“A ceremony?”
“Like a ceremony, but not like that. We drink it. If a thukeri drinks too much, he sees the Water.”
The old coroner relaxed the grip on his weapon. He shuddered with sudden relief whose source he could not quite ascertain. “Yes. The water. Sometimes…sometimes I’ve been past the water. The City of Brass. Do…your people…know that?”
Gorud said nothing at first, just scratched at the end of his nose. “Humankeri, you. Where do you think the world is from?”
If he was startled by the sudden change of topic, Beckett did not show it. “The Church Royal says that the world is a Word, the voice of the Speaker. He Spoke, and here we are.”
The therian shuffled forward, its gruff voice low and conspiratorial. “And. Was there another Word? A different Word than this one, you know?”
Beckett shrugged. “Some people thought so. Harcourt Wolfram did. He was a scientist. He thought there was a whole stack of Words, right on top of each other, and he thought he could find a way to move between them.” He saw a face, frozen in a terrifying rictus, head lolling about on a neck like it was broken, a shimmering panoply of real and unreal limbs. “He might have been right. But if there are other Words…we don’t do well there.”
Gorud nodded. “We think something like this. But not a Word. There is a Dreamer, yes, and this is his dream. One day he will wake, and all of this will vanish.” He made a popping sound with his lips. “Poof. But this is not the first dream. The Dreamer once woke before, and all that dream went away. But it didn’t go, it just isn’t. Somewhere, He still dreams it. He dreams of a Brass City and an Ocean. That is the place the dreamsnakes come from. That is where their venom takes you.”
“Takes me? It’s not a real place. It’s a hallucination.”
The therian spread his hands. “I do not know, ‘hallucination.’ It is not a real place the way this is a real place. But it is a real place. Some things still live there.”
They were quiet for a while then, as icy wind whipped around them. The water that Beckett saw had trickled to a stop, and the veneine warmth began to boil off his body and into the empty night air. The beginnings of a headache lurked around, just outside his field of perception. His knees and elbows throbbed, his right hand was sore. “Hmf.” Beckett said, eventually. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You use too much,” Gorud said. “The Water is dangerous. The City is worse.”
Beckett didn’t tell the creature about what was beyond the Brass City, about the black basalt towers on the moon. About the things that he thought might live there. “It doesn’t matter. I need it.”
Gorud nodded. “It…tastes bad. To be without it. Hurts.”
“It hurts all the time,” Beckett spat, as his headache began to ring in his ears again. “It feels like there’s broken glass in my joints, like someone’s been driving nails into my head. I can’t even get up without the stuff. I can barely move.” He pulled down his scarf and showed the therian his ruined, half-transparent face. “Do you know what this is? It’s called the fades. You get it from working in factories that use flux. Usually children get it. It kills them before they turn fifteen. Sometimes, it doesn’t show up until you’re an adult. But it kills you just the same. Two years, ten years, no one gets away from it. And it just rots your body away.”
“You worked in a factory?”
“For two years, after my father died. A long time ago. Before they knew what caused it, made them start ventilating the factories better.” Beckett snorted. “The first factory regulations were put in place the year after I quit to join the marines.”
Gorud said nothing for a moment, then, “Still, it’s too much.”
“No. I need it. I can’t work without it.”
“You think the world will fall apart if you stop working? Will He wake up?”
The old coroner rubbed at the number corner of his mouth. “Huh. No. Probably not.”
“So. Why?”
Beckett shrugged. “What else can I do? It’s this, or lie in bed until I die.” He sniffed and looked around. “It’s cold. We should go. You drink djang?”
“Haha,” Gorud said. It was not a laugh, exactly, but a sound meant to indicate that he was laughing. “Where do you think you got djang from? Thukeri have invented djang.”
“Well, come on then,” the coroner said gruffly. “I’m thirsty.”
Ten
Emilia Vie-Gorgon was nothing if not generous, and with the nearly bottomless wealth of the Raithower Vie-Gorgons at her disposal, she could afford to be. When Skinner had returned to her boarding-house, late that night, she found that most of her belongings had already been packed up and burly-sounding men with heavy, competent footsteps were in the process of moving them out. Mrs. Crewell, astonishment plain in her voice, had been waiting for her with a handful of letters, details of the arrangement between the former coroner and the Vie-Gorgon heiress.
“It says there’s a house in Lanternbridge,” Mrs. Crewell was saying, as men tromped past with trunks of clothes, “leased under William Vie-Gorgon’s name that’s mean to be for you and your assistant. There’s a cook there, and a maid that should come in once a day, and you’re to be given an allowance of…my goodness.” She quoted a figure substantially higher than Skinner had ever made with the Coroners, but must have still been paltry compared to the funds that the Raithower Vie-Gorgons regularly had access to. “If you don’t mind my asking, Miss Skinner, what…what is this all about?”
Skinner permitted herself a truly enigmatic smile, one that she ordinarily reserved for the most outrageous of circumstances. These were certainly circumstances that might qualify, even if the wine and good company hadn’t managed to coax her humor to the surface. “I have found an opportunity, Mrs. Crewell. I imagine that you’ll hear about it, soon enough. Let me thank you for your good nature and excellent hospitality. I surely cannot imagine a better host than you have been. Do not!” She suddenly raised her voice to speak to the movers. “Do not even think about moving that instrument without wrapping it in cloth, first. Have you any idea what the cold weather will do to the strings?”
She traveled by coach from Chapel Height, skirting the lower edge of New Bank, and into Lanternbridge. The neighborhood was near one of the sinuous curves of the Stark, built near one of the first bridges across its length. Centuries earlier, when Trowth the city had really been a half a dozen loosely-connected little villages, an enterprising family member-probably an Ennering, but historical documents differ-had put three long lines of bright yellow lanterns along the bridge, and ensured that they burned at every hour of the night. Travelers, merchants, tinkers, and anyone else that might bring a coin or two of commerce to one of the competing districts were, once the sun went down, quite naturally drawn to the brightly-lit bridge, and the neighborhood found its inns and taverns always full come evening.
The good trade made Lanternbridge one of the wealthiest districts in the area, a characteristic which persisted for many years, until the sprawling mass of Trowth finally, by virtue of dozens more bridges across the river, spread out to the far side of the Stark, and pushed its travelers’ lodgings with it. Lanternbridge fell into disrepair for nearly a century then, gradually sliding down the inevitable decline into slumhood, until the Great Forfeiture. Once the wealthy families abandoned Old Bank for Lanternbridge’s neighbor, New Bank, the place underwent a kind of cultural renaissance. All of the decently-paid servants, craftsmen, cobblers, haberdashers, tailors, and restauranteurs relocated to be nearer to the wealth, and Lanternbridge was where they found themselves.
By Skinner’s time, it was known as a clean, quiet, safe neighborhood, with an exciting mixture of solidly middle-class, cheap journeyman shops and startlingly luxurious fashion houses and dining rooms. It was a common place of residence for moderately wealthy, not-quite-Esteemed merchant families, for up-and-coming and ambitious young people, and for certain relatively famous and popular actors and theater managers.