Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (14 page)

Stephanie Campisi

In Downtown, between the hypodermic fringes of Sitter Park, where the junkies walk a prickly carpet of needle-tipped glass and crumpled foil, and the painful gloom of the domed Helltricks complex that pollutes the Skendgrotian skyline with its void reflective windows and vast wooden landing platforms, lay a sickle-shaped swathe of religion and spirituality, and similar things long-illicit. A trickle of residences and warehouses and gutted ex-churches, hammered together as one with irrationally added cement facades, drooping and spiking in architectural curlicues and messes of starved ivy that drank the moisture from the porous walls.

At the edges of this swoop of dark, nested buildings, there was a slightly tilted terraced house, rocked on its foundations and pockmarked from gang wars and decayed at its base from the lapping of the Voda, like a tooth hollowed with cavities. The residence of Regent Polertrony claimed a tentative space here, propped up by an abandoned satellite building of the Kram, Skendgrot’s most famous religious landmark, on which it leant like a tipsy cultureman. The residence was as recently as a decade ago marked by a half-door, unusually unadorned with names and titles and post-doctorial suffixes, but now hid behind a fringe of airplants that burst from the wooden trellis on the walls.

It was on a small wooden seat, with ribbons of white paint peeling from its sides like sunburnt skin, and a plump round cushion in a faded gingham, that Regent sat, a photographia of a strange new device pinned to his old wooden clipboard, which rested in his lap, trembling a little as his weight shifted to accommodate his constant poppy-tea drinking and the confident mathematic jottings he scattered across the page like a handful of spidery seeds. The photographia depicted a strange sort of box that opened out to reveal a series of letters printed on bone-pale keys, and the thick glass of a screen that curved like an eye. A slim generator was attached to one side with warped screws.

Regent worked quickly, mindful of the playful habits of the Skendgrotian sun, which had no qualms about hibernating behind a mass of feathery cloud or burning with such violent intensity that the Mora-infested canals of the Voda would hiss and churn. He glanced at the photographia on occasion, making notes and taking measurements, and datum by datum plotting these on to a chart that resembled a rudimentary chart of the elements. Regent was the pre-eminent Downtown onomastician, or rather, was as pre-eminent as those specialising in an outlawed vocation could be.

His current commission required nothing more than a working knowledge of the basics of onomastics and basic mechanical etymological research, though the construct was simple enough that the inherent name of the object in the photographia all but burst from the page. He quickly solved the remaining equations, then filled out a form containing the item’s name, as well as a receipt for services rendered, and set the clipboard down on the cracked flagstones that puffed with moss at his feet.

His poppy tea, a habit that had grown to gnaw at him increasingly strongly as he leant on it in an effort to remove his boredom, bit at the sides of his mouth, sloughing loose skin off from his receding gums.

If he tilted back his chair and squinted past the stubbly growths of buildings that marched in awkward lines around the veins of the Voda, he could make out the spiny modernist sculptures dotting the vast, peaked roof of Downtown University. His tenure there had extended over fifteen or so years, and yet the daily walk through the green-tinged glass partitions from the ground level rooftops down to his office, which was a drowned room three storeys down, butting off a library wing, had always kept his interest.

The possibilities to be found in that library…and the potential scope of his work — it didn’t bear thinking about. Regent stooped to collect his work and headed inside to prepare another poppy seed wash.

•

The corners of the book, despite its cloth-wrapped cover, dug into Boy’s leg, leaving a small, red divot that swam with sweat from his back. A tram car sighed above him, rocking restlessly on its slowly unspooling cable, homeless ever since the floods had cut the generators and the rails had closed half a century before. A blackened arm, like a waxy bruise, waved in death from one of the side doors, which had slid open from the prisings of the beak of a carol bird. The arm had a hand, and the hand had two remaining fingers, which crooked like fly-legs.

The tram car was coated in soot from the crematorial belching of the Abattoir Towers that huddled alongside the Wynching Cemetery. The cemetery was, in fact, where a tram car like this belonged, but the city’s burial limits seemed to have grown obese in the wake of the gang wars, disease, and the fallout from the Jolts. Boy, innocent on the inside, knew these things; knew them as he knew the importance of the book, and the translation that he was required to procure.

It was mid-afternoon, and even the rickety laneways, constructed from precarious planks worked together with wire and nails and right-angles, were busy with people heading back to work from home or an opium den after a prolonged siesta to escape the heat. A man like a walking apteka walked by, paper cones of herbal medicines and garlands and rosaries of gems and cloves adorning him as though he were an aficionado of bizarre jewellery. He thrust a paper cup of crushed peppermint mixed with something foul-smelling at Boy, who found himself cringing and hanging back, walking slowly enough that he could get lost in the crowd, but not so slowly that he would be noticed. It was easiest to push along with the clusters of slumming Kramtkrovian culturemen, noses carved to gashes from cocaine, or the washer-women dragging Hessian sacks of machine-churned clothing, or the man with the dozen parrots threaded through their skulls on to a totem beam.

The Skendgrotian skyline up close slithered by like the spiky troughs and peaks of a divinograph, leaping and swaying, then plummeting as commercial centres butted on to a shanty town region where the consumptive and malformed massed together. Boy, ever-conscious of the brutal weight of the book he carried, tried to walk briskly, to ignore the at-once fascinating and loathsome spectacles ubiquitous in this mere fraction of the vast city. He tried not to show that he feared this immense place, which seemed in complete contrast to his home in one of the farthest Brackis hamlets. Instead, he focussed on the repercussions that the naming of the book would have for his people.

•

Regent finished tabling the cryptic crossword for the morrow’s newspaper, and began filling in clues and answers with a confident hand. This would be a relatively simple crossword, with a basis that he and his former colleagues at the University had jokingly called “a variation on E the minor,” after its reliance on the slightly arcane and exceedingly rare value that this particular formula assigned to the letter “e.”

It was by now late afternoon, and the sky was beginning to blush (although this could have been from the effects of the poppy tea) at the oncoming dusk. The frail light stuttered against the profusion of green that swamped his tiny front courtyard. It was as though the immediate space around him was alive with tealights, as though for some grand religious procession that the youngsters of Downtown could only dream about, and which Regent could remember only hazily as a string of carnivalesque masques and costumes and lines of chanting youths who stepped slowly, as though the world were glass beneath their bare feet.

Regent would have slipped further into reminiscence if not for the cautious tread of someone making their way over the homemade crossings that zigzagged their way back and forth across the murky Voda, allowing access to the upper storeys of the Old Skendgrotian buildings that had escaped the flood, and to those levels and houses that had been hastily tacked on with no heed to planning regulations or aesthetics in the years that had followed.

Presently, a youth in perhaps his late teens or early twenties stood in front of the ivy-savaged gate that Regent liked to believe sheltered his privacy. His skin was tanned and creased beyond his years—from the harsh, direct sun that beat down on rings of villages that orbited the fat mass of the city, surmised Regent. The skin of Skendgrotian city natives was not as easily picked, as the sun there was sly, reflecting off grimy glass here and sneaking through thick clags of pollution there. The city natives’ skin could range from alabaster white to the deep purple-black of fine chocolate, depending where in the city one lived. The boy had grey eyes, old eyes, which shone with the determined arrogance of youth, but at the same time the fatalism of old age. Regent was unnerved by those eyes.

“Can I help you?” he asked, setting aside his crossword and securing it from the lashing of the unpredictable wind with his metal fountain pen.

The boy was silent a moment, casting his gaze down to where an identifying plaque would ordinarily hang, but upon noting its absence, returning his attention to Regent.

“Dr Polertrony?” His Rs were burred; his Os buried deep in his throat. He was definitely from the Brackis region. “The—” he hesitated, before saying, far too loudly, “the onomastician?” His voice rolled off the murk of the Voda, coming back to him as an echo that rang like a bell. “I’ve been asked to enlist your help,” he finished in an intonation-free blurt. He fumbled about and produced a broad leather-bound book that had been partially wrapped in vibrant silks. He reached a hand over the gate, offering the book to Regent. A white-tipped creeper snagged at the boy’s arm, and the soft flower crowning it fell free as he snatched his hand back.

Regent stood, took the book from the boy, hefting its considerable weight, and unlatched the gate, beckoning his visitor to enter the courtyard. He could smell the sweetly burning taste of the honey sauce that the nearby bakery used as a basis for all of its sweet breads and desserts. It was these things he missed, the innocent homely things, the way people used to have roles to fulfil—the way they all used to fit in.

Regent ran the gnawed fingertips of his empty hand over his hirsute wrist, clasping the wrist in a bony grasp while he waited for the boy to enter. The book was heavy in his hand, and he felt the damp from his finger seeping into the vivid silk layers. The youth slid past him, smelling sharply of onion and garlic and spice; some of this from sweat, and the rest perhaps from cologne, Regent thought.

Regent gestured for the boy to be seated in his gingham-covered seat, and turned to wind the small generator that hung like a spider on metal arms from a swoop of wire overhead. The generator chugged to life, pouring a hesitant and stammering spotlight onto the area below. Its light was cut in concentric circles, indicating where the round wire mesh covered the globe of the generator.

Regent took a seat on an overturned wooden crate, being careful not to spear himself on its splintering edges. He shifted the book from hand to hand, waiting for the boy to address him once more.

The youth leant forward, his collarless shirt hanging open and revealing a surprisingly strong neck. “It’s a holy book,” he said, nodding. “My people have asked for it to be named, so that we might discuss it in greater detail and so the book will grow in power.”

The onomastician rubbed a gnarled thumb over the cover of the book. “Naming provides power,” he muttered, keeping his eyes on the book. He shifted the patterned silk, all gold-spattered crimson drawn in rich swirls, looking for text or some sort of embossing. The cover was bare bar a design of three intertwining lines, bulbous at each curved end.

“May I open it?” he asked, unsure as to any particular traditions or rules regarding the book. It had been so long since he had dealt with something such as this, and he was unsure as to any customs that might need following.

“Of course,” said the youth. He skittered his shoe back and forth over the swelling mossy caulking between the old flagstones that paved the courtyard. A mosquito, fat, with dangling legs, landed on his arm, and the boy watched it with interest before lazily waving a hand at it.

“This isn’t a Brackis script,” noted Regent, taking in the blockish letters that ran down the page in neat, divided columns. The script was hard, but with flourishes here and there, as though to add a touch of humanity. It had been hand-scribed, Regent thought, taking into account the slight irregularities between repeated letters. “It’s one of the Dead languages.”

“Yes it is,” said the boy, confidently. “Old Silthan. It’s a perfect language, the most complicated language in the world. It was made for…designed for the expression of religion.” He added the last in a lower tone, swatting again at the mosquito that had long since gone elsewhere.

Regent gripped the book feverishly, marvelling at the opportunity that had been presented to him. “Number systems, is that correct?”

“The geometry of words, we call it.” The youth stood, straightening himself a little hesitantly, with that unfamiliarity that comes when one is still learning to trust the changing boundaries of one’s body. “If I leave it with you…” He trailed off, a high, questioning note in his voice.

Regent righted himself. He found that his eyes were level with the boy’s shoulder, which was slim but strong beneath his thin shirt. He raised his gaze, feeling somehow that the power balance had shifted, and so pre-empted this by going to the gate and swinging it open. “One month. Hopefully less. But come to me in a month, and I should have your name.”

The Brackis boy stood for a moment, as though trying to reassure himself that the sacred book would indeed be safe, but finally turned to leave, a fragile smile creasing his face. “A month.”

Regent listened as the boy crept back and forth across the beams that separated him from the smear of blight that was the Voda River. For all his attempts at silence, the beams shrieked occasionally, a noise that was all the more evident now that the day had faded and the acute evening stillness had set in.

•