The sour gong of rubber mallet striking glass, jagged top edge held secure by a hand gloved in nubby canvas, another strike, the snap of it breaking loose amidst a ringing showerfall of splinters and shards, the smash when it’s tossed to the growing pile of broken glass on the blue tarp spread below, another gong, another, four of them in rough dungarees, T-shirts, coveralls, clambering about the scaffolding erected before the great curving wall of broken glass, criss-crossed by an erratically angled grid of wide blue strips of tape, a detuned, arrhythmic carillon, rung out over a constant drizzle of broken glass.

“It is done,” says Agravante, under all that racket.

He’s stood at the head of a folding table, the only furniture as such in that wide room, and set on it before him a napkin folded carelessly, dotted with crumbs, a shaker tipped over, salt spilled from its silver cap, a small brass lamp, snuff of smoke uncoiling from the tip, a little white ceramic dog, ears and tail of it painted black, a tightly curled netsuke rabbit, carved from yellowing wood. “Seems odd,” says the man in the green denim jacket, taking up the last item, a ragged little cloth chimera, body of it striped, legs of iridescent fabric suggesting scales, head of it roughly wooled, with button eyes, and two limp horns. “Doing such a thing without the benefit of her majesty.”

“Yours the hand that gives, Soames Thomas,” says Agravante. “Yours it is, to take away. How,” waiting out a vigorous smash, “how goes the work?”

“New panel’s due from Wilsonville in a matter of hours,” the man in the green jacket, settling a white cap on his thickly greasy hair, “it will be in place in time for tonight. But, my lord,” pitched low now, so as not to carry much further than themselves, “assurances were made, as to supportment, for our work?”

“You’ll have your portion, my lord,” says Agravante, just as low. “This very night.” And then, raising his voice up over the clamor, “Next!” he bellows, turning away, only to “Oh!” at the glumly narrow man right there. “We are done,” says Agravante, voice pitched once more low, “nothing should need be said.” A gesture back toward the table, the items still littered on it.

“Excellency,” says the glumly narrow man, chin tucked behind the fenceposts of a high white collar, “this household’s complement has been,” the next word lost in a crash of glass, and “What?” snaps Agravante, an irritated shake of his white locks.

“Decimated!” says the glum man, flinching at his volume. “Sir. There’s aught to polish the plate.”

Agravante claps a hand to a narrow, black-jacketed shoulder, and the glum man flinches again. “You are the Majordomo! Master of any domain. I leave it, all, in your hands so very capable. Next!”

A young man, pale hair elaborately braided, gestures toward the doorway, inclines himself to murmur something as Agravante passes, into the relative quiet of the long dim hall, and another man stood there, blinking at the milky light, the clanging glass, his safety orange coveralls, his red velvet frock coat pricked and dimpled by intricate embroidery. Agravante leans to one side, looking past him, “I’d thought there were to be two of you?” he says.

“Excellency?” says the man in the frock coat.

“You’d be the Hawk’s Cinquedea. Not the Harper. Why are you here.”

“Hawk’s Widow’s,” says Pwyll. “Frankly, excellency, it’s all a wreck. Gradasso’s gone, you see. The Kern. It’s a wreck, sir, all of it, and coming down around us, and I need a place to stand. I’d just as soon,” leaning close, “other guys,” he says, hoarsely forceful, “have come over, last few days. I heard.”

“The Spadone,” says Agravante. “The Axle. The Estoc; the Flammard. And the Mason, Luys. But you, I was told, came here with the Harper.”

Pwyll looks back, over his shoulder. The front door, at the end of the hall.

“You understand,” says Agravante, leaning close in turn, “whatever my position on her majesty’s choice of Huntsman, it would be, impolitic, for me to be,” out in the wide room the tenor of the tumult’s overwhelmed by shouts and cries and an enormous shattering crash, but Agravante’s pressing home his point, “seen,” he says, “rewarding anyone who’d had a hand in the demise of that particular gallowglas.”

The gonging has, for the moment, stopped, replaced by heated conference. Out there in the wide room an enormous portion of the window’s fallen loose, smashed to tempered bits, and the Soames has taken off his cap. “Pwyll,” says Agravante, “tell me,” as Pwyll drags his attention back, “who was it, that ended the Kern.”

“I didn’t,” says Pwyll, and then, “I do not know, my lord.”

Agravante smiles. “A judicious response. Welcome aboard.”

•

A dozen cans on the tip-top shelf, Campbell’s, they say, over and over, Tomato Soup, he seizes one, his other hand busily disengaging spindly spectacles from a shirt pocket, holding them up still folded to peer through at the label, contents, suggestions, directions, but he’s blinking, shaking his head, moving the spectacles in and out until he closes up his eyes. A sigh, somewhat peeved. Lifting the spectacles away. “Stir in one can water,” he mutters, hand to the back of his head, wincing as he touches there a mighty round of black curls.

The jingle of a bell, up front.

Setting the can on the counter he turns and starts to see the little man stood unexpected there, beads of the curtain behind undisturbed by any passage. “Out,” says Gordon Porter.

The little man smiles around far too many teeth. “We are loathsome in their eyes,” he says, cheerfully. “Strewn panting on an unknown shore, overcome by weariness. No god nor mortal will have truck with us. We were born – ”

“Don’t need this,” Gordon growls.

“We were born,” that word stretched through those teeth, “for all that is not right, by their lights, and that is why we’re left to fend for ourselves in the barn, the crib, the cellar and the sty, we make of their crumbs our feasts, our wine their dregs. We’ve dogged their footsteps everywhere they’ve been, across the sere dead grass of continents since sunk, over storm-chilled waves, to cities that would one day scrape the sky, and gardens there, with oceans all about – ”

“Somebody,” says Gordon, but “we hum!” cries the little man, taking a step toward him, “mere snatches of their half-remembered songs, as we set about the work they will not do,” and another, “what else, is there, for us?”

“There’s what we do,” says Gordon, “and there’s how we go about the doing of it. No need for all the bowing and scraping, the yassuhs and the no-milords. Your nasty little self is proof enough of that.”

“We all must do as we are bidden.”

“Yeah? Who’s bidden you, these days?”

“I’ll eat your birds, youngster,” a sudden, savage snarl. “Their quills will make my toothpicks, and such delicate baubles of their skulls.”

“House is free,” says Gordon, with a lurch of a step angled toward the gap between the little man puffing himself up and the beaded curtain. “Kitchen ain’t. Get yourself gone.”

Out in the front room there’s an old man in a brown suit much too big, frowning to see Gordon stepping through the shoe-choked doorway. “Looking for Gordon,” he says. “He about?”

Gordon blinks.

“He ain’t been at the table,” says the old man, looking away to the window. George’s, it says. “He didn’t say nothing about having up family.”

Gordon blinks, again. “I know the kid,” he blurts. “Christian. He’s a, a friend.”

“Christian,” says the old man. “I swear, you are the spit and image.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“I got,” says Gordon, a vague gesture at all the shoes, “work, so, I’ll say you stopped by?”

“Tell him Duckie say he got nuts to lose.”

“Yes, sir,” says Gordon, after a moment, and Duckie nods. “I got a nap to see to, meantime,” he says, and turns away, limping slowly toward the door. Gordon watches, until the bell over the door jingles again.

•

Thick-knuckled fingers snap by the padlock, and again, loud and sharp in the still grey afternoon. He seizes the lock, shakes it, nothing. “Leugh,” he says, leaning against the smooth bright orange door, “leug.” Letting go of the lock, he stoops close to it, “Stone and Salt,” he whispers to it. “Lugubrio.”

Open it pops.

Rattle and crash with a shove he throws up the door, looking about, the empty alley and all those other orange overhead doors side by side still closed, still locked, still silent. His bald head ruddy, as if picking up some color from them all, his cloth coat, much too short in the sleeves, shawled with fur the color of cheap lime candy, his wide-waled trousers belling over bare and filthy feet as he steps inside.

A couple-three gear carts, a trunk, all blackly anonymous in the shadows, a keyboard there, leather sack beneath it, a careless splay of wood and ivory pipes, a partially assembled drum kit, tom on a spindly stand, rakish hi-hat, big bass that says Stone & Salt on the head in fresh black vinyl letters. He squats by a canvas shopping bag to rummage up a pale drumstick that he spins about suddenly unclumsy fingers. Eyes it resting, there, in his hand. Tucks it back away.

Past the kit a fleet of instrument cases laid with casual reverence on the concrete floor, a couple of fiddles, or maybe one’s a mandolin, the hulk of an acoustic bass, beached on its side in stiff nylon, something long and low and flatly rectangular, but he sits himself heavily beside a battered old guitar case of felt and cardboard, marked by a lone demure sticker, pasted at an angle, Play Anything, it says. Raps the lid of it, once, then scoots himself back.

The lid trembles and then, with a protesting creak, lifts. Up from within a slender hand, joined by another, reaching, stretching, a fusillade of knuckles cracked, joints popped, fingers wriggling now, limberly loose. The case scrapes the floor, shifted by the shift of weight within, a curled back breasting the lid, a long bare leg lifted out to slap a blue flip-flop on the concrete, a skinny red-headed man standing himself up out of the case, blinking thickly, cropped grey sweatshirt, Y-font underpants laundered to a dingy ivory. “Otto,” he says, looking away. “Or, it’s Sir Otto, now, isn’t it.”

“Not no more,” says Otto Dogstongue.

“Not no more what.”

“They say you can feel it? When it happens? Well, I’m here to tell you they’re right. Bread, oil, salt, pop, pop, pop,” savoring each plosive smack, “and once more,” a sigh, a flick of those fingers, “court’s light a Bullbeggar.” A shrug. “Had no idea ol’ Tommy Tom’d go for all that pomp and circumstance. Must be trying to impress the Barons.”

“So what did you do,” says the red-headed man, stepping away, snagging the stool from behind the drum kit.

“It’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t swan off across the river, with him and the rest of the Local brass. Kamali and Stevedore, Jackstaff and Gaffer, and Luthier, who can’t win a duel for a nickel, but not no more myself.” Sitting back, resettling that furry collar on his shoulders. “Meeting’s next week,” he says. “What am I, not supposed to go?”

“So why am I awake?” says the red-headed man, skinny gammons planted on the stool.

“Come back with me, John Wharfinger. Come back, to the Queen’s new digs. She’s done so much more, in a month, for far so many more, than the Local’s ever dreamed. You have any idea why it’s so quiet here, now, and empty?”

“I like it.”

“It’s because everybody’s there,” says Otto. “They’re all there.”

The red-headed man looks up, out toward the open door, the orange doors across the alley, scowling at the marginally brighter afternoon.

“And there’d be music. We’d all play together, again.”

“Herself?” says John Wharfinger.

“The Axe may have foresworn us, but my lady Outlaw’s piped for Carol, and I did rattle a drum betimes.”

“And the kid?”

“Streak’s yet Blue,” says Otto, unfolding a giddy smile.

John Wharfinger nods, looking down at the case on the floor.

“I mean, come on,” says Otto, smile crumpling. “We could, we could get a truck, load all this up, it wouldn’t take, come on, John.”

“I said yes,” says John Wharfinger. “But I wouldn’t say no to a truck.”

•

“No, but, see?” he’s saying, “they fucking get fogged,” holding up the goggles, “I wear ’em,” up against his forehead, “here, right?” shrugging the flop of his pompadour aside, “fucking cool, right? But when I want to actually fucking wear them,” lowering a brass-ringed lens over one glaring eye, “they’re all fucking fogged!” whipping it away, leather straps a-flap. “There has to be some fucking treatment, or something, a fucking spray, some fucking, I don’t know, fuck is the word, unguent? Something?”

The Dinny-Mara shrugs without looking up, as he adjusts scrape and chime the placement of upright leaves and shards of dark grey slate set neatly close one flat before another in a small cast-iron pot.

“Seriously,” says Sweetloaf, “they don’t fuck up like this in the fucking movies.” And then, as the Dinny-Mara sits back, eyeing his arrangement of slate, a stark little cartoon of sheer mountain cliffs, “Don’t fucking do me like this,” says Sweetloaf, aggrieved. “Moisture’s, like, your fucking thing.” The Dinny-Mara’s pouring a cup of water into the pot, and bends down to flick a switch. The gurgle of a hidden pump, and a sudden skin of water coats those leaves of slate, rinsing dull greys away to every possible shade of black, iridescent indigos through all the blues and wetly ruddy browns to hints of green, as a mist seeps up, flowing between and about those cliffs, lopping the lip of the pot. “Fuck it,” says Sweetloaf, turning away with a scowl. The Dinny-Mara carefully lifts the pot, mountains, fog, and all, and sets it on a shelf with a dozen other potfuls of mist-sodden cliffscapes.

Sweetloaf stalks away up the aisle between those stalls, lit here and there against the cloudy gloom without, and the gently lambent glow of the great wooden tub. Past it, there before the empty, unlit stage, a dozen or so are crowded about great sheets of paper unrolled on the boards, murmuring, pointing, “Fuck,” mutters Sweetloaf, “still fucking at it,” turning about, goggle-straps flapping, he stops suddenly, “Oh,” he says. “Hey.”

The young man crouched on the floor of the otherwise empty stall doesn’t look up.

“Hey,” says Sweetloaf. “Butterlocks. How the fuck you doing.”

“Stop calling me that.” His oversized shirt of yellow plaid, he’s crouched over a broad sheet of rough brown paper, scribbling over the shape he’d just begun to draw with a grease pencil. “Well,” says Sweetloaf, “the fuck should we call you? We already got a Goodhill, used to fucking do for a house up in Montavilla.”

“Christian,” he growls, starting again, two quick strokes to either side, a long wobbly line to connect them, and another, a low rectangle.

“Like that’s gonna fucking last.”

Those murmurs at the other end climb to a pelting absolutely, answered by a rousing chorus of negations and dubious groans. Christian sits up to look over his work. The thick blank painstaken strokes are now clearly the outline of a long façade, topped by a low-hipped roof. He addes a shape at one end of it, suggesting a shallow porch, and two doors, side by side.

“Fuck is that? A strip mall?”

“Apartments,” says Christian, duckwalking down to the other end of the sketch, “where people lived, and, and,” strokes now quick, assured, “worked, and,” another porch, the same two doors, “cooked,” he says, and winces, “dreamed,” he says, and scowls.

“The fuck ever,” says Sweetloaf, looking away. The kerfluffle by the stage drops away, stilling, as all those domestics and mechanicals turn, look, duck heads, a couple of them bowing, “Hey,” says Sweetloaf, “look alive. It’s the Duchess.”

Up there, Jo Gallowglas, all in black, a hand held up, nodding, as Trucos, or is it Getulos, says something earnestly emphatic, pointing to the plans, and Getulos, no, it’s Trucos, vociferously disagrees, as Jo, still nodding, backs away, that hand still up, pushing back against their collective enthusiasm.

“Shit,” spits Christian, stuffing the grease pencil in a pocket, scrabbling to roll up his drawing, clambering to his feet as Sweetloaf steps out of his way, “I gotta,” he says, but “Christian!” calls Jo, rounding the tub, heading down that wide aisle toward them, past stalls filled with art and tools and debris. “I was looking for you. Really wish you had a phone.”

“Well,” says Christian, looking down toward the other end of that aisle, the arch, the shadows beyond. “I don’t.”

“You still up on the camps?” she says, and a “hey” for Sweetloaf. “Where folks these days jungle up? I need to find somebody, and Bruno’s people are useless for this. Little old lady named May, had a big damn camper out by the airport and a metric fuckton of National Geographics,” but “Nah,” he’s saying, raising his voice, “nah, CO’s gone and ain’t neither of us want nothing to do with the new XO. Trust me.”

“I want, you,” she says. “I have to find her. And, Jack, and Hector – cops trashed the camp, Thursday night, and they didn’t get picked up, but otherwise I got no idea where they went. You need to get out to whoever you can who knows about or’s in charge of this shit, and tell me, I mean, is Springwater still a deal? What?”

He’s shaking his head. “I help you, you gotta do something for me.”

“Since when,” she says, “did this become transactional?”

“Since when I never worked for you, is when.”

“You,” she snaps, but catches herself, “what,” she says. “What is it.”

His chin juts, points toward the crowd of them, up by the stage. “They’re working out what to build, on the float out there. I mean, they know what, just not which way it’ll go. It’s a map, or a model, of the city, that’ll sit in the lap of the Queen.”

“Lap,” says Jo.

“Of a statue, of the Queen. So, you, have to tell them. Vanport has to be in there. One way or another, they gotta put Vanport in there, too. That’s what I need you to do, for me.” The glare over his hunched cheekbones. The rolled-up drawing crumpled under one arm. The free hand curled in a heedless fist.

“The fuck is Vanport?” says Jo.

It’s abrupt, how Christian turns away, sets off, slap of his grimy running shoes, “Hey!” shouts Jo. “Christian! Goddammit. Christian! You want anything with that, that fucking float? You gotta run it past Gloria! It’s her show! Christian!”

He’s gone, under the arch, into the shadows.

“Shit,” says Jo.

“Hey,” says Sweetloaf, then. “Boss. I know some a them fucking camps.”

“So do I,” says Jo. “I need all of the camps. Everything. I have to find them.”

Sweetloaf shrugs, goggles glinting. “I can drive.”