Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  The Master’s face flipped into a mask of horror for a second, and Gam ran back, dragging Prissy with him. Sirius sprang into the air, the Fetch puffed again on his pipe and his horses champed. Then the Master was in his doorway, hands in his pockets, and everyone stopped again.

  Nathan found he was bound with invisible wires.

  ‘I understand they give a very painful death. And undignified.’

  Nathan forced himself to move, and though the wires were thick and heavy, the Master could not prevent him. This fact seemed to be a surprise – he raised his eyebrow and adjusted his cuffs and when he returned to his efforts it was with gritted teeth. ‘My, my,’ he said. ‘We are growing strong, aren’t we? Unprecedentedly so.’

  Nathan did not reply except to increase his pace three steps for every two, and no matter how hard the Master grit his teeth it was easier now, more fluid, until Nathan’s foot touched the marble.

  ‘Enough!’ cried the Master and Nathan froze again, subject to a different influence. The Master had in his hand the locket – the one they had stolen. Padge was there too, all of a sudden, and Bellows beside him. ‘All good fun, young Nathan, but what are you here for? I sent you away, did I not, and urged you not to Spark?’ He looked to Bellows. ‘Am I mistaken?’

  ‘You are not, sir. I remember it clearly.’

  The Master took the chain of the locket and dangled it in front of him. ‘So do I. And now what?’

  Nathan said nothing.

  ‘He wants revenge, sir. I smell it in him.’

  ‘Revenge?’ the Master said. His face was a picture of bemusement, as if the word was without obvious meaning, or used in the wrong context. ‘I don’t follow…’

  ‘His father’s death, sir – I smell his thoughts – he imagines you had a hand in it.’

  ‘Me? But why? Nathan, young fellow, you have it all wrong.’

  ‘He saw me,’ said Bellows, ‘He saw the gill-men, and then his father, stiff and cold.’

  ‘I understand.’ The Master looped the locket chain over his head and lay the locket against his chest.

  ‘Mr Padge, perhaps you’d like to clear up this misunderstanding.’

  Padge stamped forward against his will, gait rigid like a blubbery puppet’s. With every step his jowls shook, and he looked left and right for help – there was none to be had. The Master had him under his control and directed him to walk down the steps. For a man so used to having those around him discomfited, he made quite a drama out of having the tables turned. Indeed, he wept and pulled at his trousers, as if by tugging at them he could resist his movement towards Nathan.

  ‘Now, Mr Padge, perhaps you’d like to tell Nathan precisely who visited his father yesterday.’

  ‘It could have been one of a hundred men.’

  ‘Specifically, his father, please, not his mother.’

  ‘It was my men and I.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘To make use of his mother.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘To take delivery of a token.’

  The Master toyed with the locket. ‘You refer to the contents of this?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Let us open it, then.’

  Padge, the top half of him at least, recoiled at this, though the rest remained rooted to the spot.

  The Master slid his fingernail along the side of the locket, and it sprang open. Immediately the fire left Nathan’s eyes. Seeing it, the Master released the pressure that held him, and he stumbled, almost ran forward. He put out his hand to break his fall, but it was the insubstantial one. He fell heavily on his shoulder.

  The chain rested where the Master’s heartbeat pressed against the skin. Inside the locket, resting on black velvet, was Nathan’s father’s index finger, wagging when the Master’s heartbeat, berating Nathan with its every movement. ‘You recognise it, of course. It is part of a spell called the Interdicting Finger, and it is used to control people. People with power.’

  Nathan surged at him, but the Master took the finger and held it up and Nathan remained in place, the power of his father’s finger holding him even against the pull of gravity.

  ‘Do not mistake the message for the messenger. I did not take his finger, and I would not have seen it taken. I am innocent in this.’

  Nathan spat. ‘How can you be? Nothing that gets done here isn’t your doing, one way or another.’

  The Master smiled, ruefully. ‘If only that were true. Mr Padge, for whom do you work?’

  Padge looked over the sea. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘She’ll kill me.’

  ‘Answer me!’

  ‘You know already.’

  ‘The Mistress. Indeed. The Mistress of Malarkoi, across the water. The witch that sends firebirds daily to destroy us all. What was it that she charged you to do?’

  Padge bit his tongue, to stop it from speaking, but the Master gestured to Bellows, who took an instrument like an ear trumpet from his jacket and put it near Padge’s lips and from then on it spoke in his voice: ‘To steal the locket, which belongs to his mother, to take his father’s finger, and to bring both to her agents.’

  The Master looked grave. ‘To do this would be treason, Mr Padge: no citizen of Mordew may consort with, or offer aid to, our enemy. Did she ask anything else of you?’

  Padge shut his eyes, and closed his mouth around his bitten tongue, but the instrument spoke unimpeded. ‘She said that I should manipulate the boy, Nathan Treeves, from a distance, using my connections in the slums, and bring him to fruition.’

  ‘Fruition? Bellows, can you make him speak more clearly.’

  Bellows adjusted the instrument and Padge spoke again. ‘He is the inheritor of his father’s power – part of it on his thirteenth birthday, all of it on his father’s death. His father was a Master – the former Master of Waterblack. The Mistress of Malarkoi, in prosecution of her war against Mordew, intended that Nathan should use that power against you, the Master of Mordew, and thereby pave the way for her eventual victory.’

  Bellows, appalled, put down the instrument and gestured for gill-men, but the Master shook his head. ‘My, my,’ the Master said, ‘How dastardly! So, you see, Nathan, my child, it is I who should vent my indignation, perhaps, alongside you. You have been made a pawn of.’

  Nathan moved, the pressure on him to remain being released, the Master confident, perhaps, that Nathan would see sense. But Nathan did not see sense.

  There was Bellows, nose aloft, and, beside him, gill-men. Padge was nothing, the Master was everything. It was Bellows and the gill-men who were there at his father’s door. Nathan rushed towards them again but froze once more at the Master’s gesture.

  ‘Nathan… I understand your feelings – really – but your anger is misplaced. Bellows? You blame Bellows? My boy, he is utterly benign. Look at him, for pity’s sake. Never was a gentler soul born. Why, he even came to offer succour to your poor father, to bring him medicine, which is more than can be said for your so-called friends.’

  Nathan bit his lip and forced himself forward, but there was no movement. Now Gam was beside Bellows, and Prissy beside him.

  Gam was struggling, Prissy’s head was down, her bonnet covering her face, but her hands clasped and unclasped as if she was trying to hold something and then letting it go in shock. When Gam nudged her with his elbows, scraped her with his boots, barged her in his attempts to move away, she barely noticed.

  ‘What is this fellow’s name, Bellows?’

  ‘Gam Halliday, sir.’

  ‘The gang leader?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Against his will, Gam nodded too.

  ‘And what part do you have to play in all of this, Gam Halliday? No? You don’t want to unburden yourself? Mr Padge, then.’

  ‘He was to take the boy into his confidence, and to bring him on when he could.’

  ‘Bring him on?’

  ‘To Sparking.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Howeve
r he could. Love, money, violence, revenge.’

  The ball? The haberdasher? The Fetch? The medicine? Jerky Joes? Everything? Nathan stopped struggling now. ‘And Prissy?’ Nathan said. The instrument didn’t answer, so Bellows repeated the question.

  ‘She was to give him something to care about,’ it said. ‘Something to love. Something to lose. So that he’d have to fight for her. Use his power.’

  ‘How terrible.’ The Master frowned and gave every impression of being mortified at what he was hearing. ‘Yet, Nathan, you imagine I am your enemy? Perhaps, in fact, I am your only friend. You even have one of my magical dogs. Wasn’t he, with his companion, my gift to you?’ The Master came down the steps, taking off his jacket, removing the cuffs from his shirt and rolling up his sleeves. ‘You and I have much in common. More than you think. These… individuals… they are not like you and me. They do not understand what it is to have power. They envy us. They fear us. Do you think they could ever love us? They cower to think they have angered you. And so they should.’

  ‘But my father…’

  ‘Your father? He could have done things very differently, Nathan. He made his choices and one of those choices was to die, or to let himself be killed. Do you think he could not have burned those worms from his lungs? He could have done it at any moment. At a whim. At the click of his fingers. He was much stronger than I am… So why didn’t he?’

  The Master stood before Nathan. He took the locket from around his own neck and looped the chain around Nathan’s.

  ‘This is yours. You should have it. The locket is an heirloom of your mother’s. The finger is your father’s. If you would know the secrets of this world, if you would have the answers to all the questions that are forming in your mind, you should come with me. Leave these people to their plots and schemes, their treacheries. Come inside, and I will make you understand everything.’

  Nathan looked back, and now where once he had seen friends, he saw only traitors. From Gam he expected nothing better. But Prissy? Was it all lies?

  It was. The softness of her touch, her affection – the alifonjers – all a trick, a plot, a design by which he would be forced into using his power to protect her. Now Gam’s actions were clear – to put her in danger so that he would use the Spark in spite of his father, who had always forbidden it. And Jerky Joes? Them too? Killed for the sake of this Mistress? To make him resurrect them. And his father’s death, to ‘bring him on’? All Padge’s plan and the paymaster – the Mistress of Malarkoi, whose firebirds he had known all his life.

  Padge, Gam and Prissy stood like murderers before the gallows, while the Master was relaxed, friendly even.

  ‘You see, your father and I knew each other, Nathan, when we were younger. We were in the same gentlemen’s club. I counted him as a friend, for my part. Your mother, too.’ The Master held out his hand and there was nothing stopping Nathan taking it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ came a shout. It was Gam. Prissy stood beside him and her head did not rise; she was holding Gam’s hand as if she was a small child. ‘Padge made me.’

  Now Prissy raised her face and it was tear-streaked. Her mouth drooped almost comically low, and her eyes were averted; she was afraid to look at him. Nathan felt it, the kick in his belly at the sight of her face, but now, rather than a longing in him, it set up anger, and anger with a passion as strong as the love had been. Now the longing was for her punishment, to make her suffer, and when he turned the Master was calm and quiet and his hand was still outstretched.

  ‘I make this offer very rarely. Isn’t that right, Bellows?’

  ‘I have never known you make it even once, sir.’

  When Prissy eventually met his eye, he saw that it was all true, that she had done those things, that she had taken him for a fool, played him. Her eyes were wide with regret and sorrow and guilt, but he felt the heat rise in him, burning against the locket, until it kicked against his chest, knocked on his buttons, rattled against them.

  ‘Come, Nathan, do not make yourself suffer.’

  Nathan went. He took the Master’s hand.

  The world dissolved before his eyes and they were gone.

  It was all gone.

  ‌Part Two

  The Char Cloth

  XLVI

  Then they were in a room.

  The Master was holding his hand and now, with the others gone, it seemed like an odd thing for him to be doing. The Master didn’t seem to notice.

  They stood in front of a bookcase, a low wide thing not even the height of a man, on top of which plants and ornaments and swatches of various coloured cloths were littered and from which a tumble of books threatened to avalanche. The rest of the place was equally untidy, glasses and plates and charts and notebooks and inkwells and jackets and boots jumbled around the room with no logic or order to any of it.

  The Master divined something of Nathan’s attention. He freed his hand, quietly, and clapped it together against the other. The room became tidy. ‘Better? I don’t have many guests, so you’ll have to excuse me. Come.’

  As he walked away he was silhouetted against a huge, dark window, and when Nathan walked towards it, his reflection came towards him: an anxious, thin, hollow-cheeked boy, eyes seeming to swell with tears, dirt-stained, hair straggling over his forehead, his father in miniature, drained and underfed. Around his neck hung his mother’s locket, shining in the lamplight.

  The Master came up behind him and put his hand on his shoulder, but it passed straight through. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘What happened to your arm?’

  Nathan showed him, the ghostly limb glinting.

  ‘Not to worry; I can fix that.’

  He went to a drawer and passed Nathan a small round metal container. Inside was a cream. ‘Twice a day after bathing; it’ll be as good as new in a week.’

  Nathan turned his back on his reflection.

  The Master kneeled beside him. ‘Your old life isn’t gone, Nathan. Not yet. Its marks on you are still there. They might always be there.’ He twisted Nathan around by the shoulders until the window was behind him, showing whatever his back looked like. ‘But we have an opportunity, you and I, to make something new of you. Here, in this place, is everything you could ever want or need. I will use all my resources to turn you away from the terrors you’ve experienced. What do you think of that?’

  The Master’s face showed every sign of genuine concern. Nathan followed the soft lines of his wrinkles where they gathered at the corners of his brown eyes, traced the slight pursing of his lips up into his cheeks. But he made no reply.

  The Master nodded, perhaps a little ruefully, stood up, and walked away into his room. He had a desk on which a bowl of fruit sat. In this were perfectly yellow bananas, pink peaches, green and red apples – things Nathan had only seen before if they were on the turn, or bruised, or brown, or in some other way not up to the standard necessary to attract a purchaser of the merchant class. The Master ignored them entirely, sat on the edge of his table. ‘Not convinced?’ he asked Nathan. ‘Still thinking of your old life? Don’t worry; that’s to be expected. In fact, if you want to see your friends, this mirror will show you everything.’ The Master beckoned him forward, urging him on when he was reluctant to come.

  Nathan walked to where the Master sat, looked where the Master pointed. The mirror was hung too high on the wall for him to see himself in it and it looked quite ordinary.

  ‘I will have Caretaker put it in your room. Now you’re alone, Nathan, it’s up to me to help you…’ He looked down, straightened Nathan’s jacket, wiped a strand of hair from his forehead. ‘… in whatever way I can.’ Then, as if as an afterthought, but very carefully, he arranged the locket containing the severed finger of Nathan’s father – the Interdicting Finger – so that it hung over where Nathan’s heart was.

  Nathan breathed calmly. ‘I want to be helped,’ he said.

  The Master smiled. ‘I thought you might.’

  XLVII

  Nathan’s room was war
m, clean and comfortable. There was a bed, wooden, thick with sheets and quilts and piled pillows. Against one wall was a wardrobe, so large that it could not be squeezed into the alcove beside the fire. Nathan turned the catch on the wardrobe door. The pressure behind it made it leap open: inside there were cleanly pressed clothes of every cut and colour. He let his fingers run along the hem of the leg of a pair of trousers.

  Beneath his feet were polished boards and when he walked a few steps forward and then back the nails in his boots clicked and clacked; he didn’t sink into the floor. He took off one boot and slid his stockinged foot to and fro until the wood beneath it shone wet. Between the planks there were the thinnest gaps, no more than the width of a fingernail. He took off his sock and let his toe trace the path of one gap, backwards and forwards.

  He kept his back to the window and took off the other boot and sock, stuffing both socks into one hole, and then he slid boots and socks beneath the bed. His trousers were splashed with Mud, damp with rain, torn in places. He undid his belt and they fell away, slapping at his feet like a slick of mud. These he kicked beneath the bed too, and his underthings, and then his jacket and shirt and the vest, all redolent now of the slums.

  He stood there naked and small, thin as a starved dog, the locket hard against the poke of his bones, his skin tissue-thin, one arm a ghost. Where the locket touched him, it was warm.

  In a little room off there was a deep enamel bath. Nathan filled it.

  When there was enough steam to mist the window, he looked up. The bathroom mirror was misted too, and a vague grey shape, about his size, stood before him.

  Nathan’s nails were black with filth. The lines of his knuckles were black, too, as if inked in, a sketch of a boy’s hand, an etching, and across the lines were hatched red and white scars and scratches and scrapes. His palm was the same, the lines telling of his bad fortune.

  When the bath was full, Nathan hitched his leg over the side and followed it in carefully, inching into the hot water, toe first. His skin bled dirt in muddy clouds that spread out into the clean water. When he was in, the water came up to his shoulders. He wrapped his arm round his knees and stared at the overflow, a gaping black mouth set into the white enamel.