by Jordan Reece
Go to school! She smiled and her eyes glowed brightly with her dreams. In fright and rage, he’d slapped her. She did not slap him back but fell stunned to the bed as he let the sheet drop to the floor.
At the mill, he did his work with the slap never straying far from his mind. It had felt good to strike her, and if she dreamed at him again, so would he slap her again to wake her up!
He ate his bread at break but it did not sate his hunger. It was his mother’s fault for talking about school. Part of him was still panicking, and he wanted to fill his stomach until it burst. That would make him feel better. He ate the last crumb of his bread and schemed to get more from the kitchen. Oh, it was easy, too easy!
It was a half-day and there was little else for him to do until dismissal. He took himself to the kitchen and offered to check the traps. The three women who were in there gave him the job with gladness, hating to do it themselves. One was washing dishes and two were still awarding themselves a break in the corner although the whistle had blown. He busied himself and they swiftly forgot him to work and chat.
Going from trap to trap, he let himself into the pantry. Oh! There were special soft rolls in the Boss Man’s basket for later, cheese and butter and ginger candies. Did they count the rolls? Taniel didn’t know. But he could not resist the temptation. Buttering a roll with his finger, he shoved it into his mouth. He took a chunk of the cheese and gobbled that up, too. Two of the ginger candies went into his pocket for later.
Someone was coming. He heard footsteps and a woman coughing. His heart pounding that he might be caught in the Boss Man’s food, he bent down solicitously to a trap with a mouse in it.
It was still alive, its leg caught under the bar. If not for those footsteps, he would have pressed down on the bar to make it squirm and squeak. The dust and spilled flour in the pantry made a tickle in Taniel’s throat and he coughed. The woman outside was still coughing as well.
Jesco wanted to pull away. He was himself, standing apart; he was the boy, feeling sick and frightened. Taniel was on his hands and knees now, coughing violently on the floor of the pantry as the mouse stilled. Something crashed and Taniel turned. The woman who had been washing the dishes had fallen just outside the open pantry door. Blood was coming out of her nose, froth from her lips, and she was staring right at Taniel with her brown eyes open wide in terror. The ring of white contracted as her facial muscles relaxed, the terror ebbing to a distant stare that pierced through him.
It was the flour and dust, the boy reasoned, and the cotton fibers. The kitchen was not the cleanest place and it was getting in their lungs, coating them and keeping out the air. He scrambled to his feet and ran across the pantry, where he leaped over the woman and fled from the kitchen. The two women in the corner were doubled over and hacking so hard that they shook.
Downstairs in the opening room, where the bales of raw cotton were removed from their bags, Taniel could hear a storm of coughing. One man was struggling to come up the stairs as Taniel passed by. He looked up to the boy and spoke through froth. “Help! Help-” Then he collapsed and Taniel ran on.
The lappers were doubled over and coughing when they should have been cleaning the cotton. The card hands were down on the floor, twitching and their fingers splayed out. The Boss Man had collapsed on his desk in the office. What was going on? Taniel’s throat was tickling fiercely and he swallowed as he dashed through the mill, trying desperately not to cough. It was the same in every place he passed, the machinery forgotten, men and women and children bent over and coughing, falling to the floor, bleeding and frothing and crying out weakly for help, laying still and staring, staring at nothing . . .
Demons. Demons! It was the Last Day that the Church spoke of, and to which Taniel had paid little heed. Demons were assailing the mill to collect the sinners. They would be taken to hell and just this morning, dear angels on high, just this morning Taniel had slapped his mother! Just seconds ago he had planned to torture that mouse!
The demons were coming for him. He could feel them on his heels, slavering with hunger for this sinner boy, and he was going to burn in fire for eternity if he did not go faster than they did.
A few people like him were coughing as they ran, most of them children. Terrified, Taniel turned to the door that would carry him out into the street. So did a girl, a hint of crimson edging from her nostril as she ran alongside Taniel. Then she fell, bumping into him. He staggered but was not knocked off his feet. Sunlight was bright out the dusty windows and if he could just get outside, this demonic affliction would no longer mark him as its own . . .
Angels watch over you, Jesco thought as he watched the frantic, sprinting boy. It was a useless platitude when this event had played out long ago. It was not uncommon for seers to lose their minds and terrible things, terrible things had Jesco seen through his ability. Things that made him weep in the night and now he would add this demon-fearing boy to his store of memories, the girl who hadn’t made it to the door, the hundreds of mill workers wracked with coughing as they fell.
Taniel made it to the door and beheld a horrific sight. It was not just the mill that the demons had overcome. Bodies were everywhere in the lane, people dodging them in horror only to fall in turn. The boy ran along the road as a horse drawing a wagon crumpled. The driver fell from his perch with a cry and even birds were falling out of the sky . . .
The boy had not been baptized. He recognized that this would save him, and wheeled sharply into the alley. He only had eyes for the mucky water at the far end, which was not safe to drink but surely the angels would not begrudge Taniel’s oath to fealty with soiled water when his heart was theirs in whole. The demons had come to collect but they would not collect him just so long as he got one finger into that blessed water!
The tickling became unbearable and he coughed. Then a fusillade of coughs broke from him, each one spurring the next to be worse, and his pace slowed. The river . . . the river . . . the boy listed like a ship upon a stormy sea as he ran, and then he fell, his small body striking the heap of beams. Nails pierced through his shirt and scored along his side, drawing blood as more leaked from his nostrils. He lay in the alley’s filth and stared in agony at the river where salvation waited . . . he just had to get up and go a little farther and he crawled on his belly like a baby as the scrap of his shirt ripped away on a nail . . .
“No,” Jesco said quietly after the dying boy vanished. The detectives were all staring at him, and he felt like he had been run over by a carriage. Knees shaking and head throbbing, he put out a hand to the grimy bricks to steady himself. Then he jerked away before touching them and went into his pockets for his gloves.
“Nothing to do with this murder?” Scoth asked about the scrap, which he took from Jesco.
“That is from a death during the Great Poisoning.” No longer did Jesco feel any aggravation for the detective or the street officers. Being in thrall often did that, especially if what it showed him was something grave and terrible.
“The things that you must see,” Sinclair said somberly. His flabby cheeks wobbled as he looked around anew at the alley. “The Great Poisoning indeed.”
Since it had nothing to do with this case, Scoth let the scrap fall to the mat of trash. Ravenhill looked up to the beams and said, “We should let him have a feel at the garbage under the body.”
“But this man was not killed here,” Scoth reminded him.
“Well, he could check a few things at least. Just in case.”
“It’s not as easy as that,” Jesco said in a winded voice. “They cost me, each and every one. Only give to me what you truly feel may bear a relevant memory.”
“I didn’t know if this one would be relevant or not,” Scoth said. His tone was strained and defensive. “And we can’t stand about doing that here at any rate when it takes the seer so long to perform a single reading.”
Jesco did not react to the criticism. The boy had fallen just a few feet shy of where they were standing today. Parliament h
ad had to form disposal teams, which went through every affected street and building to gather the bodies. As it was not safe to burn them, and it was worried that putting them in a mass grave would eventually deliver the poison to the groundwater, they were piled in sealed wagons and driven all the way to the sea. There they were loaded onto ships, which set sail for Palamin Atoll. Formerly a prison island, it had been many years since it was used for that purpose. The contaminated bodies were dumped there and covered in horan salts to make them unpalatable to sea birds that might consume them and spread the contamination.
That was where Taniel’s body had gone, to be tossed into the heaps and left to rot. His dreaming mother had no doubt been taken there, too, and everyone down to the horse in the road and the mouse in the trap.
The detectives were talking. Jesco tried to listen, but the thrall had drained him of a good measure of his strength. Sinclair was the only one who remembered that Jesco’s abilities did not come free, and he offered to fetch the chair. Scoth shook his head. “That wheelchair can’t be gotten around the pile of beams. Return him to the asylum; he’s of no more use to this investigation.”
“You’re welcome,” Jesco said, his temper reawakening despite his tiredness and the horror of the thrall. The detective did that to him.
Scoth looked offended, but Jesco didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. Turning on his heel, he stumbled away from the naked body. Sinclair came with him. A breeze whistled through the alley and fluttered the pieces of newspaper that Tokol had dropped. He’d also discarded the rolled-up pages that he had been holding earlier. Upon the mat of trash, the pages were bright against the dimness of its trodden brethren.
A sheet flapped against the pile of beams and flew up into the air. Sinclair sighed and called out, “Patrolman Tokol, a word of advice. One must preserve the sanctity of the scene of crime, not contribute one’s litter to it . . .”
The junior detective stopped abruptly and stared at the pile. Curious, Jesco did the same. The clouds over the dead zone were parting here and there, and the light had caught upon a silver gleam within the rotting wood. Seeing it as well, Tokol hurried over.
“Did you find something?” Scoth called.
“I don’t know,” Sinclair said, motioning aside the patrolman. Eager to rectify his errors by being overly helpful, Tokol covered his hand in a kerchief and put it between the beams. He pulled out an object hanging from a chain. It was a silver open-face timepiece, and a fine one. On a plate between the numbers, it was carved with wheat growing tall under a sky full of clouds and floating flowers.
The timepiece was clean, very clean, unlike everything else in Poisoners’ Lane. Tokol held it in the palm of his hand as Sinclair and Jesco took a look. Ravenhill and Scoth quit the body and came their way to see.
“This has not been here long,” Sinclair said. “It must have been hanging from a trouser pocket and gotten its chain caught on a nail in these beams.”
“And the chap didn’t notice?” Tokol asked in amazement. “I would notice if something lifted my watch.”
“Dragging a body and you might not have,” Scoth said, coming to Jesco’s side. The detective’s eyes were alight at this new discovery, far more than they had been with the scrap of Taniel’s shirt.
Jesco had gone almost too far in that thrall, and he was struggling to keep hold of himself and his time. They had been the same age at the Great Poisoning, Jesco and Taniel. But Taniel had lived in meanness from the day he was born and until Jesco was six, he had worked the fields of his family’s farm in the loving pack of his brothers and sisters. Singing as they planted, singing as they harvested, and fragments of those songs still came to him in dreams. Until his fingers upon the hoe became a dangerous thing, and the bed he shared with his brothers at night, and the fork with which he ate, he had been innocent of the ways of cruelty. And then he was remanded to the asylum, where he relearned what it was to be treated kindly. But Taniel . . . at no point had he had a measure of grace . . .
There was renewed excitement all around him at the timepiece. Unable to relinquish the pickpocket story to which he had fastened himself so strongly, Ravenhill said, “Maybe they were fighting over this.”
“Hardly worth a fight to end in murder, I should venture,” Scoth said, taking the timepiece from Tokol. He held it up by the chain and the clock rotated below. “This is very fine craftsmanship, no doubt, but there are no jewels within it. This would fetch no large sum of money.”
“I’ve seen a bloke kill another bloke over a couple of pennies,” Ravenhill said querulously. “This is worth a decent amount. People would kill for it.”
“Shall I then?” Jesco asked.
“We’ll take this back to the station for now,” Scoth said, not looking at him. “The chemist can tell us if it’s picked up too much kolymbium. But it doesn’t penetrate metal as deeply or as quickly.”
Ravenhill had become sulky at how his partner was not entertaining his hypothesis as much as he would like. “Perhaps it doesn’t have anything to do with the murder anyway. Just another waste of time like the fabric.”
“I could handle it and tell you all you need to know,” Jesco said. He was bleating into the wind for all the attention they paid him. Scoth stared at the timepiece like he was trying to summon some latent seer skills within himself rather than solicit Jesco for them, and Ravenhill was taking a surreptitious sip from a flask. Then he paused and spat it out into the alley. Mournfully, he dumped out the rest just in case it was gathering any poison.
“Tokol, get Amatu and you two bag that body,” Scoth ordered briskly. “Load it up in the second carriage and we’ll ferry it to the coroner. You two should do a fast but thorough inspection of this alley from one end to the other. Bag anything you could conceivably construe as related to this case, and do the same on the road here in both directions. After that, clear out. I want the two of you to be leaving this place in no more than an hour.”
“Yes, sir,” Tokol said.
“Get started.” They moved aside so that Tokol could go down the alley and relay his orders to Amatu. Next, Scoth addressed Ravenhill and Sinclair. “After we drop off the body at the coroner, we’ll take this timepiece to the chemist for testing and make sure it has not imbibed too much to be handled. Then we can examine it properly. This carving in the middle is quite distinctive, and the maker could lead us to the buyer . . .”
“Or I could do it,” Jesco said in frustration, already with a glove removed.
At last, Scoth spoke to him. “Haven’t you had enough for the day? There are other seers who-”
“Who have been driven mad, or refuse to use their skill altogether for fear of what they will see,” Jesco snapped. Losing his patience, he snapped the timepiece away from the detective.
-he was-
-he was-
-he-
-was-
-gone—
When Jesco opened his eyes, he was no longer standing at the end of the alley. His feet were swaying and his arms were tucked across his chest as Scoth carried him to the carriage.
He had pushed too far. He’d known that he was in danger of doing that when the police carriage first turned down the lane of the asylum, and he had promptly done it anyway from pique. Scoth was grim above him and the timepiece was nowhere to be seen.
Sinclair held open the door to the carriage. Grunting, Scoth got Jesco inside and upon a seat. “The next time,” the detective said in irritation, “you feel like showing off how marvelous your abilities are, wait until you are stronger so that I can be amazed.”
“The next time,” Jesco said in the same acid tone, “you feel like requesting my assistance, do a better examination of the crime scene so that you present me with the real clue before a red herring. That would amaze me in turn.”
Scoth’s lips tightened and his eyes flicked outside the carriage to where Ravenhill was fidgeting. Jesco understood from that look that Ravenhill had been the one to inspect the alley and miss the timepiece.
Removing a pad of paper and pen from his uniform, Sinclair said, “Should I stay in the carriage and write down anything Mr. Currane has to say about the timepiece, sir?”
“No, I’ll do it,” Scoth said, pulling out his own paper and pen. “Help the officers get that body out of the alley and into the compartment. We should not tarry here.”
Jesco’s legs were numb. He fumbled clumsily for his pocket, but his glove was not in there. “Did you see where my glove fell?”
Scoth sat down across from Jesco and covered his hand in a kerchief. He pulled the glove from his trench coat and offered it. When Jesco leaned over to take it, he nearly fell out of the seat. The second thrall had left him boneless.
The detective moved swiftly to catch him. “Would you be better served by your chair?”
“Yes. There’s a belt and a latch that can be fitted around my hips.”
“As I recall.”
They had worked very few cases together and the last had been a long time ago. For him to recall a detail so minor was a surprise to Jesco. Scoth dropped the glove upon his lap and turned to the chair, which was facing the wrong way for Jesco to get in. The brakes kept Scoth from turning it. He bent down to unlock them as Jesco struggled to get the glove on.
Days. It was going to be days before he could walk again. But that was why he lived in the asylum, where his meals would be fixed for him and an attendant would help him to the lavatory and anywhere else he had to go.
Scoth was triumphant with the brakes and turned the chair; Jesco failed with the glove and had to endure the detective putting it on for him. They worked together to get him into the chair, Scoth’s hands digging around Jesco’s sides for the halves of the belt. Once snapped into place, the detective retook his seat and picked up the pad of paper and pen.
He looked at Jesco as voices echoed in the alley. Ravenhill wasn’t being of any assistance. Through the window, he could be seen leaning upon the autohorse and yawning. Jesco did not envy anyone having Ravenhill as a partner, even Laeric Scoth.