trice, I donned the gown, put on the slippers, shuffled out through the door, visited the bathroom—which I discovered had been fitted with a tub—then descended the ramp.
The house had been transformed. There were rugs on the floors, vases on shelves, incomprehensible artwork on the walls, cushions on the sofas, and all manner of homely knick-knacks around the place.
“Good gracious!” I exclaimed.
Clarissa came out of the kitchen. She was wrapped in the yellow robes of a magician. “You’re awake!”
“I don’t think so. Surely I’m dreaming!”
“You were gone for ages, came home in a daze, and slept for what must have been twenty-four hours. As you can see, we’ve been busy.”
“So I see! We?”
“Kata has been appointed as our housekeeper. Come through—there’s tea and toast.”
With my eyes wide and my jaw dangling, I followed her into what had become a very well-appointed kitchen. Kata, who was cleaning the work surfaces, turned and smiled. “Hello, Mr. Fleischer.”
“Kata! I’m happy to see you again!”
I gingerly lowered myself into a chair at the table. Clarissa placed a cutting board before me on which sat a tub of butter, a pot of jam, and a plate piled high with toasted bread. She added to it a teapot, covered with a knitted cosy, cups and saucers, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar.
She laughed at the expression on my face. “These are the products of a Dar’sayn meditation, Aiden.”
“How—how so?” I stammered.
“The Magicians use the fluid to enhance their connection to the other Yatsill. I drank the stuff during my first training session with Father Spreadflower Meadows at the Temple of Magicians.”
“Who? I thought you were to be taught by Mademoiselle Clattersmash.”
“I was, but her dizziness has developed into an illness of some sort, so Meadows, one of her acolytes, has taken over her duties. My session with him involved imbibing this Dar’sayn fluid. It put me into a peculiar state of mind. I became consciously joined to the Yatsill, and I learned a lot.”
“Joined? Telepathically?”
“Yes. I was right about the Working Class. It’s hard to believe, but they have only the most rudimentary intelligence. Everything we see them accomplishing—their efficiency, their craftsmanship, even their ability to communicate with language—is by virtue of the acumen transmitted to them by the Aristocrats.”
I chuckled. “Am I to take it, then, that you, being one of the latter, used the same mental channel to plant a knowledge of tea and toast into the species?”
She smiled and nodded. “In a manner of speaking. As I suspected, the Yatsill have excavated, mimicked, and, in some respects, adapted my memories, but they work on a broad canvas. I was able to communicate greater detail to them, especially where things that’ll make you and me more comfortable are concerned. Their natural enthusiasm did the rest. As a matter of fact, they’d already created a rough approximation of tea—our English obsession—but I was able to refine their recipe. Then they set out to replicate bread, reproducing its texture and flavour as closely as possible. And so forth.”
“On which subject—” I said, and tried to pick up a knife. My fingers wouldn’t cooperate. Clarissa took over, applied butter and jam to a piece of toast, and handed it to me. I took an eager bite and tasted something similar to strawberries but with a spicy edge.
“Of course, I didn’t confine myself to trivialities,” she continued.
I swallowed and exclaimed, “There’s nothing trivial about this!”
“True. But I also refined what they’d already picked up from me concerning mechanical engineering. In future sessions, I shall try to give them more. With their fervour and astounding proficiency, they’ll soon make Yatsillat a better approximation of London. We shall feel quite at home!”
“If we can get used to having four-legged neighbours.”
“I tried to find out more about this ‘being taken’ business, too,” Clarissa continued, “but in that was singularly unsuccessful. They block the entire subject from their own minds.”
I watched our housekeeper as she took oddly shaped and strangely coloured vegetables from a bag and started to peel them.
“Kata,” I said, “were you born on Ptallaya?”
“Yes, sir, and my father. But my mother was from a place called Futuna.”
“It’s an island some distance to the north and west of Koluwai,” Clarissa put in.
“Why was she sent here, Kata?” I asked
“To serve and to have children.”
“Are many of the Servants born here?”
“Most are, but newcomers appear in the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings each time the Eyes of the Saviour open. Like all of us, they serve until they are