City of Dreams and Nightmare

by Ian Whates

  Dewar then took over, lambasting those who had been on watch for their inadequacies and explaining in detail how he had slipped past them with such ease.

  In doing so, he hoped to keep the nicks off balance, to not give them the time to ask such awkward questions as why none of them had ever encountered Lyle's old friend before. Jezmina's support was invaluable. She backed him up and appeared suitably attentive to the obviously unwell Lyle.

  Again the girl played a clever game, producing a faultless performance for the Blue Claw's benefit and doing all that he had asked of her, and yet she was probably whispering support to Lyle behind his back and would doubtless claim later that she had co-operated only because she had to. With those doe-eyes of hers, he felt certain she would get away with it too.

  Being so ill, Lyle then retired to his quarters, though not before leaving strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Once back in the private room, Dewar injected his prisoner with a sedative before securely binding and gagging him.

  This allowed him, in effect, to step into Lyle's shoes, directing the Blue Claw's activities, with the ever-present Jezmina to endorse his authority. The plans for that day, which Lyle had been only too happy to share with him, required just the slightest of amendments to ensure that he wouldn't need to leave the building at all.

  During the time he spent with Lyle, the assassin had learnt all he could of the Blue Claw, its members and the gang's structure. He now put that knowledge to good use. The first thing he did was to organise the distribution of the previous night's spoils, putting Barton in charge of that job. He then systematically ensured that all the gang's lieutenants were occupied overseeing some task or other, even taking time out to show the nicks who had been on night watch exactly how he had slipped so easily past their defences, so that they could be on guard for similar intrusion in the future. It was no skin off his nose to do so. He had no intention of coming back here again.

  Once he had every single member of the Claw organised doing something, he returned to Lyle's quarters, Jezmina beside him. He didn't yet trust the girl sufficiently to let her out of his sight.

  He unlocked and opened the door, ushering her through in front of him before relocking the door once they were inside. As soon as he turned from doing so, Jezmina leapt on him, pressing her lips to his.

  Again the girl managed something remarkable, catching him completely by surprise, which was a rarity. He took hold of her hair and pulled her off him, not stopping to be gentle, while his other hand shot up to grasp her throat.

  "Try something like that again and you're dead!"

  She stepped back, away from his grasp, and flicked her hair. A mischievous smile played at the corners of her mouth. "If you say so."

  He went to say something, but thought better of it.

  "It doesn't alter the fact that you kissed me back, just for an instant there, before you could stop yourself. Deny it, say what you want, but we'll both always know that you did."

  She said this with such conviction that he almost believed it himself. She turned around and sashayed slowly away, every provocative step an invitation and a challenge.

  Dewar stared after her in amazement, reminding himself that she was just a child, while wondering whether she had ever really been a child. He thought back to when he first surprised her in these rooms, to the timid, wide-eyed girl who had trembled and cried and submitted so meekly to being bound. Had any of that been genuine, even for an instant? Looking at her now, he very much doubted it.

  The assassin was tired at a time when he couldn't afford to be, when keeping a clear head and sharp mind were vital. He had been up all night and knew that sleep could only be postponed for so long. Taking a nap now was a risk but a calculated one, and less dangerous than making a costly error later through lack of concentration.

  Lyle was still completely out of it and ought to remain that way for most of the day, which just left Jezmina to worry about. He led her to the bed, ignoring her inevitable comments, and tied both her hands to the series of stylised iron poles which formed the headboard.

  "If this is how you like it, you should have said earlier." The girl maintained her flippant monologue.

  This was hardly the most comfortable of positions for her, but it would have to do and in any case wouldn't be for long. He couldn't run the risk of anything beyond a brief nap and there was too much still to do in any case. He told the girl that if she kept her mouth shut and behaved herself, he might consider not tying her up the next time. It was a lie, but one which sounded plausible and seemed likely to hold her.

  So he slumped into a chair, got comfortable and hoped that weariness would win out over his racing thoughts.

  Dewar awoke refreshed and clear-headed, knowing that the nap had given him the energy he needed to keep going for now. He untied Jezmina, who appeared to have fallen asleep herself, and the pair of them headed back towards the main rooms.

  As soon as they stepped into the common room he sensed that something had changed. Barton was there along with perhaps a dozen of the others, but their posture was too casual - they were trying overly hard to seem relaxed, the effort to do so undermining their intent.

  Without any noticeable signal, street-nicks converged on Dewar from all sides. He wondered where he had slipped up, what error had given him away. Jezmina vanished immediately, ducking back out the door. There were several ways he could react to the situation, but decided to start by trying to brazen it out.

  "What the breck is going on here?"

  His challenge had no effect. The street-nicks continued to close in, not saying a word. So much for plan A.

  Without any further preamble, four of the youths leapt towards him, coming in from all angles. He didn't wait for them to reach him but charged towards the one immediately in front, punching the lad, spinning and kicking at another. Hands reached for him. He twisted, punched, shoulder-charged, kicked and gouged. They outnumbered him but he had a few things going for him - experience, training and, over the majority of them, size. Also, there was the fact that no knives or other weapons had been drawn, which suggested they were intent on taking him alive. The fight was being conducted in virtual silence, which leant it an eerie, unnatural quality; the grunts of exertion and the creaks of disturbed furniture being the only sounds.

  One of nicks hooked a leg around his and tripped him while another clung to his back, an arm around his throat. Knowing he was on the way down, Dewar threw himself backwards, carrying the kid behind him and landing on him as hard as he could. The lad let go. A kick flashed towards his face before he could do more than half turn away. His lip split and started to swell at once. He tasted blood, but still caught the foot, twisting it viciously, to hear and feel the crack of fractured bone. The resultant scream of agony was the loudest sound since the fight began.

  Another kick came in to his side but he rode this one, using its momentum to help lift him back to his feet. One of the larger nicks threw a punch, but he ducked and bobbed, so that the fist flew over his shoulder, barely grazing an ear on the way through. He responded by shoulder-charging his assailant even as the punch went past, knocking him down, but there was another one in the way immediately. This one he dealt two short, sharp jabs to the kidneys with his right hand, while blocking a punch from somebody else with his left.

  The nick he had knocked over tried to bear-hug his legs and pull him down again, but he kicked out once, twice and persuaded him to let go. Another kid was sent flying with a swipe of his left arm, demolishing a small table as he landed, only to come back at the assassin wielding one of the table's legs as a club.

  Somewhere along the line Dewar had taken a blow to the forehead. Blood found its way into his left eye, stinging and raising tears which half-blinded him. Several blows rained in as he risked a quick wipe to prevent more blood trickling down while frantically blinking to clear the moisture. He took a blow from the table leg and felt a rib either crack or take a severe brui
sing.

  He dared not draw his own weapons for fear of escalation: holding off a dozen nick's fists was one thing, dealing with as many knives was another matter altogether.

  Four or five of the nicks were now out of the action, either unconscious or too injured to continue fighting, and Dewar felt confident he was winning when the door at the far side of the room burst open and a fresh batch of the Blue Claw came charging through, led by Bull, one of the gang's lieutenants, whose physique lived up to his name.

  The assassin knew when he was beaten. Seeing these new arrivals eager to join the fray he turned, shrugged off the grappling hands of a couple of nicks, and ran for the door which led back to the hallway and eventually Lyle's quarters. He kicked off the most persistent nick, hurtled out of the room and pulled the door shut, clutching the handle to prevent it from being opened. It wouldn't hold for more than a handful of seconds, but he was already reviewing in his mind the easiest exit to reach from here. Escape route decided, he turned to run, only to see Jezmina already in the process of swinging something from above her head towards his. Before he had a chance to react, it connected.

  Pain careened around his skull in jagged shards. He collapsed to his knees, fighting to stay conscious, and it was at that moment that the air reverberated with a piercing shriek. It shot right through him, the loudest sound he had ever heard, and evidently at the perfect pitch to cause maximum discomfort and pain. At first Dewar assumed the sound was inside his head, a bizarre consequence of the blow, but he saw Jezmina with her pretty face screwed up, hands pressed to her ears, almost doubling over in her attempts to escape the agonising noise. He was forced to cover his own ears, even as he toppled fully to the ground.

  He lay there in a foetal curl, the palm of his right hand supporting his ear, cheek pressed to the floorboards. From this position he saw feet; a whole crowd of booted feet, razzers' feet, approaching on the run. Only then did he finally concede that perhaps he was not going to escape after all.

  Tom and Kat were making good progress and the girl still insisted she was confident of getting him home in plenty of time for her to return to the Jeradine quarter before nightfall when their journey was interrupted by a deep, mournful tolling from ahead of them. It was a sound immediately recognisable to any resident of the under-City: the body bell.

  A death cart made its way slowly down the centre of the road, pulled by a pair of enormous oxen, their horns festooned with black ribbons and their backs draped with the traditional black cloth. This seemed to be their day for oxen, and bells. First the fire tenders and now the death cart. The beast on the right bore the bell, a great brass thing, suspended from its neck by a thick corded rope, ringing out its wail for the departed with every step; a far deeper and less strident clamour than the fire tenders' had produced. Clothed in black robes which extended from their high hoods to their ground-brushing skirts, two body boys accompanied the cart, one on either side, directing and keeping abreast with the oxen.

  Quite why they were called boys was anyone's guess. They were clearly fully grown men beneath their concealing robes, these gatherers of the dead.

  The combination of the two men standing either side of the oxen meant that the cart and its small entourage took up virtually the full width of the thoroughfare, all but forcing anyone else on the street to shuffle to one side and stand respectfully still until the cart had passed by, as tradition demanded.

  It made little sense to Tom. See a body lying in a gutter and any resident of the under-City would either ignore it or rob it, yet when the same people encountered a cart filled with a whole load of similar bodies they were supposed to stand reverently with heads bowed while it trundled on its less than merry way. Why did one deserve any more respect than the other?

  Such customs had always baffled Tom. Whether they were for religious or traditional purposes, elaborations of this sort tended to leave him cold.

  Nonetheless, both he and Kat stood dutifully back against the wall as the oxen drew near. As ever, Tom tried to peer from under his eyebrows to catch a glimpse of the body boys' faces but, as always, he failed, the hoods revealing nothing but shadows. In theory, the body boys were supposed to remain completely anonymous, a custom designed to avoid the temptation of bribery. Body parts were valuable, though less so when the death carts were as well laden as this one appeared to be. In practice, the anonymity was a farce. Tom knew three personally, and all were more than happy to take a bribe. It was an accepted perk of the job.

  "Looks like a full one," Kat muttered under her breath.

  Tom could only agree. Not that either of them could actually see into the cart, of course, what with it being covered in sacking which was, inevitably, dyed black.

  Once the cart had passed, normal activity resumed, with the entire street seeming to release a collectively held breath.

  A Thaistess stood on the corner ahead of them, her dark green robe pulled closely about her, her hood up so that her face appeared only as a lighter shadow within shadow. For some reason it reminded Tom of the acolyte outside the temple yesterday, who had watched them so intently, just as, he felt certain, this priestess was watching them now, for all that he couldn't see her eyes.

  "Have you ever had much to do with them?" He nodded towards the Thaistess.

  Kat followed his gaze. "On occasion. Why?"

  "Nothing." Tom didn't want to start an argument and had no idea of Kat's beliefs, but the priestess's appearance in the wake of the death cart struck him as distasteful somehow, as if the woman were working in concert with the body boys, collecting the spirits of the dead even as the cart collected their bodies.

  "Do you believe in all that then?" he asked. The sect taught a complex doctrine, but at its heart was the belief that the goddess Thaiss sat at the source of the Thair, and that the river began with her own teardrops, cried upon the peaks of distant mountains at the very spot where her brother Thaimon had died. As the waters flowed down the valleys and gullies towards the lowlands, they were joined by the tears of all the people in all the world who had ever cried for a lost one, until the Thair grew into the mighty torrent which eventually flowed into Thaiburley. The city took its name from the river which meant, or so the sect's proponents claimed, that Thaiss was the goddess of the whole metropolis and all the people who dwelt within it. The doctrine taught that the citizen's spirits returned to the bosom of the goddess when they died.

  "Listen, when you've been raised in the Pits like I was, it's hard to believe in any sort of gods or goddesses, at least in any kindly ones."

  "So what's your connection to them then?"

  She glared at him as if about to lose her temper, but then shook her head and smiled. "Do you ever stop asking questions?"

  He grinned. "No."

  "All right. When I first left the Tattooed Men, I managed to get into a bit of trouble. Ended up being hurt pretty badly, and for the first time there was no Shayna to turn to. Thought I was a goner, but then a Thaistess, Shella, took me in and looked after me, nursed me back to health. Think she may have had a bit of the healing power herself, because I was fighting fit again far quicker than I ought to have been. I looked out for her after that - ran a few errands and made sure no one hassled either her or the temple. In fact, she was the one who first introduced me to Ty-gen and his khybul sculptures."

  Tom had been looking at Kat as she spoke. He now glanced back towards the corner, but the Thaistess was gone.

  "Shella's all right. Never once tried to shove her beliefs down my throat, just took care of me when I needed it."

  Tom grunted noncommittally.

  Kat abruptly tensed.

  "What?" Tom was glancing around, trying to spot whatever had disturbed her.

  "Nothing," she relaxed again. "I thought I saw..."

  Tom caught a flicker of movement above and behind the girl. "Kat!"

  She spun around, following the direction of his gaze. A knife appeared in her hand as she moved, pulled from some concealed sheath; not one
of her long blades but a smaller weapon: a throwing knife.

  As she turned, her arm whipped around and cast towards the movement Tom had noted on the wall above, the thing which crept towards her with such apparent menace.

  Her aim was true and the blade clattered against the wall, shearing through a spindly tentacular limb in the process. The impact was enough to dislodge the creature, which had been moving stealthily in Kat's direction. It fell to the ground alongside its severed limb. The thing looked similar to the creature they'd encountered the previous day, the one which Kat had thrown a stone at, but whereas the limbs in that instance had been hairy, this one's seemed more reptilian and snakelike. The single baleful eye remained the same, though.

  "Breckin' Maker!" Kat stamped at the odd construct as it landed, but missed. The creature dodged her foot despite the missing limb, crowding against the wall to do so. Then, in a show of aggression that seemed to take even Kat by surprise, it stabbed down at her same foot with one of its own clawed appendages. Kat hopped back barely in time, turning the movement into an elegant swivel which led into a heel-first kick. This time she didn't miss, the full force of the blow pinning the thing against the wall, crushing the single eye.

  Viscous fluid clung to her boot as she drew it away. She attempted to wipe it clean against the wall.

  "I'm sure that thing was deliberately trying to creep up on you," Tom told her. He stepped forward to take a closer look at the ruined creature.

  "Yeah, well, thanks," she said distractedly, lifting her foot to peer critically at the heel.

  "I wasn't asking for thanks, I was just saying. Doesn't that seem odd to you?"

  "I suppose so, but then the Maker is odd."