“So why did you have Chant killed?”
Here Dowd was more cautious in his account. If he said too little, Godolphin would suspect him of concealment. Too much, and the larger picture might become apparent. The longer his employer stayed in ignorance of the scale of the stakes, the better. He proffered two explanations, both ready and waiting.
“For one thing, the man was more unreliable than I’d thought. Drunk and maudlin half the time. And I think he knew more than was good for either you or your brother. He might have ended up finding out about your travels.”
“Instead it’s the Society that’s suspicious.”
“It’s unfortunate the way these things turn out.”
“Unfortunate, my arse. A total balls-up is what it is.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I know you are, Dowdy,” Oscar said. “The point is, where do we find a scapegoat?”
“Your brother?”
“Perhaps,” Godolphin replied, cannily concealing the degree to which this suggestion found favor.
“When should I tell them you’ve come back?” Dowd asked.
“When I’ve made up a lie I can believe in,” came the reply.
Back in the house in Regent’s Park Road, Oscar took some time to study the newspaper reports of Chant’s death before retiring to his treasure house on the third floor with both his new artifacts and a good deal to think about. A sizable part of him wanted to exit this Dominion once and for all. Take himself off to Yzordderrex and set up business with Peccable; marry Hoi-Polloi despite her crossed eyes; have a litter of kids and retire to the Hills of the Conscious Cloud, in the Third, and raise parrots. But he knew he’d yearn for England sooner or later, and a yearning man could be cruel. He’d end up beating his wife, bullying his kids, and eating the parrots. So, given that he’d always have to keep a foot in England, if only during the cricket season, and given that as long as he kept a presence here he would be answerable to the Society, he had to face them.
He locked the door of his treasure room, sat down amid his collection, and waited for inspiration. The shelves around him, which were built to the ceiling, were bowed beneath the weight of his trove. Here were items gathered from the edge of the Second Dominion to the limits of the Fourth. He had only to pick one of them up to be transported back to the time and place of its acquisition. The statue of the Etook Ha’chiit, he’d bartered for in a little town called Slew, which was now, regrettably, a blasted spot, its citizens the victims of a purge visited upon them for the crime of a song, written in the dialect of their community, suggesting that the Autarch of Yzordderrex lacked testicles.
Another of his treasures, the seventh volume of Gaud Maybellome’s Encyclopedia of Heavenly Signs, originally written in the language of Third Dominion academics but widely translated for the delectation of the proletariat, he’d bought from a woman in the city of Jassick, who’d approached him in a gaming room, where he was attempting to explain cricket to a group of the locals, and said she recognized him from stories her husband (who was in the Autarch’s army in Yzordderrex) had told.
“You’re the English male,” she’d said, which didn’t seem worth denying.
Then she’d shown him the book: a very rare volume indeed. He’d never ceased to find fascination within its pages, for it was Maybellome’s intention to make an encyclopedia listing all the flora, fauna, languages, sciences, ideas, moral perspectives—in short, anything that occurred to her—that had found their way from the Fifth Dominion, the Place of the Succulent Rock, through to the other worlds. It was a herculean task, and she’d died just as she was beginning the nineteenth volume, with no end in sight, but even the one book in Godolphin’s possession was enough to guarantee that he would search for the others until his dying day. It was a bizarre, almost surreal volume. Even if only half the entries were true, or nearly true, Earth had influenced just about every aspect of the worlds from which it was divided. Fauna, for instance. There were countless animals listed in the volume-which MaybeUome claimed to be invaders from the other world. Some clearly were: the zebra, the crocodile, the dog. Others were a mixture of genetic strands, part terrestrial, part not. But many of these species (pictured in the book like fugitives from a medieval bestiary) were so outlandish he doubted their very existence. Here, for instance, were hand-sized wolves with the wings of canaries. Here was an elephant that lived in an enormous conch. Here was a literate worm that wrote omens with its thread-fine half-mile body. Wonderment upon wonderment. Godolphin only had to pick up the encyclopedia and he was ready to put on his boots and set off for the Dominions again.