by Jay Lake
"Keep your voice low. Your words can cause problems."
"Fair enough," he whispered. "But I do not hold sway here."
"Your office does." Then, digging down. "And no, this is not the histories. The archives are not organized that way." She began shifting a drift of scrolls aside, marking the pile with a wire. "Much of what is here is lost. Rot, like I said. Or simply passed beyond relevance. We mark what matters, and keep it where it lies most comfortably."
"Are the books and papers noumenal?"
She shifted deeper, digging herself a hole. He thought she was following a wire downward. After a moment, she answered: "Not exactly, no. But you've argued before judges. You know words have power."
"The power of argument is not magick."
"Tell that to someone untrained in logic or the law." She handed him a thick book bound in greasy leather. It stank, the smell a mere ghost of something old and powerful. "Hold this, please, sir."
He held it, considering what she'd told him.
"This city is built on blood," she continued. "Ancient, bloody sacrifice, the blood of dwarfs, the blood of our vanished empire. Consider this room we're in."
"A certamentarium."
"In a soldier's hall. How much blood do you suppose has been spilled right here? Enough to seal this place in souls and pain."
"So you hid the power of the words inside a box of old struggle."
"Yes." She scrambled back up, handing him a smaller volume, then began to refill the hole.
So it went for several hours, until they had accumulated a barrow's worth of books, scrolls, and maps. Some were in dreadful condition, shedding silverfish and roaches, edges laced to dust. Others had fared better. Imago spent his time following Marelle and thinking on the power of words.
The world was not built on the utterances of some god. Words were carts that carried ideas from mind to mind. If they had power—legal, noumenal, or otherwise—it came from the knowledge those words contained. And the venue. A child could recount the doctrine of adverse possession while walking through Delator Square, but there the words had no force of legal argument. A solicitor elucidating an argument before the Estate Court could recount the doctrine of adverse possession to great effect, moving property worth thousands of gold obols with the power of their words.
But the words here are not law, he thought. Nor the framework of some noumenal magick. These words were just knowledge. The first cliché of every student was that knowledge is power.
Finally the dwarfess hung up the last of her drops. "We should carry these out."
"Does material normally leave the archives?"
"No." Marelle looked sour again. "But the Lord Mayor has never had need before."
"I'm the first, aren't I? To come asking for knowledge. Though I would not have known had you not brought me."
Her sourness slipped into hurt. "The first in centuries. Still, this archive has abided."
"Much like the City Imperishable."
When they reached the hideous porch, dusk still streaked the sky with pale pink. Nighthawks peeped overhead. The first stars were out. The alley was dead quiet. He looked for Enero's man but saw no one. Imago felt a brief flash of annoyance at the absence of his driver, then guilt about his presumption of privilege.
How he'd always hated the wealthy and powerful for that.
There was nothing for it but to continue their errand. He and Marelle took four trips each to bring her treasures out.
"Wait here," she said after their last load. "I must go shut the certamentarium."
"It wasn't locked when we came in."
"It will be now."
Imago stood on the porch, watching moonlight touch the alleys to the west and listening to the night. Heliograph Hill was a quiet neighborhood. Wealth favored silence. Still, there should have been the clattering of coaches on nearby streets, even the wheezing clangor of a steam cart or two. All he could hear was gas lamps hissing on the next street over, and a distant murmur like water running.
He cocked his head and listened more carefully.
The murmur was the sound of riot, or at least a rowdy crowd. That was a noise he should have known.
By Dorgau's sweet fig, not again. Not in his city. Where was his fiacre? Why hadn't his staff been out to find him?
Marelle tugged the front doors shut. "Ready?"
"No. We have problems." He mimed listening, a hand cupped to his ear. "Hear that? Big trouble."
Imago would bet a week of dinners Bijaz and that mountebank were in the middle of it.
"Where's your driver?"
"I don't know."
She whirled on him. "We can't leave these books here."
"I can't stand around waiting, either." He was frustrated, angry-frustrated.
A dwarf came up the alley, whistling. Imago turned to stare. The whistler was young, dressed in a leather smock and thigh-high boots, his hair tucked under a tight, slick cap with a little metal lantern.
A dunny diver.
"You," said Imago. "My good dwarf."
"Evening, your worship." The dunny diver touched a finger to his forehead. "Wet Hernan, at your service."
"I am in need of help."
"So old Saltfingers said. He set us to walk above the streets for a change." The dwarf giggled. "Air's different up here. 'Tis easier to lose my way."
Imago didn't even want to speculate on how Saltfingers had known. "I need to get to the riot, but there's a load here that wants carrying away. I cannot leave it behind."
"Valuable loot, I'm expecting." Wet Hernan nodded toward the Footsoldiers' Guild Hall.
Great flaming hells, this one is as annoying as his master. "I'm the Lord Mayor, and I tell you it's not looting."
"I expect it never is looting when you're a toff, eh?" The dunny diver smiled. "What swag have you got, your worship?"
"Books and papers." Imago tried to keep the irritation from his voice. "Four dwarfs could carry it all easily enough."
"Books and papers indeed. And here's me, wondering where to find a life of the mind." Wet Hernan grinned. "I'll be back in a nip, your worship, if you'll excuse me to fetch some help." The dunny diver scuttled over to a hatch set against the stone footing of a building across the alley. He threw the timbered panel open and dropped into the darker shadows below.
"You continue to surprise me, sir," said Marelle.
"That wasn't my surprise," muttered Imago darkly, still straining to parse the noise of riot.
The dunny diver was back in less than ten minutes with three of his fellows. They emerged grinning from the passage like so many rats from a hole. Though he'd expected to see Saltfingers, they were more of the younger divers.
Imago quickly handed out the books and papers. "Please take these to my office in the Rugmaker's Cupola." The newcomers accepted their burdens and dropped back out of sight, leaving Wet Hernan in the alley with the last armload.
"Will you be taking the low road with me then, your worship?"
The very idea made Imago shudder with remembered pain. "I believe I can find my way back. But my thanks to you and your master."
"Not a good night for the streets, I'm thinking, but who is Wet Hernan to tell a toff what he should be about?" The dunny diver nodded, then disappeared, closing the hatch after himself.
"I shouldn't think you would be in any hurry to go back down there," Marelle said after they were alone again.
"Never in life." Imago eyed the cobbles at his feet. "Not if the black dogs themselves return to chase me through the streets."
"Take my arm then, and let us walk with decorum toward the riot."
"Dwarf and dwarfess," Imago said.
Marelle laughed sadly. "You are not what you appear, who once grew to be a full-man. In my own way, neither am I."
He did not often think on the curve of her back, or her sickly pallor. "You are a woman fine enough for me to take pride in being seen with."
She gave him a look which he could not interpret. "And e
veryone knows the Lord Mayor to be a dandy."
Together they strode down the streets of Heliograph Hill, watching for a cab. The surrounding quiet reminded him of the hardest days during the brief reign of the Imperator Restored. The noise ahead continued as they walked.
He wasn't certain if he'd prefer to reach the riot before or after its conclusion.
Bijaz
He flew over a landscape of white cliffs and strange, narrow valleys. Great golden towers rose in the distance. His flight was effortless.
Water dripped from his fingertips. No, it poured. With a scent like attar of roses.
Ah, roses. He was above a rose. Bijaz wondered if he were a bee. The flower shrieked in a voice much deeper than he might have expected from a blossom.
He opened his eyes to see a big man staring in horror at his own hands. Lumberman, by his clothing. His hands were tendrils of green. Rose canes grew from the wrists of the man's shirt.
More large, angry men closed in on Bijaz. Memories of his back alley rape erupted.
"What you done to Will?" one shouted.
Another wielded a stick. "Going to beat you bloody and roll you out for the dogs."
"Don't," said Bijaz. "Please." He didn't know if he was begging or warning them, but then a boot caught him in the ribs.
Moving faster than he'd ever imagined he could, Bijaz grabbed the foot. He was not so much taking action as watching himself refuse to be abused yet again by larger men. He folded the boot into a nubbin of leather while the owner screamed like a wounded rabbit. Then he grabbed a swung stick. Bijaz pulled himself to his feet as his attacker's arms turned to wood.
The others stood back, gasping, cursing. One began to throw up. The stick wielder sobbed.
"Not so much fun to beat the little man now, is it?" Bijaz's anger was as hot as his bloom of fear had been. "You're from upriver." No one local would have tried to hurt him. To these apes, he'd just been a drunken dwarf, passed out under a table after being cheated by a woman.
"M-m-make them whole," said one man. Smaller, younger than the other lumbermen, in a red flannel shirt and canvas trousers worn to shininess.
"Put down your damned fists!" Bijaz's voice shattered every mug and bottle in the room. People covered their ears and fled, even the barkeep. In a moment, he was alone in the Ripsaw.
"Oh by all the hells, what have I done?" Bijaz tried to hold in a sob. He'd played the amiable fool, for fear of the power of the Numbers Men. Already he could imagine the hatred that rumor would bring to what had just happened. The truth was hideous enough.
And if they were sufficiently angry, his powers would not save him from being crushed beneath a load of rock, or drowning while strapped to a cannon. He would have been happier dying of the violet smoke.
Bijaz rubbed his eyes and stepped out the shattered door, hoping to heal, fearing to fight again.
Outside the lumbermen were trying to raise a mob, distracting once more from Ashkoliiz's show. An ice bear—white with a harness of bells—stood on stage, surrounded by torches on high poles. Three hard-eyed men played instruments as if they were weapons.
People turned, caught between Bijaz and the stage, not quite understanding the fuss.
Bijaz advanced on his erstwhile tormentors. The five still standing bristled with knives, defending the three he'd changed. The locals knew what weapons meant.
"You!" shouted Ashkoliiz from the stage. She whirled to her musicians and spoke in a rapid, clicking language. They dropped their flutes and slipped off the back. The ice bear lumbered over the front edge, dropping into the crowd to set off a shoving, screaming panic.
The animal locked eyes with Bijaz. So it had come to this. He'd tried another way to stop Ashkoliiz. He flexed his fists, feeling the buzzy, metallic taste of the noumenal.
Wait, said a voice inside his head.
Bijaz recalled the white room, where the Numbers Men had spoken to him, changed him, made him something other than a broken, dying dwarf. He had come outside to heal, not to fight again.
Not even with that woman.
He turned away from Ashkoliiz and went to the lumbermen. He wanted to repair his mistake. But the dockside crowd ran before the ice bear, the ones closest to the lumbermen grabbing staves and hooks to fight the armed strangers.
Bijaz knew panic when he saw it. He took a deep breath and used the shattering voice again to shout, "Stop!"
The ice bear roared into the silence which followed. Then the screaming began in earnest.
He was buffeted by people who were neither friends nor enemies in the moment. Bijaz threw out his hands as a cloak of light streamed from them. Using the white fire to push his way forward, he advanced on the lumbermen. Two more were down, one with a bent hook embedded in his bloody face. The younger lumberman, still weaponless, continued to stand protectively over the men Bijaz had changed.
He pushed on toward them, intent on trying to fix what he had done. The crowd shifted to trample the men on the ground, as well as their youthful defender. Bijaz watched with horror as boots, sandals, bare feet passed over chests and faces.
They were dead in moments.
He turned. The ice bear stalked toward him, so tall that even Bijaz could spot it. He cupped his hands, ready to hurl a killing blow at the animal, when Ashkoliiz's hard, dark men slid up to his bubble of light and fire.
"Stop," one said in a curious, soft accent. "Do not," the second added. "Please," begged the third.
He paused, glancing toward the stage. Ashkoliiz spread her arms, bowed, then stepped into shadows.
The bear loomed close. The hard, dark men were gone again. People avoided Bijaz and the bear. He looked up as it leaned down, indifferent to his light.
Bijaz saw the gleam of forests in the ice bear's eyes. One great, black claw slipped through his fiery nimbus, too slow to be an assault, and touched the front of his robes. He smelled the raw meat stink of the animal's breath. Black lips wrinkled back over yellowed teeth, then the bear stepped away.
He backed up until he was against a wall. There Bijaz folded his arms and let his fire go out. In a moment he was just a dwarf in pale, grubby robes, crouched by a water barrel, waiting for a dockside brawl to die away.
It took the combined efforts of Enero's Winter Boys and a troop of bailiffs an hour to settle the fighting. The temporary stage had collapsed. Now several Winter Boys worked with two doctors to sort through the victims, searching for wounded lying among the dead.
Bijaz counted fourteen bodies at the head of the Softwood Quay. They'd dragged in several from further down Water Street, but most had died here.
Because of him.
Three-Widows slid down the wall next to him to sit on the stones. Bijaz had not seen the Cork Street enforcer, sometime avatar of the Numbers Men, since the day Three-Widows had taken him into the white room and made him wager his life at the gods' table.
"Gaming's a rough business, guv."
"So's life." Bijaz's voice was dull.
"Yes. Man places his stake. More often than not, he loses it. Nature of the play, you might say. Does a child go hungry that night? Does a landlord throw him out, come end of the week? Can't say. Not the house's affair."
"This . . . " Bijaz nodded at the bodies. "This isn't luck."
"No? Man loses his stake, doesn't get knifed for his obols walking home. Everyone knows winners ride in style. Sometimes the luck's in the losing."
"Suppose she'd raised her crowds," Bijaz said slowly. "Suppose they'd passed the hat. Suppose they'd marched from the River Gate with banners flying, dogs barking, a hundred men and boys carrying the burdens of the train." He waved his hand. "They'd still be alive."
"Luck is luck, good or ill," Three-Widows answered. When Bijaz looked, the man was gone. Had never really been there, he realized, though a pale gaming chip gleamed on the cobbles.
He picked it up. The chip was broken in two. When he fitted the halves together, even by the fitful torchlight and the silver moon, Bijaz could see a harlequ
in painted on one side, a towering tree on the other.
Closing his fist, Bijaz crushed the chip until his hand began to glow and smoke. When he opened his fingers, there was nothing but a twisted lump, like glass which had been in a great fire.
"You are being alive." Enero bent down before him.
Bijaz looked up. His heart was hollow, but he did draw breath. "That is nothing to take pride in."