‘Some of us more than others.’
Dougie laughs, pops the ice back in his mouth, and then, almost as an afterthought, he spits back onto his palm. ‘You see that Grove, you tell him that too. No hard feelings.’
Poor Grove, getting into trouble on account of me.
‘I see him, and I will.’
Dougie nods and gets back to his ice. Those blue eyes staring hard at me.
I leave him to East, get onto Brickell. Walk past Mary’s house, there’s a piano playing. Anne. Plays better than anyone in town, and I can’t find a sweeter happiness than the thought of her. I’d sneak a longer listen, but I’ve work to do. Always the rod at my back.
Big George is a while answering his door, which means he was out back. But he comes. He knows who’s knocking and you don’t make us wait.
He stands there and yawns, eyes still crusted with sleep, pupils still hunting for the compass points of the day. ‘Morning, Mark.’
‘You all right, George?’
‘Maybe I should be asking you that.’ He gestures at my bruises with the slightest shadow of my Master’s disappointment there. We’re all echoes of them that rule.
And I give him such a don’t want to talk about it look that he shakes his head. ‘Dougie?’
I shrug.
George sits heavy on that bench, lids fluttering a little. The bandage on his wrist is seeping. ‘The boy’s bad news, all pumped up on his own pride. Sobel’s never kept him in line. You keep your distance from him.’
‘Not me I’m concerned with. You all right?’
‘Just weary,’ he says. ‘I’ll lay myself here and rest. Gets me worse in summer. Maybe I’m getting old.’
George has years ahead. Still, he looks old today. Smaller. They always do.
I get him a pillow, put it under his head. ‘Sorry I didn’t drink with you yesterday.’
‘He tell you that, did he? What I said?’
I nod.
‘Sorry boy. He asked, I had no choice. You know how it is. He comes and he talks, gentle, but there’s no give to him. The blood and the words just flow somehow, and you’re all of a sudden babbling, and he’s listening even as he feeds.’ His voice is all dozy. ‘If you’d stayed I’d’ve saved you trouble, on both counts.’ He rouses a little. ‘Not just me doing the talking, neither. Your Master’s worried for you, your last year of working. You going to go to the city?’
I give a shrug that ducks the question. ‘No need for sorries or worries,’ I say, ‘and the bruises would have come anyway, that was something that was coming no matter what.’
George is snoring. I fetch him a clay jug of water for when he wakes. And then I work in the yard, clearing and stacking rubbish. His gutters are clogged, so I get up there and clean those out. Find a brown snake, and there’s a little stand-off before it decides I’m not worth it and retreats, quick and haughty, off the roof. I win that round. Me and the snakes have an agreement, mostly. I keep away, and they do too. Dougie, he likes to break their backs. I can’t fathom such pointlessness. Snakes have a beauty all their own.
Up here I can see out to the forested edge of town, and the ridge that swings up in the east, first serious rise towards the Dividing Range. West is just farms and flat, interrupted by the odd low hill that’s erupted from the earth, and the dark thin line of the railroad. I stand a moment in that heat. Enjoy the view. Then back to work.
There’s a gate hanging on its hinges, I give that some sweat too, and a creaking floorboard (nothing under, because I checked). Gutters, gates, floorboards uncreaked. George has done all right out of his visitor: a rough night for a gentle day.
I wait till he wakes, look at his books, nothing too salacious. And when he wakes, we drink. Get him some more cold water, up from the basement.
‘Your Master doesn’t take much,’ George says, ‘but it hurts and wearies anyway, that little bit.’
He doesn’t take much. He takes everything.
Most of them sleep in wine cellars, our Masters curled up there far far older than the grog, but Dain don’t. He lies in a bed. Likes to be close to the air.
‘Something comes for me, boy—it’ll do just as well down or up.’
I don’t reckon there’s a single boy who hasn’t sneaked in to see their Master sleeping. It’s deeper than sleep. They’re like stone. No breath, just an awful stillness. I slapped Dain’s face once, and he didn’t even move. That’s why they need us. They sleep so deep, they sleep in the memory of their past, and that’s an awful big chink in their armour. Still, even then killing one would be hard. Asleep their skin is stony, break most knives, turn or blunt most sharp things. They can be dragged out into the light, of course; burn away that way.
Best time for killing’s the gloaming, we reckon. Skin’s supple, penetrable as Dain says, and they’re dozy for an hour or two, not quite awake. Though they’re quick to wake if they sense a threat to them and theirs.
We boys talk about such things. Boastful like. As though we could kill our Masters, as though they wouldn’t have their hands—or worse—round our necks quick smart, snapping and snarling and seeing us out of such stupidity.
I’ve seen Dain leave by the cellar window, I’ve seen him flow cross the night like some dark breath blown by the moon. He’s fast in the way an eagle’s fast, in its effortless diving flight and endless hunger. You don’t kill that. Much easier dying, and many have, many folk much stronger than me.
I sleep in the room next over, and I wake with his passage. That darkness coming and going, it’s stronger than a change in the air, or a smell, though it’s both (he can’t hide his smell, the raw meat odour of him). It’s electric. Makes your hair stand on end.
I’m a Day Boy, but it don’t preclude night works.
CHAPTER 5
I’M STILL MOVING slow by nightfall. My skin’s too tight, my bones too sore. Dain’s home, watching me, going to work on his book like he does most nights when he’s not visiting or swinging wide circles around the town, keeping guard against the monsters. He has a distracted look. He’s still angry with me, and more.
He calls for a sherry—purely to be difficult I’m sure—and I bring it quick smart. Put it on the table by his desk; there’s a drop of the reddish liquid on the edge of the glass and I wipe it away lest it drip on all that scrawled-on paper, stacked neat to one side of him.
His study’s always neat, that chair, his desk with the stack of papers that grows steadily but never by much. He writes in ink, scratching away on one side only, and most of those sheets find the bin. He goes through so much paper. I’m sent least once a month to pick up a box when the Night Train comes.
Dain looks over at me, reading again the story of the bruises, and I feel the shame of them rising in my face. There’s a softening takes place in his eyes; the sharp line of his mouth finds a smudge. He puts down his pen. ‘Nothing but thugs, most of those boys. Except Egan’s. Grove, that one’s been raised right; I know he’s settling on making him a Master. The rest are not shown any other way to be, they’re left to run wild. Don’t make me think I’ve failed you.’
How is it that Dain can talk about his failure and make me feel
it’s mine? Because it is, I suppose. I could have left that fight, I could have run, been marked as a coward, though. What does Dain know of cowardice?
‘You’ve never failed me,’ I say. ‘But this world’s the rough one into which I’m thrown.’
‘And I can throw you out of it,’ Dain says, swiping a hand at me, though not without affection. I dart all a-wince backwards.
‘You’ve time to heal now,’ Dain mumbles, waving an arm at some vague sentiment in the air. ‘But it won’t always be the case. This is not a time for you to start feuding, the days are running down. And you must be more careful.’ Dain rubs at his lip, his face grown long. He sniffs at the air and draws in a breath that he doesn’t need. ‘Now fetch me some paper and refill my good pen. And a finger of whisky, the black label, you know the one.’
I do, and I know he’s truly settled in for the night. Means I’ve got more grump headed my way. He takes the whisky. Sips a little, rolls it in his mouth, sighs. Picks up his pen again, then puts it down.
‘Why do you set yourself at failure, boy, with myriad other paths laid out before you? You are a prince of these dry streets. You’ve the gifts of your station, and you cast it all aside with a smile. Never has a child been more determined for ruin. Why? The love of falling? Is that it?’
‘I don’t know. I try—’
‘Then don’t! Stop trying.’ He lifts a hand in disgust. ‘You can go to bed now. There’ll be a list as long as both your arms tomorrow.’
I groan.
‘Twice as long!’
Hot nights like this all you can do is toss and turn, the sheets all rasp and ruin. There’s night birds calling, and the town feels small, huddled against the greater dark. The day’s grown smaller, they say, and the night’s grown huge and toothy. You know what it’s like when you can’t sleep, and each aching fragment of the night passes slow and steady, and the late hours lumber, full of thoughts that you wouldn’t think when your brain’s Sunlit.
Most days I wish I was cleverer than I am. Cleverer and less mouthy. Grove gets into trouble because he doesn’t know better, and thinks too kindly of the world. I get into trouble because I’m too impatient with it.
And time is running down. There’s a city calling me, and I’ll see it if I’m lucky but I’m feeling my luck run thin, feeling old too. Choices heaped ahead of me, and I feel so ill-equipped to make them.
I like to hold things in my hand, get a good grip of them. Like to work them out and solve them. There’s nothing of that now, no answers in this night-time murk.
The Night Train comes and goes, its cargo unladen, its whistle calling out, and I’m still awake. Still thinking. Thinking. Thinking.
When I tumble to sleep, it’s a lean sort of thing, no meat or fat to the bones, just a gristle of drinks not drunk, of girls not kissed, and a tall man, with a taste for civility who’s disappointed with what he raised.
Do the Masters sleep deep during the day, as their God traverses the heavens? How can they not be stirred by the day, the furious quickener of blood? Yet I have seen him abed, flesh hard as stone, flesh that you could not pierce with a knife. I’ve placed a mirror to his lips and seen not a breath. I’ve called his name and he has not stirred.
But do they rest?
He told me once what they dream of.
‘The Sun, blessed and pure, a long shore, a wave that breaks, and the hunt. These are the endless things, so deep in us that we are nothing without them. We dream of a place that is all predation: a place between the light and the dark where the blood is hot and sweet, and everything is possessed of purity. We dream of that perfection. But it retreats from us; no matter how we reach out or run we cannot catch it.
‘Oh, and sometimes in our dreams, when a boy is foolish enough—and he has to have a lot of foolish in his veins—we hear him call our name.’ Dain’s face lost a good bit of its whimsy. ‘Do not call me in my sleep. Do not disturb my dreams.’
Sometimes I looked in his eyes and all I could see was that shore, receding, receding, but never quite gone. You can see time in their eyes, a stream of moments shrugged off. ‘What do we have without the oppression of time?’ Dain once asked. ‘We’ve all the crystalline perfection of forever.’
It’s the sea that calls them, and the Sun that rises out of it.
CHAPTER 6
I SHOULDN’T HAVE been here by the river and I should’ve been watching, what with the fact that this place is off limits to me, and also rightly dangerous. It’s past the borders that the Masters define as safe, and it’s territory that is none of my business. But I’ve been here before, and nothing went wrong. Just looking for yabbies in the dirty water—you get a bunch of them, cook them up (all squealing, the damn things cry for mercy no matter what Dain says) and they’re tasty. I had a hunger for them today, and there was already a bunch of them on the grass beside me, insecty legs twitching. All that sweet meat not knowing what I had planned for it.
But I’m tired. And tired’s halfway to blind, which is why I shouldn’t have been here.
I almost miss the fella that comes out of the grass by the river. Slick and fast as a snake. I get just a flash of that movement in the corner of my eye and I roll and bolt straight into the water. So I’m only touched by the briefest passing of the knife: a slice, skin parting, blood spilling, but I’m not spitted on it, which was what the bastard was aiming for. Then water soaks me or blood or both.
He grunts behind me and I’m already scrambling deep into water, fast as the fire in that cut, fast as fear into the reeds and rocks and they’re all slapping and scratching at my feet, maybe even a big old catfish having a nibble as I crash past.
Don’t have much on me. Just my pocket knife and the piss in my pants.
I shouldn’t have been there, but I was.
Dain would be mad—even more than he is already. But that is a black cloud on the horizon of later. Now is a knife at my back and the heavy breaths of a man too close behind.
I’ve a choice: left or right?
Left leads against the flow of the river, and out of town. Right swings back around, heads towards Handly Bridge. I’ve jumped off its edge often enough, but the man’s already crashing that way. I can swim but not that fast. And left there’s bulrushes and cover. So I go that way, hoping there’s no one else. I slap against the weight of the river, already up against my thighs, flicking my gaze back.
The man’s giving chase with a machete in one thick-fingered hand. He’s bearded, round at the belly, arms thick as my legs. I know the type. I can smell the grog even from here, drinks to keep himself brave. It’ll make him clumsy, though. Probably been watching me and mine, waiting for the right time. Waiting for one of us to do something stupid.
And it had to be me.
I think of Dougie, Grove, the Parson boys, those crazy twins with the wild eyes, and Twitch, nervous and laughing, always running or riding or worrying. I’m faster on my feet than all of them and I’m the one’s going to get gutted by a drunk with a big knife.
Not yet.
Not yet.
The reeds close around me, and I run where I know they’re thickest and the water’s deepest, shouting: Got a knife too. Cut you i
f you come closer.
He grunts again but he doesn’t come through the reeds and I find myself a hidey hole, been playing and hiding in these waters since I can remember—no matter that I shouldn’t a been there. Been clipped under the ear for it many times, too, given a bloody nose and a head ringing. Dain’s not cruel, not in that way, but some things he wants to make stick, he says, since he can’t watch over me when the Sun rises. Boys are allowed some mischiefs, but they’re not allowed everything. That’d be anarchy plain and simple.
Back’s sore where he cut me but I’ve had worse. No breath whistling through the wound; no taste of blood—just snot, maybe tears. You’d cry too. I’m not immune to terrors just cause of whose roof shelters me. I’m as scared as you, beneath the strut. This is the only time I’ll tell you that. But it’s there, remember that, it never goes.
The man’s circling round. I can hear him. But he doesn’t come closer. His moves are a Hunter’s, but they don’t do this. They don’t hunt boys. There’s a madness in this one. And here I am alone to face it. I have a knife, but it’s not like the machete that he’s carrying. Just a thing for cutting soft wire: gutting fish, not men.
Dain says a man should always keep something with an edge to it. Women too, at that. It’s the edge that makes us what we are, he said once, clever apes, clever cutting creatures. I asked him what knife he carries and his lips curled up, tight against his gums. He keeps his edge within him, he said, all superior. He’s no ape, not any longer, but he’s all kinds of clever.
Not that it will do me any good.
I’m here, and he’s still in the black dark hiding from the Sun.
I shouldn’t have been there. But I was, course I was. Never where I’m supposed to be. What’s the fun in that?
Chipped a tooth last year ’cause of what Dain likes to call my misadventures. Cracked a leg bad a few years back, blood swelled it and darkened, he nursed me through the bitter agonies and the sweats—and I know what that cost him, me being weak and all, hardly any use to anyone, let alone the likes of him, but he did it. Can’t nurse me through death though, and I know I’m in for a bloody hiding if I get through this all right. A hiding at the least.
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