The air on Catglass Street rattled with coincidence. Thin trails of smoke spiralling upwards and catching in a breeze and sloping alleys smelling of salted mushroom flesh, nose-wrinkling spice. Rising singing humming murmur and the crowd was sounding nearly melodic, something musical in the rustling robes and bumping shoulders and mismatched forms and colours and furious mustachioed men ranting at one another about personal space.
The Nukesmiths Guild were making art somewhere in the Crumbledowns and the air carried a faint faraway stink of something airy and electrical. The telescopes rose atop the flat roofs, and glinting sunlight ran down their edges and they rattled hollow in the wind. Tiny gods lived in the pipes and in the drains and in the cracks in the road and kept it all running and you could see them skittering and arguing sometimes if you glanced fast enough.
Tap tap tap on dusty cobblestone of a private raft, woody feet plunging up and out of the swirling, sweeping, oceanic crowd, roots and wood and leaf enwrapping, swimmingly high above, a rotund metal carriage. Somebody threw a rock at it–it dinged off the side, cracked a hole through the roof of an apathetic Candlesmith’s street stall. Whoever was inside the raft yelped.
Noone*Nofolk’s religious practices did not allow her to believe in the existence of coincidences. Pigmentation in the skin of Saint Chromatore shifted in response to ineffable urges in that immense sentience. It was called metachrosis, actually, and three-compressional sorts like her perceived it like gravity, entropy, time, events.
It was, as according to the West-Motterian Calendar, the second moon-semigaze of the season of Stones-Waking, 4377 years (or something like that) after the deaths of the giants Belemnite-in-Veils and Saint Shattered, and about 322 years since the city of Claire-Who-Named-Itself went absolutely nuts during that great big nasty civil war and ate the entire palace, with the royal family and a few shrieking aristocrats in it (though Noone did not believe in time beyond its status as a societal measurement of perceived linear entropy.)
The air stunk like pollen and spores. Sentience was in the air, thick in the cool wind and the blinding sunlight, kept suddenly imbuing itself in inconvenient places and turning them briefly, panickedly, alive. A worker from the Saint Shattered Never Died Labourer’s Society sprinted down the street past Noone, loud yellow robes flapping, waving a hammer at a shuffling and suddenly alive plank of spindleshroom.
Metachrosis was everywhere, was wild, that day.
She could see patterns everywhere, or at least the edges of them, the clicking clacking turning movements of invisible things underneath everything. The bones of the universe bumping against the skin. Noone*Nofolk could see patterns in the fat dark forms of the dinnerbirds swirling in the bloated languid blue sky, saw patterns in the footsteps, the ebbing flowing of the crowd. Saw patterns in the formations the ants took over the spindleplanks of the building to her side. Sometimes she heard in the muffled babbling in the crowd something like her own name being sung: ‘Noone knows, Noone knows, Noone knows.’
You could tell the future, if you read those patterns well enough. Noone was rubbish at it. Her grasp on the linear progression of time was too tough and she kept getting caught on sudden hours or interesting minutes. That was how it went. She was, apparently, human. Metachrosis shifted, pigments moved.
She was from the Moon, she recalled; had sailed down in one of those great ominous black sailboats and landed at one of the ports in the Mouth District in the dead of night when smokers wept in the streets and bioluminescent corpses arose in the swilling, sloshing water and the folk from the Scrimshanders Guild with the fishbone charms rattling wrapped them in ropes and dragged them up dark roads.
She had a propensity for darkness. This was not entirely intentional–she was a small woman, and round, and gravitated naturally towards corners, shade, cool and less crowded places. Her skin was grey like moonrock, blended well into shadows. She was not accustomed to the sunlight on Giantsmade.
She was dressed in the lunar fashion, wormskin cloak refracting sunlight, hefty frog hide boots–trousers. She hadn’t seen a single proper pair of trousers anywhere since she had stepped off from the port. It was all robes, skirts, swishing flailing in bedazzling colours. It all honestly looked very nice, to her, not that she would ever be caught wearing any of it.
Her belongings thumped and clinked in her roachbag, tiptaptiptapping gently alongside her, pressing close. She kept her hand tight around its leash.
She was a small woman though, not half as small as she always seemed. Her glancing gave her away. A sort of rodentine panic. She always gave off the sense that she was searching for an escape route. She was, also, not particularly fond of herself. People like that tend to make themselves small, somehow.
22nd Catglass Street. Coincidence, coincidence. Had Noone been a Bihemispherist she would have been astounded at the numerological implications. Twenty-two, the perfect number. Reverse and inverse, up and down, solve and coagula, great SUNMOON curseblessed, the two hemispheres in perfect opposition, mating endlessly together and with themselves to birth spacetime. It would have floored a Bihemispheric priest–as she was, she did not notice anything special about the address other than the musty watery stink coming from it. Numbers had no special significance to Saint Chromatophore because nothing was significant to Saint Chromatophore. Nothing was significant to Noone, either. She didn’t think about this much.
22nd Catglass Street was wedged hard between a set of flats and a darkened and hollow restaurant claiming ‘GENUINE CAVERN-FOREST CUISINE’ that looked like it hadn’t been in business for years. It was one of the old, tatty buildings that slumped uselessly between newer constructions, a squat sad rectangle hunched and rotting inside out. Huge brown bricks, cracked and dimpled, dry vine creeping out of a wretched and dirty garden and clutching its side. Fat round pits the size of fists were carved in its walls in irregular groups, from top to bottom. Bihemispheric dot poetry. Very important and symbolic religious type stuff that Noone had no idea how to read.
A lumpy spindleplank garage had been installed on the side of the building, hefty carapace doors, and she could see through gaps in the timber scattered machinery and disorganised equipment, none of which she even remotely recognised. There was a brass telescope on the roof, hunched over like a mourner, tarnished and lensless. By the door, in lumpy fresh red paint, rushed script and wavy lines, read graffiti saying:
WIDDERSHINS RECONCEIVISTATES SUNMOON
WIDDERSHINS
HORIZON PEEL AWAY AS GRAPES (WIDDERSHINS)
HENCEFORTH;; THE KNIGHTS SUGGESTED
Noone didn’t know how confused this was supposed to make her. Everything confused her, lately. She gazed at it blandly, silently–and shook herself. She rubbed her forehead and sighed and knocked on the door and felt weightless in all the coincidence–metachrosis–that had led her here. She stood in silence, gently buffeted by the passing crowd. She knocked again. She heard, faint:
‘It’s unlocked daahlin, just come in.’
‘Er.’ She glanced around, pushed her way through the door.
It opened on a jagged and close wooden staircase with torn spiderwebs and a dark grit in the corners and the roof and walls hunching oppressively above. The air was cold and clammy and was reaching out to grasp her. She stepped in.
‘Hallo daahlin. How are you, hmm? Are you from around heah? Are you new? You’ll love it here, deah, I know you will. Oh, it grinds against some, but everyone loves Claire back a little in the end!’
Noone was not sure what to say to the grey stone carved lips that were chattering and flapping at her from the wall. She settled for: ‘Wow.’
‘Oh, oh, ooh, paahdon me! You must be so busy–just give me your name, daahlin, and go right up. Feed me the sheets when you’ve done them, kay?’
‘Yes. Uhm. Noone*Nofolk.’ Noone nodded and tried to smile.
‘Noone… hem… say, how do you pronounce that? The… middle part?’
‘You have to roll your tongue a lot, and widen your throat,’ Noone explained.
‘Ah-hah. And–please close the door, deah!’
Noone nodded again, tried to smile again, and raced up the stairs, roachbag tiptaptiptapping along. She scrabbled back down, shut the door, raced right back up.
The room above wasn’t much more spacious than the staircase, though Noone at least didn’t feel like she was being actively strangled. She had a sensation of being in an attic, or a large closet–like some custodial subspace of the building, rather than an actual central room. The ceiling sloped in at the far end–the windows that had their curtains open let in a brownish, stained light, lit up lazy drifting dust motes. Something was dripping and it smelled like wet mushrooms. It was cool, dark, wretched, and Noone quite liked it. Rows of lonely, empty, inconveniently small desks lined the room–a larger desk at the very end overflowed with sheets, folders, tablets.
Something stirred.
Noone’s blood ran cold. She gaped. She was dinging between fight and flight and couldn’t pick either.
It was in the far corner, a blackened edge of the room. It pushed a chair back, wavering, swivelling. It was a shadow thing, amorphous, it stretched upwards and reached, gangling, outwards. Noone saw teeth like butcher knives, bright white and glinting, Noone saw them in rows, psychedelic–a long hall of them spiralling downwards, jagged, falling falling falling and more teeth popping up like pine trees over the horizon and it stepped towards her and said:
‘Hey ceev you’re the new guy right?’
Noone felt like she was going to crack in half. She exhaled. Her mouth was dry and felt shrivelled.
In the dirty light and the flitting motes, it was a woman. Or, the general form of a woman–the formative conceptual basis of a woman. She was unbelievably tall, and she wavered. There was an inconsistency boiling in her being. She seemed tenuous. Her presence swam.
She was, in general, gangling. She loomed over Noone, batted her head against the ceiling even while leaning on a nearby desk and resting her chin in a hand. Her feet were talons, like a chicken’s or a crow’s, great ripping claws and scales. She was grinning lazily, calmly, almost approachably except that when Noone saw her teeth prey instinct flitted through her, and when Noone looked too long at her eyes she realised something was off in them, in the colours, the dimensions–geometries?
‘Oh, ceev! I’m sorry. I blend in, like, really well in the darkness, haha. It’s like a carnivore instinct thing yakknow?’ She looked up and rolled her head side to side while she pondered the appropriateness of mentioning her culinary habits to the new recruit who was in the process of fending off a heart attack. ‘I don’t even like eating people, no worries.’
She had curly auburn hair and sleepy eyes and a casualness that permeated her entire body so that she seemed to be always leaning on something, head tilted to the side. She was wearing what Noone had determined to be the centrality of fashion in Claire: a robe of obnoxious colours (the woman’s went yellow at her upper torso, orange around the bottom, green on its edges) closed with beetle carapace buttons and bound at the waist, a wide-brimmed hat of dried scorngrass and a series of intricately carved fishbone charms hanging from her neck by strings. It all slumped messily on her in a way that looked almost fashionable.
Noone inhaled. Exhaled. Slowed her heart. Reflected on the inherent fakeness of all things and the arbitrariness of all belief. ‘Hi.’
‘Hey,’ said the woman. Her smile was very wide.
‘Um. So. You’re new, too?’
‘Nnnnnaw.’ The woman shrugged widely and glanced back at her own desk in the darkness. There was the vague sensation of papers strewn lazily about, hanging off the sides. ‘I munted up my first forms and they’ve only like, checked them now. So I’ve gotta do them again. You’ll love this job if you like bureaucracy.’
Noone loved bureaucracy. Bureaucracy had the power to erase her almost entirely, except for her most basal, most miniscule form. So that nothing ever relied on her, and nothing would ever be screwed up by her, that she could sit in some cubicle somewhere and tug on a lever and she would be helpful. She would have a chair of some soft material with a spinning base, perhaps–she dared dream–with small wheels at its bottom. And every once and then women in tight suits and thin dresses and glossy lip dressing she could never figure out the origin of would come in and congratulate her and nod at her like she was smart, and thank her for being so very helpful and empathic and so on, so on. That sort of stuff nearly made her drool.
Noone silently drooled a little.
‘Yeah, that’s the spirit! Kinda weird ceev but you do you!’
Noone snapped herself out of it and awkwardly shuffled to the end of the room, leaving behind an orchestra of unfortunate creaks and clatters. The tapping of the roachbag sounded unbearably loud. She lifted up the sheets, shuffled them in her hands, gazed over them. There were beetle carapace pens in a pot uncomfortably close to the table’s edge that Noone pushed inwards, to safety. She was vaguely aware of how to use them.
‘Hey can you grab me one of those pens? Mine’s nearly out.’
Noone took a second pen, turned around. The woman was grinning widely at her. She seemed unreasonably happy, burningly enthused to be in the presence of another person. The seeping, straight-backed, unstoppable force that was social obligation crept through Noone’s spine. She’d probably look like a real arsehole, if she didn’t sit right next to her.
So she did.
‘Thanks ceev,’ said the woman, twiddling her empty carapace pen through her fingers, up to her mouth, where she downed it in two bites. Noone tried not to stare. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Noone*Nofolk.’ Noone caught the question right out of her lips. ‘You have to roll your tongue a lot, and widen your throat.’
‘Sweet! I like it.’ She sat there for a few moments, enunciating. Noone caught her rolling her throat and widening her tongue and felt too awkward to criticise her on it.
‘I’m Bought-At-The-Northmarkets-For-A-Reasonable-Price.’ The woman winked. ‘Call me Boughtey.’
‘Well. Er. Hi, Boughtey.’
‘Hey, Noone!’
Noone then hunched over, pretending to focus on her sheets. She had seven to get through. She glanced at Boughtey, who was now polishing a thin grey pipe with a rag, was now lighting its end with a hardfire box, was sitting back and gazing at the ceiling and puffing swirling trails of silvery smoke that sparked, turned bright blue before coughing out of existence. She side-eyed Noone suddenly.
‘You take the arcbark, Noone?’ she asked, holding out the pipe.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The architect’s bark, my ceev.’
‘No, no, sorry.’ Noone hunched over and pretended to focus on her sheets. She dawdled with the pen.
‘That’s probably smart. More for me!’
The citizenship questions were strangely difficult. She felt like she was making up everything as she went along, wasn’t so much dredging up memories as she was hastily unburying quick lies that sort of all fit together. She was from Saint Chromatophore in the Rabbitswest-Range on the Moon, was a woman, aged twenty-two (Bihemispheric implications roared and panicked and she did not notice). She was not currently cursed nor had she any memory of having ever been cursed, nor had she been hexed, jinxed, plagued, or otherwise maledicted. Her perception of reality was limited to only her own compression, except in cases of high religious perceptual transcension, when she realised the falsity of perception and therefore existed in all compressions and none at once (this was actually only the fourth box down). Her opinion on fires was a solid negative and she did not believe in the existence of life or sentience within fires (she was actually ambivalent to the possibility of life or sentience within fires, however, she felt like these questions, in particular, were important to the job she was signing up for.)
She pondered again the movements of metachrosis that had directed her to this moment. For instance: the ragged and ignored poster nailed to one of those massive, over-bright street-lights in the Mouth District right off the ports. It was a sad, neglected thing, briny, sides torn. Ocean breezes, rife with garbled mutters of drowned sailors battered it and it looked like someone keeling over to die. The heaving orange lights seared down on it, great blaring cone in the shady deep-blue evening. She felt cold to the bone there, in the night with the raw breezes slicing and the air sharp with moisture, but it had grabbed her. There were other posters, too, other street-lights with their posters. She was aware of it even as it had her caught: pigmentation was shifting. She was caught in coincidence (though she did not believe in it), a mad, ineffable move of metachrosis. It had said this:
an ALL NEW form of PUBLIC SERVICE
help GIVE BACK to OUR GREAT MUNICIPOCRACY and to the famous
CITY THAT NAMED ITSELF (claire)
the world’s VERY FIRST FIRE-COMBATING SQUADRON:
THE MUNICIPAL VIGILES
(referring to vigilant like eyes like watching for fires)
are you ready to BE A HERO MAKE A DIFFERENCE MAKE A CHANGE BE A HERO?
~ please fix this, slubber
sign up at 22nd catglass street
no documentation or experience necessary, ability to audibly vocalise ideal (but not necessary), all perceptual zones under 47 compressions accepted. Quantoforms NEED NOT APPLY.
It was of course a godsend to Noone, who lacked both documentation and experience, who could vocalise, who was not a quantoform and was in fact made mostly of carbon and who as such generally stuck around a perceptual zone of three compressions. It evidently wouldn’t be much money, and probably wouldn’t be particularly good work–but there it was, hanging right in front of her, right for the picking.
But there was something else, too. It was embarrassing, actually, and she loathed to admit it to even herself, let alone anybody else.
Noone really did think she could make a difference.
‘Does it really count as a “criminal record” if you never technically did anything wrong?’
‘Um?’
‘Like–’ Boughtey was leaning dangerously back in her chair, paper in hand. ‘I’d call it more like, really bad communication from both sides. Really. You know?’
‘Maybe? Well. Probably.’
‘Yeah.’ Boughtey sniffed, nodded. ‘I’ll just put “no”, hey?’
‘Um.’
The filling of the sheets went onwards like this. Moments of a creaking, distraught silence, with the wind whipping at the windows and the muffled warbling noises of the streets rumbling, broken up occasionally by a question from Boughtey whose answer she invariably seemed to have already decided. Noone had come to the conclusion that this woman was either a burglar or a cannibal–the possibility that she was both surfaced occasionally, too, though she attempted to remain optimistic.
Nobody else entered the building. The stack of sheets on the front desk remained monolithic. Noone sniffed and pondered her employment choices.
And they were done.
Actually, Noone was done, had checked over her sheets and now stood, slowly, up. Boughtey glanced up, looked at Noone, peered out the window, held up one of her fishbone charms to the sky, measuring the sun–’Oh! Oh, I’m gonna miss the lunch muffins.’
She leant over and scribbled with a mad haste. Her writing, which Noone saw was already not particularly orderly, became a jaggedy, almost artistic scrawl. And she stood up, clutching her papers, grinning with the blithe certainty of someone who did not care that everything they had just written was probably wrong.
The lips started greeting them the second they reached the stairs, flapping and dancing on the wall. ‘Daaahlins, yaw finally done. It’s so good to see you again Boughtey.’
‘Hey, Miss Leen.’
‘I hope ya didn’t screw up ya sheets again. I love ya Boughtey but ya know how clerical errors give me such awful indigestion.’
‘Aw, naw, Leen. This one is watertight. I swear it.’ She winked.
‘Well, I implicitly trust ya Boughtey and I put my full faith in ya competence and respect for other peoples’ time and health.’ Boughtey rolled her papers awkwardly together and stuffed them them into Leen’s mouth. She crunched and chomped and snrfled, licked her lips and burped. She then coughed, gagged a bit, and spat a card out into Boughtey’s opened hand.
‘You too now, Noone.’ The lips smiled at Noone. Boughtey smiled at her, too. Noone wasn’t sure why so many people were smiling at her, today. She carefully rolled her sheets, placed them gently up to the lips–crunch and chomp and snrfle.
‘Thank ya, daahlin. I can tell this one’s going to be good.’
Cough, gag, and Noone flailed to catch the card. It was completely dry and slightly warm, almost pleasant to touch. It certified her, apparently, for Halfblink-Class Glasswork Machinery.
Boughtey slapped Noone’s shoulder as they descended the stairs.
‘They’ll love you, ceev! You seem all responsible. But not responsible enough to avoid a job like this which–really–is an giant and obvious red flag! You’ll fit right in!’
‘Thank you?’
It was that exact moment that Boughtey fell right in love with Noone*Nofolk. She had actually already fallen a little bit in love with her when she first walked in, though that was merely preliminary. This was more of a confirmation, or a scientific proving, of an initial theory. This was not an uncommon feeling for Boughtey. She was implicitly fond of most things, fonder of most people. She was good at digging out the good parts of people, even better at ignoring the negative parts unless they really jutted out and jabbed at her.
Boughtey had grown up in Claire and had never gone far from its bounds. She was a Bihemispherist despite the fact that Bihemispheric iconography and terminology literally stung her like fire. She believed in Betweenism, too, even though she barely knew anything about it.
She was part human and part Cavern-Forest cannibal spirit and therefore added up to a stunning mathematical nothing. She had no possessions, was, in terms of real estate, a puff of smelly air. The humans in Claire always thought she was going to either eat them or try to buy off their firstborn son and eat that, while the Cavern-Forest spirits treated her as esoterically as they treated everyone else. Temporally, too, she had nothing, no prospects past, nothing in the present, certainly nothing in the future. She was between everything and it was all out of her reach.
But if Boughtey had anything, it was people. She cared about them very much. Boughtey thought love really could move mountains, for whatever reason one could so desire to move a mountain. To–she figured, to herself–gain access to the bountiful ores and natural resources within, perhaps, or make room for a very large public swimming pool.
So, she fell in love with Noone*Nofolk. Noone was (or, rather, seemed) small and honest and deeply concerned. She had a nice jacket and nice boots and round poofy hair that Boughtey was mildly envious of and really wanted to poke. She looked soft. She was sad and serious and her frown looked baked onto her face. Her writing was small and compact and pretty. Words like ‘service’ and ‘community’ and ‘justice’ kept coming up.
She wouldn’t survive a second in Claire. Boughtey was (or thought she was) familiar with her type. She’d get rolled up and exploited. Tossed into the Crumbledowns, ripped off in a wormsniff bar, eaten alive by something in the river. Mugged in a side alley, trapped in a conceptual existing-not existing state in a Swallowing-of-Clouds seasonal flope. There would be no mercy for someone like her.
Boughtey wanted to help her.
Boughtey stretched when they left the confines of the building, grunted and felt the gentle fingers of sunlight warm her, listened to the musical murmur of passing crowds, balmy midday winds flitting off stone walls and fences and against her. Heard close the pipes and streets grinding beneath, subtly rearranging, Claire’s veins pumping, the city thinking and breathing and thrumming. Dry leaves like gravel trickling over stone. Sentience was everywhere. It bounced off the bricks. Claire talked to Boughtey, and she talked back, sometimes.
‘Um?’ said Noone, awkwardly hanging around behind her, glancing around for direction.
Boughtey nodded, grinned, pointed with a thumb at the thin space between their building and the apartments. The bricks always seemed moist there and scraggly grass grew through the stone flooring where it could.
‘The meeting room is meant to be like, the front,’ Boughtey explained, checking Noone was following her down the alley. ‘But the streets rearranged so now we’re sorta backwards. I reckon Miro’s pissed off Claire, if you ask me.’
‘Miro?’
‘Admiro! The manager, yakknow? He hates it when I call him that so I always call him that. You should, too. It’s pretty funny.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. He’s a real dickhead.’
‘Oh.’
The backyard was tiny and barren, mismatched bricks with weeds jutting from their sides and cobwebs hanging dusty in the scratches in the ragged wood fencing. Barrenness was a general theme in Claire, and the only plantation that could survive was knobbly barked, fronds razor sharp, capable of navigating through the great stacks of old bones Claire built itself on, the piles and piles of abandoned, buried villages, towns, cities, hastily excavated and replaced buildings.
Even this barrenness was unique.
There was a single clay pot in one forlorn corner, bricks stained and a single brutal branch breaching the dry soil, grasping monstrously at air, at life, tiny green rebel leaves shooting outwards. The vines on the fence were dead and looked like they would crumble at the touch.
The door clicked and clacked petulantly at Boughtey’s attempts to pull it open–she turned, grinned awkwardly at Noone, worked desperately at it, growing impatient.
‘Hey!’ She jiggled it. Something snapped inside it that probably shouldn’t have been snapping. ‘You guys left muffins right?!’
She stood straight and shook her head. ‘Damn. I’m sure they’re like… up to super responsible and distracting work in there. Damn. I’ll have to be illegal.’
‘Illegal?’ said Noone. ‘You’re going to break the law?’ She realised that she would probably be considered an accomplice. ‘We’re going to break the law?’
‘Yeah. That’s what illegal means. Isn’t it?’ Boughtey asked this dead serious and locked eyes with Noone.
‘Um. Yes?’
‘Well, it’s not breaking the law if the law is dumb,’ she said, now fishing through pockets.
Noone was beginning to sweat. She felt like she was made of lead. This woman–Boughtey–was an invincible, unstoppable force. She could have done anything in that moment and Noone wouldn’t have made a single move. ‘But it is. Legally! There’s–there’s no reference in any piece of Claire legislation to dumbness. At all. It never even mentions the word. What would even define dumbness? Isn’t that subjective? You can’t apply this to a legal system–not a just one.’
‘Ceev did you read, like, all of Claire’s legislation?’
‘Not all of it.’ Noone folded her arms, tilted her head side to side. ‘Lots of it. It’s good to know and I had time on the boat. And it’s surprisingly interesting. Did you know that “irascible hooliganry” is constitutionally illegal?’
Boughtey looked blankly at Noone. Noone looked blankly back at Noone. Noone had a sensation that the barely existing rapport between them had snapped in one blow.
‘That’s sweet as hell,’ said Boughtey, grinning, and she placed her scorngrass hat over her head, glanced over her shoulder, up to the sky, pulled a set of battered lockpicks from a pocket and began going at the locks. ‘You can be like… my lookout. So I know what’s illegal and what isn’t before I do it.’
‘Umm! Okay! Lockpicking is illegal, for one!’
‘Yeah? I guess this isn’t really working, anyway.’ Boughtey held her lockpicks up to the air and frowned at them. They were old and bent and Boughtey shrugged and dropped them down her throat like a bunch of corn chips. ‘Can you like, stand a little to the side?’ she said, slightly muffled, still chewing, crunching, bending. ‘So the sun and sky can’t really see me?’
Noone shuffled awkwardly, confusedly, to the side, her own shadow shuffling along. ‘Like this?’
‘Yeah ceev.’
‘What are you–’
‘I dunno if this is like, “law illegal”, but this is totally illegal against, yakknow, divine rules and the Bihemisphere and all that.’ She was floaty and mesmerising in the shadows. Vague and ethereal and she reached her arm around the crack of the door and–slipped through.
She slipped further in. The door ate her chest. She slipped only part of her head through–just one eye–so that her head seemed to shrink in on itself where the door closed. ‘Hey so is this illegal?’
‘Umm! Breaking and entering by means of paracompression or other forms of witch-arts is slightly more illegal than regular breaking and entering.’ Noone rubbed her hands together, digging around in her head for more rules she could recall. ‘Um. While blasphemy hasn’t been illegal since 3411, it might be argued, in court, to be religious discrimination.’
‘Haha. Hell yeah.’
They looked into each other’s eyes as Boughtey flailed awkwardly against the wall.
Surr Alto Iridescent-Billsmough and Captain Slubber-Gulpford were doing irresponsible and distracting un-work. They were fighting over the final lunch muffin and were so absorbed in their efforts they didn’t even notice Boughtey’s arm flapping around through the crack in the door, let alone the knocking earlier.
‘Jeeze Bill. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use some kinda… blade to reach me up here. Right? Right in that scabbard, there?’
‘I would have to be stupid to fall for such a blatant trick!’
Slubber picked off paint from the ceiling, shaved another few chocolate crumbles off the muffin, let it all drift downwards to dejectedly bounce off his helmet. He didn’t even bother trying to avoid it. She held the muffin boldly upwards.
‘Damme you, witch! Candle-Thief!’
She bit it clean in half, paper and all.
‘Damme you!’ Alto howled, reaching for his glassblade at lightning speed. Three hundred years of training bled into his veilsglass lined carapace. Glass joints ratcheted and warped, the scabbard clicked as he removed the blade, he stepped forwards with monstrous grace and the carved fishbone beetle dug its jaws into his sword-arm and he screamed bloody agony and collapsed in a rattling paralytic heap. He sounded like an entire kitchen turned upside down.
‘GNGNGNGNGNGNNGNGNGNGGNGNGN,’ was the general noise he made.
The door clicked and swung open.
‘Anyways ceev, you’ll like the others. We might seem useless from the outside or whatever but we’re like hyper-competent.’
‘GNGNGNGGNGNGNGNG,’ added Alto from the floor.
The room was a cramped, dark mess. Shades of brown and dusty shadows, beams of sunlight scanning the edges of an ancient and ragged table with one leg shorter than the other. There was a hollowness in there, like it had been killed long ago, like it was fossilised, some dry shell. Another table was backed into the far end of the room and stacked on it was–anything. Chairs, parts of chairs, something that might have been a spinnis-tubule at some point, a bent telescope, straight up unrefined logs of spindleshroom. The lanterns had flecks of verdigris on them. It all looked astoundingly flammable. Noone practically shook and buckled under all the health and safety laws the place was breaking.
‘Hey so you guys left muffins right? We have a new recruit!’ She slipped her arm around Noone’s shoulders with carnivore speed. Noone couldn’t even react. She tried to smile and kept thinking about how that light fixture that Candle-Eater was clinging onto looked very poorly screwed on.
‘Our captain has consumed the final one, and right before my very eyes. I did all I could to stop her. But the enemy is hasty, and quick-witted, and skilled in, in cheap trickery, and cruel traps.’ Lazy trails of smoke wafted from the slits in the man’s carapace-glass armour. His helmet was wedge-shaped and the three slits were thin and vertical. There was no way he should have been able to see.
The Candle-Eater cackled shrilly and sprinkled down more dried paint. She swung off the light fixture, skittered upside down, wedged herself in between the roof and a large rusted bell right above Noone.
‘Newwwwwwwbie.’ She rolled the word around in her mouth. She giggled to herself at some joke Noone was unaware of. ‘Cute. That’s cute. I reckon with you around Miro can get those juicy tax cuts.’
‘Um?’ said Noone.
‘Hi Slubber! This is Noone, uh,’ she enunciated random vowels for a few moments. ‘Nofolk! And, Noone, this is our Captain, Slubber-Gulpford.’ Boughtey leaned in. ‘Don’t let her higher position spook you! She’s super nice and relateable.’
‘You a criminal Noone?’
‘Um!’
‘Aw, ceev, she loves the law.’ She looked at Noone. ‘Right?’
Noone babbled for a second. She straightened her back. Her manager was hanging above her, grinning ghoulishly. Noone had instincts for these situations.
‘Hello! I am Noone*Nofolk! My criminal record is nonexistent. I am from Saint Chromatophore on the Moon. I have an eye for detail. In my free time I enjoy reading non-fictional books and squidskin-shifting. And not breaking the law. Er. I know how to juggle.’
‘Nevermind. Looks like you’re alone again, Alto,’ said Slubber, and Alto grunted in response. ‘Very fascinating.’ She grinned jaggedy blunt teeth. ‘You got an autobiography in that roachbag there for me?’
‘No! But! If the position so requires it, I can write one! I am highly skilled and experienced in writing and have received third place in two unrelated writing competitions in Saint Chromatophore!’
‘Yeah!’ said Boughtey, shaking Noone jovially within her arm. ‘She’s great, right?’
Slubber cackled. She cackled and cackled. She had a long reptilian face that tapered to a knife-sharp point so that it was nearly a snout. She had rows of teeth that were wide, blunt, squarish. She was one of the smallest Candle-Eaters Noone had ever seen, though there were admittedly few Candle-Eaters living on the Moon.
‘Listen. Listen.’ She dropped down from the floorboard and looked upwards at Noone, who, somehow, still felt dwarfed. ‘Just don’t screw with me. Hey? I don’t think you will. You read as real boot-lickey. I like that.’
‘Uh!’
‘What’d I just say? Don’t screw with me!’
‘Sorry!’
‘Nevermind. You’re a rebel. A hooligan. That’s fine. I like that, too. Listen, Noonie.’ She was pacing back and forth and gazing directly at Noone’s eyes. ‘Just do what I say. OK? Whatever it is. Whenever it is. Lives depend on us, Nooney. People might die. Horrendously. That blood will be on you. Your hands.’
‘Yes! Of course!’
‘Think of that. Think of dead kids, Nooniey. Have that real hard in your mind’s eye.’
Noone nodded and had it real hard in her mind’s eye.
‘That blood is on your hands. You did that. You dirty animal. How could you?’
‘Oh my… oh Pigmentation… I–what have I done?! What have I become? How could I?!’ Noone was quaking. She had gone chalk pale.
‘Yeah. Yeeeah, that’s right. Spin around three times.’
Noone immediately spun around three times.
‘Pretend to cough.’
Noone pretended to cough into her hand. Boughtey gave a thumbs up for how realistic it sounded.
‘Beat Boughtey to death for my amusement!’
‘What?’
Noone glanced at Boughtey, fists tightened. Boughtey looked right back, grinned.
Slubber cackled. Cackled, cackled, cackled. She paced right back, bounced off the Candle-Knight on the ground, and sat on the table.
‘I’m kidding I don’t give a shit. Do whatever. Catch.’ She tossed the half-muffin and it bounced off Noone’s chest and plopped to the floor.
‘What an all-encompassing orientation, captain,’ said the armoured man.
‘You flatter me so much, Alto. I love you, too.’
The armoured man dragged himself to his feet, clattering and rattling. The light fixture clattered and rattled, too, and with a monstrous metal squeal it collapsed from the ceiling and shattered into three distinct segments on his head. He didn’t even move.
He drew himself up to full height above Noone, a great wall of gleaming black carapace overlain with veilsglass, fishbones at his joints, a hefty clinking skirt of hanging chunks of linked carapace. Over his chestplate was more Bihemispheric dot poetry. There were exactly twenty-two dots, the significance of which Noone utterly ignored. He towered over Noone and, in turn, Boughtey somehow towered right over him. Noone was sure she hadn’t been that tall, just a little earlier.
‘I am Surr Alto Iridescent-Billsmough of the Seventh Royal Knights Implied of the King SUNMOON-Roland, who lives on, damme it, no matter what the Betweenist news media might claim.’ He placed his gauntlet to his chest and gazed upwards. Noone looked to where he was looking and couldn’t see anything other than a patch of dust.
‘Greetings, Selenite.’
‘Wow!’ said Boughtey. Slubber’s cackling increased.
‘Oh, um, we don’t really… use that word anymore,’ Noone stammered.
‘What. What? What’s the problem?’ he clanked and thumped, looked from face to face, twisted around and glanced at Slubber. ‘Isn’t that the word?’
‘Alto you can’t just…’ Boughtey trailed off.
‘Well, it’s fine. Really. Just, you shouldn’t–’
‘I’ve been calling them Selenites for years. That’s what we called them back in the wars, anyways. Not that any of you would remember those. Yes–legions of Selenites–monstrous and stealthy folk. The toughest and most brutal fights we ever had. And the dirtiest of tactics! I lost many good folk in those days… and slew many more! It was glorious–true glory, earned, by men, in the field of battle!’ He spread his arms wide. ‘Imagine–these very streets–flowing with blood! Literally! In the gutters, collecting dirt and bits of flesh and bone! Glistening under the eyes of the Bihemisphere!’
‘That’s horrifying,’ said Noone, wide-eyed.
‘And yes, it was glorious! And honourable!’ He nodded to himself. ‘And–’
‘Shut the hell up already, Alto,’ said Slubber between giggles.
‘Yeah, Alto!’
‘Yes, Billsmough, please shut up.’
Silence choked the room suddenly. Journeyman Streetlighter Admiro Marcus Bytbridge was clean and hard, all sharp edges and hard cutting corners. He was polished and handsome and stood with the exact kind of straight-backed authority Noone wanted to have and never would. He had that smoothed, slicked hair only guildmembers in the Streetlighters Guild could afford using oil shipped in from Saint’s Corpse in the far north. He was unshaven only enough to look suitably masculine. He was a fighter, a survivor, a brutal individualist. He was a rags to riches success story who had on his own bold initiative (and those of various servants and employees who he nearly almost always paid at the legal limit of the city’s wage laws) leapt from the moderate manor he had been raised in to the unnecessarily large mansion he now reigned from.
He was a born leader. He had the smooth, confident, bold authority of a man who had too much money to ever really fail.
‘Did the bell not alert any of you at all?’
With a monstrous metal squeal the bell collapsed from the doorframe and shattered into three distinct pieces on the ground.
‘I see.’
‘Alto broke that,’ Slubber blatantly lied.
‘Once again you expound your foul–’
‘Oh, cursedblessed SUNMOON. Any time other than now, thank you.’ He looked from silent face to silent face, stoically disgusted with each and every one. He had a thin frown shaped like an arrowhead. Noone was immediately terrified of him. ‘Fifty-Eight Halfadder Street, the Bark-Tea shop is lit up.’
‘Hey, actually? That’s just down the road,’ Boughtey said. ‘We’d have to be like, really stupid to not notice that.’
‘Yes. It’s a four minute walk slopewards. The wind is blowing the smoke in our direction.’
Everybody sniffed all at once. The stink of smoke was weaved into the air. It permeated it. It was very distinctive and very obvious.
‘Oh,’ said Boughtey.
It was havoc. Admiro stepped aside from the door and Alto, with a trained immediacy, rushed for the exit, crushed one segment of the bell, and jammed in the doorframe. Slubber, cackling, slipped beneath him. Boughtey grabbed Noone’s hand and slipped through Alto’s frame until Noone, whose ties to the physical universe were far hardier than Boughtey’s were ended up caught under Alto’s arm, face biting into glass-plated carapace.
‘Gngnowowowowowow,’ she respectfully complained.
‘Dammed joints. Yet I would slay them like I slayed the Vasemongers of the Vasemonger Incursions of oh-six!’
‘Noone I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Wow!’ Boughtey stumbled back and nearly stepped on Slubber.
And so on. Actually, from a purely rational perspective, this was a non issue. Noone merely needed to back slightly off, and Alto needed to merely shift his weight mildly to the side, and they would have slid off each other like butter. It would have taken minor coordination and a few moments of quick and competent discussion.
Noone and Alto shoved at each other until Noone went flying out of the door like a chunk of old hardened tomato sauce and Alto collapsed like a demolition work.
‘I’m so sorry! I’m really sorry!’
‘It’s okay,’ Noone grunted, picking herself up, patting herself down.
They stumbled through the alley, bumping shoulders and arms and elbows.
The people in the street rumbled with a low, buzzing panic. They had panicked before, were very frequently panicked. They were used to panic. A grunting middle aged woman sprinted ahead of them, water flapping out of a pair of pails she carried. A pair of teenagers with gangling legs hanging down from the roof they were perched on made a bet of some kind.
‘Aw wormpiss,’ said someone, who spun immediately around and began walking the opposite way.
The garage was locked, and Admiro didn’t have the keys. Neither did Slubber, neither did Alto or Boughtey, until everyone checked again and it was somehow in Slubber’s pocket the whole time.
Noone stood, transfixed and useless as her co-workers scuttled into the garage, knocking aside tools and bits of machinery. Shaded in dusty darkness were two large engines, one of which Alto had halted attempting to pull out of the garage to argue with Slubber. A chunky, square thing, carapace and brass and veilsglass at its joints, where its parts met. It had thick wheels and a long dark tube coiled around brass appendages to its side, while on its opposite side was a thick flat face covered in a blinding array of knobs, levers, dials. On its far end, where it was thicker and hardier looking, were a series of veilsglass-covered portholes with thin slits cut into them. On that same end Noone vaguely recognised the dot-signatures of the Glassworker’s Guild, the Carapace-Farmer’s Guild and a third dot-signature she did not recognise but read vaguely as saying ‘PROFESSIONALS WHOM PREVENTING OF FIRE’. Fishbone charms rattled, hung off every free part of the machine.
‘And you have your licence, Nofolk?’
Noone snapped out of her trance and nearly jumped. ‘Yes! Sir! Here it is!’ She instantly dropped it, barely caught it, and held it up for Admiro to see.
‘Very good. Just follow what Slubber says. And–wait for my signal. Yes?’
Noone nodded.
‘Very good.’
The machine clattered and groaned out of the garage.
‘Hey, Noone! You wanna light the candles?’ Boughtey said, fiddling with a hardfire box.
Alto was still pulling the machine out of the garage, his face buried in its front. He spoke slightly muffled. ‘Surely that step could be taken by somebody more qualified–’
‘You wanna light the candles?’ Boughtey said, chucking the lighter at Noone.
‘Y-okay!’ said Noone, the lighter dinging off her forehead and falling into her hands.
Slubber skittered over the top of the machine. She pried one of the veilsglass portholes which Noone–once she had lifted herself on her toes–could see had one of the most heavyweight candles she had ever come across, smooth gleaming candle wax encased in a hardy carapace sheath.
‘Keep the hands outta the hatch,’ said Slubber, grinning.
The second Noone lit one a knifelike pillar of flame darted out of the hatch. Something clattered, purred. She made a noise like a rubber toy and darted back.
The air stank of smoke.
‘Having a religious epiphany down there?’ said Slubber. ‘Quiet one on one prayer?’
‘No, no,’ Noone said, and she scuttled around the machine, knife-bursts flitting at her, awkwardly prancing back as the dry jagged heat zipped over her hand. The machine purred and rattled and she heard a skittering like bugs from inside and heard tiny voices: ‘OK! OK! OK!’
‘The Mulkins talks to itself a bunch when it’s working,’ Boughtey explained. ‘Keeps it relaxed, I think.’
‘Mulkins?’
‘Yeah! The Mulkins Engine. Because it keeps calling itself “Mulkins”.’
The Mulkins Engine clattered out of the garage with a noise like an army of full-plated ruffians assaulting a room of rubbish bins. It wrenched brutally on the road, tossed aside flecks of gravel, almost went flying uncontrollably down the slope until Alto steadied himself at its front, his back against it, gauntlets grasping its sides, walking it gently down the road. Slubber sat atop the engine, ignoring the dirty looks Alto shot at her–Noone, Boughtey, and Admiro walked besides it. People in the streets shuffled hastily aside, glancing uncomfortably at their glass-carapace monstrosity.
Noone felt like she should have been doing something more. Her hands were empty. She held the side of the Engine as she walked, to feel busy.
‘You really gotta touch us there lady?’ a pittering voice echoed from the engine. Noone let go and held her hands in her pockets. Boughtey waved as people scampered awkwardly by.
Claire sank in stacks. Reclining flat-roofed buildings–the old ones, stony and brutish, gold evening light dancing on their cracks and creeping ivy and engraved dot poetry, faces of gargoyles erupting into crests of shadow and light, gleaming spots of light climbing brass telescopes; the new ones, grainy spindleshroom, sprouting balconies and levels and side-shacks, gently smoking, darkened forms of people in well lit rooms fulfilling evening rituals. Down, down went Claire, like a great wave, jaggedy steps for a pair of giant legs.
So came the evening, so the whole world might have caught fire. So the Belemnite-in-Veils mountain range became a jagged and immense shadow and the Scorngrass Ocean far far away blazed in that orange and pink and grey sky and so fingers of darkness danced in those hills and the furrows of dried grass and the black forms of long-legged rafts trundled in the distance. The cloud-pillars that were sucked from the sky by the Scorngrass Ocean earthmouths looked like giant towers of angry red flame. Their innards went pink, yellow, dark, dark grey.
Down at the Northmarkets, which spread out at the very distant bottom of the great slope of this side of Claire in shacks and coloured fabrics and rising spinning smoke from cooking fires, the night-time spirits slunk in to make deals and sales the Streetlighters had illegalised during the day. It was interstitial time, void time, when the holy dualistic matrimony–SUNMOON, NIGHTDAY, SOLVECOAGULA, UPDOWN–of the Bihemisphere fizzled and things slipped through the cracks. It was a good time for things to go wrong.
A giant dirty crease of black smoke cut through the air, unfurled like a bad dream.
Down they trundled, people skittering aside and glancing at them, glancing at the smoke. Slubber was crooning a low song in a language Noone utterly failed to recognise, Boughtey was humming and cheerily nodding to it, and Alto was trying his hardest to ignore it. Admiro sauntered silently, flicking through a tiny notebook, occasionally scribbling in it.
They came to the end of the street, the bottom of the slope, where the stacked roofs and orange-sheathed gargoyles blocked out that view of the far skies and fields and mountains. Alto grabbed the engine by its front and ratcheted it to the side. The smoke was billowing in raging, vomitous masses out of a long, thin, spindleshroom building. The upper floor was raging. It was a writhing groaning wall of spiralling flames up there.
Folk in blue and bright purple robes and carapace armour glinting in the red flickering light dawdled in a gang in the street. On their robes rested the dot signatures of the Streetlighter’s Guild and another, smaller signature that read ‘OF THE KNIGHTS GRINNING’. Three of them shimmied along, emptying sloshing pails of water onto the building and immediately hopping backwards as spouts of steam erupted at them, and the building instantly re-caught fire again.
A huge millipede morosely clasped a scorngrass hat on the other side of the road, behind this group. It rested a head the size of Noone’s torso in a gangly segmented hand, and barely seemed to even notice a chunk of ashy wood collapsing from the building, trailing sparks, crumbling to flaming dust on the street.
Admiro sighed loudly.
The gang all spun around at once. It was mostly uncomfortable-looking rich kids, slicked hair and clean hands, befuddled and unwary, uniforms and armour barely fitting. A few, however, were hardier folk–large and rough and sauntering sorts, with gristle on their chins and hair on their arms and the handles of their swords glinting. One of these men walked towards them. The ground did not rumble as he stepped, but it looked like it really wanted to. His arms might have been made from small cauldrons stapled together. He was a cataclysm of a man. He had giant gravelly knuckles that looked like they could reduce Noone to atoms with a graze. His hair was slicked back, too. His eyes were squinting. When he grinned, his face looked like a mask.
The Mulkins Engine halted. Everybody glared at someone except for Noone, who wasn’t sure where to glare.
‘Boys in blue!’ Boughtey hissed shrilly, shuffling carefully to the back of the group, despite the fact that she had shifted to be taller than even the man approaching.
‘I hope you have a permit this time, Miro.’ He stood with a fist pressed at his side, the other against his chin.
Admiro’s face scrunched up, but he didn’t move. He had the notebook in one hand, his pen in the other. ‘Please move aside, Finneo. We’re on business.’
‘Why’ve you got business down in Essel Darlo’s area? Why don’t you go home and do business there?’ He sauntered up to Admiro and beamed blithely at him. His shadow danced and wavered, red, over Admiro.
‘There’s no fires back home at the moment,’ Slubber said, legs dangling lazily off the Mulkins.
‘Well, you should complain about that to someone else. Take some initiative. We can’t just fix every little issue you have. We’re on important business, too.’
Admiro breathed heavily in. He puffed his chest up, put an even more smug, more obnoxiously intellectual look on his face. ‘I am a professional, Finneo. It would do you good to not forget just by how much I outrank you, within the Streetlighters. And–’ and he added this part particularly slyly, like a dagger. ‘By just how long I have outranked you for. Don’t take this for bragging, please. I mean to only remind you of the implicit gap in both of our competencies, and just how informed we might be about certain situations.’
Finneo’s face twisted like shattered continental plates. He kept himself still, tense. ‘Your band of criminals back there–’ He gesticulated widely around Admiro. ‘would melt in gaol, Miro. I don’t like the look of them. I just wanna keep this little segment of Claire safe. All I want is to uphold the word of the law. Keep them in check.’ The relative calm he held collapsed. Veins popped. He looked ready to explode. One of the uncomfortable rich kids slinked forwards and carefully massaged his shoulders.
‘Or I’ll kick their arses! Clean off! Don’t think I can’t! Hah!’ He flexed suddenly, flinging the anger (and that one rich kid) right off himself. He was smiling once again.
Noone felt dizzy with metachrosis. Synchronicity was oozing out of pores in the air again. Admiro and Finneo were the same person, she realised. String was wrapped between them. They were two segments of one giant organism. Their necks might have connected in a deeper, more metaphysical realm, closer to the innards of the universe. If you peeled them both down to the bone you’d find the exact same things. They both shared the exact same swagger of people who had never, ever, had to question their place in the world.
‘Let me Admiro. Let me!’ Alto had his fists curled up, shoulders out, one hand by his sword. His helmet reached Finneo’s chin. ‘Take this dammed beetle off, Admiro, and I’ll–’
‘Quiet, Alto,’ Admiro snapped. ‘You already know what the courts think of your “violent threats”. And I refuse to take on another fine for your incompetence. See, he already has his legal expert taking notes.’ Admiro pointed at the legal expert–actually one of the burly, warrior-looking folk, who sighed despondently and slipped his notebook back into a pocket.
It was greater than any physical blow that could have been dealt to Alto. He nearly collapsed.
‘I don’t wanna brag, Admiro, but we’ve got some pre-etty good men with us, too,’ Finneo bragged. ‘Very well trained. All the top guild apprenticeships, these fellas, and a few even trained with the Unglazier Academy Clans. No criminal sorts, no questionables. Clean, honest, patriotic. Darlo gets good folks for his. On the basis of nothing more than their skill alone.’
A slender kid with a waving bobblehead sprinted by them with a pail of water that spilled all over his own feet the second he came to a stop. He emptied the sad remaining half of water in the pail over a pile of steaming, non-flaming ashes. They continued to not be on fire.
Slubber skittered to the front of the engine, perched on its side, next to an existentially crushed Alto. ‘Managing it as well as you do everything else, Finneo. I know Darlo likes consistency. Hey, how’s your pa going?’
Finneo’s grin died instantly. His face cracked all over again. The kid who had massaged him earlier, bruised, pulled himself up and began desperately massaging his shoulders. He gazed murder at Slubber.
‘You’re you’re you’re–you’re only alive ‘cause it’s illegal for me, for me to–’
‘Um! Shouldn’t we put out the fire?’ yelled Noone suddenly, gesturing at it. ‘It’s–very big!’
The slender bobblehead kid sprinted by them, back up the street where he came from. The tips of his robes were blazing.
‘Oh! Oh SUNMOON! Ricksey’s alight!’ someone wailed.
‘Who’s alight!?” Ricksey screeched, bobblehead quivering, halting.
‘Aw. Edges. Ricksey! You’re alight! You idiot! You’re gonna die, and burn to death!’ Finneo began descending down on the panicked Ricksey, his employees awkwardly shuffling behind him. ‘Put out Ricksey for SUNMOON’s sake!’ he began yelling. He glanced back as he ran off: ‘We won’t let you keep doing this, Miro. Not gonna happen.’
It was a melancholic, almost beautiful sight, watching them scatter into the distance.
And it was motion once again. There was flow, they became interlocking mechanisms. The Mulkins, lead by Alto, rattled up to the flaming building and Slubber skittered over its control plate, subtly rearranging the positions of fishbone charms, twisting this knob right, flicking that switch down, pulling up this lever. Admiro began to discuss something or other with the millipede, prepared a series of sheets and pens. Boughtey unlocked a pair of long shelves on the Mulkins, pulled out a pair of deck chairs, unfolded and set them on the ground by the building, yawned, stretched, and laid down in one.
‘Um,’ said Noone.
Slubber reached farther into the shelves in the Mulkins, pulling out a flask, a pair of cups, handing one to Boughtey and jumping into the other deck chair. Alto leant against the Mulkins, arms folded, gazing grumpily into the fire.
‘Wanna join us, Noone?’ said Boughtey, holding out her cup as Slubber emptied the contents of the flask into it–a cloudy, silvery gas that slipped into the cup like liquid, condensed and clung to its insides. The slivers of mist that hovered too far from the flask zapped away in blue flashes. It smelled like architect’s bark. ‘We’ve only got the two deck chairs so one of us is gonna have to lie on the ground. Or share.’ She smiled very honestly.
Noone ignored everything Boughtey said. ‘Weren’t we putting the fire out?’
‘Miro’s doin his preparations, Nunie,’ said Slubber, arms behind her head, eyes peacefully shut. ‘They’re very essential. Can’t just go putting out fires without them.’
Noone looked to Admiro and the millipede, whose posture visibly slipped deeper and deeper into pained apathy. Admiro was, for lack of a better word, yammering. Noone caught only snippets of what he said and heard words like ‘actionable,’ ‘synchronise,’ ‘cutting edge’ and ‘game changer’. He produced a constant stream of sheets from various pockets like a conjurer.
‘What’s he even doing?’ Noone spun around and panickedly looked to the fire, back to Admiro, at Boughtey.
‘No worries, Noone. We’ve already checked–he’s the only one who lived in there. Everything essential is safe.’
The millipede, who had been mostly mumbling, yelled suddenly: ‘All of my belongings! All of my money! Scentjars of my family! It’s all–’ and trailed off as Admiro calmed him with another barrage of jargon.
Slubber took a great noisy slurp from her cup. When she spoke, trails of mist fluttered from her mouth. ‘He’d normally be trying to buy the whole house for the cheap. But ‘cause this whole place is already owned by Darlo, he’s trying to sell insurance. Or he’ll let it burn down and buy what’s left for real cheap.’
‘Insurance? What’s insurance?’
Slubber shrugged in her chair. ‘Some wormpiss he made up.’ She sat up. ‘You do get what kinda business this is. Right?’ She had an eyebrow raised, mist trailing.
Noone took everything in. It spread open and unfolded. It was getting very dark, now. Deep dark flickering orange light licked and danced and flung odd shadows off cobbles and patches of hardy weeds, and the darkness wasn’t affected, particularly. It coagulated. An old, lumpy-faced Shatterite marched along the street, apathetically lighting the street lights with a long pole, one by one. He sniffed hairy nostrils at the smoke and glanced over their group and just kept on walking, lighting. The lights within their bulbs were weak and smoky and orange, but they swirled, built up–and with great sudden cracks they fizzled bright orange, spiky rays of thrumming light. The streets were dancing humming brass. The moon was a thin sickle. It grinned smugly.
She looked at Boughtey and Boughtey looked right back at her. She gave Noone a slow shrug and smiled at her.
‘And now you see it, do you not?’ said Alto.
He stood facing into the fire, legs wide, arms folded. He was a dark, shimmering silhouette. His long wavy shadow spilled across the street. In the light and the smoke and the fire he looked huge, some stoic ash-monster. It was very dramatic.
‘Ow,’ murmured Noon, covering her eyes as they began to sting from looking at the fire.
‘You see the depths of moral apathy–depravity–plaguing the streets of this “Municipocracy”. You see it now! The brazen immorality of today’s folk! What a mere few generations without a king has done!’ he exclaimed, jabbing a finger towards Boughtey and Slubber, moving it over towards Admiro. ‘What do they care about other than “sniffing” their “worms” or listening to their depraved “Corpsist Semi-Jazz”?’
‘Monarchist,’ Slubber barked back but her voice was overwhelmed by Alto.
‘And how it pains me! Agonises me! That I cannot do a thing!’ He clanked up to Noone, now, gauntlet open and pressed against his face. ‘That the merest pull of a lever–’ He pointed at one of the larger levers jutting out of the Mulkins. ‘Could correct this depraved madness!’
‘Why don’t you–’
‘But I am held back!’ He paced theatrically to the side. ‘I am a Knight Implied and justice, royal justice, borne from blessedcursed SUNMOON himherself, runs through my being! Yet I am kept back by this–’ and he dramatically pointed to the fishbone carved beetle on his arm. ‘So that I may be a mere thoughtless pawn to that damme Streetlighter!’
‘Couldn’t you take your arm off?’ suggested Noone. She shook her head quickly. ‘Sorry. That’s presumptuous. But it just seems like you could–’
‘Absolutely not!’
‘Yeah, he can.’ Slubber was rolling lazily through a small scroll, now. ‘It’s just that’s his sword arm and it’s the closest he still has to his dick.’
‘Absolutely not!’ Alto was rattling with anger. ‘It isn’t. It’s not. It isn’t! Damme you, the sword arm of a soldier is the very basis of their dignity, their honour, their connection to the o’ blessedcursed Bihemisphere! Such things you would be unfamiliar with!’
Slubber looked at Alto quizzically, considering his points, and then cackled at him and looked back through her scroll. Boughtey chuckled awkwardly with her.
‘Um. You. Er.’ Noone fiddled with lint in her pocket and looked at the dancing brassy shadows as she thought. ‘I agree with you. A little. Erm.’ She shook her head, straightened her back, stood with her legs wide. ‘We should do something. Right?’
Alto stood in the same way. Her eyes met his helmet slits.
‘Yes. Yes! Indeed! You understand, Selenite! I should do something!’
‘We should do something. And, um, don’t call me that.’
‘Indeed! Yes! How could I be such a coward? Am I not a Knight Implied?’ Alto stood straight and feigned wiping a tear from a cheek that was made of carapace and glass. ‘I must do something!’
‘I–we?’ Noone was deflating rapidly.
‘For the King Who Went Widdershins! For the Monarchy of Claire-Who-Named-Itself! For blessedcursed SUNMOON!’ Alto sprinted at the Mulkins and instantly collapsed: ‘GHGHGHGHGHHHGHHGHGHHG.’
Admiro looked up. The millipede looked up. Slubber and Boughtey looked up. Noone’s shadow wavered and danced.
‘For things that are maybe less historically corrupt!’ Noone exclaimed. In a panicked jittering scrabble she rushed over the form of Alto, grabbed the lever in two hands, and forced it down with all of her strength. It lifted her slightly off the ground.
The hose quaked, wiggled, spewing a floppy stream of wobbling water. Noone shuffled down to it, nearly tripping on Alto, hoisted it up awkwardly from the carapace handhold by its head. She held the hose boldly up and drenched the very nearest wall and absolutely nothing else. It crumpled in a lazy curve the moment it left the hose. A puddle collected around Noone’s feet. A single spot of the house was very free of fire.
‘Both hands, both hands!’ Boughtey yelled.
‘Um?’ said Noone, turning to see Boughtey racing over to the Mulkins, setting upwards three switches and then ratcheting a lever to the right.
‘Hey,’ said Slubber, very small and alone and useless in her deck chair, and nobody heard her.
‘Hold it in both hands, ceev! Move it with your legs, not your wrists!’
The water began to pick up. The hose buckled and hopped and Noone squeaked, grabbed it tight as she could have. It swayed and swished on its own volition, dragging at Noone’s wrists, the tendons, biting into her fingers. And water sprayed, steam and mist erupting and rolling down the house, along the road. Angry thick smoke coiled. A clump of black spindleshroom collapsed and broke into damp pieces. Rivulets of water trickled through cobbles. The hose swished and waved and rebelled.
‘Legs, ceev, legs!’
The hose was frantic. It flapped wildly about, brute strength in its skin, forced its way out of Noone’s hands until Boughtey slammed down the long lever and it waved like an agonised snake and carked it right there in the air, flapping to the ground with a clunk.
And the fire was out. The shop glistened in the lamplight. Its upstairs, much of its front centre, was a glistening, damp, black blob of ash with thin trails of smoke dissipating. And yet it stood. Noone could see the innards of a comfy looking bedroom, even. Pretty much everything was either charred or outright gone other than the wallpaper. It was lime green. It looked very pleasant.
‘Oh. Oh Saints, oh, sweet blasted Belemnite-in-Veils, sweet Saint Shattered.’ The millipede scuttled ahead, rattling and clutching his chest. He looked to Noone and she looked wildly back at him, hands in damp shaking fists. ‘Thank you, so much. I-I’ll give you a free drink, if you ever want to come. I’ll give you two. Three.’
‘Do I get one?’ asked Boughtey, leaning against a lever.
‘You were one of the girls in the deck chairs right?’
‘Hahah, yeah.’
‘If, if I ever see you again,’ said the millipede, a dark shadow over their form. ‘I will have a panic attack and die on the spot. I never want to ever see you again.’
‘Very nice,’ said Admiro. He was thoroughly blasted. Water dripped steadily from the tip of his nose. His hair bloomed like a damp wildflower. He squeezed a sleeve and it trickled.
‘I appreciate initiative. I really do.’
Noone was too rigid to nod. She was going stone. Admiro’s eyes were sharp and intelligent and thin and they blitzed over her and pinpointed her every structural weakness. He took his attention off her only to attempt to straighten out his blasted hair. She was following the deer instinct. Every slight move she made was another weakness revealed.
‘I appreciate it when one of my. Loyal. Employees has the critical thinking skills to discern flaws in my. Methodology. And decides, herself, to go out into the world, and fix it. I like a problem solver. I really do. I appreciate it. I really do.’
Noone smiled and sweat bubbled on her forehead. Heat was building up in her armpits. Admiro’s office was not in 22nd Catglass Street, because Admiro despised the idea of sharing a city, let alone a building, with his employees. Noone had no reason to know this, she was just guessing. She was completely correct. It was a room in a building that Noone figured was his. All of it. Supposedly. It was an immense building among immense buildings on the Upwards District, great and rectangular and brilliantly contemporary with pruned shrubbery along their sides and potted, imported trees along the streets. Wide and white and airy, packs of small windows glinting off streetlights, dainty rooftop observatories rising through the skyline and clicking gently.
Admiro had shelves hugging his walls, scaling up towards the needlessly high and shadowed roof packed with very old books split up by bright self-help manuals, had cabinets bulging with trophies and charming souvenirs from across Giantsmade-Second, had the lights a gentle and calming low yellow that hovered over his immense desk and cast muted shadows off the aesthetically messy sheets and books scattered across it.
Admiro Marcus Bytbridge did not think that he was better than anyone, of course. He was as much a Municipocracist as any other reasonable person in the city. His last name was proof enough of that–no fancy schmancy paternalist bloodlinery like ‘Billsmough’, no, his name was named from the city itself, was the name of a child of the revolution: Bytbridge.
All people were equal, and no division of blood or family could ever define somebody’s worth. It was just that he simply hated people who were poor sports, and it was hardly his fault that people without money, people who weren’t human, people who had illnesses, or people who had immigrated all tended to be poor sports. He mourned it, actually. He mourned it more than anyone.
‘But the process is very important. There are many forces in this city who are very interested in halting our public service, for their own purposes. You understand. You saw the Knights Grinning this morning. I simply want to ensure that we are able to sufficiently synchronise our teamwork with one another. You see, Noone, we’re a team…’ It all slipped together. Admiro was talking fat airy bullshit. It was a wispy sleepy typhoon of rubbish words and esoteric jargon and Noone was lost and buffeted in it.
Admiro had relaxed himself, and swayed and slipped side to side as he spoke. He puffed a thin trail of arcbark–the fancy sort, smelling of rosemary, smoke disintegrating to miniscule particles nearly the moment they emerged. Noone felt like she was listening to a cloud, or being smothered to death.
‘And so I will not fire you, Noone… Nofolk. In fact, you’re promoted.’
‘Oh?!’ Noone spat, unable to keep it down, and she rigidified once more, tried to blend into her seat. The chair was spindleshroom, was a dull dead pale, with a long, reedy texture. (Was her skin always quite so dull and pale, and was it always so strangely reedy, Admiro wondered, though he did not stop speaking, because he was on a masterful roll, and was even beginning to convince himself of the bullshit he was spouting.)
‘Oh yes. You’re an educated sort, yes? Bit of a writer? And I hear you’ve been planning an autobiography, too?’ He looked at her for an answer and she sat as still as before.
‘Well. I have been needing administrative assistance.’ He smiled gently, intellectually, slightly paternally, yet not enough to be too condescending. ‘Yes. You will be our newest Higher Administrative Note-Taker Manager.’
Noone remained still. She said, quietly: ‘Is that a real job?’
‘Of course it is. And it’s your real job. Say, would you pass me your glassmachines licence?’
Noone took a few moments to compose and un-rigidify herself. She fingered through her pocket and pulled out the licence, handed it to Admiro, who instantly tore it in half, crumpled it in his hands, and flung it into the bin at the end of the room.
‘Um?’
‘A notekeeper really shouldn’t be using those glassmachines, anyway. You should be focussing on your far more important administrative duties. You understand?’
Noone understood.
Catglass street rumbled with a quiet, hasty, vapour-breathing sort of life. Nights on the moon, in Saint Chromatophore, were lonely and empty and glimmering. But Claire did not sleep, especially not here, when the Northmarkets, which were only ever truly awake at night and dusk and other times spirits could slip across, were so near.
It was yet strangely calm but for footsteps tapping or of grumbling breathing or the wind rattling fishbone charms. So shifted by folk in long robes and low hats and so a gaggle of rats hissed and argued with one another, ferrying a tin of arcbark across the street. So drifted figures with masks like a bird’s beak and long curved ritual knives glinting or someone with feet turned backwards and eyes for ears and ears for eyes or someone with skin made of clinking glass shards making jabbing points out of their robe. Occasionally a merchant rolled past, wares strange-shaped and pungent-smelling rattling in a small raft, down the slope, towards the Northmarkets, which were a great blossoming star of flickering thrumming light and trails of smoke and shifting lively activity in the long blueish darkness over the fields and hills.
So the roads went brass and glints of light ran across windows and a thick hefty black nothingness enwrapped it all and the nighttime trader-spirits descended with bodies like spiralling oil, vestigial flapping arms carrying umbrellas or briefcases or books and bright eyes blinking curiously at Noone as they swam past and onwards. Some stopped and asked her questions she could not understand and only shrugged at. Some tried to sell her things and she shrugged at them, too. One, in a droning, careful voice, asked her if she was interested in selling shares of her parental abandonment issues.
‘I don’t have any parental abandonment issues,’ she argued.
‘Yes O-K. But Might you be Interested in selling Shares of your Parental Abandonment Issues?’ it asked again. Noone shrugged at it and it shrugged back and went away. Shrugging was a very good cross species communicator.
22nd Catglass Street blazed dull orange, thrummed and hummed with the hollow breezes, looked like a compacted fossil between the flats and the restaurant. There was a man with grey skin like moonrock and a low scorngrass hat swabbing at the graffiti on its door. Water dripped in weak rivulets through the stones, soap bubbles flew. He had the Saint Shattered Never Died! Labourer’s Society signature emblazoned on his robes, which were an obnoxious bright yellow. He was singing something and she couldn’t recognise his words.
‘Are you from Saint Chromatophore?’ Noone asked before she could stop herself. She was tired and odd and, in a very wide and generalised sense, regretted.
‘Nah, yeah. Ah-huh. You too, hm?’ He did not turn around, kept scrubbing.
‘Yeah. Sorry.’
‘Not much’ve us here, ay?’
‘You’re the first I’ve met.’ She glanced again at the signature. ‘Are you a Shatterite?’
‘Aw, not religiously. Just for work. I don’t believe in Saint Chromatophore and nothing else. “Who the hell are the presbyters?”’ He sang.
Noone did not smile–she was stony-faced at the best of times. Her lips twitched, eyebrows tilted. It was the only reasonable thing she’d heard all day.
He had a wide head and a rolling neck and Noone could tell he was smiling even from behind. ‘Yeah, Claire ain’t a good place for us. We’re a bad folk for Claire. Everyone here’s too convinced of things.’
‘Things?’
‘Everything. Yakknow.’ He gesticulated vaguely.
‘Oh, yeah. Well. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been here very long.’
‘Well, they are.’
‘Oh.’
The man stopped scrubbing. He turned to face Noone. Twenty-two, twenty-two (he was fourty-four years old, Noone knew, somehow, Noone knew), and the light played strangely on him. And the shifting dots, pustules, light (everything was made of colour and colour was made of chromatophores and so was everything) swimming, flowing like waves. The man’s skin was not grey, it was brown, black, white, red green blue yellow iridescence, sunlight. He was warping like something beneath water. The man said to Noone:
‘Please don’t forget about this. Don’t forget about me. Or none of this.’
‘You too,’ said Noone, and her skin was grey, she clung to it, it was grey like moonrock.
He grinned. ‘You’re acclimating already.’
As Noone stepped into 22nd Catglass she heard him quietly singing again, and she knew what he was saying: ‘Noone knew, Noone knew, Noone knew.’
‘Back so soon daahlin?’ said Miss Leen as Noone shuffled in. It was dark and her every movement seemed to echo and clank throughout the entire building. ‘But ya forms were so well made!’
‘Oh. Uh. I need to do some new forms,’ Noone said.
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. I was promoted.’
‘One of the classic Admiro promotions,’ said Miss Leen. ‘Didja make him look like a giant arsehole?’
‘I drenched him a lot.’
Miss Leen cackled. Stony flecks of spit flew from her lips as she laughed. ‘I won’t hold ya up any long daahlin. Best be going.’ She giggled quietly to herself as Noone creaked and echoed up the stairs.
It was dark and cool. The corners were filled with a darkness so thick it looked like it might come apart with a pull. Lamplight thrummed gently. There was a shadow thing, amorphous, and it turned and loomed at Noone with rows and rows of psychedelic teeth spreading far, far along and Noone said:
‘Boughtey?’
‘Ceeeeev,’ said Boughtey, waving widely at Noone as if she was far away. She had a pile of sheets strewn haphazardly about her own desk, filled out seemingly at arbitrarily.
‘Were you promoted as well?’
‘Naw. Miro checked my sheets early and apparently I super screwed them up. Like it was all just… like… scribbles at the end. Weird. Hey, wait, you got promoted?’
‘Yeah,’ said Noone, carefully shifting tables aside and sliding through them like a shark to reach the great desk at the end and take her own sheets. ‘Um. I’m an administrator note-taker something now. I’m fairly sure it’s not a real job.’
‘No glassmachines licence?’
‘Yeah.’
Boughtey snorted. ‘Classic Miro promotion. At least we made him look like a giant arsehole.’
‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Noone nodded. She supposed he did look like a giant arsehole. She did not feel particularly angry, nor did she feel particularly sad, or disappointed. Mostly, she was confused. And tired. She kept trying to figure things out in her head but gears were getting stuck, entangled. The sounds her pen made when she scratched it on the paper were unbearably loud. She kept glancing up at a light. A moth was batting and dying against it.
‘Hey, Noone, you wanna hit that bark-tea place tomorrow?’
‘Um?’
‘I figure, if you’re getting a free drink, and I’m banned forever, us combined is, like, worth at least one normal customer, right?’
‘I’m not sure if that adds up,’ Noone said.
‘You wanna go anyway?’
‘Um,’ said Noone, pausing over her sheet, pen in hand. ‘Okay.’
Meat Girls Dot Org 