City of Dreams and Nightmare (6 page)

The Kite Guard felt inordinately pleased with himself. With inspired forethought, he had managed to narrow the field of search from near-impossible vastness to a manageable area. Instead of blundering blindly into an unknown and notoriously perilous part of the city, he now had a reasonable starting point.

After sorting out a few further details, he set about closing the screen down, only to have his self-congratulatory mood swept away by a voice that bellowed across the squad room, silencing everyone there. “Tylus! What in Thaiss’s name do you think you’re up to?”

For an instant Tylus froze, dread washing through him, causing him to feel like a small child caught doing something forbidden.

Goss, his face a contorted mask, eyes bulging and cheeks flushed purple with fury, stalked across the room. Had the man no home to go to? “I’ll have your cape for this, officer, permanently!”

Recovering from the shock, Tylus determined to hold his nerve. He stood and came to attention. “Sir, I’m accessing the Screen in order to perform duties assigned to me by Senior Arkademic Magnus, sir!”

That brought the sergeant up short, though he looked no less furious. “Duties?” The word spat out like something unpalatable.

“Yes, sir. On special assignment, sir!”

The sergeant glanced across to the duty officer, who gave a quick nod of confirmation, much to Tylus’s relief. Magnus had obviously acted promptly in contacting the department.

“I was told to produce this in the event of challenge, sir.” He handed the warrant to Goss.

The sergeant read it, his nostrils flaring as he did so, before slapping it back into the young Kite Guard’s hand without saying a word. After a final hate-filled glare, he managed, “Carry on,” before turning to stalk away.

A quick glance around the room showed a few ill-concealed smirks on some of his colleagues’ faces, and it occurred to Tylus that he wasn’t the only one who despised the sergeant. In fact, this little melodrama had probably done his status among the other officers no harm at all.

Would Goss contact Magnus? Probably not, and even if he did so, it seemed unlikely that he would dare to question specifics such as accessing the Screen.

Tylus resisted the temptation to dance an impromptu jig and instead, with as much dignity as his impatient feet would allow, strolled towards supply, to exchange his torn kitecape for a fresh one.

Hawkers and stallholders paused in the process of setting up their wares to stare at Tom as he raced past; this was the last thing he needed. Presumably he was in Blood Heron territory and the gang members were likely to know these market men and women, any one of whom could point them in the direction of a fleeing fugitive.

He slowed, forcing himself to be patient, to walk rather than run.

In doing so, he paid more attention to the market itself. Immediately in front of him was a veritable curtain of dead fowl. River ducks, by the look of them. Row after row of the things suspended by their feet from horizontal poles arranged one above the other, so that each line of downward-pointing beaks ended a fraction above the next pole. Tom counted five such poles in all and he wondered who would bother to buy ducks when they could just as easily go to the river and catch their own. A man and a woman, conservatively dressed, were busy hanging the final few birds from the bottom-most pole, tying their feet and attaching hooks to each and every one.

A sign stood beside them, written in bold hand with large, untidy script. Not that it meant anything to Tom, who couldn’t read. At that moment the man noticed him and looked up, smiling, before helpfully reciting a set patter which Tom suspected might mirror the sign’s message.

“Fresh off the river, caught in the early hours o’ this morning. We’ll even pluck ’em for you if you want.”

“Don’t be daft,” his wife said beside him. “That’s a street-nick; see the way he’s dressed? Only thing he’ll ever ’ave from a stall like ours is what ’e can pinch.”

Tom bowed his head and shuffled past, cursing his curiosity. He’d managed to draw attention to himself even without running.

He continued down the street, eyes fixed on the ground, refusing to look up, allowing his mantra to loop through his thoughts as he willed people not to notice him.

A little further on, when he judged enough of the market lay between him and the stairwell, he ducked down an alley to his left, between buildings that seemed taller and sturdier than those he was used to. The alley led to another avenue, which he stepped into without hesitation. He was conscious of figures in the street around him but paid them little attention, still concentrating on going unnoticed.

Then something in their gait, their posture, penetrated his awareness. He looked up, and found himself staring at a Jeradine. In fact, all the “people” in sight were members of that tall bipedal, reptilian race. Tom froze, his thoughts racing. If even half the rumours were true, a flathead was more likely to eat him than anything else. He’d seen the occasional one or two before, at a distance, but never this many and never this close. They kept themselves to themselves as a rule, rarely leaving their enclave, which he vaguely thought of as being somewhere over the far side of the city. Here, apparently.

How had he stumbled into Jeradine territory without even realising? There was a human street just the other side of that alley. He would have expected fences, barbed wire and a gate, but this was all so casual, so unsecured. It was as if the short passageway had somehow transported him to another world.

Tom backed slowly towards the alley in question, his eyes never leaving the disturbing, green-scaled visage of the nearest Jeradine, with its bulbous eyes, broad mouth and its oddly featureless face which ran from the crown of the head, between the eyes, all the way to the tip of the snout in a straight, unbroken line. Flathead.

None of the Jeradine reacted to him, but he drew little comfort from that, knowing nothing of their habits or customs and so unable to gauge whether this was in any way an ominous sign or a good one.

Finally he was able to escape into the alley and scamper back to the market street. He hesitated on the point of stepping out, peering around the corner to ensure the way was clear. Several youths were gathered in front of the stall that sold fowl, talking with the owner, who was pointing up the street in Tom’s direction.

He ducked back hurriedly out of sight.

Now what? They were Blood Herons for sure. If he stepped out into the market he seemed guaranteed a beating, and after the way he had left two of their members, the Blood Herons would be out for revenge and so were bound to make it a nasty one. Turn the other way and he was entering the unknown, taking his chances with something intrinsically ‘other’. But at least it was a chance, whereas the street-nicks would offer him none. Drawing a deep breath, he hurried back down the alley and walked straight out into the street, turning right, wanting to put as much distance between himself and the Blood Herons as possible. Again the Jeradine in view ignored him, though whether by design or indifference was impossible to tell. From what he had heard, the flatheads were unable to shape human speech so there seemed little point in asking; though perhaps he was wrong on that last point, because coming towards him at that very moment were a pair, one of each species, clearly engrossed in conversation. What particularly caught Tom’s eye was the fact that this man, the first human he had seen on the flathead street, wore the brown and orange uniform of the City Watch; a razzer.

Suddenly the night’s events came piling in on top of him and he remembered the murder, the encounter with the Kite Guard and his own terrifying fall. Had word spread already? Had every razzer in every Row of the city been alerted and told to keep an eye out for him? Either way, the last thing in the world he wanted was another encounter with an officer of the watch, whatever the uniform.

Jeradine buildings differed from those of humans in a very specific manner, Tom realised as he frantically looked about: no windows. Did they prefer the dark? He was used to seeing shacks and hovels that were too crude to include windows, but these were proper buildings and still they had none. Tom shied away from squatting in one of the doorways, imaging a green-scaled hand emerging to drag him within, so instead took refuge in a gap between two of the buildings, sinking to his haunches and bringing his mantra into focus:
You cannot see me…

The odd pair drew closer and their conversation became audible. The actual words passed Tom by as he concentrated on not being seen, but the tone of the flathead’s voice snagged his attention anyway. There was a flat, unnatural quality to it; every syllable stretched and stilted. Tom stared at the Jeradine despite himself, and saw that in addition to the loose, smock-like tunic the flatheads seemed to favour, this one sported a particularly ugly form of jewellery: a large grey crystalline ornament, an angular, sculpted box which pressed against its throat, held there by a neck band.

Then he realised that the creature’s mouth was not actually opening as it spoke. Rather, the voice seemed to emerge from the peculiar neckwear.

Even as Tom stared at the Jeradine, the creature turned its head and stared at him. Not through him, as Tom was used to when reciting his mantra, but directly at him. This was the second time in recent hours that his litany had let him down. Had it stopped working? He refused to entertain that possibility and concentrated on reciting all the harder.

You can’t see me…

The pair moved on. Perhaps he’d imagined it; perhaps the flathead hadn’t seen him at all and it was only tiredness and nerves that made him think otherwise. He was just beginning to convince himself of this when a shadow fell across the mouth of the alley.

He looked up, to see the Jeradine with the neck-box staring down at him.

“Don’t worry, the guardsman has left. I didn’t alert him to your presence,” that cold, flat voice said. “Assuming it was the watchman from whom you were hiding.” There was something unnatural about a voice speaking without a mouth opening to utter it.

Tom looked around frantically, but there was a solid wall behind him. The creature stood blocking his only escape route.

“Nor should you fear that your fascinating ability to hide has deserted you. It still works, just not on Jeradine. We see differently from you humans.”

Despite his fear, that piece of information reassured Tom and was certainly worth remembering.

“I won’t harm you, boy. Haven’t I proved that by not handing you in to the guardsman when I had the chance?”

Despite his lingering fear, Tom’s curiosity came to the fore again. “You can speak…that box?”

“A translator, yes. A useful gadget, although it requires considerable skill to operate. They work by interpreting movement of the throat rather than by responding to actual sound. Most of my people don’t bother mastering them, but then most have no need to communicate with humans.”

“But you do.”

“Obviously. My name is Ty-gen. You humans fascinate me, so I interact with your species often. You look tired, and hungry.”

Tom was both.

“I can help. Come.”

The flathead extended a surprisingly human-looking hand – once you saw past the pale green pallor and the subtle hint of scales.

Tom stared at the hand, uncertain. Some instinct was telling him to trust this strange, talking flathead, yet he couldn’t think of a logical reason why he should. After the briefest hesitation, he gripped the proffered hand, which was cool but not as rough as he’d feared, and allowed the Jeradine to help him to his feet.

A series of elevators – the clockwork lifts – took Tylus most of the way down to the City Below but after the third such device he’d had enough. He was deeply suspicious of the elevators, ever since a cousin who was fascinated by all things mechanical had insisted on showing him the inner workings of one. All Tylus had seen was a vast array of chains and huge inter-connecting cogs. He had no idea how it all came together to actually do something constructive, nor any desire to find out. His lasting impression of the experience was that anything that complicated was bound to break down now and again. Knowing his luck, it would do so when he was on-board.

He wouldn’t have minded if the wretched things were even comfortable. The elevator system was convenient, yes, but certainly not ideal. His greatest misgivings lay in the cramped nature of the compartments, which seemed to grow subtly smaller and more confining as the journey progressed. Then there were the changeovers. Due to the city’s vast scale, no single elevator was capable of taking you from top to bottom in one unbroken journey. At least, no public one; it was rumoured that the Masters had such a conveyance, but that was only a rumour.

Mind you, perhaps the changeovers were Tylus’s own private little irritation, since so few people ever had cause to travel the entire length of the city. Any who did were forced to travel in stages, changing from one clockwork box to another. In theory, the elevators were supposed to connect, so that you stepped out of one, crossed over a corridor and instantly entered the next, ready to continue your journey. Reality rarely seemed to live up to this theory and, in Tylus’s experience, transition was never that seamless.

The clockwork lifts were dispersed throughout the city, but few of the systems went all the way down to the City Below due to lack of demand, or so it was claimed. Tylus had needed to walk some distance before reaching a system that did. In the event, he needn’t have bothered, since the final anticipated changeover proved one too many. Not only was the connecting elevator completely out of synch and still several minutes away, but there was a sizeable queue already waiting for it. So sizeable that Tylus doubted whether there would even be room for him on this next one, which meant waiting for the car to complete its descent to the bottom so that its tandemmed twin could return to the changeover platform. The lift system worked that way, with two cars working opposite each other – one going down as its partner rose, each stopping at every intervening Row whether anyone wanted them to or not. This made journeys frustratingly slow, as Tylus was coming to realise.