Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  At the bottom, in almost complete darkness, she stopped before a worn, blackened slab of stone, in which a few mysterious words had been cut, their clear capitals still legible against the murk.

  ALEXANDRIA WATER COMPANY

  Kay turned towards the light of the stair, and Will’s black shape against the light behind her.

  ‘Alexandria,’ she said. ‘That’s in –’

  ‘Egypt,’ he answered. ‘We flew a long way in the night.’

  Everything in Kay’s body, everything in her heart and on the tip of her tongue, all that she could feel or think dropped like lead shot into her feet; and she stood rooted to the ground as if she were a yew, or a cypress, or some enormous, dark and silent tree.

  Will sat lightly on a slick step, and now Kay could see his face, gentle and slightly pained. Flip had gone on ahead; she could hear him knocking or shaking what sounded like a metal door. All the exuberance she had felt up on the street now curdled in her stomach, and she grew dizzy, as if she were sliding slowly into a bottomless hole.

  ‘There’s only one way we can get your sister back, Kay, and your father. And the wraith who can help us is here. He left the mountain a long time ago – the last of the imaginers to hold out against Ghast. He hated him. He still hates him. And Ghast still fears him. This, Alexandria, is where he came to hide.’ Will paused and looked at his hands, palms down in front of him. ‘Ghast wants him dispersed. His wispers are always searching for Phantastes.’

  Beside him water trickled down the heavy, square stones of the wall and ran among the outcroppings of furzy moss and slime. Kay watched the little beads gathering head, then running and dispersing, then gathering head again as they raced down the rough dark stone. At the top of the wall the stones were damp, uniformly wet all over; at the bottom, little dropping rivulets fed a whispering current in a gulley running down. Kay looked again and again over the wall, trying to find the place where the dampness became a rivulet. It was right there, but she couldn’t see it.

  ‘Phantastes is – well –’ and Will stopped for a moment and looked down at Kay seriously. ‘When someone has an idea – I mean, a really new idea – it has to come into being somehow. You have to create a thing that wasn’t there before. From nothing, something. The more you think about it, the more impossible it seems. Now, dispersal – what Ghast did to your father – is absolute. He’s gone. It’s as if he never was. Where there was something, now there is nothing. Where there was someone, now there is no one at all.’

  Kay felt a wail stiffening in her chest. Will put his hand gently on her shoulder, and together they held in the wail.

  ‘It’s absolute. But what Phantastes can do – integration – is also absolute. If anyone can find your father, if anyone can help us bring him back, Phantastes can. He’s really the only hope we have. And that’s exactly why Ghast is afraid of him.’

  ‘And Ell?’ said Kay, clenching her fists at her side.

  ‘I don’t know. But this is where we can find help, Kay. I know it.’

  ‘In the … sewer?’

  Will smiled. His eyes smiled. ‘Phantastes is still alive because no one knows how to find him; because the only way to reach him is to lose yourself in this maze of dark and ancient tunnels half drowned in water. But if you come down here and you get lost in just the right way, he usually finds you.’

  ‘Usually?’ Kay asked.

  Flip came running round the corner. ‘Five minutes,’ he said breathlessly. ‘We’ve got to be very, very fast.’

  Kay didn’t have a moment even to look confused.

  ‘Come on.’ Will grabbed her by the hand and loped after Flip, who had already disappeared back round the corner.

  They ran as best they could along the low passages and through several doors that, Kay realized as they swept through each one, Flip had probably just opened. Each one seemed to have a heavy lock, and Flip impatiently clanged each one shut behind them; and then they were off again. The tunnels were hot, and water dripped everywhere around them, so that as they ran Kay began to feel like she was chasing through a greenhouse in the dark, and at any moment she might crash into a bed of orchids or the leaves of some carnivorous swamp plant. In the occasional shafts of light from above she could see moss growing down ancient cobbled walls, and at intervals stone arches just tall enough for her to pass through. And always, beneath her feet, a little water, in places several inches deep, in places only in scattered trickles and puddles.

  ‘Any time now, Will,’ Flip muttered under his breath as he raced ahead, ducking under an arch to the next door. He called over his shoulder, ‘Two more doors!’

  They were through them in a few moments, and as they stood on the far side of the second, in the lowest and darkest of the tunnels yet, Kay could hear a rushing sound.

  ‘It’s the flush,’ Will said as they spun on their heels and set off again. ‘The city sewers flush with river water at periodic intervals during the day.’

  The tunnel abruptly ended in a huge, cavernous lake, and Kay, still thinking with forward velocity, nearly tumbled into it. Only with difficulty did she manage to stop and step back from the edge of the pavement. The lake before them looked dark, and it smelled faintly revolting.

  ‘For centuries – since the Romans – Alexandria’s cisterns have been fed by canals from the Rosetta Nile, but the canals also supply the major sewers. The waste is flushed into this lake,’ Will finished.

  Flip was sitting in a small boat that Kay hadn’t at first noticed, off to the side of the long landing. He held two oars that were poised in the locks, their blades hanging inches above the fetid water.

  ‘In!’ said Will.

  Keeping their bodies low, they both scrambled into the boat; the oars dropped, and Flip, sitting opposite Kay, began to pull at them with the strength and regularity of a piston, saying nothing. Kay turned to Will, full of wordless questions about what was happening, and why, and where they were, but he was paying no attention. Instead he was looking back towards the landing; and when she followed his gaze, she saw why.

  A metre of foaming green water suddenly began to pour through open grates around that last door, down the passage and into the lake behind them. Kay gasped to think how, if they had been only seconds slower, they might have been caught in its thundering force. It poured and poured, a cataract of colour and motion. As the water flooded through the grilles, and from other doors along the wall of the cavern, a surge began to push into the lake, lifting the boat along as Flip rowed away into the gloom.

  Will held his finger to his lips. ‘Not one word,’ he mouthed with his lips.

  Kay looked around as they surged rhythmically across the black, silty lake. Above them a dome of rock hung in shadow, here and there perforated by weak and dusky lights – slipped stones, or drains running from the streets above, Kay thought as she craned her head over her shoulder. Water dripped from the ceiling in places, and as they passed across the surface, the loud plinks fell near and far around the boat in a random pattern.

  Now the far shore began to loom out of the grey light. It was much like the one they had left. A long landing perched a couple of metres above the water. Kay couldn’t quite pull herself up without help and, as there was no ladder, she was grateful for Will’s quick lift. The two wraiths were up in an instant, jumping so lightly from the little skiff that it didn’t even rock behind them.

  While the wraiths moored the boat, Kay walked on ahead through a low, open archway that led off the landing. Beyond was an ancient passage, bathed in light from above. The door stood unlocked and swung wide, and Kay simply walked through it. No sooner had she stepped across the threshold, turning towards the mossy cobbles of the wall with her hand outstretched, than the heavy iron gate slammed shut behind her. She knew without turning that it was locked. She froze, then spun and grabbed the gate, trying to shake it free. Her stomach heaved into her throat.

  Flip was there in three instant bounds. He spoke almost without breathing, in a torrent of exa
ct, unforgettable words. Had Kay had time to think about it, she would have thought it the most urgent thing anyone had ever said to her; but her attention was riveted to every syllable. ‘You have between three and four minutes until the next flush. It will drown you if you are caught in it. The doors ahead of you are locked. There is no way you can get through them. Don’t waste time trying. You are going to have to find another way. Wherever you end up, make noise. A lot of noise. We will find you. Go now.’

  Kay stood at the gate, gripping its iron bars as hard as she had gripped anything before in her life. She stared into Flip’s eyes, and he into hers. Neither one of them would let go.

  ‘Go!’ He was shouting at her. ‘Go! Go, go!’

  Kay turned and sprinted straight ahead. Before she had gone twenty paces, the abundant light began to fail and she was soon in near-total blackness. She held her hands out in front of her and tried to keep running straight; and for two or three paces she seemed to manage it, slowly, stumblingly. Then, feeling her way along the wall to the right, she advanced more slowly. The tunnel curved, and the stone was rough and wet under her hands. A greyness took shape in front of her, then around her, and she thought she saw light coming through cracks in the high ceiling above. She tried to remember the water she had seen earlier, which had run not much more than a metre deep. If she could just climb clear of it, she could wait it out or get up to those cracks, and – who could say? – maybe she could get out. She put her hands on the wet walls and tried to dig her fingers into the cobbles. She managed to get moss under her nails but couldn’t find any purchase. Again, and again, and again she tried, first with her hands, reaching, and then with her feet. Desperation made her foolish, and she scrabbled at the wall to no purpose at all – it was too slick, the stones were too shallowly set, and she hadn’t the strength. She began to cry and, as the tears ran, her chest threw up big jerking sobs. Now she couldn’t see anything at all, and her arms went suddenly limp. She dropped to the floor and let her head sink against the wall.

  I am going to drown.

  But her head wasn’t leaning against the wall. It had hit something metal, something iron, something very painful. Scrambling round, she found that it was a low grille set into the cobbles, covering a kind of duct or channel.

  Of course. The water has to drain out of the passage. Drains.

  She crouched and felt her way down the wall, finding more grilles, hoping for a loose one. There were more. She was counting them off, darting from grille to grille, when she realized that the gathering roar around her ears was the flush, already upon her, pouring from up ahead, from above.

  Seconds. I have seconds. I have nine nights.

  Kay groped furiously, looking for any way out of the tunnel. Her pulse roared in her ears and she felt light – as light as a leaf. ‘Here, Kay’ – she felt as if someone were speaking to her, leading her from stone to stone. ‘Faster,’ said the voice, ‘Faster.’

  Then her hand hit nothing in the darkness – a gap in the wall, large, open. Without a thought she dropped to her knees, kicked out her feet and tipped herself into it. She slid down as if it were coated in butter.

  It seemed a long while that she endured the sometimes steep slide, her elbows jarring and knocking against the rough edges of the duct. She didn’t dare to open her eyes or take her hands away from her face. The rushing sound had died away, but she knew that the water might engulf her at any time. Calm before the storm. She flailed desperately every time her feet got caught up on some obstacle or lip in the stone. Her back felt as if it were being pounded with blunt wooden hammers, and her neck ached as she strove to lift her head just far enough off the duct floor to avoid knocking.

  Then, very suddenly, she came to a complete stop. She was level, flat, stuck. With her hand pressed against stone only inches from her face, she knew she was still enclosed in the narrow duct; and now she could hear the water again – higher pitched this time, but rising in volume. She thrust her hands out sideways and grappled for a hold, then pushed herself forward; the floor of the duct was just slick enough to let her continue to slide. On and on, her joints nearly tearing with the strain, she pushed, gasping for breath, until she felt her feet come clear of the ground, no longer beneath her – and then her legs, and then, very nearly, her back. She flipped over on to her stomach, pushed herself out, and hoped that there would be a floor somewhere below. She could see nothing at all, though her eyes gaped open in the rising breeze rushing down the tunnel.

  The water was almost upon her. She dropped.

  Kay had hoped to hit something and, in that last moment before she let go, had imagined a ledge, another plinth or landing like the one she had seen a few minutes before on the lake shore above. What she hit, only a metre below her dangling legs, surprised her. It felt like earth: a little rocky, but there was a squelch of mud under her shoes, too. Any second now the flush would pour out of the duct. One. Two. Three. Then she heard it gushing and – stopping – listened hard. It sounded as if water were pouring out not just here, but all around a very vast space; unlike in the cavern above, here the vault seemed to echo emptily with the draining and dripping of what sounded like a hundred spouts. Slowly, her hands still pressed to the wall, she turned round to face outwards, keeping her feet close, just in case.

  To her relief, a grey gloom lit the space in front of her so that she was able to make out the main contours of another great cavern – exactly like the one from which she had just fallen except, judging by the apparent height of the vault, much larger. Behind her, as she clambered away, the drain began to pour with water, and she could hear, if not see, the water streaming down the slope to another great lake. The lake was so wide and the cavern so gloomy that she couldn’t see across to the other side; her vision hit the obscurity like a wall. Kay stared for a long time, happy to be on her feet, relieved to have escaped drowning in the flush, but anxious about what this cavern contained, and how she was to get out of it. Flip had said that he and Will would find her, she thought. He told me to make noise. She took a deep breath. Well then, I will make noise.

  She sang. At first she tried songs she had learned at school – quietly, almost under her breath, but occasionally, on the refrains, letting a few bold notes out into the resounding dark. After a few minutes she had begun to find her voice, and the melodies started to soar a little, and even to find out the higher pitches of the cavern’s domed ceiling. Having run through all the songs from the school choir, she paused and breathed while she tried to remember the longer and more beautiful songs that her father had taught her. She sang the first phrase that came into her head and, closing her eyes as so often she had done while he lullayed his two daughters to sleep, she let his words well up:

  ‘The blue light rose like a flower in the night

  when my true love came to me;

  she laid her left hand in my right,

  and the nightingale sang in the silkworm tree,

  to me, when she came to me.

  ‘Had never holy mountain height

  nor so dread deep the sea

  as the love my true love did me plight

  when the nightingale sang in the silkworm tree,

  to me, when she came to me.

  ‘Then let the loose leaves laugh with delight

  and tremble my love to see

  where she rises like morning new, and bright,

  and let the nightingale sing in the silkworm tree,

  to me, for she comes to me.’

  With her chin lifted and eyelids softly set, Kay had drifted while singing into that state perched just over sleep in which, so many nights before, she had listened to those words and heard them in her own head. She didn’t know, nor did she worry now, whether she understood the words, or even what they were, so drowsy and warm had she become. She felt as she sang that she followed her voice into all the reaches of the vault, where it flew and bounced and then, rebounding on the water and the walls, bounced again. Well before she came to the last verse sh
e felt that she, like her song, had grown as large as the cavern – or maybe that the cavern itself was singing, and she was only standing in it, a note like any other in its huge, enduring, dark music.

  When she reached the end of the song, for a long moment she stood quietly; and in that silence she was suddenly aware of another sound, a sound that was neither the song, nor of the song, and she opened her eyes. It was the whispering swish of a pole in the water, not twenty metres from where she stood on the shore. As she followed it up with her eyes from the surface of the lake, in the gloom, the muscles tightened up her spine, gathering into a compact, rising knot like the fist of a flower: there before her on the lake was a flat boat, and in the boat stood a tall, gaunt old wraith, in his right hand the pole, in his left a large brown book. He was bearded, part brown and part white, and his hair tumbled wispily, too, down over his shoulders. Like the wraiths he wore a hooded grey-black gown, the hood slung low around his shoulders and back, and the front loosely open over his white shirt. He was barefoot, Kay noticed. For a time he did nothing at all; he simply watched her, without staring, as if she were a tree and he were lying in the grass beneath her, looking up through her trembling leaves.

  And then, abruptly, he spoke, in a voice so clear and yet so soft that Kay was surprised she could hear him, let alone understand him.

  ‘So you are here at last.’ He paused for a long time, still picking out the blue of a spring sky between her breeze-tossed branches. ‘Before I was born, that song had already been sung in my family for a thousand years or more. We handed it down from generation to generation, each one teaching the next. My mother sang it to me when I nursed at her breast, and I had it with her milk. When I was a boy, running barefoot through the fertile fields of Assyria, I thought that if I could just run as fast as the wind, I might see the Bride; if I could just burn as hot as fire, she would come to me; if I could just beat upon the rooftops as hard as the autumn rain, she would lull me to sleep in her arms. I wished more than anything to be a storyteller, to become a singer of tales. Well. It took me thirty years to sing that song: an age of man. An age of man to become a man; an age of man to learn that I must sit still to be moved, must close my eyes to see, must give myself up to discover who I am. And yet now, in this age of children, in this time of children who have lost the oldest art, who cannot sit, who cannot close their eyes, who cannot for even a moment surrender their too-cherished selves, in such an age a child now sings this song to me.’ He watched her again. Kay had rubbed her nose a moment before, but now, her hands folded loosely across her chest, she stood stock-still. ‘Tell me your name,’ he said softly.