The Black Rose (4 page)

“We need to get out of the open,” Sardâr hissed as they crossed paths with an unashamedly staring man. “We can't do anything right now. We need somewhere to stay tonight and base ourselves.”

They passed another alley, with a three-floor gabled building on the corner. Warm light spilled out of the grimy windows, highlighting the uppermost flecks of mud on the street. By the amber glow of the nearest lamppost, Jack could make out the writing on the sign creaking slightly in the breeze:

“This should do.” Sardâr moved over to the threshold on the corner of the alleyway and, giving it a hefty shunt, entered.

The inside of the inn was true to its exterior. It seemed to have been lit with the fewest possible candles, so that patches of light and shadow waltzed across the dark wood side by side. A few booths and stained tables filled most of the floor space. The only other person visible was a plump, greasy-haired woman in an apron, who eyed them suspiciously from the other side of the bar.

“What'll you be wantin', then?” she demanded in what sounded remarkably like a Cockney accent.

“A room for the night, if you please,” Sardâr replied, looking around the dusty room uncertainly.

“Can you pay?”

“Well…” Sardâr made a point of checking his pockets, but all four of them knew that, unless alchemy could create coins or notes, none of them carried local currency. The elf smiled apologetically and approached the bar to try to negotiate.

Jack took another look around the room. Some of the planks of the ceiling were missing, and a yellow substance dripped into a small pool beneath. A dark brown insect, far too large for comfort, scuttled from under one booth to another. The rug in front of the bar was so tattered and threadbare that it more resembled roadkill.

“We can stay tonight,” Sardâr informed them, returning, “but we're going to need to earn some money in some way.”

The woman, presumably the landlady, had disappeared behind the bar and emerged with a candle and a key. “You all look pretty strange folk, but you two colored ones not gettin' your own rooms. My clientele would go mad if they found out.”

Ruth appeared to have been shocked into silence. Sardâr grimaced weakly but evidently decided now was not the time to engage in a debate about political correctness.

The landlady led them down a thin corridor opposite the entrance, past several doors, and up a stairwell of creaky wood. She unlocked three adjacent rooms and walked into each to light candles. When she was done, she returned to the top of the stairs. “I'll come back up with some hot water. I'm not cookin' anythin' now, so don't bother askin'. Good night.”

“What a charming woman,” Bál remarked as the candlelight receded down the stairs.

They deposited all their soaking bags and stripped off a few outer layers of wet clothing. True to her words, the landlady returned a few minutes later with several tin basins of warm, slightly murky water. She lit the fireplace in each of the rooms.

Jack and Ruth ended up in the same room. They slung the wet clothes and sacks over the mantelpiece to dry out and went into Sardâr and Bál's room, where they were doing the same.

“So,” Sardâr began, when they were all squashed onto the bed, “not exactly what we'd hoped for, but it will do for now.”

Bál looked like he thought this was a grievous understatement. Jack got the impression that he had been looking forward to a return to dry land whilst aboard
The Golden Turtle
but now was none too pleased to find that it was not dry and was more mud than land.

“We'll have to keep cover for a while whilst we find out what we need to. Working to fund our stay here will fit that quite well. Jack, Bál—there's likely to be some industrial work not too far away. Ruth, we can probably find you work as a maid or cook.”

“And why can't I just get the same job as the other two?”

“You can try, but I doubt you'd be taken on. From what we've just seen, I don't think social equality figures particularly prominently here…”

“What are
you
going to do, then?” Bál asked Sardâr, who was now pacing in front of the fireplace.

“I'll go undercover and try to dig up some leads,” Sardâr said. “If the Cult are here, which they almost certainly are, then their arrival won't have gone unnoticed. There will be some new business or criminal presence they'll be using as a front. Now, most importantly we need to work on disguises.” He pulled open his bag and, after rummaging a moment, retrieved the metallic egg he was looking for. He gestured for Bál to stand.

Sardâr held the egg out before Bál and muttered a single syllable. It flashed bright green and floated out of his hand, spinning around the elf and the dwarf to create a matrix of emerald light that blurred their silhouettes. A moment later it returned to the elf's hand, and the light faded.

Jack stood and inspected the two of them. As when he had seen the effects on himself and Lucy, the two people before him were still recognizably Bál and Sardâr. It was just that Bál was significantly taller, almost as tall as Jack, and Sardâr's frame had filled out and his ears rounded. It was less of a transformation than a reflection in a fairground house of mirrors.

“We're going to need some more appropriate clothing,” Sardâr continued, regarding his and Bál's stretched garments. The dwarf's had actually ripped up the seam on the side, giving him the appearance of a badly stuffed scarecrow. “I'm sure we can procure some from our delightful landlady tomorrow.”

Jack and Ruth bid the other two good night and returned to their room. The pail of water had cooled somewhat now, but they still warmed their feet in it. By the time they were done, the water was distinctly murkier than it had been. With no plumbing in sight, they pushed the container outside the door and forgot about it.

Jack didn't feel much cleaner at all for that brief wash. Thorin Salr, supposedly correlating to a millennium earlier than this world, had provided cleaner facilities. Ruth, however, seemed to be dealing with it fine, so he didn't say anything.

Their clothes had warmed by now. They took turns leaving the room while each changed into dry garments and hung the wet ones on the rail. The choice was between the four-poster bed and a few blankets on the wooden floor. Jack grudgingly chose the latter.

Ruth blew out the candle on the bedside table. There was silence for a few moments.

“Are you missing Lucy?” Ruth asked.

The question caught Jack a little off guard. “Well, yeah… I don't think we've ever spent this much time apart before. I really hope she's okay…”

“So are you two… ?”

It took Jack a moment to realize what she was talking about.

“No! No, definitely not. It was never like that. Her and Alex
maybe,
but no—that would be weird.” He thought a moment, at a loss for anything to reciprocate with. “Do you miss anyone? Do you remember anyone from before… ?”

“I guess I miss the crew a bit. And no, I don't remember anyone. All I've got from before the amnesia is that tattoo and a dream I keep having.”

“Dream?”

“It's not much to go on. It doesn't really make that much sense anyway…”

They were both silent for quite a few minutes.

“Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

An indeterminate amount of time passed. Jack rolled over. He could hear Ruth breathing softly in her sleep a few feet away. The single-pane window projected the flickering orange light from the nearest lamppost directly onto his face. He clambered up off the floor and pulled the ragged curtains shut. But it still wasn't dark. Another light shone behind him.

“Inari!” he hissed, spinning around to see the white fox on top of his sheets, twin tails wavering hypnotically on either side of his triangular head. “We can't talk now. Ruth's in here!”

The fox glanced around and caught sight of the figure in the bed.
“Oh! So are you two… ?”

“No! Well, maybe… but it's complicated—”

“Ah, ‘it's complicated'… the eternal deferral of unrequited love…”

Jack glared at the fox, now settling himself down on the floor. As before, he did not so much hear the fox's voice as sense it reverberating inside his head. “I was wondering when you'd next turn up. Not much has happened since we left Thorin Salr.”

“I know. I've been watching you.”

“You can watch us?” Jack replied, slightly alarmed. “Where is it you live, exactly?”

“Here and there. My essence is anchored in the Shard, but I can come and go in spirit form pretty much wherever I please.”

“Does that mean you can go and check up on Alex?”

The fox shook his head.
“Alex is, I assume, in Nexus. I would rather not go there. There's a powerful consciousness in that world from which I would do well to conceal my presence.”

“What, the Emperor? Icarus?”

“No. It's the—”
But the fox's voice caught in his throat, making him gag. This had happened before when Inari had tried to tell Jack a little too much about his predicament.
“Something else,”
the fox finally managed, giving up.

Jack sighed and sagged back a bit in his seated position. “Great. Just when I think I've got a grip on what's going on, it all changes again.” He paused. “In that case, could you possibly go and keep an eye on Lucy?”

The fox nodded.
“In the Sveta Mountains? That shouldn't be too much trouble.”

Jack considered the fox for a moment. “Inari… the letter from Isaac which Sardâr read us… it said that you weren't who you say you are…”

The fox raised his head slightly, looking at him intently.
“Did it, now? Yes, I met Isaac. The brother of Ruth's adoptive father, wasn't he?”

“You don't know what happened to him, then? Isaac, I mean.”

“I'm afraid I do … but that would
really
be giving the game away…”

Jack blinked, and the room was dark, devoid of the shimmering white light that seemed to accompany Inari whenever he appeared. The fox was gone.

Dawn brought a weak light upon Albion. From the upstairs window, Jack could see that the city was feeling the labor pains of a new era. The spires of churches and cathedrals jostled with smog-belching funnels and rattling cranes. Fragile cobbled streets lined with gabled houses were now intersected by wide, mud-swept roads that acted like arteries for carriages and carts. In contrast to the old sculpted wood and stone, factories sat like blackened brick behemoths, engorging workers and spewing out mechanically produced goods. Yet beyond the haze encircling the buildings, Jack could just about make out pale green hills on the horizon.

It didn't take long for Jack and Bál, having raided the storerooms of the inn for appropriate clothing, to find work. They walked a couple of streets up from The Kestrel's Quill to discover a foreman's assistant, who had set up a makeshift desk on the side of the road and was signing men up for factory work.

Jack was unsurprised to see Bál unsure on his feet, having grown to human height overnight; his clumsiness drew a few odd looks from fellow applicants and a snide remark from the foreman's assistant. Having had their names taken down—a necessity, it seemed, because many of the fellow men were illiterate—the two of them joined the lumbering march across the town to the factory building.

Ruth, meanwhile, had found a job through the landlady, whose niece worked as a maid in an aristocrat's city household only a few hundred feet from the inn. Apparently consulting a mental address book, the landlady had pointed Ruth in the direction of a woman she knew would hire “coloreds.”

Upon her meek arrival at the servants' entrance, Ruth discovered the lady of the house's ward was herself not white. The so-called house was more of a manor: an impressive whitish-grey building with wide columns not unlike a temple's. It clearly belonged to a wealthy district entirely apart from The Kestrel's Quill quarter and the rest of the city.