The Book of Dead Days

1

Darkness.

Two hours to midnight. Boy sat crouched in the box.

As usual, his legs were going to sleep under him, tucked up in the tiny dark space hidden inside the cabinet. Above him, he could hear Valerian going through his routine. Boy could only hear his voice as if from far off, and tried to work out where he had got to. It wouldn’t do to miss the cue; it wouldn’t do at all. But Boy knew he didn’t really need to worry. He used to try to count his way to it but had always got lost somewhere, and anyway, there was no need-the cue was obvious enough.

Boy tried to shift his weight ever so slightly, attempting to get some feeling back in his legs. It was no good. The box had been designed specifically for him, and Valerian had seen to it that there was no more than half an inch to spare in any direction.

Suddenly there was a solid thump on the top of the box: the first cue, which meant “Get ready, Boy.”

Boy heard a noise from the audience, faintly. He couldn’t see them, but he knew what the noise meant. It was a murmur of expectation. Valerian had just stepped onto the cabinet and was even now whipping the crowd into greater excitement as he outlined the extraordinary nature of the sight they were about to see.

Boy even caught some of Valerian’s words through the hefty oak panels of the cabinet.

“… most miraculous… feat of obscure…”

Oh-ho! thought Boy. That means we’re nearly there.

“… the Man in Two Halves Illusion…”

He readied himself, flexing his toes inside the boots, three sizes too big for him. Thump! Thump!

The cue! Boy went to stamp his legs out through the hinged flap at the end of the box but was suddenly hit by a powerful cramp. His toes curled painfully under him and he instantly felt sick. If he were to ruin it…

Desperately he tried to kick again. Still the cramp ate up his legs like a snake, biting, making him unable to move them.

Thump! Thump!

Valerian was getting cross. Boy shuddered as thoughts of what he might do to him passed through his mind. He made one last effort and shoved again. At last his legs responded and he stuck them out of the end of the box, wearing the huge boots identical to the ones Valerian was wearing.

Now, straightened out, Boy waved his legs a little. He knew this would be safe, because he was supposed to wiggle them at this point, to show they were real. They were supposed to be Valerian’s, hence the matching boots.

As Valerian had got into the front half of the box, Boy’s legs had not appeared where they should have done and the illusion must have been in danger. But Boy seemed to have got away with it. Now that his legs were sticking through the flap, the pain began to ease a bit. He got a little more air and could hear better too.

Valerian shouted, “Behold!”

Boy felt his box start to move stage left. He heard the audience gasp as they at last understood what was happening.

“Look!” he heard someone cry. “He’s gone in half!”

It was true. From where the audience sat, they could see Valerian’s head and shoulders projecting from one half of the box, while his legs moved away from him in the other part of the contraption. The single cabinet had become two boxes, running on metal tracks. There was a clear space between the two parts of his body, and the crowd went wild.

“It’s true!” shouted a woman’s voice, somewhere near the front.

Of course it was not true. It was an illusion. Although Boy knew full well what the audience were thinking as the halves of Valerian’s body went in opposite directions across the stage, he knew how it was done. He was, after all, in on the trick. Boy felt himself smile as the crowd began to applaud wildly. Then he remembered the fiasco with his legs, and the smile faded. What would Valerian say?

Sober again, Boy prepared to pull himself back in at the right time. He could sense the automatic mechanism of the contraption beginning to turn the heavy brass cogs in reverse as the two halves of the box drew back together. He felt the boxes bump gently. His cue. He panicked and whipped his legs back inside just as Valerian stepped out of the other half of the device. Boy timed it perfectly and now, cramped back in the box, breathed as deep a breath as he could. He felt the machine being trundled offstage. The stage was being cleared for the finale while Valerian took the applause of the crowd.

Offstage, Boy pushed the lid of the cabinet up with his head until there was enough space to lift it with his hands.

“Out you come, then,” said a stagehand.

Boy took the man’s hand gratefully, his legs still not working properly. He climbed out and stood for a moment in the wings, rubbing his sore calves and watching as Valerian began his grand finale.

The Fairyland Vanishing Illusion.

Boy was not needed for this part of the act. He watched Valerian from the side of the stage.

How many times has he done this? Boy wondered. He had forgotten how long he had been working for Valerian, but it was years. Boy could only guess at how many thousand times he had hidden in boxes, pulled levers, set off thunder flashes and opened trapdoors. He helped Valerian with trick after trick, week after week in the Great Theater, which was as much of a home as anywhere to Boy. In recent years he had probably spent as much time in the theater as he had in his room in Valerian’s house, known as the Yellow House, back in the Old Quarter.

Boy decided to watch the grand finale from the front of the theater, but not with the audience. He had a special place, and he wanted to be as far away as he could when Valerian came offstage.

He made his way past the painted canvas scenery drops and ropes and wires that cluttered the world just beyond the view of the public, pushing past hands and other performers. Briefly, he glanced at Snake-girl, who sat braiding her hair in a corner, then rounded a corner and bumped straight into someone.

It was Willow, the girl who helped Madame Beauchance, a rather fat singer, into her costumes. Willow was just like her name, thin and wan. Madame had joined the theater about a year ago, and Willow had immediately been made her servant. Boy had only spoken to Willow properly once, though. Madame had been screaming for hot water in her dressing room, and Boy had given Willow a freshly boiled jug he was taking to Valerian. Afterward he didn’t know why he’d done it, and he’d got in trouble with Valerian over it too.

“Can’t you look where you’re going?” Willow said, then saw who it was.

“Oh, it’s you,” she added, and rushed past before Boy could say anything. Fetching something for Madame, no doubt. Her mistress was difficult, though nothing like Valerian was to him. No one was like Valerian.

“Sorry,” said Boy, but she had gone.

Boy moved on. He had other things to worry about. He knew something was going on. Something with his master. Valerian had always been erratic, sour-tempered and unpredictable. Violent.

Now he was these things, but something else as well that Boy had never seen before. He couldn’t quite put it into words, but if he had really thought about it he might have realized that Valerian was preoccupied. Worried. Maybe even scared. But it would never have occurred to Boy that Valerian could be scared. It was Boy who did the being scared and the worrying-always waiting to get a hiding for any slight mistake he made.

He headed for the stairs, where a group of musicians blocked the way.

“You all done for tonight, Boy?” asked the violinist, an oldish man with a bent nose.

Boy didn’t answer, but forced a smile and squeezed past.

“Poor monkey,” he heard another of them say as he made his way to the secret gallery in the “gods” above the highest row of boxes. A tiny staircase led almost up to the roof space and opened onto a tiny corridor. He wasn’t really allowed in the box. No one was. It was a secret place that only Korp, the director of the Great Theater, was supposed to know about, though in fact everyone knew it was there.

The door was locked, but Boy took a piece of metal from his pocket and flicked the three tumblers of the lock in no time at all. He had learned one or two things from Valerian in their time together. In fact, apart from what he’d picked up living on the streets, most of what Boy knew about anything had been taught him by Valerian.

He dropped down the couple of feet into the box. There was the little stool covered in red velvet and the small hollow table inside which Boy knew was a bottle of the director’s favorite schnapps. In the front of the box was a small window. Boy carefully lifted the blind that covered the glassless hole, and peered forward. The glow from the footlights sparkled in his eyes.

Boy knew a lot about Valerian’s tricks. He helped perform many of them and helped assemble others. But the grand finale was something very different. So spectacular was this illusion that Valerian was known throughout the whole City for it. It was probably for this trick alone that the Great Theater was still in business.

The theater lay in the heart of what had once been the most glamorous part of the City, the Arts Quarter, now fallen into decadence and ruin. The other acts that performed there were by and large terrible. The crowds would eat and drink and talk and laugh throughout the evening, paying little or no attention to what passed onstage. They had come for one thing: the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion. Many came night after night. Others, new arrivals in town, travelers from distant parts, were about to see it for the first time.

Boy knew nothing of the workings of this trick. He had seen it a thousand times, maybe more, and still marveled every time. He supposed that it was too valuable, too extraordinary or too complicated for Valerian to tell anyone how it worked.

By the time Boy got up to the box, Valerian was already well into the piece. Boy craned his neck so that his nose was projecting a little through the view hole.

The Illusion featured a short and frankly stupid play about a drunkard who stumbles across a gathering of pixies dancing on the mountainside. They disappear back to fairyland, but the man overhears their secret words and follows them. He captures one of the little people and brings him back to the human world, determined to make his fortune with the fairy.

Valerian was reaching the climax of the show. He moved to the mouth of a cabinet built into a tree trunk, stage right. Stage left was an identical affair. He was acting without joy or passion. He knew he didn’t even have to try to inject any excitement into the audience. They were already beside themselves with anticipation.

Boy watched him carefully. Something was wrong- Valerian seemed even more uninterested than usual. He was impatient, eager to get it done with. A note had been delivered to Valerian just before the show. Did his strange mood have anything to do with that? Valerian had grown somber as he’d read.

Onstage, Valerian spoke the lines as he had many times before.

“What did those little people say?” he asked, staring at the ceiling, addressing no one in particular. “Aha! I have it!”

He stepped into the tree-trunk cabinet.

“Ho! And away to fairyland!”

And he vanished. No more than half a second later there was wisp of smoke from the second tree trunk and he reappeared, holding a tiny humanlike figure cupped in his hands. It seemed to be alive. It wriggled in his hands and you would swear you could hear a little voice coming from it. It appeared to be dressed in leaves and flowers. It could have been male or female, but it was certainly a fairy.

Then, just as Valerian, playing the drunkard, appeared to have achieved his goal, there was a double flash of lightning, for a split second the fairy seemed to grow to the size of a man and then both the fairy and Valerian vanished, back to fairyland.

The crowd erupted into huge cheers and shouts of delight.

Boy sat back on the red velvet stool and felt something dig into his back. He looked round and jumped out of his skin. Valerian sat behind him, glowering.

“You, Boy,” he said, “have let me down.”

2

“Name the five principles of Cavallo,” Valerian snapped.

They hurried through the dark streets of the City-the vast, ancient City that sprawled away into the darkness around them in all its rotting magnificence, a tangled mess of grand streets and vulgar alleys, spent and decrepit. Fat houses squatted on either side of them like wild animals lurking in the gloom.

The City. Once it had been the capital of a powerful empire, which now only existed in the peculiar mind of Frederick, the octagenarian Emperor, shut away somewhere behind the high walls of the Palace.

The Emperor’s warped memories were utterly unknown to Boy. His world began and ended with Valerian. As the two of them made their way along a particularly horrid street called Cat’s End, the midnight bells began to strike. The twenty-seventh of December had begun.

Valerian strode a pace ahead of Boy, but held his coattails to pull Boy half running, half stumbling along behind. And he was testing Boy in mind as well as body.

“Well?” he barked.

“Mystery,” Boy panted as they sped along. “Mystery and preparation and… sorry.”

He stumbled on a cobblestone. Valerian dragged him, practically in the air, around a corner and into a side street. A shortcut home.

“What?” yelled Valerian. “Mystery and preparation and what?”

“Direction?”

“Misdirection, you goat!”

“Misdirection,” said Boy, and then before Valerian had a chance to shout again, “and practice and skill. Natural skill,” he added hurriedly.

Valerian grunted in satisfaction, but didn’t slow the pace. Boy stumbled after him, pulled sideways by the tails of his coat.

Up in the secret box after the show, Valerian had glared at Boy for a good long while, so there had been no doubt that Boy was in a great deal of trouble. Then he had dragged him out of the box, along the tiny passageway, down the stairs and out into the night without even bothering to collect the money for the performance. Boy had hardly had time to think, but a question was bothering him. Badly. It had taken him at least three minutes to get from the side of the stage up to the box. It had taken Valerian no more than a couple of seconds. At least, that was how it seemed, but Boy knew from experience not to trust anything he saw Valerian do. You could never be sure, not really.

They moved on through the City, Valerian clutching Boy’s coattails, looking, from a distance, like some strange beast. They were in Gutter Street. Although there were no street signs in this part of the City (it was much too down-at-heel for refinements like that), nevertheless Boy knew where he was. They passed the Green Bird Inn. Boy had been hoping they might stop for Valerian to have a drink or two. Or more. Then he might have forgotten about Boy’s slipup. But he strode by without even a glance at the tavern. Boy gulped and staggered on.

“All right then,” said Valerian. “And if you don’t observe the Five Principles you may as well just rely on luck, which is what you made us do tonight. Anyone half sober or with half a mind would have seen-”

“I’m sorry,” said Boy.

Valerian stopped suddenly and Boy ran into the back of him. He turned and looked down into Boy’s eyes.

“Sorry.”

“Well,” Valerian said, and his voice was suddenly quiet, “well, it’s not important. Really.”

He dropped Boy’s coattails and began to head for home, still walking fast.

Boy had been thrashed by Valerian before for much less than this. More confused than ever, he watched him go for a moment. Valerian’s tall figure, his longish gray hair flowing behind him, was about to disappear round another corner. Although Boy knew the area, he grew alarmed.

Unpleasant things had been happening in the City recently. Even in the better areas, horror was not unknown. There had been a spate of terrible murders, and the inns, taverns, salons and courts were full of talk of these crimes. The murders were remarkable for their particularly gory nature: with the bodies sometimes drained of blood. There were rumors of the ghastly apparition responsible-“The Phantom.” There had also been a series of grave-robbings in some of the many cemeteries around the huge City. Many people thought the two were linked.

“Hey!” Boy cried. “Wait for me!”

It was deep into the night, and they were now in one of the worst parts of the City. Nearly home.

3

Korp, the director of the theater, began closing up. Half an hour ago he had finally managed to throw the last drunken idiot out, and before the man had even hit the mud of the alley Korp had slammed the door after him. He didn’t have to worry about being too nice to his customers. They would come night after night, as long as Valerian kept doing that thing about fairies.

Director Korp sat for a while in his office, staring into space. He felt old and tired and fat, because he was. He daydreamed, remembering days when he had traveled the continent with the greatest show ever assembled. The show had included a giant, five midgets, a two-headed calf, a snake-woman, a disappearing lady, a levitating man, twin wild boys and many, many more. It was all far behind him, and though he missed the excitement of his youth, he had a theater to run now, and he would run it as best he could till the day he died.

On the walls around him hung portraits of some of the stars who had appeared in his theater. Cavallo the Great, a legendary magician. There was Grolsch, a famous escapologist whose career had come to an untimely end one night when he failed to escape, and Bertrand Black, a bear-tamer who had had a similarly rapid demise on stage. But all the faces were from days long gone, when things had been different, more lucrative.

Korp scratched his bald head for a minute or so, then, without looking down, put his hand into a drawer in the ornate desk at which he was sitting. He fumbled around, still without looking. He put his hand on his pistol, and shoved it aside. It wasn’t what he wanted.

“Yeush!” he said, with a frown. “Where’s it gone?”

Then he remembered the bottle he’d left in his “secret” box. Wearily he got to his feet and made his way down the darkened corridors backstage. As he passed one of the dressing rooms he noticed a light.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“Oh, Director,” said a voice from inside. “It is Madame.”

He stuck his head around the door.

“Ah!” he said. “Madame! Madame Beauchance! May I say how exquisitely you sang tonight!” He smiled a wide smile.

Madame Beauchance appeared to ignore this compliment.

“It will have to change,” she said.

“Madame?”

Now Korp noticed the girl, Beauchance’s assistant, kneeling at the singer’s feet and rubbing her ankles. The girl glanced up at him.

“Madame means…?” he began again.

“I mean,” said Madame, not even looking at Korp, “that I will not continue to appear in an inferior position. To that prestidigitator.”

Korp blinked.

He felt tired. He wanted to be in bed with Lily curled up around his feet. Lily was his dog.

“The magician,” whispered the girl, almost unheard.

“Exactly!” cried Madame Beauchance.

“Ah!” said Korp.

Valerian.

4

A little after midnight.

Boy had caught up with Valerian at the top of the next alley-a particularly nasty little gutter of a lane called Blind Man’s Stick, where the roof tiles of the buildings on either side were close enough to touch in places. Here and there it was possible to catch a glimpse of the night sky between them, but Boy was not interested in the stars. Not yet.

He clung tightly to Valerian as they made their way quickly along the foul-smelling culvert. A minute later they emerged into a relatively wide street. An open drain ran down its middle. Valerian stepped across it in a single stride. Boy, small for his years, leapt the gap and slipped as he landed.

He sat dazed in the stream, then, realizing where he was, leapt to his feet.

“Oh!” he said. “Ugh!” His bottom half was covered in unnameable filth.

“Ugh! Oh!”

Valerian did not even glance back.

Boy limped after him. They turned a corner and crossed a final street.

Valerian stopped for a moment at a wrought-iron gate let into a high stone wall. He rattled one of the big keys from his pocket in the lock, and shoved the gate open. Only now did he look back long enough to be sure Boy had got through the gate with him; then he swung it shut and rattled its lock one more time.

They were home.

Boy stood dripping, trying not to smell himself as he waited in the small walled courtyard that lay between the iron gate and the front door.

Valerian opened the door with another key from the huge bunch and went inside.

The house seemed to tense as Valerian shut the door behind them both. He said nothing but stood absolutely still, as if waiting. Then he turned and looked at Boy.

“What is that vile stench?” he barked.

Boy shrugged.

“I fell over…”

“For God’s sake go and get clean! Then come to the tower.”

“Yes, sir,” said Boy.

He shuffled down one of the corridors that led off the hall.

“And be quick. You have work to do!”

5

Boy ran along two corridors and then up three flights of rickety wooden stairs to his room. “Room” was perhaps something of an exaggeration. Room, or space, was one thing the place he slept in did not have. There was a mattress, which was actually quite comfortable though it was just a shame, thought Boy, that he did not get to spend more time on it. The smallest of openings (“window” would have been too grand a word for it) let in some light. This was in the sloping roof that made up one wall of his room. His bed lay against the single vertical wall, the entrance lurked in one of the triangular ends to the space, and in the opposite one was a tiny door behind which was an even tinier cupboard. Inside the cupboard were all Boy’s possessions. A spoon he’d found in the street and particularly liked. An old pair of boots that were too small and worn-out to wear anymore. A silk scarf he’d stolen from a rich lady but that was too nice to wear. Some small empty tins that nested inside each other and some pencils that Valerian had given him to practice his writing.

This was his room.

The day Valerian had put him in it, Boy had come straight back down and eventually found Valerian sipping port in the library.

“But I can’t stand up in it,” Boy had complained.

“Then kneel down,” Valerian had said, and cuffed him round the ear.

Boy was used to clambering about in small spaces. He seemed to spend his life doing it: onstage in coffinlike cabinets and offstage in the theater too, slithering along to Korp’s supposedly secret box.

Small, cramped, dark spaces had filled Boy’s life. Long ago, he had even been hiding in one the day he was found by Valerian in an old church, St. Colette’s. Boy had crammed his narrow frame into a space at the top of a pillar in the nave.

Since he had been working for Valerian he had not seen much daylight, never mind been allowed access to such private information as what time it was, or what day or month, for that matter. It was, in fact, March 6 when Valerian had found Boy, but only Valerian knew that.

Valerian had probably chosen Boy, taken him on, because of his expertise at squeezing into ridiculously small spaces. Boy had forgotten much of that life; it was years ago, and unimportant compared to the business of every day. Every day, trying to avoid trouble, trying to avoid upsetting Valerian or getting something wrong and…

He could remember one thing about the day they met. From the small gap made where the arch fluted away from the pillar, he had seen Valerian for the first time. He was deep in discussion with someone Boy now knew to be Korp, from the theater.

Even then Valerian looked haggard and pale. His nose, long and fine, twitched in the dusty atmosphere of the old church. His skin was gray; so was his hair. He looked like a dead man walking. But his blue eyes were full of life, and his gaze roamed the dark spaces around him.

Then Boy had heard his midnight rumble of a voice, so deep the stone he was clinging to shivered with it.

“The doctor,” intoned Valerian, “pronounced me either dangerously sick or dead.”

It was while trying to understand the strangeness of those words that Boy had lost his grip and plummeted to the flag floor of the church, where he lay looking up at Valerian, scratching his nose nervously, his short-cropped black hair sticking up at interesting angles the way it always did.

“O-ho!” Valerian had said. “What have we here?”

And so they had met.

Now Boy pulled off his reeking clothes and stood naked in his dark space. He wondered what to do. The pile of clothes at his feet stank up at him. The bath was on the first floor. He had no other clothes, just a long winter overcoat.

He sighed, picked up the pile of dirty clothes and the coat and crept back along the tube to the ladder.

He dropped the clothes down to the third-floor landing, and followed them, shivering as he went.

6

Boy sat, scratching his nose. He was nervous because Valerian was pacing up and down the Tower room, crisscrossing the floor a dozen times, then pausing, staring into space for a short while before resuming his compulsive journey from the tall, narrow window in one of the sloping walls to the top of the spiral staircase, which was the only means of access by foot to the Tower. Large or heavy items had to be winched into the Tower through a trapdoor in the floor. Despite his nerves Boy noticed that, as usual, Valerian was perfectly happy to stride over the trapdoor. Boy knew the hatch was strong enough, but he would never walk over it, just in case. The trapdoor opened above the landing on the second floor; it was quite a drop.

The rest of the Tower room was filled with clutter, paraphernalia, ephemera, equipment, things and mechanisms of all descriptions. Astrolabes, hourglasses, armillary spheres, sextants, alembics, retorts, reduction dishes, mortars with pestles, crystals, locks with and without keys, knives, daggers, wands of brass and wands of wood, pots, bottles and jars were just some of the odds and ends that lay scattered around the Tower.

Boy knew what some of them were-things they used onstage. As for those he didn’t understand, Boy often wondered what they might be. Maybe they were more, and as yet untried, pieces of magical equipment for the act, though Boy had his doubts.

There was the great leather armchair in which Valerian would sit, often in a pensive mood, brooding over Boy knew not what, and there were books. Piles and piles and piles of books of all shapes and sizes, leaning at precarious angles against walls and chairs, and, Boy assumed, about all sorts of things.

Right in the middle of the Tower stood the machine. Boy always had trouble remembering what it was called. As he sat, waiting for Valerian to say or do something, he tried to remember its name. It had been designed and built by a man called Kepler, who was the closest thing Valerian had to a friend.

Boy had never seen the machine working, but since it had been installed Valerian had spent even more time in the Tower. It had a strange Latin name, camera obscura.

“Do you have no grasp of Latin at all?” Valerian had barked at him when the machine arrived. Boy had shaken his head.

“Idiot boy! It means darkroom. Camera-room. Obscura-dark. See?”

Boy had smiled nervously, pretending he understood.

“Oh, why do I try to teach you anything!” Valerian had snapped, and sat back in his leather armchair.

“Camera obscura.”

Now Boy had remembered, he felt pleased with himself, and sat, wondering what on earth it was that the thing did.

Valerian kept on walking. Boy sat in just his overcoat, scratching his nose harder.

Then Valerian stopped.

“I have a job for you,” he said.

I was afraid you’d say that, thought Boy.

“Yes,” said Boy. “Whatever I can do-”

“You can be quiet!” Valerian snapped. “Just listen, then do. All right?”

Oh, fine, thought Boy. He nodded.

“I…” Valerian looked out of the window and across the nightscape of the City. “We… I… have a problem. Things are not what they were. Things…,” he continued, “are… different now. Different. They have changed.”

He stopped and looked at Boy.

“Clear?” he barked.

Boy nodded furiously.

“Things have not happened as I had intended and now-and now time is not on our side. Far from it. We must act. Things have not gone… according to plan. So I have a job for you. Tonight.”

“Tonight?” asked Boy, then shut his mouth quickly.

“Yes. Tonight. The Trumpet. You know it?”

Boy grimaced. The Trumpet was an inn about three miles away, near the river-docks. He had been there once, and on leaving had prayed that would be his last visit.

“You must go and get something for me. Some information. Tonight. Good. Then go. Look for a big, ugly man. His name’s Green.”

Boy nodded.

“Say I sent you and tell him to give you the information. Then come back here. Do nothing else. Talk to no one else.”

Boy hesitated. Did he dare risk a question? May as well.

“Valerian,” he said carefully, “what is the information? How will I know what he tells me is right?”

“You won’t!” snapped Valerian. “Just go! Be quick! And do not get it wrong!” he said coldly.

Questions played across Boy’s face.

“So what are you waiting for?” Valerian yelled.

Boy jumped to his feet and fled down the stairs, scratching his nose.

7

By the time Korp got the fat singer out of his theater, and the girl too, it was late. There was no way he could move Valerian down the running order, but he had been pleased enough to get Madame from her previous permanent engagement in a foreign city. He sighed as he made his way up to his little loft. This was no mean feat, due to his considerable proportions and the narrowness of the passage.

He made it to the door, and noticed immediately that it was not locked. Not only that, but the little door swung open on its concealed hinges.

He cursed everyone in the Company, then collapsed into the box. Flicking the lid of the table with one foot, he sank his teeth into the cork of the bottle, removed it and then drank, long and deep.

He sighed.

Suddenly he heard a noise. It sounded like footsteps, coming from the stage. He leant forward, peering out through the view hole.

Nothing. At least, it was too dark to see anything. He held his breath.

Still nothing. Just as he had decided he was imagining it, he heard the sound again.

He peered down into the gloom of the auditorium.

His eyes grew wide.

8

Boy wasted half an hour while he wondered whether to risk asking Valerian what he should do about the fact that he had no dry clothes. No. Best not to bother him. Boy set out for the Trumpet dressed in his winter overcoat, with a piece of sacking for leggings, and his boots, which he had wiped as clean as he could.

He left, slamming the door behind him. Boy was allowed no keys to the house, but Valerian had designed a special lock that operated automatically when the door was pulled shut. You needed no key to lock the door, just one to open it again. And this was not a lock that Boy could pick. He had tried. Shortly after Valerian had shown him how to pick simple locks with a twist of metal, Boy had found himself locked out.

He had gone sneaking out one evening after the show, searching for an extra bite to eat. Food was never plentiful in the house-it didn’t interest Valerian greatly-and Boy was always trying to find more. Sometimes he could persuade one of the musicians from the theater to buy him a meal. This particular evening he’d dined thanks to the kindness of the old violinist. Hunger having driven him to the rendezvous, it was only upon his return that he realized he would not be able to get back into the house.

Aha! Boy said to himself. Let’s see if I’ve got this right.

He hunted round in his pockets for his lock-picking metal. It had once served as the artificial tendon in a metal hand that Valerian had dismantled. When he had grown bored with it, Boy had found it just right for the job of lock-picking.

He leant closer to the lock. It was almost completely dark in the street and he peered hard at the hole. He reached forward with his makeshift key, but no sooner had he touched the metal innards of the lock with the metal tendon than he was thrown backward across the street, landing in a heap in the gutter. His whole arm felt as though it had been bitten by a dragon.

Boy rubbed his arm with his good hand, cursing his luck.

Some magic device, no doubt, put by Valerian on the door to keep thieves away.

He had been in deep trouble when Valerian had found him the following morning, huddled on the doorstep, having spent a wretched freezing night outside.

Inventing was just one of Valerian’s many areas of knowledge. Years ago, when more involved in the life of the Great Theater, he had invented a system of footlights for the stage-another reason why Korp was deeply indebted to him. The lights worked on some system of chemical fire that only Valerian understood and that only he could control. They gave off a faint yet pungent smell, but were another reason why Korp’s theater had a reputation as the best in the City.

Boy had learnt much from him. For all his faults, Valerian was a remarkable man. But despite their years together, Boy actually knew very little about him, though he had picked up enough scraps of information to put together some of Valerian’s life story.

Boy knew Valerian had attended the Academy, where Kepler, the man who had recently made the camera obscura, was one of his fellow students. He knew that Valerian had studied Natural Philosophy and had been considered a more than able scholar, with the potential to become a great one. Something had happened, Boy did not know what, but it was enough to make him fall from grace. Boy gathered that he had been conducting peculiar experiments, explorations into secret or forgotten learning, something dark and forbidden.

Boy also knew that around this time Kepler and Valerian had fallen out, or at least lost touch. They had not seen each other until a few years back. Boy could remember when Valerian started visiting Kepler in his tall and narrow house across the City, and after a while Boy began to go along now and then.

Valerian had once been very wealthy, which was when he had bought the huge and rambling house, now a decayed shadow of its former self. It had been purchased from the family of a judge. It was still an opulent building then, a worthy residence for one of the City’s highest officials. But Valerian seemed to be rich no more, and over the years the house had gone to seed, as had the neighborhood around it.

Boy did not know how Valerian had lost his money, but he seemed not to care very much for anything, except the hours he spent shut away in the Tower, doing heaven knows what with his infernal contraptions and reading books from the teetering piles that lay around the room.

Boy loved the Yellow House despite its empty rooms and shamefully dirty corridors, if only because it was the only place he had ever called home. If he kept out of Valerian’s way, or at least did nothing to upset him, Boy found a little peace inside its walls. And there was the small paved garden outside the kitchen door, where on hot days Boy would cool himself among ferns and vines that sprouted from the high, damp stone walls, making the garden a secret space. There was a small well in the center of the paving. Sometimes Boy imagined that he could hear rushing water, like a river far beneath him, though he knew it was just his fancy. The river was a sluggish, smelly beast, miles away from the house, and the well was a dry, bottomless hole.

Now, standing outside in the night, Boy put his hand against the flat panels of the door, willing it to open. No luck. It was a cold night and he was naked under his coat except for the sackcloth leggings. Boy hoped Valerian would still be awake when he got back. He kept strange hours-working through the night, sometimes resting fitfully during the day and then getting up in the early evening to perform at the theater. Boy glanced up at the Tower high above the street, but he saw no light within. This was odd. It would be unlike Valerian to sleep at night! Had Valerian gone out again himself? The house was so large that if Boy was in his room he wouldn’t have heard the front door close.

There was nothing he could do about it now. The lock had dropped firmly behind him and he was out in the City, alone.

It was about one in the morning and the quarter was reaching its peak of activity. It only truly seemed to come alive late at night, with street traders still about and the taverns heaving with beer and laughter. People worked long hours and for some of them this was their only chance to pretend they had a life that was something other than total drudgery.

Boy tried, as a rule, to make himself unseen, and most of the time did a good job of avoiding trouble in this way. He was neither short nor tall, but he was very thin, and by emptying his mind and avoiding people’s eyes with his own, he made a very fair stab at invisibility as he passed through the City at night.

The City was looking its best. Some of its unpleasantness was obscured during the holidays. As was the custom, evergreen branches had been brought in to decorate houses, shops and other buildings. It was also traditional to burn candles at this time, and windows everywhere twinkled with pretty lights that burnt long into the night.

Night. It was all he seemed to see, especially during these winter days. Valerian kept Boy busy with this and that all through the small hours, until finally, just as dawn was creeping over the City, he would let him stagger off to his cot to slumber the day away; then, shouting through all the floors of the house, Valerian would rouse Boy for another evening’s performance in the theater.

“I am a vampire,” Boy said grimly as he stole down Dead Duck Lane. “That’s it. He’s a stinking vampire and now I am too!”

Realizing he was talking aloud, he looked rapidly around him, but he had gone unnoticed.

Boy thought again about what had happened to Valerian. It was only a recent thing; maybe just a few weeks or months ago, Valerian had become more irritable than usual. His moods had always swung rapidly from one extreme to another, but now they seemed fixed. Surly and preoccupied, he was less violent, less vitriolic. He spent hours on end in the Tower, only emerging to get Boy to run an errand. Boy had delivered a lot of letters for him recently, and collected many in reply.

Letters, thought Boy. Letters?

It reminded him-there had been one evening, one evening in particular, when he had delivered a letter to Kepler. Kepler lived a good way across the City, in the University Quarter.

Boy didn’t like Kepler much. He wasn’t sure why exactly; there was something about him Boy just didn’t warm to. Maybe it was because Valerian listened intently to what Kepler had to say, but showed little or no interest in any opinions Boy might have.

Kepler was thin like Valerian, but shorter and with none of Valerian’s strength. He was always muttering to himself, and tended to scurry about, like a rat, Boy thought. But if it was true that Boy didn’t like Kepler, it was also true that he was fascinated by him, for he was as much of a hoarder of strange devices and peculiar mechanisms as Valerian.

As well as being a Doctor of Medicine of the Human Animal, Kepler made specialized studies into the field of the Heavens. He had all sorts of equipment with which he looked at the stars. He recorded his observations in huge leather-bound books, having noted the motions of planets, stars and moons through his metal-and-glass devices. Kepler had told Boy that he could then make all sorts of predictions about people and their behavior, just by knowing when they had been born. Increasingly Boy had gone with Valerian on his visits to Kepler’s house. He would sit quietly in the corner of Kepler’s room and marvel at the astounding discussions they would hold.

Boy wished someone could tell him about his life, predict what would happen to him, just by setting his date of birth against the position of the stars. He knew, though, that even Kepler could not do that, because Boy did not know when he had been born.

Once Boy had been worried about this. He had even been bold enough to speak to Valerian about it.

“Who do you think my parents were?” he had asked. “How could I find out?”

But Valerian scoffed. “You will never know, nor does it matter one jot. Nor,” he added, “do you need to know. You are Boy, my Boy, and that is enough.”

Boy always tried to do what Valerian told him to- things were safer that way. So Boy tried not to think about the matter any more, but it was not always easy.

On this particular evening, however, when Boy had delivered the letter to Kepler, the Doctor had said, “Wait,” and sat down to write a reply. Boy had watched him as he scratched away with a sophisticated silver-nibbed fountain pen on a sheet of paper, pausing to consider his words. Kepler sprinkled the letter with sand, then folded up the paper and started to melt some sealing wax. As he dripped bloodred wax onto the letter and pressed his ring into it, he said, “Take this to him.” Without looking up from what he was doing, he added, “And may God protect his own.”

There was something odd in his manner that Boy remembered. And when Valerian had read that letter, his mood had sunk. That letter was when it had really started.

At about two o’clock Boy stopped at the top of Pigeon Pie Alley. At the far end of the street stood the Trumpet. All hell was breaking loose inside.

Oh, just perfect! thought Boy.

9

Korp stared at the stage, watching the ghost.

At first he thought it must be the Dark Duke. An old theater legend told how the ghost of the Dark Duke would stalk across the stage as a portent of disaster. History related how, years ago, the theater had relied on the duke for financial backing. If he didn’t like the work the theater was producing, he would storm across the stage during rehearsal, sometimes even during a performance. One day he had tried to stop a rehearsal and was stabbed by the lead actor, a touchy man at the best of times, whose brother had written the play in question. Since then the Dark Duke appeared at times of impending crisis, though he had not been seen in many, many years.

The theater was in trouble. Korp had seen so many strange things in his life that he was superstitious enough to believe that. There could be no mistake about it. The only question was when the trouble would strike.

In fact Korp was mistaken. He had only been watching the ghost for a few moments when it disappeared, leaving behind a slight cloud of dust that hung in the air, glowing.

A second later, Korp heard something behind him.

The thing slashed at Korp and he fell forward, one arm and his head across the edge of the box, dying.

10

Boy hovered at the end of Pigeon Pie Alley, trying to decide what to do. He knew he didn’t really have any choice. If Valerian wanted him to go into the Trumpet and meet a big, ugly man called Green, then he would have to do it. It was just that he didn’t want to.

There was obviously a fight going on inside. He waited, hoping things would settle down, but after a little while he thought, No-go now. Perhaps everyone in the tavern would be too busy to notice him; he could slip in and take a look around without being seen. Besides, he was freezing. At least inside he’d be warm for a while, and get away from the smell of the river just a street or two away.

As he approached the Trumpet the sound of tables breaking and bottles being smashed grew louder. The inn was really rough. There was no longer a sign with its name outside-its reputation spoke for it. There was grimy glass in some of the windows, though not all. The way into the Trumpet was down a claustrophobic alley that lay in the gloom between the buildings. Boy glanced in through a window as he headed down the alley. Things were getting lively, to say the least. He took one last gulp of the foul river air, and went inside.

The noise immediately seemed ten times louder, and if the stink was bad in the street, it was worse still inside. The whole place was a lurid riot of color, sound and smell compared to the darkness of the winter streets. For a minute Boy thought he might be sick. His head swam and he looked for a place to lurk.

Surprisingly, considering the mayhem, the fight seemed to be between only two men. The bulk of the din came from the people watching, who were cheering, shouting and fighting amongst themselves.

Boy picked his way to a small table half hidden in the space under the staircase that led upstairs.

“Beer, love?”

He looked up to see a barmaid staring at him expectantly. She held a tray of empty beer jugs in one hand and was piling short, stubby glasses up with the other.

“Well?”

Damn! thought Boy. Money. I didn’t think of that. Neither did Valerian, but that won’t stop me getting a thrashing if I get this wrong.

“I don’t have any money,” he said, looking up sadly.

She scowled briefly; then her face softened and she smiled.

“Did you know you’ve got nothing on under there?” she asked, smirking.

Boy looked down and hurriedly pulled his coat shut over his legs.

“It’s cold outside,” he ventured, trying to sound as miserable as he could. “You know, on the streets…”

“All right,” she said, “but just half an hour, mind, then out you go. Here, take this.”

She put one of the glasses she had collected back down in front of him, and then emptied the dregs of five beer jugs into it. She nodded at the glass, now containing a couple of fingers of beer slops, and smiled again.

“Better make it last, Gorgeous,” she said, and went off collecting more glasses while they were still unbroken.

Boy took one look at the beer and pushed it away.

The fight was just about over. The victor, a giant of a man, sat on the chest of the vanquished, a fat brute, raining a few last punches down on his face for good measure. But now it was all for show. Finally someone came to pull him off the fat man.

“That’s enough. Well done.”

The giant got up and for the first time Boy saw his face. He was as ugly as a dead cat.

He seemed not to appreciate being pulled off the fat man, because he swung a fist at his would-be helper and sent him sprawling across a table.

Everyone cheered except Boy, who had a sinking feeling. He pulled the sleeve of a toothless old man with a stick who was sitting nearby.

“Who’s that?” Boy asked, but he knew the answer.

“Eh?” said the man. “Don’t you know Jacob Green, the Green Giant?” He laughed, spat on the floor and waved his stick in the air for a drink.

Meanwhile Green swaggered around, taking drinks from all and sundry and downing them in a single draft.

The man he’d come to meet.

Boy looked at his beer.

Green sat talking loudly to a group in a corner, playing with something tiny in his giant hands, like a child with a toy. It was a small wooden box. He was spinning it between thumb and forefinger. Then he stopped and wound a little handle coming from its side. A small tinkle of musical notes floated through the hubbub of the tavern. A music box.

Around him, two serving girls picked up bits of shattered bottles and broken chairs. Boy did not have a clue what was going on. This was a feeling he often had working for Valerian, but things were definitely getting more peculiar. The business in Korp’s box, when Valerian had materialized behind him no more than a few seconds after he’d left the stage, had unnerved him. And now Boy wondered what on earth Valerian could need from Green. There was only one way to find out.

Boy looked at his beer. Picking up the glass, he swigged the cloudy brown liquid straight down, wiped his mouth and took a deep breath. He stood up and made his way across the room.

11

Boy was not the only servant abroad at that moment. Back in the Quarter of the Arts, Willow ventured out into the cold night, moaning to herself as she wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and over her head. Her mouse-brown hair was thick and long, keeping her warm. She had been working for Madame Beauchance for a year now, ever since Madame had come to the Great Theater. It was a year too long, in her opinion.

Madame was unattractive; she was vain and arrogant; she was lazy and spiteful, and miserly too. There was one thing which redeemed her: her voice. It was the voice of an angel. A voice that could murmur soft and low and soothe a bawling child, that could rise shrill and clear and shatter a mirror and that could slide so sweetly over a melody that a killer might sit down and weep. With her voice she had made a good career, and a small fortune that she kept to herself.

Willow ended up working for her by chance. She had been employed as tail-carrier in her previous job, working for the Fellowship of Master Liverymen. Willow didn’t know what the fellowship actually did, but she knew what she was supposed to do, and that was enough. And besides, anything was better than her life in the orphanage. The liverymen wore fancy clothes on official occasions, including long-tailed coats. It was her job to follow her master, carrying the tails of his coat so they did not trail in the dirt. There were eleven other girls and boys employed likewise, one for each of the Fellowship. That was the full extent of their duties, but since there were at least two official occasions every day, they were kept busy enough carrying coattails and brushing off mud where necessary. After three years, she had been told to take a coat to the Great Theater, where they required the costume of a liveryman.

Willow had immediately fallen for the excitement of the place. It was thrilling. She had begged Korp for a job and had begun scrubbing floors that afternoon. She never went back to the Liverymen and they did not come looking for her-there were plenty more urchins to be had. After Willow had spent a week doing odd jobs, Madame B had arrived and immediately demanded a personal assistant. Her last one, a man with a weak heart, had collapsed carrying her cases of costumes on the journey to the City.

Willow was not fond of her mistress, especially this evening, when she’d blamed Willow for not bringing her hairbrush home after the performance. “Go back. Get Korp to open up,” she’d snapped, even though she had hundreds of brushes at her lodgings. So Willow had set off.

That was how she found the side door to the theater flapping open in the chilly night air, and how she walked cautiously into the auditorium, already sensing something was wrong, and how she stood halfway back in the stalls, looking at the stage, when she felt it raining on her head.

She noticed that the footlights were faintly glowing. That too was odd-they were very expensive to run. Then she remembered she was inside and that it couldn’t be raining.

She put her hand to her hair and felt the wetness. It was warm. In the dim light coming from the stage she looked at her hand and screamed.

It was covered in blood.

She looked up to see the head and shoulders of Korp’s corpse sticking out of the box’s window.

12

Green gave Boy’s throat another gentle squeeze. He had one of his huge spadelike fists wrapped around it, though not tightly.

Not yet, thought Boy.

Despite the fact that they were in full view of everyone in the tavern, Boy had no doubt that Green would snap his neck like a dry reed if he wanted to. The Trumpet had its own laws, and one murder or another was probably nothing to these people.

Boy stood in front of Green, who sat with one arm outstretched, his fingers raising Boy onto his tiptoes. Even like this, Green was taller than him. At least it meant Boy wasn’t looking straight at Green’s foul face. He had a wide nose, with nostrils that had obviously been split in some fight or other. The whites of his eyes were yellow and watery; his lips were like two slugs sitting on each other. His hair was thinning and his scalp was diseased. Boy tried not to look, and anyway, he had other things to concentrate on. He had been standing precariously on tiptoe ever since he had had the nerve to approach the giant.

“What do you want?” Green had bawled.

“I-I-” stammered Boy. “I’ve been sent to-”

“Ah!” said Green. “He sent you, did he? Too scared to come himself! Perhaps I should just give you what I was going to give him!”

Boy nodded, and next thing he knew he was balancing on the ends of his toes.

“He sent you?”

“U-hurrrr,” squeaked Boy.

“What?” shouted Green, letting Boy drop a little onto his feet.

Green scowled and shook Boy briskly. He put him down again. “Tell him to come himself. I only deal with him. Now get lost!”

Boy fell to his knees, choking. Hearing the tinny notes of the music box again, he looked up to find Green spinning the handle, laughing to himself, captivated by the simple tune.

Boy caught only a glimpse before it was hidden in Green’s massive hand, but it was strange and beautiful.

Boy sat in the dirt of the floor and rubbed his sore neck.

Green lurched to his feet and sloped away across the room, pushing past people as he went. He staggered through the door to the latrine.

Boy picked himself up, and followed Green. He couldn’t go back to Valerian empty-handed.

As he stepped through the door there was a flash of light and a noise like a cork popping. Then everywhere was shrouded in purple smoke.

He heard a thump and then the sound of feet clambering against the wooden wall of the crap-house.

The smoke cleared and through the darkness Boy saw a shape at his feet. He knelt down and put his hand out.

It was Green, and he was dead. Boy could tell that immediately from the peculiar angle of his neck.

Boy was about to run when he saw something glinting in Green’s fist. His old magpie habits from his days on the street tugged at him. He prized the huge fingers open and there, unharmed, was the music box.

He grabbed it and stuck it in his pocket. Then he heard the door to the Trumpet open behind him.

He jumped to his feet and sped away up the side alley.

“Hey!” shouted a voice behind him. “Hey!”

“The Phantom!” cried the voice as Boy disappeared. “The Phantom has got Green!”

As he ran it occurred to him that it was true. Green must have been struck by the Phantom, just as Boy was following him. It was a lucky escape. Any sooner and he might be dead too. Boy sped on, trying to ignore the fact that he had not got the information Valerian was after, and that now the source of that information was dead.

Boy ran madly, until finally he turned a corner and ran slap into someone else. Together they flew into the mud of the street. Boy looked at the runner sprawled across him.

“Boy!” Willow screamed. She was in a state, gabbling, “I saw-in his box…”

A shadowy figure suddenly rose up in front of them.

“In a hurry?” it asked.

They looked up. From his black cape, and extravagant red-plumed hat, they knew who the man was. His was the garb of a City Watchman.

Boy had spent much of his homeless years, the years before Valerian, trying to avoid the City Watchmen. In his opinion they spent far too much of their time trying to capture hungry boys who had stolen food, and not enough stopping people killing each other in tavern brawls.

But Willow cried, “I’m so glad to see you!”

“Yes,” said the Watchman sarcastically, “I’m sure you are. Now, would you like to tell me whose blood that is?”

Boy looked at Willow and saw blood in her hair and across her shoulders. Then he noticed the Watchman was staring at him.

Boy looked at his leg. He was covered in blood too.

Things were getting messy.

“I think you’d better come with me, don’t you?”

Before either of them could answer he grabbed them both by the necks and dragged them away down the street.

Some way behind, a tall figure followed, slipping in and out of the darknesses of the street.

13

Dawn had risen on the morning of December 27, its pale light stealing into the cell where Willow and Boy lay. The room was about six feet square, with solid stone walls and a single window with no glass but a closely spaced grid of iron bars instead. This let the cold in and stopped the prisoners from getting out, which was just what the Watchmen wanted. Cold prisoners were less trouble. They often died of exposure before anybody had to decide what to do with them, which saved a lot of trouble all round.

Willow and Boy lay on some sparse and dirty straw, trying to keep away from a man who lay snoring next to one of the walls. He was huge. Once or twice he had rolled over and they had shivered on seeing his scarred face. Fortunately he had so far shown no sign of waking up.

“Why don’t they hurry up and let us out?” Willow asked again.

“We’ve got to get out,” said Boy again.

The window was high up, but when she stood on Boy’s shoulders Willow was able to peer out across the City below. “I think it’s going to snow today.” For some reason it reminded her of when she was small, just a little child, when she hadn’t had to work to survive. On a day like that there had been a lovely, thick fall of snow, and she had played in it, carefree.

The sunrise was casting a pinkish light across the whole City. Mile after murderous mile of it stretched away as far as she could see. From high in the dungeon inside the Citadel of the City Watchmen the sprawl of buildings was laid out before her like a carpet. Even this early in the morning the City hummed and bustled with the noise of tradesmen up before the sun. In the gentle pink light, and from this height, the City looked almost beautiful to Willow. Almost. In recent years she had spent too long ducking and weaving her way through its narrow lanes and dark alleys to ever think of the place as beautiful. From where she teetered on Boy’s back she could see a very long way. Could she even see the edge of the City, or was she just imagining it? Remembering it, maybe. A trip to the country when she was a little girl, with her parents. She was imagining it. She’d been too little when her parents had died to remember them.

“Have you ever been out of the City?” she asked Boy.

“Are you going to get down?”

“Oh, sorry, yes.”

She slithered off his back and landed nimbly beside him.

“Thank you,” he said. “Well?”

“I think it’s going to snow.”

“The window, Willow?” he said.

“Oh, there’s no way we’re going anywhere. The bars are solid and besides, there’s a drop that’d squash you flat. We’re stuck.”

Boy slid back down into the straw.

“Then I’m as good as dead.”

“Korp is dead,” said Willow, and shivered again.

They were both silent.

“I don’t even know your name,” said Willow after a while.

“Yes you do,” said Boy.

“What? Boy? That’s just what he calls you, isn’t it?”

Boy said nothing.

“That’s your real name? Boy? That’s not a name. You must have a real one.”

Boy looked at her.

“That’s my only name. Before Valerian found me no one called me anything at all.”

Willow stared at Boy.

“So where did you come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No,” said Boy, beginning to wish he’d been arrested on his own.

“How can you not know? Where did you live before Valerian found you?”

“In the City.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Always?”

“Yes,” said Boy. “Is that so strange?”

“No,” admitted Willow, “but I know my name and I know I was born in the City, though I can’t remember where.”

“And so do I,” said Boy angrily. “My name’s Boy and I was born in the City too! All right?”

Willow was quiet, flicking her feet with a piece of straw. “Sorry.”

Boy mumbled something.

“Why are they taking so long?” she asked again.

“We’ve got to get out,” said Boy again.

There was a rattling of keys in the huge iron lock and the door swung back on its heavy hinges.

The Watchman who had locked them up several hours before ducked his head as he came back into the cell. He seemed surprised to see them. He glanced at the sleeping figure by the wall.

“Lucky for you he drank so much,” he said.

“Did you go to the theater and look?” asked Willow.

“Oh yes,” said the Watchman. His hat had a pink plume in it. This meant he was more important than the red-plumed one who’d arrested them. Willow thought this was a good sign. He could let them go. She’d told them about finding Korp and explained about the blood. She’d told them to go and see for themselves, so they knew she was telling the truth. And Boy had just let them imagine that the blood on his clothes was the same blood that was on Willow.

“So you see that what we told you is true?” Willow asked.

“Oh yes. Very much so. And you will both be detained on suspicion of the murder of Director Korp of the Great Theater.”

14

Valerian lurked in the shadows across the road from the Citadel of the City Watchmen. It was an old building, one of the very oldest in this very old city, and was a crazy mixture of styles and materials. Black-timbered box windows lurched unnecessarily far out of rough stone walls, doors halfway up walls led only to empty space, and ornate towers and spires twisted high into the early morning air above Valerian.

He hated being here, he disliked even being in this part of the City, which was a much richer and altogether nicer area than he was used to-than what he had become used to. The longest side of the Citadel overlooked the river, and the stink coming from it was worse than ever. As if all that were not enough, it was daylight. Valerian could not remember the last time he had been outside during the day. It disturbed him.

It had all gone wrong, and time was running out. Had he really expected the boy to get the information he’d sent him for? And now he’d have to get Boy out of the Citadel, to know for sure that he hadn’t. Valerian cursed; he didn’t have time to be messing around like this.

Once, things had been so different for him, but as the last few years had turned under his feet, the specter of his past had risen to meet him like the dawn of a terrible day.

Well, there would be worse to come yet, that much Valerian knew for sure.

15

The figure in the straw stirred again. Very soon he might wake up, and with a significant hangover.

“Why did you tell them about Korp?” Boy asked Willow.

“I couldn’t not, could I? I was covered in blood. I still am.”

She tried not to look at her clothes. It was bad enough that the stuff had now dried in her hair and matted it together in places. She wanted a bath very much. Boy looked no better. For some reason he was wearing only sackcloth leggings under his overcoat, and from the knees down his legs were stained red-brown. Although Red-plume and Pink-plume thought this was Korp’s blood too, Willow knew it was not.

“So tell me again how you’ve got blood on your legs. And where your clothes are. And what you were doing out at three in the morning.”

Boy sighed. Why did she always have to ask so many questions? He changed the subject. “I can’t believe Korp’s dead.”

“No,” Willow agreed.

“But that means…”

“What?”

“Well, the theater. What will happen? There’s no one to take it over. It will close and that means I’m out of a job.”

“Me too,” said Willow, “but we don’t know for sure it’s going to close. Someone will take it over.”

“Who?” asked Boy.

“Well…,” said Willow, thinking hard. “Valerian?”

Boy was about to laugh, but then thought about it. Valerian was just about the only reason the Great Theater was still going anyway. Why shouldn’t he take it over? In fact… A terrible thought crossed his mind, but he pushed it away. There were other things to think about first. Besides, Valerian was utterly bored with the theater these days, only keeping the act going as a steady source of income.

“What will they do to us?” he asked Willow, but he knew the answer.

“Hang us, I expect.”

“Or drown us, maybe.”

They both fell silent again. The sun climbed higher over the City and shed a little light directly into their cell. Boy and Willow wasted no time in sitting in the patch of sunlight, and at last they began to feel warm.

Boy shoved his hands deep into his pockets and his left struck something solid. He pulled out the music box. He turned it over. The only other time he’d seen one was in Kepler’s house. He collected clockwork mechanisms of all kinds, and had once shown some to Boy.

Boy daydreamed, remembering the time a year or so ago when Kepler had come to stay in their house for a week while he installed the camera obscura. It had taken Kepler the whole week to fit it into the Tower room. There was a lot of banging and sawing and swearing, until finally Kepler had thrown open the door.

“Behold!” he cried dramatically, and Valerian, who had not been allowed into his own chamber during the construction, had entered. Boy had watched the door close behind them, and many months later he was still none the wiser about what the machine actually did. As the door had closed, however, he had heard Valerian exclaim, “You, Kepler, are the greatest Doctor of Natural Philosophies who has ever lived!”

“What’s that?” asked Willow.

Boy waved the music box at her and wound its handle a couple of times before putting it back in his pocket.

“I… found it,” he said. “At the Trumpet. Listen to the music, because it may be the last we hear!”

“Oh, Boy, don’t give up. It could be worse.”

“How could it be worse?”

Willow didn’t answer, because the figure lying in the straw suddenly rolled over and vomited across the floor.

“Please get me out of here,” wailed Boy.

The door rattled and opened, and Valerian entered the room.

Before Boy could open his mouth, Valerian put his finger to his lips. Pink-plume followed him.

“Two minutes,” he barked at Valerian, and then saw the mess on the floor. “Or less, if you prefer.” He pulled a face and locked them in again.

“Valerian!” Boy cried. “How did-?”

“How did I know you were here? You don’t think I’d trust you to get it right by yourself, do you? Something this important?”

Boy wished Valerian wouldn’t talk like that, especially in front of Willow, but he was too relieved to care.

“Well?” said Valerian.

Boy said nothing. Then:

“He wouldn’t tell me anything. I-”

Valerian lurched forward toward Boy, who flinched backward. But did not hit him.

“He’s dead,” Boy cried. “Someone murdered him. The Phantom!”

“What?” roared Valerian, then seemed to remember where they were and made an effort to calm himself.

“He’s dead. He-”

“Not that! Did he tell you anything? What did he say before…?”

“He wouldn’t,” Boy stammered. “He-”

“Be quiet! So he told you nothing before he died? Kepler sent him with information for me-the name of a grave. You’re sure?”

Boy nodded, and Valerian flung his arms out wide, failing to find words bad enough for Boy.

“I do have something,” Boy said. He fished in his pocket and pulled out the music box.

“Are you trying to be funny? I need a name, not trinkets!”

“Valerian?” asked Willow.

Only now did Valerian seem to notice her presence in the cell.

“Hmm?” he said, still staring at the music box.

“He said two minutes. Are you going to get us out of here?”

Boy cringed. This was not a good way to go about getting anything from his master. In fact, there was no good way to get anything from him, but Willow didn’t know that.

Valerian dragged his eyes away from the tiny mechanical object and shoved it in his pocket.

“I may as well leave you here,” he snarled. “You are no use to me.”

“Please, Valerian,” Boy begged. “It wasn’t my fault he wouldn’t talk to me.”

Valerian considered them both.

“All right then,” he said. “I suppose so.”

He looked at Boy.

“Well, Boy, it’s time you learnt the secret of the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion.”

“But that’s just a trick,” said Boy.

“Ah!” said Valerian. “No. In fact, the secret of the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion is that it is not an illusion at all.”

Boy stared at him. Willow stared at Boy.

Keys rattled in the lock again.

“Quick!” commanded Valerian. “Hold close to me.”

He grabbed them both and pressed them to his side.

Boy heard him muttering in some unknown language, and saw him pull something from one of his many pockets.

The door opened and Pink-plume stood in the doorway.

Valerian’s arm swung through the air, throwing something.

“Ho!” he cried. “Ho! And away to fairyland!”

There was a huge rush of smoke and Boy lost all sense of where he was. He felt himself lurch upward for a moment, as if flying.

Then the smoke began to clear.

“Run!” cried Valerian.

Boy ran, pulled along by his master. Valerian held Willow’s hand too.

They were in a stone corridor, somewhere in the Citadel. In a few seconds they burst out onto a roof high above the City.

“Come on!” Valerian hurtled to the edge, pulling them off after him.

“No!” screamed Boy as they flew into the air.

They fell for what seemed like ages-a heartbeat and a half-to hit the foul and freezing water of the river.

They surfaced, spluttering and coughing, quite near the bank.

“Come on!” Valerian clambered out of the water by a small wooden jetty to which ferryboats were moored. “Time we were gone. Besides,” he added, “I hate daylight.”

Rolling them both into a ferry, he climbed after them and pulled a dirty piece of canvas across them all. He set them adrift and they floated away downstream in the brisk current, heading for home.

“Are they following us?” Willow finally managed to splutter.

“No! They won’t even know we’re gone until the fool with the pink feather wakes up.”

Boy shook his head. He was used to not knowing what was going on, but this was worse than usual. “Valerian, was that really magic?”

Boy had never believed that Valerian could actually do magic. Real magic. He was not sure he had changed his mind.

“Well, I got you out of the Citadel, didn’t I? It must take real magic to do a thing like that, mustn’t it?”

Boy lay shivering under the canvas. If it was magic, couldn’t Valerian have got them straight home without having to swim in the freezing river?

He was soaked with stinking river water. At least he was back in a nice small dark space. He could cope with that. He decided to let the subject of magic drop. Let Valerian play his games. Boy had other things on his mind, like smoke. As they’d burst from the cell, there had been an awful lot of smoke. Purple smoke. It was the second time in a few hours that Boy had seen purple smoke, and the first time had left Green with his throat cut and his neck broken.

What had Valerian said?

You don’t think I’d trust you to get it right by yourself, do you?

Had Valerian been there all along, at the Trumpet? And Green-had Valerian seen to him too? No, he had wanted the precious information from Green. He wouldn’t have killed him.

And Korp? Korp must have been killed about the same time that Green was, but the Phantom couldn’t have been responsible for both. Unless… unless the Phantom was more powerful than any magician he’d ever heard of.

The boat drifted downriver, back toward the Old Quarter, toward Valerian’s magnificent crumbling mansion.

16

By the time they made it back to the Yellow House, it was nearly midday.

Valerian slammed the door behind them.

Immediately he took the music box out of his pocket and glared at it.

“Kepler, where are you?” he said to himself. “Where are you when I need you?”

Then he looked at Boy and Willow.

“Go and get cleaned up, Boy,” he said. “I seem to say that a lot at the moment, don’t I?”

“What are you doing here, girl?” he asked Willow. “You can get cleaned up too, and then leave.”

Valerian started up the stairs. “I think I had better get changed myself.”

Boy looked at Willow, then called after Valerian, “But where can she go? The theater will probably have to shut. Korp’s dead.”

“I know,” Valerian called back, “but this is not a doss-house.”

And he disappeared out of sight.

By the time Boy had washed his smelly clothes from the night before, and Willow’s, and scrubbed his coat and boots again, it was getting dark.

Boy made a fire in the kitchen to dry their wet things. They sat in front of it wrapped in blankets from Boy’s bed, and shivered.

All afternoon they had been listening to Valerian’s curses and threats come floating down through the house.

“You live here?” asked Willow, looking around her in wonder. The kitchen alone was vast, with unused implements and pots and pans hanging everywhere. It must once have fed at least a dozen people every single day. “Just you and him in this huge house?”

Boy nodded.

“But what are you? His slave?”

“No!” he said fiercely.

“Then he pays you?”

He hesitated. “No, but-”

“So you are his slave!”

“I am his famulus,” Boy cried.

Willow stopped. “His what?”

“Famulus,” said Boy. “His famulus. It means I attend him in his studies and investigations.”

“Is that what he told you?”

Boy said nothing.

“Isn’t there anyone else?” Willow pressed. “Who does the cooking? The cleaning?”

“I cook when he tells me to. No one does any cleaning.”

“But who taught you to wash clothes? To make fires? Someone must have shown you.”

“He teaches me things, but not everyday things. I worked those out for myself.”

“And before you came here? Who are your parents?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Neither do I, anymore.”

“What happened to them?” he asked, wondering as he did so why he was bothering.

“They were killed,” Willow said. “I was four.”

Boy was about to ask how they were killed, but Willow carried on, “My aunt put me in the orphanage.”

“That was nice of her.”

“She wasn’t really my aunt. She was some old relative. I’m not sure what, exactly. But she couldn’t look after me, and she died not long after that. I lived in an orphanage near the Palace walls until I got a job with the Liverymen. I was eleven then, four years ago. How old are you?”

“I don’t know,” Boy said.

Willow looked at him, cocking her head. She waited for some kind of explanation. Finally she went on with her own story.

“Then I came to the theater, but you know that,” she said. She looked hard at Boy. “What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your parents, Boy, your parents.”

“I said, I haven’t got any.”

“I know that,” Willow said, “but who were they?”

Boy shrugged. He knew she was only interested, but really, he wished she’d shut up.

“Look, I don’t know. Since I can remember I just lived in the streets, freezing and starving in the winter, all right more or less in the summer. That’s all there’s ever been. Then he found me.”

“He treats you like rubbish,” she said.

“At least I have a room and food and something to do.”

“That’s not a room,” said Willow, remembering the boxlike space at the end of the tunnel where Boy had fetched the blankets.

“So who taught you to speak, then?” she asked.

Boy felt the clothes.

“They’re dry, more or less,” he said, and Willow gave up.

They turned their backs to each other and dressed quickly. The clothes were warm from the fire and Boy began to feel better than he had for what seemed like a very long time.

“I’m hungry,” said Willow. “Starving.”

“Let’s see if there’s some food here,” Boy said, but not very hopefully.

He was right to be pessimistic. He found some dried biscuits, and they ate them slowly.

“Boy,” said Willow suddenly, “what about me?”

“You’ll have to go back to the singer,” he said. “You’re not short of food there, at least.”

“But I can’t!” Willow cried. “I’m a wanted criminal! So are you, come to that.”

He stared at the fire. “I know,” he said, “I know. Look, I’ll try and talk to Valerian again and see if you can stay. Then maybe you’ll be safe from the Watch.”

“Would you?” asked Willow. “Would you really?”

Boy looked at the hope in her face and felt himself shiver. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, for lots of reasons. And wasn’t it like admitting she was guilty if she didn’t return to Madame Beauchance? But something in him wanted her to stay.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll try. That’s all.”

“Why do you care?”

Boy hesitated. He didn’t know that he did.

He didn’t answer.

They sat and watched the fire for a while, warming themselves while it lasted. Boy felt exhausted, as much by Willow’s questions as anything. For the first time in years all sorts of thoughts crowded into his head. He pushed them away. He didn’t need to know who his parents were. It wasn’t important, no matter what Willow thought. Boy’s thoughts became hazier.

Before they knew it, they had fallen asleep on each other’s shoulders, and for a short time their weary bodies rested.

17

Darkness had fallen.

Boy and Willow woke up within moments of each other. They both got to their feet, avoiding each other’s eyes.

“Well,” said Boy, looking at the floor.

“Yes,” said Willow. “What do you think? Have you changed your mind?”

“No,” said Boy, looking up and into Willow’s eyes. “Let’s get it over with.”

They made their way up to the Tower room. After hours of hearing Valerian’s rage and curses earlier in the day, it was quiet. It seemed as good a time as any to dare to ask him for favors.

Boy knocked on the door. That in itself was strange. Normally he waited to be summoned.

“What is it?” came the voice from within.

“Valerian,” called Boy, “can we come in?”

There was a pause.

“We? Oh, very well.”

Inside Boy looked at Valerian, but not directly into his eyes. That was usually too much to take. Willow just stared openmouthed at what filled the room: the vials, the jars, the machines, the devices, the equipment, the drawings, the books, the glass things, the brass things, the wooden things. The camera obscura.

“Why is she still here?” Valerian asked.

“Please, Valerian, can she stay? The Watchmen will be after her.”

And me too, he thought.

Valerian said nothing.

“And she can’t go back to Madame, because the theater will be shut and-Oh!”

Boy stopped. The theater.

“Yes,” said Valerian, “I expect it will.”

“But that means we’ll be out of work and-”

“I could not, at this moment, possibly care less,” said Valerian. “And the girl cannot stay here. We have too much to do. That is an end to it.”

“But Korp is dead,” Willow protested. “You’ll have nowhere for your act!”

Valerian stood up, and Boy and Willow cowered where they stood. He seemed to tower above them, taller than ever.

“Listen to me. I do not care about the theater, or the act. The only thing that concerns me at the moment is time. Do you see?”

They both shook their heads. Boy shrank back against the wall as Valerian leaned close.

“Listen to me! I am in trouble. Bigger trouble than failing theaters or dead directors. I now have four days left to save my life, and the only way I can do it is hidden from me! Green”-he waved the music box-“was supposed to give me a name-a name that could just possibly save my wretched, cursed skin, and yet I have been tricked! All I have is this worthless gimmick! How can this fairground rubbish give me a name?”

He threw it to the floor.

Willow stepped forward and picked it up. She held it to the light of the single lamp in the room and smiled. She turned the little metal crank and tinny notes rang out across the room.

“I know it does that,” snapped Valerian.

Willow ignored him, and played the music again. And again.

The tune was very simple, with only eight notes. A haunting refrain, and if Valerian had listened he might have heard in it the tone of hope. Willow played it a few times, then a few more.

“Valerian,” she said, “this is a name. This tune is a name, and the name you have been searching for is Gad Beebe.”