Authors: Simon Morden
‘I thought we were going to have to kill her too. But I didn’t have the stomach for it. I wanted to see if I could reason with her instead.’ He looked at her over his shoulder, her coiled-spring hair, her skin opened up in broad red trenches. ‘Was that a mistake? Stanislav seems to think so. He says if we leave her alive, then either us or someone else will become her victims. We have to remember what sort of person she is.’
‘She’s no saint. Neither am I. You might be, I guess. What do you think we should do?’ She drew up her legs and hugged her knees.
‘That the only way to stop her may be to kill her. And that I’m not going to be the one to do it.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know if that makes me a coward or not.’
‘A lot depends on her. If she even looks at me funny, I’ll have her.’ Mary pointed down behind her neck. ‘The last time I turned my back on her, I got these.’
‘I’m supposed to protect the weak – that’s what the gurus say. I don’t know who the weak are any more.’ Dalip reached into his pocket for Pigface’s knife, and considered his distorted, dim reflection in the blade. ‘This isn’t over yet, is it?’
‘No way. But at least we can do what we came here for – ask some questions of her, and work out if we can go home or not.’
Dalip caught her gaze, and held it. ‘Do you think we can?’
‘I’m told if we do, we’d be the first.’ She blinked her big brown eyes. ‘We might have to stay.’
He didn’t know what he thought about that, and looked away.
They couldn’t find any maps, just some half-complete outlines of the coast to the south, with scratches marking a few prominent features. Mary knew that this wasn’t right, that the geomancer had to have maps, because that was the whole point. How could someone hope to divide Down with criss-crossing lines of energy without detailed maps?
The wind had picked up, and the broken doors on to the balcony were beginning to heave and yaw. Dalip went to wedge them shut, while Mary went to sit opposite the geomancer, who looked up through closing eyes at the woman who’d beaten her. Her split lips reopened as she pressed them together.
‘What do we call you?’ asked Mary.
‘Whatever you want.’
‘Pick a name. Yours would be good, but any name will do.’
Mama frowned at Mary and went to wipe away some of the freshly blooming blood with a damp cloth dipped in what might be wine. The geomancer pushed her hand firmly away.
‘I’m not a cripple.’
‘You seemed grateful enough for my help before,’ said Mama. ‘What’s changed?’
‘It’s me,’ said Mary. ‘She can fool you as to what she’s really like. She can’t fool me.’
‘She’s just a—’
‘She tried to kill me, Mama.’ Mary shrugged off the tapestry. ‘She did that. She did everything that’s happened to you and the others. All this is her fault, and she can fucking tell me her fucking name right now, or we’ll go another six rounds.’
The geomancer looked sour. ‘Bell. I’m Bell.’
‘Like the Disney princess?’
‘The thing that rings.’
‘Okay. Bell: where are your maps?’
‘I don’t have any.’
‘That’s just bollocks. I know you have maps. Where are they?’
A flash of defiance burned in Bell’s face. ‘They were stolen.’
‘Convenient. By who?’
The fire flickered, and was extinguished. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me. We want to know where the fuck we are and what the fuck is going on, and whether we can get the fuck home again. So, you’re going to tell me where your maps are, or I’ll beat it out of you right now.’ Mary balled her fists, and the muscles in her bare arms flexed.
‘A man called Crows stole them when he left me.’ Bell put her hands to her face to cover her shame.
‘Left you? Like he was your boyfriend? Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.’
‘You know this Crows man?’ Mama looked askance. ‘You get around, girl.’
‘Yes, I know him. He stole my fucking map too.’
‘Mercy! Will someone please, in heaven’s name, explain what is going on?’
‘Right.’ Mary glanced up to see she had an audience. The longer she left it, the more interested they became, and the more embarrassed she turned. ‘No. I’m going to let Bell do it.’ She
pushed her with the flat of her foot, and the geomancer tried to slap it away. Too slow.
With the focus of attention off Mary, she moved back and waited with the others.
‘Down,’ said Bell, with a shuddering sigh, ‘Down isn’t just a direction.’
‘It’s a destination,’ said Mary. ‘Get to the good bits.’
‘Down is a world separate to where we came from, but connected to it in lots of different places and times. These places we call portals, and they’re doors where people can enter Down, but not, apparently, leave. Someone, a long time ago, discovered that if you draw a line between two portals, there’s nearly always another portal on that line. You can get villages on those lines, too. Where those lines cross, you get castles. That’s why maps are important. And Crows stole mine.’
‘She’s missing some stuff out,’ said Mary, ‘but that’s pretty much what I got from Crows.’
‘So what did I miss out?’ asked Bell. She pushed her hair back from her face, to better show off her black eyes, torn skin, and dew-drop of blood clinging to the end of her nose.
‘That the villages and the castles grow, depending on how many people live there.’ Mary watched the others’ consternation rise. ‘Those houses we found in the forest? They grew there, and were just sinking back into the ground. The same with castles. She needs people to live here in order to keep the walls and the towers intact.’
‘Is that why she took us?’ Elena was as bemused as she was angry. ‘Is that all?’
‘No, that can’t be all,’ said Dalip. ‘Why did you make me fight in the pit?’
‘Fight? Pit?’ asked Mary.
‘Like a, a gladiator. She wanted me to be afraid. Isn’t that right?’
Bell shifted awkwardly, painfully. ‘I … I was carrying out an experiment. When we came to Down, we were all running from something, someone. I thought that by making someone scared enough, I could open a portal back to London. Didn’t work though, did it? You were too bloody honourable.’
She said it with grudging admiration, but hadn’t counted on Dalip not taking it as a compliment. Luiza just about stopped him from dragging the geomancer up by the hair and throwing her through the closed balcony doors.
‘It wouldn’t have worked if I’d told you why you were being trained to fight,’ said Bell. ‘It wasn’t about you being scared. It was about those other plebs being scared of you.’
Luiza pushed Dalip away and stood in front of him. Dalip’s chest heaved, and he seemed to only control himself with the utmost effort. ‘It didn’t work at all.’
‘You can’t blame me for trying,’ Bell offered.
Luiza’s hand pressed hard against Dalip’s sternum.
‘I do blame you for trying.’
‘To be honest,’ said Mary, ‘it sounds like a really shitty thing to do, over and above all the other shitty things you did. And though Crows might be shady as fuck, at least he never tried to kill me, or any of my mates. He saved me from the wolfman. He taught me how to use magic. Why don’t I guess why he left you?’
Bell stayed defiantly silent.
‘If I said he left you because he thought your idea was fucking nuts, would I be wrong?’
‘Yes. You don’t understand anything.’
‘So make me understand.’
The two women stared at each other. Mary was acutely aware of the cold wind rattling through the tower, brushing against her wounds in a way that didn’t happen when she was a bird, but also that Bell was sitting opposite her in a fine white dress turned to scarlet rags. The gravity of the damage they’d done to each other should have been worthy of comment, but neither of them were ever going to be called to account for that.
‘Crows was my lover,’ said Bell. ‘We planned everything together.’
‘Hang on,’ said Mary. ‘Where’s Grace?’
‘She’s not here.’ Mama shrugged. ‘She’s not here and we don’t know what that means.’
‘Okay. We’ll have to look for her after this. Go on, Bell: you were making plans.’
‘We knew there was a portal around here, but didn’t know where. We found this crossing point using …’ Her voice trailed off as she contemplated her collection of broken brass instruments. ‘A device. We searched – him by water, me by air.’
The others frowned at this.
Mary sniffed. ‘Remember the huge sea snake we saw after we got to the shore? That was Crows. He knew at that point that the portal was probably somewhere on the island. When he couldn’t find it, he got me to tell him exactly where. They’re not supposed to disappear.’
Bell suddenly showed more than passing interest. ‘The portal vanished?’
‘There’s nothing but rock there now. It’s gone, and Crows didn’t know what that meant. Do you?’
Bell shook her head. ‘Portals are attached to London. They don’t go anywhere. They’re fixed points.’
‘What if,’ said Dalip. ‘What if London ceased to exist?’
That caused disquiet, but he persisted.
‘I don’t mean to … I’ve got as much to lose as everyone. But that fire wasn’t normal. We ran and ran, and it wasn’t enough. Even a plane crash wouldn’t have been that bad. And if – I don’t know – a nuclear bomb, maybe, with a firestorm afterwards. Would that be enough to break the connection?’
‘When are you from?’ asked Bell.
They were all too surprised at the question to answer, except Mary.
‘Twenty twelve. You?’
‘Nineteen sixty-eight.’ Bell looked at them again, each one, checking for differences between them and her. ‘How did it go, those forty years?’
‘Good for some. Not so good for others,’ said Mary. ‘This is well off the point, though. Crows said that whoever controls the portals, controls Down.’
‘And London,’ said Dalip. ‘They’d control London too.’
‘That. But no one’s ever managed to open a door going the other way, right?’
‘No. But there has to be a way to do it.’
‘Why?’ asked Mary. ‘Why does there? Why can’t this just be it?’
‘Because it doesn’t make sense otherwise. If things can pass from London to here, then it stands to reason they can pass back.’
‘You mean like you can turn into a dragon and fucking castles grow out of the ground?’
Bell faltered. ‘This place just has different rules, that’s all.’
‘One of which might be, you can’t go back,’ interrupted Dalip. ‘Do you have any evidence at all that anything has ever gone back to London, over and above simply wishing it was true?’
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No.’
‘Great.’ He turned away, then abruptly towards her again. ‘You were going to have me fight people to the death because you hoped something might just happen that had never happened before. That’s just …’
‘Fucking nuts?’ offered Mary.
‘Pretty much covers it. If you were going to experiment on someone, at the very least you should have started with yourself.’ The wind rattled the balcony doors open, and Dalip went to close them with something more substantial.
‘These maps,’ said Mama. ‘Are they that important?’
Mary nodded. ‘Without them, we don’t have a fucking clue where we are or where to go next. Geomancers like her spend years making them, finding them, hiding them away. Get it right, and you get a massive fuck-off castle like this, people to follow you, and maybe, if you’re the first to work out how everything works, you get to run the show.’
‘Then we should concentrate on getting the maps back,’ said Mama, arms folded.
‘Problem is, Crows is long gone, turned into a sea snake and away.’
‘He can’t carry the maps like that,’ said Bell, shifting awkwardly. ‘He can’t get them wet, and he needs hands to carry them.’
Mary looked at the ceiling. ‘He lied to me. Again.’
‘He does that,’ said Bell.
‘I’m not feeling sorry for you, if that’s what you want. If I was him, I’d have lied to you too.’ She tutted. ‘He’d have to have them stashed somewhere, somewhere close. Not at his castle—’
‘He had a castle?’
‘It was a bit shit, but yes. Full of crows, which is why I thought he was called Crows.’
‘Those weren’t crows,’ said Bell.
‘Then what the fuck were they?’
‘The crows were Crows. You’ve met Daniel and his wolves.’
‘The wolfman?’
‘Him. The wolves were Daniel. Projections from him, controlled by him. He can see through them, like a witch’s familiar. Crows does the same, but through a flock of crows.’
Mary wiped her face with her hands. ‘Oh fucking hell. I thought Crows had vanished, and he was there all the time. He played me. Fuck. He even taught me how to fly.’
‘So where are the maps?’ asked Mama. ‘Does this Crows have them?’
‘He wouldn’t have left the area without them. They were in the castle, so he probably stashed them nearby, where I wouldn’t find them. And if he can only carry them when he’s a man, then … somewhere near the river. We know he swam up it, don’t we, Dalip?’
‘I thought he was going to eat me,’ said Dalip. The increasing wind rattled at the shutters again, threatening to tear them loose. What might have been thunder rumbled distantly.
‘The wolfman was down by the portal,’ said Mary. ‘I thought he was looking for Crows. Or me. But what if he was looking for the maps?’ She thought about it. ‘Where would he go with them? If he wanted to sell them, or just start again? Or maybe the other thing, trade the fact that portals can disappear.’
‘There’s really only one place. The White City. But it’ll take him weeks to get there. There’s still time to find him.’ Bell murmured an offer: ‘I can help you, if you want.’
‘You are not going to turn into a dragon again. No. You with the maps is more dangerous than Crows with the maps, we’ve already found that out for ourselves. If anyone’s going to find him, it’s me.’
‘She can turn into a bird,’ said Dalip. ‘A big one. A hawk.’
The others exchanged more glances, and Mary shrugged, pulling on her wounds.
‘I’ll go in the morning, just before it gets light. Where is this city?’
‘In the far west. If I had my maps …’
‘You’re a regular joker, aren’t you? I’m tired of having to drag everything out of you, one bit at a time. I’m just tired. I feel like I could sleep for a week.’
‘It’s the transformations,’ said Bell. ‘They’re exhausting.’
‘Crows said there’s a chance of getting stuck. Is that right?’
She looked equivocal. ‘It’s been known.’
Mary wondered what it would be like, to forget everything, to give it all up and live each day, free of consequence from yesterday and free of thought of tomorrow, her whole world just flight and wind and feathers. That wouldn’t be too bad, would it? Except she had responsibilities now, to protect this ragged band of survivors. Her crew: her gang, in other words.
Not that she’d done a good job so far, but she was going to change that, and their fortunes.
‘Okay. In the morning, I’ll go out and look for Crows. In fact, what I’ll do is look for crows. If I find some, he might be nearby. What we need to do is make sure that dragon-lady here doesn’t try anything before then. Any suggestions?’
No one, apparently, wanted to kill her. At least, they weren’t saying it out loud.
‘Tie her up and lock her in a room?’ said Luiza. ‘A small room so if she changes, she hurts herself and not us.’
‘Is she that dangerous,’ asked Mama, ‘that we have to tie her up?’
‘I don’t want her coming for me in the night,’ said Mary. ‘And it’s going to be me, isn’t it? I’m the threat to her, no matter how brave Dalip is or how mad Stanislav is.’
‘We should watch her,’ said Dalip. ‘Take turns. But that means one of us is alone with her. Two of us?’