Fire and Dust Read online

  She loved to sing about it too. My mother Anne wasn't exactly a bard – she never played for anyone outside the family – but she wrote witty little songs that were then bought by practicing bards from every ward of Sigil. Although Mother didn't know it, the performers always presented the songs as «classical tunes, written in days long past»… mostly to explain why the verses were written in such courtly language. My mother, in songs as in life, genteelly avoided the slang of the street.

  It was a strange occupation for a woman born the daughter of a duke; but then, she had long ago abandoned her heritage, and good riddance to it. Her father Urbin, Duke of Aquilune on some petty Prime world, had been a brutal man, a bully who beat his wife to death and then moved on to his daughter. Anne suffered untold agonies at his hands – untold to me, anyway – but tiny hints over the years suggested Urbin had raped her on numerous occasions, loaned her to his friends for sport, and degraded her in every conceivable way… all of this beginning when she was about eight years old and continuing till the time she turned sixteen.

  On the very day of Anne's sixteenth birthday, a young swordsman named Niles Cavendish arrived at Duke Urbin's castle. Bitter though I was at my father for never being home, I could never truly hate him: in the first heroic act of his excessively heroic career, Niles Cavendish had proved himself a saint by saving Anne from her misery. As a child, I believed he had actually killed my wicked grandfather… but the Niles of that day was not such a legendary warrior that he could single-handedly slay a well-guarded duke in the heart of his castle. Niles saved Anne by marrying her, then bringing her back to his hometown of Sigil; and if he won Urbin's permission to wed by holding a rapier to the old berk's throat, neither of my parents would say.

  So how does a woman leave behind such a hellish childhood to become a writer of comic songs? One day at a time. It helped that I was born shortly after she arrived in Sigil – taking care of a baby occupied so much of her attention, she had no time for ugly memories. It helped that my father was constantly away adventuring: she could concentrate entirely on her child, without having to coddle a husband too. Sometimes to quiet me, she played the harpsichord my father gave her as a wedding gift; and in time, she began to write little songs to greet him when he finally came home… songs that my father encouraged her to write down, songs that he showed to his bard friends who said they were worth money…

  A happy ending, some would say. Some who had never seen the scar down my mother's cheek, made by a drunken uncle who wanted to test a new dagger. Some who had never seen the empty eyesocket that she refused to explain. Some who didn't know that in the thirty-two years she'd lived in Sigil, Anne Cavendish had never stepped outside the house or seen another face besides my father and me. Before I was old enough to do the shopping, delivery boys dropped food into a chute out front and Mother shoved their payment through a slot in the door. Even when she began to sell her songs, she couldn't bear to meet customers – one of Father's friends acted as her agent, picking up sheet music left on the front stoop and sliding the proceeds under the door.

  In short, Mother laughed, she told jokes, she was utterly charming… but even I couldn't venture too close without making her flinch.

  We blew each other a lot of kisses.

  «I should tell you,» I said when I finally ran out of gossip, «I won't be around for a few days. Maybe as long as a week.»

  «Good for you, Britlin!» she beamed. «Whoever you met last night must be ravenous for more.»

  «It's not a woman, Mother…»

  «A man then? I'm broadminded. Is he cute?»

  «It's… an assignment. A painting assignment.»

  «I see: painting.» She said it with a sly wink, as if she knew that couldn't possibly be the truth.

  Sometimes, I had to reflect how lucky I was my mother never got out of the house. Otherwise, she'd bring home a different woman to meet me every night, desperately wanting her son to be showered with constant, all-consuming adoration. I was her substitute, a stand-in who might find the kind of passion she dreamed of: not Duke Urbin's bestial lust; not my own father's heroic pity; «a soul-completing love, a mutual cherishment to make weak hearts brave.»

  That last bit was from one of her songs.

  «I have to pack some things,» I told her.

  «By all means,» she replied. «A gentleman always takes appropriate precautions.»

  I laughed and shook my head. Some days, my mother had an unshakably one-track mind. As I began to climb the stairs, she called after me, «Wear the brown jacket, dear, and those nice black pants. They make you look so handsome, your lady will peel off your clothes with her teeth.»

  * * *

  When I returned to the Festhall, I was wearing my father's best rapier, and carrying a sketchbook to while away my off-hours for the next few days. Just inside the door, a factotum gave me a note from Lillian (every word a different color), saying I could find Hezekiah in an inn called She Who Sings the Sky. The place was just down Crystal Dew Lane and it had a good reputation – more expensive than most but the price bought you a good night's sleep without interruption by cracksmen or body-baggers. The next time I saw Lillian I'd have to congratulate her for ensuring the boy's safety.

  By the time I got to the inn, Hezekiah was awake and seated at the breakfast table, munching through a stack of Outland pancakes as tall as the Great Foundry's chimney. For a moment I worried he might have spilled some secrets to the other patrons eating there; but the long-suffering woman cooking the pancakes said he had talked about nothing but Lillian and the Festhall.

  Indeed, that's all he spoke of the whole time he was finishing his meal. Lillian did this, Lillian said that; and had I ever gone dancing along the Walk of Worlds? (Hezekiah, I designed one of the chambers along the walk – the room depicting Pelion, a layer of Arborea. To prepare for the commission, I spent three months in Pelion, slogging my way through an infinite expanse of white sand, all the time muttering to myself, «How in The Lady's name can I create a romantic little bower based on nothing but desert?» Still, a sphinx here, a pyramid there, and a few ruins crumbling by candlelight did the trick… not to mention the clever touch of posting signs that said PLEASE REMOVE ALL FOOTWEAR. Few couples can dance barefoot through soft warm sand without longing to disappear together behind the nearest dune.)

  Thus I listened to Hezekiah enthuse about my work as we left the inn and walked out into the street. It was a drizzly day in Sigil, with raindrops so dainty you could ignore them until you were soaked to the bone. On the streets around us, most people carried umbrellas and wore irritable expressions that grew more sullen as the rain continued; but I and the other Sensates we passed had our faces open to the wet, grinning as water streamed down our cheeks. There's an especially delightful moment when a big droplet trickles down the back of your neck, so cold it makes you squirm… yet it seems that Sensates are the only ones who appreciate the experience.

  Although our destination was almost diametrically across the hub from the Festhall, we made the trip in well under an hour thanks to Hezekiah's never-ending supply of gold: he simply hired a hippogriff hansom to fly us straight across the ring. For once, the boy showed some common sense – we both spent the entire trip with our heads stuck out the windows of the cab, lapping at the brownish rainwater and enthusing over how far down it was to the ground. Whenever one of us shouted, «Look at that!» the hippogriffs all gave fierce eagle-like screeches… which either meant, «Yes, isn't it interesting?» or «Pipe down, you sodding berks.»

  You never can tell with hippogriffs.

  * * *

  In time, the cab set us down beside Ragpickers Square, in the looming shadow of our destination – Sigil's Mortuary, headquarters to the Dustmen. Historians claim that five hundred years ago, the Mortuary was nothing more than a massive granite dome, shaped like a beehive; but since that time the Dustmen have expanded and embellished, adding side towers and outbuildings, plus a frenzy of ornamentation around the dome itself. Now ther
e are bat-winged gargoyles mounted in a circle around the peak, and trellises of razorvine growing up the walls; now, the front entrance is flanked by giant frescoes depicting all the Death Deities of the multiverse; and now the crowning glory above the entrance is a stained glass window, two storeys tall, fifty feet wide. Every pane of glass in that window is a subtly different shade of black.

  «Wow!» said Hezekiah. «What a great-looking place! I bet it's spooky at night. Do they give tours?»

  «No,» I answered, «they give funerals.»

  Although it was still before peak, several mourning parties stood queued outside the main door, suggesting that the dozen ceremony rooms inside were already occupied. I wondered how many of the corpses lined up for the final send-off were victims of the massacre at the Courts yesterday. No way to tell. Each corpse would be taken inside, prepared according to whatever rituals were desired by the next of kin, and finally launched through portals into other planes of the multiverse – to a heaven or a hell if the deceased had shown a preference during life, or maybe just to the Elemental Plane of Fire for instant cremation.

  «Excuse me, honored sir,» said a voice by my side.

  «Would you have the privilege to be Britlin Cavendish?»

  I turned to see a sallow-faced gnome kowtowing in the vicinity of my ankles. He wore a shapeless gray robe that was much too long for him; probably, it had been tailored for a short human, which meant that fully half of it piled up in folds around his three-foot-tall frame. The collar of his robe bore a tiny embroidered skull in the faded yellow and orange colors of the Dustmen.

  «Yes,» I replied, «I'm Britlin Cavendish. And this is my… this is Hezekiah Virtue.»

  «An honor, an honor,» the gnome said, taking Hezekiah's hand in both of his own and squeezing repeatedly. «You may call me Wheezle – everybody does. If I ever had another name, I've forgotten it by now.»

  He gave a little laugh as if we should take this as a joke. For politeness' sake I smiled, but his attitude didn't fool me. Gnomes in Sigil place great stock on their names, and most of them take pride in introducing themselves at length, complete with genealogies and incomprehensible honorifics: «I have the privilege to be Quando-Master Spurrit Vellosheen Legrunner, eldest son of Jance-Leader Vellosheen Spurrit Legrunner, late of the Order of the Vole, but recently advanced to the House of Frequent Bubbles, twice enwreathed.» If you meet a gnome who only gives a nickname, he's either a criminal concealing his identity or a wizard whose magic would be jeopardized by speaking his name aloud.

  «What can we do for you, Wheezle?» I asked.

  «No, honored Cavendish, it is what I can do for you,» he replied. «My superiors instructed me to watch for you and escort you to… a place nearby.»

  «A place we can keep an eye on the entrance to the Mortuary?»

  «Indeed. If you would walk this way?»

  He gestured toward a tenement building across the street… although calling it a building perhaps too generous. It looked more like a rickety piece of wooden sculpture, constructed by an untalented art student who needed lessons in carpentry. The only things propping it up were a line of equally seedy tenements on either side, leaning inward so the building in the middle had nowhere to fall. Further structural reinforcement was added by ample quantities of razorvine that twined up the front face of the building in a solid sheet of thorns.

  «You want us to go in there?» I asked.

  «It is an excellent location,» Wheezle answered. «As you can see, its height gives it a superlative view; from the seventh floor, you can observe the front entrance of the Mortuary and much of the back. Even better, the building has no tenants right now.»

  «That's because it's going to collapse any second!»

  «Factol Skall guarantees its structure is fundamentally sound,» Wheezle said. «At least for a few days.»

  «It looks fine to me,» Hezekiah chipped in. «Come on, Britlin, this will be fun.»

  Reluctantly, I followed the two of them toward the tenement. Whether or not it was structurally sound, the building was made from very old wood – the kind that would blaze like straw if our flame-happy enemies pluffed it with a fireball. Silently, I whispered a prayer to The Lady of Pain that the drizzle would keep falling until the wood became too wet to burn.

  * * *

  The design of the tenement was simple: two single-room apartments on each floor, and a wobbly staircase up the middle. Judging by the smell of the lobby, every apartment had once housed a minimum of five weak-bladdered cats.

  The doors of both ground-floor apartments were missing. So were the windows. Rain pattered in from the outside, and ran across the badly slanted floors to pool up in the corners. In spite of myself, I began to look forward to a few days in the place – I had never stayed in such a decrepit building before. If I was lucky, it would even have rats.

  The stairs creaked loudly as we started up to the higher floors. Wheezle tried to put this in a positive light. «As you can tell, your honors, we need not fear enemies creeping silently up from below.»

  «We?» I asked. «You'll be watching with us?»

  «Factol Skall deemed it helpful for one of our faction to join you,» the gnome answered. «In case you had any questions about our ways.» Which meant that Factol Skall wanted his own man planted in our party, to spy on us and report any undesirable activities. No doubt every other faction in the city was doing the same thing.

  We climbed all the way to the top, constantly brushing away the filmy cling of spider webs. The stairs teetered under our weight and I made a point of staggering my footsteps not to match Hezekiah and Wheezle – if we all walked in pace, we might give the staircase a timed wobble that would bring the whole thing crashing down. It didn't help that the top flight of steps was slick with water, dribbling in through dozens of holes in the roof. Much as the seventh floor afforded the best view of the Mortuary, I suspected the team would prefer to set lookouts on the sixth or even fifth floor… somewhere the rain couldn't penetrate so easily.

  Then again, when we reached the seventh floor, another member of our party was already there, enduring the leaky roof with no noticeable discomfort: Guvner Oonah DeVail, our brief acquaintance from the Courts. She had brought a folding canvas chair with her, and now sat a short distance back from the window, peering out into the street. Her silver-wired staff leaned up against the wall within easy grabbing distance.

  «Fine morning, isn't it?» she asked. She had managed to place her chair out of the direct line of any of the leaks, but her olive green bush-hat was still sodden with rain. «How are you two feeling?»

  «Quite well, your honor,» I bowed.

  «Bar that nonsense!» she snapped. «I'm on official leave from the court bench, so you can skip the flowery titles. My name is Oonah, got it? Oonah.»

  «Hezekiah Virtue,» my companion said, scuttling forward and holding out his hand. Whatever Prime backwater the boy came from, they were certainly big on handshakes. But DeVail was happy to reciprocate, grabbing Hezekiah's hand and pumping it heartily.

  «Heard you two saved a library yesterday,» she said. «Bully for you. Top marks.»

  I tried to look suitably modest; Hezekiah just blushed.

  «A thousand pardons, honored ones,» Wheezle interjected, «but I must return below to meet the other guests. Good deaths to you all.» He kowtowed and slipped away.

  Since this might be our only moment alone with Judge DeVail, I had to ask the vital question. «Guvner,» I said, then corrected myself, «Oonah… have you figured out what the thieves took from your office?»

  «Yes and no,» she replied in a low voice. «I believe they took a scroll written by my mother some forty years ago. People sometimes call me an explorer, but my mother Felice… she was ten times the traveler I ever hoped to be. In her lifetime she touched on all the Outer Planes – all the heavens, all the hells – as well as the Elemental Planes and more than a dozen Prime Material worlds. No one else ever rambled around the multiverse like Felice did.
»

  I might have countered that my father had easily matched Felice DeVail's achievements; but I refused to play the pathetic cast-off son, boasting on his dad's behalf. Sometime, I would have to find out if Niles had ever gone a'rambling with Oonah's mother.

  «When she died last year,» DeVail continued, «Felice left me her diaries: a treasure trove of stories and multiverse lore. I was slowly working my way through each scroll, indexing, annotating, getting them ready for more extensive scholarly research… and the sad truth is, I hadn't gotten around to the scroll the thieves took. I have no idea what was in it.»

  «The thieves said something about dust,» Hezekiah said.

  DeVail shrugged. «If you know the right portal, you can get to an entire universe of the stuff – the Quasielemental Plane of Dust. It's a flat sea of grit stretching infinitely in all directions: no water, no truly solid ground… and no air in the atmosphere, so no wind to disturb the dusty surface. On top of that, the dust is hungry; leave your armor unattended for a day, and it'll disintegrate to dust too. I've never been there, but my mother visited once. She hated it.»

  «And she didn't mention anything special about the plane?» I asked. «The thieves said she'd drawn a map. Maybe a treasure map?»

  «I honestly don't know,» Oonah answered. «She was always reluctant to talk about her travels… to talk about anything, really. My mother would much rather ferry down the River Styx than make after-dinner conversation, even with close friends. Self-effacing to a fault when she wasn't roving around the wilds.»

  Maybe Felice DeVail didn't talk to her daughter, I thought, but she must have talked to someone; otherwise, how did the thieves know there'd be something interesting in the scroll? Or perhaps Oonah herself had talked about her mother where the wrong ears could overhear. However, before I could ask Oonah who knew she had the diaries, the stairway shuddered with a flurry of rattles and creaks.

  «More company,» the Guvner said.

  Like a puppy, Hezekiah rushed to see who was coming. A moment later, he ran back to us. «There are two of them with Wheezle,» he whispered. «And one is a tiefling.»