Nocturne
Ask anyone from the Federation what winter means, and ten times out of ten you will hear of cold and snow. Ask someone from the Empire, and the answer comes out a little differently.
The long night.
Darkness in the Empire lies thick. Candles themselves are no easy thing to come by, let alone mana lamps, and so an imperial winter is nothing more than a season of gloom, stitched through with slushy rain and dark. The Federation is another matter. Mana lamps crowd not only every room but the whole length of every street, embroidering the city in light. Stars that had risen out of the ground drove the darkness from the night, and a night without darkness could no longer serve as the signal that the day's work was done. Winter in the Federation meant only this: the hours for tipping a glass and trading talk had grown longer.
The tavern street of western Fraussen. It lay well clear of Kram and of Fraussen's grand boulevard alike, and far from the road I took to the telegraph office, so I had been there only a handful of times. Tonight was the first I had ever seen that street after dark.
"......There are far too many people."
The street seethed with boisterous life. You would have been hard pressed to find a tavern with its lamps put out. It was only somewhere around nine in the evening, and still the crowds were far too thick—all the more so to me, long accustomed to the dim nights of the Empire.
"Puhahaha!"
"Come on, a toast—a toast!"
A few of them were even knocking their glasses together at tables set out of doors, in weather like this. Fine snow drifted through the dark. I had a scarf wound over my own outlandish getup, and yet they were laughing uproariously without the least sign of feeling the cold.
The strength of the liquor, perhaps.
"Hm."
Never having put a drink to my lips, I found it difficult to sympathize. Perhaps tonight I would learn the taste of it. I had kept my distance from alcohol for no better reason than that I disliked luxuries.
And speaking of luxuries, one thing came to mind. I brushed my fingers, carefully, over the object tucked into the inner pocket of my coat. Director Lovelace's gift: a pipe of dark crimson wood, elegantly curved. I had even been told it was worth bringing along, and yet I, who had never so much as sipped a drink, could not imagine setting a pipe between my teeth.
What had the director meant by giving me this?
I let the thought go there. I had been walking, and before I knew it I had arrived.
"So this is the place."
Bar Prelude. The address on the invitation had brought me to a small bar set into the corner of a building. The sign was so retiring it was impossible to tell whether they meant to draw customers at all, and the interior, though antique, had been dressed with a modesty that bordered on plain. They had brought it on themselves, you might say. The patrons within looked to number barely a quarter of those in the shops nearby.
The suspicion I had folded away rose again.
"This is supposed to be the Nocturne Club......?"
I hated to say it, but no matter how I looked, the place was a long way from a salon where men of learning gathered. Werner was nowhere to be seen, and the customers were hardly inclined to talk eagerly among themselves. Above all, there was the matter of dress. I had come in full obedience to that grotesque code, mismatched shoes and all; every other patron was dressed perfectly normally.
Thinking the address might be wrong, I checked the invitation a second time. Wasted effort.
Werner. Was it my own fault, taking at face value an invitation that wretch had dashed off without a thought?
I clenched my fist hard.
"......If he got the address wrong, I'm not letting him off."
Having already come to the bar's very door, I had no other choice. I had taken the letter I had kept so carefully and tucked it against my chest; at the very least, I meant to see Werner's face before I left. Half suspicion and half nerves, I opened the door of Bar Prelude.
The hinge gave a long creak, and a bell chimed brightly. In the same instant my eyes met those of a waitress whose expression was difficult to read.
"Welcome. How many in your party?"
"I—I'm alone."
The interior was laid out in an L, and not especially large. The tables and the bartender occupied what you might call the long stroke of that L, and for some reason the waitress showed no intention of leading me that way. More precisely, she stood where she was and began to look me over from head to foot with those deep blue eyes: hat on my head, no necktie, and beneath the coat a shirt left unbuttoned. An absurd figure, in short.
I was standing there, able neither to advance nor to retreat, when her gaze fell at last upon the mismatched shoes, one black and one brown. The waitress bent at the waist and greeted me again.
"Welcome."
A moment later she opened a door in a corner of the shop, set where neither the patrons nor anyone passing the window would ever have noticed it.
"If you would follow me. This way......"
"Ah. Yes."
At a glance the door looked fit only to open onto a privy or a storeroom. What lay beyond it was nothing of the kind: a tidy corridor. I stepped through, doing my best to keep the surprise from my face, and the waitress slowly shut the door behind me.
I walked on alone. Dim mana lamps lit a passage that wound and bent, and the ornaments along it put me in mind of the night sky. Looking them over, I realized that voices were coming from somewhere—though the bar outside had been perfectly quiet. And so I came to the end of the corridor.
"No. I know perfectly well you've studied rhetoric. Why must you invent your expressions however you please?"
"My prose is perfect. I have no intention of changing a single sentence. Not a single word."
"I could go mad. Wittgenstein! Come over here a moment."
"......You again. Joyce?"
I saw them.
A room that looked six or seven times the size of the bar outside, and within it a dozen or more people talking with bright, restless energy. Among them, arms folded, wearing that smile peculiar to him, stood Werner. If anything set the company apart, it was this: every last one of them was wearing mismatched shoes.
I watched Werner coming toward me. The last I had seen of him was a month or two ago, wasn't it? That same brazen face, scarcely changed at all, was waiting there. I was the one who spoke first.
"It's been a while."
"It has. I told you to come sometime in January. Didn't think you'd leave it to the end of the month."
Werner grinned.
"Well, no matter! Welcome to the Nocturne Club."
"......What is this place supposed to be? A hidden room inside a bar. Orders to keep some ridiculous dress code."
"Ha ha ha. Everyone here said the same thing at first. Introductions first."
"Introductions?"
When I asked, Werner only grinned and offered no real answer. Instead he beckoned me after him and made for a table set in one corner of the room. There, with a stack of paper piled into a tower before him, a severe-looking man in his middle years was scratching away with a pencil. I stole a glance at the sheet on top.
Only then, and only just, did I realize it was a musical staff.
A composer!
"Maestro Mahler."
"Werner. You, bringing someone along. Wonders never cease."
"Ha ha. These things happen."
"And the friend beside you?"
When the older man asked, Werner flicked a look my way. My turn, then.
"My name is Eugene Oslo."
"Oh ho. So you're the one they call the joint first. Welcome to the Nocturne Club."
He looked a good twenty years younger than Benjamin, and yet the seasoned authority that came off him was anything but ordinary. After we had traded greetings, Werner grinned at me—I must have looked thoroughly dazed.
"Not used to affairs like this, are you?"
"......Honestly, no."
"Then you can get used to them now. Come on. We're not finished."
And so the introductions went on. Next was a painter, brush in hand, sunk in anguish; from the look of him, about the same age as the composer of a moment before.
"Maestro Klimt. I hope you're well."
There was no reply.
"Lost in his work, I see. Right—next!"
In a gathering of a dozen or so there was no one elderly and no one middle-aged. The only men you could even call of a certain age were those two, which meant the remaining ten-odd were all young men around my own years. Unlike the older pair, who had not been much attached to talk, the youths looked starved for a fresh opponent. They were so fervent I doubted they would have cared if the newcomer's hair had been rainbow-colored rather than gray.
"This fellow is Eugene Oslo. Joint top scorer on this year's Federal Magic University entrance examination."
Their eyes changed on the spot.
"Top of the Federal Magic University?! Sit, sit—right here!"
"A fine one has walked in. Oh, and Werner—a madman like you doesn't get treated as top of the class, so don't get ideas."
The instant they heard top scorer, they all but smacked their lips and set about hauling me into the debate. Then they introduced themselves: young poets and novelists, engineers and philosophers, and even students currently enrolled at the Magic University. The rumors, it seemed, had been true. The Nocturne Club was precisely what it had been said to be—a place where young people from every quarter gathered to argue in earnest, and in good faith.
"Speaking of which. What's the subject?"
I found myself curious what they had been arguing about, and asked.
"We were discussing the interpretation of my manuscript."
"Oh, shut up, Joyce. Not a soul can make sense of your novel."
"As it happens, we'd just carried the question over into magic. Whether Boltzmann's statistical interpretation of Type 2 Magic holds. You'll join us, won't you?"
My eyes went wide.
"Now that is a tempting subject."
"Heh heh. A theorist to the marrow, just as I said. Eugene. Take a glass."
Werner sat me down on the sofa, poured wine into a crude glass, and held it out. I took a small mouthful of the purple liquid.
"......It's bitter."
"Course it is. It's cheap wine."
Thin on the tongue, and bitter, and the sharp little burn that followed was no improvement. The drink was not to my taste. The pleasure of a late night, though, and the heat of argument in a hidden room—those suited me well enough. And so I went so far as to take out a book of magic, and with those ridiculously dressed young men I walked a while through the world of the scholarship.
One round of debate drew to a close, and as the air in the room settled, I knew the moment had come to deliver the letter.