The Iron Man [Serial]

On the Lammastide

[Author's Note: The first two chapters of this work were written for a SciFriday challenge, and I marked the work completed, however I have since decided to continue the work in adventure serial style.]

It was necessary I keep shop at the dhobitorium until General Perwani's valet came to collect his uniform, and preferably until shops closed for the holiday at noon. I did this with the armed dandy poised to intervene from my back room. When finally, near closing, the general's usual snipper-snapper took the garments, I acted-out the instructions devised in whispers the night before. I closed the shop, took all cash from the till, and went to the back room.

Murphy-- he had given me no better name --waited, dressed reg proper in garments stolen from the laundrodeon racks, a right posh long-tail. He managed to cut a swell figure, though I had argued it was nigh impossible to wear another man's bespoke suit without looking a wardrobe malfunction. That was, after all, the basis of our designs for the General. The smirk my partner-in-crime flashed at me said he understood his advantage.

Ignoring the kapareghora, I followed the instructions I had been silently reciting all morning. I took down a pre-selected ensemble hanging from an overhead steam pipe. I dressed there in the back room, donning the togs of a low-level member of the creative caste. It was a gamble to dress out-of-caste, but necessary, as most members of the manual caste could not afford the services of my dhobitorium, and the mix-and-match allowance gave me the best chance to craft a passable disguise out of garments on hand. I had selected various neutral-toned garments: khaki cloth trousers, a white cotton dress shirt, a dark bedford-cord waistcoat, and a chambray summer jacket. To these I added a madras cloth bow and matching pocket fogle.

I was unable to remove anything of my own that might suggest I had left voluntarily, and though I'd accepted this during the sleepless of hours of the night, I could not say I was at peace with leaving what scant reminders of my family I then possessed. As soon as I tossed my worn garments into the laundrodeon with the rest of the soiled kapare, I quickly made for the dhobitorium's service door.

So it was I began my journey as rebel to the code on the Lammastide, which some southern allies of the Impero Nuovo celebrated as Feast of St. Peter in Chains. In a darkly twisted way, this made the dandy who had disrupted my life my very own angel. Noon bells still rang as Murphy and I made our way from the alley onto the street. I carried nothing with me but the stolen clothes on my back and my Egyptian companion's togs within in muslin garment bag.

Along the street shops closed for the late-summer festival. The holiday involved some traditions from before the Pax, but had been appropriated by the Fashionista. Once a grain festival with sacrifices and effigies of agricultural deities, on which people traveled to bless or exchange yeast and loaves, the day was now a secular celebration of closet-cleaning before the donning of Fall Fashion, and announcement of the Creatrix's designs for the next spring. A day of leavening had become one of leave-taking.

Murphy told me nothing of our escape, but to indicate a need to remain in London until after the late edition Review was printed. While the streets would still be crowded for some hours by those traveling to community swaps of baked goods and summer apparel, we would need to be indoors or on our way to a regulation bonfire of the vanities by the time of the Creatrix's printed announcement in the late edition.

This announcement, I feared, was just what Murphy's people meant to disrupt.