by Alex Pheby
Pigs will eat a corpse, if they find it, and for almost every pig that was eaten a man was eaten too.
XCIII
On the high slopes of Mordew the Glass Road rose up and away, but the houses, owned by men who would demonstrate to other men the extent to which they were in concert with the Master by mimicking his works, stretched high in many storeys, up, one room to a level, until the best of them had houses with spires which stopped only inches short of the glass.
Nathan walked up to the doors of the highest, windows barred, guarded: ten men in iron armour with pikes, proof against the ire of the oncoming crowd at least in as much as they could protect the integrity of the door, though the city around them went to anarchy.
They crossed their pikes and barred the way, but Dashini melted them with the black fire. They clawed at their greaves and visors and escutcheons, and fell to their knees, and when they became a barrier, crawling on the flagstones, Dashini cleared the path with magic, arranging them neatly to the sides, where their suffering was less of an inconvenience.
Nathan’s eyes were raised to the Glass Road above them, the artery which served the Master’s heart. He went through the doors and took the first stairs he saw.
They went up, the Spark and the knife parting the way, moving aside the pets and children and maids and nannies and guards and aunts defiant, grandmothers weeping, and then, in the end, the lady of the house and the lord, until there was no-one else to move.
He reached the higher floors, ever smaller rooms, ever more cramped and spiralled staircases, until finally there was a ladder, and he was on the roof.
Everywhere below him was now smoke, like the calm rippling of fog across the surface of the sea on a cold and storm-less morning at low tide. Whatever was beneath the surface, whatever violence the underwater creatures acted out upon each other, was hidden. What does a man on the shore know of the activities of fish and crabs and coral and vents deep in the trenches of the ocean?
Nathan reached his hands above him, and he was barely tall enough, despite the height of the house. Through his flesh he could see the shimmer of the Master’s magic, and he knew that he was proof against it. He stood on his tiptoes, like a boy nesting for blue eggs who has only ever seen brown, and when his fingers touched the Glass Road he shattered it with no more effort than a boy if he only finds brown eggs instead of blue and acts out his frustration by crushing them between his fingers.
He destroyed all of it, immediately.
The cracks did not start small and propagate along lines of weakness. Sections did not fall whole and smash as gravity took them down to the city below; he blasted it into shards the size of grains of sugar with one touch, the entire Glass Road bursting into dust. One moment it was the most solid thing in the world, the next it was only memory. The dust rose for a moment, taken with its freedom, buffeted on the fire-spawned currents of the rioting that was taking place below, but then it went in all directions, moved by the invisible and random motions of the gases surrounding it. It drifted eventually down to cover the city with icing sugar. In the heat where it met the fires of burning buildings and burning beds and burning clothes it melted and in the wind it solidified brittle, like the sugar that coats a toffee apple.
Dashini applauded, and when Nathan did too, he could see one hand beneath the other, and beneath them both the toes of his boots.
Nathan knelt, now so thin that his eyelids no longer blocked out the light.
‘It’s time for you to rest,’ Dashini said.
‘No,’ Nathan said to himself, ‘not yet.’
The Master’s gill-men could communicate with each other without words and across great distances – Nathan had seen this many times in his time in the Manse. They need only will the mind-speech and it happened, each of them linked with the other through their common act of creation. Similarly, their creator, the Master, could make himself heard by them singularly and en masse whenever he wished by virtue of the ownership the maker of a thing has over his creations. So it was with Nathan and his flukes and, though he could barely muster audible speech, he bellowed in his flukes’ minds, barked orders at them which they obeyed at once.
Half of them Nathan sent down into the Mud that gathered in the Circus: they cracked the dry surface of the pool, baked by Dashini’s black-fire, and dived down like seabirds. When they met more solid earth they tunnelled like moles. The other half he sent to the Sea Wall, where they bashed at the bricks with their fists. Into every one of his flukes he directed the power of God-flesh, and they in their turn used this power to annihilate whatever was in front of them.
Dashini was there, watching him, worrying over him. She was speaking, gesturing, urging him to stop, possibly – he could not hear her. But Nathan did not stop. Whether there is something in the need to finish a job once it is started, or whether the use of power urges itself on, or whether it is difficult to stop scratching an itch once the scratching starts, Nathan could not find itself in him to obey Dashini. He gave the Nathan-flukes the power of God and they used it.
From deep, deep down in the depths of the city there came a grinding, angry, shaking tremor, so low that even Nathan could hear it, vibrating in the matter left of his bones. Dashini raised her hands to her ears and screwed tight her eyes. Her mouth was open in a soundless scream. Down beneath the Circus, the flukes had broken into the God chamber, and now the foundations of Mordew were cracking.
This should have been enough. Nathan felt that it might be enough, but then there was the Sea Wall. How long had he lived in the pounding of the waves on that barrier? How often had he watched the firebirds die against it? Wasn’t that the sight and sound of his whole short life?
No more.
He squeezed the eye of God in his hand and it was as if he was squeezing the Sea Wall itself. The flukes were his fingers and they were strong. He clenched until his fingertips bit his flesh and his knuckles cracked. Then, all in a moment, there was nothing to grip – just the soft white eyeball – and down in the slums, on the Mews where his parents had their shack, sea water flooded in.
XCIV
At the top of the highest house, beneath where the Glass Road had been, in an abandoned bedroom, decorated to please a child, Nathan woke.
How long had passed and how he had got there he did not know, but the book was on his chest.
Immediately words appeared, and drawings, all in a furious rush, scratched on the page as if with a dry nib, carelessly formed letters, hastily sketched images, the pages skipped, panicked, back and forward, until Nathan lay his hand on the page. Whatever the book wanted to know, or to say, it stopped its writing and turned its attention to his hand, the pages warming beneath his fingers.
‘So,’ it said, ‘you’ve turned against the Master.’
Nathan nodded and the book knew it. ‘I have a question to ask,’ Nathan said.
‘Is that sensible? The Sea Wall is breached; the Glass Road is broken; the city is in chaos. This book is a tool of your enemy – shouldn’t you destroy it?’
Nathan sat up, quiet, put the open book on his lap. It would have been quite easy to tear its pages out, one at a time, until there were none left. It would have been quite easy to rip the leather and break the spine. If it proved more difficult than he imagined, if the Master had put a ward on the materials that bound the thing up, he could fill it with fire and burn the pages black, and if he could not do it himself he was sure Dashini would help him, or do it herself with the black fire, or use her blade to separate out its bindings into nothingness. Whatever the Master wanted, Nathan now knew he had the power to undo it, just as the Mistress had the power to send her firebirds and he had the power to destroy her. ‘I don’t think you would hurt me.’
The book drew something wistful in its pages: a tree blowing in the wind in autumn, leaves, dry and used, falling to the ground as winter approached. ‘You are mistaken. If the Master desires it, he could poison the pages on which you rest your hands and have your death throes recorde
d here for him to enjoy later. Nathan, you should always be sure that you understand the nature of those that surround you, and understand what it is that they would do, and why.’
‘I don’t think you want to hurt me; it’s not your nature. And I don’t want to be hurt; that’s my nature.’
‘What if you are wrong? You were wrong about Gam’ – here an image of him appeared, younger-seeming and boyish, smiling – ‘when you thought he was your betrayer. See how he resisted, even when Padge took his eye.’ Now that image was drawn, of Padge taking his knife to Gam’s eye socket and Gam gritting his teeth and clenching his fists and all around them men with faces of grim fascination and appalled amusement.
‘You knew?’
‘It is a misapprehension to imagine that only the reader reads. The book reads, too, when its pages are opened. Your hearts and minds are like stories written in words. Your souls spill words into the air, not only during speech. You were wrong about Prissy, too.’ And now onto the page came images, sad, in brown ink and faint like shadows, watered away, of the visitors who called on her sisters at the Temple of the Athanasians, and who called on her in their turn. The book showed her, shoulder against the door, and later, running into the street. There were images of her: seated in the Merchant City, by the road, in the rain, her tears lost in the downpour. Gam, coming to her with tales of wealth and of safety and, later, of debt and honour. Then Nathan saw himself, a boy smaller than he now felt, less than he now felt, and images of Prissy as she watched him, first in scorn, and then, later, the scorn softening until there was longing.
‘Enough, please.’
‘There are others. Your mother.’
‘I understand enough.’
‘Dashini, she has defences, but even she is not proof against the Master’s magic.’
‘No.’
‘So, you see, you were wrong about them, and you might be wrong about this book.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘No. Well, things are as they are. There is no point in whipping a dead horse. So, what is this question you wish to ask?’
‘I think you know.’
‘It is forbidden for you to ask that question, as I’m sure you know. There are other questions that you might ask, that will give you the answer you wish for. Can you guess them?’
‘I think so. How do you know all the things that you know?’
‘Excellent. You are such a bright boy. There was once a boy who was educated in all the things this book knows, as you were educated, Nathan. He was taught all those things that the Master considered it useful for him to know, and into these pages went that knowledge, which can now be retrieved as easily as one consults the index of an encyclopaedia and turns to the relevant page.’
‘And how did you learn to draw?’
‘The same boy learned to draw as you learned to draw, Nathan, through the careful instruction of another. The Master taught him to look past the things he could see and flatten things in his mind and so make easier that conversion of the rounded thing to the page. He gave the boy paints and inks and let him experiment with colour, to accentuate the lines or substitute for them where he could. He showed the boy the falling of light and shadow, and taught him how to represent the world with it.’
‘And what is your title, book?’ Nathan asked the question as if it was the most natural and obvious thing in the world, and perhaps it was.
‘I am titled “The Skin, Teeth and Living Voice of the Boy, Adam Birch”. In an ancient tongue, the word “birch” described a tree, and in a sister tongue “birch” was said as “bouleau” and in our speech this has become Bellows, just as Mort Dieu, Dead God, is said as Mordew. Bellows is my brother. And now you have broken all the rules.’
On the page a wavering line appeared, as if the book could not express what it wished to express, and it was neither a drawing nor words but snaked uncertainly from one side of the page to the other. But then, very precise, almost as real as real life, it drew Dashini and her mother, the Mistress, so clear that Nathan jumped involuntarily in shock, as if they were in the room.
Then there was Adam, the back of him, the same size as Nathan was now, in the same clothes, with the same hair. Around him Dashini and the Mistress writhed like snakes, kept close to him, ran their hands across him, let their skin touch him. Adam resisted, struggled to be away from them, but always to no effect. They stripped him down, first of his clothes, then of his skin, which they lay on a table in one great sheet pinned it by its edges. With knives and sharp stones and magic they took his muscles, one by one, and these they gave to their firebirds, who, thus fed, used their heat to tan Adam’s hide and make leather from it. From his throat they pulled the strings that vibrated to make the sounds of his voice, and these they snipped with tiny scissors and strung them on an instrument, so that they could make him speak by running their fingers or a bow across them.
All this they did while he lived, keeping him from dying by spells. They dissolved his bones with acids and alkalis until his skull was as soft as a baby’s. They parted it gently along the juncture lines until, grey but glistening, his mind was revealed, and this they span into thread on a spindle. This was pure pain to him, more as they weaved the thread on a loom, making pages which they sliced with great sharp knives and bound with his tanned skin, gluing them with his ligatures. The cover they decorated with crushed sapphires and enamel chipped from his teeth.
In the background of these drawings was the sacrifice of many children and goats, and the more throats were slit, the rougher and less sophisticated became the representations of them, until the book seemed to lose the skill to draw altogether and the page was filled with red the colour of blood.
Nathan turned the page and the sequence began again – Dashini and her mother, plain and clear, until the page filled with the blood of children.
‘Nathan,’ Dashini said from the doorway, ‘You are awake at last. There’s no time to waste – we must leave.’
Beside her was Sirius, and when Nathan held out his hand he came and put his head against it, whimpered.
‘What is it?’ Nathan asked him.
Sirius pawed the sheets from the bed and urged Nathan down, out into the street.
XCV
The curtains were burning in the windows, fabric billowing in the heat of its own combustion, red linen, red flame, and the cracking and blistering of the painted wooden frames. Where glass fell, smashing in the street, grey-black clouds suddenly rushed up, away into the sky.
The Temple of the Athanasians screamed in different voices: the rush of hot air from rooms in which the pressure of heat was suddenly released; people, behind, deep in the building, trying to breathe, trying to flee, trying to call for help; people in doorways, drawing some out, pushing some back, roaring and cackling; and the thick acrid smoke blanketed it all.
In the distance, the sea was encroaching like a sudden tide, held back only by the size of the God chamber which it filled, slowly but inevitably.
The madam soothed her girls – most of them had been corralled on waste ground towards the edges of the Merchant City. Away from the heat they stood shivering, bare skin in the wind, protected by mothers and friends, shielded from the eyes of the crowd who had, anyway, other concerns, other quarry.
In and out of the carcass of the blaze ran men in shirts and no trousers, trousers and no shirts, neither shirts nor trousers, and some with tall hats and nothing else. Regardless of how they were dressed, they ran in a similar way, awkwardly, heels thudding on the hard ground, feet slipping in the Living Mud, knees bent, harried one way after another, into the crowd, back into the building, and into the night where Nathan’s flukes awaited them, burning blue.
In the dark, naked flesh flashed in the firelight of torches carried by angry fathers, angry brothers, angry uncles; the light danced to the sobs of frightened fathers, frightened brothers, frightened uncles.
Sirius turned to Nathan, and up ahead was Prissy. Her hair was long enough now
to reach her shoulders, and her eyes were so hollow and bleary that he hardly recognised her. She appeared less, somehow, than he remembered her. She was standing, barefoot, pulling an old military jacket around her so tightly that the buttons were under her armpits. There had been a time, once, when the sight of her had made his stomach leap. Now, she kept wiping her lips with her sleeve and there was nothing inside him.
It had all been used up.
At a bonfire there is a patch of ground which is brightly lit, but behind that there is a very much darker blackness, induced by the eye’s shrinking at the firelight. Prissy disappeared into this.
Nathan reached out to stop her but his bones ached, and his flesh was transparent, and when he looked up from the backs of his hands she was gone, replaced by men being chased here and there. What would he have said anyway?
It was too dark to see, and when he went to Spark, to light the world, it hurt so much he had to stop, as if a nerve was caught and protested at the effort, making him turn away from it.
Around him were men on their knees, men receiving thrashings, men begging. Nathan turned away from them too, and there was Prissy again. She was in front of the Temple and in her hands she carried a spear of wood torn from the fascia – some jamb or frame freed from its previous function. She was jabbing a man, held at the elbows by two girls, near naked. He was old, white-haired, crooked, hands clenched and wringing, with a bulging belly, stick-thin arms, feet flat and archless. He was pleading with Prissy, but she was not showing him mercy.
Here came the other girls, from their safe distance, led by Prissy’s sister. They walked timidly at first, coming in huddles and embracing each other for comfort, but then Prissy brought the spear down across the old man’s shoulder and the girls ran forward, gleefully, and their hands left their shawls and they uncrossed their arms and in the heat the burning Temple gave off, its Athanasians ran amok. They took up makeshift staves and clubs and cudgels and any naked man they came across they berated him, whether he pleaded with them or not, whether he was burned or not, whether he was living or not.
