by Ian Whates
No, Dewar didn't for one moment regret the excesses he had perpetrated in those dark, fear-ridden days in Thaiburley. He did, however, acknowledge that during that period his talents had been employed by the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. He fully intended to put that right. Dewar was going home.
SEVEN
Initially their party passed through populated corridors, though Tom barely noted the fact. He spent the first part of the journey lost in thought. The sounds of movement, of conversation, the laughter of children and the scolding of worried parents – all the accoutrements of a living, bustling metropolis – washed over him to leave only the briefest of impressions. Afterwards he would recall people's faces: an elderly couple staring, two young children being held back by an anxious mother, and a smartly dressed youth looking puzzled, but he wasn't really paying attention at the time.
Kat's bartering with the Prime Master had made him feel uncomfortable and he was trying to work out why. It brought a number of matters sharply into focus, causing him to question things he'd previously taken for granted. First among them, what was he doing here?
Kat's reasons for coming along were clear enough. The leverage the Prime Master had applied was not so very different from the methods Ty-gen had used in persuading her to take Tom across the City Below: both boiled down to bribery. Was she really so materialistic, and was that a true reflection of how little their friendship meant to her? Or was he being naïve?
If Kat's motivations were so obvious, his were anything but, even to him. Throughout all that had happened he'd trusted in the Prime Master, who was undoubtedly a lot wiser than Tom, confident that the older man knew best and was happy to do whatever he advised. Kat hadn't.
It now seemed to Tom that all his life he'd been happy to let others make decisions for him, passing on the responsibility of his own life to somebody else. First it had been his mother, then Lyle and the leaders of the Blue Claw, and now the Prime Master. Maybe that was the real difference between him and Kat. Maybe that was why she always looked for the angle while he just went along with whatever others recommended. He'd been in a gang of one kind or another from the very first, and had never learned how not to be.
If so, maybe it was high time that changed. Thanks to Kat's example, he found himself wondering for the first time what he was likely to gain from all of this. Sure, he was trying to save the city, but that hadn't been enough for Kat. Was he a fool for not standing up for himself a bit more? He hadn't wanted to leave the streets and be taken under the Prime Master's wing, but it had been taken for granted that he'd go along with the process. He hadn't wanted to leave the city and go in search of the goddess Thais, but the Prime Master had been insistent, arranging matters without paying heed to his own concerns or desires. He hadn't wanted to return to Thaiburley with the weight of the city's survival resting on his shoulders, but the goddess had never allowed for any other course of action, and he didn't want to be heading off now into corridors infested with Rust Warriors to save the city and everyone in it, but no one seemed to consider the possibility that he might do anything else. And here he was, doing exactly as expected.
Of course Thaiburley's survival mattered to him, it was his home, but it was a lot of other folk's home as well. Shouldn't saving the place be down to other people? Tom felt a familiar sense of the inevitable, of life rushing past beyond his control. There had been times along the Thair's course when he'd felt swept along by circumstance in much the same way that a piece of flotsam is propelled by the river's current. If anything, events had only gathered pace since then, attaining a momentum that felt unstoppable, inevitable. Not that digging his heels in at this stage would have been a realistic option in any case, hemmed in as he was by Council Guards and the Blade. But, assuming he survived this, Tom determined that things were going to change. He'd make his own choices from here on in, no matter what others might expect of him.
"We do what we must, Tom," said a familiar voice. "Life doesn't always follow the path we expect, and we all make sacrifices. Some more than others, granted, but that's simply the way of things."
He looked up, astonished to see the goddess walking beside him. "You came back," he said.
"In a sense."
How could she possibly be walking here? Where were the Blade that moments ago had hemmed him in? "You're not real," he said, as hope that the burden of responsibility might be lifted from his shoulders evaporated as rapidly as it had blossomed.
"Oh I'm real all right, just not physical. Matters proceeded far more quickly than I would have liked. You're not ready. The information you need is still being assimilated, so I sent part of me back here to help you, to guide you."
"How?"
"Inside your head, of course," as if that much should have been obvious.
"So only I can see and hear you?"
"Exactly, and don't worry, I'll remain dormant most of the time, only emerging when I'm needed."
"Thanks a lot."
"For what?" Kat asked. The goddess had disappeared and he realised he must have spoken that last phrase out loud. "Are you still sulking with me for grabbing hold of you back in the Stain and hitching a ride?" Kat said.
"What? No, don't be daft."
"So what's with the silent treatment?"
He shrugged. "No reason."
"That's all right then, if you're sure."
He forced a smile and nodded. "Yeah, I'm sure."
Inside he was seething, wondering how much of his thought processes were now laid bare to the goddess, and whether that information was being shared with the real Thaiss back in her citadel, or was this aspect of her self-contained? Either way, he didn't like it and felt used yet again. With an effort, he stopped worrying about the goddess, reckoning there was nothing he could do about her presence no matter how much he resented the intrusion. To distract himself from fretting about this unwanted passenger, he turned his thoughts on Kat. It felt odd travelling with her again. Not awkward, just a little odd. He supposed it was because he'd grown accustomed to the reassuring presence of Mildra beside him – her warmth, quiet wisdom and gentle words. "Warm and gentle" were hardly the words he'd use to describe Kat. She was all spiky darkness and pointed steel to Mildra's comforting pastels and softness. He'd spent a lot longer with Mildra, of course, but somehow having Kat here felt more natural and, given what they were likely to be facing, he wouldn't have had it any other way.
Presumably she'd been giving matters a bit of thought as well, because as they walked she said, "So, when did you become such a POP?"
Person of imPortance: not a phrase Tom had expected to ever hear said of himself. "Beats the hell out of me," he admitted. "It sort of crept up on me when I wasn't looking. But it doesn't mean anything. I'm still the same nick you took halfway across the City Below."
She laughed. "Yeah, right. Don't seem to remember any Council Guards coming with us that time around, let alone the Blade. And what do you mean halfway? It must have been at least two thirds."
Tom grinned. "More like three quarters, but only because you took us so far in the wrong direction."
"Hey!" She cuffed his arm. "We had demon hounds after us, remember? Anyway, you were the one who wanted to avoid Blood Heron territory."
Tom's good humour soured slightly as he took in the towering ebony figures around them. "Wish we were back there now," he muttered. "Thaiss, Kat, when did everything get so complicated?"
"Know what you mean. We didn't have much of a clue what was going on then, either, but at least we were still in the streets. All these corridors, they're just plain wrong. Makes me feel I can't breathe in here."
Tom had almost forgotten how unnatural the enclosed world of the Rows had felt to him when he first encountered it. Until Kat's comment he hadn't realised how quickly he'd adapted to this environment. "You get used to it," he assured her.
She snorted. "I don't intend to be here long enough to get used to anything, thanks all the same."
The comment bro
ught home to Tom how much he'd changed. Kat was still very much a part of the City Below, but he wasn't certain he was, not anymore. If he didn't belong on the streets, where did he belong?
The thought sat uncomfortably, which must have shown on his face. "You okay?"
He made a point of gazing again at the Blade and Council Guards surrounding them. "What do you think?"
They lapsed into silence.
The longer Tom had spent in Thaiss's citadel, the more sense the initially random images and histories had begun to make, a process that continued after he'd left. As things came increasingly into focus, one particular piece of information stood out; not because it was obvious or recurring, but because it was completely absent. He'd meant to ask the goddess about it before he left, but in the end their departure had been so rushed that he'd forgotten to do so. Only now, as he marched through the corridors of the Heights towards goodness knew what fate, did the matter resurface.
The thing that his ever-inquisitive mind kept picking over was the fact that nowhere, in all that he'd seen and heard, had Tom discovered any mention of a name for the goddess's brother. It was as if someone had deliberately purged every trace of his name from the records, all records. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Tom felt certain this had to be the case.
"I hope you're not gonna go all moody on me," Kat said. "Because no one else around here is exactly a barrel of laughs." She glanced towards the stone-faced Council Guards marching beside them.
"Sorry. Just thinking."
"I noticed." Then, after a slight pause, "Tell me something. What did it feel like, killing the Soul Thief?"
Tom kept walking but inwardly he froze, wary of discussing the matter given how sensitive Kat had proven to be on the subject. "You won't hit me?"
"Not this time."
"It was…" He hesitated, trying to find the best way of expressing the experience. "It was unlike anything I've ever felt before. At first there was this numbness that crept over my head, then it was as if everything was stretching, pulling upwards, and it hurt. For a split second as I fought back, before she was gone, I saw her; I mean really saw her for what she was."
"Go on," Kat said softly as he fell silent.
"There were all these scraps of personality, tiny bits of those she'd killed, I guess, which she'd kept a hold of. I had the sense that there was something desperate in the way she clung on to them, as if they might replace some of what she'd lost… not real whole people, not by a long shot," he said quickly, remembering what Kat had once told him about the Soul Thief taking her mother. "Just their distant echoes."
"What was it she'd lost, then, her humanity?"
"No, nothing like that, she was never human."
"What then?"
He took a deep breath. "She was a Demon, one that had fallen from the Upper Heights a long time ago."
"You're kidding me. A Demon?"
"Originally, yes, like I said, a long, long time ago." Tom couldn't believe this; he was sounding like the Prime Master talking to him. "You see, Demons aren't alive in the same sense that we are. They're spawned straight from the core and linked to it far more directly than anyone – you do know that all the talented in the City Below and the arkademics and healers draw their abilities from the core?"
"Yeah, I picked that much up as we've gone along."
"Well, whenever the core is renewed…"
"Which is what we're on the way to do now, right?" she interrupted.
"Right. When that happens, the Demons are reabsorbed, they become part of the core again, and then a whole new generation of them is born. The Soul Thief must have been a Demon that somehow got left behind – not from the last generation, she's been around for too long, but the cycle before or even the one before that. Somehow she must have missed or resisted the call to return to the core with the others, fleeing down to the City Below and hiding out in the Stain instead. And she's been there ever since, living on the scraps of core material she's been leaching from the talented, using their link with the core to survive."
"Why, though? What made her different? I mean if that's what her kind are supposed to do, why didn't she simply line up with the rest of them and get reabsorbed?"
He shook his head. "No idea. Cowardice? A stronger drive to survive than the others?"
"And she's been preying on us ever since."
"Yeah, raiding the streets at intervals, whenever she's had to, picking off a few of the talented each time and draining them before vanishing back to the Stain; until the next time she gets hungry. So many people die on the streets, who's going to notice a couple more?
"And because she was so careful, people tended to dismiss her as an old wives' tale," Kat murmured. "A myth that was useful for scaring disobedient kids into bed." She shook her head. "What changed this time? Why did she attack so openly and take so many?"
Tom shrugged. "The core's corrupted. Everything's screwed up. Maybe she had no choice – maybe she couldn't get whatever she needed from just a few; or maybe the corruption fed through and drove her to greater lengths."
"A breckin' Demon." Kat shook her head. "Thaiss, who'd have thought? And what does that mean for us right now, do you reckon?"
"In what way?"
"Well, you say this core thingy is corrupted, what would that have done to the rest of the Demons, the ones still living in the Upper Heights? If they're so closely linked to the core, won't they have been corrupted too? Are we going to end up facing a whole army of Soul Thieves trying to stop us from doing whatever it is you're supposed to do?"
Now there was a disturbing thought. Tom hadn't even considered how the corruption and the hundred years of delay in the core's renewal might have affected the Demons. "I don't know," he admitted. "I honestly don't."
She snorted. "Seems to me there's a brecking lot you don't know."
"That's what I keep trying to tell everybody," he assured her, "but no one ever wants to listen."
They came to a large, sealed door blocking the entire corridor. A pair of the Blade stood sentry before it. At the party's approach, one of the obsidian figures moved, pressing something in the wall, and the door swung ponderously open.
"We're crossing into hostile territory," Verrill said, speaking to them for the first time since they'd set out. "Everyone needs to stay alert and please, keep the noise down."
Tom nodded. Kat just raised her eyebrows, as if to say "oh yeah, and what are you going to do about it if we don't?"
She kept her mouth shut though, as they crossed the threshold into a lighter, brighter world. The corridors here were wider, airier, and even Tom felt he could breathe more easily. Their party adopted a new formation. The Blade clustered tight around Kat and Tom as before, but the Council Guard spread out, some staying close while others provided both an advance and a rear guard – four ranging ahead of them, checking every branching corridor, and four lagging several paces behind.
This wasn't the only difference. The whole atmosphere of the city had changed. Gone were the voices, the bustle – the background noise of living so easily taken for granted and now noticeable only by its absence. Silence surrounded them. It was as if when passing through the door they had stepped into a completely different realm and were now moving through a city of ghosts, which, Tom supposed, in many senses they were. The sound of their footsteps reverberated through the stillness, so loud that each and every slap of leather on tile might almost have been a deliberate act of defiance.
Tom wanted to say something, just to hear a noise that was indisputably human, even if it was only his own voice, but at the same time he felt reluctant to break the pervading spell of silence. He willed Kat to make some irreverent remark, but she remained uncharacteristically quiet, perhaps heeding the captain's words or perhaps simply daunted by the eeriness that surrounded them.
In such unnatural stillness any sound was bound to be magnified, its significance exaggerated by unlikely portent. So it was with the peculiar series of noises that r
eached them from somewhere ahead, steadily rising above the karumph of collective footfalls.
A series of pronounced clicks and then a louder snap, as if something was being wound up and then released to smack against a wall. The pattern repeated constantly. Tom tried to picture what could possibly be causing such a sequence and drew a blank.
The way ahead opened into a large quadrangle. The ceiling rose to twice its former height, clearly claiming space from the Row immediately above. The floor changed abruptly from plain and functional to a mosaic of brightly coloured tiles. Corridors led from each of the four sides of the square while black-painted wrought iron stairways dropped down from a balcony above, presumably leading to the higher Row.