by Allan Kaster
When she opened the door, she found an elegantly dressed, dark-haired young man at the threshold, his eyes cast down as if his presence here was somehow shameful.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,” the man said softly, still not meeting Sagreda’s gaze. “But I’m a cousin of your wife, and I need to speak to her as soon as possible about a poorly aunt of ours—”
Sagreda interrupted him. “Mathis?”
He looked up, startled. “How do you . . . did she tell you . . . ?”
“There is no she but me, I’m afraid.” Sagreda tried to smile, but then recalled how the captain’s whiskery visage had appeared when she’d practiced in the mirror. “It looks like that last queue we found was meant to have been pre-filtered by gender.”
Mathis nodded with a kind of punch-drunk stoicism. “Okay. Everything’s temporary. I’m sorry I took so long to find you; I don’t know if the notes all blew away, or what.”
“The ones in the churches shouldn’t have.”
“About that . . .”
“Are you coming in?” Sagreda asked impatiently. They weren’t talking loudly, but who knew what Mrs. Trotter would assume if she saw the captain with a young man visiting at this uncivil hour.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to invite me,” Mathis explained glumly.
Sagreda took a moment to digest that. “Oh, fuck no.”
“You got the wang, I got the fangs,” Mathis quipped. “That’s what happens when you walk in blind.”
Sagreda said, “Please, make yourself at home in my miserable abode.” She stepped back from the doorway and let him pass, then peered out across the landing to check that no one was watching from the stairs.
Mathis draped himself over the sofa and gazed lethargically into space, focusing on nothing, perhaps in an attempt to avoid having to take in the wallpaper.
“So what exactly are the symptoms?” Sagreda asked. “Apart from a general Byronic ennui.”
“I haven’t risked daylight,” he replied. “But I gather it would be fatal. I do have a reflection. But mostly I’m just very, very tired and very, very hungry.”
“So you haven’t—?”
“Jesus, Sagreda!” Mathis stared at her in horror.
“I meant . . . maybe a dog?” The dogs here were pure automata, it wouldn’t even be animal cruelty.
“I’m not interested in dogs!” Mathis retorted irritably, as if that ought to be as obvious to Sagreda as it was to him. But then he caught himself, and walked her through the strictures he was facing. “There are certain sights and odors that make my saliva run, and my . . .” He gestured at his mouth. “I’m assuming that unless I act on those cues, I’m not going to stop feeling weak. A rare roast beef sandwich doesn’t cut it, and I have no reason to think a corgi or two would hit the spot either.”
Sagreda steeled herself. “Do you want me to fill a cup?”
Mathis took a while to reply. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Not especially,” she confessed. “But I don’t want you going into the vampiric equivalent of a diabetic coma.”
“I’d better not watch,” Mathis decided. “Who knows what strings the game will start tugging, if I see an open wound.”
“All right.” Sagreda went into the captain’s bedroom and closed the door. There was a cutthroat razor by the washing bowl, and an empty shaving mug. She took off her jacket and shirt.
The thought that Mathis feared losing control disturbed her. They’d fought for each other, suffered side by side, and risked deletion across three dozen worlds—and the software that lorded over them was far too crude to reach inside them and start imposing beliefs or desires. On their side they had love, and they had reason, while the SludgeNet possessed neither.
But it still had plenty of ways to try to manipulate their behavior. Having woken in the asinine world of East, where sensory immersion lost out more or less instantly to any trace of common sense, they were both immune to seeing-is-believing, and to the wisdom of hoodwinked crowds. But they’d never been subjected to outright torture. If the purple prose in Midnight’s bodice-and-intestine-ripping source had talked about a vampire’s longing for blood being like a white-hot poker in the chest, the SludgeNet would have no trouble bringing those words to life.
The captain’s body was amply proportioned and apparently not at all anemic; when Sagreda had filled the mug, she did not feel the least bit unsteady. “Well done, old stick!” she commended him, binding the wound with a handkerchief. She dressed again completely to conceal any trace of the breach in her skin. The captain, being some flavor of Anglican, wasn’t into religious paraphernalia; there was a King James Bible in his library but no crucifix by the bed.
She covered the mug with a playing card and opened the door. Mathis was still on the sofa; she walked right past him, into the entrance hall, and out the front door. She placed the mug on the landing, near the top of the stairs, then, leaving the door open, went back to the sitting room.
“You didn’t want to watch me,” she said. “And I don’t want to watch you, either.”
Mathis frowned slightly, but he nodded. “I’ll go back to my place when I’m finished.” He walked over to the desk and wrote something. “That’s the address, if you need to find me later. But don’t open the door to me again tonight, whatever I say.”
Sagreda felt the captain’s pulse throbbing around the raw edges of the razor wound. But Mathis was just being cautious; he’d never done this before, he didn’t know what to expect.
“You know I love you?” she said.
Mathis rolled his eyes. “At a pinch, I might go for an Oscar Wilde type, but the whole Colonel Mustard thing . . .” He shuddered.
“You’re an asshole.”
He smiled and walked down the hall. Sagreda followed a couple of steps behind, then when he was out she closed the door quickly—taking care not to slam it and wake Mrs. Trotter—and secured the bolts.
She stood by the door, listening, but the bestial slurping she’d feared never came. She waited, tensed, picturing the door splintering and a yellow-eyed, ravenous demon embracing her to finish what she’d started.
She heard the faint chink of the mug being placed back on the floor, then soft, careful, unhurried footsteps descending the stairs.
5
Sagreda needed cobalt blue. Out in the real world—if Peyam’s gloriously discursive lessons on color were to be trusted—the pigment had been used since ancient times in Chinese ceramics, and it had certainly been available to European painters in the nineteenth century. This was London, capital of an empire, mercantile hub of the world. Whatever wasn’t made here, someone would be importing it.
So she traipsed the streets, hunting for a shop that sold artists’ supplies. If the gossip she’d heard in the coffee houses was true, every tubercular poet, living or undead, from Marlowe to Yeats was currently shacked up somewhere in Bloomsbury, rubbing shoulders every night in the Salon Macabre—a dollop of name-dropping no doubt designed to set the hearts of thirteen-year-old Goths aflutter—but no one ever seemed to mention a single painter. To be fair, Sagreda’s own contributors struggled to suggest anyone but Turner; still, someone had to be responsible for all the portraits of viscounts and their horses that lined the walls of the mansions of Belgravia. Unless they just appeared out of thin air.
As she widened her search radius, Sagreda grew nervous. Every game had different rules of containment; if you wandered off into territory that didn’t belong to the core geography that had been mapped out and rendered for a thousand eyes before yours, you might get a gentle nudge guiding you back to terra cognita, or you might just fall off the edge of the world. So far as she knew, the captain was not a named character in the original novel, and no customer of the interactive version had become the least bit invested in his continued existence. If she crossed the invisible line, the easiest solution by far might be to erase her and wake a fresh comp in the same body after a hard night on the town, leaving the
new guy to piece his identity together much as Sagreda had, from the contents of his lodgings, and the people he encountered who seemed to know him.
By late afternoon on the third day of her search, she found herself off the paved streets entirely, tramping through muddy ground beside a ramshackle wooden building that smelled like a tannery. She stopped and hunted for the sun, trying to get her bearings, but the sky above was smothered by a still, gray haze, equally bright everywhere she squinted.
There was no one else in sight. She approached the building cautiously; it might just contain cheerful workers, happy to offer directions, but Midnight was proving less concerned with its supply chains than with its brooding atmospherics. If its artworks could come without artists or pigments, its leather need not have graced the body of any cow, and the strange odor might have another source entirely.
Her foot touched something taut buried in the mud, like a swollen fruit or a small balloon; she tried to step back, but the thing burst and a jet of stinking yellow fluid sprayed up from it and struck her in the chest.
A hand tugged at her trouser leg. A small boy was standing beside her. “Come with me!” he whispered urgently.
Sagreda followed him, resisting a motherly impulse to scoop him up into her arms, not least because it would be hard to manage without smearing the poor kid with pus. His legs were about a quarter as long as the captain’s, but it was all she could do to keep up. She glanced backward; something was moving at the entrance to the building, but its shape was hard to discern in the haze. It uttered an inhuman cry; in rage or in pain Sagreda couldn’t tell.
“Where are we going?” she asked the boy.
“They marked you,” he replied. “So we need to be done with it.”
“Marked me for what?” she asked.
“Ha!” He seemed to find the question so funny that it could only have been meant rhetorically.
They hit the cobblestones and weaved through small alleys, picking up the pace, inflaming the captain’s gout. In this of all things, the game wanted realism?
“How far will it follow us?” Sagreda wondered, gasping.
“As far as it takes, if you don’t do the necessary.”
Sagreda had visions of a bonfire for her clothes, and an acid bath for her infected skin.
They came to a water pump.
“Get under, get under!” the boy urged her.
“Do I take—?” She gestured at her vomit-yellow waistcoat.
“No time.”
She took off her coat and maneuvered herself under the spout; the boy clambered up and started pumping. Gobs of sticky fluid separated from the cloth and were carried down the drain, but her waistcoat remained stained in a shade that Peyam had never named, but which her contributors labeled bee excrement. She ran her thumb back and forth across the fabric, turning her chest to meet the flow, and gradually the mark began to fade.
“I think you’re done,” the boy decided, wiping his forehead with his hand. He grimaced reprovingly. “What you want with them creatures anyway?”
“Nothing! I didn’t know they were there!” Sagreda got herself upright. Her clothes were drenched and all her joints were aching, but apparently she’d been luckier than she deserved.
“You lost your way?” The boy’s incredulity shaded into smugness; who exactly was the adult here?
“I was looking for a place to buy oil paints.”
The boy sighed, as if Sagreda had somehow lived down to his expectations. “Lucy said it would come to that.”
This wasn’t a random encounter, then. The queen of the pickpockets had had her tailed by a trusted lieutenant.
“What’s your name?” she asked the boy.
“Sam.”
“So do you know of a shop that sells the materials an artist needs?”
He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “There ain’t such a thing in all of London.”
Sagreda had pretty much reconciled herself to that likelihood. “Have you ever even seen a painting?” she asked glumly. There were a couple of drab watercolors in Mrs. Trotter’s sitting room, but even if Sagreda had dared to steal them, they did not contain anything she needed.
Sam said, “I think you better talk to Lucy.”
6
“Maybe I know a house,” Lucy said cagily. “Maybe I’m thick with the scullery maid. But it’s hard to remember. My mind turns feeble when I hear my stomach rumbling.”
Sagreda handed her another shilling. “How many paintings, do you think?” They were sitting on moldy armchairs in an abandoned building with boarded up windows, surrounded by diminutive bodyguards.
“Two dozen, at least.”
“Any of them with a deep, rich blue? It needs to be deeper than a summer sky, but—”
Lucy scowled. “I can ask the maid about the colors, but who knows what she’ll make of your palaver?”
“Then I need to go in there myself,” Sagreda decided. “It’s no good sending someone else who’ll come back with the wrong thing.”
“Be my guest,” Lucy replied, unfazed. “But we’ll be making our entrance through the basement, and there’ll be a tight corner or two along the way. Perhaps you can look into the possibility of investing in a gentleman’s girdle.”
Sagreda wasn’t sure if this was genuine advice, or just a chance to mock her. “How will we get into the basement?”
“There’s a sewer.”
“Of course there is.”
“Meant to put an end to the Great Stink,” Lucy mused, “but if you ask me it’s brought no end of mischief.”
Sagreda hesitated; she didn’t mind getting covered in literal excrement, but the bullshit she was already mired in was a long way from a fact-checked documentary on the marvels of Victorian engineering. “Does anything live down there?”
Lucy considered the question. “‘Live’ might not be the right word to use. But that shouldn’t bother you, should it?”
“Why not?”
Lucy exchanged a knowing glance with Sam, who’d apparently been shadowing Sagreda for some time. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but I been told quite a bit about your fancy man. From what I hear, you got him nicely tamed, so maybe it’s time you put him to good use.”
7
Mathis went in front, holding the lamp, but Lucy and Sagreda stuck close behind him. The ceaseless, arrhythmic percussion of random drips of water all around them made Sagreda tense; if something came skittering hungrily along the tunnel, the sounds it made might easily be camouflaged by this unpredictable plinking.
With a handkerchief over her nose, and her mouth shut tight, the stench of the sewer was eye-watering but not quite disabling. Sagreda hadn’t vomited once as the captain, even when she’d stumbled on a disemboweled woman on her first night in the game, and she trusted his constitution to get her through this merely sensory assault. The two cups of blood she’d given Mathis just after sunset had only made her unsteady for a minute or two, and once she’d imbibed an equal volume of Mrs. Trotter’s strong black tea, she’d felt entirely captainly again.
“Are we close?” she asked Lucy, holding her forearm over her mouth as she spoke, which seemed to do a better job of blocking the outgoing sound than the incoming vapor.
“Pardon me?”
“Are we almost there?” Sagreda retched a little, the price of her impatience.
“You’ll see the drain to the right when we reach it,” was all Lucy could offer. “There’ll be no missing it.”
Sagreda peered into the gloom ahead, wondering if any light from the house might make it through the drain, turning the opening into a welcoming beacon. In fact, she could see a small spot of luminous yellow in the distance, beyond the reach of Mathis’s lamp. But it was not remaining still. For a moment she wondered if it might be a reflection off the surface of the putrid, ankle-deep water, shifting its apparent position because of a disturbance in the flow. But then a second yellow dot appeared, off to the left and a short way behind it, and the motion became much easier
to decode. The two lights were attached to two ambulatory bodies of some kind, and those bodies were striding down the tunnel.
She reached forward and touched Mathis’s shoulder. “Do you see that?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Any idea what they are?”
“No one’s handed me a taxonomy for this place,” he replied. “But the general rule seems to be that anything inhuman is likely to mean you harm. So the only question is whether I can fend them off, or pull rank on them somehow.”
As the creatures grew nearer, Sagreda became aware of the sound of their footfalls in the sewer water. In concert, their gaits generated a strange rhythm, in which she thought she could discern an overlapping pair of alternating sloshes and harder strikes. The captain’s chest tightened; Sagreda hoped she wasn’t about to discover that a lifetime of pipe smoking in his backstory had left him with bouts of stress-induced emphysema.
Mathis stopped walking and held the lamp high in front of him. “Who goes there?” he demanded imperiously. When he received no reply, he added: “Know that we will pass, and we will pass unmolested, or it will be the worse for you!”
The creatures continued to advance, but now the lamplight began to reach them, sketching gray outlines for the flesh and bones that held up the yellow orbs. What struck Sagreda immediately was that some of the edges she could discern were unnaturally straight. At first she doubted her eyes, but as the details grew clearer her impressions were confirmed: both figures were one-legged, walking with the aid of long wooden crutches angled across their bodies. Each possessed just a single arm and a single leg, attached to half a torso, on which was perched half a head.
As these walking anatomy lessons came into full view, they squinted angrily at the lamp. Their bodies were unclothed, but their skin was loose and wrinkled to the point where it took some scrutiny to be sure that they were both male. Each had a half-tongue that lolled partway out of its broken jaw and hung drooling over the rough plane along which the dissection had taken place. Their single lungs made sputtering sounds that emerged from the bases of their bisected windpipes; their exposed viscera oozed a little, but there was no real pretense of any functioning circulatory system. Skeletal muscles, lungs, and brains were all being powered by pure magical fiat, untroubled by any need for chemical energy.
