say
wonder
or
miracle
or
unveiling;
or
show
if they wanted to appear tough-minded, cool, indifferent. To see such a thing was either very lucky or very unlucky. You carved to mark the event, and to remind everyone whose work the city really was.
The one under his finger was Atenu, the Laborer. The one over the street was Yemaya, Sphinx-Mother. If he’d had a knife, he’d have carved wings into the soft wet wood under his hand. They’d be etched all over the city by morning, he thought.
No god had visited them in the corridors of the House. Even Tiber, the Fire, in whose name the House was run, had kept Its distance. Maybe that was for the best: there was no one to blame for the House but the men who’d made it. Too painful to think otherwise.
He found the Sphinx’s mark after poking around for a few minutes. It was behind a straggly plant that had not been there before. He sat by it and looked across the street into the window of the Mercantile’s office until the young man at the desk came to stand in the doorway and watch him suspiciously, and Jack recoiled into an alley.
He slept that night on hard earth, curled around a scraggly tree in an empty lot: the cold nearly broke him.
H e dreamt of the Barbotin House. It was a shadowy dream.
What little light there was in Barbotin came from a narrow central shaft open to the sky. There was only one door out, on the ground, and one only passed through it once as a child. On the floors above, he had worked the silk in half-light, winding and twisting the thread, serving the machines. Encased in windowless iron walls, the nights were lightless and savage. In summer, the House was an oven, and in winter, it froze.
Who would build something like that? Jack knew the story; parts of it the Masters taught, and parts were rumor. The building was once a warehouse operated by the Ergamot Mercantile, a formerly powerful concern that was bankrupted by its last president’s paranoia; the structure on Plessy Street was a minor manifestation of that illness.
To spite his creditors, as the Mercantile sank, its ruinous president gifted the building to the Church of Tiber. When the Church tore itself, victorious, from the resulting mire of litigation, it had no idea what to do with the monstrosity it had won. The structure sat idle for some years, before Father Barbotin conceived a vision: that huge safe-box, inescapable and impregnable, was surely made by the city’s gods to be a
school.
Father Barbotin’s first plan was that the building could keep the flower of the Church’s own youth locked away from the city’s temptations, held to their studies, but his colleagues were unwilling to see their own sons locked under iron in the grime of Barbary Ward. So he was forced to propose—Jack pictured him saying it; he had a very vivid image of the long-dead Father, its clarity sharpened by hate—that the place be used as a workhouse, to trap and tame the masterless youth of the docks. And that way, it could pay for itself: those boys could be put to character-building, productive,
marketable
work. Properly adjusted, the plan caught on quickly. Tiber was a power of justice, of punishing and purifying flame; it was natural for its church to branch out into the workhouse business.
Barbotin’s bust stood on the center of every floor, in the narrow well of light. It turned an enigmatic smile on the House’s occupants, neither cruel nor sympathetic. Did he hate them for the shabby corruption of his dream—what he had hoped would be a retreat for the city’s finest young men, turned into little more than another workhouse for its scum?
They
certainly hated
him
.
The House never entirely lost Barbotin’s commitment to education. The boys worked the machines all day, but in the evenings, they were herded randomly into dark rooms for their lessons. The Masters were no great scholars—only the most pathetic of the Church’s men would consent to grind out their days
wonder
or
miracle
or
unveiling;
or
show
if they wanted to appear tough-minded, cool, indifferent. To see such a thing was either very lucky or very unlucky. You carved to mark the event, and to remind everyone whose work the city really was.
The one under his finger was Atenu, the Laborer. The one over the street was Yemaya, Sphinx-Mother. If he’d had a knife, he’d have carved wings into the soft wet wood under his hand. They’d be etched all over the city by morning, he thought.
No god had visited them in the corridors of the House. Even Tiber, the Fire, in whose name the House was run, had kept Its distance. Maybe that was for the best: there was no one to blame for the House but the men who’d made it. Too painful to think otherwise.
He found the Sphinx’s mark after poking around for a few minutes. It was behind a straggly plant that had not been there before. He sat by it and looked across the street into the window of the Mercantile’s office until the young man at the desk came to stand in the doorway and watch him suspiciously, and Jack recoiled into an alley.
He slept that night on hard earth, curled around a scraggly tree in an empty lot: the cold nearly broke him.
H e dreamt of the Barbotin House. It was a shadowy dream.
What little light there was in Barbotin came from a narrow central shaft open to the sky. There was only one door out, on the ground, and one only passed through it once as a child. On the floors above, he had worked the silk in half-light, winding and twisting the thread, serving the machines. Encased in windowless iron walls, the nights were lightless and savage. In summer, the House was an oven, and in winter, it froze.
Who would build something like that? Jack knew the story; parts of it the Masters taught, and parts were rumor. The building was once a warehouse operated by the Ergamot Mercantile, a formerly powerful concern that was bankrupted by its last president’s paranoia; the structure on Plessy Street was a minor manifestation of that illness.
To spite his creditors, as the Mercantile sank, its ruinous president gifted the building to the Church of Tiber. When the Church tore itself, victorious, from the resulting mire of litigation, it had no idea what to do with the monstrosity it had won. The structure sat idle for some years, before Father Barbotin conceived a vision: that huge safe-box, inescapable and impregnable, was surely made by the city’s gods to be a
school.
Father Barbotin’s first plan was that the building could keep the flower of the Church’s own youth locked away from the city’s temptations, held to their studies, but his colleagues were unwilling to see their own sons locked under iron in the grime of Barbary Ward. So he was forced to propose—Jack pictured him saying it; he had a very vivid image of the long-dead Father, its clarity sharpened by hate—that the place be used as a workhouse, to trap and tame the masterless youth of the docks. And that way, it could pay for itself: those boys could be put to character-building, productive,
marketable
work. Properly adjusted, the plan caught on quickly. Tiber was a power of justice, of punishing and purifying flame; it was natural for its church to branch out into the workhouse business.
Barbotin’s bust stood on the center of every floor, in the narrow well of light. It turned an enigmatic smile on the House’s occupants, neither cruel nor sympathetic. Did he hate them for the shabby corruption of his dream—what he had hoped would be a retreat for the city’s finest young men, turned into little more than another workhouse for its scum?
They
certainly hated
him
.
The House never entirely lost Barbotin’s commitment to education. The boys worked the machines all day, but in the evenings, they were herded randomly into dark rooms for their lessons. The Masters were no great scholars—only the most pathetic of the Church’s men would consent to grind out their days
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