Surviving Arkadia

It turned out that the answer to how I could help was that I couldn’t right away. Nurse Trudy told me to come back the next day so that they could be sure that I’d been sufficiently traumatised to remember the Fever properly. I wanted to have words with her about deliberately traumatising me but since we didn’t know if it was enough trauma yet I decided that the conversation could wait.

Another conversation that would have to wait was the matter of Master Armstrong’s pronouns. I had defaulted to a gender neutral singular they, because I really didn’t want to make assumptions about someone who had both breasts and that much facial hair. For all I knew Dwarves had their own pronouns.

I returned to the archive to find that Jethro was already waiting for me. He had found one of the local bakeries and bought pasties of some kind for lunch. He also had a notebook that he seemed very excited to share with me.

We went up to our cosy rooms in the eaves of the archive and shared the pasties at the battered little table. At first I worried that Jethro would notice that I was more subdued than usual and ask about my trip to the hospital. Whether it was the Fever clouding his mind, or his genuine excitement about life in the big city distracting him he never asked about my morning at all.

“How did the job hunting go?” I said, as soon as I’d finished my food.

“So much better than I was expecting,” said Jethro. “I found loads of garden clearing jobs and even a few house clearing jobs that you could help out on. Building space is really limited so if a house gets abandoned they don’t wait around much before tearing it down. I also found out that there’s a market for ‘Parochial home-wears’ which is just big city bullshit talk for things that are handmade out of traditional materials. If I find any decent wood while I’m clearing I can turn it into things to sell. So can you. I can show you how to carve things. Your whittling skills are already pretty good.”

“So we can actually afford to rent somewhere in the city then?” I said. I’d been worried that two freelancers wouldn’t be able to consistently earn enough to pay proper rent. Particularly since space was so limited. When your income is irregular you can end up paying more for temporary accommodation where the landlord can just chuck you out if you run out of money. If we could both make money from the sort of whittling that we would do in our spare time anyway then we wouldn’t have to worry about completely running out.

“Absolutely. We might even be able to rent somewhere close to the citadel. There’s so little room for expansion in the old domes that the really rich families have been raising whole new domes round the edge of the city. They’re building bigger houses, with country style gardens, away from the poor folk. That leaves a lot of big properties near the centre that are getting divided up into smaller households. I had a chat with a guy from the guild of builders about it. Which reminds me. We’d both be eligible to join the guild if we work on stripping out buildings for conversion.”

“I definitely want to join a guild. Can you join more than one?”

“Yeah,” said Jethro. “You can only be a Master at one guild but you can join as many as will have you.”

“Collecting guilds. Could be my new hobby,” I said, with a lot less than my usual enthusiasm. Fortunately Jethro didn’t seem to notice.

“Ooh, I just remembered. I heard of a mysterious job that you might be interested in,” said Jethro.

“Mysterious how? Is this you trying to engage my enthusiasm?” I said.

“Mysterious as in I don’t know how,” said Jethro. “There’s a job on the Scavenger board from the Mayor. It’s been on the board for ages. I asked around and no-one knows what it’s for. There’s not a lot of Scavengers in the city but there’s not none. Someone must have answered by now but no-one is talking about what the job is."

“I am definitely looking into that,” I said. I was going to need something to take my mind off the thought of all those children burning up in the cold room while Master Armstrong and Nurse Trudy watched, unable to help any further.

“Are you going to do that this afternoon?” said Jethro.

“Not sure. Gertrude wants me to go for tea later but I don’t have anything planned until then. Maybe I’ll just go for a run along the rooftops for a bit. Get some fresh air, get a feeling for the area, level my parkour…”

#

So that’s what I did until teatime. I clambered out of one of our small windows and got onto the roof.

I ran from the City Archive to the City Hall and then ran the length of the City Chambers wing roof until I could look down into Moonstone’s open air public theatre. Nobody was using it that afternoon but I’d seen signs for some kind of performance in the evening. I turned around and ran back along the roof.

I challenged myself to parkour my way at least as far as the end of the Fever Hospital. That meant crossing the roofs of the City Archive, the Central Library, The Fellowship of the Light of Knowledge building, and the full length of the Hospital itself.

Parkour and Climbing both dinged while I was making the leap from the oddly shaped roof of the Fellowship building to the higher but less impressive roof of the Hospital. I resisted the temptation to go back now that I’d levelled up. I kept going until I reached the end of the Hospital and was faced with the choice of dropping down onto the roof of the University administration building or leaping from the corner of the hospital to one of the gothic buttresses of the University’s Great Hall.

I decided that was far enough and that I was probably already late for tea with Gertrude.

#

I wasn’t late for tea with Gertrude. But mainly because she was late for tea with me. When I arrived at her office she told me to go and sit in the tea alcove and that she just needed to sort something out and she’d be right back.

When I finally did see her again, nearly an hour later, she was looking stressed and tired and her hair was a mess. I almost joked with her that her wife had come to “visit her at work” but I recognised the severity of her expression in time.

“Please excuse me,” she said, brushing the hair out of her eyes and dropping into the delicate green chair with the golden foliage. “We had an outbreak of some extremely aggressive book worms. I had to kill one with a spade before we resorted to magical methods. All dealt with now though.” She looked down at the table and realised there was no tea there. She seemed ready to get up and get the tea herself but then she noticed something adhering to today’s cardigan. The cardigan was made up of brightly coloured lozenges, like a Harlequin costume or a Fool’s motley. She picked a chunk of something gorey from her sleeve. I caught her eye and she said, “Maybe it was a mistake to use quite such an emphatic spell.” She threw her head back and yelled for Ursula.

Ursula was a gnome, and Gertrude’s assistant, and clearly very good at her job because she arrived in the office before the echos had fully faded and she was already carrying the tea tray. She put the tray on the table and gave Gertrude a look up and down. “I told you it was a mistake to cast that at tier four,” she said, and she swept out of the room before Gertrude could object.

“Shall I pour?” I said.

“Please,” said Gertrude, slumping in her chair and picking worm bits off her knitwear.

“So how big do bookworms get here?” I said. I slid her teacup over to her and reached for the jug of milk.

“No milk, one lump of sugar,” she said. “It depends on what they’ve been eating and how long they’ve been undisturbed. They curl up in hardbacks and codexes to hibernate. They usually don’t grow any bigger than can fit inside the carcass of a book they’ve fed on. How big did they get in your world?”

I poured my own tea while I tried to remember if I’d ever seen a bookworm, “I don’t think I ever saw one. I did own books but perhaps the climate was wrong. I understood them to be tiny, the size of a grain of rice.”

“These were a lot bigger than that,” said Gertrude, I passed her the plate of tiny cakes and she picked one.

“I’m surprised you have any bookworms here. The archive seems far too well organised for that.”

“Oh it wasn’t our collection. It was a bequest. An old scholar left us his collection of books and his heirs just boxed the entire library up and sent it to us without checking. It seems he wasn’t as much of a scholar as we thought. Given the scale of the infestation and the size of the individual worms none of those books had been opened recently.”

“Perhaps more of a book hoarder than a book collector,” I said, around a mouthful of cake.

“Perhaps. Anyway, I now have to explain to Geraldine why I have worm chunks all over my new cardigan. She only got it off the blocking pins the other day.”

“Lead with how distraught you are that your beautiful cardigan got dirty then follow it up with how upsetting it was to open an ancient tome expecting a fascinating historical document and instead getting a face-full of worm,” I said.

Gertrude looked thoughtful for a bit. “If that works then I will owe you a drink.” She finished her cup of tea and then poured another one. “Now, I think we’ve put it off long enough. How was your visit to the Fever Hospital.”

I was perversely close to asking her “what hospital?” and feigning ignorance of the whole thing but the thought of the six children in the cold room wouldn’t let me make light of it.

“Nurse Trudy is a fucking saint,” I said. “But I am still pissed off at her, and you.”

“You’ve detected our cunning scheme then?” said Gertrude.

“Let the effects of the Fever traumatise me just enough that it can’t make me forget it anymore. I’d be a lot angrier but it’s exactly what I’d do. Also, while we’re unravelling mysteries, what pronouns does Master Armstrong use?”