The Phenomenals: A Game of Ghouls (3 page)

Citrine smiled briefly. She knew what Jonah meant. The atmosphere in the Kryptos was becoming a little strained. Folly got tetchy when her guests went out and didn’t come back at the
appointed time.

She raised her fist to knock, but before her knuckles could make contact with the wood the door was swiftly opened and Citrine’s heart soared at the sight of Suma Dartson, the finest
card-spreader in Degringolade.

‘My, oh my, but what a time it’s been,’ declared Suma, pulling them both in and closing the louvred door behind them (no easy task with a fellow the size of Jonah in the way).
She picked curiously at a strand of Citrine’s straggly black and russet hair.

‘The dye ran,’ explained the bedraggled girl.

Suma handed her a damp cloth to clean up, and while Citrine engaged in her ablutions the old lady turned to Jonah. ‘Dear Jonah, or should I call you “Brute”!’ she said.
‘Your names and pictures are all over this city.’

Behind her, Citrine’s face fell. ‘We’ll leave, if you think we might get you into trouble.’

Suma looked shocked. ‘Oh, my dear, I would never turn you away! You’ll want your cards spread, I expect. I’m ready.’ She nodded to a felt-topped card table. ‘But
first, tell me, what exactly happened to you all down at the Tar Pit? The
Degringolade Daily
is not a paper where truth and reality are harmonious bedfellows.’

Citrine sensed, as usual, that the wrinkled old lady knew more than she let on, but indulged her. Quickly she related everything that had happened since her last visit: how Edgar had betrayed
her and brought about her imprisonment; how Jonah had saved her from the noose (and then saved Vincent from Kamptulicon and Folly from the Lurid at the Ritual of Appeasement); and about the
discovery of her father’s empty casket in the Capodel family tomb.

‘And now,’ she ended, on a note of quiet despair, ‘we’re fugitives. I still don’t know if my father is dead or alive; I have been convicted of murdering poor dear
Florian, father’s solicitor; and Edgar has inherited everything. Folly says Leopold Kamptulicon is a Cunningman – she knows about these things – and that he and Edgar and Governor
d’Avidus are plotting something terrible.’

Suma put her arm round Citrine’s shaking shoulders and spoke gently. ‘’Tis no wonder you’re out of sorts. You have been treated most unfairly.’

Jonah slid down in a chair near the stove and rubbed his rough hands together to warm them. The sound was like a carpenter planing a plank of treen. A whistling started up and Suma took the
kettle off the stove. She made three mugs of tea and handed them around.

Jonah asked, ‘What do you know of Leucer d’Avidus? Does he ever come to you?’

‘If he did, I couldn’t tell you,’ replied Suma. ‘My clients expect privacy, you understand. I can only say of him what I read in the paper.’

Jonah snorted. ‘Hah, the
Degringolade Daily
never has a bad word to say about him. He’s filthy rich, that much is known to all, from the spoils of the Tar Pit. Though
Poseidon knows how he came to own it – it’s on Degringolade land.’

Citrine noticed that his voice sounded different, somehow clearer, and realized that for once he didn’t have his coat collar pulled up around his scarred face.

Suma’s brow creased. ‘The water, or perhaps I should say “tar”, is rather muddied when it comes to Leucer d’Avidus and his business interests.’

Citrine was no longer listening: her attention had been caught by something else: Suma’s leech barometer. Inside the tall bell jar on the shelf, twelve black bloodsuckers were writhing
themselves into a frenzied knot, slime oozing out from between their sinuated bodies.

‘Nothing is behaving as it should,’ said Suma. ‘The Lurids are almost silent, the corvids on the Kronometer are very unsetded and the leeches have been knotting like that all
day.’

Citrine shuddered and averted her eyes from the glistening entanglement. ‘It’s giving me nerves just looking at them,’ she muttered. ‘Can we spread the cards
now?’

Jonah had succumbed to the soporific warmth of the wagon and drifted off into oceanic reveries. Suma lit a carved candle in the middle of the card table and Citrine pulled up a stool. She placed
a green bag in front of her, but Suma stopped her.

‘I have some new cards I would like to try. Wenceslas found them in the Caveat Emptorium. They’d been there so long he couldn’t remember where they came from. But we’ll
use your maerl dice.’

Citrine took four small stone-like objects from her bag, each with a different number of sides, and rolled three across the table. She totalled the vertical lines on show, five in all, then she
threw the remaining thirteen-sided piece of maerl. It tumbled to a standstill with the symbol of a spider uppermost. ‘Arachnoid spread,’ she said, and arranged ten of the faded
purple-backed cards in a pattern on the table.

Citrine was hopeful that for once the cards would hold some good news. She picked five from the spread, turned them over one at a time and laid them in a straight line. On the turn of the fifth
she uttered a little sound of surprise. ‘It’s some sort of beast! That card’s not in my deck.’

Suma sucked noisily through the gaps in her teeth. It was not unusual to come across new cards. All packs included a set of standard characters, but the rest differed from region to region.

‘It’s certainly an ugly thing,’ she began, but was immediately interrupted by a loud squawk and a scrabbling noise from the roof. Suddenly the wagon wobbled dangerously and
threatened to go right over.

Citrine reeled and grabbed at the table. Suma gripped the armrests of her chair in alarm. Jonah awoke, wide-eyed and staring, and jumped to his feet crying, ‘Batten down the hatches! Rope
her, lads, rope her!’ before realizing that he was not in a storm at sea but in Suma’s wagon.

A deep rolling roar filled their ears and the wagon shook violently for a full thirty seconds. Citrine recovered her balance just in time to prevent the leech barometer from smashing to the
floor.

And then it was all over.

Citrine straightened cautiously. ‘Domna, was that an earthquake?’

Jonah, a little embarrassed by his performance, scooped up a set of scattered Cachelot teeth and replaced them on the shelf.

‘This
is
Degringolade,’ said Suma, as if that was all the explanation needed.

Badly unsettled by the quake, the cards forgotten for now, Jonah and Citrine were anxious to leave.

‘Come back whenever you can,’ said Suma, bustling them down the steps. ‘And don’t forget Wenceslas Wincheap at the Caveat Emptorium. He will gladly help you with anything
you need. A fellow in his trade knows more ’n most folk about the doings in this city. Just mention my name.’

People were coming out of their houses and shops. A small crowd had gathered under the Kronometer, pointing and gabbling excitedly. The luminous hands were just approaching Mid-Nox, but the
black pendulum that usually hissed softly from left to right was still. For now, time in Degringolade was no longer measured by the Kronometer; it had stopped.

‘Go,’ urged Suma, ‘before you’re seen.’

The old woman stood on the steps and watched the pair pedalate away. She looked again at the beast card in her hand.

‘Katatherion,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘depicted in slumber, a great danger waiting to be woken.’

Leopold Kamptulicon stood on the charred and desolate edge of the Tar Pit of Degringolade and looked out across the oily black surface of the lake. He allowed himself a moment
or two of self-indulgence as he recalled again the incredible sense of power that had engulfed him – yes, engulfed; there was no other word to describe the feeling – when, at his very
command, he had watched the Lurid of Axel Harpelaine assume the body of his living sister, Folly. It was a sight Leopold would never forget. It might have been a short-lived triumph, Jonah –
the ‘Brute’ – had made sure of that, but he still took great pleasure in knowing what it was like to have a Lurid completely under his control.

He tutted and shook his head. Luck was a fickle lady and she had chosen that night of all nights to play with him. It was undoubtedly serendipity that the random Lurid he had summoned from the
horde out on the tar was Folly Harpelaine’s brother. This blood tie ensured that Folly could easily be used as a vessel for Axel’s restless spirit. In fact, she was even better than his
original choice, Vincent Verdigris. But then all this good fortune was countered by the fact that the Mangledore, the herbally steeped and ritually waxed severed hand of an executed criminal,
belonged to that very same brother. When the Brute had tossed it into the lake, Folly had been instantly released from Kamptulicon’s power.

Who in Aether could ever have imagined such a twisted set of circumstances?

‘Only in Degringolade,’ muttered Leopold as he watched again in his mind’s eye the Mangledore sailing in a perfect arc through the air to land in the sticky sucking muck. And
as he re-imagined it sinking below the surface, so too his heart plummeted in his chest.

Leopold blamed everything on Vincent, the thieving wretch with the metal arm. At the time he had been delighted to catch the young intruder in his underground Ergastirion, the workshop where he
kept his Supermundane paraphernalia, but the boy was proving to be more trouble than he was worth. True, it wasn’t Vincent who had actually tossed the Mangledore into the tar and thus ruined
all his plans, but he had masterminded it all; Leopold was convinced of it.

‘I should have killed him when I had him strapped up in my chair,’ he muttered. ‘Freezing his fingers off was far, far less than he deserved.’ On top of all that, Vincent
had stolen his book, his precious Omnia Intum.

‘And the one-handed cullion still has it,’ hissed the thwarted Cunningman, unable to hold in his venom any longer at the thought of the powerful book, a book even he did not fully
understand, in the hands of a lowly Vulgar. ‘I will get my book back,’ he vowed to the night, ‘if I have to throttle every domnable one of those Phenomenals.’

Kamptulicon could feel the residual heat of the fires through the thick soles of his boots, so he started to walk along the shore. He went slowly, raking absent-mindedly through the detritus
with the metal-tipped point of his staff.

It was a relatively new acquisition, supporting both his body and his ego. He thought it gave him a degree of gravitas. Kamptulicon was concerned that he had lost some of the respect he had
previously commanded, and undoubtedly deserved. Hadn’t he given Leucer what he had asked for, namely an embodied Lurid? And in doing so he had demonstrated that Leucer’s dream, a legion
of such Lurids under his sole command, utterly biddable and needing no earthly sustenance, was close to becoming reality. That still hadn’t stopped him grumbling (‘grummling,’
sniggered Leopold) about the subsequent farrago at the Tar Pit.

As for Edgar Capodel, that louche fop, all he was interested in was gambling and drinking and being seen to be powerful. Well, there was a difference between having power and merely having its
appearance. One day Edgar Capodel would realize that. For now, he was oblivious to the fact that he was a mere puppet whose strings were being pulled by Leucer d’Avidus to gain access to the
facilities and chemicals at the Capodel Manufactory.

Leopold Kamptulicon was feeling many things, but mainly frustration. ‘I am a Cunningman!’ he declared to the night. ‘A master of the Supermundane, a manipulator of the hidden
realms. Leucer does not pull my strings. But without an Ergastirion I am hindered, restrained in my powers.’

Indeed, that was the very reason he was in this desolate place, seeking out somewhere to set up a new workshop of evilry. He had fled his Ergastirion under the oil shop when Vincent had stumbled
across it. For now, Edgar had allowed him to store his paraphernalia in a small unused storeroom at the Capodel Manufactory, but it was far from ideal. But this place would not do either, he
decided.

The thwarted Cunningman returned to his black mare and rode off. At the broken archway of the Degringolade gate, an indication that he was almost back on the Great West Road, a thought came into
his head. ‘What about Degringolade Manor? Could that not serve as an Ergastirion?’

Excited at the prospect, Kamptulicon pulled on the reins, wheeled his horse round and started up the overgrown driveway to the derelict building, only to give up shortly after. The overgrowth
and undergrowth were impenetrable. It must have been fifty years since Lord and Lady Degringolade had passed on. He hadn’t been in the city when they were alive (but he like everyone else had
heard the rumours of their eccentricities) and it looked as if no one had gone up to the house for decades.

Suddenly something small and fast dashed out from the long-thorned briars and ran right between the horse’s legs. Startled, she snorted and danced about nervously, nearly unseating
Kamptulicon. He managed to calm her, but as she settled he became aware of a strange noise, gathering rapidly in volume, apparently coming from the trees and bushes. It was a growing cacophony of
scrabbling and scratching and squealing and hissing. Kamptulicon lifted his lantern and watched in amazement asa horde of four-legged animals of all shapes and sizes burst forth from the
undergrowth and raced away like a moving carpet. At the same time above and all about his head he could hear and feel the flapping of scores of pairs of wings. He put his arms up to protect himself
and could just see the silhouettes of perhaps a thousand birds in panicked flight. His horse became more and more agitated. Foam flecked her nostrils and the whites of her eyes were visible. He
struggled to control her. His lantern swung at such an acute angle that it quenched itself, leaving the Cunningman effectively blind and fighting to stay in the saddle.

The ground began to shake. The mare reared and Kamptulicon was thrown violently to the ground. He heard the beast galloping away and he lay where he fell, winded. The earth’s tremors went
right through the soft marrow of his bones. Unable to stand, he clutched at his protective ring and shouted out harshly, over and over again, a virtually unintelligible sequence of words in
Quodlatin.