by Greg Egan
Her foot touched something taut buried in the mud, like a swollen fruit or a small balloon; she tried to step back, but the thing burst and a jet of stinking yellow fluid sprayed up from it and struck her in the chest.
A hand tugged at her trouser leg. A small boy was standing beside her. “Come with me!” he whispered urgently.
Sagreda followed him, resisting a motherly impulse to scoop him up into her arms, not least because it would be hard to manage without smearing the poor kid with pus. His legs were about a quarter as long as the Captain’s, but it was all she could do to keep up. She glanced backward; something was moving at the entrance to the building, but its shape was hard to discern in the haze. It uttered an inhuman cry; in rage or in pain Sagreda couldn’t tell.
“Where are we going?” she asked the boy.
“They marked you,” he replied. “So we need to be done with it.”
“Marked me for what?” she asked.
“Ha!” He seemed to find the question so funny that it could only have been meant rhetorically.
They hit the cobblestones and weaved through small alleys, picking up the pace, inflaming the Captain’s gout. In this of all things, the game wanted realism?
“How far will it follow us?” Sagreda wondered, gasping.
“As far as it takes, if you don’t do the necessary.”
Sagreda had visions of a bonfire for her clothes, and an acid bath for her infected skin.
They came to a water pump.
“Get under, get under!” the boy urged her.
“Do I take—?” She gestured at her vomit-yellow waistcoat.
“No time.”
She took off her coat and maneuvered herself under the spout; the boy clambered up and started pumping. Gobs of sticky fluid separated from the cloth and were carried down the drain, but her waistcoat remained stained in a shade that Peyam had never named, but which her contributors labeled bee excrement. She ran her thumb back and forth across the fabric, turning her chest to meet the flow, and gradually the mark began to fade.
“I think you’re done,” the boy decided, wiping his forehead with his hand. He grimaced reprovingly. “What you want with them creatures anyway?”
“Nothing! I didn’t know they were there!” Sagreda got herself upright. Her clothes were drenched and all her joints were aching, but apparently she’d been luckier than she deserved.
“You lost your way?” The boy’s incredulity shaded into smugness; who exactly was the adult here?
“I was looking for a place to buy oil paints.”
The boy sighed, as if Sagreda had somehow lived down to his expectations. “Lucy said it would come to that.”
This wasn’t a random encounter, then. The queen of the pickpockets had had her tailed by a trusted lieutenant.
“What’s your name?” she asked the boy.
“Sam.”
“So do you know of a shop that sells the materials an artist needs?”
He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “There ain’t such a thing in all of London.”
Sagreda had pretty much reconciled herself to that likelihood. “Have you ever even seen a painting?” she asked glumly. There were a couple of drab watercolors in Mrs Trotter’s sitting room, but even if Sagreda had dared to steal them, they did not contain anything she needed.
Sam said, “I think you better talk to Lucy.”
6
“Maybe I know a house,” Lucy said cagily. “Maybe I’m thick with the scullery maid. But it’s hard to remember. My mind turns feeble when I hear my stomach rumbling.”
Sagreda handed her another shilling. “How many paintings, do you think?” They were sitting on moldy armchairs in an abandoned building with boarded-up windows, surrounded by diminutive body guards.
“Two dozen, at least.”
“Any of them with a deep, rich blue? It needs to be deeper than a summer sky, but—”
Lucy scowled. “I can ask the maid about the colors, but who knows what she’ll make of your palaver?”
“Then I need to go in there myself,” Sagreda decided. “It’s no good sending someone else who’ll come back with the wrong thing.”
“Be my guest,” Lucy replied, unfazed. “But we’ll be making our entrance through the basement, and there’ll be a tight corner or two along the way. Perhaps you can look into the possibility of investing in a gentleman’s girdle.”
Sagreda wasn’t sure if this was genuine advice, or just a chance to mock her. “How will we get into the basement?”
“There’s a sewer.”
“Of course there is.”
“Meant to put an end to the Great Stink,” Lucy mused, “but if you ask me it’s brought no end of mischief.”
Sagreda hesitated; she didn’t mind getting covered in literal excrement, but the bullshit she was already mired in was a long way from a fact-checked documentary on the marvels of Victorian engineering. “Does anything live down there?”
Lucy considered the question. “‘Live’ might not be the right word to use. But that shouldn’t bother you, should it?”
“Why not?”
Lucy exchanged a knowing glance with Sam, who’d apparently been shadowing Sagreda for some time. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but I been told quite a bit about your fancy man. From what I hear, you got him nicely tamed, so maybe it’s time you put him to good use.”
7
Mathis went in front, holding the lamp, but Lucy and Sagreda stuck close behind him. The ceaseless, arrhythmic percussion of random drips of water all around them made Sagreda tense; if something came skittering hungrily along the tunnel, the sounds it made might easily be camouflaged by this unpredictable plinking.
With a handkerchief over her nose, and her mouth shut tight, the stench of the sewer was eye-watering but not quite disabling. Sagreda hadn’t vomited once as the Captain, even when she’d stumbled on a disemboweled woman on her first night in the game, and she trusted his constitution to get her through this merely sensory assault. The two cups of blood she’d given Mathis just after sunset had only made her unsteady for a minute or two, and once she’d imbibed an equal volume of Mrs Trotter’s strong black tea she’d felt entirely Captainly again.
“Are we close?” she asked Lucy, holding her forearm over her mouth as she spoke, which seemed to do a better job of blocking the outgoing sound than the incoming vapor.
“Pardon me?”
“Are we almost there?” Sagreda retched a little, the price of her impatience.
“You’ll see the drain to the right when we reach it,” was all Lucy could offer. “There’ll be no missing it.”
Sagreda peered into the gloom ahead, wondering if any light from the house might make it through the drain, turning the opening into a welcoming beacon. In fact, she could see a small spot of luminous yellow in the distance, beyond the reach of Mathis’s lamp. But it was not remaining still. For a moment she wondered if it might be a reflection off the surface of the putrid, ankle-deep water, shifting its apparent position because of a disturbance in the flow. But then a second yellow dot appeared, off to the left and a short way behind it, and the motion became much easier to decode. The two lights were attached to two ambulatory bodies of some kind, and those bodies were striding down the tunnel.
She reached forward and touched Mathis’s shoulder. “Do you see that?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Any idea what they are?”
“No one’s handed me a taxonomy for this place,” he replied. “But the general rule seems to be that anything inhuman is likely to mean you harm. So the only question is whether I can fend them off, or pull rank on them somehow.”
As the creatures grew nearer, Sagreda became aware of the sound of their footfalls in the sewer water. In concert, their gaits generated a strange rhythm, in which she thought she could discern an overlapping pair of alternating sloshes and harder strikes. The Captain’s chest tightened; Sagreda hoped she wasn’t about to discover that a lifetime of pipe sm
oking in his back-story had left him with bouts of stress-induced emphysema.
Mathis stopped walking and held the lamp high in front of him. “Who goes there?” he demanded imperiously. When he received no reply, he added: “Know that we will pass, and we will pass unmolested, or it will be the worse for you!”
The creatures continued to advance, but now the lamplight began to reach them, sketching gray outlines for the flesh and bones that held up the yellow orbs. What struck Sagreda immediately was that some of the edges she could discern were unnaturally straight. At first she doubted her eyes, but as the details grew clearer her impressions were confirmed: both figures were one-legged, walking with the aid of long wooden crutches angled across their bodies. Each possessed just a single arm and a single leg, attached to half a torso, on which was perched half a head.
As these walking anatomy lessons came into full view, they squinted angrily at the lamp. Their bodies were unclothed, but their skin was loose and wrinkled to the point where it took some scrutiny to be sure that they were both male. Each had a half-tongue that lolled part-way out of its broken jaw and hung drooling over the rough plane along which the dissection had taken place. Their single lungs made sputtering sounds that emerged from the bases of their bisected windpipes; their exposed viscera oozed a little, but there was no real pretense of any functioning circulatory system. Skeletal muscles, lungs and brains were all being powered by pure magical fiat, untroubled by any need for chemical energy.
“I hope they’re not conscious,” Mathis whispered.
Sagreda refused to entertain the possibility. “What are they meant to be?” she wondered. “A vampire someone tried to kill with a circular saw?”
Lucy stepped forward impatiently. “They’re a grisly sight, I’ll grant you that, but even if they’re stronger than they look, I’ll wager they’re not swift or agile.” Then without another word she bolted straight down the tunnel. At the last moment she veered to the right and passed by one of the half-men – almost certainly within arm’s reach, in principle, but while the creature swiveled and swayed toward her, it couldn’t really drop its crutch and grab her.
Sagreda was encouraged, but still wary. “So they’re not exactly zombie ninjas, but one nip might still infect us with the dividing plague.”
“Is that a thing?” Mathis asked.
“Not that my contributors ever heard – but there’s got to be one original idea in the whole ghastly book.”
Mathis made a larger target than Lucy, and the Captain even more so, but the officially adult members of the party plucked up their courage and ran the gauntlet. Sagreda almost hit her head on the roof of the tunnel as she scampered up the side of the tubular floor, but the wheezing half-cadaver that turned arthritically to ogle her didn’t get close. She and Mathis caught up with Lucy, who had been wise enough not to go too far ahead in the dark.
“Good thing we have the Prince of the Night here to protect us,” Lucy chuckled. “What would us poor mortals have done on our own?”
“Don’t get too cocky,” Mathis warned her. “I often find myself wanting a snack around ten.”
Lucy tugged at the neck of her blouse to reveal a string of garlic circling her neck. Mathis said nothing, but he didn’t even flinch; Sagreda wondered if it was possible, even here, to believe that an object could ward off danger when in truth it had no effect at all.
The three of them sloshed ahead through the muck.
“What if there’s no cobalt blue in all of London?” Mathis asked, succumbing to a melancholy that had only seemed to afflict him since he started wearing ruffled shirts.
Sagreda found this scenario unlikely. “In hundreds of paintings, of hundreds of subjects? The SludgeNet will have scooped them up from actual Victorian artworks it found on the web, give or take a few woo-woo-isn’t-this-scary neural-net effects. Cobalt blue fits the period, and it wasn’t all that rare. It’s not like we’re hunting for neptunium in the Stone Age.”
She glanced at Lucy, wondering what the girl had made of the exchange, but it seemed to have passed right over her head. Most, if not all, of her contributors would have heard of neural nets and neptunium, but a vague sense of recognition for a couple of anachronistic terms wasn’t going to bring a consensual memory of the early twenty-first century flooding back. Given her character’s age, it was tempting to ask her if she knew who Justin Bieber was, and see if she denied him three times before the cock crowed, but it would be cruel to wake her to her true nature if they weren’t going to stick around and help her make sense of it.
“There it is,” Lucy announced. The drain from the house they were hoping to burgle was up ahead of them on the right. Mathis swung the lamp around as they approached; the narrow, slanting pipe was half open at the bottom, and Sagreda could see dark stains on the cement. There was a grille at the top, which would normally have blocked their access – but the maid had been bribed to take out the bolts that held it down and replace them with duplicates whose threads had been stripped.
Sagreda threw the woolen blanket she’d brought over the lower surface of the pipe, in the hope that they might enter the house without becoming so filthy that they’d instantly wake every inhabitant with their stink. Lucy clambered up first, leaving her galoshes behind. She raised the doctored grille carefully and placed it to the side, almost silently, then drew herself up onto the floor.
“You’re invited and all,” she called down to Mathis. Sagreda wasn’t sure if this would work; the maid, in turn, had invited Lucy, but that didn’t make either of them the homeowner. Nonetheless, Mathis ascended without apparent difficulty, taking the lamp with him.
Sagreda stood at the base of the pipe, gazing up into the lamplit basement. She’d ignored Lucy’s suggestion of a girdle, but it hadn’t been a gratuitous jibe; this was going to be a tight fit. She stretched her arms in front of her so she could rest on her elbows without adding to her girth, and began crawling awkwardly up the slope.
Halfway to the top, she stopped advancing. She redoubled her effort, but it made no difference; whatever feverish motion she made with her elbows and knees, they didn’t have enough purchase on the blanket to propel her upward.
Mathis appeared at the top of the pipe, crouching, peering down at her. “Hold onto the blanket with your hands,” he whispered. He pushed some of it down to loosen it, giving her a fold she could grip. Then he grabbed the top and started straightening his knees to haul her up.
When her hands rose above the top of the pipe she gestured to Mathis to stop, and she pulled herself up the rest of the way. “Well, that was delightful,” she gasped. She clambered to her feet and inspected herself and her crew; they weren’t exactly fit to present to royalty, but between the blanket and their discarded galoshes they appeared to have succeeded in leaving the most pungent evidence of their journey behind.
Mathis shoved the blanket back down into the sewer and he and Lucy fitted the grille into place, swapping back actual threaded bolts. The plan was to leave by the front door, rather than retracing their steps.
Sagreda turned away from the latrine and took in the rest of the basement. The staircase led up from the middle of the room, but on the opposite side there was a door with a small, barred window: an entrance to another room on the same level.
Mathis picked up the lamp and turned the flame down low as they walked toward the stairs. In the faint light, Sagreda saw something move behind the bars in the other room. There was a clink of metal on stone, and a soft, tortured exhalation.
She took the lamp from Mathis and approached the door. If there was a witness in there, the burglars had already revealed themselves, but she had to know exactly what risk they were facing. She lifted the lamp to the level of the window, and peered inside.
At least a dozen fragments of bodies were chained to the walls and floor of the cell. Some resembled the vertically bisected men they’d met in the sewer; some had been cut along other planes. And some had been stitched together crudely, into hallucina
tory Boschian nightmares: composites with two torsos sharing a single pair of legs, or heads attached in place of limbs. Where there were eyes, they turned toward the light, and where there were ribs they began rising and falling, but the attempts these pitiful creatures made to cry out were like the sound of wet cardboard boxes collapsing as they were trod into the ground.
Sagreda retreated, gesturing to the others to continue up the stairs.
When they emerged on the ground floor, Lucy took the lamp and led the way down a long corridor. There were portraits in oil at regular intervals on the wall to their right, some authentically staid, some Gothically deranged, but none of them contained the desired blue.
They reached the drawing room. “Turn up the lamp,” Sagreda whispered. The piano, the cabinets and shelves, the sofas and small tables barely registered on her; they were just unwelcome complications, casting shadows that obscured the real treasures. The walls were covered with paintings: scenes from Greek myths, scenes from the Bible, scenes of clashing armies … and scenes of naval battles.
For a second or two she was giddy from a kind of ecstasy tinged with disbelief: after so long, it seemed impossible that she really had found what she needed; it had to be a cruel delusion, because the universe they inhabited was built from nothing else. But the feeling passed, and she strode over to the painting that had caught her eye. The ships were ablaze, but the sea was calm. No gray-green, storm-tossed water here, just a placid ocean of blue.
Sagreda contemplated merely scraping off a few samples, but it seemed wiser to take the whole thing and be sure she had as wide a range of colors as possible, rather than a fragment or two that might turn out, under better light, to have been ill-chosen. She unhooked the painting and wrapped it in a cloth.
Then she bowed to their guide. “If you please, Miss Lucy, show us the way out.”
Somewhere in the house, a door slammed heavily. Lucy extinguished the lamp. But the room only remained in perfect blackness for a few seconds before gas lights came on at the far end of the corridor.