24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop one box stood
1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing cotton (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the
5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors—lit with what he could only describe as a black light: it illuminated but did not lift the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of tattered jellyfish floating in amber bottles, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in brittle poses. The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and
1 Manzikert-brand phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and
8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles. Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by some wild delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower left corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop
1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood
8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice
1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again—and beneath the clock
1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal
1 bookcase, lacquered, stacked with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase
1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to
1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her left nub held by
1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pocket watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-gray trousers. He stared at
1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald-green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of
1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab gray suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set halfway up the wall where