A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  “And by then it might be too late for Sterre to make a difference.”

  “Yes, that is the price. The ripples spread with every moment you wait.”

  “So why are we sitting here eating cakes?”

  “It’s an investment. We’re taking one hour to save ourselves ten. Hypothetically, anyway. Assuming you get around to coming up with a solution,” she added sharply.

  “You’re not helping much.”

  “I bought you lunch, and I’m asking you pointed questions. I’m helping all I can, kid.” She tore off a piece of bread and smeared it with herbed butter, layering cheese and a shaving of red smoked pork on top. “It’s simple, really. The problem is that they don’t see what they stand to lose yet. Like you said, it’s not real. Well, no more real than a ghost story.” She chewed her bread and cheese and watched me. “You’re too committed to this story,” she said. “It’s not working, and you’re trying to think of how to make it work. Think of a new one. Something allegorical, something that will get under their skins. Maybe something involving the dikes and the sea; that seems to alarm them.”

  “No,” I said slowly. “The story isn’t the problem.” Words from my mouth weren’t real to them. They vanished away into the air like breath on a cold day. “I just need to make it real. Terrifyingly real.”

  “Wow, insightful,” she drawled. “If only I’d thought of that. How?”

  I stood up sharply. “Thank you for lunch. I think I know what to do, but I might need more help. I’ll leave word for you at the Rose and Ivy.”

  She said something else, but I’d already whirled away and started running down the street.367

  * * *

  367. Yeah, I said, “So are you going to tell me what your brilliant plan is?” But you always do this. You always fucking do this.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  They didn’t believe me when I spoke truth aloud, so I had to find another way.

  Speech is as ephemeral as mist; words written down are more real, somehow. They’re more permanent. Harder to deny. As I wrote before, they become a paper copy of a mind, capable of some of the abilities of its writer.

  I had that thought sitting in my head like a heavy weight as I ran off from Mistress Chant, back to the Sun’s Rest. The whole way, I thought in terror of how careful I’d have to be, how little room there was for error if I did this. And, floating above those thoughts like a vulture, the thought that what I was thinking of doing was something I’d seen done before. Something I’d taken part in before—in Nuryevet, we printed propaganda, and Ivo and I hauled them out into the streets by the armful and scattered them among the populace, sowing discontent and fear with them until the people chafed and itched and wept for mercy. We scraped them raw.

  I’m just one man. One Chant, alone. Mistress Chant can stuff me full of sweetbuns and coffee until I jitter out of my skin, but she’s right. She doesn’t know the whole story, and she doesn’t know where the snarls are. She can’t really untangle it the way I can; all she could do, if she really had to, would be to add more tangles, ones that blocked off mine. But it wouldn’t make anything better. It would just be a splint, enough to let things hobble along for a little longer.

  No. This, this is mine. In this, I am alone. It’s just me, my mind, my will.

  So I thought . . . I might as well make some help for myself. I might as well make paper copies of my mind.

  So—back to the Sun’s Rest. I rushed through the common room, heedless of the dour knot of Acamporas drinking in one corner, and pounded up the stairs to the attic. I scrawled out a draft, eight pages long, then swept it up, along with my pen and the pot of ink. I flew back down the stairs and out through the innyard to the street, towards a printer that Sterre knew of, a Vint named Monsieur Reinault.

  His shop is about equidistant between the Sun’s Rest and the de Waeyer offices, only a little ways off my usual route. It’s in a surprisingly roomy building for the area, and from halfway down the street I could hear the thump and creak of moving wooden parts and smell the particular dark, smoky-earthy scent of lampblack overlaid with a single perfumy note of pine resin—the smell of ink.

  Mssr. Reinault’s industry is divided in two parts, I have since found—one workshop in a neighboring district, which produces daily newspapers for a small percentage of the city’s population; and the other here, for pamphlets and books. Mssr. Reinault’s specialty is illustrated tracts, longer than pamphlets but shorter than books, describing adventure stories by means of cunning sequential pictures with simply worded captions, the better to appeal to common folk who may not have a scholar’s grasp of letters.

  When I explained what I wanted to the assistant at the front of the shop, she had me repeat myself three times before she believed me, and then she wrote out the number on a piece of paper to confirm that I wasn’t adding more zeros to the end than I intended, and then she ran off behind the curtain that separated the sales floor from the workshop. On my way from the inn, I’d thought of several more things to include in the pamphlet, and I took this moment to scrawl them out, my pages now a horrible mess of scrawls and splatters—my handwriting isn’t so nice in Heyrlandtsche as it is in Xerecci. The assistant came back a few minutes later with Mssr. Reinault himself, a tall gentleman with broad, muscled shoulders, a shock of wildly tousled gray hair and beard, and deep lines etched into his face below steel-colored eyes. He looked like a thunder god, and the first words he said to me were, “How many are you wanting?”

  “Five thousand,” I said for the fourth time. I held out the pages I’d written. “As soon as possible, please. The bill to be sent to Sterre de Waeyer at her offices.”

  He took the pages from my hand with a little more force than most people generally use for freely proffered items and scanned over it. “Oh, you’re that one,” he said, and, turning away, dropped the pages to the floor.

  I scrambled to pick them up, and by the time I’d gotten them in order he had vanished behind the curtain. I didn’t spare a glance for the shop assistant and followed him. The space behind was cavernous; there must have been at least twenty presses going at once, each of them manned by two workers. “Monsieur,” I said, switching to Vintish, “I beg your patience.”

  Reinault ignored me. He’d stopped by one of the presses. He smeared a pat of thick black paste onto a sheet of polished stone on the table next to the press, angrily dabbing and rolling the inking ball on it while it spread into a thin, smooth film. It made a sticky sound, and the smell of lampblack and pine resin grew stronger.

  “Monsieur,” I said. “If you’ll read the pamphlet carefully, I—”

  “My idiot son-in-law,” Reinault rumbled, “spent a fortune on those. I told him not to. I told him, and my girl Annette told him, but the boy wouldn’t hear sense. Took out a loan, even. Bought one of those futures contracts, said he was going to sell it on in a month or two.” Reinault turned from the table and began banging the inking ball across the type-form in the press with rhythmic, controlled motions that did nothing to conceal his anger. “The flowers withered up a week and a half ago.” My breath caught—either the sickness had progressed faster than expected, or Crispin’s flower hadn’t been the first to show the signs (which was more likely). “Now he’s ruined, and my girl’s going to have to divorce him or live in a poorhouse, or debtors’ prison, because I won’t have the idiot living here under my roof when they’re evicted next month.” He stopped and glared at me with those steel eyes. “I won’t have anything to do with you, monsieur,” he said. “Not you, and not that Sterre de Waeyer, and not your thrice-damned flowers. I won’t have it. You’re bilking honest idiots out of—you see? That’s what he was, my son-in-law. An idiot, but honest. He didn’t think that it’d be a scam. He didn’t see how it could be one.”

  “We didn’t mean it to be,” I said. “I swear it. We’re trying to make it right. With this.” I held out the papers again. “I want to print this. Five thousand copies that I’m going to distribute in the city by my
own hand. I’ll put one in your son-in-law’s hands myself, and then I’ll get him his money back.”

  Mssr. Reinault eyed me.

  “It really wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” I said. “Believe me. We don’t want your son-in-law to suffer for our mistake.” He hadn’t taken the papers from me—my arm, still outstretched, was beginning to ache. “Read it properly, and then if you still won’t print it, I’ll leave and find someone else. But your son-in-law can claim his money back regardless, whenever he likes.”

  “Words are cheap, monsieur,” he grunted, tossing the inking balls onto the table. Another attendant, nearby, had already swept a new sheet of paper onto the tympan and folded the frisket down over it, and Reinault eased the whole frame down over the type, glaring at me all the while. “I know better than anyone.”

  “Then let me show you how much mine are worth,” I said.

  Reinault shoved the type-bed forward and yanked the pull with a mighty creak of straining wood, lowering the platen that squeezed the paper onto the type. “You poets,” he snarled. “You’re all the same. You all think you’re the gods’ gift to literature.”

  “I’m not a poet.”

  “Monsieur,” he said, “whether you are a poet or no, I am a gentleman. But if you don’t leave my shop at once, I will be forced to use some ungentlemanly language indeed.”

  “Send for your son-in-law! Tell him to bring his contracts. I’ll take him to Mevrol de Waeyer’s offices right now, and we’ll come back here straightaway with a bank draft in his name. I made a mistake, monsieur, and I regret it. I am working to undo it.”

  Reinault pulled back the type-bed and lifted the tympan, peeling the paper away from the type in a smooth motion and revealing perfect blocks of flawless text. The apprentice removed the page from the frame and set it aside while Reinault, in silence, picked up the inking ball again. He said nothing to me.

  “Monsieur,” I said. “Please. Let me prove I’m serious. Look at me—I’ve got to be about the same age as your son-in-law, aren’t I?” He spared me the briefest, briefest glance, measuring me up in an instant, and dropped his eyes back to the rhythmic press of the inking ball across the type. “I swear to you it wasn’t malice—I was an honest idiot, and your son-in-law was an honest idiot, and now we two bumblers have both gotten ourselves into a mess. All I want is to do the right thing. Send for him. Please.”

  Reinault stopped and heaved a huge sigh. He glanced at his assistant and nodded, jerking his head towards the door. They nodded in return and jogged off. “Go outside.”

  “Monsieur—”

  “Go wait outside! I’ve sent for the stupid boy, what more do you want?” he roared.

  I held out the pages. “As soon as he arrives, we’ll go and I’ll be back within the hour. With his contracts refunded, and with payment for five thousand copies of this.”

  “If you think I’m going to print even one paragraph of that before—”

  “I don’t,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want you to. But start setting the type and I’ll pay you five guilders of my own money.”

  He gave me another long, slow look. “You’ll be wanting these in a rush, I suppose.”

  “Yes, as quick as possible.”

  “Five thousand?”

  “Yes.”

  He flicked through the pages, counting them, scanning over my writing too fast to be reading it. Some of the really fine printers, the ones who know their business and could set a page of type with their eyes closed, can estimate the number of words on a page just by glancing at it. “Size?”

  “Small. Pocket sized.”

  “Twelve pages of text. Title page?”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Title page?” he asked again, in a dangerous voice.

  “Yes please,” I said.

  “Twenty-one guilders. And I’ll have all of it before I print a word of this.”

  Just shy of a duit and a half per copy, then, for what would come out to four sheets of paper, folded in half and held together with a single long stitch in the crease. He was overcharging me, but I didn’t particularly care. “How quickly can you get it done?”

  He sighed again, heavily, and pulled out a pencil and a roughly bound notebook from his back pocket, little more than a wad of pages tied around the fold with a string. He opened it to the middle and scratched figures on the page for a moment. “Call it a month.”

  “Monsieur! You have dozens of presses!”

  “And dozens of orders to print,” he replied darkly. “I can allocate two presses. Why? How badly do you want these?”

  “I was hoping for three days.”

  “Then you can go on hoping, monsieur!” He shut the notebook with a snap.

  Well, what’s money for? What was I really going to use it for? “How quick could you do it with all your presses?”

  He laughed. “Good day to you, monsieur. Come back when you’ve sorted out my idiot son-in-law.”

  “Could you do it in a week?”

  “Good day.”

  “For fifteen guilders more?”

  He paused. “Mind yourself, monsieur. I don’t think your employer would take kindly to her money being spent like that.”

  “It’s my money.” It was in fact all my money, everything I’d earned that I hadn’t spent on food. This was as good a purchase as anything else. “I’ll pay it myself. This was my responsibility too, so . . . I’ll pay it.”

  “Total of thirty-six guilders. For five thousand, in a week.”

  I nodded. “Let’s just round it up to forty.”

  He laughed sharply and turned back to his press. “We can talk more when I see that proof you’ve talked so much about.”

  Reinault’s son-in-law was indeed roughly of an age with me, a man named Emile, plain-faced but sweet-eyed, short and soft—in other words, nothing at all like REDACTED but for his mop of black curls, which were close enough that it made my heart sour to look at him, so I tried not to. I whisked him off to Sterre’s offices, explaining no fewer than three times along the way what we were doing and why we were doing it. He was bemused the whole way, bemused to hand over the contracts, and bemused when Sterre’s clerk, Tyche, wrote out a bank draft for the full amount. He’d bought them from us, after all, so he received all his money back, rather than merely part of it.

  “Burn those,” I said, nodding to the contracts laid neatly on the desk under Tyche’s hands. “Them and any others that come in through that door.”

  I took Emile back to the print shop, and he showed Reinault the bank draft, and then I showed Reinault the other bank draft, the one for twenty-five guilders from Sterre’s accounts, and said, “I’ll have to get the rest from my rooms. But you’ll get started now?”

  He sighed. “Five thousand in a week,” he said slowly. “Will you be picking them up, or having them delivered?”

  “The former,” I said. “I’ll come by once a day and take however many you’ve finished.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  The first copy, the proof copy, went to Mistress Chant, to show her what I’d done. She took it between two fingers, frowning and turning it over like she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. “You wrote it down?”

  “Yes. Do you see? Do you see why? Do you see how it will work?”

  “I see it,” she said impassively.

  “What do you think?”

  “Too late for me to have an opinion, isn’t it? You went haring off too quick for me to say anything. And you’ve clearly already chosen a path and run headlong down it,” she said, tossing the pamphlet onto the table.

  “Tell me anyway. For . . . didactic reasons.”

  She crossed her arms. “It’s inelegant. You’re solving a problem meant for a jeweler’s screwdriver with a sledgehammer.”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes brute force is all you have time for.”

  “Quite.” She paused. “You want me to tell you if I think it will work.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t. I
don’t know if it will. I’ve never seen something like this before.”

  I picked the pamphlet up. “I have. That’s how I know. That’s what made me think of it. Would Lanh Chau and Arenza be interested in helping distribute these?”

  She glanced at the pamphlet again. “Not Lanh Chau,” she said. “He’s too young. I don’t want you confusing him with your . . . ways. But I will ask Arenza if she’s interested.”

  I nodded. “Have her come to the Sun’s Rest or Monsieur Reinault the printer if she is.”

  The first full batch of pamphlets went to all the buyers that Sterre had on record at her shop. I commandeered Teo and a couple of the clerks, in addition to Arenza, to help me with deliveries, and I myself went around the city to the fancy houses, one by one, and groveled and apologized.

  The thing about printed words, a paper mind, is that they can slip in where a whole man is turned away at the door. If the servants denied us, all we had to do was put a couple copies of the pamphlet into their hands and ask them to pass along the message to their employers. All that was left, then, was to trust in gossip’s ability to flourish.

  And it has started to work. People have been suspicious of us at first—why wouldn’t they be suspicious of someone on their doorstep handing them some unsolicited literature?—but the flowers are dying. Some of them now are fully black, and a few, like the printer’s son-in-law Emile’s, have already completely withered.

  When I do manage to explain, when I make them read the pamphlet and really comprehend for once, when they see the realities laid out before them in clear language in crisp black ink on paper . . . It’s different, wildly different, than one young man clutching at their sleeves on the street and desperately begging for someone to listen to him.

  I get to watch, in silence, as it dawns on them that the disease isn’t some clever scheme that Sterre and I cooked up. People rant at me, rail at me, cry at me. “We’re ruined,” they cry—if it had only just been wealthy folk, they could have afforded to take the blow. They would have cried and whined about it, but no one in their household would have starved.