Hoegbo on looked down through a murk diluted only by a few lamps.
“It’s empty,” he shouted down. “The cage is empty. But I’ll take it.”
An unintelligible answer floated up. As his sight adjusted to the scene below, the distant solicitor in his chair, the other two still standing, he thought for a horrible second that they were melting. The boy seemed melded to his suitcase, the green of it inseparable from the white of the a ached arm. The woman’s nubs were impossibly white, as if she had grown new bones. The solicitor was just a splash of green.
When he stood on solid ground again, he could not control his shaking.
“I’ll have the papers to you tomorrow, a er I’ve catalogued all of the items,” he said.
All around, on the arms of the chairs, on the table, atop the bookcase, white mushrooms had risen on slender stalks, their gills tinged red.
The solicitor sat in his chair and giggled uncontrollably.
“It was nice to meet you,” Hoegbo on said as he walked to the door that led to the room that led to the next room and the room a er that and then, hopefully, the outside, by which time he would be running.
The woman’s stubs had sprouted white tendrils of fungus that lazily wound their way around the dried blood and obscured it. Her eyes were slowly filling with white.
Hoegbo on backed into the damaged table and almost fell. “As I say, a pleasure doing business with you.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” the solicitor said, and giggled again, his skin as green and wrinkly as a lizard’s.
“Then I will see you again, soon,” Hoegbo on said, edging toward the door, groping behind him for the knob, “and under… under be er… “ But he could not finish his sentence.
The boy’s arms were dark green, fuzzy and indistinct, as if he were a still life made of points of paint on a canvas. His suitcase, once blue, had turned a blackish green, for the fungi had engulfed it much as ivy had engulfed the eastern wall of the mansion. All the terrible knowledge of his condition shone through the boy’s eyes and yet still he held his mother’s arm as the white tendrils wound round both their limbs in an ever more permanent embrace.
Hoegbo on later believed he would have stood at the door forever, hand on the knob, the solicitor’s giggle a low whine in the background, if not for what happened next.
The broken clock groaned and struck midnight. The shuddering stroke reverberated through the room, through the thousands of jars of preserved animals. The solicitor looked up in sudden terror and, with a so popping sound, exploded into a lightly falling rain of emerald spores that dri ed to the floor with as slow and tranquil a grace as the seeds of a dandelion. As if the sound had torn him apart.
Outside, Hoegbo on tore off his mask, knelt, and threw up beside the fountain that guarded the path toAlbumuth Boulevard. Behind him, across a square of dark green grass, the bodies of Daffed, his daughters, his other son, smoldered gray and black. The charred smell mixed with mildew and the rain that stippled his back. His arms and legs trembled with an enervating weakness. His mouth felt hot and dry. For a long time, he sat in the same position, watching pinpricks break his reflection in the fountain.
He shivered as the water shivered.
He had never come this close before. Either they had died long before he arrived or long a er he le. The solicitor’s liquid giggle trickled through his ears, along with the so pop of the spores. He shuddered, relaxed, shuddered again.
When his assistant Alan Bristlewing questioned, as he o en did, the wisdom of taking on such hazardous work, Hoegbo on would smile and change the subject. He could not choose between two conflicting impulses: the upswelling of excitement and the desire to flee Ambergris and return to Morrow, the city of his birth. As each new episode receded into memory, his nerve returned, somehow stronger.
The boy’s arm, fused to his suitcase.
Holding on to the lichen-flecked stone lip of the pool, Hoegbo on plunged his head into the smooth water. The chill shocked him. It prickled his skin, cut through the numbness to burn the inside of his nose.
A sob escaped him, and another, and then a third that bent him over the water again. The back of his neck was suddenly cool. When he pulled away, he looked down at his reflection — and the mask he had made to hide his emotions was gone. He was himself again.
Hoegbo on stood up. Across the courtyard, the Cappan’s men had abandoned the bodies to begin the task of nailing boards across the doors and windows of the mansion. No one pulled the shades open to protest being trapped inside. No one banged on the door, begging to be let out. They had already begun their journey.
One look at his face as he staggered to safety had told the Cappan’s men everything. No doubt they would have boarded him in too, if not for the bribes and his previous record of survival.
Hoegbo on wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. The merchandise he had bought would molder in the mansion, unused and unrecorded except in his ledger of “Potential Acquisitions: Lost.” Depending on which hysteria-induced procedure the Cappan had adopted this fortnight, the mansion grounds might be cordoned off or the mansion itself might be put to the torch.
The clock struck midnight.
The cage stood beside him, slick with rain. Hoegbo on had gripped its handle so hard during his escape — from every corner, Daffed’s infernal collection of dead things staring innocently at him — that he had been branded where the skin had not been rubbed off his palm. He bore the mark of the handle: a delicate filigree of unfamiliar symbols from behind which strange eyes peered out. In the fading light, with the rain falling harder, the fungi appeared to have been washed off the cover of the cage. Perversely, this fact disappointed him. With each new encounter, he had come to expect further revelations.
Blinking away the rain, Hoegbo on let out a deep breath, stuffed his mask in a pocket, wrapped the cloth around his injured hand, and picked up the cage. It was heavier than he remembered it, and oddly balanced. It made him list to the side as he started walking up the path to the main road. He would have to hurry if he was to make the curfew imposed by the Cappan.
Ambergris at dusk, occluded and darkened by the rain that spla ered on sidewalks, ra led against rooftops, struck windows, hinted at a level of debauchery almost as unnerving to Hoegbo on as the way, whenever he stopped to switch the cage from his le to his right hand and back again, the weight never seemed the same.
The city that flourished from wholesome activity by day became its opposite by night. Orgies had been reported in abandoned churches. Grotesque and lewd water puppet shows were staged down by the docks. Weekly, the merchant quarter held midnight auctions of paintings that could only be termed obscene. The fey illustrated books of Collart and Slothian enjoyed a popularity that placed the authors but a single step below the Cappan in status. In the Religious Quarter, the hard-pressed Truffidian priests tried to wrest back authority from the conflicting prophets Peterson and Stra on, whose dueling theologies infected ever-more violent followers.