Lost Acre

by Andrew Caldecott

  5

  The Rogue Mechanicals

  Throughout the day, trade burgeoned in the coffee shops on Aether’s Way, the urge to communal discussion fuelled by the sequence of dire events and a dearth of answers. Was Wynter cause or solution? Expectations for his promised New Year speech had risen to fever-pitch.

  New Year’s Eve still had one card to play. As daylight failed, the townsfolk lined the Golden Mean for the arrival of the mechanicals, cheering every staccato step as the trio entered the gate with characteristic punctuality. A former Mayor might have suffered an unpredictable and violent end hours earlier, but rituals bring reassurance. At the centre of Market Square, three children, chosen by ballot, moved forward to open the caskets of rural produce – only for Wynter, in full Mayoral regalia, to raise a restraining hand. Pulling on a pair of heavy leather gauntlets, he moved to the central figure and flicked the clasp of his casket. To a communal whoop of horror, a hooded serpentine head rose from the rim. Wynter seized the monstrosity and twisted the neck round and round as the creature tried to strike at his protected arms. The other two caskets yielded bloated maggots with spiny backs and a tussock of what appeared to be living grass which thrashed as Wynter balled it in his fist.

  Wynter addressed his citizens with a stern brevity. ‘These dire happenings are all of a piece. I shall speak of them tomorrow.’

  He summoned Fanguin to collect the corpses for examination and signalled the crowd to disperse.

  As metalworkers gingerly probed the mechanicals for further unwelcome surprises, voices sank to a repressed whisper. What next?

  *

  ‘Mission, Oblong!’ The familiar command from a familiar voice prompted Oblong to turn. ‘I’ve already picked the lock.’

  Dark rings from fitful sleep added to the usual intensity of Valourhand’s gaze.

  Here we go again, he thought, following Valourhand as she half-barged and half-evaded her way through the press down the Golden Mean to Baubles & Relics.

  Crudely cut out letters had been pasted to the window: New Year Sale, with a footnote underneath: All returns to await Miss Roc.

  Valourhand strode in. ‘You light the fire. I’ll track down the inventory.’

  Oblong stood, stupefied. ‘Vixen, you’re not a shopkeeper – and you’ll never be, not in a month of Sundays!’

  Valourhand for once deigned to explain. ‘When I was slaving here over Bolitho’s calculations, Orelia talked about clearing the stock at New Year and starting again. It’s the least we can do.’

  ‘Have you any idea where she is?’

  ‘I fucked up, Oblong. Hayman Salt was her best friend and I cost him his life. And no, I haven’t a clue where she is. But Roc’s a survivor.’ She shuffled her feet before continuing, confessing her catastrophic encounter with the ice-dragon.

  Oblong, listening in silence, lit the fire, his one domestic skill.

  ‘Why did the ice-dragon come?’

  ‘To freeze the river and protect the town from earthquake. Bole couldn’t risk returning Wynter to a ruin.’

  Oblong instinctively sensed there must be more to it than that, but he judged it politic to change the subject. ‘All right, a sale it is. Let’s give it our best shot.’

  Valourhand investigated the current display before turning her attention to Orelia’s desk. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she cried, producing Orelia’s copy of Straighten the Rope. Although it had the same gold title lettering and lavish maroon binding as the original, these pages were blank. Valourhand reasoned out loud, ‘Someone took the original and substituted this, which means the original mattered.’

  Energised, she darted around the room, until the Bexter-Bune microscope on the table by the fire caught her eye. She peered in to discover a slide containing the tiny patch of leather Fanguin had scraped from the original book.

  ‘Oh God,’ she groaned. ‘Human skin dyed maroon – it was the binding, Oblong, not those damned calculations! It must be Wynter’s skin. He was attacked in his cell, remember. We’ve been fooled again.’

  ‘But nobody was at the mixing-point,’ he objected. ‘Nobody but me and Pomeny Tighe.’ He explained the spheres and her disappearance.

  ‘For a dull historian, you do get up to more than your fair share,’ replied Valourhand tartly. Now she too changed the subject, adjourning for further thought the troubling question of where and how Wynter had been resurrected, if not in Lost Acre’s mixing-point. ‘Come on, we’ve a lot to do.’

  Obligingly, Roc’s inventory recorded the acquisition costs, to which Valourhand added twenty per cent, unless she liked the piece, when she added more. Her taste was unsurprisingly idiosyncratic – walking sticks and scientific apparatus earned immediate mark-ups, but little else. She had no interest in furniture, but whimsically doubled the price of a music-box.

  These humdrum tasks – bringing up the stock, rearranging the display and adding price labels – brought a measure of relief. Oblong relished the physical exercise, while Valourhand took pleasure in honest description, adding comments from the inventory which Orelia probably, and her late aunt certainly, would have left to the customer’s powers of observation: Dog owner once: see back left leg and Deeply scratched impression of a pig by childish pen-knife on underside. She added her own expertise to scientific instruments: Excellent for an intelligent teenager, not for the pro, and so on.

  Oblong, initially hostile to the general idea, found the labels oddly engaging. Maybe her candour would attract rather than deter custom; time would tell.

  Their tasks done, Oblong made the mistake of issuing a warning. ‘Can I suggest you don’t go snooping round the Manor. There’s something about Wynter – he appears to know everything about everyone, even what’s going to happen before it does.’ He told her about the prophecy coins and the mantoleon’s fate at Wynter’s hands. ‘So, beware,’ he concluded.

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s just the night for a midnight ramble.’

  The dark rings around Valourhand’s eyes had inexplicably faded.

  *

  The following morning the Notice Board displayed the image of a snake gripped by a gloved hand: the third prophecy coin, all as foretold.

  6

  Filling the Gaps

  Day by day the Manor was acquiring a household – scullions, a cook and a porter, and guards outside and in, most drawn from The Understairs. Ignored for so long by Snorkel’s regime, they offered Wynter immediate loyalty. Each wore an armband displaying a dark star on a white background like a single Satanic snowflake. This abstract emblem replaced Sir Veronal’s weasels wherever they could be found.

  One application for cleaning duties disturbed Scry’s stern countenance with a smile: I may be short, but I’m good on the extendables and get to every crook and grannie. The references were unexpectedly effusive.

  For the first time in her life, Aggs entered the Manor.

  At seven that night, Wynter sat in his familiar chair poring over his speech for the following day.

  His head porter entered and announced, ‘There’s a man at the front gate. A Mr Bendigo Sly. He would like an audience.’

  ‘I’ll see him.’

  ‘If I may be so bold, sir, treat Mr Sly with caution.’

  ‘Indeed, I will.’

  Sly sidled in, hangdog but alert. He carried a box wrapped in towelling.

  ‘You’ve joined the unemployed, I understand,’ observed Wynter without standing up.

  Sly checked the room to confirm the absence of third parties. ‘I’m here to appeal for clemency.’

  ‘Clemency?’ Wynter smiled, as if ‘Clemency’ were Sly’s consort.

  Sly placed the box in front of the Mayor, taking care to ensure that the towelling protected the table. Cold air misted from the surface. He opened the box. Through the steam, Wynter made out a slim metal tube and a dart-shaped indent, now empty. He picked up the tube and peered through the mouth at the fire: the interior had been rifled for accuracy. The ice must have b
een as hard as steel.

  Toxicology and the art of delivery had always been favourite subjects. Not since the pin driven into Sir Henry’s eye, a device of his own design, had he encountered such ingenuity.

  ‘Name of poison?’ he asked.

  Sly blinked. He did not answer it because he did not know. ‘It was meant for you,’ he said instead. ‘Mr Snorkel instructed me to proceed if his speech didn’t do the biz.’

  Wynter loathed common-or-garden slang, but he knew that to achieve extremes and eradicate scruple in your minions, you must work in combinations. He was therefore always on the hunt for that rare match where two working together generate a fiercer fanaticism than either would achieve left to their own devices. He sensed such a marriage in Bendigo Sly and Carcasey Jack.

  ‘Who constructed this pretty thing?’ asked Wynter.

  ‘Snorkel liked to play close, Mr Wynter, but it has a North Tower feel, fancy but functional.’ He belatedly answered the first question too. ‘I’m piss-poor at poisons . . .’ Sly shrugged. ‘But I shine at intelligence-gathering.’

  He’s casting for the question he wants me to ask. Why not, thought Wynter.

  ‘Who were Snorkel’s cronies, Mr Sly? Who went along with this? I want the men, the women and the children.’

  ‘I had an inkling you might ask, sir.’

  Sly’s list tallied closely with the names Scry had noted at Snorkel’s envoi, but it had extras: addresses and ages, and a second tier too: their closest friends, all written in a methodical hand at odds with Sly’s penchant for spoken slang.

  ‘You start tomorrow.’ Wynter stated terms, financially less generous than Sly had hoped, but not mean. ‘You recruit from the defence force, but you and yours operate in the shadows. Report only to me, and make no visible move until I tell you. The greatest political sin is complacency, for it loses a winning position. That’s why your former master deserved to die, and why I give you what you came for.’

  He courteously showed his newest employee to the door.

  Wynter felt more secure from his enemies within – but without? His inherited memory told him nothing of the Witan Hall, the location supplied by Carcasey Jack. Bole’s vigilance had lapsed in terms of the countrysiders. Over the intervening centuries could they have stumbled on the mixing-point? And where was Finch, the usurper’s direct descendant?

  He consoled himself with the thought that many had already fallen: Fortemain had been eliminated by Scry’s hand, the changelings by Nona’s, and Vibes by Bole as the false Ferox. These memories had come in sleep, but with the vivid detail of the real. He had particularly relished watching the hideous dwarf, Vibes, flailing vainly with his lobster claw against the stranglehold of Bole alias Ferox in his escarpment garden.

  Through Bole’s eyes, now as Vibes, not Ferox, Wynter had also been shown the treehouse interior, the ventilation system and the sophisticated network of rooms. Then Tyke had appeared, Tyke the beautiful boy, the only person to have emerged from the mixing-point untouched.

  An old envy flared. He had laboured hard for supremacy, whereas Tyke’s gifts had not been earned. An old rage flared too: you do not defy Geryon Wynter and escape unpunished.

  *

  Early light, New Year’s Day, brought an unexpected visitor to Fanguin’s front door.

  ‘Hurry, hurry.’

  ‘Wha—?’

  ‘Hurry!’ Scry’s cheeks shone like a schoolgirl’s. Frequent contact had dulled the suspicion that Scry had a dual nature, half-woman, half-Fury. Fanguin, still in his pyjamas, hurried upstairs, changed and hurried back. He snatched up a specimen box on the way out. Only his biological skills could have brought her to his doorstep at this hour.

  ‘The octagon has opened,’ she announced as they hurried east. In Market Square they caught their first clear view of the town’s highest terrestrial point. The structure had vanished; in its place spread the branches of a great tree, shot through with balls of vegetation.

  A clutch of morning runners stood in the graveyard, the only reminder that days earlier, Brother Harfoot’s church had held the summit.

  The octagon’s panels had opened like a flower and now lay flat like cards from a Clock Patience.

  Fanguin kept the examination logical, starting with the panels: planed wood, but alien; followed by the equally alien tree. The grooved grey-green bark flaked away in his fingers. The twigs had no give and when bent, they snapped. He pinched one of the few dark buds, which also crumbled to dust. The tree was dead through and through, and the seasonal festoons of greenery were not of its making but rather that silent assassin: mistletoe. The parasite resembled the common genus, viscum album, with its coral-like branches, shiny leaves and plump berries. Yet this variant had a peculiarly aggressive habit, weaving in and out of the bark like a maggot through meat, and the traditional waxy white berries had a pinkish blush. Fanguin took cuttings, leaves and stalks, and gathered a handful of berries.

  ‘A visceral death’

  ‘Whoever did this wanted us to have the parasite rather than the host,’ he murmured.

  Scry agreed, privately troubled that Wynter had known nothing of the octagon or its contents. Some other force must be at work.

  She probed Fanguin on a different subject. ‘Do you know Madge Brown?’

  ‘I know she gives old Gorhambury a head massage every Sunday night.’

  Scry added this disturbing fact to her dossier on Madge Brown: she had the wherewithal to know every municipal move before it happened.

  On the return journey, Scry bestowed a rare compliment. ‘You know you’re a descendant, Doctor Fanguin?’

  ‘Of whom?’

  ‘The first age,’ she said.

  *

  Back in his study, Fanguin tested stalks and leaves first, but found nothing out of the ordinary. The juice of the berries, however, yielded unusually high quantities of gamma aminobutyric acid, known in the trade as GABA. The chemical had contrasting qualities – excitatory to a young mammalian brain, inhibitory to the mature. This liquid had additional elements, albeit too complex for his chemistry to unravel.

  After several experiments which told him nothing new, he placed a single drop of the juice into one of the cruets of sap. The cruet juddered as sap and juice engaged in a violent reaction before settling. The juice’s active ingredients had been neutralised. Remembering the filings, he brought out the second cruet and placed a drop of juice simultaneously in each. Not only did the same reaction occur in each, the cruets edged towards each other until, as before, the imposter was neutralised. To his surprise, a similar interreaction occurred between the two cruets when the juice was placed only in one. The sap’s fragrance, he noted, had lost its special intensity. Damage had been done.

  Fanguin settled down to prepare a written report for his new master. Wynter had warned of a hedge-priest in Lost Acre in search of a new dominion. An uncomfortable fragment of half-history gnawed away. Hadn’t druids worshipped mistletoe?

  7

  Manifesto The new regime brought change to the Parliament Chamber. Young men with armbands stood at every entrance door. Denizens of The Understairs sat in blocks, having, unusually, placed attendance before work commitments. Wynter had empowered them.

  Behind a squint, high in a corner room which had been the night guard’s cell, Sly perched with a small but powerful telescope. His note-taker sat beside him. Sly dictated only essentials: who cheered or jeered whom; who sat next to whom and left with whom; who tabled which motions with whose support. File 1: Friend and Foe: the first of many.

  Gorhambury had spent a night in the municipal archives. Only a registered citizen could be elected Mayor, but might a breach be retrospectively remedied, and did Wynter satisfy the criteria? Had he been born to a Rotherweirder? Wynter’s remarkable knowledge of every facet of local life suggested as much, as did his reaction to corruption: he had already blocked transfers to the Snorkel Foundation, revoked the protected status of suspect charities and hunted through Committee minutes fo
r due declarations of interest, finding few. Wynter’s energy had the fierceness of Virtue. Ferensen’s narrative might be true of Sir Veronal, but surely not Wynter? Gorhambury disliked the Defence Force, but he conceded that recent events demanded vigilance.

  Wynter had changed too. Having previously approached the speaker’s dais with deference, now he swept in, stood tall and spoke with authority.

  ‘Out of respect for last year’s candidates, I’ve read their speeches and found a grain of truth in each, which I propose to share.’

  ‘Who was your mother, Mr Wynter?’ growled Mr Norrington.

  ‘Order,’ cried Gorhambury. ‘The Mayor assures me this issue will be addressed.’

  Wynter, unruffled, resumed, ‘Miss Roc had a nose for the corruption which has blighted this town. Last week I turned off the syphon; yesterday its owner died, brought down by a poison dart, ladies and gentlemen. And where is Miss Roc, the popular owner of Baubles & Relics? She has inexplicably vanished. Rest assured, we shall reclaim your money from the profiteers and spend it on you. We shall deal with those responsible.’

  An unsettling mix of cheers and silence greeted the announcement. Wynter dropped his voice and crossed his chest. ‘Whatever his faults, and we do not wish to speak ill of the dead, Mr Snorkel condemned countrysiders for arrogance. How right he was. It knows no bounds. Think of those three children and the monstrosities awaiting them in the mechanicals. Mr Strimmer said we should retake what is ours. I agree there too. It will be done in due time.’ Wynter had not mentioned this disturbing policy to Gorhambury. ‘These monsters are not made here. We must find and destroy their biological factory before it destroys us.’

  ‘You do like to say “we”, Mr Wynter, but are you one of us?’ In the mouth of the beanpole solicitor from Finewad & Parchling, whose conveyancing benefits from the Snorkel regime had been immense, the question carried extra weight. ‘More to the point, having regard to clause 1(1)(i)(a) of the Citizen Registration Regulations, are you officially one of us?’