by Alex Pheby
The gin-wife brought him the bowl – a heavy clay container, chipped and craquelured in the varnishing – and when she bent to place it down in front of him a waft of her scent came strongly into his nostrils, even over the astringent acidity of the wine in the bowl. In this odour Anaximander noticed the likeness-in-scent (there is no exact word for the noun) of the two men who rustled and fidgeted behind a closed door to Anaximander’s left, behind where the gin-wife stood – they were her sons, probably, her nephews perhaps – and they were whispering in voices that they imagined were inaudible but which any dog would hear as clearly as if the words were spoken directly into their ear. They spoke of Anaximander and gave the opinion that he was exactly the type of creature that would give a person they named as ‘Padge’ a ‘run for his money’. This phrase, while idiomatic, gave Anaximander a good idea of what this gin-wife would ask of him in repayment of his debt.
She stood upright again, creaking from the lumbago, and went to pour for herself a glass of clear and oily liquid flavoured with peaches. She put it between her pursed and painted lips and sipped. As she did this, the dog said, ‘Can I take it you wish me to kill Padge?’ to which the gin-wife coughed and spluttered a fine, fruity mist into the room as if she had taken his former mistress’s atomiser from the vanity and puffed a waft of it, thereby rendering the air less disagreeable to her.
‘How do you know about Padge?’ the gin-wife said, once she had regained her composure.
Anaximander knew enough about the ways of people to understand that it was neither necessary nor desirable to answer even the easiest question fully or accurately, nor that it profited a dog to reveal everything that he knew, so rather than give her an exhaustive account of his abilities, he said instead: ‘I am happy to make an attempt on his life, but I cannot guarantee success. Is he a powerful man?’
The gin-wife scoffed, but there was in her glandular secretions a whiff of fear, a sense of unease that undercut her dismissive hand-waving, and at the door there was the sound of ears being pressed against wood – a slight sucking as pinnae met the door, then the gentle throb of heartbeats communicated into the wood via the skin of the eavesdroppers. Her two sons held their breaths.
From this, Anaximander understood that there was something in this Padge that was intimidating to these people, and that they believed that if they told Anaximander what they knew of Padge then the dog would baulk at the commission he was being offered.
While the gin-wife formulated her reply, moving her set of wooden teeth from one side of her mouth to the other with her tongue, Anaximander considered the extent to which his capabilities – which were determined by the Master’s fluences and his own inherited constitution – exceeded or were exceeded by these people’s assumptions about his abilities. This he did since it would allow him to gauge the risks inherent in the work and the degree of preparation required to ensure success. While he was aware that they had seen him disembowelling the gin-wife’s patron, and that this was then a possible minimum floor for their expectations of his prowess at violence, he was not sure as to the imagination of these people and the limits of it.
The décor of the parlour of the gin-house suggested a grey and colourless drabness of spirit, but in the matter of brute aggression this was not necessarily telling, since there are many people who have little ability in the appreciation of aesthetic pleasure but are nonetheless ingenious in the modes and means of the martial arts – indeed, it may be that a man who finds himself lacking in the first takes solace in the second. They might imagine him, therefore, as a gambling man imagines a baited bear, and while this would be a serious underestimate, what if they imagined him as a child imagines a dragon or a giant, having powers exceeding any counter?
Anaximander felt out these possibilities for himself, and was reasonably certain he was a match for this Padge, whoever he was, but the gin-wife remained stubbornly silent, as if, to her, the matter was finely weighted, and Anaximander was not immune to doubt, as no wise dog is. Nor, though, was he immune to impatience. ‘I will undertake the task in any case,’ he said, after too much prevarication on her part. ‘Though, if it proves too onerous, I will return and proffer instead a more equitable service.’
The gin-wife stroked her hand over her chin, but Anaximander went on. ‘Have you any personal items which bear the odour of the man in question? Or do you have a map on which his present whereabouts or known haunts are indicated? Failing either of these, can you provide a very precise and accurate description of him?’
The gin-wife pointed to the wall, and at the end of the line which continued straight from where the tip of her finger hit the air was a painting done in oils, redolent of turpentine. Behind that tang was the scent of a man.
‘Did he give you this in person?’ Anaximander said.
The gin-wife nodded, and the dog married the odour present on the frame with the image within it, which was of a fat man, round-faced, with oily ringlets piled about his face.
‘You wish for him to die?’ Anaximander said, in order to rule out any misapprehensions.
The gin-wife nodded again, as if the speaking of the words might be overheard, or perhaps she was incapable of bringing such an idea to utterance.
There was nothing to be gained from remaining further, so Anaximander left. When he did so, the woman and her sons relaxed – so much is obvious to a dog since relaxation loosens the muscles, of which sphincters are a type, and this provokes the emission of bacterial gas from the colon in small but easily detectable amounts. It is worth noting that the flora within the bowel give an identifiable odour that is unique to each person – Anaximander committed these odours to memory.
Outside the gin-house there was no significant trace of the smell of the fat man he sought, but of the gin-wife and her sons there was an abundance. A dog when coming to a place can sense the presence, absence, and directions of egress of anyone or thing leaving that place to a degree it is impossible for a man to appreciate without recourse to metaphor and simile. Since man is a visually fixated creature in the main, visual metaphors are helpful – imagine, then, looking over a vista which you are at the centre of, and from you leads a network of a thousand strings, each a different colour, each a different thickness, and that these threads continue indefinitely into the distance. Concentrating on a thread causes it to widen in width and deepen in colour, these alterations also affecting the distance the thread can be observed snaking away from you. These threads overlay but do not obscure the visible objects of the world and interact with other things – sounds, textures, temperatures – and in every way interlace with your experience. If you saw like this, and could put a name to each of these threads, it would be much easier to know where those people of your acquaintance were at any given time, and Anaximander was a magical dog, made by the Master of Mordew, and he had been gifted additional senses – a feeling that magic is near, for example – so when he went out into the street he had a strong impression of where it was he might need to go in order to fulfil his duty to the gin-wife. This was not in that vague sense that someone who wonders what to do next might have, but in the way of someone who sees the thing they want and can move towards it. There was the path the sons had taken, going together into the Merchant City, towards, in the very far distance, the presence of magic, and with violence dotting the path.
Anaximander went quickly, his nose an inch above the ground, avoiding the dead-life and Living Mud as well as he could, skirting the bonfires, giving wide berth to slum-dwellers unless there was some slight resemblance to the smells of his immediate attention in which case he gave them a fleeting sniff.
A metal fence is designed to prevent the passage of people and at that job it is an excellent construction, but it is not designed to keep dogs out, and so Anaximander made a quick and easy transition from the slums to the guarded Merchant City. When he left the slums behind, the blanketing interference of the dead-life coming into being and passing out of it, the magic of the Living Mud out of w
hich the dead-life sprang, and the monotonous similarity this gave to the world – such as a man might experience at night, or by the sea, where there is something so overwhelming that it can dull the specificity of all but the most particular objects and events – this was all gone on entry into the Merchant City. The dead-life was gone, the Living Mud was gone, even the residents of the place were ensconced behind their walls, in their houses, by their fires, and the muddle that Anaximander hadn’t quite recognised was present cleared, allowing a much more precise sense of those things he wanted to know.
He raised his head and his path was unobstructed.
Now the sense of the fat man was obvious, marrying with the threads that the dog had been following – those belonging to the gin-wife’s sons – and also now there were the threads of Treeves and his companions, whose odours seemed to rise from the earth, up through the ground, mingled with the scent of ordure and rot.
Dogs cannot, in general, read – Anaximander was an exception to this – nor are they as aware of the commercial activities men put so much effort into since there is no commerce between dogs, nor money, nor any usury, and hence there was no natural understanding of places such as shops and banks and pawnbrokers, or premises catering to any other kind of customer of goods, nor of services – such as laundry or tailoring – so he did not pay much attention to the signs hanging outside of these, though he noticed in passing the interactions of his quarry with these named places.
One such premises reeked of the fat man – though ‘reeked’ is a somewhat pejorative word, and dogs do not judge smells in the way men do – and also this place reeked of death, of rotting meat and decomposition and blood and violence and other more subtle odours such as fear, anger and jealousy. Without the taint of the Living Mud everywhere, such things were much more sensible, and so was the way in which the fat man’s odour interacted with these other smells, so much so that Anaximander could assume he had a hand in the generative conditions of all of these factors, so thoroughly was he part of the smell-image.
Anaximander stood at a distance from this place and listened, hearing having more utility at this range than it did further out, where it is hard to discern sense from nonsense since sounds are fleeting whereas smells linger.
Dogs can easily discern the difference between sounds made from organic and inorganic sources. The clashing of cutlery, the scraping of plates, the rush of gas through a pipe and its ignition, all these things Anaximander could differentiate from conversation, or eructation, or laughing, or, in one case, sobbing. This last sound came from a wooden construction, the roof of which was visible above a wall behind which meat was rotting.
Anaximander skirted the periphery of this wall, remaining behind it, wary of being observed but listening and smelling intently.
There is an element, even to tears, of a man’s odour, though diluted and briny, and it was clear that it was the fat man who was weeping, and, since a man’s mood may also be determined through his smell, Anaximander knew he was both frightened and regretful. This had a simultaneous effect on the man’s anger, which was severe and reactive.
The rear door was padlocked, so Anaximander scrambled over the wall.
He went bounding towards the door. Even as he bounded, not pausing in the least, he was made aware by its smell of something inside very redolent of Treeves, or more accurately Treeves’s parent, or more accurately still Treeves’s mother – the odour was like Treeves’s but converted in its sex, given the signature of that type of boy’s metabolism, but as it might be in an adult woman. There was an object belonging to her in the room and it was being handled, the waft from its movement coming stronger and weaker by turns. When the door swung in under the weight of Anaximander’s paws, his nails scratching the planks and making scuffs in the varnish, there was Padge, recognisable as such from the gin-wife’s portrait, a scroll out in front of him.
He turned from his work – he had been observing the writing on the scroll with a jeweller’s loupe and wiping mucus from his nose before it fell in a drop onto the dry parchment. ‘What on earth…’ he said, but Anaximander interrupted him.
‘I have been charged, in the satisfaction of an obligation, with taking your life. To facilitate this, please bare your throat so that I might the more easily tear it out.’ Anaximander had no expectation that this gambit might work, and that was not its function. He said it only that it might give him time, during the composition and inevitable utterance of a reply, to take in the particulars of the room, as these were complex.
There was magic, death, sexual congress, hatred, love, sadness, the comings and goings of scores of people, money, debt, the disappointments of age, the misplaced enthusiasms of youth, poverty, wealth, betrayal, plotting, alcohol consumed to excess, rare fungi, spices, sweetmeats and above it all, cloaking and embracing it, the bitter and nauseating impression of butter left out in the heat, then chilled, warmed, and chilled again so often that it had turned bad – this came from Padge, who oozed it into the small room where it caught at the back of Anaximander’s throat.
The matter closest at hand was the scroll and why it should smell of Treeves’s mother.
As the man opened his mouth to speak, Anaximander took a step forward. An untampered-with dog’s vision is not as acute as, say, a hawk’s is, which is very precise indeed, allowing it to make out the beating of a mouse’s heart in the arteries of its neck as it hides in a field of ripe wheat one hundred yards below where said hawk hovers in the air, but a magically enhanced dog’s eyes are altered specifically in the realm of contrasts, allowing them to read at a great distance. This is useful in any number of ways, but especially in the descryment of written instructions left by his master, and also in the comprehension and dictation of simple spells, such as those provided to ward against burglary and which might need to be invoked in extremis should the dog’s physical protections prove insufficient to ensure the prosecution of his duties. For this reason, Anaximander was able to read, at a glance, the crabbed and cryptic script which the scroll exhibited in one solid block, despite the hand in which it was written being archaic and inconsistent with the habitual forms – many of the letters one might expect being substituted for variants that had fallen out of common usage, or which had never been in popular currency.
In short, the scroll was a deed of property transfer outlining the intended disposition of diverse premises, properties, rights, goods and chattels on the supposed or proven death of one Clarissa Delacroix – to name her short title, the deed specifying very many more names, both given and received – who, if the deed were to be believed, owned the majority of the wealth of the Merchant City and almost all of the licenses granted by which trade might be conducted between Mordew and the world that existed outside the Sea Wall. This world, to Anaximander, was surprisingly extensive, hundreds of named cities being listed, forcing upon him, in an instant, what a philosopher might call a ‘paradigm shift’ since he had, until that time, felt that Mordew was almost all there was of things, practically speaking, and now he had to recalibrate his understanding. These licenses were granted in perpetuity and subject to no other authority – not even the Master – such rights claimed by reference to treaties and contracts that predated recorded history but which were vouchsafed by the existence of seals and marks in the possession and safekeeping of the family Delacroix, and which were open for inspection at the arrangement of the relevant certifying parties. This also caused Anaximander to adjust his thinking, since he had always assumed the Master operated in a system of his own making, but he was unable to consider these new facts for long – Padge spoke into the necessary silence in which thought develops.
‘An obligation, you say,’ he said, rolling up the scroll, perhaps noticing that it had become the focus of the dog’s attention.
Anaximander had seen all that he needed to see and was already tracing the scroll’s unique scent in a path that led out of the room. He had a tentative working assumption that it had been brought from up
the hill, towards where the great houses of the Merchant City were to be found, and within one of which he had until recently been indentured. Once this business was done he planned to find where this scroll had previously resided, to go there, and to investigate the exact significance of the words on it, and this because of the link between the scroll and, through Treeves’s mother, to Treeves himself – the service-pledge of his companion, Sirius. The evidence suggested, so far, that Treeves’s mother was this ‘Clarissa’ and that Treeves was the named beneficiary of the testator.
Still, there remained his obligation to discharge to the gin-wife, and Padge had asked a question. In the circumstance, under an issued threat of death from a large and magical dog – or any such creature – most men of Anaximander’s experience gave off the scent of a man in fear of his life, which is quite recognisable, yet Padge smelled of nothing any different from before the threat was delivered, as if he was entirely unaffected by the prospect: he was curious, perhaps a little, but certainly not much.
Anaximander couldn’t speak openly to Padge as that would expose the gin-wife – and, by association, her sons – who was in this matter his employer and was therefore owed a secondary debt of consideration in matters that might rebound on her and cause her difficulties, but he could at least outline the generalities and so gauge by Padge’s reaction the likely progress of the business in hand. ‘Indeed,’ Anaximander said, ‘I have agreed to fulfil an obligation and this can be done by providing evidence of your death.’
Padge wet his lips and nodded. ‘A man may have many enemies, certainly, and my business will tend to bring me into conflict with just the sort of person who would hire a strange beast to do their dirty work for them. Here, then! I have a proposition. Just as a man may buy another man’s debt, hoping to collect on it where the original debtor failed, so also may he buy another man’s, or dog’s, obligation. I will purchase your obligation to kill me, and you may return to your employer and give the price I give you to them, thereby satisfying your obligation in a usual and accepted mode of exchange. What would you say is a fair price?’