The Phenomenals: A Tangle of Traitors
Read The Phenomenals: A Tangle of Traitors Online
Authors: F. E. Higgins
To Violée and Flammando
ONTENTS
Chapter 9 Problems and Solutions
Chapter 17 The Lantern Bearers
Chapter 19 The Reluctant Burglar
Chapter 20 This Evening’s Entertainment
Chapter 23 A Turn-Up for the Books
Chapter 26 Blood Is Thicker than Water
Chapter 27 Whose Side Are You On?
Chapter 33 From the
Degringolade Daily
Lurid | | / |
Phenomenal | | /fuh- |
See also
Lemures, Vapids, Noctivagrantes,
et al.
HAPTER
1
HE
H
UNTER
The lucent moon cast her benign light across the glittering roofs of the northern city, and in that gentle light the frosted verges of the Great West Road gleamed eerily. An
echoing chime announced the impending arrival of 12 Nox. And marking each chime, like a macabre pendulum, a decaying skeletal form swung to and fro on the ancient gibbet at Quadrivium Crossroads.
Thus justice had been served.
Approaching this strangely affecting sight was a girl in a black leather paletot coat. Without hesitation she climbed the seven steps up to the platform and went straight to the body. She
steadied it with her hand and looked up at the face. The features were unrecognizable; the local corvids had picked the flesh down to the bone.
‘Domna,’ she murmured, wrinkling her nose at the smell. ‘It’s not just the birds that have been at you.’ She lifted the sleeve of his left arm. His hand was gone,
severed neatly at the wrist. From the way his trousers flapped, she could tell that his left leg was also missing. ‘Silvan beluae?’ she wondered, and looked over her shoulder at the
dark forest some miles distant from the city. ‘But they rarely leave the woods.’
She jumped down from the platform, her thick-soled boots leaving a deep impression in the dirt, and was walking away when she saw two men come shuffling up to the gibbet. They were pushing a
long, narrow handcart. They too climbed the steps and, as one sawed through the thick rope, the other stood ready to catch the body. It rattled as it fell and its skull snapped off and rolled on to
the platform.
‘What was his crime?’ she asked.
Both men started at the sound of her voice. ‘Thievery and murder,’ said the man with the knife, peering down from the platform at what he took for a blond youth. ‘Robbed a
perfumer’s and killed an Urban Guardsman.’
‘Could do with some perfume now,’ joked the second man.
Together they took the body and dumped it unceremoniously on to the handcart. The girl flinched. Even a criminal deserved a little more respect than that. She caught up with them as they started
to wheel the cart away.
‘Where will you take him?’
‘To the Tar Pit. That’s where they all go. Best place for ’is kind. Nany graveyard’ll have ’im.’
The men hurried off one way and the girl watched them for a while before going in another. Her manuslantern swung back and forth at her side, casting an orange glow. She walked quickly,
purposefully, the city lights twinkling behind her. The road was rutted, and the verges lined with ragged bushes and trees.
Shortly she came to two imposing granite pillars, once a magnificent gateway but now showing signs of dereliction. The stone arch that had spanned the gap between them lay nearby broken in two.
The girl passed between the pillars and veered off to the left. The landscape changed, stretching away from her darkly, and the ground underfoot was no longer firm. Pools of water reflected the
shining moon, and above a myriad blue lights flitted around, tempting her to follow them. But she maintained her path.
‘You won’t catch me out,’ she said, laughing. ‘Nany Puca will get me tonight!’
She continued, trying to ignore the constant howling that filled the air, to a set of iron railings. She followed them round to a pair of gates, rusted off their hinges, and as she passed
between them she read the words wrought into the iron:
D
EGRINGOLADE
K
OMATERION
In the adumbral komaterion the air of abandonment was tangible. Mossy headstones and statues were barely visible above the tall grass. The girl walked on, stumbling
occasionally, until she came upon a small dark building almost completely hidden in the undergrowth and covered in thick ivy. Its wide door was flanked by two columns which supported a pediment in
the classical style. This was a kryptos, a building within which lay the bodies of the dead.
The girl took a large key from her pocket, unlocked the door and entered the musty tomb.
‘Well, Folly,’ she said to herself, ‘home, sweet home. At least for now.’
HAPTER
2
HE
T
HIEF
‘Spletivus!’ oathed Vincent, with justifiable feeling, as he watched the triangular piece of stone fall to the ground some fifty feet below him. It shattered. Only
moments earlier his entire body weight had been supported by those fragments.
He laughed lightly at the near miss; it was not the first in his young life. As he continued to inch along the crumbling narrow ledge that ran across the front of the house he exhaled slowly and
deliberately. He was not a stranger to precarity, but his current position was more precarious than most. He was four floors up; if he fell he too would shatter like that stone and be dead for
sure. He wondered how many seconds it would take before he hit the ground.
But he had no intention of falling. There was a balcony to his left by which he planned to make good his escape through the house. Then the unmistakable sound of a sash window being thrown up
caused him to reconsider. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a man craning his neck through the window. He groaned. ‘Constable Weed.’
‘We’ve got you this time, lad,’ crowed the uniformed man triumphantly. ‘You might as well give up now.’
Vincent looked to his left. Now there was another constable on the balcony. He stood at the railing with his arms crossed over his chest. ‘It’s the end of the line for you,
sonny,’ he said. ‘The Pilfering Picklock will be no more.’
Vincent grinned. ‘If you want me you’ll have to come and get me.’
Both men frowned. ‘You’ve got nowhere to go,’ said Constable Weed. ‘Don’t be a fool. Come back.’
Vincent laughed. ‘To face the hangman’s noose? Not a chance, gentlemen.’
He took a small grappling hook on a rope from under his long cloak and tossed it expertly on to the balcony, causing the constable to step back rapidly. He yanked sharply on it, pulling it back
and securing it to the balusters. Then, before the disbelieving eyes of Constable Weed and his gape-mouthed companion, Vincent jumped out from the ledge to swing back into the house through the
window below the balcony. He landed in a shower of glass but, cat-like, on his two feet. He brushed down his cloak and looked around.
He was in a large bedroom. The occupant of the four-poster bed in the centre of the room, around which were pulled heavy curtains to keep out the winter’s cold, had been snoring loudly.
Not any more. A fat nightcapped head appeared from behind the drapes.
‘Evening, my good fellow,’ said Vincent.
‘What the . . . ?’ spluttered the man, but Vincent dazzled him with a beam of light from a device he had concealed in his hand. Then he raced to the door, opened it as wide as it
would go and promptly hid behind it. The two constables came running in at the same time as the man emerged from his bed.
‘We’re after the Pilfering Picklock,’ shouted Weed. ‘He came into your room.’
‘Good Lord! Then I think he just ran out again,’ said the man, still blinded by the flash of light and the fact that he had drunk rather more port than was good for him that
evening.
‘Search every niche, every nook and every cranny in the house,’ ordered the other constable.
So all three – the woozy sleeper and the two constables – hurried from the room to join other members of the household, which included a number of servants whose irritation at being
disturbed from their sleep was tempered rather nicely by the fact that their rich and less-than-generous employer had become the latest victim of the notorious thief.
The Pilfering Picklock himself waited until the syncopated footsteps faded, before pushing the door shut. With a practised eye he glanced around the spacious room. On the nightstand there was a
crystal glass with a good two inches of red wine in it. He helped himself, of course, to the diamond cufflinks that sat next to the glass and slipped them into one of his many pockets. There was a
gilded dressing mirror in a corner of the room and Vincent caught sight of himself. He pushed back his hood, smoothed down his cloak, bulging as it was with spoils, and ran his hand through his
thick dark hair. He smiled his winning smile.
‘Vincent, you are a handsome fellow, no doubt!’
Then, aware that time was of the essence, he poked his head out into the corridor. A solitary gaslight glowed gently further down the hall. He could hear a medley of excited voices, but they
were safely distant. He crept along the hall and skipped lightly down the stairs, three flights in all, sliding down the final banister (oh, they knew how to polish treen, these servants) and
hurried to the front door. It was chained and bolted and locked and the key was gone.
‘Ha,’ laughed Vincent softly. ‘No doubt in my honour.’
He took from his belt what looked like a pair of long black pins. Seconds later the lock was picked and he was out on the street. He glanced up at the hook and rope with regret. He hated to lose
any of the tools of his trade, but sacrifices had to be made. He walked quickly away from the house and, when a large barrel-laden wagon passed by, stepped into the road and hailed it. The driver
looked him up and down.
‘Any chance of a ride?’ asked Vincent, and flashed his smile. ‘I can pay.’
The driver, a ruddy-faced fellow with big hands, mumbled something which Vincent took as a yes.
‘Splendid,’ he said cheerfully, and climbed up. As he settled into his seat he saw a copy of the local newspaper. And there in black and white on the front page was a head and
shoulders portrait of a boy hardly recognizable as himself. The artist had had no choice but to draw him with his black hood up and his eye-mask. He smiled at the headline: