A great, spherical pond dominated the centre of the courtyard. Aranfal carefully approached it and gazed into the waters. In the depths, he could see flashes of colour.
‘Hope moves in strange ways.’
Aranfal turned his head sharply. There was a little boy at his side, a child with black, curly hair and large, inquisitive eyes.
‘I thought I’d be alone,’ Aranfal said. ‘I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m just getting sick of you people.’
The child frowned. ‘“You people”? What do you mean?’
‘You … things down here. You faces of the Old Place, like that thing with no eyes.’
The boy shook his head. ‘The Old Place is a god of many parts.’ The courtyard darkened for a moment, and a hard expression entered the boy’s eyes.
Aranfal turned back to the pond, while the child continued to speak. ‘Besides, you’re wrong. I’m not a thing of the Old Place. I’m a mortal. Or once I was, anyway. I think I’m just a memory, now. Hmm – so maybe you’re right.’ He grinned and stuck out his hand. ‘Alexander,’ he said.
Aranfal took the boy’s hand. Is this Jaco’s son, the one whose disappearance set this whole thing in motion? He decided not to ask. There are too many questions already.
‘I’m looking for something,’ Aranfal said. ‘The First Memory of the Old Place. I spoke with a … well, a creature without eyes. It told me it might be here. It says the First Memory is the only thing that can stop Ruin from becoming a god, whatever that means.’
Alexander cringed at the word “Ruin”. He looked up at the blue sky. ‘He is almost upon us. I have felt him myself, though I am so weak compared with all the others.’ He nodded. ‘The First Memory might stop him. If it’s here.’ He smiled at Aranfal. ‘What if Ruin already has the First Memory? Don’t you think it would explain so much?’ He laughed. ‘Who knows, though? I suppose you must do what the Eyeless One asks.’
‘It told me the First Memory could be here,’ Aranfal said. ‘It’s my only way out. If I don’t find it, I’m dead, or I’m here forever.’
Alexander burst into tinkling giggles. ‘If you don’t find it, we’re all going to die or be here forever! Though we won’t be dead. If Ruin takes over the Old Place …’ Alexander shuddered. ‘If that creature takes over the Old Place – if he becomes the Old Place – then we will live in memory forever. And they will be the memories he likes. Memories we’d like to hide away.’
He frowned at Aranfal.
‘On that cheery note,’ said the Watcher, ‘I’d better find this memory as soon as I can.’ He glanced at the pond. ‘The Eyeless One said it might be in the Hopeful Chambers.’
‘Hmm! It’s possible!’ The boy spread his arms out wide. ‘Anything is possible, isn’t it? Especially now!’ He grinned. ‘Did the Eyeless One say where exactly it might be?’
Aranfal shook his head. ‘No. Only that I’m supposed to look in the Hopeful Chambers.’
‘Ah!’ Alexander clapped his hands. ‘In that case, you should not be standing here!’ He reached out and placed a hand on Aranfal’s back. ‘You need to dive in!’
He pushed, and the Watcher went under.
This was not water: this was something else entirely.
The colours moved across and through one another, knitting together and falling apart, blues and reds and greens and golds of every hue: a paint pot, turned into an ocean. He found he was suspended within it, watching the colours twist and turn.
He felt something at the top of his head. He reached up and found a kind of cord emerging from his skull. He wondered for a moment if he had suffered some kind of bizarre injury. My brain is falling apart, or whatever’s left of it. But no: he felt no pain. He tugged at the cord, pulled it down before his eyes.
It was a wriggling string of black something, like the other colours that writhed before him. He felt a sense of familiarity. The more he looked, the stronger the sensation grew: this was something that belonged to him. It was something that mattered to him, something that mattered to his past. He saw a face there, in the blackness: his face. It grew, the colour snaking outwards, until it gathered around his head.
He was in the See House.
It was one of the great halls. The people were sitting in groups on the ground, or standing in the corners, whispering to one another. All of them kept far away from the centre of the room, where a naked man was tied to a chair, his face caked in blood. He was unconscious.
Aranfal examined the room, until he found himself as a young man, trembling in the corner. He had no mask, then.
‘What’s this, then?’
He turned around. Alexander was there, grinning at him, totally out of place in this great, dark hall.
‘An interrogation,’ Aranfal replied. He looked back at himself, at that young man. Was this Aranfal, or Aran Fal, or something in between?
You know what’s about to happen, here.
‘I thought this was supposed to be the Hopeful Chambers,’ he said to Alexander. ‘There’s nothing hopeful about this place.’
Alexander shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ He nodded at the younger Aranfal. ‘Perhaps you don’t remember how you felt back then. I can sense hope here.’ He sniffed in a breath, as if tasting the memory, and for a heartbeat he seemed so much older than he appeared. He exhaled and grinned at the real Aranfal. ‘There is hope, here, though one has to search for it.’ He whistled through his teeth. ‘Though – interrogation? Jandell used to interrogate me, on and on, over and over. Yes, interrogation was the word for it. But it was just the two of us. There are so many of you here. What kind of interrogation takes place in a crowd?’
‘A lesson,’ the Watcher replied.
‘Ah!’ Alexander cried. ‘What an interesting school this must have been!’
A man walked to the centre of the room, near the unconscious wretch. Aranfal remembered him well: Derren Rever, a teacher of Watchers, though he was not much older than many of the Apprentices. He was a tall, nervous creature, forever tearing at his robes with fidgety fingers, his black beard quivering.
‘He’s almost dead!’ Derren cried. The Apprentices in the hall glanced at one another. Some of them sniggered. They wouldn’t snigger at the other teachers. They wouldn’t snigger at Brightling. The teacher gestured at the man in the chair. ‘Who did this?’
Two Apprentices were pushed forward by their loving classmates. Aranfal couldn’t remember them, now. He had forgotten all their names when he stopped being Aran Fal.
‘You two,’ Derren said. ‘You’ve made a nice mess of him, that’s for sure. What did you learn?’
The two Apprentices – a man or a woman, or a boy and a girl, more accurately – stood with their hands behind their backs.
‘We need to know so many things,’ Derren said. ‘We need to know …’
Derren droned on, and the real Aranfal turned his attention elsewhere. He couldn’t listen to that man back then, and he couldn’t listen to him in a memory.
He looked to the side of the room. A wall was missing, and in its place was a low platform, lined with chairs. In each of these was a gigantic figure, human in shape but far greater in size. He could not make out their features: they were dark things, moving shadows, huddled beneath hoods. They held little balls of black material in their hands, which they pulled apart and knitted together, over and over. It was the same substance he had seen in that chaotic pond.
‘Who are they?’ he asked Alexander, gesturing to the figures beyond. ‘What are they doing?’
Alexander snatched a quick glance at the shadowy creatures. For once there was no cheer in his voice. ‘The Old Place is full of many strange creatures,’ he whispered. ‘The Operators are its children, but there are other beings here. Shadowthings, I call them. I think it makes things less scary, when you give them a name. No one knows what they are. They’re not like the others down here. They don’t seem to love memories. They drain away the power, until nothing’s left but a husk, and sometimes not even that. They don’t even seem to enjoy it.
’
‘Are they doing that now?’ asked Aranfal, nodding at the Shadowthings. ‘Are they draining my memory?’
Alexander shrugged. ‘Maybe so. How could I know? No one understands the Shadowthings.’
‘Where do they find this power?’
‘It’s everywhere, Aranfal. You just need to look with open eyes.’ The boy nodded back at Derren, back at this memory from long ago. ‘Memories have different kinds of powers. There is hope, here.’ He chuckled. ‘Let’s see what happened with your hope.’
Derren was now frothing with rage.
‘Is there no one here who can suggest what to do?’ he asked. ‘Is there none among you who can think of a way of getting more from this man?’
‘Masks,’ said someone in the crowd. ‘Give us masks and we’ll look inside him.’
Derren snatched out his own mask from somewhere in his gown: the face of a cricket. It seemed incongruous on such a big man. He slotted it onto his face.
‘Masks, masks, masks!’ he cried. ‘You always talk about masks, don’t you? You think the masks just let you open someone up, hmm, like a key in a door, and show you everything inside them? No. It’s the wearer that matters. And if you’re not a proper Watcher without your mask, you won’t be a proper Watcher with your mask.’ He turned his insect face onto the unfortunate in the chair. ‘Besides – they are not all-powerful. You can get a feel for a person, depending on how good you are: the way they work, some of the things they have done. But it’s not like reading a book, my children. It’s not like you can flick through the pages and find what they had for breakfast! And sometimes …’ Here, he paused, and gave the man a hard look. ‘Sometimes they don’t work at all. Sometimes we come up against people who just block us out. The masks are wonderful things – but the mind is stronger.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘Any other ideas?’
A silence hung over the room. No one knew how to respond. But then the prisoner began to stir; he pulled himself upright in his chair and blinked hazily at the Watchers. He broke into a grin.
‘Where are the ones that were beating me?’ He looked around the room through blood-caked eyes. ‘I can’t see them. They’re probably hiding.’ He gave a theatrical frown. ‘Of course, there’s a good reason they’ve got nothing out of me. I don’t have any story to tell.’
Derren shook his head. ‘You’re one of the worst Doubters in the West, Yannus. We know about your groups. We know about your plays. You will tell us about your network. You will tell us about the others.’
Yannus shook his head, and laughed. At the side of the room, the real Aranfal closed his eyes. He knew what was coming. Aran Fal becoming Aranfal.
‘His son is a Watcher,’ said the young Aranfal, in a trembling voice.
‘Who said that?’ Derren cast his insect gaze across the room. ‘Who just spoke?’
The memory Aranfal walked forward, emerging from the crowd of Watchers. ‘His son. His son is a Watcher. He’s in our cohort.’
The memory Aranfal pulled a knife out from his cloak. At the side, the real Watcher groaned. Alexander took him by the hand.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘What did you do?’
The memory Aranfal seemed to steady himself. ‘He’s tough, isn’t he?’ he said. He pointed the knife at Yannus. ‘I could cut out his eyeballs right now, and he wouldn’t care. Would you?’
Said eyeballs did not move, but remained carefully focused on Aranfal.
‘But his son – he loves his son. Everyone loves their children. It’s the only thing that makes a difference, sometimes.’
He grinned, and it was a savage thing. The other Watchers had all gone very quiet, watching him carefully. Aran Fal becoming Aranfal.
‘It wasn’t anything new, what I did,’ said the real Aranfal. ‘Brightling taught me it all. She showed me the way, before … before this day.’
‘What do you mean?’ Alexander looked genuinely confused. ‘What wasn’t new?’
‘What I did.’ Aranfal nodded. ‘It wasn’t new. But I got a name for it. Maybe I was a bit more aggressive than Brightling and the rest of them.’
He believed he was changing, shifting from Aranfal back to Aran Fal. But he couldn’t truly go back to that boy, could he? No one could ever go back. He would have to become someone else: a different kind of Aran Fal.
Back in the memory, the tide of his terrible history was surging ever forward.
‘He has a son,’ said the young Aranfal. ‘Also called Yannus. And he’s a fucking Watcher!’ The last two words were uttered in a kind of hiss. He couldn’t remember if it was real or forced. Probably a bit of both.
Yannus grinned. ‘That’s not true.’ But he was lying. Every part of his face screamed his lies, and Aranfal needed no mask to see it. ‘My son is in the West.’
‘Your son is here. Yannus the younger, come on! Step forward!’
If anyone thought that Yannus the younger would remain hidden, they were sorely mistaken. A part of Aranfal wished, now, that he had.
A young Watcher shuffled forward from the others. He was a pathetic specimen, a short, pudgy boy, his face pockmarked with pimples and blemishes. His hair was dirty and unkempt, and he had a slowness to him that suggested a mental softness. No one seemed to know him, apart from the younger Aranfal. Yannus had helped him, once, in the library. That was where Yannus the younger spent most of his days. He had helped Aranfal find a book, and he had told him his name. His real name. He’d done well, keeping it hidden from the Watchers. But he told Aranfal the truth, and the Watcher never knew why. He shouldn’t have done that. His name was his weakness, in the end.
But in this moment, the boy did not seem weak, and he did not seem afraid.
‘Yes,’ was all he said.
Aranfal pointed the knife at him. ‘Your father is a Doubter.’
The boy glanced at the man in the chair and back at Aranfal. ‘Yet I am a Watcher.’ He shrugged. ‘What a world we live in. But nothing will change either fact.’
Aranfal grimaced, turning back to the father. ‘Tell us what you know, or I’ll butcher him. I’ll do it right now. We don’t need the sons of Doubters running around the See House anyway.’
Yannus senior remained silent.
‘Very well, then.’ Aranfal looked at Yannus the younger and moved forward.
The memory froze. Aranfal was not sure why, but he was grateful.
‘What happened?’ Alexander asked. ‘Did you kill him?’
Aranfal nodded. ‘Eventually.’
‘Hope,’ Alexander said. ‘There is hope here. Your hope. The hope of an ambitious man. Other hope, too. The hope of a teacher for his students. The hope of a son for his father, and the other way around. Hope! So widespread, so desperate, so powerful, so strange!’
‘Why did we come here?’ Aranfal asked. ‘How will it help us find the First Memory?’
‘There is no help here. You must help yourself. You must walk your own path, in the Old Place.’
Aranfal was distracted by the Shadowthings. They were slowly climbing to their feet, depositing the black magic of his memories onto the floor.
‘Where are they going?’
‘Another place,’ said Alexander, with a shrug. ‘Perhaps another memory.’
There came a scream. Aranfal saw that the dark beings were walking through a bright door. On the other side, for just a moment, he saw Aleah. She was in pain. She screamed again.
Not knowing what else to do, Aranfal ran to the door. Or perhaps it was Aran Fal who ran.
CHAPTER 13
Brandione had come to a village of the past.
The town was hardly deserving of the name: a rough, shit-strewn road, beaten into the ground between some hovels. Soldiers were milling around, dirty and tired, carrying their lives on their backs. Brandione knew where he was, all right. He had come to this place through the Hallway of Regret, and there was plenty of regret here.
It took him a while to find the younger version of himself. His h
air was thicker, his skin unlined, his body thinner. He looked like the others, caked in mud, gripping his handcannon tightly. But he was the one in charge. The others fell quiet when he was near, keeping their jokes and curses to themselves.
The memory Brandione was studying a building at the end of the street, a hard look in his eye. Hard, and tired. As he looked at that structure, the older Brandione felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, a void that seemed to slowly expand.
‘Leader Brandione.’
The younger Brandione turned his head slightly. Someone was beside him, an older man, his face a scrabble of beard and cuts, his small eyes casting shrewd glances at his surroundings. Nal, he was called, though they all knew him as Nail. Always respectful to Brandione, but not the sort of person the future General would ever have trusted. Clever, in his own way: the type who could always find his dinner. But not a man to trust.
The young Brandione nodded at Nal. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Nal shifted his gaze to the building at the far end of the road. ‘Funny, to put a barn there, my lord.’
Brandione shrugged. ‘Maybe the town was built around the barn.’
‘Maybe,’ Nal said, though he did not sound convinced. ‘Or maybe it never was a barn. Maybe it is a … depot, of some kind. Hmm? Somewhere for these …’ He was about to spit out a swear word, but held it in. They all tried not to swear before their Leader. It wasn’t a rule, and it certainly wasn’t something Brandione had demanded. Something just made them hold their tongues.
‘Somewhere for these traitors to store things, my Leader,’ Nal went on. ‘Somewhere to keep their little weapons.’
Nal seemed to despise the westerners, but it was feigned. The soldiery of the Overland had learned to respect the rebels a great deal. None of them thought too much about the causes of the rebellion, not even Brandione. But they knew the consequences, all right. The West. It was half the Overland, and it was in flames. The war was fought in snowy mountains, in burning deserts, in soggy farmlands: the complexity was endless, and though the Centre won, in the end, it was a close-run thing. If the westerners had been victorious, the Overland would have lost its great breadbasket, its store of food and fuel and furs and fancies. And a new rival would have been born.
The Memory Page 9
