Authors: Simon Morden
‘Forty-seven. Forty-eight.’
The strain was showing in his voice.
‘Keep going. Do not stop. You are not weak. You are strong.’ Stanislav glanced up again. ‘If the geomancer was there, we could catch her by surprise. She does not look like a fighter herself. Incapacitate her guards, and you have her.’
The pain was building, and all Dalip could do was grunt.
‘Once you have taken her hostage, we can free the others, and whoever else wishes to leave. Her dragon cannot attack us without attacking her. When we are safe, we can decide what to do with her. Remember what she is and what she has done. There may be no justice other than what we give, and if we let her go, she and her men may hunt us down, or simply go back to slaving.’
Dalip’s arms were trembling with effort. He locked his elbows to rest, but Stanislav wasn’t letting him slack off.
‘In this ring you fight until you finish. You cannot stop before then.’
The fire. He couldn’t feel his arms any more, but he kept on going for another one, another two, then he collapsed face-first on to the cold, hard ground.
‘Your legs are not tired. Get up. Run from the door to the
door, then reverse. We may have just one chance at this, and you must be ready. Up. Up!’
Dalip dragged his bones upright, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides. He started to run.
She had to step over a wall that hadn’t been there before. It was just about knee-high, wide enough to have to stand on on the way across it, made of rough stones that were more-or-less fitted together.
Having crossed it and jumped down the other side, she looked back at it. Crows was already heading up the hill, carrying the fish he’d caught – she still wasn’t quite sure how – while she was paddling up and down in the shallows.
The wall extended left and right. Soil and shrubs were piled up against the inside of the wall, and when she checked, the outside too.
Like it had pushed its way out of the ground.
She looked up the hill. Crows had disappeared into the ruined tower, so she took the opportunity to follow the line. It ran all the way around the tower, following the same contour, and she arrived back where she’d started a few minutes later, breathless and not a little confused.
She climbed after Crows, to find that the wall wasn’t the only addition. There was a new pavement in front of the doorway, and somehow the tower seemed taller and more substantial. If that had been all, she’d have just put it down to her faulty memory, but the circular wall was something else. She hadn’t forgotten it, and neither could she dismiss it.
And inside, the roof, or at least, the floor above, had been repaired. But not in a new wood way. The boards now over her head looked old and tired, the beams supporting them rough and soot-stained.
‘Crows? What the fuck is happening to your castle?’
‘You’ve noticed,’ he called from the back room where he kept his stores.
‘I’m not blind. Or stupid.’ The ceiling was too far away for her to jump up and touch, but it obviously wasn’t at the top of the tower. There were going to be stairs somewhere, and she started searching for them.
She found a dark alcove that, when she looked up into it, she could see faintly. Uneven stone steps led upwards, and with a quick glance behind her, she started up them, hands feeling the way against the walls of the narrow staircase. It grew brighter as she climbed: the stairs ahead of her grew more ragged, until there were whole sections of tread missing, but there was a doorway to her right just before it became unusable. She stepped through, and found she was standing on the boards she’d been looking up at before.
They seemed solid enough when she pressed them with the toe of her boot, and she walked out on to them, listening to them creak softly.
Above her, the crows had moved up a level. There was another threadbare set of rafters hanging from the sockets in the walls, and the birds returning to roost seemed perfectly at home. She paced the square sides of the tower, and ended back at the door.
She wasn’t imagining it, and Crows wasn’t denying it.
‘Dinner is cooking,’ he said, appearing behind her.
‘How is this even possible?’ she asked him, throwing her hands up in disbelief.
He shrugged. ‘I cannot tell you why, but I can tell you how. There are lines of energy that flow under the surface of the land. Where those lines cross, the energy pools as in a well. Miracles happen there.’
‘So, what? The castles just appear?’
‘Yes.’ Crows shrugged again. ‘What can I say? Down was like that before I got here. I did not make the rules.’
‘What about the villages?’
‘Yes, those too. If you stay long enough in one place, a house forms for you. Those are along the lines. Where two or more meet, you get castles.’
‘Fucking hell. That’s crazy. Why isn’t everybody running around trying to find their own castle, then?’
‘As you can imagine, it is not as simple as that.’
‘And this one’s repairing itself because?’
‘Because you are here, Mary. The land responds according to our natures. Some people are weak in magic. Others are strong, like you. You can drink deeply from the well beneath us. The castle was never very big, and I lost heart, so it fell into ruin. Now, it is responding to your presence, and grows once again.’
‘Me? What did I do?’
‘You do not have to do anything. You just have to be.’ Crows tapped his foot on the boards, and they sounded hollowly back.
Mary looked around her with wonder. ‘This grew, out of nothing?’
‘Again, not out of nothing. Out of the ground. It rises and falls with the power of the men or women under its roof.’
She pressed her hand against the wall, where the individual stones fitted with each other in blocks and courses, like a gigantic jigsaw. ‘That is still fucking nuts. So how do you find these lines of energy?’
‘You search for them. Tease them out. Remember how I told you that maps were powerful things? This is why: if you have a map, you can start to find the lines. Once you have drawn the lines, you can find where they cross. Where they cross is where castles rise. And sometimes, you can, if you are clever and you have more complete maps than anyone else, you can find a place that no one else knows of.’
‘Do you?’ she asked.
‘Do I what?’
‘Have maps?’
Crows pursed his lips. ‘I might.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘Mary,’ he said. ‘They are fragile, and very precious. They are not objects to be idly toyed with. But perhaps … yes. You must start a map of your own, and mark everything you know of so far on to it. Come, and eat, and then while it is still light, we can make a start.’
Crows wasn’t much of a cook, Mary decided, not that she could do better with the ingredients to hand. There was steamed fish – bony and tasting oddly of weeds – and boiled grain that was a step firmer than porridge. He thought it was fine: he extracted every last morsel of grey flesh from the skeleton, scooping out the difficult to reach bits near the head with one of his long fingers, and sucking the juices from the tail, all the while using the same fingers to cup small balls of grain and feed them past his white teeth.
If she didn’t eat, she’d be too weak to walk to all the places that Crows thought it necessary to take her to, and too weak to weave fog from the air she breathed and darkness from the shadows she cast.
She could do magic. If that wasn’t astounding enough, the very land itself was magical, with castles springing up from the ground at her unspoken command. Eating some mediocre meals was a small price to pay for such wonders, and she’d do it without complaint.
Then when they’d finished, and she’d washed her face and hands and bowls in what had been that morning, a stream, and was now a stone arch sluicing water down a trough before it
turned into a stream, she sat on the still-open doorstep while Crows fetched a sheet of paper and some ink.
She wasn’t sure where he’d get paper from, or pens. They spoke of being manufactured, while everything about Down was crafted – handmade, bespoke, using only raw materials.
The ink was made from soot and oils, the pens from strippeddown feathers, and the paper, she was both fascinated and disgusted to learn, was actually a scraped-clean square of animal skin, the size of a school exercise book.
She’d always been an inveterate doodler, tagging everything with the art she saw on the street. This was different. Even the ink was rare and precious, delicate and worryingly permanent. No hesitation, no erasing.
‘How do I do this?’ she asked.
‘You mark down everything you’ve seen, as accurately as possible. Mark where you have walked, the mountains you saw in the distance, the curve of the rivers, the lines of the hills. Guess the distances if you cannot measure them. Start where you started, finish where you are.’
‘And what do I do with it when I’m done?’
‘You keep it,’ said Crows. ‘This is the beginning of your wealth here in Down.’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking at the blank parchment. ‘Okay.’
She looked out over the land from the doorstep and the newly restored pavement, and the sun that was sliding around to her right. The long ridge that made the headland was a dark smudge.
‘Everything?’
‘It is most important that you put in every last detail, while you still remember it.’
She’d never used a quill pen before: she dipped the nib in the little pot of ink tentatively, before making an equally uncertain mark on the parchment at the top and right of the page. That was to mark the door they’d come through. Then another, bottom
left, to indicate Crow’s castle. What she knew of Down would fit somewhere in between.
She scratched out the lines to represent the bay and the estuary, the river and the lake they’d completely missed because they were on the wrong bank. She added dots for where they camped and the village they’d found.
She was concentrating so hard on getting it as right as she could make it, it was only when she looked up did she see Crows staring intently at the picture she’d drawn.
‘How does it look?’ she asked him.
‘Carefully done. When it is dry, we will put it some place safe.’ He bent low to blow softly on it. ‘The portal is on the beach itself?’
‘It’s in the sea, facing the beach, set in a big rock that stands on its own. I could show you if you want.’
‘No need. I know where you mean. There used to be an arch there, but it collapsed in a storm.’
‘Crows, will I ever get back home?’
He sat back on his haunches. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘The wolfman told us that going home was impossible. Was he lying?’
‘He was telling the truth, as far as he knows it.’
‘But does that mean he’s wrong?’ She held her map up to the reddening sun, watching how the light played through the thin sheet and emboldened the black lines she’d made.
‘That is a geomancer’s great dream, the grand project, to discover whether or not those in Down can pass through the portals to London.’
‘No one has, then.’ She didn’t know how to feel about that. She was trapped, but the prison was far bigger than the freedom she’d previously taken for granted.
‘Yet,’ said Crows. ‘Geomancers fight for control over land, over castles, over portals. Your friends have been taken in case they know something about how the portals work: even the smallest clue might help open the way.’
‘What’s going to happen to them?’
‘If I know her, she will never let them go: what they know will be useful to others and part of being a good geomancer is to deny knowledge to other geomancers. She will force them to work for her, like she did the villagers under my protection.’
‘Slave labour.’
‘Yes.’ Crows sagged at the thought. ‘I wish I could do more.’
‘Has she got a castle?’
‘Hers is large, with high walls and a commanding view over the land. She has soldiers at her beck and call, and workers in her fields. She does not have to worry about finding food, or keeping warm. She spends her whole day in study. I was no match for her, and I barely escaped her myself.’ He curled in on himself further, and worried at his thumb with his teeth. ‘She shamed me.’
‘We can get them back.’
‘We are not enough,’ said Crows. ‘We would need an army to take her castle, and we are not going to find one. This part of Down is empty.’
‘Maybe we should just go somewhere where there are more people and, I don’t know, hire an army. Can we do that?’
‘The only city I know of is hundreds of miles away. There are people here and there in the hills to the east, but they enjoy their peace, and it is not their quarrel. We cannot make them fight for us, and we will not be able to persuade them either.’
Mary looked again at her map, at the tiny amount of land it actually covered. There was so much more to explore, but she still felt the urge to at least try and rescue the others.
‘Can we go and look at her castle? Just to see what it’s like?’
Crows looked up. It was clear he didn’t want to.
‘You know where it is, right?’ she asked.
‘Yes, yes. I know it, but it is too dangerous. If she catches us, then she will kill me and enslave you.’
‘Crows, my friends need me to help them.’ She felt the first stirrings of irritation. ‘And I need you. You can’t say no.’
‘It is too dangerous,’ he repeated. ‘There is nothing to gain by going, and everything to lose.’
‘You’re scared.’
‘Yes, and you should be too. Her power is terrible. She is far stronger than me, and that is that. I have run from her once, and I am not so great a fool as to confront her again. I will do what I can around the margins, saving those who escape from her, but if they are within her walls, I can do nothing.’
‘I can’t do anything, either.’ She let the map drift to the floor. ‘I’ve only just got here, I don’t know how anything works. I thought,’ she said, ‘you were going to help me.’
‘I am helping you. And I am helping you by telling you that we cannot stand against her. We would be throwing our lives away, and in doing so make her stronger still.’ Crows shied away from her, rising on his thin legs and going out on to the pavement. ‘There is a time to fight and a time to hide. Perhaps when her fortunes are reversed, we can help your friends. Until then, they will come to no real harm – they are too valuable alive.’
‘They’re fucking slaves, Crows! It’s not the fucking Ritz they’re staying in. If it was the other way around, and they’d got me instead of Dalip, I bet he’d be thinking up some sort of way to get us out of there, no matter how long it took.’ She looked up at the man, how his black skin glowed with the orange of sunset, and remembered the fire of the tunnels. Yes, she’d been terrified, but that had been no reason to abandon everyone else. They’d saved each other once before, the best they could. ‘We have to try.’
‘We do not “have to try”. No one is forcing you to do anything. No one will think better of you for failing. Those few people who know you will soon forget. Nothing you have done will be written down. Even if you succeed, who will thank you? There is no reward to gain, no medals to win, no one will make you queen.’ He waved his hand at the darkening land. ‘If you want to be queen, then be one here. This is your country. Rule it how you see fit.’
Her fingers and toes were tingling. The end of her nose. Her ears. This was what she was like just before she blew. The rage growled like a trapped animal, desperate to escape. The only way it could go was out of her throat.