The Seer (2 page)

The autohorse clipped faster down the road and the drugged man fell away. Jesco looked out the back window to see him sprawled in a puddle and laughing with insanity. He had done all of that running without shoes, and was oblivious to his lacerated feet. “I wonder what he sees,” Jesco said, for all he saw was a pathetic sight in a man of means, his clothes torn and stained, laying helpless in an area famous for its proliferation of pickpockets.

“He sees grandness, and that is why he does it,” Sinclair said. “They are brought into the station to dry out in the tank, weaving tales of knights and dragons and glory, maidens or gentlemen fair, cracking their knuckles on the bars and walls of the cell and believing them dastardly assailants. They are heroes in their own minds for the length of the intoxication, and they love themselves for it and believe themselves to be loved. This is why they cannot find temperance. They wish to stay within these fantasies forever. It is an endless loop of flying high, coming down and remembering how they acted without comport, and desiring to fly high again to forget how their conscience pricks. This goes on and on until they die or else stumble into a bolus dose that destroys their sanity.”

Grimmer still was the scenery out the glass. “A rich man’s delight, rucaline,” Sinclair said. “The rest keep to opium.” Such a den was outside: a squat gray establishment hunkered down between taller buildings and with bursts of fake poppies around the door to indicate what one could find within. There was a room within the brothel Jesco patronized on occasion that was for the smoking of opium. Though curious, he had never entered it, and Collier warned him not to create a problem where there was none. For Collier’s sake, Jesco would avoid it. That beautiful man knew much more about opium from working there than Jesco did from his sporadic visits. Leave opium to the sick and broken for pain relief; there was no need for Jesco to have it.

The traffic had ended. Now the carriage was passing through slums peopled only by shadows. This was the dead zone. All was silent except for the dulled sounds of the autohorse’s hooves and the rattling of the wheels. Although they had the assurance of the chemist, nervousness filled Jesco to be nearing Poisoners’ Lane. It had been fifteen years since anyone called this area home, fifteen years since those terrifying articles appeared in the newspapers of the bodies in the streets and the tenements, still sitting at tables over meager meals and sagging in corners. One did not feel sick upon exposure. One did not feel sick at all, and then hours later, Death suddenly came knocking. The Church had taken advantage of the fall of thousands, blaming it upon demons, but Science fingered the true cause. Jesco was ten years old at the time, one of many children in the asylum crying out in nightmares of bodies strewn everywhere like paper dolls, streams of foam leaking from their lips and their eyes staring into whatever lay beyond.

But there were no bodies now. The carriage bumped and turned through the silent streets, ever held in shadow from the abandoned, looming tenements. They could not be knocked down without freeing even more kolymbium, and still it would be sunken in the earth so that nothing could be built here again. The buildings stood as a graveyard, and once a year patrols of street officers swept through to peep in windows and make sure no one had broken in and perished. The fear of the dead zone was so extreme that they rarely found anyone save those intentionally missing, who had had the goal of ending their lives by dwelling in an emptied apartment until the poison overtook them.

Sinclair was looking at him in concern, although Jesco’s remembrances of that childhood fear had made only a small divot in his forehead. “Are you well?” The eyes of the junior detective slid to Jesco’s gloved hands.

Jesco shook his head to dismiss the worry. “I am not in thrall. It is simply strange to be in this haunted place that I’ve heard about since childhood.”

Sinclair saw the truth of it and returned to gazing out the glass. “It was the worst of the worst even before the poisoning, a squalid place, no sanitation, no clean water, no insulation or ventilation in many of the buildings. I heard about how they slept here, three to a bed and two
under
a bed, rented for eight hours and then it was three more to the bed and two underneath. Then the same again in another eight hours. There could be fifteen people living in the smallest of rooms, forty in a larger one, and that house, that house there, it must have held hundreds.” He motioned and moved aside so that Jesco could look. They were passing a huge, centuries-old house with two floors. Hints of its former grandness remained in the stone quoins, the columns and pediment about the front door, and the oriel windows. When first built, it had been the home of a very rich person. Now it was a cracked and smudged disaster with shattered glass.

“Only to see it in its heyday. The gardens had to have been splendid,” Sinclair said wistfully. There were no gardens now. Nudging up on either side were cheaply constructed tenements, each shrugging a deferential shoulder towards the once fine mansion. “This used to be the belle of the river. Called Wadalabie in olden days, before industry took root here.”

Amused, Jesco said, “Are you a man of history, Sinclair?”

“A man of insomnia. A book of history cures it.” He smiled as Jesco chuckled. “Many lords and ladies kept summer homes in Wadalabie. Did you know some of the earliest photographs were taken here? A collection called
Place of Dreams
showed it in all its finery: mansions and stables, and paths of white stone going down through fields of flowers to the river. A boat ran between Wadalabie and Rosendrie, where they could travel to shop. A short and pleasant trip on calm waters. But those lords and ladies died in time, and left their homes to their children, and some of them leased out those homes or sold them. And then the Industrial Revolution swept through Ainscote, and it transformed this place entirely. Wadalabie to Wattling, mansions to tenements, stables to textile factories, and no trace left of those paths or flowers.” He looked once more to Jesco’s hands. “Have you seen things like this, how time changes the world? You must.”

“Yes.” It was why Jesco had to be so careful about what he touched.

The carriage made another turn and slowed. They had arrived at their destination. Then Jesco was stepping out after the junior detective, and into Poisoners’ Lane where the alchemist had wrought his destruction in one of these very buildings.

It was the grimmest place of all. Along either side of the narrow gray road were tall brick buildings, all of them coated in grime. They were eyeless, as the windows had been removed and sealed up with bricks to discourage anyone from going inside. The doors were sealed in the same way, making every building wholly faceless. Above, the sky seemed only to be a reflection of the road beneath in its gray flatness. No trees pierced the rooftops and no birds flew overhead. All that existed within this claustrophobic lane was itself. The rest of the world felt miles away. Even the river, as close as the far side of the buildings to Jesco’s right, made no sound.

There was another police carriage parked in the road, and a voice hailed Sinclair from an alley. Jesco breathed shallowly to take less of the air in this place into himself. Over twenty thousand people had died here almost simultaneously. Should ever there be a place ripe for spooks, this would be it. Failing to quell his anxiety, he followed Sinclair to the alley. The patrolman Tokol was standing at the end of it, a newspaper rolled up in his fist. Despite being of the same age as Jesco, he still looked like more of an overgrown boy than a man. Greeting Sinclair warmly and ignoring Jesco, Tokol moved aside to let them pass.

“And a good day to you, too,” Jesco said loudly, forgetting his resolve to take in as little air as possible while he was here. Embarrassed, Tokol grunted a hostile good day. Jesco did not have to inquire to know that Tokol accepted Church teachings that what he did was obscene, but that placed the boyish officer in a quandary. The police relied on seer skills to assist in solving crimes. He resolved the matter by pretending Jesco did not exist, which was why Jesco took a special delight in reminding the officer that he most assuredly did, had every right to be here, and that his word was not only admissible in court but preferred.

The alley was piled with a tall heap of long beams on one side. Rags and bits of paper were trapped in the heap, and nails protruded from the rotting wood. The ground was carpeted in layers of trash, so trodden upon that it lay mostly flat, and it reeked of mold. Fresher trash was present in a few sheets of newspaper, which Tokol had discarded.

More beams connected the buildings on either side, one so low that Jesco had to stoop to pass beneath it. The purpose of the beams was beyond his kenning. Jesco was no student of architecture, but from the way the buildings leaned, he guessed that they were holding them at bay so that they did not collapse upon each other.

Also within the alley was a duo of his least favorite detectives in Steon Ravenhill and Laeric Scoth. Ravenhill had no animosity toward Jesco, but he had grown increasingly incompetent over the years. Now fifty, he was a man who drowned the horrors of his work in ale and smelled suspiciously even now at mid-morning. His wife had left him recently, and he had fallen apart further in her absence. Stubble-cheeked, slumping, and slovenly with stains on his lapel, his oily, graying hair hung in lusterless locks from too long without washing.

Scoth was his protégé and partner. Twenty years younger and unmarried, he cut a fine, straight-backed figure in his spotless uniform and trench coat. Even the wind skirted around him rather than muss his thick brown hair. He patronized the same brothel as Jesco, who had seen him once in the dining room with a male prostitute, and again in the back garden. Scoth hadn’t noticed Jesco on either occasion, and Jesco hadn’t waved. Everything about Scoth irritated Jesco. In fairness, everything about Jesco appeared to irritate Laeric Scoth. The first murder case they had worked together was a disaster, Scoth a newly minted detective absolutely certain that he knew who was responsible for the dead woman in the garden, and Jesco blasting his certainty to shreds with one touch of the woman’s skirt. Scoth had never forgiven him.

Another street officer was posted to the far end of the alley, and that was one who loathed Jesco even more than Tokol did. She studiously looked away when she noticed Jesco observing her. He did not repeat his boisterous greeting, because now he could see the body.

The man was naked and laying flat on his back, his arms raised over his head. Fair-haired, pale skinned, and with unnaturally light blue eyes, his natural pallor had been enhanced by death. His only color was in the smears of blood on his chest, and grains of dirt from the alley. The rest of him was ghostly white, even the slug of his tongue, which was visible in his gaping mouth. His head was tilted to the side and he stared unblinkingly at the filthy bricks.

“There was a case I had,” Ravenhill mumbled, and the smell of spirits grew heavy around him. He weaved a little on his feet. “Young fellow got drunk and was leaping roofs. He fell into an alley and right onto a post dumped at an angle there. Speared him straight through the groin and he bled out in minutes.”

The man before them was also relatively young, somewhere in his twenties. Scoth’s eyes were fixed to the body. He had always been resentful that his powers of observation flagged in the face of a seer’s abilities, and he did not acknowledge Jesco. Sinclair crouched down by the head, a kerchief pressed daintily to his nose and mouth.

“I don’t think he was leaping roofs here,” Jesco said.

“Is that your professional opinion?” Scoth asked acidly.

“It is my unprofessional opinion,” Jesco said, “seeing as you haven’t supplied me with anything for my professional one.”

He was a very strong seer, but he could not read from flesh. Ravenhill looked up to the buildings on either side like he was gauging them for distance. Someone going at a run
could
have leaped them, but the chances of a person getting drunk, wandering into Poisoners’ Lane, scaling a building, and disrobing to leap roofs was infinitesimal. The man had not gored himself upon a beam either. None of them were bloody over their heads, and the two deep punctures in his chest looked like the work of a blade.

“We shouldn’t stay here long,” Ravenhill rumbled.

“Then let’s do this swiftly,” Scoth said. “He was not murdered in this place. That much is clear. There isn’t enough blood. He was struck low elsewhere and dumped here sometime last night.”

“How do you know it was last night?” Jesco asked. It was not to aggravate the detective but true curiosity. “You can’t conclude that by insect life or lack thereof in this place.”

Aggravated anyway, Scoth did not look like he was going to answer. But then he saw Sinclair’s interest, and deigned to respond. “He is not decomposed, indeed, he has barely begun to bloat. The tramp did not find him by scent. I would say that this man was alive and well less than twelve hours ago, and only sometime after that did he meet his fate.”

“Perhaps this was a mugging,” Ravenhill said, drawing down his eyes from the rooftops. “No one around here to act as a witness.”

“What pickpocket would lurk about in this part of Wattling?” Scoth asked.

“Said yourself the body was dumped. So that’s what happened. This fellow is strolling about the streets outside the dead zone, minding his own business, and a pickpocket comes up and demands his money. Happens all over Wattling every day and night. Then the fellow fights him but ends up on the wrong side of the blade.”