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By Root 685 0

off of St. Dunsany’s Street, beneath the topside neighborhood called Red Lanes, were the eeriest section of the city, at least as far as James Crowell was concerned. Not only was Dunsany’s Street, like all places in the Arcadium, strangely resistant to indications of time, but the labyrinthine alleys and lanes seemed to confuse space and direction as well. If Crowell hadn’t made this trip ten or fifteen times already, he could easily imagine himself getting lost; the first time, he’d returned to the same street three times without recognizing it, because he’d come at it from three different directions. From different angles, Quarter Down Street had a different play of shadows, and different light seeping in from Red Lanes. The single phlogiston street lamp, clearly visible when he came at it from Sower Street, was blocked by a verdigris-defaced bronze sign when he came at it from Exeter Street. The bronze equestrian statue, probably a representation of Janusz Vlytze, had the disturbing quality of looking like three heavyset men when viewed from the angle of Short Lane.

He regretted not being able to keep the coach and horses that he drove, but horses generally didn’t care to go into the Arcadium. Moreover, Crowell’s employer at the livery stable had strict rules about taking coaches for personal use. Which meant that James Crowell had to walk through the increasingly frigid air as night settled over Trowth.

If he’d been topside, in Red Lanes, the coachman would have seen the murky overcast slowly chill and sink to the ground, turning into a dense fog that would drain through the gaps in the upper streets, and begin to fill the Arcadium. The sky would become painfully clear as the atmosphere, which had the effect of blotting out the sun during the day, and kept baleful stars still hidden behind its dirty clouds, had the reverse effect on the moon: magnifying the cold, pale disc so that it hung heavy and bright over the pulsing blue lights of Trowth’s phlogiston streetlamps.

Beneath Red Lanes, James Crowell only saw the fog creep in, and kept as close to the center of the cramped arteries of the Arcadium as he could. Vrylaks, the yellow, vampiric foglets that had come to Trowth with the wave of sharpsie immigrants, tended to lurk close to the ground along the walls. They were generally no trouble for a healthy adult man, but if that same man stumbled into a pack of them, they could crawl down his throat and drain the blood out through his lungs in seconds, leaving a red cloud of tiny droplets suspended in the air.

Crowell shivered and tightened his scarf around his mouth. He was on his way back home from Printer’s Close, which was the only Close that was still used for the profession it took its name from. Fishery Close, for instance, hadn’t been a fish-market for twenty years, and the small courtyard of Advocate’s Close hadn’t been full of law firms for close to a hundred. Fleshmarket Close was likewise no longer full of butcher shops, but it had been filled by brothels, so almost everyone agreed that the name was still appropriate.

He’d managed to get the first chapter of Tower of Brass in to Flood, Cheetham, and Crabtree Printers just before they closed up shop, which meant the pages would be on display the next morning for publishers to look at. If they found it interesting enough, they could put up the funding to have Flood et al. print it. And Crowell had to admit that this one was good.

Tower of Brass wasn’t his, of course, but his son’s. James Crowell didn’t really approve of the boy writing about the kinds of things that the lurid, pulpy two-penny novels addressed, but it was his own fault. James hadn’t been able to afford to send his son to University, so all that talent went unrefined and uneducated, wasted. The young man that might have been remembered by history as the next Silas Ennering, the great Poet Laureate under Edmund II, would instead be barely recalled by history at all, and if he was, as a footnote when someone mentioned cheap horror stories.

Still, the boy’s first novel, Ice House, had sold