Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  And it was nothing like Sil had imagined.

  8

  Luke

  The wall was too old to be Rix’s Silence.

  ‘It’s not the same one Crovan was attacking,’ Luke told Silyen.

  It was more than old. It was ancient. It was a dry-stone wall, made without mortar. Rocks were piled on top of one another and fitted painstakingly together, each piebald with white lichen and green moss. It stood as high as Luke’s shoulder, though appeared taller because of grasses sprouting from the top. A butterfly, its wings flimsy and near-transparent, flitted among the seed-heavy stalks as they whisked in the breeze.

  It looked like nothing so much as Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans to keep out marauders from the north. When Luke was younger, they’d visited it a few times on family holidays. Mum was a keen walker, though Daisy was usually begging to be picked up before they’d gone a mile. Luke ran his hands over the wall, marvelling at the contrast between the prickly velvet of the moss and the rough stone beneath.

  Silyen, though, was frowning. The Equal seemed displeased as he looked one way along the length of it, then turned to survey the other direction.

  ‘Problem?’ Luke asked eventually.

  ‘It’s straight.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘How do you keep things in, if it’s straight? It should be an enclosure.’

  Luke got what he meant. If a Silence was a way to contain memories, it made sense it would enclose them, like a wall around a fortress.

  ‘The one before, that Rix laid on you, was round,’ Silyen said. ‘Like a city wall. Break through the wall, and you’re into whatever’s kept behind it. But this . . .’

  The Equal tailed off, looking at the structure reproachfully.

  ‘Perhaps it’s not a Silence at all,’ Luke suggested. ‘Perhaps it’s just a wall that my brain thought would look good. It’s like somewhere I used to visit with my family. So if it’s that . . .’

  If it was that, then he should be able to change it, just as he had with the clothes they were wearing and the road they’d driven on. Luke looked at the wall and imagined it taller. Pictured the stones more neatly aligned.

  Nothing altered. So, this wasn’t his creation. But it wasn’t Rix’s black wall, either. The only other person who Luke knew had Silenced him was Crovan. Was this his handiwork?

  But then why did it appear as though it had been here for centuries?

  ‘It must have been made looking this way, right? Because otherwise it’s definitely older than me, and no one could have Silenced me before I was even born.’

  ‘There are hereditary Quiets that pass down the generations,’ Silyen said. ‘Families use them to hide their dirty secrets – the true parentage of a child, which might permanently disbar a line of succession, that sort of thing. My mother’s family has a Quiet. My aunt Euterpe told me about it in the library at Orpen – that was her mindscape, a perfect recreation of the Orpen Mote of her childhood, before it burned down. But the Quiet has a different shape. It’s a locked box to which she had a key.’

  ‘So this is Crovan’s work?’

  Silyen shook his head, either in disagreement or bafflement. Luke didn’t know whether to be reassured or scared that the Equal was just as much at a loss.

  ‘It just . . . goes on,’ Silyen said, casting his eyes along the expanse of it. ‘No secret could be that big.’

  ‘So it can’t be one,’ said Luke. ‘And look.’

  He pointed to where, a short distance further along, the wall had broken down. A fall of stones had left a breach in the length of it, wide enough for a person to squeeze through.

  On inspection, it looked like a normal gap in a normal wall. The sort of thing where a storm knocked a few stones off the top, then sheep took to jumping over the low part, and stone by stone, a hole opened up. It didn’t look as though it had been smashed down by a raging Skillful fury, like Crovan’s. Simply something that had come apart with age.

  Luke had learned his lesson on the shore of Eilean Dòchais, when he’d thrust his hand into Loch nan Deur and had his curiosity rewarded by excruciating pain. But he could see no danger here. This place was Luke himself, Silyen had said, and he sensed that that was true.

  ‘You let me go to Crovan because you both wanted to learn how to break down a Silence as a way to discover the concealed memory,’ he told Silyen. ‘So, if this is a Silence, then what – the memory comes back on the other side? We should try.’

  Silyen nibbled his fingernails. It was strange to see him so uncertain – Silyen, who had answers for every question you could think of, and ten more you hadn’t.

  ‘We should. Shall I go first?’

  ‘No thanks. My mind, my memories.’

  Silyen nodded as Luke squared his shoulders and looked at the gap. Luke couldn’t believe he was feeling so tense. Couldn’t believe that this was all real – in a manner of speaking – when he was actually sat in an armchair at Far Carr. Couldn’t believe that the whole of this past year hadn’t just been some astonishingly detailed bad dream from beginning to end.

  Could he be hurt, in this place? If his clothes here weren’t exactly real, then was his body? Could he die here?

  Luke reached cautiously into the space between the stones. Something lifted and tickled the hairs on his arms, but so lightly it might have been merely a breeze. There was no pain, no sense of threat or malevolence. As he stepped through, his scalp tingled. He felt his pulse throb beneath his fingernails. His heart sped up. Was that only adrenaline, or something more?

  As Luke stood there, trying to see if any thoughts or memories had come back into his head that hadn’t been there a few moments ago, Silyen nudged him aside from the gap. And as the Equal stepped across too, he gasped so loudly that Luke thought he must have sliced an artery on a jagged bit of rock.

  ‘What? Are you okay?’

  ‘Skill,’ Silyen hissed. His eyes had gone very wide. ‘Ahh, so much.’

  Luke shook his shoulder, and could feel the boy’s heartbeat thrumming through him as if he was as fragile as a bird. Silyen splayed a palm on his chest, catching his breath.

  ‘But I don’t remember anything,’ Luke told him. ‘No memories have come back to me. And they should, shouldn’t they?’

  They stared at each other. The Equal’s confusion was evident – and disconcerting. Luke had relied on Silyen to be a kind of guide in this place, he realized. Now it seemed that it was equally new territory to him.

  ‘Let’s start from what we know,’ Silyen said. ‘Here, in your mind, is some kind of act. In certain respects, it resembles a Silence – a wall or barrier. However, in one important regard, it is different: it’s not an enclosure. It appears to be old. It also appears to be broken – or at least, breaking down. It was created using an act of immense Skill, or by a very powerfully Skilled person.’

  Luke’s mind raced. When he examined where it had brought him, he almost stopped breathing.

  ‘Maybe it’s him? The Wonder King? The name’s a bit of a clue that he’s incredibly powerful. He lived a long time ago, which is why the wall would be old. And you said that he was forgotten – almost forgotten, with just bits and pieces of memories. Would that be what happened if a Silence broke down, like a wall with gaps and holes? Something – or someone – who’s not quite remembered, but not quite forgotten, either?’

  Luke realized he was trembling. What did it all mean? Silyen had raked his hair over his face, as if giving himself privacy to think.

  ‘Can you take us up there?’ the Equal said after a while, pointing to the top of one of the tallest, snowiest mountains. ‘Because we need to see . . .’

  Luke looked. The peaks were a long way away and a long way up. Definitely higher than the hills in the Peak District that Mum and Dad used to drag them up in the holidays.

  ‘Do I dream up a plane or something? Give us wings? Maybe get a giant eagle to come and pick us up – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that in a movie . . .’

&nbs
p; ‘Eagles are always good.’ Silyen was grinning. ‘But there’s an easier way, now that you’re more accustomed to how this place works. You simply think it.’

  ‘Think it?’

  ‘Well, this is your mind, Hadley, and most of us use our minds for thinking, though you may be an exception.’

  ‘Just when I was thinking you might not be a colossal git, Silyen.’

  The Equal spread his hands wide. But Luke got his point. How would it work? Would they fly up into the air – because that would be both cool and terrifying? Why on earth had his stupid brain created a landscape like this anyway, and not . . . Then his stomach lurched and everything swirled as if the world was a painting whose colours had run. He staggered and his feet slipped beneath him. Two hands grabbed his wrists and held on tight.

  Luke blinked and opened his eyes.

  ‘If I might suggest . . .’ Silyen murmured. ‘More suitable footwear?’

  They were now high on a mountain peak. The sky up here was blue-pink and stung with each breath, and snow-covered ice crunched beneath their feet. They were so high that condors circled below them.

  ‘Better,’ the Equal said, stamping his feet with satisfaction.

  Luke examined himself. He was clad in a mountaineer’s down suit, as garishly red as a London bus. Silyen was in some historical version, complete with tweed trousers tucked into thick socks, round tinted goggles, and a scarf that muffled him to the nose. Great – even in Luke’s imagination the Equal was the cool one.

  Sil pulled Luke to his side and pointed to the grassy plains below, threaded through with a golden ribbon of river.

  ‘Look, you can see Crovan’s handiwork from here. Each one of those he laid on you after your interrogation sessions.’ The Equal’s voice hesitated a moment. ‘So many . . .’

  Scattered across the landscape at intervals, like cattle corrals or city walls with no city inside, were small enclosures. They were constructed from smooth blocks that reminded Luke of the sheer sides of Eilean Dòchais castle, and they pitted the landscape. He couldn’t imagine what the minds of those kept prisoner for years must look like, if Crovan hurt them and Silenced them over and over again. Their minds would be an expanse of pitiless little citadels, locking away horror and pain.

  Luke had to get back to Eilean Dòchais. He had to know that Coira was okay. He desperately hoped that she had reconsidered her plan to wait and confront Crovan, and had instead fled the castle – along with whomever else among its prisoners she chose to get to safety.

  ‘And there,’ Silyen continued. ‘That’s the Silence Rix put in place when he used you to kill Zelston. The one Crovan was trying to tear down, to find out how to break through Silences laid by others.’

  The walls of this one were taller, thicker, blacker; the whole structure had a lopsided appearance, as if thrown up quickly. But it was still a strong enclosure, and sealed behind it were Luke’s memories of those minutes in Kyneston’s ballroom that had wrecked his life and ended Chancellor Zelston’s.

  ‘Those are what Silences usually look like . . .’ Silyen said.

  ‘. . . and then there’s that.’

  Luke finished the sentence as they both stared at the wall that meandered through the great plain. It wove close to the river, looking just as much a part of the landscape. From up here, you could mistake it for a natural feature, like the incredible gritstone edges Dad had once shown them in the Peak District national park.

  ‘It looks like it belongs. You’d almost not notice it, unless you walked into it,’ Luke said.

  ‘Hmm . . .’

  Silyen sounded abstracted. Then the Equal spun on his heel and reached into the air, grasping the handle of a door that hadn’t been there moments earlier, and which Luke was pretty sure he hadn’t imagined. It was made of slatted wood and painted a thick, glossy white.

  Silyen pushed it open. ‘Excuse the mess. I’m not one for entertaining visitors.’

  A ‘mess’ was one way of putting it. The high, sunlit room resembled an explosion in a library. There were books everywhere. Piled on the floor and on shelves – both in neat rows and more haphazard stacks. Books were stuffed under cushions and down the sides of posh but knackered sofas and armchairs.

  The Equal made a gallant ‘after you’ gesture, and Luke stepped through – hesitantly, because he knew where they must be now. If the vast landscape was somehow, mystifyingly, Luke, then this unexpectedly cheerful, white-walled room overflowing with books must be . . . Silyen.

  He glanced back. Through the doorway he could see the frosted sky of the mountain peak; their footprints were still visible in the snow-crust. The door swung shut – then disappeared. Luke took a deep breath and looked around.

  ‘It’s not as sinister as I would have imagined,’ he conceded.

  Silyen smirked, and picked a path through the scattered books to a large table with not an inch of visible surface space. Among the litter of books, cups and several French coffee presses was a wooden box the colour of cinnamon.

  Silyen patted it. ‘My family’s Quiet. It’s how I knew of the existence of my ancestor Cadmus’s journals. It doesn’t contain them, of course. Only my aunt’s memory of Orpen actually held the books. But the knowledge of them is locked away in here. Gavar has one, and Jenner, and my mother of course.

  ‘Just as Silences are walls that encircle a memory that’s hidden, Quiets take the form of closable objects: boxes, bags, chests, safes, wardrobes, you name it. We can open them, but we can’t show their contents to anyone else. That’s the difference between the two acts. A Quiet bestowed on Equals doesn’t rob us of our memories, but prevents us from sharing them. A Silence laid on commoners conceals your memory from you.

  ‘Quiets are mostly used in families, but they’re also used by groups. Say a bunch of friends commits a murder one drunken night: you can all accept a Quiet. None of you will forget the deed, but you’ll each be prevented from talking about it. Or two people having an affair could agree to conceal it with a Quiet. The only one who can lift a Quiet is the one who bestows it, presumably the person with most to lose. So, you can see why Crovan and I thought it would be valuable to know how to break down those walls and open those boxes. Just imagine what you might discover.’

  Silyen’s eyes gleamed. His enthusiasm would be infectious – were it not for the inconvenient fact that this research was why he’d allowed Luke to be sent to Crovan. The Equal had seemed genuinely contrite about that earlier, but presumably only because he’d taken a shine to Luke, rather than because he’d grown any morals.

  And yet Luke planned to use Silyen, too, if he could. To get to Eilean Dòchais. To help Coira escape safely if there was any trouble, and maybe to show her how to wake the Skill she surely possessed. He even dreamed of Silyen pitching his weight behind the struggle against his father. None of those things would cancel out what Silyen had done to him. But Luke knew now that the world was greyer than it had appeared when he first joined the Millmoor Games and Social Club. And when he and his friends had sat in disused offices, planning their latest strikebacks against a faceless regime.

  And sometimes the person who benefited most, when you forgave someone, was yourself.

  ‘There’s something I need to show you,’ the Equal said, throwing an arm round Luke’s shoulder and steering him towards the far wall of the library, which was floor-to-ceiling French doors. ‘And the view is amazing.’

  It was. Sil led Luke onto a terrace strewn with tropical flowers. The air was warm and heavy with vanilla, coconut and sea salt, and glittering water stretched away to the horizon. The terrace was raised above a sandy beach, and from the water’s edge, the sea darkened from turquoise to deepest navy blue.

  Luke had never left Britain, and the unfamiliar scents and sights were almost overwhelming. It was one more thing the Equals denied the common people – the right to see anything beyond their own small corner of the wide, vast world. Luke had created his inner world from the fantasy realms of video games, but Silye
n’s perfect place had a real-world counterpart.

  ‘My family has an estate on one of the Confederate-controlled islands in the Caribbean,’ the Equal said. ‘We don’t go there much, because, ugh, aeroplanes, and also truly loathsome politics. But it’s beautiful and inspired me, I guess. Oh, hello.’

  Luke glanced down. Their clothing had changed to better suit the outdoors. Silyen was in a buttoned black linen shirt, while Luke was . . .

  Luke was topless.

  ‘A shirt would be nice,’ he said through gritted teeth.

  Silyen’s grin was diabolical, but a moment later Luke was clothed. In an extremely tight white T-shirt. Luke rolled his eyes. If this was Silyen’s mind, he should be grateful not to be naked.

  ‘The wardrobe opportunities honestly aren’t why I’ve brought you here.’

  The Equal nudged Luke around to where a riotous tropical garden met the sea. You could hardly tell it was a garden, because the flowers were so overgrown, but the wall gave it away. It was in a tumbledown state, thanks no doubt to the climate, and cut through the bright blooms to run right into the sea.

  ‘I never realized,’ said Silyen. ‘Because it doesn’t look at all out of place. But that’s the same wall, I swear. Watch.’

  And as Luke did, Silyen altered the landscape around them, just as Luke had been able to manipulate his own world. The sprawling foliage shrank back; the shoreline retreated, leaving an exposed seabed. Coral stood in the sunlight like petrified trees, sprouting from seaweed grass. But just as when Luke had attempted the same thing, the wall remained unchanged.

  Luke’s spine prickled.

  ‘I don’t get it. Someone’s Silenced both of us, in the same way?’

  ‘It’s stranger than that. I’ve told you that my aunt’s mind-space was the Orpen Mote of her childhood. We’d walk round it and talk and laugh and argue. Over the years, I got to know every corner of it. There was a wall that ran through the water meadow beyond the moat – an odd place for one. Then I realized how ancient it was, and decided it must have belonged to some vanished building, or been the boundary of a long-lost field.