‘I’m sure he does,’ Egan says. ‘And it is, shamefully, true; if not for long. I’d come to the city to find this one. I never quite expected he would find me.’
I look at my shoes.
The constable clears his throat. ‘I have some small use for him, sir. Now that I know he’s spoken true. We’ve troubles that he might know about.’
‘Look at me, boy,’ Egan says, and I do, because I have no choice. ‘Tell him whatever you know. And don’t lie, I can tell when you’re lying. The whole world can.’
I do what I’m told. I tell him about Grainer and the other boys, and it stings a little. But what do I owe them? Grainer ran out on me.
When I’m done, to the constable’s and Egan’s satisfaction, Egan reaches into a pocket, pulls out a gold coin—Sun stamped—and presses it into the constable’s palm. ‘For your trouble,’ he says.
‘Ain’t no trouble,’ the constable says, but he doesn’t hand the coin back. ‘Not like some of them that come through here, why, just the other d…’ His voice drops away, he’s seen Egan’s absence of interest. You never bore one of them, and that’s a fact. ‘Ain’t no trouble,’ he says, then glances to some papers, clears his throat. ‘I best—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Egan says. ‘We have taken up enough of your time.’
We all know whose time we’ve taken up.
I smile, and I get a glare from him that chills me to the marrow. ‘Come with me, boy,’ Egan says, and his voice is a cold blade. Of course, I follow him. I don’t want to all of a sudden, but I do.
There’s a carriage waiting for us: Egan gestures that I get in. And when I do he follows, and there’s not a hint of humour in his eyes. Perhaps I should have shut my mouth and taken my punishment for the theft.
He taps the roof ceiling and the carriage jolts forward.
‘So. You know the scrambling life now,’ Egan says. ‘Didn’t take you long to find your feet, however shakily. Dain taught you something at least, even if you have showered him in dishonour.’
I look away, at the city passing by, those sodium lights. The haze of dust, the smell of diesel, coke and horses.
There’s more silence. We pass through the gates, the city behind us, and ahead of us. All the light of that deep city and it illuminates Egan’s displeasure.
‘Master Dain, is he all right?’
‘I am here, am I not?’ Egan says. ‘We do not see eye to eye on much. But I used what influence I have to return here.’ Egan turns his gaze upon the city. ‘Dain was sent home. You ruined him, broke his heart. My Grove is looking after him. I was ready to hunt for you, and now—here we are. You and me.’
‘I am to go home?’
Egan nodded. ‘For a little while. No more than a year and probably less. You will train your replacement, a new boy due in a few weeks. But all this is nothing and nowhere yet. We’ve a sharper task ahead. You’ve been summoned by the first ones, the ones made on the sixth day of the world: the Council itself. They do not like it when boys run, it sets the wrong example. Surely you were aware of this. Dain did not keep you that ignorant, or perhaps he trusted you more than you deserved. We are to head there directly, and then home.’
‘The Council,’ I say. ‘The Council will eat me up.’
And there’s such regret mixed with my fear. Egan’s right, I’ve brought trouble and shame to my Master, and he never deserved it.
Egan nods. ‘Perhaps, they have been known to do such things. Perhaps not. Now, I will give you what guidance I can. And I will accompany you.’ To find comfort in Egan’s company is an oddity. But here he is all that is familiar. ‘You must listen to them,’ he says. ‘You must be honest. You cannot hide. They know all the hiding places in your skull and the deeper you hide, the deeper they will dig.’
We’ve gone down into the bowels of the city, down and around the Wide Circle Road with its face-worn statues of the Fallen Dark—here a stony hand raised against the Sun, here a head tilted in direct defiance of the killing light. And then we’re hurtling towards the great tower of the Sun, its light burning through the cracks in the carriage.
At the foot of the temple we disembark, and I’ve never seen Egan’s face lit like this; there’s a terrifying beauty in it. His skin as pale as cream and dark too, like it’s both night and day. He slides glasses with smoked lenses over his eyes, and I’m left squinting.
In that awesome luminosity, Egan crouches down. ‘You must keep your mouth shut now, boy. I know how hard that is for you, but you must if you wish to live. And you must be brave. Fear and doubt could kill you here. You have never been in so much danger. Death has set his throne down within these halls, and even I might not be able to protect you.’
The Council of Teeth. The frighteners. Not a Day Boy who isn’t warned of them, isn’t threatened with their scrutiny. We curse in their name if we’re really crazy mad. Council this and Council that. Not that they hear us.
We walk beneath the Luminance towards a small door. A Master is waiting there; he looks at me, then Egan.
‘So this is the one?’
Egan nods. And I do my best to keep my eyes cast at my feet.
The Master of the door considers me with smiling deadly eyes. ‘Oh, I guess you believe that you’ve seen things. Hah!’ He lays a cold hand gently on my head for a moment, then in a movement faster than I can see it, he’s back at the door, swinging it open, gesturing that we might pass.
Egan grabs my hand, and we walk through the doorway, past its guardian. ‘Welcome. Welcome, Master Egan and little squeaking Day Boy.’
The door shuts behind us and we are in a room big and wide. It hums, with the hum of machines. If there’s a stutter to my steps, Egan makes up for it. ‘If I had time,’ he says, ‘I’d have schooled you in this. But I do not. The Night Train runs late because of us. Because of you.’
We walk across the room to another set of doors. They open at our approach, a small room—almost a cage—one side lined with buttons. Lots of buttons.
‘This is a lift.’ Egan says. ‘You’d have read of them no doubt. You are not to be lifted, however. Not yet. We will descend before we rise again.’
Egan presses the bottom button, and the lift drops.
Down and down.
‘This was once an installation. Military. It housed all the sciences of violence. The wickedness of man. But there were more wicked things in the world. And they were waiting. Are you frightened?’ Egan says.
And I nod, even as I am wrapped in the wonder of it: this falling box.
‘Good. Fear’ll keep you honest.’
The doors open, and it’s Egan who hesitates at the portal, and that fills me with a grander dread. There’s a scream somewhere: there is laughter, and the hint of a low growl.
We enter a well-lit hall, narrow at first, that opens onto cages. I give the one nearest a good looking-at and there’s a still form in one corner. Just a lump of folded limbs, bent neck and misery. But as we approach it stirs and then it’s hard against the bars. So fast it’s less movement than magic, dark and swift. An incandescent gaze fixes on me like the North Star.
‘Mr Egan. Mr Egan, a gift for me?’ The voice is sca
rcely a whisper. ‘A tender little morsel?’
And I recognise him.
‘Dav,’ I say.
‘Mark? Oh, Mark, of course it is. Been a good fella?’ Dav stares at me, and I take a few steps towards him.
Egan’s hand closes over my shoulder.
‘Steady,’ he says. ‘Steady. He is but part-way done.’
These are those that aren’t discarded and didn’t run. These are Day Boys yet to become Masters. Shifting slowly from one form to another. And this is far worse than that lock-up. Here’s a hunger that reaches inside of me. I can feel Dain, and Egan and all the others in these Masters-not-quite. I can feel the changes coming on them without the Mastery.
‘Just a little,’ Dav croons in a thin voice that penetrates. ‘Just a little. Come here, Mark. I’ve new secrets to share.’
And what was still becomes motion. Like a flock of pigeons that’s seen the hawk, except I’m the prey and a hundred cages are rattled and tested filled with cries and moans, and just a little.
Egan squeezes my shoulder. ‘Move,’ he says. ‘Move. You’re safe, these cages cannot bend to their will, but it does not do to linger.’
It’s a long walk down that hallway: the unbearable weight of all that hunger, all those eyes new to predation rolling in their orbits, reflecting the light of the hall. The air’s hot and dry, and there’s the thin smell of old blood and rancid piss. And they beat their hands against the bars, and cast their shadows across the floor, whip-like and hungry.
‘Just a little, Mr Egan.’
Hands reach through the bars. And I think of that other prison. The hungers so different there, and yet I’d be dead and ruined just as quick.
‘Not enough blood in this boy for the least of you. And what there is is thin stuff,’ Egan says. ‘Not enough to fill you up.’
‘Just a little.’
‘No reason in them,’ Egan says. ‘Not yet. Just hunger. Walk, boy, walk. You are safe with me.’
Takes forever, that minute or two, but we reach the end of it. At last.
We turn into another hall and they stop their cries. More metal walls, a short one ending in a door. No cages this time, no cries, nor sound but for our footfalls and the beating of my heart. I can feel a panic rising.
‘Deep, breathe deep. A thousand terrors could not prepare you for this place; better to trust in your breathing.’
The door is old and made of metal, but like timber it looks as if it’s swelled some, though I don’t know how that can be. Rust stains the door, a deep flaking red towards the bottom. One corner’s buckled a little.
‘Prepare yourself,’ Egan says, and he presses a hand against the door and begins to open it.
It’s always been blood, and human blood at that. Dain says that they can’t subsist on anything but. Some have tried, and it may work for a while, but that way lies madness. Our blood is at once calming and exciting to them. Those new to Mastery—and thus not quite Masters, I suppose—will play with it. Or they’ll deny their hungers and seek some substitute.
Never lasts. There comes a point when they succumb. And if they don’t they sink down, low and lower. Grow more monstrous, and that’s the thing, they become worse than they ever feared.
Hunger’s a nasty creature. We’ve all had our bellies empty, we know its pull. But they’ve a hunger beyond hunger. Cruel and vengeful.
Was a Master once who fed only on swans. Had a madness, before the madness. Killed a whole town. A Master such as that isn’t a Master anymore, but something ill and wrong, something that must be destroyed.
They say it was the swans that killed him, a mighty flock of them descending. Wasn’t nothing of the sort, Dain says.
It was the Council of Teeth.
CHAPTER 21
THE DOOR OPENS stiff and slow and shrieking. Even with Egan’s great strength it’s a long time opening. And then before us is darkness. Such suffocating midnight. Egan’s fingers close around my wrist so tight I can feel the bones moving. He drags me through and it’s like he’s dragging himself.
The door closes and it’s dark, darker than anything I have ever known, and it takes the breath from me: more than a punch. I am gasping and keening.
The sound of dripping water and something else, a dim rustling that grows louder. And all I can smell is blood, it chokes the air. Nothing old or dead about it, this is quick and new, and I can’t help but prickle and fear at the sense of it.
There is a momentary flash of light, no more than a match lit, but it seems a brightness grander than the Sun. A light of revelation, a filler of cracks and crannies. And I see it all with such vivid and swift clarity. Maybe I die a little. Step from one world to another.
Beyond the shallow pool they stand, coffins of stone or petrified wood heaped and jumbled in broad pyramids.
No. That sounds too neat, sounds too much of man, and these aren’t men. This is the Council of Teeth lounging in these caskets, so many of them, the coffins extending beyond my vision. Every eye is upon me. A driving, terrifying brightness. More powerful than any Master I have ever seen, but these aren’t Masters either. They’re lords beneath the mountain. This is the true City in the Shadow of the Mountain, here where the dark dips deep and down and down and down.
And I close my eyes and I’m granted a vision. Of a midnight vehemence that unfurled from these deep roots of stone, that spread bleak crow wings to beat against the wind, to smother and to rule. It rose up, and fell again. And buried itself, patient and deep.
Then all is of pitch again, complete and smothering, dark but for flashes of light behind my eyes.
‘Still,’ Egan says. ‘Be still.’ And I realise that I am fitting and jerking, my eyes rolling back, teeth clenching so tight they might crack beneath their own relentless pressure. ‘Still.’
And I find the calm, his cold fingers tight around my wrist, his eyes staring into mine, and there’s light in that gaze and a path for me to follow, and I am home in my skull, and the Sun is shining and the world is settled into its familiar rhythms. ‘Come back from those shudders,’ he says. ‘Come back from the fear. Still. Be still.’
‘I’m here,’ I say.
‘Good,’ Egan says. ‘Because you must.’
‘So this is the boy?’ A voice rises from the dark. Deep and as old as the rocks of the mountain, the air sings and sighs like the walls are covered in leaves or leathery wings, and there is nothing cooling in that breath, it smothers and burns. ‘You are here in the dark that reveals all. You are here in the heat that marks the wind’s demise, where old stone folds and sinks into the fiery heart of the world. All the voices whisper here. Whisper and die.’
‘He is young,’ another voice says, ‘to be the source of so much trouble.’
‘He has a knack for it,’ Egan says.
There is a laugh that goosebumps me, I feel a little faint. Egan’s grip tightens, and a finger touches my face.
‘What should we do with him?’ The finger pulls away. ‘Boy? What should we do with you? I am sure you have an answer for that. If you haven’t bitten off your own tongue.’
‘Let me go
home,’ I say.
‘Why should we?’
‘So I can repair what I have done. The dishonour of running. The dismay of my Master. Let me finish my days in my home.’
‘We are not known for second chances. Gifts given are to be seized, not fled from. You were to study the ways of this world, and instead you ran. What right do you have of it now? What right of breath or heartbeat?’
I swallow, and I can taste my blood. ‘If I do not deserve this, then be done with me.’ If death is what is meant for me, then I would hurry to it with my blood quick in my heart. Hurry to it, and have it finish me at once. I don’t want any lingering. That was my mistake when I saw the spiral; I should have stayed and faced whatever threat it represented. I want to speak of it, but, instead, Egan’s grip tightens. And I know there is no room for excuses. ‘Be done with me,’ I say again.
There’s a chattering laughter, a cricketing wave of it, that echoes in the dark halls. Laugh ignites laugh which ignites more laughter. And I’m washed over by their humour, made to feel like nothing.
‘You ran. You ran. And then, you have committed acts of theft, and lingered with insurgents. And then, you let yourself be caught. To run, and return. To be so meek…’
‘He did what he did to survive,’ Egan says.
‘And that is reason enough? A beast does that. Those newborn things in their cages, they could claim survival is at the heart of their madness, too, and it would be true. That is why we have cages, why we have punishments. We are the quiet after chaos, we are the reason of shadows. The Council of Teeth, not just the bite.’
The dark is closing in, I can feel it almost as tight as Egan’s grip. I’m a-sweat and a-shake, and I can’t see them that would judge me. But I open my mouth.
‘I’ve always been loyal,’ I say. ‘I’ve always served.’
‘And we would expect no less,’ comes that burrowing voice. ‘But have you served us well?’
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