INTERLUDE
They sat in a small café with wiry black chairs and a board advertising poached eggs on slices of toast. The spirit, Belchamber, purchased for her a small cup of coffee and cold rice pudding.
The girl had never liked her name. It was quite ridiculous, in her opinion, that the very epithet designated to reveal the quintessential essence of who one was as a human creature was always chosen by someone who knew absolutely nothing about them.
When the spirit asked, she told him anyway.
The word felt sibilant against her tongue.
‘How did you come to this city?’
She had no answer. Only bitterness and apathy to everything before and around her like the blue-grey fog of a winter morning, softening and blotting out all.
The girl did not want to die.
She simply did not feel like living.
She shrugged, and so the little spirit brought his hands together.
‘I have a proposition for you,’ said Belchamber. She braced herself for whatever lewd or illegal activity a spirit of this city would ask of a vagabond girl. ‘Ollianne Shrine is in need of some assistance – polishing the tiles, shooing the foxes, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re offering me a job? As a shrine hand?’
‘It is dull work,’ said Belchamber. ‘But the position is paid. And they will feed you.’
‘Why would you help me?’
‘Why not?’ asked Belchamber. ‘I have found too many bodies on the cobbles of this city, dead from dirty opium or vile imitations of packet spells or both. I would hate to find you that way, come wintertime.’
There was a gentle earnestness to him that caught the girl quite by surprise.
‘I don’t want to tell anyone my name,’ she said.
‘What would you prefer to go by?’
Her mind was slow. She cast around for inspiration.
‘Edwina Benedict,’ she said.
The spirit chuckled, and before she could change her mind, he raised his little arm and called, ‘Bill, please!’
He led her to a hostel three streets away, and as she followed him she watched her own feet gloomily. She was used to soft soil, not concrete. The city was loud and filled with smoke and sordid stenches.
‘I’ll pay for your first month staying here,’ said Belchamber as they stood before the hostel.
‘The spirits will expect you at sunrise. That’s seven o’clock, Miss.
The Ollianne Shrine is a mighty walk to the west. It’s in the Mourners’ District and the trams are dear in this city, so I suggest you leave at five. ’
The Ollianne Shrine was on a steep hill, and from the top of the steps, the girl could see the little motor cars below. She was greeted at the gate by an aged spirit with soft, white fur who sparkled in the sunlight. She thrust a bundle of clothes at her. Her name was Thistlethwaite.
‘Belchamber is well respected here,’ said Thistlethwaite. ‘Pray you do not embarrass him.’
The girl placed her stolen shoes and old clothes on a wooden shelf within the gate house and changed into the borrowed cottons of her uniform: a green tunic, drop-waist skirt and embroidered slippers.
It was, she realised, up to her to procure her own tasks.
The girl despised cleaning but she despised herself far more, and so she marched over to the shrine steps and, without magic, started polishing the mosaic risers.
All 342 of them. It took the girl an entire week.
She scrubbed them all, her fingers wearing down, her nails breaking and bleeding.
When she was done, she found an envelope beside her street clothes and, within it, her first ever payment of silver.
She returned every day. She replaced the salts and simmered the rosewater and polished the statues.
All the while, she was assaulted by the babble of her memories.
Flashes of Cate covered in blood, the dull thuck of the bread knife, Opal’s wheezing, Opal smiling, writhing against Lio, Opal dying in the moonlight on the blood-soaked linen, the stark willows with guillotine branches, her mother crying and her father silent.
The girl scrubbed until her knuckles ached, until the scar on her hand callused, until she went home to the hostel room she shared with three other women and got into bed and did not move until it was time to rise again.
And so, she became a kind of apprentice to the shrine and the spirits, who in turn taught her new ways to use magic.
The spirits had no need of human spells.
They, after all, were the first Magicians, and like human spellcrafters often tended toward one talent or another.
A number of these spirits lectured at the Royal Institute, the girl later learned, and so from them she scraped together her education.
In premise, their magic was similar to that of the forest. Yet, in practise it could not feel more different: Acanthi’s magic was earthy, imperfect, wild.
The magic of the city was precise, regal, beautiful.
They were the same language: one was a violent scrawl carved with a bread knife and the other was a calligraphic script painted with a fine brush.
From one spirit she learned about spells of the psyche; from another she learned about spells of deception.
And when the downtrodden wandered up to the shrine from the Mourners’ District orphanage or the Syden Street Medical Centre, what could she do but accommodate their requests?
She learned, bit by bit, to fix their draughty windows and charm away their vermin, and when she was done, the girl wandered back to the hostel remembering little.
Her internal world was a bloated bucket, sore and constantly spilling over.
The days dribbled past, and she pretended more and more that she was Edwina Benedict.
To comfort herself, she made up histories of lovers, of schoolroom memories, of a mother and father happy to welcome her home at New Year’s.
Yet, no matter how hard she pretended, she could not outrun the echoes of the knife piercing Opal’s flesh.
The sound followed her along the dirty footpaths, mingling with the caws of the crows and the shouts of the shoeshines, the ghost of a dead girl cursed to haunt her forever.
The spring solstice passed and the city was swathed in swatches of purple and finally the girl saw the spirit Belchamber again.
There he was, trundling down Mieunetti Road behind a vagabond.
The girl, upon seeing him, had a mind to thank him for his help but he chattered away at the dirty man and did not see her.
‘At the shrine,’ pleaded the little spirit. ‘They are generous. They can help you.’
‘I told you to leave off it!’ The man swiped at the spirit, but Belchamber dodged. One of the man’s hands had been cut off.
‘Please, sir,’ said Belchamber. ‘The spirits are a discreet race. They do not believe in the Prohibition. You will have their support and their assistance in magic, please, the packet spell you’ve purchased is from a daemon of poor reputation! It’s not a fortune charm at all. It is powdered opium.’
The man turned and kicked Belchamber hard in the middle, and the spirit cried out as he tumbled into a set of bins. The girl flew to his side.
‘Well,’ wheezed Belchamber, upon seeing her. ‘If it isn’t Eggs Benedict.’
‘Are you injured?’ she asked.
‘Only a little,’ he said, wincing. ‘Sometimes, I wish I were more corporeal so that I might better connect with your species. However, the corporeality I do have today is rather a burden.’
‘Where do you live?’ asked the girl.
The spirit shrugged.
‘You don’t have a home?’
‘Spirits do not need homes,’ said Belchamber. ‘Just as we do not need clothes or books or bread. We live wherever we please. Our magic is all we require.’
‘Would you like a home?’
The spirit chuckled. ‘I am quite alright without help.’
Yet, when he stood, he clutched at his middle. The girl scooped him up in her arms. He was light, as if made of tin and he said, ‘Oh, fine, then.’
As she walked, his eyes drooped shut. She hid him under her coat as she passed the hostel staff. She had recently moved into a private room the size of a shoe cupboard; she set the spirit down on her bed and placed a plate of salt and a bowl of rosewater beside him.
‘A fast learner,’ mumbled the spirit.
‘The spirits are good teachers,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you ought to teach me a thing or two,’ said Belchamber, breathing in the salts and drinking down the rosewater. ‘Why is your kind so resistant to help?’
‘Why are you so insistent to help?’ asked the girl.
‘Because I can,’ said Belchamber. ‘Because people need it.’
‘Do they deserve it?’
‘Kindness is not a currency, always in need of equilibrium,’ said the little spirit. ‘It’s been hardly a year since the rifles were set down; next year, it shall be a decade since the change to the constitution. Still, humans are losing hands and eyes for what is a birthright.’
‘Magic is a burden,’ said the girl.
‘That is rot,’ said Belchamber. ‘It is a tool, imbued with whatever meaning we give it.’
‘The war changed things, I suppose.’
‘The war was a farce. We’ve a corrupt king who wanted to cover up his mistakes by provoking the very people he once depended on. How terribly unfair it is that the United Allies did not throw him out of the palace. Instead, they made him ceremonial.’
‘What do you mean, “ceremonial”?’ asked the girl.
‘Did your school masters or mistresses not teach you?’
The girl shook her head.