by Simon Morden
The bandages dropped away. He couldn’t see it all, but he could see enough. There was a puckered wound, where the flesh was gathered together by Mama’s neat stitching, that ran all the way from his front, around his flank, to where he couldn’t quite see at his back. It looked paler than the surrounding skin, not livid with infection nor black with dried blood. It wasn’t terrible to look at, although it was very long. He didn’t know how he could have possibly survived: one little nick on his intestines, and he’d have died of septicaemia.
Crows’ sword had done far more than that.
He could feel the ridges and knots under his fingertip, but there was no reciprocal sensation on his side. Odd, but not unusual. Then he realised that the skin hadn’t started to knit together, and never would. He placed one hand below the cut line, and one above, and gently stretched the wound apart.
There seemed to be a universe nestling in there. Holding the skin taut, he caught glimpses of stars, moving against the black of space. Whole galaxies were turning in the far distance. He stared for some considerable time, before letting go and allowing the wound to press together.
Some other reality had been incorporated into his body, filling the hole where his flank had been breached with its vastness.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘You did this, accidentally?’
‘I didn’t do it on purpose! I don’t even know what it is I did. You were losing blood, I wanted to seal it up. And I did it. It worked. You didn’t die.’
‘How far inside does this go?’ It was difficult to see, from his viewpoint.
‘I looked at it – into it – and I couldn’t see an end.’
He took his hands away, and let his shirt fall back down. He didn’t know whether to be grateful or terrified. He didn’t know if what she’d done changed him irrevocably or allowed him to stay the same. He didn’t know if it would grow until it consumed him, or if it would dwindle away as he healed, or whether he would simply be like this for ever.
One thing was obvious to him, though. He was now being sustained only by magic.
‘You know you’ve trapped me here, don’t you?’ He disengaged himself from her arms and took an unsteady step away. ‘I can’t leave Down. Not ever.’
‘What?’
‘If I step through a portal, back to London, where magic doesn’t work, I’ll die.’ He took another step. ‘All that, all that … effort. I did it because this place is worth saving. Not because I wanted to stay here for ever.’
‘It could have been worse.’
‘How?’
‘You could have died a week ago, Dalip. You could not be here at all.’
There was a shell on the beach. A little one, not much bigger than his thumb. He snapped it in two, held out his forearm, and ran the razor-sharp edge along it, splitting the skin like it was ripe fruit.
She started towards him, waving her hands, trying to stop him. But it was too late. He held up his arm to show her, and a swirl of stars moved behind the ragged gash, the same stars that passed in the dark of his eyes.
‘Tell me,’ he said: ‘what have I become?’
Also by Simon Morden from Gollancz
Down Station
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Gollancz
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.
Copyright © Simon Morden 2016
The moral right of Simon Morden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 21150 6
www.simonmorden.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
www.gollancz.co.uk
