Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  Nathan recognised it. ‘It’s his antechamber.’

  He took the lead and Dashini followed. The threads were so clear now that he did not even need to concentrate or look at them askance. Whatever inhibition the Master intended with the locket was overridden by the God-Flesh, and though they were filaments of nothing, finer than hair, they were stained by the Master’s magic a dim and inconsistent purple. Against the white it couldn’t have been clearer.

  Gill-men appeared in the doorway behind them. ‘You may not leave; the Master forbids it.’

  ‘Try to stop us.’ Dashini grabbed Nathan and, through the room, wherever the two were not, there bloomed a cloud of silver dust that clung to everything it touched. When it met the gill-men it slicked over them and they froze.

  ‘Let’s go. It’s a simple trick; it won’t hold them for long.’

  Nathan turned to the threads and ran, clutching Dashini to him, weaving her through the web. She followed, laughing nervously as a child does when thrown in the air: out of control, in danger, but somehow also safe. The Master’s webs were sharp and purple-black, and if they had taken it at a steady pace they’d have made it through without drawing blood, but the presence of the gill-men forced him on, hurried him, and one string nicked his ear – nothing, barely prickling with blood, but it stopped him in his tracks, raised his temper.

  Down at his feet, the worms gathered. One slipped around his ankle, spiralled up, as if it wanted to get in.

  Nathan Itched and Scratched in an instant and Sparked blue. When it met the worm, it made dust of it, and the purple washed away, leaving strings that were no more resilient than real spiderwebs and which snapped and pinged and fell innocuous to the floor.

  He spurred the feeling again, framed the little cut in his mind, envisioned the worms, and directed the anger at the mass ahead of him. Dashini understood and ran ahead; the threads fell apart as she reached them. Now Nathan raced her and within seconds they were out of the room and in the corridor trafficked by footmen and valets all rushing, but all suddenly stopped, trays in hand, brushes over shoulders, faces smudged with ash or rouge.

  Nathan looked down at his free hand. He could see the bones, clearly, and even these were insubstantial.

  ‘How did you arrive here, the first time?’ Dashini said, snapping her fingers in front of his face.

  ‘Past the machines and through the washroom.’

  ‘Back to the Underneath then?’

  ‘It was different. There were no boys there.’ Nathan stared along the corridor where they had stood as Bellows sorted them into useful boys and rejects, where he had discarded Prissy, where he had informed them of their great privilege. There was nothing he recognised. He went to the nearest lackey, a thin, pasty-faced, tight-collared kitchen boy. ‘Where is the laundry?’

  The lackey stood astounded, dumbstruck, like a waxwork of himself incapable of speech.

  Dashini came up to him and drew her knife. Its black fire sucked in the light, obscured the already murky corridor, but a bite of the blade in the lackey’s shoulder brought him back to life. ‘Take us to the laundry.’

  The laundry women were about their business with brusque efficiency, wringing and steaming and beating the filth from whatever cloth came within their range. The heat was stifling, the steam close to boiling and billowing in waves from pits cloudy with soap water.

  The lackey showed them in as if they were dignitaries and left at a run, let off the leash. As he went, he rang a bell by the door and each of the women turned to face it – all as different as seven faces can be, but all sweating in the same fashion from the extreme heat.

  ‘What have we here?’

  ‘Visitors?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, no-one visits the washerwomen.’

  ‘They must be lost.’

  At no time did the laundresses leave off their work, instead they wrung and pounded and starched with their heads turned.

  Except one. ‘I know her. Looks just like her mother. Didn’t I tell you she was here?’

  ‘Here she goes.’

  ‘Bloody foreigners.’

  ‘I know you! You look just like her.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know her. Or him. Get yourselves out of it, or I’ll dunk you in with the bed linen and see if I can’t boil some sense into you.’

  ‘You won’t!’

  The woman came closer and Nathan saw about her features something of the others, the people of Malarkoi.

  ‘You’re the Mistress’s girl. She misses you, my love. You’ve got to go home, right now.’

  Dashini said nothing.

  ‘We’re both a long way from home, aren’t we, my darling? Aren’t we, girl?’

  ‘Show me the way out.’

  ‘It’s not like Malarkoi, is it?’ The laundress’s eyes brimmed with expectancy, something borne of need and loss and longing, but if Dashini cared it was not obvious from her expression – she looked at this woman as if she was a block of wood. ‘We need to go. Now.’

  ‘Of course you do, sweetheart. Homesick, I bet. Imagine the welcome you’ll get. Imagine!’

  The woman took her hands from the hot water and though her arms from the elbows to the shoulders were pale from sunlessness, these forearms were as red as smacked arses and swollen from endless work.

  She tapped the side of her nose and gestured for Nathan and Dashini to follow.

  ‘He’ll murder you for this!’

  ‘Only if you tell him.’

  ‘What’s to say I won’t?’

  ‘Who’ll do my share of the sheets if I’m dead, eh? You?’

  She took them to the hole where Nathan had come in, once, with Prissy’s arms wrapped around him, and pulled aside the wooden cover. The bucket dangled above the darkness, suspended from the pulley by rusted chain-links.

  ‘If you’re going to do it, get it done. If Bellows comes in, we’re all for the vats.’

  ‘Sod Bellows! Big-nosed arse-licker.’

  The women cackled and Nathan and Dashini climbed into the bucket.

  ‘No time to waste.’

  They were lowered into the darkness.

  LXXXVIII

  Machines hammered, gears grated, sparks shone, pools of Living Mud gathered; everything disappeared off into black, and only the edges of things were illuminated, trembling to the percussion of the engines beating in the Underneath.

  Dashini smiled, her teeth glinting in spark-light. ‘Let’s shine some light on proceedings!’ She turned, and with a wide sweep of her arms, day blossomed in the Underneath, and she was the sun. Everywhere was clear now, precisely illuminated in her gold light: a huge cavern carved from the rock, in which the Master’s constructions laboured. Pipework joined it all, pumping Living Mud from vats into pressurisers, pistons compressing it and sending it creeping, thick, up tubes that pierced the rock walls and led deep into the Manse.

  There was a time when this would have interested Nathan, answered questions he had half-posed in his desire to understand the world, but now, dripping worms onto his feet, all he wanted to do was leave. ‘There.’ He shook away a freshly born worm and pointed – a staircase which snaked through the machinery to doors carved from the walls.

  ‘Let’s run. As soon as we’re free, I can take us anywhere.’

  ‘To the Circus,’ Nathan replied, without a pause.

  ‘One thing,’ Dashini said, her feet apart, set and immobile, but tensed, ready. ‘When we get into the city, we finish it, right? We show the Master who’s boss. Right? We crack this egg.’

  Nathan didn’t need to think of the things he’d seen. He didn’t need to feel the pain of the things he had been made to do. He didn’t need to think of the sacrifices and the betrayals, or his father, dead, or the slum boys, perverted. He just nodded and said, ‘Right.’

  —An Interlude—

  Many and varied are the wonders a dog may perceive, far exceeding those that, for example, a human man enjoys, since the senses of a dog and the senses of a man differ in number
and degree, but they are also used in practically differing ways. Think how a man stands erect: this position may elevate him, he thinks, but much of what transpires takes place at the junction of the person and the world at ground level, and already his senses function poorly in comparison with a dog’s, especially that of smell. This lack of capability accounts for why a man is often disgusted by odours, since he knows not what are their sources and fears what it is that he does not know. By fearing these things and going out of his way to avoid them, even by standing on his hind legs all day and thereby straining his spine, he cuts himself off from much that is useful, and possibly that which is beautiful too, since beauty and utility are not entirely at odds, and some philosophers are inclined to link the one with the other.

  This is not a criticism one could level at dogs, as a species – they enthusiastically approach all sources of smell, familiar and unfamiliar alike, and force their snouts into objects of interest, inhale, and in that inhalation take a whole universe of things into their sensorium where there they may be sorted, understood, enjoyed and codified. Men, in their ignorance, will not account for this fact, will refuse to understand it, will pretend to themselves that their faithful companions, trotting by their sides, are lesser things, vulgar.

  Perhaps the opposite is true.

  Dogs, unlike men, are collegial sorts – they do not tend to represent themselves to themselves as superior creatures, but rather look to those around in a spirit always conducive to the common weal. If they did so represent themselves – as better than those they share the world with – they might see much in the behaviour of man that would make them take a lesser opinion of them, but they do not, and is it not a sign of elevation of sensitivity that one does not trouble oneself with the low aspects of life? And does the opposite hold – that an obsession with vulgar things is the province of the vulgar? So, dogs cannot properly have the above charge aimed at them, since they choose to overlook the vulgarities and poor behaviour of their ‘owners’ and instead seek always to bring everyone up out of the gutter.

  Thoughts of this kind were mulled over by the speaking dog Anaximander as he took a deep breath and sifted through the reeks that were inherent in the back parlour of the slum gin-wife’s premises, he having killed one of her patrons and speckled the walls and floor with that man’s blood. This was in protection of Anaximander’s freedom, so recently won, but it thereby established an obligation, the sort that a free dog must satisfy or earn for himself a reputation.

  In this room were traces of fifty men and at least as many women. Into Anaximander’s mind a pack of them became visible – some sickly and mild, some hale and angry, some perturbed, some with child, some labouring, some dying, some related to each other, some lonely – and he could smell all of it.

  Present in the room were the odours of their hair colours – the sugar of a red-haired man, the vinegar of a blonde, the wax of the raven-headed – and the spiced tints of their skins, the taint of a poorly functioning liver, the tang of exercise in sweat, the efficiency of muscles which taste more or less like salt. Anaximander could tell where these people had travelled, how regularly they visited the gin-house, whether they kept themselves local or whether they roamed far through the quarters of the city. Most trod the same few streets, haunted the Living Mud, day in and day out, some had cause to visit the Merchant City and brought the smoke of coal fires back with them. Some very few had the scent of places other than Mordew, but all of these people interacted with the room in different ways, leaning their hips on table edges, scuffing their boots on bare patches of the carpet, pulling aside a painting, seeing behind it, pressing their nose to the window pane.

  Given the extent of the information at the dog’s disposal, and the closeness with which information and nicety of observation exist, and the link between these things and wisdom, and the similarity that wisdom and refinement of feeling exhibit, what could explain the opinion a man holds of a dog that he is ‘vulgar’ other than ignorance on the part of the man?

  Moreover, it was also as if this room was filled with a cast of people from a play that was now over, the curtain drawn – these people being the men and women who had previously been in the gin-house but were there no longer – and Anaximander was possessed of a memory so eidetic that all the things these people had been and all the things they had done in this play were branded in his memory. The lives of these people overlapped with those who were present, each existing in the same space, all doing different things at different times, all smelling of it – and this from a simple breath.

  He apprehended all of these things in an instant, as if a hundred sheets of tracing paper, each bearing a different image, were laid one upon the other for him to riffle through, to shuffle, to see which image was darker and which was lighter, and the whole representing the motives and actions of the people present and no longer present and all suggestive of the world as it was, and how he, Anaximander, should act in it.

  A man has no knowledge of any of this by virtue of the fact that he is reluctant to use his sense of smell.

  Vulgar, indeed!

  ‘So,’ the gin-wife said, ‘what are you offering to pay your debt with?’

  The woman was ill – there was a pungent growth in her skull that was pressing on a gland that generated juices that were excreted as a sweet musk. The proximity of the juniper that flavoured her gin overwrote this scent – at least enough to hide it from the squeamish human nose – but it was clear and distinct to the dog’s, and this was information that he kept for himself, since there was in the interchange of this room something of Nathan Treeves: his mother, his father, people of their acquaintance, and with them men of violence, recognisable by the dried blood beneath their nails that they left in powder on the surfaces of the furniture they touched, the glasses.

  So when the gin-wife asked Anaximander what he could do for her, he did not say immediately that he could identify her illness, or offer any other service, instead he played his cards close to his chest, since very quickly there seemed to be something else at stake, something that took priority over the paying of a minor debt.

  Instead he said, ‘What is it that you need?’

  In the room behind, Sirius, his companion, and the others were leaving, and he knew that, whatever service she would require of him, there was another more important service that he could provide to Sirius’s new master. As Sirius left he would have felt all this, probably, his senses being magically enhanced to a degree Anaximander’s could not match – the power of speech takes up a great deal of the space available in a dog’s mind, and Sirius was not so handicapped – but Sirius did not communicate his exiting, and this gave Anaximander a further impetus: to impress his companion.

  This was a new world for both of them and they found themselves thrust into it after a long and tedious imprisonment in the Merchant’s house, which was both an enbondment between them but also a kind of estrangement, each representing to the other the extent of the world and its perfidious, previous limitation. Now was the opportunity for that relationship between them to develop, and for Anaximander to demonstrate that the new expanse of possibilities could be one in which there was a role for them as individuals, and also as co-dependent agents. Who, after all, knew these dogs better than each other? Who would provide the support and understanding each would need? But also who was the most oppressively familiar, the most like an anchor to the patterns of the past?

  Moreover, how many magical dogs were there in the world? No matter what benefits there are to being a dog there are clear obstacles too – namely a natural paucity in extent that the dog mind exhibits in some areas in comparison to a man’s, like a cat’s to a dog’s, or a mouse to a cat’s, or an ant’s to a mouse’s, which no amount of smelling can compensate for. A dog may not write a poem, for example, nor paint a mural, nor design a building, since those things are not within its realm of understanding. Nor may he feel altogether in concert with a world which views him as a lesser thing.
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br />   It is enervating, to say the least. So, dogs ought to stick together and help each other where they may.

  The gin-wife turned her back on Anaximander and went to a cabinet against the wall in which bottles rattled as she stepped. When she opened the door, the leading loosened on its glass. Unlike the rest of the room, the contents of the cabinet – various brews of gin in bottles – scarcely harboured a single speck of dust, and each brew was raw, having had barely enough time to achieve the name ‘gin’ let alone to mature.

  ‘You want anything?’ she said.

  Dogs can tolerate alcohol, but to what end? A man seems reluctant to live his life and will take any opportunity to disrupt what limited feeling he has for it with whatever happens to be at hand – substances, other people, fighting, procreation – providing that the world becomes blurred to him, reduced. A dog, whose life is considered so little that it is brought about for trivial uses, is bred for the entertainment of gambling or for the husbanding of livestock, or in order to serve as a guard or an ornament, that animal does not dull his senses willingly.

  He may need them in order to maintain his safety, but even in the fight the dog would rather feel pain than nothing, since isn’t feeling nothing close to being dead? Isn’t feeling less more deathly than feeling even unpleasant things? And since death is worse than life, then numbness is worse than sensitivity, regardless what of. Though what man lives his life like that? So Anaximander was suspicious of the pedestal onto which men raised themselves, something which seemed to him as if they were hiding something from the world and from themselves, since a man cannot be at once proud of himself and also determined to erase himself by the endless imbibing of strong liquor.

  So Anaximander did not want the ‘anything’ that the gin-wife offered him, but he also did not want to appear ungrateful, understanding as he did that people hated most of all to be rendered irrelevant in the eyes of those around them, so he asked the gin-wife to pour wine for him into a bowl, though he intended only to make a show of drinking it while not consuming it overmuch.