City of Light & Shadow (15 page)

  By the time their boat nudged up against the quay at Stoutford, the trader was snoring soundly, the empty silver flask lying on the seat beside him. Or it was, until Dewar pocketed it for safe keeping. He slid out from the seat on his transient friend's other side and left him there, confident that the fellow would awaken with a heavy head but lighter pockets, courtesy of the substantial purse the assassin had just lifted from him, a comfortingly heavy weight now ensconced within the folds of his own clothing.

  Once ashore, Dewar wasted no time in spending some of the purse's contents, replenishing supplies and then acquiring a sound horse and some good quality tackle to match. Within an hour of stepping off the boat he set out for Eastwell, a town that straddled the great trade route which bisected the continent. As he left Stoutford behind, Dewar spared a thought for his inadvertent benefactor, wondering if he were awake yet.

  The horse served him well and they made good time. Dewar judged his mount's strength and stamina with precision and so avoided riding the beast into the ground while getting the most out of it. Nonetheless, the horse was exhausted by the time they arrived at Eastwell and he rewarded it with two nights' rest at a good stabling facility, where it was able to rest and feed and regain its strength, ready for the last stage of the journey.

  It had taken a little over two days to reach Eastwell, a town he had passed through before and whose taverns he knew well enough to engineer an encounter with fellow travellers. On the second morning following his arrival, Dewar reclaimed his horse and joined a trade caravan as it trundled out of the town on the road to distant Deliia.

  Deliia was perilously close to familiar territory, and he didn't want to run the risk of his arrival being noted; far better to merely be one of a crowd rather than a lone horseman riding through the gates. Once at Deliia his plan was to sell the horse and seek passage on a boat. One bound for the Misted Isles.

  No, Dewar didn't for one moment regret the excesses he had perpetrated in those dark, fear-ridden days in Thaiburley. He did, however, acknowledge that during that period his talents had been employed by the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. He fully intended to put that right. Dewar was going home.

 
 

 
 
 

Initially their party passed through populated corridors, though Tom barely noted the fact. He spent the first part of the journey lost in thought. The sounds of movement, of conversation, the laughter of children and the scolding of worried parents – all the accoutrements of a living, bustling metropolis – washed over him to leave only the briefest of impressions. Afterwards he would recall people's faces: an elderly couple staring, two young children being held back by an anxious mother, and a smartly dressed youth looking puzzled, but he wasn't really paying attention at the time.

  Kat's bartering with the Prime Master had made him feel uncomfortable and he was trying to work out why. It brought a number of matters sharply into focus, causing him to question things he'd previously taken for granted. First among them, what was
he
doing here?

  Kat's reasons for coming along were clear enough. The leverage the Prime Master had applied was not so very different from the methods Ty-gen had used in persuading her to take Tom across the City Below: both boiled down to bribery. Was she really so materialistic, and was that a true reflection of how little their friendship meant to her? Or was he being naïve?

  If Kat's motivations were so obvious, his were anything but, even to him. Throughout all that had happened he'd trusted in the Prime Master, who was undoubtedly a lot wiser than Tom, confident that the older man knew best and was happy to do whatever he advised. Kat hadn't.

  It now seemed to Tom that all his life he'd been happy to let others make decisions for him, passing on the responsibility of his own life to somebody else. First it had been his mother, then Lyle and the leaders of the Blue Claw, and now the Prime Master. Maybe that was the real difference between him and Kat. Maybe that was why she always looked for the angle while he just went along with whatever others recommended. He'd been in a gang of one kind or another from the very first, and had never learned how not to be.

  If so, maybe it was high time that changed. Thanks to Kat's example, he found himself wondering for the first time what
he
was likely to gain from all of this. Sure, he was trying to save the city, but that hadn't been enough for Kat. Was he a fool for not standing up for himself a bit more? He hadn't
wanted
to leave the streets and be taken under the Prime Master's wing, but it had been taken for granted that he'd go along with the process. He hadn't
wanted
to leave the city and go in search of the goddess Thais, but the Prime Master had been insistent, arranging matters without paying heed to his own concerns or desires. He hadn't
wanted
to return to Thaiburley with the weight of the city's survival resting on his shoulders, but the goddess had never allowed for any other course of action, and he didn't
want
to be heading off now into corridors infested with Rust Warriors to save the city and everyone in it, but no one seemed to consider the possibility that he might do anything else. And here he was, doing exactly as expected.

  Of course Thaiburley's survival mattered to him, it was his home, but it was a lot of other folk's home as well. Shouldn't saving the place be down to
other
people? Tom felt a familiar sense of the inevitable, of life rushing past beyond his control. There had been times along the Thair's course when he'd felt swept along by circumstance in much the same way that a piece of flotsam is propelled by the river's current. If anything, events had only gathered pace since then, attaining a momentum that felt unstoppable, inevitable. Not that digging his heels in at this stage would have been a realistic option in any case, hemmed in as he was by Council Guards and the Blade. But, assuming he survived this, Tom determined that things were going to change. He'd make his own choices from here on in, no matter what others might expect of him.

  "We do what we must, Tom," said a familiar voice. "Life doesn't always follow the path we expect, and we all make sacrifices. Some more than others, granted, but that's simply the way of things."

  He looked up, astonished to see the goddess walking beside him. "You came back," he said.

  "In a sense."

  
How
could she possibly be walking here? Where were the Blade that moments ago had hemmed him in? "You're not real," he said, as hope that the burden of responsibility might be lifted from his shoulders evaporated as rapidly as it had blossomed.

  "Oh I'm real all right, just not physical. Matters proceeded far more quickly than I would have liked. You're not ready. The information you need is still being assimilated, so I sent part of me back here to help you, to guide you."

  "How?"

  "Inside your head, of course," as if that much should have been obvious.

  "So only I can see and hear you?"

  "Exactly, and don't worry, I'll remain dormant most of the time, only emerging when I'm needed."

  "Thanks a lot."

  "For what?" Kat asked. The goddess had disappeared and he realised he must have spoken that last phrase out loud. "Are you still sulking with me for grabbing hold of you back in the Stain and hitching a ride?" Kat said.

  "What? No, don't be daft."

  "So what's with the silent treatment?"

  He shrugged. "No reason."

  "That's all right then, if you're sure."

  He forced a smile and nodded. "Yeah, I'm sure."

  Inside he was seething, wondering how much of his thought processes were now laid bare to the goddess, and whether that information was being shared with the real Thaiss back in her citadel, or was this aspect of her self-contained? Either way, he didn't like it and felt used yet again. With an effort, he stopped worrying about the goddess, reckoning there was nothing he could do about her presence no matter how much he resented the intrusion. To distract himself from fretting about this unwanted passenger, he turned his thoughts on Kat. It felt odd travelling with her again. Not awkward, just a little odd. He supposed it was because he'd grown accustomed to the reassuring presence of Mildra beside him – her warmth, quiet wisdom and gentle words. "Warm and gentle" were hardly the words he'd use to describe Kat. She was all spiky darkness and pointed steel to Mildra's comforting pastels and softness. He'd spent a lot longer with Mildra, of course, but somehow having Kat here felt more natural and, given what they were likely to be facing, he wouldn't have had it any other way.

  Presumably she'd been giving matters a bit of thought as well, because as they walked she said, "So, when did you become such a POP?"

  Person of imPortance: not a phrase Tom had expected to ever hear said of himself. "Beats the hell out of me," he admitted. "It sort of crept up on me when I wasn't looking. But it doesn't mean anything. I'm still the same nick you took halfway across the City Below."

  She laughed. "Yeah, right. Don't seem to remember any Council Guards coming with us that time around, let alone the Blade. And what do you mean halfway? It must have been at least two thirds."

  Tom grinned. "More like three quarters, but only because you took us so far in the wrong direction."

  "Hey!" She cuffed his arm. "We had demon hounds after us, remember? Anyway, you were the one who wanted to avoid Blood Heron territory."

  Tom's good humour soured slightly as he took in the towering ebony figures around them. "Wish we were back there now," he muttered. "Thaiss, Kat, when did everything get so complicated?"

  "Know what you mean. We didn't have much of a clue what was going on then, either, but at least we were still in the streets. All these corridors, they're just plain wrong. Makes me feel I can't breathe in here."

  Tom had almost forgotten how unnatural the enclosed world of the Rows had felt to him when he first encountered it. Until Kat's comment he hadn't realised how quickly he'd adapted to this environment. "You get used to it," he assured her.

  She snorted. "I don't intend to be here long enough to get used to anything, thanks all the same."

  The comment brought home to Tom how much he'd changed. Kat was still very much a part of the City Below, but he wasn't certain he was, not anymore. If he didn't belong on the streets, where did he belong?

  The thought sat uncomfortably, which must have shown on his face. "You okay?"

  He made a point of gazing again at the Blade and Council Guards surrounding them. "What do you think?"

  They lapsed into silence.

 

The longer Tom had spent in Thaiss's citadel, the more sense the initially random images and histories had begun to make, a process that continued after he'd left. As things came increasingly into focus, one particular piece of information stood out; not because it was obvious or recurring, but because it was completely absent. He'd meant to ask the goddess about it before he left, but in the end their departure had been so rushed that he'd forgotten to do so. Only now, as he marched through the corridors of the Heights towards goodness knew what fate, did the matter resurface.

  The thing that his ever-inquisitive mind kept picking over was the fact that nowhere, in all that he'd seen and heard, had Tom discovered any mention of a name for the goddess's brother. It was as if someone had deliberately purged every trace of his name from the records,
all
records. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Tom felt certain this had to be the case.

  "I hope you're not gonna go all moody on me," Kat said. "Because no one else around here is exactly a barrel of laughs." She glanced towards the stone-faced Council Guards marching beside them.

  "Sorry. Just thinking."

  "I noticed." Then, after a slight pause, "Tell me something. What did it feel like, killing the Soul Thief?"

  Tom kept walking but inwardly he froze, wary of discussing the matter given how sensitive Kat had proven to be on the subject. "You won't hit me?"

  "Not this time."

  "It was…" He hesitated, trying to find the best way of expressing the experience. "It was unlike anything I've ever felt before. At first there was this numbness that crept over my head, then it was as if everything was stretching, pulling upwards, and it
hurt
. For a split second as I fought back, before she was gone, I saw her; I mean
really
saw her for what she was."

  "Go on," Kat said softly as he fell silent.

  "There were all these scraps of personality, tiny bits of those she'd killed, I guess, which she'd kept a hold of. I had the sense that there was something desperate in the way she clung on to them, as if they might replace some of what she'd lost… not real
whole
people, not by a long shot," he said quickly, remembering what Kat had once told him about the Soul Thief taking her mother. "Just their distant echoes."

  "What was it she'd lost, then, her humanity?"

  "No, nothing like that, she was never human."

  "What then?"

  He took a deep breath. "She was a Demon, one that had fallen from the Upper Heights a long time ago."

  "You're kidding me. A
Demon
?"

  "Originally, yes, like I said, a long, long time ago." Tom couldn't believe this; he was sounding like the Prime Master talking to
him
. "You see, Demons aren't alive in the same sense that we are. They're spawned straight from the core and linked to it far more directly than anyone – you do know that all the talented in the City Below and the arkademics and healers draw their abilities from the core?"