by Jay Lake
"How many faces does any man have?" Onesiphorous muttered.
"Maybe you understand." Clement stopped pacing. "Maybe you need to know. Whatever you see around fire, that between you and her. I already say too much. I don't want hear nothing. When she angry, she ride horses into deep water, leave them there."
He tried for reassurance. "She'll forgive you. If she needs you to tell me, she'll forgive."
Clement laughed, a hollow sound. "You crazy little man. Tide raise him boats, drown him boy, forgive nothing. Why she be any different from wind and water?"
"Why indeed?" He set his spoon inside his dry bowl with a click. "It seems best to leave you swamp people to fight your own war. I will stop asking foolish questions."
"Where you go, then?" Clement glanced out at the night-black swamp.
"The plantations, the mines. See who I can raise among the City folk here to fight."
"Them? Failed parasites, ah. Live off your City power without no respect for him."
"As may be," Onesiphorous said. "But I have experience in organizing people to do things they might not see as desirable. I believe I can find a way. Will you take me to one of the settlements?"
"We sleep. Then I take you to Lost Receiver Mine, ah. Got one thing to ask you first, me."
"Yes?"
"Don't say no more we are swamp people. Our people, we the Angoumois."
"Angoumois. My apologies." Onesiphorous rubbed his aching temples. "You mentioned sleep?"
He awoke to the squawking of birds. Onesiphorous blinked his eyes open. A strong green light showed outside the refectory. Two women in dresses much like the swamp-mother's worked at the cookpot. They chattered without ever turning to glance at him.
Four red birds clung to the top rail of one of the half-walls. Did she ride behind those bright black eyes?
Onesiphorous sat up, wondering where to pee. He slipped out the trap door in the floor and climbed down the ladder to a little landing where several boats were tied up. The tide was high again, judging from how close the water came to the boards beneath his feet. No one seemed to be around, so he unbuttoned his pants and urinated directly into the swamp in a steaming arc.
"That a bad idea," said Clement behind him.
Surprised, the dwarf splashed on his pants. "My thanks, sir," he replied bitterly.
"Candirú fish, he swim up your little yellow river. You one unhappy man after he climb inside."
"How lovely."
"Angoulême have many gifts, City man. We all she children."
Onesiphorous tried to figure if Clement was twitting him, but his host seemed positively lugubrious this morning. "Is there anything else I should do before we go?"
Clement nodded solemnly. "Get in the boat."
Insects whirred like a steam engine with bad bearings. Clement paddled again, though today the little boat also had a pair of oars shipped. They slid between narrow passes walled by root balls and lumps of clay. Onesiphorous watched for more stony evidence of the drowned city, but he saw nothing certain.
They finally came to a halt in the mossy shadows of a stand of trees. A large channel opened before them. A visible current disturbed the water's dark surface.
"Listen, ah," said Clement. "The mine, she just up this stream. I take you there but fast. I must go back to her. I already say too much to you, she will take price from me."
"How are you going to find her?"
"She everywhere, City man. I open my arms and close my eyes, she find me."
Onesiphorous felt a sense of dread. "You take care. She has too much to say, she can ask me. You are helping me and repaying the death of your nephew."
Clement smiled sadly. "The tide, she got no forgiveness." Then he unshipped his oars and put his back into moving the boat out onto the open water.
Free of the trees, Onesiphorous could see the outcropping of the Lost Receiver Mine. It rose from the swamp like a black stone thumb, taller than even the Rugmaker's Cupola and at least as wide.
He wondered about the resemblance to a tower as Clement made for a dock sticking out from the flowering bushes at the base.
Good as his word, Clement crabbed the boat close enough to the dock to let Onesiphorous climb out. The Angoumois then slipped away on the current. The dwarf watched his guide find his way back into darkness. As Clement rowed into the shadows of bushes, something followed that left a long, narrow vee of ripples on the surface.
If Onesiphorous had possessed another coin, he would have paid it to the water right then in case Clement was in need of a fare all too soon. She could not be trusted in a way that made sense to men. He wasn't sure she could be trusted at all, even though he had been allowed to walk free of the swamps.
Not the swamps. He'd walked free of Angoulême, drowned lands that yet lived in green shadows under her protection.
Once Boudin's uncle was gone, quite possibly forever, Onesiphorous made his way to the curtain of vines where the dock met the rock. He was surprised at how rickety the structure was, until he reflected that this was a jade mine. They did not bring heavy ores out to barges here. What came from within the rock could be carried by a man with a padded valise.
The vines masked a recessed entrance where a door made of stout planks stood propped open. A sun-browned dwarfess sat on a cane-bottomed chair in the middle of the doorway. She smoked a long, thin clay pipe as she tipped her seat back on two legs.
"You're that Slashed fellow." She spoke around the stem of her pipe, narrow trails of smoke coming from her lips as she talked. "Long way from home, aren't you?"
Onesiphorous made a tiny bow. "I don't believe we've had the pleasure."
"You've got a strange definition of pleasure." She tilted the chair onto all four legs and set the pipe on the stone flooring. "I'm Beaulise. I believe you know my father."
"Beaulise?" He drew a blank on who her family might be.
"Bijaz, late your enemy. Now a crazed, god-touched old man."
"Ah." He wasn't sure what this presaged—irritated rebuff or welcome. "Bijaz, yes."
"Yes?" She snorted. "That's all you can say about the strangest transformation in the City Imperishable?"
Onesiphorous decided to try for a change of subject. "Was I expected?"
She pursed her lips. "Not exactly. Come in, we can talk in the coolth."
"Of course," he said, and followed her inside.
Imago
He ignored the writ from the Assemblage. The Burgesses had managed to dither themselves into irrelevance after the disgrace of the old Inner Chamber and the overthrow of the Imperator Restored. The rest of his immediate troubles were dispatched by relatively simple decision-making.
By Dorgau's brass hells, he missed Onesiphorous. There had been nothing from the south but silent blockade.
Imago decided to step out for dinner. He wanted to stretch his legs again. He took a cloak and made his way down the spiraled stair. His usual guards were not at the door—confusion with the changeover regarding Enero's men. Now that the Winter Boys were staying on another season, Imago would need to make the City Men a greater priority. He didn't intend to be caught short yet again.
Cork Street was deserted. He wondered if a riot had erupted somewhere.
Imago found his way into a steaming, high-windowed café with the menu painted on the glass in gold lettering. It was reversed from within, intending to appeal to passersby, but he could still read it. Besides, he'd eaten here often enough.
"Pease soup," he told the server, a narrow-faced woman with a strange cast to her skin. Yellow Mountains? If so, she was a long way from home. "Tell the cook to throw some bacon butts in it if he hasn't already. Also half a long loaf, honey butter, and a kava, please."
She grunted and moved on.
Imago stared out the window. The street was still all but deserted, and he was the only customer in the cafe. This was like the bad old days when the threat of noumenal attack hung over the City in a miasma of fear.
The clink of cooking in
the kitchen ceased. Imago stepped to the door to peer outside. The downhill stretch of Cork Street amid the gaming parlors was empty, the narrow park in the middle of the boulevard quiet as well.
A mob was gathered at the bottom of the hill on the Bridge of Chances. Again.
Something towered above them—a plant. Well, a tree, at that height.
A horse galloped down from the crest of the hill. "To be coming!" shouted the freerider in the saddle.
Imago darted out the door and allowed himself to be hoisted ungraciously onto horseback. At least this wasn't a war saddle—otherwise he would have been sharing space with a number of uncomfortable implements.
They raced down along the center of the streetcar tracks until they reached the edge of the crowd. The freerider wheeled his horse so that Imago could get a good view.
A tree grew out of the Little Bull and through the east side of the Bridge of Chances. It had destroyed a good portion of the center span in the process.
Imago knew who was behind something like that. "Jason!"
"Excuse me, sir." Someone tapped him on the elbow.
Imago turned to see four large bailiffs right behind him. One of them swung a brass-shod staff to knock the Lord Mayor's freerider escort off his horse like a dropped sack of grain. The other three dragged Imago down after him.
"I do believe you're under arrest, sir."
Imago recognized the grinning bailiff who led the squad. Serjeant Robichande, one of the deepest Assemblage loyalists in the City Imperishable.
He started to yell, but they stuffed him into a huge wad of burlap meant for baling indigo and hauled him away from the shouting crowd.
The Lord Mayor of the City Imperishable was unwrapped and dumped without ceremony onto a marble floor. Groaning, he looked up to see a ceiling painted with a mural of Balnea Meeting the False Riders. The artist had expended considerable effort on the goddess's rosy nipples.
A red-coated bailiff stood over him, staff now pressed against Imago's chest. A judicial bench loomed behind the bailiff. Imago looked the other way. A familiar gallery rose.
He was back in the fraud courts before the bench dolus malus. He'd nearly died in this room the night the crowd had stormed the Limerock Palace. Jason the Factor had rescued him, unknown and unknowing who he was.
The night Imago had declared himself for Lord Mayor.
He was certain that the symbolism was utterly intentional.
"Welcome," said a very familiar bald judge. Judge-Financial and Burgess Alois Wedgeburr, syndic of a metals-trading cartel, oldest son and heir to the Horse Street Wedgeburrs of Heliograph Hill. The man who'd ordered his death once before.
Also known as "Crusty Alice" in certain clubs in the Sudgate districts where decent men went to spend an hour or an evening—or sometimes a weekend—as indecent women.
Imago kept that little fact close to hand.
"So?" Once again, Imago was playing for this life before this man. Once again, he hated it. This time, however, Imago held many more cards. "I trust I am about to be accorded the honor of my office, released from this ridiculous position, and receive an abject apology."
"Fine words for a man on the floor," said Wedgeburr. "I understand you are styled Lord Mayor of the City Imperishable, but my clerks have been unable to find any evidence of your election. So before you plead immunity of office, as you have previously done before this court, I would suggest that you take that fact into account."
"What elections?" Imago asked, surprised into speaking unwisely.
"And you used to follow the minutes of our sessions so closely." The judge sounded almost loving. "The edict of 42 Imperator Arnulf regarding elective office in the City Imperishable was voided this past week by an act of the Assemblage. Noon today was established declarations of intent by candidates desiring to seek elective offices covered by the act."
"We don't have any elective offices."
"Somehow the title Lord Mayor springs to mind." Wedgeburr stroked his silver-wrapped thighbone gavel. "A fine young man named Roncelvas Fidelo has declared himself. He is a candidate, with official immunity from prosecution. You, Imago of Lockwood, are a private citizen who has been pretending to public office and expending valuable resources required for the defense and enlargement of the interests of the City Imperishable."
Fidelo was the little buggerer who'd been dogging Bijaz, Imago realized. He had to think quickly. It was likely none of his people knew he was here. The freerider had been clubbed from the back, and would remember nothing. Play for time, play for time.
"You know that won't hold up under any review whatsoever," he said in his smoothest voice. "The law has always recognized that a thing established without objection creates a precedent for its own continuation. When the First Counselor of the Inner Chamber negotiated a settlement with me in my capacity as Lord Mayor after the battle of Terminus Plaza, the Assemblage of Burgesses waived any objections to my office."
Wedgeburr grinned. "The actions of this court will eventually be subject to the review of history. My rulings may well be found wanting, in which case I shall be saddened by the cloud upon my name." He pointed his gavel at Imago, his voice thickening. "You made a mockery of the proceedings in this courtroom. You incited an invasion of the Limerock Palace. You were instrumental in the murder of a bailiff, on that very floor where you now loll so disrespectfully. Your actions that day and subsequently led directly to the murder of all but one member of the sitting Inner Chamber. This court cannot let such insults to its dignity stand. This court will not be made a laughingstock." He hammered the gavel down repeatedly, his face blooming red.
This was no legal hearing at all, Imago belatedly realized. Only Wedgeburr and the bailiffs were present. "You declaim from a bench like a judge," he said quietly, speaking to the redcoats more than Wedgeburr himself. "But I see no office, nor dignity of the court. There is no transcript being taken for review. There are no clerks sitting in the gallery. You and these fine gentlemen are consp—" Imago cut off as the staff jabbed hard into his sternum. His breath left him and would not return.
"Beg for your life," Wedgeburr growled. "Beg for your life, and I might let you stand on your own feet again before the good serjeant and his men have their way with you. Beg for your life, and I might tell them to kill you before they set fire to your hands and feet, crush your knees and elbows, pluck out your eyes and your tongue and your cock. Beg for your life well enough to please me, or they will do all these things before you die."
Robichande stirred uneasily, a look of slow alarm dawning on his face.
Imago, still fighting for breath, gasped, "The . . . " There were no reasonable defenses. He tried for an unreasonable one—secret passion and shame. "The dead man. Was he a favorite of Crusty Alice?"
Wedgeburr screamed and vaulted over the front of the bench, landing heavily on the marble floor before Imago. He raised the thighbone gavel over his head in a two-handed stroke, but Robichande caught it and held it high.
"Him that killed Marko, he gets his punishment," the oxlike bailiff said. "But we ain't breaking kneecaps here. That's not how it's done."
The judge quivered with rage .
"Who cares," snapped one of the other redcoats. "We're in for it now. Keep his honor happy. Let the little pecker have it."
"I will forget every name and face here," Imago said quickly, "except his honor's. Only let this end, on your oaths to the law."
"He. Is. Mine!" Wedgeburr shouted, struggling with Robichande.
The big serjeant snatched the gavel loose from the judge's grip and hurled it across the gallery, where it shattered against the back wall. He sacked Wedgeburr hard with his shoulder and stuffed the judge in the witness cage, which he then locked. Robichande walked back over to Imago and dropped the key on his chest. "Sword's behind the bench. You decide. Giving that choice to a complicated man like you is revenge enough for me." The bailiff walked slowly up the stairs. "Come on boys. We'll let them two sort it out."
; Imago regained the last of his breath as the courtroom door snicked shut. He stared up at the painting on the ceiling. Balnea was particularly well-endowed, and could probably suckle an entire village. He found his feet, as always off balance due to the loss of so much of his length of leg, then staggered to the cage.
Wedgeburr leaned against the back of the bars. It was deliberately too narrow to allow him to sit. Imago was intimately familiar with how that position felt. He'd nearly lost his life in that exact spot.
"I could leave," he said quietly. "Place the keys on the floor right here in front of you. Arrange with Zaharias of Fallen Arch to have the room sealed. You'd starve to death right there, piss running down your leg, shit stinking between your ankles, licking the bars for cool moisture. All a few feet from the keys of freedom. I could keep you locked here until there was nothing between you and the deepest brass hell save another breath. Then I could walk in, drink a tall glass of water, and watch you die. No broken elbows, no fire. Just a slow starving. What do you think of that?"