Tarnished City

by Vic James

  Abi was stunned. Of course, Jon was painting a picture of the best possible outcome. But he wasn’t making false promises about Luke’s immediate release. He had answered with integrity.

  She met Midsummer’s gaze, looking for the Equal’s approval. The heir gave a noncommittal shrug, but grinned.

  And really, she had already given Faiers the information about Rix. Theoretically, it was out of her hands now.

  ‘I think that sounds like a plan,’ she said.

  A loud crackling sound came from the other end of the sofa. It was Renie, tossing down an empty plastic wrapper.

  ‘You know,’ the kid said. ‘The thing about plans is, they require more biscuits.’

  15

  Silyen

  Was this real, or unreal? Silyen wondered, walking through Orpen’s hallway, his fingers trailing across the dark wood panelling.

  To be more accurate, was he touching the bricks-and-mortar Orpen Mote that he and Aunty Terpy had Skillfully rebuilt over these past weeks – a task much more intricate than the restoration of Kyneston’s exploded East Wing? Or was he walking through memory-Orpen, where the pair of them had met during all those years his aunt had lain unconscious in her bed?

  He ought to know the difference. More to the point, he ought to be disturbed that he didn’t know the difference.

  But he wasn’t. The two Orpens overlaid each other almost seamlessly and Silyen walked easily in them both.

  It was usually the furniture that gave it away. Restored-Orpen was still only half furnished; Mama and Jenner were locating suitable pieces from other family properties and sending them over. Memory-Orpen was crammed with and ornaments. It held everything that had filled the house during Aunty Terpy’s youth, from tapestries and suits of armour, to the books in the library – including the cedarwood chest containing the lost journals of Cadmus Parva-Jardine.

  Yes, objectively, Silyen knew that only one of the two was ‘real’, in the sense of physically existing in the present moment. But the memory-Orpen he’d visited in childhood, and occasionally slipped into now, felt no less real. In certain corridors and passageways, it was still possible to mistake the two versions of this place.

  But there was no mistaking the third Orpen. The one made of Skill.

  It wasn’t constructed from wood and stone, nor from memories, but from power. It existed in the same bright-and-dark world he had perceived that day at Parliament. A reality composed entirely of Skill, and its absence. Everything in it was either void, or limned in light, like a sheet of black paper sketched on in gold.

  This was the world he needed to see today.

  Silyen was more practised than he had been at Westminster. On that day (the day of his adoption, and the conversation with Meilyr Tresco), he had glimpsed the bright world by chance. Now, he could look at it at will.

  Silyen closed his eyes and opened them onto a shining outline of Orpen. Just as at Westminster, objects and spaces could only be discerned if they contained traces of Skill.

  So this Orpen was no blank space, as the Skill-devoid streets of London had been. Because the entire structure had been magically rebuilt by Silyen and his aunt, the house appeared almost as solid as it did in the real world, albeit made entirely of dully shimmering gold.

  Which was understandable. Quite apart from the latest rebuilding, Orpen had been riddled with magic for centuries. He looked to his left. There was a shining fissure in the soft glow of a windowpane, perhaps secretly repaired by a Parva child after a ball game mishap. High up, vivid bands of gold coiled around a chimney stack, the crumbling mortar Skillfully reinforced by some prudent lord or lady.

  There was hardly a corner of this old moated manor that had not at some time been Skill-touched by its residents. Looking down, Silyen could even see glints scintillating through the moat drains far beneath his feet, the work of a practically minded Parva, keeping the channels clear.

  Once, Skill had saturated even the most mundane aspects of an Equal’s life – an art as lawful as eating.

  With the advent of the slavedays, that had been set aside. Tasks once performed by Skill became the preserve of slave labour. That freed the Equals from having to think of such things – unSkilled housekeepers could instruct unSkilled slaves.

  But what had been lost was incalculable: intimacy with one’s Skill and a true understanding of all it could do.

  Silyen made his way through the light-limned corridor and up the staircase. In both restored-Orpen and memory-Orpen, this staircase was plain and dark, with smooth bannisters and thick, foot-hollowed treads. Walking in Skill, the stairs were likewise dim. Having never needed intervention beyond Silyen’s own rebuilding, they bore only a faint Skillful trace.

  But at the top of the stairs blazed a radiance to rival that of the House of Light.

  In a cupboard.

  It was a large walk-in linen cupboard, presently disused. It had been the same large linen cupboard in memory-Orpen, when it saw daily use. Silyen opened its door and ran his hands across the interior, feeling both the smooth wood of today’s bare shelves, and the stiff, cool sheets stored here in the Orpen of Euterpe’s youth.

  But in the third, Skill-haunted Orpen, this space had served a different purpose entirely. Silyen wondered how he knew, and shivered.

  He held reality up for the Skill-light to shine through and, beneath the present and the near past, discerned many more layers beneath. Orpen was a palimpsest of power. And there was the cause of the brilliance in this place, sunk centuries-deep. Silyen plunged down towards it, and surfaced in the exact same spot he had left.

  Lustrous Skill engulfed the small cupboard. The light here was as absolute as the dark would be in a cave. Dazzled, Silyen’s eyes could discern nothing of his surroundings. He had to trust his other senses to know that he was not alone.

  In the unseeing brightness, life began and ended. A woman screamed. A baby cried. A man wept.

  The hairs prickled up Silyen’s neck. He could feel the pulse of his Skill in every part of his body: throbbing in his earlobes, beating beneath his fingernails.

  This large closet had been panelled off from the bedroom of which it was originally part. But once, it had all been one room. Silyen turned in a circle where he stood. Some inner sense told him that there was the bed on which, four centuries ago, Cadmus’s first wife had struggled in labour. There was where their child Sosigenes had been born, the umbilical cord cut by a servant before the baby was handed to his father.

  And here was where Cadmus had stripped his son’s Skill. The violence of that act burned bright enough to sear through the centuries.

  Why had he done it? And how?

  Silyen walked forward. (Some small and irrelevant part of his brain told him that wasn’t possible, because in restored-Orpen the panelled back wall of the cupboard blocked his way. But either the wall wasn’t quite real or he wasn’t quite real, because he was definitely walking forward.)

  And he saw them: three bright flames.

  Look closer.

  Not flame. Each presence was not a single radiance, but a thousand threads of fire, all tangled together.

  Two pulsed brightly, but one was unravelling into nothingness, like a fuse fizzing towards its own explosive annihilation. And it wasn’t the latterly Skilless infant Sosigenes. His newborn form shone. No, the unspooling brilliance was his mother, in her fatal childbed.

  This is how we die.

  Loss of Skill didn’t mean death – as both Meilyr Tresco and Jenner had obligingly demonstrated. But evidently, with death came this dissolution of Skill.

  Mesmerized, Silyen watched what Cadmus did next.

  Cadmus hadn’t understood exactly what he was doing. The journals Silyen had read over and over in memory-Orpen’s library made that clear. In them, his ancestor had connected the terrible night of his wife’s death with his son’s Skillessness, but he had never realized – or never acknowledged – that he was the cause.

  Whatever Cadmus had done, it had been i
ntuitive, unconscious. But the fabric of Orpen itself remembered.

  And as Silyen watched, he finally understood.

  He saw how Cadmus fastened one end of his child’s Skill to its mother’s golden thread. And how he joined the other end to his own. The Skill of all three were now tied together to make one tangled golden cord. Cadmus was attempting to anchor his wife in life. To be the strong rock to which her spirit was tethered.

  The knotted cord held strong. But still his wife’s Skill burned out like a bright fuse as her life ebbed.

  And then his wife’s thread was all burned away, and it was Sosigenes’ Skill that was fizzing into the darkness. Cadmus recoiled and the conjoined thread broke. A tiny golden wisp floated after the rest into the dim. The remainder writhed and snapped back to its anchor – Cadmus.

  Where there had been three bright flames in the room, now there was only one.

  And though he could neither hear nor see it, Silyen felt Cadmus utter a raw howl that shivered right through him. He closed his eyes and trembled.

  It was only the clashing of knives that brought Silyen round. They were so close he could feel them cut the air.

  He took a deep breath. Tried to steady himself. Pushed away sensations that threatened to overwhelm him, to a distance from where they could be safely examined later.

  ‘You’re getting good,’ he said, turning and opening his eyes back onto the real world. ‘Although not good enough yet that I’d let you shave me.’

  Dog grinned, and scraped the blades of Black Billy’s glove against each other. They were thick with clotted blood.

  ‘It’s not a shave – I’ll be giving – your cousin Ragnarr.’

  Silyen looked at what Dog held in his other hand and rolled his eyes. Not again.

  ‘Couldn’t you go and kill a nice prime steak?’ he said. ‘Picking bones out of my dinner every night is becoming a little tedious.’

  Dog hoisted the two brace of rabbits he held and emitted his barking laughter.

  ‘Just be grateful – I didn’t bring – the badger.’

  Silyen grimaced.

  ‘Anything interesting – in the cupboard?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ said Silyen. He wiped his sweaty palms down his jeans. ‘Things I need to think about. Come on, I’ll put the kettle on while you get your furry victims ready for the pot.’

  In the kitchen, Silyen filled the coffee pot while he watched Dog deftly use the array of Black Billy’s implements to skin, gut and joint his kill. The man’s proficiency had improved amazingly. He’d dispatch Ragnarr in a trice. ‘You’re not so – chatty today.’

  ‘I think I just saw what I did to my brother. To both of them, in a way.’

  Dog paused to rip the sheath of skin and fur expertly off a second rabbit, revealing the purple-pink meat beneath, swathed in gleaming membrane. He deployed the fine blade of the glove’s little finger to nick it away. Job done, he grunted, so Silyen continued.

  ‘I took Jenner’s Skill when we were little. It’s the only explanation for how he is, and how I am. I’ve no recollection of it at all. I must have been a baby.’

  ‘So you were – born bad.’ Dog wheezed in amusement.

  ‘You wound me. No, it has to be that, because my ability and his lack of Skill would be a pretty massive coincidence, otherwise. But I never understood how it could have happened. I mean, there’s precocious, and then there’s performing dastardly deeds before you’re even out of nappies.

  ‘When I read Cadmus’s journals, it was clear that he’d done the same, but didn’t know it. So I realized it could be done accidentally. Unconsciously. The logical next step was to find out if it could also be done consciously, which inspired me to carry out a little experiment with Gavar and his baby.’

  It hadn’t been his finest hour. Silyen paused and poured himself more coffee. He’d finished the pot all by himself, but with Black Billy’s glove on it wasn’t like Dog would be able to pick up a cup without slicing his nose off.

  Dog was watching, intrigued. And even though Silyen knew the man couldn’t hurt him, that gaze was disturbing. Dog owed him three debts: a name, an escape and a life. Whose life would it be?

  He put a hand to his throat. What would it be like to feel Dog’s steel there, and your warm blood spilling?

  He shrugged off his disquiet and continued.

  ‘I was trying out ideas, wondering if Skill flowed between a parent and child. I wanted to discover if I could pull any of Gavar’s Skill into his baseborn daughter. But I was doing it blind. It’s only in the past year that I’ve been able to “see” Skill, and only in these last few weeks that I’ve seen it with sufficient acuity to grasp how you might manipulate it.

  ‘So I daresay I was doing it badly. That’s what experiments are, doing things badly, until you do them better. I knew it was affecting Gavar. He would get headaches. He’s always been moody, but his temper became even worse, if that’s possible. And you know how it ended: that night at the gate. I wanted to see if little Libby could open it. I may have been overeager, and Gavar snapped. It was all most unfortunate.’

  It was more than unfortunate. It was, if he was being honest, unforgivable. His Skillful meddling had tightened the bonds between father and child. But he hadn’t foreseen how that would influence Gavar’s reaction, when confronted with Leah trying to steal away with their daughter.

  Silyen remembered Leah, fatally wounded and lying on the cold ground. He recalled Gavar’s icy fury – No one steals what’s mine – when the emotion he truly felt for the girl was a hot passion. And Jenner, bent over her as she died. What a mess. All Silyen had been able to do was walk away.

  Can’t you do anything? Jenner had called after him.

  No, there had been nothing he could do. No one can bring back the dead, he’d told his brother. Not even me.

  Not Silyen at Kyneston gate. Not Cadmus Parva at his dying wife’s side.

  Some things not even Skill could do.

  ‘Enough of that,’ he announced, hopping down from the countertop to peer over Dog’s shoulder. ‘If I may make a suggestion, add a little more black pepper. Last night’s was woefully under-seasoned.’

  ‘You can do it yourself – tomorrow,’ growled Dog. ‘I leave at dawn. Got a job to do. Your cousin won’t know – what bit him.’

  The man clashed his steel fingers, before picking up another rabbit and expertly slashing its fur from jaw to tail in one practised motion.

  Which was when the roof of Orpen Mote blew off.

  16

  Silyen

  Dog actually snarled, and if Crovan had progressed to giving the man hackles, they would have risen.

  All around them, bricks shrivelled and crumbled, turning back into the ash they had been until Silyen and his aunt had begun their restoration. Silyen glanced up. Where the roof had been was now night sky. As he watched, the stars warped. Pots and pans were falling from the walls, clattering to the floor, their shapes blurring, melting.

  ‘Out, quickly,’ Silyen gasped.

  Dog needed no telling. As they ran from the kitchen, the walls collapsed in a final puff of gritty dust. The floorboards scorched and withered beneath their feet as they ran. From behind came an almighty crash – the great iron chandelier in Orpen’s hall smashing onto the stone-flagged floor.

  Silyen set both hands to the front door and rammed through it. Where was his aunt?

  This wasn’t the first time.

  Occasionally, over these past weeks, small portions of Orpen had reverted to ruin. Silyen would turn a corner and find a room gone; a wall half missing; a passageway newly open to the sky. It was Aunty Terpy’s grief, her potent, destructive Skill lashing out and undoing all their work. Silyen would simply pause, restore, and move on.

  Not this time. This looked bad enough to devastate the house all over again, unless she was stopped.

  ‘There,’ Dog barked, pointing at the rose garden set on a terrace above the house.

  In the thin moonlight Silye
n saw Aunt Euterpe on her knees, clawing at the dirt. She looked just as she had that day a quarter of a century ago, when her grief over her parents’ deaths and Orpen’s destruction unleashed catastrophe. When Winterbourne Zelston had commanded her to be still, and she had been – through all the years that followed, until Silyen had found her in this same garden.

  Silyen ran to his aunt, grabbed her shaking shoulders, and heaved her upright.

  ‘Stop it,’ he shouted. ‘Stop. It’ll all fall again.’

  Euterpe’s eyes were wide in her thin, pale face. The layers of Orpen flickered and superimposed. And she looked once more like the invalid girl he had met in the rose garden, and swapped stories with as they walked around the moat.

  His friend. His sort of sister.

  ‘I miss him,’ Euterpe cried, tears streaking her soil-smudged face. ‘I miss him more than I can bear. You should have left me here, Silyen. Left me to dream of my Winter coming back.’

  Silyen shook her fiercely. It was building again, that awful pressure they had all felt in Kyneston’s ballroom before it exploded. Pressure as if your brain was inflating inside your skull, with violence the only release.

  ‘Your Skill,’ he hissed. ‘Control it.’

  Dog lurched over. He swung his head as if to dislodge the swelling pain. Blood trickled from his nose. With the hand that wasn’t gloved in death, he slapped her.

  ‘You’ll kill us all,’ he growled.

  ‘I wish I was dead,’ Euterpe shrieked. ‘I wish I didn’t have this Skill that protects me from myself. I wish I could be with him.’

  Silyen froze. He released his aunt, who slumped to her knees. He closed his eyes, and opened them in Skill.

  Aunt Euterpe was so dazzling he raised a hand to shield his vision. The raw power of this woman was astonishing. She pulsed brighter than any Equal he had seen, a writhing ball of energy.

  What had he seen Cadmus do? Could he pluck and pull this coiling power and unravel her? Did he dare?