Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  She was led by the man with the fawn birthmark, and Nathan tried to follow, but he stumbled, onto one knee. His mother didn’t turn, but Prissy helped him up, putting her arm around his waist. ‘I never realised your mum was so posh. What was she doing in the slums all those years, noshing off blokes, if she could have been here, everyone licking her arse all day long?’

  The question barely registered – in Nathan’s ears his blood was hissing, and in his eyes there were swarms of tiny, bright motes. It was all he could do to breathe.

  Dashini said something, laughed, Gam too, but it was all very distant, hard to grasp and Nathan concentrated on each breath, each step instead.

  The floor in the ballroom had spring to it, rebounding as Nathan’s feet met it, the more so as they reached the middle, dwindling as they crossed to the other side of the room. There was a platform where musical instruments were propped, waiting for their players. Here Nathan could have sat, gathered his resources, countered the force that was erasing him from the world, but they didn’t pause, and he didn’t have the strength to ask them to.

  They passed into another room. It was an orangery, though quite how Nathan came to recognise it he didn’t understand. His mother was at home here, though. She appeared rightly placed at last, at the right temperature, protected from the depredations of the climate, nurtured, and Nathan could see her as a girl, as least as real as the mother he knew her to be now, at least as present, and she ran laughing through the trees and smeared her hand through the condensation on the glass, observed her palm, wet. She licked it.

  Prissy’s arm was joined by Gam’s, and though he moved his legs they felt like paper, patterns of legs in tissue, which trailed behind him as they went, incapable of interacting with the ground and holding him. To his eyes the world was weightless and faded, as if he was seeing back into time, or through into the hearts of things. It was as if he saw a realm of things gone, or different than they were now, a world of things no longer his.

  They walked through stone cloisters surrounding a fountain and through a wide archway into a garden lit by lamps and braziers, trees and shrubs surrounding a pond like that in the Master’s tower. In it, the girl who was more real now than his mother grabbed the tails of newts, filtered spawn between her fingers, and dangled the larvae of dragonflies by their legs, bringing them up close to her eyes.

  As they passed, gaping fish breached to speak to her, silently. The water splashed by sculptures, down rockeries, cascading white and bubbling over his mother’s toes, her toes as a girl, the train of her velvet gown black and wet. His own feet were transparent now, like outlines the book used to sketch before it coloured them in.

  ‘Are you alright, Nathan?’ Dashini asked.

  Nathan did not reply, could not bring air to vibrate the cords of his throat. When she replied for him, the words did not register in his ear, but he felt himself hitched higher on the hips of his companions.

  The man with the fawn birthmark halted in front of an ornate gate; it was rippling with the magic that would take them down to the port-side. The door lackey ran up and made play with his keys in the lock. He fumbled and clanked, and Nathan’s mother folded her arms, both as a woman and as a girl, and made a face of very slight irritation, as if they deserved better.

  The man with the fawn birthmark took a step towards her, his lower lip between his teeth, blinking, hands gripped and wringing at his waist. Before he could speak – apologise, propose marriage, offer his life, whatever it was that wracked him – Nathan’s mother silenced him with a glance.

  They waited in this silence as the lackey, ever more anxiously, rattled the keys.

  Into the garden gathered groups of people – slender men and women, neurasthenic children, straight and ashen-faced, stern and timid, in impractically tight and elaborate clothing. These groups were followed by crowding servants carrying bags and boxes, objets d’art wrapped in cloth, boxes secured with string, mirrors held by their edges. Padge was there, showing the scroll to whoever came near him, warding them off with it, clutching his shoulder.

  Soon there were people everywhere, all at a constant distance from Nathan’s mother, silently, patiently, angrily waiting on the opening of the gate and staring. The lackey was impossibly flustered now. The keys clacked like castanets in his hands and, though the rest of the world was faint, Nathan felt the lackey’s agonies perfectly, where all the others seemed to wish death on him.

  It should have been simple – Nathan had done so much more. Hadn’t he destroyed the city? Hadn’t he touched the corpse of God? Taken his eye? But when he Sparked the lock – so tiny a thing – the world became nothing but pain to him. The Itch was pain. The Scratch was pain. The progress across his nerves of the Spark was pain, and pain so pure and bright that it was as if the sun had dawned in the centre of his soul. The pain stemmed from the locket, from the Interdicting Finger, and it took over everything. It was as if it had entirely replaced his heart. He put his hand to his chest, though the movement of his muscles was pain too, and his fingers were entirely numb, as if the locket had dulled everything outside only to replace it with agony from within.

  Dashini kneeled in front of him, took his face in her hands, looked into his staring eyes, saw into the wide, black, tortured pupils. ‘You’ve gone too far.’

  The blood stilled in Nathan’s veins, its heavy motionlessness burning inside him. It clotted there, clogged his heart, and without the movement of blood he could not live. Inside was only stillness. It felt like death now, as if death was in him, as if death was tearing him all to pieces, stretching, ripping every cell, splitting him from inside.

  Then his mother was there. She was a girl and she was a woman and she took her hand – so elegant, so nail-bitten, so flawless, so ingrained with Mud, so innocent, so powerful – and she put it on his chest.

  ‘Your life is mine,’ she said.

  Now Nathan’s heart thudded and blood flowed through his veins like wind blowing, his soul returning, finding purchase in a body almost abandoned, and he took a deep gasping breath.

  Nathan’s mother turned her back on him and went to the gate.

  XCIX

  Their ship drew away from the Sea Wall Gate, its red sail barely bulging, and a flotilla of nobles came after in merchant ships of their own. The waters of the harbour required no great force to traverse, but once they were out to sea they had to sail away from the breach in the Sea Wall which was dragging everything and anything into it.

  From here the extent of the smoke cloud that grew up from the city from the fires burning in every quarter was appalling. Sirius sat beside Nathan, and Anaximander was by his mother.

  ‘It’s going to be alright, Gam.’ Prissy went over to him and Gam looked up at her but said nothing.

  Now Prissy turned to Nathan and she looked him in the eyes, studiously avoiding Dashini’s. Nathan could barely meet her gaze, but there was something in her expression that he had seen before.

  ‘Before you go bed, make one up for Nathan,’ Dashini said, ‘He will die without rest, regardless of what his mother thinks.’ Her tone was that which a merchant’s wife would take with a skivvy, or a patron of the Temple would use on an Athanasian. Prissy recognised it, denied it, but when her eyes fell back on Gam, she bowed her head regardless.

  ‘You know what to do?’ said Gam, and Prissy nodded. She put her hand on her friend’s shoulder, squeezed it, and went down below, where the galley and the crew’s chambers were.

  In the west now, as the boat followed the winds east, the Manse billowed smoke.

  ‘Will he recover, I wonder?’ Dashini said.

  Nathan’s mother stepped in front of her so that she could no longer look into the distance, and her dog came with her. She wore an expression that spoke of something dark, and also of the woman’s hatred, her poor opinion of the girl who stood before her. ‘And if he does not?’ she said to Dashini. ‘Is that what you hope for? What then?’

  Dashini had hatred of her own, and derisi
on too, and she turned from his mother and faced Nathan. She stood before him, rigid like a whip handle, and seemed ever taller to him, so tall that she blocked out the sky.

  ‘He must sleep,’ Dashini said. ‘Gam, will you take him below… Gam?’

  Gam did not reply, but someone did. ‘Perhaps there will be time later for him to rest, Madame, Mademoiselle.’

  Nathan recognised the voice instantly – how could he fail to, having heard it lecturing him for all that time in the Manse? It was as familiar as any voice. Sirius growled – there was Bellows on the deck of the ship.

  Beside him were gill-men, twenty at least, and now, sliding up beside them, emerging from the water to drip and flounder like landed fish, more of them. Nathan grabbed Sirius’s collar, and though he had no strength to restrain his creature, it obeyed his intentions, nevertheless.

  ‘Young Nathan. The Master returns and you must too. Your coming back into the fold will be as the wayward child’s, and penitent, I hope. You will receive punishment, of that there is no doubt, but the Master is not cruel: whatever your fate, it will be done in the spirit of rehabilitation; I have no doubt of that.’ Bellows did not seem angry, but his gill-men could scarcely conceal their disgust, which was visible in the twisting of their long fingers and the gaping at their necks.

  Dashini put herself, knife drawn, between Nathan and his enemies. ‘Your Master is finished,’ she hissed.

  Bellows flinched, not just at the words, though these clearly hurt him, but also at Dashini, whose existence had brought about this terrible situation. ‘She-child, your bile is not required. Whatever pain you seek to inflict on me is nothing compared to that which I already suffer on your account, so much that I do not notice it and will not, no matter how much you intend to provoke me.’ Bellows gestured to the gill-men and they moved like the encroaching tide, coming forward in slow and partial surges.

  Sirius growled and so did Anaximander, and they looked to their service-pledges for permission to attack, but neither gave any.

  Dashini, though, needed no permission and she stepped forward, but then, from the galley, there was a scream – Prissy – and then here was Padge, one arm crimson and limp but with the other around Prissy’s neck, a knife angled to stab down into the base of the damsel’s throat.

  ‘Mr Padge,’ said Bellows, ordering his gill-men to stop with a gesture, ‘your presence here is not at all welcome.’

  ‘So I am told. Yet here I am.’ In Padge’s pocket was the scroll with which he had proved his right to travel, as an inheritor of wealth, but Padge paid it no attention now.

  ‘Oh help… Oh my… Oh Lord…’ Prissy cried.

  Nathan moved, but the pain was too much. Bellows spared him only a little attention, Padge spared him none.

  ‘What do you with the girl-child? This is no time for your usual business.’

  ‘I do not intend to carry out my “usual business”. I need only ensure my safe passage until I can be put off. I intend to do that by holding this child hostage, knowing she is a favourite of our new Master.’

  The boat tossed and lurched in the waves, and if Padge thought he was sure-footed enough to avoid slitting Prissy’s throat, even by accident, then it did not look like that. Prissy put her hand to her forehead as if she might complicate matters by swooning.

  Bellows took a step forward. ‘You are mistaken if you believe Mastery of Mordew has passed to a successor. The Master returns and then we will see justice done.’

  Padge pressed the knife almost into Prissy’s windpipe and tottered forward, closer to where Nathan lay prone, and now Sirius did not know who to growl at.

  ‘I’ll come back with you, Bellows,’ Nathan said, ‘I promise. Just don’t let him hurt anyone. They’re innocent. All of them.’ His voice was barely audible, nothing in the wind, but Bellows understood Nathan’s words by their smell.

  Dashini lurched, but Nathan’s mother held her wrist.

  ‘That is a bargain, Nathan,’ Bellows said. ‘You will come, and we can fix what you have broken.’ Bellows turned to Padge and advanced, the gill-men coming beside him. ‘The Master trusts me with his most puissant spells. I need only utter what he has taught me, and my enemies will be destroyed.’ Bellows took from his pocket a tube, very simple, like a telescope. ‘I need only direct this at the object of my ire, the Master says, and say the word, and all I desire death for will die.’ He continued towards Padge, but it was clear he was hesitating, as if he was reluctant to destroy him, as if he could have scruples about such a thing. ‘I must be strong, the Master says. There is a first time for everything.’

  He pointed the tube forward, and before Padge could stab into Prissy’s throat, Bellows uttered the activating word.

  Red light issued, crackling through the air, sending magic death to Padge, sparing Prissy.

  But Padge was not killed. Rather, he laughed and advanced, and as he did so the red light was reflected from him. Padge’s ire was much greater than Bellows’s was, the range of his enemies broader, and the red light burned until it illuminated Bellows and his Gill-men, shining its light on and through them, so that they shone and shone, and shone so hard that they burned, their skins blistering and curling and turning altogether to nothing.

  In their places were boys, frail and thin, small creatures, curled on their sides as if they were sleeping, even Bellows.

  Padge leant over Bellows as he lay on the deck, and the desire to gloat was too much for him. ‘You are not the only one with magic toys.’ He took from his coat his mirror, the one in which he habitually and neurotically coiffured his hair. ‘Look! You fool. Protection of the highest order. The Mistress’s best. Capable of reflecting anything.’ He knelt to show Bellows the object, which had looked no different to any other mirror used when combing hair or checking the lay of a jacket in the rear but which now shimmered with power. ‘Did you think I go around without protection? You’re a fool. Die, you pompous idiot!’

  While his attention was turned entirely on Bellows, and at the urgent and irritated ushering forward of Prissy, Gam came up to him from his hiding place behind a barrel where Prissy had directed him to wait for just such an opportunity. The False Damsel was her con, and she’d always played it flawlessly – whether it was against Nathan, the haberdasher or anyone else – and Padge didn’t even twig.

  Now Gam, easy as anything, stabbed Padge in the back with Joes’s stiletto. The dull, ordinary, black blade slid straight between Padge’s ribs where they met his spine. From behind, this is the best way to reach a man’s heart, and Padge’s, pierced, promptly stopped beating.

  ‘Magic mirrors not much use against knives though, eh, Mr Padge?’ Gam said. Whether Padge lived long enough to hear Gam deliver these words, it is impossible to tell. But, before Gam returned the stiletto to his boot, he wiped his blade on Padge’s velvet trousers where they bulged across the buttocks, just for good measure.

  C

  Bellows was trembling. He was a little bigger than Nathan, but not by much, and he was white, like a potato shoot is white, translucent at the edges, kept so long in the darkness that he appeared to have turned to albinism, bleached of the defences the day builds up against the sun, the skin freed of the wasteful effort required to protect itself. In the legs he was thin, and his arms were those of a boy for whom rough play was unusual. His eyes were deep-set: a bookish sort, more keen on the movement of words on a page than of bodies in streets.

  His fingers were long, and his nails neatly trimmed, his lips thin and of a pink of the most colourless sort, differing from the whiteness of his face by a degree but no more. His nose was small and snub, almost like the snout of a piglet, if one was being uncharitable. It was certainly nothing like the oar blade that had cut through the corridors of the Manse.

  He was barely breathing, but something shook the skin, a thin and fragile parchment like rice paper. The ventricles and atria of his heart, rattling beneath his ribs, cast their shadow on the surface above.

  It was impossible
to hate this thing, this child, no matter whom he had been, and hatred was too much for Nathan now. He’d had enough of both love and hatred; they were all too much. With the last of his strength, he turned to his jacket. It was by some mysterious process folded and placed behind him on the boards in the shadow of a tar barrel.

  ‘Where are you going, Nathan?’ said Dashini.

  Her hand was on his shoulder, but it was so faint, so trivial in that moment, that he could ignore it.

  Here was Bellows, and the boy was dying.

  Bellows, Buleau, Birch. He reached for the book that was in his pocket – the skin and teeth and living voice of Adam.

  ‘Can I help you, Nat?’

  ‘No, Prissy.’ The words struggled out of his lips. He would do this.

  Hadn’t Bellows been as good as he could to him? A teacher, even if the curriculum was one another had set. Bellows had executed his duties with care, brought Nathan into his confidence on all things, treated him well, for his part.

  Nathan took the edge of the book and pulled it towards him. It caught on a nail, pulled loose, perhaps, by the straining of the bulkhead and the constant requirement in the wood that it respond to the movements of the sea, the sea and wood being incompatible things, one relatively unmovable, the other much more so. Nathan had to angle the board of the book’s cover so that it slid over the nail head – it was too much for him to lift it.

  Once it was over, he turned his head and there was Bellows, one cheek pressed against the planks, the other filling and emptying like a tiny balloon, or the neck of a croaking toad, and he croaked too – a sound incongruous coming from the lips of a boy, a low, deep and pained grumble of mourning.

  Nathan slid the book, the brother, over to Bellows, and leaned in close.

  ‘I found him,’ Nathan said.