1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood
8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice
1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again—and beneath the clock
1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal
1 bookcase, lacquered, stacked with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase
1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to
1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her left nub held by
1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pocket watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-gray trousers. He stared at
1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald-green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of
1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab gray suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set halfway up the wall where
the cage sat on a window ledge. The dark, narrow window reflected needlings of rain through its tubular green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-gray with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise, fat and fecund, in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk.
The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbotton like a rather long time.
“That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,” Hoegbotton said, to slow the solicitor’s relentless chatter.
The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.
“The bird itself. The bird,” the solicitor said, “is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true. But,” he gestured at the walls, “surely you see the richness of Daffed’s collection.”
Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of famous zoologists. Daffed’s wife and son stood beside the solicitor, last remnants of a family of six.
Hoegbotton frowned. “But I don’t really need the collection. It’s a fine collection, very fine”—and he meant it; he admired a man who could so single-mindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of things—“but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?” Hoegbotton shrugged his famous shrug, perfected over several years of haggling.
The solicitor stared at Hoegbotton as if he did not believe him. “Well, then, what is your offer? What will you take?”
“I’m still calculating that figure.”
The solicitor loosened his collar with one sharp tug. “It’s been more than an hour. My clients are not well!” He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. Despite the sweat, the solicitor seemed parched. His mask puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.
“I’m sorry for your loss—all of your losses,” Hoegbotton said, turning to the mother and child who stood in mute acceptance of their fate. “I won’t keep you much longer.” The speech never sounded sincere, no matter how sincerely he meant it.
The solicitor made a noise between a groan and a choke that Hoegbotton did not bother to catalog.
His thoughts had returned to the merchandise—rug, clock, bookcase, phonograph, table, chairs. What price might they accept?
Hoegbotton would not have included the cage in his calculations if the boy’s stare had not kept flickering wildly toward it and back down again, gliding like Hoegbotton’s own over the remnants of a success that had become utter failure. For all the outlandish things in the room—the boy’s own mother to be counted among them—the boy most feared the cage, an object that could no more hurt him than the green suitcase that hung from his arm.
A reflexive sadness for the boy ran through Hoegbotton, even as he noted the delicacy of the silver engravings on the chair legs; definitely pre-Trillian.
He stared at the boy until the boy stared back. “Don’t you know you’re safe now?” Hoegbotton said a little too loudly, the words muffled by the cloth over his mouth. An echo traveled up to the high ceiling, encountered the skylight, and descended at a higher pitch.
The boy said nothing. As was his right. Outside, the bodies of his father, brother, and two sisters were being burned as a precaution, the bodies too mutilated to have withstood a Viewing anyway. The boy’s fate, too, was uncertain. Sometimes survivors did not survive.
Nothing could make one safe. There had been a great spasm of buying houses without basements or with stone floors, but no one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events, combined with their infrequency, had instilled a certain fatalism in Ambergris’s inhabitants.
The solicitor had run out of patience. He stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbotton, his breath sour and thick. “Are you ready yet? You’ve had more than enough time. Should I call Slattery or Ungdom instead?” His voice seemed more distorted than the mask could explain, as if he were in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly, emotion.
Hoegbotton took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor’s gaze. The names of his chief rivals made a little vein in Hoegbotton’s left eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom—towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.
“Call for them, then,” he said, looking away.
The solicitor’s gaze bored into his cheek and then the foul presence was gone. The solicitor had slumped into one of the chairs, a great smudge of a man.
“Anyway, I’m almost ready,” Hoegbotton said. The vein in his eyelid would not stop pulsing. It was true: neither Slattery nor Ungdom would come. Because they were afraid. Because their devotion to their job was incomplete, insufficient, inadequate. Hoegbotton imagined them both taken up into the rain and torn to pieces by the wind.