The Bell Between Worlds (42 page)

His eyes lingered on the smoke – searching for something at its centre – but then he looked up above the churning plumes.

The hairs prickled on his neck.

Looming through the shades of grey was a shape so vast that it took him a moment for his eyes to find its edges. It was a colossal pyramid of shadow, soaring out of the heart of the city towards the heavens, looming over the maze of houses and streets, the maelstrom of cloud and smoke, even the Barrens themselves. Its great mass seemed to block out the light across a giant portion of the sky, casting a sharp, angular shadow over the cloud. As he watched, some of it cleared, revealing a triangular wall of jet-black stone, which seemed to draw in the light. It had no features, no breaks in its surface: nothing but a dark, solid expanse of stone sloping up towards the point of the pyramid.

“The Dirgheon,” murmured Simia, who had climbed up next to him.

Sylas turned to her. She too was staring up at the monstrous building. He saw at once that it had a strange effect on her; her ruddy cheeks had paled.

“What is it?” he asked breathlessly.

“Thoth’s citadel. The centre of everything.”

He swallowed. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“It isn’t,” she said, drawing her eyes away as if she could not bear to look at it any longer.

“What’s inside?”

“Bad things. Very bad things. Thoth and his Magrumen; the birthing chambers of the Ghor; plenty of things that you just don’t want to know about, and you don’t want to meet. And then–” her eyes moved back to the giant pyramid – “there are those they’ve captured but haven’t yet killed.”

Sylas followed her eyes to the pyramid’s base. “It’s a
prison
?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

She drew a lungful of the chill morning air, then jumped down from the rock. “Come on, we have to keep moving – they may not be far behind. And believe me, we won’t hear them when they come.”

Sylas took a last lingering look at the Dirgheon. His eyes traced one sloping wall to the other, trying to imagine how many thousands of rooms and halls lay within, how many squalid cells and endless, twisting passageways. He thought of Bayleon and Fathray and Bowe and wondered if they would be taken there – if they were there even now – to languish in some forgotten room at the end of some lost, lightless corridor.

“Come on!” snapped Simia impatiently.

“OK, OK,” he said, his eyes lingering on the pyramid for a moment longer.

He leapt down from the rock and followed Simia to the wall of the gully.

“We’ll have to risk it from here,” she said. “The sooner we’re in the city the better.”

She clambered up the bank using what few footholds she could and, glancing warily in all directions, pushed herself over the top. Sylas scrambled up behind her and heaved himself on to the flat ground beyond.

They lay still for some seconds, searching the low, flat horizon behind them for any sign of their pursuers, but saw nothing. The Barrens were shrouded in a mist that boiled and churned ominously in the breeze.

Slowly they stood up.

Immediately Sylas heard the sounds of the city. It gave off a low rumble, as though its walls and streets were growling spitefully at the new day. The noise was unnerving after the silence of the Barrens, but as he listened, he realised that it was no more than a chorus of sounds, each lending resonance to the city’s guttural voice: cartwheels on stone, yells from the market, hammers on anvils, whining from sawmills, hooves in the mud – these and a thousand other sounds of life came together as a single thunderous growl. He felt his heart quicken at the sound of people living their lives and he felt the Barrens’ deathly blanket start to recede, as if his blood was flowing more freely.

“We’ll have to go in through the slums,” said Simia with distaste. “They might be looking for us on the roads. Just stay close behind me and don’t say a word to anyone or anything – no matter what.”

They moved quickly, no longer running but walking briskly, trying not to look conspicuous.

The nearest shacks were only a short distance away and it was not long before they started to see people: a man labouring under water buckets, a woman hanging out grubby washing and a child running down one of the alleyways. Simia kept walking, her arms swinging confidently at her sides, humming a tune under her breath.

Sylas’s stomach tightened as he noticed a waver in her voice.

In another minute they were there, walking up to the first makeshift hovel: walls made of mud and scrap wood and a roof of some kind of canvas. As he walked past it and into an alleyway, he noticed a strong smell: the unmistakable stench of sewage. It seemed to issue from every dark corner, every putrid ditch and tumbledown shelter, and it only became stronger the further they walked into the slum.

He tried to keep his eyes down and straight ahead as they wandered from one alleyway into another, but he caught occasional glimpses of withered men and women sitting in dark doorways smoking a pipe or cooking at a fire, filthy children playing in the dust, old people sleeping in hammocks or on the hard earth. And while the sounds of the city were louder than ever, Sylas realised that none of them were coming from the slum: this was a silent, depressing place; a place of sickly murmurs and shuffling feet; of wheezing and coughing and disease.

He turned a corner and nearly walked headlong into a thick wooden pole driven into the earth. He heard a flutter overhead and looked up to see a huge red flag flapping against the grey sky. A skeletal white face glowered down from among the folds, shifting with each curl of the flag so that it almost seemed alive: frowning, glaring. It was Thoth’s standard, presiding over these poor people as if he himself was there, peering down at them, mocking them in their defeat. Sylas hurried on, staying close behind Simia.

They entered a warren of tiny passageways pressed in so tightly that there was little light to see by. She moved confidently, turning this way and that without hesitation.

“You know this place, don’t you?” he whispered.

She nodded.

“How?”

“I lived here. After the war,” she whispered, turning to press her finger to her lips. She walked on.

Sylas looked again at the squalor around him. She had lived
here
– in this? He found it hard to imagine her – someone with so much life and energy – living in such a horrible, deathly place, a place where people seemed broken and without hope.

As he followed her, he looked about him with new interest, trying to picture her in the dingy backstreets and squalid homes. The more he allowed himself to see, the more he believed that it might be true. The people were not so different from Simia after all: beneath their matted hair and grimy skin they had faces like any other, some with bright, lively eyes and others whose expressions betrayed intelligence and humour. He saw children playing with a ball made of rags, laughing gleefully as one of them swept at it with her bare foot and missed completely, falling unceremoniously on her back. Some of the old people lying in doorways returned his gaze, occasionally showing interest as they passed. One of them turned his head to watch him go, craning his shrivelled neck, seemingly unable to move his tired old limbs.

And then Sylas saw something familiar. They had just crossed a low bridge made of pieces of wood and hard-packed earth, blocking their noses against the stagnant drain below, when he saw a symbol scratched crudely into a broken wall.

A feather.

For a moment he was unsure, but as he drew nearer, he became more and more certain that he knew it.

He turned to Simia, who had paused further up the lane, and pointed at the symbol.

“
Filimaya
was wearing this,” he whispered. “It was on her gown.”

“Shhhh!” hissed Simia, rushing back and taking him by the arm. “Don’t use her name here! There are spies everywhere!”

“But what is it?” he pressed, pulling his arm away. “What does it mean?”

“It’s the mark of the Suhl,” murmured Simia, looking about her warily as they walked.

“
Here?
”

She looked a little surprised. “We’re everywhere,” she whispered, “but
especially
here. These are some of the unlucky ones – those who didn’t get away after the war. You’ll find the Suhl in every slum of the world. Slums are safe – no order, no guards, nobody checking your papers or collecting your taxes. This whole place is one giant sanctuary. Problem is, it’s almost as bad as what they’re hiding from.”

“So the others at the mill – they were the lucky ones?”

She nodded. “The stronger ones – the ones who still had some fight in them, some hope. There are a few places like the mill, but not many. The rest are in places like this, or out there–” she gestured towards the Barrens – “in the wilderness.”

They rounded a corner and entered a broader street in which there were a few sparse stalls selling a few limp vegetables and cheap offcuts of meat. Sylas paid them scant attention, for above them loomed the gigantic silhouette of the Dirgheon, now clearly visible between the clouds and smoke.

He saw for the first time that its vast sloping sides were made up of thousands of blocks of stone placed together in perfectly straight rows, like a giant staircase rising on all sides towards a distant point high above the clouds. He saw too that they were not entirely black, for a vast red banner had been hung from the very centre of each. They trailed over the black steps like rivers of blood, widening as they descended. In their very centre was depicted the now familiar image of a giant skeletal face: the face of Thoth glowering down over his city as though watching everything, scrutinising everyone. Beneath his imposing visage were three symbols: the hunched bird; two circles, one within the other; and a scroll. The effect of the banners was just as his creator had intended: a show of absolute, terrifying power.

As they moved further down the lane, Sylas saw that it was not the only vast structure in the city. Just to their right and a little nearer, a great stone tower loomed over the shambolic skyline. Unlike the dark, brooding form of the Dirgheon this was an elegant building, constructed entirely of exquisite white stone. Its smooth sides bowed inwards until they almost met in the middle, before they broadened at the top like the branches of a vast tree to support two gigantic circular platforms, one above the other, with a series of arches between. Around these archways was carved a breathtaking collection of human figures in poses that Sylas could not quite make out, gathered round myriad symbols and shapes.

Sylas’s eyes moved between this and the Dirgheon. It was hard to imagine two more contrasting buildings.

“The Temple of Isia,” whispered Simia at his side, breaking into a run. “Come on, and
stop staring
!”

They jogged down lane after lane, street after street, passage after passage. The character of the buildings began to change, becoming far more substantial than any they had seen in the slums, made out of wattle and daub or even stone, some constructed over two storeys. They were clearly entering the heart of things, the centre of Thoth’s great city. The lanes became narrower and darker, the light blocked out by the towering structures that leaned in above them, using up every last bit of space.

Then they turned a corner to see the lane opening out, the final buildings giving way to an entirely new scene. They walked out of the alleyway and into the light.

A broad view of the river opened up in front of them. Like at the mill the vast body of water swept in a wide arc, turning almost back upon itself in a perfect meander. But that was the extent of the resemblance. Instead of the cool, blue-grey waters at the mill, these were brown and opaque; instead of the lively current was a rolling, sluggish churn that swallowed and regurgitated an endless flow of sewage and detritus. The sloping banks heaved with litter and filth and even the ravenous birds that circled above seemed to peer down with distaste. When they dared to descend, they swooped and snatched up their mouldy prize without touching down.

Sylas covered his nose and mouth. “It’s disgusting,” he mumbled.

Simia said nothing. She was not cringing but smiling. She was not looking at him but staring out across the river.

He followed her eyes. “What are you looking at?”

“Paiscion’s home,” she said.

The snap of the lock woke Bowe in an instant. He recoiled as the great iron door of his cell flew open and a giant figure appeared in the doorway.

It was like no Ghor he had ever seen: taller, broader, its head less stooped, its posture more human. The feeble light from the corridor illuminated the beast’s great mane of hair, the gold collar around its neck and the fine armour covering its muscular chest, arms and thighs. At the centre of the breastplate a single symbol was picked out in gold: a skeletal face, devoid of all expression, empty and dark. It was the livery of Thoth’s personal guard.

Before Bowe could react, the guard took two athletic bounds, reached down and grasped his neck in a vice-like grip, then slammed him up against the wall. It leaned forward, bringing its short, half-human muzzle and canine teeth within inches of his face.