‘Of course,’ Dargel says. ‘Why you nearly built the place single-handed.’
I give Dain such a look, and my Master pats my hand. ‘He exaggerates. I was but one of many.’
‘Your Master was among the first, he’s been our kind for longer than this is old. He set up the schools, he spoke for the new ones. He went below, a hundred times, they say. He was one of many, but he was hardly the least.’
‘Enough, Dargel, enough,’ Dain says.
‘Of course, of course, I forget that is how you are, and now more than ever, though why you would come here—’
‘I have my reasons,’ Dain says.
Not a Master in the world didn’t have reasons.
CHAPTER 17
MY EYES SNAP open with the sound of the door mechanism releasing. My dreams were full of ticking clocks and alien moons, of snow and bears and girls with sharp teeth. I’m up and out of bed, quick smart. Hardly slept, still on edge after that attack. Not sure I’ll ever relax in this city, which would make Dain happy for sure.
I turn the handle and go out.
There’s a table set there with food. Fruit and some cold meats, bread and cheese. I eat it, and all of it’s good, fresh food, but it’s not what I’m used to. And in that I find another niggle of homesickness.
There’s a clock on the wall, 12.30 pm. Still a long time until night. Maybe there’s something wrong with the mechanism: the ticks and the tocks not quite right.
Maybe we Day Boys are meant to wander even here.
I eat a little more, because I’m hungry. I’m always hungry, what boy isn’t?
Then I put my ear to the door, strain to hear what’s going on outside. Nothing. I push the door a crack, peek down first left then right. Long hallway, not a soul on it. Only me.
I shut the door, walk back into my room and shut that door, too. The lock slips back into its ticking place, but I no longer trust it.
I grab the book on the solar system and read. Still reading when Dain wakes.
‘Where did you get those books?’ Dain asks me.
‘I thought you organised it.’
Dain picks up the one about the boy and the girl, and the cold city, and his face twists. ‘Someone is having a joke with us.’
He takes that book to his room, then comes back, and his face is a little brighter. ‘What did you think about the book on the solar system?’
I want to tell him about all the things I’ve seen, the planets in that dark above our head, all those worlds, but I can’t. All I can think about is why the books were there, and who put them there. That novel could be the death of someone, why would they risk it? I’m just a Day Boy, and here in the City in the Shadow of the Mountain that’s less than nothing.
‘You weren’t lying,’ I say. ‘Those stars and planets are right huge.’ And I know at once that I’ve said the wrong thing. How can I hope to survive this place if I can’t even read my own Master?
‘No.’ He pulls his coat over his shoulders. ‘I wasn’t.’ And grabs his hat and almost yanks it down over his head.
‘I am going out tonight. I’ve business to attend to. You’re to stay here. Do not leave these rooms. You hear me?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then heed me. If you leave, you will be punished, and believe me when I say that you will wish it was me that did the punishing. Do not mistake this city’s dangers for those of Midfield.’ He sighs, straightens his hat, getting the brim just so. ‘Things are far more complex here.’
He leaves me to the rooms, and at least I have those other books.
Three hours I’m reading. Then another three. I walk to the narrow balcony and close my hands over the ironwork, and I look down. There’s lights and steam engines throbbing somewhere, like the pain in my temple. I can see the streets below, the folks walking through it all as though it were nothing, and maybe it is nothing.
But I can’t look at this place and see it without the threat Dain has suggested. It’s there in the lights and shadows. From here all the way down to the Wide Circle Road where the statues of the Fallen Dark stand, lit and featureless, as the Sun once made them.
I feel a gaze settle on me, and I stare down at the streets, and see the red glow of eyes, a head turning, a figure walking away fast.
I reckon since that Hunter chased me I’ve felt on the run, as though I had a target painted on my back and there’s all manner of folks chasing me for it.
And the paranoias strike me, and I think that maybe Dain has left me here. That he isn’t coming back, that I’m some price paid whether I want it or not. Everything has a cost, Dain says. Maybe I’m that cost.
When I walk back inside someone’s waiting in the room. Give a little yelp, before I’m jutting out my jaw.
I’m out with my knife quick smart and the man smiles at me. ‘Put the stabber away, little man.’ Madigan bares his fangs. ‘I’m not here to bleed you.’
I slide the knife into my boot, but I keep the handle clear and in easy reach. ‘Why are you here then?’
‘Your Master has left a message. He will not be returning this night, but you are to expect him tomorrow evening.’
‘Where’s he gone?’
‘It is not for you or I to ask such things, or expect an answer.’
I grimace at that, and he flashes me another toothful smile. ‘Deeper in the mountain, I suspect. There is a meeting of the Council, and your Master has been invited. Just as you do not question him, he cannot question them.’
But I’ve questions all right. This fella smiles again, once, then is out the door almost faster than I can see. It shuts and I lock it, though it’ll not do me much good.
Night and there’s doors closing, slamming. There’s airs moving. I can feel the breath of the old building. I open one window a crack, catch the fires on the slope to the west, and see the long shadows. Stir-crazy I am, two long days in this room, and longer nights without Dain. Books only hold so much comfort when you’re as worried as I am.
There’s screams, and laughter, horrible until it ends, and then the silence is worse: nothing more quiet than predators.
A machine starts up somewhere, and I realise I’ve been dozing. Resilient, Dain’s always called me and I thought he meant stupid.
The doors to the outside are closing. I can smell the smoke of engines straining at their work. Dawn’s coming another day, and the Master’s not returned, and I’ve not had a visit from Madigan since that first.
There’s trouble.
Trouble I’m not the cause of, not at least direct like.
And then, I see it, on the foot of my bed. A slip of paper marked with a spiral. The Hunter’s spiral. And I’m gripped with the deepest of terrors. Things are creeping. They will come tonight, and I have it, a horrible rising certainty. I need to get out of here.
I open the door wider. Step onto the balcony. Something hurls itself into the sky and I bite back a yell. It’s just a bird, but my heart’s pounding. I look to the road and the great doors closing.
I know I shouldn’t. I swore I wouldn’t. But that t
error’s rising. And I realise it’s been there all along, building.
Some of my kind have taken to calling you the Feast. If I run I could make it. I might. I grab my bedsheet, tie one end to the edge of the balcony and then clamber down, letting myself drop when the sheet runs out. I land a bit funny, twist my ankle a little, but I can still run—sort of. There’s a low fence and I’m over it.
Carriages pass me by, three of them, shooting down the road towards the heart of the city, but I’m headed the other way. I’m safer in the light.
The Gates of Dawn are three feet thick, all steel and mechanics, gears as big as houses, big enough to set the mountain ticking. And they’re closing fast.
I’m running.
‘Oi!’ someone yells. But I keep my feet banging hard against the concrete road.
I bolt through the doorway just as they’re shutting, tons of metal drawing towards me, bearing down on me, threatening. Could be squashed flat, but there’s no turning back and when someone yells at me again I ignore them. Dark shapes thrash past, the last of the bats.
A leathery smack to the face, and another; doesn’t even slow me, not one bit.
I make it, the door closing behind me. I’m locked out, in the Red City. In the light of a red dawn. Smoke and dust and diesel. Parrots are calling, fires are burning and I stand with my world behind me locked away in mountain rock and iron.
‘Here he is,’ someone yells. ‘Here he is, the Day Boy.’ I think he says the; it might just as well be a.
How do they know?
Well. What else would I be?
TENNYSON AND THE POISONED WORLD
Twitcher is just that. All twitches and worries. He shuffles, he runs. And when he’s alone he smiles. I don’t know him enough, but I know he’s smarter than he puts out, less frightened. There’s an anger to him, a sharp edge all its own. And you see it with his story. Here it comes out, and when he’s done with its telling, he always seems surprised, as though he’s just been reminded of something. Something that he should never forget. That’s Twitcher, he sneaks but he’s clever about it. Makes it look like something else.
You know how it is with poison. Dangerous, the sort of thing that can get out of hand, that can rise up and swallow you, like the sea does to the Masters, if they get too close—Tennyson says that’s because the sea and the salt never quite changed the way everything else did. It remembers, and it will always remember with hatred.
Tennyson was a chemist. He made play with all that bittery sweet stuff. He was good at it. Some he helped, some he killed. He liked the killing. In secret.
The war was still on, but we were already losing it. The world was closing in, and they were at the edges, the Masters and the other monsters. No one quite got that the Masters were our last best hope, keeping the worst things at bay. But who would know that? Who would even suspect it?
Government thought Tennyson might find some cure.
He never wanted to. Why would he want to? He could see the poetry in it. Says it was splendid those last days. Like a Sunset. Like a sky flaring its last great bright upon itself. The beautiful fury in the dying of beautiful things.
And while all of them looked out, looked at what was coming, he looked in. He looked so deep within the heart of things. Where everything is muddy, everything a possibility no matter how outlandish. Some singularity had been met, and now, it were shifting everything. The world weren’t dying, it weren’t even sick. It was dead. But it might rise again.
He opened doors. He found out secrets.
Nothing is set in stone, says my Tennyson. Nothing is still. And everything might be or might not. And what he saw, with all those magics of the past time, was a shifting of the hinges. Worlds changed forever.
There was a war on but everyone, everyone, was fighting themselves. He found a way to bring us all onto the one path, to sort wheat from chaff. He flooded the world with his elixirs and those that died thanked him. Those that rose up thanked him too. Death is a gift that he gave out willingly. He made them all see its beauty.
CHAPTER 18
THERE’S A HALF-DOZEN of them. Some of the biggest men I’ve ever seen. Like that damn Hunter, but none’s knifed up.
They’re confident in their strength, that’s to my advantage. At least I’ve got that blade in my boot, though cutting’s likely to end with broken bones, cutting’s close work. And I reckon I can run faster than any of them if I’ve room, if I’ve a chance.
I puff up my chest. ‘What of it?’ I say, and gesture at the lightening sky. ‘It’s day, isn’t it?’
Someone laughs. ‘You know what we mean.’
There’s the train tracks nearby. And narrow streets, running up the mountainside, and houses, plenty of houses. And I can smell bread baking somewhere, and the smell of the Sun rising and baking the land. The ground’s hard beneath my feet, and there’s not a hint of green anywhere, no grass, no trees. It’s a wilderness of buildings and people; sets my heart pounding so hard it’s hurting in my chest.
The biggest of them, a man with a black beard down to his chest, comes walking towards me. He don’t need to puff his chest, he’s as broad as I am long; kinda fella whose walking by blocks out the Sun.
I look up and up at him. He looks down at me, thumbs in his belt. And the rest of them stand back.
‘How’d you grow so tall?’ I say.
‘We’re made big in the Red City,’ he says. ‘Who’s your Master?’
‘What’s that?’ I say.
The fella laughs. Me standing up to a giant with not so much as a slingshot to hand.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Never had no master.’ I crack my neck, left and right.
And he finds it offensive somehow; a storm knits itself together in those big dark brows of his. ‘You’re coming with me, boy.’
‘Not coming with no one,’ I say, and I’m sprinting before I finish talking, kicking up red dust, and he swipes out at me but I’m darting wide. Another tries to tackle me but he’s not nearly quick enough.
I’m over those grasping hands, even manage a quick kick in his ribs as I jump, can’t resist showing off. Don’t take much comfort in his groaning; too focused on the narrow road ahead. They’re faster than I thought but I can keep myself in front. Just not far enough.
So I start for where the street’s all bends and angles. I take one turn, then another. But I don’t know where I’m running to. All I’ve got is my speed.
There’s a whistle on the rooftops. A cry and the banging of a bell. And I’m putting on more speed, lungs burning almost as bad as my legs.
A door opens to the right of me. A young face peers out.
‘Here, in here,’ he cries.
And because I can’t think of nothing else, I take the doorway. He shuts the door behind me.
‘Who are you?’ I demand when I’ve breath enough for talking.
He puts a finger to his lips.
Footfalls crashing d
own the street. Low cries. Men make ungainly predators. I feel some shame for my kind.
The boy stands there, ear against the door, not that he needs it, these blokes clod by all thump and crash and shouting.
‘They’re gone,’ he says, after a while.
‘What did they want?’
There’s laughter, lots of laughter, and I jerk around, quick, take in the room.
It’s dingy, crowded with chairs, and there’s boys here, five of them, and they’re all smiling at me.
‘You,’ the door boy says.
One of the boys taps his skull. ‘They want what’s in your head.’
I can be slow some days but the blood’s pulsing.
‘Insurrectionists,’ I say.
‘Some people might call ’em heroes,’ someone says.
Another laughs. ‘There’s no heroes in this world. Just stupid men, and monsters.’
I know these boys. I know their type. ‘You’re Day Boys like me,’ I say.
The boy at the door bows. ‘We were Day Boys. Now we’re the lost. The discarded. We’re the ones the Masters let go. The softer ones anyway, the ones that couldn’t quite bear to kill us. We was at the top of the heap and now we’re at the bottom.’
I look at him and he half-laughs. ‘Memory’s a goad and a bitterness, like you’d imagine.’
‘And those men?’
‘Some of them were like us, it’s how they know. Others not. All of them want the Masters gone. We hide until we get caught, or flee the city. Bit of dying in both of those. But we’ve done all right: we’ve collectivised.’
I’m hardly hearing him.
‘Dain would never leave me,’ I say. ‘Not here.’
‘We all thought that, but here we are, deserted or cast out or fled and not found.’ The door boy taps his chest. ‘I’m Grainer,’ he says, then waggles his thumbs at the others. ‘The tall one’s Midas, that’s Billow with the wispiest beard, Jack with the scar on his chin.’
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