"Quite edible," he said, as he wiped his hands on his leaves, "but I hardly feel immortal." He snapped his fingers and his private servant moved up next to him. "Take this away and plant the seeds as I have instructed," he said.
The night wore on as I minced and bowed and nodded. I kept a close watch on the Master to see what kinds of changes the fruit might make in him, but nothing remarkable came to pass. When he got up to dance with the young lady who had revealed to the others my sexual techniques, I pumped Graves for any information he might have about the exhibit the Master had referred to. He told me some of his men had been pulled from their usual assignments in order to guard the thing, but not even he knew where it was being built.
"We can only know what the Master tells us," he said, smiling.
I considered paying him a visit the next day in my new, official capacity and ordering him in for a reading. I wondered how many deaths he had been responsible for over the years. As I pictured his head being filled with inert gas before a crowd in Memorial Park, swelling to match his sense of self-importance, I caught myself. "You are hating again, Cley," I told myself. I remembered the word carved into sulphur in Professor Flock's tomb—"forgive." It was a struggle, but before long, I could see that Graves was simply trying to survive. He had his own disguise, like me, like the rest of them. We were all trying to hide our true selves from Drachton Below, waiting for his "glorious dream" to finally come to a close.
The affair abruptly ended when the Master entangled two young ladies in rapidly growing vines, like spiderwebs, and left through the double doors of the kitchen. The minute he was gone, the music stopped, the lights came up, and the attendants began cleaning up. The demon was then led away. Guests were wrapping up the delicacies of the territory in napkins and pocketing them to take back to their families. I was quite drunk but relieved that I had made it through the evening.
The coach was waiting for me outside on the windy street, but I told the driver to go on without me. I walked the City for an hour or so, trying to sober up. It was down on the
Boulevard of Montz along the man-made lake of floating lilies that I realized I was being followed. I first heard the footsteps in syncopation with my own. Finally, I spun around and saw a shadow clumsily dart into a doorway on the other side of the street.
I went directly to my apartment, locked the door behind me, and listened with my ear to the keyhole. When I had established that there was no one there, I rushed to my desk and prepared a vial of the beauty. My skull itched terribly, and I was beginning to quiver on the edge of withdrawal. I took it in the head and called on Flock, but he would no longer come. The floor and walls wavered and sparked, the yellow flowers wept, and before I dozed off, of all people, Frod Geeble, the tavern owner of Anamasobia, appeared before me and spent a half hour belching.
The next morning I was up early, filling out appointment cards for those unlucky citizens I would decide to read. Of course, I had no intention of turning ten people over to the Master for execution. Whatever it was I was going to do, I had ten days in which to do it and then figure out some way to flee the City. For now, though, I would need to follow through with the charade by requesting that certain individuals I encountered through the morning come to my offices in the afternoon for a reading.
I left my apartment before the crush of workers on the way to their jobs could choke the streets. My first stop was to be the Top of the City, where I had dined the previous night. I took a circuitous route, doubling back, stopping in passageways, passing through the Academy of Physiognomy and then out the back door. I had not noticed anyone following me, but if someone was, I felt confident that I had lost him.
When I got to the restaurant, the cleanup crew was just opening the doors to the elevator that led to the dome. They tried to prevent me from going up, but I told them who I was and asked them if they would like to stop by my office for a reading that afternoon. When they instantly lost all interest in detaining me, I realized that my new power would come in handy. I didn't bother to give any of them cards, and they smiled thankfully at me. I smiled back as the elevator doors closed.
The restaurant was empty, save for a cleaning woman, who entered soon after me and was trying to scrub the blood of poor Burke from the middle of the dance floor. She ignored me and I her. I could see the sun coming up beyond the dome, and the room began to glow with its warmth. My plan was to use the tower as a lookout point in order to see if I could spot any signs of construction going on throughout the city. I walked the rim of the crystal, staring down, watching carefully as the insectlike inhabitants scurried purposefully along paths and through holes in the coral structures. "Palishize," I thought to myself.
I spotted nothing. All seemed as it always had on the City's skyline. There were no great depressions in the earth, no accumulation of building equipment, no scaffolding. As I spied from my perch, I noticed that the woman had walked up next to me and was also looking down.
"Can I help you?" I asked.
"Was wondering if you were looking for the demon," she said.
"The demon was here last night," I told her. "That mess you are working on is the fruit of its labor."
"I know that," she said and smiled through missing teeth. "But I guess you haven't heard about what happened last night. As soon as they took it through the kitchen over there, it managed to burst out of its chains. They tried to flame it, but they ended up flaming each other. The ones that were left were killed by it. It's out there now, hiding in the City," she said.
"That is not good," I said.
"I read in the paper where one of the Master's experts said that it must be hiding underground during the daylight hours. They said there shouldn't be a problem until the night comes."
The news was frightful, but I did not miss the fact that there was much information to be garnered from listening to the populace. I thanked her and she seemed genuinely happy that I had acknowledged her help. She went back to the stain, kneeled and continued scrubbing.
Having found nothing in the visible topography of the City to indicate the construction of the exhibit, I left and went immediately to a newsstand to purchase a copy of the Gazette. Sitting down with it in front of a steaming cup of shudder at the outdoor cafe by the park, I turned to the second page and read the headline demon loose. I sped through the story, which told me little more than the cleaning woman had. "Since when has Below begun admitting to mistakes?" I wondered. In the past, this incident would never have been reported. This was something I would try to ask him about at our next meeting.
The shudder went down well, and I ordered another cup. I sat contemplating the thought that an ally of some kind might be helpful, but who was I to trust? The cleaning woman seemed the only one I had met since my return who didn't appear to have any ulterior motive behind her words. I thought about her and then recalled her telling me that the demon was probably underground somewhere. It struck me that not only was the demon hiding beneath the surface but also that was probably the location of the exhibit.
I remembered from my student days when I had had to be across town to attend a reading or fetch reports from the Ministry of Security in a hurry. I had traveled underground to avoid the busy hours on the streets. When the foundation of the City had been laid, Below had ingeniously built in a vast network of underground passageways, tunnels, and catacombs that he himself had used as a means of traveling unseen from location to location. "Surprise is my meat, Cley," he had said to me on one occasion, referring to that very network. Officials were allowed to use it but rarely did, not wanting to be found down there by the Master and raise his suspicion of some hidden plot.