Chapter Text
We leapt from the dirigible to the Hangman’s Arch.
The heads of the recently hanged watched as we climbed down and passed. One winked. It is hard to stay dead in London, I reminded myself. It wasn’t murder.
“Where to?” The devil asked me.
“Do you have a suggestion?”
It wasn’t drizzling, no matter how much my stinging skin told me it was. Ladybones Road was fog filled without rain to cloud the grouping of stalactites I knew I’d come from. And the Unlucky Devil wasn’t leaving me alone to my misery and threadbare clothes. Neither had I left him to his.
“Ladybones is the place if you want to get caught in mysteries and spies. Though to look at you… You haven’t got a place to rest, have you?”
I knew better than to answer, but my body never knew that as well as my mind did. The tilt of my neck and twitch of my lips were all he needed to point a way down the street. A street sign lit by gaslight pointed to Spite.
“I hear there’s a home, somewhere you can rent a room. I know a few unfortunate souls that have rented there.”
I gave a slow nod. I could not thank him. Thanking leads to owing.
He dusted himself off once more and gave me one last smile. “Hell will remember your kindness.”
He disappeared into the fog. I was alone. All of London lay before me.
Welcome to London, delicious friend.
I took to the winding streets and treacherous cobbles. There were maps before London fell. And when it fell the percussive reconfiguration rendered them all to nought. Still, it ought to have made some rhyme or reason. Streets that I could see intersect farther down disappeared from sight when I made a turn. The soles of my shoes cracked, breaking on the cobbles of a city that delighted in breaking the rules of dimensional space.
I would need money for shoes. Money for a room. Kindness had gotten me nowhere. It got you here.
But glowering at dizzying streets and my poor excuse for soles would get me nowhere. I needed an address before the Constables scooped me off the streets for vagrancy. I’d be back in New Newgate before the dirigible could unload.
The lodging-house had one room available. But rooms required payment.
“You pay in Rostygold?”
I’d heard of it. Something paid for blood. Or paid for in blood. As if I hadn’t shed enough blood getting here.
“I don’t have any,” I started patting down my pockets for a pence. Nothing. Idiot, I’d just escaped prison. I barely had the clothes on my back.
She looked down at me with sad hollow eyes. The kind everyone in Spite seemed to have if they weren’t picking your pockets.
“Tell you what, secrets are worth their weight. You bring me some information and we’ll call it yours.”
“Where would I-”
“Don’t you know anything, love? The cats. If you catch the right cat, it’ll tell you a secret. But don’t hurt ‘em. Duchess won’t thank you for that.” She peered behind me at the gutter across the street. “There’s a tabby now. Better go get it.”
Never run in broken shoes. Never hold a cat up to your face. And never leave the Surface for the Neath.
I did all of the things my mother told me not to in one day. And the secrets the cat gave me, its claws buried in my ears and neck and everything else it could hold, were worth a currency I didn’t understand and didn’t need to.
The Attic Room was cramped and draughty. I couldn’t keep a candle lit for sputtering out. But it had a bed. And a roof. And the house had meals served at 6, morning and night.
Big improvement on Newgate.
“Ma’am, I think I see something-”
She cut me off, shoving the old key into my hands. “Anything in the room was left by the previous tenant. It’s your problem now, love.”
I started to call to her, but she bustled out of the attic like it would bite her. And given everything about Fallen London it might’ve done. It did.
It was shorter work than I’d expected, prying the diamond out from between the floorboards. Harder work dusting it off. Harder work by far - but it’s yours now. And one of the few contacts I’d been promised an introduction to was a fence. The Smiling Fence she was called.
I could see the spires of the Bazaar jutting above rooftops from my window. All it would take was an introduction.
She smiled - of course she did - when she saw me. But something about the way her eyes moved across me, almost like looking behind me. Like watching all the entrances at once.
“What have you got for me, then?”
Her eyes glistened when I pulled it from my pocket. The mislaid diamond hardly the size of a very small pebble, but her eyes lost their saccading rhythm to hone in like a hawk on a rabbit. She plucked it from the palm of my hand without another word.
She examined the jewel. A makeshift jewelers lens to her eye.
“Twelve echoes and fifty pence.” Her smile widened. Just a little.
“Echoes?”
“Hundred pence make an echo. Things in the Bazaar will cost you echoes and pence. Things out of it… there’s a lot to trade.”
I nodded like a damned thing of it had made sense.
“Your clothes don’t look too good. Call it twelve echoes and some clothes that aren’t falling apart between the seams?”
I nodded again. “No chance you have some boots lying around?”
“Only stepping around,” she said absently as she folded a faded morning suit into my arms.
I grimaced. The clothes smelt of mothballs and desperation. But it was better than what I’d been in.
“Change in the back, yeah?”
As I adjusted the tie and coat, praying the sadness would wash out with some care, a window broke. Heavy boots tromped. The Smiling Fence looked up as I stumbled out of the back with a sigh.
“Flamin’ constables again. Not your doing, I imagine. Just time for me to close up shop again.” She pushed me towards the door. “Quickly now.”
I went out the door as the constables went in. Thankfully they didn’t pay me a second glance. Far more interested in the Fence and her goods. She smiled over their shoulders at me as I melted into the crowds of side streets. You didn’t melt as well as you thought.
Just as I was clear of the constables and blending into the crowd I felt a brush against my hand. The crinkle of folded paper in it. I looked, whirling in the crowd to find the stranger. They’d gone.
“Have patience. Arrange for lodgings. I will send assistance there. All shall be well.”
I frowned at the note before I tucked it away. Who knew I was here? Why would they help me?
My thoughts cast to the Unlucky Devil once more. He would have been upfront. In the moment. Not waiting like this and moving in secrecy.
I thought it over, chewing it like thick molasses all the way up to my small attic room. And on the doorway was a package.