Blackchapel

===28 Spring 1386==========

Nan had been back from her visit to Valder Keep eight days now, and she had spoken to me maybe three times in that interval, one of which was on her immediate arrival home, before she found out that Magnus had died ten days before, and that I was the one who had let it happen. Part of me understood that it was sad, for Nan to have given up on me so completely, and part of me was simply relieved, because the only person I wanted to talk to was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

I knew he wasn’t coming back, because after his failed recall ritual I had stopped taking my psychesuppressant tonic and now hadn’t had a dose in almost three weeks. I had only a dim sense of what getting to see him would accomplish, other than a possible brief respite from the omnipresent, physically painful, totality with which I missed him. And the only result of this experiment had been that every unrestful person to die in Oldtown for probably the last fifteen hundred years had turned up hoping I was the answer to everything they fucked up in life and never got around to fixing before they kicked it. The house was packed full of a whole host of ghouls bearing an assortment of **** wounds ranging from pox blisters to beheadings.

One of them, whom I particularly disliked for her habit of following me into the bathroom, had been run over by a horse and carriage. I resented the fact that she was ambulatory when by all rights she ought to have been stuck forever glued to whatever street she’d been mown down on, and further resented how much she liked to talk about it. Her unfinished thing was that the wrongful **** settlement due to her family had never actually managed to get paid, and for some reason she thought I could do something about this six centuries after the fact.

It was a little bit ridiculous, how much it hurt my feelings that to Curry, leaving me behind evidently did not signify as unfinished business.

The sensible thing to do, after figuring out that Curry wasn’t coming back to see me, would have been to visit the temple and begin again with my suppressant draughts so that whatever made me into an irresistible beacon for dead people would die down and the crowd could again disperse. But that would have required effort far beyond anything I was capable of, and nobody else was going to go get the stuff for me. Even if I hadn’t forgotten how to talk following his ****, I couldn’t ask Nan for anything, and nobody else knew about the shades. Baggett might have made the trip, because he had proven doggedly persistent in coming to see me every day, but I didn’t know how to describe in writing what he ought to get, or without it begging a lot of impossible explaining as to why I needed it.

And anyway, he was beginning to wear me out, with his inexplicably undeterrable conviction that with Curry’s funeral now past and his ashes safely home with us, these milestones meant I would one day begin recovering from this loss.

Baggett wasn’t himself unscathed. To start, he was the one who let himself in when neither of us showed up for our next scheduled shifts, and came upstairs to find that after Curry died I had curled up against him with some notion of simply expiring myself, then failed to move from that place for almost a full day even though that didn’t happen.

Then Baggett was the one who had fetched a priest from the temple of Rava, and the two of them had pried me away from the corpse while I fought them, and once they removed me I had curled up in the corner. The last person I had spoken aloud to was Curry, and now that I physically couldn't—suspecting unintentional affectation on my part I had tried and failed all by myself, to say words aloud—it was possible he might be the last, too.

Now Baggett was the one trying to lure me back to the land of people who did normal things like eat meals and have a daily paid occupation, and even if a mute detective would have done anybody one bit of good, I was not taken in by his well-meaning fraud. I wasn’t sure I liked how devoted he had turned out beneath his acid exterior, because I also wasn’t sure how to disabuse him of this belief that I was going to return to the watch guard at some point. The idea was equal parts impossible and absurd to contemplate, and because I loved Baggett—even if I didn’t love him as much as Curry—I couldn’t work out how to make him understand he had lost both of us and that he should really just give up on his notions of rescue now, while he still had a chance of me not drowning him.

Nine days ago, after they took Curry away, a different priest had come and given me a look over, to see if there was any worry I had picked up the same grippe that had carried him off, except the only thing wrong with me was that I couldn't talk anymore. He was the one who explained to Baggett what was the matter, and I knew Baggett had told this to Nan later because I had heard them in the kitchen, and all Nan said was, “Then neither of us has to say anything.”

Six days ago I had silently trailed Nan out of the temple after Curry’s well-attended service, her trudging along with his funeral urn cradled in her arms, not looking at me—and the fact emerged to me with inescapable clarity that his affable presence was ought which bound us, and that I shouldn’t remain here in her home, serving as a constant reminder of everything I had cost her. At first I had thought she and I might find some way to bridge our two islands of solitary grief, but now I understood that was impossible. I loved Nan, and if she hated the sight of me then I would not remain an unwelcome guest in her home.

It was a relief to have made a decision about it, and having that out of the way improved my spirits considerably. Over the last few days I’d been to every chemist shop on this side of the city, and at each I had purchased a four ounce bottle of laudanum. These I was accumulating in the top drawer of Curry’s clothes dresser, since on the rare occasions I now slept I did that in his room. They were safe there because Nan couldn’t bear to come in here at all. It was a convenient way for us to avoid each other.

I didn’t want to put Nan to any bother with any of my scant possessions, so on each of these trips I had taken a few articles in a bag and left it in the donation box at whatever temple was nearest. I did this for a different faith each time, to avoid anybody thinking they noticed a peculiar pattern, and because it seemed more fair that way. This was an efficient means of disposition for an estate so small as mine, so now I had left: one set of clothes, my bathing costume, the book of Estaharan chaunceyhorse tales that Curry had given me back when we were still teenagers, my chaunceyhorse herself, Curry’s copy of the book about the whale which he had gifted me when we turned twenty-four, his mother’s chaunceyhorse quilt, and a silver cigarette case which had been a present from Baggett when Curry and I closed our first case.

Taken together like this, it was a bit amusing that nearly all my most precious possessions were either all about Curry, or all about the chaunceyhorse, or both.

The cigarette case I had wrapped up in brown paper with a heartfelt note that Baggett would hate, justifiably so considering the absolute cowardice it reflected, and parceled to his address in this morning’s post, since he wasn’t an idiot and would find it wildly suspicious if I simply offered it back to him. The whale book I had left in the top drawer of Curry's bed stand after rereading its inscription some three hundred additional times and crying inconsolably on each iteration: To Fuzzy, the most tenacious barnacle, on her birth-day, from the becleaved one who likes her best. Love, Magnus.

No one must want my piebald chaunceyhorse toy but Curry—so, being unsure what else to do with her, I had kissed the horse on her threadbare nose and put her in the bottom drawer where he kept the cigarettes he smoked about twice a year and pretended he didn’t have at all. The quilt—I left it neatly folded on the bed when I tidied his room that morning. The clothes—I wore these out of the house today, since people might think it was odd if I set off to the Blackchapel bridge and tramped through the streets already wearing my bathing costume.

Blackchapel was a popular place to go and hop into the river in warm weather, and even if the water was a bit high and swollen with spring rain at the moment, plenty of people simply sunbathed on the bridge. And today was unseasonably warm enough that even if it was a bit early in the day, nobody who passed took any notice of me sitting on the bridge, swinging my legs merrily and drinking laudanum from a coffee flask while I enjoyed the sight of the sun dappling off the water below.

I’d downed over half the flask, enough that there wasn’t any turning back now, and consequently was feeling rather cheerful for the first time in weeks, congratulating myself on what an unfussy and unpainful way this was to drown oneself, with a very minimal amount of bother for others. So it was something of an unwelcome annoyance, when I heard a familiar voice calling from a distance. I didn’t want to go to the trouble of placing that voice, when I was supposed to be done with all the inconvenient parts of life, like trying.

I was irritated that whoever it was had decided to turn up and pester me now, when I had originally planned to take another ten or twenty minutes enjoying the sun and the pleasant fuzziness of the laudanum before my last swim. I looked around, for whoever it was, and saw no one. The voice sounded odd, and faint, and by the time it had repeated my name twice again, an extremely startling thing occurred to me.