All the ladies agreed he wasn’t attractive. No, his features were too severe and his limbs too long for him to be considered handsome. But he possessed a certain bearing that was alluring, though perhaps only because it was so uncommon in the Pelphian male. He never fussed with his hair or publicly preened, never posed in a doorway or at the foot of a stair, blocking traffic just for the attention. No, the tall guest was polite to everyone, expressed interest in no one, and tipped like a man on his way to the gallows.
The staff couldn’t help but feel a little offended that he never sampled any of the city’s many culinary offerings. Pelphia was renowned for its bakeries and cafés, a fact that the doormen and elevator attendants brought to his attention, unprompted, more than once. Nor did he take advantage of the ringdom’s bountiful culture. As far as anyone could tell, he had not attended a single gala, concert, play, or burlesque. The guest took his meals in his room, read his outdated newspapers, and went to the noonday fights.
The concierge, Mr. Aloysius Stull, was finally forced to shush his gossiping staff, saying, “Leave Mr. Pinfield alone. He is a Boskop,” which was both an unsatisfactory answer and also a very complete one.
Boskops inhabited the seventeenth ringdom of Boskopeia. Amid the colorful flora of the Tower, the Boskops were a dull little species of mushroom. A Boskop’s ideal party was one that no one attended and that ended early, with the host going to bed with his own wife, of all people.
Indeed, that was why the Sphinx had chosen the disguise for Senlin. No Pelphian would see a Boskop and think pirate, or burglar, or spy.
In his room, on the third evening since his arrival, Senlin opened the cigar box the Sphinx had packed for him and plucked out a cigar. He removed the thin tobacco-leaf wrapper to reveal a metal tube, perforated like a saltshaker at the head. He twisted the body until it clicked and then began to speak into the device in a low, clear voice.
“July ninth, six thirty-five in the evening. Today, I made my third visit to the Colosseum.” Senlin paced his room as he spoke. The Sphinx had insisted his lodging be modest for the sake of appearances—it would not do for a Boskop accountant to sleep in a suite. Still, his “single” was neither small nor modest. Every room in the Bon Royal was larger than his quarters aboard the Stone Cloud had been, though the luxury was wasted on him. The gorgeous four-post bed deserved honeymooners, not an insomniac who napped on top of the covers in his clothes.
“I tried to get access to the balcony again, but was … soundly rejected. For the record, the guard who tore up my banknote did not give me a receipt. I’ve never had a bribe turned down before. I’m not sure whether that’s inspiring or terrifying. One thing’s for certain, the Coterie Club’s security is as tight as a tick.”
He lingered over the newspaper that lay open on the bureau. “I think I’ve seen all I’m going to see from the bleachers.” Picking up the paper that was dated December 3, he scanned the headline that he had read many times in recent days: DUCHESS M. PELL CANCELS WINTER RECITALS, UNDISCLOSED ILLNESS CITED. He squinted at the accompanying image: an engraving of a woman sitting at a piano, a large black whale of an instrument. Her head was thrown back. Her arms were held straight as a sleepwalker. Her expression was one of ecstasy.
Senlin dropped the paper and cleared his throat.
“I’m beginning to suspect that the fights are rigged, or perhaps choreographed. There’s just something about the way the men grapple that doesn’t quite sit with me. The blows are too regular, the fighting too flamboyant.” Senlin thought of his own experience with brief, brutal, and chaotic violence, which had been many things, but never graceful, never so coherent. “If the fights are fixed, the public doesn’t seem to know. I’ve never seen so many wagers being thrown about. But I think we can rule out your thought that the Colosseum is being used to train the hods. That is, assuming Marat isn’t plotting a war of charades. I think the whole enterprise probably exists to line the pockets of the men upstairs. Perhaps they just don’t want you to know they’re getting rich at the expense of your workforce.
“I’ll try a larger bribe with the club guards tomorrow.” After a pause, he decided not to mention his sighting of Duke Wilhelm H. Pell. “If that fails, I might try leaping into the ring. Unless you have a better idea. End of report.”
Senlin twisted the head a second time, and the cylinder began to wriggle in his palm. It unfurled a pair of thin, painted wings. Six fine, brass legs curled out from the thorax, and the domed head of the clockwork moth began to rotate, taking in its surroundings.
Opening first the curtains, then the glass doors to his small balcony, Senlin was met by a blat of noise. The third-floor gallery opposite his hotel room was crowded with the overflow of a party. Many of the attendees wore masks and brandished champagne coupes so wildly they sloshed onto the street below. Pedestrians shouted up at them: some in derision, others in solidarity.
A woman in a sunset dress noticed him. She pushed her black mask onto her forehead to get a better look at him, or perhaps to show herself off. She was beautiful but aging and caked in makeup. She blew him a kiss. He did not catch it.
He said, “I found a moth in my room.” And to prove it, he let the Sphinx’s recorder flutter from his hands into the gulf between them. Clapping with delight, the woman watched the moth bounce up toward a sky that guttered with gaslight stars. Then pitching forward, she retched over the balcony rail.
At night and from above, it was easier to see one of the city’s more curious features. The regular cobbles of the streets were interrupted by discs of quartz, each as large as a barrelhead. The dials glowed faintly, like candles behind wax paper. About a dozen or so of the dials dappled each block, though without any discernable pattern. He thought they were perhaps manhole covers or windows into some subterranean space, but when he’d tried during the day to peer past the sallow glow into what lurked below, he’d been unable to discern anything beyond the foggy light.
Surrendering his momentary curiosity, Senlin shut the glass doors and returned to his newspapers.
Early on in his research, Senlin had read several accounts of Commissioner Pound’s increasingly embarrassing attempts to apprehend the man who had stolen a painting from the Baths, which was a Pelphian protectorate. The paper described the criminal as “a tourist with a murky past named Tomas Sinlend, whose ready transformation into the dread pirate Mudd evidences a singular and wicked genius.” Senlin was amused to read one account that referred to him as a “criminal mastermind,” and another that said he was an “infamous pugilist.” Numerous editorials described Commissioner Pound as a man haunted by his own failure, a fixation with which Senlin could sadly sympathize.
But it wasn’t his own infamy or Pound’s pursuit of him that sparked Senlin’s obsession with the local rag. It was the fact that Marya’s story unfolded in the society pages. Much of the account came from a single source, a reporter for the Daily Reverie named Oren Robinson. Over the course of months, he had written nearly two dozen articles about Marya. Robinson was also responsible for coining what would become her stage name, “the Mermaid.” The fact that she was once married to the criminal “Tomas Sinlend” was never mentioned.
Robinson was a shameless gossip and a bloviating prig, but he wrote well enough, and Senlin thought his account was not without at least some kernel of truth. According to Robinson, Marya’s history began when the Duke Wilhelm H. Pell discovered her in the Baths and saved her from a life of destitution and ruin.
Marya’s introduction to Pelphian society occurred at Duchess Dostler’s End of Summer Soiree.
The Daily Reverie
THE DUCHESS D’S LATEST CATASTROPHE
AUGUST 19
… Duke Wilhelm Horace Pell was in attendance this evening, having returned from his summer holiday in the Baths. He brought with him a companion who appeared to have never passed before a looking glass in her life. Despite the duke’s assurances that she was a rare and worthy lady he’d found bubbling about the Baths, he
r frock was a shade of terminal gangrene that appeared to have been clipped from an onion sack. If she hadn’t such a pretty face, I would’ve thought the duke had engaged us all in some tasteless prank.
Modest as her fashion was, the rustic lady was elsewise bold. She introduced herself as “Marya, Just Marya” while the duke was still drawing his breath. Then she shook my hand like a pump handle.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a more unnecessarily opinionated woman in my life. Seeking an inoffensive subject of conversation, I asked her what she thought of the hired quartet. She went on to evaluate each player, one by one, and in some detail. (I won’t defame the poor musicians by reporting her amateur assessment here, but neither can I find it in my heart to defend the trumpet work of Mr. Molyneux, who tips the bottle more often than a fop tips his hat.) When the duke’s companion concluded by remarking that our ringdom’s sacred anthem sounded a bit like a “dog startling a flock of geese,” the duke nearly choked on a fig.
I cannot imagine we will see Madam “Marya, Just Marya” again.
Senlin smiled at the thought of Marya deflating the puffed-up reporter. (She had, after all, plenty of practice deflating a certain puffed-up headmaster.) While she had been off scandalizing reporters, he had been trying to disappear inside the Baths, trying to blend in with the mode and make himself inoffensive. He had sought salvation through anonymity. She had sought it through distinction. He couldn’t help but wonder if hers hadn’t been the wiser course.
And it hadn’t taken long for her to bring the press around.
The Daily Reverie
DUCHESS ROCKFORD’S WEEKLY FLOGGING
AUGUST 22
… now, it is with unanticipated awe that I must report the reappearance of Duke Wilhelm Pell’s unvarnished escort, Marya (no-longer-Just). Not only did she return—she distinguished herself admirably. I daresay I like her. I daresay you might like her, too.
As previously implied (the snails smelled like feet, I tell you) Duchess Rockford’s party had not begun well, and by the stroke of nine, her guests had begun to curdle about the exits. Even her most fawning friends began to make their excuses, all as transparent as a fart. No doubt they were hoping to catch the late fight or an early burlesque but didn’t want to hurt the grand old dame’s feelings, what she has left of them floating in that punch-bowl heart of hers. Not even Rockford’s artisanal gin could forestall the exodus.
It was amid this run for the exits that Marya sat down, uninvited, at the duchess’s piano and began to play.
I should not refer to it as play because the word conjures up a levity, a frivolity, which was absent in her performance. She engaged the piano in a lover’s quarrel, an argument she was clearly determined to win. And then, after she had hooked us all on the strings of her instrument, she opened up her throat and began to sing.
I weep for you who were not present, because you must depend upon the faint notes of my fair words to hear the epiphany that resounded in those rooms. If her playing was a quarrel, her voice was a perfect reconciliation. She sang like a mermaid.
Her voice enticed the deserters back from the cloakroom. It made men recant their excuses and women cancel their good-night kisses. They flocked to this mermaid like doomed sailors, and the ship of our evening was dashed upon her song.
Though Senlin wasn’t surprised to find that people adored her playing so much, it was strange to hear another man articulate the experience with such poetic excitement. It wasn’t long after her performance at Rockford’s party that Marya was invited to play at the Marquess Jean Clamond’s birthday celebration. In review of this formal debut, Oren Robinson wrote, “Mark my words, if the Mermaid played the Vivant tomorrow, they would have to build a fifth balcony to accommodate her admirers.” Senlin understood this to be no small compliment: The Vivant was the supreme venue in a city of venues.
The right people took notice of Marya’s talent, and in a matter of days, she was transformed from a dowdy nobody into a fashion plate. According to Robinson, she single-handedly popularized the empire waist. “She looks,” Robinson remarked of her third performance, “like a red-headed wraith in a white nightgown. Rather than make any effort to strangle her hair in one of the intricate architectures now popular with the aged and the ugly, she allows her locks to hang, tangle, and toss as they please, a choice that only dramatizes her feverish attitude.” Her fame was so great, in fact, that it became the subject of a stage play called The Mermaid’s Tale, which purported to be an authentic and authorized history of her life.
Then, in December, the tone of the headlines changed again. The bolded words were no longer Rapturous, Genius, and Miracle but were now Confusion, Mystery, and Disaster. Overnight, the Mermaid vanished from the public eye.
She became the subject of endless speculation, which ranged from the innocuous to the insane. Some suggested she had sung her voice right out of her throat and had been left a mad and violent mute. Others claimed she was a victim of poisoning, likely perpetrated by some jealous rival whose fame Marya had eclipsed. None of these fictions were ever corroborated, least of all by Duke Wilhelm. He sequestered Marya in his home, shut all the curtains, removed most of his staff, and stationed guards at all the windows and doors. Then, without further explanation, he embarked upon a big-game hunting expedition in the southern plains of Ur, where he remained for nearly four months.
Only upon his return did the duke confess to the press that in December Marya had been stricken by a horrible and contagious withering disease. The royal physician, Dr. Edmond Rawlins, who had been charged with her care in the duke’s absence, corroborated the fact and added that he suspected she suffered from an illness she had imported from her former life. The duke, it was then revealed, had been hunting not for game but for a cure, which he found at last on a mountaintop at the edge of everything, where an ancient hermit lived upon the very cusp of night itself.
The hermit was so moved by the duke’s tale, he gave him a purse of dust he had gathered from the crater of a fallen star. The hermit promised the dust would cure anything short of death. And, miraculously, the royal physician proclaimed it had done just that. Marya soon recovered and then returned to public life at the end of spring. According to the accounts of the Daily Reverie, she was every bit her former self.
Senlin found the story of the duke’s search for a cure far-fetched. But then, he supposed, it was possible that Marya had really fallen ill, and the duke had found a cure somewhere and only exaggerated the details. It was possible.
But it was also possible, if one took a more cynical view, that Marya had refused to play. It was possible she had tried to escape, possible she had angered the duke in some way. He might have imprisoned her in his home to punish her and then left to shoot elephants for all Senlin knew.
He wanted nothing so badly as to read her story, told in her own words, or at least to have a direct quote from her declaring that she was safe, happy, and free.
The only lengthy interview he could find among all his stacks of newspapers was from the first night she sold out the Vivant, months before her seclusion.
It was on that night, Oren Robinson would later claim, that the Mermaid cemented her fame.
The Daily Reverie
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE MERMAID
SEPTEMBER 29
The following is an exclusive interview with Madam Marya (MM), conducted after her debut performance at the Vivant. It was conducted in her dressing room and in the company of Duke Wilhelm H. Pell (WHP). All quotes are as accurate as I can make them.
OR: Congratulations on your performance, Madam Mermaid. It was one of the most stirring unveilings I’ve seen at the Vivant in years.
MM: Thank you. It was an absolute delight.
OR: Tell me, what was it like to play in front of five thousand of Pelphia’s most esteemed and cultured persons?
MM: Well, of course, I couldn’t think about that while I was performing. Music is like romance; nothing ruins the mood so well as self-consciousn
ess.
WHP: Oh, darling.
MM: I mean to say, I tried to play as naturally as I would to my friends back home.
OR: Which was where, remind us?
MM: A seaside town called Isaugh.
OR: Then my moniker for you was more apropos than I knew! And you were the starlet of this humble fishtown, I imagine?
MM: I wouldn’t have called myself a star.
WHP: You are being too modest, my dear.
MM: I suppose I was as famous as anyone can be among friends.
OR: I daresay we are able to appreciate your talents more fully here. Could you tell me a bit about your musical philosophy?
MM: Well, I have observed a trend here that presses composers and musicians, particularly, toward a sort of holy boredom. I mean, who said music had to be such a serious thing? I find musicians who just plink through the notes like a music box to be horribly dull. Songs are emotional. It’s better to play sincere mistakes than lifeless perfection.
OR: So you are a sentimentalist?
MM: I play with sentiment, if that’s what you mean. I don’t just sprawl upon the bench like a washed-up fish.
WHP: Steady on, darling.
OR: Would you care to talk a little about how you and the duke met?
MM: It was at a party in the Baths.
OR: Yes? Could you elaborate? Indulge us all with a small anecdote, perhaps?
WHP: It’s an impertinent question, Oren, really, but since that seems to be the spirit of the evening, I’ll answer it with an impertinent announcement. I have asked the Mermaid to marry me, and she has accepted.
The Hod King Page 3