The City (25 page)

The hall was cold as charity in winter, and hot beyond bearing in summer, but Bartellus found the atmosphere enlivening, and it was with a light step that he strode to his usual table, deep in the centre of the hall, flanked by two carved pillars. Carvelho was already there, as Bartellus knew he would be.

‘Bartellus!’ his assistant said, looking up and seeing him. ‘This is a fine day!’

Carvelho was a former infantryman of the Maritime, invalided out ten years before. He was in his forties, lean and muscular, and looked more like a street fighter than an academic, until you noticed one arm had been amputated above the elbow. He relied on the small fee Bartellus paid him to supplement his army pension and keep a wife and three children somewhere in the Library quarter. Carvelho was enthusiastic about his work, and if he guessed that the old man’s main interest was not what he pretended, then he never let on.

‘How so?’

‘I have come across a reference in this,’ Carvelho waved a manuscript Bartellus knew to be the working journal of a courtier in the far eastern Dravidian empire two thousand years before, ‘to the third Dravidian emperor …’

‘Argipelus.’

‘Yes, Argipelus, writing a letter to Mohastidies …’

An early emperor of the City, Bartellus remembered, frowning with the effort.

‘Asking for green marble for his palace.’ He grinned his lop-sided grin and Bartellus smiled in response. Carvelho believed his own ancestors originally travelled from the outskirts of the Dravidian empire far across the Little Sea. He was fascinated with the history of the civilization and delighted when he discovered any long-ago link with the City. ‘If we could find that letter – what a breakthrough that would be!’

‘Indeed.’ Bartellus sat down at the table. ‘Now, I have narrowed down some subjects for you.’ These were his invariable words. He handed Carvelho a piece of paper. The younger man looked at it and nodded and set off happily towards the huge central stack of drawers,
protected by tarpaulins, where lay the thousands of catalogues of books, their subjects and location. Eventually, before the end of the day, he would come back with a list of twenty or thirty books, and between them they would winnow them down to a dozen or so to order from the custodians. They would arrive in the wheeled carts the next day. This work would take Carvelho most of the afternoon, leaving Bartellus to study in privacy the volumes already heaped in front of him. Six out of seven of those books were of no interest to the old man; they were merely a diversion to disguise from Carvelho, and from anyone who showed more than a passing interest, Bartellus’ real pursuit.

When he and Em had emerged from the dark of the sewers eight years before he had not guessed he would ever think again of the Halls and their wretched Dwellers. Yet the words of the long-dead Ysold pursued him. The woman, in the last hour of her life, had told him the Eating Gate was breaking down, that it was no longer repaired, and that eventually the entire City would flood as a result. Bartellus wondered, despite himself, why a job once deemed important enough to justify teams of engineers descending regularly into the peril of the deeper Halls had been abandoned. He had been a bureaucrat himself, of sorts, and he knew it was probably just an oversight, a lost piece of paper, or a few thousand talents saved on someone’s budget.

Yet, without occupation one day, he had wandered into the Great Library to see if he could find any reference to the Gate – and had become hopelessly trapped. After a few months of floundering in the enticing pathways of history, he had found the journal of an engineer called Miletos, an engaging character, whose humour and intellect shone out from the dusty parchment and faded inks. The man never mentioned the Eating Gate – indeed, after nearly eight years, Bartellus had yet to find the official name of the structure – but his musings on the architecture of the long-ago City, and his knife-sharp comments on the personalities of his day, fired Bartellus’ imagination for the first time in decades. Indeed, Miletos’ journal was the only work the old soldier had ever stolen from the library. He had spirited it past the beady eyes of the crones who watched the exits, split into three parts and tied round his stomach. That was six years before and he still felt guilty about it.

Since then he had been drawn as deeply into a study of the City’s architecture as he had once been lost in the Halls themselves. It
was almost impossible to link the murky tunnels, caverns and bridges he had encountered in his brief sojourn in the Halls with the dry descriptions by dry-as-dust engineers of triple-bore drains, intercepting sewers, catchpits and overflow weirs. It was a maze, perhaps a hopeless one, but Bartellus loved the challenge, and he revelled in the work.

Then one winter’s day a green-clad custodian had lingered at his table, the clicking wheels of his laden cart slowing then falling silent. The man, small and thin-featured with red hair and a humped shoulder, asked him genially about his interests, commenting on the pile of volumes stacked around Bartellus, all on the subjects of engineering, architecture and the history of the City’s construction. The custodian had questioned him keenly, his bright pale eyes fixed on him with a scholarly fervour. Bartellus, appalled at the thought he was being watched, abandoned his studies at the library that very day, and it was more than half a year before he ventured there again. Then he started to conceal his real interest in a welter of other subjects. And he employed Carvelho as his proxy. He saw the redheaded custodian from time to time, but the little man seemed to have forgotten him.

With a sigh of contentment Bartellus pulled a familiar volume towards him, bound in cracked leather, entitled
The First Life of Marshall Creed
. In his younger days Creed was a ship owner from the isle of Iastos, a trader in obsidian and mother-of-pearl and something of a rogue and a chancer. He had fallen on hard times after a hurricane wrecked half his ships, and he fetched up, after many escapades, most of which Bartellus considered pure fantasy, resident in Otaro. In those days, more than four hundred years before, the City was open to all foreigners, and it was a central hub of commerce, its port thronged with ships of all nations. Creed, with his long-suffering wife and five daughters, rented a house from which he conducted a variety of businesses on the farthest fringes of legality.

It was the last three chapters of his
Life
which interested Bartellus. Creed was an old man by then, and the autobiography took on a melancholy tone. The author abandoned the boastfulness and arrogance of the previous pages, and spoke instead like a man with a last mission before the end, which he could see coming with sad clarity. He took to wandering the City, marvelling at its beauty and cruelty. He spoke with awe of the Rainbow Gardens, which in those
days spread out from the palace in great arcs more than ten leagues long, each planted with flowers in just one colour of the spectrum. He talked with mathematicians and astronomers, who explained to the old man the complex formulae used to build the twenty-seven crystal towers of the Red Palace through which the sun would shine in succession on midsummer’s morn. He described the glass birdhouses on the Shield, where the brightest birds from all over the world were brought to breed and flourish, to be released over the rooftops, filling the sky with colour on feast days and to honour the gods. He wrote of the Cages, metal prisons in which the most despised criminals, men and women, were hauled up the outside of the City’s walls, some of them already half dead from torture, some fit and still struggling, to die a lingering and hideous death from shock and thirst as an entertainment for all to watch.

And he described, in the finicky detail of an old man who can no longer judge the attention span of his readers, a trip down into the sewers beneath the palace, to the Dark Water, the name he gave to the great river Menander as it dived beneath the City, and to the Magisterium Gate, a construction intended to break up and pulverize large objects which found their way into the high sewers before they could cause obstruction further down in the narrower tunnels.

The Magisterium Gate was not the Eating Gate, of that Bartellus was sure, for it had only sixteen ‘rotating engines’, as Creed described them, whereas Bartellus was certain the Eating Gate had twenty barrels – nineteen when he last had sight of it. But the mechanism appeared the same, and Creed joined a party of engineers who went down to the Gate to maintain it one day in midsummer when water levels were low and dangers at a minimum. The author spoke of the long walk down through leagues of stinking tunnels, the ghostly inhabitants who disappeared into darkness whenever anyone approached them, and one curious incident.

After completing the work on the Gate, which Creed described in exhaustive detail, the party made its way back up towards the light. Not a moment too soon for the old man. He wrote:

Woefully I trudged, my spirits cloaked in darkness as my boots were encrusted with ordure. I felt I would never be liberated from this mournful place although, indeed, I had been in its depths for not half a day. My young companions laughed and shouted and joked
,
but their sounds of desperate cheer echoed hollowly from the dripping walls. Our return journey was painfully longer than the outward walk for, I was informed, unforecast rainfall in the distant world outside rendered that way impassable. I admit to a stomach full of terrors at the news. I can imagine no more frightful place to be lost than in the bowels of those awful eternal tunnels.

Poor old man that I am, I found myself lagging behind the strong youngsters who were my companions. Too proud, old fool, to cry out to them to wait for me, I struggled on, falling further and further behind. Their torches began to fade out of sight and only then did I cast aside self-conceit and call to them, but by then it was too late and they did not hear me.

As I was fearing I had been lost to the darkness, my legs weakening with terror and fatigue, the welcome light of a torch flickered on the far side of the stream I was following. I turned with relief towards it, for I thought one of my companions had returned for me, unaccountably taking the other side of the water. But I was astonished beyond words to see it was a woman, holding aloft the flame and watching me with calm interest.

Bartellus shifted in his hard seat, leaning forward to peer at the page intently.

She raised the torch higher, and I could see she was garbed in long pale robes, hooded, like an angel or a spirit of the Domanii. Then my senses reasserted themselves, and I realized she was but a real woman, for her robes had been snipped off immodestly above the ankle bones and her feet were clad in strong thick-soled boots, sensible footwear for a walking in the drear sewers. She threw back her hood and I saw she was not young, yet not old. Her hair was the silver of moonlight and her face that of a stern angel.

I roused myself to call out to her for aid, but a cry from further down the tunnel indicated my companions had registered my loss. I saw their torches hurriedly making their way back to rescue me, and the woman faded away into the darkness.

He and the sewer workers carried on climbing more slowly and Creed, diligent still despite his fear, described the many tunnels they travelled through.

It seemed like a lifetime before we saw the happy sight of daylight filtering through ornate metal grilles above our heads. Within an hour I was back in the bosom of my family, and I spent many days recovering from my ordeal. Indeed, for weeks afterwards the coming of night would put me in an anxious torment, for I feared the walls were closing in, and I slept with a night light in my chamber for a season.

But come the autumn of that year he had recovered his spirits enough to meet one of the workers who had accompanied him on his underground journey. The man, dour and grizzled, had been working in the sewers for the emperor for more than a decade.

‘You should have told us, sir,’ said the man solemnly when I had finished my strange story. ‘The gullible call them wraiths, but I believe they are enemies of the City, burrowing up through the drains.’

I thought about the tall, graceful figure I had seen. The good man’s theory that this was an enemy tunneller seemed unlikely but I had no wish to offend him. So I said, ‘Wraiths? Do the gullible say why these spirits inhabit the depths?’

The older man looked away. ‘It is not known,’ he answered curtly, ‘if they live there or descend there to seek their victims. Some say they live there in an enchanted place called the Hall of Watchers.’

‘Enchanted?’ I could not help smiling as I repeated this unlikely word. ‘Are they wraiths or witches?’

But the man did not answer him and Creed, after questioning other sewer workers, dismissed this talk of the Hall of Watchers as a myth similar to so many others, such as the spirits of dead children which inhabited the palaces of the Shield, or the angels said to descend on battlefields to suck out the souls of dying soldiers. By the time of his death, he had come to dismiss his own vision as phantasmagoria conjured by a mind disordered by fear, exhaustion and the fumes of the sewer.

Bartellus sat back. He had read these passages a dozen times, infuriated by the lack of information. He stared at the pages in frustration, hoping meaning would drift off them if he glared at them for long enough.

The Hall of Watchers was the only link with the world he knew. He
often thought about the warrior Indaro. He cursed himself for paying so little attention to his surroundings at the time and retaining so little memory subsequently. He remembered the torch-filled Hall with its carvings of birds, the small quiet white room where he had supped in strange companionship with the old woman. It had all seemed like a dream, a brief respite for his mind from the hellish endurance of his life. He and Emly had not spoken of those times for some years, and when he had last questioned her the girl’s memory of the events was murky.

As he sat, musing on the past, Carvelho returned. He pushed Bartellus’ piece of paper back across the table to him, and added his own list of books. He was smiling.