Fleshy Man drew some lines and arrows.
“Now clear off,” he said. “And don’t come back here trying to sell that shit again, understand? If I see your face a second time, my men will make you wish the Temple had gotten hold of you.”
I emerged wobbly-legged and blinking into the glim-light, feeling like I’d had a narrow escape. The chaos of the Undermarket roiled around me as I pulled my cap down, silently thanking my Hair for behaving itself, and scuttled through the market to where I had agreed to meet Mieka.
Mieka leaned against the uneven brick, her flat cap tipped at a boyish angle.
“Well?” she asked. “How did it go?”
Once she had heard the story and exclaimed over it, she seemed relatively cheerful about my prospects.
“It could have been worse,” she said. “And he gave you the address.”
“Not just that,” I said, showing Mieka the letter. “I can’t read it, though.”
“It’s sealed.”
“I don’t care. I need to know what he said before I give it to the Book Man.”
Mieka broke the seal on the letter after examining it and read slowly but accurately:
‘For what it’s worth, this lass wanted a letter of introduction. Do with her as you wish, but I told her of you in exchange for fair goods. She can embroider with the Temple’s stitches, which may be of use to you. Make no promises.’
“The address is for a crematorium,” said Mieka, her mouth twisting. “That’s odd. It’s in a district where there’s a lot of them all clustered together. Seems an odd place for a bookshop—even a black market one.”
I suppressed a shudder. I didn’t know why I hated the crematoriums so, but the thought of goinginsideone made my skin crawl.
There were crematoriums everywhere you turned in Quell, it seemed, and in the most incongruous arrangements—a charnel house next door to a tavern, or wedged between two pleasure houses. Their chimneys belched smoke day and night.
Mieka told me some of the crematoriums had backdoor deals with the slaughterhouses and tanneries to burn animal parts as well, to maintain the image of constant burning—which indicated constant piety, which ensured constant business from the Temple, which had been known to boycott and shut down crematoriums that they thought treated the business of burning thedead with too little gravity. Sweet herbs and powdered incense were burned with the dead matter to perfume the smoke, but the sweet stink persisted beneath. It reminded me of the smell of cut flowers left too long in water, sliming at the stems.
Baldbeak fluttered back to my shoulder, his breath making a little plume of steam in the cold air. I reached up to scratch the gray fuzz on his beak.
“Can you take me there now?” I asked.
“My business is concluded,” said Mieka, a little mysteriously. “Let’s go.”
About halfway to the address on the paper, we came across a funeral procession marching from a Temple to one of the many crematoriums. I stopped to watch. It was a far cry from the torched parades the Follower Priest had described, the ones that used to march through the Corpse Roads. These participants had the grim air of seeing that something was completed, rather than any air of celebrating life. It was, of course, led by a Priest in the yellow-gold robes of the Temple. He walked with his hands folded before him, taking long, slow steps. A Fool dressed in black-and-white motley in a vaguely skeletal geometric pattern and wearing a skull-like jeweled mask danced at the front of the line, right under the Priest’s nose (and making it difficult for the Priest to maintain his expression of grave piety). Bells around his wrists jingled as he moved, and clappers tied to his ankles provided arat-tat-tatcounterpoint to the low, sobbing drums played by the Novice Priests at the back of the line, behind the family. Mieka spat on the road with a contemptuous sneer.
“You don’t believe?” I turned to her. She snorted.
“That the Temple is the true faith? No.” Her lip curled. “They’re all pomp and ceremony where everyone can see, and corruption behind doors. Corruption and nastiness.”
I wondered why she hated the Temple so, but didn’t want to pursue a subject that was so obviously unpleasant.
I turned my attention back to the procession. A Death Fool was a hangover from the days of the Plague—an old superstition that had appeared often in Mother’s bedtime stories. Peasants at the time of the Plague believed that the Fools brought good luck by distracting the sickness’s attention from the rest of the family, and the Fools believed that they themselves were protected from the sickness by the bells and cymbals they wore. At one point, when the Plague was at its height, every family had had someone dress in an approximation of the costume and dance for the corpse. Now, however, nearly two hundred years on, only the wealthy could afford to hire one, as the trappings of funerals had become more elaborate and ceremonial.
“All superstitious nonsense. Revenue gathering,” said Mieka under her breath. “Can you find your way from here? I need to get back.”
“Of course,” I said, hoping that was true, and waved her off.
The procession was almost upon me now. The corpse must have been that of a nobleman, or woman, because the wrappings on the body were ornate and richly embroidered, with the same kind of dizzying, disorienting designs that I had seen on the altar cloth. I wished I could get close enough to see it in detail! There was something so familiar about it—the way it hooked the eye like a fish on a line and drew it through every swirl and curlicue of the pattern.
Four Priests carried the litter; only Priests of the Temple were allowed to touch a dead body. Even the family was forbidden to come too near. Not that these mourners looked like they were likely to want to minister to their dead relative themselves—they were far too richly dressed, and the scented handkerchiefs they held to their noses as they picked their way through the puddles showed no evidence of tears. They were talking amongst themselves as they walked, paying little to no attention to the unfortunate corpse.
The Fool finished his capering, stepped out of line as theprocession halted at the crematorium door, and ducked around a corner. If he were regularly employed at funerals, he probably knew the crematoriums around here well and could help me find the one I needed. I approached him cautiously. He was leaning against the brick with his eyes closed, occasionally lifting a cigarette to his skeletal mouth, and blowing out a thick cloud of smoke, incongruous against the elaborately jeweled mask. He saw me coming and grinned at me lecherously, his mouth painted startlingly wide and red.
“Well, hello there,” he said. “Care for a kiss from the Death Fool? It’s good luck.”
