Chương 30: Chapter Thirty: A Poor Way to Honour the Gift

Alice set out for the Sixth Compact's office earlier than she needed to that morning, money already set aside into her glove for any purchases she would need, and let herself do a little sightseeing. As she didn't have any plans to do any marsh runs or go to the pitch that day, she felt somewhat like the tourist she technically was as she glanced around the street.

It was a small indulgence, as up to that point, the only things that allowed her to carry on were keeping her eyes down and her pace steady, focused solely on her goals. Over a million people lived in this city, by her own rough count of what she'd read, and she'd spent most of her time here treating nearly all of them as scenery to get past rather than a place actually worth seeing. Perhaps, now that she was planning to spend more time in the city proper, she could learn to belong to it too.

[Map Building] would likely benefit as well. Greybell Lane gave way to Aldgate the way it always did, cobbles roughening underfoot, and the morning traffic thickening around her. A dust-cart rattled past, iron-bound wheels loud enough to drown out conversation for a full ten seconds, and behind it a coal merchant's dray sat half-blocking the junction while two men argued about right of way in a dialect thick enough that she only caught every third word.

Soot sat on every surface that held still long enough to collect it; window ledges, doorsteps, the shoulders of a stationary policeman who didn't seem to notice or mind. The air had a taste to it this close to the river, coal-smoke and something fishier underneath, and she found herself breathing shallow out of old habit in a different life with a weaker set of lungs. She passed a chemist's window stacked with blue and green bottles, hand-lettered signs promising cures for everything from consumption to melancholy.

A woman in a good wool coat and a terrible temper harangued a costermonger over the price of his cresses.

"... four bunches a penny, madam, and cheap at twice that!" she overheard, while a boy of perhaps seven sat on the corner with a tray of bootlaces and an expression of weathered patience that made her chest ache a little. Things about children in this city always did that when she let her guard down.

Above it all, the buildings themselves leaned into the street, upper storeys jutting out over the pavement, brick gone the colour of a dull darkened wine, windows crowded three and four to a floor where a family's whole life happened behind glass she could have touched from the road. It was, she admitted to herself, rather a lot of scenery to have simply gotten past.

The small side-street office for the Sixth Compact that she was familiar with was busy that morning, three runners' desks all occupied and a line already forming past the door, and a quick glance inside told her Thomas wasn't among them. Off on some errand or another, or simply not rostered today. She didn't linger to ask.

It was, in any case, too small an office for what she actually wanted; general registration and pitch complaints were hardly the same business as rank mechanics and upgrade requirements, and she doubted a runner's side desk would have either the material or the authority to hand it over even if Thomas had been sitting right there. The main building, she recalled, sat further into the Vicus proper. She turned her steps that way instead.

Alice had heard the girls on her street speak of it, how grand and how lively it was, plenty of times without ever once bothering to walk through the Vicus herself. It was the East End's great sprawling market proper, the beating commercial heart of everything east of the Tower. Getting there meant cutting south off Greybell onto a thoroughfare wide enough for two dust-carts to pass abreast, then following the noise, which grew steadily from a murmur into something closer to a loud tide.

The market itself opened up ahead of her all at once, stalls in the hundreds, packed shoulder to shoulder under canvas awnings gone grey with soot, running in rows deep enough that she lost the far end of them in haze and distance. Fishmongers shouted over greengrocers who shouted over a man selling nothing but buttons, an entire trestle of them sorted by size and colour.

Somewhere past the produce the character of the place and its people shifted, stalls giving way to guild frontages proper, with Compact offices, licensing halls, a building with iron bars over its windows that she could only suspect the legality of. The Eastern Compact's main office sat two streets deep into that second stretch, easy enough to find once she knew to look for the brass plaque rather than a striped awning. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Vicus, a strange name, she thought over the word as she walked. Latin, unmistakably, for something as mundane as neighbourhood or district, hung over a market this size, for likely a good many years. She thought of the map she'd pored over weeks ago, empires with odd but familiar-looking names, borders drawn nothing like the ones she'd grown up memorising. But it no longer was about the borders.

It was the foreign verbiage sitting comfortably in the heart of what might be considered an alternate Britain, through church liturgy and guild architecture and now, market districts, worn so naturally it barely registered to an Englishman's eye. Whatever had happened here, she was increasingly certain, hadn't diverged from her own history sometime in this century, or even the last several.

It went back further than that, all the way back, she suspected, to whatever had or hadn't happened when Rome first came to Britain at all, and never quite finished leaving, or at least not as fully as in her own world. The Eastern Compact's office, when she reached it, smelled quite similar to the smaller one in Aldgate, tallow and old paper and the particular mustiness of a room where money changed hands often.

A low shelf near the door held a scatter of pamphlets of various sizes, and she let herself linger over them now, turning one over in her hands, Guild Registration for the New Freelancer, thin as a leaf, while the clerk behind the counter finished with an old man clutching a fishmonger's license.

"May I help you, miss?" the clerk said once the old man had shuffled off, younger than she had expected, spectacles too big for his face, ink on two fingers of his writing hand.

"Good morning." She set the pamphlet back on its shelf.

"I was hoping for some information on class upgrades. Ranks, mostly. I'm ever so grateful for the Angel's gifts, of course, as anyone must be, but the Voice only ever gives us the one line, and I've come to think I owe it a bit more study than that, if I'm to understand what's truly meant by it. How the progression actually works, beyond what we're told after achieving it."

"Right." He didn't look particularly surprised by the question, which she took, cautiously, as a good sign.

"You'll know your Ignota from your Nota, I take it."

"Of course," she said, hopefully with the easy confidence of a woman who had absolutely known about this all her life.

"One to twenty, twenty-one and onwards. I'm asking about what comes after that, and how a person actually gets there, what it's meant to feel like, what changes in a soul the Angel judges worthy of it. It seems a poor way to honour the gift, only ever hearing the Voice and never troubling to understand the rest of His intention."

"Ah." Something in his expression shifted, not unkindly, but as if he was preparing to disappoint someone so pious as gently as possible.

"That'd be restricted material, I'm afraid. Rank mechanics past the introductory level, upgrade requirements, all of it, it's for sponsored or apprenticed members only. Freelancers don't qualify."

"That does seem," she said, "remarkably unhelpful for people who are, likely, the ones who need it most."

"I don't disagree, for what it's worth." He almost smiled.

"There's an introductory pamphlet. Tuppence. It's what I'd have given newcomers, adolescents, a middle-class child, truth told, but it's what everyone starts with."

"A child," she repeated, and let a note of genuine irritation into it, because it was, by this point, not difficult to find.

"I'm asking because I want something rather more thorough than what's given to children, sir."

"That'd be church business, mostly," he said.

"Sunday schooling. They do the proper teaching of it, the Third Testament, the ranks, all the doctrine round the Angel's Voice. Compact only handles the trade side."

"I haven't been able to attend as regularly as I'd like," she said, which was true but utterly misleading in ways she'd gotten rather good at.

"And what I have managed to read leaves quite a lot out. I'd hoped the guild might fill some of the gaps." He considered her for a moment, and then shrugged, the universal gesture of a man deciding a stranger's oddness wasn't his problem to solve.

"Can't help you there beyond the pamphlet, miss. Rest is restricted, like I said. I don't know much of it myself." She bought it anyway, alongside other unnecessarily expensive introductory papers, and thanked him with rather more warmth than the transaction deserved. She didn't want to become a woman worth remembering by anyone beyond an afternoon.