Tarnished City

by Vic James

  Silyen had been spurred to re-examine these questions after what Crovan had done to Meilyr. Hence his confrontation with Jenner at the gate. Sil had wondered if Jenner’s desperation to free Abi Hadley might spark some residual power. He had stirred up his brother with provoking words. And he had attempted a small transfusion of Skill, to see if his brother’s body would respond to it and remember forgotten abilities.

  But in the event, Jenner had proved unable either to retain transfused Skill, or generate more of his own. The resulting anger and raw hurt of his usually calm and affable brother had shocked even Silyen.

  That encounter with Jenner proving fruitless, no light had been cast on what had happened to Meilyr Tresco. Had Crovan taken Meilyr’s power, as Silyen believed he himself had taken Jenner’s? Had Meilyr’s Skill been destroyed? Or was there a third possibility? From the descriptions Silyen had gathered of the spray of gold that burst from Meilyr, of its rising and disappearance, had his ripped-out power somehow been flung back into the World of Light?

  And what of the flare of brightness that had shot through the House of Light’s shimmering ceiling after Silyen’s adoption ritual? The two events pointed to one conclusion: that the barrier between this world and the World of Light was permeable. Penetrable.

  Could Skill be drained out of this world – or pulled into ?

  As he passed through Westminster’s corridors, Silyen let his awareness unfurl and eddy around him, sensing the movement of the Skilled. There was Bouda Matravers, hurrying into a quadrangle on the left, a vitality both intense and controlled. No sign of Gavar near her, of course.

  His perception spiralled upward and outward, until it encompassed the entire Westminster complex. He felt different, more connected, now that he was an heir – an acknowledged part of this place. Silyen paused in the corridor and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he gasped.

  He was seeing a world composed of only bright and dark. Of Skill, and its absence. Behind him throbbed a power so blazing he dared not turn – the House of Light. All around were the glowing traces of hundreds of Equals: parliamentarians, their guests and family members, the second- and third-borns who would never hold office, but who worked here. Each individual was a Skillful radiance that flickered and flared. He tipped his head. Up high in the Chancellor’s Tower moved an intense golden pulse: Father, prowling.

  Dazed, Silyen leaned against the wall. A tangle of brilliance bore down on him, which he only belatedly realized was a person walking along the corridor. It stopped right alongside, and its proximity was hardly bearable.

  ‘Are you all right?’ a voice asked.

  Silyen had no idea who it belonged to. Was incapable of responding.

  ‘Whatever,’ the voice said sniffily. ‘Weirdo.’

  The brightness moved on.

  Silyen tried to focus. It wasn’t just the dazzling hotspots of Skilled individuals that he could see. Around him, the walls of Westminster were faintly limned in light. He must be seeing the traces of Skill worked on the building through its history, he realized.

  The lambent outline was sufficient to navigate through, and Silyen made his way to the low River Door that led from Westminster down to the Thames. It wasn’t one favoured by parliamentarians. He pushed it open into a gust of wind and noise: the stop-start of clogged traffic, car horns quarrelling with pedestrians, tour bus guides describing the glories of the House of Light in more languages than even Silyen recognized. Britain’s inhabitants might be unable to leave the country until the completion of their slavedays, but visitors flocked here from every corner of the globe.

  Westminster Bridge was surely heaving with people, as usual. But in Silyen’s Skillful sight, it was nothing but emptiness and darkness.

  How much more beautiful it would be, golden and glowing. Filled with Skill.

  A crawling pinprick of brightness distracted him – an Equal in a taxi, coming over the bridge – which was why he sensed nothing until the blade was at his throat, too late for his Skillful reflexes to kick in.

  ‘That’s you – dead,’ a voice rasped in his ear.

  Then it laughed, a repulsive sound.

  Silyen closed his eyes and concentrated, momentarily terrified that his normal sight had been burned away by his bright vision. But when he opened them again, the everyday world swam back into view.

  And what a view. Dog stood in front of him, blade upraised to Silyen’s neck and looking not a whit saner than when he had last seen the man – when he’d summoned the gate at Kyneston and released him in the aftermath of the East Wing’s destruction.

  Dog’s strangulation of Great-Aunt Hypatia had gone undetected amid the general chaos. Her body, already purpling and puffy, hadn’t been found until the next morning. The faint contusions around her neck were deemed an injury from the explosion; her death was attributed to a heart attack from shock. Only Silyen – and Abi Hadley – had seen Dog moving purposefully towards Hypatia, the leash wrapped around his hand.

  Silyen sighed. ‘I would say I’ve missed you,’ he said, raising a hand and lightly pushing the blade away from his neck. ‘But Mother instilled in me that a gentleman never lies.’

  ‘You’re no gentleman,’ Dog rasped.

  ‘I’m an heir, now, so mind your manners. No more knives at throats, please.’ He glanced down. Dog appeared to have more than one knife. He had a whole bunch of them, held oddly in his hand. ‘I presume this isn’t a social call, to congratulate me on my elevation?’

  ‘Need your help,’ growled Dog. ‘Been – busy. Need a place – to lie low. I owe you – three debts, so – came to you.’

  ‘I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how debts work. The idea is that you help me.’

  Silyen inspected Dog. He was still wearing the clothes in which he’d run from Kyneston, coveralls swiped off a peg in the kennels. They were thickly grimed, and coated with a dried substance that was mud, blood, or worse.

  ‘I can’t take you to our house on the Embankment – though I think Father plans on trading up from there soon. But I keep a little place for myself in Marylebone. Let’s walk; I’ll make sure we’re not noticed. And put those knives away. What exactly have you “been busy” doing – burgling cutlery drawers?’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  Dog opened his fingers and Silyen saw that he wasn’t holding knives after all. Where his right hand had been was a replacement made of metal. Razor-sharp metal. Then he looked more closely and saw the leather webbing across the man’s palm, the laces that criss-crossed up the back and knotted tight at the wrist. It was part glove, part instrument of torture. And that was when he realized what he was looking at.

  ‘Black Billy’s handiwork. I never knew you shared my appreciation of historical artefacts. You must have paid a visit to my relatives at Ide.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Dog, ‘to see the old place – again.’

  He bared his teeth in a grin, and dug his monstrous hand into the coverall’s voluminous front pocket to conceal it. Side by side, they turned away from the river towards St James’s Park, skirted Green Park, and kept going.

  At Silyen’s bolt-hole – a limewashed mews house in a quiet courtyard – he coaxed Dog into taking off the glove so he could examine it while the coffee brewed. It was heavy, made of mottled, folded and refolded crucible steel. Each finger was jointed. And each one was subtly different, varying in the length and width of its blade.

  Every schoolchild in Britain knew the story of this glove: the final work of a blacksmith who, a century and a half ago, had led a revolt against his harsh masters. Black Billy had incited his fellow villagers to rise up against the Vernays of Ide – a branch of the Jardine family. But the peasants never stood a chance. While his closest confederates were summarily executed, Billy was tortured to death using the ingenious instruments he had first been Skillfully compelled to forge. Implements that had remained at Ide in the custody of the Vernays ever since.

  Until now.

  ‘For slicing,’ s
aid Dog, watching him sort through the various blades. ‘For peeling. For segmenting. And there are – others, too. Not knives.’

  He opened a flat leather pouch that hung from his belt and withdrew more implements.

  ‘For ears,’ Dog announced, holding up a delicate length of metal. It curved in sinuous loops, with minuscule barbs along its length.

  He picked out another. ‘For eyes.’ That one was more like an ice cream scoop for someone with a tiny appetite. Silyen grimaced. He hated ice cream.

  ‘Souvenirs?’ he asked. ‘Or have you more practical plans?’

  ‘A workman likes – good tools,’ the man rasped. ‘Getting them – was easy. The family was – away. Someone who knew me – let me in.’

  ‘After what you did?’

  ‘My leash – round his throat – may have persuaded him.’

  Dog’s abrading laugh again.

  ‘This one,’ Dog said, leaning in to touch the largest blade on the glove, heavy and serrated, ‘will take off the head – of your cousin Ragnarr.’

  Silyen poured himself a thin, hot stream of coffee and let that sink in. He sat back in his chair and raised the cup to his lips.

  ‘Revenge is a beautiful thing,’ he said. ‘And I appreciate what you’re doing to reduce my Christmas card list, but will I have any relatives left by the time you’re done? What Ivarr did to your wife and unborn baby was unspeakable, but you killed him, his wife, and their children. My great-aunt made you her dog, and you’ve paid her back in kind – using the leash was a nice touch. But are you going after Ragnarr because of his older brother’s deeds? Because if that’s how it works, I should have women Gavar has wronged knocking on my door morning, noon and night.’

  ‘They did – everything together.’

  Including, presumably, raping Dog’s wife. Silyen took another sip of scalding coffee and let it warm him. Fine. Cousin Ragnarr wasn’t someone Silyen would shed any tears over.

  In fact, another killing of an Equal so soon after the assassination of Zelston would electrify the nation. Father would crack down harshly. That would oppress the common people further, while reminding them that Equals were vulnerable. Which would stir things up nicely.

  And for the victim to be yet another of the Vernays of Ide, whose crushing of Black Billy’s Revolt had made them a byword for Equal oppression of the commoners, and who had been the victims of the worst commoner slaying of Equals in living memory when Dog took out Heir Ivarr and his family five years ago?

  Well, that was almost perfect.

  ‘It seems to me,’ he told Dog, ‘that you’ll be in need of somewhere more long-term to hide out. Luckily, I know just the spot. My aunt is expecting me at the ruins of Orpen Mote – we’re going to rebuild it. No one goes near the place.’ He proffered the steaming silver pot and a small cup. ‘And it’s only fifty miles from Ide. Coffee?’

  Dog took the cup, and bared his teeth in what was once a grin but was now simply a horror.

  They travelled out the next morning, the car driven not by one of the family chauffeurs but by a discreet fellow of Silyen’s acquaintance. He dropped them at the perimeter of the woods that encircled the once-great estate, and they went forward on foot through the trees, then across fields where waist-high cow parsley, vernal grass and feathery vetch whipped at them as they walked.

  Orpen had no gate worth the name, simply a plain iron four-bar set into a low stone wall. The boundary was marked instead by an immense ha-ha – a ditch to prevent animals crossing. And not only animals. Sil felt the tingle of Skill as he crossed the ditch’s small bridge, its cattle grid rusted with long disuse. Dog shuddered as he stood on the grid. The touch of Skill meant nothing good to him.

  ‘You don’t have to come over,’ Silyen said. ‘The woods here have plenty of game. You could hunt. Practise. I’ll find you at the end of the day.’

  Dog patted the pocket of the overalls, and the blades within clashed dully. He nodded, turned his back, and loped off towards the treeline. The man would kill every Equal in Britain if he could, Silyen thought, watching him go. He touched his throat and remembered the scrape of steel there.

  Aunt Euterpe was sitting in the garden just as she had the first time he’d met her, when he walked into her mind as she lay slumbering at Kyneston.

  But this was no fresh-faced twenty-four-year-old, sunning herself in a deckchair.

  Aunt Euterpe’s youthful beauty had been scraped away by the painstaking knife of sorrow, sculpting her delicate features into something austere. She resembled a funerary statue, set upon a crumbling line of masonry that might once have been an ornamental wall. Her dress was plain and black. And as he bent to kiss her cold cheeks he saw, pinned near her throat, an ivory badge bearing the Roman banner and standard of the Zelston coat of arms. Mourning attire.

  Taking her hands, Silyen gently pulled her upright. Euterpe leaned against him, her head just reaching his shoulder, as together they stared at the charred remains of lost Orpen. She was his mother’s sister, but sometimes, recalling the days of his childhood and adolescence they had spent together in this place, Silyen felt she was more like his.

  It took a moment for him to realize she was crying. Reflexively, he put his arms around her and folded her against his chest.

  ‘I wish you’d never woken me,’ she said, muffled into his riding jacket. ‘I wish I could have slept and dreamed forever. In our garden, Winterbourne was still alive. But here . . .’

  ‘Here, you are alive,’ he said. ‘And you will be happy again. Look.’

  He took his aunt’s hand. Felt the Skill that throbbed there, almost like a second pulse. The strength of this woman.

  He let Skill flow out of him. Felt it drip through his fingers like blood and drop into the soil. He’d become better, so much better at this, since the day the Hadley girls had caught him in the woods experimenting with the cherry tree.

  What had lain dormant in the earth responded.

  Clods of soil writhed. The first green shoot pushed up out of the ground. Then another. A third. A whole row of them. They grew, bushed and bloomed. At his side, Euterpe Parva watched as flower after flower unfolded, each a blood-red bowl of petals.

  In the garden of Orpen Mote, the air was heavy with the scent of roses.

  7

  Luke

  Luke had imagined various scenarios awaiting within the walls of Eilean Dochais. A leash and obedience classes, perhaps. Maybe a dungeon. Certainly a cell. But never this.

  He checked in the mirror as he knotted the black tie. The grandfather clock in the hallway had already chimed quarter past, so he toed on his polished dress shoes and hurried downstairs. In the castle’s high central atrium, draped on all sides with antique flags and heraldic banners, Devin was waiting anxiously, just as he had hovered on the threshold when Luke first arrived.

  A silver fob watch was in his hand. Devin waited for his master every night, and liked to ensure that the castle’s other occupants were seated before Crovan took his place at the table.

  As Luke pushed open the glass-paned doors to the dining room, he was greeted with a scene remarkably like the one at breakfast that first morning, when Coira had dressed him in Julian’s clothes and brought him down. He’d thought, at the time, that he was hallucinating.

  Two chandeliers glittered at each end of the windowless room. Along one wall hung a tattered battle standard emblazoned with the now-familiar motto: Omnes vulnerant; ultima necat – All hours wound; the last one kills. Against the opposite wall stood an immense glass case housing a tableau of stuffed game animals – pheasants, deer, pine martens, all grimacing at the indignity of their afterlife.

  But the most striking thing about the room was the people gathered in it. A dozen were already present. Their full number would be twenty one: mostly men in immaculate black tie, though there were three women in bright evening dress. Servants circulated with glasses of champagne. It was how Luke had always imagined the Equals lived, behind the walls of their great estates: lu
xurious and carefree.

  Except everyone here was Condemned. These were no party guests, but prisoners of the state, sentenced to Crovan’s keeping at Eilean Dochais.

  Luke hunted for his place card around the table, and found it almost directly opposite where Crovan sat. To his right would be Julian. He didn’t need to read the namecard to his left, as the seat was already occupied.

  ‘Hello, Luke,’ said Lavinia, tipping up her face. ‘Don’t you look handsome tonight? Are you going to give a lady a proper greeting?’

  Luke had learned Lavinia’s name easily, given how few women were here. She was bird-tiny and at least a decade older than his Mum.

  He had no idea what constituted a ‘proper greeting’, until she presented her rouged cheek. It would be just like kissing your grandma, Luke told himself, as he bent over her – except at the last minute, Lavinia turned her head and met him full on the mouth. Luke felt her lips part expectantly and recoiled, gagging. He wiped her scarlet lipstick from his mouth and coughed to cover the gesture, but any hope of discretion was dashed when Lavinia shrieked loud enough for the entire room to hear.

  ‘No lip-kissing, you naughty boy. I know I’m irresistible, but my mouth is only for darling Braby.’

  Luke burned with mortification, and matters weren’t helped when the first pair of eyes he met across the table were Coira’s, filled with scorn.

  Then Coira was gone, carrying a great silver platter through to the kitchen. She wasn’t one of the ‘guests’ – as those who gathered every morning and evening around this table styled themselves – but a servant. Although apparently she possessed some authority over the others.

  ‘Hands off the ladies, Luke,’ came a voice from over Luke’s shoulder. ‘Evening, Lavinia, you gorgeous fossil.’

  Lavinia simpered as Julian pulled out his chair and sat down.

  ‘Got you, did she?’ Jules muttered quietly, pushing his floppy hair out of his eyes. ‘Sorry I didn’t warn you. Quicker than a striking snake, that one.’

  ‘Thanks for nothing.’ Luke stole a look at Lavinia, who had picked up a silver salt cellar and was admiring her reflection in it. ‘Who on earth is darling Braby?’