The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam (21 page)

Alan drew his own blade, resentful that he might have to use it. Spider wielded the Boatman’s pole. And there was Nora, of course. Four against two, so in theory this
would be an easy win. But Alan had never been able to fight in the dark, so it was more like three against two. And even if they won, well, it didn’t mean that nobody would get hurt. And the
killing
… Even if they won, there would probably be
killing
. Well, definitely: they couldn’t let these people get back to Daunt and bring down all of her might on him. His stomach was in his boots. Maybe he could just hide behind a tree, or jump into the swamp and wait until it was all over.

But he didn’t, and Daunt’s mushroom-gatherers broke into their camp right next to him, so he was first in line. He heard a swish and a yell right in front of him and stumbled backwards, feeling something cold stinging the end of his nose. He fell onto his arse with a bump, rolled over and crawled across a tangle of roots, then clambered to his feet again once he was reasonably sure that he wasn’t standing up into the path of a swinging sword.

He stood up and saw that any swords that had been swinging were now still. The fight appeared to be over. ‘What?’ Alan said, to nobody in particular. ‘What? Have they gone?’

‘Nora got them,’ Spider said. ‘See. They’re here on the ground.’

‘We didn’t even get a look-in,’ Churr said. ‘She’s a demon, that one.’

‘I did not get to twirl the staff,’ Spider murmured. ‘Most disappointing.’

‘There were only two of them,’ Nora said.

‘I take it that this is why Mapmakers generally don’t get involved,’ Spider said.

‘Yes,’ Nora replied. ‘We are too powerful. There is no question.’

‘And modest with it,’ Alan said.

Churr unwrapped the starstones again, and their pale light glimmered over the scene.

Daunt’s men were thin and bearded, and both sported topknots. They had the mushroom symbol on their foreheads and more elaborate fungal designs tattooed on their naked chests. Their loose trousers were tied up around their knees and their bare feet were caked with hardened mud. Strangely, both of them had eyes exactly the same colour: a very, very pale green, so pale as to be almost white, like the Boatman’s. And their skin was luminously pale, too, their black tattoos standing out sharply in contrast. Their pale green eyes were wide open, their faces shocked. What was left of their faces, at any rate.

‘Why?’ Alan asked, looking away. ‘Why, Nora, do you always go for their faces? Is it a Mapmaker thing?’

Nora waggled her head. ‘Yes, in that it is a practical thing, and Mapmakers are practical. If you are fighting with your bare hands, which is what we usually do so as to avoid carrying extra weight, then it makes sense to target soft and vulnerable – yet important – parts of the body. Like you did with the crocodile, if you remember. Faces and genitals are most effective.’ She surveyed her handiwork. ‘Also, of course, there’s the psychological
aspect. People don’t like seeing excessive damage done to another’s face. They don’t want it to happen to them. Seeing a friend or ally – or indeed, even a stranger – hurt like that can be a much greater deterrent to attack than, say, seeing a friend or ally being knocked out with a stick.’

‘A crocodile isn’t a person, though,’ Alan said.

Nora looked confused. ‘Oh,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Well, no. But an enemy is an enemy. And the difference in intelligence between you and a crocodile may not be so much greater than the difference between a Mapmaker and a normal human being.’

Her words were met with a long silence.

‘Right then,’ Alan said, clapping his hands together. ‘Okay. Shall we raid their camp? I mean, morally, now, it’s small potatoes, really. As far as I can see.’ He glanced down at the dead bodies and then looked away again.

‘I need to wash my hands,’ Nora said, holding her hands up. It looked as if she was wearing long red gloves.

‘Is there any point?’ Alan asked.

‘Drying blood feels unpleasant,’ Nora said, plunging her arms into the swamp and sluicing the dirty water over them.

‘Somebody should stay with Eyes,’ Churr said.

‘I will,’ Spider said shortly. ‘I am very excited to see what kind of fungus these two unfortunates may have been carrying, but Alan here has been quite literally shouldering the burden of care for my old friend and so I will remain by his side.’ He stroked his beard. ‘Then
tomorrow I will take my turn at carrying the poor fellow. All I ask is that I can spend some time drawing any unusual specimens before they are ingested.’

‘We’re not going to ingest anything,’ Churr said. She was almost dancing with excitement. ‘Not unless Alan has one of his emotional episodes and feels like a binge. But’ –and here she addressed Alan directly – ‘he’d better fucking not. Now come on, people.’

As the group hopped from root cluster to root cluster, Alan thought about the gatherers that Nora had killed. They had lit a fire, but they had not been reticent about fighting in the dark. He remembered what Daunt had once said to him, about taking mushrooms in order to open her eyes. He had thought she was speaking metaphorically – and maybe she was, in part – but perhaps there were mushrooms that could actually help a person to
see
.

Spider would know.

There was nothing much at the mushroom gatherers’ camp apart from the fire, now burning low, and a couple of large, bulging backpacks. Churr fell upon the backpacks with delight, but stopped herself opening them. ‘We’ll open them back at our own camp,’ she said. ‘It’ll be more exciting.’

Alan looked longingly at the fire. ‘We could make this our camp,’ he said.

‘Yeah, sure, if you want to be the one to drag Eyes over.’

Alan didn’t say anything. His back and shoulders were on fire.

‘Yeah,’ Churr said. ‘Thought you might have had enough of that by now.’

Why had Alan even invited Eyes along? He couldn’t remember. It had been a bad idea and he was angry with himself for it, but almost immediately the anger was subsumed by guilt. Eyes was not a burden; he was a
friend
. Alan got angry with himself for feeling angry. ‘Oh, come on,’ he growled. ‘Let’s fuck off.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Nora said from behind him, as he led the way back to their own camp, ‘we will come back here and I will track the gatherers directly to Dok. Our journey will be quickened. This encounter has been a stroke of luck.’

‘For us it has,’ Alan muttered.

‘So sometimes the swamp is deep, and sometimes it isn’t. Why is that? Are there more buildings beneath us? Are there chasms in between them? Deep trenches full of sludge?’

‘Yes. Obviously we don’t really know what is sunken, what is lost.’ Nora raised an eyebrow. ‘Not yet, at least. I will find out.’

‘But sometimes it is shallow and marshy and it feels like
ground
. Like the hill the Pyramid is built on.’

‘Well, of course: the swamp is not just water, Alan. We do not fully understand its provenance, but wherever the water is coming from, it is bringing with it earth, mud, silt. And whatever you think about magic, about the structure of Gleam being imbued with something that keeps it standing, there is no doubt that buildings are crumbling into the swamp and becoming part of it. Perhaps the stone lasts longer than it should, or at least longer than you would expect a new construction to last,
but it does not last forever. Not all of it, anyway. So perhaps some of the ground you feel – perhaps some of the mud that supports this forest – was once brick. Perhaps towers have risen and fallen time and time again before the Gleam that we know came to be.’

Alan was silent for a time as they walked through the gutwood. There were signs of other human life now: treehouses with candles in the windows, snailshells bearing the remains of cooking fires, a paraffin lamp screwed into a trunk. ‘Are there any plans to, y’know’ – Alan waved an arm – ‘save it? Stop it? Save Gleam, and stop the swamp? Find out all about it and reverse it?’

‘Quite possibly. There was much about our work that I was never told. I wanted to know, but …’ Nora sighed. ‘They didn’t talk to their young ones – well, not to their young
girls
.’ She held up a hand and stopped the party. ‘Shuddersnake,’ she whispered, pointing with the other hand at a thin, pale yellow serpent lounging somehow insolently atop a wide branch. It gave them a lazy hiss as they gave its tree a wide berth.

‘Nora, when we first came to the swamp, you said you would change. And you seemed to undergo some kind of … episode.’

‘I was opening up to the spirit, letting it change me before performing the carto.’

‘You talked a lot about a needlestick.’

Now Nora fell silent. Eventually she said quietly, ‘I wish I hadn’t.’

Alan didn’t press it.

When Alan was not pestering Nora with his questions, Nora would converse quietly with Churr in a language of murmurs and half-smiles and subtle tactility. But Churr would not remain at Nora’s side when Alan was there. She would look coldly at him and then slip away. Alan wondered at Nora’s tolerance of him, given the way he’d treated Churr, but that was only one of the many things about Nora that he did not understand. As for Churr herself … He knew that he had been cruel to her back at The Cup and Skull, and knew that he ought to apologise. He ran through conversations in his head. When he’d worked out how to phrase it properly, and when the atmosphere between them was not so bitter as to make anything positive he might say sound insincere, he would say sorry properly.

Nora was on the trail of the mushroom gatherers, looking not for signs of their recent passage, but evidence of an established route. And indeed, there were mushroom symbols carved into the bark of some of the trees.

‘It seems a trifle thoughtless,’ Spider opined, upon their discovery of the first. Surely they would not
literally
signpost the way to the source of their power and wealth?’

‘There must be more to it than merely knowing the way,’ Churr said. ‘It must all be protected.’

‘By what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘In truth, I thought we would have had more trouble
by now,’ Spider said. ‘I would have expected Daunt to be more of a presence. And where are the murderers? Where are the monsters?’

‘Maybe Nora’s scared them off,’ Churr said, laughing.

We’ve got the monster with us
, Alan thought.
The greatest monster of them all
.

‘Yes,’ Spider said, ‘a formidable ally indeed.’

‘Nora has already saved our lives more than once,’ Churr said, seriously now. ‘It’s hardly been a relaxing trip. If it wasn’t for her, then we would have had more than enough trouble.’

‘Though some of us have had more trouble than others,’ Spider said. ‘I’d say Eyes was on his last legs, but he is beyond even that point.’

‘We’re not leaving him,’ Alan said.

‘Well, no,’ Spider replied, appraising Alan. ‘Of course not.’

*

They saw figures watching them from the trees and Alan thought about the Boatman with his second mouth. Sometimes they heard cackling, and sometimes songs, though nothing Alan knew, and not ones that he liked. The voices were eerie and the songs were tuneless and meandering. They saw distant fires, but even Churr resisted the urge to investigate. Sometimes the swamp was bright, sometimes it was not. ‘I have heard stories about the lights in the swamp,’ Churr said one evening, as they watched Nora perform the carto. ‘Some say it is
like lightning, but deep, deep down. The flashes last a long time in the thick slime. They start slow and fade slow. Some say there is a great war going on, far beneath us, where the drowned dead are battling each other with fire and magic.’

‘The deeper we get the more and more we talk about magic,’ Alan pointed out.

‘It is not about heading deeper,’ Churr said. Now that there was plenty of wood around, she was using it to make some basic crossbow bolts. ‘Those of us who don’t enjoy the security of a House talk about magic all the time. It’s about
exposure
. It is about being out in the Discard wilds, away from the business of employment and bugs and rent. It becomes more important to those of us on the outside.’

‘Do transients travel much through the swamp?’

‘No.’ Churr shook her head. ‘It might not feel too bad really, but if Nora wasn’t with us, things would be very different – much harder. And it’s so bloody wet and dark and miserable.’

They saw people watching them: bald, pale people with sharp teeth and crooked smiles who stood in the mud and stared. Their clothes were ragged with swamp-rot, and rashes and sores covered their flesh. The odd figure was sitting cross-legged on platforms amongst the tree. Some had extra mouths or eyes. They saw one woman leaning out of a treehouse window who vomited a shower of tiny frogs into their path. ‘Sorry,’ she called
down, her voice broken. ‘Too many in – in here.’ After they passed they heard her vomit again, and the frogs chittering as they plopped into the swamp. One night they heard splashing from behind them and turned to see a wild-haired man running in their direction; his arms terminated not in hands but in misshapen glass lumps. His wrists were semi-transparent, something between glass and flesh: you could see bones and blood in them. The man starting laughing hysterically once they’d turned to him, and waved his arms in the air.

‘See?’ Churr said. ‘Magic.’

‘The corruption?’ Alan asked.

Nora nodded. ‘I think so,’ she said.

‘Will it corrupt us?’

Alan had wondered at Spider and Churr’s strange behaviour during the journey on the raft; perhaps that had been the corruption at work. Neither of them had acknowledged it, so it was difficult to talk about. Maybe they were unaware of it. Maybe he too had been behaving strangely, and was equally unaware. He remembered Nora telling him to stop muttering …

They saw no snails as big as the one that had crested the rooftop the night Alan met Churr, but they saw colossal empty shells, some of which had been turned into homes. The trees were bigger now too, and they did see a slug the size of a motorcycle, wearing an empty saddle. They found half-submerged cages that looked empty until you got too close, and then a crocodile would burst from the
swamp, growling and snapping against the metal bars. Thick vines hung from the branches around them. Sometimes they could hear hissing, and at night the insect sounds were loud and sleeping was difficult. They took turns to watch for attackers, human or otherwise.

Churr started to find plenty of targets for her crossbow: bright birds and fat little rat-things that jumped from tree to tree. She kept the colourful feathers to fletch the new bolts that filled the quiver. And Nora found chubby purple grubs – you couldn’t just pull them from the tree because they’d stick fast, but if you tickled their backs they’d just fall right off. Nora and Churr ate them alive, juices running down their chins, the grubs’ bodies wriggling from between their lips, but Alan couldn’t bring himself to. Nora squeezed the grubs over Eyes’ mouth. ‘These are rich,’ she said, ‘sustaining. They’re good for him – good for all of us.’

Once Nora shot at a flash of white darting in between the trees and came back with a large white long-haired cat. It didn’t have any mud or dirt on it at all. Everybody looked at it mutely.

‘I don’t think we should eat this,’ Spider said eventually, and the others all agreed.

Soon they realised that they were not the only ones travelling in that direction. The man with glass hands was one of them, and there were others, shaking so badly that they could only walk very slowly. Their limbs shuddered and their features twitched and they kept falling over.
Others had less strange problems: lesions, body wounds, stomach problems. They came across dead bodies, slowly being claimed by the flora and fauna of the swamp.

One morning they met a girl with thin tendrils growing from her scalp, entwined with her hair. Her skin was dyed dark green, and she had the subdermal facial implants of a worshipper at the Dome of the Toad. ‘What is your ailment?’ she asked them, in a high, clear voice.

‘None,’ Alan replied. ‘Our friend here is injured, but otherwise we suffer no ailments.’

The girl’s eyes brightened. ‘Then where are you going? Do you know why we’re here?’

‘We’re looking for Dok,’ Alan said. ‘What do you mean, do we know why we’re here?’

‘Many of us do not know,’ the girl said, and indicated the forest at large, through which many travellers could now be seen. ‘We are drawn, but we do not know where. We wake up in the morning and something in us compels us to travel. It looks like those of us who suffer are compelled to travel to the same place.’

‘Those of you who suffer … ailments?’

‘Yes.’ The girl ran a hand through her hair. The tendrils writhed and she flinched. ‘Not usual ailments.’

The gutwood was increasingly busy with the ailing. There were people from communities that Alan recognised, like the girl from the Dome of the Toad, and hermits with their shell homes on their backs. There were perhaps more Glasstowners than any other type.
There were bikers who’d obviously long since abandoned their vehicles; they plodded along, shades pushed up onto their foreheads, tripping over their beards and struggling to carry their own weight, and even the occasional resident from Wha House, recognisable by the distinctive hairstyle they were obliged to adopt if they wanted to stay there. Not all of them displayed a visible affliction, but their eyes were all feverishly bright and burning.

‘The source of the corruption is close now,’ Nora said, after two more days. The gutwood was almost as crowded as Market Top and the swamp, which had always smelled bad, was now thick with the dead and the dying, the bones and bodily fluids, and the air was increasingly difficult to breathe. But the trees were thinning out, and through them could be seen an expanse of space, and even some light – not just luminescence, but actual light, coming down from above.

And sure enough, soon they were free of the forest. The open expanse turned out to be marsh: black water, rotting wood and tufty grass. A network of wooden boards laid across it was jammed with people making their way towards something large, dark and bulbous. A thin mist cloaked everything.

Alan looked at Nora, and she nodded. ‘It’s in there,’ she said. She looked unwell. ‘A great sickness in the spirit is in there.’

They joined the queue and shuffled along the boards.
Even here there were bodies: people who’d slipped or fallen or been pushed into the marsh, just left there. Some were fresh, some were just bones, many displaying signs of illness: skulls with more eye-sockets than usual, skulls with horns, hands with thick, bristling clusters of finger bones; skeletons of unusual size and arrangement.

‘This is it,’ Churr whispered. ‘This is where everybody comes when they’ve fallen through – when they’ve fallen right down, all the way through all of the levels, all the way down through Gleam, right to the very bottom. The bottom of the world.’

‘I suppose there might be others like us,’ Alan said, ‘people who chose to come here.’

‘Do we know that we chose?’ Spider said.

Nobody answered him.

‘There,’ Alan said, later, after the party had progressed a little. ‘Daunt’s people. See? Over there, not on the next path, but the one beyond that? Wearing the mushroom?’ They were dressed like the mushroom gatherers that Nora had killed. ‘The mushrooms must be inside, then,’ he said. ‘We haven’t missed them.’

‘Of course we haven’t bloody missed them,’ Churr snapped. ‘Some of us have been keeping our eyes open.’

The looming shape resolved itself into a building or, at least, the top of a building. It was a great dome, the rest of which had been swallowed by the swamp, and the boards all converged into a wooden walkway that ran around its circumference. From the walkway, steps had
been carved into the dome, leading to a large hole. Alan suspected it hadn’t been part of the original building’s design; it was too jagged and ugly – not that the dome itself was pretty, because it wasn’t. It was made of something smooth, grey and featureless.

‘The original structure,’ Nora said.

‘You think there’s something in there other than sick people?’ Alan asked.

‘There’s something in there. Definitely.’

‘Not anything that’s particularly houseproud,’ Spider said. ‘Nothing that fancies cleaning up this mess.’ He prodded at a corpse lying in the sucking mud with his foot.

Alan spun around at the sound of a baby crying, but there were lots of babies and children being carried along the boards by harried parents, and when he listened more closely, there was a whole tapestry of baby cries winding through the general hubbub. The noise had accreted at such a slow pace that he hadn’t really noticed, but now he could hear babies crying, children wailing, the murmur of hundreds of low conversations and individuals talking to themselves, the occasional shout or scream as somebody’s pain became too great for them to contain. These were people in sorry states indeed, but they weren’t ill with diseases that Alan had encountered before. All of these people were suffering from wild, weird afflictions that appeared to have only one thing in common: they had compelled their sufferers
here
, to Dok.