The godsworn swung open the grill and led them into the cupola. The only feature inside was a pit, twenty feet wide and as deep as death. Rough slabs of stone embedded in its walls formed a stairway into darkness.
“Is he to be trusted?” the godsworn asked.
“No.” Kareem looked Jon over, proffered a dirty strip of hessian. “Surrender your stick – and you’re wearing this.”
I’m already at their mercy, Jon thought, and closed his eyes in submission. His logic couldn’t hold back the panic he felt as Kareem tied the blindfold tight.
An arm looped around his own, pulled him forwards. Kareem was half his weight; if Jon tumbled, they would both fall. With faltering steps, he made his way down the stairs, his free hand grasping at the wall’s rough masonry.
He tried to count the corridors that they passed, to make a map of the place in his mind. The stones in the wall became slippery and warm to his touch. Jon imagined giant scales, and shuddered.
Deeper, he was led from the stairs into a maze of passages. Kareem spun him at every turning. Soon he had no idea how many lefts and rights he had taken, or in what order. It was impossible. He felt as sick as a dog and cursed himself for imagining the Freeborn to be fools. There was no way he could describe the route he had taken to the censors, or find his way back.
***
“Remove your blindfold.”
Jon was blinded by the glare of a lamp.
“Where am I?”
“A long way from home. Keep up, big man, or you’ll be lost for all eternity.” Kareem turned his lanthorn away and tramped off into the darkness. Jon blundered after him, half blind, suddenly more afraid of losing his guide than of reaching his destination.
They travelled tunnels of red earth, always downwards sloping, surfaces greasy with slime. They were barely tall enough for a man, and if they had once been part of a mine or catacombs, no tools or litter lay beside the paths and no engravings or alcoves decorated the walls to prove it.
Jon wondered how deep they walked and felt the pressure of tons of rock and soil overhead.
The corridor widened into an open space where footsteps echoed. The floor was pockmarked with sandy rivulets, and wet underfoot. There was a faint sense of a breeze but no stars. Droplets of water fell all around. Jon tested one that splashed on his hand, tasted minerals and acid.
Two lanthorns swung in their direction. A thick Glaschu accent called distantly from the darkness. “Who goes there?”
Kareem grunted his name and followed the lights. A small rowing boat appeared in the gloom, lying lopsided on the gravel. A rope rose from its prow to a small wooden pier that extended from a bank of clay. Jon realised that he stood on the bed of an underground river.
The guards on the pier wore drab workingmen’s clothes but their chests were crossed with powder belts and they were armed with swords and arquebuses, wheel locks of recent design, which they trained on Jon. It was the first time he had faced a man down the wrong end of a barrel and it made his skin crawl.
One of them helped Kareem to clamber onto the decking.
“Where’s the general?” Kareem asked.
“Giving a sermon.” The guard thumbed over his shoulder as his colleague helped Jon onto the bank.
Jon followed Kareem along the subterranean riverbank to a wall of thick stone. There was a culvert at its base, surrounded by a litter of iron bars and recently chipped rock. The ends of a rope ladder were tied to the remaining stubs of black metal that protruded from the ground like a hog’s teeth.
Kareem gestured with exaggerated politeness. “After you.”
Jon squeezed his bulky frame backwards through the small opening. His legs dangled in the void beyond. His feet groped for a surface. Feeling one, he dropped down, and stumbled as it slewed underfoot. He held out his arms to keep his balance, saw that he stood on a pontoon floating in the waters of an arched tunnel. Kareem laughed and scurried down to join him, nimble as a monkey.
A punt and pole were tethered to the side of the wooden platform. Kareem untied the flat-bottomed boat, slid it into the water and steadied it. Jon climbed gingerly on board, half expecting it to flounder under his weight and huddled at the front of its small square-cut prow as they cast off into the underworld.
Tall columns loomed out of nowhere and passed silently on either side of them as they glided across the water. There was no light save for Kareem’s lanthorn on the dank walls, no sound but the dripping of water. For a moment, Jon fancied that he was in the land of the dead, being ferried to He-who-sits-upon-the-mountain for judgement, who would weigh his sins in the scales, against the tear of a child.
“What is this place?” Jon asked, hoping for a clue that he could pass onto the censors, should he make it out alive.
“A cistern. We’ve fixed it up so it doesn’t fill. The water’s only a couple of yards deep.”
Jon heard the distant chatter of voices and assumed that by some trick of amplification the sounds of the city had been transported by well or sewer. As they grew louder, he turned from side to side in confusion, trying to understand their source.
They drifted around a corner and a hundred lights came into view. He saw strands of lanthorns hanging from ropes that looped through the air like the rigging of a ship, a score of campfires that burned in braziers suspended in mid-air. The shadows of men moved amongst them and the air stank of people, the water or worse. He jolted, startled, as a bucket flew overhead, speeding along a high wire, suspended from a whining pulley.
Jon slowly made sense of what he could see: a shanty town made of platforms and bridges, pontoons and old rowing boats that hovered just above the water, lashed to the columns that supported the roof of the ancient underground reservoir. It was as if an absent-minded shipwright had decided to construct a galleon from the top down, and then forgotten to build the hull.
“This is our home,” Kareem said. “We call it the Holt.”
The dream
It is a blazing hot day. The stamping boots of grown-ups fill the air with dust. It doesn’t bother them, but it makes Daniel’s eyes sting and Dahlia is coughing up a storm.
He drags his sister from the vintner. The quicker they can bring home the bottle of wine, the less likely a beating from Father. They hurry across the street, deep into the crowds.
“Stop pulling me, Dan-Dan,” Dahlia complains. It’s not her fault. She’s only little; she doesn’t understand. Dan is ten years old, nearly a man. Responsible.
A path opens up between the legs of the adults, like a tunnel or a forest track, and at its end sits the man with the painted face.
The crowd freezes mid-stride, motionless, like statues in a memorial. It’s as if time itself has deferred to Daniel’s destiny.
The painted man beckons Daniel over with a wave and a smile. His golden tooth glints, and in the dream it makes a noise like a chime.
Daniel and Dahlia stand in front of him.
“What are you doing?” Daniel asks, staring at the man’s lap. He has a tray balanced between his knees and upon the tray sit three cups, inverted. It’s some kind of game; one that Daniel has not seen before. The painted man licks his lips. His teeth are rotten; his tongue is serpentine. Somehow, in the dream, Daniel doesn’t notice the danger.
“You can keep the gold, if you can follow it,” the painted man says, “but you must concentrate, boy – real hard.”
He sets a coin spinning with a casual flick of his wrist, a crown, covers it with one of the cups. He shuffles them slowly. Daniel’s eyes, as sharp as an eagle’s, track every move. The cups move faster and faster, flicking from hand to hand, but for Daniel time slows. He can see everything. The game is easy.
The cups stop. Daniel picks out the one that covers the coin, tries to peek under its lip as the man lifts it from the tray. There is nothing underneath. Daniel realises that he has been tricked.
<
br /> The painted man makes a sad face.
Daniel feels dread, rising through his legs and into his heart. He turns. Dahlia is gone. He screams her name into the crowd, turns full circle, searching desperately. She has disappeared as completely as the coin. Snatched by sleight of hand. He runs into the thicket of men’s legs, pushing and screaming as they tighten around him. They become a cage. He is trapped. She is gone, forever.
Somewhere far behind him, the painted man begins to laugh.
***
“Fuck!”
Where am I?
Daniel’s mind whirled. Reluctantly his faculties returned to his head, some semblance of sense returned. I’m in bed, in a dark room and I’m still drunk, he realised, and sat upright.
His head throbbed viscously. Waking up drunk was just about the only thing worse than waking up with a hangover. Apart from that dream.
Actually, the dream wasn’t so bad in remembrance. He could almost forgive himself when he was awake: blame it all on Father’s drunkenness, remind himself how young he had been, that he was a victim, not the criminal.
Almost.
There was no forgiving the tightness in his face or the taste in his mouth.
“Fuck.”
A passing night-maid cast a hush towards his door. Daniel barely noticed and did not care. His mind was still locked inwards. He groped about for his tinderbox and after five minutes of swearing, incompetence got his candle lit.
Three years spent perfecting my knowledge of law and the martial arts in order to listen to the flatulent gossip of idiots. He sat on the edge of his bed, head in hands, and totted up the evenings he had wasted eavesdropping at Corbin’s command, the hours spent watching dissipated demi-masters stuff their mouths with quail and biscuits, quaff wines from every corner of the globe. Not just any wines, obscenely expensive bottles normally reserved for name days and funerals. They spilt almost as much as they drank. They were unworthy of investigation. The greatest danger that they posed was to the carpets.
He had begun to detest their careless hands and rowdy banter. In the taverns of Turbulence, you guarded your tongue and listened for the threat in every spoken word. The demi-masters hadn’t the brains to hide their thoughts. Some delighted in causing offence, as if doing so could have no consequence.
And I have learnt nothing, despite their ceaseless yapping.
All the while Corbin, the grey bastard, was searching for clues, solving the mystery of Adelmus’s murder without Daniel’s help. It was worse than having to help Mother clean the mill-house while Jon and Father worked the sails.
He needed to piss.
The house of office was several corridor lengths away. He reached for the chamber pot under his bed and emptied himself. As he looked down at his manhood, he noticed a softness about his stomach that looked suspiciously like the beginnings of fatness. He cursed Corbin to the land of the dead and back and launched into his drills. He worked his way through the Brotherhood’s system of grips, wards, evasions and flourishes. Every punch and kick felled an imaginary prosecutor.
Sweating and exhausted, his temper subsided. There was no point in going to bed; broken sleep was worse than getting none at all, and it would be dawn soon. He knuckled the sides of his eyes and watched the geometric mouldings of the ceiling blur. A thick envelope lay on his writing desk. Its seal was the colour of dried blood and stamped with the henge icon of the Verge.
My contract.
He supposed he ought to read it, however pointless that might be. It would start to look suspicious if he left it uninspected forever. He broke the wax and withdrew a loaf of papers inscribed on the headed paper of the Honourable Company of Cunning.
The letter of welcome from Chairman Gleam was banal. The conditions of his new employment were lengthy and printed in a type almost too small to read. One detail stood out; his stipend was two hundred pounds a year, less the cost of his materials and lodgings, to be held on account at the Convergence. It was a ridiculous sum of money. Daniel doubted a magistrate earned so much. He would lend it to Jon, after the mission was over, if he was allowed to keep it. Finally, there was a schedule of employment.
It said that he had been assigned to the workshop for his first week of paid work, making votive offerings and the like. He knew that already, had spent several days working with some of the more hopeless demi-masters. Was it a punishment for something, he wondered? His carousing? Maybe his chivalry towards Miranda? Had Gleame arranged it to keep him out of the way of the real talent? It didn’t matter either way. He wasn’t at the Verge to learn the cunning arts; he was there to solve a crime.
The problem was, the way things were, that wasn’t going to happen.
Corbin be damned, Daniel thought. If the bastard wouldn’t let him help, he would have to find his own way to prove himself. Where to start?
I must think like a censor. Nothing was forthcoming. I should pray to the All-seeing for insight, trust the gods to guide me… Gods help me! I’m turning into my brother.
Daniel raised his hands and brought them together like a pair of wings. As he did so two ideas combined into one, gripped him. He smiled wryly and thanked He-who-sails-the-wind. If that was providence in action, it was a subtle thing indeed, but wherever it had come from, he now had a plan.
I am not yet a censor, and that gives me one advantage over Corbin, he thought. The Verge’s diminutive temple with its conical glass steeple lay in the mess of the atrium, confined to a corner like a wayward child. If Corbin could not talk to the godsworn then that was a rock left unturned. When the week’s work was done, Daniel’s investigation would begin.
He changed his mind about the value of short sleep, and buried his head under his pillow.
Terms of engagement
The Drowner’s Finger looked like a land for the dead, Miranda thought, albeit a pleasant one. Some driftwood, the sun-bleached skull of a whale and the blackened ribcage of a longship decorated the small promontory that cowered under the Convergence’s leaden walls. They helped to keep the salt and sea spray at bay.
The garden’s centrepiece was a natural spring ringed with stout oak posts and bedded with smooth pebbles of Blue John, purple and gold. According to Master Somney, it was the work of ancient men, each stone the culmination of a hazardous pilgrimage. The purpose of those journeys had been lost in time but the slow accumulation of ritual and superstition had made the pool a superior source of magic. The greater part of its power had been drained in the construction of the walls that towered above them. Now it served, like a retired warhorse or obsolete artillery piece, as an instrument of training and practice.
Every place at the pool’s edge was taken. Miranda waited impatiently for her turn.
It could be worse, she thought. It was more crowded yesterday. Of the forty or so demi-masters who had arrived with her, only two dozen remained. Lloyd was gone, Bartholomew as well, neither one expelled but rather having gone of their own free choice. A few days of manual labour, the indignity of shared accommodation, and the revelation of what mastering the cunning would entail had been enough for them.
Miranda was mystified by their irresolution. What had they expected? The Convergence was a place of industry, not a school. Every day that they received a stipend and did not invest magic, the masters were losing money. It was a state of affairs that would not be tolerated a moment longer than necessary.
The demi-masters at the water’s edge chopped the air with ungainly hands, attempted gibberish incantations. They were nervous, of being seen to be foolish, of a million rules unknown, and so they stuttered and stumbled over the unpronounceable. Pathetic, Miranda thought. How could they expect to bend magic to their will when they couldn’t even control their own mouths and bodies?
Somney watched from a distance. The scowl on his face confirmed her assessment. These young adults had been thrown into a world where the route to suc
cess had to be found, not followed. Cosseted upbringings had left them ill-suited to the task. Miranda closed her eyes. The constructs she had memorised whirled inside her mind. Crisp cubes and cuboids, pyramids, cones, prisms, cylinders and spheres jostled for attention.
Three young masters practised amongst the neophytes. They were an altogether different matter. Watching them at work was a lesson in itself. They moved gracefully, muttering numinous incantations, movements aligned to the magic. She could see that too, dimly, or at least sense it in some way. Its presence ebbed and flowed from one area to another, evading the wills of the masters like an unwilling partner at a dance. Anticipating its next move seemed to be the art of the game.
The masters’ dress was as outlandish as their exercise. The first, a brooding type, seemed to have made a fetish of nature. He wore a robe of leaves and a crown of mistletoe and ivy, and stank like the countryside. Organic. She thought his approach a cliché, like something from a child’s story, boring and obvious.
The second was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He wore only a loincloth and every one of his gestures ended in a display of perfectly aligned muscle. Watching him was a guilty pleasure. She tried not to stare.
The final master had put out his eyes, or else had persuaded someone else to do it, and recently. His face was wrapped in gauze, its edges steeped with blood. A week ago, she would have been disgusted; now her revulsion was tinged with an admiration for the dedication of the act, his total commitment to the craft.
Master Somney called a rotation, and Miranda nervously took a place at the water’s edge. She stood between two posts, waist high and weathered, between Nathan and the master who looked like a shrub. This close to the water she could see a sparkling cold light, not on its surface but just above it.
Wild magic – and she could see it with bare eyes.
The Censor's Hand: Book One of the Thrice~Crossed Swords Trilogy Page 15
