Fantasy fiction; Hell -- Fiction; Magic -- Fiction
The light was bright and cheerful as always, but he felt chilly all the
same. Discovering where he was had destroyed all of his amusement in
the town's crazy construction, and taken the warmth out of his bones.
He eyed the passers-by uneasily, wondering as each one approached
him whether he was seeing a prisoner like himself, a soul in eternal
torment, or an emissary of the Fallen whose real form was ambiguous.
* * * * *
For the rest of the morning he roamed the streets in search of a
likely-looking figure, but finally he had to admit that his wanderings
were fruitless. He sat down on a doorstep to think it out.
His Atavars were the "symbols of his error"; they were night-prowlers,
obviously, because he had been one himself, gun in hand. The error
itself was something to do with Jeremy Wright and Evelyn--not the
impending murder, because it had not been committed, but some other
error. The man in the top hat had been chosen, perhaps, because he had
conceived of Wright as a cavalier, a suave homebreaker, or something
of the sort; dinner clothes made a pointed symbol of such a notion. Of
what else, specifically, had he suspected Jeremy? Tom-catting!
He groaned and dropped his head in his hands, remembering the cat he
had seen in conjunction with his first sight of the man in dinner
clothes. How was he to find one ragged alley-cat in a town where there
were doubtless hundreds? Cats did not wear period costumes. He couldn't
go around touching cats until something happened!
He heard a sniffing sound and a thin mournful whine at his side. He
looked down.
"Go 'way," he said. "I want a cat, not a mongrel pooch."
The puppy, recoiling at the unfriendly tone, dropped its tail and
began to sidle away from him, and gloomily he watched it go. Brown
dog?--Brown cat?--Brown dog! An inspiration!
"Here, Fleet," he essayed. The puppy burst into a frenzy of
tail-wagging and came back, with that peculiar angled trot only dogs
out of all the four-footed beasts seem to affect. Hugh patted its head,
and it whined and licked his hand.
"There, there," he said. "You're lost, I know. So am I. If your name is
Fleet, we'll both be home shortly. It darn well better be Fleet."
Hugh considered the animal speculatively. It certainly seemed to
respond to the name; but then, it was only a puppy, and might just as
easily respond to any friendly noise. Grimly he sat and waited. In
about an hour the dog began to get restless, and Hugh carted it across
the street to a shop and bought it some meat, leaving in payment a
letter from a colleague which the shopkeeper seemed to think was full
of cantrips, charms of some kind. Then he resumed his vigil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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