For Sharli, the Mother of Mordew’s translation of her to the Island of the White Hills was even more fraught than it was for the others, since she – and ‘she’ she most definitely was, having taken the pledge to be a woman to the exclusion of all other ways of being – was not Sharli as the other assassins knew her, but was an imposter.
The Sharli the others knew was in an Assembly re-education facility in Shemsouth, coming to terms with the ideas her new life would rely on, whereas this Sharli was Hailey-Beth-Martial Clementina Roads, cycling in the Women’s Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade, living undercover as an observer-in-general in Mordew with responsibility for monitoring possible Theistic Resurrection Scenarios. As such, she knew, as all Assembly members knew, that to be translated through the weft, and in this instance the warp, was the same as dying, and she only did it because she knew that if she didn’t, Deaf Sam would kill her anyway.
She had been thinking, this Clementina – who we shall continue to call Sharli because that is the name she had taught herself to think of as her own – of ways to leave the company of the other assassins since before the meal at which Padge had laid his contract on the table, but had come up with nothing suitable.
She turned the rings of Sharli’s victims one after the other, on that afternoon already described, this being a mannerism the previous Sharli possessed. She sucked at the pipe clenched between her teeth, to the opium of which she was rendered immune by Assembly pulmonary engineering, and, as the conversation continued, ran various scenarios through her mind.
To be translated through the weft or the warp was to be destroyed utterly in the real and then remade anew in either the real, or in a false realm. It was a theistic nonsense to imagine that consciousness continued across this process, it only appearing that way because the replica created to replace the original person was in every way convincing to those who remained, as perfect replicas always are. These replicas always claimed that they felt as if nothing had happened and that they were fine, and that, please, would everybody stop fussing over them. By doing this, they unknowingly convinced the gullible that they were the same person that had existed before the translation.
But this was what the Hailey-Beths in Prose named ‘the propaganda of the immaterial soul’ and was a technique weft-parasites used so that they could dangle the fantasy of heavens in front of their believers and thereby distract them from the value of their one true life as part of the human Assembly. It is no compensation for an early death to know that someone exactly like you, but not you, lives on in your place.
Sharli needed to avoid this fate, but how?
If she had claimed she had business elsewhere, this would have given her away – there could be no more pressing business than this for an assassin in Padge’s employ – and the moment even one of them suspected her of being an imposter she would have been as good as dead. Assassins, after all, are excellent at killing – certainly better at it than she was at self-defence, despite her Vanguard training.
If she had called for help by signalling any nearby intelligencers then she’d risk her sisters’ lives, forcing them to come to her rescue, jeopardising their own missions, and quite probably she’d still be killed. So there was no point in doing that.
If she had left the table and never returned, they would hunt her down, very quickly, and anyway, it was her pledge to investigate weft anomalies like the Mother of Mordew and to report about them to her sisters, so while this would save her own life it might endanger the work of the Crusade, something she would never risk doing.
She took her glass from the table, licked the tannin from around the rim of it, and downed whatever remained. Knowing that Sharli could not leave a stemmed glass unsinging, she held the base tight against the table and ran a fingertip around the recently wetted rim. The tone it gave was light and jolly, entirely unlike how she felt inside. Fortunately, Deaf Sam lowered the note by filling the glass with wine. The surface of the liquid rippled and danced, and Sharli smiled at Sam, who could see the vibration even if he couldn’t hear the sound.
He smiled back at her.
When Sharli was a woman, Deaf Sam and she were lovers, regardless of who he, she or they were on those days, and since Clementina had replaced the original, she had honoured this obligation. Now she gazed at Sam with a demure and simultaneously coquettish fluttering of her eyelashes, something that the Vanguard surgeons had made semi-reflexive by building the nerve paths into Clementina’s own muscles during the process of altering her to mimic her cover.
If she tried to take them all by surprise, Deaf Sam included, by, for example, breaking the bladder of poison gas she had taped to her inner thigh, there would be significant collateral damage. Sharli had seen the effects of this poison in the field during the co-option of Judea, though, granted, used on a much greater scale. Half the restaurant would be blue-faced, bulge-eyed corpses before the agent dissipated, and, more likely than not, at least one of the assassins – the Druze, or Montalban, probably – would have immunity. Both had spent time outside Mordew, and they were paranoid enough to spend their commissions on wide-spectrum defences against poison.
Could she defeat them hand to hand? She imagined an attempt, visualising each move at speed in the battle notation that assassins knew – a kind of algebra of violence by which the outcome of a fight could be predicted through the playing of a complex tactical game – and there was a very low chance of success. In fact, in none of the elaborations of any known line of play did she manage to kill four of them before she herself was killed, and this was most likely by Deaf Sam, which added the taint of betrayal to the outcomes.
Often, when assassins have taken more opium than is sensible over lunch, minutes pass in which each quietly communes with their thoughts, the world given clarity and significance by their smoking. Such a period passed now, and Sharli adopted a face that told of the fascinations of a passing bluebottle, or of finding patterns in the rattling of pots in the restaurant kitchens, or of how exquisite a cool breeze feels on the flushed skin of a wine drinker’s cheek. In fact, she was thinking no such things, and to hide that fact she looked down so that no one could see her real thoughts playing out inside her eyes.
Could she turn down the call to the Mother of Mordew for religious reasons? Not at all. Though religious people seem to an observer to have entirely lost their senses in the obvious falsity of their beliefs, and thereby appear like madmen, unlike madmen, whose thoughts tend towards the unanchored and variable, the faithful are attached to their delusions like limpets are to rocks – that is, very tenaciously. This was particularly true of these assassins, the last people in the city of their gestalt and thereby by definition the most attached to it. If she recanted now, they would kill her on the spot as an imposter, or a heretic, or as someone who had developed an incurable illness.
She decided to bide her time and keep an eye out for opportunities.
One of these came almost immediately when Montalban and the Druze left to prepare for the visit to the Mother of Mordew, so Sharli pretended to do the same, but instead went by the most direct route to the mines, keeping to the shadows, head down all the way.
Montalban had never liked Mordew, but he couldn’t deny that it was a profitable place to live for one of his skills. His childhood home – a city that did not have a name pronounceable in his adopted tongue and which consequently he had now forgotten – was under transition to Assembly option and his father’s training was no longer sanctioned. There was no use for them, and with neither father or son willing to retrain they packed up their things and made their way north across the floodplains.
Wet, cold and the consumption of algae have hardening effects on those who can withstand them, as do hunger, illness and grief, and those who cannot bear them will often die. Montalban’s father did the latter, while Montalban experienced the former, the only visible effect on him the leaching of all colour from his hair. One day, he turned his back on his sire’s body, leaving it semi-submerged in a marsh since he had no way of burying him and lacked the strength to pull him a hundred miles to drier ground. He took the old man’s knives and his blowpipes and the few coins he had kept back for emergencies, and trudged away without once looking back. What was there to look at? A puffy and mouldering cadaver? The soul was gone, and what was one more pile of tainted meat to the living? This he told himself, but the following morning his hair was white as a ghost’s.
When he came to a port, reclaimed from the brine swamp, and made passage to Mordew by murdering a ticket holder of a trader berth, he found in that city employment sufficient to allow him eating and drinking rights in a brothel. He was very grateful for the fact, even if the city itself was rainy and cheerless. His joy was in the things of the past – in coloured yurts and whooping horse riders, women with spirits as lively as the bells on their silks – but the past is always gone, and one must find happiness where one may.
His father had always taught him the value of money, the prospect of it being a useful lubricant when a job seemed stiff and dry, so when Padge made his speech, now, many years after Montalban’s arrival, and laid the contract before them all, his mood had risen. Before that there was only the possibility of the world as it already was. But this? To take all that Padge had? That might be enough to buy a new life.
How much was a ship? How much was a crew? How much were provisions sufficient to sail to a place that was neither present nor past but which might contain all the pleasures Montalban had once imagined were waiting for a man like him, but of which he had lost sight through the drudgery of life? Possibly one seventh of Padge’s fortune, an amount he might now come to possess. Even more, should one or more of them die.
Sharli he could see, turning her rings as she always did, sitting across from him. She was off her game – they all knew it – and some of them suspected she had lost faith in her path. She was always staring away somewhere, her eyes naturally focussing on the far distance, and thinking thoughts that were closed to him. This his father had called ‘the traitor’s gaze’, since a true friend found sufficient interest in whomever they were friends with, and had no need to look away to the true source of their duties and obligations, which was somewhere else. She, then, might well not live to claim her share – even if her gaze lied, her distraction would prove just as fatal. An assassin cannot afford to be thinking about anything other than the immediate here and now.
Montalban took a sugared almond from a dish near the contract, white as his hair, and watched to see whose attention flickered over to examine what his hands were doing. Deaf Sam, as he had expected, saw him, as did Simon, but the Druze seemed not to notice at all, which was suspicious since an assassin’s hands are dangerous things which must always be watched.
‘You have an uncommonly sweet tooth today, Montalban,’ said Mick the Greek, thereby letting both Montalban and the Druze know that he had seen it, and knew that it was odd that the Druze was pretending they hadn’t.
Simon sniffed at this, and there was exchanged across the table that subtle and exhausting complex of interactions that assassins exchange when gathered. This, incidentally, was why most people of their trade worked alone – to do otherwise was too much effort for a mind to take. But once Simon had made his recognition clear, everyone knew it, with one exception, Sharli, who did not reply in any of the accepted ways, and who they all knew now was a traitor to their group, though they did not know why.
Montalban, who had stood to indicate that they should all visit the Mother of Mordew, now suggested, verbally, that they should make what preparations they needed to make prior to that journey.
After they all secured the contract and paper, Montalban left to go to his residence and the Druze went to theirs, and they met on the road, where the Druze had something to say.
The Druze got their name from an ancient sect that was famed for its willingness to dissemble, and this the assassin used only because they were good at bluffing at cards, and not because of any supposed hereditary link to the Druzes of the past, or any of their surviving relatives in the present. It was only coincidental that this assassin had some of that sect’s features, facially and in skin tone, and only whimsically that they adopted a Druze’s supposed mode of dress – which was a conical headdress known as a tantour and so-called Ottoman-trousers, which were baggy and jewelled in costume rubies, diamonds and emeralds.
They lived in that part of Mordew known as the Forest, which was uphill, so there was no reason they should not have gone along with Montalban when he left, since they both went the same way.
Once the two had checked for spies and telltales, they spoke quickly as they walked.
The Druze said, ‘The time comes, and we are prepared. What are your ideas?’
Montalban replied, ‘That seven will be two, that there is a traitor, that the others are pairs.’
To which the Druze replied in turn, ‘This is also my reading. Sharli is an imposter, I think. Deaf Sam is faithful to her, Mick the Greek will go with Anatole.’
The Druze went on to say that Padge’s bequest was unexpected but was as good as any of the group-breaking possibilities previously discussed, both assassins having tired of their associates.
They said all this between the street known as Indigo Approach – for the colour the Glass Road gave to the alabaster that clad the buildings there – and an area that was demolished to make way for the preliminary foundations of a new townhouse. The architect of this residence had boasted, in the queue for a local purveyor of delicacies, in this case cheese, that ‘it would be the highest and most needle-like structure in the Pleasaunce – so I can bill the client double – yet cheap to build, maximising my profits.’
From the waste ground there scuttled a rare beetle, which was entirely transparent and productive of a sleeping venom prized by poisoners. Both the Druze and Montalban went to scoop it up, but the Druze got there first. They agreed between them that Montalban should have third share of the beetle’s milkings, since now they were partners by conspiracy and should act mostly in concert.
The Druze said, ‘The major obstacles are the contract terms and the invigilation the Mother will enforce.’
To which Montalban replied, ‘Then we will need to get to her first.’
And the Druze asked, ‘What if the attempt fails? There is a possibility she will punish us.’
The ‘need to get to her first’, and ‘the attempt’ were references to a plan these two had drawn up to come to an agreement with the Mother of Mordew to their advantage at the expense of the other assassins by convincing her that the other five were heretics, a fact they would introduce by exposing Sharli to her, so that she might have an empirically definite example of the possibility of such a thing, before tarring the others with the brush with which Sharli had been tarred. The ‘failure’ worried about was the small chance that their god would ‘punish’ them for their subterfuge, though since she was a god of assassins, they posited that such a position on her part would be contradictory and that she would be just as likely to reward them.
The Druze stroked the length of their nose while this was being said and swished the fabric of their tantour in gentle swirls that released a pleasant odour of lavender. The gems on their trousers glistened and shone.
Montalban reconsidered, as he had many times before, whether his rule against attachments with other assassins was as necessary as it once was, given the Druze’s significant charms. This was a little way away from Indigo Approach, on the road outside The Five Carnelians which was a hostelry frequented by Mordew’s more wealthy grain and nut merchants.
Montalban said, ‘We must do what assassins do.’
The Druze replied, ‘Then let us go there now, without delay, and bargain for our plan.’
These two then went not to their residences, as they had said they would to the others, but straight to the mines. In doing so, they met Sharli on the way and, shortly after, Deaf Sam. This made their subterfuge redundant, and simultaneously put paid to any of her own that Sharli might have had to save her life, as she saw it.
Anatole, he of the obscenely tight clothes, pondered, with half the remaining company only at the table, not including himself, what exactly he thought he was playing at, sitting here while others left.
He had come late to assassinhood, having first ruled out other careers by a process of what seemed, to those around him, unnecessary comprehensiveness.
He had been, in order: a milker of cows, a carrier of letters, a clearer of glasses, a clerk, an architect’s assistant, a washer of pots, a chef, a dealer of drugs to chefs, a collector of debts from chefs, a moneylender to chefs, a moneylender in general, a gambler with other people’s money, a singer of songs, a writer of songs for other people to sing, a bare-knuckle boxer, an enforcer, and then a singer of songs (again). None of these jobs had stuck, most of them being forced on him by circumstances, though he did find himself both writing and singing songs, even when he was not paid for it.
One day, a childhood colleague who had worked with him in the dairy, and who had become the owner of a delicatessen high in the Merchant City, had come upon him during a trip to the slums. He was visiting, this childhood friend, a woman who blacked her eyes in the hovel where Anatole was sometimes wont to collapse under the influence of strong drink. He had said to Anatole, ‘Pull yourself together and apply yourself to a trade!’
These words made an impression on Anatole, as did the fact that they had come from someone like this former associate, a person whom Anatole had considered not only an idiot of the weakest water, but a tedious one. From that moment he had vowed to do as this dolt had bid him, but not in the way that might have been expected.
He followed him – his name was, if Anatole remembered correctly, Farelle, or Lafette, or something with a similar proportion of vowels and consonants – singing songs softly to himself. He tracked him for days, finding out about his life, tracing his movements, familiarising himself with his confidantes and housemates.
When he knew all that he needed to know about him, Anatole pierced one of his arteries when he was at his slum business. He spilled his blood in gushes, to the tune of some self-penned doggerel, across the bare breasts of that black-eyed woman. She objected, of course, and Anatole agreed to return with enough money to compensate her if she agreed to quieten down and dispose of Lafette, or Farelle, or Rafael, or whatever the now exsanguinated fool had been called.
She didn’t want to agree to any such thing, of course, but then he sang her a song and showed her his blade until she changed her mind.
To close this part of the story and remove the requirement for us to return to it later, Anatole did come back, and he did compensate her, very generously, for her trouble, and she became a friend to Anatole to this very day. He found enough work for her, in various ways, that she rarely, if ever, blacked her eyes any more.
Leaving the corpse to the woman to burn, or sell, or portion up, he went to where Rafael – let us settle on that name, for want of a better one – had lived, and slipped from room to room, smothering those who lay abed, sticking any others in their ribs, and generally making the place his own.
Whistling, he took the keys to the delicatessen and found the safe, the combination of which was left at the default setting, and so he helped himself to the sum remaining in it. He reserved a portion to compensate the slum woman, and with some of the rest he hired a drayman, his cart, and a boy. He had them empty the shop of all the comestibles that would survive a night, since he intended to go to the trade market in the morning and sell these to the chefs sourcing goods for that day’s specials.
Finding the cart only half full, he went back to the house, and, paying the drayman and his boy a silver to ignore the corpses, had them load up with whatever valuable things they could see. While they did this, Anatole let his eye drift from here to there around Rafael’s former home. He found himself not in the least bit guilty for what he had done, and noted this of himself. It profits a man greatly to know who he is, and it is not everyone who can butcher a family without it impacting on his emotions.
This realisation was quickly to prove useful to Anatole, since the next day, when he tried to sell the goods he had acquired, he, the drayman and the boy were quickly recognised as murderers, and while a crowd of Rafael’s former associates beat the other two with staves until they were dead, Anatole managed to slip away to a secluded place where he then determined to become an assassin, since the killings had caused him no issue and it was only the selling of the stolen goods that was a problem. Anatole reasoned that if he could be paid for killings in advance there would be no problem at all, and he’d be spared the trouble of fencing contraband.
Here he was, wondering, years later, whether he should be coming up with a plan to make the greater part of Padge’s fortune his. The thing that stopped him, and he would admit this to anyone, if asked, was that he was perfectly happy as he was, suited to his work, and very much enjoying every aspect of it. Unlike the others, he was sad to hear that Padge felt he needed their insurance, because his employer paid him a good wage, the work was not onerous, and who else would he work for once Padge was gone?
In his mind he composed a lament to Mr Padge, and though the man had no funeral, it would have been very fitting had Anatole performed it there.
Of Mick the Greek nothing is known, but what of Deaf Sam and Simon? Those two remain to be discussed, though both have been covered in part, and so we must return to the table at The Commodious Hour because if we did not do so it would be inequitable, and all assassins are equal in the eyes of the Mother of Mordew, and so in our eyes, which are subsidiary to hers, since this story is hers, whether we know it yet or not.
Of Deaf Sam it is necessary to speak without reference to sound, for reasons which are obvious. We should not say that we speak of him at all, which is an aural metaphor, instead we shall say that we deal with him, or treat of him, or put him front and centre, since those things do not make noise.
Which is not to assert that Sam – who was Deaf Sam to the others but Sam alone to himself – lived in utter silence. He heard many things, except that these sounds were not related to events in the world but were things his mind made of the truncated paths that did not reach the organs of hearing that the others had. He heard swooshings and ringings, high tones and low, tak-tak-tak and mah-mah-mah, and any number of meaningless noises so that he ignored them, mostly, unless they were useful for lulling him to sleep, or waking him up.
In his mind he did not think in words, since he had never heard any, nor had he troubled to learn to read, but he was fluent in a visual language that made distinctions of the most minute kind and attributed meaning to them, and other people’s meaning he derived from the movement of their lips, or the wrinkles at the corners of their eyes, and these he loved in Sharli to the point at which he cared about little else.
A clarification is required. The Sharli of old he did not love – she was a hard creature, her features rigid and unkind, and though they made the motions of loving together, the feeling never grew in his heart. He loved her substitute, the new Sharli, there being an ineffable something in the way that she was now that provoked in him the loving sensation, which he felt deeply whether he was clothed or unclothed, during the day or night, asleep or awake.
There she was at the table, hiding her true thoughts by gazing at her knees, framed by empty bottles and the high backs of their chairs, in the foreground of a scene he had seen a hundred times: the restaurant lazily full, drinking off the richness of expensive lunches.
We have learned the pasts of some of these assassins, but Sam’s present was what typified him, because he had never loved before, and here was Sharli, so perfect in even her imperfections, the slight drift of her left eye, the kink in the line of her nose, all of which combined with her other attributes – strength matched to intelligence, thoughtfulness matched to action, doing matched to being – and the otherwise obviousness of her beauty, that he could scarcely look away from her, even when the contract was laid on the table and Padge made his speech.
Money, this was no small thing, certainly, but only if it could be shared with her, this imposter who had improved on her original in ways that Deaf Sam could not understand.
If he had known that Clementina’s liquid engineers had over-tuned her pheromonal balance, and that much of the source of his new love was a slight flaw in the mimicry of the odour the Assembly had made as camouflage, then he would have killed her on the spot, knowing himself to have been played for a fool. But he did not know this. He luxuriated instead in the delusion of his love for this not-Sharli. He didn’t play in his mind battle scenarios, but the wooings and seductions that might take their mere physical bonding to another level entirely.
Until Padge’s arrival, and for an hour or so afterwards, these internal love plans had all taken a similar path – an intense intimation of his authentic yearning for her that would overcome her natural assassin’s suspicions – but now that the Padge information had sunk in, he turned his mind to a demonstration of his devotion. He would secure the eventual bounty from Padge’s death by killing all the others, leaving him and Sharli alone to claim it, and then he would give his share to her. He would, at that moment, make it clear that he had known that she was an imposter all along and thus, by his efforts and his openness, win her heart where now he only possessed her body.
Granted, this plan overshadowed the one sticking point in the whole business – if she was an imposter, for whom was she working? – but Sam allowed himself to ignore this issue, love being like that, turning the eyes of even the deaf to inconvenient facts that they would prefer not to consider.
It is not easy to stare at an assassin – they have an ability to determine whether they are being observed, honed by years in the field – but Sam was used to taking pleasure from his other senses to supplement what he could not get from sight alone. He could smell her skin, which was redolent of the leather wax she used on the sheath of her dagger and the uppers of her boots. He could feel in his fingertips the slight rasp of her breath that too much smoking had made, the air forced between narrowed bronchioles. These were enough to add to his sight – her lips were contained in the reflection of a butter knife, one clavicle was in the bowl of a polished vase – and he could have watched her for hours, forever even, if only that was possible.
Then she stood, and he realised that Montalban was gone, along with the Druze, and she went after them, brushing her fingers over his shoulder as she left, and now he cursed his lack of hearing. In truth, though, if he had not been mooning over Sharli he would have read the progress of the conversation on the others’ lips and would have known more surely what it was he needed to do.
That considered, he did what he would have done anyway, and followed Sharli shortly after, relying on his relationship – carefully cultivated over years – with all the doormen of all the establishments in a mile’s radius to allow him to follow Sharli to where she was going, something he did without alerting her, despite her being on her guard throughout.
Simon only remains, and we know that he went to the mines and met the others there, since we said he went to call on the Mother of Mordew, so we only now need to know why. Perhaps we also need to have information about who he was. We have intelligence on the others – except the mysterious Mick the Greek – so why would we exclude Simon?
But why do we have intelligence on the others? Why have we returned to this gang of miscreants when we could equally have left them well alone and dedicated our time to more obviously important matters? Because those things that seem to not be relevant, those marginal things, those unspoken voices, are the very essence of some cities, are the source of its energies, are the important parts, even when this seems not to be so at all.
Mordew – that was a place that suited the concentration on one person very well, with all the others ignored or relegated to a subsidiary place, but Malarkoi – which was the place to where all these assassins would be sent – that was a place of many levels, of many centres, of many disparate and minority opinions, all coming together under the aegis of its Mistress into a unity. What is a unity, if not a unity of parts?
It should be said, despite the above, that Simon was the least interesting of the group. He mostly kept himself to himself, conserved his wealth by buying dividend-bearing interests in going concerns in the city, ate crackers and meat paste alone most nights, and slept on a straw mattress in a single cheap room. During the day he practised his slices and punches, and kneeings and knife-throwings, put targets of paper on distant trees and made his best efforts to hit them with thrown knives, caring as if they were living things and not circles and outlines.
When addressed, he had nothing much to say, parroting the last thing that had been said to him in a gin-house, or at a cockfight, and that in a solemn monotone, so that people were reluctant to continue conversing with him.
Like all the assassins he was, or had been until recently, a very beautiful person to look at, and therefore he was never wanting for company, even if that was of a very vacuous and tiresome sort. He performed his sexual role with whomever seemed to want him to, taking some pleasure in it, but he had tired even of this, preferring to spend the time he wasted on intercourse in repetitive and soothing calculations of returns on investment, and the possibility of retirement, and his eventual flight to some place where the standard of living was high while associated costs were low.
This preference was why he had decided to make himself plain-looking, even ugly. Then he would not attract other beautiful people, who were confident in their looks enough to bowl in on his privacy and force him out of it with their wiles and attractions. He sought, by transforming himself by turns into a ratlike creature, to relegate himself out of any category of superficial handsomeness. He would then be in a league with other people generally unconfident enough in their looks that they would not approach others but would always wait to be approached. Though he did not make himself so ugly that he would be ranked amongst the desperate, who, in their desperation, will do almost anything to attain a mate, and force themselves on another’s attention in ways very much like the beautiful do in their entitlement, though for the opposite reason.
Some of the work he did himself, by dressing poorly, stooping his posture, and by wearing unpleasant colognes, but other things he went to a costumier for, and to a person talented in the cutting of hair, and to people who performed bonework on the face.
Those ignorant of cosmetic facial reconstruction would say that if someone needed to break the bone of the nose, or of the cheek, then surely there are ways of doing it very cheaply – entry into a boxing tournament in a rougher part of town, or picking a fight with a drunk and then failing to block their flailing blows – but this is not to know the sophistication with which bonework could be done, or the extent that this work could be more or less permanent.
He decided to hire a woman called Eleanor who, though expensive, could, with tools, enlarge or reduce any part of the face to order and within stated parameters. He went to her back room, which she kept soundproofed with pillows and blankets on the walls.
At first, she would not do it, seeing his face and knowing it to be something she could not labour over without spoiling. She was a beautiful person herself, with olive skin and pale brown eyes and a face so perfectly symmetrical that it was sometimes difficult to believe that such an object could exist in the world, so she felt a kinship with him, and an attraction too. When she told him this, and put her hand on his wrist, and drew him to her, he made her understand that this was precisely why he had come to her, to prevent what was happening now from happening ever again.
He said it with an angry curl on his lip.
This she found insulting, since no beautiful person likes to be rejected, and so she began the work for which he had sought to commission her on the instant, and certainly before her analgesic creams had had time to kick in.
First, she took a chisel to his chin, chipping away enough bone so that what had once been a firm jut was now a ratlike recession into the neck. She did not trim the excess skin, as she might have, so that the effect was accentuated by a stepped series of wrinkles that went from Simon’s lower lip down to his Adam’s apple.
Then she applied a depilatory to the same area, and prised wide the follicles of his top lip so the hair there grew thicker and more wiry.
She applied a restrictive cage to his teeth and by turning a cog she altered the angles of his incisors, mostly, but all the others too, so that they sloped back in the manner of a rodent.
She glued a prosthetic beneath the skin of his nose, to change its angle, and put drops in his eyes that made them redder than they should be.
Lastly, she plucked out the hair from his hairline, so it made his forehead sweep back. In every way she did what she was asked, which was to make him seem like a rat.
The effect he could not see immediately when she held the mirror up for him, defiant and irritated at the end of the procedures, because she had bandaged him up, but when he moved to seduce her in a way with which he had salved many irritated and defiant women in the past, he was pleased to see her flinch and step back, taking this as a sign of her newly found repulsion for him.
He paid her his coins, with extra for more bandages and eye drops, and returned to his straw cot. Here he waited through a fortnight, as she had suggested.
His landlady brought him soup and emptied his pot, and for the next two weeks he was very content with his own company. The only thing that disturbed his equanimity was the excitement and anticipation he felt at the prospect of returning to the world and seeing how it reacted to him. The other assassins would not blink, since they never did, but he was curious to see how the patrons at The Commodious Hour would regard him, since they had, until that day, to a man and woman, made him feel by their glances that they knew him to be a beautiful thing, and a proportion of them felt the need to attract his attention, or waylay him on the way to the facilities, or in some other manner alter the course of his life in ways he did not appreciate.
When eventually the day came for the bandages to be removed, he looked upon himself in the mirror with a kind of awed bemusement, seeing not his own face there but the face of an ugly man who had features very murine, and on whom, if he had seen him in the street, he would not have allowed his gaze to linger, feeling that there was nothing pleasurable there to enjoy.
Without waiting, Simon put on his waxed coat and his pointiest shoes and made his back crooked and held his arms in front of him, bent at the elbows. His moustaches, unmatched by any beard below since Eleanor’s depilation, he pulled out long and straight, and he sidled into the street, where no one then spared him a second glance if they completed even a first.
This was like joy to him, to walk unregarded along the streets, and he took a long route and many detours to his meeting with Mr Padge, up and down the hill, from the Pleasaunce to the slums, in unfamiliar streets and places where he was well known. He excited no attention anywhere, and, because this was more than a temporary disguise, he felt from himself a great weight lifted off, permanently, of other people’s expectations, so that when he took his place at the lunch table, the others the only people recognising him the whole way, he had never been happier in his life.
So unlike himself was he now that he went to the Mother of Mordew to re-register himself with her, fearing she would not recognise him when the time came to keep the contract. He need not have worried – her comprehension of the world went beyond superficial things, and she knew him immediately.
The consideration of Mr Padge’s assassins is complete, except for one important thing: what these disloyal and untruthful scoundrels did not realise was that the Mother of Mordew, to whom they had all gone, was an avatar of the Mistress of Malarkoi. It was in this mode that she had communicated to Mr Padge, the very man whose contract each was trying to both fulfil and cheat on, in her successful attempts to make Nathan Treeves come to fruition. She had no interest in any of their betrayals, having her own plan to kill Clarissa Delacroix and resurrect Nathan Treeves so that he might take his throne in Waterblack, City of Death. He would, at the end, wreak such havoc that the warpling would intervene to end it, giving the Mistress the chance to do what she had always planned to do, which was to kill that god and take her place.