‘Do you want to go by the old house? I rented it to a tanner and his family -eight squealin’ brats, all a match for you and your sister.’
Mayel shook his head. He didn’t trust his voice not to betray the emotion he felt now. The Shambles was smaller to his eyes, ruder and meaner than it had seemed when he’d not known better. Guilt gnawed at him. He’d left with his father, hugging his sister tight so as to not lose her in the crowd of people fleeing the city. Their mother lay on the one bed in the shack they called home, dying of the white plague. With her last breath she urged them to flee. He could still see the blood-flecked foam bubbling from her mouth as she pleaded for them to save themselves.
For some reason his father had decided a life of service to Vellern would save them -and perhaps he’d been right, though Mayel had learned at the monastery that the white plague was nowhere near as contagious as the peasants believed it. Whatever the truth, they had set off on their pilgrimage to the Island of Birds. After a week of tramping dirt roads, his sister had stumbled, and never found the strength to get up again. The memory still left a knot in his stomach. He hadn’t had the strength to hate his father then, but he’d made up for it later.
‘I understand.’ Shandek’s voice was softer now. He knew the start of the story, and recognised the pain on Mayel’s face. ‘You never told me what happened to your da’.’
‘He died,’ Mayel replied flatly. ‘After a few months he realised a monastery where they didn’t make wine wasn’t the place for him. Tried to slip away at night in a small boat. The Bitches took him.’
‘The Bitches?’
‘The rocks around the island. The monks always claimed that only people who’d fished the lake their whole life are able to navigate through them. They don’t even let men from the village sail alone until they’ve thirty summers. Everyone else ends up smashed against the Bitches.’
‘Right.’ Shandek lapsed into silence. Sympathy was an underused emotion of his. What could a man say? Pity was a woman’s province, and he didn’t like to intrude. Instead, he let his eyes wander the familiar lines of his home. After thirty-three summers of walking these streets, he could pick up the slightest change, whether it was a rise in fortunes permitting repairs, or the subtle indications that a man or woman were drinking more than they were working nowadays. Shandek kept an eye out for these people. It didn’t do to have utter misery and complete poverty. It was like he always said: make sure the sheep are fat before you fleece them.
The sunken theatre occupied a sudden open space on the eastern edge of the Shambles, where the busy thoroughfare of Long Walk was an abrupt border to the district; folk tended to emerge blinking in the newfound light after the narrow alleys of the Shambles. Dodging the carts and sliding through the currents of humanity that flowed back and forth, Shandek led his cousin across to where low stalls and barrows encircled the theatre, unconsciously echoing the barricade of shrines around the Six Temples further north. A pair of willow trees obscured much of the theatre’s southern aspect, but Mayel could see building work going on.
‘They’re adding a tier?’
The sunken theatre was open, with an arched greystone wall running around three sides. At the stage end the ground fell away into a deep pit, within which a building looking like a warehouse had been constructed so its roof was level with the street. It served as both offices and backstage for the theatre. Mayel guessed that was where his so-called friend had died.
The low single-storey wall enclosing this large chunk of ground had flat-roofed rooms all around its interior. It looked small, compared with the space inside, like a child’s toy made out of proportion. Mayel had remembered the theatre as more imposing, even without the wooden palisade now being erected to raise the height of the wall.
As he and Shandek got closer, they could see workmen and scaffolds behind the market carts that were trading as usual, ignoring the commotion behind them.
‘Another tier,’ Shandek confirmed eventually.
They had stopped by a butcher’s stall. The woman who was running it wore a loose-fitting brown dress, low-cut and sleeveless, and Mayel could make out the tiny dark circles of blood dried into the material. He stared at the woman as her eyes drifted, listless and unfocused, over the street ahead. Her pallid skin was stretched tight over bones that looked too big for her body. ‘Sign of a nasty habit,’ he muttered, more to himself than his cousin.
‘Eh? Ah, that one.’ Shandek sniffed, though Mayel couldn’t tell whether it was mild disgust or embarrassment -whoever supplied the woman might well be giving Shandek a cut of the proceeds. ‘Been workin’ hard on killin’ herself slow, that one. Six weeks since her children died in a fire, and she won’t see another six.’
As they spoke, the woman jumped at a crash from the scaffold behind. She looked fearfully at the wall a few yards behind her, as if watching it for danger. The wall itself was blank and featureless, yet it was at that she stared, rather than the windows of the new second floor above.
‘Folk say she cracked before the fire,’ Shandek continued, ‘that it was her fault. It’s said she’d been jumpin’ at shadows, an’ talkin’ about daemons being after her girls. She set fire to the house to frighten off the shadows. Now she’s got nowhere else to live. Either she sleeps in the temples, where the fires burn all night, or she’s in the opium dens before nightfall. Her husband will be somewhere about here; she’s only good for leavin’ at the stall for a short while.’
Shandek fell silent, frowning at the woman for a handful of heartbeats before nudging Mayel into movement, towards the theatre’s main entrance. ‘What with people runnin’ from shadows, and these stories of a dark man walking the night streets, there’s somethin’ up with this city.’
Mayel didn’t reply, but submitted to his larger cousin’s urging. Even as they walked away, he kept his eyes on the woman for as long as he could. There was an echo of something in her face that made him shiver. For a moment, he thought he heard screams, and the crackle of flames. Then they passed around the corner and the spell was broken.
The main entrance was open, and freshly painted -as they turned in to the open gateway Shandek had to check his stride to avoid a man crouching at the right-hand gate, putting the final touches to the elaborate picture.
Mayel stopped and looked, trying to imagine the whole image, while Shandek muttered an apology for his foot clipping the painter’s trailing heel. The painting was not what Mayel had expected, not the usual sort of scenes that hinted at the delights awaiting them within.
‘
The Broken Spear
,
Five Wives of the Sea
-even
The Triumph of Gods
would be a more obvious choice than this one,’ Mayel muttered.
Against a granite sky of roiling cloud, the aftermath of a battle on a bowl-shaped plain. In the background, a huge castle crowned by five massive towers. One of those towers had been shattered and flames, painted with such skill they seemed real to Mayel, licked at the castle wall. Before the walls towered the varied shapes of the Reapers, Death’s violent Aspects, who embodied the ways men feared to die: the emaciated face of the Soldier glared down at the slain around his feet, while the Burning Man stood on a hillock behind him with arms outstretched like a martyr. The Great Wolf was a vague shape in the background, stalking its prey in the blurred shadows, and the Headsman reclined on a distant block of stone with his axe propped on his shoulder. Strangely, it was the Wither Queen who was painted in the greatest detail. Mayel felt her cruel gaze, her pale grey eyes, slice into him. Her lips as thin as dagger-blades were slightly parted, as though she was about to speak his name.
He felt her cold touch on his skin. His mother wasn’t the only person Mayel had seen dying of disease; he had known some who had endured agonising months of her cruelty. The Wither Queen robbed her victims of everything, of the person they had once been as much as the life her lord demanded. Though she was a God, Mayel hated her for what she was.
The detail of the plain below the Reapers was vague; angular shapes hinted at a carpet of slaughtered men and creatures. Somehow the magnitude of the horror was increased by the remoteness. Framing the entire plain was a high ridge of grim rocks the colour of sand. Mayel looked closer and realised that there was the faintest of detail on the rocks, almost like the grain of wood. He shivered, thinking of the pine boxes wealthier folk used to bury their dead in.
‘Gods, man,’ Shandek exclaimed, ‘you’ve quite a skill there. This is better than any I’ve seen in my life.’
‘Thank you, sir. It’s . . .’ The painter’s voice tailed off as he looked from Shandek to the painting. A small man with the dark skin that spoke of a western heritage, he wore little more than rags, yet his face was clean and his hair carefully trimmed. His expression was one of dazed bemusement, as if he couldn’t believe he had been able to produce it. ‘It is the best thing I’ve ever done, by a long way.’
‘I didn’t know you cared anything about art,’ Mayel said to his cousin, unable to tear his eyes from the painting.
‘Ah, I’ve seen a bit in my time.’ Shandek grinned.
‘When? You’re no collector.’
‘No, but I’ve been in plenty of places belongin’ to men who are. You have my compliments, friend. Can you tell us where the man in charge is?’
The painter gave a wince and jabbed his brush towards the interior. ‘The minstrel will be in one of the boxes. Sitting in shadow. If you go in they’ll find you soon enough.’
‘They?’ wondered Shandek aloud, but the painter had already returned to his work. Shrugging, Shandek stepped through the gates and glanced into the dim, cramped room where the money-collectors would work, counting the copper pieces as folk filed in. It was empty yet, without even a stool or table.
A walkway led off both left and right, to storerooms of no more than two yards’ depth on the outer side, and the boxes for the rich folk further in on the inner wall. Ahead was a short flight of steps leading into the theatre itself.
Shandek hopped up these and turned to beckon Mayel to follow. The youth hesitated, still unnerved by the painting on the door. The style reminded him of religious paintings, the ancient and holy images they had been so proud of on the Island of Birds.
Behind him, he felt the presence of Brohm loom close. He’d been shadowing them, and he wasn’t going to enter until Mayel had.
‘Why did you want me to come here with you?’
‘Why?’ Shandek puffed his cheeks out in dismissal. ‘No great reason, cuz. I wanted to speak to you before I came, thought you might be interested. Also, you got more learnin’ than me. These artistic types might say somethin’ clever and I wouldn’t know whether to agree or stab ’em.’
Mayel sighed and started up the steps. Something nagged at him.
I don’t want to be here at all, but what am I frightened of? Jackdaw won’t be here, and what else do I have to be afraid of?
As if in answer, a figure leapt out behind Shandek and grabbed him by his shoulders in a blur of bone-white. Shandek yelped and tried to turn, but his attacker held him tight, pinning his arms back. Mayel saw a white, hairless head and a savage flash of teeth over Shandek’s shoulder. His cousin flailed madly as Brohm shoved Mayel aside and ran for the stairs, but before he reached his employer, the albino had jumped backwards and effortlessly tossed Shandek away.
Brohm raised his massive fist as he charged, but the albino was quicker. Darting forward, he lunged low and crashed a fist into Brohm’s stomach, stopping the larger man in his tracks. Brohm gasped and doubled over, sinking to his knees, only to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and thrown down after his master. Mayel heard the thump of Brohm falling and rolling on the rough paved steps. Then there was silence.
Having dispatched both men from his path, the albino paused, hairless head bright in the sunlight. He was dressed in cropped linen trousers and a laced shirt, sleeves cut well short of the wrist. As Mayel took in the albino’s malformed face, he wondered whether this was a human at all. It looked as if some God had formed the albino from white clay, using a detailed description, but without actually seeing the real thing. The features were too smooth, the jaw protruding and thick. Its eyes were over-large, curling almonds of blackness. Meeting the albino’s gaze drained the warmth from Mayel’s heart, drawing him in to a cold and pitiless place.
He tore his eyes away as the albino continued to inspect him, looking at him as if he were an insect, or a rabbit that had surprised a wolf by not running. He looked down. Its bare feet were split down the middle and Mayel’s breath caught when he realised each foot mainly consisted of two great toes, a short talon curled down over the end of each.
‘That’s enough, I think,’ called an unseen man. The albino’s head snapped round, but soon dropped its glare. It pointed at Mayel, then retreated with alacrity.
‘Please, come out into the light. My guard dog won’t hurt you.’
Mayel stared out into the open auditorium, frozen with fear, until a burst of swearing rang out. He scrambled up the steps.
‘Pissin’ breath of Karkarn!’ his cousin groaned. ‘I’ll shove that painter’s brush so far up his arse he’ll paint with his tongue from now on.’
‘Now, now,’ said the voice, and a man dressed as a minstrel came into sight, lounging in a box with his feet up on the barrier. Around his neck was a golden chain, with strange discs, like coins, decorated with jewels. A peacock feather sprouted from his hat. ‘I am certain the painter will have told you no lies, so you can hardly blame him for the actions of others.’
Shandek hauled himself up. Brohm was sitting upright, clutching his gut. Neither looked badly hurt.
‘We jus’ came here to talk. Didn’t hafta set your wolves on us,’ Brohm muttered.
The minstrel gave a sniff. ‘They’re dogs, not wolves.’