Tarnished City

by Vic James

  ‘Morality is nothing to do with it, Hadley. This is a common error I see among many of the Condemned sent to me here. Those whose crimes arise from their idealism. Like the woman who left us this evening. Or like you.

  ‘You imagine that you are better than us. You are not. Only weaker. A world in which your kind ruled would not be improved. It would be merely diminished. And that is one of the lessons my household is designed to instil. Come with me.’

  Crovan rose, and led the way from the library. Luke’s eyes roamed frantically for something, anything, that he might hit this man with. Knock him unconscious. Escape. But no, the collar would prevent it. They descended the stairs, and Luke found himself unexpectedly back in the dining room.

  Crovan paused, his hand on the door to the kitchen.

  ‘Those who are sent to me, I divide in two. Half live as Equals do. The other half remain in servitude. To those who are my guests, I give power over those who serve. The collars prevent servants harming or physically restraining guests, just as they prevent all of you from harming me. But guests may harm servants with impunity.

  ‘Many guests enjoy frequent visits below stairs to do exactly that. Some hold out, just as you will. But out of boredom, out of frustration, they all give in eventually – just as you will.’

  Luke’s head spun. What was Crovan saying?

  ‘Harming? Why on earth would those of us up here want to hurt any of the others?’

  ‘Because,’ said Crovan, ‘that is human nature.’

  He pushed open the door and the sound, magnified by a deep stone corridor, clawed at Luke’s ears.

  Somewhere down below, a woman was screaming.

  8

  Luke

  ‘The strong dominate the weak,’ Crovan continued. ‘Men over women. British over inferior races. Equal over commoner. It is the natural way of things. As you saw this evening, I require those who would leave me to understand and acknowledge that, before I can grant them the mercy of the door.’

  Luke could barely think, with the hideous sound of that thin, high wail echoing up the passageway. But you didn’t need to think to know that what Crovan was spouting was the vilest stuff imaginable.

  These people. Their power. The good they could do with it, and the evil they chose instead.

  Another shriek. Luke pushed past his master. Who cared what Crovan would do to him? Whatever was happening down there had to be stopped.

  ‘It’s what you truly are, Luke,’ Crovan called after him, as he sprinted down the corridor. ‘All of you.’

  Luke pulled up in the doorway of a huge kitchen. He in the bare impression: stone walls, an immense fireplace and wooden tables. It looked centuries old, maybe dating from the time of the kings.

  His eyes went immediately to a group of people gathered at one end of the room. There was a trio of men in black-tie evening dress – Luke’s fellow guests. One of them held a struggling fourth man, clad in a servant’s grey tunic, in an armlock. Two women stood backed against the table. One, her evening gown half ripped from her bony shoulder, was Lavinia. In front of her, arms outstretched, stood Coira, spitting her words into the face of the nearest man.

  ‘Don’t touch her again, Blake, or you’ll be sorry.’

  ‘You never learn, do you?’ Blake said. He was smoking a thin cigarette, and Luke noticed with horror what looked like livid burn spots on Lavinia’s exposed shoulder. ‘You can’t be in two places at once. I think my friend here has some unfinished business with Josie downstairs.’

  Blake thumbed over his shoulder to the third man, who gave a slow, lazy grin.

  ‘So . . . Josie? Or Lavinia? You may be our master’s pet, and untouchable, but you can only protect one of them.’ Luke realized what Coira was going to try at the same time as she moved. Grabbing Lavinia’s arm, Coira spun the older woman round and pushed her towards an open door on the far side of the room. But the man behind Blake was equally fast – and bigger. He snatched at Lavinia with one hand and at Coira with the other. He somehow missed, or failed to keep hold of Coira, and she slipped between his fingers. The girl cursed, a ragged, furious sound, and ran to the door.

  ‘Josie,’ she called down, with a yell that sounded too big for her skinny chest. ‘Hide!’

  Then she turned to the man holding Lavinia.

  ‘Let her go.’

  She launched herself at him, fingers clawing for his face, and he roared. Which was when Luke snatched up a fire iron from the massive open hearth and raised his voice.

  ‘You heard her. Let Lavinia go.’

  The room went quiet.

  ‘New boy.’ Blake’s voice was curdled with scorn. ‘I really wouldn’t interfere.’

  ‘I’m not interfering,’ said Luke, lifting the fire iron. ‘I’m stopping this right now.’

  ‘You think?’ said Blake. But a note of uncertainty had come into his voice. He took a small step back towards his more powerfully built accomplice, who was struggling to hold Lavinia with one hand while fending off Coira’s raking fingernails. Was he seeking his goon’s protection?

  No.

  Whip-fast, Blake grabbed Lavinia by her long wispy hair and forced her head down. Plucking the cigarette from his wet mouth he pressed it against Lavinia’s scrawny neck. The woman shrieked again and the sound turned Luke’s stomach.

  ‘Every step you take,’ said Blake, ‘l’ll burn Lavinia another beauty spot. And she’s so ugly’ – he twisted his hand in the woman’s long hair and forced her tear-and-snot-streaked face towards Luke; her eyes rolled wildly with terror – ‘I reckon it’ll take quite a few to make her beautiful.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Luke, hefting the iron bar in what he desperately hoped was an intimidating fashion, ‘and while your hands are full, I’ll bash your brains out. Your friends are both busy, so it’ll be just you and me. I’m half your age and worked in Millmoor’s Machine Park, which I reckon makes me twice as fit. So how about it?’

  Blake snarled as Luke sprang. The man pushed Lavinia to one side, and darted around the table, keeping it between him and Luke.

  ‘Lavinia, get downstairs,’ yelled Coira. ‘Go!’

  Luke had no opportunity to see if the older woman made her escape, because Blake was reaching beneath the table. Reaching, not fumbling. He knew what was down there.

  One hand whipped up to throw a heavy, flat blade fast in Luke’s direction. A meat cleaver. Luke swerved and swore. He rested a hand on the pitted tabletop to steady himself – which was when Blake stabbed it with a carving fork.

  Luke howled with pain, but even as he did so, something else urged him on – the knowledge that, if Crovan’s description of how the collars worked was true, Blake wasn’t used to people able to fight back.

  He jumped up onto the table and lashed out. He was wobbly, poorly positioned, but just close enough to clip Blake’s skull, sending the man reeling.

  ‘Luke!’

  Luke turned towards Coira’s warning cry just in time to see an iron skillet descend towards his head. The third guest had released the struggling serving man and come to Blake’s aid.

  Luke raised a desperate hand, but it was too late.

  The pan connected with the side of his head and he went down into hot, black darkness.

  The touch of something scalding brought him back up again.

  ‘Ahh!’ He shrank away.

  ‘It’s only a cup of tea,’ Coira said, folding his fingers around it. ‘I don’t believe tea cures everything, but it’s a good place to start.’

  Luke blinked. He was sat on a bench in the kitchen, his back propped against the table. He doubted Coira would be giving him tea if Blake was still tormenting Lavinia somewhere nearby, but he looked around to check anyway. They were alone.

  What else had happened? He remembered the skillet descending, and reached up his other hand to feel around his skull. The hand hurt – it was bandaged – but not his head.

  ‘How?’ he croaked, taking a grateful sip of the tea. ‘Crovan,’ she said. �
��And are you really okay? Because he said you would be, but he’s a sadist, so that could mean anything from “still hurting” to “in absolute agony”.’

  ‘My hand hurts, but my head’s fine. Which is weird. And where’s Lavinia? That bastard Blake.’

  Luke clenched his fist angrily, then yelped at his injury once again.

  ‘Crovan appeared as soon as you went down.’ Coira settled herself on the bench beside him, and Luke found her presence as warming as the tea. ‘He was angry. Sent Blake and the others back upstairs immediately. Rhys – the guy with me – went to check on Lavinia. So I was the only one here when Crovan healed you. But just your head, so it’s not about sparing you pain. He must have been worried about concussion or brain injury. I’ve never seen him do that before. Why do you matter, Luke Hadley?’

  Startled, Luke looked up. He mattered?

  I won’t let him break you. That had been Silyen Jardine’s promise at Kyneston’s gate. Not beyond repair.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he told her truthfully.

  ‘Thank you for trying,’ Coira said. ‘That was brave.’

  ‘Not bravery; just reflex. And it feels like all I do is try. I want to change things for the better, but only seem to screw up even worse.’

  ‘Well, if killing Chancellor Zelston was your idea of changing things for the better, then maybe you’re right.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Luke, stung by Coira’s words. He shifted upright from where he’d let himself slump against her. ‘Yes, I held the gun, but I have no recollection of doing it. One of them must have used me.’

  Coira looked at him. Her assessing gaze reminded him of someone, though he couldn’t place who.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Luke insisted. ‘And I’m not staying here. Nor can you. What just happened, that’s happened before, hasn’t it? Have they . . .’ And the idea that stabbed into Luke’s brain was more excruciating than any carving fork. ‘Have they ever done anything like that to you?’

  If she said ‘yes’, he’d find that iron bar again and go kick Blake’s door in right now.

  She didn’t say ‘yes’. But her answer was unexpected. ‘They can’t,’ she said. ‘They can’t harm me, in the same way that none of the servants can harm the guests. They’ve tried, but you saw how it is. They can’t even keep hold of me. Blows don’t land. The collar prevents it somehow. It’s how I knew I could get involved, without the risk that Blake would start using me as a human ashtray too. So you see, I’m not all that brave, either.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I saw earlier,’ Luke said, then flushed pink all the way up to his ears because he was so rubbish at this saying-nice-stuff-to-girls thing, and he hadn’t meant it like that anyway. ‘But I don’t understand. Crovan explained the set-up of this place, and it seemed pretty simple: we guests can hurt you servants, and clearly we can hurt each other. But you can’t harm us.’

  ‘No one can hurt me,’ said Coira. ‘I think it’s because I was a child when I came here, and even Crovan isn’t that evil.’

  Luke said nothing. He wasn’t convinced that there were any limits to Crovan’s depravity.

  ‘How old were you?’ he said finally.

  ‘I came below stairs when I turned thirteen, I think. Birthdays are a bit hazy, but it was four years ago. Before then, I was upstairs. This place is all I can remember. I’ve no recollections of the time before, or of my parents.’ Which was the worst thing Luke had heard yet. To take away memories of your family. Your past. Of who you truly were. It was like Dog, who didn’t even know his own name, only that he had once had a wife whom he loved, who had been abused and had killed herself. I only remember what he let me keep, Luke heard the voice rasp in the darkness of Kyneston’s kennels. And that’s just the bad things.

  Would Crovan do that to Luke, too? Would he end up not caring about escaping, because he had lost any memory of who and what he would be escaping to?

  ‘There has to be a way out of here,’ he said. ‘You and me, Julian, we’re so young. We can’t spend our lives like this.’ ‘Julian’s not who you think he is. I saw you talking at earlier, when you were both looking at me. I see him looking at me a lot.’

  ‘Well, who wouldn’t?’ said Luke, then immediately wanted to bury his face in his hands. Okay, Millmoor hadn’t been a good place to sharpen his social skills, but honestly.

  But Coira appeared amused, a little, for when he looked up she was smiling.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m wrong. He’s never laid a finger on me. It’s just I sometimes get the feeling he’d like to. As for getting out, well, Rhys and I have explored everything we can think of. The boat. Any way the collars might let us incapacitate Crovan, even though we can’t actually harm him.’

  ‘There’s a boat?’

  ‘Don’t get excited. It’s moored on the far shore of the loch, so you probably wouldn’t have seen it from the helicopter. It brings over our supplies once a week. There’s a watergate down below, with double doors kept locked so we’re never in the dock at the same time they are. And yes, yes.’ Coira held up her hand because Luke had been going to interrupt. ‘There is a way around that. We managed it about a year ago; Rhys stowed away. But the boat never made it to the other side.’

  ‘It sunk?’

  ‘No, it just . . . couldn’t get there. It stopped. The engine was running; there was no wind; it could go left or right, but not forward. There must be some Skillful boundary that none of us Condemned can cross.’

  Luke put down his mug in disbelief. He’d known this wasn’t going to be simple. Escaping a deadly castle surrounded by a loch full of pain, while wearing a magical collar that let your Skillful jailer jerk you around like a puppet, was always going to be a tall order. But he’d never doubted it could be done.

  But this? Even if you overcame all of those things, for there then to be some boundary that you couldn’t cross? It must be like Kyneston’s wall, he supposed, responsive only to the Equal family.

  ‘So, what?’ he said to Coira eventually. ‘You’re saying we should just give up? Accept our lot, until the day we finally crack and walk out of a door that kills us? Because I’m not doing that. I’ve got a family that needs to know I’m all right. I’ve got people to fight for.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Coira, standing and pulling Luke to his feet, careful of his bandaged hand. ‘The only thing more impossible than getting out of here is accepting that you’ll never get out of here. But you’re going to need your strength, which means you need sleep. So no more questions, for now.’

  Coira led him through the maze of the castle’s corridors. Through the dining room, the high atrium where the heads of stag and elk hung next to the guns that shot them, and up the stairs.

  ‘I know the way,’ Luke protested. ‘You should go back. Lavinia will need you more than I do.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ Coira countered, with a meaningful nod at the door next to Luke’s as they turned onto his landing. Blake’s room. ‘Lock your door tonight. And maybe tomorrow, you’ll find a leak in the ceiling and will need to move.’

  Luke grinned. She was smart this girl. Smart like Abi. And brave like Angel.

  Except Angel wasn’t who Luke had thought she was. She had been daring, but it had all been done with the knowledge that her Skill would protect her. His infatuation with the beautiful blonde woman felt like a lifetime ago. He darted a glance at Coira. Making the same mistake with someone in here would be a bad idea. A very bad idea.

  But hey, it was fine to have an ally in your escape plans, wasn’t it?

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Coira, looking at him curiously. ‘Or are you having some kind of delayed head injury thing? Because you look a bit—’

  ‘No,’ Luke said hastily, mortified. ‘No, I’m fine.’

  As he closed the door, he thought he heard a faint snort of laughter.

  But if he went to sleep buoyed by the discovery that he wasn’t the only one in here desperate to get out, he woke in an altogether more
sombre mood.

  This place was horrific. People were encouraged to prey on each other, simply to justify Crovan’s dehumanizing ideas about Equal superiority. And if what Coira had said was correct, Luke was trapped here by his collar. He didn’t just have to find a way out of the castle; after that, lay some kind of boundary that functioned like the Kyneston wall. And despite his experiences with Silyen Jardine, he didn’t know nearly enough about how such a thing might work.

  He didn’t know anything about it at all.

  So: a perimeter, and a collar. His hands went to his throat. It was more like a ribbon than a collar: soft and supple. So close to the skin that you couldn’t get your fingers under it. So smooth, in fact, that when Luke stroked his fingers down his throat, he could hardly tell when he reached the band.

  Almost as if it had become part of his skin.

  His stomach lurched as he scrabbled with his fingernails at the edge of the collar, but could get no purchase. The band was indistinguishable from his flesh.

  He ran to the small sink in the corner of his room and retched.

  When he had finished, and had washed and wiped his face, he could hear Blake moving around next door. The man and his cronies would surely have it in for Luke after last night’s misadventure. So remembering Coira’s suggestion, Luke sploshed some water on the floor and went down early before breakfast to ask Devin for a change of room.

  ‘Oh,’ said Devin, after acquiescing fussily. ‘Our master will see you again this morning. He’s asked me to bring you up at eleven o’clock, so meet me here five minutes before. Don’t be late.’

  That didn’t sound great. Was Luke in trouble for intervening last night? Well, no one had told him he couldn’t. And maybe Luke would have a few questions for Crovan.

  Blake appeared as he was relocating his few things – you could hardly call them possessions – to the new room. Luke tensed for a spat. The man was sporting a tight, puffy black eye from where Luke had clipped him last night. Its pink rims streamed as he peered balefully at Luke.

  ‘So he did fix you. That’s like giving water to a starving man – it just prolongs the agony. I’ll enjoy watching your mind being broken apart, Luke Hadley.’