Armand D'Alterac
Posts: 37
1/6/2014
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It has been often observed that there are no foxes in the City. Indeed, such is the prevalence of this statement, and the associated assumption that they are all made into candles, that it has become somewhat of a repeated phrase on the lips of small children, used in their rhyming games. ‘Their tails are all aflame’, they cry, ‘their tails are still aflame!’
This statement is erroneous, and furthermore, some parties may even find it insulting.
For there is at least one fox that still walks the streets, the sewers, and the roofs of Fallen London.
It is an ancient creature. Its pelt is pock-marked and torn, what fur is left to it is shabby and in colours mortal eyes are not permitted to observe. A score of lead shot is nestled in its bones, spiteful strikes from keen-eyed rattus faber in the all-too-brief moment before their untimely deaths. Its teeth have grown sharp on glim and black coral and its paws tread more lightly than those of the Labyrinth's tigers at a time of feeding. Its eyes burn more fiercely than any false-candle that bears its name, but its tails, all nine, remain long, whole and unsinged, tipped in a white as blinding as the Judgement.
These are the scraps, the secrets, that I have heard dropped from the lips of rats, of cats, and in one particularly memorable case, a scarred and titanic fungal slug.
A one-eyed tom cat possessed of an irrepressible virility first spat one such secret at me, after my ham-handed attempt to catch it had managed to scare off the particularly captivating, lily-white beauty he had been stalking. To hear a mention of foxes is a rare thing, but to hear of a live specimen in the City! Rarer still.
I scoured the libraries, and found scant references in scientific journals of questionable veracity to tales of a fox-like beast spied by the shores of the Stolen River, digging in the sand for crustaceans. One excitable author noted how it uncovered the most hideous glim-carapaced beasts and fought long and hard with them on the shore. Each time one such unfortunate would attempt to scuttle back to the black abyss of safety that is the Zee, the fox would leap before it and bar the way with nine tails. At the light, the carcinous, calciferous creature would scrabble for purchase, shielding its jagged eye –stalks, while the fox turned and bit savagely into its shell. Once. Twice. A third time. The author describes the shattering of the beast is accompanied by a sound she likened to the screams of a child. The fox would then feast on the fallen glim, choking down every hateful morsel, its hide revulsing as it coughed up blood black as the tarry depths.
I scoured the bookshops; those egalitarian, enigmatic and eclectic establishments of effervescent erudition. I found traveller’s tales and drunken zee-stories, but only passing references to the one beast among the many that walked the Neath that had caught my particular interest. ‘It wore its hide like a cloak’, wrote one honey-mazed individual, describing the vision he had seen. ‘The colours were a spectrum of darkness. Colours the mind forgets, and could not remember, even if it tried’.
Another: ‘I held up a light to the creature, and it fixed its eyes with mine. I saw in those eyes an age unmatched with any I had encountered, save perhaps the Masters and their servants. I sensed a numinous feeling of dread as I drank deep of its gaze, like that which is often tempered by the smoke-lensed spectacles of devils. After what seemed an eternity, it looked, disgusted, at the stub of the candle I bore, and with a flick of its tail, the false-flame was extinguished. By the time my trembling hands had found the matches and re-lit it, the beast was gone.’
Other, less direct sources shed some ‘light’ upon the question of foxes. An account of Scandinavian customs and folklore I snatched from the flames of the North Bank book bonfires spoke of salt-white foxes running far, far in the North, where their fur scratches against the mountains and produces sparks that light up the sky.
Even snatched whispers from gentlemen of the Orient speak of the importance of foxes. The Khans of the Fourth City, according to a Hungarian source, viewed the fox as a beast of ill-omen, and to encounter one at the start or end of a hunt was great calamity. Met at the beginning of the hunt, it was best advised to turn back and head for home, and tarry a night before attempting the hunt again. To let a fox see your eyes as it died was to let it curse you, and a dead fox must be separated into at least four parts, with its tail cut off, placed in its mouth, and then the body parts cast in all directions. This, it is believed, would prevent its rebirth.
Not so, it seems, the beast of which I now write, for one account, hidden in the scribbled journals of a now-exiled former civil servant, read as follows:
‘By chance and luck I cornered the thing, and, taking to heart what I had learned, held tight on one of its tails. The colour burnt my skin as the light shone through, the bones of my hand black and twisted against its purity. I held fast. I reached aside, took a cleaver, and I cut its snarling, gnashing head from its body. One by one I severed the tails, and placed them in its mouth. That I let drift on the Stolen River, and watched as it was carried away North.
That night, I was haunted by its spirit in my dreams. That night, and every night following. Even the repeated application of laudanum did little to relieve me.
Some months later, while walking by the Docks, I thought I saw the flash of those terrible tails, and I felt the ache of the burning on my scarred hand. As I watched, I saw its eyes, and I knew it had returned.’
Why the ritual, spelled out so carefully, had failed in this instance I hardly dare suppose, but fail it did, and the creature returned to London’s shores to feast on crabs once more.
After I had exhausted literary sources, I found I still knew little of the beast’s origins, and so turned to the other avenues open to me. I returned to that most celebrated art of catching cats.
Sharing secrets is often the most efficient way to garner a feline’s fleeting interest, and so it was here. After shedding a few of my own, I managed to extract one particularly interesting morsel from a svelte young stray as it leapt among the shrubs of the Tyrant’s Gardens.
It told me, between mouthfuls of bat, that the fox was older the city, possibly older than the Fourth. I knew from folklore that it must have been at least a century in age to possess its nine tails, or so the stories spoke.
Was it true, then? Was this beast older than London? It certainly seemed possible. To survive where all its other kin have not would speak of a wisdom and cunning borne only from long ages of experience, and the wounds it bore indicated a lengthy stay in the Neath. Older than the Fourth City? That I couldn't answer, but as with anything to do with the former cities that fell, I felt the answer was likely to be hidden in the Forgotten Quarter.
As the winds whispered through that broken and fog-shrouded place, I followed the secret signs of the Dacoity Reclamation Society, (having had previous dealings with these men, former citizens of the Empire’s Raj turned mercenary since the Fall). I was lead to a small cache of relics of the Fourth City; the ubiquitous horse-head amulets, a stinking bottle that had once contained airag, and scraps of their script. Hidden at the bottom, beneath a thick layer of dust was something that caught my eye; another amulet, but in the shape of a fox’s head, and tied to it: a tuft of rusty fur.
My literary research had informed me that the Mongol peoples would craft fox amulets as wards against the beasts and the evil they were rumoured to bring, and I counted my discovery of one such amulet a stroke of good luck.
A bottle of Angel’s Trumpet in hand, I was very soon at the door of an antiquarian acquaintance who specialized in the study of the Fourth City. Sooner still and we were discussing the amulet over a steadily growing pile of wine glasses.
He, too, had heard tales of the fox-beast of my study, and confirmed that at least one account of its sighting in the time of the Fourth City existed. We both pored through his vast library of collected texts as we sought for the specific journal in which he had recorded the text, before its original parchment finally succumbed to the ravages of the Neath’s damp and fog. By the time we had uncovered it, (lying beneath a treatise on the tensile properties of the hair of various species of horse, and its applications in the music industry of the Khanates,) the moon-pearls were announcing ‘dawn’.
What follows is an extract of that text:
“That day, my men and I had intended to hunt the beasts of this great cavern beneath the surface, but, when the horses were saddled and lead to the gates, we were forced to turn back. At the threshold stood a monster, a demon, and in its mouth was the fox-fur that once hung over the gateway to my court. It held it reverently, with compassion, and as it passed through the gate into my home, it looked at each of my huntsmen in turn, cursing them with silent eyes. One hunter, an impetuous youth, ignorant of the old ways, leapt from the back of his horse, and attempted to thrust a spear into the hide of the demon.”
For the sake of my readers' sensibilities, I will not transcribe the original author’s account of what occurred, and will take up his narrative again at a later point of his story:
“The devil lay now in the court, daring any of my men to remove it. Nine tails swept in all directions, marking each footfall of those who walked, carefully, around it. It was sleeping, but both eyes remained open and fixed on me. Beside it lay an overturned bottle of the Khan’s Daughter’s brandy. I had watched, horrified, as it lapped up every last drop, with a sense of purpose I had only seen in the most determined of riders. Finally, by the end of the third lanterns-light, it arose and passed back through my gates. I did not see it again, but ever after I would not allow the presence of fox-fur or fox-bone in my home.”
That the beast had stalked the streets and tents of the khans and the Fourth City was, then, tantamount to fact. However, I still felt that there were answers waiting to be discovered. I bargained with my antiquarian acquaintance to keep the fox-head amulet I had uncovered, much to his sorrow, but to ease his pain I did promise to return from the Tomb Colonies with some more collected texts of the Fourth City.
Indeed, it was to that ‘delightful’ place I now found myself bound. There are few ships that go to the Colonies, but I managed to procure for myself a place on a ship carrying enough silk to cover a sizeable portion of London. All for bandages, the Zee-Captain informed me. I merely nodded without comment. I had been to the Tomb Colonies once or twice before, purely out of academic interest, I add, for I still deny any and all involvement in that incident with the weasel and Her Imperial Majesty’s corsets. I find them to be, paradoxically, both utterly fascinating and staggeringly dull. It is perhaps an oxymoron for a thing to be fascinatingly dull, but there it is. The company can be a little rough, or perhaps frayed, around the edges, and the incidences of an eyeball falling into one’s wine-glass are altogether too frequent to be amusing, but it is still intriguing to see a continuation of the Empire, even in such circumstances. Perhaps being, myself, French, I should not feel pride in such things, but it cannot be helped. A small niche of Britain in the heart of the underworld. More London than London. If any of my readers should have reason to visit, I heartily recommend the little shop by the Mausoleum Quay, the one that humourously calls itself ‘The Bandaged Sole’. The proprietor and chef is of Jewry, and a remarkably inventive fellow. I am told he pioneered the sale of fried fish and potatoes before the Fall, but some indiscretion or other involving the sale of unlicensed Rubbery Lumps has led to his permanent citizenship of the Tomb Colonies. Altogether, the meal is well worth the associated snide glances and hurtful statements that accrue.
But I digress. After docking, I progressed swiftly to the small guesthouse where I had spent my previous stopovers. It is a small bastion of bandage-free solitude in a realm of mummification and dressings. I laid out my plans, I would endeavour to find a Tomb Colonist of age approximately matching what the most eminent scholars guessed to be the Third City’s era in the Neath, and question them on matters of vulpine intrigue.
My opportunity arrived without too much delay. I was gratefully received by a Spaniard, locally known as the Unscathed Conquistador, a gentleman of advanced age but remarkably intact condition. He regaled me with tales of his life on the Surface, of matters of the Spanish Conquests, and the vast treasure-hoards of the peoples of the Americas. While, by his own admission, he was some four or five centuries younger than the best estimates of the age of the Third City, he had arrived in the Neath during the time of the Fourth City, via one of the hidden roads from the Surface. He would not tell me which, only that he discovered it during his travels in the Yucatán. He had spent his time in the Fourth City researching its predecessor, having both a personal interest and knowledge of the culture of that people.
What did he know of foxes? I asked the question and showed him the amulet. His expression passed quickly from confusion to comprehension. He knew of the beast, although he had never witnessed it himself. Indeed, his theory ran that it was not vulpes vulpes, or the red fox, that admirably loathsome creature of low cunning that featured in so many fables and tales of folklore. Nor, indeed, was it vulpes corsac, its cousin more familiar to the Mongolian people. He believed that it was probably not a fox at all, at least according to scientifically accepted classification. He held no truck with the modern thinking of esoteric cryptozoology and troglobiometry, and stood firmly on the side of the prelapsarian academics, with their enshrined systems of classification as laid down by Linnaeus. After enduring a stereotypically Latin rant on the soft-headedness of Haeckel and how, in his opinion, the German was in league with the Masters to hinder the further cause of science, I finally managed to steer the conversation back towards foxes.
Ah, he began to opine. Yes. His theory was that the beast of which we had both mutually heard was an example of cerdocyon thous, the ‘crab-eating fox’. It was a dog-like, fox-like creature native to the Americas, he told me, and had, most likely, been taken down to the Neath along with the Third City.
He had no evidence to this hypothesis, of course, except for the creature’s documented habit of feasting on the rare, dying moon-miser that had plummeted from the cavern roof, and on other, lesser crustaceans. Clearly, he added, it was close enough to a fox that it grew its extra tails. Further information was not immediately forthcoming. I thanked him and departed.
When back in London, I mused over what I had now learnt. The beast may have its origins in the Third City, and was present in the Fourth. How had it come by its extreme longevity? Was that merely an extension of what we, all of us, witness here in the Neath, of Death’s kindly absence? I thought not. Scarred and marked as it was, there was a certain… vitality about the creature, at least from what I could infer in the accounts I had read. Perhaps it was cunning enough to defeat the Boatman in the traditional game of chess, or perhaps it was possessed of immortality.
I had run out of places to search. My inquiries as to any surviving Third City citizens produced no fruit, save a remarkably dogged Constable trailing me wherever I went in what he thought was a suitable disguise. In my experience of these matters, no matter how much rouge and face-paint one may apply, and no matter how large the approximation of a bust, or how tight the corset, the addition of a bristling moustache to the picture rather gives the game away.
I returned to daily life, recording what I knew, for now, in a small journal that I kept in other personal treasures. To its clasp I tied the fox-head amulet, a touch I thought fitting.
My research did not, as it happens, end there. While lunching one day in Spite, a consumptive-looking madman loped past the eatery where I was dining, screaming such appalling secrets that they rent the ear and caused not insubstantial bleeding to some present. He spoke of candles and wells, the usual sort of nonsense that also tends to spew forth from the similarly-mad Northbound Parliamentarian after a long debate.
One of his statements did not seem like the others, however, and I duly inscribed it on the edge of a napkin before settling my bill and departing. He spoke of a cat, and how it ‘ruled the roofs of five stolen cities’. The thought raced through my mind, had I found a Third City citizen with whom I could commune? Cats are capricious creatures, (although, on that note, I would not consider goats particularly feline), so I did not build my hopes, but after receiving a few pointers from urchins (at no small cost) as to its current location, I made my way there, journal in hand.
Now, dear reader, please do not assume that I was, before this meeting, entirely ignorant of the ‘Starveling Cat’ and its reputation. I, too, have felt the sting of a larder ravaged by this creature, who in passing also saw fit to nap on my Lenguals. They still have not forgiven me for my reticence to remove the beast from their forms, and have, more than once, taken their revenge through a particularly loud cough at an inopportune moment. (Of course, on the advice of my legal counsel, I hasten to point out that I wasn’t there at the time, and furthermore, have no idea what happened to the good lady of the house’s moon-pearls, or indeed her most fine vintage of Morelways. Personally I blame the butler).
I approached carefully. On the edge of a well, in the centre of a deserted, cobbled courtyard, the wretched animal sat, preening itself in that haughty manner that only cats can achieve. In my hand, I held a ham. Not the fungal imitation peddled on street-corners by grubby-faced costermongers with grubbier carts. A real ham. Of real boar.
It was gone, in a flash. Only my quick reactions saved my fingers from being taken with it.
The Starveling Cat looked at me expectantly and impatiently. I sensed it beginning to eye me up for a second helping. Quickly, I blurted out my question. Did it know foxes in the Third City?
The slit of its pupils narrowed further. It licked its lips, contemplating the question. Finally, it answered.
It knew foxes, it said. It had eaten foxes, too. Foxes had Eaten.
Had it seen a fox with nine tales?
I waited.
Once, the cat said, just once, before London, a vial of Mr Apples’ had been in the city. There was a fight. It had been taken, and taken again. Knife and candle was fought over it. Then it had broken, and no one had been there to lap up the spill.
Except a fox.
What else it said, I cannot remember, but I found myself in my lodgings next to several empty boxes of fungal crackers and the remains of three yeast-loaves, and hours had passed.
What then of the fox? If the cat is to be believed, (and by all sane reasoning, it should never be listened to, let alone believed), the beast drank of the Hesperidian in the time of the Third City, and has survived until now. It is cunning, and has had many centuries to learn the art of concealment.
Are there no foxes in the city?
My dear reader, I would argue there is, at least, one.
edited by Armand D'Alterac on 1/7/2014
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Excerpts from a Frenchman's journal
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