From the Deep of the Dark j-6
Page 43
Dick Tull sat on the kettle-black’s worn leather seat as the carriage swayed rhythmically down Cloisterham Avenue, the street crowded with horses and omnibuses and carts laden with milk churns or mounds of black coal, shifting and settling as the crowded traffic moved and halted.
The only other passenger was a clerk who fastidiously kept a pair of calfskin gloves on at all times, even in the carriage’s warm cab. He was often in the same carriage when Dick ventured off to lunch. No doubt the dour little scribe returned home for a brief meal served by his wife, then returned to his office to serve out the remainder of his day at work. Usually the clerk had a newssheet to engage him, but a lightning printers’ strike had stopped today’s editions and so, like Dick, he leant on the handle of his cane, shaking with the carriage’s motions, jolting slightly as the boiler coughed out each belch of smoke.
‘An observation, sir, if I may?’ said the clerk.
Dick nodded. So he fancied himself an observant man, this grey little jack-an-ink?
‘You often board at the same place. A very fine neighbourhood. Yet you always disembark in the direction of an ordinary to take your luncheon. I was wondering why a fellow who carries as fine a silver cane as you would choose to eat in an establishment where its knives must be chained to its tables? Is this a new fashion for gentlemen I am unaware of?’
Dick used the cane to bang on the roof to let the driver know he was going to exit. ‘Food’s food. Why pay for five waiters’ wages when you’re eating just the same? Besides, there’s sometimes work to be picked up from the tables there, as well as a good roast.’
‘Commissions are to be had inside an ordinary?’ The clerk sounded surprised as the carriage drew to a stop. ‘Well I never. I had surmised from your hours of luncheon that you might be retired?’
Dick opened the carriage door to the cold and made to step down. ‘As much as a man’s allowed to be.’
No. The Court of the Air didn’t have much of a retirement plan, not unless you included growing old in a porcelain tower in the torpid heat of a far-off island. But then, the Court paid handsomely enough to offset such inconveniences. Airsickness wasn’t much of a perk, though. Travelling up to the new aerial city floating up there in the heavens. Creating its own clouds with the exhaust of all those thinking machines. Watching, always watching. See all, say nothing. Some things never changed.
Dick pulled his coat in tight and crossed over to see what Sadly was serving today.
‘Listen to me and listen well,’ said the clan’s wise-woman. ‘For this is the story of the scar that cuts the world and what may emerge from the deep of the dark.’
The three seanore nomads, the wise-woman’s chosen disciples, bobbed warily along the edge of the great trench, for there were strong currents about here said to stir out of the depths. Strong enough to suck many an unsuspecting swimmer down into the maw of the world. A premise far more disturbing to them than the legends which were spun out of such mortal dangers.
The wise-woman sensed their lack of conviction and found their disrespect irksome, banging her rotor-spear in the seabed and sending up eddies of black dust. ‘Attention to me. The wisdom of these songs was ancient when the orb of the sun and the rays it casts into the sea were yellow rather than the red that warms your cheeks. I have not dragged you to gaze into the abyss so you might have a tale with which to scare unruly children. Listen you well, to the song of two thieves, one young, one old, who risked all to cast the demons of the mirror-realm back into the darkness from which they crawled.’
The three disciples quietened down to listen to the songs. Perhaps there was hope for them. After all, the passage of time could, or so it was said, make diamonds from even the crudest of coals.
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