“It seems strange to me,” Lord Baster-kin says, glancing through the break in the curtain on his side of the litter as he holds the edge of his cloak to his face, blocking as much as possible the stench rising from the gutters close beneath the litter, “that, after all we went through in a very different sort of place than this—”
“If you mean your lordship’s lodge below the mountain,” Isadora comments, “it was indeed a lovely spot, particularly in comparison to so much of this district.”
“And yet you choose to live here still?” Baster-kin queries.
“Like me, my husband was born here,” Isadora answers. “And wished, as he wishes, to remain.” Now it is her turn to glance outside, with an air of some slight despair that Baster-kin finds oddly encouraging. “I do not know that I could have lived my entire life in this part of the district, which was my home until I met him.”
“I cannot pretend to comprehend how dismal a place it must have been for a child,” Baster-kin says slowly. “Nor why you and your husband would have chosen to stay — particularly now, when the sentek has been promoted to the leadership of the whole of the Broken army, and you could live in any part of or residence in the city that you might choose to request of the God-King.”
“Look about yourself once more, my lord,” Isadora says. “Many of these people are victims of their own perfidy and vice, but many others are merely unfortunate victims of circumstances that made this district an inevitable home. Citizens, for example, whose ill fortune is not the result of dissolution or of ill intent, but of the loss, many years ago, of the head of their family to war, or of a limb of that family elder to those same conflicts. It is a cruel and unjust truth, my lord, that many Broken soldiers, having left the army and returned to the district, are unable to find work that would allow them to leave, while some cannot even afford shelter, here, and so haunt these streets night and day, begging and stealing, many of them, and forming a new sort of army: an army of ghostly reminders of the occasionally cruel ingratitude of kings.”
Baster-kin holds up a mildly warning hand. “Be careful, my lady, with the words you choose,” he advises earnestly.
“All right, then — of the ingratitude of governments,” Isadora says, with an impatient nod of her head. “Then, as well, there are workmen — masons, builders — who have suffered crippling injury during the continual construction of this city’s and its kingdom’s houses of government, worship, and wealthy residency, and who are similarly left with no choice but to bring their families here, to the Fifth. You shall meet some such men when we reach our destination — but I ask you now, do not such people deserve at least one capable and honest healer to assist them, and does that not justify my staying and trying to help?”
“They deserve more than that, Lady Arnem,” Baster-kin replies. “And the worst residents of this district deserve certain things, as well — and, before long, all shall receive them, you have my word.” Despite the apparent charity and condescension embodied in these statements, it occurs to Isadora that there ought to be a sharp difference in quality between Lord Baster-kin’s first and second uses of the word “deserve.” She has no time to dwell upon the subject, however, as Baster-kin suddenly draws the curtains of his litter wider apart. “By Kafra, where can we be? A place of rare evil, if even the stars offer little light.”
“We approach the southwest wall, the shadow of which grows ever longer,” Isadora replies. “Deeper into the district than even I will venture, any longer — although I did as a child. It was my happy habit, then, to investigate most such neighborhoods, sometimes at foolish risk. But I learned much …”
“No doubt.” Lord Baster-kin looks to Lady Arnem and studies her face for a moment. And that, he muses, is what will make you such a superb judge of what this city and this kingdom will require, in the months and years to come …
“And one thing I learned, above all,” Isadora says, completing her thought. “There are at least some citizens in this district who recognize that the original planners of the city—”
“‘Planners’?” Baster-kin interrupts, a little less enthusiastically than he has sounded, to this moment: “You mean the planner, don’t you? For there was but one — Oxmontrot.”
Isadora deflects the man’s critical tone with a charming smile. “Forgive me, my lord,” she says; and Baster-kin, of course, cannot help but do so. “My husband has told me of your great dislike for the founder of the kingdom, and I did not wish to tread upon your sensibilities. But, yes, Oxmontrot, whatever his other faults, preached habits of personal and public cleanliness — if you will remember, my mistress and tutor was wont to speak of them, during our time together, by the name the Mad King originally gave them: heigenkeit.† Yet how could the Mad King”—and here Isadora ventures to actually touch Baster-kin’s gloved hand and laugh lightly for effect, seeing that she is drawing her companion in—“particularly as he was, for all his wisdom, apparently going mad even then — how could he have known that what were, in his time, necessary and rigorous policies, such as the creation of the Fifth District for his agèd and injured soldiers and laborers, would one day become of far less concern to his heirs? Heirs who, having become divine and removed to the inviolable safety and sanctity of the Inner City, were forced to depend all the more on advisors, too many of whom — unlike yourself — were district officials and citizens with less than sound or honest ends in mind, and who thereby helped to create, unintentionally, of course, this — this disgrace that we see about us now?”
“Admirably expressed, Lady Arnem,” Baster-kin says, turning to look again on the street about him, so that his true enthusiasm for both the thoughts and their speaker will not become obvious in his face. “I doubt if I could have put the matter any better, myself.” At that, he searches their immediate surroundings again, as if suddenly more surprised by their appearance than he is by Lady Arnem’s thoughts. “By Kafra,” he murmurs, “I do believe that this neighborhood is actually taking on an even more dismal aspect …”
Dissatisfied to see and hear that her brief outburst of opinion and feeling has apparently had so little effect, Isadora also looks outside: Is it possible, she thinks, that he truly has lost the deep, the consuming affection that he had for me, however childish, when he was but a youth? For, ironically, much as she had once feared that boyish and diseased form of devotion — a sickness that Gisa had called obsese†—she had been depending upon some part of it still being alive, in order for her plan of this evening to succeed. But she remains calm, knowing that she has another stratagem in mind with which to achieve the same goal.