by Jeff Kamen
‘Yes,’ he said, blinking uncertainly. ‘Yes, I ... I agree.’
On hearing this, a look of deep and overflowing anguish appeared on Paget’s face, and he seized Moth by the wrist and held onto him in great earnestness. ‘You’ve done the right thing, child,’ he said, ‘congratulationsh.’
‘But how ... how will —’
‘Indeed, for together we have sworn to be as one. And mark my words, we will. We’ll find him, child. Trust me, we’ll find him even if we have to search beneath the world.’
Chapter 73 — Rings
In growing heat the women queued to enter the regional city of Durs, the most densely populated area they’d come to so far.
For miles they’d passed people sleeping in the roads and on rooftops, and now they were entering a foul bedragglement of squatter huts and tents. These dwellings were inhabited by refugees, people who had left their failing homelands in search of luck and work and who’d since been turfed away with nothing and had nowhere to go. Some had arrived in family groups, while many were lone pioneers come to scrape what living they could whilst waiting for others in the starving outlands to come and join them.
The squalor extending from the city was appalling. Thick sluggish streams of waste lay glistening at the roadside. There were flies on the people and their food and flies teeming inside the cart and flies on everything. They could barely see for the harsh smoke of dung fires, barely hear each other for the wailing of beggars and gangs of mopheaded urchins who roamed with no discernible kin at all amidst that hot fog of burning rubbish and outstretched hands.
‘Hygiene ... hygiene ...’ cried a man in tattered clothes, tramping past them in a stink of his own making, selling soaps and perfumed oils from a little handcart.
Radjík watched as an outbound cart came trundling by, a brace of rabbits swinging from the canopy and a couple of children peering like mice over the shoulders of their parents. ‘Lucky them,’ she said.
‘Just have to keep going,’ Jaala replied exhaustedly. Like Radjík, she was wearing little more than loose drapes now, their heavy northern hides folded away in the back. In spite of this, she could feel the sweat crawling down her body in tiny increments.
They gave what they could to the wretches pawing at their feet, a ragged mob who were shortly to be pushed away by city guards as they were directed towards the northern gates, where a few hours later they were finally admitted, Jaala paying out the last of their money in the process. ‘You sure about this?’ Radjík said, and Jaala nodded, too tired to argue her case again, and they drove through the tall arches to where the crowds roamed in a ferment of noise and burning charcoal. With no idea where to head to, they asked for the metal workers and vendors of jewels, and were directed accordingly. Soon they were touring the streets while the sun throbbed smokily over the bustling populace, passing among shop traders and wandering merchants calling for them to stop a while, to taste, drink, try out their wares.
As they drove on, Jaala opened her drawstring purse and studied the rings it held. Vadraskar’s all, her final legacy, set with large gemstones and each with a tiny scorpion engraved in the band, the unmistakeable mark of its owner. For years they’d lain hidden under the trunk’s false bottom: now they were to be put to use. She picked through them carefully as the chassis jolted, selecting the one she was keeping aside for the healer woman, should she ever meet her again. The gemstone was a golden orange colour, like the eyes she recalled in the clouded lamplight. Another she put aside for Nina, leaving her seven of the original ten for trading. She wore none herself and the tenth had perished with Anya, something she dwelt on ruefully as the mule pushed on through the milling bodies and they approached the quarter they were seeking.
The exchange took place in a dark little enclosure where fine hammered coils were set out on cool metal trays. The man they were dealing with was using a heavy magnifying lens, his desk lamps burning brightly as he handled the goods and muttered cryptically to someone out the back. ‘Sedam,’ he said, placing another sample beneath the glass.
As evening loomed, they turned away from the overcrowded slums they were passing through and followed the signs to the southern gates, keen to be free of the place. They’d only sold three of the rings, but even so had earned more than enough to keep them going for the coming weeks, should they need to rely on the money. Jaala was driving, wanting to focus on something real, unambivalent, to get her mind away from the mass of overlapping memories the city was conjuring, a confusing maze of voices and lives competing for her attention and the feel of it like the days of sickness she’d known at Ansthalt.
Then, as she passed a certain sidestreet, she saw something. A flickering image. Over two centuries old, yet still clear, piercingly so, still terrible to behold. A figure holding up the body of a child: a woman, wailing up at the sky, pleading with whatever agency would listen to her above the leaning rooftops. The child’s limbs hanging like some naked offering of despair.
‘What you doin?’ Radjík said, sitting up as Jaala drew them to a halt alongside a crumbling wall, but all she could do was sit with her face in her hands, breathing harshly.
‘Just give me a minute,’ she said at last, climbing down, then she went back to search the fronts of a run of narrow shops and hovels. She wandered on further, turning uncertainly, until on rounding a corner, she came to the door of what appeared to be a hospice, a place of alms and care.
She entered and went down a quiet hall, letting the cool air and stone calm her thoughts as she looked for a place to sit. A place that she felt she knew. That she trusted. Where the voices could settle. Where the flickerings were under her control.
A few minutes passed. She rubbed her face and took slow breaths. Eventually, after swallowing a couple of pills, she reached inside her other pocket and counted the money and stood. Discovering that the building still functioned as an orphanage, she asked for the sister on duty and gave her a warm handful of coins, then left with the woman staring after her.
‘Tamara ... she used to work there,’ she said, apologising as she climbed up and took the reins. Radjík sat watching her dubiously.
She looked out a few moments. Then, with another apology, she prompted the mule on and drove them to the gates and out to the smoky hell of the camps beyond.
Chapter 74 — Entering Durs
‘Mark me,’ Paget said, as Kol tossed more driftwood onto the fire, ‘the greatest battle lies ahead, and must be fought even as the future slumbers between the worlds. For what has fallen to myself and Kol is the duty to begin the formation of a mighty vanguard. Indeed, what our true role may be, we are as yet too distant behind the veils to know, but the signs indicate, and this I most dearly and deeply believe, that we stand at the beginning of a reordering on a scale not thought possible for a thousand generations.’ Exhaling smoke, he drew back from the fire. His long weathered features quaking in the flames. The pits of his skin darkly cratered. He kept Moth in his view as he smoked, then took out the pipestem and said, ‘I see your eyes marvel once again at the Cage, child. I see it draws you in. Thus it works with the enemy.’
Moth jumped at this, turning back guiltily from staring at the handcart, where the rectangular structure stood darkly draped as always. Three days they’d rattled south together, and each time he’d cast it a querying look, Paget had snapped at him, warning of unseen eyes that marked their progress along the road. When he’d asked what was meant by this, Paget, in great alarm at his lack of knowing, had urgently begun his education with regards to the common tricks of their enemies.
Yet even so, the questions would not leave him.
‘I ... I wasn’t looking at it,’ he said, ‘I just ... I’m sorry, Paget. I couldn’t help it.’
‘And help what, pray?’
‘I ... I was wondering what was in it, that’s all. Ah ... I wondered why you had it covered over.’
Paget smoked again, nodding. ‘Fortunately, child, you are not the Cage’s enemy. Were this so, you woul
d already be within it. Inside, so to speak. Is that not the case, Kol?’
Kol looked up, chewing.
‘Is anyone allowed ...’ he tried again, looking anxiously around the beach, ‘I-I mean, when will I be allowed to ask what it’s for?’ As he said this, he reached a malnourished hand for the pipe, grabbing it from Paget, who observed him steadily from beneath a raised eyebrow. ‘Is it ... is it to hold your enemies?’ he said, sucking on the stem.
The eyebrow arched further. ‘First, child, in so asking, you should bear in mind that the enemy has many faces and many names, and not all are held by corporeal measures. But yes, hold them the Cage will and indeed must.’
Moth inhaled, glancing towards the cart again as if something might suddenly appear, and whilst he smoked, Paget continued his teachings in the matter of cautionary awareness by warning him of places he had visited incautiously himself, and where he had feared for his existence — places thought to be friendly, he reflected, clicking his nails, where the Fraternity’s many persecutors had threatened to snatch at him on every streetcorner, and where shadowed eyes had studied him unnaturally from behind doorways and shuttered windows. He spoke of cockcrow intimations of danger and of gates of trespass unopenable by man and of the pathways beyond them yet to be unearthed, yet to be followed, ghost paths laid down in ink and scroll by some arcane and rephramic brotherhood in an old forgotten maproom ...
‘The risk the Cage poses,’ he said in conclusion, ‘is its very attractiveness to those who would harm us, or who would seek to know of its powers. But yet in drawing the enemy inward, so it works to our great advantage in its capacity to apprehend the assailant. The Cage verily ensnares them. Thus, child, in this way they are dealt with, none to return.’
Moth was staring at him. ‘But ... if they’re in the Cage, then how ...’
‘Understand me well. When I speak of this secret I speak of all the good that humanity contains and so much more, of things yet undreamt of in this impoverished age.’
‘Yes, but how —’
‘Child,’ Paget cut in, his face wrinkling in displeasure, ‘bring forth your ear, that I am not obliged to speak aloud, nor risk the enemy’s interception.’
Moth leant in a little, watching him with awestruck and moonlike eyes.
‘What ask you, pray?’
He exhaled, and through that silky outpouring, whispered, ‘Ah, how do you get rid of them?’
Paget cut glances around the darkened shingle. ‘They simply go, child. They are no more, nor evermore shall be. It is for this very reason the Cage sits empty at this moment, awaiting the next inhabitant.’
‘Does it ... does it do it to anyone? Anyone who goes inside?’
‘Indeed not, for I have gone inside myself to prepare its manifestation. Within it, a friend is the safest they could be. For an enemy, the opposite applies with great avengeance.’
‘So ... so what happens to them?’
Paget checked about again, then leant in so that their cheeks almost touched. ‘Hush, child,’ he said, ‘worry not about such things. The enemy goes to the place where they must be. An isle, perhaps, overrun with wolves and bears, but let us not speak of it. Rather let us focus ourselves on finding the one who is lost to us.’ With that, he looked soberly back to the fire, his features sinking into dark creases. ‘For I fear just as mine head begins to ache, that this may be one of the greatest challenges of all.’
Their search after that continued with greater intensity than before. They called at isolated hamlets and larger settlements alike, following a trail of signs alternately promising and false all along that baking route. Between them they studied books, studied the clouds and stars, went asking questions among the common folk slogging through their daily chores and errands.
In this time they crested high peaks overlooking the bitten and half submerged coastline, a desolate zone of waves and wreckage and the drear stacks of archaic buildings awash and rusting in greens and browns and the occasional charred tower jutting from the water like a crown of Hades. One day they entered a petrified woodland and roved through the twisting and porous limbs with the sun blazing through, the dry ground scattered with what looked like clay chips and powdered dust. On leaving it, they filed up a silent elevation hauling the cart along with gasps, a place where more dead trees stood in tortured elegance upon a rocky slope, their wiry branches trailing against the light like upturned roots.
They passed through empty wastes of climbing thorns and weeds and entered dead towns reclaimed and overbuilt by the piecing together of generational slums that resembled termite mounds of a leached grey composition, the inhabited holes and caverns packed with crowds of unwashed humanity and its endless fires and smoke, and the poor and toothless going about haggard and worn and downtrodden.
Moth going through it all with a trepidation that only the pipe seemed able to cure, and as they trekked on, it seemed to him that all three in the Fraternity were engaged in a gigantic struggle. Often — watching Paget prowl among the ruins, go peering through windows, following people this way and that, even chasing them, listening endlessly upon rooftops and upraised places as he scanned the layered signals of reality and realities unknown for information, often balanced on one foot, his knee raised like a cranefly as he worked through his contemplations, silent most of the time yet occasionally reduced to screeching, honking, even squeaking like a baby — he feared for their leader; and at other times — lusting for the pipe and herbs, waking as though semi-frosted and clutching at his bag for the map and the letter he’d been left, knowing in certain ways, and yet unable to face, those dread thoughts clustered like lice around a hot and windy unearthing of a gravetomb, the furious panic and confusion circling within a dark tunnel of voices and howls and flames — he feared for himself, unable to imagine how he might get through it all, even united with his father, to any joyous conclusion.
Then finally it happened. Paget received a visitation. They were camped in a rock shelter in the lowlands when he returned to the fire in stormy excitement. ‘A dish, Kol, a dish,’ he ordered, holding before him the struggling form of a rabbit, suspended by the ears. He’d been roaming alone with his long shirt flapping and his greasy hair twitching beneath his hat, kicking at rubble and scouring the ground with a stick, and now, on producing his knife, he slit the creature down the belly and began to pluck from it various glistening organs, some of which he kept for close deliberation and some of which he tossed aside for eating.
It was in teasing apart that blue pool of guts that he discerned a message of the highest importance. ‘Durs,’ he said, staring away, and would not speak for a while, nor move even to wipe his fingers. When at last Moth managed to get him to communicate, Paget smiled at him tearfully and said, ‘He is captive, child, captive. I see it clearly. His grief. Yet not the motive for keeping him.’
‘I ... I don’t understand,’ Moth whispered, looking uncertainly from him to the innards. ‘What exactly did you see?’
‘He is in trouble, child, yet he is among us still, and for that we must be grateful.’
He swallowed uneasily. ‘Paget, that’s, ah ... but what’s he doing? Is he okay?’
Paget stared trancelike down at the entrails again, poking at them with the blade. ‘I see a house. But yet a great house, full of intrigue. He is a prisoner, of that I have no doubt. Tell me, child, can you conjure any reason why this might be the case?’
‘Why ... why he’s there? I-I don’t know, I ...’
‘Think, child, think quickly. Does he have skills? Is he furnished with knowledge useful to his captors?’
‘Paget, I ... I can’t think. He-he’s a doctor, a scientist. Maybe that’s it.’
‘Is that all, child? Think what he knows, to explain this predicament. Does he have enemies? Was he running from them?’
‘Well ... yes, he did, I mean he was. I mean, he was running from people at home. He ... he knew about things they were after. The soil ... the girl, the Genetik ...’ He looked up
, his eyes burning feverishly. ‘Yes, you’re right, I-I can imagine them coming after him. Can you see what’s happened to him?’
Paget regarded the innards with a sorrowing expression. ‘A house, that is all I am told for now. He is in a large house in Durs and in danger due to his skills. It’s not much, but I see it clearly. Child,’ he said solemnly, looking up, ‘your father must be rescued without delay.’
‘But ... but how? How do we get to him?’
‘That matters not, young actias. What matters is that we leave in haste and act as we are bound to. For all we know they may be planning to move him on. We may never get this chance again.’ Clicking his fingers, he ordered Kol to pack up their things. ‘We must leave,’ he said, ‘and in haste.’
‘We’re leaving now?’ Moth gasped.
‘Yes, child, now. The time like no other.’
‘But I’ve just got the meat started,’ Kol complained, lifting a narrow rib.
‘What is that, pray?’ Paget asked, squinting.
‘Er, goat,’ Kol muttered, noticing Moth was watching. ‘Poor kid,’ he added, grinning at Paget, whose mouth ripped open into a grimace of delight at this, and who then sprang up in readiness as Moth began to round up their possessions and pack them away.
‘Th-thank you, Paget,’ he said, collecting his bag for him, ‘thank you for all you’re doing.’
‘You may thank me when we’re finished, child,’ Paget replied, adjusting his hat, and as soon as the meat was wrapped, he stamped the fire down to ashes.
~O~
A few nights later, diverting away from the filth and beggary of the squatter camps, clad in dark cloaks lest they be recognised, they came in sight of the city.