Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (15 page)

Boy stood on one of the many criss-crossing, interlocking beams of splintery wood and bricks rammed through with rusted poles that had been set up, makeshift, by persons unknown. There was a neat little arched bridge further down, drawn from bluestone and decorated with colourful mosaics and ornate fretwork, and marked with metal signposts that howled as the wind caught them, but quaintness in no way made up for practicality, and so it seemed that this monstrosity of footbridges joining the rough alleyways flanking either bank of the Voda had been devised from a mixture of necessity and laziness.

Boy balanced where he was, squinting back at the domed building that leant like an ailing veteran against Dr Polertrony’s residence. Its front windows, what appeared to have once been glorious
leadlights depicting detailed scenes, were bare, revealing only thin stalks of straggling black metal here and there from which the glass had long ago fallen.

He steadied himself, then leapt onto the near bank, sliding in the mud-drowned weeds, avoiding a whorl of vomit plastered like papier mache down over the knife-like reeds and death lilies. He stumbled up to the path, still off-balance, feeling hazy and heady from the greasy, humid air. A feral cat, mangy and with a distended belly and hungry eyes, crawled out from a sewer drain and fled past him and on to the sagging stone balcony of a once-beautiful mansion.

The tiny church had once been painted a vibrant pale blue, the colour of wren’s eggs, but now was lined with layers of algae and the gritty handprints of smog. Birdlime caked the protruding windowsills like foul snow, and airplants clung grimly between the widening gaps between the bluestone. The front doors, double and pointed at their tops, were set to one side. Cracked metal fretwork splintered across them.

Boy went around to the north side of the church, the side farthest away from Dr Polertrony’s. There was a toothless grille here, obscured only partially by broken glass and rocky debris, that seemed to lead inside. He slipped through, bending down and curling up in that manner that only the young seem capable of, squeezing into small spaces like rats.

Inside, the church was stifling, as though it were holding on to a lungful of air indefinitely. The fading light spilled through the blind windows, catching on the mosaic ceiling and floors. The pattern on the floor alternated between coloured and mirrored tiles, as did the ceiling, but in such a way that the mirrors above reflected the coloured tiles below and vice-versa. The effect was oddly sea-like, and Boy stood for a moment mentally tracing the paths between mirrored and patterned tiles. For all this, though, it was difficult to make out what exactly the mosaic depicted, whether text or image.

He realised, momentarily, that it was not this that was the point of it, however, and sank to the ground, crossing his legs and watching about him as the very presence of this intricate beauty overwhelmed him. He remained, thus, in a wash of faded, reflected colour, each instance an echo of those before it, and created and recreated over and over as the sun slowly ebbed away in entirety.

•

It was until a ludicrous hour in the morning each day over the next week that Regent Polertrony worked in his attic office, poring over the angular text in the book and consulting a series of dictionaries and grammars he had pulled from a rotting wooden crate. The Voda’s damp breath seemed to pervade everything, causing generators to short circuit, books to weep and moulder, and clothing to sweat seemingly spontaneously. The rooms on the ground level of the house were often clammy, particularly in the morning, as though spritzed with a fine layer of silty mist. Usually the attic escaped this, and remained relatively dry, but a telling, dark stain had begun to spread across the ceiling like a grasping hand. Similar stains marred the fleur de lis wallpaper that had been thickly and hurriedly applied to the walls.

Regent stretched his arms over his head, listening for the dull click of his shoulders and elbows. The Voda outside was tinged a faint green from the belching gas it released as it settled overnight. Every now and then, a Mora would break the surface, cabbage-like brain pulsing in its open cranium, and dash after a particularly large dragonfly or the skimming trail of a hapless fish swimming carelessly by.

He lowered his arms and stacked his reference materials in a neat pile, doing the same with the looseleaf paper on which he was jotting down the book’s dimensions and concordance. He was not getting anywhere with it. The task was entirely beyond him: he was unfamiliar with the language — and what a language it was, as though deliberately designed to be as ambiguous and puzzling as possible. Which it probably had been, he thought, tying the silk sash around its leather cover and yanking it tightly enough that the edges of the cover bore shallow marks from the effort.

He switched off the generator powering his desk lamp, which was fading and flickering anyway, and went down the stairs, grasping at the slick banister with one hand, and clutching the book in the other.

•

Downtown University existed half in the new city, and half in the old. It was not that it had come out of the flood unscathed as such, but rather an enormous effort had been invested into draining the floors and buildings that now found themselves below ground level, and in building glass-walled partitions between the precarious structures so that they might be more easily accessed.

Regent found himself taking the familiar route down to his erstwhile office — left past Anthropology, down on to the Esoterics division, down again, right through Geomatics, and down again into the Linguistics and Culture rooms, the ones that seemed to have grown organically from the curved spool of the library wing. He glanced into the library, along the rows of musty writing desks that flanked the massive shelves that trembled slightly each time a Mils crewboat roared past or a ferry rumbled by, churning the water propping up the university walls like milk.

As he had hoped, and half suspected, Fenton White was bent over the desk farthest from the eastern entrance, working under the old-fashioned paraffin lamps and clattering away at his typewriter like a man possessed. This particular attribute probably had something to do with the fact that he was, in fact, a man possessed — although he would never volunteer any more information than that he had been self-experimenting at the request of a certain Mils High Commissioner.

Fenton looked up as Regent approached, but continued his mad touch-typing, switching the alphabet on the keys between those of three languages seamlessly. After transcribing an additional page or so, he ceased typing, and steepled his fingers together, resting his slender forearms against the fat black body of the typewriter.

“A challenging assignment, I take it?” he said knowingly. Regent almost expected him to rub his bony hands together in glee.

Fenton had the kind of memory that seemed to be perfect in all regards: he could recite verbatim entire books that he had read years past, and transcribe from memory conversations between multiple parties, but was most evidently gifted in languages, being able to master completely foreign socio- and pragmalinguistic norms with minimal effort. Regent, a renowned onomastician, but fluent in only three languages and passably knowledgeable about several dialects, found that his jealousy was lessened if he ascribed Fenton’s gift to more Mils-funded self-experimentation.

“Maddeningly so,” concurred Regent. “I’ve been at it all night. I’ve exhausted all my resources at home, and well, I have to admit that my proficiency with this language isn’t what it should be.”

“Well, it isn’t really your area of research as such, is it, though?” He held out his hand to Regent, indicating that he should like to take a look at the book. Regent gladly gave it to him.

“It really seems quite impossible,” Regent said, rolling his stiff shoulders back and forth. He had forgotten how the cold in here had made him ache. “Old Silthan. The word boundaries are entirely ambiguous, and appear in dozens of different formations throughout the text, making a lexical concordance near impossible, and both the case system and verbal inflection system use portmanteau forms that are half the time underspecified, meaning that any equation I write is either too generalised or too precise. It’s like I’ve thrown a rounded off version of Pi into the first step of a problem.”

Fenton nodded, taking up Regent’s despairing argument and kindly pointing out the sheer hellishness of the language in question.

“Twelve cases,” Fenton continued, “four moods, dual, tri, and multiple plural systems, and inflection that can vary according to the position of a letter within a word, that word within the phrase, that phrase within a sentence, that sentence within the paragraph…” He trailed off, exhilarated by the brilliance of the language they were discussing.

“It’s like a language of fractals. There seems to be an immeasurable number of permutations. Each aspect of each equation that I write overrides the last.”

“How long do you have?” asked Fenton, skimming over the pages of the book and tapping out notes on his typewriter as he read.

Regent seated himself backwards on the chair of the next desk along, hugging its curved wooden back. “Three weeks yet. But I have nothing: no clue as to the name. The number of syllables? The letter with which the name starts? The prevalence of vowels, and which vowels? The phonotactics? Everything I try seems to be filtered through a layer of obscurity.” He unfurled his arms from around the chair, realising that he had been grasping it so tightly that long spiderwebbing marks caused by the pressure had begun to sprawl down his flesh. He dabbed at his brow with the back of his hand, and wished he could do the same for the clammy underneath of his knees.

Fenton, already immersed in several pages of notes pertaining to the book, glanced up over the long, low frames of his spectacles. “It’s nearing dawn, Regent. I’d suggest that you take a break. Go down to the Noodle Road Snuggery or the Markets. Or even back to your own bed. I’ll send notice if I come up with anything in your absence.”

Regent wanted to protest, but knew that doing so would be only out of the fear of Fenton’s making the sort of advance in the work that Regent held no hope of doing — which would be an inevitable outcome, anyway. He stood, straightening out his trousers so that they skimmed the tops of his narrow shoes.

The nerve passage running through his brow was stabbing sharply at his forehead, causing black spots to drill against his vision. The pain had spread through to the back of his skull and his neck; even his jaw was stiff. He did indeed need to rest: he was exhausted, in fact, but the pull of the Snuggery, at Fenton’s suggestion, no less, was far more appealing. Both for its proximity and the soft opium haze that made its name so apt.

•

Boy remained in the old church for most of the following month, venturing out during the day for a roll of smoked meat or a handful of lychees and starfruit, but avoiding the analytical stares of the bustling citizens and tourists. As he gradually grew used to the city and its abundance of muddled together cultural and class groups, he found that everyone moved with a fierce focus, in a linear fashion.

At one point he bumped into a newsprint vendor with the most vividly black skin Boy had ever seen, who thrust a ragged-edged sheet at him. The vendor’s fingers were swollen from arthritis, with his knuckles standing out like the thick wooden keys of hamlet flutes.

“The Mora!” bellowed the man, his tongue slavering from his mouth, covered in a thick yellowed paste. “Don’t you want to know about the Mils and the Mora?” He caught Boy’s arm, and Boy wondered whether those knotted fingers would grow into his flesh like roots.

Boy shook his head. “I don’t read,” he said simply. “I come from the hamlets.”

At this, the man’s gnarled fingers carved at Boy’s pale skin, leaving a series of jagged raw crescents like demented notes on a musical stave. His left pupil swam mistily back and forth beneath the shell of a cataract, and his right overcorrected as he sought Boy’s gaze. “Then how do you expect to know anything?” crowed the man, flashing filed-back gold teeth.

Boy pulled his arm away, rubbing at the vicious score printed into it. He dashed across an arched bridge heavy with mangoes and starfruit that had fallen from two entwined trees yawning up out of the Voda. An elephant-boy crawled about, a basket in either hand, selecting the darkest, softest fruit from the ripe mounds of pulp.

Boy ignored him, and leaning with his arms against a faded wooden balustrade, stared at the well-heeled patrons in a tri-level cafe carefully laughing and sipping at their drinks, and thought about what he knew.

His trek to the city, on foot and then the terrifying linked, open platforms of the rail-line that met the walls of the city before drowning beneath the black Voda water — this trek had been of such importance to him. Insightful, reverential, enlightening; time alone with himself, the book, and the teachings that coloured hamlet life from one’s very first days. It was this, this and the time he spent in the sad, anonymous church, that was sharply marked for him. Indeed, this city to him was a furious, seething mass of seemingly unconnected people, things, places, all nameless, all unknown; but little by little, it revealed itself to him, evolving from chaos into a perfect, clockwork whole.

And there was not only this, but the thought that he, a bastard, after all, had no name, yet he was he not perfectly capable of comprehending himself?

•

Regent lay on his back across a metal book trolley. If he jiggled his legs, its castored wheels shivered from side to side. He suspected that movement enough on his behalf could send it crashing into a bookcase.

He finished tallying up his results, and said glumly, “Three hundred and forty-six.” He waited not so patiently for Fenton to enlighten him as to his own number.

Fenton squinted myopically through his spectacles. He hesitated a moment before replying, drumming his spindly fingers against his typewriter. The ringing sound caused by this took a few moments to die away, but even once it had, Regent could not shake the eerie feeling that it somehow remained. “Six hundred and forty-three, I’m afraid.”