by Tim Lebbon
Before long, Rafe became completely overawed by what he was seeing. In Trengborne, a simple farming village where the folks worked to live, and lived simply, there was little out of the ordinary. Rafe had seen a raid by tumblers when he was very young—he remembered them congregating around a fallen child, playing with him, toying with their prey before one of them rolled forward and pierced him with its barbs—and sometimes, in dreams, he thought he remembered a wraith. But other than that, nothing extreme. Here, the sights saturated his senses very quickly. Rafe’s simple perception of things was soon drowned out by the excesses of Pavisse.
A man was lying in the road being kicked by three coal miners, their boots impacting with his head and stomach and groin, and yet all who passed averted their eyes. The victim looked like fodder—dregs of an ancient race once bred for food in Long Marrakash—and although Rafe had never before seen one of these sad creatures, he hid his fascination and walked on. Elsewhere, a naked woman sat in a rocking chair in a doorway with her legs wide open, beckoning men to sample her wares. One fledger stopped, did his business there and then, paid her and walked away. The woman put on her stock alluring smile once more, scanning the street, eyes glazed with bad wine and skin greyed by years of rhellim use. The display was horrific and sickening, and Rafe thought of the many rumours he’d heard from the young men in Trengborne. Naked women in the streets, they had said. It had sounded dreamlike. In reality, it was a nightmare.
He passed through a narrow byway and emerged into a huge square, bounded on all sides by buildings four storeys tall, all of them seemingly overflowing with people waving long scraps of coloured cloth. They were relatively silent, although the strange sounds of grunting, feet scraping on stone and heavy breathing seemed to give a silent, secretive whisper to the crowd. Every now and then the impact of wood upon stone or something softer inspired a groan. Rafe stood back for some time, unable to see past the knot of people standing before him. He stared up at the windows and balconies, trying to make out what these people were watching from their expressions. On a few faces he saw vague disinterest, a few others outright fascination, but generally they seemed excited and enraged at the same time. He’d seen similar expressions on the faces of the rhellim-fuelled whores back in Trengborne, desperate for business but sometimes, when the militia were away, ignored and looked down upon.
He pushed his way through the crowd.
They had a tumbler in there. It was a big one, obviously well-fed in this gladiatorial ring. The wooden pen had walls twice the height of a fledger, curved inward at the top, spiked with barbed metal prongs to prevent the tumbler from rolling out. Rafe had once heard that they reacted to sound, zoning in on playing children or couples courting in the long mountain grass. That explained the silent spectators.
There was a man in the enclosure with the tumbler. He was not really there to fight, but to stay alive. How long he could do so, and the inevitability of his eventual demise, was obviously the entertainment for this crowd.
The tumbler left an intermittent bloody track across the cleaned stone square as it rolled. Crushed into its plant-like hide was a second man, dead, pierced by the thing’s many natural spikes and hooks. One arm flipped free as the tumbler rolled, thumping the stone in a rhythm that gave that silent place a grotesque heartbeat.
Rafe turned and pushed his way back through the crowd, ignoring the hostile stares and vague threats of violence. He tried to find his way back to his uncle’s home, but the streets conspired to keep him to themselves, confusing him with corners where he was sure there had been none before, new buildings, strange views, hidden courtyards. The further he went the more lost he became, and each way felt wrong. He looked out for Uncle Vance just in case the big man had come out to search for him, but every face he saw was a stranger, and none of these strangers had any interest in him. In the end he curled up in a shadowy doorway and closed his eyes, shaking with fear, preferring to sink down into sleep peopled with calming memories of his parents than subject himself to more of what this place had to offer.
His poor, dead parents. How right they had been: Pavisse was fit only for madmen and wraiths. Eyes closed, Rafe tried to remember his way back to Trengborne, back to before things had gone so insanely wrong. But even though in his mind’s eye he was there, everything was dark. He felt as though he was in a warm cave where the air was heavy and wet, and safety thrummed like his mother’s heartbeat.
Someone touched his arm. Rafe opened his eyes. He groaned out loud.
The woman was short and stocky, and of some indefinable age. She had wild hair that formed a filthy halo around her head, strands twisted and pointing away from her skull in all directions as if seeking escape. Her eyes were a dark green, their whites speckled with the flush of broken veins. Her face was scored with swirling tattoos that started at the corners of her eyes, spiralled and multiplied across her cheeks—there were patterns there which he thought he should know—until their branches conjoined again to enter her mouth at both corners. Rafe was sure they continued inside, just as he was certain that those eyes saw everything.
It was the first time he had ever seen a witch.
“So what’s a nice boy like you doing in Pavisse?” she asked.
“You should know.”
“Me? Why me?” She shrugged and looked almost offended, but her green eyes were glinting with humour.
“I know a witch when I see one,” Rafe said, “and witches know everything.” He was trying to appear brave and knowledgeable, but he sounded like a child. Tears threatened and he swallowed them back. They burned.
The woman looked him up and down, licking her lips.
They eat people, Rafe remembered one of his friends saying, fear and fascination distorting his voice.
“Actually I’m a lady,” the woman said, “and I don’t quite know everything. Almost, but not quite.” She smiled, reached out quickly and grabbed Rafe’s cock through his thick trousers, squeezing and twisting it slightly. “Never been dipped, that one. I can tell.”
Rafe pushed her away and drew his legs up, trying to force himself back into the solid wooden door behind him. “Leave me alone!” he cried, sounding more frightened than ever.
The woman leaned back and laughed, stopped suddenly, then looked back down at Rafe. She staggered back two steps, her eyes so wide open that Rafe was sure they would tumble onto her cheeks. “Oh my sweet old heart!” she gasped.
This frightened Rafe more than having the old woman grab him. At least then he’d known what she was doing—touting for trade—whereas now, her sudden fearful reaction was even more disturbing. He scared her, that much was plain. Her mouth had dropped and the tattoos elongated across her cheeks, like extra screams to complement the one that seemed to be building within her.
“What?” Rafe asked, feeling a confidence building from nowhere. A group of fledgers passed by, their dull yellow eyes skitting across the scene as if he and this woman had always been here. From elsewhere a roar suddenly rose from the maze of buildings, alleys and courtyards, and he wondered whether the man had killed the tumbler after all.
“Come with me!” the witch said, her voice shaking. She stepped forward as if to grab him again, but paused with her hand hovering inches from his shoulder. Her voice lowered. “Please. Come with me. I can hide you. I can help you.”
“I don’t need your help! Leave me alone, witch. Got a prong in your palm? I know that’s how you do it, stick me and poison me—”
“That’s for charlatans and those that betray the name,” she hissed. “I fear you, but don’t put me down for what I have to do. I am what I say, and I do what I do to survive. We all know there’s no magic in anything now, don’t we?” She stared at him for a few seconds, unmoving, seeming not to breathe as she awaited whatever answer he would give.
“So why help me? I have nothing. You can’t screw me for tellans.”
“Such language!” the old witch said, and for a brief instant Rafe heard his mother in her tone
.
“Fuck,” he said, and started to cry.
“Come with me,” the witch said again, on the verge of panic now. She looked over her shoulder at a pair of coal miners who were loitering across the street. Rafe followed her gaze, wondering what they wanted, sure that they had not even noticed him and the witch. A horse clipped up the dusty road, slow and tired, and the man sitting astride it was hooded and slumped in the saddle.
Him, him! Rafe thought, but this man’s robe was black, not red, and Rafe could see his face, the heavy grey beard that hung down over his chest and stomach.
The witch froze, seeming to sense Rafe’s brief flush of fear.
“You’ve already seen a Red Monk?” she asked.
Rafe frowned, wincing at the sudden sharp memory. “The man wore red …”
“With me,” she said. “Quickly now!”
“I have to find my uncle.”
“We can do that later; right now you have to get off the street. Now! If you’ve seen one Monk and survived, there’ll be more yet. Though how you survived…?”
She was suddenly not threatening at all. Rafe had been scared of her at first—those tattoos, her grabbing his cock, the simple fact that someone in this sprawling, ugly town had noticed him—but now he heard his mother’s tone in her worried words, sensed a level of concern outweighing any intent to hurt or abuse.
In a way, it felt as if she knew him.
“How do you know me?”
“I don’t. But I know what you’ll know and what you’ll seek. I’m honoured, boy, and amazed, and I think perhaps I’m only dreaming here. But for now no more, eh? Let’s keep our lips sealed and our minds our own. Get off the street, get hidden, that’s the priority for you right now. Follow me, keep quiet and in a few minutes we’ll be safe and we can talk. And listen. Only I guess I’ll be doing the listening. I have been for all these years, watching and listening …”
“I don’t—”
“—understand. Yes. Boy, what’s your name?”
“Rafe Baburn.”
“Pleased to meet you, Rafe. I’m a witch, as you rightly said, and a whore in with it too. My name’s Hope. There’s irony in that, because it’s the name I took for myself years before I knew that’s what I’d spend my life doing: hoping. Praying to the Black and the sleeping gods and the bloody shitting Mages if I had to that … well, we should go.”
Rafe did not understand the witch’s ramblings and he thought that perhaps she’d lost her mind. She showed no signs of rhellim usage, none of the side effects of fledge, and her breath smelled of old cabbage and bad meat, not alcohol. But she talked nonsense. A strange nonsense. A nonsense directed at him and about him. He missed his mother. He missed his father. And now this woman, this witch-whore called Hope, wanted to take him home.
“I’m very hungry,” he said. “I haven’t eaten since … since I saw my parents killed.”
The sympathy that filled her eyes could not be faked. “Oh Rafe,” she said. “Come with me. Then we can talk.”
Hope grabbed Rafe’s hand and pulled him quickly into the mouth of a narrow alley. And they entered another world.
It was a city within the city. Rafe smelled it before seeing anything, wafts and hints of what was about to be revealed drawing them through the alley; the strong, mysterious tang he had sensed up on the hillside, and the vague aroma of old alcohol which he knew from Trengborne. But there were other smells here too, rich aromas that seemed to emanate from the moss-covered walls of the alleyway, strong and weak, sickly and dry, inviting and disgusting. He breathed in deeply and gagged on the stink of shit, and his next breath caused a stirring in his loins as rhellim fumes stroked his mind. Contradictions and confusions accompanied him as he followed Hope away from the bustle of the Pavisse he could just understand and into the hidden city he could not.
They turned the final corner of the alley. He should have expected something like this, he supposed. No varied raft of smells like that would come from a few vagrants sleeping rough beneath the skins of stolen furbats. But it still came as a shock when he saw the hundreds of people, the alley widening into a street, the chaos of a town that seemed so different from the one he had just left. Back there Pavisse was a rough place built well, a once-proud town turned sour after the Cataclysmic War had robbed it of magic. Here … it was newer, Rafe knew, but a place such as this did not thrive on hope. It lived off bitterness and crime, desperation and hate. It had been formed after the Cataclysmic War and was a product of it.
The street curved into the distance, passing beyond view maybe five hundred steps away. Some of the buildings may have been the rear facades of those he had just passed in Pavisse’s main street, but back here they were deformed, half-collapsed, mutated by the additions and changes wrought by their strange inhabitants. A heavy machine formed part of one building, its use long since forgotten but its exposed innards curving up towards the sun, making room for a few tall, thin fledgers to lay back and chew their drug. The machine was rusted where it was metal, smoothed by time where it was stone, and there were bones too, the flesh of its biological parts long since rotted away and added back to the ground. The building had seemingly grown around it, and Rafe wondered what had been here first: machine or construction. Perhaps one had been to support the other, although Rafe could not now guess at which way this could have worked.
There were more machines, small and large, a few with obvious uses—those that had moved as transport, others which had probably once ploughed and planted in the fields—but most with purposes lost in the turbulent mists of time. They were all incorporated in some way, chopped and changed and altered as if those that had used them were frustrated at their lack of animation. The channels were there within these machines, the empty reservoirs and sacs and current routes that had given them the strange life they once lived, but they were dead. Dead as the sand beneath the dwellers’ feet, dead as the air they exhaled, dead as the corpses Rafe saw in the gutter in one or two places. There was a fledger, his or her body twisted and ripped from whatever had killed it. There was also something else, something that must once have been fodder because of its size, exposed ribs torn back and knotted by the accelerated growth, slabs of flesh and muscle ripped from its wet corpse. As he watched, disgusted and terrified, a small lizard darted from a rent beneath one of the larger machines, buried its nose in the fodder and darted away again, dinner in its mouth.
The fodder shifted, turning its misshapen head and uttering a low, wretched groan.
“Mage shit!” Rafe exclaimed.
“Leave it be,” Hope said, walking by without giving the pitiful thing a second glance.
Help, it hissed. Rafe looked down, but the fodder was not looking at him. Perhaps the sound of its plea had simply been air escaping its slashed neck.
“Leave it be!” Hope said again. She’d turned back to him now, conveying the same message within her stare. Rafe glanced around. A few people were watching him. A female fledger, bald, eyes yellow as a rancid wound, beckoned him over with one impossibly long finger. She was naked, and hung from a twist of metal and stone with one hand. Her body was speckled with soft black spots. It looked as if she were rotting from the inside.
“Fun, stranger?” she said. Her voice was strangely quiet, high, musical. Almost hypnotic. “Fun with me stranger?”
“Not with you, no!” Hope said.
The fledger hissed and dropped from her perch, landing on the street wide-legged and crouched into a fighting stance.
“Paid you already, has he?” she hissed.
“He’s with me, yes,” Hope said. Rafe glanced sideways and saw that she had one hand inside her jacket. Furbat, he noticed, picking out a crazy detail in this loaded moment. Furbat jacket, so old that the leather was denuded of all fur, shiny with age, darkened with sweat and rain and who knew what else. This jacket had seen its fair share of years and places. How much of this had been upon Hope’s shoulders, and how much on other peoples’?
The fledg
er hopped a few steps closer like a jumping spider. Rafe could smell her. Rank, rotten, and sad.
“Fledge, young one, stranger, a bit of fledge with my legs around your face, you’ve never eaten so well!” She thrust her groin forward and displayed the hairless crack there, like a jagged slit in the earth.
Rafe could not help looking down. There were traces of fledge across her pale yellow thighs, a mustardy trace that hinted at more drug within.
“I won’t warn you again,” Hope said. Something in her voice brought a moment of silence, a period of nervous calm. But there were others watching now—fledgers, coal miners, people who simply had nothing else to do—and the fledger did not wish to lose face.
“Screw you, witch!” she said.
Hope brought her hand out from her pocket. Even before she opened her fist Rafe saw the fledger’s eyes widen with fear. The others backed away as well, suddenly having more urgent things to attend to. There was real terror here, Rafe saw, a rich reverence the fledger must have held for Hope from the first moment. But the confrontation was all about face and respect, and once begun her pitch had to be carried through, one way or another.
Hope held a handful of spiders. One was green, another bright orange, the third black. All of them were fat and fast. She lobbed them at the fledger and muttered something under her breath, and then she walked quickly away.
The fledger leaped onto the uneven wall and pulled herself up, grasping at uncertain handholds and rusted projections before she disappeared up and over onto the rooftop, moving like the spiders she fled. The orange arachnid followed her up, while the other two went in opposite directions along the base of the building as if to outflank her.
The fledger screamed all the way.
“What was that?” Rafe asked quietly. They were walking quickly now, the screams of the fleeing fledger echoing from above. A small smile perked the corners of Hope’s mouth. “Those spiders, Hope. What were they? They were following her.”
