by Alex Pheby
Nathan made Gam a new eye – stronger than his lost one, more resolving of detail and colour, magical in its abilities – and he made him new teeth, hale, and hard as diamonds, and all his scars and injuries Nathan undid, making of this slum child something close to perfection.
As he and Prissy watched, Gam swelled, grew, shucked off the influence of malnutrition and despair on his development, until his clothes stretched at the seams and his face matured by years.
‘No, Nathan,’ Gam shouted. ‘I don’t like it.’
The words had barely left his lips and Nathan doused the Sparks. He was not regretful, though. He felt instead that he knew better than the boy. The Spark told him so.
‘One last job, Gam.’
XLIV
The Fetch was at his table, hunched over a chipped earthenware plate. He gripped his spoon in his fist, wrapping his fingers over the shaft so that its bowl seemed to grow straight out of his flesh. Beside him a black iron pot, half-filled with a thin, white broth, steamed and filled the room with the sour tang of onions. There were carrots on the table too, and apples, but they were put to the side, arranged in ranks and files, immaculately cleaned and ordered by size. The Fetch brought the spoon up and sipped the broth between pursed lips. When he put the spoon back to the plate, he smacked his lips.
Gam waited in the doorway and Nathan knew he would need to go in first.
A meek child would have feared to knock at the Fetch’s door, would have stood peering through the glass until he was noticed, but Nathan was no longer meek. The time for waiting was gone, the time for reluctance gone. His father was gone. He went to push the door open, but his hand passed through it. He opened it with his other hand; the room lit as he crossed the threshold, Sirius pacing beside him.
When the Fetch looked up, he froze, one drop of soup the only thing that moved, dripping from his dumbstruck lower lip and disappearing into his beard. The blueness of Nathan’s aura made a death mask of the Fetch’s jaundiced pallor, and, had he been a corpse indeed, he would not have moved any more than he did.
‘Nothing to say, Mr Fetch?’ Gam asked, still dizzily blinking from the unfamiliarity of his new eye.
When his attention turned to Gam he rose in his seat, as if he remembered suddenly who and where he was. ‘You again? You look different.’
Nathan stepped forward and now he was fully inside his light filled every corner of that place, glistening on cracked glass and making cobwebs shine.
‘Get your horses,’ Nathan said.
‘My horses? You don’t speak about my horses, boy.’
Gam went up to the table and placed both palms down. ‘Watch your tone. You might be a cruel, lonely old sod, but I know you’re not stupid. When was the last time you saw anything like him?’
Gam didn’t point to Nathan. He didn’t need to. The Fetch raised his eyes slowly, and whether there was soup still on the old man’s lips, or whether it was something else, his tongue came out and licked. ‘Saw the Master once. On his balcony, he was. Up high on the tower. His gill-men had taken the boys, and I was checking the horses’ holsters and bits. Can’t be too careful with my girls; they’re my beauties. Don’t want them getting scratched. Or worse. It was a clear night. Winter. Something caught my eye. Moonlight, I thought it was, or a shooting star. It was neither of those. Right up there at the top, amongst the statues, he was there. Must have been the Master, looking off west, over the sea. Glowing he was. Blue like your boy is. He raised up his arms and a great ball of light come. He threw it off, off to Malarkoi, I guess. That’s what the gill-men say, amongst themselves. At the Mistress, they reckon. To burn the witch to ash. I don’t know. Anyway’ – the Fetch jerked his chin towards Nathan – ‘he looked like that.’
Gam nodded. ‘You’re taking us up to the Manse.’
The Fetch flinched and pulled back. ‘No, I ain’t. Not this time. He’d burn me to ash too, the Master, for bringing something like that.’
Gam nodded again. ‘Well, the question is, then: when do you want to get burned, Mr Fetch? Now, or when we get to the Master?’
Nathan’s light blazed so bright in the Fetch’s kitchen that it etched the pattern of their shadows into the wet wooden boards.
The Fetch had to blinker the horses before they’d settle. When they saw Nathan, they snorted and pulled against the reins and Sirius had them lifting their legs and clattering their hooves.
‘Usually they can’t wait, my lovelies, to be out of their stalls. You calm now. The Fetch will take care of you.’ But even as he said it, he turned away and looked at his feet.
‘Can’t you do something about it, Nat?’ Prissy said.
‘About what?’
Gam went over to the nearest horse and dragged the blanket from its back. The Fetch went to stop him, as if by reflex, but pulled back. Gam spat through his new teeth, still huge in his mouth, took the blanket to Nathan and draped it over his shoulders. At first it made no difference, but when he pulled it close around his neck and gathered it at the throat the light that had poured into the world now struggled through the tight weave of the hemp and when Gam took the Fetch’s hat and put it on Nathan’s head the courtyard dimmed back to the grey drudge it always was – a little bluer, perhaps.
‘Don’t lift your face,’ Gam said, ‘and we’ll be alright.’
‘You’ll be going in the cage, dog and all,’ the Fetch growled. ‘They know what to expect; you’re not riding up in the front with me.’
Gam began to object, but Nathan held him back. If the Fetch intended anything, some trap in wood and leather, then it would fail. If he caged them in iron it would fail. Nathan raised the brim of his hat, and the Fetch stood illuminated like rocks picked out by the beam from a lighthouse. The old man quivered to see him and turned his back. Nathan nodded and the three of them went into the cage.
Once they were sitting, the Fetch took his bell from the shelf and geed the horses out of the yard. With one hand he held the reins and with the other he rang out a slow clanging rhythm that fought against the deadening mist to call unwanted boys to him from across the slums.
The Fetch went inward, away from the Sea Wall, into that port-side jumble of driftwood and ropes woven from seaweed that led to the start of the Glass Road. Today he had more pressing concerns than the gathering of brass, and he took the shortest way, not seeming to care whether one boy or three got into the cage behind him. Today he seemed to have no heart for the chiding of his passengers; all who came aboard were spared his opinion of them. They were spared the tales of the Master’s predilections. One or two boys even managed to keep hold of their coins, and these they clutched so tightly that you could almost read the outline of the thin, broad discs through their bones and skin.
Though the Fetch took the quickest way, the cage was full in less than half the distance they had to travel. Nathan, Gam, Prissy and Sirius sat nearest the exit so that each of the boys had to squeeze past to find his seat. It was as if a representative of each of the types of boy filed past them – a thin one, a fat one, a sad one, one who cowered and one who strutted, but all of them were black with mud and damp around the edges.
Nathan recognised none of them.
The sad boy, a tall knobbly specimen who rested his face in his hands and whose lank hair fell greasy almost down to his knees, was crying.
Gam took a breath and began to speak, but Nathan got there first this time. ‘You ever hear the story of Solomon Peel?’ said Nathan from beneath the brim of his hat. Somehow the crying child knew the words were directed at him. He shook his head, so that the mist that had gathered on his hair dissipated, and tears dropped to splash on the toes of his boots.
‘Solomon Peel was tall. He had long hair like the tail of a horse, dirty like it too, on account of how he was a slum-boy and never got out from the dirt for long enough for the rain to wash him clean.’
The boy looked over now, to see who the storyteller was, but aside from the horse blanket and the hat, there was nothing to see.
‘One day his dad decided there wasn’t room for a tall piece of work like poor Solomon. He himself, the father, was a shortish man, and the mother too, which led him to wonder, as Solomon grew, whether he was his flesh and blood at all, or whether his mother hadn’t been playing away, or consorting unnatural with the Living Mud. So, when Solomon outgrew the nest and didn’t show any signs of getting shorter, his father was only too glad to get shot of him, having five short stocky sons of his own about the place. He gave him a brass coin and told him to listen out for the Fetch’s bell. Then he barred the door to him and that was that.
‘Now Solomon was a weak child, overstretched like a pollarded sapling and just as unlikely to bend in a changeable wind. When he saw the Fetch, he started to cry. The water came off him like dew on the Sea Wall when the firebirds shake the shore, and for this reason the Fetch prized him very highly. He put him right towards the back, where you are, where he couldn’t be bothered or consoled much.
‘The Fetch don’t do nothing unless you can match a coin to the effort, and this he did because he knew one thing that Solomon didn’t know – that the Master has a liking for criers. You might think that all boys can be made to cry, and you’d be right, but some boys cry more than most, and some other boys cry more than that. Solomon was one of this last sort – like you seem to be.
‘The Fetch knows that a crier commands double from the Master’s gill-men, which was why he was careful with him. What does the Master want with a crier? Well, a boy’s tears are a precious thing; you can use them in all sorts of ways: in potions, in tinctures, some say the Master uses them like a merchant uses salt – to give flavour to his food – but the truth is that when you weep, part of your soul goes away in the water, part of you, and the more you cry the more of you goes.
‘The Master can work with this, can put your soul in his spells, can take you and use you in the other side of things – the magic world – where he gets his power from. And Solomon, he cried so much, when the Master encouraged him, that he cried himself out entirely and died, leaving only his dry skin and bones behind him. Now he does the Master’s bidding on the other side, and when the wind blows on the Glass Road you can hear him sobbing long, choking, tearless sobs from the other side as he does the Master’s will.’
Gam nodded in confirmation, and the crier’s head drooped until his hair rested on his knees, and when he cried, he did so silently.
‘That one,’ said Nathan, ‘was for Jerky Joes.’
XLV
The Fetch cracked the whip, reaching down to stroke the horses’ flanks in turn after each swish, so as to apologise, but he drove them faster than he normally would. He had no urgency when it was the boys’ needs he was meeting, but now he had reason of his own not to tarry, he found the slow lope of his beauties insufficient. Even if he seemed to regret using the whip, he drove them on regardless, his comforting hand less and less authentic, the touches more like slaps.
Down below, the roofs of the city jerked with each rotation of the wheel. Nathan watched: a chimney stack clogged with twigs and feathers, a square of flickering candle light from a gable room, and later, as the spires of the Merchant City began to dominate, their blades cutting the sky in mimicry of the Master, the pavements made of wide plates of glass or polished marble, reflecting the spires and then the Glass Road itself.
Suddenly, here was the Manse, looming into view, and now Nathan pulled his hood down over his eyes, and Prissy held tightly to his elbow.
It was clear from the start that the gill-men would not be fooled. Even as the cart rounded the approach, the horses stamping as the tree cover fell away and the hum from the engines buzzing in the air, they were rigid, sniffing, faces to the sky. As the cart mounted the drive more of them appeared like ants from the Underneath until they were everywhere. Some fell back to protect the side door, others went forward, dull green arms emerging from their sleeves, inch by inch, clawed hands grasping at what they yet had no understanding of.
The Fetch pulled the cart up short.
Gam knocked on the back of the cage. ‘What are you stopping for?’
The old man took his pipe from his jacket and lit it slowly, said nothing. Gam leant forward as if he meant to force the Fetch onward, but Nathan put out his hand. ‘Prissy,’ he said, ‘let the boys out.’
She slipped the unlocked catch, but the boys didn’t move. The gill-men came closer, surrounding the cart on all sides now but keeping their distance from Nathan.
‘Come on, you rats!’ Gam shouted and dragged the boys one by one to the back of the cart. No matter how hard he pushed them, they stayed in, arms and legs fixed and stiff.
Nathan got to his feet and let the blanket fall to the floor. It was as if daybreak had suddenly come, blue daybreak, casting red-hued shadows which fell always away from Nathan. They were fidgeting, flickering shadows of boys, and a cage of shadow lay across them. Heat too, like the scorch of a fire when dry wood catches.
The gill-men stopped as if ordered, froze to attention, faces up, and Nathan went to the side of the cart. He placed his hand on a wooden bar. Beneath his fingers the wood turned brittle, became quickly red, then grey, then white, all in a second before it fell to nothing. Nathan followed it to the ground.
When his boots hit the Glass Road it rang like a pealing bell, squeaked like a wine glass when he walked. What water had settled – sea dew, mist – skittered away from his footfalls, boiled off into tiny droplets that ran in circles, desperate in their last moments to flee.
Gam followed, dragging Prissy with him, Sirius beside them, and though the Fetch affected not to notice anything but his pipe, the tobacco lost the flame.
‘Little filth,’ said one of the gill-men – the nearest. ‘You glow like a firefly. Come no closer, or we will snuff you out.’
Nathan did not stop, and a cadre of the monsters came at him. Sirius surged forward, but they all fell at once, desiccated, like leaves from a tree. More came and more fell until, as one, the rest turned and retreated back to the place from which they had come, disappearing into nothing, as fog disappears in the face of the noon sun. Sirius barked after them in both triumph and warning.
Gam went to the Fetch. ‘Take him to the Master.’
‘You take him!’
Gam looked for Nathan to punish the old man’s insolence, but Nathan ignored it.
‘Round the back.’ Gam pulled Prissy as if by making her move he could lead Nathan with him. Prissy came, all the while looking over her shoulder, but Nathan didn’t follow. His eyes were fixed on the facade.
Who the facade was meant to welcome wasn’t clear. The Glass Road ended not at the foot of the flight of stone steps but to the side of the Manse. The steps led down to a vertiginous drop, black, carved from the rock. It was a smooth cliff face, scorched from glass and melted. If this was the front of the place then it looked out only across the sea, as if those intended to mount it could cross the water unaided, could stride through the sky without a road to carry them.
On the uppermost step, framed by two great fluted columns, stood the Master.
He, like the facade, was stubbornly facing out to sea, as if the light that scorched through Nathan’s pores was invisible to him, as if it didn’t wash across the night sky, bleaching out the stars, blurring the contours of the moon, as if it didn’t pick out the undersides of the clouds, making them impossibly and ominously heavy.
Nathan strode forward, though there was nowhere for him to walk. Even Sirius wouldn’t go with him.
‘Gam, stop him!’ Prissy screamed, but when he saw the Master, Gam drew back, gripping Prissy by the shoulders.
‘There’s nothing left to do now. It’s all been done.’
The Master turned to face Nathan just as his foot left the solid ground and he moved into the air. It was not even that the Master turned, he switched instead, so that now his body was at the correct alignment without time having passed.
Their eyes met, and even across the distance there
was a connection, a passing of information like a shout or a slap, but quicker.
As Nathan’s foot drifted down to rest where the ground would have been, the Master lifted his chin and in a blur his hands moved, and now beneath Nathan’s feet a framework appeared, a scaffold blue as Nathan was. When his foot struck it, threads of glass filled with light and glowed like a sun-struck web below him. Nathan put his weight on it as a natural consequence of moving forward, and there was no insubstantiality that might have made him recoil.
‘Nathan Treeves,’ the Master said. His voice echoed in Nathan’s skull and made the back of his throat burn. ‘You return.’
Nathan stopped. Gam and Prissy were dumbstruck, stilled with their mouths open and Gam’s arm across Prissy’s chest. Sirius was frozen in place, caught between a snarl and a lunge. Even the Fetch was motionless, the breath still on his lips, a plume of newly lit pipe smoke, solid as a dead cloud, anchored to the bowl of his pipe.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your father.’
Nathan bit his lip and tried to move, but he was as paralysed as the others. When he tried to speak the words were stifled, slow-moving, deadened.
The Master came down the steps, slipping his hands into his trouser pockets. When he came, he skipped, almost boyishly, taking two steps at a time. ‘We knew each other very well, your father and I. Very sad business. Very sad. But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, so they say, and here you are, blazing with his power. I hope he taught you well.’
Nathan seethed and now he felt a shift, the slightest movement in his muscles.
‘Lungworm was it? Terrible. Easily cured, though. If you know what you’re doing.’
Nathan leapt all at once onto the lowest step, whatever force that held him finding itself outmatched.