Dispatch from a Colored Room

by Matt Weber

the night, I go searching: sidewalk cracks, parks, mazy alleys that might end in abandoned houses. Eventually I find what I'm looking for. Like a fool in a fairy tale, I put it on our windowsill.

  I awake to a tapping on the windowpane. It's too dark to see color, but there's a long shape folded up there, gripping the sill and frame with smaller fractions of its body than I would have thought possible. It meets my eyes, then silently leaps back and down.

  I skirt the bed, which dominates the middle of the room—I made the hotel move it away from the window, so I could be between Aimée and any intruder, and so I'd be the one waking in just this situation—and fly through the near-total dark of the hallways practically by echolocation, down the stairs spattered with acullico quids and chewed betel, through the lobby where no one is at the desk, and out the door. It takes me a minute to find the Dandelion Knight, looking at me from a recess between buildings with bright eyes, reflecting the street's blue gaslight from their pupils.

  "It worked," I say, not sure how else to react.

  "It worked," he says back. "What do you need?"

  "I need Sim back," I say.

  "Do you know who has him?" he asks.

  "Yes," I say, "and so do you, unless I miss my guess."

  "What makes you say that?" He gives me a tiny smirk in the dark.

  "You came to help Gauthier Leblanc," I say. "Just this way. Don't tell me you're not keeping an eye on this whole Greyking circus."

  "All right," he says. "I won't."

  I wait for him to continue, but he doesn't. "So what do I do?" I finally ask. "What do you know? What can you do for me? What do you want?"

  "Ah," he says.

  My mind works furiously. "All right, fine," I say. "You wanted Sim's grandfather to publish the colored room poem under his own name. He never did. But we can." This is actually true, I think, even if we lose the battle for control of the Greyking board; editorial control is obviously the last thing on the minds of Dawnroad and their VC cronies. "What else do you want? Tell me."

  "We don't want that any more," he says, and my heart sinks. "It's been a generation; the poem is a curiosity, and M Leblanc has no more poems to publish. In a hundred years, maybe, we'll want his authorship discovered. But not right now."

  "Then what?"

  "We'll tell you," he says, "when we know."

  "Fine," I say, before I can stop myself—before I can really make myself understand what it means to make a carte-blanche promise to the Dandelion Knight. "One book, printed at the house's expense. As many copies as we can print without going into bankruptcy, priced however you like. Do you need me to sign something?"

  The Dandelion Knight smiles again in answer, and I shiver. But I make myself speak.

  "Now what can you do?"

  You're restless. I know. We're almost there. But we can't get there without the ransom note.

  He read the thing to Sim after he wrote it. I can't even imagine.

  Dearest Aimée

  Sim has come to visit me for a while. I will return him to you shortly of course. Only I wonder if you recall the financial matter outstanding between myself and your father. I know it is gauche to insist but you recall of course the effects of the nerve agent to which the 7th was exposed at the Hoofstone. I remind you that they are pernicious and can only be managed at considerable expense. Perhaps when you come to pick Sim up you could bring the paperwork required to settle the issue. 60% of your father’s allotment seems fair to both of us. I say 60% due to my illness and to the regrettable necessity of interacting with the board by proxy which carries some small cost and aggravation. You are a healthy girl and will surely live to see my share bequeathed to Sim so it should be little hardship.

  I know you never approved of the little walks that Sim and I were accustomed to take when we lived on the sixth. We will have no time for promenades in the next day or so but in about twenty-four hours I imagine we will begin them for old times' sake. If you prefer to intercept him before the outset of our expeditions I will be deprived of a great pleasure but I accede to a mother's prerogatives. We will take in a show at the Blue-Roofed Room in Folio tomorrow noon if you wish to join us.

  Your loving uncle

  E

  Like an idiot, I took this to the gendarmes. They told me with utterly straight faces that it sounded like the words of a man anticipating a few enjoyable days with a beloved nephew. Which, when I thought about it, was exactly right, as far as it went.

  I said "like an idiot." I suppose it doesn't seem idiotic; in another life, I might have thought of it as futile but not stupid. But we live in the world, and I live with the memory of coming back to the hotel room from the station. Of unlocking the door, pushing it inward, and hitting something heavy with a soft thump. Of cursing, and pushing, and finally getting a gap big enough to wiggle through—of cursing myself for the weeks of sitting and eating restaurant food and not walking that had made my hips and ass thicker than they should be. Of screaming for help, dropping to the floor, taking a pulse, trying to ignore the blueness of her lips and nails. Of walking through the apartment, when it was all over and she'd been taken to St. Nox's, and feeling a stabbing pain in my foot. Of pulling out the needle.

  I'm so sorry, Sim. But they need to know.

  I think everyone here has been onstage or in the seats at the Blue-Roofed Room; but perhaps you don't know that it was abandoned until perhaps a decade ago, the legendary cerulean ceiling falling out in chunks, mice nesting in the wells that held its tiny embedded lights. The green felt seats were in no better condition, nor the brown stage with its green carpet rolled up in the rear. I enter as a member of the audience; Elias and Sim wait on the stage in a classic pose, child on man's lap, knife pricking throat.

  "You have the contract?" Elias says.

  "Is Sim hurt?" I ask.

  Elias laughs wetly at that. "What if he is?" he says. "Hear that, Sim? Your mother only wants an undamaged son. Otherwise she'll just send you back."

  "Sim," I say, meeting his eyes, "we would never leave you with this man. I just want to know if we should take you to a doctor afterward. But your great-uncle doesn't care enough about your well-being to let me know..."

  "The boy's fine," Elias snarls. "I'll have what's mine now."

  I look at the wings without moving my eyes. I can't tell which side he'll come in from, but I know I need to get Elias to the proscenium. "Bring Sim here," I say, "and we'll make the exchange."

  "Why?"

  "You were military," I say. "How do I know what traps you've set between here and where you are?"

  His face loses its belligerent confusion for a moment and becomes oddly soft, almost wobbly, before setting back into a snarl of scorn. His hand moves over Sim's chest in a way that sickens me. "Traps?" he says. "I was in the 7th Ashview, you depthless cunt. I've had enough of traps to last a lifetime. If you can call it a life, what I've had since the Hoofstone."

  "You were paid for what you suffered at the Hoofstone," I say, trying to sound like I think suffering can be paid for with money.

  "You think that's what I want?" Elias says. "Table scraps from tax takings, and a blind eye from the fat-fuck greycoats too craven to fight the battles that need it? I'm fed up with hush money—"

  "You still take it, though, don't you?" I say. "You and Jesson Desrosiers and the rest of the 7th."

  "When I get my share of what's mine," says Elias, "I'll be able to turn it down on principle."

  "That's not how principle works," I say.

  "Spoken like a bank flunky from the central second," he says. "I'm done talking. Bring me the papers or lose the boy."

  I shrug, heart in my throat, and hop the stage, and that's when I get what I need: A flash of green, dull in the dark, from stage left. As I walk to Elias and Sim I list slightly to my own left, drawing his gaze. I can smell him from farther away than I'd like, and I can see the whites of Sim's eyes all around his irises.

  That was my first taste of stagecraft, that afternoon in the
Blue-Roofed Room, for an audience of one. I can't imagine I did it well. I see the suspicion mounting in Elias' eyes as I approach, the minutest angle off true that I can muster without tripping his sense of something wrong—these soldier types have it, I know that, a fallible but real sixth sense that nags at the base of the brain when a situation is about to erupt in some unknowable disaster. I even see the dread mounting in Sim, who's not sure to be more terrified that I don't have something up my sleeve or that I do. I take out the papers as I draw near and make myself wait to fumble them, because I know I won't do it naturally and so I'll only have one chance, to occupy his eye and hand with one instinctual reaction before his sixth sense screams.

  I'm close enough to kiss him, the smell scraping the back of my throat with every breath. He's planned a lot, but I see with hope and smug pleasure that he hasn't planned this moment, the one where he needs to restrain Sim with one hand, keep the knife at his throat with another, and somehow sign the papers surrendering half of Greyking Books to his custody. He curses and fumbles; eventually he's got his left arm across Sim's chest, his knife in his left hand at the side of the boy's throat, and his right hand free, beckoning for the quill.

  Things happen slowly now. I move the quill near Elias' hand, which begins to close in anticipation.

  Sim, all fear and flopsweat, feels the iron of Elias' grip relax. I see this in his eyes, the trapped rat's flash of