The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 12.3

As far as Key could tell, Seffa had neither surname nor a home address. At least, none that she had chosen to reveal, through either word or deed. His powers of observation were strangely limited when it came to assessing other people, but even to Key she seemed oddly out of place. She had a strange affect: quiet, almost preternaturally still. Key would often forget she was there until her small voice would pipe up out of the shadows nearby, usually to make a perceptive comment about something she was reading or he was studying.

It became a habit. Each day, in the middle of the afternoon, when Key had been ensconced in his studies for a good hour, she would appear in his makeshift lab as if by magic. Aside from the fact that she entered by the western tunnel he had no idea where she came from. Just as he had not asked where she was from or what her last name was, Key had not asked what led her into the Undercity each day. Was she a wayward schoolchild, escaping the drudgery of going home after class, like him? Did she even attend school? Such questions occasionally broke the surface of his deep mind, causing no small amount of perturbation. But Key was nothing if not tenacious, and his desire to put all distractions out of his mind was strong.

Over a month of this strange routine passed by before they had their first proper conversation. Key had gotten comfortable enough around Seffa to endure her constant presence, if only as a vaguely identified node of thinking, talking body heat that liked to flit about his space. Hours often went by where he forgot her existence entirely, only to discover that she'd been talking to him the whole time. Such was the nature of their relationship, and the nature of Seffa, that she took this in stride. It would only be much later that Key began to realize the reason for this, and the surprisingly favorable impression his self-absorption made upon her.

It was raining hard on the surface, far above Key and Seffa's shared hideout, which they could tell from the outflow draining into the sewer mains en route to the lab. Key had just finished a difficult dissection, in this case of a large amphibious arachnid he'd caught on a day trip to the shores of the Inner Sea. He and Seffa had reached a mostly unspoken agreement about his experiments, wherein she remained silent about most of them if he agreed to euthanize them humanely. She also seemed generally less likely to complain if he kept to creatures she found personally frightening; the water spider had produced only a shudder and no comment. Vivisection was off the table entirely, literally and figuratively, after their first encounter. She took the matter quite seriously, and Key found that despite the setback to his own experimental progress he was disinclined to argue with her about it.

Had he spent any time analyzing the nature of this disinclination he might have come to certain conclusions far earlier than he did, but such is life, and such is adolescence, and such was the nature of Key, who analyzed himself least of all.

He was cleaning his instruments with alcohol—the cheap moonshine brewed in the Warrens, available at most potheks, even in Kammerend, for its purity and numerous uses, proved most effective for this task—when she jumped up from her seat on the warm elbow of a massive steam pipe and made a hooting noise. It shocked him so badly that he dropped the scalpel he'd been disinfecting and, for the moment, forgot all about it.

"What?" he called, the desperation apparent in his voice. A number of paranoid hypotheticals had sprung to mind as the likely cause of this outburst, none of which bore any relation to logic. His father hand found them, had come in with a gang of factory workers to smash his equipment and drag him out by his ear. His tutors had sent a spy who'd infiltrated them, and had alerted Seffa to his presence. One of his prize specimens had gotten out its cage and skittered to freedom, never to be found again.

"Yoo-hoo!" called Seffa again, raising a small fist in the air and doing a little jig on the pipe. Her cheap hide shoes tapped an echoing beat into the sonorous pipe that only set off Key's anxiety. "He did it!"

"Who did what?" he asked, scowling when he realized that nothing at all had happened—that she was referring to the dingy pulp she'd been reading from the comfort of her heated perch. Some girlish frippery, no doubt, full of fainting maidens and noble, boring princelings of impeccable breeding.

"Black Hunter, of course!" she said. Key paused. This caught his attention.

"Well of course he did," he said. "He's Black Hunter. He always does it."

"Oh, Key—do you love Black Hunter? Tell me you love him like I do!"

Key, feeling for some reason rather defensive, allowed that he did indeed harbor a fondness for the legendary vigilante, and found himself creeping around his workbench and toward Seffa.

"Is that last month's?"

"No, silly! This month's, just out today!"

And in that moment whatever structures held his normally restrained, strictly controlled psyche at bay collapsed like a house of cards.

"What day is it?"

"Thirdday," she said, smiling.

"Damn it, I'd forgotten." As obsessed as he was with natural philosophy, not a week went by that Key failed to buy a copy of Strange Fiction from the pothek on the corner of Eb Way and Kammerend Boulevard, on his way home from school. Unlike the other Kammerender families, his father saw no reason his son shouldn't walk to and from school, as he had. Just because Valkin had improved the family's fortunes did not mean that he had forgotten what it was like to live lean, or so he put it. Which had been embarrassing, at first—the jeers from passing carriages cracked even Key's stony façade—until he realized that it gave him a degree of freedom the others might be jealous of, had they given it any thought.

The long walks home from the University district, where his academy was located, proved a fecund source of a moiety of illicit pleasures. Most potheks were unscrupulous about their clientele, and would happily sell tobacco and liquor to a twelve year old boy as anyone else. Had Key been interested in such things, that is. What did interest him, however, was the ability to veer off course into the sewers and catch specimens, or to explore the ruins of the Prosekhal, searching for caches of phirotic equipment (which he never found), or patronizing certain specialized potheks that dealt in the type of tools a young anatomist might require, but lack the credentials to acquire over the counter.

But perhaps the most important discovery of these travels was the pulp rack at Benteel's Drugs & Sundry. It was Strange Fiction that drew him first and kept him longest, that treasure trove of weird tales and fantastic adventures that included, among many others, the Exploits of Black Hunter, Oridos's legendary vigilante.

It was in the dim light of a hastilylit lantern that they read together, he for the first time and she, just asdelightedly, looking up from time to time to watch his reaction as the storyunfolded, for the second. And throughwhat gaps there were in the tightly wound interstices of Keynish Helg, a lightwas kindled that would never go out.    

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