not.
The idea still alarms me. Our working theory was the Cognitae had constructed the City of Dust, just as they constructed the place on Gershom, as an occulted hiding place for the Yellow King, where he could go about his infernal work, unchallenged. Why this should be the case, or what the Yellow King Orphaeus was doing, we will come to.
For now, let me focus on Fredrik Dance. His lunatic work suggested he had somehow observed the other heavens, which is to say the star fields that shone over the City of Dust, quite contrary to those that twinkled above Queen Mab. The City of Dust, whatever it is, is virtually impossible to find or access. Many, including the dread scions of the Traitor Legions, have been trying to find a way in. My own access was quite accidental, and though we had revisited Feverfugue – now a derelict ruin – I was not able to repeat it.
Finding an access point to the City of Dust had become our priority.
So, Fredrik Dance. The mad savant-astronomer. Him we would question, and him we could not find. Since his departure from the baron’s court, he had been of no fixed abode, and our search for him had been fruitless. It seemed he lodged with friends, and never stayed long in one place. We had a pictotint portrait of him, taken from the frontis of one of his more respectable works, and Harlon Nayl had conducted extensive streetwork to track his whereabouts. The same answer kept turning up: wherever he might be living was a mystery, but he had been seen regularly at Lengmur’s salon, drawn, perhaps, to the society of others who shared his fringe beliefs.
Mam Tontelle’s performance continued apace, and I had now scanned the premises three times.
‘Only one person here even comes close to matching his description,’ I whispered to Eisenhorn. ‘The old fellow at the bar there.’
Eisenhorn frowned. ‘Then we’ve wasted our night and endured this pantomime for nothing. We’ll try again tomorrow, or the night after.’
‘So that’s not him?’
He looked at me, and raised his eyebrows with a sarcastic air. When I had first met him, Eisenhorn had claimed that his countenance was incapable of expression, but this, I had discovered, was a bluff. His almost perpetual lack of facial gesture was a matter of habit, and a conditioned desire to give nothing away.
‘No, Beta,’ he said.
‘Because?’
‘I thought you were a sharp wit,’ he said. ‘We’re looking for an astronomer.’
‘And you discount him, though he fairly matches the description, because he’s blind?’
‘It seems reasonable to do so.’
‘A blind astronomer is not the most unlikely notion I have had to entertain since meeting you,’ I said. ‘I have seen words break bones, and been carried over rooftops by daemons. Just saying.’
He sighed, and turned to look again at the small man seated at the bar.
‘It’s not him,’ he said. ‘I have just scanned his thoughts. He is drunk, and of very fuddled inclination. There is no shred of science or learning in him, and the only name that circles there is Unvence.’
I sighed. ‘Poor Unvence,’ I said. ‘He is dejected and alone. I suppose he just comes here to listen.’
‘He comes here to drink,’ Eisenhorn replied. ‘I can hear his mind, staggering around, trying to count from memory the coins left in his pockets to calculate how many more amasecs he can purchase.’
Eisenhorn made to get up and leave. I placed my hand on his arm to stay him.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Listen to her,’ I hissed.
Mam Tontelle was addressing her audience again, beginning another of her fishing expeditions.
‘No one?’ she asked. ‘The number I see is clear to me. One-one-nine. One hundred and nineteen. Oh, it is very clear. A letter too. The letter “L”.’
No one responded.
‘Let’s go,’ Eisenhorn snapped at me.
‘One hundred and nineteen,’ I whispered back.
He hesitated.
‘No, she’s just a charlatan,’ he said.
‘Her affect has changed,’ I replied. ‘Look at her.’
Mam Tontelle was trembling slightly, and looking to the crowd with some anxious hope. The pitch of her voice had altered. If this was an act, it was unexpectedly good, and had taken a strangely agitated turn that seemed unlikely to entertain the gathering.
‘Is there another letter, mam?’ I called out. I heard Eisenhorn growl in frustration.
Mam Tontelle turned to look at me.
‘Do you know?’ she asked.
She would not cold-read me.
‘Another letter, mam?’ I repeated.
‘Yes,’ she said. She swallowed hard. ‘A “C”. The other letter is “C”.’
; There had been a book, a notebook. I had borrowed it from the Blackwards emporium… I say ‘borrowed’, but in truth ‘purloined’ is a better word. It had been in my possession until I fell into Ravenor’s custody. It had been small, bound in blue and handwritten in a ciphered language that no one seemed to recognise. On the inside cover had been inscribed the number ‘119’, and it had appeared to be a commonplace book belonging to Lilean Chase, the Cognitae heretic, an individual Eisenhorn had been pursuing for more years than I had been alive.
I had never managed to crack the cipher, nor identify the number ‘119’, which I felt might be a key to decryption.
And here was Mam Tontelle, the parlour voicer and false medium, linking that number with Lilean Chase’s initials.
I glanced at Eisenhorn, and saw him settle back with a frown on his face. Whatever the fakery here, he was caught by the significance too. He saw my glance and acknowledged it with a little nod that admonished, ‘Proceed – with caution.’
‘Do you have a whole name, mam?’ I asked.
Mam Tontelle shook her head.
‘You must tell me, dear,’ she said. She looked most uncomfortable. She kept licking her lips as though she was parched.
‘I am wary of tricks,’ I replied. ‘To engage with your act here, I would need a name. A provenance.’
An ugly leer contorted her face, and she flushed with anger. But this was not her, I felt. It was her face responding to some alien emotion that had seized her.
‘Provenance?’ she hissed. ‘You have provenance enough! The letters! The numbers! And here, more… A colour. Blue. A commonplace colour, I think you’ll agree. What more would you have? The name cannot be spoken. Not here. Not in public company.’
Four clues now, exceeding all coincidence. The colour, the stress of the word ‘commonplace’.
‘Very well, mam,’ I said. ‘Then what is the message that you are obliged to transmit?’
