trying to find a missing chair. The chair was important, obviously. Oliver knew it was a dream because he had never met the King, and the not-so-merry monarch said if they could only find the chair, parliament might agree to sow his arms back on. Then the Whisperer pushed through into the dream.
‘Oliver, I can see you. Can you see me?’
‘I can’t see you, Whisperer, go away.’
‘Then you can, Oliver,’ hissed the misshapen form that had appeared before him. ‘I can connect with you. I can connect with almost all of our kind.’
‘I’m not like you, Whisperer,’ said Oliver.
‘No. I realize that, Oliver. You are the best of us. I have waited a lifetime or more for you to arrive. The others think they’re perfect, the ones who aren’t locked up in here with my friends and me. But they haven’t met you, Oliver. If they had they wouldn’t be so proud, so vain, so content with themselves and their powers.’
Oliver knew they kept the Whisperer locked somewhere dark, deep beneath the earth. Chained in by hexes and curse-walls and powerful worldsinger gates. His ugly lumpen face was beyond description, a wreckage of human flesh. When the Whisperer had been born, his terrified parents must have run a league in the opposite direction.
‘Can’t you get out of my mind?’ pleaded Oliver. ‘Get out of my life?’
‘You are my life, Oliver,’ hissed the creature. ‘You and the others I contact. Do you think my own life is worth the living? They keep me in the dark, Oliver, alone in a cell hardly tall enough to stand up in so I can’t rush the warders when they remember to check I’m still here. The rats visit me, Oliver. Drawn by my smell and waste. I break my teeth on their bones, sometimes, when the warders forget to feed me.’
Oliver felt sick. ‘And what do they taste like?’
The Whisperer laughed, a sound like air escaping from an expansion engine. ‘What do they taste like, Oliver? Like chicken, Oliver, like the finest roast chicken. I borrowed the taste from your mind. I hope you don’t mind. I have so few reference points.’
Oliver gagged and the Whisperer danced a mad little jig in front of him. ‘I try not to eat the food they give me, Oliver. They put potions in it, to soften my brain and keep me tired, sleepy.’
In the dream palace the King had appeared again, but he took one look at the Whisperer and turned smartly around.
‘How sad, Oliver. Even the phantoms in a dream find me repulsive. Remind me. This time, is it me dreaming of you, or is it you dreaming of me?’
‘What does it matter?’ Oliver shouted. ‘Leave my mind alone.’
‘Your time is coming, my perfect friend,’ said the Whisperer. ‘You are about to find out what a flexible and surprising thing life is. And when you do, you might be very glad of me crawling around in your skull. Yes, you might be very glad indeed.’
‘I am rather sure I won’t be,’ said Oliver.
‘Don’t make your mind up quite so fast, Oliver. Things have already started moving. Your curious visitor, Harry Stave. What do you think of him, boy? Bit of a dark horse, perhaps. Bit of a bludger and a broadsman?’
‘I don’t-’
‘Shhhh,’ hushed the Whisperer. ‘You’re going to get woken up in a couple of seconds.’
He was.
It was an early start to sign on the county registration book, and as always, Oliver found himself outside the Hundred Locks police station in time to see the prisoners from the night before marched away from the cells, across to the magistrate’s small office along Rayner’s Street. Among the usual string of tavern brawlers were a handful of Quatershiftian refugees: two men and a single woman — possibly their sister.
Their clothes were ruined and Oliver guessed they had escaped across the sea, circumventing the cursewall along the border with Jackals. One of the men was shaking uncontrollably, his compatriots stunned into a shocked silence. What tales had they been told by the Commonshare’s propaganda committee? That Quatershift had won the Two-Year War? That Jackals was now a model of Carlist right-practice? That Jackals had suffered a famine too, after replacing its farmers with Committees of Agrarian Equalization and marching its educated yeomen into a Gideon’s Collar — the steam-driven killing machines which now filled the Commonshare’s city squares?
Whatever the lies, they had not been enough to keep these three from escaping the great terror in Quatershift. Since the Commonshare’s worldsingers had laid the cursewall, there had been so few refugees making it alive to Jackals that magistrates now granted the shifties automatic political asylum. One of the many emigre charities would be called in to help. After all, there were now more Quatershiftian nobles sloshing around Jackals than there were back in the homeland — the lucky ones who had flooded out with their gold before the cursewall was raised. The less fortunate quality were still in Commonshare camps waiting on a piece of paper with a red number scrawled across it … followed by an iron bolt fired through the neck.
As the line of prisoners disappeared down the street, Oliver knocked on the station door and entered.
‘Oliver.’ Sergeant Cudban glanced back from locking the door to the cells. ‘That time of the week already?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Oliver.
‘Come on in laddie, don’t stand on ceremony. Your wee conjurer is already around the back. Would you like a nice cup of caffeel? Young Wattle’s just brewed up.’
Oliver nodded. Sergeant Cudban was a brusque, straightforward uplander, and he had little patience for the worldsingers and even less for the superior manners of Oliver’s personal tormentor, Edwin Pullinger, the county’s Inspector Royal from the State Department of Feymist.
‘A busy night?’ Oliver asked.
‘Aye, the usual. Although I did have the parson in here yesterday. Somebody’s been stuffing political pamphlets inside the book of Circlelaw.’
‘Pamphlets,’ laughed Oliver.
‘You should have seen the man’s face. The highlights of
Oliver shrugged. ‘For that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever read it either.’
The sergeant winked at Oliver. ‘I’ll slip you a copy later then, compatriot. Never sat well with me, laddie, burning books. Them’s the sort of larks foreigners get up to, not us Jackelians. Benjamin Carl hasn’t been seen alive since eighty-one anyway, and to my mind, since the uprising was crushed most of his revolutionaries have been baking bread and milling steel for the last fifteen years.’
‘And printing pamphlets,’ Oliver added slyly.
Sergeant Cudban pinned up a reward on the wall, an illustration of a highwayman and a modest reward staring down on them. ‘Grumbles, laddie. Everyone’s got grumbles. You happy, laddie? Being dragged in here to sign on every week at the pleasure of that purple-robed prat? And do you think I’m happy? Three wee constables to keep the parliament’s law in Hundred Locks while Shipman Town above has ten times that number. What do they do all day — interview cod? Arrest gulls? And send their beered-up sailors down here to break each other’s heads in my taverns.’
Constable Wattle poked his face around the door. ‘Inspector Pullinger wants to know why he’s being kept waiting.’
‘See, laddie. Grumbles.’ The sergeant turned to his constable. ‘The Department of Feymist would not like the answer to that question, young Wattle.’
Oliver was ushered into the office. Cudban unobtrusively took up position underneath the station’s weapons rack, cleaning the cutlasses in the top row and oiling the walnut-stocked rifles below. Listening all the while. It was not unknown for the Department to resort to worldsinger mind tricks to get results — but it would not happen while old Cudban was in charge of policing the Hundred Locks Township.
The oily sorcerer had a new arrival sitting by his side, another Department of Feymist worldsinger, though not much older than Oliver. An acolyte. Pullinger rubbed his brow where a tattoo of four small purple flowers shone — the mark of his rank among the worldsingers.
Edwin Pullinger turned the register on the writing desk around and pushed it towards Oliver. ‘Your official signature, Mister Brooks. My colleague here will be counter-signing for the Department.’
Oliver picked up the stylus and dipped its nib in the inkpot. ‘Planning to retire, Inspector Pullinger?’
