The Sunken City Trilogy

by Phil Williams

  “How’d you ever convince the FTC you’re not nuts...”

  Lightgate rolled her arms, gun pivoting to point at Letty like it was tied to her by string. “No mystery. I have great ideas, and I know how to work with people.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Letty snarled. “You never could’ve got close to the humans without me –”

  “Yes. Thanks for that. You are useful, Letty.”

  “I’ll give you fucking thanks!” Letty tensed but didn’t move. Lightgate’s lazy-looking eyes were way too ready.

  “Letty. We’ve done good today. Someone’s on your side, for once. I took advantage of opportunities you couldn’t, that’s all.”

  “Opportunities for what?”

  “To make a better world, what else?” Lightgate said. “Breaking down old walls, destroying the Ministry, destroying the FTC. Destroying whatever plagues the Sunken City.” She’d started laughing, taken by her own words. “Change, Letty. We have opportunities for change. Have fun with it!”

  “You’re nuts,” Letty snarled; even without Lightgate’s flippant tone, she would’ve known the fairy cared about none of that. “You were nuts before, you’re only more nuts now, and you used these boys who believed in better, all for what? To stoke violence?”

  “Is that a bad thing? No one wanted to lift a finger against the Ministry or Val. I came up with genius ideas – blame the turnbold on Barton, frame Val for human deaths, all sorts. The best I got was a coward’s note.” Lightgate delved a free hand into her jacket, searching pockets. In a brief flurry of irritation, betraying her instability, she pulled a crumpled piece of paper out and tossed it towards Letty. It came nowhere near. Letty watched it fall as Lightgate railed on, “The FTC are too scared to even talk to me face-to-face! You meet Edwing? He’s the only one I got more than a phone call from, and he’s got all the gumption of a fucking lamp. They’ve been scared forever. They need this.”

  “A catastrophic monster attack? The murder of innocents?”

  “An attack necessary to take back the Dispenser. To prove Val’s been lying. An attack we could blame on the humans, at that – they’re known enemies of the Ministry. Except, uh-oh, Val’s people kill them? Double-trouble for her!”

  “Except they’re gone. And where’s the fucking Dispenser?”

  Lightgate shrugged, “Details.”

  “The Ministry are gonna go apeshit! Val’s gonna hunt you down! Aren’t you –”

  “Looking forward to it?” Lightgate grinned. “You have your love affair with the Sunken City, Letty. My dreams are simpler. And clearly more appealing, considering our respective social circles.”

  Letty stared, aghast. Why did anyone follow Lightgate? Edwing had known better, so who had she convinced to do something as daft as set off those turnbold charges? Would any Fae be mad enough to put the FTC at risk like that? Letty’s eyes scanned down to that scrunched up ball of paper. No, probably not. “You got a secretive note? Anonymous help?”

  Lightgate didn’t reply, amused face not seeming to follow.

  Letty knew it, deep down, already. Lightgate had brought her own brand of crazy into this and the Blue Angel had seized the opportunity. Active, somehow, in the FTC, wielding the same influence Pax suggested it had over the MEE. “We were getting close – getting both sides talking – trying to figure out the truth of this. The Blue Angel’s scared of that, and you’ve just given it a fucking golden platter of chaos to revive the Fae-human rift. You’re insane.”

  “No,” Lightgate said, eyes moving wistfully up, “I am creative. We haven’t fought for our place in this world in ten years, Letty. Don’t you miss the conflict? The excitement of battle? Your human friend might step on some toes, but we can do so much more. We damaged the MEE, how are you not impressed?”

  “Because we didn’t do it! You don’t even know who set off the charges! That note,” she gestured to the paper, “is it written in ink or just scratched into the fucking paper?”

  “What?” Lightgate frowned.

  “This is what it does!” Letty shouted. “The Blue Angel is playing you!”

  “This Blue Angel again,” Lightgate sighed. “Aren’t you tired of that paranoid talk? Whoever was behind those charges, good for them. If they’re playing, I’m game. If the Ministry comes, it’s open season. The FTC can crumble, if they’re not ready – but I’m ready. We’ve sown seeds. You sowed seeds. Let’s reap.”

  “I’m no fucking farmer. You’re talking about setting the world on fire.”

  Lightgate leant in closer, face wicked. “You can’t deny it’s gonna be pretty.”

  Letty screwed her eyes shut. With hope finally creeping in, so came the psychos and warmongers and chaos. “Why don’t you put me out of my fucking misery?”

  “Oh no,” Lightgate said. “You’re a good soldier. You’re going to fight with me.”

  “Why not imagine my answer?”

  “Because I’ve got a gun on you and you’re a survivor. Do we really need to discuss how you’re going to survive?”

  11

  “Are you gonna throw up again?” Casaria asked.

  “Fuck off,” Pax answered, hands on her knees. “How far have we gone?”

  The streets at either end of the alley were busy with pedestrians and fast-moving cars. The mindless bustle of Central, oblivious to the panic a few blocks away.

  “We’re near the river,” Casaria said. “A few streets from Planter Bridge.”

  “And the Underground?” Pax said.

  “On the south bank, sure – but with him? Looking like that?” He nodded to Rufaizu’s hospital gown. Pax hardly looked well herself, after the tussle with the turnbold. Her new trousers had a tear down the right calf and her face felt sticky in places she didn’t dare touch, worried about smearing the blood of mutilated men. It was nothing compared to the carnage of Casaria’s suit, though.

  Pax said, “You’re the one that looks like an adult abortion.”

  Casaria scoffed. “These people can’t see past a suit. They’re locked in their own pointless heads, witness only to their daylight expectations.”

  Pax stared, unsure whether to be alarmed by his contradictory comments or impressed that he understood the same phenomenon that Letty said kept the Fae hidden.

  Another siren wailed as a police car shot past. The pedestrians barely reacted.

  Patting her pockets to check for a phone, it took Pax a moment to recall they’d ditched Rimes’ phone after Chaucer Crescent. She should’ve taken Letty’s advice to get another one. But they could get to a payphone once they were out of the open.

  She gave Rufaizu a look. He pumped his eyebrows playfully, energy redoubling minute by minute. As though he hadn’t just escaped government abduction. Admirable, but perhaps indicative of something wrong with him. She said, “Up for a walk?”

  “My lady,” he said, stepping away from the wall and giving a graceful curtsey. He stumbled on his own feet and had to steady himself. “Yes. Yes I am.”

  “Okay, the bridge is this way? We’ll make like it’s no big deal.” She led by example, moving into the bustle. Casaria dogged her heels. When he met a businesswoman’s eyes, she buried her face in her phone.

  “Where are we going?” Casaria said. “The Underground, then where?”

  “Broadplain,” Pax said. “To get the others out of there, if it’s not already too late.”

  “Broadplain,” Casaria scoffed. “I told you, never trust those insects, now you’ve seen the results.”

  “Result of bad men playing bad games,” Rufaizu disagreed.

  “Shut up or I’ll shut you up,” Casaria replied.

  “That’s what got us here to begin with,” Pax said, stopping at a traffic light. “You and your bloody efforts to keep innocent people quiet.”

  Casaria stopped, slotting into the waiting crowd. One man glanced at Pax’s face and sidestepped around a woman and child to stand further away. Pax smiled at the little girl, who stared back, noncommittal.

>   The lights beeped for them to cross. Rufaizu sprang off the pavement with sudden inspiration. “Barfly! You bust through and showed them who was boss.”

  Pax kept her head low, passing more pedestrians, willing the young man to tone it down.

  “I was the one who went in to get you,” Casaria said. “And it’s me who knows how to face the hell that the Ministry’s going to raise after this.”

  Pax cut through the crowd to a set of steps that intersected riverside office blocks. She said to Casaria, without looking back, “You’re sure they’ve got anything left? Seemed your people just took a blow.”

  “Hardly,” Casaria said. “Mathers? Devon? Those two were dead weight. There’s others that’ll fill the gaps. London will send people. It’ll be weapons-free.” He opened his jacket demonstratively. The pistol he’d retrieved was holstered there. Pax slapped the jacket shut again.

  They came to the edge of the thick, rolling grey slosh of the River Gader, 200 metres wide at this point. Planter Bridge, with its jagged pillars and worn floral moulding, was accessible by a tall set of steps. Trying to refill her lungs, Pax cursed the architects of Central for taking them down to river level before sending them up onto the bridge. After a five-storey flight from a tortoise-hydra, it was enough to keep them all quiet until they reached the crest of the bridge.

  Alongside thinning traffic, Rufaizu skipped to the bridge’s edge to look down into the river, and cooed at the cityscape that flanked it, like he’d never seen such grandeur. Pax gave him a warning look, to tell him they needed to keep moving, but what the hell, it was a chance to recharge.

  She came to the young man’s side and followed his gaze to take in Ordshaw. How long had it been since she’d last seen this view? And during the day? The cityscape was beautiful in its rises and falls, a spectrum of old and new. There was the domed, twin-turreted Hall of Tongues, now home to the mayoral office. The vast gothic peaks of St Margaret’s Cathedral. In the distance, it was possible to see the pointed tip of Grant’s Obelisk, and near that the familiar stepped riverfront facade of Featherback’s Casino. Between those landmarks sat the glass and metal totems of modern business: most notably No. 2 Waterfront, better known as The Spoon, and the Duvcorp building.

  “Lot’s changed,” Rufaizu said, with wonder.

  Pax nodded. It was different enough from when she’d first arrived, and she couldn’t imagine how it must look compared to his childhood memories; he’d left aged nine, and must have seen some things in between. But at least he’d always known what lay beneath it. For her, she was only just discovering Ordshaw’s true layers. Ready to kill them all. She asked him, “Why did you come back?”

  Rufaizu’s face screwed up. “To kill the minotaur.”

  His answer was so simple, so honest. The fool. Pax said, “You know it’s more than just a monster, right? You know about the Blue Angel? You know what your father knew – that word he wrote in the Ripton Chapel? The grugulochs?”

  His face screwed even tighter. “The what?”

  Pax stalled. Not the revelation she’d hoped for.

  A trio of Japanese tourists passed, huddled together with hurried whispers, a wildly conspicuous attempt at subtlety. One of them pointed at Pax and she looked away. A camera clicked behind her.

  “What do you know?” Pax implored of Rufaizu. “What happened between Apothel and the Fae? Between him and the Blue Angel?” Rufaizu’s face clouded in anguish. “What?”

  “Don’t trust the Ministry,” Rufaizu said, reciting it like rote. “Nor the Fae. The Angel, he was our only ally. But don’t trust him.”

  “He – him? You know who it is?”

  “No,” Rufaizu said. “No oh no, don’t know, don’t know.”

  “He’s an imbecile,” Casaria summarised.

  Rufaizu raised a pointing finger, “Am not. I’ve just never seen him. But I know he made trouble. Got Papa angry, made him betray the Fae. Fairy friends.”

  “And what happened?” Pax said. “How’d you find the weapon, the book? Why’d Apothel deface the Ripton Chapel?”

  “He didn’t.” Rufaizu frowned. “Never defaced nothing – Papa loved his work. He sent the Fae gun and the book away to protect them. Once he knew the gun didn’t work – and the Angel told him wait. My father died and...” Rufaizu spat aside as a curse, almost hitting a dog walker. “I wanted nothing to do with that kind of friend.”

  Pax tried to piece the frantic account together. Apothel had known the Fae were coming for him, to get their Dispenser back, and the Blue Angel had persuaded him to face them. He’d made provisions to preserve his work, though he couldn’t have preserved the chapel – but he hadn’t been the one who defaced it –

  “The Blue Angel itself?” Pax said, quietly. “It got in there and destroyed whatever hints Apothel left behind, before anyone could see it. Trying to erase his legacy. So why leave the word grugulochs?”

  “As a warning,” Casaria suggested. “Sign off their work?”

  That didn’t sound right, but what other reason was there? As a reflex, a joke? Another trick? This was getting Pax nowhere.

  A man in a white van shouted “Mentalists!” at them, his laughter punching the sky as he sped off. Casaria snarled, “We ought to keep moving.”

  Pax nodded. “Let’s walk and talk. Rufaizu, how’d you trace what Apothel sent away?”

  Rufaizu smiled, trotting at her side, towards the far side of the bridge and the stairs down. “Hard work. The hardest.”

  Pax watched his expression, listing upwards on the left side like he’d once taken a blow that left permanent damage. “Where’ve you been all this time?”

  “No easy path. Ran just to run, you know, to start. A long way from Ordshaw, making sure those Fae didn’t do for me. I looked for Papa’s people and found a lot else besides. Secrets of the French Alps. Myths of Gardossa, legends of the Antler King.”

  “Gar-what-sa?” Pax said, not liking the broadness of any of that.

  Rufaizu ignored the question. “Uncle Staryn took me in, eventual. Good as a blood uncle. Papa trusted him with the gun, and the book, but he didn’t tell me, not for a long time. Didn’t know Ordshaw and thought I oughta not know it either. I came of age, though, and I learnt what needed knowing. Learnt why Papa couldn’t work the weapon. Had to come back. Had to find Citizen Barton and get the electric weed, to make the gun work. Finish what Papa started.”

  “And it brought you here,” Casaria concluded. “Hobbling across a bridge like an escaped dementia patient. The boy’s an imbecile, he’s led an imbecile’s life –”

  “Watch your mouth!” Rufaizu sprang towards him, then back again, hopping like a boxer. “Got me by surprise before, but I scrap – you’d better believe I scrap!”

  “Alright, put your dicks away,” Pax intervened irritably. “You can punch each other out when I’m through with all this. What did you learn that needed learning?”

  Rufaizu paused to give her a merry look, like all the answers of the universe were obvious. “That last call from the Angel, that was true as blue. Scratched in the wall when Papa wanted to know how to get the gun going. Told him, real simple, wait. Just that. Wait. No other answers – no more help. Not for the first time, I learnt. Everyone out there waiting – ignoring the truth, actively ignoring it. They waited in Gardossa and the city crumbled. What we’ve got in Ordshaw, it’s not the first, might not be the last. The Blue Angel’s moved and been around. He’s old and powerful and didn’t always have a minotaur or glogockles, but he always had something.”

  She felt like that she already understood this, just hadn’t put the thoughts together yet. The thing behind this was more than a person. It had done more than move and manipulate the glo; it had a hand in the monsters themselves. Was it possible the creatures were its creation, somehow produced by it? The minotaur included. “What else did it have, what other things?”

  “Hard to say,” Rufaizu admitted. “History ain’t kind to legend. He had a hand in the demon of Gardossa, I�
��m sure. And the waywards of the Alps, they were not natural – I swear he was there.”

  “Why?” Pax said. “Why do you think the Angel was involved? How do we find it?”

  “Ask me?” Rufaizu said. “It’s to do with his food. Cut off his food, get him angry, get him making mistakes, showing himself. The honourable Theo Murhaimer, in his saga, claimed the light was revealed, like glo reveals a trail. But whatever he attempted, he didn’t succeed. No more than legacy, but it’s enough, right?”

  “Seriously,” Casaria snarled. “Utter gibberish.” He marched ahead to the stairs down, shoving past people coming up. Pax signalled for Rufaizu to follow, quickly. They caught up as Casaria reached the Underground entrance. At the gates, he pulled back his jacket to show a guard his badge and muttered a few words. The guard buzzed him through, and Casaria waited for Rufaizu and Pax to go ahead. His hand lingered a little too long on Pax’s shoulder, guiding her through. Pax was fairly sure he hadn’t had that badge before. Nor a holster. The bulging grenades, of course, she’d seen him pocket. He was ready for war, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  It was another problem she didn’t have the capacity to focus on, as she tried to unravel Rufaizu’s words. She could see he’d collected hints he didn’t fully understand himself, but there were names at least, paths to follow. And her instincts were right; the Blue Angel was a hider. It was possible no one had got close, or lived to talk about it. No one had formed a connection like she had.

  Locked in those thoughts, Pax barely noticed them boarding a train, nor it rattling out of the station. The lights flickered and Rufaizu looked out the window at the passing brickwork, creeping up out of his seat. “We shouldn’t be down here.”

  “It’s only a few stops,” Pax said. She didn’t like it either. The air seemed tighter than usual. Down the aisle, a man in a brown coat sagged against a pole, eyelids heavy. Were they being drained right now? Pax took a breath, trying to feel it, and she could all but sense the creatures lurking beyond the walls, ready to claw at her, chase her.