There is a sudden quivering of wings or limbs, part insect, part warm flesh, where those things should not share a likeness. It sounds wrong, and it settles into me, that wrong, settles and builds. A shrill hissing floods the air.
‘Leave him with us. We will decide.’
Egan lets go of my arm and the door opens and shuts before my eyes can adjust to the shifting light, but I get an image of so many dark shapes. And I am alone, and in the dark with a Council of Teeth.
CHAPTER 22
THERE’S SILENCE FOR a while, just the sensation of eyes. Of being watched, and my skin’s crawling. Why do folks watch me so? But I stand there as quiet and casual as I can. This isn’t much different from them lost boys. So I tell myself.
‘Why should we not just kill you now?’
And I want to say that I am just now starting to live, that I’m missing home, missing Anne, and the hot rasp of the wind through the trees, that I’m missing the rising and setting Sun, the great big blind eye of the moon. But I stand still, not shaking even as hands touch my face again and again. Fingers cold and urgent like stones that have swallowed frost and forgotten to thaw, touch that hurts and numbs at the same time so you can’t tell the difference.
‘Speak to us.’
‘I have always served my Master to my best.’
‘Your best.’
‘Your best. We find that hard to believe. You have brought dishonour on him, and through him, us.’
And here, I truly see what I’ve always known. Dain is my Master, but he isn’t his alone. Dain has his masters too, and they are ancient in their mastery.
‘So killing me will honour him? Will honour you?’
‘Boy, do not argue. You’ve not the wit for it.’
I lower my gaze to the dark at my feet, which is just as dark as the dark before me. Impenetrable and unknowable. There is no truth, unless it is the ultimate truths. The darkness that is the end of all things. But how am I to know that? All I am is a Day Boy, pulse aching in my throat.
‘Boy, you speak our name too often in vain.’
I try not to show my fear, but fear is all I am now. How could they know? They’re just prodding and poking, all the whispering voices.
‘You, Dougie. Yes, we know your names.’
‘The wind whispers them to us.’
‘And good Grove, of whom you’ll be the ruin.’
‘We see disaster all around you.’
‘The last days of a Day Boy are a storm, spinning and wild.’
‘A battle of possibilities.’
‘Are you to be drawn here, or cast out?’
‘Are you to be a Master or a servant?’
‘Are you worthy?’
Don’t argue, I’m thinking. Don’t argue. Don’t argue. I want to argue, I want to know what the wind says, and why is it so cruel? It can’t speak to them all the time, the air is still a good bit of the time. What if I am only good when the sky is becalmed? Are they watching then? I want to know all these things. But I keep my lips zipped, and in truth it’s all I can do not to drop, shaking, on the ground and beg for mercy. Maybe that’s what they want.
A hand, hard as sticks, rough as a shattered stone, closes around my arm. ‘You’re such a little thing, not a thread of meat on you.’
‘Not a thread, but there’s blood in my veins. And it is yours.’ I try not to have too much quaver in my voice but it is there. The air chills, my skin gets prickled and bumped with the cold. I’m a nerve: busting and fearful. ‘All of it is yours.’
And at this moment it is. Is that what they want, an offering? I don’t wish for the ruin of my Master. I’m not one to roll over and spill secrets at whispers in the dark, but I’d die for those I love. I tilt my neck. Not that they’ve need of such acquiescence.
The hand tightens and then I am lifted up. Up through the dark, and all I can feel is hot breath, the beating of dark wings. And I’d piss myself here if there was piss in me but I’m dry and cracked as the red earth outside. My lips are tight against my teeth. My balls have crawled halfway up my guts.
‘I could split your skull,’ says a voice right in my ear. Skin’s prickling now, that voice is loud, so close. I can hear the clattering of its teeth. Feel the working of its muscles, hard with exertion, but easy with it too, like it was born to flight, not stone. ‘Split your skull and bleed the story from you. All your monkey words and your fear and pain.’
‘Let me fall,’ I quaver. ‘Let me fall.’
And it does.
I flip twice through the air, darkness, darkness and down and down.
And then there’s hands snatching me up again. And this time there might be a drop of piss in me! I’m human after all.
‘Do not think you can tell us what to do. Down here we plan, listening to the wind, down here we are thought and scheming, and you are part of that. All of you in the open sky. We are the Stewards of Blood, the Council of Teeth, and you are a child of sticks and bones with piss in your pants. We are those that rule—and we always have been. We’re the shadows that come spilling from the cracks with evening time. We are the voice of reason and the despair that comes with it. Those we made still think they’re closer to you than to us, but they aren’t, even if you can make them think they are. For all their hungers they’ve not got a thimbleful of beating blood within them. They’ve no pulse but for yours and that is why they cling to you so. But here is where they will reside, one day, down in the dark, one by one. When we call them to us.’
My feet thump onto the hard ground, and I land heavily and roll on my back into piles of rocks and old bones. It hurts, but I stand. The earth is brittle beneath my feet.
‘Leave us,’ the voices say. ‘Leave us, and call in the Master.’
I walk back through the door. It is opened before me, by something fast and strong, another loud squeal, and into that lit hall I am almost pushed. Egan looks at me, and I’m blinking like a newborn thing.
‘They want to talk to you,’ I manage, and cough up a little dust. Egan’s lips thin. He straightens his jacket. Brushes at the shoulders, actually fusses a bit, and I can see some of the man he was, or even the boy.
‘You wait here,’ he says, turning to me. ‘No matter how long. No running off.’
I smile, sort of. ‘No run left in me,’ I say.
Egan grunts and walks back into the Council. And I’m alone. Nearby in the hall of cages one of them howls like a mad dog, and someone laughs. And I realise that the heart of the Masters’ world is all rage and madness. The heart of the world that I live in is a beast cruel and sick.
I drop onto the ground, and push my palms into my eyes; my head is throbbing. I want to be sick, but I won’t throw up here.
‘You did good,’ comes a whisper: Dav. And it sounds like the Dav of old, the one who taught me to fight, to hold my tears, to be brave. ‘I can feel their satisfaction.’
I don’t move my hands from my face. ‘I did nothing.’
But there’s no answer.
Egan isn’t that long, and when he comes back, he is quiet. A little broken in a way I can’t unde
rstand. And I can only guess at what he’s seen. Because he can see in the Dark: he has its measure, and it’s terrified him.
‘What did they say?’ And I ask it gentle, no arrogance at all.
For a moment I think he’s going to say nothing, he just looks at me, and then he smiles as if at some passing fancy. ‘That if I were to kill you, now would be the best time. Perhaps the only time.’
‘So will you kill me?’ I’m too tired to fight, even if I could.
Egan shakes his head. ‘Time to go home,’ he says.
We don’t speak as we walk back past them cages of madness. But this time there’s no reaching arms or cries. The Masters-in-waiting are silent, subdued. I don’t see Dav, even though I look hard.
Maybe he’s hiding. Maybe he’s ashamed. But he is what he is now. And the madness will pass, because it must.
I raise my hand in farewell, and then those lift doors open, and Egan’s shuffling me through.
We take the lift with not a hint of conversation, up slow and steady, though I’m remembering that dark flight, and it feels to me that this lift could stop, pause and plummet at any change of heart in them below.
The Master at the door seems disappointed to see us pass, but we barely acknowledge him.
Egan opens the door to our carriage. ‘Hurry, boy,’ he says. ‘The Night Train waits for no one long.’
But that night it waits for us.
I was too young to remember the insurrection, but the consequences…Dain says it was the last gasp. Most of the town’s adults up in arms. Killed two of Dain’s closest allies, wounded another so he had to be put down. But that wasn’t enough.
The ringleaders, when they were caught, were forced to Change. When they were mad with hunger their families were fed to them, and when that was done they were caged, dragged to the centre of the town to await the judgment of the Sun.
And it found them wanting, as Dain might say. I heard it tore strips from them and boiled away their flesh like the Sun burns away a mist. Only a mist don’t go the way they went, crooning and calling, pleading to the Sun, calling to the town to join them.
And then, finally, screaming.
Cruel, monstrous.
Necessary, Dain said.
CHAPTER 23
I GUESS I’M running my mind over it the whole way home—picking at it like it’s some sort of ache and a puzzle wrapped in one. Egan doesn’t talk, just me and him in silence, and this time there’s no books. So what can you do but pick at what’s there and what’s been said? Two fools from the country and the wreckage I’ve made of my life. I could have had more of these days of working, but all I did was cut back the share I had. I knew that Dougie and Grove had their times extended but I’d never thought it could really happen for me. Now I’ve gone and ruined it.
I sit and stare at the dark. Nothing to see but the dim lights of distant homesteads, and I wonder at the lives of those who live there in that middle-of-nowhere grim. How do you measure out such a life?
We stop near midnight in the centre of town, Mr Stevens there at attention. Must’ve been expecting us, his beard’s trimmed, and even though I’m still all thought and fear—there’s a new boy coming, a new boy—home brings out the grins. The sweat of it, the heat, the smells. This is my home, and I can’t help but feel a little heroic. I’ve survived the City in the Shadow of the Mountain, I faced the Council of Teeth, I stole the red nails. Who wouldn’t be proud? Midfield seems a little smaller!
Egan smacks me sharp on the back of the head. ‘This isn’t an occasion for swagger, boy.’
And he is right. Dain! What will Dain think of me? Such a thought was a mere abstraction on the train, now it’s an impending terror.
Egan can see it in my face. Masters can see everything. ‘You know your own way home. Can I trust you to make it there?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I say.
‘Good.’ And then he’s gone, and it’s just me and my dread and my shame.
I’m almost creeping when I reach the house, but it doesn’t matter. He will be aware of my presence.
‘Home,’ I whisper as I open the door. I step through and the world tilts, and he’s there, dropping from the ceiling, darkness coalescing. A form both familiar and like nothing I have ever seen before. His gaze swallows me whole. Studies me. Looking for wounds, looking for the story of my week past.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and that sets him off.
‘Sorry?’ Dain rushes at me, like a storm made man-like but shorn of none of its rage. The whole house quakes and bends, draws in and I am certain to be crushed in his rage. I feel my own bones move in their joints. But I have met the fury of the Council of Teeth; no matter my shame, I cannot submit. I tilt my head, let him come at me.
Then it is gone, that terrible pressure, and it is only Dain staring at me, and I can’t tell what he is feeling. But it is more full, darker, furious and smaller.
‘Sorry,’ he says, and I cannot tell if it is a question or an accusation or an apology.
He shakes like a child—but I am the child, not him—I want to reach out and comfort him, or run away and never come back.
Then he looks at me one more time and flees the room.
CHAPTER 24
THERE’S THE RIVER rushing, quickening around the bend, Sun’s hot, but it’s a lessening thing, grown to its limits and already retreating. Summer’s passing is a slow slide down and then a drop. Few weeks from now, we’ll see our first frosts. The trees are already turning, shifting to the ambers and the reds. And the road here is shaded in that colour on either side of the bank, and Anne’s standing beside me. All the colours I could ever want.
‘How was it?’ Anne asks. We shouldn’t be here, but we are. And there’s a sweetness to that shouldn’t that is sweeter than any other, but I keep it bound up. I keep it where she can’t see it: the foolish smile that I’m hoping doesn’t mark my face. I am happy and terrified at once. I haven’t seen her in so long. How can she put a deeper fear in me than any Master? I’ve faced that council, I’ve had troubles find me that I’d never expected and seen them off, and yet, here, in front of her, it doesn’t mean a thing.
I look at her steady as I can. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’
‘The City of Monsters? Really? Heard you ran. Panicked and ran, out into the Red City. Even I know that is a bad thing to do.’ She says that last bit as though I’m stupid.
Maybe I am.
We’re spitting off Handly Bridge, down on a log that’s got caught in the bridge, half-submerged. I’m thinking it’s a crocodile, and why not? Come all the way down from up north, where they grow big as logs, and I mean big logs. Grey and grinning, and rising from the murk to bring down water buffalo, or roos, or a man. Masters aren’t the only predators.
‘That was just ill circumstance,’ I say.
‘Dain talking to you yet?’
‘A little.’
‘You should have seen him when he thought you lost. He came to see my ma. Such a sadness.’
I feel my heart clench.
‘I thought it might even be the death of him.’
Anne gives me a sly smile. ‘I knew you’d be back.’ She spits out across the shimmering air. ‘So a person can live there?’
‘Yes, but why you’d want to is beyond me. All those folks dressed up, all them Masters crowding out the living.’
Anne laughs. ‘All that city politicking, Ma says it drives the Masters to distraction. Chasing their tails with their teeth and filling the air with schemes and machinations.’
I hock another spit. ‘There was some of that, I reckon, yes.’
‘So what’s it like in the City in the Shadow of the Mountain?’
‘Dry and dark,’ I say. ‘No river like this.’ I close my eyes, feel the Sun on my face, taste the muddy smells of our muddy river—no dust. Then I remember that place deep below, and the shallow ponds that stand before the stone coffins. I wonder if they really are shallow. Perhaps they run deep, deeper than this river, down into the hollow places of the earth. Perhaps they are the true death of the winds, the drowning of them once they have given up their secrets.
‘Were you scared?’ Anne says, and there’s a weight of mockery in her voice. Maybe I’m showing too much.
I puff out my chest. ‘Scared to hell sometimes, but I handled myself OK. I’m still breathing and I saw the heart of that city. I saw the spaces beneath their great brass Luminance.’ And it still haunts my sleep, that bright dark, those endless pools, the hands that closed around my throat. And where they touched, still tender.
Anne folds her hands across her chest. ‘You saw the young Masters’ cages, too?’
I give her a good look. ‘You know about them cages?’
Anne snorts. ‘And you didn’t? Whispers drift both ways.’
‘Of course I knew about them.’
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