“Leave him alone, he says!” Your father again. “Still haven’t learned to respect your elders?”
“What are you doing?” asks another face, some older predecessor. Each succeeding member of the family lived longer than the one who came before. “What could be so costly?”
“I’ve lost the key to my heart!” you shout, overcome by strange emotions. “I have to buy it back.”
“By all the Gods That Never Were,” swears your grandfather’s face. “That old scam again. You are being taken for a rube, boy.”
Another stone face speaks, someone from terribly far down the line of ages.
“All of these stones are worthless, you know,” says the face. “Bits of worthless glass. The Potentates manufacture these by the million.”
“Nonsense!” says your father’s visage. “Their worth is what made us a great family.”
“No, he is right,” says another ancient face. “The last true jewels were lost ages ago. This is all fakery. Our wealth is an illusion.”
You scrape more armloads of the brilliants into the chest, hurrying. To stay in this chamber too long will drive you mad. Don’t listen to their babble. They are liars and fools. And they are dead.
“René,” says another nameless face of stone. “All wealth is an illusion. When you join us you will understand.”
“Join us,” says another face. “You are so close already.”
“Join us,” says another, through stone lips.
“Shut up!” you shout.
The faces grow still, but their fiery opticals stare at you.
You close the chest of brilliants, heft it to your shoulder, and leave the vault. The door slams closed behind you like the thunder of a collapsing empire.
You race up the stairs and check your pocket watch.
Less than an hour until sunrise.
You run out the front door, cross the overgrown courtyard, and head down the hillside.
Early risers are lighting their lanterns as you pass the gates of Beatific mansions.
Once through the Steeple Gate you head into the Rusted Zone, directly toward the Well of Bones, clutching the chest in your tireless arms, a precious ransom of a hundred-thousand worthless brilliants.
Along the Avenue of Copper Lungs you nearly stumble into a fizzleshade as it manifests in a haze of wispy hair and antique clothing. It stares at you with transparent opticals, pleading for help. They always want the same thing…the completion of unfinished business. Something left undone before they perished.
Please…this one moans…my name is Enri…I left two children behind when I died. Will you find them and tell them about my hidden gold?
“You died three-thousand years ago,” you mutter, shuffling along under the weight of your burden. “Your children are long dead, too.”
The phantom follows you, blinking in and out of existence, losing its purchase in the living world.
Pleeaaaasssse…it wails. The children will starve! You must help me. I bled to death in this gutter…don’t leave them alone.
“Piss off!” you shout, a stab of guilt in your clicking chest.
Behind you the fizzleshade blinks into nothingness.
The light of pre-dawn limns the corroded skyline with an amber glow. The exact shade of the Doxie’s opticals. You scurry along the streets of twisted metal, avoiding crowds of Clatterpox on their way to the factories. Gendarmes in black trenchcoats and stove-pipe hats patrol the streets now. Their faces are clusters of optical lenses, swiveling in multiple directions at once, observing the early morning activity, always alert for anything out of the ordinary.
Suddenly you realize that you are out of the ordinary. You are exactly the kind of anomaly the gendarmes look for as they enforce the laws of the Urbille: a lone Beatific carrying a heavy chest through the pre-dawn rust. And if that chest were to be inspected, a fortune in brilliants. You walk quietly now, hoping to avoid their attention. If there were time, you might tell them of your blackmailers’ plot and let the Potentates’ justice fall upon the Doxie and her confederate. But by the time they investigated your claims the sun would rise, your heart-key would be lost forever, and you would be dead.
No other course now but the Well of Bones.
You rush past steaming grates, the crooked frames of aluminum huts, and cross a bridge painted with the sigils of feuding Clatterpox gangs. Luckily, at this hour only working citizens will be up and about.
There it is. The walled plaza containing the Well of Bones. You walk through the open gate, glad there are no guards here. Who would care to guard a worthless pit of bones? This place is haunted by the lowest of scavengers, those who climb the sheer walls of the pit for miles deep and crawl back up with a bag of bones to sell for a few copper bits, or trade for drugs. Bone used to be highly valued in the Urbille, but nobody wants it anymore. It is a relic of the organic times.
Now you stand before the great pit, among the piles of scrap metal and the crude huts of bone-divers. There is no time to think about how completely vulnerable you are in this place because the sun has broken the jagged horizon, and you see the Doxie and her Clatterpox enter the plaza.
She moves gracefully across the muddy scrapyard, as out of place as yourself. Today her fine gown is green, the color of damp moss. Her black hair is a tall oval, secured with a spiral of copper wires. Her face is the one you remember: superb with its tiny red lips, arcing painted eyebrows, and the delicate curve of perfect cheeks. Her opticals glimmer at you, although with malice or amusement you cannot say. The Clatterpox named Flux shambles beside her, filling the air with his noxious exhalations.
“Sir Honore,” she greets you, her voice that of a high-bred Beatific. You would never guess she was a mind harlot if you met her on an avenue in the Good Hills. “So glad you could make it.”
You sit the chest of brilliants at her feet. You don’t bother to return her greeting, or to remove your hat. She deserves no respect from you.
The Clatterpox opens the lid of the chest and looks inside. He nods his bulky head, and the Doxie reaches inside her cleavage. She produces the brass key that means your life. She offers it to you in the palm of one white-gloved hand.
“Why?” you ask, taking the key from her. You need to wind your gears soon, but you have about two hours left. And you must know…if she will tell you.
As the Clatterpox lifts the chest in its metal arms, she reaches to caress its grimy cheek.
“You would not understand, Honore.”
“I doubt that I will,” you say. “But I’ve paid a heavy price. I deserve an explanation.”
The Doxie smiles and turns her amber lenses toward you again. “I did it for my lover,” she says.
Your neck gears nearly slip. “You love this Clatterpox?”
“Yes,” she says. “So you do know the concept of love…”
“I am well versed in matters historical, Madame. As well as the poetic arts.”
She nods, the morning light glinting off her delicate nose. “But do you know that love is real? Have you ever felt it?”
“You mock me.”
“No, Honore,” she says. “Not at all. Extort yes, but never mock. I, too, am a Beatific.”
“Your behavior suggests otherwise.”
“We are this way, you and I, only because we could afford the process.”
The process. Beatification. You recall it, three centuries past. A rite of passage, your father called it. The shedding of useless organic bulk, everything but the all-important brain, center of the living intellect.