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name.”
    “Then how do you know he exists?”
    “I don’t,” said Risley. “But you’ve heard the rumors too. I can see that clear enough.”
    Atwood frowned. It was easy to forget how keen-eyed Risley was. “Perhaps,” he allowed.
    “And that’s not the strangest of all,” Risley said.
    “Oh?”
    Risley snatched back his pipe. “You should ask around the university. I’m surprised you haven’t already.” Atwood said nothing, and Risley smirked at his silence. “But then they’re probably not very fond of you, are they?”
    “Not especially,” said Atwood. “But they’ll come around.”
    Risley inhaled the opium deeply. “If you say so,” he said with a deep, satisfied sigh, and collapsed back onto the cushions. Atwood and Walter left the Carrion King to his dreams. He had told them all he could.
    Atwood looked back, forlornly. He could smell the opium all around them and saw a myriad of phantasms dart across the faces of those around him, some convulsing, while others lay in a blissful stupor. He missed it suddenly, with a fierce and dangerous longing, but he forced himself to follow Walter back out into the night.

7
The Wharfs
    The police had been busy. The wharf was swarming with uniformed men walking the perimeter and scribbling notes, while the cameramen unfolded their lumbering cameras. A number of patrolmen and volunteers were out on rafts and dinghies combing the wharves and peering under the boardwalks, a swarm of splattered locusts in blue. It was grim, painstaking work conducted in the shadow of the docks amidst hulls laden with cargo. Sailors lined their decks and peered down from the rigging in morbid fascination. The bodies were already covered in dirty canvas sheets and were being lifted onto stretchers when Atwood arrived. He caught a mangled, bloody glimpse before they were gone. It was like something from his nightmares.
    The smell of opium still clung to Atwood’s skin and clothes cloyingly, and the dreams lingered as well. He had the sudden thought that they had crawled from his skull in the night and taken root, that the dead were somehow his doing. It was a mad thought and he crushed it ruthlessly. This was no time for madness, but he remembered walking beneath a canopy of gnarled and twisted branches, some taller than mountains, with roots as deep as oceans. He could still feel the forest calling him back, feel its sweet lure of freedom and timelessness, murmuring promises of kind dreams and deep sleep. But the forest that rose behind his eyes was not a paradise, but rather some ancient, fiendish orchard, and he had seen at last that the trees had been grown from bodies, and some had faces in place of fruit. For a moment he thought he was there still, hunted and alone. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and forced himself to concentrate.
    A small crowd had gathered on the shore, drawn by the call of misery and the promise of drama. The bodies themselves were of no consequence; they were of interest only for the manner of their deaths. It was grotesque, even in a city barely a generation removed from a frontier town. The crowd murmured to itself restlessly.
    Atwood recognized a number of Hearst’s men, Rehms and Wright among them. They noticed him too, but that was a problem for later. Young’s men were also out in force; but quiet, peculiar Walter had managed to find his way to the front of the pack and was deep in conversation with Sergeant Wry. Atwood joined them, straightening his tie. It was important to nurture his police as well as underworld contacts. Atwood gave Walter an acknowledging smile. He had done well.
    “Sergeant Wry,” Atwood greeted. “A pleasure, as always.”
    Wry narrowed his eyes at him, as if he suspected some trap in the innocuous pleasantries. He was a stolidly suspicious man. Atwood liked him, which only made the sergeant more suspicious. He waved his superior over.
    Inspector Quirke was already on his way, clambering up the boardwalk in his dark