Day Boy

by Trent Jamieson

  ‘You boys go on home,’ Mick says.

  But we don’t move.

  ‘I said go.’ There’s a hardness to his voice, but he gentles it quick. ‘You’ve work to do for your Masters. And I’ve work to do here. Stop on by the hall and send Jane out to me. Tell her to bring her gear. She’ll know what I mean.’

  We hover there, looking at his work.

  ‘Don’t try my patience!’

  And we’re on our bikes and riding.

  Dain wakes me that night. ‘I heard what you did, and what you found,’ he says. ‘You should have told me.’

  I shrug, sleepy-eyed.

  ‘The world scars you ten times more if you hold such things inside. If you don’t share them.’

  Says the man who doesn’t give away a thing.

  ‘We found a shallow grave,’ I say. And all the time I’m thinking that we wouldn’t have if it weren’t for Dougie busting up Grove’s bike. And I’m thinking I’d like to bust up Dougie right now. But I know how that ends.

  ‘You found a mother and child,’ Dain says. ‘You found their corpses. It is a terrible thing.’

  ‘Will you find who did it?’

  Dain shakes his head. ‘They’re long gone. Not even the auditors could find them now.’

  ‘So they’re not here?’

  ‘No, murderers of this sort fear our kind too much to linger.’ Dain lowers himself onto the end of the bed. ‘But not enough to stop them from doing this. A mother and a babe, and the mother scarcely more than a child herself. This is a dark place made darker by monsters and fools.’

  Dain touches my hair, quick and light. ‘But we are still a part of it.’ He sighs. ‘I better get back to my book.’

  Feels Dain’s been writing that book since forever. I asked him once if it were about those last days, when words were powerful.

  He just laughed. ‘Words were powerful, yes. Lightning quick. And judgments flickered across the earth. In those last days we had screens that we drowned in. They led everywhere, but mostly we only saw our own reflection in them. And then the dreams changed, and then they stopped being dreams.

  ‘Mark, I sometimes wonder…if that isn’t true. If I just never woke. But then why would I dream of you?’

  Well—why wouldn’t he?

  Two days later there’s visitors that come from Hadentown in a cart horse-drawn. Two men: thin, armed with knives. They come at noon, to Town Hall. Mick’s waiting and he guides them inside. They leave almost at once—their faces dark and heavy. Two small coffins set on the back. One of the men doesn’t bother hiding his tears, and it’s a hard thing to see.

  I’m there gawping with Dougie: the fella knows where the action is. Called me to it, from my work at the Sewills’.

  Mick glares at us. ‘You two, move on.’

  We do—if a trifle slow.

  ‘There was a woman missing from Hadentown. Woman and a baby,’ Dougie tells me, because Dougie knows most of anything, and when he’s in a good mood, he’s fine company. Likes to gossip as much as destroy bikes or lay his fists upon you.

  ‘What’s it all mean?’ I say.

  Dougie looks at me. ‘Means there’s a murderer about. Or there was.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe it doesn’t mean anything but the world’s a damn awful cruel place.’

  Dain’s not from here. He wasn’t born to this town. I don’t know where he came from, some other place of the before here nows. But he was tenured to the university in the City in the Shadow of the Mountain. I’ve asked him why he isn’t working there still.

  And he said the place was a poison and a joy. But the poison was worse. So he left, was assigned, or banished (depending on his mood), to Midfield. His kind don’t get much of a choice in where they’re sent.

  But he says he loves the place, that it suits him more than he would have believed. The city must be fed, and it is the Masters that ensure it is. That keep the manufactories running, that keep away the other monsters, that bleed the towns, as the townsfolk themselves are bled.

  I know he misses his books. I know he misses the conversations. The Grand Conversation, he said, that is the confluence of all that thought. I asked him once if he was afraid to go back, or that they might make him go back. ‘My people are cruel,’ he says, ‘but it’s a clever cruelty, I know it; I possess it too. It would do them no service to bring me back, I was too good at the game. It was why I left.’

  That’s about the best answer I got. Never quite understood what the game was, when he told me this. But I think I do now, having been a piece in it.

  PART TWO

  COUNTRY MICE

  Of all the sins beneath Lord Sun

  Of all the sinners, the worst, they run.

  CHAPTER 14

  IT’S A MONTH since that Hunter’s knife. The wound don’t pull so much now. And the sting and the shame of that meeting is dulling. Been a week since me and Grove found that shallow grave. Dain looks me over, sends me protesting for a haircut and tells me I’m to wash. He has suitcases packed in his room. And a note for me to take them down to the front room. They’re heavy, but I get them down those stairs.

  Another note says, Pack for hot and cold, and four days at least.

  I don’t have much, but I pack my best. The long-sleeved shirts and the vest. And a cap that Dain gave me last year on my birthday with NYC embroidered on its face.

  That night he wakes me. Big bright moon in the sky.

  ‘Up, boy, up. We don’t have much time.’ He’s holding his bags like they’re light as air, not a single hint of strain. The bags themselves creak and grumble like all things when the Masters touch them; they quicken—not quite alive.

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘You know where we’re going,’ he says. And my heart races.

  I know. I know. The City in the Shadow of the Mountain. The city of them. The city of the Masters. Only two places we’d ever go. The city or the sea. Never been to either. And now.

  ‘Best fetch my comb,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve packed it for you already.’

  We’re quick to the centre of town, and the Station.

  There’s folk already waiting. Certain nods at us, Petri at heel. There’s men and women, getting wagons ready. The Parson twins are waiting for a barrel of oil for Kast’s burner; they scowl and growl at me, and I give them a good scowl right back, and Dain clips me under the ear—how that sets them laughing. Mary’s there with a list long as her arm. Supplies coming in.

  ‘Shipment of paper expected for you, Mr Dain,’ she says.

  Dain nods. ‘I’ll send the boy for it as soon as we get back.’

  ‘Make sure there’s plenty of sweets,’ I tell her. Dain’s taken his bags, and is talking low to Certain. Petri’s rolled onto her back, and Dain scratches her belly.

  ‘I would if people paid for them rather than just slipping them in their mouth,’ she says.

  ‘I’m no thief,’ I say, puffing up my chest.

  ‘No, a thief’d get away with it.’

 
Anne’s there too, and she laughs, until Mary gives her a hard look. And I know I best step careful. Think of it as practice for where I’m going. Mary gets called over to Mr Stevens, Anne doesn’t follow. She’s about the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen today, she’s more radiant than that moon, and her eyes are darker than the sky between the stars. And then she grins.

  A smile with an edge like glass.

  ‘Off to the city, I am,’ I say.

  Anne nods. ‘Explains why your hair’s combed flat like a wet carpet. Look like a lost country boy who hardly knows what end of a brush to use.’

  Heat in my face and my words all drop to my feet, no good to me there.

  There’s a shrill whistle in the near distance. A building cry of machinery at furious work.

  ‘I—’

  ‘Course, that’s what you are,’ Anne says. ‘Be careful in that dark city, they’ve little liking of country boys except their blood. But there will be music,’ and her eyes have taken a faraway cast, and I feel the strangest jealousy till she’s gazing at me again. ‘Find the music for me, Mark, and when you do, close your eyes, and think of me.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Yes, I know you will.’ Then she’s off talking to her ma, looking down the list, and I’m watching her, my blood running hot and cold, and faster than it was.

  ‘What did I say about her?’ Dain places the bags at my boots. ‘When will you listen to me?’

  ‘I listen all the time.’

  ‘Schoolyard semantics invite a schoolboy caning,’ he says, and I wince, but he’s smiling again. ‘No one likes a smart mouth, Mark. Particularly when it is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is.’

  My mouth’s been all types of stupid today. But I’m wise enough to keep it closed for a while after that.

  Night Train comes into town all a-racket, brakes screaming out their halt. Mr Stevens stands watching from a distance, comes over and talks to the driver. Dark shapes dart from carriage top to carriage top. Fish all covered in ice are taken from the rear cars. Bags of grain loaded into the car next over. Manifests are signed off and trades accounted for. It’s a few mad minutes of frenzied industry.

  A fella, a Master I don’t know, drops lightly from the roof of the nearest carriage dressed in a long coat, a fedora on his head. ‘You got your tickets?’

  We’re the only folk heading to the city from Midfield.

  ‘Of course I have, Frederick,’ Dain says. ‘Have you ever known me not to follow protocol?’

  The Ticket Master laughs. But he inspects Dain’s papers and checks me too. He holds my jaw, tilts my head and peers into my eyes like he’s looking into my skull. Not much in there. Not much at all. Just music, and the way Anne walked to her mum, like she knew I was watching.

  The Ticket Master’s eyes narrow.

  ‘Frederick!’ Dain glares at him, hard as a glare can be.

  ‘Never be too careful,’ Frederick says. ‘Could be strung up with bombs.’

  ‘The time of bombs is past. He’s mine,’ Dain says.

  ‘Sorry, Professor,’ the Ticket Master says, without a hint of sorry, and tips his hat and picks up Dain’s bag. Mr Stevens is already running back to his tower, and a bell starts ringing, and the engines are building up steam.

  The nearest door opens, and we step into the train. Me in a train; in the Night Train at that! There’s a long hallway that runs down the carriage’s belly, rooms closed tight. Though there’s noises, music and cries, and laughter. I stop at one door where a fine tune’s playing, fiddles and what sounds like a guitar. Music’s a bait that catches me, already thinking of Anne’s instructions. I put my head against the door.

  Dain clips me under the ear. ‘Keep moving, boy.’

  We find our room. A bench chair and a bed. I sit down, and the train starts moving, slow at first but faster with each clack of the wheels. Fast so that the dark slides by, and the town with it. And the night’s in motion all around us, as though it’s drawing the train on and pushing it away. In a few minutes we’re further from home than I’ve been in my whole life. Further away from Anne. And I’m feeling a gloom settle in me.

  ‘Boy, listen to me, now,’ Dain says. ‘And watch.’ He taps the bed in three places, and it opens. There’s a man-sized space beneath, dark and narrow.

  ‘Just so you know. Not that I need to use it this time, we’ll be there before dawn,’ Dain says. ‘I’ve rooms at my old university. But I will take you around the city too. It is time you knew it, knew the options that await you, low and high. You’ll see little of me for much of the trip. I’ve errands to run. There is some research I need to engage in concerning this book.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have plenty of paper for when you get back,’ I say.

  Dain looks at me. ‘Is that mockery I hear?’

  I shake my head. ‘Will we be there too long?’

  ‘Put away that sad face, we’ll be home soon enough. Don’t you want to see the city?’

  Of course I do! Who wouldn’t?

  Dain rings a bell and a man comes, hair cut short, tattoos of the Sun on his wrists. He’s all politeness. I can’t tell if that’s truly him or the job.

  ‘Take Mark here to the library,’ Dain says. ‘He’s to have one book, and nothing salacious. And do you have any papers?’

  The fella nods. ‘I’ll bring them back with the boy.’ He takes me down the long corridor that runs through the Night Train.

  I feel like I’m in the belly of a snake. We pass locked doors. Behind them I can hear crying, or prayers to gods that I don’t know. Old ones, though not as old as the Sun. And there’s that music again.

  The man frowns when I stop to listen.

  ‘Hurry, young bloke,’ he says. ‘We’ve no time for loitering. These are folk just like you, headed for the mountain or the Red City. First rule of that place worth practising: never seem to take an interest in anything; study everything real close.’

  These might be regular folk but they’re not like me. Well, most of them at any rate. They’re not Day Boys. But I do what he says. Been in enough trouble lately.

  Finally, we come to the library. Oh, I’ve never seen anything like this. Books and books and books! There’s a dozen shelves of them. Books on everything. I run my fingers over their spines. Some are cracked, some don’t even look like they’ve ever been opened.

  ‘You’ll like these ones.’ The man gestures towards one wall. ‘They’re the stories.’

  I pick one about a boy and a dragon, or a thing that seems to be a boy. After all, he’s only made of words. The paper’s yellow and curling. The spine’s coming away a bit, sure sign that it’s a good one.

  ‘I never knew there was so many books.’

  ‘This?’ the man says, picking up the latest broadsheet and folding it under his arm. ‘This is nothing.’

  And he might be right, but it’s the grandest thing I’ve ever seen.

  ‘You thank your Master,’ the man says. ‘He’s a good one.’

  And I do.

  ‘And thank you, good man,’ Dain says and waves his hand dismissively.

&nb
sp; When we are alone Dain gives me a look. Hard, direct. ‘There are many things about the city that we must speak of. Too many, and most I am sure you will forget or ignore, but you must know this, and it is paramount. Are you listening, boy?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Good. Firstly, know that in the city I am at my weakest, for there are so many of my kind. In the city there is great danger. From the moment you enter the mountain, you must be careful. And you must not leave it without me. Once those steel doors that guard it close, you must remain within. No diurnal adventures for you. Do you know what diurnal means?’

  I nod. ‘Course I do! It’s the story of my life.’

  Dain gives a little chuckle at that.

  ‘You’re a wanderer, Mark, but there is to be no wandering in that city. Everything you do will reflect upon me. And it is forbidden for your kind to enter the Red City unaccompanied.’

  ‘As if I would,’ I say, ‘I hear it’s a dangerous place.’

  ‘You do not know the half of it. You are my Day Boy, my servant, my responsibility. You break this rule, then trouble will be heaped upon us. You know too much, and you might just know something that those folk in the Red City desire.’

  ‘Makes me a powerful sort of fella,’ I say.

  Dain shakes his head. ‘Makes you someone that they’d happily pull the bones from till you sang. Secrets go into the City in the Shadow of the Mountain, they do not come out of it. Are we understood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good lad.’ Dain smiles. He buries his head in his broadsheet, and me in my book, and the night slides by. The land quickly grows dry. Lit by that bright moon, one time I think I see a flash of forms that might be the cold children. Might just be my eyes getting all tricksy.

  The train stops twice on the way to the city. Two towns both about as big as Midfield. The last town, I get off to stretch my legs.