by Simon Morden
‘That’s what I’m thinking. Which is seriously fucking mad.’
The horn was sounding again and the pirates were assembling at the junction. They came down the road to find Dalip and Mary by the open front door.
‘That’s most of their human lackeys seen to, by God. But whatever those things are, they won’t face us like men. The dastards used their slaves as shields, to get back inside their bunkers without engaging with good, honest steel. Door to door it’ll have to be.’ Simeon spat on the ground and looked up at the building. ‘So what’s this place?’
‘It’s big enough for our needs, and a decent enough barracks for those not on duty.’
‘Right,’ said Simeon. ‘Search the place, room by room. Break things if you have to. Look for trapdoors, secret passages. Let’s have no surprises.’
Two dozen pirates piled through the doorway, and their voices could be heard, shouting as they banged about, checking every last space.
Elena didn’t join them, and she had Sebastian behind her. Dalip saw, and stepped between them and Mary. He held Sebastian’s gaze for longer than was normally necessary and inclined his head slightly.
‘This isn’t your fight,’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’
Here they were, squaring up to each other like fighting cocks. Considering everything else that had gone on, the situation was verging on the ridiculous, if only they hadn’t both been armed.
‘Mary had nothing to do with Luiza’s death,’ said Dalip, loudly enough so that everyone present could hear.
Then Mary pushed past him. ‘You can’t believe I did. Elena?’
‘You went with Crows,’ she said.
‘I stole the maps back.’ She shook the bag of them at her. ‘Look. Here they are.’
‘You have no honour,’ said Elena.
‘I have plenty of honour.’ Mary threw a cloth bag down at her feet. Worn metal coins spilled out across the dirt.
‘What, what are these?’
‘My honour. They give them to you, and a weapon, at the ferry. It’s all a con, though. Like one of those fairs where all the stalls are fixed, but you never realise until all your money’s gone.’
‘But you worked with Crows, yes?’
‘No. I pretended to work with Crows.’
‘You wanted the maps for yourself. You tried to run off with them when we got here. You cannot be trusted in anything.’ Elena pushed Sebastian forward, towards Mary, presumably assuming that he’d go for her. Dalip could tell he was beginning to see that the situation previously presented to him as clear-cut was anything but.
‘Mary was only doing what she thought was right. The maps don’t belong to us,’ said Dalip. ‘Or rather, they belong to everyone: it doesn’t really matter who owns them. What matters is what we do with them. Crows is working for the White City, whatever that means. He was going to give them, or sell them, to the Lords and Ladies in return for who knows what. We do know that once they had them, that’d be the last we ever saw of them. We have Mary to thank for saving them from Crows. Not so we can sell them ourselves, but so we can use them.’
‘If I may,’ said Simeon. He ambled lazily across in front of them, and then back again. ‘It is abundantly clear that Mary would make an admirable pirate lady. She is a liar and a thief, and probably not averse to a bit of the claret, but also she’s brave to boot, and loyal to her crew. Her quick-thinking salvaged a tragic situation and wrested control from our enemy. She is to be commended.’
He leaned his sword over his shoulder and dared anyone to gainsay him.
Elena stepped back, her lips thin and her face white. Then she turned and walked away. Sebastian swiped at the ground with his blade and made to follow her.
‘Sebastian,’ said Simeon. ‘Sometimes dipping your wick makes a man lose his head. If you get my meaning.’
Sebastian worked his jaw, said nothing, and trotted to catch up with Elena. Simeon turned to Mary.
‘Don’t find yourself alone with either of them. I have a premonition of woe regarding that pair.’
‘I didn’t go with Crows because I … Oh, what’s the point?’
‘The maps were the point. I would have done the same: I have, however, learnt through long and bitter experience that the dead stay dead, and that a man can only mourn so many times before he becomes inured. Singh, I charge you with the most solemn duty of keeping Mary alive.’ He pushed his hat up. ‘Can you manage that?’
‘Aye aye, Captain.’
‘We’ll make a sailor of you yet.’
One of the crew emerged from the building, giving the all-clear, and Simeon ushered Mary and Dalip inside. They followed the corridor to the courtyard.
‘What do you need?’ Simeon asked them.
‘Somewhere big enough to lay out all the maps, arrange them, and make sense of it all. It’ll need light, but no draughts.’ Dalip looked around at the square, trying to judge the sizes of the rooms that might lie behind them.
‘Take whatever room you want. I’ll post a guard and lookouts. Then we can start kicking down doors and hauling these dastards out, one by one.’ He reached into his jacket and pulled out the plastic egg, handing it to Dalip. ‘You might need this.’
When he’d gone, Mary leaned in. ‘What is it?’
‘Something I took from the Wolfman, along with his boots.’ He gave it to her, and she turned it over in her hand. ‘It’s a light. A little portable light.’
‘How does it work?’
‘I have no idea. I think it’s from the future too.’ He took it back and popped it into a pocket. ‘Let’s have a look around and pick somewhere.’
‘We’ll need Mama if we’re going to piece all these bits together.’ She glanced down the long corridor to the outside. ‘I know Elena’s pissed about Luiza dying, but how can she think I had anything to do with it?’
‘Because if something terrible happens, you find someone to blame.’
‘Blame the Wolfman. Blame Crows. Don’t blame me.’
Dalip shrugged. ‘You flew away. You didn’t come back. That looks a lot like guilt.’
She was quiet for a while, and Dalip studied the square of sky.
‘What did you think?’
‘I thought you were dead. That you and Crows had fought over the maps and you’d lost. Otherwise, you would’ve come back.’
He remembered what it had been like, sitting there, staring out to sea. It was only a few days ago, and he’d wondered if he’d ever get used to the hollow feeling inside. It turned out that he wouldn’t. And then on seeing her again – her stabbing him was forgotten – there was no sudden filling up again: simply confusion. How could she be alive when he’d so entirely believed her dead?
‘This isn’t making a start, is it?’ he said. ‘Let’s find some stairs.’
He was pointed to a rough wooden ladder that led up into a series of bare, dusty rooms that didn’t look like they’d been used for years. Their footprints, especially those from Mary’s bare feet, left a clear trail when they ventured beyond the search party’s tracks.
The windows were narrow, mere slits that hardly let in any light, and more like those in medieval castles than anything else. Dalip put his eye to one, and saw a section of the road and a couple of buildings. Nothing moved outside.
‘This is as good a place as any. We can even block up the windows with bits of cloth if we have to.’
‘It’s a bit, well: dark.’ She stalked around the corner room. The doorways – no doors – were adjacent to each other against the innermost wall.
‘Why don’t we see if this works?’ He put the egg in the middle of the floor, which was apparently on a slope, because the egg rolled over and he had to stop it. He frowned, then asked: ‘Give me the compass a minute.’
He wrestled it from its tin and placed it on the boards, waiting for the
glass face to stop swinging before he set the egg carefully down on its dimpled end, and it settled.
‘So we just wait for it to realise it needs to work?’
‘Pretty much. It hasn’t got an on switch. It’s got no switches at all.’ He stepped back and examined the room. Yes: it would be big enough, and being on the first floor, away from any of the four ladders, meant there’d be no through traffic. They could even insist on it and have guards warning people away. Or they could have a little viewing gallery so that anyone who wanted to could see their progress. That would be far better. If they had no secrets, there’d be no conspiracy theories brewing downstairs.
Their original plan had been to copy the maps on to a single sheet of paper or parchment, which they were going to buy, or somehow trade for, at the White City. That didn’t look like it was going to happen now. It wasn’t that sort of city, and he hadn’t seen a single scrap of paper. It was, however, still a good plan.
Mary had finally put the maps down, and was looking through the windows one by one.
‘Where did the boat end up?’ he asked.
‘This creepy bay, really tall cliffs, and a ladder cut out of the rock. It was insane. And the beach was covered with old, rotting boats, just sitting there, falling apart.’
‘The Bay of Bones,’ he said. ‘We didn’t land there. There’s a much easier way here, starting further along the coast.’ He almost told her about the other White City, the one buried under the forest. Something stopped him. ‘We could use the sail. To draw on. We can spread it out over the floor and once we’ve positioned a part of the map, we can draw it on the sail underneath. That would work.’
‘I pushed the boat back out into the sea, to try and make Crows think I’d legged it. I suppose someone could go and check, see if it’s still bobbing around in the bay. But in the morning: it’s a bit of a walk and you don’t want to be doing that climb up or down at night.’
‘Probably right. No point in taking stupid risks, is there?’
She laughed, and suddenly there was no need for him to feel awkward around her any more. They’d seamlessly picked up their friendship where they’d left off. Everything was all right between them again.
‘What will you do if we work out a way of going home?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’ She looked round from the window. ‘Let’s worry about that later.’
The egg began to glow, a pale moon in the dark.
23
There’d been some supplies in the building, presumably kept to feed travellers: those had been quickly exhausted by the sheer number of hungry pirates. It wasn’t Mary’s problem, though. It had been made quite clear that she and Dalip were to concern themselves with the maps and nothing else.
She didn’t know what to make of that: it wasn’t like she had any secret knowledge that would help in either ordering the individual fragments, or making sense of the whole.
Dalip knew more about Down stuff than she did. Mama was better at jigsaws. All she was, was a better thief than Crows.
First thing in the morning, Simeon had hand-picked two small groups, who would leave the valley together, then separate. One was to head back to the pirate ship and collect Mama, the other was to scale the cliffs at the Bay of Bones and retake Mary’s boat. The captain had shown more excitement over the possibility of new sailcloth than the use it was to be put, but she understood why, and gave him the compass to help the second group navigate their way back to the White City.
The city itself was quiet, but not calm. Tension seethed behind every barred door. She didn’t quite understand how the pirates had taken the place so easily: they’d killed several of the Lords and Ladies’ servants, but there were still more. Simeon’s crew were more prepared to use violence, which counted for a lot in her experience – one scary fucker could intimidate a whole street – but the figure in the robe yesterday had been able to grab a sword and force it down. And just how many bosses there were was a mystery.
They had to be planning something. This was their manor, and they’d try and take it back, no matter what. All the more reason for them to start soon, and finish sooner.
The egg had burned bright all night. It was still alight in the morning, and showed no sign of going out. They had almost too much light.
Dalip suggested putting the egg higher, near the ceiling. There was nothing to hang it with, or on, but he said he’d come up with something. Mary used the time to start the laborious task of laying all the maps out on the floor. If they were folded, she would carefully open them out. If they were crumpled, she would press her palm on them and try to iron out some of the creases.
There were so many of them. Each one a journey, sometimes short, sometimes long, from portal to castle, where, inevitably, the journey would end. She’d laid out ten, so she left a gap, and started on the next batch. She was up to nineteen when she heard the shot.
She stiffened and sat up. The echo of it came and went, came and went, then faded away.
Dalip barrelled into the room. ‘What was that?’
‘Someone’s got the gun.’
‘The gun? What gun?’
‘The ferryman had one.’
‘He has a gun?’
‘Didn’t you see it? Over the fireplace?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Didn’t you see the ferryman when you crossed the river? He’s in the hut just behind it.’
‘We swam the river and sneaked past. What sort of pirates knock on the door and ask to come in?’
‘The sort that just got shot at. Fuck. I forgot. Otherwise I would have told you.’ She got up and peered through one of the window slits. ‘Can’t see anything.’
‘Just when you think it can’t get any worse. I need to find the captain: what sort of gun was it?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’
‘Was it long, short, modern, old?’
‘I don’t know!’ She threw her hands in the air. ‘Long. Like you’d find in a war film.’
‘Some sort of rifle, then.’ He turned and disappeared again.
She’d forgotten about the gun: with everything else that was going on, it had just been one of those perfectly normal things. Monsters, pirates, doorless buildings, crappy little towns pretending they’re cities.
So when Simeon appeared with Dalip, she shouted out: ‘I didn’t know you hadn’t seen it. It’s not my fault.’
‘Mary,’ said Simeon, ‘not everything is your fault.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘We are now, however, trapped in the valley. We are also one man down, which sorely grieves me. I’ve sent remnants of that party across the river and up to the top, to see if they can find an alternative route down. Barring that, we wait till nightfall’s dark embrace and ambush the shooter. It loses us a day, and it brings my crew discomfort. Maintaining discipline on these fellows just became a great deal more difficult, so I implore you to redouble your efforts.’ He looked at what little had been done so far. ‘Time is not our friend, shipmates: it is our enemy.’
He left, leaving Dalip and Mary staring at the maps.
‘Right,’ she said. She picked up a handful of paper and shoved it at Dalip. ‘Without Mama, we’re going to have to go even faster. You sort these out. I really hope something comes up, because otherwise, we’re screwed.’
‘It’s only one rifle.’
‘So? One bloke with a rifle and box of bullets, waiting for anyone coming down that path, could hold off a fucking army.’
‘He has to sleep sometime.’
‘Does he? If he’s one of those face-peeling things, he probably doesn’t need to eat, sleep, shit or breathe.’ She waved his objections away. ‘Come on. Get on with it.’
She turned her back on him and deliberately concentrated on her work, arranging the maps in groups of ten, g
oing back for more when she was done. He was doing the same, following her lead, and by the time they had finished, the floor was half-covered.
They met in the space in the middle, the egg on the floor throwing strange shadows up at their faces.
‘How many’ve you got?’
Dalip looked behind him. ‘Eighty-seven.’
‘One hundred and twenty-four. That’s …’
‘Two hundred and eleven. Any way you look at it, it’s a lot of maps.’
‘So what do we do now? Apart from wait for the next shot?’
‘We had two maps together beforehand. At the beach.’
‘And then?’
‘Mama might not be here, but we can still use her method.’ He turned slowly, taking in all the maps, stroking at his beard. ‘We find everything with a coast, and try to line them up.’
They toured their respective collections, gleaned the maps that clearly had a coastline drawn on, and reconvened.
‘We know,’ he said, handing her his maps, ‘the coast goes roughly east-west. Make a line right here on the floor. Just lay them out, and I’ll be right back.’
‘Where are you going?’ She held the papers against her to stop them spilling.
He wouldn’t say, just skipped away and out.
She’d just finished laying them in a row when Dalip returned with Simeon.
‘I cannot be the wet nurse to this enterprise,’ he was saying. ‘Do you know how much there is to being a pirate captain?’
‘Unless there’s anyone else in your crew who knows exactly where they are by the shape of the coastline, then you’re the only person who can help. We,’ and he pointed at himself and Mary, ‘can stare at these until the sun goes out. But if you can do what you say, this is going to take you ten minutes.’
Simeon tutted and looked at all the scraps of paper. ‘Ten minutes?’
‘Not those.’ Mary laid her hand on the nearest strip of coast. ‘Just these.’
