Will Power (29 page)

“What I can pay for, more like,” I said, giving him what was supposed to be a matey we’re-all-men-of-the-world kind of grin.

“Indeed,” he said, his obsequiousness curdling a little about the edges.

I wondered vaguely about buying something for Renthrette, but I couldn’t afford even the diamonds you needed the magnifier just to see. I walked away, thinking derisively about Sorrail, who seemed to have bunches of the things lying around and could thus throw necklaces and pendants at her when she stepped into the palace. I remembered getting her a silver chain back in Graycoast and wondered if she still had it. Probably not.

Parked close by was a pair of wagons painted cream, ornamented with a purple trim, and hung with brass and gold fittings. Beside the wagons stood a stall where two men, one dressed in a full, velvet cloak, the other in a buff leather jerkin, sold scented soaps.

“The finest way to cleanse the softest skin,” announced the man in the cloak in a high, nasal drawl. “Release the delicate fragrance of rose petals and jasmine as you bathe. Suffuse yourself with the aroma of luxury as you rinse the cares of the day from your hands. The highest quality natural ingredients made by the best perfumiers. . . .”

A cluster of women in taffeta conferred and began opening their purses. Soon they were sniffing admiringly and discussing how these were all the latest colors and featured a new range of shapes. A glance down the street, however, showed me that these two were only a small part of a convoy of such wagons all offering slightly different variations on the same theme, each proprietor attesting to their delicate perfumes, soft bubbles, and a dozen other qualities which left my head spinning. For someone whose approach to soap had been a reluctant encounter with a block of carbolic once a month, this was all pretty strange. But, as Garnet had told me, people here were pretty keen on soap.

Straight in front of me was a trim little stall where a trim little lady was selling trim little chocolate birds with what looked like real feathers in the tail. At first I was merely intrigued, but the elegant crowd who had already purchased her wares and now stood with rhapsodic
looks on their faces and little poems of praise on their lips could not be ignored.

“How much?” I drooled.

“One silver piece,” said the girl, with a doubtful look at my attire.

I paused, temporarily stunned. “A piece of silver?” I asked. “For a chocolate pigeon the size of a wren?”

“Vermilion hedge sparrows,” she remarked with dry condescension. “Very rare. There are cheaper ones available from other vendors, but they are of inferior quality.”

“They are indeed,” agreed a lady to my left, who was daintily nibbling on a tiny area of wing tip. She was swathed in courtly, ultramarine satin fringed with lace and studded all over with pearls. Over her heart was a gilt-edged miniature of the king, which she wore as a broach. “Therahlia’s were quite the thing last month, but these are so much finer,” she said, then added amiably, “There is simply no one at her stall these days. It is thought that she will have to leave the market within the week! Ah, well, supply and demand, you know. Look at the detailing around the little creature’s eyes! Superlative.”

“Madame has exquisite taste,” remarked the vendor. “These are specially handcrafted for the more discerning palate. Of course, if yours . . .” she began, turning to me.

“I’ll take two,” I said, fishing in my pocket.

“How very extravagant,” said the courtly lady, catching me off guard with an admiring look that was almost erotic.

“I like the finer things in life,” I managed.

“Indeed you do, sir,” said the vendor, all trace of contempt evaporating like spit in a hot pan.

“Aren’t you one of those Outsiders?” the lady asked, now sidling close to me provocatively and giving me a disarmingly direct look. She was a radiant creature with a sultry gaze that belied her pale skin. Large diamonds hung from her earlobes and her hair was gathered up to expose them.

“Well,” I began, nonchalantly biting the head off one of my delicacies. I chewed for no more than a second and then it hit me. “Oh my God!” I spluttered, spitting feathers and chocolate onto the pavement. “What the hell is this?”

“Sparrows dipped in chocolate,” she answered. “I thought you were familiar . . .”

“Real
sparrows?”

“Naturally,” inserted the vendor indignantly. “Did you expect some kind of substitute?”

“Oh, God,” I repeated, spitting again, and trying to suck up the bits of dried bone and tissue already halfway to my gut.

“Really!” said the courtly lady, backing away from me rapidly, “your behavior is really
quite
inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate?!” I spluttered between coughs that left dribblings of brown phlegm down my tunic. “Inappropriate? You give me chocolate-covered real dead birds and you think that vomiting them back at you is inappropriate? That is the single nastiest thing that has ever been passed off as food! God, I think I have a teeny piece of beak stuck in my tooth. What the hell are you people thinking?”

“My first instinct,” said the vendor to the lady, “was that he lacked the refinement to appreciate sweetmeats of this quality. . . .”

“Mine, too,” agreed the other, whose eyes had frozen over as if caught in a blizzard. “I don’t know why they allow these people in.”

And with that, she stalked pointedly away, though I was too busy hacking up bits of dirt-colored sparrow to take notice of her or the others who were looking me up and down with their noses wrinkled in distaste.

It’s funny how one’s enthusiasm for shopping can be dampened by a mouthful of chocolate-covered bird. The stores, whose excesses had formerly seemed so fresh and sparklingly inviting, a sumptuous feast for the eyes, a glorious display of wealth and good taste, were now merely excesses: grotesque and ridiculous. I traded my second sparrow for a thumbnail-sized tart with what looked like wafer-thin slicings of strawberry on the top. It was a beautiful little thing assembled with the skill of a goldsmith and the eye of a painter, and it tasted of absolutely nothing. I would have thrown it away but it had gone down in one swallow. Odd, really. The way everyone else was nibbling on them and extolling the “simply darling” subtleties of flavor, I began to wonder if I’d gotten a bad one. Maybe I hadn’t paid enough.

“If you could take a piece of the sky,” I remarked to the girl who had sold it to me, “and turn it into something edible, this is what it would taste like.”

“They
are
wonderfully light, aren’t they, sir,” she agreed warmly. “Like a piece of the sky: a charming conceit! You have a most ready wit and a shrewd palate, sir.”

“No,” I said, “you misunderstand me. I don’t mean it as a compliment.”

She gave me a blank look.

“I mean,” I persisted with overly slow clarity, “they have no flavor or texture. They have nothing that would make any sane person want to eat them, let alone spend a vast amount of money on them. I cannot say they taste like soap or excrement or chocolates stuffed with bits of bird, because they do not taste at all. They are a culinary vacuum and I have already wasted more words on them than they could ever deserve. You ought to sell something with a bit of bite. Try this, for example.”

I produced a small piece of the blue cheese I had found in the woodland cave, wrapped in a thin leather cloth. “This is perhaps a bit bold for this place, but give it a try. This is a cheese with real character, a cheese to sample between sips of a dusty red wine, a cheese of boldness, sharp, but still warm, tangy but . . .”

I trailed off. As I pushed the cheese under her nose, her face had blanched first with distaste, then swelled to revulsion, and wound up in something oddly like fear. Her eyes flashed from the morsel of cheese to my face. I cannot imagine what she saw there, but it seemed to fill her with dread. She backed away, staring at me with her hand over her mouth, then began to run, sobbing as she fled.

Passersby eyed me with hostile curiosity. What had I done? I tried to shrug and smile reassuringly at the faces turned toward me, but this—not surprisingly—didn’t help. Maybe I still had chocolate sparrow bits on my shirt.

I made for the library. At least there I wouldn’t feel like some absurd fish flopping about on the floor. There I could lose myself in a good book or six. Even a bad one would be better than trying to blend in with these people. It had been an odd day. But as I have learned to remind myself, things can always get worse.

I didn’t bother trying the main door to the library, but went straight to the side entrance. The door opened as easily as it had before, though a key had been pushed into the lock from the inside, as if someone had tried to lock it without realizing that the mechanism was rusted away. The writing table had been pushed back up against the second door, but it yielded as it had done before and I was in before you could say “minimum security.”

“Aliana?” I whispered, with the hushed reverence I reserve for libraries. There was no answer. I walked around a great case of medical books and peered at the main entrance, but there was no sign of her or anyone else, so I wandered through the aisles of piled and shelved volumes, wending my way back to the drama stacks. I settled here and randomly plucked a book from the shelf behind me.

“The Tragical History of Shatrel, Lord of Dambreland, and the Horrid Revenge of Benath Kazrak,”
I read aloud. “Sounds good to me.”

And so I settled and read under the pale, glowing dome for an hour. But when I reached the fourth act, with Shatrel’s demonic machinations in full swing, the thing ended abruptly. There were thirty pages missing, cut out at the spine with a knife or scissors. I cursed quietly to myself and replaced it in the shelves. The next one I selected got a careful examination before I started reading, and this produced a curious discovery: The play’s final pages were intact, but much of the second act was missing, cut out like the conclusion of the other play. I took down a pile of books and flicked through them. Over half of them had some pages missing: a couple missing only three or four pages, some lacking a good deal more, one being reduced to no more than a dozen leaves.

I put them back and sat pensively. This was not the result of decay, neglect, or the passage of time. These books were not accidentally
burned, nor had their pages fallen out of rotted bindings or been casually torn out by owners who needed a piece of scrap paper. These had been rigorously and systematically mutilated. To someone like me who had seen similar work done by the Diamond Empire in Thrusia, this could mean only one thing: censorship. But of what and by whom?

I often find that I think better on my feet, so I rose and began to pace the library floor. It was a large building and I had seen only a fraction of it. Since there didn’t seem to be anyone about, this seemed as good a time as any to see what else was there while I mulled over recent developments.

I saw it like this: Long ago, Phasdreille was the center of a glorious civilization and it produced much that was fair and wonderful to behold. The city architecture by itself would have been ample evidence of this, but so was the literature I had been reading and the paintings I had seen in the king’s palace. In more recent years, however, something of the fire that had inspired the “fair folk” had gone out. What I saw now was a society devoid of passion and intensity except in their understandable hatred for the goblins: a society ruled by fashion and ostentation, by the shallowest performance and superficiality. In such a culture, even the great literary products of its past could be considered scurrilous and disreputable. So the good people of present day Phasdreille had opted to rid themselves of what they now considered degenerate.

It sounded right to me, but the real test would be to turn up some local history books and see what had happened to create this shift in attitude. Perhaps it was the appearance of the goblins themselves? With this in mind, I began to climb the stone-balustraded spiral staircase that coiled up to a great gallery which skirted the dome. It was lined with books and doors into other, darker rooms. Since I wasn’t finding the books I had been looking for I began trying the doors. A few were open but led to tiny storage rooms with empty crates and boxes. The rest were locked.

I suppose some part of me had always known this, but my few months adventuring had driven the point home: The best doors are always locked, and how much you want to get into a room is directly proportional to how difficult it is to do so. Tell a child he can go in any room but the one at the end of the dark corridor and, as all good storytellers know, that’s where he’ll want to go as soon as he’s left alone in the house. The same is true of romantic conquest, I suppose: forbidden
fruit, and all that. This I offer as explanation for using my handy fruit knife (which hadn’t seen much fruit lately) to throw the tumblers in the lock of one particularly interesting-looking door.

It was bigger than the others, heavy and studded with square-headed iron nails that were now quite black. The handle was a great iron ring that hung stiff and heavy, and the lock was old, purposeful but far from intricate. After no more than a couple of minutes probing and twisting in the massive keyhole, something turned over and fell back. Breathlessly, I twisted the ring and pulled. The door opened.