The Seer Read Free

of fake poppies around the door to indicate what one could find within. There was a room within the brothel Jesco patronized on occasion that was for the smoking of opium. Though curious, he had never entered it, and Collier warned him not to create a problem where there was none. For Collier’s sake, Jesco would avoid it. That beautiful man knew much more about opium from working there than Jesco did from his sporadic visits. Leave opium to the sick and broken for pain relief; there was no need for Jesco to have it.
    The traffic had ended. Now the carriage was passing through slums peopled only by shadows. This was the dead zone. All was silent except for the dulled sounds of the autohorse’s hooves and the rattling of the wheels. Although they had the assurance of the chemist, nervousness filled Jesco to be nearing Poisoners’ Lane. It had been fifteen years since anyone called this area home, fifteen years since those terrifying articles appeared in the newspapers of the bodies in the streets and the tenements, still sitting at tables over meager meals and sagging in corners. One did not feel sick upon exposure. One did not feel sick at all, and then hours later, Death suddenly came knocking. The Church had taken advantage of the fall of thousands, blaming it upon demons, but Science fingered the true cause. Jesco was ten years old at the time, one of many children in the asylum crying out in nightmares of bodies strewn everywhere like paper dolls, streams of foam leaking from their lips and their eyes staring into whatever lay beyond.
    But there were no bodies now. The carriage bumped and turned through the silent streets, ever held in shadow from the abandoned, looming tenements. They could not be knocked down without freeing even more kolymbium, and still it would be sunken in the earth so that nothing could be built here again. The buildings stood as a graveyard, and once a year patrols of street officers swept through to peep in windows and make sure no one had broken in and perished. The fear of the dead zone was so extreme that they rarely found anyone save those intentionally missing, who had had the goal of ending their lives by dwelling in an emptied apartment until the poison overtook them.
    Sinclair was looking at him in concern, although Jesco’s remembrances of that childhood fear had made only a small divot in his forehead. “Are you well?” The eyes of the junior detective slid to Jesco’s gloved hands.
    Jesco shook his head to dismiss the worry. “I am not in thrall. It is simply strange to be in this haunted place that I’ve heard about since childhood.”
    Sinclair saw the truth of it and returned to gazing out the glass. “It was the worst of the worst even before the poisoning, a squalid place, no sanitation, no clean water, no insulation or ventilation in many of the buildings. I heard about how they slept here, three to a bed and two under a bed, rented for eight hours and then it was three more to the bed and two underneath. Then the same again in another eight hours. There could be fifteen people living in the smallest of rooms, forty in a larger one, and that house, that house there, it must have held hundreds.” He motioned and moved aside so that Jesco could look. They were passing a huge, centuries-old house with two floors. Hints of its former grandness remained in the stone quoins, the columns and pediment about the front door, and the oriel windows. When first built, it had been the home of a very rich person. Now it was a cracked and smudged disaster with shattered glass.
    “Only to see it in its heyday. The gardens had to have been splendid,” Sinclair said wistfully. There were no gardens now. Nudging up on either side were cheaply constructed tenements, each shrugging a deferential shoulder towards the once fine mansion. “This used to be the belle of the river. Called Wadalabie in olden days, before industry took root here.”
    Amused, Jesco said, “Are you a man of