John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

“You mean using me! You mean owning me!” I said hotly.

She said, “Hush,” because, at that moment, Dr. Fell came marching around the corner of the building, with his stiff-kneed gait, his hands folded behind his back. The black man was not with him.

Fell said thinly, “Matters are prepared. Miss Daw, if you could bring your patient…?”

I said, “I don’t want to go back into that cell. It’s horrible.”

Fell turned his narrow face toward me. At that moment, even if Quentin had never told me, I would have known his eyes were nothing but hard marbles, painted to look like eyes.

“Do not make a fuss. You will be released by tomorrow afternoon. All conditions will be reset to the status quo ante, and we will continue as before.”

The cell did not look any different, except that the heavy black iron chain had been replaced by a modern chain of machine-forged steel links. Miss Daw’s compact disc player was atop the little shelf near the door where it normally rested, out of my reach, playing beautiful clear music.

I spent the afternoon with selections of concertos by Brahms floating past me. I had noticed that the music did not repeat in the same order, as a phonograph record might have done. I wondered if this kind of music box was common in the outside world, if every child owned one, or only the rich.

I tried to turn on my other senses, but Grendel’s curse was still on me. I wondered idly if I looked prettier to other people now, if Grendel’s lust had made me look more like his daydream image of me.

That evening I was given a freshly pressed school uniform to wear, and a hurried and cross-looking Sister Twitchett told me to don it quickly.

While I was getting dressed, she frowned at the compact disc player, and shut it off. “Mustn’t let them think we are mollycoddlers… ” she said to herself.

When footsteps sounded in the corridor, she looked around worriedly, and hid the disc player beneath one of my two buckets.

“Look smart!” she snapped at me.

And she curtsied toward the barred door of the cell. She had closed it behind her when she had entered, which was unusual.

I could hear Boggin’s voice. “…Your Lordship will forgive us if we have nothing prepared. The unexpected nature, one is tempted to say, surprise nature, of Your Lordship’s visit, left us with no time to… ”

A voice of gravel answered him, a voice as harsh as a clash of gears in a broken gearbox. “Heh. If your spies didn’t warn you I was coming, cut their pay. You’re not getting value for value.”

“I am not certain I… ah… can permit myself to comprehend, yes, that is the word, comprehend, every nuance of Your Lordship’s, ah, implication.”

“Then think.”

A grotesque man stomped up to the door. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored blue pinstripe suit with a fashionable overcoat atop that.

He was hunchbacked, and his hump made him look as if he were carrying a bag or a small child piggyback. His shoulders and chest slanted from left to right, but the slabs of muscle there would have made even the chest of a bull seem puny. It looked like he was wearing football pads. His arms were larger around than other men’s thighs. His legs, on the other hand, were thinner than other men’s arms, and one was crooked, like a monkey’s leg, while the other was long and straight. He stood on them at an angle, with his knees pointed different directions, and his feet splayed out, so that his walk was a rolling sidelong shuffle, like the walk of a crab.

The crooked leg was clamped in a complex brace of shining steel, with gears and motors at the kneecap and ankle. In his hand he held a short steel bar. I assume it was a cane, but he never leaned on it.

His face was round and slablike, his mouth ringed with muscle, his brows jutted like an ape’s. His skull was covered with short stubble. His eyes were narrow slits, and his wrinkles seemed to be scowling, squinting, and grinning, all at once.

I should mention that the suit was perfectly cut, but it did nothing to detract from his twisted hugeness. He had diamond cufflinks in white cuffs, but his hands were still hairy and heavy, and his sausage-fingers were brown with calluses.

He squinted (and scowled and grinned) at me.

“So this is the little bottom you’ve been spanking, eh?”

Boggin was behind, looming tall. The squat man’s head was on a level with his navel, although the man’s shoulders and hump were more nearly level with Boggin’s chest.

“Your Lordship’s meaning, ah, escapes me.” Behind the squat man, Boggin waved his hand at me, and rolled his eyes toward Sister Twitchett. He wiggled his brows suggestively. It took me a moment to realize that he wanted me to curtsey, too.

The squat man said, “Well, you did on a bell tower in plain view of anyone within a mile. And my spies do give me value for value.”

I took my plaid skirt in hand and curtsied. The steel chain running between my neck and the ceiling rattled.

“Let’s see her close,” said the squat man.

Boggin said, “Sister Twitchett, the key, if you please? Open the door for Lord Mulciber.”

The Sister straightened up from her curtsey (which she had been holding for at least a minute) and made a great show of patting her pockets and frowning, as if she had forgotten where the key was.

The squat man said, “Never mind. Do it myself.” Then, louder: “Iron! Cold Iron! Hot-forged Steel! Obey the Smith of Iron’s Will!”

The door rattled in its frame, and the chain on my neck shivered and chimed, but nothing else happened. The door did not open.

The squat man crooked his head sideways and grinned (and squinted and scowled) at him. “Clever, clever, North Wind! Point taken. The girly here is not getting away.”

Sister Twitchett suddenly found the key. “Here it is!”

“Heh. Right in the same pocket you groped three times. Funny, that,” the squat man grunted.

“If Your Lordship will permit me…?” Sister Twitchett simpered.

“Don’t bother. I don’t go into cells I can’t get out of. Not with the North Wind breathing down my neck. I can shout from here.” (He was not shouting; he was only two yards away from me.) “You, there, girl. What do you call yourself?”

Boggin said, “Her name is… ”

“Shut it. Talking to the girl.”

“Of course, Your Lordship,” said Boggin smoothly. “If Your Lordship intends a private conversation with our, ah, guest here, I can step away…”

“You might as well hear it live as on tape. Girl…?”

I curtsied again. “Yes, Your Lordship.”

“Your name?”

“They called me Secunda, Lordship, till they let me pick my name. I picked Amelia Armstrong Windrose. I think my real name is Phaethusa, daughter of Helion. But that could be a lie. I’ve been lied to a very great deal, Your Lordship.”

Boggin cleared his throat and said, “Now see here, Miss Windrose… ”

“Shut it. I won’t ask again,” said the squat man, his voice suddenly terrible.

Boggin blenched and stepped back.

The squat man shifted gears in his voicebox back to a more gentle growl, and said to me, “No more of that ‘Lordship’ stuff. You’re not under me, and I don’t deserve it nohow.”

“What shall I call you, Your L… sir?”

“Oi, we are polite, aren’t we? You can call me Stumpy. Everyone does behind my back. My back is so large, they figure I won’t hear. Nothing wrong with my ears, though, except my ears got the same problem yours do.”

I looked at him a moment. He grinned (and squinted and scowled) back at me.

“What problem is that, Lord Mulciber?”

“I hear a lot of lies. I hear a lot of flattery.”