A vagabond girl stood in the crisp autumn wind, naked except for the patterned blanket tossed across her shoulders like a wanderer's cloak. Its tasseled edges hung low enough to obscure thighs, buttocks, and the bareness of her chest. She stood with her spine toward the pit of Golben, her shoulders knotted like gnarled wood, her black hair a tangled spiderweb around her cheeks. In the silver palm of her left hand rested the black key used to turn the locks in the doors and corridors that had ushered them back to the surface.
In the right hand, there was a knife, unfamiliar in grip but too familiar in its vision -- it was bent like a talon, curved back, its point splitting the occasional droplet of rain that killed itself across its edge.
Giuseppe's knife held the weight of a thousand lives, she imagined. Inside its steel and the carved arabesque of its wooden handle were husbands lost and dead mothers. Children too, perhaps, whose throats the Black Man deemed it necessary to draw a single line across--
"This is mine," the seamstress said to Cinnabar and Glenn Burnie as the three of them stood on the lip of Golben.
"This is mine, and I am going to keep it."
She walked whether or not they followed, her bare legs striding uneasily through wet grass.
* * * *
Fourteen-thousand four-hundred-and-fifty-five steps carried her to Stonebrook, where the half-naked girl dragged her heels through mud and crusting hroseshit. She found a small tavern where the soup was warm. Because the innkeeper did not think it proper for a girl as young as she was to let bare hints of her breasts -- "I don't care," she'd told him, exhaustion making it difficult, nearly impossible to raise wooden spoon to flaking lips -- a chamber-maid escorted the girl to a dressmaker--
"Do you care to let me measure your hips," the proper fellow said, examining her through a scraped monocle.
"I want to finish my soup," Gloria told him.
"I'd prefer it if you let go of the knife, child."
"I haven't had enough
soup," she said.
The chamber-maid dragged her fingernails through her hair and flapped her palm and fingers at the dressmaker, leading the girl by her makeshift cloak through a number of motions and poses, all meant help the man draw invisible lines between the girl's hips and elbows. His measuring-string helped him cast numbers upon paper, and a few meager coins procured from Gloria's satchel helped him understand that there was indeed no need to put the weary-eyed girl through a gauntlet of measurements and sizings.
She hadn't enough for a tailored dress. Three tarnished shillings and a threepenny piece, enough for a faded gray riding-skirt too heavy for her hips and a fellow's moth-eaten sweater procured from old bins -- "Men and women die," the monocled dressmaker proclaimed, "and leave behind a number of garments perfectly suited to young ladies who haven't a suitable inheritance."
In Stonebrook, Gloria Wynsee ate four-and-a-half bowls of potato stew and said
thank you, please for three mugs of honeyed mead. They told her it was fine, it was remarkable how much she could eat, it is as though you haven't eaten in weeks, child--
Before she slept -- "A room's been made for you," the chamber-maid told her, "paid in the name of one Cinnabar Calomel. Do you know him?" -- Gloria Wynsee hovered over the small room's toilet-basin and threw up whole hunks of meat and a slurry of broth. The half-digested mead burned in her nostrils. She wiped foam from her lips and carefully cradled her stomach, her
stomach, which had once been a great and girthy barrel, but was now a sagging hammock over her waistline, an empty sack distended and misshapen.
"How long has it been since you've eaten," asked the chamber-maid over her shoulder.
"Yesterday," Gloria said. "I ate just yesterday."
"I hate liars," the maid scolded, before grappling for the girl's right hand. "And your finger -- how long has it been since you lost it?"
The seamstress turned her chin, looking upon her pudgy fingers peering out from beneath the sleeve of her wrinkled sweater. A thumb, a forefinger, a middle finger, a smallest finger--
A thumb, a forefinger, a middle finger, a smallest finger.
"Four," she said. "There are four. My fingers are just fine."
When the chamber-maid finally departed, Gloria Wynsee examined the gap between the third and fifth finger where a fourth should be. But all that remained was a black and red stump, a few slivers of flesh, and a single knot of golden fabric tightened around the rough and bloody edge of a digit severed at the knuckle.
Wax. Red wax. A golden tangle of thread to keep it from all pouring out.
She slept in her bed and did not thrash or whimper. She slept a dead man's sleep.
* * * *
With morning she rose; with morning, she waited in front of the inn for the cart she had been told would come. The girl squinted against the moist, fall Sunlight. A cart full of roadstones rocked and bounced through the puddles of a recent rain. The bearded man who snapped the reins and tugged the bits of the brown horses leading the wooden wagon stopped near the inn and said, "Are you Gloria Wynsee," to her, reciting the name from memory.
"I am. I was told to wait here."
"I'm moving stones down toward Myrkentown. Some bloke named Calomel asked might I give you a ride. I won't turn down a few extra coppers for company."
"Cinnabar Calomel is just a story," she said, throwing her satchel amid the stones in the back. The bag's unbuttoned flap lazily slipped open, a wagging canvas tongue. Inside, the Black Man's ever-white clothes had been stuffed with wild abandon into the mouth of the sack, dots of his skin strewn like snow amid the fabric's creases.
She dozed during the rough and rumbling travel toward Myrkentown, but like Rhaena Olwak had taught her, she still performed little ballets of math in her weary brain.
Twenty-four-thousand five-hundred-and-thirty-one.