The Furnace of Los
The imagination, a down-at-heel sage once said to me, is the only tool we need to get inside another’s head.
He was drunk, half out of his own head on cheap communion wine, and though I remarked that an axe wielded by a strong arm was as equal to the task, he maintained that the mind capable of abstract thought was a weapon still to be bested. To prove his point, he sweet-talked himself into sharing my bed for the night. But then, I’ve always been susceptible to men with a little something extra between their ears.
Many years later I found myself regretting not having paid more attention to what he had said. I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been, with a man my mother—bless her soul—would have warned me to stay away from, committing a crime that only the empty or addled of head would even contemplate. It was a cold, heartless night - so inhospitable that pleasure was the only true principle governing the actions of girls who found themselves out in it. And if later that night I shed any tears, it was simply because I had ignored my sisters’ better judgement.
I shouldn’t have been standing there. Where? Thirty feet above the ground, with my legs splayed and my bare feet gripping the rough clay tiles of a workshop roof on the edge of Chemytown. With the wind whispering around my legs and ruffling my skirt whilst a member of the city’s finest idly passed by on the pavement below.
If the man had taken a moment to look up instead of examining his flat feet, he’d have seen a sight to stop him in his tracks. But he kept his head down as he morosely completed his beat; not for the first time, I wondered why it is that they call themselves the watch. I remained rooted to the spot. My partner in crime—one Mercury Jones, five feet six inches of fabulous intellect trapped inside a Toulouse-Lautrec physique—was clinging to a straining metal gutter for dear life. His knuckles were white and his arms shook with the effort of defying gravity’s relentless tug on his little body; his face was a mask of concentration and fear. Of limited stature, he doesn’t like heights at the best of times, so hanging from a rusty strip of metal thirty feet above a Lebensraum street, in a bone-chilling December wind, just before the chimes of midnight, wasn’t his idea of fun. However, he had no one but himself to blame.
I could see that the wind and the cold, not to mention the strain of keeping his grip, were taking their toll on those little arms and it seemed to me that he too was having second thoughts about the wisdom of this nocturnal foray. Good. The way I saw it, I should have been settled in the Silver Cage with a jug of iced gin in one hand and a fan of cards in the other, fleecing some out-of-towner for all he was worth. The action was hot in the Cage whatever the weather; the only threats in the gambling hall were to a fat purse; and wearing a knee-length brown leather dress with a scooped neck was a boon for an evening instead of sheer folly. Mercury looked at me pleadingly, but I was still annoyed with him for bringing me here. I turned away, rubbing some warmth back into my goose bumps.
Lebensraum glittered under the dark sky. From my vantage, her tall towers and bulbous domes, squat warehouses and jumbled slate roofs looked fearful and grotesque, as if I had imagined them. To the south, Chemytown chain-smoked fumes into the sky, as if the night were not already black enough; by the warmth of their roaring furnaces the alchemists no doubt secretly plotted against one another. To the west Galleon beckoned, where, under one of those roofs, the charms of the Cage welcomed pleasure-seekers. The moon bathed the city in its chill silver light and the wind blew from the west, carrying with it the sour odour of Babble, the beggar settlement, from beyond the city walls. People had bolted their shutters and doors, everyone was staying in or holing up in a coffee house or drinking den for the evening; this was not a night for thieves to be abroad.
