canica (4/7)

The thrill intoxicated me. What began as a hesitant probing for truth became a drunken and hungry thing, a fever stoked by the rumours I spread. It gave me power over the others. I fed them lies like scraps tossed to a stray. No one knew better. No one knew anything.

I dreamt of coded messages without meaning and of unopened parcels sinking into a deep river. In these dreams I could not make out my reflection on the flex of the current. Sometimes I slipped on the bank and tumbled. Sometimes I dove. Salt water filled my lungs.

‘That isn't the way of it.’

Metal clattered, rolled. I slipped off the balustrade and stopped the coin with my foot. Heart hammering, I picked it up between my middle and index finger and said: I suppose you know better.

‘Yes. Yeah, I think I do,’ she said. Her face was all angles and a self-satisfied little smile spread across her face like a flattened-out V. ‘More to the point I think you’re full of shit.’

Why don’t you enlighten me.

The archivist shrugged. ‘That’s not what I’m here for,’ she said. ‘Hand me the book.’

What’s it for?

She extended a hand, palm up. She said nothing.

I shoved her against the archive shelves. Manuscripts flapped and scattered. She winced as my knife pressed into the skin of her neck.

Tell me, I whispered. What does the book say? Where do the parcels go? Who opens them, what’s inside? Who lights those signal fires, who writes the names on the wall?

She let out a gutteral sound. The little squashed V returned. ‘I don’t know what’s in the book,’ she growled. ‘I’m just to pass it on.’

To who?

‘Whom.’

I dug the knife deeper until it drew blood.

‘I’ve listened,’ she said. ‘That’s all. I’ve read and listened, that’s all, it’s all I do. It’s all for the Margravine. Reports and coded messages.’

A feral panic took hold of me. How do you know? I said. She might have seen something in my eyes because her smile withered and she looked afraid. I shook her. How?

‘I hear things,’ she said. ‘The other middlemen talk and there’s rumblings in the court of late. She’s on the move, that’s what the talk says. They’re reports. Missives, orders. Her spies—‘

I threw her to the floor and ran. I didn’t stop until I was half way across the city.

Slumping against a street corner beneath the light of an oil lantern I ripped the book from my pack. As I pried open its covers a dead leaf slipped out from between the pages. I snatched at it, hissing curses. The night wind rose. Other leaves skittered dry over the cobblestones and swept it away.

The book was a study of architecture. Notes had been scribbled in the margins, but if they were a code I couldn’t decipher them. I pressed a new leaf between the pages and left it by the archives door.