Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(46)
Jallico and I sat side by side, across the field from Vienna, who was, as always, on the bench beside the carousel.
“Was that you?” I asked him.
He turned lightning quickly to face me. “Are you serious?” he said. “It’s not me.”
“Behind the Eruption perhaps?” I said.
“Never,” he said. “That bird is trying to frame me. I’m almost positive it knows I am following her.”
“Very well,” I said. “I trust you would tell me everything. But I do have to ask. You understand.”
“Of course.”
Still I was mightily suspicious. It could have been Lair in the murmuration, but the way the long hair hung in the back was the picture of Jallico, and his height. Lair was much taller. “Who do you think it is?” I asked him.
“It could be anybody. It could be her imagination,” he said.
After that day, I took Jallico off the duty of tailing Vienna and put him on a detail of searching through the old town for the woman with white hair. I followed Vienna with my spy glass from the bell tower of the cathedral, and I noticed that once Jallico was no longer pursuing her, she no longer passed behind the Eruption on a daily basis. In fact, she never did again. As the cold weather came on, her walking route stayed clear of the shore, and passed through the most pedestrian parts of town—the field with the carousel, the city square, Saint Philo’s colonnade, etc. One place she was making new visits to, though, was the Lyceum where her father had been a professor.
It was three weeks after we’d witnessed the starlings’ depiction of Vienna sharing a kiss with a young man—a cold and dreary Friday that made me feel my age. The old women who gathered on the benches in the city square were predicting a snow storm the likes of which hadn’t been seen in the Knot in years. That was the word from Jallico as he arrived at our offices at the constabulary just after the rolls and coffee had been delivered.
“You know what that means?” he said. “The snow?”
“I could smell it in the air,” I told him. “While I was waiting for you, I cleaned my pistol and made sure it was loaded.”
“Do you feel the Beast will strike today?”
“I’d like to put an end to this bloody case and retire.”
Before setting out—Jallico for the old town and me for the Lyceum, we decided to use a runner. We needed some way to keep in touch throughout the day, and so we put in with the Commissioner to procure a child messenger, willing to run word between us as the day progressed. The girl, Meralee, I was told was quite fast and could be trusted with any assignment. She was very attentive, her face like an axe-head pointing forward, ready to cut into the day. Long red hair and freckles; a lively child. Even as fed up with life as the Beast had made me, she brought a smile to my face. I would give her a handsome tip well past what the constabulary would pay her. Jallico and I decided that he should take her first as there was a greater chance that he might run into our quarry. The Beast had already struck a few times in the area around the cathedral and fountain.
“Send the girl off before you engage in anything the slightest bit dangerous,” I said. “And if you pick up the trail of the Beast, contact me and wait till I arrive.”
It had already begun to snow, and so I took a coach and four to the Lyceum. It was a hulking, somber old place built of granite shipped in from the majestic cliffs of Answer Island—even the least of my homeland’s attributes were appropriated by the empire. Of course, academics rarely work a full week, and the place was like a ghost town. I showed the secretary of the zoology lab my badge and asked to see Clifford Von Drome’s offices and effects. The fellow looked to be a science experiment himself, a shambling wreck in a moth-eaten sweater, a bent primate with long arms and short legs. Stokes was his name, and though he was certainly not much to look at, he knew where everything was.
An hour after I arrived at the empty school, I found myself knee deep in cartons of paper in a dimly lit room. Sifting through the professor’s work, I slowly came to realize he was a serious scientist. His specialty appeared to be centered on the nexus between human and animal disease. He seemed to be looking for human cures in the animal world. Most of the work dealt with immunology. There were papers on certain failings of human health and animals’ natural protection against those diseases—the slow loris, ghost lemurs, certain members of the cat family, civets, raccoons. There was a series of daguerreotypes I uncovered of individuals half naked and beset by strange growths and postures, odd manifestations of the face, like one old fellow with pointed ears and long incisors.
After a while I took a break and went out into the hallway to escape the stuffy room. Stokes came by and inquired if I needed anything. I asked him why all these boxes and notes were kept. He told me that Von Drome was a brilliant researcher and some of his investigations into the Natural world had resulted in cures and products that brought the Lyceum and the city quite a bit of money. I asked him to stay still for a moment and went back into the room to fetch the browning daguerreotypes of the patients. I’d hoped that he might be able to identify one or two of them even though time had moved on. I handed him the lot and said, “Do you know who any of these people are?”
“I’d seen them in here years ago,” he said. I remember these poor souls but their names are long gone. He came to the last of the pictures and held it up. “This one is Tessa,” he said.