Funnily enough the first person I see is Son, lying on a bed fast asleep. I tuck his teddy bear underneath his arm. How sweet.
“What’s the matter with him?” asks a red haired nurse. She’s not talking to me, but rather to the nurse beside her who is wearing the smallest spectacles I’ve ever seen. You could see atoms through those lenses. You could see quarks.
“The anaesthetist put him to sleep,” she says. “He’s to be used for spare parts.”
“The little mite.” The red haired nurse leans closer to him. “He’s such a sweet little thing. Poor, too. Look at the state of his clothes. Barely rags.”
“You could say the same of nearly everyone down here,” says Little Spectacles.
“And he’s to be cut up so that some wealthy woman upstairs can have a new liver. And in three years time she’ll have drunk that one into oblivion and there’ll be another little boy lying here on the bed.”
“So?”
“So I’m not letting it happen,” says Red Hair. “Where’s the sal volatile? That’ll wake him up.”
“You’ll be in trouble if the Doctor sees you.”
“I’m not frightened of the Doctor.”
“Yes, you are. Everyone is.”
Red Hair shudders, but she pulls a little green bottle from somewhere and opens the lid. She holds the bottle beneath his nose.
“Here we go,” she says. Son coughs and splutters, and I realise I’ve been delayed here for too long.
I head into the next ward. The burns unit. And here she is at last, lying on a bed surrounded by all sorts of wires and tubes and things. Her feathers have been burned clear away, and her naked skin is pink and tender. The doctor is marking off her intimate parts with a blue crayon.
She sees me. She turns an eye towards me, the better to look at me.
“Carrionman,” she says. “I knew you’d find me.”
“You can’t have her,” says the Doctor, his back to me as he sketches out her internal organs on her skin. “She was brought to Dream London Hospital and so now she’s mine.”
He turns and faces me, and I feel a flutter of fear. He’s a handsome man, every inch the doctor. Friendly, calm, professional, the very model of the bedside manner. A perfect healer. And yet I can see this for the shell that it is. Underneath all that, there is nothing. No emotion. He heals people because that’s his job. He doesn’t care. Pay him more and he’d be just as effective an assassin. He’s the consummate professional. He couldn’t sell his soul, he never had one.
“Well?” he says. “Must you take up my time?”
“If you cure her, then what will I eat?” I ask.
“I’m just doing my job,” replies the doctor, smoothly.
“And I’m doing mine,” I say. I turn to look at her.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
She looks embarrassed, she can’t meet my gaze.
“I was staying in a guest house in Purley,” she says. “It caught fire. I was trapped inside. They dragged me out, brought me here.”
“She would have died if they hadn’t done so,” said the Doctor.
She looks down at the bed clothes. She knows its true.
“Do you want to die?” the Doctor asks her. She doesn’t reply. But she doesn’t want to die.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. I tilt my head the other way to look at her. “You know how it goes. You can choose to live like a human, or you can choose to live like a bird. You chose to fly.”
“Carrionman,” said the Doctor, “you’re just looking for your next meal.”
So what if I was? Didn’t the Doctor eat meat?
“Step away from her, Doctor,” I say. “Turn off your machines. If she is meant to die, she will die.”
“And then you’ll eat her, Carrionman?”
“And don’t you eat, Doctor?” I reply.
He looks at me, thinking, and then he shrugs.
“Plenty more where she came from,” he says, and he reaches out and flicks a switch. The green wheezing machine dies.
“But I don’t...” gasps the bird woman. We watch her die, the doctor and I. And then the Doctor leaves me in peace to enjoy my meal.
That’s me done. There is no moral to this story, by the way, save that we all have to make a living.
I head back into the corridor, ready to go home.
I’m in the basement, at the very bottom of the Dream London Hospital. I can see the orange glow of the furnaces, just around the corner.
A dark shadow crosses the wall and Son turns the corner, teddy bear under his arm. He looks at me.
“Which way out of here, mister?” he asks. He is pale, his cheeks streaked with tears. He’s clearly terrified: the fact that he is in trouble has finally dawned on him. “I want my mum,” he says. It’s enough to wring the heart of a stone statue.
From what I’ve heard, there are great men around the corner, naked but for loin cloths. They feed the furnaces. Covered in sweat, they hurl everything that comes their way into the fire, no questions asked. Rags, bones, strips of flesh, little boys.
I should leave Son to his fate.
But then again, I live by bird fate, not human fate.
“You’re going the wrong way,” I say, and I take his hand. “Come on, I’ll take you back upstairs.”
“Thanks, mister,” he says.
I lead him away from the furnace, back up to his parents.
SAFE HOUSE
K J PARKER
“GENTLEMEN,” I SAID, “please. Think about it logically.”
The noose went down over my head, brushing my nose. They’re surprisingly heavy, nooses, especially the low-grade hemp type. You really feel the weight, where they press on your collar bone.
“You can’t,” I said, “just kill sorcerers, everybody knows that. At the last moment they turn into smoke and vanish. So, if you hang me, it’ll prove I’m not a sorcerer, and you’ll have killed an innocent man.”
The hangman scowled at me. “They all say that,” he said, and pulled the bag over my head.
I hate it when they do that. Ever since I was a kid I’ve never been exactly wild about confined spaces. Inside a bag is about as confined as you can get. Oh well, I thought. The hangman was wearing a knitted scarf round his neck; imagine his wife giving it to him. There you are, it’ll keep you nice and warm when you’re out hanging people. My toes were clenching inside my boots; I was trying to dig my imaginary claws into the scaffold floor, to get a better grip. The things you do.
(Getting hung always puts me in mind of when I was a kid, and my mother decided it was time I learned how to kill chickens. She showed me, three times (three chickens), patiently explaining, there’s a right way and a wrong way; where to support the bird’s weight with your left hand, how to feel for the junction of the spine and the skull with your forefinger and thumb, so that when you come to do the twist-and-lift, it’ll all be as clean and easy as clicking your fingers. Now it’s your turn, she said; and I tried, and I made a mess of it. No, she said patiently, like this; and she showed me again, and again (I was, what, eight years old at this point); now you do it, go on, don’t be such a baby. I remember, the chicken looked at me, and I looked at it. I’ll swear, that bird was sorry for me. So I tried, and she had to grab it out of my hands and finish it off. No, she said, you’re not listening, you never listen. So she caught me another clucking, thrashing, round-eyed chicken and subdued it with her big, flat hands (she could subdue any living thing, the way I imagine only a god could) and thrust it into my arms; and I crushed it to me, and got my right hand round the bird’s neck, and tugged so hard that its head just came off—
I can’t click my fingers, either. There’s some things you just can’t learn.)
You always believe in the last-second reprieve. It never comes.
THE THING ABOUT turning into a cloud of smoke is it hurts. In order to do it, you have to pull apart every fibre of your body while simultaneously raising your body temperature to the point of igni
tion. Not only that; you don’t want to burn, you want to detonate. In effect, you’ve got the pain of being torn apart and the pain of being burnt alive, all crammed into a tiny fraction of a second of really, really intense discomfort. True, it’s over in a flash—literally—but that’s not the end of it. Think about when you bang your knee or stub your toe; you get the initial surge of pain, followed by a long, dull ache. Now think, every bit of you. And sometimes it can last for days.
THE THING YOU dread most is a sudden gust of wind. Thankfully, on this occasion I didn’t have to deal with anything like that, which was just as well. A gentle breeze picked me up and carried me into a warm patch just below the clouds, where I hung for a while (catching my breath, so to speak) until the sun went past noon, and I was able to drift down to ground level and pull myself together.
The really skilful, show-off types can solidify with their clothes on and intact; not me. I wound up in a small wood somewhere with one shirt sleeve, which was jammed round my left leg so tight I had to scrabble round for a bit of sharp flint and cut it off before it stopped the flow of blood completely. I was dizzy, disorientated, freezing cold, nauseous, starving hungry—where the contents of your stomach get to during the dematerialisation process, nobody knows—and I hurt all over. I crawled under a bush, curled up into a ball and sort of existed painfully for quite some time.
Each time, it’s like being born again, except that you’re not some appealingly helpless bundle of joy surrounded by loving parents and doting relatives. Instead, it’s a bit like coming back as a wolf cub. Very small animals are scared of you, larger animals want to eat you, and human beings know they can get threepence bounty on your skin at minimal risk. The talent, which got you into this mess in the first place, is no use to you at all, not unless you’re one of those freaks who can recover from a total dislocation in ten minutes flat. What you really need at that precise point in your career is a safe place, with solid walls and a heavy door you can bolt shut, a warm fire and (if at all possible) something to eat.
I knew of exactly such a place. It was twelve miles away. Might as well have been on the Moon.
IN AP’ESANGELIA, THEY give you dirty looks, and when you want a bed for the night, everywhere’s suddenly full. In ChorisAnthropou, you have to report to the Prefecture on arrival and swear a solemn undertaking not to try any weird stuff. In Callianis, soldiers wake you up in the early hours of the morning and give you a free cart-ride to the border. In BocFlemen, they kill you.
A man might be forgiven for avoiding these places. After all, they don’t want you, so why put yourself out? Answer: it’s the duty of a tenured adept of the Studium to go where he’s sent and, generally speaking, if the Studium sends you somewhere there’s a good reason. We—use of the first person plural makes it sound like I’m on the Faculty; I’m not, I’m third grade, a footsoldier, though with distinctions in military forms—have undertaken various responsibilities, unasked, unthanked. We regulate the use and misuse of the talent, wherever, whenever. We sort out untrained naturals who suddenly discover they can turn milk sour or command earthquakes. We track down rogue adepts who decide they’ve had enough of running errands and want to be gods instead. We research unexplained phenomena, in case there’s something we should know. Some places they like us, some they don’t. We don’t get paid, or anything vulgar like that. We do the job, we go home, we get sent somewhere else, in my case usually somewhere they really don’t like us at all.
Such as BocFlemen. Actually, I can see their point. They have an unfortunate history with the talent. A couple of hundred years ago, we—the talented community—did them the honour of choosing their country to fight a war in. The Studium put a stop to it, eventually. By then, however, the damage had been done.There’s places in BocFlemen where the grass will never grow again, and the first thing women do when they’ve given birth is count the baby’s fingers and toes.
I get sent to BocFlemen rather too often for my liking. They send me there because, deficient as I am in many aspects of our craft, I’m rather good at dislocations. It’s one of those Forms that some people can do and others can’t; nothing to do with intelligence, diligence, dedication or even natural aptitude, more of a knack, like wiggling your ears. A hint for young postulants trying to decide what to specialise in after second year. Don’t opt for dislocations, even if you’re really good at them. Otherwise, sooner or later some sadistic bugger will send you to BocFlemen.
YOU WILL HAVE gathered from the foregoing that my latest mission had ended in abject failure. Somewhere along a very short line (I’d only been in the country three days) I’d messed up and been found out, wasted a whole week being incarcerated and tortured, and then the whole dreary business of execution. I hadn’t found the talented natural I’d been sent to deal with, I hadn’t even tracked down the men I was supposed to make contact with. More than likely, someone would have to come in to get me out. I really hate it when I’m the one who has to do the rescuing, and I tend not to put too much effort into hiding my resentment. I wasn’t, therefore, looking forward to having to face my saviour in due course.
YOU MAY RECALL that I mentioned a war.
When wars end, things get left behind. There’s the obvious stuff, like the plough turning up bones every year in a particular field, or a helmet hanging upside down from three chains over a fire, full of soup. And there’s buildings. As often as not, the briars and the nettles cover them up, or the locals smash up the masonry for hard standing. But there are some bits of military architecture that are too big to hide and too strong to break, and a classic example of this class are the blockhouse towers.
Both sides built them. They both copied the specifications faithfully from the same book, so you have no way of knowing from the outside which are which—unfortunate, since each side encoded their towers with heavy-duty guard forms, instantly and absolutely lethal to the other side. We—my lot—weren’t on either side in that war, our order hadn’t even been founded back then, but for some reason the towers of Side A—we don’t know their names or anything about them—tolerate us, while Side B’s towers kill us the moment we walk through the door. We have maps, of course, showing all the towers; where known, the towers are marked friendly or hostile. Roughly two thirds of them have been annotated in this manner. Naturally, since I seem to spend so much time in bloody Boc, I’ve studied these maps in great detail. I know where all the towers are, and their polarity (where ascertained). There was a tower twelve miles away. Needless to say, the polarity was unrecorded.
Great. However, if you can get inside one without it killing you, a blockhouse tower is your very best friend in a place like Boc. It will feed and clothe you, keep you warm, keep you safe until someone traipses out to get you. Boc people won’t go near them, not for any money; I have no idea what they see when they look at them, but it’s not what I see, that’s for sure. A while back, they had a nasty habit of posting sentries round them at a safe distance, to arrest anyone trying to get inside; since the budget cuts, they haven’t bothered so much. The tower was, therefore, my very best hope, provided I could get there and it didn’t kill me. Fifty-fifty; in Boc, those are very good odds.
I GOT THERE.
Only just. The torrential rain was good, in that it kept people indoors, so I was able to move in daylight; not so good, in that I was soaked to the skin, and the ploughed fields turned into glue, and my eyes were full of rain so I couldn’t see where I was going. But you don’t want to hear about a naked man taking a very long, very miserable walk in the country. I got there.
Blockhouse tower 316N528W stands on the highest point of a hog’s back dividing two river valleys. As is often the case, a dense wood had grown up all round it in the hundred-fifty-odd years since the war; the towers obviously did something to the ground they stood on, because grass, weeds, nettles, briars, all the usual ground rubbish simply won’t grow within a three-mile radius, but oaks, beeches and silver birches go crazy. Ironic, in a way. They’re desperately short
of good lumber in Boc and pay through the nose to import it, and there’s all this good standing timber they daren’t touch.
Trees are good, though, if you don’t want to be seen, so once I was inside the eaves of the wood, I was able to relax a little. It took me longer than I’d thought to find the bloody thing, but eventually I struggled up a steep slope and there it suddenly was, crowded by half a dozen of the biggest oak trees you ever saw, like a diplomat flanked by bodyguards.
Blockhouse tower describes them pretty well. They’re square-footprint blocks, straight-sided, flat-topped, no battlements, crenellations or frilly bits. I read somewhere that they’re built of brick faced with a special kind of concrete, the recipe for which was lost a long time ago—how anyone knows this I have no idea—because the facing doesn’t weather, crumble or crack. What you see is a single black block about forty feet high, twenty feet square; sheer, smooth sides, slightly rough to the touch, and in the dead centre of the north-facing wall, the crumbling remains of a single steel door.
I stood and looked at it. This one was in better shape than most; it was red with rust but still in one piece, and someone had left it slightly ajar. It’s going through the doorway that kills you. I went all thoughtful. The only people who use the towers nowadays are our lot. A partly-open door would therefore suggest that someone had tried to get in and been struck dead on the threshold. But I looked and there were no signs of a body—meaning nothing, since there are wolves in Boc, not to mention badgers, foxes and rats. Or it could be that the last person to use the tower had neglected to shut the door, or the door latch no longer worked. I stared at it for a very long time. Then, feeling more stupid than ever before, which is really saying something, I walked up to it and sort of winced sideways, slid past the door and went in.
Fearsome Magics Page 11