by Alex Pheby
Thirdly, that a particular phase of the history of the dispute was now ending, that Nathan would do one of a number of things, that chickens would come home to roost, that plans would come to fruition, and that various practical issues would need to be attended to. One of these, the disposition of Nathaniel Treeves’s corpse, Anaximander was enlisted to help in, though he was sworn to secrecy on the matter, so no more will be said of it. All of this third aspect of what Anaximander learned of his mistress’s life culminated in the fact that soon she would be leaving Mordew, and that this would require Clarissa’s return to her palace – a place where she had no wish to return.
Fourthly, in the palace was a man who had visited Clarissa in the slums, recognisable by a fawn-coloured birthmark on his face, and that this man was a cousin who, though always attempting to inveigle his way into her good graces – needlessly, in her view – could be relied on to help them by virtue, a vow he had once made, and shared secrets that would dishonour him.
All of these things were related to Anaximander in a way which suggested that, like in a game of strategy such as chess, the events of his mistress’s life and the facts of Mordew’s history were to be thought of as gambits aiming towards an eventual victory, with feints and sacrifices, attacks and counter-attacks, positioning and manoeuvring and not, as might be expected, that general, aimless flow of existence that typifies life as many live it. Moreover, she suggested more than once that this was a game she had played several – indeed many – times before, and that the events of recent history were ones with known outcomes which the players sought to refine to their advantage. She was ever reluctant to clarify how it was that this was true – her argument being that the forewarning of those not in her position of knowing had a tendency to skew the results of any set of actions – but never would she speak of Nathan. So forcefully reluctant was she on this matter that Anaximander quickly came to understand that he should never mention her son’s role in her plans.
And yet, one night towards the end of their confinement in the Merchant City house, Anaximander did steer the conversation, accidentally, around to the subject of Nathan. They were by the fire, the sturdy logs of which had dwindled, through lateness, into something akin to coals, when he said, ‘How you must have thought of hearths like this, of warmth like this, of comfort like this, in those long years in the slums.’
Clarissa, hearing him, smiled. Then she said, ‘And how I will think of them again when Nathan’s work is complete, and he consigns this city entirely to the sea.’
Part Three
Pyrolysis
LXXXIX
Nathan and Dashini appeared in the Circus, right where Nathan had once fished for limb-babies – how long ago was it? Months? Years? Did time even pass in the Manse? Their apparition sent slum children wading back to the shores, and ripples of the Living Mud washed the Strand.
Nathan didn’t pause to appreciate the scene around him, no matter how different it might seem to him as he was now in contrast to that nervous, reticent child he had been. That kind of thought he left to the poor, sad, silent slum-dwellers that surrounded him. He, instead, pushed out for the middle while Dashini ran for the edge, holding her dress up. When he reached the deepest part, he submerged himself entirely, both hands enclosing God’s eye. When the Mud was over his hair and in his ears, he Itched and Scratched and Sparked with everything he could feel.
He knew what would happen because he knew what he wanted. That was the secret. He only had to know what he wanted, to bring it to mind. No more worms, no more limb-babies, no more alifonjers. Too long had his dreams and his pain dictated things. Now he would control it. Dashini had shown him by her example. The eye was showing him. Power. It can be seized. It can be directed.
Up from the Mud came swarms of flukes, Nathan-sized, Nathan-shaped, faceless but whole, hundreds of them emerging in waves centred on Nathan. As they formed, the Mud was consumed, Nathan revealed at the centre. His grip on the eye was so tight that he might have crushed it, and here was an army, building, seething around him, staring eyelessly.
‘That’s it!’ Dashini cried.
More and more came, thousands of Nathan-flukes, and though he could feel himself getting thinner, he didn’t care. This was not some pool of worms, or pit of anger, sadness. This was an army. First, he would use it to drive the people out of the slums up into the Merchant City, where they would be safe, and then, when that was done, he would send his army down into the Living Mud beneath the Circus. It was clear to him now: the Circus was the place most affected by the proximity of God, the place where the eggshell that was Mordew was the thinnest, where the fishing had always been best, where God’s power had the most potency. If he could crack it here, then that crack would propagate throughout the city.
Dashini saw his plan, part of it at least. She raised high the Nathan Knife and began to sing. Across Mordew, to the slum boys and the hawkers, the fences and the witch-women, the hair-sellers and rag-seekers, the fishermen’s widows and their orphans, the eye-blackers and the Athanasians, the gin-house proprietresses, the broom-handlers, and all the hungry, filthy, Mud-stained wretches withering in the shadow of the Sea Wall, to these she appeared in their bonfires and their candlelights, urging them in song to rise up out of their squalor and take what they were due from the Merchant City.
Nathan stood up from the Mud, opened his fist and the eye was like an egg, white and firm. There were thousands of flukes now, and they were moving towards him as if drawn by a magnet. They reached for him, grabbed at him, not in violence but in worship, and these he filled with the Spark so that they shone blue. He sent them out into the slums to usher the people out, to help them where they needed help, and to remove any obstacles. God’s eye allowed it to become real, against the will of the Interdicting Finger, against the will of the Master.
Dashini’s song turned to a scream of joy as the people moved. She fed the slums with the black fire, driving out water, driving out rain, and she made every firebird feather burst like a bomb. Pillars of steam and smoke she forced up into the sky. The people and the flukes and all those things that could crawl out from the Living Mud fled the flames and went urgently up to the Merchant City, shrieking and crying.
XC
‘Come on!’ Dashini shouted, but when Nathan did not respond she went to him. ‘What are you waiting for?’
The Mud was ankle-deep and boiling, the birthing of flukes popping and singeing and making the air acrid. Nathan did not pay any of it much mind, except that he could see, hear and smell it all as if it was behind glass, or beneath water, or muffled by something.
Dashini put her hand on his cheek, and he looked up. ‘There is always a sacrifice, Nathan. In this case it is your flesh.’
What she meant was that Nathan was becoming insubstantial again, but not just in one arm – the whole of him was transparent, his eyes were unable to catch as much of the light as they had once done, the machinery of his ears was not as sensitive to the vibrations of sound, everything of the world came into him less effectively.
‘You are becoming a ghost,’ Dashini said, kindly, in a way that Nathan felt even if his other senses were failing. ‘But not yet. We can still win, Nathan. You can still beat him.’
And that was what Nathan wanted to do, to defeat the Master – not only for his father and the others, but for himself. Though Nathan was a frail child, frightened and easily manipulated, he was also bitter and angry, resentful and full of rage, and this side of him was like a saviour to the other, now that there was power to bolster it. What child – when surrounded by bullies, taunted and mocked and poked – no matter how weak, does not long for the strength to best their foes, to drive them weeping back to their hovels? What child would not kill their persecutors, if they were able to? Nathan was not a saint, to take endless punishment and not mete it out in his turn.
Dashini took the Manual of Spatio-Temporal Manipulation, and Nathan held her hand, but when she made the spell, it would not take. She
shook her head and tried again, but each time it tugged at her, drawing her deep into the Merchant City, ahead of the crowd, but it could not find enough of Nathan to operate on. ‘You’re too insubstantial for it,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to walk.’
Nathan didn’t wait but went directly towards the closest gate. Dashini followed after him, and when they passed a bonfire, she threw the Manual into the flames, where it burned unspectacularly, like any paper burns.
XCI
There was nothing much to see ahead except the light of a street lamp obscured by smoke, as if it shone through milk and struggled to light anything, but from behind they could feel it, heat caressing the backs of their necks, ruffling the fine hair there. When they turned, there was the glow of the distant fire, a line which lit like a sunset. From somewhere there was the rattling of gates, urgent and persistent.
They went up the hill, that same hill that Nathan had fled down, an old woman’s coin purse in his hand, and even if the smoke had not obscured his vision, made indistinct the forms and lines of near objects and blinded anyone walking towards him, he would not have feared for his liberty. Who would now have the power to restrain him? Who could now bring him to justice? Even the Master would have to fight for that right.
They passed through the tight streets, houses shutter-drawn against this odd and unexpected fog, the clicking of their shoes on the cobbles taking precedence over the distant susurration of an approaching crowd.
In the plaza where the merchant women had taken drinks while their litter-bearers waited and picked at hangnails, there was a wall of backs, the colours of their fabrics resolving from the gloom as Nathan and Dashini grew closer. The quality of the embroidery, the elegance of the cut, and the brocading of arms borne spoke of the class of these backs: the merchants and their wives had gathered.
‘The scum must not be allowed to come past the gates.’
‘Never!’
‘Has anyone thought to check the locks are secure? Who knows whether we can trust the work done by these urks?’
‘Who would check? The workers have returned to their hovels.’
‘There is not one of them remaining?’
‘Who holds the keys?’
‘Well…’
Now came a clot of men and women from another street, and amongst them were the faceless flukes Nathan had made. The people carried burning wood, but the hands of the flukes were alight themselves with blue, like Nathan’s Spark – not so bright, but bright enough.
The merchants saw them and were silent.
From another street, another crowd, and another, and the plaza was surrounded. Now around Nathan and Dashini others surged, thick bodies in motion, angry, shifting them, separating them from each other. Any obstacles this crowd displaced, and they moved with a flickering viciousness of intent, with the strange stuttering dynamism of a riot, by turns unrestrained and then awestruck at its own audacity, and everywhere punctuated with Nathan’s blue flukes urging them on, guiding them.
Nathan edged back to Dashini and she barged her way to him.
‘This way,’ she shouted.
Down a side street, the crowd was laughing and jeering at a man on his knees scrabbling amongst ribbons and bobbins and confections of lace. The whites were muddied by boot stamps and the buttons cracked, but he defended them as if they were his children, reaching around them, encircling them with his brittle and stick-thin limbs to absolutely no effect.
‘You barbarians!’ was all he could say.
He was the haberdasher, and the crowd pushed past him into his shop. It made examples of his stock, of his mannequins, of his swatches of perfect cloth, strewing them in the dirt and tearing them for torch kindling.
‘Please!’ he cried on his knees, and someone set a fire in his shop window and laughed to see the futile efforts with which he tried to stop the flames catching in the scrupulous damplessness of his displays.
Dashini grabbed Nathan’s arm, still solid enough to grip, and pulled him away.
XCII
Further into the Merchant City the pharmacist’s wife was disturbed at last, and her husband too. The crowd dragged them both into the street. The pharmacist was neatly attired and nodding, going where they wished to lead him. He made polite requests that they leave off his arm and not rip his sleeve. His wife, larger than he was as a cow is larger than a calf, was wrapped in a volume of white, frilled cotton, capped and barefoot. Unlike her husband, she bellowed her disapproval. She batted the crowd back with meaty forearms windmilling left and right.
It only took a few ruffians to distract the husband and wife while others entered the surgery. To the scrape of wood on wood, the medicine cabinet was drawn into the street. The pharmacists’ symbols were inlaid in marquetry of a very subtle type, veneers from all the woods of the world, with thin and immaculately stained varnishes. When it was dragged across the threshold – hefted over the lip that the door met when it closed on them all – the medicines in their jars and phials and stoppered bottles clinked and chimed and clacked.
The pharmacist and his wife objected, first in fear and then, though fearful still, smiling and emollient, hands palm-first and expressions that said ‘let us be reasonable’ and ‘we are all friends here’ and ‘you need only ask’. These communications, if they met anyone, had a limited range, certainly not enough to reach the rioters on the stairs into the pharmacist’s former home. They had tired of the weight of all that decoration and wood and were pushing it beyond the point where it must necessarily fall. As all things that have met the removal of the ground that supports them, the cabinet dropped, in angles and lurches and sudden shifts of position down the steps, one by one, until it was no longer upright. The glass panes and glass bottles and glass shelves on which those bottles were placed smashed in their contact with the stone of the street, where the whole thing flopped onto its belly.
From where he stood, Nathan could see less than he needed to make a full picture of events, but Dashini made addenda of her own, reading in the urgent movements of his neck and craning his desire to know what it was that had happened. ‘The medicines have spilled, all of them, and smashed. The liquid is bleeding into puddles. They shimmer and reflect the light; there was probably mercury in them, or precious oils. The pills, white, are in the mud and mess. The people are eating them anyway. I suppose their diseases are worse than eating filth. They are taking up handfuls of the stuff and using their teeth and tongues to pick out the pills. Some of them are putting their lips to the standing liquid. They suck it up. They love life.’
The pharmacist barged his way through the crowd. Perhaps his concern was for them, or perhaps it was for his precious stock, or for the precision of the proper dosing, but he urged them all to stop. If there were contraindications implied in the mixture of the chemicals, or side effects that needed to be considered, or prohibitions that each of these mixtures transgressed, the pharmacist was advising of them, as his profession required. His advice was not taken.
In the zoo it was as if the chaos that had gripped Mordew was a disease that was not communicable equally to all species, as if ruminants and herbivores and lizards and birds had some dispositional immunity that rodents, carnivores and claw-bearing mammals did not share. The primates had the least resistance, fingers gripping the mesh of their enclosures so hard that it must have caused them pain and injury, then pulling and shaking it as if to see which would give out first, the metal or the flesh.
All of the predators, in concert, acted as if in solidarity with the rioters, as if they could smell the change in the distribution of control in the city, as if the rights of the people extended also to the animals and had the flavour of blood, its thick iron tang catching in their throats and on their tongues, driving in them a hunger for freedom.
There was the empty and dusty oval in which the alifonjers had cowered, the plaque with their image and its associated lines of description remaining in the absence of the living specimens, their breathing, their steady and slow
chewing, and their black eyes glistening in the moonlight.
Nathan turned at the top of a hill and looked down into the city.
In the warehouses of the Entrepôt, areas were given over to the storage of grain and root vegetables from the Northfields and the Southfields, and also viands imported from the farmlands of the surrounding world. The industry of Mordew paid for these luxuries by barter and through the vouchsafing of certain promises. The grain was kept from the predation of rodents in great silos, elevated on struts, meats in cold storage, wine in cellars below the ground. The crowd went for all of these, in its hunger. It was huge, and as it destroyed the barriers between itself and the stored food, it let up billows of dust and smoke. It caused fires to light wherever they could find purchase. Grain poured, meats were laid bare, and wine wet the dry throats of those fleeing the fire. If avalanches of grain occasionally suffocated those beneath them, and the concussions of exploding doors deafened those near, then also were there thirsts slaked, and bellies filled.
When they came to the swine factory, the gates were thrown open, boxes splintered, packets of bacon trodden under foot. The low sheds in which the pigs were grown, each animal in its own cage, were invaded by Nathan-flukes, and though first the sows screamed in fear and the piglets wailed to hear their mothers’ distress, those screams became joyful, slats rattling beneath the trotters of families reunited and fresh air tasted. It is true that some of the pigs were taken by the crowd, killed and roasted, but the larger pigs had as much appetite for revolution as the men and women, and these collided with walls, fences, window glass: anything that could be destroyed they destroyed.
