by Alex Pheby
Nathan lifted his hand. His skin was laced with silver, in the lines of his palm, in the folds between his fingers, in the crescents of his nails. The glove on the other hand was stuck to the skin, and when he reached to pull it away it didn’t react and no matter how hard he pulled it only came away a little, the lines of silver extending over the weave of the scales.
‘What is this?’ he said.
The Mistress lay back on her couch. ‘Oh, you know, my latest gambit in the great battle. Defensive magic. It’ll dispel if… when… when you destroy me. It’s not proof against your power, especially with the catalysing and controlling book you have at your chest – my daughter and I made that book, did you know that? She’s terrifically talented. Can be a little disorienting, though, don’t you agree?’ She sipped her drink. ‘So, what next? It’s your turn, I think.’
The book at Nathan’s chest spoke to him, but not in words, and he couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t think of anything but to walk over to where the Mistress lay. What he intended to do, he didn’t know.
‘Shall I help? Try something physical. You know, stabbing, or strangling, or clubbing. That kind of thing.’
Nathan shook his head. ‘Where is Adam, Bellows’s brother?’
Now the Mistress looked puzzled. She drained her drink, placed it beside her on a low table, sat up and leaned over to him. ‘Sorry, Nathan. I think I’ve misread things.’ She looked very kindly, affectionate towards him, even. ‘I’ve mistaken all this fire – which is awfully impressive, really – for understanding. Perhaps that’s the pay-off, though, right? Extra force must come at a cost, after all. You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?’
‘Where is Adam?’ Nathan repeated.
The Mistress got up. ‘I’m just going to get another drink. Are you sure you don’t want something? No?’ She filled her glass.
‘Adam,’ she said when she returned, ‘went back to Mordew with my daughter Dashini. If the Master has suggested otherwise, then he’s misleading you. Moreover, if he hasn’t told Bellows, he’s misleading him too, which is unfair, really, because Bellows is a very nice chap, and it isn’t one hundred percent ethical to lie to nice people about things, is it?’
‘So he isn’t here?’
‘Well… Nathan,’ she said ‘Adam is neither here nor there. You have been sent to me, by the Master of Mordew, to destroy me. That is the matter at hand, right? In the great and everlasting war between the tontine powers, this is the part when you, Nathan, heir to Waterblack, puppet of the Master of Mordew, bearer of the greatest power the world has ever seen but not knowing how to use it, come to Malarkoi and depose me, its Mistress. I can’t, of course, tell you what happens next, since that’s up to you, but that’s the gist. Does this make sense?’
‘The Master sent me.’
The Mistress nodded like Bellows did when explaining a difficult sum, the first part of which Nathan had got right. ‘The Master sent you to kill me, right? He needs me dead because I’m interfering with his plans, taking his attention away from the work he’s doing in the Underneath, right? Hasn’t he told you any of this? I send the firebirds, he has to rebuff them or the Sea Wall collapses, I slow down his defensive work against the oncoming Crusade and give myself time to prepare my counter-attack for when you eventually kill me.’ The Mistress drained her drink again, then rested her chin on her hand. ‘I’m not sure, Nathan, why he’s keeping you in the dark. Laziness? Is he getting lazy? Or has he found a new variation?’ She dangled the glass by its stem, twisted and turned it, one way then the other. After a while she puffed out her cheeks, smiled and stood. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘enough pondering. Let’s cut to the chase.’
Without warning she marched up to Nathan and punched him full in the face. Now her smile was a grimace, and behind her lips her teeth were sharp, her eyes fierce. The quills of her hair flared up behind her and she lunged head first into Nathan’s stomach. He sprawled on the floor, breathless.
‘One! I have your breath.’
As he lay on the floor, she leapt on top of him, scratched at his face with her nails, sharp as arrowheads.
‘Two! I have your blood.’
She grabbed his head, smashed it down against the mosaic, pulled away, clutching his hair in her fist.
‘Three! I have your hair.’
Now she spat in his face and her spittle burned his eyes. ‘Fight, Nathan. He can’t have sent you here to die, but I will kill you if I can.’
Through acid-blurred eyes, Nathan saw her stand. She took his breath, his blood, his hair and she moulded them together in her hands, chanting under her breath, every spine erect.
Now it came to a fight, Nathan’s instincts – pain-spurred, slum-spurred, book-spurred – took over. He grabbed the knife from his belt and he Scratched whatever Spark he could summon into it. The glove constricted his hand, the silvery tracery cut, but the Rebuttal in Ice came out regardless, flooding the room with slivers of cold, freezing the Mistress in place. Nathan rose to his feet – she was inside a crystal of ice, seemingly immobile, her hands surrounding a ball of energy that vibrated in place.
She turned her eyes to him, smiled, and the ice exploded out, pelting Nathan with hailstones that scoured his skin. ‘Good boy!’ she cried. ‘You can do it.’
She shut her eyes, chanted again, concentrated on the ball of energy in her hands.
Nathan levelled the knife, his skin stinging and cold. He sent the Rebuttal again, with more power this time, but the Mistress waved her hand and a swarm of diamond bats appeared, which froze in the Rebuttal and fell to the ground, shattering to glass dust. The Mistress exhaled and the minute shards scoured Nathan again, biting like a sandstorm. He had to turn away. When he turned back, she was gone.
Nathan tore at the glove, tore at the lines of quicksilver that covered him like lace, but they wouldn’t come off. Then the Mistress kicked him in the back with such force that he lost all feeling and slumped. She was on him, muttering, cursing, calling on the all gods and the light in the room dimmed. ‘You have your knife, Nathan. It’s only fair that I have weapons too.’
Up from the mosaic, the menagerie rose – a white stag, antlers sharp as daggers; a firebird, burning; men with the heads of oxen; great snakes with the heads of men; wolves, red-eyed and ravening; huge lizards of all colours, some winged, some feathered, some breathing fire, some breathing ice; and in the centre of them, greater than them all, a black shadow, clawed and fanged and crowned in gold.
‘Kill him!’ the Mistress cried.
The shadow approached, the air shaking around it, vibrating, and the others came with it. The Mistress was holding Nathan in place, his arms bent back, baring his chest as if he was a sacrifice. The book fell to the ground and Nathan scrabbled at his waist with his fingers for the knife. It was not there.
The creatures were shrieking, barking, baying for his death. The shadow whispered what seemed to be a prayer; Nathan heard it directly in his mind.
When it touched him he stopped struggling.
All at once he was somewhere else, lying on a cold stone slab, his eyes closed. He tried to look around, but he couldn’t move at all, not even his eyelids. It wasn’t dark, though. Above him there was light strong enough to reach his mind, even if his eyes were shut. In the air was the smell of incense, thick and sweet, cinnamon and sandalwood.
Then he was back in his body, deep in it, right at the core. It was red and black and airless. Here was the Spark, and the Spark was not as he remembered it. It was not a thing, to be controlled, it was a gateway – bright as an open door at the end of a dark corridor.
Nathan went through it.
His Spark burned the room. It burned the wall hangings, it burned the banquette, it burned the glasses. In an instant it destroyed everything – the cement that held the mosaic, the drinks cabinet, the lizards. It burned the shadow and it burned the white stag. When it faded, it had burned everything there was to burn. Only the knife and the book remained, and, kneeling before
him naked, her skin etched in blue with symbols and pictograms and hieroglyphs, the Mistress.
‘I see now,’ she said. ‘This is a novelty. He’s found a new opening. He sends you out without enough protection, and rather than teach you to use the Spark, he lets the Spark defend itself. It’s neat. It’s efficient. But I’m not sure it’ll work in the endgame. It does, after all, take its toll.’ She pointed at Nathan.
He was naked too, but worse, he was faded: not transparent, not quite, but translucent, like thick stained glass. ‘Your body can’t cope with that much Spark, and it’s a bit early for you to be passing across to the immaterial realm, don’t you think?’
It was like his arm had gone after the rat bite, but all over. The more he Sparked, the more it leached from him.
As he was looking at himself, the mistress pulled something out from under her knees. It was a blade.
Nathan stepped back, raised his own knife, but she shook her head.
‘No, you win. Anything I do to kill you, the Spark will undo. Anyway, that was never my plan. Sometimes it’s necessary to make a queen sacrifice, and this is one of those times.’
The Mistress rose to her feet, head bowed, knife laid across her palms, and went over to him. ‘This is for Dashini, when you see her. I will call it the “Nathan Knife”, and it’s made from the breath, the blood, and the hair I just took from you. I bequeath it to her, and I beg you to deliver it.’
She passed the knife to him and he took it. Then she gathered her spines in her hands, held them together behind her. ‘In payment, I give my life.’ She licked her lips, raised her chin, and tipped her head back. ‘Come on then. Let’s do what needs to be done.’
Nathan breathed and the book shouted to him, urged him, commanded him, and without thinking, he picked it up. He put it between his knees and then, with both hands gripped around the pommel of the Nathan Knife, he stabbed up into the curve where the Mistress’s jaw met her throat.
Immediately, the Spark burned in the room again. The quicksilver boiled off his skin, the glove dissolved and, though it seemed impossible, the fervour of the Spark increased tenfold. The gold walls and the silver columns all leapt into flames, the stone itself caught fire, and he burned atop the pyramid like a new sun, scorching the land around him for a league in all directions.
LXXIV
As he approached the beach there were fewer of them. He could let his vision rest here and there without it hurting.
It was bright as midday, brighter, grit and dirt shining, blades of grass burning, smoke and dust and ash rushing like a hurricane away from him in all directions, roaring in his ears. Even when he stopped walking he felt like he was falling, or that the world raced past him so quickly that he must surely hit the ground, must surely die.
Where he stood, the earth crumbled under his feet and fires were set deep down where the roots of plants and trees had dried into tinder. They caught alight, brief and doomed geysers coming through cracks only to be burned dry themselves, to disappear into nothing. The sea glistened with his light, and at least that seemed immune to him, rolling into the shore below the cliff edge and away again as if he was nothing.
There was no ship anchored off the coast; perhaps he had come to the wrong place. He had walked blindly, always looking up, always listening to the screaming of the gulls, not seeing or hearing anything else, not smelling anything else in the smoke, not tasting anything else, only looking up and walking forwards. He might have gone anywhere.
His legs gave way, slipping out from underneath him, forcing him to sit, and he drew his knees up to his cheeks and buried his eyes in them, pressing the lids shut with his knee bones. Even this was no good – behind his shut eyes was the legion of the dead he had made, so he pushed harder until by some compression of the optic nerves there was darkness, at least in the spots where he pressed the hardest. He concentrated on these, put all his will into these false places of blackness where his fire didn’t exist, his light didn’t exist, where the dead did not exist, where he could put himself beyond their silenced cries and the crackling of flesh and the crumbling of bones and, worse, the acceptance with which they were met, as if they deserved it.
‘Nathan.’
To meet death fighting is one thing, even if the foe is overpowering, softening the fact on both sides, one knowing that they had resisted, the other knowing that the violence was reciprocated, that it would be returned upon them in different circumstances. But to lie prostrate and burn? Men and women and children, as if it was a kind of worship. What was that?
‘Nathan.’
At his chest, a tapping. The book. It was cool against his chest, the ivory inlay, the calfskin binding, the blue crushed stone of the dammed water, as if he could bathe in it, cleanse himself, drink, swim.
‘Open the book.’
Nathan dropped the book on the ground, and immediately there was blackness everywhere as if he had gone blind. Down his cheeks dripped tears and his chest heaved with sobs, both of which had been there all along but which the fire had turned to nothing, gasps for breath, and steam.
The night air was cold on his naked skin and the waves splashed gently on the sand.
‘It had to be done to end the war.’
‘Shut up!’
‘You cannot blame yourself.’
‘Please!’
‘Very well.’
The pages of the book rustled and flicked in the breeze that was coming off the sea.
‘You made me burn. I could feel you against my heart. You were feeding the fire.’
‘This book did nothing. Any more than you did, Nathan. This book is a tool, an object, a weapon of the Master.’
‘So you admit it.’
‘There is no “I” to admit anything, any more than a spade admits its crime in the digging of a grave, or a coffin in containing the dead.’
‘You made me burn.’
‘The book is inscribed with many spells, Nathan. Written in its pages are ancient things, things only the Master sees. Some of these can cause an effect, sometimes calming, sometimes exciting. Catalysis and inhibition. A book is not responsible for the words written in it. That burden lies elsewhere.’
‘But I am not a book. I am a person.’
The book remained silent, but on its pages it drew all kinds of living things, it drew the passage of time, fast rivers cutting ancient rock, the movement of the Earth in the arrangement of its continents, the rising and falling of cities. It drew all the things of the world from the earliest days and into the future. From here Nathan was always foremost on the page.
Nathan saw none of this, his eyes pressed still harder into his knees, crushing his face, but the inscriptions in a magic book do not require eyes upon them to be read, and it drew ever further and deeper into the past and into the future, drawing things that, perhaps, even the Master did not know, things that are contained solely in the memories contained by the vibrations of the weft beneath the understanding of men, no matter how powerful. Though Nathan sought to dwell in his guilt, to bury himself in his misery, to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by destroying that part of himself that cared about the world, the spell cast by the drawings drew him away from that pit just as they had drawn him into the fire. They closed his mind to the memories, and closed his spirit to the spirits of the dead.
Nathan lifted his head and there was the moon, gibbous and fat, barely suspended over the horizon. ‘I am not his.’
‘Everything is his.’
‘I am not.’
‘Then, Nathan, you must make him yours.’
LXXV
The ship did not return to the shore for hours. Nathan sat and shivered and read the book all night. It drew to him, pictures of simplicity and symmetry, and when they came for him, he was just a boy: a slight, translucent, naked child.
None of the crew would meet his gaze, but they found clothes for him – damp, oversized, rum-stained clothes that no-one else would claim.
Rain
fell in sheets all the next day. It pounded on the hollows of the ship’s keel, drumbeats that resonated in their chests. It blurred the waves flat, replacing them with the contours of the wind-driven showers that mocked the oarsmen and filled the boat with talk of sails and the ease of traversing the sea lanes with different ships of the past. The fish was slothful, and even after slaking could barely be induced to move.
When Mordew emerged out of the gloom all in a piece, Sea Wall, slums, Merchant City, Glass Road, Manse, Pleasaunce, a grey silhouette, a piece of cut-out scenery, it was unfamiliar to Nathan, as if this were a different city, its sister: a larger, grander, stranger city, familiar to the eye but lacking the emotional connection that renders something yours.
‘We were paid up front,’ Captain Penthenny said, firmly, but as if she didn’t really wish to be heard. ‘So there’s no need for us to make dock. We can take you to shore in a boat.’
‘Or should we just push him over and let him swim for it?’
Whoever said it was shushed.
‘Let him burn his way there.’
‘Let him boil the sea dry and walk on the seabed.’
‘Silence! One more word from you dogs and I swear I’ll give your guts to the fish.’
‘If you give me a boat, I’ll row myself,’ Nathan said, eyes down.
‘Perhaps that would be for the best. Rope it,’ she said, ‘and we’ll drag it back when he’s off.’
‘I hope he burns it to dust and drowns himself.’
Nathan turned, and now the crew required no Captain to silence them, any words they had caught in their throats.
Nathan turned back and they scampered away to do their work, to quickly take him from the ship, and then what? Turn the ship around and make for Malarkoi, to salvage the gold? To pick the bones of the place?
‘It is cursed now,’ Nathan said. ‘Don’t go back there.’
Penthenny smiled for the first time. ‘We are a superstitious lot, sailors, but poor. It’ll take more than a curse to put us off.’
