The Businessman

Foursquare is the only place in the Network with four train stations.

Nobody knows exactly why it’s like that. The city grew up around the stations, we know that much. They’re all different, one all girders and glass, one an underground tunnel, one elegant like a sitting room, one bare wooden boards that the rain lashes down on more often than not. Foursquare is very rainy, you know. Rain, and gas lamps, and slithery strange lights—those are the images you should have in your head, when thinking of Foursquare.

The wooden train station is the oldest, we think. People came, and they built what they could from what they had.

What it means, that trains come there from four directions—it means that it’s the place where the Engineers gather. And that’s important.

Nobody actually knows whether the Engineers are in charge of the trains or the trains are in charge of the Engineers. And what’s maybe more curious, nobody ever wonders if the trains are wrong. You hear all sorts of things about wrong things in a village here or there, angels imprisoned and photographers bringing fog and all that, but nobody ever wonders: what about the trains? Nobody actually understands them.

(“They were left by our forebears,” the Gambler pointed out. “There wasn’t any wrong then.)

Perhaps. Perhaps there wasn’t any wrong then. Or perhaps it was always lurking under the skin of the world, before it tore and was destroyed. Perhaps the trains were part of the process that tore the world to shreds. When you come right down to it, we don’t know a lot.

At any rate. I was an owner of several prosperous establishments in Foursquare, considered an up-and-coming politician as well as a shrewd businessman, but more and more, I was haunted by the issue of the trains.

In fairness, I have to say that part of that was how the Guild of Engineers behaves. Nobody charges them full price, for instance. If by chance one of them is charged full price, they “courteously” allow the business manager one chance to rectify the matter—which generally involves an elaborate pantomime of apology, free perks, and promises—and if the performance is deemed insufficient, they blacklist the establishment. And what that often means is that the blacklisted establishment—since few of the locals will go there—is as surely doomed as a person who is thrown off the trains into the Desert.

At any rate, I found that I wanted to know more about both the Engineers and the trains, so I instructed my bartenders and staff to give them all possible courtesy and the most extravagant possible welcome.

(“I’m not sure I understand,” the Preacher said.)

Business sense. I’ve always been blessed with good business sense. And it served me well in this instance. At first, I just had small groups of Engineers enjoying my hospitality, but eventually there were whole tables of them, and finally, a waitress brought me a tale.

Five high ranking Engineers, she said, sat down at one of my tables. This was in the Dianara—you may be familiar with it, madam, for it has been around for quite some time, named after the wife of the original founder. They had enough to drink, probably more than enough. After a while, one of them asked about a package.

“They say it’ll come in to the Southside Station,” one of them said, “when the Thirty-Seven shows back up. And for the trains’ sake, keep your voice down.”

“When?”

“No telling. It’s been years, you know how slow the trains are at this sort of thing, How long has it been since the Thirty-Seven carried passengers? About six years? Seems about right. She’ll be coming in any day now. And when she does, she gets everything, you understand? Absolutely everything. It’s a rough time for a train.”

It was a peculiar conversation, I thought, but also an opportunity. If I could find out about this “package,” I could find out more about the Guild. If the Engineers wanted it back, well, I could bargain with them, secret for secret.

So I sent the waitress away and then began to plan.

I wasn’t in charge of the heist, naturally. I had people for that. That’s part of good business sense: letting your experts do the job. I chose a man with the unlikely moniker of Itcher, and he chose his team—lock-breakers, bone-breakers. I provided them with a place to meet, and a place to plan, and all their tools, and appointments with a Confessor after they were done, if anything went wrong—

Ah, yes. That’s another aspect of living in Foursquare. The Confessors are much like Ghost-catchers, I think, except they suck away the memories that you don’t need to carry, and put them in bottles like ghosts. For a price, of course. There’s always a price. But it’s worth it, because Foursquare has its monsters like any other place. The slithering lights don’t really do any harm—they just skulk around the margins, eating the occasional unwary dog. But the Tatterdemalion will come for you.

There are rules, as there are always rules, for the Tatterdemalion’s attack. You have to have done grievous harm to someone else, and it has to be on your mind. Then you begin to see it—at first, very far away, at the end of the street, just staring at you. You’re in trouble when it starts getting closer. But the Confessors are supposed to be proof against that—if you don’t have a memory, then what you did can’t weigh on your mind, can it?

We waited, and waited, and eventually word came in that the Thirty-Seven had come in to the South Platform and was staying there, on a siding, without moving. So then we knew that whatever the package was, it was ready to be picked up.

I stayed up the whole night that my people were getting the package. Unprofessional of me, perhaps. But this was important for all of Foursquare, perhaps all of the Network. To undo the tyranny of the trains . . .

At length, they brought the package to me. And I was just as mystified as I had been before.

It was, as far as I could see, a box. A box made of the same silvery material as the trains themselves, curved at the corners, without any seams or openings. I couldn’t tell what it did, or what it meant. I tried a great many things to open it—crowbars, hammers, acid—and nothing worked. I called in mechanics and all sorts of experts—insisting, of course, that they make an appointment with a Confessor when they’re done—and none of them helped. It was a complete enigma.

And then Itcher came to me and said, “The Tatterdemalion is after me.”

I was astonished, of course. The heist had gone off without any trouble. I asked him if he had done anything, and offered to pay for his visit to a Confessor—although a Confessor doesn’t always help, you know, if the Tatterdemalion is already locked on. He refused. “I have to leave Foursquare. It’s the only way. I think it’s closing in on my apartment, now. Saw it downstairs in the lobby. I just have to get some things, and I’ll be on my way. The only thing is—I think it has something to do with you. I’ve got a blank spot in my mind from right after you called me in, on the fourth, about, and I’m pretty sure I did something that I needed Confessed.”

I thought about it. The fourth. The fourth was when I first heard of the package, when I first conceived of the plan.

An awful thought came to me. “What if the Engineers can control the Tatterdemalion?”

“What?”

“If they sent it after us for interfering in their business—that’s the only thing we might have done that would be weighing on our minds, because we both go to Confessors like we’re supposed to. And if that’s true, then the trains aren’t safe.”

“The trains are my only chance,” Itcher said. “If I can get away, it’ll have to cross the Desert. And that might be hard even for something like that. At any rate, it goes slow, so if I keep moving, I might keep ahead of it for the rest of my life.”

I couldn’t dissuade him. To be fair, if he was right, he would keep me safe too, by running; there’s only one Tatterdemalion, and it only follows one target at a time. But if he was wrong—

That night, I have to confess, I beat the package with a hammer. It frustrated me so much, that enigmatic thing, which yielded no profit that I could see but was nonetheless precious to the Engineers—I just wanted to know why. I just wanted to understand.

The next day, the news came in: a scarecrow had been found on the stairs to Itcher’s apartment. Some of the cloth was still in the process of transforming from human skin when they found it. Itcher had gone back for whatever “important items” he needed to take with him, and his luck had run out.

If I was right, if the Tatterdemalion was after us on the orders of the Engineers, I had to get out of the city without them knowing. And the only way to do that was through the trains. How to take a train secretly?

My first investment was a traveling case for the package. I was just bringing it home—or watching it be carried home, rather—when I saw it at the end of the street. A scarecrow with clothes made of multicolored patches, face drawn on the crude burlap sack that made up its head, straw poking out a few odd places—standing completely by itself.

As I watched, it took one painfully slow, lurching step forwards.

“We’re going around,” I told the porters. I didn’t bother to tell them why. They couldn’t see it, any more than the rest of the people on the street. People step around the Tatterdemalion without thinking about it, but if you point it out to them, they never perceive it. Of course, if you’re close enough to point it out, you might not live long. It’s slow, but it never stops moving.

I went back to my home—keenly aware that going back to his home had been Itcher’s undoing—and started to make plans. That I had to leave, that was obvious.

The next step was disguise. I streaked my hair, I put on clothes that I wouldn’t be caught dead in—because that was the alternative, being caught dead. Every time I heard the housekeeper move around the place, I felt my nerves twang, because any movement could be the scarecrow, coming for me—and I knew that it gets faster the closer it gets.

At last, I was ready to depart. I dragged my traveling chest to the train and got on, alone, without any guards or help. After all, guards couldn’t even see the Tatterdemalion.

I did have a plan, though, and a point of contact. A colleague in Underledge was just as concerned about the rule of the Engineers as I was. I had exchanged letters with him many times. And so I set out for Underledge, three stops from the north station, going what might as well be called west.

It went off, although I scarcely dared to believe it, smoothly. The Engineers never realized a thing.

I reached Underledge without a hitch, and forced myself to adjust to that looming ceiling of stone over half the city, and found my colleague in a cliff house that overlooked the teeming population below. He was shocked, of course. He hadn’t been expecting me at all, and the circumstances of my arrival were even more shocking still. “They’ve gone too far,” he said—actually, he said that quite a few times. Using something as wrong as the Tatterdemalion—that’s a betrayal of our common humanity, if Engineers still have humanity.

My colleague quickly sent letters to various other people that we know, people who have their suspicions about the Engineers. He also persuaded me to try the effects of extreme heat on the package, but it stayed as silver and unyielding and frustrating as ever.

At last, we agreed to take the accursed thing to Smoke. With all their devices, the engines that run off the hot springs, they have extensive resources for testing and poking and prodding. If they couldn’t crack it—

At the moment, I wasn’t willing to think about what we would do if they couldn’t crack it. I was becoming more and more fixated on the silver cube.

And then, a month after I left Foursquare, a few days from the preparations to leave for Smoke, I heard my bedroom door open, and turned around to scold the housekeeper for not knocking, and saw it. Faded, multicolored scraps of cloth all over, except for the head, a burlap sack with the features drawn on. Leaking straw.

Close. Too close. This close to me, it would be too fast to dodge around, to get to the door, and while nobody is exactly sure how the Tatterdemalion takes people, it’s safe to assume that at a touch, it would be all over for me. The only way out was the window.

The window, as you will remember, of a cliffside mansion.

I didn’t hesitate. I pushed the curtains back and stepped out onto the window ledge—few windows have glass in Underledge, for the huge ledge keeps off what little weather there is besides harsh sunlight. I saw, as I got out there, that the ledge led past the other windows, and around the corner of the house, and presumably from there to the elevator, but also that it was narrow enough for just my feet, and I would have to press myself against the wall at every moment, and I, as you can see, am not a small man.

I would rather die from falling than be taken by the Tatterdemalion. So I set out, shuffling sideways, arms spread against the stucco. The wall was rough under my fingers. I could feel my blood pounding through my veins, and my breath was coming fast. Sidle, sidle, sidle, as fast as I could—

Because the Tatterdemalion was coming out the window.

The Tatterdemalion was adopting much the same posture as I was, flattened against the wall. And it shuffled towards me.

It was a slow chase, and a horrible one, because I could not move faster than the Tatterdemalion without risking the fall. The corner was the worst of it, figuring out how to edge myself around the corner without plummeting. Many times, I thought of pushing my palms against the wall, about hurtling backwards—better that than what the thing had in store for me. And then we were above the slope, and the danger was worse, for if I fell, I would fall on the roof of another house—breaking bones, perhaps, but not dying—and then I would be helpless to escape, forced to lie there shattered as the horrible scarecrow came closer, and closer, and then touched me.

It was coming closer now. Closer, and closer, and closer, and slightly faster with every step, until I finally reached the elevator platform—my colleague’s private elevator car was there, thank everything that lives, and as the thing reached out for me, I lunged into the elevator and turned the crank to shut the door, and it slammed on an outstretched straw hand.

I shuddered, and threw the lever, and the floor lurched as we descended.

And then, just as I drew a shaky breath, the doors started to open—pried open by gloves filled with straw—and I was face to face with the thing, no escape—and a girder hit it as we descended, knocking it free of the elevator and sending it plummeting.

I knew better than to think that the fall would destroy it, but it might slow it down for a while. I rode the elevator down, and fled into the city—mindful of the sad straw pile that seemed to be slowly reassembling itself—and sent a message to my colleague asking for the package.

He sent the package, and supplies for the journey, and guards. I don’t suppose the guards can do anything against the Tatterdemalion, but they will keep the package safe.

The final verdict is, the Tatterdemalion must have traveled by train. I can’t think of any way even something like that could make it across the Desert in a month. And that means that you can’t trust the trains, or the Engineers. It’s very nice and pleasant to tell stories where the trains are there when you need them, ready to whisk you away from whatever wrong thing has happened—but it’s false. The trains are not your friends.

“Maybe the Tatterdemalion is after you for something else,” the Medicine Seller ventured.

“For what? I haven’t done anything that would attract its attention. Itcher never did anything that would attract its attention. It’s being consciously used, by the Engineers.”

“You never said what happened to the waitress,” the Gunslinger noted.

“The waitress?”

“The one who originally told you about the package,” the Preacher realized. “What happened to her?”

“Seems a little careless,” the Gunslinger added. “Letting her talk to just anybody.”

“Does it matter?” the Businessman asked.

“What do you mean, does it matter?” That was the Medicine Seller. “Of course it matters, she’s a human being!”

The Businessman shrugged. “I don’t remember anything bad happening to her.”

“Do you remember going to one of those Confessors?”

“I’ve been to a Confessor several times. You can’t be too careful. But the point is, it doesn’t matter if something did happen to her, because I don’t remember it, and if I don’t remember being involved, the Tatterdemalion is in no position to go after me. Those are the two factors: there has to be grievous harm to another party, and the perpetrator has to think about it. No thought, no memory, no problem.”

“Well, it would be quite a problem to that poor woman!” the Medicine Seller said indignantly.

The Businessman was about to say something when the Ghost-catcher mused, “Grievous harm to another party.”

“Yes, that’s the usual way of putting it. It’s hard to get good facts, of course, but we’ve been dealing with the Tatterdemalion for some time, in Foursquare. It has rules. There’s only one of it. It only pursues one person at a time. And it only hunts people who are aware of their transgression.”

“Not grievous harm to another person,” the Ghost-catcher went on, as if the Businessman hadn’t spoken.

“I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making.”

“Just a thought,” the Ghost-catcher said. “Not sure it’ll come to anything. Let me think about it a bit more.”

“You can if you want,” the Gambler pointed out, “but it’s your turn for a story, you know.”

“I’m not sure you want to hear my stories.”

“The Preacher said that too, and it wasn’t true then either. If you don’t have something to tell, then you can just admit it, but don’t hide behind this, ‘I’m too spooky for you,’ business. We’ve all seen some things.”

There was a brief pause as—the Kid thought—everyone wondered in unison whether the Gambler was about to die.

“Actually,” the Ghost-catcher said. “I do have one story. Bit of an odd one.”

“Go on,” the Medicine Seller said, a little nervously.

And so, after another of those ominous pauses, the Ghost-catcher began.