The market was a festival of red banners and big white letters, hanging above stalls, walls, inns, across laneways, fallen in ditches and slightly trampled.  Every broadsheet on every newstand screamed the same headline:

ECONOMIC MIRACLE: FLOOR OF TWELVE CHEERS FOR FINLEY

The crowd was thick, a sea of jostling shoulders, five amblers for every living. Most carried crates and barrels and bundles and sacks many times their size. A muscular one trudged along with ten-foot steel rods bundled on each shoulder, pushing its compatriots out of the ambler-only lane. People – the living ones – walked around them almost subconsciously.

A stall was roasting mushrooms on a bastard grill. A gaggle of kids stared and drooled around the counter. The chef – if he could be called that – brandished a butcher knife at them, to little effect.

A steam engine inched through the crowd, impotently blowing its whistle. Four attendants jogged alongside, each flaunting an iron-tipped whip that they liberally used on amblers and people alike whenever one strayed into the engine’s path.

An ambler with a loaded flatpan set on its head reeled and spilled soybeans all over the street. There was stunned silence, then the immediate crowd raced each other to their knees and began snatching them up by the armfuls, shoving indiscriminately at the living and the dead.

James Cowen observed.  ‘They respond to whipping now. Isn’t it convenient?’

‘Yes Maestro,’ said Sam.

The steam engine edged close and an attendant came at them, raised his whip, saw Lucia, thought better of it and looked decidedly in the opposite direction. He yelled at the kids at the stall instead, whip cracking. They scattered every which way.

A boy with a mop of filthy curls stumbled face-first into Lucia’s shin. He looked up with wide eyes. ‘A giant!’ He squeaked, more awed than terrified. ‘Look, guys! A giant!’

Lucia wore a black cloak with tall stiff collars and tails that touched the knee. People and ambler alike gave her a wide berth, but the kid was almost starry-eyed, and clung to her leg for some stupid reason.

‘I hate children,’ James muttered.

Lucia bent down, picked up the kid by back of his neck like a kitten, and set him aside. Sam saw that he was skinny, too skinny, and instinctively clutched tighter the bag that held the sandwich she had packed for lunch.

A stall was peddling formaldehyde in fragile-looking glass cylinders, and the price was ridiculous. Sam pointed it out, and ten minutes later Lucia was carrying their entire stock in a harness on her back. ‘They stole these and didn’t know what they were worth,’ said James. ‘But we know the alks might be running short, don’t we, with their recent influx of work?’

‘Yes Maestro,’ said Sam.

Despite carrying a mountain of glass on her back, Lucia ignored the amblers’ lane. She led in the front, blindfold on, parting the afternoon crowd with her shadow. There were weird looks, but no one dared get in her way.

‘They used to give way until a few years ago,’ said James wistfully. ‘Couriers used to end up several Floors further from their destination because they had to let the living go first. But you know how people are. They want their deliveries on time. So Finley changed their routines one batch at a time, and now we get pushed around by the dead on our streets. What do you think of that?’

Sam shrugged.

‘An excellent answer.’

The crowd thickened at the heart of the market, where a cluster of passenger lifts stood in a pavilion divided into two halves. Ingel’s Bakery took up the left side. Rows and rows of fresh-baked loaves were on display behind a curved glass window, with dozens of white-garbed amblers working the stone-fired ovens behind them. Hundreds of people were piled up before the display, jostling for a better view. Fingernails scratched at the glass.

A pair of amblers, decked out in fine Finley orange, stood guard at the entrance holding muskets and nailed clubs, their vacant faces clean and shiny. A red banner above the door read:

WE TAKE FINLEYBUCKS!

‘Lucia, take the wares to the House, then join us on the Floor of Three. The cargo lifts are…that way,’ James waved his hands vaguely to the east. ‘Come, apprentice. Let us queue with the plebs.’

James Cowen, the great Maestro, was not much without Lucia – a slim man of middling height, balding, shuffling along in a dark coat with his head down and hands in his pockets. Just like any other man. ‘Look there,’ he pointed away from the delicious display of bread. ‘What do you think of them, my clever and concise apprentice?’

On other side of the pavilion was a Finley’s Emporium. Its modest display was trimmed with nasty orange skirtings. Posed inside were three tuxedoed amblers: a woman playing a grand piano; an old man halfway into taking apart – or putting back together, who can tell – a clock with a tiny screwdriver; and a man with bulging purple-veined arms twisting an iron bar into a knot. A box of such knots sat behind it, demonstrating the longevity of its stamina, Sam supposed.

Lifts came and went, and the queue shuffled along. Sam began to hear the piano, faintly at first, then loud enough to recognize the tune: Isle of Mead, the mandated drinking song of the Floor of Twelve.

It was jaunty and breathlessly fast. The pianist’s fingers flew across the keys in defiance of anatomy, whipping like coiled springs in five distinct directions. Sam was no alchemist, but even she could tell that its fingerbones had been removed.

Down the queue, two men were tapping their whips and following along at the top of their voices. They had bright orange tags and cartoon skeletons on their shirts, depicted here with crosses for eyes and cheerfully blowing on a whistle. Finley supervisors.

James had started humming too, for some stupid reason. Sam scowled at him.

‘What? You don’t like it?’                                                                                   

‘It sounds…wrong,’ said Sam, though that word was woefully inadequate. She looked down at her feet. Watching those elastic, tentacle-like fingers fly in all directions was making her sick.  

‘Wrong? Why? Ah, but let me guess – the music is without soul? But why? It’s played on time, it gets loud and quiet, it knows the verse and the chorus. What’s so wrong with it?’

Sam closed her eyes. The tune assaulted her nerves. ‘It’s bad,’ she managed. There was more to it than that of course, but the words would not come.

‘Bad? It is breathtakingly horrendous! The piano-playing routine was atrociously implemented. The encoder could only have been an amateur. One would think the Finleys would be embarrassed to commercialize such a poor effort, but, well, this is the Floor of Twelve, and no one can tell the difference.’

Sam did not think that was quite right, but there was no point arguing when only two words were expected out of her.

‘Yes Maestro,’ she said.

‘Remember, we do not blame the ambler for a poor routine, just as musicians do not blame their instrument for a poor performance. Those that do are inevitably amateurs and morons.’

‘The ambler is but a puppet.’

‘Precisely, my clever and incredibly concise apprentice. Puppets on strings.’

There was a moment of blissful silence as the Isle of Mead came to an end. Then the lady in front of Sam dropped her purse. Lipstick, the little pad things that touched up the face with powder, a bunch of those thin brushes for the brows…or were they for lashes? Sam watched them scatter to the four winds as the lady scrambled after them in a flowing dress clearly not meant for a Floor as low as Twelve, calling out ‘Husband? Husband!’ like a mantra.

The husband hurried after a lipstick, excusing himself. Being of considerable girth, his considerable backside bumped into James with considerable momentum. James fell. He fell like a man double his age.

Sam caught him by the arm. An adult should have better balance than that, she was sure. Even amblers did. James clutched at her shoulder, and she felt bone through his gloves. He has always been thin, but over the last few months thin has become an understatement.

‘It’s been a long day, and I’m a frail old man.’ James grinned at the flatulence hovering before his nose. ‘Arses above limit should be kept under capes.’

That was loudly said for a frail old man. By the time they squeezed into the lift James was wiping bloody dirt from his forehead. ‘That’s not mine, is it?’ he asked with some alarm. ‘I can’t be bleeding when I meet clients.’

‘I think it’s lipstick,’ Sam said, lying.

Next Chapter: Chattel (4)