City of Light & Shadow

by Ian Whates

  Kat's words came to him then, as his brain caught up and had time to process what she had shouted earlier. "What the breck are you playing at you dumb ass? Do something!" What indeed. Then, presumably as he reacted, she'd yelled, "Go, kid! Give it hell!"

  Same old Kat. Tom drew strength from the familiarity of her presence. He allowed his ability to well up inside him, spurred on by the emotions that raced through him – fear, embarrassment, even shame at his need to be saved, but most of all there was anger; at the Rust Warrior for nearly killing him and at himself for nearly allowing it to. He felt the energy of his talent spread through his body like water rushing to fill a vacant vessel. Power sang through his veins, making his skin tingle and fingertips burn. When he couldn't contain it anymore, he let go, lashing out at his enemies. Not just at one Rust Warrior this time but at all of them. Tom could sense them, their presence appearing to his inner eye as dark yet amorphous nodes of being. They possessed a porous, honeycomb fragility in comparison to the black solidity of the Blade. In a heartbeat he had reached out to touch all those in his immediate vicinity, crushing every single one of them in the process.

  The moment passed, his talent receded, draining out of him as rapidly as it had risen, leaving behind only a sense of something missing.

  Kat on the other hand was animated and still pumped up. "Woohoo!" she crowed. "Go Tom! When you get angry, kid, you really get angry."

  The words sounded muffled, as if heard through a filter, his awareness still expanding from its deadly focus to encompass the outside world once more. "Will you stop calling me 'kid'?" he said, though more from habit than from any genuine offence.

  "After seeing this, maybe I will," she replied.

  The attacking Rust Warriors were gone. There were no bodies, no smouldering cadavers, just a few rusted flakes still settling to the floor like autumnal leaves.

  Tom made a quick headcount of the survivors. Two of the Blade had been lost and three of the Council Guards had fallen, leaving just one of the white and purple and five of the towering ebony figures. There was still no sign of Captain Verrill or those men who had stayed with him to fight as a rearguard, and Tom doubted there ever would be.

  "Sir, are you able to continue?" the lone guard asked. The man's Heights accent struck Tom as almost comical amidst so much carnage, and as for his composure – no outward sign of fear, no apparent shock at seeing his colleagues cut down around him. Thaiss, how Tom wished he could be more like that. The guardsman might almost have been one of the Blade.

  "Yes," Tom assured him. "I'm ready. Let's get this over with."

  The Blade seemed to draw even closer around them as they pushed on, two in front, three behind. The surviving guard stayed tight by Tom's side, Kat at his shoulder. If he'd felt uncomfortable with such close attention before, it didn't bother him in the least now. Something had changed; his attitude. Tom no longer felt like a precious passenger guarded by formidable bodyguards – the soft centre of the group. He now felt fully part of things, as formidable as Kat and as powerful as the Blade. Normally such a concerted use of his talent would have left him drained and weak, but not this time. The power had receded but not completely. He could feel it, primed and ready, a mere thought away. Instead of being exhausted after the fight he felt energised, alive, and itching to go again. His talent bubbled within him, barely in check. He didn't know whether this was due to carrying a cylinder of pure core material on his back or simply the adrenalin rush, but he wasn't complaining either way. The Rust Warriors were welcome to attack again. When they did, they wouldn't know what had hit them.

  NINE

  Tom's spirits were lifted by Kat, who had been in buoyant mood since the battle. Her confidence was infectious. Their mastery of the Rust Warriors, or rather his mastery, gave them every reason to hope that the worst might be over. Bone flu begat the Rust Warriors, and they were used to seize control of key areas in the city. That seemed to be the extent of the plan. If so, they'd now learnt to overcome their enemy's chief, perhaps only, weapon. All they had to do was keep sharp and focused and they couldn't fail. Tom wanted to get the core replenished as quickly as possible so that he could get on with the rest of his life, his new life, which would be lived on his terms. Yet a nagging corner of his mind worried that things couldn't be this easy – if the loss of more than half those sent to guard them could really be considered easy.

  One thing that Tom was increasingly conscious of as they moved ever closer to the heart of the city was how pleasant the surroundings were. He recalled the dingy oppressiveness of the Swarbs' Row – the first of Thaiburley's internal corridors he'd had any real experience of – and this was a long way removed from that. Everything here was light, bright and airy. Since they'd entered the residential areas even Kat seemed to have forgotten her discomfort at being enclosed.

  Tom wondered which Row they were actually in. The Heights, certainly, but which one? He recalled the levels verse – the rhyme that was supposed to enable a person to work out exactly where in Thaiburley's labyrinthine passageways they were at any given moment.

  From the Medics' Row where lives are saved

  To the streets of the Bankers where fortunes are made

  From Residence Rows where Kite Guards patrol,

  And learned folk study the soul,

  Arkademics and Masters with wisdom to share,

  The city's leaders, entrusted to care…

  He snorted. Fat lot of good that did him. Where was the verse that said:

  From empty corridors and silent places

  Where Rust Warriors wait to steal your faces…?

  Okay, so maybe he'd never make a poet.

  He guessed this had to be one of the Residences; certainly he could well imagine they might look something like this. Not that it really mattered, he was just curious.

  As if to emphasise exactly how pleasant life in the Heights could be, they stumbled into a virtual park, just a short while after the pitched battle in which Tom had frozen and so nearly died.

  Due to the straight corridors, Tom could see the park long before they actually reached it. He could hear it too. Bird song. Tom had almost forgotten what that sounded like. Songbirds were a rarity in the City Below. Those few that had managed to establish themselves were likely to end up in the frying pan or the cook pot long before they reached old age.

  The nearer they came, the more he was able to see of what looked to be a garden, and the more it struck him that those living in the City Below were provided with nothing like this. Once he would simply have been awed by something like this, not questioning why those up-City should have such luxuries when his own Row didn't, but he was increasingly coming to question such inequality rather than just accepting it.

  The sounds that now washed over them reminded Tom of waking up beside the Thair to the feel of his cheeks gently warmed by the sun's early rays and the chorus of a hundred tiny voices raised in song as if to welcome the day – a celebration of the new dawn. People in the Heights really had no idea how lucky they were.

  The open area the group then stepped into was much larger than the play park and had the added benefit of not being littered with dead people. On the contrary, everything here seemed very much alive, even when it proved not to be.

  A small bright-breasted bird shot across the open square above their heads – a flash of brown and red. As it flew, the bird squawked out alarm at their intrusion, its strident call rising above the background chorus. The bird looked so realistic and yet…

  "It's a projection, isn't it?" Kat said, her voice quiet, as if she didn't fully believe her own words.

  "Yes," Tom replied. "I think it is."

  "But how…?"

  "No idea."

  A small brown creature – like a tiny rat but fluffier and somehow cuter – scurried across their path to disappear into the undergrowth. Kat laughed in delight, a child-like sound that surprised Tom coming from her.

  The floor of the square was carpeted in close-cropped g
rass while around them bushes and even a few trees rose in a profusion of greens – bright, dark, glossy, matte – shades and shapes abounded. Here sat a bush of tiny leaves that veered towards yellow, there a bunch of spear-like grasses standing tall and straight and pale, while beside them was a plant whose long, pointed leaves were variegated and so shiny they might almost have been waxed. Where the grasses stood rigid with military precision, these leaves spread outward and curved towards the ground. Small low benches carved from white stone were dotted among the undergrowth, each one about the right size for two people, giving some indication of this small park's purpose.

  One particularly tall flower caught Tom's attention, a single bud that stood proud at the tip; a rod-straight stem which emerged from a collar of spear-like leaves. He bent to examine it and as he did the bud rapidly opened to reveal a beautiful bright red flower, the petals curving upwards as if to suggest an elegant wine glass. At the same time the flower released a puff of air in Tom's face. He jerked back instinctively but needn't have worried. This was not an attack, but proved to be no more than a concentrated blast of what he assumed must be the flower's normal perfume. Sweet, floral, if a little sickly for his taste.

  He reached out to hold the flower's stem, feeling the hardness of metal beneath the fibrous green. A device, not a living thing at all, despite the very convincing appearance. Curious to see if everything else was similar, he reached out to touch the broad, fern-like leaf of a taller plant nearby. His hand passed straight through its gently swaying form. A projection.

  "None of this is real!" he said, feeling almost cheated.

  "Some of it is," Kat replied as she lifted her hand to suck on the tip of a finger. "The brecking thorns on this one are at any rate."

  The entire park proved to be exactly that: an ingenious blend of the real, the artificial and the completely illusory; and much of the time it was impossible to tell one from another.

  "This whole place is trying to play mind games with us," Kat muttered.

  Tom knew what she meant. The park was doubtless intended to relax people, to ease stress and inspire feelings of tranquillity; a retreat for city dwellers who might otherwise never experience the outside world. Maybe under normal circumstances that worked for him, but not today. When you were moving through hostile territory, constantly looking over your shoulder and suspicious of every shadow, a place where everything was geared to fool the senses took on a far more sinister aspect.

  Even so, he couldn't help but be impressed by the artifice, the thought that had gone into planning all this.

  "Gardens of Tranquillity, they're called," the lone surviving Council Guard supplied. So, Verrill wasn't the only one among the White and Purples capable of being human. "People come here to relax… Or they did."

  Kat snorted. "Creepy."

  The feature that most drew Tom's attention was the waterfall, though his initial impression was anything but favourable. The falls burbled down one wall – a dozen or so small pools in a descending series from which water bounced and tumbled, one to another, the whole set among rugged grey stones topped with mosses and tufts of grass. Tom might have been more impressed if he hadn't seen so many examples of the real thing during his time in the world outside. This seemed no more than a crude and clumsy imitation by comparison. At least, it did until he stepped to one side and was suddenly granted a view beneath the surface of the rock face.

  A succession of small containers, like oblong buckets, were being carried on a conveyor belt to the top of the falls, where each tipped and deposited a basinful of water into the uppermost pool before heading back towards the ground on the opposite side of the belt, to be immediately replaced by the next container in line for a repeat performance. Huge toothed wheels turned ponderously in the background, keeping the buckets moving at a constant pace.

  Tom took a step backwards and the rock wall appeared solid and rocklike again. Forward and it became translucent, like tinted glass, once more displaying the fall's inner workings. He repeated the process several more times, backward and forward, marvelling at the transition.

  Kat was like a small child, running her hands through illusory leaves at different speeds to see how much disruption it caused the projected images, sniffing at the scent-laden flower mechanisms – which were scattered throughout the park.

  She looked across at him and grinned. "Have you ever seen anything like this?" she asked.

  "No," Tom admitted, "never."

  One of the things he'd always admired about Kat was her maturity. It wasn't simply that she was a year or two older than him, she had about her a sense of having seen and experienced things far beyond his ken. More than once it had made him feel like a fumbling child in comparison, yet in this environment she was the one acting like a child. It was a side of her he'd never really seen before. He doubted whether many people had.

  The Blade moved across this contrived pocket of the outside world unperturbed, walking through the projections as if they weren't there, causing Tom to wonder whether they could actually sense them at all. If so, they clearly weren't fooled by the pretence and could differentiate readily between the real and the illusory.

  Tom couldn't, and he found himself enchanted by this whole virtual park, if not to the same degree that Kat was.

  "These gardens are used for education as well," the surviving white-and-purple said. "Groups of children are brought here to learn about the outside world."

  "Why not just take them outside?" Kat wanted to know.

  The guard shrugged.

  The educational element made perfect sense to Tom. Why else would you have artificial flowers puffing out exaggerated concentrates of perfume in such extravagant fashion? Kat had now triggered so many that the place was starting to smell like the sweetest apothaker's shop in the world. Tom could just imagine some aged sage instructing a group of attentive children on the colours and perfumes of the various blooms. Of course, if the kids in the Heights were even remotely like those in the under-City, the "attentive" part was never going to happen, but it still conjured up a comfortable image.

  One patch in particular drew Tom's interest: long spindly stems growing taller than he stood, bedecked with broad, flat, serrated leaves which resembled opened hands. Why this apparently innocuous bush should appeal to him so strongly he wasn't sure, but there was something in the way the leaves gently danced, as if marking time by shifting from one delicate tip to another, and the burnished redwood stems bent grudgingly forward and back, that he found enchanting. He stepped forward, straining his neck and pushing his face in among the insubstantial stems as if seeking a whiff of elusive perfume.

  "Snap out of it," a voice said; the goddess.

  Tom ignored her, irritated at the interruption.

  "It's a trap, can't you feel it?"

  What was the old crone going on about? Then he remembered the meadow of flowers in the mountains above the Jeeraiy. He'd had no notion that his actions were being influenced then, could something similar be happening now? Once alerted, he found the intrusion, sensed the presence seeping into his thoughts. The hypnotic plant, he realised; somehow this invasive presence was leaching out of the projection and into his mind.

  "Well, now that you've finally woken up, do something about it," the goddess said.

  He did. He flexed his power, destroying the insidious tendrils of attempted control before following them to their source, to the very systems that generated the virtual elements of the park.

  A dark form appeared at his shoulder, towering over him. A black lance shot out, punching through the illusory plant, through the floor and into whatever circuits lay beneath. There was an arc of energy, the acrid smell of burning and a wisp of smoke. The willowy plant disappeared as did the presence which had attempted to invade Tom's mind. In fact, all the projections flickered out across the entire park, which suddenly seemed reduced and less magical as a result. The lance withdrew to reveal blackened and broken circuits. The Blade turned and walked away w
ithout saying a word.

  Tom stared at the hole in the floor. It opened into the guts of the very systems that ran the city.

  Thaiburley itself was turning against him.

  It had been a trap, just as the goddess claimed. One not triggered by the Blade or by Kat or the Council Guard, but only by him. The realisation shook Tom. Up until now there had only been the Rust Warriors to contend with, but it was obvious their enemy was adapting, that it could utilise other tools when needed, and that they couldn't relax for an instant.