The City

by Stella Gemmell

  She was so accustomed to making the mark that she seldom any longer thought of its significance. The gulon she had seen in the sewers was the first and only one she had ever encountered, and it had been on the day her brother Elija disappeared. She remembered little of that awful day, only the big ugly gulon and the way it hissed at her, baring long yellow teeth. And her last sight of her brother on the bridge in the failing torchlight seconds before it was swept away. No day passed when she did not think of Elija, but she no longer thought of him with hope in her heart, only sad regret.

  She put the brush down and her hand dropped to her side. The panel was far from finished. It was now a jigsaw of bright shards of glass, shaped and painted but separate. It was ready to be joined together into a work of art with strips of lead called calms. The work still to be done involved skill and craftsmanship, and she and Frayling would work many more hours to complete it. But her creative work was finished and, as always, she felt more sadness than satisfaction.

  The previous piece she had painted, with the tentacles of the monster, had dried, and she placed it on a wooden tray. She laid a piece of felt over it, then put the gulon piece on top. Grasping the tray under one arm, she hoisted the hem of her skirt and tucked it into her waistband before climbing carefully down the ladder. At the bottom she covered her legs again and descended the flights of stairs to the ground-floor furnace room where Frayling worked.

  Frayling must have heard her coming, for he opened the workroom door and took the heavy tray from her arms. He was a tall young man, thin and stooping, with mouse-coloured hair that flopped over his face. He was still shy with Emly though he had worked for her father for more than two years. He was more outgoing with Bartellus, who claimed the man had a dry wit, though Em had never seen any evidence of it. Frayling got around nimbly enough on a single crutch. His right leg had been cruelly crushed, and was useless to him except as a prop. He was unmarried and had no relatives. His room was a tiny cell on the first floor, and he seldom left the house.

  “So,” he said to her, nodding nervously, “the gulon.”

  She gazed at him. A fine pair, she thought, a shy man and a speechless woman.

  “Did you tell Bartellus,” he asked, blinking nervously, “about the watcher?”

  When she said nothing, he added reprovingly, “You said you would.”

  Em had been trying not to think about the man she had seen loitering in Blue Duck Alley. It was four days before and she was in her attic workroom, sitting on the wide sill overlooking the alley, feeding crumbs to the birds, when she leaned out and looked down to the cobbles. She could see the tops of people’s heads and she was tempted to drop pieces of bread and see if they hit anyone. One head stood out from the usual slowly milling crowd of workers and street vendors. It was topped with fair hair which caught the sunlight. The man was strolling down the alley as if he had all the time in the world. As he moved farther away she could judge he was a tall man. A soldier, she thought. He walked with a swagger, in contrast with the shuffling, apologetic gait of the poor people of Lindo.

  She thought no more about it until she spotted him again later that day. He was leaning against a corner, half hidden in deep shadow. She was sure it was the same man, and he seemed to be watching the House of Glass. Emly jumped up and ran down the stairs all the way from the attic to the ground floor. She went into the front room at street level, a room never used for it was musty and damp. There was a window onto the alley, boarded up but with gaps between the boards. It was thick with grime. She breathed on the glass and rubbed at the spot with her fist. The man had vanished from the corner, and she was disappointed. But moments later she saw him coming towards her, strolling like a man who owns the world, she thought. He was certainly a soldier, for he wore military boots and a faded red jerkin which might once have been part of a uniform. And he was armed, with a sword sheathed on his left hip, and a long knife at his waist on the right.

  He was coming close, looking up and down at the House of Glass, glancing with interest along the narrow alley beside it. He had very pale eyes, she saw. Emly ducked away from his gaze, though there was little chance he would spot her behind the dusty glass. When she looked again he was gone.

  She shook her head at Frayling. She wished she had never told him, for he would be at it like a dog on a bone until she told Bartellus.

  “If you don’t tell him, I will,” said the servant, then he blushed for his forwardness.

  Chapter 17

  Bartellus’ bad knee was aching by the time he reached the quiet twittens of Gervain. The quarter was in the north-west, nestled comfortably between the luxury of Otaro and the imperial precincts of the Red Palace. It was perhaps the safest area of the City for an old man to walk alone at night, and Bart’s grip on his dagger loosened for the first time since he left the Great Library.

  As he neared his destination he trod more quietly, alert for footfalls behind him, for shadows slinking into darkness. But the quarter was still and silent, the only sounds the distant chatter from a small inn, brought on the night air, and his own laboured grunting.

  He slid into a narrow lane then into a shadowed doorway. Climbing the steep stairs to Callista’s garret he wondered as always if this was a wise thing to do. Aside from his love for Emly, this was the only part of his life which made him vulnerable. He knew it but he could not abandon it.

  He knocked twice on the mean door at the top of the steps and it opened immediately, releasing a gust of rank air.

  “About time,” a voice grunted. “We’re not here for your convenience, man.”

  “Convenience scarcely comes into it,” Bart barked. Not for the first time he wondered why he was trusting his life, and perhaps Em’s, to this disaffected soldier, one-eyed, sarcastic, bitter. Vitellus he called himself, a former member of the Thousand, the elite bodyguard of the emperor. As such he was a deep well of information on the Immortal and his ways, and on the geography of the inner palace, called the Keep. He considered himself the chief of this motley chain of conspirators, but Bart saw him as the rattling link which put them all at hazard.

  He looked around the group. Seven today. I trust none of you, he thought.

  “Welcome,” said the man who called himself Sully. Small and slim, an ex-soldier as they all were, he worked as a servant in a palace on the Shield. He was sharp of mind and Bart put more faith in the man’s opinions than any of them. “We were saying there was a naval battle two days ago.”

  “I heard.”

  “You heard what?” demanded Vitellus. Always ready to argue, to confront.

  “Only that there was one.”

  “South of the Salient. Two of our ships sunk. We don’t know how many of theirs. The blockade was broken for a day.”

  “There was fresh fish in the market,” said Bart.

  Sully smiled. “Fishermen only need a few hours to bring in fish by the netful. For many of them it is the difference between life and death.”

  “What do you have for us, old man?” Vitellus asked Bart.

  Bartellus shrugged. Nothing. Vitellus sniffed, as if this confirmed his expectations. Bart offered them valuable information on the Halls and secret pathways under the City, although it was of little use to these soldiers in their obsession with politics and personalities.

  Jonto, a serving cavalryman, growled, “We’re not interested in fish, man. Vitellus and I have heard talk of a coup attempt.”

  There’s always talk of a coup attempt, Bart thought. But he nodded encouragingly.

  “The Emperor’s Hounds,” Jonto said. The Hounds were a century of the Thousand, led by a thirty-year veteran called Fortance, Bart recalled.

  “What about them?” he asked.

  “They fouled up a bodyguard detail. Their leader was demoted and moved to another century…”

  “He’s lucky he’s not dead,” put in Sully.

  “And there’s been a shake-up. Reassignment to and from other centuries. It’s made a lot of people unhappy.�
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  Sully said what Bart was thinking. “Soldiers are always unhappy. They always have something to moan about.”

  “The Hounds are blaming Rafe Vincerus for the defeat of the Maritime.”

  “Why not blame Flavius Randell Kerr? He was the army’s general,” asked Sully. But Bart knew the answer—Flavius was dead and Rafael alive. No sport in blaming a dead man.

  “And there’s something else,” said Vitellus. He glanced at Jonto. “Talk among the Leopards. Against Marcellus. And his doxy.”

  Marcellus Vincerus was once wed to Giulia, sister to Marcus Rae Khan, head of the Family Khan. Marcus was popular enough among the soldiery, but less so than his sister, the only woman to have ridden with a cavalry unit a decade ago in the Family’s army. When Giulia left her husband’s embrace to return to the Khan palace on the Shield, it was rumoured to be because of Marcellus’ dalliance with a famous courtesan.

  They fell to discussing the whore, who was much despised. It was a favourite subject. Bart looked at them with contempt. Pride and ambition fed these men. They saw themselves heading an army, leading their peers, cheered by the people, brutally crushing enemies. Meanwhile, they gossiped like fishwives, swilling too much ale, and peppering their largely invented yarns with salacious detail.

  For him, no one would shout his name in triumph. If Bartellus found a way to revenge himself on the emperor for the brutal killing of his family he knew nothing more waited for him than death, torturous and lingering, or sudden. His ambition was to thrust a knife deep into the man’s heart, or slit his throat, whichever proved practical at the time. To avenge the four innocents who had died at Araeon’s hands—four out of millions. And if he found a chance to punish the others who had conspired against him, or who had stood by and watched the entertainment of his betrayal and torment, then so much the better.

  He would do his best to first detach himself from Em, to put her in a place of safety but, much as he loved her, he knew he might condemn her with himself.

  So the old general drifted from one little band of plotters to the next, never staying long enough to risk identification, always watching and waiting for the one man who could help him penetrate the palace, then the Keep and reach Araeon. To get into the palace you needed the right papers, the right face. The Keep was next to impossible to infiltrate, and the Immortal was said seldom to leave it these days.

  He caught Sully’s eye, and the small man smiled slightly. He was the only one Bart had any time for, for the man listened to the bluster and idle threats of the soldiers and took them all in, revealing little. He wondered if Sully was a spy. In case he was being watched, Bart always took a roundabout route home and, if he was in any doubt, stayed at an inn overnight and returned in the plain light of day.

  After listening to hours of pointless gossip, fuelled by ale brought by the whore’s ancient mother from downstairs, Bartellus resolved to abandon this group, but try to stay in contact with Sully. He would not attend the next meeting, but he would wait outside and follow Sully home afterwards. He had not the energy for midnight skulking this night.

  Halfway through a meandering yarn by Vitellus he suddenly walked to the door and left without a word. He heard them sneering at him as he went down the stairs.

  In the Great Storm the rains had come down too hard and fast for the sewers and storm drains to cope, and the narrow streets of the Armoury had become raging rivers. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had died in the flash floods, drowned in the seething streets or trapped helpless in their homes. It was rumoured that the City’s gravediggers could not respectfully lay to rest all the corpses, and that after dark for weeks afterwards carts rumbled through the night carrying the dead out to the Salient to be dropped in the sea. Since then the quarter of Lindo seemed to lie lower, sinking into sodden foundations. Cellars previously dry lay underwater, and residents whose homes already stood in the wet had been forced to move to the upper rooms, despairing of keeping their goods and furnishings dry.

  The white cats of Lindo did not like to get their paws wet and had migrated to the upper levels—the roofs and upper storeys, the bridges and buttresses which supported the crumbling buildings. They abandoned the damp streets and waterlogged cellars to the black rats, only coming down at night to feed.

  Many of the cats were still pure white. Over the centuries they had often mated with lower feline orders, but their bloodline was strong, and when a deviation occurred—brown paws or a ginger mask—it would disappear again in later generations. They mated often amongst themselves, and raised their kits in the nooks and crevices of the crumbling chimney stacks and rotting eaves on the north side of Blue Duck Alley.

  The sky bridge between the House of Glass and the lodging house opposite was a highway for the cats. They would hunt at night among the hovels of the shack and shanty village south of the alley. Then, when daylight threatened, they would make their way to the glassmaker’s house, ascending its wedding cake of storeys with ease, and cross the wooden sky bridge to their nests.

  Far below them Bartellus, returning home after midnight, gazed up and saw the white shapes gliding across the sky. He sniffed the air. The cobbled stones of Blue Duck Alley were cooling quickly, radiating their stored warmth into the night. And they told their own story in the smells they released. Bart guessed a barrel had broken when Doro’s ale house had received a delivery, for good wood was hard to come by these days. The contents had sloshed down the alley and the stones were still sticky under his boots. There was the faint scent of herbs as well. Bartellus sniffed again. Perhaps cooking smells from Meggy’s lodging house, for the woman used cheap herbs to disguise the unwholesome whiff of cheaper meat. Or a whore had passed by recently, her skin rubbed with herbs to make up for lack of soap. And laid over all there was the familiar and sharp stench of blood and shit which signalled a death somewhere near the alley on this warm summer’s day.

  Bartellus noted this with interest but without revulsion. In fact, his stomach was grumbling. He had eaten a good rich stew at the Shining Stars, but that was long hours before, and he looked forward to a hunk of the bread he had purchased that morning, with cheese from the dairy in Parting Street, and onion relish he had bought from Meggy, but which he guessed was made by the whore who rented her attic. Meggy’s food had improved considerably since the young woman had moved in with her two boys in the summer.

  Bart glanced up at the attic window, where a faint light shone. He wondered if she plied her trade in the same room where she lived with her two boys. It was of no more than passing interest. She was scarcely more than a child herself, and thin as a sword.

  He left the alley, ducking into the narrow passageway beside the House of Glass and dragging out the big iron key which opened the side door. The door was always locked. They had two keys—one was always on Bartellus’ person, the other hung on a hook inside the door. If Bart was out he locked the door from the outside. If Frayling needed to go out too, Emly used the second key to lock the door from the inside. Then Frayling had to knock to be let back in. There had never been a day in the last two years when all three of them had left the house at the same time.

  He was expecting to be greeted by midnight silence, to slip quietly into his bed and permit thoughts of plotters and conspiracies to drift from his mind. But he was scarcely through the door when he was waylaid by both Emly, clattering down the stairs, and Frayling, looming suddenly from his ground-floor workroom.

  “There was a watcher,” Frayling told him, glancing at Emly, who nodded. “A soldier. Miss Emly saw him. I think he means us ill.”

  This amounted to garrulousness from the young workman, but worry was etched across his face, so Bartellus hid his amusement. He looked at Emly, whose face was anxious too.

  “When was this?”

  Frayling burst out, “Four days ago, then again today. He was watching the house.” He looked to Emly again. She nodded. “A soldier,” she whispered.

  They both watched him, looking for reas
surance. He shook his head. “Why do you say he was watching the house, Em?”

  “He was,” she answered. “Fair and tall,” she added. “Red uniform.”

  She was never a child to panic about trifles, so Bart knew she was probably right about what she saw. He remembered Creggan’s words about a soldier asking questions, and a muscle in his heart cramped.

  “How old?”

  She shrugged. She could not guess the ages of men.

  Bartellus, his brow furrowed, threw off his greatcoat and climbed the stairs to the candlelit parlour followed by the two youngsters. He crossed the stifling room and poured himself a glass of wine from the jug. He sat down in the comfortable chair he always used, and he sighed.

  Emly and Frayling stood waiting for him to speak.

  “This is not good news,” he admitted. “This might be about my past—my past before I became Bartellus.” He looked at Frayling, but if the youngster found his words surprising he gave no sign of it. “If this soldier is watching us it might be he knows who I am. Then others may also know, and we are in danger and will have to leave here.”

  And, he did not have to add, Emly could no longer pursue her vocation, and they would have to disappear, perhaps travel overseas, for Bartellus could now afford the life of a rich man if not his reputation.

  Emly’s face fell and his heart was cut by the pain in her eyes.

  “But,” he said, cursing himself, for tiredness had made him careless, “it might have nothing to do with me. Perhaps he is merely planning to rob the House of Glass.” He smiled at Em, seeking to calm her fears, but she stared back at him with big eyes and he remembered the little girl he had first met, eyes wide, blank with terror and dread. And he vowed to himself at that moment that if this watcher had truly found him, found Shuskara the lost general, then he would kill him, and kill whoever he acted for, and he would bury his past forever.

  He smiled broadly at Em and told her, putting confidence in his voice, “It won’t come to that. I’ll see that everything will be all right.”