The Beating of His Wings Read Free Page A

as it were, of both letter and Mother Superior leaves this case somewhat in the Limbo in which unbaptized infants are said to wait out eternity. Given the violent nature of his imaginings (though not, to be fair, his behaviour) it seems wisest to place him in the protective ward until the letter can be found or the Mother Superior recovers enoughto tell us more about him. As it stands, there is no one to whom I can even write to make enquiries about him. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs and it is not the first time by a long chalk that records have gone missing. I will discuss the alleviation of his symptoms when the herbalist comes the day after tomorrow. As to his delusions of grandeur – in my opinion, treating those is the work of many years.
     
Anna Calkins, Anomist
     
    For weeks Cale lay in bed, retching and sleeping, retching and sleeping. He became aware after a few days that the door at the end of the twenty-bed ward was locked at all times, but this was both something he was used to and, in the circumstances, hardly mattered: he was not in a fit state to go anywhere. The food was adequate, the care kindly enough. He did not like sleeping in the same room as other men once again but there were only nineteen of them and they all seemed to live in their own nightmares and were not concerned with him. He was able to stay quiet and endure.

2
     
    The Two Trevors, Lugavoy and Kovtun, had spent a frustrating week in Spanish Leeds trying to discover a way of getting to Thomas Cale. They had been thwarted by the cautious nature of the enquiries forced on them in Kitty the Hare’s city (as it had now become). It didn’t do to upset Kitty and they didn’t want him to know what they were up to. Kitty liked a bung, and the amount of money he’d expect for allowing them to operate in his dominion was not something they were keen to pay: this was to be their last job and they had no intention of sharing the rewards with Kitty the Hare. Questions had to be discreet, which is not easy when fear is usually what you do, when threats are your legal tender. The two were considering more brutal methods when discretion finally paid off. They heard of a young seamstress in the town who had been encouraging a better class of client to come to her by boasting, truthfully, that she had made the elegant suit worn by Thomas Cale at his notoriously bad-tempered appearance at the royal banquet held in honour of Arbell Materazzi and her husband, Conn.
    Who knows what helpful information Cale might have let slip while he was having his inside leg measured? Tailors were almost as good a source of information as priests, and easier to manipulate – the tailors’ immortal souls were not at risk for blabbing a bit of dropped gossip; there was no such thing as the silence of the changing room. But the young seamstress was not as easily menaced as they’d hoped.
    ‘I don’t know anything about Thomas Cale, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. Go away.’
    This response meant that one of two things was going to happen. Trevor Kovtun had by now resigned himself to committing an atrocity of some kind, Kitty the Hare or not. He locked the shop door and brought down the shutter on the open window. The seamstress didn’t waste her time telling them to stop. They lowered their voices as they worked.
    ‘I’m fed up with what we have to do to this girl,’ said Trevor Lugavoy. This was both true and a way of frightening her. ‘I really do want this to be our last job.’
    ‘Don’t say that. If you say it’s our last then something will go wrong.’
    ‘You mean,’ said Lugavoy, ‘some supernatural power is listening and will thwart our presumption?’
    ‘It doesn’t do any harm to act as if there were a God sometimes. Don’t tempt providence.’
    Trevor Kovtun walked over to the seamstress, who had by now realized something dreadful had come into her life.
    ‘You seem to be a clever little thing – your own shop, a sharp tongue