The Book of Dead Days (2 page)

The door was locked, but Boy took a piece of metal from his pocket and flicked the three tumblers of the lock in no time at all. He had learned one or two things from Valerian in their time together. In fact, apart from what he’d picked up living on the streets, most of what Boy knew about anything had been taught him by Valerian.

He dropped down the couple of feet into the box. There was the little stool covered in red velvet and the small hollow table inside which Boy knew was a bottle of the director’s favorite schnapps. In the front of the box was a small window. Boy carefully lifted the blind that covered the glassless hole, and peered forward. The glow from the footlights sparkled in his eyes.

Boy knew a lot about Valerian’s tricks. He helped perform many of them and helped assemble others. But the grand finale was something very different. So spectacular was this illusion that Valerian was known throughout the whole City for it. It was probably for this trick alone that the Great Theater was still in business.

The theater lay in the heart of what had once been the most glamorous part of the City, the Arts Quarter, now fallen into decadence and ruin. The other acts that performed there were by and large terrible. The crowds would eat and drink and talk and laugh throughout the evening, paying little or no attention to what passed onstage. They had come for one thing: the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion. Many came night after night. Others, new arrivals in town, travelers from distant parts, were about to see it for the first time.

Boy knew nothing of the workings of this trick. He had seen it a thousand times, maybe more, and still marveled every time. He supposed that it was too valuable, too extraordinary or too complicated for Valerian to tell anyone how it worked.

By the time Boy got up to the box, Valerian was already well into the piece. Boy craned his neck so that his nose was projecting a little through the view hole.

The Illusion featured a short and frankly stupid play about a drunkard who stumbles across a gathering of pixies dancing on the mountainside. They disappear back to fairyland, but the man overhears their secret words and follows them. He captures one of the little people and brings him back to the human world, determined to make his fortune with the fairy.

Valerian was reaching the climax of the show. He moved to the mouth of a cabinet built into a tree trunk, stage right. Stage left was an identical affair. He was acting without joy or passion. He knew he didn’t even have to try to inject any excitement into the audience. They were already beside themselves with anticipation.

Boy watched him carefully. Something was wrong- Valerian seemed even more uninterested than usual. He was impatient, eager to get it done with. A note had been delivered to Valerian just before the show. Did his strange mood have anything to do with that? Valerian had grown somber as he’d read.

Onstage, Valerian spoke the lines as he had many times before.

“What did those little people say?” he asked, staring at the ceiling, addressing no one in particular. “Aha! I have it!”

He stepped into the tree-trunk cabinet.

“Ho! And away to fairyland!”

And he vanished. No more than half a second later there was wisp of smoke from the second tree trunk and he reappeared, holding a tiny humanlike figure cupped in his hands. It seemed to be alive. It wriggled in his hands and you would swear you could hear a little voice coming from it. It appeared to be dressed in leaves and flowers. It could have been male or female, but it was certainly a fairy.

Then, just as Valerian, playing the drunkard, appeared to have achieved his goal, there was a double flash of lightning, for a split second the fairy seemed to grow to the size of a man and then both the fairy and Valerian vanished, back to fairyland.

The crowd erupted into huge cheers and shouts of delight.

Boy sat back on the red velvet stool and felt something dig into his back. He looked round and jumped out of his skin. Valerian sat behind him, glowering.

“You, Boy,” he said, “have let me down.”

“Name the five principles of Cavallo,” Valerian snapped.

They hurried through the dark streets of the City-the vast, ancient City that sprawled away into the darkness around them in all its rotting magnificence, a tangled mess of grand streets and vulgar alleys, spent and decrepit. Fat houses squatted on either side of them like wild animals lurking in the gloom.

The City. Once it had been the capital of a powerful empire, which now only existed in the peculiar mind of Frederick, the octagenarian Emperor, shut away somewhere behind the high walls of the Palace.

The Emperor’s warped memories were utterly unknown to Boy.
His
world began and ended with Valerian. As the two of them made their way along a particularly horrid street called Cat’s End, the midnight bells began to strike. The twenty-seventh of December had begun.

Valerian strode a pace ahead of Boy, but held his coattails to pull Boy half running, half stumbling along behind. And he was testing Boy in mind as well as body.

“Well?” he barked.

“Mystery,” Boy panted as they sped along. “Mystery and preparation and… sorry.”

He stumbled on a cobblestone. Valerian dragged him, practically in the air, around a corner and into a side street. A shortcut home.

“What?” yelled Valerian. “Mystery and preparation and
what
?”

“Direction?”

“
Mis
direction, you goat!”

“Misdirection,” said Boy, and then before Valerian had a chance to shout again, “and practice and skill. Natural skill,” he added hurriedly.

Valerian grunted in satisfaction, but didn’t slow the pace. Boy stumbled after him, pulled sideways by the tails of his coat.

Up in the secret box after the show, Valerian had glared at Boy for a good long while, so there had been no doubt that Boy was in a great deal of trouble. Then he had dragged him out of the box, along the tiny passageway, down the stairs and out into the night without even bothering to collect the money for the performance. Boy had hardly had time to think, but a question was bothering him. Badly. It had taken him at least three minutes to get from the side of the stage up to the box. It had taken Valerian no more than a couple of seconds. At least, that was how it seemed, but Boy knew from experience not to trust anything he saw Valerian do. You could never be sure, not really.

They moved on through the City, Valerian clutching Boy’s coattails, looking, from a distance, like some strange beast. They were in Gutter Street. Although there were no street signs in this part of the City (it was much too down-at-heel for refinements like that), nevertheless Boy knew where he was. They passed the Green Bird Inn. Boy had been hoping they might stop for Valerian to have a drink or two. Or more. Then he might have forgotten about Boy’s slipup. But he strode by without even a glance at the tavern. Boy gulped and staggered on.

“All right then,” said Valerian. “And if you don’t observe the Five Principles you may as well just rely on luck, which is what you made us do tonight. Anyone half sober or with half a mind would have seen-”

“I’m sorry,” said Boy.

Valerian stopped suddenly and Boy ran into the back of him. He turned and looked down into Boy’s eyes.

“Sorry.”

“Well,” Valerian said, and his voice was suddenly quiet, “well, it’s not important. Really.”

He dropped Boy’s coattails and began to head for home, still walking fast.

Boy had been thrashed by Valerian before for much less than this. More confused than ever, he watched him go for a moment. Valerian’s tall figure, his longish gray hair flowing behind him, was about to disappear round another corner. Although Boy knew the area, he grew alarmed.

Unpleasant things had been happening in the City recently. Even in the better areas, horror was not unknown. There had been a spate of terrible murders, and the inns, taverns, salons and courts were full of talk of these crimes. The murders were remarkable for their particularly gory nature: with the bodies sometimes drained of blood. There were rumors of the ghastly apparition responsible-“The Phantom.” There had also been a series of grave-robbings in some of the many cemeteries around the huge City. Many people thought the two were linked.

“Hey!” Boy cried. “Wait for me!”

It was deep into the night, and they were now in one of the worst parts of the City. Nearly home.

Korp, the director of the theater, began closing up. Half an hour ago he had finally managed to throw the last drunken idiot out, and before the man had even hit the mud of the alley Korp had slammed the door after him. He didn’t have to worry about being too nice to his customers. They would come night after night, as long as Valerian kept doing that thing about fairies.

Director Korp sat for a while in his office, staring into space. He felt old and tired and fat, because he was. He daydreamed, remembering days when he had traveled the continent with the greatest show ever assembled. The show had included a giant, five midgets, a two-headed calf, a snake-woman, a disappearing lady, a levitating man, twin wild boys and many, many more. It was all far behind him, and though he missed the excitement of his youth, he had a theater to run now, and he would run it as best he could till the day he died.

On the walls around him hung portraits of some of the stars who had appeared in his theater. Cavallo the Great, a legendary magician. There was Grolsch, a famous escapologist whose career had come to an untimely end one night when he failed to escape, and Bertrand Black, a bear-tamer who had had a similarly rapid demise on stage. But all the faces were from days long gone, when things had been different, more lucrative.

Korp scratched his bald head for a minute or so, then, without looking down, put his hand into a drawer in the ornate desk at which he was sitting. He fumbled around, still without looking. He put his hand on his pistol, and shoved it aside. It wasn’t what he wanted.

“Yeush!” he said, with a frown. “Where’s it gone?”

Then he remembered the bottle he’d left in his “secret” box. Wearily he got to his feet and made his way down the darkened corridors backstage. As he passed one of the dressing rooms he noticed a light.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“Oh, Director,” said a voice from inside. “It is Madame.”

He stuck his head around the door.

“Ah!” he said. “Madame! Madame Beauchance! May I say how exquisitely you sang tonight!” He smiled a wide smile.

Madame Beauchance appeared to ignore this compliment.

“It will have to change,” she said.

“Madame?”

Now Korp noticed the girl, Beauchance’s assistant, kneeling at the singer’s feet and rubbing her ankles. The girl glanced up at him.

“Madame means…?” he began again.

“I mean,” said Madame, not even looking at Korp, “that I will not continue to appear in an
inferior
position. To that prestidigitator.”

Korp blinked.

He felt tired. He wanted to be in bed with Lily curled up around his feet. Lily was his dog.

“The magician,” whispered the girl, almost unheard.

“Exactly!” cried Madame Beauchance.

“Ah!” said Korp.

Valerian.

A little after midnight.

Boy had caught up with Valerian at the top of the next alley-a particularly nasty little gutter of a lane called Blind Man’s Stick, where the roof tiles of the buildings on either side were close enough to touch in places. Here and there it was possible to catch a glimpse of the night sky between them, but Boy was not interested in the stars. Not yet.

He clung tightly to Valerian as they made their way quickly along the foul-smelling culvert. A minute later they emerged into a relatively wide street. An open drain ran down its middle. Valerian stepped across it in a single stride. Boy, small for his years, leapt the gap and slipped as he landed.

He sat dazed in the stream, then, realizing where he was, leapt to his feet.

“Oh!” he said. “Ugh!” His bottom half was covered in unnameable filth.

“Ugh! Oh!”

Valerian did not even glance back.

Boy limped after him. They turned a corner and crossed a final street.

Valerian stopped for a moment at a wrought-iron gate let into a high stone wall. He rattled one of the big keys from his pocket in the lock, and shoved the gate open. Only now did he look back long enough to be sure Boy had got through the gate with him; then he swung it shut and rattled its lock one more time.

They were home.

Boy stood dripping, trying not to smell himself as he waited in the small walled courtyard that lay between the iron gate and the front door.

Valerian opened the door with another key from the huge bunch and went inside.

The house seemed to tense as Valerian shut the door behind them both. He said nothing but stood absolutely still, as if waiting. Then he turned and looked at Boy.

“What is that vile stench?” he barked.

Boy shrugged.

“I fell over…”

“For God’s sake go and get clean! Then come to the tower.”

“Yes, sir,” said Boy.

He shuffled down one of the corridors that led off the hall.

“And be quick. You have work to do!”

Boy ran along two corridors and then up three flights of rickety wooden stairs to his room. “Room” was perhaps something of an exaggeration. Room, or space, was one thing the place he slept in did not have. There was a mattress, which was actually quite comfortable though it was just a shame, thought Boy, that he did not get to spend more time on it. The smallest of openings (“window” would have been too grand a word for it) let in some light. This was in the sloping roof that made up one wall of his room. His bed lay against the single vertical wall, the entrance lurked in one of the triangular ends to the space, and in the opposite one was a tiny door behind which was an even tinier cupboard. Inside the cupboard were all Boy’s possessions. A spoon he’d found in the street and particularly liked. An old pair of boots that were too small and worn-out to wear anymore. A silk scarf he’d stolen from a rich lady but that was too nice to wear. Some small empty tins that nested inside each other and some pencils that Valerian had given him to practice his writing.