by Tom Fletcher
He watched as two similarly built – and equally naked – men jumped down into the pit. Daunt clapped delightedly, and the drumbeat accelerated to an aural blur. A woman dressed in rags and covered with mushroom tattoos held out a platter of small red things that smelled deliciously of spices. He took a handful and thanked the woman, but she was gone, offering food to the next spectator. The morsels were meaty at first, but melted into nothing. Some kind of offal, fried in something bright. Luxury food. He watched as the men in the pit bowed to their queen, sat cross-legged opposite each other and tipped the silver bowls to their mouths. They inhaled the orange fragments and chewed furiously. Alan looked across at Daunt, who was rapt. Her empty throne was bobbing its way into the room, carried by enthusiastic members of her following, and when she noticed it behind her, she quickly climbed backwards into it, trying not to take her eyes off the men in the pit. They were getting to their feet. One made claws of his hands and snarled at the other. The men collided, one lowering his head and smashing his skull into the other’s, and the room erupted into a roar that nearly knocked Alan from his feet. He could tell from the men’s expressions that they were howling and screaming, but he couldn’t hear a sound from them. It was disconcerting. Their nails drew ribbons of blood across each other’s taut flesh. They grappled and punched and kicked and bit. Yellow drool ran from their mouths. Alan watched, his jaw dropping, as one headlocked the other and thumped him repeatedly in the face. The one in the headlock grabbed his opponent’s penis and squeezed, hard. Alan flinched, looked away, looked up at Daunt. She could barely contain herself. She was pointing and laughing hysterically. There were whoops from the crowd. He looked back into the pit, and one was on the floor, being kicked in the ribs. He couldn’t tell them apart. They were both covered with streaks of blood now, and blood poured from their noses and ears, and spattered across the floor of the pit as they moved. The one on the floor somehow wriggled into a position where he could reach the other’s shin with his mouth. He sank his teeth into it. Now they were both on the floor, writhing around after each other. The ash coated their skin, sticking to the blood and the sweat and rising in clouds around them.
Alan felt hot breath on his neck. Daunt was leaning down to speak to him. ‘They can’t feel pain,’ she said, her lips brushing his ear. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
Alan just nodded.
‘They can’t really feel anything.’
One bone-cracking blow after another. The musclebound bodies were hard and heavy. Faces were pushed into the ground. Everything was grey. Fingers were forced through skin. Extremities were pulled and stretched. Details blurred. The fight became impressionistic: impossible bodies in torturous configurations appearing in glimpses through the fog of ash. Sometimes dark fluid sprayed out. The crowd seethed and swayed. Fists pummelled the air and mouths opened to cheer and did not close again. Everything was slow. People were touching each other. Alan’s skin tingled and his cock grew. There was some kind of music but he could not work out what it was. He looked up at Daunt and saw that she had a hand beneath her skirt and her eyes were half closed. Her other hand found the top of his head and she ran it through his hair. One of the men in the pit suddenly hauled himself up over the side and stood before the throne. He could only open one eye, both ears had gone, and blood bubbled from between his lips and ran in black tracks through the grey filth coating his chest. The crowd quietened. He raised one hand and in it was something soft and fleshy, no doubt torn from his opponent’s body, but due to the state of it, and the ash, Alan could not tell what it was. Daunt wound Alan’s hair around her fingers as she clenched her hand into a fist, and the whole room heard her gasp.
Later, she took him to her private chambers and bade him play for her, then pleasure her. ‘You are the appetiser,’ she explained to Alan, as the pit-winner, still bleeding, watched from the corner of the deep red room. The room was a nest of furs and silks and skins and dark wooden chests. A censer burned. Cabinets lined the walls, full of glass bottles, the contents of which were difficult to determine. As the pit-winner watched Alan and Daunt, he drank some kind of concoction that, Daunt explained, would keep him going for as long as she needed. His presence would normally have put Alan off his stride – not because he was a man, but because he looked near dead – but something in the air or the food or the drink enabled Alan to shrug off his reservations and devote himself. He didn’t want Snapper seeing, though; he turned the guitar over before he began to perform his ministrations.
Later still, when Daunt was preoccupied with the bloody, hulking beast, Alan scanned the shelves for what he wanted. The sex coupled with the increasingly strong smoke from the censer made it difficult to concentrate. He got dizzy looking at all of the glass and all of the reflections in the glass. Green glass, red glass, yellow glass, brown glass; fat jars, delicate vials, tall bottles, twisted baubles.
There. He thought he’d spotted it.
His mouth was dry. He hadn’t expected to get this far. He hadn’t expected to be presented with this opportunity. Except maybe it wasn’t an opportunity; maybe the hulking beast-man currently grunting away beside him was Daunt’s security. How would Alan have fared in that pit? He didn’t want to think about it. And that wasn’t to mention Daunt herself – she was notorious for the punishments that she delighted in meting out personally.
He looked at the mushrooms that his contact had demanded – the distinctive pale green cap, thin white stems – in their uncoloured glass vials. He looked at Daunt and her lover. They seemed to be occupying each other completely.
He looked back at the mushrooms.
4
Tanglepipe Junction
Wild Alan hauled himself up a shaky ladder onto the broken gantry of a circular metal tower, Snapper strapped to his back, and turned to look down at the vast tangle of silver pipework that he’d climbed through. Large cylinders, like the one behind him, reached upwards from the maze like big stubby fingers, and attendant ladders and gantries hung from their sides. His audience sat on these walkways, or stood on ramshackle wooden bridges that had been thrown up between the fingers, or looked up from the pipes below, or peered from holes in the sides of the cylinders that had been created by rust, but now functioned as windows.
Coloured glass lanterns swayed gently in the warm breeze, and clouds moved slowly across the night sky. The moons hung low and full and purple. Alan swung the guitar round and ran his fingertips across the steel strings. He winced. Snapper was already badly out of tune. He could hear the audience murmuring. There were more of them down amongst the pipes, he saw, down amongst that nightmarishly convoluted network. Some pipes were wide enough for rows of people to stand on them and look up, others just right for straddling. Some were smaller still, and served as hand- and foot-holds, but little else. More and more people were appearing from the labyrinth. It’s a whole village, he realised. Maybe there’ll be a bed for me tonight.
He left the House of a Thousand Hollows so rarely that he didn’t really know the places he was likely to get a good reception, or where the people were hospitable. In his limited experience, small communities like this were usually on the defensive side – they’d accept trade and entertainment from travellers, but wouldn’t welcome them into their homes. When the show was over they’d hurry back into their dwellings with fixed grins and hands on knife handles, then slam their doors and double lock them. He understood that. He was always relieved to arrive back at the House, find his own room and bolt the door.
He was pretty high up here, and could see a long way out. It was the first time he’d been above the skyline in days. He took in the view as he tuned his guitar.
Pipes ran out from the metal tangle in all directions in long, straight clusters that kept on going until they were so distant, so fine, that they looked like strands of hair. They shone in the moonlight. Although they were beneath Alan’s vantage point, they were still far above the swamp and many of the buildings, which lay in darkness. Close to the tangle, larg
e pale boxy structures rose from that darkness, their sides thick with creeping plants that looked black now, but would be revealed as dark green by the daylight. The tops of other, smaller buildings were just visible around them: a variety of peaked roofs and flat, tiered roofs, a jostle of eaves and tiles, everything pressed up against everything else. All of the buildings in Gleam were connected to their neighbours at some level by the old architecture or new – apart from the Black Pyramid, which stood alone.
The largest pipe cluster led directly to the Pyramid, which hulked on the eastern horizon like a monster, like a god. The Pyramid was the tallest thing in Gleam. It rose from a shadowed wasteland of discarded products; a scrapyard of faulty rejects: broken things that were not pleasant to think on, the intended purposes of which were never obvious.
He strummed the guitar again. As in tune as it’ll ever be. One day he’d buy, beg or steal a nice new one; an instrument that wasn’t all battered to hell, that hadn’t lost strips of plywood, that didn’t have gouges in the mahogany-stained finish. One with level frets from the get-go. But he wouldn’t. Not really. He was Snapper’s and Snapper was his and that was the way it would always be. He held the neck to his eyes. He’d levelled Snapper’s frets himself with some sandpaper from a dented old toolbox he’d found in a dusty, abandoned attic, and then varnished the whole thing back at the Thousand Hollows. He put the guitar down and took off his fingerless black leather gloves. Then he shrugged off his long brown wool-tweed jacket. Beneath it he wore a white shirt, black trousers and black braces. He rolled his shirt sleeves up, revealing brightly coloured tattoos of birds with women’s faces, devils swinging their legs from sad crescent moons, and toads wearing top hats. He took a cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket and lit it with a match, then blew the match out and flicked it over the railing. He inhaled deeply and held the breath. Something stronger would be better. Cigarette between his lips, he crouched down and took a wineskin from the inner pocket of his coat. It didn’t have wine in it, but beer from an inn called The Toad Inside that he’d passed through a couple of days back.
He could hear his audience talking, their voices growing louder. They were not restless, not yet, but he’d have to start soon. He took the cigarette in his fingers, which were shaking, and tested the railing. It wobbled slightly. He stepped back from it and took a good long swig from the skin. Should’ve saved some whisky. He always sang better with some whisky in him. ‘Right then,’ he whispered. He picked Snapper back up and slipped the strap over his shoulder.
He slammed the side of his fist into the huge metal canister behind him and the boom exploded outwards, far louder than he’d ever expected. But it stopped the talking. ‘Right then!’ he shouted. ‘I’m Wild Alan, and I’m here to sing you some songs.’
A cheer came back, also louder than he’d expected, and he grinned. He was fully functional tonight. This time he’d begin with something fast. ‘Ruth of the Rooftops’ was always a good starter. His fingers danced over the fretboard almost of their own accord, bypassing his brain completely. The strings sang out loud and clear, the sound travelling well through the damp night air. He played for a while before singing, warming up, settling on a pace and then falling in with it. When he did sing, his voice was low and resonant. Years of practice meant that he could project well enough, so even outside he could make the lyrics clear to the audience.
When he came to the chorus, he pressed the head of the guitar into the side of the cylinder the gantry was attached to and used it as an amplifier. He kicked it too; a steel-toecap boot was the perfect beater for such a drum. His black hair fell in front of his face as he played and he rose and fell on the sound, taking the crowd with him – up for songs of love and lust and justice done, and down again with songs of Modest Mills, songs of exiles and massacres. He sang songs about how Gleam would end, and songs of how Gleam had come to be. He sang songs about loners and misfits and freaks and wandering demons and gang warfare and Bed Men and Bright Women and the Honeyed and the Forests of Dok, legends of the Discard and the Warehouse Wastes, and – vitally, finally, once they were rapt – horror stories about the Black Pyramid, and the monsters who ruled—
An arrow appeared, quivering, in the metal just to the left of his head. He fell to the floor, song truncated, and another whistled above him and pierced the cylinder, right where his throat had been not a moment before. Shit. The sudden silence was total.
‘Shut yer fuckhole, scumbag!’ somebody shouted. A harsh voice. But he couldn’t see who or exactly where from without raising his face, which he was not about to do. He swung Snapper round onto his back and scrambled forward, beneath the railing. He turned round and slid off the gantry, not looking down, absolutely refusing to look down. The ladder was to his right; he hooked his foot around it and pulled himself over. An arrow could get him in the back at any moment.
And he’d been singing so well, too.
Who wants to hurt me? But the list was long, and he knew it.
He reached up, grabbed his coat and threw it behind him. It billowed down through the night air to land – hopefully – somewhere on the knot of pipework beneath. He descended the ladder at speed, dropping a few rungs at a time and braking with his hands. People were shouting now, and the whole Junction was reverberating with the sound of heavy footsteps.
Another arrow hit Snapper, severing at least a couple of strings. The guitar rocked, the strings lashed back like whips, and Alan lost his footing. He cursed as his knees bounced off rung after rung. More arrows glanced off the cylinder and clattered down around him. Fuckers. Snapper ricocheted off pipes to his back as the tangle swallowed him down. At least he had some cover now.
He finally caught a rung with his foot. It snapped, weak with rust, but the next one held. He looked down. His coat had landed on a lower gantry, not far beneath him. He quickly climbed down to it and stepped off the ladder.
He was deep in the metal forest. Fat segmented ducts wormed through the tangle, as did rows of thin copper tubes. Ranks of thigh-wide silver conduits wove in and out of each other, vertically and horizontally and diagonally. Some pipes had been painted green once, some yellow, but they were all streaked orange with rust now. Metal walkways led from the gantry and disappeared into the morass, forming passages with walls and ceilings of dense pipework. The tangle flickered with yellow light; sconces had been hammered into the metal and torches burned at various intersections within. The ladder extended further beyond the gantry on which Alan stood, down into darkness.
This was Tanglepipe Junction: a small settlement that had grown up around the congruence of some of the trunk pipes that Alan and other travellers used to make their way around the Factory. But the trunk with the cart was … which way from here? It was over the other side of the tangle, beneath the largest of the cylinders.
People were running and screaming. Alan could see figures climbing ladders, descending ladders, could hear gantries shaking as people rushed back to the relative safety of their homes inside the structures. Maybe this wasn’t about him; maybe the attackers were here to settle business with somebody else. Or maybe they were just raiders passing through.
Maybe he could just slip away.
He quickly took Snapper from his shoulder and donned his coat. He took his gloves from the pockets and put them back on. Before strapping Snapper back onto his back, he examined the damage. It was painful to see. The arrow had hit the guitar dead in the neck, leaving a pale wound that nearly split the wood in two. The broken strings lolled around like horrible, ungainly living things. But Alan had no time to remove them completely.
He could climb down yet further, or disappear into the tangle. Neither option was appealing. The tangle was more likely to house the shooters, and the ladder … well, all Gleamers knew to stay as high as possible at all times. Down is out was the mantra.
Decision made, Alan darted into the nearest passageway. With a little luck, he could even find his way through this maze and catch the big trunk cart withou
t anybody even seeing him.
But the luck was not with him.
A woman emerged from a shadowed alcove, a long curved knife in her hand. She wore pale breeches and a brown leather waistcoat and her long blonde hair was tied up into a topknot. She grinned as she passed into the dancing light of a torch.
‘What a voice,’ she hissed through her teeth. ‘I’d recognise it anywhere.’
‘Daunt?’ Alan said, stepping backwards. ‘What a relief! I was worried it would be somebody unfriendly.’
Something hard and cold pressed into the back of his neck.
‘I’m unfriendly, warbler,’ said a soft voice from behind, the kind of voice that suggested very bad teeth. It was accompanied by a cloud of stinking breath and flecks of warm spittle. ‘I’m a right nasty fucker.’
‘I don’t think you’ve met Bittewood, Alan,’ Daunt said.
‘No, I don’t think I have. Is he the bad shot?’
‘He is more of a close-quarters kind of man, it’s true.’
‘I’m a knife man,’ said Bittewood, and the hard cold something pressed into the back of Alan’s neck was pressed a little harder.
‘Daunt, I thought we got on,’ Alan said. He swallowed. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘We did get on. We did.’ Daunt moved closer, her own knife up. The green eyes that had been so bright and lively in the bedchamber were now hard. Her cheekbones were high and sharp. She looked thinner than she had the other night, too thin, and by the light of the torch she had a cadaverous aspect. ‘But you ruined it, Alan, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’