The White City

by Simon Morden

  ‘We can’t …’

  ‘We can’t stop him unless we either kill him or cripple him.’

  ‘And you’re going to do that? You?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Dalip twisted away. He had a knife, a kitchen knife that was his kirpan, bound to him with a strip of cloth around his waist, under his overalls. He’d probably be no match for Crows’ magic in open combat, but a stealthy first cut to the back of one of his legs would bring him down without killing him.

  Of course, stabbing someone with a dirty blade was a double death sentence on Down. If infection didn’t get him, the weirdness of the landscape would.

  He was too squeamish. Stanislav had been right all along.

  Could he do it? He knew how to. If getting rid of Crows was the only way to protect himself and his friends, was that enough of a moral imperative for him to act pre-emptively?

  ‘Would you let me?’ he asked.

  ‘What? Crows? I … We’re just kids, Dalip. How the fuck did we end up like this?’

  Dalip watched Mama standing in the sea, her trouser legs neatly turned up to her knees as the waves broke around her generous calves.

  ‘We ran,’ he said. ‘We did what we needed to survive. And we kept doing it. You got away from the Wolfman, we broke out of the pit, we fought Bell, we fought Stanislav. We chased Crows, we captured the maps.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder what happened to Grace?’

  ‘Maybe she escaped. Maybe she died. Whichever, we’ve seen no sign of her since, and we wouldn’t know where to start looking.’ His shoulders shifted, stretching back against his natural tendency to stoop. ‘But, yes. Every day. I try and picture how I’d be coping on my own, against all this.’

  ‘Down gives,’ said Mary.

  ‘And half the time the gifts could kill you.’

  He had another thought, a terrible, world-changing thought, and the only way to see if he was right was to look.

  He opened the trunk again in slow, deliberate moves, lifting the lid and lowering it on the hinge side, then lifting out each map in turn until he was sure he was right.

  And when he was, he tilted his head back and yelled. ‘Crows? Crows? Get back here and tell me how you did it.’

  He hadn’t gone far. Barely had the cry died away that a familiar thin black shadow crested a dune and started to lope down towards the beach.

  When he arrived, they were all assembled.

  ‘Every single one of them, right? Every single map was made by some poor sod emerging from a portal.’

  ‘That is correct,’ said Crows. His gaze darted from one to another, as he tried to judge their mood.

  ‘And almost each and every journey ended at a castle.’

  Crows didn’t speak, just nodded.

  ‘Tell me why. Tell us all why.’

  The breeze ruffled Crows’ cloak of night for a moment. ‘Because the geomancers do not permit people to travel further. New arrivals have information that would be valuable to others, so they are either kept as slaves, or are, well … There are exceptions. But that relies on knowing to evade the geomancers and their slavers from the very first moment of arrival in Down. Most are so affected by the circumstances of their escape from London that they do not escape a second time.’

  ‘You did. You even stole Bell’s maps.’

  ‘It is unusual to find two castles little more than a day apart. I had previously enquired of the maps before I left her and, by taking them with me, ensured that she would not be able to find me.’

  ‘You rescued Mary from the Wolfman.’

  ‘It was my duty to do so. It was not my duty to tell her, or you, everything. Or anything.’ He spread his fingers wide. ‘Trust is hard to come by. Betrayal is everywhere. I do not trust you. You do not trust me.’

  Dalip worried at his sparse beard. ‘What happened when you first stepped out of your portal?’

  ‘Most geomancers keep a careful watch over the portal closest to their castle. I arrived at an opportune moment, when the guards were distracted. To my mind, they did not look like the kind of people to show me mercy. I hid, almost in plain sight, and waited for nightfall. I bled into the ground from the cuts that still scar me, and I did not move. When their eyes were blinded by their night fire, I crept away, and while I was still close by, the portal opened again. I saw what happened, and was glad I trusted my instincts.’

  ‘Crows, just how many free people are there?’

  ‘A few. A very few. Listen: Down is not exactly paradise but, inshallah, it will not kill you.’ He ticked his tongue behind his teeth. ‘How this iniquitous rule of slavers and enslaved started, I do not know. But it strangles any chance of a righteous life here.’

  ‘You were taken eventually, though?’

  ‘By the Wolfman, and I was brought before Bell. I made myself useful. Then I made myself necessary. In the end, I made myself indispensable. All the while, I learnt my magic, and I scoured the maps for somewhere to go where I could escape my captors. Being a prisoner is not in my nature, though many become accustomed to it if they believe there is no alternative.’

  Mary balled her fists. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell me any of this?’

  ‘Trust, Mary. I took advantage of you, yes. I sheltered you and fed you and taught you as well. I did not hold you against your will, neither did I require any service from you. I asked nothing of you but your map. You were free to go, even to your death. As exchanges go, ours was quite equal.’

  She turned away and, after taking some half-dozen steps, wheeled back round. ‘You cold-hearted bastard.’

  He bowed. ‘I can hardly deny it. But I am better than many, if not better than most.’

  Mama huffed. ‘That doesn’t speak highly of you now, does it? Poor Mary, deceiving her so.’

  ‘She has survived my minor cruelties and has flourished.’ He glanced over to Mary. ‘Why did you not stay at the castle? It was yours. You had the land between there and the portal. The Wolfman would have served you as he served Bell.’

  ‘It burned down,’ said Luiza.

  ‘Castles grow again,’ countered Crows. ‘You would have been secure, and not have to wander the face of Down like this—’

  ‘Looking for somewhere that does not exist,’ she screamed in his face, ‘this White City is just a lie.’

  Elena pulled at her cousin’s sleeve, and Luiza shook her off.

  ‘Everything you say is a lie.’

  And with that, she launched herself at Crows, tumbling him to the sand and knocking Dalip aside, then pinning Crows’ spindly limbs with her own lean arms and smashing her forehead down into his face.

  Crows twisted his head aside at the last moment, so that she connected with his cheek instead.

  Dalip, on his back himself, struggled to his knees, and Mama, with all her maternal strength, picked Luiza off Crows as if she were no more than a piece of underground litter.

  ‘You calm down. This is dangerous. Dangerous for all of us.’ She carried Luiza a distance away before setting her down again.

  ‘Dangerous for him.’ She pressed her hand to her head, but made no effort to have another go at Crows.

  ‘No. Dangerous for you, especially. Down looks into your soul, and sees who you really are. Am I right, Crows?’

  ‘Truly, madam, you speak the truth.’ He checked that no one else was going to assault him, and got to his feet. He extended a hand to Dalip who, after a brief hesitation, accepted.

  ‘What does that mean? For us?’ he asked.

  ‘The good lady is wise. She knows we all have secrets from each other, even ourselves. But we cannot hide our true nature from Down.’

  Dalip looked at the others, one by one. He knew them, in part, in the same way he’d known Stanislav. He realised what a mistake he’d made there, and wondered what mistakes he was making now.

 
‘Down is what? Alive somehow? Watching us?’

  ‘No,’ said Crows. He crouched down and scooped up a handful of beach, holding it in his fist. As he straightened back up, grains dribbled out between his fingers. ‘Down dreams of us. We sparkle in its mind like the sand.’

  Dalip traced the trickle of powder as it fell and become one with the beach again.

  ‘Are we dead? Are we actually dead?’

  ‘Is this your fear?’ Crows’ eyes grew large. ‘That you did not escape? That you burned with your colleagues?’

  There was a lump in Dalip’s throat, and he swallowed against it. He was all too aware that he was the centre of attention, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  ‘It,’ he said, summoning up the courage to name his terror, ‘just makes more sense than any other explanation.’

  ‘And yet you fight.’ Crows opened his fist and held his palm flat. ‘Here, look.’ He took a pinch of sand and proffered it.

  Dalip held out his own hand and Crows rubbed the sand free of his fingertips.

  ‘This is you, and Mary, and Mama, and Luiza, and Elena. This is me and Bell and the Wolfman. This is all of us. Down cannot tell us apart. It does not favour the faithful and punish the wicked. It gives each of us what we want.’ He shrugged. ‘Imperfectly but generously. You know, Dalip Singh, that you are not dead. You know you experience pain and fear and joy. You know you are alive because you know death and you are not it. You know it here.’ Crows pressed his sandy hand against Dalip’s chest.

  ‘What if we don’t get what we want?’

  ‘Then you are mistaken about what it is you really want. Down sees through the lies you tell yourself, the masks you wear, the roles you play. Which is why your friend Mary is a glorious falcon, Bell a dragon, and I am—’

  ‘A snake.’

  Crows shrugged again. ‘Mama is not wrong. Your angry friend Luiza needs to watch herself. And you need to watch her too, and help her understand that her anger is as likely to be rewarded as your courage.’

  Mary absently brushed the sandy handprint from Dalip’s front. ‘But Dalip can’t …’

  ‘You do not tell the gift-giver what gifts to give,’ said Crows. ‘But if you follow me, you will see.’

  He slipped out from the group encircling him, past a still furious Luiza, who he bowed low to – honestly or sarcastically, who could tell? – and walked back up the beach to the dunes.

  ‘He could just tell us,’ said Mama.

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t think we’ll believe him.’ Dalip watched him shrink into the distance. ‘He’d be right about that.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Mary. ‘What else are we going to do?’

  Dalip found himself next to Elena.

  ‘My cousin,’ she said, her voice so quiet that Dalip had to lean in, ‘is he saying she will change? Into a, a …’

  ‘Monster?’

  Elena nodded, mute again.

  ‘I think he’s saying we’re all going to change, over time. But I’m sure nothing bad will happen to Luiza. It’s just that Crows makes us all angry, trying to pin him down, only to find out that when he says one thing, he means something else.’

  ‘She does get angry. She gets angry with me sometimes.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ said Dalip, with no confidence that it would be. ‘We just have to work out what’s going on, and then it’ll be …’

  ‘Fine,’ she echoed.

  They climbed up the face of the dune, following the collapsed footprints left by Crows, coming and going. As they crested the dune, they saw Crows below them, standing next to a post jutting out of the sand.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Come and see.’

  They slithered down, all except Luiza who stayed at the top.

  Dalip patted the wooden post. It was curved like a tusk, weathered with salt and worn by the sand.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Dig at its base.’

  Frowning, Dalip got down on his knees. He could tell that someone – presumably Crows – had already pushed the sand aside, and covered it up again. He dug his fingers into the cool dry sand and scooped it away, following the bend of the wood.

  It flattened and ran into the lee of the dune. Dalip scraped and shovelled along its length, a task made difficult by the sand from above falling back into the hollow he was making.

  There was something buried there. Protrusions at right angles to the main beam, jutting out each side in pairs. First one, then another, and after that it got too difficult to excavate any more.

  He sat back on his haunches, and wiped his hands on his shins.

  ‘Well?’ asked Mary.

  ‘It’s a going to be a boat,’ said Dalip. ‘Not today, not tomorrow, but in a couple of days, it’s going to be a boat.’

  5

  There was nothing they could do to speed up the boat-building. Down worked away, quietly, secretly. Mary saw Dalip creep back to the site and watch for a long time, just to try and catch something being added. He left, frustrated, and yet the next morning when she’d gone for a look, it was half ready.

  It had a hull, and the first signs of a deck. From being buried deep in the sand, it was starting to float up through the dunes in which it was being born. When it was – what? Finished? Ripe? – it would pop to the surface like a rubber duck in the bath. They’d just have to drag it to the water’s edge and push it out to sea.

  Crows had been a stoker, below decks on a steamship, shovelling coal into the belly of a red-hot furnace. He’d said he had experience: believing that included little sailing boats was an assumption too far. Dalip was the only one with any relevant knowledge at all, and he didn’t know how a Down-grown ship was going to differ from a modern fibreglass dinghy. He’d confessed that he might end up killing them all.

  And that was without the risk of having Crows in the same boat.

  It was going to have to carry six of them, for as long as it took to cross the bay. The White City, if it was more than an artefact of Down’s collective imagination, may not be there after all. But at least they wouldn’t have to have walk all the way, and if Dalip’s idea of using the portals as a time machine was actually possible, it wouldn’t matter too much how long they spent looking for it.

  She patted the boat and went back down to the beach, where Dalip and Mama were sifting through the maps again, this time looking for any mention of this mythical city made of white stone. She crouched between them and watched for a while.

  ‘Any luck?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s difficult to tell. There’s this one.’ He passed her a dog-eared scrap little bigger than a Post-it note. ‘It doesn’t seem to have a portal on it, but whatever this is was still important enough to draw.’

  ‘There’s no writing on it.’ She looked at the front, with its faded fine lines, then at the back, which had a completely different pattern on it. ‘And they used both sides.’

  ‘There are old books in the British Library where people have written an entirely different text sideways across an existing one. Paper’s going to be really rare, so yes, every last scrap gets used. Lots of these have two, three, even four maps on them.’ Dalip rubbed his eyes and screwed up his face. ‘I’m going blind staring at these things.’

  ‘Do you think the White City exists?’ she asked.

  Mama stretched out her sore legs and wriggled her toes against the sand. Her blisters were already starting to heal. ‘Crows hasn’t outright denied it,’ she said. ‘If this is a map of it, then I guess it might.’

  ‘It has to,’ said Dalip.

  ‘And why is that?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Because we want it to.’

  ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘it was supposed to be the one place that didn’t rely on Down’s magic. So wishing it real isn’t going to make it happen.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. Do yo
u know what the blind spot is?’ Dalip half-turned towards her in a shuffle.

  ‘I … maybe.’ Mary didn’t. She knew what a blind spot was, but not the blind spot.

  ‘It’s the bit at the back of your eye where the optic nerve collects all the signals together and sends them to the brain. It’s the only area where there aren’t any light-collecting cells. Normally, you never notice, but there’s this trick you can do with a dot and a cross drawn on a piece of paper. Stare at the dot and move the paper closer or further away, and at a certain point, the cross will simply disappear.’

  ‘So … ?’

  ‘If you want to hide from Down, you want somewhere that doesn’t have villages, castles, portals, or anything worth fighting over. Down’s blind spot. The White City.’

  ‘You’re just making shit up now, aren’t you?’ Mary peered deep into the map fragment for a hidden meaning.

  ‘It’s all I’ve got. Sorry.’

  Mama looked down at her feet. ‘Crows was running to somewhere, girl. He might not know where, or even if, but he was moving with purpose. And that man, he does nothing without intending to profit from it. May as well call where he was heading the White City and have done with it.’

  ‘You see, that makes much more sense.’

  Mary handed the map back to Dalip and stood up. Out to sea, a serpent’s head rose above the swell and turned their way. She waved before she realised what she was doing, and Mama rolled her eyes.

  ‘He’ll do you no good, girl,’ she said. ‘He’ll take everything, and leave you with nothing.’

  Dropping her hand by her side and feeling both foolish and angry, Mary had a ready response on the tip of her tongue. Then she glanced at Dalip, who was almost cringing in anticipation.

  ‘You know what, Mama? Kind of worked that out for myself. The idea of having Bell’s seconds is just a little bit … you know, sad.’ She swished her skirts and turned away, still feeling the tingling in her fingers and the tip of her nose that she always experienced just before she was going to blow.

  But it was better this way. More grown-up. She didn’t have to bite every single time, even though Mama’s advice was unasked for and, for fuck’s sake, all she’d done was wave. She clenched her fists and kept on walking, down the beach and towards the strand line. Tomorrow morning, they’d be heaving the boat down to the shore – all this bickering would be done with because they’d be on the move.