Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  ‘Gam, I’m warning you…’

  ‘She’s still a looker though. Next job I pull off, well, I might knock her up. There! You see it?’

  They did: a blue spark darting off into the night. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing, you nosy little urks. They saw nothing, did they, Natty?’ Gam whispered now, as if the others couldn’t hear him. ‘Our secret, Nat. I just wish I could convince you to come over to me. We need a boy like you.’

  Nathan bit down the Itch, all of it, as best he could. ‘What do you care?’ he said. ‘You’ll be working for the Master by the night’s end.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He didn’t pick me the last two times. And he won’t pick you, neither. Word on the street is, he don’t like the competition. So, you’ll have to join my gang – it’s the only game in town. And anyway, it’d be good to widen your horizons. You’ve never been out of the slums, have you? The world ain’t all rain and dead-life, you know.’ Gam leaned back, licking his teeth and raising his eyebrows. He crossed his arms and put out his legs so that the boy opposite got kicked in the shins.

  Nathan took a deep breath, then turned away.

  The lardy boy wiggled himself forward, squeezing between the boys either side of him, popping out into the gangway in the middle of the cage. He greased his hair back with his fingers and nodded to two skinny boys. They leaned towards him and he whispered something that made them clench their fists. As a pack, they moved in on Nathan.

  ‘Hello,’ said the lardy.

  Nathan glanced at Gam, but he was now affecting to be asleep, with his peaked cap down over his face. Nathan looked at his feet. No Itch. No Scratch.

  The lardy boy was flanked on either side by a skinny one.

  ‘I’m Cuckoo,’ the lardy said. ‘And these are my brothers, Willy and Wonty.’ He smiled, sucked his teeth, and smiled again. ‘I say brothers,’ Cuckoo continued, ‘we all live in the same nest, anyway. No need to concern ourselves with the niceties.’

  ‘Found him in the laundry pile,’ said Willy.

  ‘Shut it!’

  ‘Covered in bird shit.’

  ‘Shut it! Don’t take notice of these two. Dad’s sick of the lot of us, never mind where we came from. If the Master won’t take us, he’ll sack us in the docks as if we was a mouser’s kittens.’

  ‘Will he?’

  ‘Won’t he?’

  ‘He will. So, we’ve got a proposition for you.’

  ‘He won’t know what that is.’

  ‘A deal. The deal is, we won’t kick your teeth in if you show us how to do that spark. What’s more, we won’t snap your spine.’

  ‘He’ll snap it. He likes to snap things.’

  ‘I do. I’m not drowning, sucking in wet canvas, coal dust the last thing I taste, because some little toad knows magic and won’t let on. We want to live, don’t we?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘We do.’

  Nathan looked up from his boots at the three of them. ‘You don’t want it. You don’t want it inside you. It’s not a trick. It’s not a game.’

  Nathan stood up. For a second he was just a small boy, barely anything in the world, but then he was lit from somewhere, from inside, his eyes blazing and his hair on end, as if the still damp air was blowing a hurricane. ‘You want the Spark?’ he said, quivering, the Itch thrilling through him, desperate to be Scratched.

  Gam lifted the brim of his cap. ‘You can’t have it. It’s his. It was passed down to him, and now, on the event of him reaching his thirteenth, he’s blooming. Isn’t that right, Nathan? Coming into his own.’

  ‘Take it,’ Nathan whispered. One touch and he’d Scratch. Just one touch.

  ‘Natty…’

  ‘Come on, take it.’

  Cuckoo came closer. Reached.

  ‘Take it!’

  ‘What’s the racket back there? Right. I warned you.’

  The cart stopped and the Fetch came back and the Itch disappeared, unscratched. The Fetch unlashed the door, reached into the cage and fished around until he found an ankle, any ankle, and dragged. Perhaps it should have been Nathan and perhaps it should have been Cuckoo, but it was a blond one who was pulled out into the street, grasping air as he went, knocking knees and skull on the wood.

  ‘You mouldy strip of leather. I’ll tan you.’

  The Fetch brought his whip down on him, whoever he was, across his cheeks and his shoulder bones, sending cracking slaps echoing between the merchant garrets. Immediately three welts shone through the ingrained mud, singing red and tight. The boy thrashed like a newly gelded weasel, and the Fetch had to renew his grip before he could add another three stripes, intersecting with the others, criss-crossing beneath the boy’s tears.

  ‘If I tell you quiet, I mean quiet. You want to make my horses’ ears twitch? You think they want to hear your nonsense? You dogs?’ Down came the whip, striking on his out-breath. ‘They… do… not… want… to… hear… your… barking!’

  The boy fell to his knees and the Fetch made to finish his lesson. But something inside – not compassion, not shame: a seizure – made him clutch at his chest. He staggered for a while, treading back and forward in a little waltz, done in a circle. Then he found his breath. ‘Oh no. Not yet, Fetch, old boy.’ He pounded his ribs to the rhythm of his heartbeat. ‘There’s years left in this old pump.’

  When he was sure all was as it should be, he pulled the boy up by the arm and slung him back into the cage. He fell by Nathan, face pressed onto the wood, eyes wide and blank.

  ‘He’ll be alright, won’t he?’ Wonty asked.

  ‘Will he?’ Willy replied.

  Nathan helped the boy back to his seat and the cart moved off.

  V

  A few yards after the Fetch Gate, the horses refused to go on. They tossed their heads and chewed their bits and in the air there was the tang of their sweat. When they stamped, their hoof-falls rang like the Fetch’s bell: high and pure. They had hit the Glass Road.

  It seemed to grow out of the cobblestones, shifting gradually from their grey-green, lichen-crusted surfaces, smoothing in the course of a few feet, growing darker, becoming one single undifferentiated block as if there had been a furnace here capable of firing the matter of the earth and glazing it. A black path like the hugest piece of jet went then in a perfect shallow spiral, around and up and over the slums, circling the city mountain, disappearing from view, coming back on the other side to cross the Merchant City, disappearing again, stretching by ever higher loops over the Pleasaunce and the forested heights all the way to the entranceway of the Manse high at the pinnacle. The boys shifted in their places – this was the Master’s work, cold and resonant with his magic.

  The Fetch got down, put his pipe in his coat pocket and walked forward, stroking the lead horse as he went. He calmed and cajoled it, whispering baby talk and giving it little kisses on the neck. From inside his coat he pulled booties of wool which he rubbed down the horse’s forelimbs. Any hint of Living Mud he wiped away with his handkerchief, any dead-life leeches too. He gradually slipped the wool down and over the horse’s iron shod hooves, repeating the process slowly and sweetly until both were spared the unnatural sensation of walking on glass. Only then did they agree to go on again.

  ‘And what do you lot think you’re looking at? Keep your staring for those who appreciate it, if there are any.’

  Where the cobbles had rattled and jolted them from side to side, the Glass Road was so smooth that the city slid past Nathan’s gaze as if he was meant to look, as if it was designed to give them a grand tour of the Master’s ingenuity. They went quickly, too, the surface having a fluence placed on it which urged travellers forward, counteracting the gradient, facilitating the Master’s business.

  Parts of the city were familiar to Nathan – the chaos of the slums, obviously, but also the chimneys of the Factorium, smoke drifting on the pressure their fires provoked, and the flat grey expanses and warehouses of the Entrepôt – but there were many things he had not
seen before. As they left his home far below, as the Glass Road looped higher, there was a square of variable green flowing out of the mountainside like factory smoke that never spread. It was caged by tall iron fences but swayed in the wind. Amongst it were limbs of wood, and creatures with wings, and strange rats holding high, proud tails of fur. Down inside were glades of light and blue-pooled water. Nathan turned and stared, but soon they left it behind the endless turning of the Road, and it blurred in the confusion of his memory. Then there were the merchant houses, with coloured glass for windows and steep, tiled gables. Between the houses were streets with lamps lit yellow, people with gloves and muffs and hoods of leather.

  Higher still there was an archway, filigreed and bronze, that spanned a road of cobbles. This road split into many paths, each splitting into more and joining again in junctions. In the spaces between these paths were cages, open to the sky but enclosed by high walls, windowed, behind which strange beasts were gathered, huge and in pairs, or families all of the one type, barracked together. These creatures were content to pace their spaces slowly, attentively, first one way, then the other, and to stare out quietly at the merchants who stared in at them in their turn.

  Then this gave way to the Pleasaunce, the houses so tall that the roofs were almost close enough to touch: enormous, ornate weathervanes, lightning rods, gargoyled gutters.

  At the end of the Glass Road the Master’s Manse jutted up.

  It was a great, black wedge laced with shining windows, colonnaded along each side with irregular turrets whose purposes were guessed at and talked over and speculated on in every corner of the city. As the cart drew closer the oppressive looming of it was felt by all. It was so black that even in the clouded gloom it was perfectly visible, blacker than anything around it.

  Drawing near, the boys – all of them – fell quiet. What was once an idea was now a cold fact, close enough to gauge the span of, close enough so that it refused to be ignored. Many a boy had said, in the familiar misery of the slums, with the bravado of those who had known absolute poverty, that nothing could be worse than scrabbling for sprats in the Living Mud, or blacking their eyes for merchant men, or fighting off the flukes that crept in from under a loose plank. But now? What if it could be worse? The unfamiliar blackness of this place seemed worse already.

  Nathan couldn’t tear his eyes away from the Manse. The very top had squares cut out of it, and slits, like battlements, and between each of these were flagpoles, black pennants blowing away east in the wind. The tower was not like a cliff: its surface was decorated, and what he’d always thought must be irregularities were alcoves in which statues had been placed – slender, elongated, figures, emaciated even, a hundred of them at least, garbed in real fabric, with circlets and torcs that reflected the light. They all gestured down – to what, Nathan couldn’t guess.

  As the cart came over the final rise, there was a flight of stairs as wide as the Circus, ascending gently to a wave of doors, twenty of them, large in the middle, a building’s height, and getting smaller at the edges, until the final door on either side might have been designed to admit an imp, or a dog.

  The Fetch pulled the horses up short.

  A man emerged from nowhere, from the earth itself, rising up in full livery, shirt cuffs and collars and a tall hat.

  ‘Fifteen,’ offered the Fetch, speaking without looking at the man, but he came back and counted the boys anyway. He leaned in through the gate and the nearest ones gasped: his face was broad across the cheeks and flat, and where his eyes might have been there was only skin without even eyebrows to break the smoothness.

  Gam prodded the boy next to him. ‘There’s always someone worse off than yourself, my dad used to say. Looks like he was right.’

  The man counted, stretching out long fingers, oddly jointed, so that the knuckles twisted back. He twitched and twisted a knuckle, like a tally man marks off a day’s pickings.

  ‘Fifteen,’ repeated the Fetch.

  ‘Thirteen,’ the man said, though he didn’t open his mouth to speak and the sound came instead from slits in his throat that opened up for the purpose. ‘One’s broken and there’s a reject from before.’

  ‘I knew it,’ growled the Fetch and came towards Gam.

  ‘No need to get hot and bothered. I’ll walk back. Natty, you’re on your own for true now. When you get back home, my offer’s good.’

  ‘What about my commission, you little thief!’

  ‘Sing for it, granddad.’

  Gam slipped away from the Fetch, out of the cage, ran then slid, knees bent, on the shiny gripless soles of his boots, off down the Glass Road.

  The eyeless man snapped his fingers and brought the Fetch to heel. The Fetch held out his hand, involuntarily, and the man gave him flat coins of silver, one for each of the boys, stroking them in turn across the Fetch’s calloused palms until they rested in the hollow in the middle, from where the Fetch snatched them away to make room for the next.

  ‘Bring them to the rear, then leave.’

  ‘Gladly,’ said the Fetch from the back of his throat.

  VI

  Round the back, the dark, broad-paved grandeur of the facade was quickly forgotten. Piles of slag gathered beneath soot-stained hatches. Smoke and steam issued from pipes coming jagged from the wall. All around were people shouting and labouring. The Fetch barked commands over the sound of the grinding of gears in the deep, so loud it shook the earth and caused the dirt to move as if it were alive with ants. He dragged the boys out of the cage two at a time, slinging them aside as if they were soiling his good straw.

  The eyeless man came and linked the boys’ hands together so that they formed a chain that might more easily be led than a crowd of children operating independently. The blond boy lay where he had been left, and the Fetch paid him no attention whatever, slamming the door on Cuckoo’s outstretched hand when he reached to touch him.

  When they were all lined up, the eyeless man took the hand of the foremost boy and led them all, crocodile-style, through the grounds and across to a flight of stairs that plunged into a scar in the earth. Here the lead boy hesitated, but the eyeless man did not, and he dragged them, the whole chain, down into the darkness.

  The noise here was even louder: metal teeth grating against each other, enormous hammers clanking, red-hot pistons slamming into steaming engines, shaking the boys’ bones with their concussions. Glass vats of the Living Mud emptied through tubes, transported everywhere, mindless flukes pressing against the glass.

  The eyeless man led them through narrow pathways between the huge machines, the smell of burning oil sensed, impossibly, through the eyes and lips as well as the nose, the earthy sulphurous tang of the Mud blending with it, each boy gripping the hand of the boy front and back and the last boy gripping the one hand with both of his. The purpose of the machines was not clear, to Nathan at least, but it was certain that they must have a purpose, one they followed with endless, tireless energy, fiercely, with no consideration for creatures as small as these boys were made to feel.

  Here the Mud was processed, but to what end?

  Nathan was holding Cuckoo’s hand, and from time to time the fat boy looked back. If it was for reassurance, Nathan had none to give, though so vicious seemed this place that he would have given it if he could. All the previous acrimony seemed of no import at all. Were they to be part of this machinery? Were they to be sent into it, to loosen trapped workings like loom-boys in the Merchant City? To unplug obstructions from the tubes?

  What information reached the eyeless man, Nathan couldn’t tell, but he moved without pause. When junctions came, he negotiated them surely. Ladders would take them up and down, and though Nathan had resolved to keep track of their movements, the complexity was beyond him after only a few minutes. They travelled for close to an hour. Never once was the noise anything but deafening, never once did the machines stop in their movements, or the Living Mud in its progress through the tubes.

  They came into a pla
ce that was relatively free of machinery. In the middle of this was a pulley on which was suspended a bucket of a size sufficient to carry two or three boys. The eyeless man stopped here and loaded boys in, Nathan, Cuckoo and the shaven-headed boy. The pulley was hoisted up without a pause and they lurched into the air. Nathan and the boy were face to face, their noses almost touching. Nathan looked up; the chain disappeared into the darkness fifty or a hundred feet above. There seemed to be no purpose to it but then, after a while, a tiny square of light appeared, like the doorway of an inn at the end of a dark day’s walk. The noise up here was lessened, and Nathan began to speak, to say ‘Do you see that?’ but when he tried, he heard himself as if through water, only very faintly.

  He cleared his throat as if the problem lay there, and tried again, but then the bucket hit a link in the chain that was out of place and the whole thing shuddered and tipped. Below, the faces of the other boys were raised to them, tiny, like the last grains of rice in the bottom of an earthenware pot. Cuckoo grabbed Nathan, and they both grabbed the chain, but the other boy put his arms outward, as if he could balance himself. Instead, he started to slip, out of the bucket, sending it tipping further.

  ‘Let him go!’ Cuckoo shouted, but Nathan reached for him, catching him by the wrist, upending the bucket so that he and Cuckoo had to kick and drag it back beneath them. Nathan felt the boy slipping. He wrapped the chain around his wrist and one leg around the boy’s waist and grabbed him by the shorts. Slowly he drew him back in, pulled him to his chest.

  It was then that Nathan saw he was not a boy at all. Beneath the dirt and the fear there was a girl with a wide mouth and wide brown eyes. She grabbed his collar and clenched with both her fists, gripping him as if she would never let go.