The Marquis was still flexing his pins-and-needles cramping fingers, trying to rub life back into them. “What is it?” he said, trying to sound unimpressed.
The man said, “There we go,” and pulled up a large square of metal. “It’s the drain.” De Carabas did not have a chance to protest, as his brother picked him up and dropped him down a hole in the floor.
Probably, thought de Carabas, there are rides like this at funfairs. He could imagine them. Upworlders might pay good money to take this ride if they were certain they would survive it.
He crashed through pipes, swept along by the flow of water, always heading down and deeper. He was not certain he was going to survive it, and he was not having fun.
The Marquis’ body was bruised and battered as he rode the water down the pipe. He tumbled out, facedown, onto a large metal grate, which seemed scarcely able to hold his weight. He crawled off the grate onto the rock floor beside it, and he shivered.
There was an unlikely sort of a noise, and it was immediately followed by his brother, who shot out of the pipe and landed on his feet, as if he’d been practicing. He smiled. “Fun, eh?”
“Not really,” said the Marquis de Carabas. And then he had to ask. “Were you just going ‘Whee!’?”
“Of course! Weren’t you?” asked his brother.
De Carabas got to his feet, unsteadily. He said only, “What are you calling yourself these days?”
“Still the same. I don’t change.”
“It’s not your real name, Peregrine,” said de Carabas.
“It’ll do. It marks my territory and my intentions. You’re still calling yourself a Marquis, then?” said Peregrine.
“I am, because I say I am,” said the Marquis. He looked, he was sure, like a drowned thing, and sounded, he was certain, unconvincing. He felt small and foolish.
“Your choice. Anyway, I’m off. You don’t need me anymore. Stay out of trouble. You don’t actually have to thank me.” His brother meant it, of course. That was what stung the hardest.
The Marquis de Carabas hated himself. He hadn’t wanted to say it, but now it had to be said. “Thank you, Peregrine.”
“Oh!” said Peregrine. “Your coat. Word on the street is, it wound up in Shepherd’s Bush. That’s all I know. So. Advice. Mean this most sincerely. I know you don’t like advice. But, the coat? Let it go. Forget about it. Just get a new coat. Honest.”
“Well then,” said the Marquis.
“Well,” said Peregrine, and he grinned and shook himself like a dog, spraying water everywhere, before he slipped into the shadows and was gone.
The Marquis de Carabas stood and dripped balefully.
He had a little time before the Elephant discovered the lack of water in the room, and the lack of a body, and came looking for him.
He checked his shirt pocket: the sandwich bag was there, and the envelope appeared safe and dry inside it.
He wondered, for a moment, about something that had bothered him since the Market. Why would the Mushroom lad use him, de Carabas, to send a letter to the fair Drusilla? And what kind of letter could persuade a member of the Raven’s Court, and one with a star on her hand at that, to give up her life at the court and love one of the Mushroom People?
A suspicion occurred to him. It was not a comfortable idea, but it was swept aside by more immediate problems.
He could hide: lie low for a while. It would pass. But there was the coat to think about. He had been rescued—rescued!—by his brother, something that would never have happened under normal circumstances. He could get a new coat. Of course he could. But it would not be his coat.
A shepherd had his coat.
The Marquis de Carabas always had a plan, and he always had a fallback plan; and beneath these plans he always had a real plan, one that he would not even let himself know about, for when the original plan and the fallback plan had both gone south.
Now, it pained him to admit to himself, he had no plan. He did not even have a normal, boring, obvious plan that he could abandon as soon as things got tricky. He just had a want, and it drove him as their need for food or love or safety drove those the Marquis considered lesser men.
He was planless. He just wanted his coat back.
The Marquis de Carabas began walking. He had an envelope containing a love poem in his pocket, he was wrapped in a damp blanket, and he hated his brother for rescuing him.
When you create yourself from scratch you need a model of some kind, something to aim towards or head away from—all the things you want to be, or intentionally not be.
The Marquis had known whom he had wanted not to be, when he was a boy. He had definitely not wanted to be like Peregrine. He had not wanted to be like anyone at all. He had, instead, wanted to be elegant, elusive, brilliant and, above all things, he had wanted to be unique.
Just like Peregrine.
* * *
The thing was, he had been told by a former shepherd on the run, whom he had helped across the Tyburn River to freedom, and to a short but happy life as a camp entertainer for the Roman Legion who waited there, beside the river, for orders that would never come, that the shepherds never made you do anything. They just took your natural impulses and desires and they pushed them, reinforced them, so you acted quite naturally, only you acted in the ways that they wanted.
He remembered that, and then he forgot it, because he was scared of being alone.
The Marquis had not known until just this moment quite how scared he was of being alone, and was surprised by how happy he was to see several other people walking in the same direction as he was.
“I’m glad you’re here,” one of them called.
“I’m glad you’re here,” called another.
“I’m glad I’m here too,” said de Carabas. Where was he going? Where were they going? So good that they were all traveling the same way together. There was safety in numbers.
“It’s good to be together,” said a thin white woman, with a happy sort of a sigh. And it was.
“It’s good to be together,” said the Marquis.
“Indeed it is. It’s good to be together,” said his neighbor on the other side. There was something familiar about this person. He had huge ears, like fans, and a nose like a thick, grey-green snake. The Marquis began to wonder if he had ever met this person before, and was trying to remember exactly where, when he was tapped gently on the shoulder by a man holding a large stick with a curved end.
“We never want to fall out of step, do we?” said the man, reasonably, and the Marquis thought Of course we don’t, and he sped up a little, so he was back in step once more.
“That’s good. Out of step is out of mind,” said the man with the stick, and he moved on.
“Out of step is out of mind,” said the Marquis aloud, wondering how he could have missed knowing something so obvious, so basic. There was a tiny part of him, somewhere distant, that wondered what that actually meant.
They reached the place they were going, and it was good to be among friends.
Time passed strangely in that place, but soon enough the Marquis and his friend with the grey-green face and the long nose were given a job to do, a real job, and it was this: they disposed of those members of the flock who could no longer move or serve, once anything that might be of use had been removed and reused. They removed the last of what was left, hair and tallow fat and all, then they dragged it to the pit, and dropped the remnants in. The shifts were long and tiring, and the work was messy, but the two of them did it together and they stayed in step.
They had been working proudly together for several days when the Marquis noticed an irritant. Someone appeared to be trying to attract his attention.
“I followed you,” whispered the stranger. “I know you didn’t want me to. But, well, needs must.”