The Sunken City Trilogy
Page 1
Contents
Under Ordshaw
Part 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Part 2
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Part 3
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Enjoyed reading?
Copyright
Blue Angel
Part 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Part 2
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Epilogue
Enjoyed Reading?
Copyright
The Violent Fae
Part 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Part 2
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Part 3
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Epilogue
Copyright
A Note from the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Also By Phil Williams
Copyright
Under Ordshaw
Part 1
Friday
1
Pax Kuranes peered over her whisky tumbler at a man in a turquoise vinyl trench coat. At 4am on what she still considered to be Thursday night, the bar was dead, and the only other occupant had approached her with a cheeky smile. A smile like Albie’s, when he’d wanted a ride somewhere. This guy had olive skin and long, unwashed hair, but it was the same anxiously innocent smile. He couldn’t be more than nineteen, and Pax doubted humouring him would threaten her life, challenge everything she knew or put the entire city in danger. Besides, she was already bored of reading poker news off her phone.
“Rufaizu.” The young man held out a hand, the other raised defensively. “Not trying to hit on you, nothing like that. Just curious.”
He pointed to his jacket, asking permission to put a hand in a pocket. Pax gave him a slight smile, but folded her arms to conceal her night’s earnings in her coat.
“You’re having a good time.” Rufaizu nodded to the empty glasses on the bar, one hand still up.
“Yeah,” she replied. The £3,237 in her pocket was two months’ security and more. She’d taken the bulk of it from a pastel-vested finance prick who couldn’t believe he’d lost to a girl. That arrogance put Pax on a path to join the World Poker Tour’s first outing in Ordshaw, right when it had looked like she needed to choose between an entry ticket and paying rent. “It’s been a productive night.”
“May I?” Rufaizu indicated his pocket again.
Pax let him wait. Good manners were rare in Ordshaw, let alone in the Sticky Tap Sports Bar. Might as well savour the moment. Her eyes tracked to the muted TV crammed between vodka optics. The BBC World News was looping the same images of a bus crash that’d been rolling all night. Pax looked sideways at Rufaizu. He hadn’t moved. “Go on then.”
He took out a notepad, slowly, as though it might intimidate her. He took out a pen, just as slow.
“What’s your problem?” Pax asked.
“No problem!” he replied brightly. “Lookit, I just gather answers.” He thumbed through a few crumpled pages for her to see. “My father said you never meet a dull person after 3am. So I have three questions for people after 3am. First –”
“Let me,” Pax said, reading a few of the answers upside down. She pulled his hand, and the pad, a little closer, to figure it out for herself.
Petey – payday – all-nighter, shots!
Tyler – been paving roads, beer’s the most refreshing.
Luka – girlfriend left him – vodka is like home.
Pax looked from the pad to Rufaizu, then scanned the bar again. It was a weird hobby for a young man, lurking in places like this. Only the lowest people came here. The sort that didn’t talk to one another, as Pax liked it. She pushed the pad back towards Rufaizu, concluding, “Name, reason they’re out, what they’re drinking. All guys, huh?”
Rufaizu whooped with delight, almost jumping. He slapped a hand into the pad and said, “Damn right! Damn right! You are sharp. I like you.” He quickly backed off, face serious. “Not like that. Nothing creepy. I’ll just ask the questions and go, okay? Not trying to sleep with you.”
“You’re making it creepy,” Pax warned him. She found herself smiling, though. He was worse than Albie. Her little brother was a dork, but he tried to hide it with dignified quietness. This guy’s dorkiness was bubbling out. “Why these questions?”
“Oh, these?” Rufaizu replied, as though surprised at the notepad himself. “I guess they’re a start? To tell us if someone’s . . . you know . . .”
Pax frowned, but he didn’t elaborate.
“Okay. Shall we?” Rufaizu grinned. As quickly as the grin came, it disappeared, as something caught his eye. A suited man stood in the entrance doorway, watching them, coming no further into the bar. With a sharp intake of breath, Rufaizu said, “Lookit, I’ll be on my way. Back to my booth, back to my booth.”
“You’re not gonna ask me my questions?” Pax said, eyeing the newcomer.
Rufaizu lowered his face to hide it. He clicked his pen and spoke rapidly, much quieter. “Um. Sure. Real quick. Can I have your name?”
“Why, you don’t like yours?” Pax joked.
He paused, not following. She used the momentary lull to sip her whisky.
“He bothering you?”
Pax jumped on her stool, the man in the suit suddenly at their shoulders.
“Son of a . . .” Pax uttered. He’d crossed the bar without a sound. The man’s darkly handsome face was lit in the bar’s archaic neon, skin like a Latino singer, not a hair out of place, suit freshly pressed. His white teeth shone like headlights in the dim bar and his smile killed Rufaizu’s cheer.
“No trouble, friend,” Rufaizu said. “Don’t want none. Just shooting the breeze.”
The suit’s eyes stayed fixed on Rufaizu. “He’s bothering me.”
Pax searched for the barman, but he was nowhere to be seen. No one else in the room.
“The lady’s not interested,” the suit said.
“Hey,” Pax said. “The lady can talk for herself.”
The man gave her a wink. “Just trying to help.”
“I don’t need your help.”
Rufaizu chipped in, then. “Yeah, man, she don’t need –”
The suit pounced, pinning Rufaizu’s arm behind his back and slamming his face into the bar. He yanked Rufaizu upright again, the younger man’s nose bloody and his free arm snapping around. Pax stepped back, too late, as the two men collided with her and made her stumble, whisky spilling. Rufaizu made incoherent noises of protest as the suit hauled him across the floor. The suit flashed another smile back to Pax and said, “Enjoy your drink, miss.”
“Leave it out,” Pax replied hotly. “He didn’t do anything.”
Rufaizu tried to break free, but the man tightened his grip, forcing him still. As he marched Rufaizu to the exit, the suit said, “Trust me, he would’ve.”
Rufaizu gave up struggling and started goading. “Tough guy, I’ll set Barton on you, what’re you gonna do? He’s fought the minotaur!”
The door swung shut behind them. Pax stared into their absence.
4am lunacy. An irate office worker taking out his machismo on some mixed-up kid?
“What happened?” The barman’s voice snapped Pax’s attention back to the bar. He had a tray of clean glasses in his hands as he stared at an overturned stool. Rufaizu’s notepad sat on the bar in front of him. Pax grabbed it.
“Fat use you are,” she said. He gave her a bored look, said nothing and turned away.
Pax rolled the notepad in her hand. With the cash in her pocket, the Pax Kuranes Beer, Burger and Liveliness Fund was finally in good health. All she had to do was go home, pay the rent and enjoy the tournament starting Thursday. Revel in the memory of her ace-high flush holding up against an opponent’s trips.
The notepad felt heavy, though. The handwriting was childish and the paper was warped from being repeatedly wet and dried. Painfully similar to Albie’s books of ideas. He wouldn’t visit places like this, would he? It might happen anywhere, though. Some suit pounding on some awkward kid for being different. The boy had raved about a minotaur, for crying out loud. Pax huffed. She’d already put one entitled prick in his place that evening. Why stop now?
She downed the whisky, pocketed the notepad and hurried outside.
The road was still, cracked tarmac dancing in the flicker of the Sticky Tap’s light. An old air conditioning unit squeaked a few doors down. Pax scanned up and down, nothing moving anywhere nearby. She hadn’t heard a car engine. Definitely no sounds of a struggle. They’d been bucking against each other on the way out; surely they couldn’t have moved anywhere fast?
Pax frowned, reimagining the men’s rapid departure. Rewinding to when the suit had struck. The men had bumped into her. Together. She shot a hand to her coat pocket.
Her fingers closed on empty space. The money was gone. £3,237. Gone.
No wait – there was the hard nugget of a £2 coin in there. Mocking her.
£3,235 gone.
The little bastard.
Pax held her breath. If she opened her mouth her whole venomous vocabulary might fly out. No. Keep calm. Be practical. She had lost more money quicker, in stupider ways, and recovered it – it was a bad beat. She could turn it around. Even if the Poker Tour started in six days. Even if the rent was due.
She took out her phone, bringing up a contact, fingers tapping on autopilot.
“Pax,” Bees answered at once. “Heard you cleared up this evening.”
“Yeah. The news might’ve spread faster than I’d have liked.”
“Had some trouble?”
A chain-link fence rattled nearby. A black cat pounced to a higher vantage point to watch her. Pax met its green eyes as she answered. “Something like that. Guy called himself Rufaizu. Nineteen or twenty. Looked European, Roma maybe. Long green-blue coat.”
“Not much to add to that.”
“You know him?” Pax asked.
“Of him. Turned up a few weeks back, held his own in a game or two. Then made off with a chunk of money that wasn’t his. The Row Street Rogues are after him. Out of St Alphege’s.”
She didn’t need to be told where the Rogues came from. Some of the worst people from the worst part of town. They wouldn’t have sent a suit out to collect. And Rufaizu wouldn’t have made a grab for her cash in the middle of a serious confrontation, anyway. They were working together. She’d been robbed, simple as that.
Pax said, “Got a last known location?”
Rufaizu’s apartment poked out the top of a red-brick terrace on the edge of the warehouse district, opposite the grimiest station of the K&S Underground. The windows were painted black, lessening the glare of the station’s brightly lit sign. Pax drew an impression of the youth from the state of his home: the door locked by a piece of string looped over a nail; STAY OUT painted in sloppy red letters; smashed bottles on the floor testifying to the dual triumphs of drinking and hygiene problems. His dirt-encrusted blanket had been shredded, the mattress on the floor ripped apart. The stains and the scent of alcohol, partially masking what Pax feared was a more offensive odour underneath, suggested the place hadn’t lost much charm when the guys from St Alphege’s had turned it over.
Pax took in the peeling wallpaper, the uneven floorboards and the cracked single light bulb. The cafés in Ten Gardens spent a fortune trying to recreate this shabby look, and here this vagrant had stumbled across the real thing. He probably didn’t know it, though; for someone who stole from affluent poker games, Rufaizu was light on luxuries. Pax trod lightly over the floorboards, listening for their creaks. She tugged at the ones that moved, and one came up. There was a crinkled collection of men’s magazines in the hollow underneath. A good, albeit disgusting, sign. Rufaizu had hidden stuff here, and the Row Street Rogues had failed to find it.
Pax ran a hand over the walls, checking the cracks and tears. Her finger bumped over a groove. Stopping to look closer, she found the crack ran up in a strangely straight line. She applied pressure, one side and then the other. Part of the wall flexed, a different material to the rest. She jammed a key in the crack and popped it open. The false front came off, a single panel wedged over a cavity in the lath and plaster, apparently containing Rufaizu’s most prized possessions.
There were two items in the wall space: a thick leather-bound book and a glass tube trimmed with brass, a lever protruding from one side and a stack of interconnected cogs at one end. The contraption was dented and scratched; it looked like a nerd’s desk ornament, but it had been tossed about. A lot. The book was also worn from rough handling. Pax skimmed through it, finding reams of handwritten symbols, with repeated combinations of circles, triangles and lines. The symbols surrounded maniacally etched illustrations and diagrams.
She hummed to herself, closing the tome and reading the title, carved into its cover as though by a knife: Apothel’s Miscellany.
This would do.
It would work out, Pax told herself as she watched the city roll past the bus window. Whether the book’s bizarre contents were the product of crazed mania or passionate creativity, the things hidden in the wall had to be
important to Rufaizu. Albie protected this sort of creative crap with his life; she had to believe the vagrant kid was similar. If he wanted them back, they could do a deal. If not, they’d give a strong clue as to what he did want. Or at least where she could find him.
She rode the night bus with the items carefully stowed in her backpack, calm. Being calm was everything in a crisis. It was just theft. She was handling it. She had a few days yet, until the World Poker Tour. Eight days before rent was due. There was petty cash in the kitchen drawer. A stale loaf of bread on the counter that was probably still edible.
Everything would be fine.
When she came in sight of her apartment building, however, she gagged on the panic she was fighting to keep down. The man in the suit stood waiting, and everything she had assumed about Rufaizu’s simple con, and what it would take to set it right, was shattered.
2
Unreliable people. Say to be somewhere and don’t turn up. Unwanted, unreliable, bastard pigs. Give you an invite you want nothing to do with, then screw you. Dragging up the past for no good goddamned reason.
The angry thoughts shot through Darren Barton like a drill sergeant’s shouts, encouraging one thick punch after another.
He typically coped with life in one of two ways. Strong enough liquor, drunk quick enough, could help him forget. The next best thing was to beat all hell out of something with his bare hands. He had run out of Johnnie Walker before it dulled the pain, so he was throwing punch after punch into the sack that hung in his garage. The bag swung like a pendulum as the supports shuddered. Half drunk and out of shape in a long-term way, Barton found his punches were glancing off the bag, inaccurate, but his full weight and loathing made each strike matter.
The noise of the impacts, the rattle of the chain and the creaking rafter were all blocked out by his heavy breathing and the sound of blood pumping in his ears. He might have woken up the wife, the kid, but it didn’t matter. Their problem.
Another punch. Another animalistic noise to release some of the pressure.
That little scumbag, arranging meetings he couldn’t keep.
At this damn hour.
His father’s son, another stinking shadow you could trust for nothing more than trouble.
Barton took a step back and his foot caught a can of beer on the floor. Taking a sip from the can in his hand, he slowed down to focus. Catching his breath, he saw three empty cans, now. He blinked to check if it was his vision failing him. Definitely three of them. He must have been going for at least half an hour. His vest clung tight to his chest, skin slick with sweat, hot like a radiator.