Dispatch from a Colored Room

A tiny smirk in the dark

I awake to a tapping on the windowpane. It's too dark to see color, but there's a long shape folded up there, gripping the sill and frame with smaller fractions of its body than I would have thought possible. It meets my eyes, then silently leaps back and down.

I skirt the bed, which dominates the middle of the room—I made the hotel move it away from the window, so I could be between Aimée and any intruder, and so I'd be the one waking in just this situation—and fly through the near-total dark of the hallways practically by echolocation, down the stairs spattered with acullico quids and chewed betel, through the lobby where no one is at the desk, and out the door. It takes me a minute to find the Dandelion Knight, looking at me from a recess between buildings with bright eyes, reflecting the street's blue gaslight from their pupils. 

"It worked," I say, not sure how else to react.

"It worked," he says back. "What do you need?"

"I need Sim back," I say.

"Do you know who has him?" he asks.

"Yes," I say, "and so do you, unless I miss my guess."

"What makes you say that?" He gives me a tiny smirk in the dark. 

"You came to help Gauthier Leblanc," I say. "Just this way. Don't tell me you're not keeping an eye on this whole Greyking circus."

"All right," he says. "I won't." 

I wait for him to continue, but he doesn't. "So what do I do?" I finally ask. "What do you know? What can you do for me? What do you want?"

"Ah," he says.

My mind works furiously. "All right, fine," I say. "You wanted Sim's grandfather to publish the colored room poem under his own name. He never did. But we can." This is actually true, I think, even if we lose the battle for control of the Greyking board; editorial control is obviously the last thing on the minds of Dawnroad and their VC cronies. "What else do you want? Tell me."

"We don't want that any more," he says, and my heart sinks. "It's been a generation; the poem is a curiosity, and M Leblanc has no more poems to publish. In a hundred years, maybe, we'll want his authorship discovered. But not right now."

"Then what?"

"We'll tell you," he says, "when we know."

"Fine," I say, before I can stop myself—before I can really make myself understand what it means to make a carte-blanche promise to the Dandelion Knight. "One book, printed at the house's expense. As many copies as we can print without going into bankruptcy, priced however you like. Do you need me to sign something?"

The Dandelion Knight smiles again in answer, and I shiver. But I make myself speak.

"Now what can you do?"