Dispatch from a Colored Room

by Matt Weber

down. It's just me, Aimée, Sim, and a bunch of equity that no one quite knows what to do with.

  And the documents. Dawnroad ships us an awful lot of documents—mostly, I think, as psychological warfare; they come in dribs and drabs, with no particular organization, and almost all of them are completely useless. They're all things that Duskstreet held for Gauthier Leblanc, of course. And one day, I get Sim to sleep, get back to sifting the boxes, and find a battered, spiral-bound notebook with "GL" written in the upper right corner of the cover.

  I wish I could say I hesitate before I read it. But I know I’ll have to show it to Aimée, and I know I might not get it back after that. And so, over that otherwise unremarkable box of ledgers, memos, manifests, and receipts, I read all the letters I’ve read to you so far today; and I read letters I don’t have time to bother with tonight, a thousand absorbing banalities and touching platitudes sketching Gauthier Leblanc’s rise up the rather short corporate ladder of Greyking Books; and, last, I read this.

  I have become a character from a fairy tale—and the fool, at that, or at best the hapless hero with a hard road ahead.

  This separation cannot be borne, Aimée. It is only a matter of time before this chancre has its way with me, and it may kill me before it devours my flesh; already my judgment suffers, my worse urges slip their chains. The doctors here are no better than they are on the sixth—no hope of a cure, no estimate of the time remaining me. So I have done what the fools in the fairy tales do. I have taken a day away from work to comb the streets of the fourth terrace in search of a dandelion (which are rare, you must know, for the synod and the gendarmerie order them exterminated wherever they are seen) and put it outside the window of my office.

  It is odd how these things happen—how often, in such a full city, we can find ourselves on an empty street, or empty but for the Dandelion Knight. We walked side by side, like friends, and I made my request.

  I name myself fool, but I know a few things nonetheless. I call him the Dandelion Knight, but he is not the same Aurcryn-Jon who visited me on the sixth. His voice was higher, his step lighter, his frame stronger. None by much; I would have taken him for the same in a more casual encounter. (Is there such a thing as a casual encounter with the Dandelion Knight?) It follows, then, that the Dandelion Knight has power over the body, if he can make his servants look so much the same. And then—

  I forget how much you cannot know; how little, even now, you can possibly understand, much less remember. I fought yellow-headed men like this in the 7th Ashview, with Elias and Jesson and all the others. I know they can see the Champions of Altronne, who are invisible to us except as ghosts, through windows or high on distant parapets and balconies. I know they can contend with a Champion hand to hand, and I know they reap lesser men like wheat in wet soil. I have heard some of them call to one another in lost accents and vocabularies, the sort we hear mangled in stage-plays aspiring to an ambiance of centuries long past. If the flesh serves them in these ways, what other concessions might it make? They are breakers, these yellow men, not healers; yet, in learning to break, what else might they have learned?

  "You've come to ask about the chancre," Aurcryn-Jon said to me.

  "You can cure it?" I asked.

  "For a price, of course."

  "Name it."

  And he did.

  Aimée, it does not seem high. But that is what fools in fairy tales always think.

  "You cannot have forgotten the Hoofstone mission," I said after the price was set. It was a risk, I suppose; for what if they had? But it seemed inconceivable, that such men could pay me such attention and not know.

  "You fought bravely there, I am told," said the Dandelion Knight. "Your men killed and were killed, and those who were not killed, suffered. But that was when you could not find a use for us, nor we you. Now you are a pillar of Altronner letters, separated from your daughter by a wall only we can tear down. What use to crush a failed schoolteacher, M Leblanc? We have more elegant plans."

  We spoke, then, for a time, of my misgivings. Perhaps by the time you read this, Aimée, they will all have come to nothing; but, you must realize, there are some strange interpretations that have taken hold among the poem's enthusiasts, ones that do not reflect well on its author. It is my belief that these controversies form a part, perhaps the greater part, of its appeal. If I reveal myself as its author, I will be pressed for an answer. I will not give one, of course, for I wish to sell books; but how might my demurral be received? What inferences might I inadvertently encourage?

  Think enough along these lines, though, and their irrelevance becomes clear. The Dandelion Knight has given me a hope that no physician would. Wherefore I must close, Aimée, with two tasks in mind. The second is to put pen to paper, for the Dandelion Knight has asked for a chapbook, and one poem does not a chapbook make. But, before I begin, I must speak with the friends of mine who know Aurcryn-Jon best: Jesson Desrosiers and your own caretaker, to whom I owe all. In his company, I believe I can pass a short visit with you and your mother without imperiling your good opinion of me. My heart sings at the thought, Aimée—of hearing your words, watching your stride, feeling the new weight of your body in my arms, the strength of your back and the length of your legs. Perhaps I will finally hand you these letters. Perhaps you will read them with your own eyes.

  "He never made that visit," Aimée says, when she finishes reading through the letters. "How did he die, Pel? And when?”

  "He disappeared," I say. "The last time his papers were shown was in Old Port Station, near Jesson Desrosiers' last known location. He left a will with an attorney, so when he had been missing for three months, the directive was clear enough: At that point the assets reverted to you and Ciel. That's when Duskstreet stepped in."

  "So he could still be alive?"

  Aimée speaks the words strangely, and it takes me a moment to understand how and why. "Aimée," I say, "you don't have to pretend you want to see him. You don't have a single memory of him that isn't from a heliotype."

  She looks at me strangely. "How would you know?" she says. "Maybe he did visit me once. He was good at avoiding the law, it seems; perhaps he saw me and I never told anyone until now."

  "Desrosiers is gone too," I say. "It's in the police report. They found his body with its head bashed in, months later. He was living in a ditch, Aimée, just desperate. Amazing quantities of substances in his bloodstream, a sack of cash buried nearby that no one could account for. Your father's blood on his clothes.” I draw a deep breath for what I’m about to say. “Remember that first letter. ‘Disencumber you of my failing flesh.’ Your father was suicidal, Aimée. He fled Jesson for a reason, did he not? Back when he joined Greyking. I think he may have come back for a reason too—”

  She won't talk to me for hours after that. Days, maybe.

  When they ran out of documents, Dawnroad began sending us legal notices.

  We were prepared for this, though not by our own design. The Greyking board had added a generously staffed legal department to the company, ostensibly for the protection of intellectual property (not least the colored room poem). In fact, a number of those lawyers specialized in finance, and were responsible for the questionable maneuvers that lined the pockets of the shareholders—but, in any event, you don't sign up as in-house counsel to a small press without some trace of appreciation for the product, and more than one soul in Legal worked for us unpaid to separate the bluffs from the real threats. Of the latter there were three.

  First, Dawnroad had petitioned the gendarmerie to reopen the investigation into Gauthier Leblanc's death, on the grounds that he was their real client and might not wish to surrender his assets to Aimée. Accordingly, we were told to cease and desist spending any of Aimée's inheritance, which was of course the only money either of us had to live on. This rattled me more than it did Aimée, who more quickly understood the endgame: Either her father was alive, in which case (she had faith) he would not begrudge her the money, or he was dead, in whi
ch case it was hers. In any case, she had spent some time living on credit she was not good for, and knew that you filled your belly and fended off the rain any way you could, especially when there were children to care for.

  Second, we were warned that we might be summoned to testify on the activities of Greyking's investment wing. This was a pure shakedown; the implication was that, if Dawnroad didn't get what they wanted, they would blow the whistle on Greyking's only profitable division. Recall, of course, that Dawnroad owned a large minority of Greyking, which made this a self-destructive threat in the short term, and one Aimée and I were both disposed to ignore; but a perceptive soul in Legal pointed out that the good bankers at Dawnroad would still eat if their stock in Greyking plummeted, and we would not.

  Last, and strangest, Elias Charbon had informed Dawnroad Bank that he had had a share in creating the colored room poem, and that he thus deserved a fraction of Aimée's interest in the company. We find out about this at the Lunidor board meeting, where he appears in a tailored suit that must easily cost ten times the price of my outfit and Aimée's combined, beaming a fat grin like a devil that's just eaten a baby. "Nice to see you, Aimée," he says.

  Aimée, to her credit,