City of Dreams and Nightmare (24 page)

Even so, this was a whiff of scandal that Magnus could well do without at present.

So he courted, befriended and offered support where appropriate, ensuring that Syrena and her allies remained insignificant voices crying in the wilderness.

It was this familiar dance of political manoeuvring that Magnus was fully absorbed by when he became aware of a disturbance, a rumbling of murmurs and exclamations that swirled around him. He looked up, a little annoyed at being interrupted but wondering what could cause such a commotion here, in the common room of the assembly. What he saw provided more than adequate explanation.

Moving steadily towards him, dispensing smiles and greetings as he passed, was the prime master of Thaiburley, flanked by four of the council guard. Magnus stopped speaking, forgot what he had been saying and so allowed the delicate web of silken words he had been so carefully spinning to disintegrate.

This was unprecedented. Never in living memory had council guards set foot in the assembly’s commons. Despite the vastness of the room, Magnus felt hemmed in, as if the walls were closing inexorably towards him. He looked around quickly, seeking a means of escape, but knew that if he ran now, in front of so many of his contemporaries, all would be lost beyond any hope of redemption and he was not yet ready to throw everything away so wantonly. He waited, rising to his feet as the prime master’s party arrived, with smile and greeting at the ready.

“Prime master, again you have managed to surprise me.”

“Magnus, yes, I get to visit the assembly too infrequently these days – the pressure of time and responsibility, I’m afraid.”

This sounded promising; no immediate sign of his being arrested yet at any rate.

The prime master took a seat, the four white-cloaked guards arraying themselves behind him. Once Magnus had also sat down again, he continued. “Look, apologies for the unorthodox entrance, but there have been developments in the Thomas investigation.”

Magnus’s heart skipped a beat. Surely the prime master was not about to discuss such sensitive issues here, where a hundred pairs of ears were straining to catch every nuance? The prime master could not possibly have reached his present eminence were he that naïve.

“Developments regarding you, actually.”

Magnus tensed despite his best efforts. Was this it: arrest after all?

“I don’t mean to alarm you, but a disturbing possibility has emerged.” If this was intended not to alarm Magnus, it was doing a very poor job. “It seems that Thomas may not have been the intended victim of the murder.”

Magnus blinked, wondering if he had heard correctly. “Pardon?”

“We now have reason to believe that you may have been the actual target, that the assassin killed the wrong man.”

Magnus fought to control a very strong desire to laugh. “What?” was all he could manage.

“Think about it,” the prime master continued, “a street-nick is assigned to kill you and is sent to a place where he expects to find you. On his arrival, he sees a man dressed in senior cleric’s blue exactly where and when he was told you would be.”

“Yes, but, I mean, who…?”

“Not for you to worry about, my friend; leave the answering of questions to the experts, who are working on them even as we speak. Our prime concern is for your safety. That’s why the guards are here. Until this situation is resolved, I’m assigning two of the council’s own guard to protect you. They’ll be your constant companions until the monsters responsible for this appalling act are brought to justice, as they inevitably shall be.” These last words boomed out sonorously, as if the prime master were delivering a stirring speech.

A ripple of spontaneous applause broke out among the onlookers, which quickly gathered pace until all those present were clapping enthusiastically. Of course the prime master wasn’t naïve, Magnus realised; he was deliberately playing to an audience.

“I don’t know what to say, prime–”

The man held up a hand, forestalling further comment. “No need to thank me, Magnus. It’s just the council’s way of letting you know that you have friends and you don’t have to face this ordeal alone.”

The prime master then excused himself and left, breezing out of the common room as he had breezed in. With him, he took two of the tall and solemn guards. Conspicuously, the other two remained.

In the wake of his departure, excited conversation bubbled throughout the room. Magnus sat and brooded, letting all the hubbub wash over him. How had this happened? Ostensibly, everything was being done for his benefit – the man servant, the guards – but in the process, he was being stifled bit by bit, his freedom of movement restricted. And, as yet, he could not think of a single thing to do about it.

The session bell called them back for the afternoon’s proceedings, and Magnus filed out with his fellows towards the assembly hall, flanked by his newly-acquired white-cloaked shadows, who he hoped would wait at the doors. As he was about to enter the hall, a runner came up and handed him a slip of paper. He read the message as he walked but, on seeing its content, stumbled to a halt.

Magnus read the note again with growing disbelief. He clenched his fist in frustration, scrunching the sheet of paper up in the process.

“Bad news, Magnus?” asked a concerned voice.

He looked up to discover that his reaction had been witnessed by a fellow senior arkademic, one who wore her robe with unfailing elegance. As ever, her pure silver hair was pulled back severely and tied in a bun. Rumour had it that she maintained her faultless complexion courtesy of the judicious application of the arts, but the truth was that she had never looked any different. There were no specific moments when people could point to a sudden transformation, old to younger-looking; the wretched woman simply never seemed to age, so the rumours remained just that. Her grey-blue eyes now studied him closely, looking for any crack or weakness.

He smiled, with as little sincerity as she had expressed in her words. “Nothing of any importance, Syrena, though thank you for your concern.”

The woman nodded and walked on.

Magnus smoothed out the paper and read the message for a third time, though he couldn’t have explained why, since he knew perfectly well what it said. The message had originated from a Captain Johnson, a watch station commander in the City Below. It asked for confirmation that a man by the name of Dewar worked for him and requested a description of the individual if so.

What in the name of Thaiss was going on down there?

THIRTEEN

Tylus was relieved to see the girl, Jezmina, depart. He noted the affect she had on some of the men but couldn’t understand it. To him she was just a child making a spectacle of herself and he found the sight both irritating and tiresome. The men who were taken in by her clumsy flaunting he could only pity. Richardson seemed far more charitably disposed to the girl, treating her as if she were some precious daughter, which made him the ideal person to escort her away. Once he did so, everyone was able to concentrate more effectively.

Looking back, once things calmed down a little and the thrill of new discovery palled, Tylus found he had mixed feelings about the raid. It had been a qualified success at best. Ironically, where it proved most worthwhile was in providing progress for the watch with regard to their ongoing situation with the street-nicks; the very carrot he had used to persuade Johnson to authorise the raid in the first place without any real expectation of success in that direction. It now seemed certain that these strange hybrid mechanisms were affecting the youths’ behaviour to some extent and so were indeed connected to the problem. A happy circumstance which did his reputation no harm whatsoever.

Unfortunately, there was still no sign of the boy Tom, and general consensus seemed to be that if the lad had returned to the under-City early the previous morning as presumed, he should have found his way home by now. As he clearly hadn’t, it was felt that he had probably fallen victim to one of the many dangers that lurked in the streets. This was all well and good, but it didn’t help Tylus, who could hardly return to the senior arkademic with such vague and unsubstantiated conjecture. If the lad had perished he needed to establish exactly where and how. He was going to have to piece together the sequence of events that led up to whatever had become of the boy; only then could he stand in front of Magnus and report with confidence. That meant widening the area of search, with the most immediate priority being to establish exactly where Tom had returned to in the City Below. To discover this, he would have to check each and every stairwell until he chanced upon the right one. Which entailed dealing with the street-nicks. The problem being, of course, that the street-nicks were not fully themselves at present, so nothing he learnt from them could be relied upon.

All of which left Tylus with an awkward dilemma, one which was only likely to be resolved once he understood exactly what these devices were doing to the nicks and determined whether or not their effects could be countered. The latest developments had been reported through official channels and the watch was waiting for direction from up-City but, according to both Johnson and Able, instructions could be a while in coming.

“Nothing new in that,” Able assured him. “We’re well used to coping for ourselves down here. It’s something you have to pick up quick in the watch if you want to survive.”

From all that Tylus had heard, there was one place they could turn to for information while they waited for the wheels of command to turn: the dog master. If he dealt in similar mechanical-organic hybrids to these devices, as had been suggested, he might just be able to shed some light on the matter. Nobody had any better ideas, so Tylus set off to find this shadowy figure. Richardson and Dewar accompanied him, though neither seemed too thrilled at the prospect.

“You hear dark things about the dog master,” Richardson muttered.

“The things you don’t hear are even worse,” Dewar assured him.

Interestingly, it was Dewar who led the way. Richardson admitted to having a vague idea of the areas the dog master haunted, but only Dewar seemed confident of the exact location, which added some credence to the man’s claim of having lived down here in the past.

They took with them the deactivated device, which had been severed from the unfortunate street-nick’s corpse. The mechanism had shown no sign of animation since being removed. Tylus, who carried it, was surprised at how light the thing was, and how small. Once they were cut away from the nick, the spindly legs had retracted, curling up on themselves to leave an irregular ball which fitted comfortably in the palm of his hand. This also had the effect of making the device seem even more organic, since it had curled up in much the same manner as a spider or other small creature might in death or when under threat.

Tylus held the thing in a cloth bag and was more than a little nervous about carrying it at all. He was doing so only by default. Richardson had made it clear that he was not about to touch the thing and Tylus had not even bothered offering the task to Dewar. For some reason, he was determined not to look weak in that man’s eyes.

Dewar led them through a prosperous area close to the guard station. They walked on cobbles down Wood Street, where shop windows were filled with chairs and tables and cabinets and dressers, carved out of various woods in varied style, from utilitarian simplicity to extravagantly sculpted ornateness, though the former predominated. Many of these would have been produced by local craftsmen from wood brought in via the river, though some were undoubtedly imported already made.

Iron lamp posts stood silent sentry at intervals along the street’s course, testament to the days before the war when electricity had been more widely available.

They headed down a side turning, past a tavern whose freshly painted sign declared it to be the Boot and Shoe Inn. Slatted iron-frame benches lined the tavern’s wall, in front of which half a dozen ale barrels had been stood on end, each with a disc of wood nailed to its top to form a table. At one such, two bewhiskered men were sitting, their flagons of ale on the table before them. The pair glanced at the trio and wished them a good day as they strode past, though whether this was because of his and Richardson’s uniforms or they were simply predisposed to politeness, Tylus would not have cared to guess.

The turning led into another broad avenue, again with its full complement of redundant street lamps. The houses here were two-storey and looked well maintained, but as they crossed this street and took another narrow turning, that soon changed. The buildings became noticeably more dilapidated while remaining substantial in size – faded reminders of better days.

In minutes they had moved from streets where people were plentiful to ones where they were almost entirely absent, though dogs remained numerous. Perhaps they always were down here and Tylus was simply more aware of them given who they were going to see. Most looked natural, which was not what Tylus would have expected from what he’d heard, but a particularly large and mangy-looking specimen, which padded away in front of them, looked to have a stilted, awkward gait.

One turning led to another and the state of the buildings in no way improved.

“He knows we’re here,” Dewar said quietly.

“How can you be sure?”

“Look behind us.”

Tylus did so. Two hybrid hounds stood there, differing in size and underlying breed but unified by their shared patchwork of fur and metal. The larger of the two, which stood as high as the Kite Guard’s thigh, boasted a pair of brown canine eyes; the smaller dog didn’t. In their place it had two bulbous grills, unblinking bulges which looked to be built out of wire mesh. The larger dog’s jaw and, presumably, teeth were made from metal, while the smaller one’s head looked completely natural apart from the meshed, insect-like eyes. Both had necks constructed of overlapping steel plates. Tylus was fascinated by the way these plates slid smoothly over each other as the dogs moved, a fact which became apparent as the larger hound padded forward, lowering its head on drawing nearer.

Dewar stepped towards the creature. “Dog master, we have business with you. And we bring you a gift.”

He gestured towards Tylus, who reached gingerly into the cloth bag and pulled out the curled-up spiderish mechanism. He hated handling the thing, afraid that it was only playing dead and would spring to life at any moment, to dig its invasive claws into his body. Yet it remained inert as he held it out on his flat palm towards the hound, which sniffed at it suspiciously, as any wholly natural dog might.

The false-dog cocked its head, voicing an all-too convincing growl, which prompted him to lift his hand away slowly. It then trotted forward again, passing between them, until it stood in the direction they had been walking. A few paces ahead, it stopped, turned back to look at them and voiced a single, slightly tinny bark.

“I presume we’re supposed to follow,” Tylus said quietly.

“I would imagine so,” Dewar replied.

As they set off after the lead dog, another hybrid hound arrived to join the smaller one behind them, with a fourth appearing almost immediately, this one the largest yet. Tylus tried to regard them as an honour guard. That way, it didn’t feel quite so much as if he and his companions had just been relegated to the status of prisoners.

Their canine guide led them to a flight of old iron steps, black paint peeling from the handrail which was surrendering to rust. The lead dog didn’t hesitate but trotted straight up the stairs. Slightly to Tylus’s bemusement, the smallest of their four-strong escort disdained the steps altogether and instead scuttled straight up the wall, its limbs splayed out to either side like some disjointed crab. The lead dog pushed against the door at the top of the stairs, the bottom half of which instantly swung open, closing again once the dog had trotted through. Following at its heels, Dewar turned the appropriate handle and the door opened as one unit. When Tylus went to step in behind the arkademic’s man, the wall-climbing dog skittered through the doorway above his shoulder, its back almost brushing his hair, causing him to cringe despite his best efforts not to.

He glared after the thing but soon forgot it as he stared at what waited on the other side of the door. He seemed to have stepped into a jungle, though one built by human hands rather than the dictates of nature. An undergrowth of clutter rose to his left: boxes, steel plates, coils of wire thread, circuit boards, pins, iron rods, small wheels, parts of goodness knew what machinery, all heaped together with no obvious rhyme or reason. Thick, bough-like pipes paralleled the floor and vines of steel cable looped from the ceiling in every direction, forcing Tylus to duck as he followed Dewar deeper into the room, while the whole place was oppressively hot.

“How creepy is this?” Richardson said from behind him.

Tylus grunted a noncommittal response. Bearing in mind the nature of the dog master’s creations, he was just relieved that, as yet, there was no evidence of a pile of discarded organic parts to match the mechanical one by the door, particularly given the temperature in here. Then he saw the man himself, who stood before them with the lead dog at his side.

The dog master looked like some feral creature, as wild as any of the under-City’s numerous unclaimed hounds. Not a tall man, yet his presence, outlandish appearance and sheer energy seemed to raise his stature beyond mere physical height. For clothes he wore a patchwork of what could only be dog pelts, which appeared to have been layered and stitched together in some mad artist’s frenzy. Strips of tattered fur trailed from the arms like fronds and colour changes occurred apparently at random, with no thought to matching or blending: chocolate brown one minute, brindled grey the next, with a strip of creamy white here and a panel of sandy gold there. Tylus just hoped the skins had been properly cured.

The man’s face matched his attire; unshaven, but not in the sense of possessing a beard, rather in the sense of someone who had simply forgotten to use a razor for several days, leading to a rash of peppercorn stubble in haphazard white and grey. The hair was unkempt, uncut in a fair while and whiter than the stubble. It fell in draggle-like strands over ears and neck and shoulders, hair which showed slight kinks and waves as it tumbled but would probably have been straight were it worn shorter.

Yet it was the eyes which dominated. Set above a prominent hooked nose, they burned like hot coals, with an energy that Tylus already thought of as manic even before this outlandish apparition spoke.

“What an interesting party it is that comes to visit me. An officer of the watch, a Kite Guard descended from the distant Heights and, last but not least, my old friend Dewar. How privileged I am.”

Friend
? Dewar had made no mention of actually knowing the man.

“Hello, dog master,” Dewar said levelly and perhaps a little cagily. Tylus caught the hint of reservation and wondered exactly what the history was between these two. Should he be concerned about it? Had it been a mistake to let Dewar accompany them? A little late to worry about such things now.

“It must be, oh, I don’t know, a long, long time since you were last here, Dewar; and how did you say goodbye on that occasion? By kicking one of my poor pets, as I recall.”

“No offence or insult was intended to either you or your pet, dog master, but I was in something of a hurry and it would insist on trying to hump my leg.”

“But it’s a dog, and it liked you. What would you expect it to do?”

“Leave my leg in peace. All the other dogs down here seem to manage to.”

“No matter, that’s all behind us now, long forgotten.” The dog master waved a hand with a casualness which didn’t fool Tylus and he doubted whether it convinced Dewar either. “Now, I understand you have a gift for me?”

Tylus reached into the bag again. He had hoped that, having done this once already, grasping the device might be a little easier the second time. It wasn’t. But he still held out the curled-up construct with a steady hand.

The dog master peered at it. “Hmm, vile things aren’t they?” He then snatched the thing from the Kite Guard and casually tossed it up in the air and caught it again, as he might a ball.

“They’re the Maker’s,” he supplied. “My pets have brought me one or two of late, but another one’s always welcome.”

“You know this Maker?” Dewar asked.

“By his deeds, certainly. As an individual? No. Nor would I wish to. I mean, look at this,” he held the construct out to Dewar. “It’s an abomination. The man needs locking up, which is what your two friends here should be doing rather than pestering an old man like me.” He indicated Tylus and Richardson.