Down Station (21 page)

Dalip wanted to know. He wanted to know how a railway engineer with an Eastern European accent and a better command of English than most English people knew which end of a pig to stick with a knife. He also didn’t want to know, because none of the scenarios that he was constructing were ones in which Stanislav had been a good, decent man. By not knowing the truth, he didn’t have to make a decision.

And, he discovered, he was content with that.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s none of my business.’

‘That is not true. However, it is not relevant for now. When we have killed the geomancer, her dragon and her steward, freed the slaves and escaped from the castle, then perhaps we can talk more.’ Stanislav raised his stick. ‘One more bout.’

‘I’m tired.’

‘You think that matters to your enemies? You think they will wait while you have a little sleep, a meal? When you can fight exhausted better than they can fresh – then we can stop.’

Dalip ached. He was tired and hungry and dirty. His hair, normally washed and combed every morning, was a bound rope thick with oils. His boilersuit was becoming stiff with sweat and dirt. His kachera … he was ashamed of them. He should be clean. It was one of his sacred duties.

And this man, this gadfly, wouldn’t let him rest. Dalip wasn’t
lazy. He worked hard, at everything, as was right and proper. A moment’s respite was all he wanted.

‘First strike?’

‘Then make sure it counts. None of your dabbing at me.’

Dalip assumed his stance, and so did Stanislav, and they began to circle each other. Now, the older man seemed tireless: relentless would be a better word. Driven. Determined never to lose. He was the same last thing at night as he was first thing in the morning, pushing himself, and pushing Dalip. He saw any slackening of the regime as intolerable weakness.

Dabbing indeed. He’d show him dabbing.

They feinted, lunged, dodged, retreated. Dalip remembered what Stanislav had said about getting tired, and making mistakes. He was already tired, so he ought to just close and attack, but the older man was still a stronger and faster and moreover, a filthier fighter. There was nothing pure about his style – whatever worked.

Then he was aware of being watched; a slight change in the air, a presence behind and above him that Stanislav in his singular focus hadn’t spotted.

In that moment, he was distracted, and his opponent struck, trying to tangle his feet and push him back against the wall. Dalip fell, but rolled out of the way before the stick poked his stomach, or his neck, or his groin, or his kidneys, or sideways into his ribs. So many ways that he was vulnerable, so many ways to be killed.

‘She’s here,’ he said, and Stanislav, thinking it might be a trick, ignored him and tried to rush him again. In his haste, he left himself open. Dalip dropped, thrust his arm up and delivered a palpable blow that would, had it not been a blunt piece of wood, gone up under the sternum and into the heart.

It was one of the few times he’d won: it left Stanislav winded, and him with sore fingers.

‘She’s here,’ he repeated, holding out his hand for Stanislav to grasp.

And she was.

Even by the candlelight, it looked as if she’d been beaten. Her face was battered, two black eyes, one she could barely see out of, a ragged purple cut on her pale forehead, her jaw swollen and seemingly misaligned. Her hair, normally straight and golden, was dishevelled and patchy, as if clumps of it had been cut or torn out. What could be seen of her shoulders and chest were mottled in colours from black to yellow.

She was staring down at the two men, just as they were staring up. Then she turned and left, slowly, painfully. The door up on the balcony opened, then closed again.

‘Soon,’ said Stanislav. ‘As soon as we can. We may not get a better chance.’

21

She dragged herself back to the castle. At times, it was literally that: when her legs were too tired, too painful to use, she’d pulled herself from one tree to the next. Her back – why did it have to be her back where she couldn’t see – felt strange. Numb one minute, burning the next. If she knew anything about dragons, which she didn’t because how could she, she guessed that whatever wounds she had were infected, and that she was going to die soon.

Which was, she considered, a fucking stupid way to go. Not that she wanted to go at all. She was eighteen and everything that life had so far thrown at her, and everything she’d thrown at life, had taught her that she was immortal. Stupid, irresponsible, impulsive, angry, alone: but immortal all the same. No matter what she did, no matter how much trouble she got herself into, nothing was actually going to kill her.

Not even the fire that drove her to Down. She’d watched other people die in flames, but it hadn’t claimed her.

And now she was going to get blood poisoning, like some skanky needle-marked junkie. Unless Crows showed up and helped her.

She’d shouted for him. Softly, because she didn’t want her voice to carry as far as a wolf ’s cry, but he never came.

Eventually, after stumbling and falling and crawling and rising, she recognised where she was, and spotted the unfinished crown of Crows’ tower through the forest. She hoped he’d be there. She was still hoping when she passed under the gateway that hadn’t been there when she’d left. She still hoped when she banged her little fist against the dark stained wood of the door, which also hadn’t been there before.

But the door opened slightly with her knocking, and she knew he wasn’t there.

It didn’t stop her from shouting for him.

‘Crows, you bastard. Why didn’t you tell me about the fucking dragon? Crows? Crows!’

He didn’t come, and she slumped against the door frame, immediately falling forward because she knocked the cuts on her back. The waves of pain left her on her hands and knees, gasping and nauseous.

She could feel fresh blood leaking down her sides, soaking into what remained of her boilersuit. She needed water. She wouldn’t feel so dizzy, so exhausted, if she drank more than the few scooped handfuls she’d managed from tiny, earthy-tasting rivulets. And she needed food, whatever she could find. Most of all she needed the pain to subside so that she could move again.

When she woke up, she was face down on the cold, hard stone and the shaft of sunlight through the open door had moved around. Her lips were dry, her mouth parched, her tongue stuck. She almost choked as she gasped, and her coughing was enough to make her whole body ache.

The rest, enforced and reluctant, had helped. She could now creep on all fours back out of the door – with difficulty as she seemed to blunder and sway into either the wall or the door as she tried to pass through – and across the pavement towards the spring.

It had, like the gate and the door, improved itself. From the trough that had contained the run of water before, it had become a circular pool. The water poured out of a stone spout at one side, and out again at the other, into a gutter that carried it through the now-impressive wall.

Even though she knew she shouldn’t, once she’d drunk her fill of cold, clear spring water so that it sat heavy and potent in her belly, she levered herself up and slid into the pool, pushing herself up and over the rim.

She held her face just over the surface of the water, while it soaked up her arms and legs. It wasn’t deep. It barely came to her elbows. But it was enough. She pressed her head down and turned it side to side, wetting her hair and scalp, watching the water tint pink in front of her wide-open eyes.

Then she rolled on to her back, spreading her arms wide and letting her body float. The water around her, constantly refreshed, gradually grew clearer as she lay there, her clothes once again becoming loose about her, rather than stuck to her skin. With her arms up, only the oval of her face – eyes, nose, mouth and chin – was above the rippling surface. She reached under for the boilersuit’s zip and dragged it down, easing her arms out one at a time, and pulled it down to her waist.

It wouldn’t come. It was stuck against something on her back. And yet when she tugged, it didn’t hurt. It just didn’t move.

The material was too tough for her to tear. She didn’t have a knife, though Crows might have left something in the castle. She couldn’t see her back anyway.

She gave up and tried to sit. Even that simple task seemed almost beyond her. She felt so weak, it took an age to manage upright. Something broke the water behind her, distinctly, long after she did.

She didn’t dare turn around. As the coldness of the water faded and the warmth of the late afternoon air touched her, she realised that there was something clinging to her back, hanging between her shoulder blades, heavy and wet. She sat very still, screwing her eyes up so that she wasn’t even tempted.

She shifted slightly, and the weight shifted with her, slow and large.

She couldn’t sit there all day. She couldn’t avoid whatever it was. She had no weapons, but she did have magic. What good that might be against something that held her so close without her noticing until now was only ever going to be a guess.

She opened her eyes and turned her head slightly, her gaze falling on the frayed strap of her top, her bruised brown skin, the slope of her shoulder, and the tawny ridge of feathers behind.

No hesitation now. Her head snapped around to the other shoulder, and there was another mass of mottled plumage. It didn’t matter over which side she looked, the view was identical and reversed.

She had wings.

Actual wings. Sodden, bedraggled, dripping water, but they were incontrovertibly wings. They hung off her back, still and lifeless, on her and part of her, and she couldn’t move them because she had no way of knowing how to move them. Which muscles should she flex, which part of her brain should she spark to trigger that? She knew how to move her fingers, her toes: she just thought about it, and it happened. But wings?

How did she even get wings? Where did they come from, and what did they mean? Was it what Crows said, about doing too much, too soon? Had she become so infested with magic that it was breaking out, changing her without asking, taking her over.

She didn’t know if she should be scared or not. She’d grown wings because … she’d wished for them. Trapped on the mountain with only an angry dragon for company, with a sheer drop behind her, she remembered what she’d thought, what would have helped at that moment. If she could have flown.

And now she had wings. She didn’t know if that meant she could fly. Perhaps it did, if she could work out how to use them. On the other hand, if she did, then she knew nothing about how to fly. If she’d been given a car, she wouldn’t know how to drive it any more than being given wings gave her the knowledge of how to swoop and dive and soar.

Still sitting in the pond, she forced her legs out the boiler suit, then worked it backwards over the wings until she was free of it. She felt awkward, that standing would make her overbalance. But she couldn’t just stay there. Afternoon was stretching into evening, and soon it would be night.

As well as awkward, she felt restless. She hadn’t eaten for a day, two days, maybe longer – however long it had taken for her to get back to the castle. She was battered and bruised and bewinged, but she was also hollow.

Gripping the side of the pool, she got herself to crouching. Then slowly, slowly, she stood, more water pouring from her, giving her goosebumps as it evaporated away. She felt the wind catch the feathers behind her, and she shivered.

Her wings flexed, and tugged against her. She splashed her feet, scrabbling for stability, and after five or six steps, was able to stand mostly upright again. Gingerly, she lifted a leg over the edge of the pool, then the other, and she was on the pavement, leaving damp footprints trailing up to the door.

She was getting used to it, to them. There was nothing to it, really, just a difference in her gait, a change in her posture, a slight delay in her turn. She’d have to open the door wider. That was fine, too.

Wings. She had wings. Her breath caught in her throat, coming out like the first sob. She’d wanted this – not this exactly – but this: to bend the world to her will. It had always been coldly inflexible before, uncaring, unresponsive to her wants and wishes. Now Down was giving her her dreams in a piecemeal, overgenerous way that didn’t make any sense and wasn’t controllable.

She could snap her fingers and light fires. She could drag light and dark out of thin air. She could weave the natural world around her for camouflage and for weapons. A castle was growing out of the ground to her unbidden command.

No one had said Down was safe. It was the ways in which it was unsafe that confounded her. Friends that turned out to be enemies, she could understand. Growing wings was incomprehensible.

She could ignore that for the moment, despite the ever-present weight on her back. The first thing she did was check the little room she’d slept in for the map she’d drawn. It had gone, taken by Crows.

Of course it had. Maps were power and wealth. Why did people tell her the truth and then betray her with those same truths? Because they could. Draw a map, said Crows, put everything down that you remember. How stupid could she be? He’d told her exactly what he was going to do, and she hadn’t even noticed, in the same way that the wolfman had: in Down, there was no one to stop you doing whatever you wanted. She hadn’t asked, what if you wanted to be very wicked?

So the map had gone. She could make another one, with the right materials, which inevitably had gone too, with the rest of Crows’ supposed hoard of knowledge. It became more of a question of what he’d left than what he’d taken.

The candle was still on the table, and she lit it almost casually, even though the act itself was extraordinary. There was grain, which she could boil, but there was also a cake of something dark and heavy and sticky. She licked her fingers and tasted the dense flavours of sweet, rich fruit, dried and compressed into a single solid block.

Which she tore into, pulling and clawing, and when that wasn’t fast enough, picking up and worrying chunks out of it with her small white teeth.

What was she doing? She put the pressed fruit down on the table and backed away like it was something live and dangerous. She spat out what was already in her mouth and not yet down her throat or her front. She liked sweet stuff, but not that much, not that intensely. Yet she could see her fingers glistening and had the overwhelming urge to suck the syrup off them.

She made a conscious effort to stop herself. Boiling the grain up, making a porridge, it would take time. She could do that: she didn’t have anything else do. Crows wasn’t around, and judging from what was missing, he wouldn’t be coming back. This was her castle now, and it certainly seemed to be responding to her presence by becoming more complete. She filled a metal pot with grain, listening to the way they bounced against sides, and carried it outside to fill it with water.

The sun was setting, and the sky was turning purple with dusk. The crows were coming back to roost, their black shapes wheeling above her and around the incomplete tower. They called to her, and she watched the way their wings snapped and flapped as they turned.

She felt a longing, a terrifying ache, that told her she should be up there, with them, and not concerning herself with such mundane things as cooking. Birds didn’t do that; they lived off the wild bounty of the world.

She clenched her fists and closed her eyes, and the feeling passed.

Crows had piled up firewood and set the pot over it. She tried to copy what he’d done, but inevitably she was unpractised, and she hadn’t been paying that much attention. The wood, she could find, stacked away in another room, but it came with no instructions on how much to use or how to lay it out. She guessed, and caught it alight by willpower alone. When the first flames had died down, she dropped a scorched, sooty flat stone into the middle of the fire, and carefully placed the pot on top of it.

The heat reached her, and made her shy away, her feathers trembling. The pot settled on the stone at an angle, but it didn’t spill. She’d need to remember to pad her hand when she retrieved it later. When she looked up, the crows were still circling and calling. It would take a while for the grain to cook down. Time enough to climb the tower.

She tried to resist. She tried so very hard. But wrestling with her compulsions was harder, and she was exhausted and confused, and in no state to feel strong. She gave in. She almost ran. Back inside, up the steps, past the room she’d entered previously because that too was now enclosed by timbers stretching overhead and boarded out. The steps, where they’d petered out into space now carried on, and so did she.

The tower now had a top, a parapet of stone that was waist-high, and the rafters that would make the roof had already grown out. All that was missing was the floor beneath, and the shingles above. The crows swirled around her, cawing and cackling, but those already roosting merely hopped out of her way as she stepped on the exposed beams on her way to the edge.

She planted her feet, held on to one of the angled uprights, and stared out over Down. From the height she was at, she could see more, even the distant mountain with the twin peaks, which the geomancer ruled and where she’d fought a dragon and at least not lost.

When she leaned out and looked down at the cooking fire, she didn’t feel a visceral turn in her stomach. Rather, she felt the opposite. Elation. Her wings fluttered against the gusting wind, rising of their own accord.

A crow hopped on to the parapet beside her, its head turning to inspect her with one dark eye. The same wind that she felt riffled the purple-black plumage on its back, and it flapped its wings with sudden violence, making the wing-tips snap like whips. It settled, and its pale beak announced a caw.

‘Caw,’ she said back. ‘Caw.’ Her own wings, brown, speckled with white and black, remained mute.