Red Sun Also Rises, A (15 page)

Small chirruping creatures, like colourful marbles with corkscrew tails, were projecting themselves back and forth between the eaves of the houses.

“Hey!” a voice called. It was the tailor, squatting on his four legs beside the fountain in the square. He straightened up and raised four very large cloth bags. “I’ve been waiting. I’ve got your togs.”

Having been almost naked for so long, the satisfaction I experienced back in the house some minutes later, as I stood kitted out in a full suit, was enough to drive away the horrors of my nightmare. Admittedly, my new outfit wasn’t that of a gentleman, but the material was smooth and comfortable.

“From what is it woven?” I enquired.

“From a substance extruded by the Ptall’kors.”

“I wish I hadn’t asked.”

My boots were of Kaljoor skin and more comfortable than any I’d ever worn on Earth.

As Clarissa exited the room in which she’d dressed, I doffed my cloth cap, bowed, and said, “Good day to you, young sir!”

“Very funny,” she said, smiling. “I don’t care if I look like a gent. This suit is far more practical than skirts and corsets and all the ridiculous paraphernalia that goes with them.”

“Believe me, Clarissa, you are unmistakably female!” I replied, then immediately felt myself blushing at my uncharacteristic boldness.

She fluttered her eyelashes in jest, but I sensed she was secretly pleased, too, by my clumsy compliment.

The tailor checked us over to make sure everything fitted properly, then touched his fingers to his cap and made for the door.

“Wait a moment, please!” Clarissa called after him.

“Is there something else, ma’am?”

“Just a question. We’ve heard that Aristocrats are ‘taken.’ Could you perhaps explain to us what that entails?”

“By the Suns!” the Yatsill cried out, throwing up his hands in horror. “No! No! Such things mustn’t be spoken of by the Working Class and certainly shouldn’t be mentioned in the sight of the Saviour!
My goodness! My goodness!”

He turned, practically ran to the door, and left the house without looking back.

“That was helpful,” I observed.

Moments later, the grocer arrived with three assistants and basket after basket of foodstuffs. He explained each item—the fruits, nuts, vegetables, and meats—then presented us with a case of cooking implements. Clarissa thanked him then asked him about being taken. He shrieked and raced away.

The furniture man knocked at our door. He’d brought a Ptall’kor into the square, piled high with furniture, which he and his seven helpers unloaded and carried into our new home.

Clarissa said to me, “I’ll spare him,” and let the Yatsill depart without interrogation. “Did you notice how they arrived one after the other, Aiden? I think it’s obvious from what we’ve heard so far that the Aristocracy transmits intelligence to the Working Class through some sort of telepathic channel. It appears they also bestow upon them a remarkable ability to be organised and efficient.”

“Perhaps being an Aristocrat has made you telepathic, too,” I suggested. “You knew Colonel Spearjab’s hunting party had caught one of those Quee-tan creatures before there was any evidence to suggest it.”

Before she could respond, there came yet another knock at the door and a Yatsill poked his mask into the vestibule. “’Scuse me,” he said. “I have a cab waiting outside for Guardsman Fleischer.”

“Um. That’s me,” I said.

“You’re to get into uniform, sir, and I’m to take you to Crooked Blue Tower Barracks for training. Colonel Spearjab’s orders.”

“Very well,” I responded reluctantly. “Wait outside, would you? I’ll be with you presently.”

The messenger withdrew.

“I don’t know how I’ll cope without you beside me,” I said to Clarissa.

“As best you can. And at least you have a home to come back to.”

I pulled a package from the bag the tailor had given me and unwrapped my uniform. To my dismay, instead of pulling from it the good old British reds, I found myself clutching French greys of the
Napoleonic era.

“Clarissa! What the dickens is in that head of yours!”

“Oops!” she said, sympathetically. “Sir Philip Hufferton taught me a lot of history, Aiden, so think yourself lucky. You might have ended up in armour!”

I took the uniform into one of the rooms and changed into it. The furniture maker had left us a dressing table, and while examining myself in its mirror, I couldn’t help but utter a groan. I looked preposterous. My hair was too long, I was sporting a bushy beard, the jacket and trousers drooped off my skinny frame as if they were still on a clothes hanger, and my new boots didn’t match the outfit at all.

Swallowing what pitiful remnants of my pride remained—a small meal indeed—I went back into the vestibule and gave Clarissa a rueful salute. I realised, as I did so, that my hands were shaking.

I released a shuddery breath and admitted, “I’m afraid to be alone.”

“You’ll have Colonel Spearjab with you,” she reminded me. “He’s a familiar face.”

“A perfectly foul face, but masked, at least. I suppose I’d better be off. Will you be all right?”

“Yes. I daresay I’ll be summoned by Madam Clattersmash in due course.”

“Well,” I said. “Here goes.”

I stepped out of the house.

“In you get, chum!” the cab driver called from atop his conveyance.

I opened the cabin door, climbed in, and sat down. The vehicle jolted into motion. The Kaljoor pulled it out of the square and onto a wide thoroughfare along which Ptall’kors, various wagons, and other hansoms were travelling. To either side, Yatsill were beetling past, some in working men’s suits and flat caps, some in skirts, bustles, and bonnets, with parasols held over their heads, and some in evening suits and toppers, swinging canes and touching their brims as they passed the “ladies.”

During the first few moments of that cab ride, it occurred to me that, were it not for the fact the pedestrians were all four-legged and masked, it could almost be a summer’s day in London, but the more I looked, the more I saw the falsity of this impression. A “sandwich-board man,” for example, bore not an advertisement for “Pear’s Soap” or “Lipton’s Tea,” but for “Touchmeddle’s Quee’tan Steaks, Raw and Dripping with Goodness! Get them while you still can!” and when we passed—wonder of wonders!—a theatre, I saw that its billboard proclaimed “The Astonishing Leotard,” together with an illustration of a quadrupedal tightrope-walker juggling coloured balls while balanced on two parallel lines.

That the signs and hoardings were written in English was in itself a marvel, but to see the letters and numbers of my native language rendered in an endless variety of strange lines, curves, and angles fair muddled the mind.

I was driven past a row of shops—Hearty Henry’s Haberdashery, Twitch’s Bakery, Scoop the Grocer, Paddlecloud’s Hardware Store, Disparage the Butcher, Dignity’s Olde Tea Shoppe, Rebuttle’s Tremendously Big Pottery Emporium—then we turned right onto one of the great tree-lined avenues that sloped steeply down, cutting through the nine terraces from the top of the city all the way to the fishing village at the bottom. This thoroughfare descended at such a sharp angle that the driver stopped the hansom, unharnessed the Kaljoor, and hitched it to the back of the cabin, so rather than towing the conveyance, the beast was now lowering it down the incline.

Traffic was much heavier and there were roadworks everywhere. We were surrounded by carts transporting goods and materials to and from the various levels of the city. Those going up were struggling against the escarpment; those going down were fighting against the pull of gravity, and I witnessed a number of them coming a cropper and spilling their loads, which went tumbling away toward the sea far below.

Hawkers stood at every corner, their sing-song sales pitches adding to the general cacophony:

“Hot P’tezznam roots! Hot P’tezznam roots! Freshly dug and boiled soft!”

“Who’ll buy my Kelumin flowers? Lovely Kelumin flowers! Brighten your home! Who’ll buy my Kelumin flowers?”

“Knives sharpened! Pots polished! Knives sharpened! Pots polished!”

We left the fourth terrace and traversed the fifth and the sixth, both of which were now almost entirely filled by the new residential districts. The seventh had been transformed into a beautiful park with lakes and bandstands, banks of exotic flowers, and thickets of curiously formed trees. I saw Yatsill strolling along the footpaths and others enjoying picnics on the bluish-green grass. There was also a small group of unclothed individuals marching along bearing placards that read:
Reverse the changes! Back to the old ways! Say no to the dissonance!

At the seaward edge of the park, along the top of the almost sheer drop that fell to the next terrace, the Yatsill had built a high crenellated wall with bastions spaced evenly along its length. Initially, I took this to be a defence against seagoing marauders, but as we passed onto the eighth terrace through a tremendously tall gateway, I realised the battlements were facing inward, not outward. This made no sense. If the Yatsill feared a land attack, why was the wall here rather than at the top of the first level? And what, exactly, was the nature of the threat? I determined to find this out as soon as possible.

Beyond the wall, the eighth terrace contained forts, parade grounds, and barracks. There were also builders’ yards, paper mills, printworks, and the premises of metalworkers, carpenters, and glassblowers.

The cabbie drove me to a military establishment and dropped me at the gate, above which a sign read “Crooked Blue Tower Barracks” despite there being no tower present, crooked, blue, or otherwise. Out of habit, I patted my pockets in search of loose change to pay for my ride. Of course, I had none, and regardless, the hansom clattered away before I could have handed over any coins.

A sentry—Working Class—stepped forward and said, “You must be Fleischer.”

“Yes,” I responded, then foolishly added, “How did you know?”

The Yatsill regarded me through the holes of his mask and said, “You’re underequipped in the leg and elbow department, Guardsman. Go through, please. Colonel Spearjab is waiting for you.”

He held the portal open and I passed through into a large courtyard. There were about thirty Workers in it, all dressed in Napoleonic grey. Five of them were wielding swords—chopping, slashing, and stabbing at ten-foot-tall tree stumps—while the others watched.

A figure strode over to me. When he spoke, I recognised the voice of Colonel Momentous Spearjab coming from behind the long-beaked stork mask.

“Ah-ha! There you are, old chap! We’ve been waiting for you! What! What! Here, take this.”

He held out a scabbarded sword, hilt first.

I looked at it and felt the heat sucked out of my body.

“We’ve been practising but we’re not bally sure of the technique,” Spearjab said. “Show us, would you? Hey?”

I shook my head and took a step back. “I can’t. I don’t know how to use it.”

“Come come, old fellow. Harrumph! Give it a try.”

Again, I shook my head.

“I say,” Spearjab grumbled. “I
am
a colonel, you know. A
colonel
, I say! Humph! Humph! You
do
realise you have to obey my jolly old orders, yes? The thing of it is, this
is
an order. What! Take the sword.”

I drew an unsteady breath, reached out, and closed my fingers around the weapon’s grip. Spearjab maintained his hold on the scabbard as I slowly pulled the weapon from it. It scraped free and I stumbled a little, surprised by its weight. It was much heavier than I had anticipated.

“Good show!” the colonel murmured.

I looked down at the hilt, at the ornately carved quillons and studded pommel.

“Please, no.”

It was the sword the Valley of Reflections had shown to me—the weapon I would use to kill Mademoiselle Crockery Clattersmash.

° °

6. Guardsman
and
Magician

How much time had passed since I’d last awoken in a bed? I had no idea, but when I finally did so once again, it was not the pleasure it should have been, for my entire body ached abysmally. Every muscle felt bruised. My hands were blistered and I could hardly straighten my fingers. When I sat up and swung my legs to the floor, the pain was so excruciating I couldn’t help but moan in distress.

I had no memory of my return to the house—though I could vaguely recall a cab driver helping me out of a hansom—nor did I know how much time had passed since then. By the angle of the light slanting in through the gap in my curtains, I guessed it to be no small period.

Curtains! There’d been none before!

With another moan, I pushed myself upright, hobbled across the room, and pulled the draperies open. The square below was empty, the only movement being from the water of the tinkling fountain. I looked down at myself and found, to my surprise, that I was wearing blue-and-yellow-striped pyjamas. Then I turned and surveyed my bedchamber. The walls had been painted a very pale green. A dressing gown was hanging from a hook on the door. There was a wardrobe to my left, its doors open, showing it to be full of clothes. A pair of slippers poked out from beneath the end of my bed.

I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, bemused.

I could smell toast.

In a trice, I donned the gown, put on the slippers, shuffled out through the door, visited the bathroom—which I discovered had been fitted with a tub—then descended the ramp.

The house had been transformed. There were rugs on the floors, vases on shelves, incomprehensible artwork on the walls, cushions on the sofas, and all manner of homely knick-knacks around the place.

“Good gracious!” I exclaimed.

Clarissa came out of the kitchen. She was wrapped in the yellow robes of a magician. “You’re awake!”

“I don’t think so. Surely I’m dreaming!”

“You were gone for ages, came home in a daze, and slept for what must have been twenty-four hours. As you can see, we’ve been busy.”

“So I see! We?”

“Kata has been appointed as our housekeeper. Come through—there’s tea and toast.”

With my eyes wide and my jaw dangling, I followed her into what had become a very well-appointed kitchen. Kata, who was cleaning the work surfaces, turned and smiled. “Hello, Mr. Fleischer.”

“Kata! I’m happy to see you again!”

I gingerly lowered myself into a chair at the table. Clarissa placed a cutting board before me on which sat a tub of butter, a pot of jam, and a plate piled high with toasted bread. She added to it a teapot, covered with a knitted cosy, cups and saucers, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar.

She laughed at the expression on my face. “These are the products of a Dar’sayn meditation, Aiden.”

“How—how so?” I stammered.

“The Magicians use the fluid to enhance their connection to the other Yatsill. I drank the stuff during my first training session with Father Spreadflower Meadows at the Temple of Magicians.”

“Who? I thought you were to be taught by Mademoiselle Clattersmash.”

“I was, but her dizziness has developed into an illness of some sort, so Meadows, one of her acolytes, has taken over her duties. My session with him involved imbibing this Dar’sayn fluid. It put me into a peculiar state of mind. I became consciously
joined
to the Yatsill, and I learned a lot.”

“Joined? Telepathically?”

“Yes. I was right about the Working Class. It’s hard to believe, but they have only the most rudimentary intelligence. Everything we see them accomplishing—their efficiency, their craftsmanship, even their ability to communicate with language—is by virtue of the acumen transmitted to them by the Aristocrats.”

I chuckled. “Am I to take it, then, that you, being one of the latter, used the same mental channel to plant a knowledge of tea and toast into the species?”

She smiled and nodded. “In a manner of speaking. As I suspected, the Yatsill have excavated, mimicked, and, in some respects, adapted my memories, but they work on a broad canvas. I was able to communicate greater detail to them, especially where things that’ll make you and me more comfortable are concerned. Their natural enthusiasm did the rest. As a matter of fact, they’d already created a rough approximation of tea—our English obsession—but I was able to refine their recipe. Then they set out to replicate bread, reproducing its texture and flavour as closely as possible. And so forth.”

“On which subject—” I said, and tried to pick up a knife. My fingers wouldn’t cooperate. Clarissa took over, applied butter and jam to a piece of toast, and handed it to me. I took an eager bite and tasted something similar to strawberries but with a spicy edge.

“Of course, I didn’t confine myself to trivialities,” she continued.

I swallowed and exclaimed, “There’s nothing trivial about this!”

“True. But I also refined what they’d already picked up from me concerning mechanical engineering. In future sessions, I shall try to give them more. With their fervour and astounding proficiency, they’ll soon make Yatsillat a better approximation of London. We shall feel quite at home!”

“If we can get used to having four-legged neighbours.”

“I tried to find out more about this ‘being taken’ business, too,” Clarissa continued, “but in that was singularly unsuccessful. They block the entire subject from their own minds.”

I watched our housekeeper as she took oddly shaped and strangely coloured vegetables from a bag and started to peel them.

“Kata,” I said, “were you born on Ptallaya?”

“Yes, sir, and my father. But my mother was from a place called Futuna.”

“It’s an island some distance to the north and west of Koluwai,” Clarissa put in.

“Why was she sent here, Kata?” I asked

“To serve and to have children.”

“Are many of the Servants born here?”

“Most are, but newcomers appear in the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings each time the Eyes of the Saviour open. Like all of us, they serve until they are released.”

“Released? I’ve heard that term used once or twice before. What does it mean?”

“It is when we are sent to your world as a reward for our service.”

I looked at Clarissa and said, “Home!” then to Kata, “How do we get released?”

“The gods will decide,” she answered, and her tone signalled an unwillingness to discuss the matter any further.

It took six rounds of toast and two cups of tea to stop my stomach from grumbling. When I’d eaten my fill, we left the kitchen, crossed the black-and-white-tiled floor of the big square vestibule, and settled in our lounge. It was a bright and cheerful room, with tall windows in two of the walls.

I was telling Clarissa about my training.

“It was brutal. Over and over, I was ordered to assault a tree stump with a heavy sword.”

“You brought the weapon back with you,” she said. “It’s by the front door.”

“I have to carry it whenever I’m on duty. I’m positive the dashed thing is heavier than I am. I could barely stand up by the time Spearjab released me. There’s not a single part of me that doesn’t hurt.”

“Exercise has never been your forte, but I’m sure you’ll adapt to it.”

“I don’t want to! I never want that accursed blade in my hands again. It’s the one I saw in my vision, Clarissa. The one I shall use to murder Mademoiselle Clattersmash!”

“It is? How curious! But if you really saw the future, then you should regard the vision as an opportunity.”

“An opportunity to do what?”

“To change it.”

For the briefest of moments, my heart filled with hope. Why hadn’t I realised that before? Of course! All I had to do was avoid ever being alone with Mademoiselle Clattersmash!

The image of the Yatsill’s butchered corpse invaded my mind’s eye. It blurred and became the ragged carcass of Polly Nichols.

“It won’t work,” I whispered. “I have no control over my Mr. Hyde.”

For the first occasion in all the time I’d known her, I witnessed my friend lose her temper. Slapping her hands down onto the arms of her chair, she shouted, “Why the blazes do you persist with this absurd notion, Aiden? You are
not
Jack the Ripper! For crying out loud, don’t you think we
all
have a darkness within us? Don’t you think I’ve imagined wreaking a terrible revenge on Rupert Hufferton for what he did to me? He killed my father! Caused my mother to die of grief! He made a twisted ruin of me and threw me out of my home and into the streets. I was an outcast, and it was his fault. I haven’t just imagined murdering him—I’ve spent hour after hour daydreaming how I might bring him down, deprive him of his riches, destroy his reputation, take away everything he holds dear. I’ve even thought how satisfactory it would be to hold him prisoner and torture him! Horrible things! Horrible!”

I stared, open-mouthed, at her.

“It’s natural!” she insisted. “It’s perfectly normal to harbour such thoughts about a person who’s done you a terrible wrong!”

“But—” I began.

She halted me with a palm directed at my face. “No. Just listen. That Tanner girl and her father made of you a victim and gave you little choice but to leave Theaston Vale. Anyone would react with rage at that, but up until then your life had been a sheltered one, your character mild, your emotions unformed. You didn’t know how to articulate your fury, so you locked it deep inside yourself and refused to acknowledge it. Then, in London, when you stumbled upon the corpse of Polly Nichols, you experienced primal fear. The horror of that experience was also suppressed and got mixed up with your imprisoned wrath. It left your memory impaired and is causing you to doubt the integrity of your own character. You imagined that Jack, to commit those dreadful murders, must possess the same intensity of anger as you, and since you find it inconceivable that anyone
but
you could possibly possess it, you’ve concluded that you must be the Ripper. Bad logic!” She leaned forward until her goggles were close to my face. “You are
not
a murderer!”

My heart rejected her assertion, but intellectually she made perfect sense. I said, “How, then, do I overcome this delusion?”

“You are akin to a dormant volcano. If you erupt, it might be destructive. If, however, you can find a way to relieve the pressure in a more measured fashion, that will do much to calm your inner turmoil.”

I looked at my blistered hands. “Perhaps if I throw myself into this training?”

“Yes! Physical activity!”

“If I’m up to it. I’m already a wreck.”

“I’m sure a hot bath will help. You relax here while I light the fire and put some buckets of water to heat.”

While Clarissa fussed around me—and almost certainly to stop me dwelling on my fears—she talked about the estate she’d been given. It was comprised of the house we were in, a farm just outside the city, a manufacturing plant on the first level, and a block of dwellings on the second. The residents of the latter would be her workforce when she decided what her factory should produce.

“Some mechanical contrivance or other,” she said. “I have no idea how long we’re going to be here. It may be for the rest of our lives, so I might as well make myself useful.”

“Contrivance?”

“Hmm. I’ve been thinking about those long avenues. They’re ridiculously steep. It occurred to me that they might benefit from cable trams, like the ones they’ve been constructing in San Francisco.”

“Judging by the number of spills I saw on them earlier, I’d agree.”

My bath was soon ready. Among the new items in the bathroom, I found a cut-throat razor crafted at my companion’s behest by one of the city’s knife makers. After some work, I was finally able to liberate my chin from its outrageous beard. My hair, on the other hand, was almost down to my shoulders and I felt oddly disinclined to cut it. Having shaved, I thankfully gave myself up to the tub’s steaming water, its heat penetrating my sore muscles all the way to the bone.

Maybe Clarissa was right. I wasn’t the Whitechapel killer. But still I could feel that black something inside of me. I wanted to know it. I needed to be sure it hadn’t committed the acts I attributed to it. Cautiously, with my eyes closed, I mentally probed inward.

I sank into shadows.

Nothing. For a long time, nothing.

Then, as if hands were reaching into me to dredge the images from the depths of my mind, I saw the sword, the blood, and Polly Nichols, torn, gutted, dead. Her eyes were looking up into mine. The two deep lacerations in her throat worked like mouths. They chorused:
“You think I might find happiness with a dusty old bookworm? A tall, thin dullard? A bundle of sticks bound together in last century’s clothes? Why, I would rather be alone for the rest of my life than be bonded to a wretched scarecrow like you!

She spat. Her blood splashed onto my boots.

I opened my eyes. My jaw was clenched. My fingers were white, gripping the sides of the bathtub.

“Damn you!” I hissed. “Damn you, Aiden Fleischer!”