Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  ‘He was speaking with such earnestness to Him that I believe they did not notice me in the hall and had quite forgotten our meeting. They whispered between themselves at some distance, so I could not hear what was said, but the Master was not at all pleased. It must be, I have thought since, that my brother had failed again to provide the information that the Master required, for Adam seemed apologetic in the face of the Master’s questions, and the Master most aggrieved. I stood quietly, intending to wait until I was noticed, but neither of them did notice, and their argument become hotter and hotter. At the end, the Master said:

  ‘“You will prove yourself useful, boy, let me assure you.”

  ‘And with that the Master walked him from the room and sent him back to Malarkoi then and there, to finish the work that he had started.’

  ‘Did you ever see him again?’

  ‘Never. He left and he never returned. The Mistress has him, in her dungeons, the Master says, and there she tortures him for information.’ Bellows was wringing his hands. ‘He will never tell her anything. I have assured the Master of this many times. He would never betray him. I worry that the Master does not believe me, that He thinks badly of Adam, something I would not have my brother suffer for the world. I work every day so that the Master might see that I, who am only a pale shadow of my brother, am entirely faithful, and that He should see that Adam would be so much more so. I work so that the Master might know how useful a boy may become, and how much more useful Adam would be.’ Bellows turned to Nathan, sniffing his thoughts, and now he came closer. ‘You wonder what your role might be? You wonder what a poor slum boy might do for the Master? Perhaps you might succeed where Adam failed. He will send you there, to Malarkoi, and you will rescue my brother. This I believe, though He has said nothing. Why else would He cosset you in this way? Why else would He educate you? Why else does He provide you with a magical book of languages? So that you might go into Malarkoi, where He will not deign to go, and there do His will on His behalf.’

  Bellows was not present at dinner that evening, and his absence seemed to disconcert Cook. Whether he missed the authority of his superior, or whether he felt the burden of leadership in the room that now only contained Nathan, was impossible to tell, but after he laid out the courses he rubbed up and down his bare arms and fidgeted. If Nathan left too long between spoons of soup he leant forward, not quite chivvying with his hands but clutching at his waist, as if the boy’s progress was insufficient.

  Each empty plate or bowl was taken away the moment it was finished, Cook rattling his way to and from the kitchen with unusual speed. The food itself was unchanged from that day’s expected menu, and Nathan was keen to get the whole thing over with in order to return the sooner to his room, so Cook’s officiousness was not a worry, but in a place with such a rigid routine Nathan couldn’t help but notice the difference.

  Cook came back with the final course – a small plate of crackers and ripe cheese. He was older than the Fetch, probably, more crooked, but also in some indefinable way stronger. He was wiry, slender, his hands and forearms scored with fresh burns, the scars of old burns, blisters, callouses – all natural consequences of his work – none of which seemed to bother him.

  At his belt he wore towels – five of them at least, one clean, one dotted with sauces, one dry, one wet, one thicker – and in his pockets were matches and salt and ground pepper – Nathan knew this since if Bellows ever asked for extra seasoning, Cook would reach into one, take a pinch, and dust whatever ingredient was lacking with a fine coating until Bellow’s tastes were satisfied.

  Nathan took a cracker and a piece of cheese, chewed it slowly while Cook hovered. He swallowed, smacked his lips. Cook angled his head to where the jug was, silently asking Nathan whether he wanted water.

  Nathan shook his head in return, and Cook, with a slightly anxious stare to check that the meal was over to Nathan’s satisfaction, took the plate and shuffled off to the kitchens, from where he did not emerge.

  LX

  In the gloom of the middle of the night, Nathan woke to movement and the sound of pages slapping together and the creaking of the book’s stiff leather spine. He did not need to open his eyes. His hand was already heavy on the book’s cover, so he slipped it over his sheets and lay it on the pillow beside him. The book fell open and immediately began to speak.

  ‘Nathan. Are you awake? Have you drifted off into death? You lie so still. Speak and prove that you are yet alive.’

  ‘Of course I’m alive. Why wouldn’t I be?’ Nathan said.

  ‘Indeed!’ the book laughed. ‘Indeed. Why not indeed? So, then, a living boy must attend to his studies. What shall it be? A story? A sum? What would you learn tonight?’

  Nathan wiped his eyes open and slipped up until his back was against the headboard.

  ‘Do they talk like we do, in Malarkoi?’

  There was a dry and rustling silence for a little while, as if the book had fallen shut, and when it spoke again it was quiet, almost whispering.

  ‘Malarkoi? What do you know of Malarkoi?’

  ‘It is a city, and in that city there is a Mistress, and I’ve got to go there.’

  ‘To see her? You are being sent to see the Mistress? Who told you this?’

  ‘No-one has yet. But Bellows said it might happen.’

  ‘Bellows. And you would go there, would you? To see the Mistress of Malarkoi?’

  Nathan said nothing.

  ‘What is wrong? You fear her, perhaps?’

  Nathan shook his head.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’ve always lived here. Always. I don’t know anywhere else.’

  ‘Is it so wonderful, then, here, that you would not consider going elsewhere?’

  Nathan shook his head again.

  ‘So why must you stay?’

  The book waited, but Nathan had no answer, except only a lone tear that splashed after a little while onto an open page. He tried to brush it off, but when it hit the paper it was outlined in ink and beneath it the word ‘tear’ appeared.

  ‘I see,’ said the book, who read his tears as easily as he understood his words. ‘You love them still, then?’

  Nathan turned his head so that any more tears could fall in privacy and not give his heart away.

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t you? A boy may love his mother and feel no shame in it. And a boy of your age will notice pangs of longing at the arrangement of the features on a pretty face. Are you wearing your locket, Nathan?’

  Nathan reached for it, and it was there, but it was cold. Nathan was crying now in a way he could not control or account for, the tears twisting his throat and making his chest heave for air.

  On one page the book drew a mother clasping her child to her chest, though Nathan did not see it, and on the other a pretty girl offering her hand for a dance. The pages riffled forward, each showing a slightly different image, until the child was left on the ground, the mother’s back turned, and the offered hand was snatched away, the girl laughing cruelly.

  ‘Nathan, a boy who feels will feel, and this might make him sad or happy, but this is not the function of feeling. One does not love because one wishes to feel either happy or sad. One loves because one needs to be sensitive to the world, to see in it that which is lovable. Not to see it, not to be sensitive to it, is not a strength but a form of blindness. One might look into the daylight and find that sometimes it is dim, and sometimes it is bright, and that daylight might be too dim, or too bright, but it is always better to see than it is to be blind. You suffer because, like the sensation of burning on the skin when one touches a hot kettle, you have sensed something real.’

  ‘But…’ Nathan managed, though the rest of the words, if words he had intended, caught again.

  ‘But you were badly treated? Perhaps that is so, but when a loud noise falls upon the ear, and you hear it and smart at the sound, is that the fault of the sound? The sound is what it is, the pain comes from your sensitivity to it, which is a goo
d thing. When you touch a flame, it stings your fingers, but is the flame at fault? It is what it is. When you love, you love the thing as it is, because it is as it is. If the flame burns you, can you feel aggrieved? You must feel the pain as a consequence of feeling anything – indeed, to shy away from pain is to deny the world. Pain must be borne, even sought out, so that you might learn about the world from it.’

  Nathan listened and though the tears came he could not deny the words of the book.

  ‘It is an admirable thing to be able to sense the world, Nathan, in all its facets – it is one of the great strengths of people that they might do it. But you cannot sense all things equally, or perhaps even enough to understand them. This is the source of unhappiness, it has been said – that we know not all things. Though it might hurt us to come into knowledge, pain is the indicator that we are passing into a purer state, a happier state.’

  ‘I don’t know about all of that.’

  ‘Of course… this is a matter that would be best left until you are a little older. Yet perhaps there is something you might do to ease your suffering. You wish to know the answers to questions that you are frightened to ask. You need not ask them. There is a girl – Prissy, if your tears are right – you would know whether or not she betrayed you, is that correct?’

  Nathan bit his lip and it occurred to him that he might lie, but why would he? Why dissemble in the middle of the night, deep inside the Master’s Manse, with a magic book beside him on the pillow, drawing and writing and speaking to him as if it could read his every thought, knowing him inside out, caring what it was he felt; instead he nodded.

  ‘And less so, Gam? And the man Padge? And behind it all your mother, you think? And behind all that, perhaps without you even knowing it, your father? You feel much betrayed, Nathan. And all the while you are consumed with guilt, knowing that you had the power to change it all, but did not use it?’

  ‘Do you know everything?’

  ‘There is no “you”, Nathan, but everything you are sad about is contained in your tears.’

  Nathan lay down, his tears having leached the life from him.

  ‘Before you sleep, Nathan, will you agree to something?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tomorrow night, when you wake, take this book to the playroom. There is something there that will help you.’

  LXI

  The next day Bellows gave Nathan a book of exercises – incomplete diagrams in which the missing angles of triangles and the lengths of their sides should be enumerated – and though he needed his full attention to complete them, his mind was pitched forward to bedtime. So it was through his meals, and his bath, until he was in his bed. The candle was flickering beside him; the book was across his knees.

  He blew out the light, pulled the covers up so that the cotton lay across his face all the way up to his forehead, and he rested his arms so they blocked out the world. One shoulder plugged up one ear and the forefinger of the same arm plugged his other ear. He breathed. This technique he had used innumerable times in the slums, while his father was coughing on the bed and he needed to fight back the expectation of his death. He used it while his mother worked and he needed to drown the sounds: the exhortations and insults that he no longer found either bemusing or horrifying but the irregularity of which punctured his efforts to ignore them.

  The window of his bedroom let in very little light, and he was so high up that there was nothing to see through it, but when his eyes opened and he did not look directly at his arm he could see it in the gap between his face and his bed sheets – each pane a grey rectangle in the blackness. He stared at one until his eyes were dry and when he blinked, he stared at the next until his eyes blurred with static and the panes crossed to meet in the middle.

  Then he sat up.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  Nathan yawned.

  ‘Nathan?’

  The book tutted from under the pillow, a disappointed little sound. Nathan reached under his covers and there was a chirrup, like a happy bird makes, before his fingers even reached it.

  ‘Come on then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To the playroom. It’s time.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘For answers. You’ll understand.’

  Nathan wiped the last of the sleep from his eyes, smoothed the twist from his pyjamas, tucked the book under his arm, and sneaked over to the door. He opened it a little; in the crack between the frame there was no sign of anyone in the hall, no sound of rattling pans or scraping brooms and, most importantly, no clicking of Bellows’s heels.

  Nathan bit his lip and went through – no one, just the empty corridor and the dead stares of painted eyes regarding each other from either wall. He slipped out in his stockinged feet, slid swiftly across the dark wood, bent at the knee as if that small difference in height would protect him from being seen, or preparing for the lower ceiling to come.

  At night gill-men roamed the halls equipped with weapons the Master provided them. Bellows said it was for his safety in the unlikely event the Mistress’s assassins found ingress, but they would serve just as well as punishers of errant boys.

  The corridor was empty and there was no sound, but then, right at the opposite end, a wedge of light was revealed as a door opened. Nathan sprinted for the door to the playroom, skidding the last few feet and hitting the panelled wood, rattling a picture in its frame. He stood there, back to the wall, one hand settling a portrait of an unknown man in a tightly buttoned collar and stovepipe hat, the other stopping its motion on the picture wire. ‘In the morning, then, but no later.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Bellows.’

  It was the sibilant hiss of a gill-man. Nathan’s stomach lurched. He twisted until he had the key in the lock. He turned, and there were two silhouettes, tall, stooped, flat-headed – a pair of them. If the gill-men stopped and turned they would see Nathan, and if they saw him they would call him back, and if he was called back he would go, and the book – so solid beneath the thin cloth of his pyjamas, half Nathan’s size, it sometimes seemed, more solid than he was himself – they would sniff it straight away, then there would be talk of what he was doing here, after lights out. Bellows would be called.

  But only if they turned.

  They stood there for the longest time, black cut-outs of their weird shapes in the light of an open doorway, but, in the end, they did not turn; they disappeared into the corridor.

  They were gone, leaving Nathan free to open the door and go where the book had asked him to go, to find answers, but now Nathan couldn’t quite bring himself to open the door.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ the book asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t know…’

  Why was he feeling so guilty? What did he feel he was doing wrong? He thought hard, but it was dull, muted. No answer came. Nathan turned the handle, opened the door, and then they were in.

  He had never been there in the dark before, but the room seemed to know what to do. As soon as the door shut behind him, candles lit themselves here and there and the gas came up, pure white and glowing. Nathan ran around, drawing the curtains on the eight walls, even the little one on the door to the garden, hiding the shame he still felt but couldn’t account for.

  When it was done, he sat in the middle of the rug and lay the book out in front of him.

  ‘So many nice toys,’ it said. Nathan nodded and went to get his favourites, showing them one at a time to the open pages.

  ‘That one,’ it said, ‘is known as the Perpetuum Mobile and its marbles can be induced to move forever, with no application of force, if one knows how. And that is Ballard’s Bow, made from the finest cured ash and carried by the boy warrior Ballard in the third Iberian War. And that is the Ark of Noah, in miniature, which protected the creatures of prehistory from drowning at the whim of the weftling.’ The book named each thing that Nathan brought to it, and on its pages came little histories of the things, and instructions
for their use, and the toys that Nathan had played with in only the most obvious ways were suddenly given new purpose and possibility. Nathan brought everything, even objects he had previously had no interest in, and the book showed him what they were and what one did with them.

  Then Nathan brought it the theatre.

  ‘Ah,’ said the book, ‘the matter in hand. That, Nathan, is a very potent form of thing. It is a Retrospective Odeum – one of only a handful ever made. It comes from the dark times, before the Master made Mordew, when all things were in chaos and flux. It is a powerful but vicious thing from a powerful but vicious time. It is primal, linking in with the world in a way few can understand. Perhaps even the Master does not understand it.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  The pages of the book went blank, as if it were reluctant to write of it, and it said nothing for a while, but then it fluttered and spoke, and it was as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Best to see. There’s clay, over in the corner. Bring it here.’

  Nathan rushed back with it, the square block wrapped in damp muslin, resting in a shallow bowl of water.

  ‘Take some – a handful, no more.’

  Nathan dug his fingers into the smooth cold wetness and pulled out a fist that oozed between his fingers.

  ‘Excellent. Now, take something sharp – the tip of that arrow – and pierce your skin until it bleeds.’

  Nathan stopped, his enthusiasm suddenly gone.

  On the page came the image of a fingertip and a slit was cut across it. Blood pooled and then, when the finger was turned over, it fell in fat drops. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘Won’t it sting?’

  The book was silent for a little while.

  ‘It will sting, but nothing you aren’t used to. It will be worth it.’

  Nathan put down the clay, took the head of the arrow and pushed it against the tip of his left index finger. It pressed against the skin, making a dent that disappeared when he took the point away again.