The Phenomenals: A Tangle of Traitors Read Online Free PDF

and laid on the counter rings, necklaces, some silver
spoons, five silk handkerchiefs and the crystal glass. Wenceslas hummed and hawed and eventually handed over a fistful of coins. They were not like any Vincent had seen before. Wenceslas answered
his question before he asked it. ‘Sequins, sequarts and sequenturies,’ he said. ‘The currency of Degringolade. Take ’em or leave ’em.’
    Vincent took them and as he added them to his own purse he remembered Suma’s present. He showed it to Wenceslas, who didn’t seem at all surprised. ‘A Mangledore.’
    Sounds like some sort of vegetable, thought Vincent. ‘Suma Dartson just gave it to me for no reason.’
    Wenceslas raised a bushy brow. ‘Suma never gives nanyone nanything for no reason. Take my advice: keep it.’ He sniffed it before handing it back. ‘Quite fresh too.’
    ‘Fresh? You mean it’s real?’ Vincent dropped it quickly into the bag.
    ‘Oh yes, the severed hand of a hanged man. A lighted Mangledore strikes the sleeping with the afflictions of the dead – they can’t see, hear or move as long it stays alight.
And it can only be quenched in cow’s milk drawn that day. The holder is immune.’ He looked at Vincent slyly. ‘Very useful if you’re in the business of thieving, at
night.’
    ‘I think it’s time I went,’ said Vincent.
    ‘Here, I got something for you too, a sort of welcome to the city.’ Wenceslas held out his hand, upon which rested a small polished metal acorn.
    ‘Let me guess,’ said Vincent. ‘For luck?’
    ‘See?’ said Wenceslas with a grin. ‘I knew you knew wot’s wot!

C HAPTER 6
     
T HE D ARK H EART
    ‘My word,’ breathed Folly. ‘I had almost forgotten. It really is a different world down here.’
    She was standing at the top of a steep slope; behind her was the salt marsh, and stretching before her into the darkness was the treacherous Tar Pit of Degringolade. It resembled a vast dark
lake, but it was no serene watery surface she gazed upon, far from it. This was a lake of tar: sticky, noxious, black tar, oozing up from deep below the earth. The tar never set, merely thickened
and thinned with the passing seasons, and its depth was unknown. In winter it was at its most dense, on account of the cold, and its heaving surface was like a rash of plague boils, each pustule
swelling into a fat bubble that strained to its limit before exploding and releasing toxic gases. Mothers warned their children to stay away on pain of death. They knew that once in the tar’s
agglutinant hold, the chances of escape were virtually nil.
    Folly adjusted her gas mask, tightening the straps, but even with the mask filtering the miasma, the acrid air stung her nostrils and caught in the back of her throat. She descended the worn
trail and stood on the narrow shore. All about, blackened tapering pillars of salt rose from the ground, like a charred forest, and the shore was strewn with animal skeletons, innocent victims of
the gas or the tar. But there were also the bones of the guilty, for this dark slick was the last resting place of scores of convicted criminals, hanged by the neck and then thrown unceremoniously
into the pit. The churning tar disgorged its grisly contents on a regular basis, the fleshless remains of those who met their end by the noose carried ashore by the undulations of the viscous
soup.
    Poor devils, thought Folly, and curled her lip in revulsion. She thought of the body on the gallows. Whether criminals deserved their fate or not – for justice was not an exact science
– there was no satisfaction to be had from the sight of their exposed and blackened remains. This place truly was the dark heart of Degringolade.
    Folly listened to another noise, not the sucking and popping tar but a low hum and a rhythmical swooshing. She looked across the seething surface towards the far shore, the origin of the noise,
and saw a number of large grey pipes rising like metal tentacles from the tar. They