by Jay Lake
Still, this problem was all too obvious. "Are you a Boxer or an Opener?"
"Boxer."
A traditional dwarf then, Bijaz thought, trimming his stitches to move with the times. "And what has brought you to my door?"
"M-m-my wife." The dwarf's chest shuddered as he stifled a sob. "She—she's taken our girls out of their boxes."
"By Dorgau's left testicle! How old?" Boxing was not a process that lent itself to interruption. Dwarfs were created by clamping healthy children into boxes to constrict body size. Growing frames limited development of the protruding legs. Onesiphorous had been raised in a box, from ages six to fifteen. He'd spent the first year out of the box learning how to walk again, rebuilding his muscles. This exquisite torture of children was an ancient art, but very well understood.
To release a child during the process was even more damaging than boxing them in the first place.
"Six and eight."
"So the youngest just went in?"
"Two weeks ago. We were all so proud." His chest shuddered again. "At least that's what I thought. The houseman-attendant placed her within, and we have—had—a private nurse come twice a day."
Onesiphorous had not thought upon his own houseman in years. Doctors, usually dwarfs, who specialized in the medical and developmental problems of children still in their boxes.
Away from the City Imperishable, the life of dwarfs seemed ever more like perversion and less like civilization.
"What about the eight-year-old?" he asked.
"I don't know." The dwarf sobbed again. "B-b-berra came last night with two dwarfs I didn't recognize." He tried to collect his breath. "One struck me with an axe handle. While I lay stunned, they broke open the boxes and took my girls." Another body-wracking shudder. "I could hear them shrieking."
"Berra is your wife?"
"Yes."
Onesiphorous stared at his desk. He hadn't been here long enough to accrue layers of documents. There was a brass compass left behind by the previous tenant, a large baize blotter, a sheaf of blank letters signed by Imago, four days' worth of Port Defiance's local broadsheets, and a scratched-over draft of a letter to the Lord Mayor.
Though so much had already changed since he'd begun to write it.
The argument which had dominated the exiles' society here in Port Defiance, creeping into the politics of the Harbormaster and the trade factors of the Loska District, was now erupting into the destruction of families.
So it begins, he thought. The end of who we have been for a thousand years. He'd realized the problem as soon as he'd arrived in Port Defiance, but this poor buggerer's children were the first real victims.
The older girl was in a great deal of trouble.
"What do you wish me to do?" he finally asked. "I have no legal authority. I am just a dwarf among other dwarfs."
Red eyes stared at him, face shivering. "Can you get them back?"
"I wouldn't know how to begin," Onesiphorous said softly. "We have no laws to protect children in their boxes. Only the chains of custom. Which your wife has broken. Do you have any idea who the dwarfs with her might have been?"
"I'm not sure." The visitor's voice had broken completely now. The sound of defeat. "They both wore blue jackets. Like the inspectors. But there's no dwarfs in the Harbormaster's service."
"Uniforms?" Dwarfs had never worn uniforms. Styles, yes, most notably the traditional muslin wrappings, but not uniforms. His kind were forbidden from being sworn into high office, and a dwarf was never forced to draw a weapon under orders. Each limitation had a privilege hidden somewhere within.
"Could be."
"Look, ah . . . " He stopped. "What is your name?"
The dwarf stood. "I sign my bank drafts as Trefethen the Spice Factor. Not that it matters now."
"Trefethen. I'll talk to some friends. I can't think what I can do personally, but I'll try. Officially, it's not my purpose here."
"If you're not here to help the dwarfs," Trefethen asked bitterly, "what is your purpose?"
With that he left, his tea still untouched.
"A good question, sir," Onesiphorous told the empty room.
It had all been much simpler when he'd been fighting the Burgesses to make a new way for dwarfs. Children broken from their boxes wasn't the way he'd meant to create.
Onesiphorous watched the late sunlight slant across his window as birds circled low over the water, feasting on something drowned. The Alate's bell clinked slightly as he rolled it in his hand.
Big Sister entered without knocking just as Onesiphorous finally pulled off his sodden trousers. His linen knickers clung to his thighs, but his state of dress was her lookout if she was going to go barging about.
"What do you want?" he snapped.
"I thought we ought to talk again."
"Learned anything new since yesterday?"
"Port Defiance deserves to be free. Port Defiance should be grateful for what it already has. Openers are taking on the Boxers. Openers and Boxers are plotting together. The plantations hate the miners. The miners hate the plantations."
"Scarcely news, any of that." His thoughts were on Trefethen, and the dwarf's poor daughters.
"Scarcely." She leaned against the wall and regarded him with cool amusement. "The warehousemen and the factors over in Loska have a cozy little klatch going. No room for an honest businesswomen to buy her way in."
"They matching you bribe for bribe?"
"Yes. With a sinking fund. Tribade business would be a lot tougher if more people were both clever and consistent."
"Most business would be tougher." Lord Mayor Imago had a close relationship with the Tribade. Onesiphorous himself had cooperated with them in the days when sending dwarfs downriver had been illegal. Even so, he wasn't certain they ought to be the future of the City Imperishable.
Or Port Defiance, for that matter.
"Funny place, this world," said Big Sister. "Also, a dwarf in a small boat set himself on fire outside the Blunt Scupper."
"What did they do?"
"Cut the painter line and let it drift with the tide. He never screamed."
Onesiphorous had a sick feeling he knew the unfortunate dwarf. "Did he say anything?"
"No. But the Blunt Scupper is over on Curlew Eyot. Lot of Openers drink there. Used to be a plantation man's bar. Still is, some. Odd choice of drinking companions, if you take my meaning."
The plantations along the Jade Coast raised indigo, cotton, ground nuts, and other crops on land cleared from the swampy jungles. There was money in that, but also generations of backbreaking labor ruled over by rotting aristocracy. Lord Mayor Imago's family had retreated to a plantation after some financial disgrace in his youth, Onesiphorous knew, though he was vague about the details.
The plantation men had no love for the Harbormaster, or any of the rest of Port Defiance's officialdom. This city hosted the only bourses where they could market their crops—it was that or sell them over the rail to free traders at a steep discount—but exchange fees were a permanent point of contention.
"Poor bastard," Onesiphorous said. "If it's who I think, I know why he did it." And I sent him to his death. "As for his choice of venue, Dorgau take me if I can explain. I have enough trouble with politics in the City Imperishable, and I was born there. People here are crazed by too much sun and saltwater. It's like trying to sort out a dogfight."
"Indeed," she said. "And the dogs are growling on the citizens' council."
Onesiphorous tried to put Trefethen the Spice Factor out of his mind. His imagination would not let go of the proud, broken dwarf sitting still as death as flames blackened his skin and his eyes boiled. He had to think. "Is the Harbormaster in on that?"
"Not that I can tell, but old Sevenships is cannier than most. He's likely involved in every little two-bit movement around here."
"And you're back because you thought I needed the meeting minutes?" He stood, tugging on dry, ragged pants.
"The Boxers are angry. It's
dwarf business. You're a dwarf. I thought you might want to know they're ready to start knifing Openers."
"Over . . . ?" Onesiphorous asked.
"Some kids were taken, their boxes broken."
"I know." All he could see was Trefethen drifting aflame into the sunset.
"Good. Let's just say there's encouragement from some of the local types. The sort who drink confusion to the City Imperishable with their morning wine."
"And they'd rather live beneath a corsair flag, or answer to some master down the Sunward Sea?"
Big Sister snorted with amusement. "When do you think the last warship of the City Imperishable passed this way?"
Onesiphorous was surprised. "We have warships?"
She cocked a finger at him. "My point exactly. May I see the bell, by the way?"
"Bell?" He felt stupid, missing some twist in the conversation. "What bell?"
"That the bird-man brought you."
Onesiphorous swallowed a growl. That bastard boy Boudin was spreading rumor about him. "Your sources are curious."
"No, just observant."
He couldn't think of a reason not to, so he tossed it to her.
She rolled it between her fingers. The little clink seemed loud in the flickering light of his oil lamps. "This is old," she said. "City-made, from a long time back. Silver's heavier than a modern smith would make it, unless he was working a fake. Don't know why anyone would forge something this trivial."
"Delightful. The Alates are handing out party favors from summers past."
She shrugged. "Maybe he found it sewn to a corpse floating somewhere. You never can tell." The bell gleamed in the lamplight as she set it down on his desk with a curiously dainty motion. "I think you're in trouble here, friend dwarf."
"So you told me yesterday."
"Not personal danger. That, too. In this case I mean the City Imperishable. Your precious Lord Mayor needs to start watching Port Defiance carefully. The Burgesses aren't likely to look this way during our lifetimes. Not until the tax assessments stop flowing, which will be too late. If Sevenships strikes the City's colors over the Flag Towers, there'll be no way to run them up again."
The loss of trade and the flow of goods would be crippling. Worse, though, was what might happen to the dwarfs once the contentious forces which had broken Trefethen's family made their way upriver. If Imago didn't find a way to focus the City dwarfs on their own future, that would be the end of them all.
And what ill would come of such an ending? asked a little voice deep inside his head. The wealth of centuries had been built on the suffering of children, that the full-men of the City Imperishable might have their captive accountants and business managers.
He looked down at his short, twisted legs and teakettle body. Perhaps it was time for something new.
"You think life as a dwarf is hard," said Big Sister, "try being born a woman."
Imago
Marelle used a hard-strike match to light the storm lamp by the door. The certamentarium was a reflection in paper of the guildhall's chaos. A fire waiting to happen, feeding on the words of centuries. After a belated moment, it occurred to Imago to wonder why there was a lamp here in the first place.
She adjusted the wicking screw. His nose was flooded with the scent of rock oil for a moment.
This room had a ceiling about fifteen feet high, but he could not gauge the size because of the mountains of books, scrolls and loose paper. Imago had spent quite a bit of time in libraries and filing rooms, back when he was a barrator. The sheer number of pages here beggared his imagination.
"This should have all rotted over the centuries."
"Left unattended, it would have." She picked her way down a canyon within the tottering cliffed walls of books.
Imago followed, wondering who cared for this place. Someone had passed their secrets on to Marelle, obviously enough. He would need to have her background inquired after.
A dozen paces in was a little clearing. Rough lumber provided shoring to keep the archives at bay. Wires were strung between the vertical beams. Hanging from the wires were thousands of earrings, gleaming in hundreds of colors as they reflected the lamp's flickering light.
"Jewelry?" he asked.
Marelle gave him a sour look. "Don't be a fool, sir. You're smarter than that." She handed one to him.
Not an earring, he realized. The resemblance was obvious—wire-strung baubles with a hook at the top. A beaded drop, as it were. Too long to be worn from an ear, though. When Imago looked where she'd taken it down, he realized all the drops in that section of wire were similar.
"It's a code," he said slowly. "A filing system." His fingers moved over the individual pieces of the drop. A flat piece of drilled slate no bigger than a coin. There were scratches on it, deliberate hashmarks. Below that, two glasswork beads gleaming violet in the lamplight. Then a tiny wooden spacer, followed by a pale cowrie shell, and three more irregular stones: two dark green, one either red or brown.
"Indeed."
He looked at her. Marelle's eyes were shadowed in the lamplight. Imago continued: "So though this is chaos to the eye, entombed within more rot and chaos, these archives have been maintained over the centuries since your Marja-Louise brought them down the River Saltus."
"Marja-Louisa," she corrected. "There is too much here to let it be burned for soap ash. Treatises, journals, dissertations, maps, herbaria . . . "
He rolled the beaded drop in his hand. Clever, he thought, very clever. Even in complete darkness it could be read by someone who knew the code. And if one wandered the streets with this thing, it was not an obvious message of any sort—just an eccentric piece of jewelry. Still, something bothered him. "What good is a library if no one knows it is there?"
The fierceness of her reply startled him. "What good is a library if it is left for dead? Burned? Banned?"
"So what has this place been awaiting?"
"Need." She set the lantern on a rickety table and stepped close to him. "There are books and scrolls here lost to rot, to rats, to the sheer pressure of being buried too deep. There was never another choice. If these had come out in the early years, the masters at Imperatorial University would have reclaimed everything and put it under ban. If the Saltus School had not got there first. Over the years since, things have changed. To whom do these belong now?"
"The shadows, apparently." He continued to finger the beads. "And whoever does all this beadwork." Imago dangled the drop between them. "This coding can be read in the dark, which reduces the risk of fire. What good does darkness do among the archives themselves?"
"There has been blindness among the caretakers," she said. "The archives have become a thing of their own, the reading incidental."
"And how do you know so much?"
She stared at him, eyes glittering. Imago saw that Marelle shivered. Fear? Chill, in the heart of this damp, dark building? "Trust that I will tell you in time."
"Show me what I need to know, and I will trust."
"It is not so simple." She took the drop from him and returned it to its proper place on the wire. "But we can find the histories. They will need to be removed." She shuddered again.
He wondered how often recovery ever happened in this crowded place. "My thanks to you, then; in hopes that we learn."
"Mmm." Marelle ran her fingers over the drops, whispering some mnemonic until she found what she sought. She plucked three off a wire, then stepped between two of the frames. The dwarfess did not take the lamp with her as she began to scale stacks of paper.
Her voice echoed back from the flickering shadows: "Wait."
What else was he to do?
After the first two trips beyond the wired walls, perhaps ten minutes each, Marelle allowed Imago to follow her. "Mind your step."
He minded. It was difficult. Where the path in from the door had used the old floor of the certamentarium as a walkway, here they scrambled up the shoals of paper and leather bindings. Imago wondered what had been sacrificed
for the footpath. Histories of agriculture? Scrolls in incomprehensible languages?
There was a system here, however eccentric.
She stopped without warning, so that he bumped into her back. "Careful," she hissed before taking his hand and guiding it to a wire. Strung from ceiling to floor was a pattern of beads. It must match the drops she'd pulled. Imago could barely see anything, even though the lamp was only paces behind them.
"So we are among the histories of the empire?"