Thresholder, ch 163, Collegium

Normal Link

Edit/Comment Link

~~~~

The Collegium had a large campus in the city, and a fair bit of what might have been green space if not for the pollution. The trees struggled and the grass was scraggly, but the buildings, at least, were impressive, large stone structures with a few too many gargoyles and grotesques jutting out at odd places. There was something claustrophobic about it, maybe the fact that so many of the “open” parts were enclosed by walls.

Perry went alone. He’d wanted to bring Anaksi with him, but she had pointed out that she was drawing incredible amounts of attention, and while he wasn’t the most normal looking person in the Dusklands, he could slip in much easier, especially after buying some clothes. And sometimes, walking the streets, he thought that he was the most normal-looking person.

After a morning of spending money, Perry was dressed in a dark wool frock coat that fell down to his knees, a shirt with a high, stiff, white collar, a purple silk cravat, polished shoes, and a bowler hat. He had a cane with a molded glass head, one that looked more expensive than it was, and he had his sword in his sheathe, which Anaksi assured him was at least moderately in fashion, though there was a specific sort of sword that was more common among the upper classes. And, of course, Perry had gloves that covered his hands to hide the mark there.

All this was perhaps not entirely necessary, but it was a form of disguise, and gathering it meant that there was time for Marchand to gather information. The armor was up in the hotel room, with Anaksi, and the earpiece was in Perry’s ear, which not only allowed communication, but allowed Marchand to eavesdrop on every local conversation in both the hotel and on the streets. Perry had, with their help, slowly built up a better identity than the one he’d had on the train, which in turn was better than the one he’d had in the Gulch.

Anaksi had been introduced to Marchand. She understood him to be a ghost of some sort, or a spirit that was bound to the armor, rather than what he actually was, which was a sophisticated artificial intelligence that was also running on Perry’s spiritual circulatory system. This was not for lack of trying, but the truth was just too weird.

The new cover was that Perry was a young man who had gotten off the train Addled just a few days ago, which was when the last of the trains had come in. He had an interest in geography and studying what the Dusklands had to offer, which is why he’d come over. Any lack of understanding of the details of his life before the train would be excused by him being Addled in the journey. Any lack of understanding of Charlonion would be because he was new. He was well-to-do, having brought things along that he could sell, and looking to become an academic, and in pursuit of that goal, he was after a woman named Doctrix Grayspear — doctrix was a female form of doctor, and here meant a scientist who was engaged in teaching.

According to Anaksi, this was the name that the strange woman who might have been Queenie had given, and the stated purpose of stealing the harmonizer was to build a weapon capable of killing the Commission dead.

That was the other reason that Anaksi hadn’t told Perry until that morning: she hadn’t known whether they would still be on the same side after she’d said it.

So now Perry was walking around like he knew where he was going as the campus bustled around him, dipping through doors and walking through courtyards as though he were on his way somewhere. What he needed was a directory, if they even had one.

He eventually found himself at the Collegium Registry, a small administrative office, and was given a set of directions that would have been incomprehensible if not for the fact that he’d flown over the place last night, had Marchand make a map, then carefully looked at the map from all angles before leaving the hotel room.

The doctrix’s office was up a tall tower that looked over the whole city, accessed by a spiral staircase that wound up the side of a larger building that the tower was a part of. The spiral staircase seemed like it might once have belonged in a castle and been transplanted into the collegium, though Perry didn’t know how or why that would ever have happened. He did know that the spiral staircase had been built for someone that was at least a foot shorter than him, because he kept getting close to being knocked out by a low-hanging chunk of stone.

When he reached the top, he placed a hand on the door.

“March, anyone in there?” he asked in a low voice.

There was a long pause. “It’s difficult to say with such a poorly suited microphone. I would place good odds on her being alone, unless the second person is asleep or taking pains to make as little noise as possible.”

Perry knocked twice, and a shrill voice called for him to come in.

An office and a workshop were in the midst of having a fight in the top of the turret, and it was clear that the workshop was winning. Papers were strewn across a desk that was butted up against one wall, its chair pinned in place. Three bookcases had been custom-built for the space, and they were filled with books, but there was more equipment in front of them, and a separate stack of books that had been removed from the bookcases and scattered on the ground for easy access.

Most of the interior of the room was taken up with a large device that was similar to what Perry had seen in the basement of city hall. There was more equipment around it, its purpose unclear, with wires both connected and disconnected, some of them leading to cranks and others to meters. There was a hole in the center when it was pretty clear a harmonizer was meant to slot in.

Doctrix Grayspear stood next to the machine. She was very short, probably not more than five feet tall, in her mid-forties with yellow hair that had a green tint to it, like it had been bleached, dyed, and then faded. She wore a white blouse and coveralls that were slightly more stately than work clothes, done up with brass buttons and careful patterning. She held her hands behind her back and stared at Perry.

“Well, what is it you’ve come here for?” she asked. She had a thick accent, unplaceable, which wasn’t a surprise given that none of the countries matched.

“Sorry, I just came off the train a few days ago, and I guess I’m what you’d call Addled, but I was told you were taking on students,” said Perry.

“Students?” asked the doctrix. “What moron told you that?”

“Someone at the Registry,” said Perry. “I apologize, but I didn’t get her name.” He held out his gloved hand. “Harrison Rex.”

Doctrix Graysprear hesitated for only a moment, then shook it. “I teach my classes, that should be enough for them.”

“I apologize,” said Perry. “But they had some notion that with my background, I could be of some use to you?”

“Background, from before the Addling?” asked the doctrix with an arched eyebrow. She had impressive eyebrows, thick and bushy, and with exquisite control of them. When she arched an eyebrow, it went high, like it was trying to escape up her forehead.

“I was a scholar,” said Perry. “Not of harmonizers, or stability, but of geography generally.”

“Maps?” asked the doctrix.

“Yes and no,” said Perry. “Maps, but also the ways that agriculture interacts with transportation and cultural determinism. The movements of people and rivers, all that sort of thing. Climate and geological processes. Urban planning, resource distribution, Charlonion has this fascinating relationship with the internal Flux, the way there’s a false city inside of the real city, mined for materials, it’s … well, the sort of thing that I’m interested in.”

He was only playing up his interest a little bit, and he did have academic credentials, even if it had been a long time since he’d used them — he didn’t consider reading through books to count.

“And they foisted you on me?” asked Doctrix Grayspear. “An Addled boy?” She shook her head. “My work is too important for this.”

“I have a place to stay in the city,” said Perry. “I have money. Please, if there’s anything I can do, even manual labor, I’ll do it to have a chance. I hadn’t thought that the Collegium would be so … exclusive.”

“Bah,” said Doctrix Grayspear. “For the money, they’ll let in anyone.” She looked Perry up and down. “A tall man, I never trust those. Why did you come here?”

“I — like I said, someone down at the Register,” said Perry.

“No, no,” said the doctrix. “Here, to the Dusklands.”

“Oh,” said Perry. “Well, I don’t really know. Addled, I guess.”

“You must have a better guess than that,” said Doctrix Grayspear, more like a declaration than a question.

“I suppose it was the newness,” said Perry. “The memories are a fog, but … I came from a world that was set in stone, and here everything is fresh and new. There’s room for someone to make a mark.”

“And you think you’re one to do that?” asked the doctrix. She raised her eyebrow even higher than it had gone before. “What skills do you have?”

“A keen mind, a gift for languages, and a willingness to work,” said Perry. “Look, if you already have someone working with you, I would understand, but you must at least want someone to run some errands, right?”

“You have gone from wanting to be a student of mine to running errands?” asked the doctrix.

“Come on, the Collegium can’t be that different from the institutions of learning I used to know,” said Perry. “Professors always want people to run errands.”

The doctrix broke out into a smile. “And all the while, you’ll be watching my research, will you? Seeing what you can pick up, here and there, hoping to make yourself invaluable to me.”

“That’s the plan, yes,” said Perry. “I could probably take some courses at the Collegium, but I was told they’re halfway through the term right now. Please.”

“It’s not just someone at the Register that told you of me, is it?” asked Doctrix Grayspear.

“You have something of a reputation, it would seem,” said Perry, which he hoped she would take as a compliment. He was also hoping that it was vague enough not to invite further questions he would have to bullshit his way through.

“Well, then your first task is to get me tea,” said the doctrix. “There’s a small teahouse three blocks upriver, Cornish and Gables. I like a white tea. Get a pearl of it, and a bag of sugar — white sugar, not brown, bone-bleached — then come back here. And if you can do that, we can talk.”

“Thank you, Doctrix,” said Perry.

She harrumphed at him, then turned back to her machine, and Perry dismissed himself.

It could have gone better and it could have gone worse. He hadn’t asked about the machine, though maybe he should have. This was supposedly the person that Queenie — or the woman wearing the same scarf as Queenie — had been in contact with, part of a plot against the Commission, or a tool that could be used against them. She had seemed normal, or at least normal for a college professor. There hadn’t been any obvious signs of Queenie, but Perry would come back later, under cover of darkness, and do a more thorough examination.

The teahouse wasn’t hard to find. It was tall and imposing, and built in a style that Perry had seen in a few other parts of the city by this point. Charlonion was harvesting from parts of itself, places where the buildings would shift and reappear, apparently stable, but the harvesting process was almost surely one of grabbing what could be grabbed, cutting out doors and windows then stockpiling them at a warehouse somewhere. This led to a certain eclectic style in the poorer parts of town, though only in places where a building had been built rather than found. Sometimes a row of shops would all be in that same mishmash of colors and architectural features, garish and maximalist. Some were painted so that the colors matched even if the shapes of the windows didn’t, but that seemed rare.

The more that Perry looked at the tea shop though, the more he thought it was in a different mold. There was something deliberate about the mishmash, a flow of lines and coherence of vision that wasn’t there in other buildings that had the same eclectic frontage. Someone had spent time and effort to make a mix of materials into a kind of art, architectural collage.

The tea shop itself was on the fancier side, and Perry dutifully bought the things he’d been requested to buy.

“How long are we spending on this, sir?” asked Marchand as Perry paid.

“We have no other leads,” said Perry as he left the shop, very aware that talking to himself made him look insane — though maybe not all that unusual by the standards of this city. “I want to know what she knows, when she talked to Queenie, what about. It would be wonderful to plant some nanites all over that workshop and her clothes.”

“Alas, sir,” said Marchand.

“This is high risk,” said Perry. “We should be well ahead of Queenie, if she was traveling with the Yuuks, but I don’t know what kind of movement powers she has, so she might be in the city at this very moment. And as soon as we bump into her, it’s on. And if she spots me from a distance, I’m pretty sure she can put a bullet in my brain with a sniper rifle.”

“It does seem quite fraught, sir,” said Marchand. “And yet this is the course you’ve decided on?”

“For now,” said Perry. “I’m going to scope out the situation, the environment, and ideally we’ll get some kind of surveillance going, unless the doctrix can give us some kind of lead, witting or otherwise. Of course, questioning her would be easier if I were an Inspector …”

“We have no method for tracking Queenie,” said Marchand. “And as you’ve said, if she gets the drop on you, it does seem likely that she’ll simply kill you.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Perry, though even as he said it he was aware that he didn’t actually know what that entailed. Careful in the sense of limiting sightlines? Staying on his toes? A sniper was, in some sense, a worst case matchup for him unless he was in his armor — and he didn’t have a handle on how powerful that sniper rifle actually was, whether it could punch through.

He went back up the spiral staircase, careful not to bang his head, and paused for a moment outside the door, leaning against it, trying to hear any conversation within. But there was none, so he simply went inside.

“You know how to make tea?” asked Doctrix Grayspear without looking at him. She was messing with the machine.

“Maybe not to your standards,” said Perry. He looked around the workshop and spied a large metal pot, which was sitting on top of a coil. “Is that the tea-maker?”

“We call it a kettle,” said the doctrix with a cluck of her tongue. “The teapot is beneath. Water is three flights down.”

“Three flights down?” asked Perry.

“There’s no plumbing here,” said the doctrix, turning to him. “So you’ll have to take the kettle, go down three flights of stairs, find the one working sink on that floor, fill it up, and return to me. Do you have that?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Perry.

“Good,” said the doctrix, turning back to her work. “Get to it then.”

Perry didn’t particularly like being jerked around like this, and was second-guessing the whole plan. What he could have done was burst in there and pretended that he was a Peony or a K-man, and asked questions with a much different tone, but the lead wasn’t solid, and Anaksi didn’t know much, and it was entirely possible that Queenie had never revealed herself. Swinging in is what he felt like doing, but it would blow his other options.

So Perry filled the kettle and came back up, and set the kettle on the burner.

“And, uh,” said Perry. “This is … how do I use this?”

“Electricity,” said Doctrix Grayspear. “I would suppose they don’t have that, on the other side.”

“No,” said Perry. “I don’t think so, anyway.”

“Here,” said the doctrix. She went over to the burner and placed two fingers in a slot on the side, wincing slightly. The coil started glowing red hot beneath the kettle, but she withdrew her fingers and looked expectantly at Perry. “You’ll have to take your gloves off.”

“I’m … not sure what that is,” said Perry.

“Electricity,” the doctrix repeated. “Very very important for you to know, if you’re looking to be my assistant. The body produces vital energy, and the catalyzer draws from and transforms it, twisting it to diverse ends.”

“This is what those lights run on,” said Perry, eyeing the fingerholes skeptically. “Meaning … there’s a person somewhere powering them.”

“Yes yes,” said the doctrix. “My you came here fresh. Now place your fingers in the holes, we want our tea, don’t we?”

Perry took his glove off his unmarked hand, then inserted his fingers carefully, cautious, and was still caught off-guard by the way it seemed to bite into him. The coil beneath the kettle instantly went white hot and he could feel the heat pouring off it before he modulated the energy that the device was drawing from him. He could pull his vital energy back, and did so until the glow had faded down to a warm red.

“Curious,” said Doctrix Grayspear. “Remove your fingers, do that again.”

“We don’t want tea?” Perry asked.

“Science is more important than tea,” said the doctrix.

Perry did as requested, but he was pulling back before he felt it bit into his soul, so the coils only warmed up as normal, just as they had done for the doctrix.

“Even more curious,” said Doctrix Grayspear. “Do you know what happened, and why?”

“No,” said Perry. “I’ve never done this before, maybe that’s why.”

“Explain the mechanism,” said the doctrix, looking at him.

“Uh … let’s say you have a bladder filled with water,” said Perry. “You poke it, and there’s a lot of pressure, so the water comes out fast, but soon enough the pressure is equalized, and all you have left is the normal pressure of the water trying to escape.”

“A worthy hypothesis,” said the doctrix. “But a shame it’s one we cannot test, unless we pull people right from the trains.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “Is this … dangerous?”

“Oh, of course,” said Doctrix Grayspear. “There’s a risk of fire, but beyond that, you can feel the drain, yes? It will kill you, in time.”

Perry kept his fingers where they were. The kettle was close to boiling. “But it will take time?”

“Time, yes,” said the doctrix. “Shifts are twelve hours, and they come out feeling sickly, but a night’s rest can see them back to normal, if they eat well and have a strong constitution.”

The kettle started whistling, and Perry withdrew his fingers, looking at them. He wondered how much of his energy the kettle would have taken if he’d let it. Obviously it was interacting with second sphere, and obviously he had far, far more vital energy than the average person here. There was probably a way to use that, though he would need an engineer to help him. He’d asked Anaksi about the lights, and she hadn’t known.

“They could … use the Leased?” asked Perry.

“Could,” said the doctrix as she poured the hot water from the kettle into the small pot. “Do, perhaps, though the Leased would be at risk of killing themselves.”

Anaksi hadn’t known much about the Leased either. They were walking morons, pliable, without any will of their own, suitable for simple labor but not much else. The Eshkee had assumed that it was slavery, but they had captured one of the Leased once, thinking that they were freeing him, but the man only stood there, mutely. He had sat in their lodge, not eating or drinking, not seeming to need either of those things, for an entire week before they decided to drop him off at Grabler’s Gulch in the middle of the night.

“They have this vital energy then?” asked Perry.

“I won’t lecture you on the basics,” said the doctrix. “There’s got to be something for the Addled, the Commission must see to that.”

“The Commission doesn’t teach science to the Addled,” said Perry.

That gave the doctrix pause. “Ah, well, I suppose that’s true. But yes, the Leased have a vital energy, nothing about their nature has changed, it’s only for the duration of the Lease that they’re like that, and inside, somewhere, is still the old person, much as they might wish there weren’t.” She looked Perry over. “What do you think of them?”

“The Leased?” asked Perry.

“Yes,” nodded the doctrix. “Your unfiltered thoughts, please.”

“I don’t think it’s much different from selling your labor,” said Perry. “You agree to go work on a roofing crew, or down in the mines, and you are your labor for a while. Nothing much different in being Leased, as I understand it, except that you’re not really you for that time. Give up a year of your life, come out the other side paid, that’s not so different.”

This was far from unfiltered: it was what he thought she wanted to hear. The idea horrified him, not just because of the lack of agency and the abuse those ‘bodies’ surely endured, the working conditions that might leave a person maimed. The Leased at least seemed to go into it with some semblance of consent, but it was consent gained through grinding poverty. At least, this is what Perry had gathered from Marchand’s report, which was itself based on hints and suggestions from conversations around the hotel that morning.

“They told you that I studied them?” asked Doctrix Grayspear.

“No, that wasn’t mentioned,” said Perry. “Studied them … how?”

“You were sent here because of your interest in the ways of the Flux, yes?” asked the doctrix.

“I was …” said Perry slowly. “Sorry if I’m being slow, but I’m not seeing the connection.”

“Oh, it’s all connected,” said the doctrix. “There is an … essentialism to the world, or at least to the Dusklands. With the rails, we add it in, make it firm, and with the Leased, we take it out, remove a piece of them. It’s in both the Flux and the harmonizers, a sense of what is and what might be. Did you know that we made an anti-harmonizer?”

“Uh, no,” said Perry. “Is that … public knowledge?”

“Oh, the public hardly knows anything,” said the doctrix with a wave of her hand. “And the Commission isn’t too much better. But they saw the direction my obsessions were going, and have exiled me here, to a corner of the Collegium.”

“Oh,” said Perry. “I’m … sorry. That must be difficult.”

“The nature of the obsession is the self,” said Doctrix Grayspear, speaking mostly to herself now. “But of course, it’s a difficult thing, and this,” she traced her fingers along the edge of the machine at the center of the room, not quite the same as what was in the basement of city hall. “This is a delicate machine whose components are extremely expensive, more than the Commission would want to pay.”

Perry stayed silent. He wasn’t sure what she was suggesting, if she was suggesting anything, but a glowing pink orb might have been exactly what she wanted, and he knew just how precious they were.

“I’m afraid I’m not following,” said Perry. “What does this machine do?”

“Ah,” said Doctrix Grayspear. “You know, most people would ask that the very moment they came in?” She ran her fingers over it again, stroking it. “It cleaves at the very souls of men.”

Perry frowned at her. “That seems more poetic than scientific.”

“Oh, certainly,” said the doctrix. “But the Leased pose a question, what is a person when we flense away their pieces, what is left when we leave only the core? And it’s a question I have every ambition to answer.” She turned away from the machine and looked at Perry with a beaming smile. “This is what I’m doing. This is what you’ll help me with, if you stay, and if you have no interest, you can run with your tail tucked between your legs.”

“It’s not what I was trained for,” said Perry.

“This is the beauty,” said the doctrix. “No one was trained.” Her smile grew wider. “There was another, an assistant before you, some months ago. She had a passion for it, but had to take her leave, and I doubt she’ll return — she was always more suited to the Flux, I think.”

“Is this … legal?” asked Perry.

“Of course,” said the doctrix. “I am doing things for which the Commission has made no guidelines. I am on new, unknown frontiers.”

“Then yes, I’ll help out in whatever way you need, so long as I can learn with you,” said Perry.

“Good,” said the doctrix, clapping once. “Then go get me lunch. There’s a place that sells wrapped sandwiches, just off the river, I can give you directions. Get something for yourself as well, while you’re there.”

Perry looked at her for a moment.

“Now,” she said. “The sliced brown, no cheese.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Perry, bowing slightly. “And thank you again for the opportunity.”

He left the room and didn’t speak to Marchand until he was two floors below.

“We’re going to need surveillance,” said Perry. “How difficult would it be to wire up a walkie as a listening device?”

“Relatively simple using the tools we have, along with my guidance,” said Marchand. “It would be quite noticeable, and the battery would run dry in short order, but we can find solutions to those problems.”

“Good,” said Perry. “What’s your read on her?”

“I hope you’re not thinking of pursuing her romantically,” said Marchand.

Perry paused halfway down the spiral staircase. “What the fuck?”

“You do seem to have a type, sir, if you don’t mind me saying,” said Marchand. “I only think that in this case, it might be an unwelcome complication.”

“Not going to be an issue,” said Perry. “Like, at all.”

“And what is your read, sir?” asked Marchand.

“I think she’s dangerous, and might be onto me, and certainly if the things she’s doing are legal they probably shouldn’t be,” said Perry. “But her previous assistant was definitely Queenie, and I want to be here when she shows back up with the harmonizer in hand. The only issue is not getting shot in the head from a mile away.”