He viewed this with some distaste.
These great fools occupy our minds enough as it is. Nightly they are staggeringalong the Mynned gutters, gaping at the stars through the branches of the trees. Must we have them paraded in front of us at the Prospekt Theatre, as well, their pockets full of clinking bottles, followed onto the stage by half a dozen barking Dandy Dinmont dogs they have bought from some trader in Line Mass who claims to have trained them on Stockholm Tar and live cats?
And later he added:
The Grand Cairo seems to fear them more than ever. “Their ears are everywhere!” he claims, and has sent out orders to increase the vigilance of his own spies. He visits my studio in the early hours and sits down cross-legged in the only good chair, as full of his own importance as ever and heavy with secrets he cannot wait to divulge-the plague zone has shifted again, fifteen people will be arrested at Alves tomorrow for trying to smuggle relatives out, and so forth. But his conspiracies are not going well. He is bilious, quarrelsome, insecure. If he hears a door slam in the distance he gives a guilty start, then tries to pass it off by laughing sarcastically or flying into a rage. He drinks black-currant gin without stopping; and as this stuff inflames his imagination his conversationturns less on how he will outwit his masters, and more and more on escape from the city.
“Tell me, Ashlyme,” he sighs. “Will any of us ever get out of this trap we have made for ourselves?” He never mentions the Fat Mam.
As the dwarf’s anxieties multiplied, he abandoned his visits to Mynned. But he would not have Ashlyme at the tower in Montrouge. Instead he arranged furtive meetings in Shrogg’s Dene, Cheminor, and the Haunted Gate, all the most squalid regions of the Low City, often to no more purpose than half an hour’s walk in the rain along some old fortification overgrown with willow herb, during which he would pick up and cast aside dozens of bits of leather, rusty saucepans, and other decaying domestic implements. One evening on his return from such an outing, Ashlyme found himself on Clavescin Crescent, a street whose name was not familiar to him.
He had come from a depopulated suburb a mile north of Cheminor, where muddy cinder paths lined with poplar trees wound among the empty lazar houses and crematoria. He had hoped to be at the foot of the Gabelline Stairs before darkness caught him: but it was already late, and a heavy blue twilight had set in, confusing him as to distances. He recognised the three-storey terraced houses, with their peeling fronts and cracked casement windows, as belonging to the Artists’ Quarter. Which part of it he wasn’t entirely sure, although he hoped he might be close to the familiar warren of streets behind Monstrance Avenue and the Plaza of Unrealised Time.
Little arched alleyways led off the crescent at intervals. He was hurrying past the mouth of one of them when he heard a low cry-not quite of pain, but not quite of anguish either.
This was such a strange sound to hear, even in the plague zone, that he stopped and peered into the alley. It was damp and unwelcoming, but it opened out after ten yards or so into a courtyard like a deep well, the sides of which were propped up by huge balks of timber. Night was already advanced there amid the builders’ rubble. At the foot of one bulging wall, under a heavily boarded window, bags of mortar stood in a line. Someone had fallen down among them. Ashlyme could see an indistinct figure supporting itself on its hands and knees. Unwilling to enter the alley, he called uncertainly, “Are you unwell?”
“Yes,” said a muffled voice. Then: “No.”
Ashlyme bit his lip. “Can you move this way?” he suggested.
Silence.
“I can only help you if you come out,” said Ashlyme.
A low chuckle came from behind one of the timber balks. Ashlyme said, “Is there someone else in there?” He strained his eyes to see into the courtyard. The man on the floor put his hands on his head and groaned suddenly. “Are you alone in there?” Ashlyme asked him.
The Barley brothers, who had spent all afternoon hunting rats in the overgrown gardens behind the crescent, were unable to keep quiet any longer.
“Nobody in here, yer honour,” said Matey in a sepulchral voice. They had never heard anything funnier. They stuffed their handkerchieves into their mouths and rolled about on the floor. They bolted from the shadows which had concealed them and, laughing helplessly, shouldered their way out of the alley. “What a frightful sight!” they shouted, and, “Give him some stick, vicar!” Their grinning faces bobbed over Ashlyme in the twilight like red balloons; they smelled strongly of ferrets and bottled beer. Hard-favoured little Dandy Dinmont dogs milled about between their hobnail-booted feet, yelping hysterically.
“I’m weeing myself,” said Gog. “I’m doing it!”
Ashlyme was incensed. “Leave us alone!” he cried. “Go back where you belong and stop all this!” But they only laughed louder and ran away down the crescent, belching and farting and tripping over their dogs.
When the echo of their footsteps had died away at last, Ashlyme went to have a look at the man in the courtyard. He was trembling feverishly. Every so often he let out a groan, then whispered something to himself which sounded like, “Where am I? Oh, where am I?” He had no obvious injuries. His clothes, though crumpled and covered with whitish dust, were of good quality; he still had on a wide-brimmed felt hat of a kind popular in the High City. But he would not say who he was or where he had come from; and when Ashlyme urged him, “If you could just get up-” he only whimpered and pushed himself further in among the bags of cement. Ashlyme knelt down and tried to lift him. He resisted feebly and his hat fell off. Ashlyme found himself gazing into the flabby features and horrified eyes of Paulinus Rack.
“What on earth are you doing here, Rack?” he said.
“I’m lost,” whispered the entrepreneur helplessly. “I’m lost.”
He clutched Ashlyme’s sleeve. “Beggars are all around us,” he said. “Do nothing to provoke them.” Suddenly he shivered and hissed: “Livio, all these roads are the same! Livio, they don’t lead anywhere! Livio, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” Breathing heavily, hanging on to Ashlyme’s shoulder for support, he pulled himself to his feet and stood there with his mouth hanging open, staring about in a frightened, sightless way.
At the Luitpold Cafe they were keeping the night at arm’s length in a stuporous silence.
Madame sat behind her zinc counter with its shallow glass dishes of gooseberries soaked in lemon genever, thirty years the speciality of the house. A few vague plumes of steam issued from the kitchen door behind her. When she wasn’t required to serve she folded her thin hands in her lap and stared at nothing, like an animal waiting at a gate. Insects smacked into the wavering, bluish lamps, blundered off round the room, and flew into the lamps again. A generation before, this place had been the very heart of the Artists’ Quarter, the centre of the world: now its walls had an indelible lacquer of dirt into which had been scratched the indecipherable signatures of arriviste and poseur; and in place of the fabulous poets and painters of long ago, only a few fakers and failed polemicists sat at the marble-topped tables, writing endless letters to influential men.
Quarantine was the only word they knew. They could taste it in their mouths. They contemplated it constantly, while the plague, like grey dust, rained down on their shoulders.
Paulinus Rack had recovered his wits, although his eyes were still watery and apprehensive. It was not clear what had happened to him. He contradicted himself at every turn. First he claimed that he had entered the Low City on his own, then that he had been with Livio Fognet and some unnamed friend of theirs, “who cleared off as soon as he saw our plan.” He said that they had come in that morning at eleven o’clock, but maintained later that he remembered passing an entire night in the courtyard where Ashlyme had found him. He said that he had been opportuned by beggars, and had to hide from them, but boasted later that they had been members of the plague police in disguise, with a special warrant for his arrest.