Garment of Shadows Read Online Free PDF

ring, accompanied by a sharp hallucinatory odour of wet goat. It was not the one missing from my own hand, for it was big enough around to fit my thumb. A man’s signet ring, very old and, judging from its weight and colour, very valuable. I held it to the lamp-light to study the worn design on its flat edge: a bird of some kind, a stork or pelican, standing on wavy lines that indicated water.
    Not a thing one might expect to find in the shop of a brass-worker. But then, neither was it the sort of jewellery one might expect in the pocket of an amnesiac escaped circus performer.
    But a pick-pocket? One who had run afoul of the police?
    Or, did it belong to my missing husband?
    I set the lamp on a clear patch of bench, and emptied my pockets down to the fluff.
    I picked up the embroidered purse, noting that the clasp was still shut—the ring could not have fallen from there. I poured its contents out onto the age-old wood, coins and currency, all relatively new. BANQUE D’ETAT DU MAROC , they said, CINQ FRANCS ; the coins were stamped with EMPIRE CHERIFIEN, I FRANC and 50 CENTIMES . One marked 25 CENTIMES had a hole in its centre.
    So: Morocco.
    I corrected myself: More exactly, this purse had been filled in Morocco. Still, it was evidence enough to be going on.
    And the Arabic numbers, along with the spectacles and the modern rifles the soldiers had carried, suggested the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth—or the thirteenth.
    Absently, I rubbed the currency about on the filthy wood, then crumpled it before returning it to my pocket: unlikely that someone with my current appearance would possess crisp, new bills.
    In addition to the bits and bobs I had appropriated the day before, I found the following:
    In the trouser pockets, grains of coarse yellow sand.
    In the left-hand pocket, a chalky stone the size of a flattened walnut.
    From the right-hand pocket I took a length of twine, snugly bound, and an object wrapped in a handkerchief. I unwound the worn muslin to reveal a length of copper pipe, four inches long and an inch across. The handkerchief was permeated with sand. Beneath the creases I made out the crisp lines of a long-ago ironing, but there were no convenient monograms or laundry marks. I examined the pipe; it contained only air. But when I wrapped it back in the cloth, then laid the bundle across the fingers of my right hand, they closed comfortably around it.
    My left hand remembered all too vividly the sensation of driving a knife through flesh. My right hand, it would seem, provided the support of brute weight.
    So: a pick-pocket accustomed to nasty fighting.
    Had I killed a man to steal his ring?
    I dropped the primitive knuckle-duster into its pocket, then took a closer look at the quartz-like stone. Other than being of sedimentary origin, and vaguely reminding me of building material although it was of a size that more invited the hand to throw, it told me nothing—my store of odd knowledge apparently did not include petrology.
    The stone and everything else went into the pockets they had come from, with the exception of a handful of dried fruit, the decorative knife, the empty purse, the scissors, and the ring. The fruit I ate; the empty purse I tossed onto the brazier coals, pushing it down with a stick; the rusted scissors, which had jabbed me continuously the previous day, I abandoned on a high shelf; the ring I sat and studied.
    The problem was, everything I took from my pockets had seemed possessed of immense mystery and import, as if the stone, the pipe-length, the grains of sand were whispering a message just beneath my ability to hear. When everything meant nothing, it would appear, even meaningless objects became numinous with Meaning. The date pip I spat into my palm positively throbbed with significance.
    It was damned irritating.
    Another donkey went past, a reminder that daylight could not be far away. I had to leave this place, lest I be driven to make use of that pipecosh and the