The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 4.1

Thijis trudged up the steps to his flat feeling tired and hunted. It was late afternoon. The walk home from the Warrens had soaked his shirt with sweat and eradicated the pleasant floating sensation he'd acquired from two Eberan Whiskey Slings. He hadn't been drunk enough to waste money on a hackney cab.

Thijis lived in Ebsea, a small neighborhood wedged in between the newer construction of the University district and the eastern end of the Warrens. Too expensive for Warreners and too poor for people of substance, it fit his needs well. He could afford an entire floor of an ancient building that he thought had originally been a chapter house for a military order of some sort—what remained of the engraving over the front gate had a spear in it and the graffiti in the cracked, dry cellar baths seemed to suggest as much.

The owner was an aging socialite who had made several questionable investments in real estate in his middle age, and had mostly left them to rot; he rented the top floor to Thijis at a reduced rate and, in exchange, Irik never bothered him about the rats in the cellar and kept the place free of squatters and sauma fiends who might damage it beyond future sale. The only other tenant at the moment was an old midwife who lived on the first floor with her daughter, both of whom thought Thijis entirely ignorant of the fact that they were practicing medicine without a license or the proper set of genitals.

He unlocked the front door and entered the cool front hall with a sigh, nodding to the short queue of waiting patients outside the women's door before climbing the main staircase. He tore his jacket off as soon as he reached his flat, rolled up his sleeves and poured himself a glass of water from the warm pitcher near the wood stove in the small kitchen. He'd had a couple of builders who owed him a favor knock down several walls when he moved in, creating a large open space defined only by what it held within it. His bed was in one corner, under the high windows, his worktables and desk in the opposite corner; a variety of chairs, bookshelves, and a small dining table in between. In a cabinet beneath a window, he kept a well stocked bar.

Thijis poured himself a drink, pear brandy with soda from a siphon. He wished he had thought to buy some ice to put in it, one of the big heavy blocks the grocer around the corner sold for a quarter crown. But, much like the cab, he hadn't been drunk enough to spend the chits. His living was a good one, when it was flowing: looking at the four case files on his desk, he sighed. Nothing seemed like too small an excuse to keep him out of that chair right now. He gave up trying to find one and simply admitted he had no interest in working, then climbed the steps to the roof and sat under the palm trees that grew in the overgrown corner garden, somehow still thriving in the massive pots that may well have been as old as the house for all Thijis knew.

It felt like home. Like his home, without Dalia. She hadn't lived here for long before she'd left. She didn't like it, preferred their little walk-up at Marketend. She had liked the cherry trees, their blossoms in the spring the prettiest in the city, or so Marketenders claimed. Thijis had liked it because Dalia did, but the space was small and not ideal, and when he'd left the Prosecutors Office and gone into private practice he'd told her they had to move. That wasn't why she had left, he didn't think, but it hadn't helped.

Irik sipped at his brandy and soda and watched the suns set over the western horizon, Oridos spread before him like a hilly blanket. The spires of the University captured Palo, the larger sun, as it followed its little brother Alon into the dark of night beneath the sphere of the world. Or, rather, as the sphere of the world rotates away from it. You're thinking like a bloody monk now.

On a small table beside his chair sat a brown leather case. Taking out his pipe along with his lighter, he put them next to the case and unbuckled the top, revealing the shiny brass horn and cylinder of his recorder. Cranking it several times, he lit a fresh pipe and sat back as the first strains of Agne's Second Symphony rose through the evening air.

There were no perfect moments in life, Thijis had learned, no divinely structured motifs or refrains. Tempo and melody were random; theme came from within or not at all. There was the chaos of reality, and the human intent that tried in vain to shape it. Inhaling deeply, he looked out as the last of the day fled and thought that his own symphony had started to sound atonal, of late. Or perhaps for longer. But every movement had its end. It was only a matter of playing it out.

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