Further acquaintance did not make me fonder of Nautilus—and indeed the reverence I saw in Gus’s eyes as he gawked only heightened my distaste. The buildings rippled and rilled, rising in fantastical contortions around alleys so narrow the inhabitants could barely skirt one another, and every surface partook of the same nacreous glow. Towers spiraled up in wanton disregard of gravity, carving bright trails into a sky that never showed anything but twilight. Those inhabitants who did not mind indulging in a continual expenditure could use their magic to create any appearance they liked, and a great many of them strolled about in permanent masquerade. Faces glittered with tiny turquoise scales, or antlers rose in a diamantine mist, or pearly draperies flowed like Greek statuary pursued by restless winds. Gus stared and marveled, his mouth twisted into eternal self-congratulation that he was here among these chosen ones.
For my part, I would have preferred tossing in muck with the pigs.
Even in his awe, Gus seemed hurried and distracted, charging through the streets and then reeling to unexpected stops to gaze up at the sky before rushing on again. I supposed that the recent revelations as to Margo’s poor health were to blame.
We came to a place where the word Immigration was gouged into the wall in phosphorescent script, and I noted a lintel above it. Lintels, I now knew, marked those places where a citizen could penetrate the walls, a lit or two of magic extracted as a toll as they went. Gus shoved directly in. I was forced to tip sharply backward in order to slide through the permeable zone, the bright letters bannering and then bursting against my eyes. There was a queasy whitening of the view as if we were drowning in a butter churn, a resistant suction, and then a yielding gasp. We were through.
Into what, even here, was clearly an office. It was a very small room, the sort allotted to someone of correspondingly small importance. Most of the cramped space was taken up by an enormous desk of battered wood, so discordant inside these luminous walls that I knew at once it must have been brought here from what Gus called the unworld. On the floor nearby was an enormous china basin painted with tiny violets and filled with dingy water.
Papers and stamps were strewn on desk and floor alike, and so were what I took for the wet prints left by the inmate’s feet; that is, once I realized who the inmate was.
There was a severe wooden armchair behind the desk, but no one sat in it. Instead a very large frog spread its warty folds amidst the papers. The creature was quite circular apart from the bulges of its legs, and some two feet in diameter. A mouth ran around nearly half its circumference, which gave it the look of a cushion with its seam coming undone. Its hide was a dirty blue dotted with emerald-green bumps of a disquieting brightness.
It looked at Gus through a pair of pince-nez, which finding no nose to pinch were simply balanced atop its head.
“Well,” said the frog. “Have you the requisite, then?”
I was accustomed to persons of odd appearance, of course, but this was extravagant even by the city’s standards. If the frog was an altered human, it was surely spending quite a bit of magic to maintain an aspect so removed from its former one. I supposed its salary did not suffice to meet the bills.
“Not yet.” Gus exhaled, out of breath. “I thought perhaps an initial payment, to be followed at intervals by—”
The frog turned away. This was a prolonged procedure involving lumbering haunches and undulating flesh, which ended with the frog’s profile spread before us. “No.”
“I am presently able to draw on my own mind at a rate of nearly three talens for every unworld rotation! I can put down two hundred on the spot, and—”
“You are not in the unworld, Mr. Farrow. What passes for time in Nautilus is not so reliable. Your flow here might not be either.”
“I can remove myself there between payments, in order to ensure a steady supply.”
I knew by the rolling of Gus’s eyes how much this offer terrified him, and how handsome he thought himself to make it. In the unworld he risked being arrested for my murder, besides which he would age there like anyone else. His life was the currency he wished to hoard most of all.
“I would find the wait too onerous, I fear.” The frog’s delivery was laconic, drawling, and I began to enjoy it. Owing to my scream, my mouth lacked the flexibility for an appreciative grin.
“Do you not hear me? Within a single unworld year, I could meet your requirements. Even with interest!” Here Gus stamped with all the petulance of a child.
“If only you were not subject to taxation, you mean? All citizens must contribute to the city’s maintenance. These talens you boast of are bleeding even now to feed the common atmosphere.” That observation startled me. The minotaur had mentioned taxes, and said that even I paid them involuntarily, but I’d given little thought to how they were paid. Of course I saw that the magical outlay necessary to create and sustain all the cold marvels of Nautilus must be enormous.
“Then—call it a year and a half. I could—”
“No. You are perhaps aware that bribery is a crime punishable by exile, Mr. Farrow.”
“Yes, of course. But for Margo’s sake I would risk nearly—”
“It is not the risk to you that concerns me, Mr. Farrow.” A single eye, scarlet and black, rotated to gaze at us sidelong. At this angle, the lens of the pince-nez did not cover the eye at all but rather twinkled beside it like a small mirage. “Every time you visit this office, it could be remarked upon. The more visits, the greater the chance that I will live out my days in a manner—uh, ugh—not of my choosing.”
At this I grew quite certain that the frog had indeed been human, and moreover a woman. My interest in her flared with such heat that it took me by surprise. I had settled into a comfortable contempt for every Nautiluser, I realized, as if there were nothing to choose among them. But perhaps there might be some—
“Then we can find an intermediary. I have a friend—for a percentage, at any rate, I believe he would help. You could meet Asterion anywhere you found convenient.”
“The minotaur?” The frog expressed her feelings at this suggestion by continuing her sluggish turn atop her paperwork until we confronted a green-spotted rump. “Certainly not.”
“Miss Anura, I beseech you to reconsider!” Gus here forgot his manners to the point of rounding her desk and thrusting himself into her field of vision. “My aunt is very ill. I must bring her here immediately, on any terms that can be arranged. For a greater consideration—you need not feel bound by your initial mention of a thousand talens—I would be delighted to increase the figure.”
I noticed for the first time that her front legs did not end in the splayed paws of a frog but rather in miniature human hands, dusty blue, and about the size of a two-year-old child’s. I supposed they made it easier to sign and stamp.
“A thousand, Mr. Farrow. Paid in advance, and on the condition that you leave now and don’t come back without it. Another intrusion like this one, and no amount will suffice to move me.”
Gus began sputtering, leaning much too close to her. Rather than continue her laborious shuffle, Miss Anura seized on the expedient of shutting her scarlet eyes. Two globes of blue wrinkled skin faced Gus and would not part again for all his blustering.
Miss Anura was hopelessly corrupt; that I quite understood. She was abusing her position as a public servant for private gain. When I was alive I would have considered such venality unforgivable, revolting.
Here in Nautilus, I found I rather liked it, and her, and not merely because of the consternation she produced in Gus. Had death made me so amoral, then? Perhaps it had.
Gus at last drew a deep breath, closing his own eyes in sheer frustration. The frog opened hers and looked. Not at him, but at me.
It was nothing new to me, of course, to be stared at in my ghastly condition. I had no way to hide what I was; I could not mask my billowing and flashing as one might a disease of the skin. Instead I must submit to a constant and degrading examination as a waving, shrieking spectacle towed about against my will.
But Miss Anura’s look was of a different character. She met my eyes with a morose, unblinking knowing. It did not quite rise to the level of sympathy, perhaps, but it was still an acknowledgment of my personhood.
“Good afternoon, then, Miss Anura,” Gus managed. His words were sharp-edged, snipped like so many paper dolls from crisp resentment.
“A good afternoon to you, Mr. Farrow.” There was no such thing as afternoon in Nautilus, but such phrases are not easily extinguished. Miss Anura did not lower her gaze as she spoke, but kept it on my flickering visage. “And to you, Miss Bildstein.”
Gus jerked on hearing this, as indeed did I. For of course we both realized at once that it was the first time since my death that anyone had addressed me—apart from Gus himself, who prattled at me as a child would to a favored toy.
On an impulse I moved to bow myself down to Miss Anura. I don’t know what I hoped to do—perhaps I would have tried to kiss one small blue hand. My bodiless form inclined with more alacrity than I had expected, though the part of me corresponding to feet remained firmly anchored to Gus. Like a candle flame bent by the wind, I swooped straight at the frog’s bulging eyes.
Even in Nautilus, it seemed, such behavior on the part of a ghost was deemed alarming. The frog flattened herself to an improbable degree across her desk. She quivered, her emerald spots blazing with anxiety, and spat at me. I recoiled and pitched to-and-fro above Gus’s head again, and Miss Anura, released from the pressure of my looming presence, sprang into the air with shocked agility and splashed into her basin. Her webbed hind feet and human hands paddled at the unclean water while she glowered at me.
I wished I could apologize; I was very sorry to have frightened her. But my scream would not allow room for words.
“She’s never done such a thing before!” Gus yelped. “Miss Anura, I hope you won’t allow this, this fit of Catherine’s to change your mind. She probably was not even conscious of her own movement—it was likely a kind of reflex or spasm triggered by her name. I realize she may not have made the best impression, but as a rule she’s quite docile. No trouble to me at all.”
Docile. My longing for vengeance compounded at the word, though I knew Gus’s claim to be untroubled by me was a lie.
“She can’t possibly make a worse impression than you do,” Miss Anura groused. “She’s calmer than you are, and far more well-spoken.”
With that, Gus nodded, his face crimson, and we backed out of the office with a pop of violated wall. He stomped a short distance, and even the worn folds of his coat seemed to seethe with frustration and spite.
Then he stopped and leaned against a wall. I had time to wonder how Miss Anura had learned my name; her casual knowledge suggested that Gus and I were of more interest to the local gossips than I would have guessed. I had time to worry that I had squandered her goodwill, broken that frail thread of connection that had spun from the meeting of our eyes.
What was it I was feeling? Why was my loneliness so much heavier now that she had breached it?
I found Gus’s eyes had lifted while I was lost in thought. His head was craned back so that he could take in nearly the whole of me, and so he remained, contemplating me in the way that a pickpocket might the bulges in a rich man’s coat.