The shudder went down well, and I ordered another cup. I sat contemplating the thought that an ally of some kind might be helpful, but who was I to trust? The cleaning woman seemed the only one I had met since my return who didn't appear to have any ulterior motive behind her words. I thought about her and then recalled her telling me that the demon was probably underground somewhere. It struck me that not only was the demon hiding beneath the surface but also that was probably the location of the exhibit.
I remembered from my student days when I had had to be across town to attend a reading or fetch reports from the Ministry of Security in a hurry. I had traveled underground to avoid the busy hours on the streets. When the foundation of the City had been laid, Below had ingeniously built in a vast network of underground passageways, tunnels, and catacombs that he himself had used as a means of traveling unseen from location to location. "Surprise is my meat, Cley," he had said to me on one occasion, referring to that very network. Officials were allowed to use it but rarely did, not wanting to be found down there by the Master and raise his suspicion of some hidden plot.
"Beneath the surface," I said to myself, and wanted to go and investigate right then. Instead, I kept my revelation in check and got up and passed out appointment cards to the other patrons of the cafe. They thanked me in pitifully weak voices. I could see how frightened they were, but I had to keep a severe gaze as I took down their names.
On the way back to the office to keep those appointments, I passed through the mall where I had witnessed Calloo battle the claw man the day before. There was another match going on and quite a bigger crowd of onlookers. Belows were exchanging hands, and the audience was calling for gears and springs to be scattered across the ring. Luckily, the participants were not familiar to me.
I walked up to a soldier who stood behind the crowd, holding a flamethrower. One of the automated gladiators had just lost his head to a battle-ax blow. "What happens to the ones that are defeated or broken?" I asked him.
"None of your business," he said.
"Do you know who I am?" I asked him in a pleasant voice.
"You're about two seconds from being burnt beyond recognition," he said. "Move on."
I handed him an appointment card. Seeing it, he immediately understood the gravity of his mistake.
"Your honor," he said.
"Perhaps we could discuss it in my office this afternoon," I said. "By the way, has anyone ever read that forehead of yours?" I shook my head and grumbled a little.
"A million pardons, your honor," he said. "The ones who are defeated are taken back to the big warehouse behind the munitions factory. If they are beyond saving, they are incinerated after the brass and zinc parts have been removed. If they are salvageable, they are outfitted with new pieces and sent back for another battle match."
I snatched the card from his hand. "You are very helpful," I said.
As I walked away, he called after me, "Welcome back from Doralice."
I spent the afternoon at my office, reading those who I had made appointments for. They were all just simple people of the realm, and I did not make them undress. Instead, I played around with the calipers and the lip vise, every now and then jotting down a bogus note or two as I had done back in Anama-sobia. No matter how deficient the Physiognomy told me they were, I lauded praise on their features and encouraged them to talk. At first they were wary, unused to having so important a member of the realm seem friendly to them. I believe they each reached a point where they intuited that I would do them no harm, and then they told me everything—about their children, their jobs, their fears concerning the demon. I nodded and listened attentively even though I was itching for the beauty.
Then the last of the fellows who came through my examination room, a young gardener, whose main job was keeping the tilibar bushes blooming in the park, mentioned something that I found interesting. He had heard I had been to the territory and wanted to let me know that he too had been there.
"I was sent out to the wilderness beyond the boundary of the territory about a month after the Master's expedition had returned, a few weeks after you were so wrongly sentenced," he said.
"Interesting," I said.
"I was ordered by the Master to bring back a variety of species of plants and trees—a great quantity of them. The operation was immense," he told me.
"What did you do with them?" I asked.
"It was the strangest thing," he said. "We brought them back to the City and were told to deliver them to the western side of town, over by the sewage treatment plant and the waterworks. We dropped them off in the middle of the street, and they nearly filled the whole thoroughfare. Then I was dismissed from the detail and was sent back to the park to my tilibar bushes. The next day, after work, I went to see what they had done with them, and they had all vanished."
He wanted to then tell me about his fiancee and his plans for the future, but by then the chills were running through me, and I needed a fix desperately. I ushered him to the door as he was still talking, assuring him that he was a great asset to the realm and wishing him well in his marriage. The instant he was outside, I closed the door and went to my desk to prepare a syringe. Through the years, I had become so good that I had that needle in my neck in less than three minutes.
Since I had been able to quit the beauty once, it seemed to know that I could do it again, and because of this it did not treat me so roughly as it had back before my imprisonment. I would still hallucinate, but there was less of it, and that overwhelming feeling of paranoia was replaced by long stretches of deep thought. That afternoon, I daydreamed about rescuing Cal-loo from his mechanized, walking death and enlisting him to help me. Then I watched out the window the illusion of the City melting in a fine black rain that fell beneath an opulent sun.
I knew none of it was real, and yet I continued to fantasize, this time about Aria. How I would rescue her and she would forgive me and fall in love with the new me. It all seemed so simple, so absolutely necessary. I had my arms around her and was just about to kiss her, when there came a knocking at my door that scared me so by its suddenness that I nearly fell out of my chair.
"Package for Physiognomist Cley," a voice said.
My head spun as I got up and walked shakily to the door. I opened it just enough to let the package in and then closed it. "Thank you," I called, but there was no response. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. There was no name on it, no return address. I laid it on my desk and then just sat staring at it for some time. Finally, when the effects of the beauty had nearly worn off, I opened it. The first thing I pulled out was a note written in the Master's hand.
Cley,
Here is the demon horn I promised you last night. Try to stay away from the ones that are attached to a head. If you can't, I have enclosed something to help you protect yourself Do not go out at night until the crisis has been abated.
Drachton Below, Master of the Realm
Inside the package I found the hard black horn of a demon. Holding it in my hand, I realized that with its weight and sharp tip, it would make an adequate weapon. Beneath it, though, wrapped in tissue paper, I discovered something far more effective—my old derringer, fully loaded, along with a box of bullets. When I put on my topcoat that evening to leave the office, I had the gun, the horn, and a scalpel, each in a different pocket. None of them was a flamethrower, but I did feel a little safer as I stepped onto the street beneath the starlit sky.
I moved with some confidence amid the sea of homebound workers. When they recognized me, they gave me that curious one-fingered salute. Upon seeing it, I smiled and lifted my middle finger to them as a show of solidarity. To my annoyance, they did not smile back, but dropped their gaze and moved off, looking disgusted. It was then that I wished I was one of them, a nobody in the crowd, living a simple life like the gardener and his fiancee.