The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 10.3

Helg's story writhed in his head like a kraken as he made his way into the city, different parts of it clicking and sparking like elekstone held up to a lightning sphere.

Sitting in that sewer, listening to Keynish Helg's halting, whispered confessions, Thijis had felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

Most people thought of a life as a line, with a beginning and an end. One thing he had learned after years of combing the strata of society looking for answers to questions large and small was that a life was not a line but a web. It started as a point on another strand and grew, branching and spreading until it became the faded lace of a dead man's history. And all webs were connected into a great tapestry that blanketed the world. You couldn't escape it, not with a ship to sail across the impassable Abyd or by disappearing into the most desolate reaches of the wilderness. An ant affects an empress by walking on her slipper, whether she knows it or not.

Helg's web was lopsided and strange, but shockingly expansive. The threads of the doctor's life had burrowed themselves into the fabric of this city so deeply that to remove them would seem to make the whole thing unravel.

Skirting around the walls of the neighborhood-sized compound that was the University, he managed to slide into the Forge district without laying eyes on another waking soul. It was early yet, even by Forge standards. He'd known Dalia would be up.

Were all people, if one looked closely enough, so fundamental to the world? Did every woman's life weave threads of influence and control, attraction and repulsion into the lives of the people around her? Or was Helg simply something special? Thijis didn't much believe in coincidence. Coincidence was the enemy of logic. But he couldn't account for the things he had heard from that old man. The things that had set him on his current path.

The suns were high enough in the sky now to light the streets in a blaze of post-dawn gold. It had occurred to him only as he sat in Dalia's kitchen that he hadn't slept in over a day. Which perhaps helped to explain the sparkling haze that had set over his mind when he saw her.

Nevertheless, he didn't feel tired, only on edge. Ready. Certain, despite the gaps that still took up so much of his knowledge of this case. Case. It's long since become a bit more than that, hasn't it Irik?

His destination was a small, abandoned mill on the northern edge of the Forge, a tumbledown structure known to be a sauma den and a shelter for the least desirable of the neighborhood's homeless.

Lost in thought, he almost walked past the grimy, broken entrance to the mill, off the beaten path behind a smeltery and the empty shell of a tea-stand, long closed. A filthy urchin with skin that might have been white, brown, or purple beneath the dirt sat to the right of the hole that looked to have once been a doorway.

"Farthing for a bit, penny for a dab," the boy said, producing a coin-sized brown paper packet and making it dance across his knuckles.

"No, thank you," said Thijis. "Never the touch the stuff. How's the mood this morning?"

Smelters' Row was narrow and deep, and the sunslight hadn't lit up the street here yet. The boy squinted up at him, apparently considering, and after a moment got to his feet and looked Thijis up and down.

"Same old blighters and fiends, milord," he said, eyeing the cartridges lining the leather of Thijis' gun belt.

"Still sleeping it off?" he asked. The boy nodded.