Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  In the air there was a curious and maniacal music of laughter and wailing, singing and crying, and the splintering and crackling of burning wood. Nathan watched Prissy, seeing her anger, seeing her joy. She gloried in her revenge, but he could only recognise it. It felt like nothing to him.

  Prissy shouted and laughed, but Nathan stood back as the facade of the Temple blackened and its motto burned into a gibberish of ash.

  Now Sirius was tugging at Nathan’s jacket, scratching at his feet. Dashini was beside him, and she seemed as hypnotised as he was. ‘I can feel him,’ she said. ‘The Master is on his way home.’

  Sirius whined and howled.

  Nathan pointed to Prissy and Dashini nodded, went to retrieve her.

  When they returned, Prissy was panting, smiling, but when she saw Nathan her expression turned suddenly shamefaced. She dropped the spear, as if only now noticing what it was, but her guilt wasn’t about that. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  She came over and it looked as if she was going to embrace him, but when she opened her arms her jacket gaped and bared her skin and she needed to pull it closed again. ‘Can you forgive me?’ she said, less than an arm’s length away.

  So much had happened that Nathan could scarcely remember what she might be forgiven for, much less why. She was just a child – small, dirty, powerless. As he had been. ‘Can you forgive me?’ he said, but she didn’t seem to know what he meant.

  ‘The Master,’ Dashini said to Nathan. ‘He’ll kill you all when he gets back. It’s time to go.’

  This Nathan could understand. He kneeled beside his dog. ‘Where’s Gam, Sirius? Where’s my mum?’

  XCVI

  The restaurant was as busy as ever, but no-one was eating – there was a feverish and tense industry aimed at bringing in whatever was valuable and barring all the windows and doors against the rioters and the rising sea.

  Padge’s office was busy too, with men of all sizes in and out of it so often that the door banged like a drum at an execution. The flies swarmed in multitudes, moving as if one organism, a cloud of black. Each man who went in parted them only briefly, the flock separating in the space in front of him and reforming in the space behind him. The discarded carcasses and offcuts and offal gave off avalanches of maggots at the footsteps of these men, and they writhed lost and white in the Mud.

  They found Gam a little distance away, hidden in the shadows, staring, and when he saw them, he barely reacted, as if he was expecting them. He didn’t offer an apology or ask for one, he turned his gaze immediately back to where it had been concentrated, ignoring them all: there was Padge, broader than ever, greasier than ever, his ringlets tighter and more repulsive than ever, mirror in hand, whispering too close into the ears of the Dawlish brothers.

  They took up guard on either side of the door and Padge went in.

  ‘He’s chimed you, I reckon,’ Gam said.

  Nathan didn’t react.

  ‘Master gave him a bell, sensitive to the approach of magic, so he’d know to let the gill-men in on business. Also serves to alert him to you, in this case. He’ll be on his guard.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Dashini leaned in. ‘What are you waiting for? Simply go and do whatever it is you are here to do. If you want to, I’ll do it. I can do it from here.’

  Nathan put his hand on hers.

  Now another figure came to the door. He was an old man, crooked, wearing a cloak and hood. When he came into the light it was clear who he was – the Fetch – except he was burned down one side of him, crisped and black, the edges like chicken skin that has caught the fire, the spit left too low, the curl of his ear ragged and charcoaled, his nose, too, one side of it, and when he walked it was with a great effort that showed on his face.

  ‘What’s happened to him?’ Prissy said.

  When he raised his hand to knock it was first with the right hand, but that he could not raise as high as he wished and it made him wince, so he had to swap over to the left and when he knocked again tears came to his eyes. The Dawlish brothers pulled aside the door and the Fetch limped into the yard. Immediately the flies became aware of him and surrounded him on all sides, desperate to crawl beneath his cloak and find the exposed meat within. He clapped his hands together, but it was not until Padge allowed him inside that they stopped.

  ‘Two with one stone, Natty. It’s your lucky day.’ Gam waved Nathan in and the others followed, Sirius first.

  When Nathan was at arm’s reach of the door, the chimes set off vigorously, as if a church warden had taken it upon himself to pull all of the bell ropes at once.

  The door barred his way and Nathan could see no-one – the Fetch, Dawlish or Padge – so he made it into splinters with a thought, biting down the pain, and blew those splinters away. The Dawlish brothers, trained for fighting, span to meet him; the Fetch and Padge stepped away.

  ‘Boss. You want that we should snap this fish across the knee?’ said one brother.

  ‘You don’t snap a fish across a knee. You club it on the back of the head,’ said the other.

  ‘You want I should wring this rabbit’s neck?’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  Padge smiled, and across his face flickered an apologetic grimace, as if he knew what Nathan would do and felt sorry that it was he that would force him to do it.

  Nathan grit his teeth and the light shone so brightly that everyone who could put their hands across their eyes did so automatically, without needing to think about it, and their stripped skeletons were visible to them as if their flesh was gone and only pink bones and muscles remained.

  With this light there was a screech as impossible to bear as the light, which brought them all down to their knees. Even Sirius circled and whined. Not Nathan, though. The sound barely troubled his ears and to him this light was nothing, he could see everything perfectly well by it, better than perfectly, in fact, because where it fell it revealed not only the real things of the world, but the structures behind those things, the auras of those things, the ideals of them, the templates on which these things were based, their blueprints, their perfect forms and how the real deviated from them. He could see all the wrongs in the hearts of these people and the more he shone the more glaring these things became.

  ‘Do you see me?’ he said.

  They did see him, though none of them could speak he was so bright and loud, like an angel, too powerful to be denied but too powerful to be conversed with, or understood.

  Only Padge had any semblance of his rational faculties, and these were insufficient to do anything but pull his lip back across his teeth in a kind of flawed defiance.

  ‘You’re almost gone, Nathan. Stop!’ Dashini said in his ear.

  Her breath on his neck was more effective than her words, and the light faded by degrees, revealing the yard again, except now there were no corpses, and no maggots, and the flies did not trouble the air with their buzzing. It was all gone, and the courtyard was as clean as a sandblasted facade and as empty of ordure as a surgeon’s table is before an operation begins.

  Of the Dawlish brothers and their heavy-fisted aggression there was equally nothing. Even the Fetch, whose damp grey robes had gathered thick over every limb, was now standing in the bleached linens of a child receiving first communion. Padge, though, he was as he had been – startled, discomfited, but Padge still.

  The Fetch fell to the ground before Nathan, who stepped up to him. ‘Please, son, please. I ain’t a bad man.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I ain’t!’

  Nathan could have striped the Fetch like a red pike, ready for salting, with exactly as much enthusiasm as the Fetch had shown with Cuckoo, or whichever child he had beaten half to death on the day months before when Nathan first met the Master. With each strike he could have made the Fetch understand his sins, made them very obvious, made him whimper and wail in recognition of them as his skin blistered and blood ran like tears of contrition to splash
down onto the scorched flags of the restaurant back yard.

  But Nathan didn’t. Instead he turned away, reached down to calm Sirius with strokes.

  Padge seemed to gather himself, standing straighter, not fearful now. ‘What is it that you wish?’

  Nathan said nothing. Against Sirius’s fur his hands were like colourless jellyfish seen at the shoreline – almost identical to the medium in which they floated, scarcely distinguishable.

  ‘I’ve got a few little jobs for you, Mr Padge,’ said Gam, with a voice that was almost free of a nervous tremulousness.

  Padge smirked and looked out from beneath his oiled curls as if he was about to object, as if this was too much of a reversal for him to meet with equanimity, but he was nothing if not a pragmatist. ‘Very well, Master Halliday, what is it that I can do for you?’

  ‘Bring out his mum.’

  ‘His mother? I do not have her.’ Padge’s hand went to the folds of his throat, to hide the fluttering where the blood moved the skin.

  ‘Don’t lie.’

  Padge narrowed his eyes at Gam, but Nathan at his shoulder stopped whatever violence those eyes promised.

  ‘I do not, Gam, habitually shelter whores, no matter whose mother they are. But with the Glass Road gone, the city ablaze, water leaking in, seditionaries and insurgents running about willy-nilly threatening the peace, where else should people be going? Those with connections, that is. Those who will be taken in. If I were her, I would go to the Palace and leave Mordew by ship, as all the aristocracy intend to.’

  The home of the man with the fawn birthmark? Was this what his mother had meant when she said he would need him? Was this the day?

  Padge straightened his jacket. ‘The Palace royals know the magic that opens the Sea Wall Gate. They have a magic door down to the port. Those wishing to flee Mordew will go by that route.’

  ‘Right then,’ said Gam, ‘after you.’

  Padge tried to take them via routes that would allow an ambush, but Gam was aware of these, knew which men were in Padge’s pay and where they might be holed up, and besides, once they left the slums, Sirius took the lead, galloping on ahead, turning, howling until the pack rejoined him, running off again.

  ‘Your hound knows where he is going, even if you do not,’ Padge said.

  This was true. Sirius rounded a corner and set up barking. Nathan thought that he wanted them to follow, but the barking was not for them – out of a door came Anaximander, and behind him Nathan’s mother, wearing, as always, her white nightdress, though now it was laundered. Her hand was on the scruff of the dog’s neck, he looking over his shoulder back at her before coming to greet his companion.

  Nathan stepped forward, briefly, as if he could embrace his mother as the two dogs embraced, but her expression was stern, her lips unparted, joyless to see him. She stared at his face, at Dashini, at Prissy, at Gam, as if they were the pieces on a chess board, wooden and featureless.

  ‘Nathan,’ Anaximander said, once his greetings to Sirius were done. ‘Time grows short. The sea rises. Even revenge must wait…’ Here he looked at Padge. ‘We must make our way to the palace and from there away from Mordew. The Master returns and he will not take your mutiny lightly. Let me show you the way.’

  XCVII

  The front entrance to the Palace was grander and prettier than the lavatory they had come in by once, but it was not as grand or as pretty as it had been the day before. Now the high double doors were blackened in long patches that dripped scorch marks down to broken glass, and outbreaks of fire gathered at their base. Off a little to one side there were men and women preparing more bottles to throw, filling them with lamp oil and scraps of rags. Flukes hovered by the lower windows, illuminating the planks of boarded windows with their Spark and staring into the gaps. The stained-glass images that yesterday would have caught the dwindling sunlight were boarded over too, and though this wood seemed vulnerable to the fire, it was thick enough to withstand it, at least for now.

  ‘How are we going to get in?’ Gam said.

  Padge smiled. ‘There is always a way. See, higher up, there is a place from where a man may safely look down.’

  He was right – up above the doorway there was a recessed alcove with an arrow slit. Across it shadows passed, as if the light behind was obscured by a figure moving across the gap.

  ‘You need only present yourself,’ Padge went on.

  Gam jabbed Padge in the ribs, setting him first wobbling and then, when that calmed, biting back the spite that his temperament provoked.

  ‘And what about when we get shot by a toff for being bottle lobbers?’ Gam said. ‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you? You go.’

  Padge smiled, the corners of his mouth piercing his cheeks until all his teeth were visible, his eyes boring into Gam.

  ‘Announce the coming of your Master,’ Dashini added, and when Padge turned to her and her knife, his smile dwindled.

  He stood as tall as his stature allowed him. He smoothed the wrinkles from the velvet, wiped the sweat from his lip, and marched as confidently as any man who deserved to be admitted to somewhere by rights might walk, up the stairs, along the colonnaded pathway, between the caryatids, and rapped on the door.

  In the alcove above the light was blocked out entirely, but the door did not open. Padge sniffed and knocked again. He was about to return when a much smaller door, hidden by a trompe l’oeil vineyard receding into the distance, opened a crack. At it there was an eye, wary and roaming. It saw Padge, but it wasn’t looking for him, darting off around, instead, to see who he was with, and, when it found no-one, the door came wider, to give it a broader scope. Padge went forward, palms out and obsequious, but the owner of the eye, a man the same height as Padge but as emaciated as a starving slum child and infinitely old, drew a pistol on him. ‘Have you brought her?’

  ‘Whom?’ Padge asked.

  ‘The Princess Clarissa, who else?’

  Padge nodded, but the man was already ignoring him. He had seen Nathan’s mother, off at a distance, and was stiff like a hunting dog, facing her, hand out pointing.

  Padge, unaccustomed to being ignored, put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, turned him.

  The old man did not so much as look at Padge, but shot him in the shoulder with the pistol, the noise and smoke drawing everyone’s attention, even Padge’s, so that it was with some surprise that he found himself bleeding a moment later and that his jacket was completely ruined.

  ‘Princess!’ the old man cried, tremulously, gesturing for her to come in. ‘The city falls and you return, as always.’

  He paid no one any attention other than her; not Nathan, who was blue with light and ghostly; not Dashini, who brandished the black fire from her knife; not Prissy, who hesitated before coming, as if she and Gam might make their way home to the sewers and forget the remorseless control that night was exerting on all their movements; not Gam, who took Prissy by the hand and guided her away from the crowd which, in its feral fury, had sensed the possibility for violence on the hill on which they were standing and was surging towards them; not the dogs, who sniffed and stared as if everything around them held meaning.

  If the old man’s invitation was not to all of them, then this was an irrelevance – he had no interest in which of the party entered once Nathan’s mother came. He bowed low to her as she crossed the threshold and, finding himself not low enough, got creaking down onto his knees and then lay flat on the floor. He gathered a strip of ribbon that trailed from her dress, sooty and mud-stained, and took it and held it as if it was the most precious fabric imaginable – a relic, perhaps, from the age of saints. He put it to his lips. ‘You return,’ was all he could say, and this only breathlessly.

  Nathan’s mother ignored him, stepped over him. Her attention was elsewhere.

  At the foot of the stairs was the man with the fawn-coloured birthmark who had visited her in her hovel, and who had deigned to release Nathan and Prissy from his custody on the night of the ball. He walk
ed towards Nathan’s mother not in the most direct way but following a spiral of which she was the centre point and which might take a very long time to trace.

  Nathan’s mother watched him as he approached, and the expression on her face was complex to the point of unreadability – was she furious, fascinated, appalled? It seemed to be all of these things at once. She looked around and smiled and seemed about to say something. Her lips parted and there was a pause.

  The man with the fawn-coloured birthmark put his hands together, as if in expectation of speech, but instead he received something else – Nathan’s mother spat on the ground between them. ‘You know what will happen next,’ she said to him.

  ‘Princess Clarissa, I…’

  ‘You know what will happen, so you know what you must do.’

  The man with the fawn-coloured birthmark sighed and nodded and looked at his feet. When he clicked his fingers, the old man leapt up from the floor, closed the door on the rioters, and scampered off into the room where the ball had been held, his heels ringing out an echoing pizzicato in the emptiness.

  The rest stood in silence and when the man returned, they followed him.

  XCVIII

  Nathan had never seen his mother stand so tall, but he himself had never felt more tired. The locket weighed heavily in his chest, forcing his lifeblood around it, through it, the beating of his heart clinking the chain, his skin so thin that he could see his organs beneath, the colour of his lungs blue as if there was never enough oxygen in them.

  And there was pain: in his bones, in his marrow, dull, gnawing, pain in his nerves, surging and waning with the contraction and relaxation of his ventricles, pain in the centre of his head, inside, behind his eyes. He was stooped with it, but his mother put her shoulders back and a woman in the livery of the servants of the house dressed her in a cape of dark, heavy velvet.