City of Dreams and Nightmare (21 page)

Quite why they were called boys was anyone’s guess. They were clearly fully grown men beneath their concealing robes, these gatherers of the dead.

The combination of the two men standing either side of the oxen meant that the cart and its small entourage took up virtually the full width of the thoroughfare, all but forcing anyone else on the street to shuffle to one side and stand respectfully still until the cart had passed by, as tradition demanded.

It made little sense to Tom. See a body lying in a gutter and any resident of the under-City would either ignore it or rob it, yet when the same people encountered a cart filled with a whole load of similar bodies they were supposed to stand reverently with heads bowed while it trundled on its less than merry way. Why did one deserve any more respect than the other?

Such customs had always baffled Tom. Whether they were for religious or traditional purposes, elaborations of this sort tended to leave him cold.

Nonetheless, both he and Kat stood dutifully back against the wall as the oxen drew near. As ever, Tom tried to peer from under his eyebrows to catch a glimpse of the body boys’ faces but, as always, he failed, the hoods revealing nothing but shadows. In theory, the body boys were supposed to remain completely anonymous, a custom designed to avoid the temptation of bribery. Body parts were valuable, though less so when the death carts were as well laden as this one appeared to be. In practice, the anonymity was a farce. Tom knew three personally, and all were more than happy to take a bribe. It was an accepted perk of the job.

“Looks like a full one,” Kat muttered under her breath.

Tom could only agree. Not that either of them could actually see into the cart, of course, what with it being covered in sacking which was, inevitably, dyed black.

Once the cart had passed, normal activity resumed, with the entire street seeming to release a collectively held breath.

A Thaistess stood on the corner ahead of them, her dark green robe pulled closely about her, her hood up so that her face appeared only as a lighter shadow within shadow. For some reason it reminded Tom of the acolyte outside the temple yesterday, who had watched them so intently, just as, he felt certain, this priestess was watching them now, for all that he couldn’t see her eyes.

“Have you ever had much to do with them?” He nodded towards the Thaistess.

Kat followed his gaze. “On occasion. Why?”

“Nothing.” Tom didn’t want to start an argument and had no idea of Kat’s beliefs, but the priestess’s appearance in the wake of the death cart struck him as distasteful somehow, as if the woman were working in concert with the body boys, collecting the spirits of the dead even as the cart collected their bodies.

“Do you believe in all that then?” he asked. The sect taught a complex doctrine, but at its heart was the belief that the goddess Thaiss sat at the source of the Thair, and that the river began with her own teardrops, cried upon the peaks of distant mountains at the very spot where her brother Thaimon had died. As the waters flowed down the valleys and gullies towards the lowlands, they were joined by the tears of all the people in all the world who had ever cried for a lost one, until the Thair grew into the mighty torrent which eventually flowed into Thaiburley. The city took its name from the river which meant, or so the sect’s proponents claimed, that Thaiss was the goddess of the whole metropolis and all the people who dwelt within it. The doctrine taught that the citizen’s spirits returned to the bosom of the goddess when they died.

“Listen, when you’ve been raised in the Pits like I was, it’s hard to believe in any sort of gods or goddesses, at least in any kindly ones.”

“So what’s your connection to them then?”

She glared at him as if about to lose her temper, but then shook her head and smiled. “Do you ever stop asking questions?”

He grinned. “No.”

“All right. When I first left the Tattooed Men, I managed to get into a bit of trouble. Ended up being hurt pretty badly, and for the first time there was no Shayna to turn to. Thought I was a goner, but then a Thaistess, Shella, took me in and looked after me, nursed me back to health. Think she may have had a bit of the healing power herself, because I was fighting fit again far quicker than I ought to have been. I looked out for her after that – ran a few errands and made sure no one hassled either her or the temple. In fact, she was the one who first introduced me to Ty-gen and his khybul sculptures.”

Tom had been looking at Kat as she spoke. He now glanced back towards the corner, but the Thaistess was gone.

“Shella’s all right. Never once tried to shove her beliefs down my throat, just took care of me when I needed it.”

Tom grunted noncommittally.

Kat abruptly tensed.

“What?” Tom was glancing around, trying to spot whatever had disturbed her.

“Nothing,” she relaxed again. “I thought I saw…”

Tom caught a flicker of movement above and behind the girl. “Kat!”

She spun around, following the direction of his gaze. A knife appeared in her hand as she moved, pulled from some concealed sheath; not one of her long blades but a smaller weapon: a throwing knife.

As she turned, her arm whipped around and cast towards the movement Tom had noted on the wall above, the thing which crept towards her with such apparent menace.

Her aim was true and the blade clattered against the wall, shearing through a spindly tentacular limb in the process. The impact was enough to dislodge the creature, which had been moving stealthily in Kat’s direction. It fell to the ground alongside its severed limb. The thing looked similar to the creature they’d encountered the previous day, the one which Kat had thrown a stone at, but whereas the limbs in that instance had been hairy, this one’s seemed more reptilian and snakelike. The single baleful eye remained the same, though.

“Breckin’ Maker!” Kat stamped at the odd construct as it landed, but missed. The creature dodged her foot despite the missing limb, crowding against the wall to do so. Then, in a show of aggression that seemed to take even Kat by surprise, it stabbed down at her same foot with one of its own clawed appendages. Kat hopped back barely in time, turning the movement into an elegant swivel which led into a heel-first kick. This time she didn’t miss, the full force of the blow pinning the thing against the wall, crushing the single eye.

Viscous fluid clung to her boot as she drew it away. She attempted to wipe it clean against the wall.

“I’m sure that thing was deliberately trying to creep up on you,” Tom told her. He stepped forward to take a closer look at the ruined creature.

“Yeah, well, thanks,” she said distractedly, lifting her foot to peer critically at the heel.

“I wasn’t asking for thanks, I was just saying. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

“I suppose so, but then the Maker is odd.”

She stopped inspecting her foot, evidently satisfied, and looked across at him. As she did so, her eyes widened. At the same moment, he felt something land on his back, between the shoulders; not a particularly big or heavy something, and he reached an arm back to try and swat it off.

Then it stabbed him.

That first wound was to the back of his neck and was followed by three more to his back and shoulders. He felt each one go in; four shafts of agony following instantly one after the other. Nor did any of the blades withdraw.

Kat was beside him, then someone else as well, dimly sensed through the pain: the Thaistess.

“Don’t try to pull it off,” she seemed to say. “You might kill him.”

He knew what it had to be: one of the Maker’s creatures. So this was what the first one had intended for Kat, but what was the thing doing? The pain intensified and he might well have screamed.

It burned.

He could feel the clawed feet pressing into his body. The one attacking his neck and the other at the centre of his back were the worst, they seemed to be burrowing into his spine, but it was more than that. His mind burned.

He definitely screamed this time. “Get it off of me!”

“No, don’t, whatever you do,” that same voice said.

It felt as if the device was poisoning his thoughts. The very centre of his being was shifting, beliefs that were not his own attempted to assert themselves and he fought this invasion of everything he was with all his will. The result was searing agony.

He screamed again, and must have fallen over or collapsed, because his next awareness was of his cheek pressed against the ground, saliva drooling from his mouth. There were hands on his arms, trying to pull him upright. Then everything else was washed away as a wave of agony rose to engulf him once more.

While invasive and forceful on the surface, there was also a less obvious side to this attack. Beneath the bludgeon of force and pain, subtle alterations were being attempted, adjustments intended to curtail his free will, to channel and reshape his thoughts, prejudices and inclinations so that they conformed to a specific pattern and were remoulded to someone else’s dictates rather than his own. Except that, if successful, they would become his own. But he wasn’t having it. He refused to accept such an invasion of his very being.

Part of him suspected that the crippling pain was a consequence of his resistance, that, had he been less aware, the insidious influence would have slipped in and reshaped his mind almost unnoticed. But if pain was the price, so be it.

It was a peculiar experience. His whole focus had turned inward. His consciousness had withdrawn to a central core from where it could gauge the incursion in all its strivings, both subtle and overt. He had no idea why he was able to do this, how he even knew what was required to conduct such a defence, but conduct it he did. And, bit by stubborn bit, he was winning.

He remained completely oblivious to the goings on of the outside world, taking no notice of any sensory input. All that mattered was repulsing this insidious assault.

Bit by bit Tom reasserted his will; step by grudging step he purged the foreign influence from his mind. Once his eyes flickered open, once he felt able to look beyond himself again, he knew he had won.

He lay on his side, on a raised pallet in a small, plain room. His back throbbed, but it was a pain he welcomed, a sign that he had won the battle and returned to the world. With great care he reached behind to feel his back, finding fresh wounds with blood trickling from them. He sat up gingerly and then looked back at the pallet to see the Maker’s creature on a sheet stained with blood. His blood.

He stared with morbid fascination at the instrument of his torment. It had segmented metallic legs but otherwise followed the same pattern as the others, with a small body dominated by a single eye. It lay on its back unmoving, with legs retracted and curled inward, and was clearly dead, if such a thing could ever have been considered alive.

He got to his feet slowly, careful not to touch the Maker’s creature while trying not to stretch his back and so aggravate the wounds. Even as he did so, a woman entered the room. Her moss green cape marked her as a Thaistess, and he thought he recognised her from pain-clouded memories. Her hood was down and she looked far younger than he had ever imagined a priestess to be, with a fragile, sensitive face and long, dark-blonde hair. Kindly, that was the overall impression. Her almond eyes showed concern, but none of that stopped Tom from instinctively drawing back.

Kat followed immediately on the priestess’s heels. “We heard you moving,” the girl explained. Then, seeing his reaction to the Thaistess, she added, “This is Mildra. She helped you, brought you here when you collapsed, welcomed us both into her home and has been tending you since.”

“How long?” he croaked.

The girl shrugged. “A couple of hours.” Was that all? It felt like a lifetime.

The Thaistess moved fully into the room and tried to inspect his back. Suddenly conscious of having no shirt on, Tom turned to prevent her.

The woman looked at him. “May I?”

A little reluctantly, he complied. After all, had she meant him any harm she could presumably have done her worst while he was unconscious.

“I can help heal those.” She didn’t touch, apparently content with what her eyes reported. “But there could be worse. I’m going to touch your head, only for a few seconds. Will you let me?”

Tom took a deep breath and nodded. She moved her hands slowly, as if not to alarm him, and placed fingertips to his temples in much the same way as the Tattooed Men’s healer had, but this time he felt no flow of warmth, in fact he felt nothing.

Then the touch withdrew and the woman stepped back. “Incredible. I would never have believed this. You defeated it!” She stared at him, her eyes full of wonder. “That must be why it clung to you for so long – normally they infect and move on, but you never fully succumbed and then overcame it somehow. The Goddess has truly blessed you, Tom, whether you realise it or not.”

Blessed? Tom didn’t feel particularly blessed. Bruised, tired, aching and set upon, yes, thirsty even, but blessed hardly came into it.

The priestess produced a pair of finger cymbals, attached to her robe by a thin chord. Taking one in each hand, she brought them firmly together, to clash against each other and then slide apart. A single crystal-clear chime rang out, far louder than Tom had expected and evidently carrying further than he realised because a grey-robed acolyte entered scant seconds later, doubtless in response to the sound. A teenage girl of roughly his own age, she carried two jugs of water, one in each hand. Wisps of steam rose from the first, which had a cloth draped over half its mouth, while a small cup hung from the handle of the other.

The acolyte handed the second jug to the Thaistess, who filled the cup and handed it to Tom. Had she read his mind? He took the small metal vessel without saying a word and drank from it: chilled, clear water, which he finished thirstily. As he handed the cup back, he even found the grace to thank the woman.

Meanwhile the acolyte set about cleaning his wounds, washing them with the cloth and warm water. He winced at every touch but did his best to hold still.