Two or three cats ran out of a trench dug across the newly surfaced road at my feet, he wrote in his journal. Their eyes were green and blank. Has the dwarf already left Viriconium? Or was he crouched up there in the darkness among his rusty knives and hair totems, trying to keep track of his plots against the Barley brothers?
He had something of an answer to this a few days later in the plague zone.
On a visit to the Rue Serpolet he was forced out of his way by the attentions of the beggars in the Plaza of Unrealised Time. He found himself on the seeping periphery of Cheminor, that suburb of flaking brick walls where the streets are lined with graveyards, old churches, and boarding-houses. At night the lamps there give off an orange glare which muddles the sense of perspective and gives the blank faces of the people a suffering look. They seem to float towards you in their cheap sober clothes, then away from you again like ghosts. It is often called “the Undertakers’ Quarter.” Ashlyme, unencumbered by his easel for once, was making his way down an alley which opened onto the main thoroughfare of Endingall Street, when he heard the sound of running footsteps.
He popped his head out of the mouth of the alley. Up and down Endingall Street the orange lamps stretched dully away. He had the impression of a crowd of people coming quickly towards him. He withdrew his head and waited.
A moment later a small agitated figure ran past. It was the Grand Cairo. He had a leather cosh in one hand, and in the other something that looked like a long kitchen knife. He passed the mouth of the alley in a flash, the skirts of his black coat slapping his knees and his steel-toe-capped boots thudding urgently as he propelled himself down the middle of the road with his head thrown back and his breath hissing between his bared teeth. There were extensive stains on his hands, made blackish by the orange light, and on the blade of his knife. His eyes were white and staring with effort. He risked a glance over his shoulder, groaned, and ran on, looking neither right nor left.
Close on his heels came a score of his own policemen, waving their arms and tugging back on the leads of their enormous dogs.
It was over in an instant: one moment Endingall Street was full of the pursuit, carried on in grim silence but for the pounding of feet, the hoarse panting and choking of the dogs; the next there was only a fading whiff of Altaean Balm to suggest that the dwarf had even been there. Had he killed someone again? Why else would he be chased by his own men? Ashlyme blinked into the orange glare. Endingall Street was bounded by a high wall, purpled with soot. Over the top of it he suddenly caught sight of an ornamental obelisk, bearing the figure of a stone bird poised for flight. It was a cemetery. Had they chased the dwarf into it? For a moment Ashlyme debated going to see. Then he walked quickly off in the direction of the Artists’ Quarter. By the time he found himself on familiar ground, the whole event had taken on the distant, unreal air of a scene in an old play, and he had almost convinced himself it was not the Grand Cairo he had seen, but some other very small man.
Later that evening he met Fat Mam Etteilla hurrying away from the Rue Serpolet in the direction of the High City. A fine rain had beaded her bare arms and greying hair; it gave her cheeks the same varnished appearance as the fruit on her hat. She clutched in her reddened hands the handles of an assortment of shopping bags which bulged with old clothes. She seemed withdrawn and thoughtful, heavy with determination. He walked along with her silently for a few minutes, glancing up every so often at her monumental body towering above him, and admiring what he had earlier described as her “implacable simplicity.”
“How is Audsley King?” he asked. “I’m off to see her now. I expect you’ll be back there soon?” When she didn’t answer he went on anxiously, “Do you think she should be left alone at this time of night?”
The fortune-teller shrugged.
“I can’t help her,” she said, staring darkly off into the rain, “if she won’t help herself. She has no faith in me or in the cards.” She made a peculiar, puzzled, hopeless gesture, lifting the shopping bags for Ashlyme to see. “She told me to pack my things,” she said. “That’s what she’s just done.” She wiped the rain off her face with a sudden angry motion. Her eyes were hard and hurt.
“She’s like a child,” protested Ashlyme. “She doesn’t mean it.”
Fat Mam Etteilla sniffed. “I’ve packed my things, as I was told to,” she said stubbornly. “You have to go where the faith is.” She shook her head. “I could have helped her,” she said. “She begged me to, as you well know.” She walked away from Ashlyme, quickly and angrily, leaving him behind as if he reminded her too much of Audsley King. “Begged me to,” she repeated, with a sort of massive dignity. “But I can’t do any more if she doesn’t respect my cards.”
Ashlyme didn’t know what to say. He struggled to keep up with her, but in her anger and hurt pride she quickly left him behind. He stood on the wet pavement feeling isolated and abandoned. “I thought I saw the Grand Cairo an hour ago,” he shouted suddenly. “He seemed to be in a hurry.” If he had hoped to surprise her he was mistaken. She walked on like a tired horse, her broad back moving steadily away towards the Plaza of Unrealised Time. Eventually she looked back at him and nodded. “I knew it was you who came dressed as a fish,” she said. “Oh, you could have helped her once, I give you your due for that. But you should have got her out of there while you still had the courage of your convictions.” Then she was gone.
He was in the Rue Serpolet for an hour and a half, whistling and calling up at the lighted window of Audsley King’s studio. A shadow moved back and forth in front of the shadow of an easel, but she would not let him in, and all he could hear was her harsh, mannish sobbing. The air was full of withered chestnut leaves, which touched his face like wet hands.
He continued to hear nothing from Emmet Buffo. Was the astronomer ignoring him out of pique? Should he go to Alves and see him anyway? He was loth somehow to make the journey. He sent another note instead.
While he wasted his energy thus, unaware that he had so little time left at his disposal, autumn, like a thin melancholy, settled itself into the plague zone. Down there it was as if the world had become as flimsy as the muslin curtains at an old woman’s window in the Via Gellia: as if the actual essence of the world was too old to care anymore about keeping up appearances. With the first frosts, unknown wasting diseases had swept the Low City; and the quarantine police, unable to deal with the situation, unsure even whether the new phthisias and fevers were contagious, had panicked and begun to seal and burn the houses of the dead. For days the dusty avenues and abandoned alleyways had been full of reluctant fires, flickering at night like blue gas flames, as feeble and debilitated as the zone itself, which now crept quietly over its original boundary at the Pleasure Canal, inundating Lime Walk and the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves and stealing up towards the ponderous great houses, the banks of anemones, the tall pastel towers of the High City. Alves held out on its steep spur, eccentric and insular in a greyish sea.
As the plague tightened its grip, so the Barley brothers tried harder to become human.
If indeed they did create the city “from a handful of dust,” Ashlyme told his journal, these brothers seem to have done so only in order to vandalise it. They contribute nothing. They get into the wineshops at night and steal from the barrels. When they go fishing in the Pleasure Canal it is only to fill a jam jar full of mud and stagger home at midnight as pissed as the newts they have been able to discern, always out of reach, in the cloudy water.