Shades of Grey

Joseph Yewberry

“Good of you to drop around,” said the Red prefect as soon as I had settled on the sofa opposite him.

He seemed chirpy and friendly, despite our recent enmity—it was probably because he was confident I’d not live long enough to take his job. The front room of his house was what I called “untidy chic.” Prefects weren’t subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect’s room.

“Comfortable?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can’t have that. I need you as sharp as a tack. Here, sit on this piece of metal. How’s that? Still comfortable?”

“Not in the least.”

“Good. Since you’ll be off at dawn tomorrow, I wanted to brief you fully over the trip to High Saffron.

I’d be joining you myself, but the burden of leadership precludes one from doing one’s duty. Since no one else volunteered, you’ll be going on your own. Have a look at this.”

He laid a hand-drawn map on the coffee table.

“This is us here—and that’s your destination. So you have to go from here”—he pointed to East Carmine—“and travel all the way to—”

“High Saffron?”

“You’ve done it before?”

“I understand the theory about traveling—that it involves moving between two points, usually different ones.”

“But not always,” said Yewberry, eager not to give me the intellectual upper hand.

“True,” I conceded.

“Excellent. This map is an amalgam of every trip that was aborted in the High Saffron direction, mixed with a few guesses and some unsubstantiated rumor. As you can see, the Perpetulite only goes partway.

It spalled at Bleak Point, and after that it’s about sixteen miles, all on foot, all trackless. Mr. Fandango will take you to the Bleak Point and drop you there. The track of the abandoned roadway can be clearly seen, and it was worked on up until thirty years ago—you may find some abandoned Leapback on the way and a Faraday or two. In fact, it’s all plain sailing until you get to . . . here.”

He pointed to a spot on the map about five miles beyond Bleak Point, where there was a picture of a flak tower. I leaned forward and studied the map carefully. Beyond this, the detail was worryingly vague. Of High Saffron itself, there was only its position on an estuary. But also marked on the map were Riffraff, man-eating megafauna, an impenetrable grove of yateveos and the Apocryphal bird with the long neck that wasn’t an ostrich. I pointed this out.

“Mapmakers can get carried away,” he admitted. “The sorry truth is that once past Bleak Point, it’s all pretty much guesswork.”

“May I take the map?”

“I’d rather you didn’t. I wouldn’t want anyone to find his way back here.”

I knew he meant nomadic Riffraff, but I said, “Like who? Swans?”

“That’s not funny, Russett. Any more of that kind of disrespectful backchat and you could find yourself—” He stopped, wondering what he could do to make my life any worse. He couldn’t, so instead opened a wooden box and showed me a compass.

“Can I take that with me?”

“Absolutely not!” said Yewberry. “I just thought I’d show it to you—the only one in the village. Beautiful, isn’t it? I like this leather bit here especially.”

“Very nice. So . . . what can I expect to find in High Saffron?”

“We’re not really sure. A detailed study of the Council minutes suggests that the founders of East Carmine first attempted to mine it about three hundred years ago. They described it as about forty square miles in size, with evidence of a bypass, a harbor, a railway station, several thousand domestic dwellings, municipal buildings, something loosely described as ‘defensive structures’ and two temples of commerce.

But to be honest, that might describe any one of hundreds of pre-Epiphanic towns, and they saw it only two centuries after the Something That Happened. So aside from the odd cementless building and anything made of Perpetulite, there won’t be much left.”

“And what do you want me to actually do?”

“You’re to sketch, observe and describe. Take any pieces of scrap color that you can find for appraisal back here, and keep an eye out for a route that the Ford might take. But most of all, we really want to know if it’s safe. No swans or Riffraff, that sort of thing—and what happened to the others, of course.”

“How do I report back if it’s not safe, sir?”

“Hmm,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I think you’ve got me there. Returning would help, I suppose.”

He thought for a moment, then showed me his daylight calculations. “You’ve got a little over sixteen hours of daylight tomorrow, but I can’t give you any accurate journey timings as the precise terrain and distances are unknown. You’ll need to time yourself from Bleak Point to the flak tower, and from there to High Saffron. No matter what happens, make sure you leave enough time to get back to Fandango an hour before sundown—that’s when he’ll leave.”

“Marvelous,” I said, somewhat rattled. A four-hour walk beyond Jade-under-Lime’s Outer Markers was the farthest I’d ever gone from the safety of civilization. Even in the long days of high summer, a two-hour margin for safety was the minimum during an extended toshing trip—although tough nuts had been known to make it back with only twenty minutes of light left. Mind you, I always suspected that they’d engineered it that way. That they might have got back hours ago and then waited around the corner, for the hero effect.

“Now,” said Yewberry, “we want you to complete this mission, but not to throw your life away unnecessarily.”

“I’m with you on that one, sir.”

“Good man. Is that sofa still uncomfortable?”

“Almost excruciating, sir.”

“Excellent. Watch out for eruptives on the summit section, keep a wary eye out for megafauna, clutching brambles and yateveos—and don’t keep any metal that is unusually warm to the touch. Oh, yes,” he added, “if you you find any toy Dinky cars, bring them back for my collection. I’ll give you an extra ten merits for each one you find. Any questions?” “Yes,” I said. “What do I get in my packed lunch?” “Whatever you decide to put in it, I suppose.”