Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  The grinding of teeth, birdsong, and the flapping of tent fabric was all that disturbed the silence. Behind those noises there was a broad emptiness, an absence so clear that it nagged at his ear as if it was a distant siren or tolling of bells.

  The lack of the sea.

  He had promised Bellows he would find Adam, his brother, but where was there to look? He had half-expected to scour a city like Mordew, to find agents of the Mistress, to convince them of his mission or extort the information, to run down stairs, and burn open doors. There was nothing here to burn and no-one to extort.

  He turned to face the way he had come and the land rolled, obscuring the path behind him. When he breathed there was nothing but dry air. When he touched the tips of his fingers together, they grated in a way that almost tickled. When he listened, that static of pounding waves and the constant cresting white water, and the movement of distant shale, and the concussion of firebirds and the heavy press of all the world’s water against the Master’s Sea Wall was gone, and in its place was the high sweet piping of birds in trees as he passed. They were announcing his coming in voices so high that they travelled into the sky, harmonising with the lowing of the animals around him.

  As he stood on the dusty path made by footfalls between the fields, warmed by the Spark, he felt as if he might remove some of his clothes.

  He slipped the over-jacket from his shoulders and it fell like a tannery hide, propping stiffly around his calves, seemingly reluctant to meet the ground. Then came his jacket and then his woollens, and he stood in his shirt. He stepped away and left the clothes, bent to unlace his boots. The laces were knotted and had dried so tight that he had to pick at them with his nails before he could find enough purchase to pull the knots apart. He slipped off first one and then the other and both pairs of socks, balling them together, tossing them away.

  He left the pile behind him, things shucked off and discarded, and though sharp stones occasionally poked at the soles of his feet, he was pleased to be free of it all.

  The animals grazed and took not the slightest notice of him, whether his light blazed blue, whether the corona around him spread wider, and whether the birds chirped warnings across the boundaries of their territories and so sent word of Nathan ahead as he made his way to the Mistress of Malarkoi.

  LXXII

  The first person he saw he almost missed, so startling was the rest of the scene. Coming round a hill, Nathan emerged into the bowl of a great valley, smooth and round, and filled with tents of all sizes and colours and punctuated with trails of smoke rising into the sky and bunting strung between high poles, and flotillas of kites in formation, stags and birds and dragons of paper, balloons made from red and blue, scaffolds around sculptures, and, in the far distance, greater than all of this, a high, gold pyramid, glinting in the sunlight, its steps covered with more tents. Everywhere was moving, not one single piece of it still, but everything spinning and swaying and turning and flapping in the cool breeze that rolled down the sides of the valley.

  With everything to see, it would have been no surprise if he had missed her. She was young, perhaps only five or six years old, very tiny. She had in her hand a rope, by which was tied an animal, shaggy and dirty with matted fur, black around the eyes as if it was crying. The girl was stock still, a crust of bread in her mouth that she was not chewing and crumbs down the front of her smock.

  Nathan stared at her and she stared at him, and then, as if someone had burst her, she fell to the ground, hands flat to the earth. Nathan stepped forwards, to see if she was alright, but as he did, she squeaked and pressed herself hard into the earth, scrambling to get as low as possible.

  He came closer and under her breath she was muttering something, over and over. He couldn’t make it out, but he kneeled beside her and reached for her hand. Her skin was the brown of the conker the book had showed him, but dusty and dull. As he reached across, the dust on her skin burst alight and the hairs on her arm twisted and crinkled and blew away. She reflected his light, turning to mustard. He pulled back and she was brown again.

  She pushed herself into the dirt and shook there, muttering.

  Nathan took a step back and turned away. Around him there were others, standing as she had done with their animals, and as he faced them they dropped to the earth and prostrated themselves, so that it felt as if he had the power to drop these people simply by turning his attention on them.

  They were beautiful, painted in every colour he could imagine, decorated with bows and gems and ribbons in their hair.

  ‘Where is Adam, Bellows’s brother?’ he shouted, but no-one raised their heads from the ground.

  Now there was a ringing of bells. Of course; why shouldn’t an alarm go up? Had he been so stupid as to imagine he could walk into this place brazenly, an agent of the Master, their Mistress’s enemy, and not be recognised? Not be taken as an intruder? He clenched his fists and effulgences of power, ripples of light, emanated from his hands the more he held himself tight.

  He went to the nearest tent, opened the flap.

  Inside was a fire, a pole, mats, cooking implements and two old women, knotting ribbons.

  ‘Where is Adam?’ he asked, first in the language of Mordew, then in the language the book had taught him.

  The women replied to neither question, but fell face down, supplicant.

  The same at the next tent, and the next.

  Where could a man be held, in this place? Where could he be hidden? Nathan ran from tent to tent and, unless Adam was staked like a goat, there was nowhere for him to be.

  Further into the city, if city it was, the tents became larger, more sumptuous, and they contained more people, but still there was nowhere where anyone could be held. In Mordew, in the Merchant City, there were secure doors and basements, lock-ups and attics, dungeons – ample places for the kidnap and restraint of men. But here, everything was open, everything was shared, and the people abased themselves before him.

  ‘Where is Adam?’ he cried, but no one responded.

  Nathan sat on the ground. He needed time to think. Nothing was the same here as he was used to, and he didn’t know what to do. He felt for his locket as he had so many times in the Manse, but it was not there. What was he to think? What was he not to think? If only Bellows was there. The Master.

  He crossed his legs and the earth cracked beneath him, fissures opening in the soil a finger’s width apart. Nathan blinked. This place was so strange. Or was it he that was strange? He filled his mouth with saliva, parted his lips a little and let it drop. He’d wanted to see it fall into the gap, trace it down, but it boiled on his lips before any of that could happen.

  He put a finger into a crack, and it shimmered the air, blackened the ground.

  What was he?

  He looked around and everything was shimmering, everything was blackening. The longer he sat there, the further he burned the world.

  At a distance, a man came from a tent – he was so far away that when Nathan put his hand up, he could describe his height with the distance between the tips of his thumb and index finger. Nathan waved at him, and the man waved back.

  ‘Have you seen Adam?’ Nathan called out to him.

  The man cupped his hand to his ear.

  ‘Adam,’ Nathan repeated. ‘Have you seen Adam?’

  The man couldn’t hear, so Nathan got up, went nearer, and the man burned to ash in front of him.

  Nathan shut his eyes, but the world inside his head was just as strange. There were the alifonjers: spectral, but perfect in every detail. There were the women and children he had just seen – ghosts in ranks, genuflecting to him as if he was their Master. Now, here was the man he had just called out to, the man he had burned to ash. The man walked towards him, smiling, keen to speak. He put his hand to Nathan’s chest, where the book was. He formed a word on his lips.

  Nathan opened his eyes and here was the burning world again.

  The book was hot over his heart. It reminded him of his duty,
the Pyramid, the Mistress.

  Keep on the right path.

  It insisted.

  He took a breath and walked forward. Bells rang ahead of him, the ringing falling silent as he arrived, as if he melted the bowls of their bells with his light.

  In the burning sun, from clear skies, it snowed grey around him, huge flakes, smoking, edges burning orange in the breezes that buffeted them. Kite strings were tethered ahead of him, but the kites they had tethered had caught alight. Flocks of silk dragons were loosed, soaring into the sky to drift down in slow arcs. Bunting severed at one end flapped and lashed. Balloons were freed from their moorings. Everyone he came to – so many of them now, dense masses of them the closer he came to the pyramid – they prostrated themselves before him, as if he was expected, as if he was worshipped.

  When his approach caused their hair to light, their clothes to burn, their rings and necklaces and bangles to melt and pool on the dry earth where their ashes lay, they accepted it silently. If he closed his eyes, there they were, smiling at him.

  As he walked, the poles of the tents, bare of fabric, burned away, cast shadows in red, a darkness that seemed to want to hide from him, edging around so it was always behind the object it mimicked, hiding while it charred.

  The book was beating like a second heart as he walked, slapping with each step. He put his hand to it, pressed it still against his flesh and it burned white, so white that even in the blue-red scorch of this place it was blinding.

  LXXIII

  At ground level there was a doorway into the pyramid, unblocked by a door, twice the height of Nathan but approximately his width. Into it crammed people, forcing themselves beyond the tolerance of their limbs and joints, scratching their skin, tearing their hair.

  As he got closer, they pressed themselves to the ground as if they could put themselves out with dust, or pre-emptively escape into their graves, become funeral ashes and mix with the dry soil. They made a carpet of backs for him, varicoloured fabrics turning red then black then to the colours of blistering flesh, then to nothing, a mesh of burned palm leaves laid to greet his coming.

  Inside the entrance passageway his feet made a road through their bones, their shoulders, their hips, and as he stepped, they crackled. If his slight weight did not crush them, they fell into pieces anyway, so great was his heat.

  On each wall was a decoration of images – the same women, or a woman and a girl, tall with elongated skulls and fingers – scenes that played out as he came unopposed into the Mistress’s pyramid. These women were given gifts – bushels of corn, herds of goats, sacks of flour – and precious things were lain at their feet. These things they took and held up to the sun and from the sun were spawned magical creatures. There were firebirds – Nathan could recognise these easily since the pictures, though stylised, were accurate and clear – but there were other things that Nathan did not recognise, the heads of one animal on the bodies of others, combinations of things.

  ‘Where is Adam Birch?’ Nathan cried, but even he could not hear himself above the screams and the crackings and splinterings of everything around him. His words burned dry in his throat.

  Now he was climbing as the floor gathered beneath his feet, compressed and baked. Occasionally he saw into a chamber off the passageway, looking down into it at the scramble of those within – candles and knives and pyres and altars and gold and silver and priests and adjutants frozen for the briefest bright moment in his light, staring with the eyes of startled cats, interrupted forever in their chanting, blasted against the surfaces of the walls that had until then shielded them.

  In one room there was, briefly, a child on a bower, all around surrounded by men and women on their hands and knees, abasing themselves, and the child was opened at the throat. From a brazier emerged the head of a bird, just like the one that had perched atop the Sea Wall and looked at him, and though the child was a memory immediately, the supplicants too, the firebird birthed itself as if from an egg, struggling out from its shell, flames clinging to it like the amniotic membrane, its hands clawing at the metal, pulling it into shapes and beads that fell and hissed and darted over a stone altar.

  When it fell down and lay, panting, exhausted and wailing from its birth, Nathan raised the knife and spoke the Rebuttal in Ice, and the firebird joined the others behind his eyes.

  Further in, the passageway forked: down into a mire of more bodies, and up into a high and wide gallery with lamps that rattled and swayed from the ceiling on chains in the wind he caused to rush away from him in all directions. He took the route upward, away from the hell of that place.

  ‘Hello. My goodness, look at you!’

  He heard the words in his bones, spoken by magic and carried, resonating, under the base things of the world. Nathan stopped.

  At the top of the stairs there stood a woman. She was tall and dark and thin as a reed. She approached, moving by a means Nathan could not see.

  Porcupine spines grew where her hair might have been, blue-black and iridescent, coming straight from the scalp. Her eyes seemed to take up the whole of her face, so captivating were they of the attention. She held out her hand. ‘Wonderful to see you, Nathan. Haven’t you got powerful.’ Her dress was black on black – black silk, black cotton, black lace, black embroidery – but her skin was as white as ant eggs. ‘Come in, come in. I’ve been waiting for absolute aeons.’

  Nathan took her hand, but she didn’t burn away, didn’t brittle and disappear. She didn’t seem affected at all. She led him away and he turned. The gallery blazed behind him, flames in the darkness, smoke clouds, bones bleached like shells on a beach.

  Inside, the pyramid was opulently furnished – walls of gold, pillars of silver, swathes of cloth of every colour, a mosaic floor seemingly made of jewels, showing an entire menagerie of fantastical beasts and man–animal hybrids.

  She rushed over to a cabinet laid out with bottles and glasses. ‘Would you like a drink? You must be parched.’ At this she laughed. When Nathan shook his head, solemnly, she laughed even more. ‘It really is lovely to see you, Nathan.’ She took her own drink and laid back on a banquette, her arm draped over, her quills fanned out where her head met a pillow. ‘Could you…’ she said, gesturing around Nathan in a loose circle. He didn’t understand what she meant. Inside, such was the force of his power, the wall hangings flapped and strained at their fixings as if a great wind was blowing. ‘Your fire… might you quell it, just a little? I’d rather not set the décor alight – it’s very hard to find good fabric these days.’

  Nathan bit his lip. The book at his chest was heavy, even heavier, weighing against his skin as if it wanted to be on the inside of his ribs, beside his heart.

  ‘You can’t can you? Dear boy.’ She pursed her lips. ‘It’s that book, I suppose? Book,’ she called, ‘You’re making him burn too hot.’

  The book weighed heavier still, but he still burned.

  The Mistress tutted. ‘My own fault. Too good at my job.’ She snapped her fingers and from behind a carved three-panelled blind came a thin, brittle creature, insect-like, with many legs and arms but with a monkey face, red as a boiled lobster, its eyes averted. It skittered up to where the Mistress sat. She made a sign to it and it ran off. ‘It’s hard to control tools sometimes, right? Especially magical ones. You don’t need to tell me. I’m the worst.’ She laughed again, but now slightly ruefully. ‘Anyway, plenty of time to learn.’

  The creature returned with a glove, limp and silk, patterned like a butterfly’s wings. It tried to give it to the Mistress, but she pointed instead to Nathan. The thing wouldn’t move and looked back and forward at the ground. The Mistress encouraged it forward, ushering it on – ‘Go on! You can do it’ – but when it was out of her reach it stopped and could not be coaxed any further. The Mistress smiled. ‘It’s a bit shy. Would you mind?’

  Nathan reached for the glove and the creature burst into flames. It blazed and smoked, but only for a fraction of a second before it was gone without even
a squeak. Nathan picked up the glove.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the Mistress, ‘I can always make another one.’

  Nathan held the glove in his hand but didn’t know what she wanted him to do with it.

  She put down her glass and walked over to him. ‘There are objects, Nathan my boy – and you know this already – there are objects that have power. You know, magic weapons, magic artefacts, magic books, etcetera, etcetera. This glove is one of them.’ She stood behind him and reached around, took it from his hand. ‘It is made from the scales of creatures long dead, beautiful things from a time before all… this. Tiny things, like butterflies, I suppose, that flitted about up there, past the sky, at the very surface of the sun. There are none left now – my ancestors, I’m ashamed to say, harvested them somewhat remorselessly. We will never see them again… unless, I suppose, you might turn your attention to it? Perhaps? Anyway, not the time to be asking for favours. They were immune to fire, and when woven with… never mind. Put it on.’

  Nathan didn’t. He stood instead and blazed.

  ‘Oh, go on. I promise you can still try to kill me, but there’s no point making a mess while we do it, is there?’ She smiled and there didn’t seem to be any malice in her. It didn’t seem like a trick. The book was heavier than lead, heavier than gold, hard against his skin, but she smiled, and he put on the glove.

  The world went dark.

  When his eyes adjusted there she was, glowing, smiling, upright. She put her hands together and blew between them and out rushed a thousand white moths. They fluttered around him and over him and when they landed on his skin and clothes they melted like quicksilver. ‘You really are quite impressive, you know, at this stage of the game.’ She turned and picked up her glass again. ‘Does give one hope.’