• 1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing co on (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the
• 5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors — lit with what he could only describe as a black light: it illuminated but did not li the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of ta ered jellyfish floating in amber bo les, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in bri le poses.
The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and
• 1 Manzikert-brand phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and
• 8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles.
Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by some wild delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower le corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop
• 1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood
• 8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice
• 1 grandfather clock, its blood-spa ered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again — and beneath the clock
• 1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal
• 1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase
• 1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists.
Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to
• 1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her le nub held by
• 1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pocket watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-gray trousers. He stared at
• 1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the a ention of
• 1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbo on, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly.
He wore a drab gray suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor.
Hoegbo on considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set half-way up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. The dark, narrow window reflected needlings of rain through its tubular green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-gray with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise, fat and fecund, in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk.
The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbo on like a rather long time.
“That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,” Hoegbo on said, to slow the solicitor’s relentless cha er.
The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.
“The bird itself. The bird,” the solicitor said, “is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true.
But,” he gestured at the walls, “surely you see the richness of Daffed’s collection.”
Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of famous zoologists. Daffed’s wife and son stood beside the solicitor, last remnants of a family of six.
Hoegbo on frowned. “But I don’t really need the collection. It’s a fine collection, very fine”—and he meant it; he admired a man who could so singlemindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of
The solicitor stared at Hoegbo on as if he did not believe him. “Well, then, what
“I’m still calculating that figure.”
The solicitor loosened his collar with one sharp tug. “It’s been more than an hour. My clients are not well!” He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. Despite the sweat, the solicitor seemed parched. His mask puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.
“I’m sorry for your loss — all of your losses,” Hoegbo on said, turning to the mother and child who stood in mute acceptance of their fate. “I won’t keep you much longer.” The speech never sounded sincere, no ma er how sincerely he meant it.
The solicitor made a noise between a groan and a choke that Hoegbo on did not bother to catalog. His thoughts had returned to the merchandise — rug, clock, bookcase, phonograph, table, chairs. What price might they accept?
Hoegbo on would not have included the cage in his calculations if the boy’s stare had not kept flickering wildly toward it and back down again, gliding like Hoegbo on’s own over the remnants of a success that had become u er failure. For all the outlandish things in the room — the boy’s own mother to be counted among them — the boy most feared the cage, an object that could no more hurt him than the green suitcase that hung from his arm.
A reflexive sadness for the boy ran through Hoegbo on, even as he noted the delicacy of the silver engravings on the chair legs; definitely pre-Trillian.
He stared at the boy until the boy stared back. “Don’t you know you’re safe now?” Hoegbo on said a li le too loudly, the words muffled by the cloth over his mouth. An echo traveled up to the high ceiling, encountered the skylight, and descended at a higher pitch.
The boy said nothing. As was his right. Outside, the bodies of his father, brother, and two sisters were being burned as a precaution, the bodies too mutilated to have withstood a Viewing anyway. The boy’s fate, too, was uncertain. Sometimes survivors did not survive.
Nothing could make one safe. There had been a great spasm of buying houses without basements or with stone floors, but no one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events, combined with their infrequency, had instilled a certain fatalism in Ambergris’ inhabitants.
The solicitor had run out of patience. He stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbo on, his breath sour and thick. “Are you ready yet? You’ve had more than enough time. Should I callSla ery or Ungdom instead?”
His voice seemed more distorted than the mask could explain, as if he were in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly, emotion.
Hoegbo on took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor’s gaze. The names of his chief rivals made a li le vein in Hoegbo on’s le eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom — towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.
“Call for them, then,” he said, looking away.
The solicitor’s gaze bored into his cheek and then the foul presence was gone. The solicitor had slumped into one of the chairs, a great smudge of a man.
“Anyway, I’m almost ready,” Hoegbo on said. The vein in his eyelid would not stop pulsing. It was true:
