#apprently he did some things for the pens so i wanna know if he’s done anything for us yet or if he will cause they should let him

[nylwnder]

i just learned zar has a graphic design degree and now we’re besties

[writersstareoutwindows]

Scene: The subterranean city of Fallen London. Our Narrator appears to take us on a guided tour.

Welcome, delicious friend.

-

Sometimes they talk about her, on very late nights at the Singing Mandrake, when drink flows strong and the river’s low tide coughs up awful smells—when no one pays much mind to who has got the drink flowing.

‘I hear she was a watchmaker back on the surface.’ A man points knowingly with the neck of his bottle. ‘Some folk’ve seen her talking with those clever little rat things, copying their designs or some such. Knows her gears, y’know.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says a woman scornfully from across the room. ‘Everyone knows she worked in a gambling hall. Haven’t you heard her asking about that silly mythical card game?’

Her companion nods. ‘She dealt cards. I’ve seen her do tricks with a deck.’

Someone interrupts with avid interest. ‘Oh, no! I think she must have been a journalist. She doesn’t spend all that time chasing mysteries on the constables’ behalf, that’s for certain! They don’t trust her, and isn’t it just like authority to distrust honest journalism? I do hope she publishes her findings soon.’

The bartender, who usually acts as referee in such debates, can’t help putting forth their own theory. ‘She told me she moved in above a bookshop because the smell reminds her of the surface. She was probably a bookseller, or a librarian.’

‘A librarian?’ Someone who’s drunk a drop too much cackles. ‘You ever known a librarian who brawls with zailors and falls asleep in the gutter? Mark me, she did the same work up there that she does down here—finding things and folks as don’t wanna be found. And it’s damn sure not for the constables, that much’s true.’

‘And how do you know what she does down here?’ the scornful woman demands. ‘She seems to delight in the confusion!’

Someone in the corner is overlooked. She’s counting her pennies while she listens—that much liquor doesn’t come cheap, even at the Mandrake—and, quietly, she’s laughing.

They are all at least half-right. Kate McKnight was many things before she came to the Neath. She’s a little disappointed that no one mentioned her time apprenticing in a morgue, but then, those on whom she practices those skills are usually too far gone to gossip. Kate prefers it that way. The scornful woman is right; she delights in confusion. Uncertainty is anonymity, and it’s much easier to get things done when you can appear before anyone as anything.

The truth is that Kate McKnight has always considered herself, above all, a storyteller. On the surface, that had meant to her folktales and ghost stories and old town legends, fairy tales and the latest gothic romance, epics from history, scandals from the evening news. For all the thousand professions through which she’s spun, she always came back to a tavern-hearth at evening, gathering folk round to the sound of her voice. She made her own stories sometimes, but that was never the point to her. Storytelling was creative, but not like that. What she created in that ring of firelight was belief, a world that became true for a brief flash because there were people listening. And Kate felt a duty to that fleeting truth. Even when it made people cry, even when she didn’t like the ending, she had never changed a story.

When Kate told a story, she wasn’t here or there or anywhere. She wasn’t Kate; she was simply a voice, and that disappearance gave her more power than she had in any profession.

She loved them all, of course; she’d had so many only because she wanted to lay her hands on every experience she could. Some stuck to her fingers and stayed there awhile, because they weren’t really so different from storytelling. Journalism was one. Finding things was another. Dealing was one of her favorites.

It was very much like setting up a tale; she held all the elements in her hands, then shuffled them up and passed them out blind, like Fortune at her wheel. As her players danced and reeled around stakes that were already set, Kate ceased to be Kate. She took their bets with no stake in the game herself, yet bound by duty to it. She wasn’t here or there, and she could do nothing to change what happened—no matter how often an unlucky player shouted that she’d rigged the whole thing. How she loved to witness a game unfolding, and oh, the stories she learned to read on their faces.

Kate McKnight could never get enough of anything—except by the tavern-hearth at evening, when her voice brought other voices into life, when faith flickered in the eyes of the crowd and Kate came apart, no more than words, nothing but a mediator, a non-thing, a narrator, when her racing heartbeat stilled and she came close, so close that she thought she could hear it...

And then he came.

In the Neath, being a storyteller means something different. She’s spent plenty of time picking up commissions in Veilgarden like any other two-pence poet, of course. She’s written fifty verses on mycology and turned out a startling number of penny-dreadfuls just to get by. But there have been friends who, after dinner with her, realise that she did not once say a word about herself. She spends a great deal of time gossiping with urchins over currant-buns, yet even they don’t know how to address her. They're happy to shout just ‘bigguns!’ of course, and the most brazen among them call her ‘Katie.’ But for everyone else, it’s a stumble of ‘Miss—er, sir? Er, yes.’

When she goes walking, the brim of her hat shades her face in the pale corpselight, so that no one is ever quite sure they’ve recognised her passing by. Certainly, there are people who know the name Kate McKnight; she’s the person you go to for a handful or secrets, or to solve a problem when you can’t afford someone else. But they could never pick her face out of the crowd beneath Hangman’s Arch. She isn’t a face so much as half a shaded smile, hands tucking a notebook away, coattails disappearing out the door. The only impression she seems to leave upon anyone is that of being unsettlingly known.

He taught her how to do that. He was terribly good at it; even now, even for her, his face is no more than a dull imprint in her mind. It’s his voice that stands out, American, almost a croon. He had this way of speaking that made you think he was the only thing worth listening to. It wasn’t quite lying, but it wasn’t the truth, either. Of course, Kate stopped believing in truth after she met him.

He arrived in the gambling hall one night, a new but unremarkable face, and joined in at her table. He was an eager sort with a poor poker face who lost with great magnanimity. His chips were well down by the final bid when something curious happened. He smiled, and sighed, and then—laid down a resoundingly winning hand.

Somehow, Kate knew, it was not the other gamblers he had been playing. He smiled at her before he left, a cunning thing half-shaded by his pork pie hat.

She never really knew his name. He told her, afterwards, that ‘You can call me Lloyd’, but she’s used that trick of phrase enough times by now. He told her a lot of things, about the city that fell in the year she was born, about dreams and stories, and their curious conflux, and the things that he had seen in the world beneath. Honey that brings you into a dream, a carnival that plays with the edge of Hell, other fallen cities and their fallen gods and all their secrets still buried. The light of the false-stars, and how it dances on long dark miles of underground ocean.

He told her things about himself that probably weren’t true. He told her things about herself that definitely weren’t, though sometimes at night—what passes for night without a sun—when she dreams of the Comtessa again, or when she finds herself holding a bottle of souls, she remembers what he said. No matter what she thought of him in the end, his was still the story that sent her here, the belief he flashed into life that down here, Kate would find what it was she heard in stories.

I am not like him, and yet she is not that different, either.

Kate knows that Lloyd only ever told her one true thing. It was in their first real meeting, once he stopped playing such strange games as lurking in shadows and smirking from corners. He sat down at her table in the cafe quite unannounced, but he had brought two cups of coffee, so she didn’t complain. They talked in somewhat inane circles while she wrote down a story she’d pieced together from local gossip. One of the editors for the newspaper had an interest in such things.

And then he asked, ‘What do you dream of, Kate McKnight?’

Kate stopped writing.

There was nothing remarkable about the question itself. It was that he had known to ask it.

‘A storm,’ she whispered at last. ‘So powerful that it tears every city off the surface of the earth. My mother’s journals, burning.’

She touched her own face, as if it might disappear.

‘Reflections in a mirror that are not me.’

Her hand fell. She set down the pen and looked at him.

‘The burial of the dead.’

Lloyd smiled.

‘Oh, Kate. I’ve been looking for you.’