Hugo watched this in wonder, looking from the river to the box in his palm and wondering how much fog the little glass container actually held. But it continued to pour out, and little by little, the mist on the river thickened, and the smell of the London particular began to overwrite the usual scents of the Quayside Harbors. As the level of it rose, the lights of the buildings out on the piers and the ships on the river began to dim until they were mere pinpricks. Then, one by one, they vanished altogether in the clotting dark of the fog.
Hugo leaned down close to the box and breathed deep, feeling actual pain as his lungs protested and a simultaneous but different kind of ache as his heart and memory absorbed the thing they had been craving. Then he put the box carefully inside his vest, pulled on his coat, stuffed one of its pockets with matches and an old shirt that could be torn into rags, and went out into the particular, the fog eddying around him as it continued spilling out of the vessel in his vest.
Hugo hunted in the alley behind his house for a bit of dry driftwood, nearly falling off the bulkhead twice before he found a suitable stick. He wrapped the top of it in his old shirt, clamped it between his knees as he lit a match from his pocket, and set the makeshift torch ablaze. I’ll need pitch for next time, he thought. This will burn too fast without it.
The fog drowned the Quayside Harbors and its stretch of the Skidwrack in less than ten minutes, turning it into an entirely new and alien landscape. Though Hugo had lived there only a year, he had come to know the district well. But the fog made the familiar unknowable—so much so that twice he found people wandering lost in the miasma who probably knew the Harbors far better than Hugo did. And it could be more frightening than the darkest hours of the darkest night. Hugo helped the lost souls find their ways home until his torch had burned down to cinders, and although he tried to refuse the coins they offered in thanks, by the time he got home, he had enough to buy pitch to make a proper linklighter’s torch.
He tossed the remnants of his driftwood stick into the river and went upstairs to his room. He shed his coat, took the glass box from his vest pocket, and, leaning out the window again, slowly turned the lid clockwise. As he tightened it, the fog flowed in just as it had flowed out, and by the time the lid was shut snugly, every shred of the particular had gone back into its container, leaving nothing behind but a vaguely sooty film on the window. No more opening the box inside, he decided as he put it on the crate that made a table beside his bed and shucked out of his now-filthy clothes.
The next day was Saturday. Instead of sleeping late, he woke early, his nose seeking and finding the scent of the fog instantly and rousing him out of dreams of London and home. Even though the murk had been in his room only once, its scent had permeated the threadbare curtains and sheets and lingered even in the clear bright light of morning. There on the bedside crate was the glass box. Hugo sat and stared at it for long minutes before he finally got up and dressed to start his day.
He found another shirt that could be sacrificed for rags and packed it in his bag, along with his matches and his fog glasses. Then he tucked the box carefully in his pocket and went straight to the Tar and Pitch Works, where he convinced the merchant to sell him a crock of leavings scraped from a broken barrel, enough to soak the rags and make a proper torch when he was ready. From there he headed for the water, pausing along the way to peer into each alley he passed until he found the perfect length of wood to make the handle.
Then, right at the edge of the pier, he hesitated. What to do with his fog?
He hadn’t actually bought it intending to inundate Nagspeake for purposes of turning linklighter again. Something about that didn’t feel right—pouring the fug over the city just to make money helping people get around in it. And he did remember that bad things could happen in the fog. There were thieves who posed as linklighters only to lead their customers into dark alleys and rob them. People drifted into the paths of horses. People wandered blindly off embankments and into the Thames to drown. People got sick—just a little sick if they were strong or lucky; deathly sick if they weren’t. And to manage in a fog—just to move about in it without getting hurt, never mind finding your way to where you wanted to go—you had to know how to do it. You had to learn, which took time and experience. Even just pouring out a particular now and then could be deadly. What damage might he already have done, letting it loose the night before?
Hugo had been intending to find a boat to take him down the river to Bayside, where he could let the fog loose over the Magothy, but now he reconsidered. Bayside would be one of the worst places to unleash a particular. It had miles of water frontage, dozens of boats coming, going, and lying at anchor, and thousands of people staying there who weren’t from Nagspeake at all and would be even more lost and helpless than the locals,
