Beaton told him everything was fine and that they would stay one more night to see the lights. All day they moved through the tunnels again, searching for some sign of humanity. Near evening, Mayor Bataldo's uncle, Joseph, found something in one of the passageways. It was a small gold coin with an imprint of a coiled serpent on one side and a flower on the other. After showing the others, he put it in his pocket and joined them for some salted caribou meat and turnip root.
My head nodded more and more with fatigue as I continued with Aria's account until I must have fallen asleep reading, because it was precisely here that the words of the text suddenly swept up off the page, turning into the snaking arm of a sea creature, and pulled me down beneath the surface of paper and ink. There was a minute of gasping for air, and then I, Cley, stood next to the huddled miners asleep on the street of Palishize. Even Moissac, who was supposed to be keeping guard, was firmly rooted in dreams. I leaned over and studied the face of Beaton as a young man.
"Cley," said a voice a few feet down the street. At the curve where the cobbled shells disappeared around the base of a building, there was a woman. She wore a veil over her entire face.
"Aria?" I whispered.
She waved to me to come to her. I moved cautiously away from the miners. As I approached her, she reached out to me, and I instinctively took her in my arms. I kissed her through the veil and we fell to lean against the slope of the mound. She was breathing heavily as my hand ran up under her skirts, along her thigh, toward paradise.
The next thing I knew, we were standing in front of the sleeping miners and Aria was pointing down at Joseph.
"He has my coin," she said to me.
"What coin?" I asked.
"It runs my child," she said. "The Master has taken my son and automated him, made him into a penny machine. I was given four coins to put in a slot in his back. When the coins drop in, he will be alive for an hour. He moves stiffly and sometimes I can hear the gear work humming, but I love him. I foolishly have used up three of the coins already, and the one that man has is my last coin. There are no others like them; the Master poured the metal himself."
I tried to nudge Joseph with the toe of my boot, but it passed right through him.
"I don't think we can do anything," I said.
"Tomorrow, we can," she said. 'Til bring up the red lights for one more dawn, and then tomorrow night we will have him."
"What do you mean, 'have him'?" I asked.
She took my hand and put it to her breast. An instant later, it was the next night and she was relating her plan for me. I was to play a little flute she gave me and lure him awake and around the corner where there was a small alley. She would be waiting there.
"I can't play," I told her.
"Blow hard," she said.
I did, but heard nothing. Nevertheless, Joseph awoke from sleep, stood up, scratched his stomach, and then came toward me. Although I was amazed, I began backing up the street to where it turned into the alley. We were halfway there, when I saw Moissac sit up, crossing his legs in front of him. He watched intently but made no move to interfere.
Aria stood a short way down between the structures. As I brought Joseph around the corner, she stepped forward.
"My coin," she said, putting her hand out.
To my surprise, the miner turned and looked at her. He shared a strong resemblance to his nephew, only thinner from the rugged journey.
"I haven't got it," he said, bringing his hands together as if in prayer.
"Where is it?" she asked, the veil rustling slightly with the breeze of each word.
"I lost it," he said. "Today in the tunnels, I took it out of my pocket to look at so many times, I must have dropped it."
She stood like a statue. I could hear the distant waves of the sea. Then she lifted her arms and put her fingers to the bottom of the veil. As she lifted it, I closed my eyes and turned away.
I heard Joseph make a noise, a furious exhalation as if the breath were being sucked out of him. When I finally opened my eyes, the veil was dropping and the miner lay dead at my feet. There were as many holes in his flesh as there were openings in the mounds of Palishize. Aria vanished, sifting into the sound of the surf.
Somehow, I was still present in my ghostly form the next morning when Beaton and the others discovered Joseph was missing. They went in search of him. Moissac found him almost immediately and called to the men. Whatever spell the red lights had cast over the expedition, it suddenly vanished in the face of Joseph's wounds.
"Run, now," said the foliate, caressing Beaton's left cheek.
He yelled, "Run," and they did. As they dashed out through the gates of Palishize, they could feel the thing following them. They made their way back through the forest, moving like deer over the fallen trees and bursting through the undergrowth. Not until they had crossed a frozen river did they feel the invisible terror take its gaze from them. Once on the other side, they lay down on the bank and gasped for breath while all the time the frozen water snapped and cracked against my spine and the moving ice moaned, "Cley, you worthless fly turd, it's time to mine sulphur."
The gas lamp suddenly came up, casting out the darkness, and I staggered to my feet beneath a torrent of expletives. The corporal wielded the cane with a blind fury. As I undressed down to my underwear, my arms and back bleeding from the assault, I heard Matters say, "What is this nonsense?" I turned around to see him lift the manuscript pages of the Fragments off the bed where they had fallen through the night.
"This won't do," he said, gathering the pages into a pile and clasping it beneath his arm. "You'll dig double your roll for a week for this, you sorry ass of a dog."
"Drachton Below said I was permitted to bring these pages to Doralice," I said.
The corporal reached out with the cane and struck me hard on the side of my neck. The blow staggered me, and I went down on one knee. He had caught the bottom of my ear, and it stung unmercifully.
"Do you think that will prevent me from burning this in my fireplace tonight?" he said. "I don't even want to be touching it. There should be no room in your head for this air. The mine is the mind, and I don't want it littered with frivolity," he said, swinging the cane across my back.
I came up off the ground so quickly, he did not have time to react. My fist, fueled by the thought of the Fragments reduced to ash, drove deep into his soft stomach. I could smell the Rose Ear Sweet as his breath exploded out. Before he could straighten up, I came across with my right hand and hit him squarely on the side of the head. Blood came from his mouth. He tottered for a moment or two and then began to fall. As he went down, I grabbed a handful of hair and the whole ratty coif came sliding off his scalp, his hat dropping next to him. Two more kicks to the head put him out, and over his face I dropped the black wig.
I dressed quickly and then set about turning the corporal over in order to fetch the manuscript. I rolled the pages into a tube and tied them with the piece of string they had come bound in. Instead of taking his sword, I grabbed the monkey-headed cane. Putting my fist around it gave me a sudden sense of power. I so wanted to thrash the slumped form of Matters, I had to grit my teeth in order to forgo my revenge. Instead, I bolted from the room, stumbled down the stairs, and fled the inn.
I tried to follow the sound of the ocean down to the beach, but I could never seem to get there, trapped as I was in the maze of dunes. Running through the sand was tiring me out, and I began to fear that the corporal would have awakened and would soon be on my trail. I stopped in order to think and listen more closely to the waves. That is when Silencio came bounding over a dune.