by Alex Pheby
‘Is it?’ Padge said, his eyes flitting over Nathan as if the sight of him was painful in itself.
‘Yes. You’ve got nothing to worry about, Mr Padge. That I promise.’
Slowly the handkerchief came down.
‘The word of a gentleman is worth thousands,’ he said, ‘but what makes you think I’d have medicine for him? Do I look like a medic?’
He certainly did not.
‘He’s got money.’
One of Padge’s eyebrows, a wedge as thick and black as a farrier’s thumb, bent in the middle.
‘Has he? I suppose he may have. He certainly hasn’t wasted any of it on his tailor, I’ll give him that. Let me see what I’ve got.’ Padge turned and went to a blanket box in one corner. When he bent, the fabric on his arse stretched so tight that it looked as if two bald priests were sharing the same felt cap. He returned, after a lot of rattling and cursing, with a little stoppered green bottle. He held it between thumb and forefinger and raised it to the lamp. Inside it was half-full of a milky liquid. He sloshed it around. ‘Still relatively fresh. One of my fellows had it from a corpse – don’t worry! I’m assured he was free of the worm. He died from something else altogether. Indeed, he was walking around quite cheerfully before my man found him.’
‘He’ll take it.’ Gam reached out for the bottle, but Padge snapped it away.
‘What’s it worth to you?’
Nathan stepped forward now, and although Gam put an arm across his chest, he couldn’t stop him talking. ‘It’s for my dad. What’s a dad worth?’
‘Depends entirely on the father in question,’ Padge said, smiling as if the disgust in Nathan’s voice wasn’t blatant. ‘My father? I wouldn’t have given a brass farthing for him. In fact, I paid good money to make him go away. My mother too. As for yours? Well, that is for you to decide.’
Nathan took out his purse, wincing at the rat bite, and emptied his share of the haberdasher’s takings into the palm of his other hand. ‘This much?’
Padge whistled. ‘He must be quite the man.’ He brought the bottle forward, but when Nathan went to hand him the coins, he pulled it back. ‘And yet… Perhaps you misjudge me. Perhaps you take me for a cold, greedy soul, with no thought for anything but the weight of a purse.’ Padge took out the mirror again, checking to see if, perhaps, such bad character was apparent in his features. When he was satisfied, he returned it. ‘No, I am not such a man. And to prove it, you may have the medicine. Keep your coins.’ Padge smiled sweetly and held out the bottle. When Nathan didn’t take it, Gam did, and the moment he did, Padge leaned in until he was so close to Nathan that their breaths ruffled each other’s hair. ‘But when I do you a favour, my young fellow, I expect one done for me in return. Understand me?’
He pulled back. Nathan held out his money again. ‘Take it. I don’t want to owe you anything.’
Padge snorted. ‘I can see how much your father means to you. I have no great knowledge of mathematics, boy, but I know there are no numbers high enough to adequately describe his value to you. Consequently, your little pile could never be enough. I will not be made a fool of. The law of equivalences dictates that you will pay me his worth to you, one way or another. Now get out!’
Nathan wanted to argue, but Gam pushed him back and Prissy pulled him, until all three followed Joes out of the door.
XIX
Nathan clutched the little bottle so hard that it might have shattered in his fist. The others went back to the den, but Nathan held the medicine out in front of him as if it was drawing him along, pulling him against his fear between the cramped and decrepit shacks that made up the slum. In and out it drew him on the quickest possible route home, through the narrowest of gaps, through puddles of Living Mud, so that the coarse weave of his jacket caught splinters of rotting wood and his boots splashed up dead-life on either side.
Here and there were new bonfires, new effigies of the Mistress, half-alight and smoking, but when the bottle met an obstacle it paid it no attention, forcing Nathan to shin up damp greasy planks, gripping with his bad hand, to slide down scree and rubble, through piles of smouldering bonfire ash, all to satisfy its need to get home, to get to its patient, to do its work. It paid no attention to vendors of firebird feathers, or women throwing out slops, or to men to whom his mother or father owed money; they recognised in Nathan’s determination and pace that there was something unusual about the boy today, something their demands and questions would have to defer to.
When his shack came into view, the bottle didn’t ease its urgency; instead Nathan broke into a run to accommodate it the better. When he skidded to a stop and pushed the tarp aside, he was breathing hard and heavy.
He need not have hurried – his mother had a visitor.
Leaning over the bed, licked by firelight, was a man. He was adjusting his clothing, buttoning himself, wiping a lock of hair free from the sweat that glistened on his brow.
When he saw Nathan, he frowned. He turned towards the boy, straightened his tie and clicked his heels neatly together.
Nathan stared. The man was tall, well fed, broad across the chest, so that Nathan imagined that he might be able to handle himself if it came to a fight. He nodded briskly to Nathan and then turned back to the bed, where Nathan’s mother was beneath the covers – half in and half out, one leg as bare as a bark-stripped branch.
‘I will take my leave, Princess,’ the man said, bowing to her, then turning to the door.
‘The money!’ she cried.
He stopped and almost looked at Nathan, but not quite, his head resisting the final degree or so of rotation necessary to bring him into view again. ‘Of course.’
He reached into the pocket of his trousers – not his jacket, his hand did not move up to that privileged place near his heart – down, where coins disturbed the lie of the cloth. He smiled. On his top lip there was a fawn birthmark, hardly visible in the dim light, in the shape of a teardrop.
From his pocket he took a silver coin. ‘I carry nothing smaller than this. So… take the rest on account?’ He placed the coin on the bed by Nathan’s mother’s foot and left.
Nathan stood for a little, not moving, and then his mother rolled over, dragging the sheet with her, turning her back on him. ‘Remember his face,’ she said. ‘One day you’re going to need him.’
There was a sound from behind the curtain. Nathan pulled it across. There was his father, bolt upright in bed as if he had seen an apparition, but his eyes were closed. ‘Dad?’
His father didn’t move. Nathan could see the muscles of his jaw working, his eyes pinched at the corners. His hands gripped the cover as tightly as Nathan was gripping the bottle, his neck was corded like a panicked horse’s.
‘I’ve got something that might help.’ Nathan thought he could see recognition, some little sign, some conflict in his father’s desire to remain rigid. ‘It’s medicine.’
His father’s face was growing redder and he was trembling, his shoulders shaking. Beneath the covers, his feet and knees drew up where they previously had been laid out as straight as they could go.
‘Will you take it?’
Now his lips drew back so that the teeth, standing alone from the gums so that the brown roots were visible, shook and glistened in the firelight. He trembled all over.
Nathan unscrewed the bottle. The medicine reeked of aniseed. Nathan took his father’s hand, ignoring the throbbing in his own, and tried to open his fist, but it was too tightly clenched.
‘Should I put it to your lips?’
Now spittle was gathering in the corner of his father’s mouth and he was making hissing sounds with each breath, urgent, wet little noises, and his nostrils were wide and dry.
‘Dad, I don’t know what to do.’
He screwed up his face and then it was too much. The coughing started again, doubling him up and tearing the silence with the sound of it.
‘It’s too late.’ His mother was standing, silhouetted so that her emaciated body was bla
ck, outlined in yellow where her transparent nightdress let the candlelight through.
‘He’s alive, isn’t he?’ Nathan snapped.
‘The worms… that’s all that’s keeping him here. They need him.’
‘I need him.’
His mother shrugged and went back to bed.
‘Take it, Dad. Please.’
His father turned his head. His eyes were wide and red, and his mouth screamed pain and flecks of phlegm onto the sheets, but his hand came out, hard and urgent, and grabbed the bottle from Nathan. He took it and put the whole thing into his mouth, slumping down onto the mattress, letting the weight of what remained of his body close his mouth around it, the coughing expelling itself through his nose for want of any other exit. He stayed there, heaving and snorting and buckling for what seemed like forever. When it was done, he eventually lay over, exhausted and sweating, his eyes rolled up into his head. There on the sheet was the bottle, empty, and the corners of his father’s mouth were white with the medicine. He fell into unconsciousness, but Nathan took his hand. ‘Well done, Dad. Well done. I’ll get more. I promise, Dad. I promise.’
XX
At night, the Master’s magic leaked down from the Manse.
If the moon was risen it was difficult to see. Even with the clouds and the fog and the rolling curtain of mist battered up from the Sea Wall, the moon was still there, dissipating, diffusing, blanketing Nathan’s sight with enough interference to mask the magic’s eerie subtlety. Bird-death obscured it too, but when the moon sank and the firebirds ceased their attack, he could see it clearly. It was putrid green and viscous, part smoke, part treacle. It slipped from the base of the Manse where the rock turned into the facade, as if there was a breach there, a crack formed by the works below.
Nathan drew his knees up towards his chest and pulled his jacket tight around them, sucked at his wound, tongued the gap in his flesh that would not close. His father’s coughing was the only thing louder than the crash of the waves, even if the medicine did seem to be giving him relief – there was something in the tenor of the coughs, a depth, a strength, that suggested he was clearing his chest, finding matter to expel.
He followed the flow of magic down from the summit, through Mordew, through the Merchant City, though they were too well fed and too well rested to feel it, along the Glass Road, past the gated verge that kept the slums out, past the houses that commerce built in the slums – the Fetch and his stable, the tanner, the Temples with their emaciated madams and grubby, perfumed girls, the fishermen’s huts housing broken-boned, brine-pickled, sun-beaten old men and their silent widows-to-be, into the Mud-caked places where Padge recruited his crews, down to where the hopeless lay in their damp bedding, a single width of wood above them, waiting for death – the lot of it was tinted green, infused by this leaking of power.
The people couldn’t see it only because it was so pervasive, like a smell that hangs about which is only ever noticed after one has been away. Except from here there was no going away – or if there was, it was a one-way trip.
Behind it was the Master, for whom they were all raw materials in some unspoken enterprise. His movements were too quick to recognise, his purposes too unfathomable, but he needed this city and its people nonetheless. Around him they all gathered, as if it were the other way around, as if they needed him, his light, his excrescences, his slow seeping evil.
Though Nathan wanted to hate him, to hate it, to hate everything, there was something in this putridity, in this light, that he recognised. It ran through him, too, so that he knew it intimately.
The Spark.
The Spark was in him, though he denied it. It thrilled in his bones, though he resisted it. It overtook him and burned away the dreary dampness of the world, lit it through, as if illuminating it with lightning. It was painful, but it tore away the bonds, the misery, the dead weight of his father and mother, the perversions of the haberdasher, the cruelty of Padge. It burned away the future, a life in the sea spray, watching wood blacken and turn to mould.
It exceeded even the petty pleasures and comforts of the merchants by such a margin that he could burn them to dust. He need not concern himself with little things, little people; he could burn the lot of them away, if he could stand the pain. Who would stand against him, when the Spark came?
‘Do not use it.’
He closed his eyes and over the crashing of the waves his father’s silence was louder than anything, now that he was asleep.
Nathan walked out of the slums.
XXI
There was an exit from the sewers on the slum side of the fence. Gam had told him about it, scratched a map on paper torn from the back of a book before it went into the fire. A pipe once carried the effluent to the Sea Wall, but since it might just as well discharge into the slum as into the sea, when the pipe failed no one thought to repair it. For years it pumped ordure out so that a lichen-slicked semicircle of abandoned ground was laid onto the landscape, but one year it stopped flowing. As the smell receded and the slum-dwellers advanced, the entrance became hidden behind shacks and trash, so that now only Gam and his gang knew or cared about it.
In the darkness, Nathan went to where an old, bald horse blanket was left seemingly at random amongst windblown scraps and peelings. He pulled the blanket aside: there was the pipe, encrusted with unrecognisable matter. He slipped into it.
Inside was dry. The dripping of water echoed from somewhere, but it was not wet here; the walls flaked to his touch. His feet found a flat and glassy substance beneath them. In the darkness there was nothing to see; Nathan was glad of that.
The pipe was on an incline, slight enough that he could walk without difficulty upward, towards the high ground beneath the Merchant City. He let the burn in his calves guide him, and when the pipe met a junction, he took the upward path.
As he went, the sound of water became louder, the odour of the waste, already noxious and dizzying, grew stronger, until eventually he came to a place where there was flow.
By now his eyes were used to the blackness and could manage with what light there was. The pipe he had been walking through was blocked, a tangle of twigs and feathers and branches, but it was only when he reached the end of the pipe that he saw what had held them there in the first place, what had caused them to gather there, what had prevented the sewage from moving easily, what had been entombed in layers of filth, caked on and accreted over months. It was a corpse.
At first Nathan thought it was a mass of branches, but one branch was suddenly a hand, then another the crook of a knee, then it all became obvious in a sick rush which had Nathan scrabbling. The thing’s face was half covered by the sewage, eddies swirling in its open mouth, nameless liquid washing its empty eye sockets, thin straggles of hair like algae pulled downstream by the current.
The dead-life kept away from it, fearing, perhaps, the nothingness that it represented, and Nathan also turned his back on it. He waded, knee-deep, until he met a pipe wide enough to require a maintenance walkway, and here he hauled himself up.
Gam had showed him the signs to look for – arrows and numbers scratched onto junctions and the ends of pipe sections. Still feeling the corpse’s gaze on the back of his neck, he sought out the entrance to the clubhouse.
Nathan closed the door on the stench behind him and on anything else that might have been there, lurking. It must have been an hour or two after midnight, but down here in the clubhouse it was as light as it always was. He knew better than to imagine he would find his way to the library, there were so many turns and dead ends and recessed switches that Gam kept secret, but anywhere was better than the slums with his parents, the coughing, the well-dressed men, their hands clenching on the way in, ties loosened on the way out.
He went downward, where there was the option, and at the first room with furniture he sat himself in a chair, in the pale stone-light, and tried to think of nothing.
When the others came back, he’d hear them, Gam at least. He’d go to th
em and convince them he needed more money for medicine. He’d borrow it, if he had to, from Padge and buy so much that he’d cure his dad in one go. Then, when his dad was better, Nathan would strike out alone, make a living like Gam did, find some way of managing the Spark, set up house with Prissy. Too much… He’d do something different from the way it was now.
As he sat in the room, dust thick on the chair arm beneath his fingers and cobwebs blowing thin as an old lace shawl from the chandelier, he wondered how it had come to this. There had been a time, he knew it though he couldn’t remember it, when there had been happiness. Hadn’t there? His father and mother, hand in hand. Hadn’t it coloured his days? Hadn’t it warmed his thoughts, his stomach? Hadn’t it brought a slow quietness to the world? But now… he could never feel it. Only the lack of it.
He rubbed his eyes back in their sockets so that red blood burned his vision and the dryness of them was replaced for a moment. The rat bite bit to the bone.
They had laughed, once upon a time. They must have done – he remembered laughing in the way that a child laughs when it knows, does not hope, but knows, that the laughter is shared. He would laugh until he was almost sick. But at what? He could think of nothing.
He rubbed his eyes harder, so that red glittering light came from who knows where, behind his lids, behind his palms, from somewhere inside.
And from here an image came – his mother? A woman, certainly, tall and strong and wrapped in silk, with her skin pale from being inside, but without a hint of sallowness, and in her hand, she held a child. Him?
And she smiled.
He jerked up from the chair as if he had saved himself from falling. There was a sound, somewhere far away. A voice – a man’s, questioning, or calling. Nathan got to his feet.
Had he slept? There was no way of knowing down here with the clocks wound down centuries before. There was a door opposite the one he had come in through, huge and heavy with a big dull brass handle. Nathan blinked and opened it, the brass cold in his hand. When it came open the voice was louder.
