The White City

32

Waking up ought to have hurt less than it did. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d got there, only that he shouldn’t be able to contemplate either of those questions.

‘Well now,’ said Mama, ‘don’t you look like something the cat dragged in?’

He tried to speak, coughed, winced, and gave up. The square of cloth suspended over him from poles, like a four-poster bed, flapped in the cool breeze, and the hammock he was lying in swayed gently.

‘You’re not right yet, so don’t you go tiring yourself out.’

He blinked, and felt the grittiness of his sleep-filled eyes. The canopy rattled above again. He could see. That in itself was a miracle.

‘Wind’s picking up,’ Mama observed. ‘Maybe a storm coming over. It’ll have to find someone else to take. It wouldn’t dare have you.’

He could smell the brine, and hear the waves build and fall on the beach. If he looked to his left, he could see Mama, round and solid, sitting on a sea-chest, holding the little board-backed diary they’d found together. Beyond her was the bay: a curve of sand, a flash of surf, a hint of the forest beyond. To his right were the ragged cliffs carved out of cream-coloured blocks. Somewhere down by his feet should be a long boat, but he couldn’t raise his head that far. He couldn’t raise his head at all.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

He knew what should have happened. He’d wedged his bloodied machete into the glowing ball of energy embedded in the plinth. And then… then Crows had cut him open and left him to die. He’d realised how badly he’d been hurt, and that holding the edges of the wound together was only going to do so much. He’d been bleeding, inside and out, and it would only stop when he ran out of blood.

After the Lord of the White City had left, no one else had come until Mary turned up, and by then he’d been long past help.

‘Why am I alive?’

Mama folded the book shut and laid it down next to her on the sea-chest.

‘There’s no easy answer to that,’ she said. ‘Not that I’m saying you should have died just so I don’t have to give a reason. The short way of saying it is that she fixed you up. The long way is, well: more complicated.’

‘Mary? But I was…’

‘Cut stem to stern down to the giblets? There was that.’

‘So what did she do?’ Mary had arrived with nothing, not even the most rudimentary of first-aid equipment, let alone anything that would have saved his life.

‘Be easier to show you,’ said Mama. ‘Shame I haven’t got a mirror.’

His hands were across his chest. He worked out that his fingers would move, even his wrists, but there was no strength in them. All the same, he had to know. ‘What did she do?’

‘She fixed you up that only way she could.’ Mama clasped her big hands together. ‘If she can explain it, she’s learnt to do it since she tried explaining it to me.’

‘Magic? She used magic?’

‘She did. She did it well enough that you’re still here and you and me are talking about the hows and the whys of it.’ She shrugged and her hands drifted apart, gesturing to the sea. ‘The whys are simple enough. She wasn’t ready to let you go.’

‘She wasn’t ready to let me go?’

‘We can spend all of today you just repeating me. I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing to hurry for, and neither have you, but if you wanted to make it easier, you could just believe me.’ Mama leaned forward and pressed her hand on his forehead. ‘There’s no fever. If anything, you’re colder than you ought to be. We’ll get a fire going later, see if that makes any difference.’

‘I was… dying,’ he said. ‘I’d made my peace with God. I was ready.’

‘Listen to yourself! How old are you?’

‘Nineteen. Maybe twenty. I don’t know any more.’

‘Let me tell you something. Boys your age know nothing about anything. They don’t know when to be scared, when to run, when to back down or when to shut up. Give it a few years and you might have something worth saying.’ Mama huffed. ‘Peace with God indeed. You need a life of service and knowing you’re on the right path for that.’

Dalip found he didn’t have the energy to argue.

‘Am I going to get better?’

‘Mercy, considering the state you were in when we brought you here, you are better. You can open your eyes, you can breathe, you can talk. And don’t you be ungrateful, either. No one likes a failed martyr.’

‘Martyr?’

‘You’re alive, and you’ll just have to get used to it. And try not to throw yourself into the mouth of the nearest lion next time.’

‘There were no lions.’

‘Don’t get fresh with me. That was a metaphor.’ She huffed again. ‘You hungry?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

She frowned. ‘You should be hungry. I’ve got some clear broth I made for you.’

‘Maybe later.’

‘You should have some. See if you can take it.’

‘Later.’

If anything was going to make him better quickly, it was the thought of being nursed back to health by Mama. She meant well, but it was going to drive him to distraction. He was already twitching.

‘Actually, I do want something. I want to see what’s happened to me.’

‘You’re not up to that yet.’ Mama stood up and stood over him. ‘Promise me you’re not going to try and look any time soon.’

‘Okay, I want to look even more now.’ He took a deep breath and moved his hands to the sides of the hammock. He tried to lever himself to a sitting position, failed, and slipped down even further towards the knotted end by his feet.

‘I’m not helping,’ said Mama. ‘I sewed you up, and I see it every time I look at you. I just don’t think you’re strong enough right now.’

He was so frustrated. He wriggled uselessly until he was almost completely cocooned in the hammock, and was in a worse position than before.

‘You want some of that soup now?’ she asked him.

‘No. Thank you.’

She sat back down and opened the board-covered book, peering at the page held almost at arm’s length. Her lips moved with the archaic syllables, and eventually he stopped struggling and watched her.

‘I thought you couldn’t read it.’

‘I had help: a man called Edmund who’s on the boat. He’s from the fifteenth century, you know. Anyhow, once you get your eye in, it’s not so bad.’ She ostentatiously turned to the next page. ‘It’s very interesting. Especially where it talks about the Lady Grace of Almond Eyes.’

‘It does what?’ He couldn’t sit up, but his whole body started.

‘Oh, you think you know everything there is to Down, then it comes up with another dirty little secret. Turns out half the crew have met Grace at some point or other.’

‘How? We’ve been here for, what?’

‘A couple of months. Might be three by now. Grace has been here for years. Decades. Maybe even longer.’

‘But she came through with us.’

‘She did. Doesn’t mean she hasn’t been here before. Repeatedly.’

‘Then how? That would mean—’

‘She has a way of travelling back through the portals. And always had.’

‘But then—’

‘She was no waif we picked up. She was using the portal to get out of danger. She knew what was coming.’

‘All this time, we’ve been wondering what happened to her. And she… that’s…’ He didn’t what else to say. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘She’s crossing Down, going from one door to the next. Going back and forward through time, I suppose. Safe to say, if we stay here long enough, we’ll get to ask her ourselves.’ She closed the book again, her point made. ‘We could have gone home. She was there, with us, at the portal. She could have done whatever it is she does, and we’d all be home now. Stanislav and Luiza would still be with us. You wouldn’t have suffered the way you have. Mary wouldn’t be out looking for Elena right now. Simeon wouldn’t have been dragged into this fight of ours, and we would never have met Bell or Crows.’

‘Crows,’ said Dalip. ‘I could have killed him, twice over. Instead, he killed me.’

‘Oh hush. Mary told me what happened, but he’ll have escaped the valley, you can count on that. He’s slipperier than the Devil himself. But Grace: she could have kept us away from all those people. And even if she couldn’t, then, have sent us home through a portal, there are others. We could have gone to the next one along and used that. Instead, she just abandoned us. What sort of person does that?’

‘She does. Over and over again, apparently.’

A shadow flicked over the canopy. His gaze followed the movement and saw a giant falcon skim the sand.

‘Mary’s back,’ said Mama.

‘So where’s Grace now?’ He was wondering out loud, but she took it as a question.

‘Who knows? We don’t. We don’t even know if she’s working with, or against, the White City. There’s no one left to ask.’

‘There’s the ferryman.’

‘You shot him, remember?’

‘I might be able to repair him. If I ever get out of this hammock.’

‘Good luck with that. Good luck with both, because I don’t think you’ve the faintest idea where to start mending some robot from the future. What you’ve got to do is rest, Dalip, and take it easy.’

Mary was walking across the beach towards them, the breeze driving her red dress against the shape of her legs. She looked thoughtful, determined, in control, and when she ducked under the edge of the canopy, she smiled at him.

‘You’re awake.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’

‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Like I need to talk to you. About what you did to me.’

She stopped smiling and stared at her sand-speckled feet. Mama rose from the sea-chest and slipped the book under its wooden lid.

‘Why don’t I give you youngsters some space?’ she said, and went to stand, trouser legs rolled up, in the washing waves.

Mary sat down in Mama’s place and wouldn’t look at him.

‘Mama won’t tell me,’ he said, ‘but I need to know.’

‘You were dying.’

‘I know. I’d accepted that. I’d done my duty: I’d fought bravely, and won through. It was always likely. It’s not like I wanted to die. I’m not a martyr, whatever Mama says. This, though, is unexpected. How did you keep me alive?’

‘It was all I had to work with.’ She bit at her lip. ‘Light and dark. That’s all there was. I didn’t know what I was doing, only that I had to do something.’

‘She won’t show me, or tell me anything about it. Is it that awful?’

‘No,’ she said, then equivocated. ‘It is a bit weird, though.’

He waited for her to explain, but she just knotted her fingers together in various permutations and looked uncomfortable.

‘Tell me.’

‘I… I just tried to stop the bleeding. It was all running out of you, and I couldn’t hold it in. I threw stuff at it and hoped.’ Her face grew pinched. ‘It worked.’

‘Tell me,’ he said, almost howling with frustration. ‘Just… tell me.’

‘Mama doesn’t think that’s a good idea. I… I don’t know. If you promised me you’d never look, then I’d tell you. But you’re going to look anyway, so what’s the point?’ She stood by the hammock and pushed the material down on one side so that she could take hold of his legs and turn him without spilling him on to the ground beneath. He let her guide his body, and realised that he wasn’t wearing the same clothes as he had been before. Of course. Not when the other set had been soaked with his own blood.

His bare feet connected with the soft sand, and the sudden change in orientation made him dizzy. He swallowed hard and concentrated on stopping the world, this world, any world, from spinning.

‘I think standing’s beyond me at the moment.’

‘You’re just saying that because you haven’t done it for a bit.’

‘How long?’

‘About a week.’

‘A… week?’

‘You were pretty beat up. I found Elena, by the way. I think I convinced her to come back.’

‘That’s good.’ He pressed his toes against the sand, feeling its texture and cool dampness as he burrowed them in. ‘Assuming you’re ready to forgive her.’

‘It’s okay. If she tries to pull any shit on me, I can take it from there.’ She slipped her hand under his shoulders, reaching around his back. ‘Ready for this?’

‘Not really, but let’s do it anyway.’

She counted to three, and lifted him. He hung on to her, draping his mostly useless arms about her neck. They stood like that for a while, her steadying him, him trying to work out which way was up. Every little movement he made sent the horizon tumbling.

It settled, eventually. She didn’t let go of him, but let him lean on her than her holding him up.

He gathered up his new, clean shirt, and lifted it up.

His torso was wrapped with bandages, which his dull fingers eventually untied and unwound. He could tell that something wasn’t quite right, because he couldn’t feel that he’d been cut at all. His mind remembered the strange tug and release of skin and flesh as it was first caught, then sliced apart. Yet his body had no memory of it all.

The bandages dropped away. He couldn’t see it all, but he could see enough. There was a puckered wound, where the flesh was gathered together by Mama’s neat stitching, that ran all the way from his front, around his flank, to where he couldn’t quite see at his back. It looked paler than the surrounding skin, not livid with infection nor black with dried blood. It wasn’t terrible to look at, although it was very long. He didn’t know how he could have possibly survived: one little nick on his intestines, and he’d have died of septicaemia.

Crows’ sword had done far more than that.

He could feel the ridges and knots under his fingertip, but there was no reciprocal sensation on his side. Odd, but not unusual. Then he realised that the skin hadn’t started to knit together, and never would. He placed one hand below the cut line, and one above, and gently stretched the wound apart.

There seemed to be a universe nestling in there. Holding the skin taut, he caught glimpses of stars, moving against the black of space. Whole galaxies were turning in the far distance. He stared for some considerable time, before letting go and allowing the wound to press together.

Some other reality had been incorporated into his body, filling the hole where his flank had been breached with its vastness.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘You did this, accidentally?’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose! I don’t even know what it is I did. You were losing blood, I wanted to seal it up. And I did it. It worked. You didn’t die.’

‘How far inside does this go?’ It was difficult to see, from his viewpoint.

‘I looked at it◦– into it◦– and I couldn’t see an end.’

He took his hands away, and let his shirt fall back down. He didn’t know whether to be grateful or terrified. He didn’t know if what she’d done changed him irrevocably or allowed him to stay the same. He didn’t know if it would grow until it consumed him, or if it would dwindle away as he healed, or whether he would simply be like this for ever.

One thing was obvious to him, though. He was now being sustained only by magic.

‘You know you’ve trapped me here, don’t you?’ He disengaged himself from her arms and took an unsteady step away. ‘I can’t leave Down. Not ever.’

‘What?’

‘If I step through a portal, back to London, where magic doesn’t work, I’ll die.’ He took another step. ‘All that, all that… effort. I did it because this place is worth saving. Not because I wanted to stay here for ever.’

‘It could have been worse.’

‘How?’

‘You could have died a week ago, Dalip. You could not be here at all.’

There was a shell on the beach. A little one, not much bigger than his thumb. He snapped it in two, held out his forearm, and ran the razor-sharp edge along it, splitting the skin like it was ripe fruit.

She started towards him, waving her hands, trying to stop him. But it was too late. He held up his arm to show her, and a swirl of stars moved behind the ragged gash, the same stars that passed in the dark of his eyes.

‘Tell me,’ he said: ‘what have I become?’