Authors: Stella Gemmell
The City
Built up over the millennia, layer upon layer, the City is ancient and vast. Over the centuries, it has sprawled beyond its walls, the cause of constant war with neighbouring peoples and kingdoms, laying waste to what was once green and fertile.
And at the heart of the City resides the emperor. Few have ever seen him. Those who have remember a man in his prime and yet he should be very old. Some speculate that he is no longer human; others wonder if indeed he ever truly was. And a small number have come to a desperate conclusion: that the only way to stop the ceaseless slaughter is to end the emperor’s unnaturally long life.
From the rotting, flood-ruined catacombs beneath the City, where the poor struggle to stay alive, to the blood-soaked fields of battle, where so few heroes survive, these rebels pin their hopes on one man. A man who was once the emperor’s foremost general. A man, a revered soldier, who could lead an uprising and unite the City. A man who was betrayed, imprisoned, tortured and is now believed to be dead...
Contents
Part Three: The House of Glass
Part Six: The Day of Summoning
Stella Gemmell
For Dave, of course.
The Deepest Dark
CHAPTER ONE
FIRST THERE WAS
the darkness – heavy and choking, blue-black and tangible, filling the mouth and ears and mind. Then the smell – huge, as solid as rough stone beneath bare feet or a pillow over the face, suffocating thought. Finally, the sound of the sewer – the never-ending sigh of the stream, the drips and the splashes and the gushing.
And the pitter-patter of sharp claws on wet brick.
The rat was big and old, and he was canny. He needed no light to follow the contours of the labyrinth in which he lived out his days. His paws detected the minute variations of texture on the bricks he raced along, high above the never-ending stream of life. The astonishing discrimination of his twitching nose told him how high the stream was flowing, the quality of its contents – a high, thin flood brought vegetation, small dead things, sometimes larger ones; a low thick turgid flow held its own treats for the discerning rodent – and the quality of the air, which was sometimes enough to make even a rat ill. He could tell by the pressure on his sensitive ears whether he was running through a small tight tunnel, or where the ceiling opened high above him into one of the soaring vaults designed by a long-forgotten master architect, raised by a team of City builders, a wonder of mathematics, unseen for centuries, forgotten.
The rat could hear his friends pittering on the other side of the
brick wall he followed, pattering in the next damp tunnel above him. But for a while he had outrun them all, following his nose’s relentless demand.
The corpse was barely bloated, barely dead, the rigor of mortality only recently departed. It was naked save for a rag drifting round its neck, the skin pale and cold as winter sunrise. It had fetched up against the worn teeth of a broken metal grille, which for a short while resumed its long-abandoned role of stopping large objects moving further downstream into the deeper depths of the sewer.
A burgeoning of the stream would happen later that day, and the dead man would travel on alone – but for a while the rat kept him company.
The boy awoke with a start on the tiny ledge where he slept. He kicked out. The kick might have been an errant muscle or the dead-end of a bad dream, but it was only a small movement. He’d been taking his rest on this ledge for long enough to know – even in sleep – he could not afford any sudden move, far less a sleepy roll which would dump him into the stream of waste unreeling endlessly below him. But when he went to his rest at night he was always dog-tired, dead to the world (dead, certainly, in the world’s mind), and he lay unmoving, unconscious until it was time to wake.
Elija, who had been living in the sewer for four years, was ten years old.
He knew he held a privileged position. When he and his sister had first found sanctuary there their protector, an older boy, a redhead called Rubin, had to fight for their right to stay in that place of warmth and safety. Then for nights without number one of them had to stay on guard lest they be dumped into the stream by those jealous of their territory. But that was a long time ago; his little sister Em couldn’t remember back that far. Now they had been in the sewers for longer than most of the Dwellers and their status was, for the time, secure.
Elija shifted carefully, his bare foot detecting the variations of texture on the bricks until it hit an outcrop of broken cement, its contours better known to him than the palm of his hand. He levered up to sitting. Watery light was filtering through broken stonework high in the roof above him. It wasn’t enough to see by, but it thinned the air and gave it a texture of motes Elija felt he could trap in his
hand and keep for later in the day, deeper in the sewer, where it might be needed.
His memories were mostly of a crying woman and a hard-handed man, fist constantly raised, face red. Then there was the time of being alone with Em, running and hiding, always frightened. His dreams often contained blood, although he remembered none. The fear still lay on the edge of his consciousness, but he had no memory of it; he was glad to be safe.
Rubin had explained to them about the stream. It was a small river which rose high above the City in the south, in a place of blue hills and silver trees under constant sun. It was called the Sheepwash there. It dived underground to take on its new guise as a sewer many leagues from the City. Goats dipped their feet in it in final tribute before it left the daylight for ever.
The light was stronger now. Elija had been aware of the presence of his sister since he woke, but now he turned carefully and could see the curve of her dark head above the huddled lump of her body.
‘Wake up, slugabed,’ he said quietly, with no real intention of waking her. She needed more sleep than he did. She didn’t stir, although he could hear movement around him as the Dwellers roused themselves for another day of darkness. There were stirring sounds, the occasional muttered exchange, a sudden echoing shout or imprecation to the gods of the Halls.
Elija stood and relieved himself into the stream which now ran the height of a man below his ledge. He walked confidently along the narrow shelf and picked up the small bag of belongings which lay between him and Em at night. He sat down and opened it, taking out the piece of valuable sapphire moss they had found beyond the Eating Gate. The moss still smelled fresh and he tore a piece off and rubbed it into his face and hands, relishing the fast-fading sweetness, the tang Rubin had told him was called lemon. He was supposed to use it on his feet, he knew, to ward off foot-rot, which claimed so many of the Dwellers. But they only had a little left and he didn’t want to waste it on his feet. He would see that Em did, though.
His hands clean, he foraged in the bag again and came up with strips of dried meat he’d bought from Old Hal. He chewed them slowly and thoroughly, coping stoically with the familiar cramps in his middle which flowed then ebbed.
He called again. ‘Wake up, Em. Time to eat.’
He kicked her gently and knew she was awake though she didn’t move. From the sack he used for a pillow he took out the rags for his feet and spent the next few moments carefully winding and rewinding them round ankles and heels, paying special care to the ankle bones, insteps, toes. In his years in the Halls he had got to know many people who were now dead, many of them from sicknesses arising in the feet.
Em was moving at last, going sleepily through her own morning rituals. Her brother did not speak to her and focused his eyes on far walls and the movements of distant Dwellers, giving her privacy.
It was as light now as it would get. Above him the vaulted dome was filled with a shining silver mist which never entirely went away but sometimes thinned and drifted in clouds. Hundreds of ledges ran along the curved walls, mostly above the height of Elija’s shelf, mostly inaccessible and untenanted. The Dwellers called it the Hall of Blue Light. Elija and Emly called it home.
Rivers flowed in from three brick arches at the base of the dome, met in a maelstrom of water at the centre, then exited through a pitch-black maw towards the perils of the Eating Gate, the little Hellespont, Dark Water and, finally, to the ocean itself uncounted leagues away.
A harsh voice behind him brought Elija quickly to his feet.
‘Lije. Em. Let’s march.’
And the new day began.
The leader of today’s foraging party was called Malvenny. He was tall – a disadvantage in the Halls – and his face was long and thin, his nose hooked and bent sideways. Em said his eyes were green. She had the disconcerting habit of looking straight into people’s faces, whereas Elija always addressed Malvenny at chest level.
He followed the tall man closely, Em to his right, well within the sputtering light of Malvenny’s torch. There were seven in the party, and only the dog-tail had a torch too. They carried plenty with them, of course, but used them sparingly in well-travelled Halls.
It was more than an hour’s march to the Eating Gate, then more than that to their foraging ground today. Malvenny had not told them where they were going – it was his privilege, he was the leader and he had the food – but Elija knew there would be poor pickings any closer. He had confidence in Malvenny. Elija walked briskly
through the dark, watching Em’s small feet and feeling her hot hand in his.
They reached the Malefactors’ Cross, a sturdy bridge built of tarred rope and planks which led to the main highway. They crossed it – as Rubin used to say – with respect.
As he always did, Elija stopped in the middle for a moment to lean on the thick ropes and look down into the Whithergo, a diversion from the main stream which, everyone knew, shortly plunged down a great hole deep into the fastnesses of the earth. Nobody went into the Whithergo tunnel. It led to only darkness and death.
‘Get on there, boy,’ a gruff voice said behind him. The dog-tail.
Elija watched his feet as he walked, and he thought about food, as he usually did if his brain wasn’t busy elsewhere. He guessed what Malvenny was carrying – mealie cakes and dried meat, maybe some dried fruit if they were lucky. Once the tall man had given them some eggs, rock hard and pickled in spicy vinegar, which they had all fallen on, delighted by something different to eat. Today Malvenny’s sack looked sadly thin.
They stopped to rest at the Last Talking Point, beyond which the paralysing roar of the Eating Gate would make conversation impossible. They all sat and Malvenny took the sack from his back and handed out fresh water and thin oatcakes. These were eaten ferociously and in silence. Elija felt his stomach grip them and he rubbed Em’s back gently as she ate hers.
Malvenny returned his cup to his sack, cleared his throat and spat into the stream. ‘We’re going to the Westering Shores.’ The others took the news without comment, except the man with the gruff voice, a newcomer whose name Elija didn’t know.
‘Where’s that, man? How far?’
‘It’s a long way. There’s good pickings, treasure sometimes.’
‘How far is far?’
‘We cross the Eating Gate,’ Malvenny explained, ‘then take the rising Hall furthest on the far side. It’s a long haul, but it’s dry.’ He burrowed again in his sack as if to discourage more questions.
All he said was true. The shores rose for a long way, then plunged down again. As a result it was often drier there than in other places and pickings were found more easily. Even treasure, as Malvenny said. Em had found a silver imperial and a piece of citrine glass there on the same day. But it was also true that it was more dangerous. If
there was a flood, from a heavy storm in the distant outside, then the Westering Shores became a trap. By the time any Dwellers there realized the water was rising, it would be too late.
The gruff man, who now called himself Bartellus, had had many names in the world above. The world had called him Shuskara. It had called him father, and son, and husband, and general. It had called him criminal and traitor. Now it called him deceased.