Pariah: Eisenhorn vs Ravenor Page 12

  To be fair to him, most of the art was only adequate at best. The commune was a working studio for commercial portraiture. Some of the residents had loftier aspirations that were unlikely ever to be realised. Only Shadrake had any proper talent. I wondered if he was still a resident.

  The top floor of the buildings was a false floor built across the massive rafters of the old plating works. It was here, in areas divided and demarcated by dirty curtains and other makeshift hangings, that the models, assistants, hue-makers and other juniors of the commune, along with friends and hangers-on, lived and slept.

  We went up. The place was empty, except for a few slumbering youths and an old woman boiling a tin kettle on a burner stove. The space that Padua Prate had once occupied had been taken over by another person, but I soon found a vacant place. I knew how it worked. Newcomers just took the next empty space available.

  The space was near the eaves, and had a couple of dirty mattresses and an old, green silk curtain that could be pulled across on a rail.

  ‘Here?’ Lightburn asked.

  ‘We’ll wait here, and watch for my friend,’ I told him.

  He sat down on one of the mattresses. He looked unconvinced and ready, at any moment, to leave.

  After a few minutes, I spied Lucrea, a young model and hue-maker, who had been living there when I had been Padua Prate. She was thinner than I remembered. I went to greet her, leaving Lightburn where he was, glaring after me.

  ‘Padua?’ Lucrea cried. ‘You came back!’

  She seemed delighted to see me, though there was a haze of lho in her eyes.

  ‘A job didn’t work out,’ I said, ‘so I thought I’d move back. Constant still here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘He mentions you sometimes. He had his eye on you. He’ll be pleased you’ve returned.’

  Shadrake was an unsavoury sort, and had a reputation for treating his models as playthings before discarding them.

  ‘He can keep his hands to himself,’ I said.

  ‘He still pays well for someone who can sit as well as you,’ she said. ‘You should use him. Use his interest to further yourself.’

  I shrugged. I could tell from her tone that she had either been abused and discarded by Shadrake, or was unhappy that she hadn’t yet caught his eye. I feared that this was because she was already too thin and pale for him. Poverty, poor diet and the lho had begun to spoil Lucrea’s looks and waste her away. Shadrake liked his girls, and boys, rather more healthy-looking, with a rude vigour to them. If their looks were to be ruined, and their youth stolen, he would do the ruining and stealing himself.

  ‘Has anyone else been asking after for me?’ I asked her.

  ‘A few did,’ she said, ‘after you went away so suddenly.’ She mentioned the names of a few others in the community, who had become Padua’s friends during her stay. ‘No one recently.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Where are your clothes come from?’ she asked, suddenly interested. ‘Look at you now! So fancy and fine!’

  Though they were damp, and now dirty, I was still clad in the garments of Laurael Raeside.

  ‘These?’ I said, looking down at myself. ‘I can’t abide them. They are prissy things that the artist I was sitting for made me wear.’

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked.

  ‘Sym, up on the top of Regency Rise.’

  She was impressed.

  ‘But he is a proper sort. They say he pays well.’

  ‘He’s no better than Shadrake. Dirty old lech. He wanted to paint me, then tumble me. When I denied him and told him I’d leave, he refused to give me back my clothes, so I took the ones he’d dressed me in.’

  Lucrea laughed.

  ‘They are so uncomfortable!’ I declared.

  ‘And who’s he?’ she whispered, glancing in the direction of Lightburn.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said to her. ‘He follows me around like a dog.’

  ‘He’s quite a handsome one, in that mournful way,’ she said. ‘He looks a dangerous sort. I like that look in a fellow’s eye.’

  ‘I haven’t decided if I do just yet,’ I said.

  She smiled at me, and hugged me enthusiastically. I could smell the dirt of her, and her stale breath, and feel the very bones of her.

  ‘It’s so good to see you again, Pad!’ she cried. ‘Why don’t you come down to my lodge for a smoke and a good chat?’

  ‘I will,’ I told her. It pained me to see her so much declined since our last meeting. She was not looking after herself at all. ‘Give me a while to arrange my things, and I’ll be down.’

  I went back to Lightburn, drew the curtain, and sat down. I thought I might give Judika a few hours, perhaps the whole of the night. It was getting dark, and I did not fancy traversing the neighbourhood after nightfall. Besides, Lightburn had refused to tell me how far the journey to Mam Mordaunt might be.

  I took up the little blue book, and began to study it while I waited, hoping to learn a little more of the mysterious society that had become the mortal enemy of the Maze Undue, and had so cruelly unfounded our lives. As I worked, I tried to relax and focus my mind using my tempering litany. The sound of Sister Bismillah’s voice in my imagination, a voice I suspected I would never hear again, was very sad.

  Apart from the numerals on the cover – 119 – and the Enmabic title, the book was composed in a complex cypher. I worked my way through the yellow pages of tightly handwritten brown ink, trying all the basic decrypting methods we had been taught. Substitution and transposition didn’t seem to work, and neither did obvious numeric formulae. There had to be a key, and I fancied that the number 119 was part of it. But what did it denote? The one hundred and nineteenth letter? The one hundred and nineteenth word? The one hundred and nineteenth page? The one hundred and nineteenth word on the one hundred and nineteenth page?

  Or was it just the one hundred and nineteenth of Lilean Chase’s notebooks, painstakingly numbered where the Secretary chose not to number his?

  The Curst made some grumble about the long wait, so I gave him more coins, and told him to go down to the street to fetch some food and drink for us. He did so, reluctantly.

  He had been gone about half an hour when I began to feel that someone was watching me. It was a quite distressing feeling for, quite apart from the immediate alarm, it brought back the feeling I had woken to the night before, the feeling that had roused me and got me to search the attics until I found Sister Tharpe.

  There were eyes upon me. I got up off the mattress, and went to the curtain, half-expecting to see Lucrea coming to visit me, but the space around was empty. Other bedrolls and sleeping areas were screened off by lank drapes and curtains. A few lamps glowed. A breeze stirred the curtains. I could hear rain on the roof.

  Behind the curtain, I should have been out of sight of everyone, unless some voyeur had bored a spy hole in the floor or the slope of the roof above me. To feel a gaze upon me suggested something more than physical eyes. We had been taught that, under certain circumstances, the inward gaze of the psyker, the outreaching vision, can feel like sunburn on the skin. I twisted my cuff to dead, but it did not alleviate the sensation.

  I took the bent silver pin, and went out into the open. I walked the length of the lodging floor, quietly noting the people sleeping, resting or drinking in their curtained spaces. I went to the head of the stairs. There was no sign of Lightburn returning.

  I went down.

  On the previous night, the night the Maze Undue fell, I had wondered if I was imagining the sensation of being regarded. In hindsight, I had decided that it had been the loose end of a dream that I had woken up with, which had been intensified into an apparently genuine memory by the traumatic events that had followed.

  But this was the same. It was a real feeling, not imagination, and it convinced me that the night before I’d had a real feeling too. So, the question arose, was the same fate about to befall the commune as had engulfed the Maze Undue? Or had some force, some psychic im
pulse, roused me then to discover Sister Tharpe’s intrusion, rather than being part of that invasion?

  I took a chance. There, halfway down the top stairs of the commune, I turned my cuff to live again, allowing myself to be more receptive – more vulnerable – to psyk.

  Almost at once, I heard the laughter of a child again. The sound chilled me, just as it had in the attics of the Maze Undue. I swallowed hard. I crept down the stairs, listening carefully for another trace.

  On the landing below, a broad space brightly lit by a ratty old chandelier, there was a mouldering sofa and two large porcelain pots for walking sticks. The floorboards, banisters, walls and ceiling had been painted a dull white, and so had the old mirror screwed to the wall, gilt frame and glass and everything, so it was just the painted, white relief shape of a mirror on the wall. To one side were a pair of closed double doors. To the other, across the landing, doors led into the pigment shops. Dirty curtains hung across those doorways. The dusty, multi-coloured tracks of endless feet scuffed in and out of the doorways where pigment dust had been trodden across the white floorboards.

  Below me, the ragged stairs descended to more pigment shops on the floor below.

  I heard a child laugh again. I turned. I glimpsed movement. The curtain screening one of the pigment shop doorways stirred slightly.

  I went that way, the pin ready. I drew the curtain aside and stepped in.

  The air was close, and smelled of minerals and powders. Filthy trestle tables lined the room, stacked with pigment tins, mixing cups, jars, bottles and dishes of clear oil. The spoons, brushes, scoops and knives, all the tools of the trade, stood in pots, begrimed. The floor was a stew of trodden-in colours. No one was at work. A few lamps had been left on, and they gave off a pearlescent glow because of the powder in the air.

  I crossed into the adjoining shop, which was similarly furnished, though slightly smaller. Again, I thought I heard a laugh. I sensed a movement.

  A third room joined the first two, and I went through. An old man sat at one of the benches, delicately mixing a shade of red in a ceramic cup.

  ‘Hello?’ he asked, looking up at me.

  ‘Did a child,’ I began. ‘Did a child come in here?’

  He looked puzzled.

  ‘No one has come in here at all,’ he replied.

  I walked through his room, past the trays of stoppered bottles, and entered a store room where the mixing oils and suspension mediums were kept in large glass flasks on wooden shelves. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny figure scurry out of the door at the far end.

  A child. A person no taller than my mid-thigh.

  I darted after the shape. The doorway, through a curtain, led back out onto the landing. There was no one out there, but the double doors at the far side, which had been shut when I had stood there previously, were closing.

  I went to them and opened them directly. I walked into a sudden burst of noise.

  This chamber, a cluttered and untidy drawing room, had in it about two dozen people, all of them with musical instruments. Music had been a popular diversion in the commune, and many of the residents had liked to gather of an evening to play together while they drank or sank into stupors of lho, grinweed or gladstones.

  By happenstance, the very moment I opened the door, they started playing for the first time that night, a raucous flourish of sound made by fiddles, drums, pipes, theorbos, sackbuts and other instruments. One of the pigment-stained residents even had a lirone, a sixteen-stringed cello.

  The blast of noise made me jump wildly.

  A cry went up, and everyone in the room stopped playing and started to laugh at the sight of me. I must have seemed very comical, to blench in such a way.

  ‘Look!’ someone cried. ‘It’s Padua. Padua is back!’

  Several of them got up to welcome me, or to introduce me to newcomers I had not met. I did not at all want this sudden society, but I had to play my part.

  As I was greeted and welcomed, I looked around the room past the faces around me. It was crowded with old furniture, and much piled with rugs and old bolsters and cushions. Everywhere there were lamps, glasses, bottles, plates of iokum and candied fruits, and shisha pipes.

  There was no sign whatsoever of a small child, not even cowering behind furniture in the most shadowy corners.

  CHAPTER 19

  Which is of Shadrake’s vision

  One of the musical company was Constant Shadrake, the artist. He set down his fiddle and came to me at once, beaming a smile that was supposed to be paternal but which barely concealed his venal inclinations.

  ‘Padua! Dear Padua!’ he said. His voice was husky and thick, the effect, I believed, of yellodes and lho combined. ‘I am overjoyed to see you back with us in the merry household!’

  He was in a good humour, though it was that part of the evening. Shadrake regularly became sour and bitter as the night wore on and intoxicants multiplied in his bloodstream.

  ‘I want you to sit for me immediately!’ he declared.

  ‘I have only just arrived, sir,’ I protested.

  ‘That face of yours has inspired me. I have been listless for days.’

  He insisted that I follow him down to his studio, though I doubted any work would actually be done. Others of the company were encouraged to follow along, and bring their wine and their instruments, so that music might accompany him while he considered a composition.

  All the while, I looked around for signs of the child I had seen. The feeling of eyes upon me did not go away. I felt trapped. I wanted quiet, and the opportunity to investigate and flee, but I was instead bound up with a lecherous painter and his befuddled entourage. If I wished to preserve the mask of Padua Prate, I had to go along with it.

  ‘Who, my dear, has been buying you such luxurious clothes?’ Shadrake asked me as we descended the staircase. He fondled the lapel of my coat, as though to evaluate the quality, but it was little more than an excuse to brush his hand against my breast.

  ‘Has someone been cosseting you?’ he asked.

  ‘I was sitting,‘ I replied. ‘These are the clothes I was given.’

  ‘Who were you sitting for?’ he asked.

  ‘A nobody,’ I replied.

  ‘But who?’ He wanted to know. He was the fickle sort, easily affronted or offended, but his pride was equally easy to preen.

  ‘Some talentless man called Sym,’ I replied.

  He beamed. This report pleased him immensely. He began to tell the gaggle of drinkers and musicians accompanying us how he had taught the great Sym all about shadow, and clouds, and seascapes.

  Shadrake was a tall man, and bony, with hair so dark he never shaved cleanly, even with a fresh razor. He may have been handsome as a younger man, and evidently still thought of himself that way. Hard living and erosive substances had hollowed him out. He was portly where he ought to have been slim, bony where he should have had meat, wolfish and arrogant, bleary and bloodshot. He stank of drink and lho smoke. His hands were filthy with paint. Nevertheless, he acted as though he was armed with the most unfailing charisma. He fancied himself to be an irresistibly sexual being.

  His entourage of models, hue-makers, under-painters, apprentices, juniors and, I’m quite sure, bawds from the local streets, did nothing to disabuse him of that notion. They obeyed his every order, and laughed at his every joke. They did this out of fear of falling out of favour, or of falling in the way of his loutish temper if it turned. They kept him happy, so he would stay happy with them.

  We went into his studio. The place was the usual mess of half-finished work, easels, stands and immense quantities of clutter. Shadrake had never been the tidiest of men; he seemed to thrive in conditions of chaos and disarray, but things had got worse. There was stuff everywhere. Items cluttered every surface and were strewn across the floor: dirty clothes, books, painting paraphernalia, cups, props, plates, garbage, bottles and even a few chamber pots in need of emptying. Half-eaten meals lay rotting on dishes. Garments and sundry
items were piled up on chairs.

  That was not the worst of it. Shadrake’s work had developed since I had last seen it. The images in his paintings were disquieting to say the least. It was not simply that his technique had diminished (the work was extremely scrappy, almost childish), but the content was the stuff of lurid nightmares. Fiendish shapes coupled and writhed. Violence and dismemberment were prevalent. Anatomical grotesquery featured heavily. Some of the symbols and decorations scratched into the images were simply disturbing of themselves.

  I felt most uneasy. My function here had been to study Shadrake for signs of taint, and I had reported that none had been evident. Certain glyphs and ornaments – devices that had originally flagged him as a person of interest – had proven to be rather more innocent and accidental than the sigils feared by the Secretary and Mentor Murlees.

  But this was not right. This was plainly the work of a man with heretical leanings, either deliberate ones or accidental. I experienced a sense of tremendous guilt that I had not performed this function better. I had left it undone and unchecked and, after my departure, it had festered.

  He was asking me what I thought of the pictures. In all honesty, they made me feel sick. I said something inconsequential. I forced myself to look more closely.

  I reconsidered. There was a derangement here, but Shadrake had obviously become quite dissolute, and his outlook transformed by an excess of opiates. Though quite foul and uncomfortable, the work – like the condition of the studio itself – was perhaps the product of a hallucinating addict. Constant Shadrake had lost himself in the fevers of lho and obscura.

  Someone cleared clothes off a chair, sat down, and started to play the theorbo. Someone else banged at a tambourine. Wine and amasec were slopped gleefully into glasses and handed out. Shadrake was expounding to all and sundry his latest philosophy of working, while smoking a lho-stick and vigorously loosening the paint on a palette with an oiled brush. He talked through the stick clamped between his teeth.