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thebaconsandwichofregret · 5 years ago

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Happy False Value Day everyone!!!

As many of you know Ben Aaronovitch used to work for Waterstone’s, a bookshop chain in the UK, and because he’s quite proud of having worked there (and they are proud of having once employed him, no seriously, every time I even look at one of his books in one of their shops a member of staff spontaneously appears to tell me “He used to work here you know!” If I had a pound for every time I’d heard that I could afford to buy the Folly) he gives Waterstone’s a special exclusive short story in the first run of every new Rivers of London book.

Obviously this is great for those of us who are UK fans.

It’s less great for those of you who are international fans. However in the spirit of International Magical Cooperation I managed to get my hands on my copy ever so slightly early and so I have here for your reading pleasure, the exclusive short story from False Value - A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Please note that this story contains mentions of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

By Ben Aaronovitch

You know that song by The Kinks? Not that one. The other one. No, not that one either. Yeah, that one- ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, but that song’s about me.

These days my daughter does her best to keep me looking respectable, and I haven’t the heart to tell her that I’d much rather wear my nice comfortable corduroy trousers, with braces, and leave my shirt untucked. But back in the sixties I was the dedicated follower of fashion. And it’s true that they sought me here and they sought me there but, as Ray Davies knew perfectly well, that was probably because of the drug dealing. What can I say? Clothes aren’t cheap.

I was a middleman buying wholesale and supplying a network of dealers, mostly in and around the King’s Road. I rarely sold retail, although I did have a number of select clients. And of course nothing lubricates a soirée like a bowl full of alpha-methylphenethylamine. It was all going swimmingly until some little shit from Islington stiffed me on a payment and I found myself coming up ten grand short. And, believe me, ten grand in 1967 was a lot of money. You could buy a house in Notting Hill for less than that - not that anyone wanted to, not in those days.

Now, I’ll admit that as an entrepreneur working in such a volatile industry, I probably should have ensured that I had a cash reserve stashed away against such an eventuality. Mistakes were definitely made. But in my defence, not only had I just discovered the joys of blow, I was also distracted by my infatuation with Lilith.

Now, I’ve always cheerfully swung both ways and, to be honest, I’ve always been more attracted by the cut of someone’s trousers than what was held therein. But when I met Lilith it was if all the cash registers rung out in celebration. She was so like a man in some ways and so like a woman in others. I’d love to say that it was the best of both worlds, but looking back it was a disaster in every respect. Although a completely exhilarating disaster, like a roller coaster to an unknown destination. I tried explaining what she was like to Ray Davies and that beardy writer who ran that sci-fi magazine, but they both got her completely wrong.

So there I was, suddenly ten grand down to people whose names you’re better off not knowing - let’s just call them the Deplorables and leave it at that. If I tell you that their nicknames were Cutter, Lead Pipe and Gnasher, that should give you a flavour of their character. You could call Cutter the brains behind the gang but that would be risking an overstatement. Organised crime in the good old days required little in the way of actual brains and relied much more on a calculated defiance of the social niceties vis-à-vis psychotic violence. Terrify your rivals, bully your customers, and hand out a bung to the local constabulary and you were away.

And it goes without saying that aesthetically they were a dead loss.

The Deplorables had a straightforward approach to those that owed them money which I will leave to your imagination - suffice only to say that it involved a sledgehammer and, of all things, a marlinspike.

But I had no intention of losing my knees, so I had arranged a couple of new deals that would net me a sufficient profit to cover both what I owed the Deplorables and the same again to appease them sufficiently to save my poor knees from a fate worse than polyester.

I know some of you are thinking that polyester was hip and groovy back in the Swinging Sixties, but trust me when I say that it was an abomination from the start - whatever the elegance of its long chain polymers.

In order to keep body and wardrobe together while I waited for these deals to come to fruition I decanted, along with Lilith and my faithful sidekick Merton, to a squat in Wandsworth just off the Earlsfield High Street. Now, I normally shun the transpontine reaches of the capital. But my thinking was sound. With my reputation as a flower of Chelsea and the King’s Road, I reckoned that nobody - least of all the dim members of the Deplorables - would think to look for me across the river.

‘No fucking way,’ said Lilith when she first saw it, ‘am I living in this shithole.’

Squats come in many flavours. But political, religious or student, they are almost always shitholes. However, I could see this one had potential and Nigel, God bless his woolen Woolworths socks, had at least kept it clean.

But not particularly tidy.

Outwardly Nigel was definitely one of the children of Aquarius. Inside he had the soul of an accountant, but alas none of the facility with numbers.

According to Nigel, who could be dull about this sort of thing, the building we were squatting in had been built in the eighteenth century as an inn that specialised in serving the trade along the river Wandle. This was news to me, because I had assumed the rank channel immediately behind the house was a canal.

‘There used to be factories up and down the Wandle,’ he told me despite my best efforts to stop him, ‘all connected up with barges. And this is where the wartermen used to get their drinks in.’

With the collapse of that trade it was converted into a grad town house, a status it retained for a hundred years or so before providing slum housing for the unwashed multitude. Occasionally on its hundred-year odyssey it would surface into the light of respectable society before descending once more into the depths of squalor.

Which is where yours truly arrived to bring a touch of colour and a modicum of good taste to the old place.

Looking back, I believe that might have been the start of the whole ghastly business.

Now the thing about the drug trade is that it overlaps with the general smuggling industry. As a result a man with the right contacts can acquire much in the way of valuable cloth - Egyptian cotton and the like - without troubling the good people of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. Then such an individual might use his reputation for fashion to sell on said items to the East End rag trade at less than wholesale, cash under the table, no questions asked and no invoices raised. Not as lucrative as a suitcase full of horse, but safer and more dependable.

Cloth, even expensive cloth, takes up considerably more room even than Mary Jane, so the fact that the old building had a beer cellar capacious enough to store the stock was the other reason I’d chosen it as a bolt-hole. Merton and I pressed Nigel into service to help us carry the bales, wrapped in tarpaulin for protection, down to the cellar, which proved to be mercifully dry and cool.

It was surprisingly cool - you could have used it as a pantry.

‘That’s because of the river,’ Nigel explained. ‘It’s just the other side of that wall.’

I touched the wall and was surprised to find it cool but bone dry.

‘They know how to build houses in those days,’ said Nigel.

Once we’d moved the good in, it was time to deal with the ever simmering domestic crisis that was life with Lilith. In the latest instalment of the drama, she had ejected Nigel from the master bedroom and claimed it as her own. This was less of a distraction than it might be because Nigel, like nearly all men, was clearly smitten with Lilith and acquiesced with surprisingly good grace.

And so we settled in companionably enough, especially when Lilith and Nigel discovered a common in the works of Jack Kerouac. I could see that at some point I would be bedding down with Merton for a night or two. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t find Lilith’s peccadillos upsetting but Merton, bless his acrylic Y-fronts offers compensation in his own rough manner.

Things started to go wrong the night of the storm and consequent flood. And while our decision to drop acid and commune with the thunder- Nigel’s idea, by the way - probably wasn’t to blame, it certainly didn’t help.

I don’t normally do hallucinogenics as they often disappoint. You go up expecting Yellow Submarine and get a lot of irritating visual distraction instead. My colour sense is quite keen enough, thank you, without having a pair of purple velvet bell-bottoms start to shine like a neon sign.

The master bedroom - now Lilith’s domain - contained, of all things, a king-size four-poster bed that was missing its curtains. But since I’d arrived, it at least had matching cotton sheets in a tasteful orange and green fleurs-de-lis pattern. They matched the old wallpaper with its geometric tan and orange florets that still showed the retangular ghosts of long vanished photographs and paintings.

At some point - Nigel had said the 1930s - the owners had installed an aluminium-framed picture window that ran almost the length of the room and looked out over the canal, or more importantly, up into the boiling clouds of the oncoming storm.

Lilith started on the bed with all three of us, but I can’t take anything seriously when heading up on LSD, least of all sex. So I quickly disengaged and chose to sit on the end of the bed and watch the storm. I doubt the others were troubled by my absence.

I watched the storm come in over the rooftops of South London with lightning flashing in my eyes and that glorious sense of joy that only comes from something psychoactive interacting with your neurones. I lost myself in that storm and, in it, I thought I sensed the roar of the god of joy, whose acolytes dance naked on the hilltops and rip the goats apart.

But the mind is fickle and darts from thought to thought and I became fascinated by the patterns the raindrops traced down the window glass. Then the play of light and shadow drew me to the walls, where I found myself pulling at the torn edge of the wallpaper. Like most squats, damp had gotten into the room at some point in the past and the top layer peeled away to reveal another layer below - a vertical floral design in red, purple and green on a pale background. Carefully I stripped a couple of square feet away. And while behind me Lilith howled obscenities in the throes of her passion, I started on the next layer. This revealed a faded leaf design in silver and turquoise. The colours pulled at me and I realised that if I could just find the original surface I might open a portal to another dimension - one of style and colour and exquisite taste.

But I had to be patient. Clawing the walls would disrupt the delicate lines of cosmic energy that flowed along the pinstripes of the layer of blue linen-finish paper. Delicately, I peeled a loose corner until I uncovered a beautiful mustard yellow bird that glowed with an inner light. Gently and meticulously I revealed more. A trellis design overgrown with olive and brown brambles sporting red flowers and crimson birds. I knew it at once as a classic design from ‘the Firm’, the company founded by William Morris to bring back craftsmanship to a world turned grey and smoky by the Industrial Revolution.

I was ready for a hallucination then, and willed my mind into the pattern in front of me, but nothing happened. The wallpaper shone out of the hole in the wall, the light shifting like sunlight through a real trellis, real birds, but that achingly rational part of my brain stayed aloof. Chemistry, it said, it’s all chemistry.

At some point Nigel escaped the bed and fled whimpering into the cupboard and closed the door behind himself.

The trellis and its mustard-coloured birds mocked me from the walls,

‘I think we’re sinking,’ said Merton, for what I realised was the third or fourth time.

I was still coming down and it took concentration to focus on Merton, who was stark naked and pacing up and down at the foot of the bed. Lilith was sprawled face down, arms and legs spread like a starfish to occupy as much space as possible. There was no sign of Nigel, and in my elevated state I seriously gave consideration to the thought that Lilith had devoured him following coitus.

Merton rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if testing his footing.

‘Definitely sinking,’ he said, and ran out of the door.

I flailed about a bit until I found a packet of Lilith’s Embassy Filters and a box of Swan Vestas, managed to not light the filter on the second attempt and dragged in a grateful lungful. A burst of head-clearing nicotine helped chase away the last of the lysergic acid diethylamide and I was just trying to determine whether I’d hallucinated a naked Merton when he reappeared.

‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘We’re not sinking but we’re definitely flooding.’

The cellar was divided into two parts. The stairs led down to the smaller part of it, essentially a wide corridor which used to house, so Nigel insisted on telling me, the coal chute - now bricked up. A big metal reinforced door opened into the larger part of the cellar - the part with over ten grand’s worth of fabric stored in it. The door was closed but the corridor part was two inches deep in filthy water.

‘Don’t open the door!’ called Nigel from the top of the stairs.

I had no intention of leaving the dry section of the stairs, let alone risking the cuffs of my maroon corduroy flares in what looked to me like sewage overflow. Merton, who’d been trying to force the door open, now splashed back as if stung. For a man who I’d once seen cheerfully batter a traffic warden for awarding him a ticket, it was odd how he never argued with Nigel - not about practical things to do with the house anyway.

Nigel, resplendent in a genuine Indian cloth kaftan - or so he claimed - passed me and stepped gingerly into the water. Reaching the door, he rapped sharply with his knuckles just above the waterline, then he methodically rapped up the door until he reached head height. After a few experimental raps to confirm, he turned to me and told me I was deader than a moleskin waistcoat.

‘The whole room’s flooded,’ he said. ‘Probably not a good idea to open this door.’

I sat down on the stairs and put my head in my hands. I did a mental inventory of what I’d stored and how it had been packed. It was bad, but if we could pump out the room half of it could be salvaged - especially the silks, since the individual rolls had been wrapped in polythene.

Thank God for Hans von Pechmann, I thought, and got to my feet.

‘We need to drain the room,’ I said. ‘Nigel, get a pump and enough hose to run it back out to the river.’

Nigel nodded.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, and practically skipped up the stairs.

‘Put some clothes on before you go out!’ I called after him.

I told Merton that when we had the pump and the hose, he would have to cut a suitable hole in the door - near the top.

‘Will you need tools?’ I asked.

Merton eyed up the door.

‘I have what I need in my bedroom,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’

It took Nigel the best part of the day to source the suitable equipment. In the meantime, I sent Merton out to the local phone box to see if I couldn’t rustle up another life- and kneecap-saving transaction. Ideally, I should have been making the calls myself but I didn’t dare show my face on the street - it’s a well-known face, even in South London. I spent the time cataloguing my wardrobe, alas much reduced by my exile, ironing that which needed ironing and casting away those items that had fallen out of style since my last purge.

Some things never go out of style - some things, thank God, will never come back. Let us hope that the lime-green acrylic aquiline button-down cardigan is one of them. I really don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it.

Apart from a spectacularly noisy toilet break, Lilith stayed blissfully asleep in the main bedroom until teatime and then vanished into the bathroom for the next two hours.

Once Nigel had returned with the pump and the hose, Merton used his hammer and chisel to cut a rough hole, six inches across, near the top of the door. Nigel had brought down the cream-coloured hostess trolley and mounted the pump on that to keep it out of the water. Once it was rigged we ran a hosepipe up the stair, down the hall, across the kitchen and poked it out the back window. Merton stayed to supervise the outflow while I returned to the top of the stairs and gave Nigel the nod.

It looked ramshackle and was, indeed, held together with string and gaffer tape. But like most things that Nigel built, especially his improvised hookahs, it was perfectly adequate. The pump puttered into life, the pipe going through the hole in the door stiffened, there was a gurgling sound and I followed the passage of the water upstairs and into the kitchen. There, an arc of water shot from the hose and into the river beyond.

‘How long until it’s pumped out?’ I asked.

‘A couple of days,’ said Nigel.

When I objected, he pointed out that it was a small-bore hosepipe, that the cellar was large and that we didn’t know how the river water was getting in.

Some things you can’t control, I suppose, such as Lilith - who I found sitting in the kitchen in a loose yellow kimono, drinking brandy and letting her assets hang out.

‘It smells different in here’ she said.

I pointed out that the window was open to allow egress of the hosepipe and was thus allowing fresh air, to which Lilith was generally unaccustomed, to enter the room. Lilith grunted and said she was going out that evening to meet some friends in Soho.

I tried to talk her out of it but she insisted, and there was no stopping Lilith when she was set on something.

‘What if the Deplorables see you?’ I asked.

‘Darling,’ said Lilith, throwing an orange ostrich feather boa around her neck, ‘the Deplorables never frequent the places I do and in any case - I’m invisible.’

I was making another calming cup of tea when I realised that Lilith had been right. The kitchen smelt fresh and, oddly, sun dappled - of you thought sun dappled was a smell. I went to the open window and took a deep breath. Not normally something I’d recommend given the foetid nature of the Wandle - which still looked more like a canal to me - behind the house. The air was fresh and another thing I noticed was that the water shooting out of the hosepipe was clear. I pulled the pipe in a bit and had a closer look and then an experimental tate - just the tip of the tongue, you understand. It was plain, clean water. Perhaps, I thought, the cellar had been flooded by a burst mains pipe. If so, then there was a chance that much of my stock might survive relatively intact.

I also noticed that the house had a small back garden, or rather a side garden, an overgrown patch of weeds and brambles that filled a roughly triangular space between next door’s garden wall, the river and the side of the kitchen. I replaced the hose and went looking for the door that led to the garden. I’m not a horticulturalist myself, but to a man in my position, knowing there’s a back door - for egress in extremis - is always a comfort.

It took three days to drain the cellar, which passed as quickly as two quarters of Lebanese cannabis resin could make it. Now I’ve never been one to get the munchies, but Nigel could consume an astonishing amount of fish and chips, and poor Merton was forced to make several supply runs. On the morning of the fourth day, Nigel declared that we could force the door and I went to fetch Merton.

Who was nowhere to be found.

His room was as he always left it, the bed made with military precision and knife-edge creases. Merton was a thoroughly institutionalised boy, but what institution - the navy, prison, the Foreign Legion - I’d never thought to ask. His clothes, though dull, were hung or folded with the same admirable care. His tool case was missing but the canvas bag containing his baseball bat, bayonet and the long wooden stick with the stainless steel barbs that I didn’t want to know the purpose of, was tucked into the wardrobe next to his two spare pairs of Doc Martens boots.

I returned to the basement corridor, which Nigel had mercifully mopped clean once the muddy water had soaked away. Nigel was standing by the door to the cellar, stock-still and staring at something on the floor.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

Nigel pointed mutely at a battered blue metal toolbox sitting by the door. Its top was open and its trays expanded to reveal its rows of neatly arrayed tools and boxes of screws and nails.

‘He must have gone inside,’ said Nigel. His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. ‘Inside there!’

Since I had no idea why Nigel was so agitated, I reached out and pushed the door open. It opened a fraction and then pushed back - as if someone was leaning against the other side.

‘Merton,’ I said, ‘stop fucking about and let me in.’

I shoved harder and the door opened a crack and out poured a weird sweet smell like cooked milk. And with it a sense of outraged dignity which so surprised me that I jumped back from the door, which slammed shut.

‘Is he in there?’ asked Nigel.

‘Must be,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.

Neither of us could match Merton - because that’s who it had to be - for physical might. I mean, I employed him precisely because he could intimidate your average creditor just by breaking wind. So we trooped upstairs for a cup of tea and some pharmaceutical reinforcement.

‘Got any more black beauties?’ asked Nigel, who never could separate his biphetamines from his common or garden amphetamines. I swear, you try to educate people but there are limits. I gave him a couple of ludes, and given the day we’d had so far, took a couple myself. Lilith returned fabulously drunk at two in the morning, and we all piled into bed and didn’t get up until the next afternoon.

The door to the cellar remained closed and Merton’s tool case was still where he’d left it. I tried the door, but it was stuck fast with no give at all. I even tried knocking it down, like they do in films, but all I did was bruise my shoulder.

If Merton was in there, he wasn’t coming out until he was good and ready. And since I wasn’t getting in, I had to accept that I wouldn’t be realising any value from my stock of fabrics any time soon. Still, I’d already written down their value and put other deals in motion to generate cash flow - another drug deal, as it happens. A stack of Happy Bus LSD out of Rotterdam. A little bit riskier than my normal deals, but needs must, as they say.

Without Merton, I was forced to rely on Nigel to go out and make the necessary phone calls. Unlike Merton, who followed instructions without question, I had to explain everything to him as if he were in a spy movie with Michael Caine. Once he had the gist, he darted out the front door wearing an RAF surplus greatcoat. As I watched him go from the upstairs window, I realised that his hair had grown long enough to reach between his shoulder blades and wondered why I hadn’t noticed.

The next couple of days went past with no sign of Merton, and I only managed to keep anxiety at bay with the help of my dwindling supply of cannabis resin and long punishing nights with Lilith.

The door to the cellar remained closed.

When I had nerved myself up to go look, I noticed that something had been jammed into the cracks around the edge of the door - as if it had oozed out from inside the cellar in liquid form and then set on contact with air. I took a set of pliers from Merton’s tool case and worried a fragment out. It’s a long time since I’ve prepared a slide in earnest, but while I didn’t have a microscope I did have a jeweller’s glass I keep for checking crystal shape. Under magnification the fragment revealed itself to be a tangle of threads - blue cotton, my good Egyptian cotton at a guess. I picked at the tangle with a pair of tweezers and a strange notion struck me - that the threads weren’t tangled randomly, that there was a pattern to the knots.

I could imagine a circumstance where the pressure of water could both shred the original weave of a cloth and then tangle the threads. I could even imagine water pressure forcing the threads around the edge of the door, but it seemed unlikely. Before I discovered fashion and pharmaceuticals I did a degree in chemistry. Started a degree, to be precise - I stopped paying attention in the second year. But I always thought of myself as rational even when under the influence.

If I’d known what I know now, I would have run screaming from the house and taken my chances with the Deplorables. But I lived in a much smaller world in those days.

Although large enough for my Rotterdam connection to agree to a deal. Not only that, but it seemed my credit was good enough for me to procure a sample shipment on good faith. With the profit from that sale I could finance a larger shipment and thus dig myself out of my financial predicament and quit the squat - and it’s creepy basement.

The only catch being that I would have to provide my own mule to bring the sample in. Normally you don’t use your friends as mules, not even friends of friends. What you really want is a gullible person who’s been talked into it by someone you only know through business. I knew a guy who could meet a girl at a party and have her on a plane to Ankara the next day. He made a living recruiting mules and didn’t mind some wastage at all - right up to the point someone’s mother gave him both barrels of her husband’s grousing shotgun. The police never caught her and only Merton and I turned up for the funeral.

It wasn’t hard to persuade Lilith to fly to Rotterdam - especially first class - and the beauty was that wherever she touched down, she paid for herself. Or to be strictly accurate, other people took care of her needs for her. The downside, of course, was that you had to allow her time to party - in this case, at least a week. You’d think that without Lilith sharing the high thread cotton sheets of the four-poster bed I’d be getting more sleep, but I found myself spending most of every night staring at the underside of the bed’s canopy.

It didn’t help that I had to ration the Quaaludes - I needed them to keep Nigel functioning.

‘There’s something in the cellar,’ he said, and refused to go down into the basement.

I, on the other hand, found myself increasingly drawn to the cellar door. Especially when it started to flower.

It started with a spray of cotton around the door frame, overlapping triangular leaves of white and navy-blue cotton that stuck to the bricks of the wall as if they’d been glued in place. I took a sample and found that instead of regular weave, the cloth was formed by the intertwining of threads in a complex pattern. Some of the threads amongst the white and blue were a bright scarlet and spread through the fabric in a branching pattern like streams into a river basin. Or, more disturbingly, like capillaries branching out from a vein.

I did make an attempt, cautiously, to scrape one of the ‘leaves’ off the wall with a trowel I found in Merton’s tool case. But even as I pushed the blade under the edge of the cloth I felt such a wave of disinterest - I cannot describe it more clearly than that- that I found myself halfway up the basement stairs before I realised what had happened.

The next day the cotton leaves had spread out at least another six inches and surrounding the door were tongues of crimson and yellow orgaza. Individual threads had begun to colonise the door proper - curling into swirling patterns like ivy climbing a wall. I spent an indeterminate amount of time with my back to the opposite wall, staring at the pattern to see if I could spot them moving.

I wondered what it meant. Perhaps Nigel was right, and the Age of Aquarius was upon us and we had entered a time of miracles.

When I was upstairs I tried to put the cellar out of my mind and concentrate on plans for the future. I had fallen into drug dealing almost by accident and had always found it an easy and convenient way to keep myself in the sartorial fashion I aspired to. But if my run-in with the deplorables was an indication of the future, then perhaps it was time to pack it in. A boutique of my own instead, one in which I could serve both as owner-manager and inspiration. Before the merest thought of doing actual work, no matter how supervisory, had filled me with disgust but now … now it seemed attractive.

I didn’t trust these feelings.

I needed out of the squat. I needed to be strutting down the King’s Road or Carnaby Street. I wanted back out into the world, where I could be as dazzling and as splendid as the first acolyte of the goddess of fashion.

But you need working kneecaps to strut your stuff. And so I stayed where I was.

By the third day the door was completely obscured behind a tapestry of red, black and gold thread, and wings of cotton spread out across the walls and ceiling. The organza had likewise spread and a third wave of pink and yellow damask now framed the doorway. By the sixth day the entire corridor was curtained in swathes of multicoloured fabric, so that it seemed a tunnel to a draper’s wonderland.

I no longer dared leave the safety of the foot of the stairs and yet I still found myself walking down them three times a day to look. The urge to walk into its warm comforting embrace was terrifying.

On the seventh day, Lilith failed to return. I started to seriously worry on the eighth; on the ninth, I fell into such a despair that no amount of near pharmaceutical-grade Drinamyl amphetamines could lift me from it. On the tenth, a postcard arrived with four jaunty pictures of a tram stop, a fountain, a town square, a gigantic statue of a man holding up the sky and Groeten uit Rotterdam written across the front.

On the back Lilith sent me love and kisses, explained that she’d met a splendid sailor or three and would be staying on in the Netherlands for a bit, but not to worry because she’d found a perfectly wonderful Spaniard to courier my product back to London. Thoughtfully she’d written the travel and contact details of the Spanish courier on the postcard - in plain English.

With a heavy heart I sent Nigel out to pick up the package and when he failed to return I was not surprised.

We live in a universe constantly assailed by the forces of entropy. Nothing good, pure or beautiful can stand up to the relentless regression towards the mean, the dull and the shabby. A minority have always striven to be a beacon in the gloom, a constant source of inspiration to those around them. Some worked through the medium of paint, or music, or literature, but I have sought to make myself the living embodiment of style and culture.

God knows it hasn’t been easy.

But a man should always know when he’s been beaten. That morning, as I sat in the kitchen, futilely waiting for Nigel to return, I realised that that time, for me, was nigh. I went upstairs, stripped myself down to my underwear - not nylon and not frilly, thank you, Ray - and after taking a deep breath to steel myself, donned a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a matching moleskin shirt. A pair of Hush Puppies and one of Merton’s donkey jackets completed my transformation. I looked in the mirror - I was unrecognisable.

Stuffing the last of my cash reserves in my pockets, I headed for the front door. I paused by the basement only long enough to ensure it was closed. From behind it came a noise that might have been a giant breathing, or water flowing, or shuttles running back and forth across lines of thread.

I shuddered and walked boldly out into the sunlight.

My plan was simple. Take the train to Holyhead, the ferry to Dublin and then, via a few contacts I still had, to America and freedom.

I didn’t even get as far as Garratt Lane before I ran straight into Cutter. I tried to braout but somehow he recognized me instantly and called out my name.

I turned, ran back to the squat, slammed the door behind me and went for the back door. There I could escape via the garden, over the wall and run for Wimbledon Park station.

But Lead Pipe was waiting in the kitchen, with a cup of tea on the go and the Daily Mirror open to the back pages.

‘About time,’ he rumbled when he saw me.

Three guesses where I went next.

I was down the stairs and into the basement corridor before I even noticed that the walls had grown a fringe that glowed with a soft golden light. I was prepared to throw myself frantically at the cellar door but I found it open. I ran inside with no brighter plan than to barricade myself inside and hope the Deplorables grew bored.

Inside the cellar was a riot of colour. The walls were arrayed with purple organza and burgundy charmeuse, while sprays of a brilliant blue habotai framed cascades of fabric woven in a dozen colours - scarlet, yellow and green - into tangles of vines, leaves and flowers. Globes of light hung suspended from golden threads in each corner, illuminating a bundle of gold and black embroidered silk suspended from tendrils of lace - like a cocoon from a spider-s web.

Around me was a giant’s breathing and the warp and weft of a loom gigantic enough to weave the stars themselves. I could no more have stopped myself from grasping that bundle than I could have stopped myself breathing.

The bundle was warm and squirming in my arms. I unwrapped a layer of gauzy chiffon, gazed down on my fate and was lost.

‘Oi,’ said a voice from behind me.

I turned to find myself confronting the sartorial disaster that were the Deplorables en masse. I won’t describe their appearance on the off chance that children may one day read this account.

‘Can I help you gentlemen?’ I asked, because politeness is always stylish.

‘Yeah,’ said Cutter. ‘You can give us the ten grand you owe us.’

‘Plus interest,’ said Lead Pipe.

‘Plus interest,’ said Cutter.

‘I’m rather afraid I haven’t got it,’ I said.

‘That’s a shame,’ said Cutter, and he turned to Lead Pipe. ‘Isn’t that a shame?’

‘It’s definitely a shame,’ said Lead Pipe.

The bundle in my arms squirmed a bit and made happy gurgling noises.

‘Since the money is not forthcoming, I’m afraid we’ll be forced to take measures,’ said Cutter. He looked once more to Lead Pipe. ‘Is your sledgehammer ready?’

By way of reply, Lead Pipe held up his sledgehammer and I couldn’t help but notice that there were brown stains on the long wooden handle.

‘And Gnasher,’ said Cutter. ‘Do you have a marlinspike about your person?”

Gnasher grunted and held up a pointed lump of metal that I can only presume, in my ignorance of all things nautical, was a marlinspike.

Cutter turned back to me and smiled nastily.

‘I’d say that you should take this like a man,’ said Cutter. ‘But that would be a waste of time.’

Never mind his rudeness, I had more pressing concerns.

‘Shush,’ I said. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

Cutter’s face suffused to a fine shade of puce and he opened his mouth to continue his ranting, so I twitched aside the fine damask sheet to reveal my daughter nestled in her bundle of silk and high-thread Egyptian cotton.

Her beautiful brown face broke into a charming smile and, opening her chubby arms in a benediction, she laughed - a sound like water tumbling over stones.

Cutter gave me an astonished look and whispered.

‘Is this your…?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered back. ‘Her name is Wanda.’

‘But,’ said Cutter, ‘you can’t keep her here.’

‘She likes it here,’ I said indignantly.

‘It’s a dump,’ said Lead Pipe in a low rumble. ‘It’s not fit for human habitation.’

‘He’s right,’ said Cutter. ‘There’s damp and mould and the kitchen is a disgrace.’

‘And there’s no nursery,’ rumbled Lead Pipe.

‘And the garden is a jungle,’ said Gnasher. ‘Totally unsuitable.’

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I can’t attend to any of these details if you break my legs.’

‘Obviously, we have to deal with the immediate shortcomings of the house before we return to the matter of breaking your legs,’ said Cutter. ‘Don’t we boys?’

‘I know a couple of builders,’ said Gnasher. ‘And Lead Pipe has green fingers. Ain’t that right?’

Lead Pipe cracked knuckles the size of walnuts. ‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘You should see his allotment,’ said Cutter. ‘He has compost heaps you wouldn’t believe.’

I thought of the rumours of what exactly happened to people who crossed the Deplorables and I decided that I actually did believe in those heaps.

‘About my legs,’ I said but Cutter wasn’t listening.

‘And there’s the roof,’ he said, and the others nodded.

‘About my legs,’ I said louder and then wished I hadn’t, because the trio were jerked out of their dreams of home improvement and focused on yours truly in a somewhat disconcerting manner.

‘What about them?’ asked Cutter, taking a step towards me.

‘I thought we might reach a more mutually beneficial arrangement,’ I said.

‘What kind of beneficial arrangement did you have in mind?’ he said.

‘There’s the matter of the way you dress,’ I said.

Cutter pushed his face towards mine.

‘What’s wrong with the way we dress?’ he said. ‘It’s practical.’

‘Stain resistant,’ said Lead Pipe.

‘Yes, but,’ I said, ‘it could be so much more.’

And Wanda laughed again and this time behind the chuckling stream was the crisp snap of fabric shears and the whistling hum of the shuttle as it plays back and forth across the thread.

‘But first,’ said Cutter, waving a blunt finger in my face, ‘we have to sort out the playroom.’

And that was that. I gave up the pharmaceutical trade and opened a boutique instead. Cutter and his boys were my first customers, and while they never stopped being an unsavoury gang of foul-mouthed thugs, at least when they broke legs they were well dressed doing it.

Merton, it turned out, had fled the squat the day we pumped out the water and, being in need of some security, assaulted a police officer so that he could spend a couple of nice peaceful years at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Lilith visited him regularly, and after he got out they ran an animal sanctuary just outside Abergavenny until their deaths, within three months of each other, in 2009. Nigel is still alive and taught cybernetics at Imperial College until his retirement a couple of years ago.

My daughter and I never got around to giving the boutique a name. It was always just ‘the shop’ and given that we never advertised it’s a wonder that we stay in business. We’re always at the cutting edge of fashion. We were out of flares while the Bay City Rollers were still number one and stocking bondage trousers before John Lyndon had dyed his hair. We’ve moved the shop a couple of times and, while we’re hard to find, we’re always close to the river.

So if you want to know what the herd are going to be wearing next spring, and if you can find us and are prepared to pay the price, you too can join the ranks of the stylish, the à la mode, and truly become a dedicated follower of fashion.

END

#rivers of london #ben aaronovitch #false value spoilers #false value #a dedicated follower of fashion #rol spoilers #rol short stories

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wizards-need-not-apply · 6 years ago

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The Namesake: Wizards vs. Sorcerers in 5e

Since it’s introduction in 3rd Edition, the Sorcerer has always had a dogged existence. Back in that edition, when a wizard cast a spell, the knowledge of that spell would disappear from their heads once it was over, which is why Wizards always had their heads in their spellbooks: they had to, in order to keep spells in their heads! This was a system called Vancian Casting. Sorcerers, by contrast, used a new system of magic, called Spontaneous Casting. In this system, the knowledge of a spell would not leave the caster’s mind after expending all of their spell slots. This shook up the world of casting, and a few of the writers for WoTC were not pleased. As such, life for the Sorcerer was rough: they didn’t get nearly as many cool prestige classes, metamagic was harder for them to pull off, and there was more or less little reason to play a Sorcerer.

Two editions came and went, leaving us with the current rendition of the Wizard and Sorcerer classes. Opinions are divided on the current state of Sorcerers, some saying that they’re just as powerful as they were in 4th edition, where they received a significant power boost. Other say that things haven’t really changed since the days of 3rd, with WoTC keeping the class down on purpose. So... what’s new, and what changed?

Leave some, take a lot:

In 5e, Sorcerers got something that they’ve been clamoring for since 3rd edition: exclusive access to metamagic! Metamagic, for the uninitiated, is a way to customize spells on the fly, making them safer for allies, shoot farther, or shoot faster, letting the sorcerer cast multiple spells in one turn! To do this, sorcerers would call upon Sorcery Points, which was a special pool that fueled their metamagic.

However, things were not all sunshine and rainbows for the Sorcerer. In fact, them getting metamagic may arguably be the only good point they got in 5e. You see, when they got metamagic, they also took a lot of the punch out of the metamagic system in general. For one, there are really only two metamagics really worth considering: Quickened Spell and Twinned Spell. Quickened Spell lets you cast multiple spells per turn... in the past. In 5e, there is a hard cap of one spell and one cantrip per turn, so chances are, the most you’ll be doing is hard casting one spell, and then quickened casting a cantrip. Which isn’t bad, but not nearly as abusable as the Quickened Spell of the past. Twinned Spell does exactly what it says on the tin: it lets you double cast a spell. This is really good, not only for offense but for defense as well. Twinning Haste for your melee friends will give you many pats on the back, and it’s pretty much the best trick you can pull off for levels to come. All of the other metamagics are usually too situational, or only come up in fringe cases, leaving a big power gap between the two mentioned earlier for an offensively minded Sorcerer. For more controlling Sorcerers, you’re still going to be picking up Twinned Spell, since it’s just that good.

In addition, Sorcery Points, the thing used to fuel metamagic, is also stretched way too thin. In addition to fueling metamagic, Sorcery Points are also used to grant additional Spell Slots, letting the sorcerer (sort of) cast more spells per day. The problem comes with trying to tie in both at the same time. If you use a bunch of metamagic, you won’t have any extra spell slots later in the day! And if you use a bunch of spell slots, well you don’t get to use cool metamagic! Combined with the fact that Sorcery Points only refresh during long rest up until the level 20 capstone, this leaves the Sorcerer at a Catch-22 compared to other casters. Most other casters only have to worry about Spell Slots every day, while the Sorcerer is left in a dilemma. If you are too liberal in your usage of Sorcery Points, then you’ll run out of gas very quickly compared to other casters. If you’re too frugal with your Sorcery Points, then you’re sort of missing the point of playing a Sorcerer in the first place!

Adding onto this, Sorcerers are also often criticized for not being able to make enough individual decisions throughout their career. They get a measly 15 spells known, and they can’t swap their spells until they level up. They also have a lot of “dead” levels, where they don’t get much besides an extra spell slot, another spell, and maybe an origin feature and a metamagic choice. Yes, Wizards have about as many dead levels, and yes, Warlocks only get 15 spells as well. But the inflexible selection of spells for Sorcerers sets them apart from both of them. Wizards can swap their spells at will every night, letting them flip their role anytime they want. Warlocks get plenty of pact features, invocations, and Mystic Arcanum to pad their levels.

A lopsided battle:

Things are already dire for the Sorcerer, but things get even worse when you compare them to the other full casters, especially Wizards. The Sorcerer spell list is essentially the Wizard spell list, but with a lot of spells taken out. In fact, Sorcerers only get one exclusive spell: the inconsistent, but fun Chaos Bolt, introduced in Xanthar’s Guide to Everything. By comparison, Wizards get 32 exclusive spells, not including spells granted by subclasses. Combined with the fact that Sorcerers are the only full caster (depending on how you define Warlock) that does not get ritual casting, and Sorcerers are by and far the worst utility caster.

The main claim to fame in the past was that Sorcerers could cast more spells per day, in exchange for their lackluster spell list. In 5e, this is technically true, but only under two conditions: 1. The Sorcerer does not use any metamagic and 2. The party does not take a short rest. I already discussed the implications of the first point, but the second point is a curious case. Almost every single class has some sort of short rest feature. For Warlocks and Wizards, they can recover spell slots. Sorcerer’s don’t get this feature at all. They don’t even get any short rest benefits until level 20, where they finally get the ability to recover... 4 Sorcery Points every short rest. This is pathetic, especially compared with a level 18 wizard, who gets to recover a 9th level spell slot or lower for free every short rest. You can’t even recover a spell slot above level two with this feature, and besides that, Sorcerers have an arbitrary limit of restoration at fifth level spells anyway!

Sorcerers are also tied with Bards as the slowest growing full caster class. Both Bards and Sorcerers started with a mere two subclasses, getting three more in the future. Compare that with Wizards, who started with eight subclasses and got two more in the future. At the very least, Sorcerers tend to get more Unearthed Arcana content compared to Bards and Warlocks, and they did get a throwaway origin in the Plane Shift: Kaladesh article. On the subject of subclasses...

Kick in the teeth: Lore Master Wizards

Most content found in Unearthed Arcana has a good chance of making it to the full release of a published book. Such was the case for the Divine Soul Sorcerer, which is a sort of Cleric Sorcerer based around healing people. The Lore Master Wizard is also a subclass found in Unearthed Arcana, but it has a zero percent chance of making it to a book. I dare say that the Lore Master Wizard is the most universally hated UA subclass ever published by WoTC. It showed how little they cared for the Sorcerer, and how much they loved the Wizard (surprise surprise that a company that has “Wizard” in their name would be biased towards Wizards).

So, how bad was this subclass to nab it that dubious title? Well, for starters, the subclass does not mention the word “metamagic” once, instead opting to give the subclass a lot of “pseudo metamagic”. Some of the features are straight up stolen metamagic that uses spell slots instead of Sorcery Points. Because of that distinction, they can sculpt their spells more widely, more powerfully, and more often compared to Sorcerers. On top of that, it’s a straight up overpowered class. At level two, they can change the typing of any spell with a damage type to any other damage type. This would be bad enough, since this feature used to be a metamagic that is surprisingly absent from the Sorcerer class. Add to the fact that one of the damage types you can swap to is Force damage, the best damage type in the game, and the fact that you get to change the saving throw on your spells, at no cost, you get the most front loaded caster subclass to date. Hell, Sorcerers don’t even get metamagic proper until level three, and this subclass out does them in versatility for levels to come!

At level six, Lore Masters get to do a bunch of the aforementioned pseudo metamagic by spending spell slots. Just one level one spell can net you extra force damage (which is the best type of damage), and for another spell slot level, you can do Extended Spell, without having to take Extended Spell, which is a normally fringe metamagic. A third level spell slot lets you increase the DC of a spell saving throw. At level ten, you get the biggest slap in the face possible: you can just swap out any prepared spell for any other spell on your list. The biggest downside to a wizard, completely gone! Their capstone ability is just milking it: at level 14, you get to cast a spell from any spell list. Yeah, ANY SPELL FROM ANY SPELL LIST. Nevermind that wizards have the most bloated spell list of any full caster, they get to steal the Ranger’s spells too!

People, especially fans of the Sorcerer were outraged. In just one subclass with six features, they managed to out do an entire class proper, and they managed to be a great deal better than many of the Wizard’s own subclasses! People flooded their social media accounts to complain, and they never looked back until they made the School of Invention Wizard, a sort of “Lore Master v2″. That subclass is an arguably better Wild Magic Sorcerer, but it has the distinction of taking the “erudite, wizened master of magic” that the Lore Master was, and turned it into a “bumbling madman.” It even goes so far as to mock the old Lore Masters, saying that “wizards of other traditions often think of them as lunatics.”

Not all doom and gloom

Despite all of the weaknesses of a Sorcerer, they still garner plenty of fans. Hell, they managed to charm me, which is saying something, since I’m usually down for taking the most optimal choice when possible. Sure, they’re the worst full caster, but it’s not by a horribly large margin like in older editions. In fact, the power gaps in 5e are mostly small in comparison. Sorcerers make for a distinct, fresh take on full casting, that feels much more defined than the pyrrhic Wizards. They’re also much more fun to roleplay as than the stick in the mud that keeps their nose in a book all day. Given the choice between the two, I’ll take Sorcerer any day of the week.

#dnd 5e #sorcerers #wizards #rpg advice #class comparison

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aubonne · 6 years ago

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Wand makers backstory

So I did a previous post with wand maker logo designs ( https://aubonne.tumblr.com/image/174239147390) and while drawing them I began to think about their backstories and specificities, so if worldbuilding is your cup of tea, enjoy:

Neatherlands: Gertruida Van der Horst is the leading Wandmaker from the Netherlands since she opened her shop in the 1930's. Her talents in Potions and Metamorphosis allowed her to retain her youthful looks and beautiful allure. She is said to have left a trail of enamored lovers of all genders and social positions everywhere through Europe.

She favors simple woods and refines them with colorful potions. Like most continental European wandmakers she uses dragon and phoenix feather but rarely uses unicorn hair. Her preference goes to Chimaera scales. However she is also known to produce the occasional eccentric wand with cores such as Gorgon lashes or Sphinx testicles.

Germany: Hermann Walter Augustus Tannenträu is the sixth generation of Tannenträu to produce wands. German and Swiss wandmakers are known for being the only European wandmakers to prefer magical stones to magical creature wand cores (the so-called “German school”). It is important to note that it is a practice that is wide-spread in many African and South-American countries.

Tannenträu is an old man, whose piercing eyes are hidden beneath bushy grey brows. He is known for disappearing for several weeks in spring to harvest wood and stones in the old “Harzgebirge” in central Germany. Some say he hasn’t spoken for years but he is known to emit occasional grunts and nods to communicate. Some say he has a hidden sense of humor as he has been known to pair impatient wizards with hard to master wands, arrogant wizard worried about appearances with discrete and simple but efficient wands and shy wizards with long, flamboyant wands.

Sébastien Côté is a French-Canadian wandmaker and one of the rare who is muggle born. His father was working in the wood industry and from him Sébatien Côté inherited a passion for wood-working and a talent for picking durable and high-quality.

He uses wood that is extracted from the trunk and pays special attention to the drying process. He is known to say that having good wood, fairly treated and masterfully worked is two-third of the job being done. His focus on the wood has lead him to use exclusively were-animals hairs ( especially were-stags) which, in his opinion, bound best to the wood.

He is a quiet and kind, middle-aged man. He lives with his family in rural Quebec and comes to his shop in magical Ottawa during the week.

Russia: The Afanasyev family is known as one of the oldest wand-makers clans of the world. While some dispute their claim that they emerged from the fall of Constantinople’s bringing together Russian tradition and Roman excellence their family can surely be traced back to the 16th century. The most recent wandmakers are Alexei Afanasyev who is over 160-year-old and has been mentoring his granddaughter for the last ten years. Ogrufina Afanasyev is a talented young witch who completed her education in the famous Russian wizarding school of Lysaya gora ( лысая гора), the bald-mountain wizarding school.

She made hers the tradition of doing the wood-harvesting on especially powerful times of the year like the summer equinox or full-moon nights. Each wand is also ducked into a special and secret potion which protects it from weathering and to a certain point damage. Located in Saint-Petersburg her family’s shop is hidden under an orthodox church and the sound of singing and prayer can be heard faintly.

Italy: Battisto Ginevra Acerbi, is the wandmaker of aterlier Bentivoglio in Milan (since 1452)

This man of 59 has a loud voice and tends to walk around her shop furiously. He is strict and always coldly polite, almost haughty. You can get a rise out of him by mentioning his rival of atelier Rucellai (which I may do later). The atelier is a large room hidden under a large plaza, in it row upon rows of tidy shelves contain delicately leather-wrapped wands. Every one of them is carefully registered in a magical book that Battisto Acerbi constantly carries with him.

He specializes on wand cores made of magical bird species and his wands are rumored to react especially quickly.

Poland: Zofia Poniatowska is a young and eccentric polish witch. She lives and works in an exquisite castle, gifted to her ancestors by the Polish king Stanislaw at a time where the polish court was especially open to witches and wizards. Her ancestor Apolonia Ustrzyeka was a close friend of the king and performed feats of magic for him. She was also a wandmaker. She gifted her wands to those wizards and witches she took a liking to and transmitted her craft to her children.

As part of that dynasty Zofia Poniatowska is still following the same traditional practices and produces wands of great intricacy but not necessarily ones that are easy to master. As her family has dominated the Polish wand-making market with their difficult but very powerful wands they are probably responsible for the saying that “Polish wands are fickle”, a saying that is probably born of the frustration of those who did not take the time to master her complex wands.

USA (1): The daughter of Antwan Jonkers and Maria Jonkers (senior), Maria Jonkers is one of the most talented American wandmakers. Her family rose to prominence during the early 1920s, at that time many black wizards were turned down by wand makers and their difficulty and in some cases even failure to obtain wands was another stigma they had to bear in wizarding society.

At that time Maria’s grandfather who was born muggleborn ( am.: no-maj) which constituted another criteria of discrimination, displayed a peculiar talent for creating and matching wands. In his youth in rural Pennsylvania he had already felt attached to nature and forests. Later, he turned that interest into his profession and his Wand making shop in Boston became a hub for African-American wizards. He was especially known for having lengthy discussions with his customers to carefully pick the most appropriate wand for them. Since then his son and now his granddaughter has perpetuated that tradition.

USA (2): As an illegitimate daughter of the famous wizarding tycoon Bill Werkins, Susan Harley inherited a generous sum which, still young at the time she meticulously employed to build an impressive collection of magical artifacts. She is known among other for possessing the biggest collection of self-cleaning magical blinding glasses of the world. Her talent and genius were to repurpose powerful but broken or plain useless artifact into wands which retain some of their former characteristics. While it sometimes produces strange wands (her spontaneously combusting wands come to mind), others are especially interesting.

Now well into her 40s, Harley is not the most patient woman and is known to only sell her wands after complaining as she remains a collector by heart and would probably not sell any of her creation if she did not need the money to buy new artifacts.

France: The two brothers Jean and Philemon Prigeant are managing the French wand making house “Au Bonheur des Sorcières” created during the 19th century by their ancestor Simon Prigeant and his friend Marcelle Lagarde. At that time Marcelle Lagarde, a wizarding banker, came up with the ide to sell wands ready-made and not on order as was usual at that time. His friend Prigeant, a wandmaker like his father, first refused, worrying that it would hurt his reputation but was won over by his friend. Their shop was extremely successful and now, ready-to-use wands are the standard in all wizarding communities.

Today the Prigeant brothers produce the majority of wands used by French wizards. The younger son, Jean, makes the wands and manages the shop while the older finds the wood and the cores and writes very successful romance novels.

#harry potter #hogwarts #ollivander #wands #magic #worldbuilding #design #digital art

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