by Tom Fletcher
13
Bloody Nora
Nora had Raspy tied to a fat rusty pipe. He had his back against the pipe and his hands tied to his feet around the other side of it so that his spine was uncomfortably curved. He was also suspended above a large rectangular pool of something that looked like oil and facing straight down into it.
‘Here it is,’ she announced. ‘It’s a he.’
There were countless such pools set into the stone floor of this gigantic cube of a building. They were regularly spaced, and stretched off towards each of the four walls. The ceiling was far away, lost in shadow. The large pipe, part of a grid system, looked busy with valves and stopcocks and, above the pools, some very complex nozzles, which looked like they had delivered something into the pools once upon a time. They were long and tapered, becoming thin copper pipes themselves, and knotted and contorted into bewildering, labyrinthine tangles. Some of these thin pipes still retained their sheen; others were dull and oxidised.
There was a machine in each pool, too: long cylindrical things like rollers of some sort, connected at each end to poolside runners via a sequence of gears and wheels. They reminded Alan of mangles. Piled up against one end of their pool’s machine were their instruments, cases and coats.
‘What are we here for?’ Alan asked. ‘What is he here for?’ His voice echoed around the massive interior.
‘Don’t you want to know what they wanted?’ Nora asked.
‘Oh! Oh, yes. Of course.’ Wake up, he thought. ‘Thank you, Nora.’
‘That’s quite all right.’
‘I thought you’d done that … thing. That thing you did to the others.’
‘No,’ Nora said, smiling up at him. ‘The face thing? No. You and I, Alan; we need to have a talk.’
Alan nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said warily. ‘Maybe after we’ve learned a few things from our friend here, Churr could introduce us properly.’ He looked pointedly at Churr as he said this.
‘Stop being so useless,’ Churr said.
Alan looked back up at Raspy. He really could have done with a drink, or something to sharpen him up a bit. He was being useless. He opened his mouth to ask Raspy a question.
an arrow through a neck
He couldn’t think of anything.
fountain of blood
He imagined his own blood spraying out in front of him, all thin and warm.
long-hair spitting teeth
a knife to the face
He felt dizzy and sick.
a sword, in under the ribs
He looked down into the pool but the thick, dusty liquid looked red to him. He saw Raspy’s sneering face reflected in it. He remembered how close he’d come to killing the man. The nausea rose up his throat with a vengeance. He backed away, turned around, crouched down. ‘I’m not really a fighter,’ he said, to nobody in particular.
‘That’s not true,’ Spider said. ‘You can fight when your blood’s up.’
‘We are in the Discard proper now,’ Nora said. ‘You will have to fight.’
‘He’s prob’ly just hungover,’ Eyes said. ‘Silly bugger. Ignore him.’
‘I can’t believe,’ said Raspy, from up above, ‘that we were sent into the filthy Discard for the sole purpose of capturing you. And my men all died for it. For you.’ He spat down into the pool. His saliva just rested on the top of whatever was in it. ‘What a waste.’
‘You didn’t have to do it,’ Alan said, standing back up. He swayed slightly. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the difference between you and me. I lived in the Pyramid too, once, but I didn’t just do what I was told.’
‘And now look at you.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Alan met Raspy’s contemptuous gaze. ‘I’ve got my dignity.’
There was a moment’s silence, and then Alan darted to the edge of the pool to throw up, noisily. He could feel everybody watching him. When he was done, he cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I haven’t had any sleep,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem. That’s all the problem is. Does anybody have a hip-flask?’
‘I got mine but no way in hell are you puttin’ your lips round it now,’ Eyes said.
‘Okay. Thanks, Eyes. Okay. Next steps, people. What’s the plan?’
‘We extract information from our prisoner,’ Churr said. ‘Well, if you want to. Which I presume you do. They came for you, after all. You must want to know why.’
‘Yes,’ Alan said. ‘Yes, I do.’ He addressed Raspy. ‘Arbitrator. Do you know why you were sent to detain me?’
‘Contrary to your assertions last night,’ Raspy replied, ‘I do. Yes. But never in Green’s whole hell will I reveal our reasons to you.’
‘Surely if you had captured me, I would have been told why.’ Alan folded his arms and strode along the side of the pool, away from the site of his regurgitations.
‘Yes.’
‘So why not tell me now?’
‘Two very different sets of circumstances.’
‘You mean, had I been captured I would not be free, whereas here and now I am free, so I am able to act upon the information, whereas if I was captive then I would not.’
‘… yes.’
‘So it’s information that I could, if I were in possession of it, act upon?’
‘… yes,’ Raspy said again. He sounded unsure. ‘But doesn’t all information fall into that category?’
‘No. You have revealed something. Now.’ Alan made eye contact with Raspy and grinned.
‘This is pathetic,’ Raspy said. ‘I’ve never been interrogated before and I doubt I ever will be again, so I have very little in the way of reference points, but this must be up there as one of the worst interrogations ever.’
‘Down there, more likely,’ Alan said. ‘Not up there. Down there. At the bottom of the league table, see, rather than at the top. High is good, low is bad. Generally. But don’t worry. I’m just getting started.’
‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’ Raspy said. ‘An Arbitrator all trussed up for you to do whatever you want to.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Alan said. ‘Why would I love such a thing? Either you think that I’m the kind of person who would leap at the chance to torture and debase a fellow human being, given the opportunity, which in fact says far more about you than it does about me, or you know something about how I feel about Arbitrators. Which you couldn’t possibly know, unless we’ve met before.’
Raspy didn’t say anything.
‘It’s not as if we’ve ever met, is it?’ Alan made a show of standing on tiptoe and peering hard at the captive. ‘Have we? We haven’t, have we?’
Raspy still didn’t say anything. He looked angry.
‘So how do you know how I feel about Arbitrators?’
‘Because of your history with us. We were briefed.’
‘I don’t see how my history with the Arbitrators is relevant to your successful apprehension of me.’ Alan’s voice rose and his smile had disappeared. ‘And, let’s face it, you folks are pretty stingy with the details of past atrocities committed by yourselves, because in the Pyramid you’ve got an entirely undeserved reputation that requires a hell of a lot of maintenance. Haven’t you? For instance, a zero-tolerance approach to the dissemination of unhelpful or negative stories about the Arbitrators. Including within the Arbitration Service.’
Raspy didn’t say anything.
‘So don’t expect me to believe that they briefed you on the Modest Mills massacre, on my incarceration – which was for the aforementioned dissemination of blah blah, etc., by the way – or on the near-fatal beating you lot gave me, or on the vile threats you made to my wife and child.’
Raspy looked even angrier than he had before.
‘So I’ll ask you again: how do you know how I feel about you slimy, foul Arbitrator shites?’
Nothing.
‘Is this – the fact of you even knowing about all that, which I notice you’re not attempting to deny, or even pretending to be s
urprised by – perhaps connected somehow to why you were sent out here to get me?’
‘Congratulations,’ Raspy said. ‘A round of applause for the self-righteous cunt with vomit down his shirt. You’ve worked it out. Whatever, I don’t care. You’re going to kill me anyway.’
‘You mean that you were sent out here to capture me because I’ve somehow told people how awful you all are? Except I haven’t. I haven’t told anybody.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Except …’ His eyes widened.
Now Raspy was grinning down at him. He looked like a gargoyle up there, tied to the pipe, his head at an unnatural angle, his features twisted into an expression loaded with self-satisfaction and menace. ‘Has it clicked?’ he rasped.
Alan didn’t say anything.
‘Your precious little boy has been asking all kinds of difficult questions,’ Raspy said. ‘Telling all kinds of stories. What did you call it? Dissemination of … of …’
‘Fuck you,’ Alan breathed. ‘He’s a child.’
‘Yeah,’ Raspy said. ‘But he’s your child. So we were going to bring you back in and use you to give him a little demonstration about the price you pay for not adhering to the letter of Pyramid law. We could have just killed him, of course, or thrown him out, but getting rid of children tends to fuel more rumours than it stops. Scaring children shitless, on the other hand … That works very well.’ He mused for a moment. ‘Little shits’ll believe anything, as long as they respect the liar.’
Alan felt disembodied. When he spoke it happened automatically, as if his mouth was working all on its own while his mind and soul floated off to one side, observing. ‘So what’s happening to Billy now?’
‘He’s alive,’ Raspy said. ‘He’s in isolation, but he’s alive. As you say – he’s a child.’
‘But doesn’t even that mean the kind of awkward disappearance you were hoping to avoid?’
Raspy spat again. ‘Nobody was expecting us to fail.’ He tossed his head towards Nora; it was the only way he had of gesturing. ‘Nobody was expecting us to fall foul of a Mapmaker. Mapmakers don’t get involved, do they?’ He laughed, slightly nervously. His tone was now the least confrontational it had been; he sounded almost afraid. ‘Everybody knows that.’
Nora was smiling serenely up at the incapacitated Arbitrator. From beneath her cloak she withdrew a leather roll. ‘Alan,’ she said, ‘I will find out more about the Pyramid – where your son is being held, its defences.’ She turned to face him. ‘You probably don’t want to stick around for the extraction, though. Given how you feel about violence.’
‘I don’t want to stick around anyway.’ And Alan found he was walking away, past pools of multicoloured sludge and weird, forgotten machinery, and he didn’t know where he was going, and his head was full of blood and full of noise.
*
When Nora came to him afterwards she came alone. Once again she was living up to her moniker. Her cloak and arms were covered; in fact, now Alan could see the cloak was a palimpsest of stains, old and new, and not just dark reds and browns, but dark greens and blues and purples. But her arms and hands were bright red and still wet.
She found him perched on the minute hand of a gigantic stopped clock that adorned one of the interior walls of the pool building. The clock was visible from the floor – it was large enough to be visible from wherever in the building you were. It was accessible via a staircase inside the wall that, on Alan’s ascent, had been thick with cobwebs. At the top of the staircase there was a chamber that was almost fully occupied by the clock’s mechanism, all gears and wheels, and all rusted fast. And there was a tiny door which provided access to the clock face. When Alan first opened it he recoiled from what appeared to be an immediate sheer drop, then, approaching more cautiously, he spotted a little ledge which was actually wide enough for him to feel comfortable on. From there he was able to step out onto the minute hand – it was a good two feet wide – and walk along it. It didn’t shift or creak or move in the slightest. He didn’t really think about the potential consequences of the hand moving, or failing to take his weight, or his blasé dismissal of those consequences, until later.
He sat right on the very tip, his legs dangling over the end, and looked down through his feet. Screams and grunts echoed around the space as Nora did her thing. The pools beneath him were luridly bright; each one was a slightly different colour and all of them had a multicoloured, oily sheen. His view was slightly spoiled by the grid of large pipes, one of which Raspy had been tied to, but even so it was remarkable. It was a bit like the colourful geometries he experienced when he drank some of Spider’s mushroom tea: Spider’s own special blend of dream-meat and long-legs. What he’d give for some of that right now.
He tried to wrest his thoughts away from mushroom tea, from drugs, from alcohol. He found himself fantasising about sex with Churr and put a stop to that, too. There was something he had to think about: something huge, something awful, something more important than anything else. He knew what it was, he just couldn’t articulate it to himself. He couldn’t put it into words.
Billy was in trouble, and it was his fault.
How had he got to this point? He wasn’t aware he’d ever stopped being a child himself. He’d always thought that at some point he’d realise how to be an adult, how to be a parent. As if he’d reach a certain age and then the next day wake up a different, more capable human being who knew what was what and how the world worked and how to navigate it. How to be responsible for another human being. But no. He’d become a parent and suddenly he’d had to pretend to be an adult, for Billy’s sake. He’d known he was a fraud, though: he was playing at it, like he played at everything else. And in addition, once he’d become a parent, he’d realised that his own parents had only been pretending all that time, too. They hadn’t been adults any more than he was. Becoming a parent meant realising that there was no such thing as an adult, not really. Everybody was a fraud. Everybody was just pretending. Adults were just children with scary responsibilities, and parents were just children with children of their own.
Billy, I’m sorry.
‘Hello!’ said a little voice from behind him.
He turned and saw Bloody Nora sitting on the minute hand too, right next to him, swinging her legs. She flashed him a broad smile. His gaze lingered on her red hands, arms and cloak.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Bloody Nora … I see the Mapmakers deserve their reputation.’
‘We are trained from a very young age how to fight. It’s true.’
‘And you have no …’ Alan searched for the word ‘… compunction?’
‘We are trained not to,’ Nora said. ‘That too is true. Where we go, we are not usually required to fight humans, but no human life is more important than our work and so it is important to be able to kill people when they get in the way.’
‘And torture?’
‘Anybody with imagination can be a torturer,’ she said. She smiled again. ‘Anybody with imagination, and no … compunction.’
‘And how does all of this fit into your work?’
‘Have you ever met a Mapmaker before?’
He shook his head.
‘Our work is the mapping of Gleam in its entirety. This means exploring constantly, and exploring quickly, given the rate of change. The factory is so big that—’
‘The what?’
‘The factory. Our current theory is that Gleam is one single factory.’
‘Isn’t it just a’ – Alan waved his arms about – ‘big jumble?’
‘That is quite a popular theory, yes, though usually expressed via a variety of filters. For example, certain outlier tribes believe that Gleam is just a set of building blocks abandoned by a godly infant. Some believe that Gleam is the result of a single rogue building spell that has been running for millennia: just one little spell, building one part of Gleam and then flashing across to some other bit of it and adding another building there too, and on, and on, and on, never stopping.’ She cocked her head. ‘I fin
d this theory quite charming, but I do not believe in that kind of magic.’
‘Not that kind?’
‘No.’
Alan waited for Nora to elaborate on this, but she didn’t.
‘A factory, hey?’ Alan said. He looked back down between his feet at all the pools. ‘Makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose. What was it for? What did they make?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘And who were they?’
‘We—’
‘And where are they?’
‘Wild Alan, I do not like being interrupted. Actually, nobody likes being interrupted.’
‘Sorry.’
‘We are talking about a significant timescale here. They became us, or rather, they begat us. Sometime after the factory stopped being a factory, and became Gleam, is what makes sense, and is what most Mapmakers believe. But what I was saying was this: coupled with the rate of change, the sheer size of Gleam means that mapping it fully is a never-ending task, one that generation after generation of Mapmakers must engage in. And the encroachment from the swamp means that the ground floors are unmappable. They were lost to the swamp generations ago. However’ – and she held up a single finger – ‘I believe I know of something that may aid us in our mapping. It’s a place I wish to find: a place of records, of documents.’
‘Of maps.’
‘Precisely. Maps and plans made by the builders, those behind Gleam. The founders. Detailing the entire structure as it originally stood, thereby easing our mapping of the entire structure as it currently stands. And also providing an invaluable historical context to what we do.’
‘But how does killing all those Arbitrators help you with that?’
‘In two ways. Firstly, it puts you in my debt.’
‘I’m not good at honouring debts.’
‘You will honour this one. And secondly, it means that there are fewer Arbitrators to stand between me and those old maps.’
Alan sighed. ‘They’re in the Pyramid.’
‘So I believe. My understanding is that the Pyramid was once the brain of the factory, the seat of its rulers, and that the secrets of Gleam can be found within.’