as if we wore it out.” She sniffed the air, alert suddenly to a warm scent.
Orinda nodded. “You smell the breakfast cooking, too, don’t you?”
By way of answer, Leodora’s stomach gurgled.
“Come along, my dear. After we eat, we can ponder all the questions in the universe without being taken by them, as Mr. Burbage used to say.” Orinda clasped her hand and led her toward the stairs.
Leodora pocketed the pendant and let her hostess lead her, but she wasn’t giving up on discovering how this span had been blighted. Deep inside she knew that the plague visited upon this place had something to do with her.
* * *
Upon another spiral, on the distant span of Vijnagar, something unnatural came flowing along Kalian Esplanade. In the late-night darkness a darker mass moved, topped by five smooth, pale, hairless heads. The mass or its constituents made no sound, yet thrust along the esplanade without benefit of any torchbearer to guide them. Those who plied that trade saw the approaching anomaly and changed course instinctively to avoid it, which abrupt shift caused their clients to take notice of the five heads sailing past, sunken eyes glistening, watchful, like birds of prey. Some people drew up, backed to the seawall, to let the thing by. Bearers and clients were united in their unease, and if anyone spoke, it was to whisper. “Archivists,” said some, thinking that the legendary Library had sent its agents to capture some piece of knowledge, a scholarly scroll perhaps. As no one had ever laid eyes upon the rumored archivists, it was a reasonable opinion, though less explicable was why a cluster of library archivists should elicit discomfort if not outright terror, for there were many others brushed against by the flowing mass who instinctively made small gestures to ward off evil before hurrying on their way, all too grateful to be going in the opposite direction.
The place called Lotus Hall, while still open for business, was nearly dormant this late, inhabited by a few regulars who would have sat there no matter what entertainment was proffered. At the moment that entertainment comprised a man spinning four ducks that balanced perfectly poised on the tips of their beaks upon polished clamshells. No one paid him or his trained fowl the slightest attention, although the ducks were working very hard and occasionally let fly a disgruntled quack.
The proprietor, Nuberne, was feeling the pinch since the remarkable Jax had gone. The puppeteer had brought in standing-room crowds, the best he’d ever seen. He suspected that his wife, Rolend, had hastened the puppeteer’s departure with her unbridled overtures, and things had not been pleasant between them since.
He was standing in his small kitchen off the hall when the sounds of the performance ceased. Even the small, innocuous noises of snoring drunks and cautious conversations stopped. As his head turned, the hair on the back of his neck stiffened and he threw off a shiver in response to the uncanny silence.
The hall, seen through the doorway, became darker than the kitchen, where two low cooking fires tossed trembling shadows as well as heat. Even the wall sconces and the chandelier candles seemed to have guttered and gone out. From the center of this deeper darkness five pale heads gained in size every moment, until he could make out the glassy eyes within the sunken orbits, eager and hungry in their focus upon him. Not until they hovered just beyond the doorway did he make out the folds and darts of their black cloaks. This was the effect they strove for, of course, and though he recognized the manipulation, he could not overcome its dread intent. Later as he clung to his wife’s stiff fingers, he would insist it couldn’t be real, any of it, because the archivists were a myth. Everyone knew it.
Packed closely together, the five hovered at the doorway as one of them spoke. “You are the proprietor?” The bloodless lips had hardly moved. All eyes still feasted upon him.
Nuberne tried to reply, swallowed, cleared his throat, and managed a raspy, “I am.”
“We are interested in a performer who seems not to be performing this night.”
He tried to make sense of that. “You’re wanting me to hire him?”
The five exchanged looks. “No. What would make you think that?”
“I don’t understand then.”
At that point his wife, Rolend, approached from wherever she’d been in the depths of the hall. “What’s happened here, Nuberne?” she called as she scanned the wide-eyed stragglers, the nonperforming ducks.