City of Light & Shadow (16 page)

  "Yeah, I picked that much up as we've gone along."

  "Well, whenever the core is renewed…"

  "Which is what we're on the way to do now, right?" she interrupted.

  "Right. When that happens, the Demons are reabsorbed, they become part of the core again, and then a whole new generation of them is born. The Soul Thief must have been a Demon that somehow got left behind – not from the last generation, she's been around for too long, but the cycle before or even the one before that. Somehow she must have missed or resisted the call to return to the core with the others, fleeing down to the City Below and hiding out in the Stain instead. And she's been there ever since, living on the scraps of core material she's been leaching from the talented, using their link with the core to survive."

  "Why, though? What made her different? I mean if that's what her kind are supposed to do, why didn't she simply line up with the rest of them and get reabsorbed?"

  He shook his head. "No idea. Cowardice? A stronger drive to survive than the others?"

  "And she's been preying on us ever since."

  "Yeah, raiding the streets at intervals, whenever she's had to, picking off a few of the talented each time and draining them before vanishing back to the Stain; until the next time she gets hungry. So many people die on the streets, who's going to notice a couple more?

  "And because she was so careful, people tended to dismiss her as an old wives' tale," Kat murmured. "A myth that was useful for scaring disobedient kids into bed." She shook her head. "What changed this time? Why did she attack so openly and take so many?"

  Tom shrugged. "The core's corrupted. Everything's screwed up. Maybe she had no choice – maybe she couldn't get whatever she needed from just a few; or maybe the corruption fed through and drove her to greater lengths."

  "A breckin' Demon." Kat shook her head. "Thaiss, who'd have thought? And what does that mean for us right now, do you reckon?"

  "In what way?"

  "Well, you say this core thingy is corrupted, what would that have done to the rest of the Demons, the ones still living in the Upper Heights? If they're so closely linked to the core, won't they have been corrupted too? Are we going to end up facing a whole army of Soul Thieves trying to stop us from doing whatever it is you're supposed to do?"

  Now there was a disturbing thought. Tom hadn't even considered how the corruption and the hundred years of delay in the core's renewal might have affected the Demons. "I don't know," he admitted. "I honestly don't."

  She snorted. "Seems to me there's a brecking lot you don't know."

  "That's what I keep trying to tell everybody," he assured her, "but no one ever wants to listen."

 

They came to a large, sealed door blocking the entire corridor. A pair of the Blade stood sentry before it. At the party's approach, one of the obsidian figures moved, pressing something in the wall, and the door swung ponderously open.

  "We're crossing into hostile territory," Verrill said, speaking to them for the first time since they'd set out. "Everyone needs to stay alert and please, keep the noise down."

  Tom nodded. Kat just raised her eyebrows, as if to say "oh yeah, and what are you going to do about it if we don't?"

  She kept her mouth shut though, as they crossed the threshold into a lighter, brighter world. The corridors here were wider, airier, and even Tom felt he could breathe more easily. Their party adopted a new formation. The Blade clustered tight around Kat and Tom as before, but the Council Guard spread out, some staying close while others provided both an advance and a rear guard – four ranging ahead of them, checking every branching corridor, and four lagging several paces behind.

  This wasn't the only difference. The whole atmosphere of the city had changed. Gone were the voices, the bustle – the background noise of living so easily taken for granted and now noticeable only by its absence. Silence surrounded them. It was as if when passing through the door they had stepped into a completely different realm and were now moving through a city of ghosts, which, Tom supposed, in many senses they were. The sound of their footsteps reverberated through the stillness, so loud that each and every slap of leather on tile might almost have been a deliberate act of defiance.

  Tom wanted to say something, just to hear a noise that was indisputably human, even if it was only his own voice, but at the same time he felt reluctant to break the pervading spell of silence. He willed Kat to make some irreverent remark, but she remained uncharacteristically quiet, perhaps heeding the captain's words or perhaps simply daunted by the eeriness that surrounded them.

  In such unnatural stillness any sound was bound to be magnified, its significance exaggerated by unlikely portent. So it was with the peculiar series of noises that reached them from somewhere ahead, steadily rising above the
karumph
of collective footfalls.

  A series of pronounced clicks and then a louder snap, as if something was being wound up and then released to smack against a wall. The pattern repeated constantly. Tom tried to picture what could possibly be causing such a sequence and drew a blank.

  The way ahead opened into a large quadrangle. The ceiling rose to twice its former height, clearly claiming space from the Row immediately above. The floor changed abruptly from plain and functional to a mosaic of brightly coloured tiles. Corridors led from each of the four sides of the square while black-painted wrought iron stairways dropped down from a balcony above, presumably leading to the higher Row.

  In the centre of this open area stood one of the most bizarre things Tom had ever seen. It was a square glass booth, the bottom part of which revealed an interlinking array of different sized cogs: some bronzed, others sliver, while a few of the smallest were jet black. In addition to these cogs there were coupling rods, metal strips, rubberized wheels and cyclical chains. The whole thing looked so intricate that Tom wondered whether it served any real purpose at all or was just there to provide decorative entertainment. The mechanism had obviously been active for a while and continued through its cycle as they traipsed through.

  The Council Guards in the lead of their group split as they came to the machine, two passing on either side of it, while the Blade and those Guards who remained close to Tom and Kat moved as one to the left of the booth.

  Tom slowed down, fascinated by the way motion in the visible workings was transferred from one cog to another as the various components interacted.

  In doing so, he caused the party's formation to stretch, giving him a clearer view of the booth and allowing Kat to slip through the ranks of their guards.

  The top part of the booth featured four painted mannequins – two male and two female – all sawn off at the waist. They stared forth from alternate facets of the kiosk, so that the four formed an outward-facing cross. Brightly painted with long-lashed eyes, rosy cheeks and vacuous smiles that were doubtless intended to be endearing, but Tom found them vaguely sinister, particularly in these unnaturally still corridors.

  The series of sounds which had so intrigued him as they approached were caused by the mannequin facing them, one of the female ones. Somehow, the mechanism must have become jammed in the "on" position, because her right arm, bent at the elbow, was in the process of thrusting out towards them. As it reached the wall of the kiosk a small slot opened, at around chest-height for a child, to disgorge a handful of brightly coloured tablets – presumably sweets – which cascaded down the face of the kiosk to join the growing mound of similar objects on the floor, spreading steadily outward from the machine to form a glistening rainbow pool.

  The slot clicked shut and after a few seconds the arm moved slowly backward to repeat the process, presumably over and over again until either the sweets ran out or its power did. Each movement of cog against cog was accompanied by a theatrical ratcheting sound and the dispensing slot closed with an audible snap.

  Kat bent down to pick up a couple of the sweets, popping them into her mouth. Tom stopped to watch her, and the whole party ground to a halt. "Hey, these are all right," Kat said, scooping up a large handful which she then stuffed into various pockets. "Want some?" She held out a few towards him, ignoring the guards.

  He shook his head. It felt disrespectful, somehow, like robbing the dead. Sure, he'd done that himself alongside others from the Blue Claw in the past, but that had been in the City Below, where a corpse's possessions were no more than a resource to be recycled, where it was all about survival, and corpse frisking was an accepted part of the routine. This was a different world, though, and those sweets were intended for bright-eyed clean-faced kids in freshly washed clothes, kids who'd never had to face the things he had, who didn't even know they existed – until recently at any rate. Taking their sweets just seemed wrong, as if in doing so he would somehow be contributing what had befallen these unknown children and the robbing of their innocence.

  Kat shrugged, oblivious to any such concerns. "Suit yourself," she said, giving him a curious look as she brought her hand back and shoved the sweets into her mouth instead.

  She then sauntered back to join him and, following a scowl from Verrill, their little party was able to set off again, like some multi-limbed caterpillar. As they left the quadrangle, the sounds of the machine churning out its sweets receded with every new step.

  Shortly afterwards, they encountered their first body.

  The corridor on the far side of the square took on a different character to the one they'd walked through previously. Doors lined either side at staggered intervals, many brightly coloured, bearing decorative touches and ornate numbers which ran in sequence – 387 followed by 385 and then 383 – while doormats sat before several. They had entered a residential sector.

  Most of the doors were closed, a couple stood ajar and a few were broken in, smashed apart as if made of eggshell, while some of the doormats had been kicked askew. Tom resisted the temptation to glance into any of these open dwellings, afraid of what he might see there, though they all seemed wreathed in darkness in any case. One, an allwhite door, bore a patina of dried, russet stains which he definitely didn't want to think about. He noticed Kat studying this intently and guessed she was imagining the deathblow that had caused it.

  These were the first signs of actual violence they'd seen. The smashed doors, the dried blood, even the disturbed mats, combined to bring home the gravity of their mission and the dangers that lurked unseen around them.

  If they didn't, the first body certainly did.

  It was a man, lying half in and half out the open door to one of the dwellings, his face down, arm stretching across the hallway. A pool of dried blood spread outward from where his mouth must have been, like some perverse cartoonist's speech bubble. The Blade and the Guards on the left hand side were forced to move around or step over him. No one made any comment.

  This proved to be the first of many.

  Tom was used to bodies; they'd been an everyday fact of life for as long as he could remember, so he had no qualms in stepping over those sprawled across the centre of the passageway, and blood was hardly a novelty either, but he quailed at the sheer number they were coming across and wondered how many had actually perished up here in the Heights. It was clear that death had descended on these corridors suddenly and unexpectedly, and he could only hope that elsewhere there might have been more warning and fewer casualties.

  There were no body boys up here to remove the dead so they simply lay where they'd fallen, and he presumed they'd stay that way, at least until all this was over.

  The corridor opened into another broad square, this one far wider than the sweet machine's and with a higher ceiling. It went up four or five rows at least. As they entered, Tom stumbled to a halt. This time, nobody complained.

  The quadrangle had evidently been designed as a leisure park of some sort. To their left stood a children's play area, complete with climbing frame, slides, swings, a tumble wall, and other items Tom could only guess at; to the left a series of tunnels, skating tubes, ramps and curved climbs, while ahead stood a tiered rockery of stone seats, steps, and plants. At the top of this array was what had clearly been a fountain, now toppled and no longer working. Several watercourses were cleverly interwoven with the flower borders and seats, leading to four curved ponds at the base of the arrangement. Currently bobbing on the surface of these ponds were a number of large and very dead fish, while the water around them was stained red.

  Not that Tom spared these details anything more than passing notice, not even the dead fish. His attention was principally captured by the human bodies. They began at his feet, as the party entered the square. Closest was a woman, her abdomen ripped open; beside her lay a small child, perhaps her daughter, neck twisted at an impossible angle. The bodies and their blood carpeted much of the floor and rose to drape themselves over seats and pathways. They peaked where a man's form sprawled over where the fountain used to stand. Arms were outstretched, limbs ripped from their sockets, heads twisted and bludgeoned, while eyes stared sightlessly up at him, as if in accusation or perhaps desperately beseeching.

  Tom felt his stomach heave and fought to control it.

  "Thaiss!" whispered Kat from beside him. The fact that a survivor of the Pits was shocked by what they found here spoke volumes.

  The flies didn't help. There weren't yet enough of them to be considered a swarm but there were more than enough for Tom. Disturbed by the party's arrival, the dark insects took to the air, the droning of their wings providing a flat and disconcerting soundtrack to the carnage around them. He swatted distractedly at one that zigzagged too close, missing it completely.