The famous witch Madame Campaspe, who claimed she had transcended humanity and thus had no need to die and who always carried with her a tame water rat, was nowhere to be found. Some said she had retired to the Piedmont, where she owned a walled estate in the Iron Lake district under an assumed name, others that she had been drowned by a horrified lover, that her clothes had been discovered by the river and taken to the local church to be burned. Nobody expected her back.
Hammers sang. Workmen were tearing walls from houses and stringing waxflowers over the streets of Rose Hall. The little river community was half-dismantled, the houses at its core reduced to roofs and floors so that they might serve as dance pavilions. They looked like so many skeletons, flanked by sad piles of rubble.
The bureaucrat and Chu stood before what was once Madame Campaspe’s house. The high roof, ironically like a squared-off version of a witch’s peaked cap, and the corner posts were all that remained intact. The interior had been filled with scrap lumber and other inflammables. “What a mess,” the bureaucrat said disgustedly of the heaped and broken wardrobes and divans, stained blankets, clotted masses of paper, and filthy brown rugs, the flotsam and jetsam of a hastily abandoned life. A broken-backed stuffed angel shark leered from the bottom. The house reeked of white kerosene.
“It’ll make a nice bonfire, anyway,” Chu said. She stepped back as a canvas-gloved woman threw in more planks. “Hey — lady! Yeah, you. You from around here?”
The woman brushed back her short black hair with her wrist, not bothering to doff her work glove. “I was born here.” Her eyes were green, cool, skeptical. “What do you want to know?”
“The woman who used to live here, the witch. Did you know her?”
“I know of her, of course. Madame Campaspe was the richest woman in Rose Hall. Tough old bird. There was plenty of gossip. But I live on the other side of town. I never actually met her.”
Chu smiled dryly. “Of course not. A big place like this, how could you meet her?”
“Actually,” the bureaucrat said, “we’re more interested in a student of hers. A man named Gregorian. Did you know him?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“This is the man who made all the commercials,” Chu said. Then, when the woman continued to look blank, “On television. Television! Have you ever heard of television?”
Quickly the bureaucrat said, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but notice that lovely pendant you’re wearing. Is it haunt work?”
Startled in the first flush of anger, the woman glanced down at the stone hanging between her breasts. It was smoothly polished, the length of a human thumb, straightedged on one side, curved on the other, rounded atop and tapering below to a blunt point. It was too big for a fishing weight and too edgeless and asymmetrical to be a spear point. “It’s a shell knife,” she said.
Then, brusquely, she seized her barrow and trundled it away.
The bureaucrat stared after her. “Have you noticed how evasive the locals get when we start asking questions?”
“Yes, it does seem they’ve got something to hide, doesn’t it?” Chu said thoughtfully. “There’s a local trade smuggling haunt artifacts. Stone projectile points, bits of pottery, and so on. Things that properly belong to the government. It would be easy enough for a witch to get involved in that sort of thing. They’re always poking around in odd places, nosing about boneyards, mucking about ravines. Digging holes.”
“Is there much money in haunt artifacts?”
“Well, they aren’t exactly making any more of them.”
Chu smiled at the bureaucrat, and he realized guiltily that his face must bear that exact same expression, sharp little grins with an unclean edge to them, as if they were predators that had caught scent of blood. “I wonder what they’re hiding.”
“It’ll be interesting to find out.”
They headed back to the hotel. In the weeds by the edge of town some children had caught a nautilus. Shrieking blissfully, they rode its shell, two and three at a time, while it slowly pulled itself forward with long, fluid arms. The bureaucrat commiserated silently with the wretched creature. It was hard to imagine it as it would be within the year, soaring and swooping in Ocean’s waters, a creature of preternatural speed, of uncanny grace.
In the center of town, they passed through a loose congeries of trucks belonging to entertainers and concessionaires brought in by the local businesses as a farewell gesture. A proud-bellied man was cranking out the canopy for a puppet theater. Others were raising a Wheel into the sky. It all looked tawdry, cheap, immeasurably sad.
The bureaucrat led the way through the lobby and into the hotel bar. It was cool and dark here, cluttered with neon signs advertising discontinued brands of alcohol and behemoth tusks gone chalky with age, and redolent with a lifetime’s spillage of cheap ale. Strings of paper flowers gone gray as dust hung over adhesive-backed holos of fighters trapped in greasy rainbow-smears while they threw the same famous punches over and over.
A sloppily fat bartender leaned back against a narrow counter, watching television. Their reflections swam up from the depths of a corroded mirror, rising from behind a ragged line of bottles, pale and popeyed, exotics from Ocean’s trenches. The bureaucrat put his briefcase up on the bar, and Chu with a nod slipped away to the toilets.
The bureaucrat coughed. With a lurch, the bartender straightened, turned, laughed. “Whoah! You want to know something, I didn’t see you there.” His head was bald as a toadstool and speckled with thumbprint-sized brown spots. Splaying his hands on the bar, he leaned forward leeringly. “So what the fuck can I do for—” He stopped. “That thing for sale?”
The bureaucrat looked down at the briefcase, up at the barkeep. He was the most physically repulsive man the bureaucrat had ever seen. Fleshy growths sprouted from his eyelids like small tentacles; they jiggled as he talked. His over-sly smile was a caricature of cunning.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well.” The man’s teeth were bruised and cracked, his gums purple, his breath sweet with corruption. “I know a man who might be interested in buying such a thing.” He winked. “Let’s not mention any names.”
“I could get in a lot of trouble if I went back up without this.”
“Not if it fell in the river.” The old troll touched the bureaucrat’s arm ingratiatingly, as if to draw him into a shared fantasy universe of conspiracy, treachery, and sleazy profit. “What the fuck. Accidents happen. A smart fucker could arrange for them to happen in front of witnesses.”
Suddenly the man’s face paled, and he sucked in air between his teeth. Lieutenant Chu’s reflection rose up in the mirror. The bartender turned away quickly.
“Where to next?” Chu asked. She glanced curiously at the fat man, now gazing fixedly into the television.
“I still have some things to see to upcountry.” The bureaucrat rapped the bar. “Excuse me! Do you have a gate here?”
“Back room,” the old man muttered. He didn’t look up.
More bodies were discovered today in the Plymouth Hundreds in Estuary Province, a newswoman said. Shown here are just a few of the dozens of corpses removed from shallow graves this morning. Authorities say the hands, feet, and heads had been removed to slow identification.
“I’d hate to be working homicide hereabouts,” Chu commented. “Lots of old scores are being settled nowadays.”
In the back room the bureaucrat related his conversation with the bartender to Chu. She whistled softly. “You really do have a way of stumbling into things! Well, now I know where to begin looking. Let me go poke around and see what I can turn up.”
“Do you need any help?”
“You’d only be in the way. See to your business. I’ll give you a nudge when I find something.” She left.