I stared at Tommo. “How did you know about the rabbit?”
“Whoops.”
“You snitched on me?”
The entire table turned to stare at Tommo. Lying was bad, but snitching on one’s own hue was far worse. He seemed somewhat less than contrite.
“I should apologize, really. But your sneaky rabbit subterfuge would have come out sooner or later, so it’s far better that a friend and colleague should cop the sixty merits of bounty rather than someone less deserving.”
“Less deserving than you?” remarked Lucy. “How is that even remotely possible?”
“There’s no need to be unpleasant. I’ll make it up to him.”
“How?”
He didn’t answer, and instead caught the eye of the dinner monitor and asked to switch tables, which he did. To be honest, his perfidy worked in my favor, for the LIAR badge was not mentioned again.
“Does anyone know anything about High Saffron?” I asked. “I’m not convinced that my briefing from Yewberry will be anything but absolutely useless.”
There was silence around the table.
“The, um, lack of eyewitness data makes facts thin on the ground,” replied Daisy diplomatically, trying not to make me any more worried than I was already, “but there are many half-truths and suppositions.”
“Which are?”
They looked at one another, then Lucy spoke. “Legend says High Saffron is where the memories of the Previous have collected. They lament upon their lost lives and vanished histories, and lurk in the shadows, waiting to feed upon the charisma of those still living.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said hurriedly, “I don’t want to hear the half-truths. Anyone have any facts?”
“Mining speculators arrive in the village every now and again,” said Daisy, “lured by stories of unimaginable Chromatic riches. The prefects sell these miners a speculating license,” continued Lucy, “and they take the road to High Saffron and do not return. Or at least, not this way.”
“I heard that travelers arrived by sea,” said Doug, “who came from the same place as the man who fell from the sky. And they take people to work for them somewhere across the ocean.”
“I heard that High Saffron is populated entirely by cannibalistic Riffraff,” added Arnold in a remark that possibly helped the least, “and they eat the brains of everyone who approaches.”
“There are many who blame the Riffraff for the disappearances,” said Lucy, giving Arnold a sharp kick under the table, “but if there was a community there, we’d know about it by now. And someone would have escaped to tell the tale.”
There were other stories, none of them helpful, and all of them unproved.
“I’m on my own, aren’t I?” I said in a quiet voice. No one replied, which was answer enough.
Joseph Yewberry
1.2.23.09.022: A unanimous verdict by the primes will countermand the head prefect.
“Good of you to drop around,” said the Red prefect as soon as I had settled on the sofa opposite him.
He seemed chirpy and friendly, despite our recent enmity—it was probably because he was confident I’d not live long enough to take his job. The front room of his house was what I called “untidy chic.” Prefects weren’t subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect’s room.
“Comfortable?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can’t have that. I need you as sharp as a tack. Here, sit on this piece of metal. How’s that? Still comfortable?”
“Not in the least.”
“Good. Since you’ll be off at dawn tomorrow, I wanted to brief you fully over the trip to High Saffron.
I’d be joining you myself, but the burden of leadership precludes one from doing one’s duty. Since no one else volunteered, you’ll be going on your own. Have a look at this.”
He laid a hand-drawn map on the coffee table.
“This is us here—and that’s your destination. So you have to go from here”—he pointed to East Carmine—“and travel all the way to—”
“High Saffron?”
“You’ve done it before?”
“I understand the theory about traveling—that it involves moving between two points, usually different ones.”
“But not always,” said Yewberry, eager not to give me the intellectual upper hand.
“True,” I conceded.
“Excellent. This map is an amalgam of every trip that was aborted in the High Saffron direction, mixed with a few guesses and some unsubstantiated rumor. As you can see, the Perpetulite only goes partway.
It spalled at Bleak Point, and after that it’s about sixteen miles, all on foot, all trackless. Mr. Fandango will take you to the Bleak Point and drop you there. The track of the abandoned roadway can be clearly seen, and it was worked on up until thirty years ago—you may find some abandoned Leapback on the way and a Faraday or two. In fact, it’s all plain sailing until you get to . . . here.”
He pointed to a spot on the map about five miles beyond Bleak Point, where there was a picture of a flak tower. I leaned forward and studied the map carefully. Beyond this, the detail was worryingly vague. Of High Saffron itself, there was only its position on an estuary. But also marked on the map were Riffraff, man-eating megafauna, an impenetrable grove of yateveos and the Apocryphal bird with the long neck that wasn’t an ostrich. I pointed this out.
“Mapmakers can get carried away,” he admitted. “The sorry truth is that once past Bleak Point, it’s all pretty much guesswork.”
“May I take the map?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I wouldn’t want anyone to find his way back here.”
I knew he meant nomadic Riffraff, but I said, “Like who? Swans?”
“That’s not funny, Russett. Any more of that kind of disrespectful backchat and you could find yourself—” He stopped, wondering what he could do to make my life any worse. He couldn’t, so instead opened a wooden box and showed me a compass.
“Can I take that with me?”
“Absolutely not!” said Yewberry. “I just thought I’d show it to you—the only one in the village. Beautiful, isn’t it? I like this leather bit here especially.”
“Very nice. So . . . what can I expect to find in High Saffron?”
“We’re not really sure. A detailed study of the Council minutes suggests that the founders of East Carmine first attempted to mine it about three hundred years ago. They described it as about forty square miles in size, with evidence of a bypass, a harbor, a railway station, several thousand domestic dwellings, municipal buildings, something loosely described as ‘defensive structures’ and two temples of commerce.
But to be honest, that might describe any one of hundreds of pre-Epiphanic towns, and they saw it only two centuries after the Something That Happened. So aside from the odd cementless building and anything made of Perpetulite, there won’t be much left.”
“And what do you want me to actually do?”
“You’re to sketch, observe and describe. Take any pieces of scrap color that you can find for appraisal back here, and keep an eye out for a route that the Ford might take. But most of all, we really want to know if it’s safe. No swans or Riffraff, that sort of thing—and what happened to the others, of course.”
“How do I report back if it’s not safe, sir?”