The Book of Dead Days (3 page)

This was his room.

The day Valerian had put him in it, Boy had come straight back down and eventually found Valerian sipping port in the library.

“But I can’t stand up in it,” Boy had complained.

“Then kneel down,” Valerian had said, and cuffed him round the ear.

Boy was used to clambering about in small spaces. He seemed to spend his life doing it: onstage in coffinlike cabinets and offstage in the theater too, slithering along to Korp’s supposedly secret box.

Small, cramped, dark spaces had filled Boy’s life. Long ago, he had even been hiding in one the day he was found by Valerian in an old church, St. Colette’s. Boy had crammed his narrow frame into a space at the top of a pillar in the nave.

Since he had been working for Valerian he had not seen much daylight, never mind been allowed access to such private information as what time it was, or what day or month, for that matter. It was, in fact, March 6 when Valerian had found Boy, but only Valerian knew that.

Valerian had probably chosen Boy, taken him on, because of his expertise at squeezing into ridiculously small spaces. Boy had forgotten much of that life; it was years ago, and unimportant compared to the business of every day. Every day, trying to avoid trouble, trying to avoid upsetting Valerian or getting something wrong and…

He could remember one thing about the day they met. From the small gap made where the arch fluted away from the pillar, he had seen Valerian for the first time. He was deep in discussion with someone Boy now knew to be Korp, from the theater.

Even then Valerian looked haggard and pale. His nose, long and fine, twitched in the dusty atmosphere of the old church. His skin was gray; so was his hair. He looked like a dead man walking. But his blue eyes were full of life, and his gaze roamed the dark spaces around him.

Then Boy had heard his midnight rumble of a voice, so deep the stone he was clinging to shivered with it.

“The doctor,” intoned Valerian, “pronounced me either dangerously sick or dead.”

It was while trying to understand the strangeness of those words that Boy had lost his grip and plummeted to the flag floor of the church, where he lay looking up at Valerian, scratching his nose nervously, his short-cropped black hair sticking up at interesting angles the way it always did.

“O-ho!” Valerian had said. “What have we here?”

And so they had met.

Now Boy pulled off his reeking clothes and stood naked in his dark space. He wondered what to do. The pile of clothes at his feet stank up at him. The bath was on the first floor. He had no other clothes, just a long winter overcoat.

He sighed, picked up the pile of dirty clothes and the coat and crept back along the tube to the ladder.

He dropped the clothes down to the third-floor landing, and followed them, shivering as he went.

Boy sat, scratching his nose. He was nervous because Valerian was pacing up and down the Tower room, crisscrossing the floor a dozen times, then pausing, staring into space for a short while before resuming his compulsive journey from the tall, narrow window in one of the sloping walls to the top of the spiral staircase, which was the only means of access by foot to the Tower. Large or heavy items had to be winched into the Tower through a trapdoor in the floor. Despite his nerves Boy noticed that, as usual, Valerian was perfectly happy to stride over the trapdoor. Boy knew the hatch was strong enough, but he would never walk over it, just in case. The trapdoor opened above the landing on the second floor; it was quite a drop.

The rest of the Tower room was filled with clutter, paraphernalia, ephemera, equipment, things and mechanisms of all descriptions. Astrolabes, hourglasses, armillary spheres, sextants, alembics, retorts, reduction dishes, mortars with pestles, crystals, locks with and without keys, knives, daggers, wands of brass and wands of wood, pots, bottles and jars were just some of the odds and ends that lay scattered around the Tower.

Boy knew what some of them were-things they used onstage. As for those he didn’t understand, Boy often wondered what they might be. Maybe they were more, and as yet untried, pieces of magical equipment for the act, though Boy had his doubts.

There was the great leather armchair in which Valerian would sit, often in a pensive mood, brooding over Boy knew not what, and there were books. Piles and piles and piles of books of all shapes and sizes, leaning at precarious angles against walls and chairs, and, Boy assumed, about all sorts of things.

Right in the middle of the Tower stood the machine. Boy always had trouble remembering what it was called. As he sat, waiting for Valerian to say or do something, he tried to remember its name. It had been designed and built by a man called Kepler, who was the closest thing Valerian had to a friend.

Boy had never seen the machine working, but since it had been installed Valerian had spent even more time in the Tower. It had a strange Latin name,
camera obscura
.

“Do you have no grasp of Latin at all?” Valerian had barked at him when the machine arrived. Boy had shaken his head.

“Idiot boy! It means darkroom.
Camera
-room.
Obscura
-dark. See?”

Boy had smiled nervously, pretending he understood.

“Oh, why do I try to teach you anything!” Valerian had snapped, and sat back in his leather armchair.

“Camera obscura.”

Now Boy had remembered, he felt pleased with himself, and sat, wondering what on earth it was that the thing did.

Valerian kept on walking. Boy sat in just his overcoat, scratching his nose harder.

Then Valerian stopped.

“I have a job for you,” he said.

I was afraid you’d say that,
thought Boy.

“Yes,” said Boy. “Whatever I can do-”

“You can be quiet!” Valerian snapped. “Just listen, then do. All right?”

Oh, fine,
thought Boy. He nodded.

“I…” Valerian looked out of the window and across the nightscape of the City. “We… I… have a problem. Things are not what they were. Things…,” he continued, “are… different now. Different. They have changed.”

He stopped and looked at Boy.

“Clear?” he barked.

Boy nodded furiously.

“Things have not happened as I had intended and now-and now time is not on our side. Far from it. We must act. Things have not gone… according to plan. So I have a job for you. Tonight.”

“Tonight?” asked Boy, then shut his mouth quickly.

“Yes. Tonight. The Trumpet. You know it?”

Boy grimaced. The Trumpet was an inn about three miles away, near the river-docks. He had been there once, and on leaving had prayed that would be his last visit.

“You must go and get something for me. Some information. Tonight. Good. Then go. Look for a big, ugly man. His name’s Green.”

Boy nodded.

“Say I sent you and tell him to give you the information. Then come back here. Do nothing else. Talk to no one else.”

Boy hesitated. Did he dare risk a question?
May as well.

“Valerian,” he said carefully, “what is the information? How will I know what he tells me is right?”

“You won’t!” snapped Valerian. “Just go! Be quick! And do not get it wrong!” he said coldly.

Questions played across Boy’s face.

“So what are you waiting for?” Valerian yelled.

Boy jumped to his feet and fled down the stairs, scratching his nose.

By the time Korp got the fat singer out of his theater, and the girl too, it was late. There was no way he could move Valerian down the running order, but he had been pleased enough to get Madame from her previous permanent engagement in a foreign city. He sighed as he made his way up to his little loft. This was no mean feat, due to his considerable proportions and the narrowness of the passage.

He made it to the door, and noticed immediately that it was not locked. Not only that, but the little door swung open on its concealed hinges.

He cursed everyone in the Company, then collapsed into the box. Flicking the lid of the table with one foot, he sank his teeth into the cork of the bottle, removed it and then drank, long and deep.

He sighed.

Suddenly he heard a noise. It sounded like footsteps, coming from the stage. He leant forward, peering out through the view hole.

Nothing. At least, it was too dark to see anything. He held his breath.

Still nothing. Just as he had decided he was imagining it, he heard the sound again.

He peered down into the gloom of the auditorium.

His eyes grew wide.

Boy wasted half an hour while he wondered whether to risk asking Valerian what he should do about the fact that he had no dry clothes. No. Best not to bother him. Boy set out for the Trumpet dressed in his winter overcoat, with a piece of sacking for leggings, and his boots, which he had wiped as clean as he could.

He left, slamming the door behind him. Boy was allowed no keys to the house, but Valerian had designed a special lock that operated automatically when the door was pulled shut. You needed no key to lock the door, just one to open it again. And this was not a lock that Boy could pick. He had tried. Shortly after Valerian had shown him how to pick simple locks with a twist of metal, Boy had found himself locked out.

He had gone sneaking out one evening after the show, searching for an extra bite to eat. Food was never plentiful in the house-it didn’t interest Valerian greatly-and Boy was always trying to find more. Sometimes he could persuade one of the musicians from the theater to buy him a meal. This particular evening he’d dined thanks to the kindness of the old violinist. Hunger having driven him to the rendezvous, it was only upon his return that he realized he would not be able to get back into the house.

Aha!
Boy said to himself.
Let’s see if I’ve got this right.

He hunted round in his pockets for his lock-picking metal. It had once served as the artificial tendon in a metal hand that Valerian had dismantled. When he had grown bored with it, Boy had found it just right for the job of lock-picking.

He leant closer to the lock. It was almost completely dark in the street and he peered hard at the hole. He reached forward with his makeshift key, but no sooner had he touched the metal innards of the lock with the metal tendon than he was thrown backward across the street, landing in a heap in the gutter. His whole arm felt as though it had been bitten by a dragon.

Boy rubbed his arm with his good hand, cursing his luck.

Some magic device, no doubt, put by Valerian on the door to keep thieves away.

He had been in deep trouble when Valerian had found him the following morning, huddled on the doorstep, having spent a wretched freezing night outside.

Inventing was just one of Valerian’s many areas of knowledge. Years ago, when more involved in the life of the Great Theater, he had invented a system of footlights for the stage-another reason why Korp was deeply indebted to him. The lights worked on some system of chemical fire that only Valerian understood and that only he could control. They gave off a faint yet pungent smell, but were another reason why Korp’s theater had a reputation as the best in the City.

Boy had learnt much from him. For all his faults, Valerian was a remarkable man. But despite their years together, Boy actually knew very little about him, though he had picked up enough scraps of information to put together some of Valerian’s life story.

Boy knew Valerian had attended the Academy, where Kepler, the man who had recently made the camera obscura, was one of his fellow students. He knew that Valerian had studied Natural Philosophy and had been considered a more than able scholar, with the potential to become a great one. Something had happened, Boy did not know what, but it was enough to make him fall from grace. Boy gathered that he had been conducting peculiar experiments, explorations into secret or forgotten learning, something dark and forbidden.

Boy also knew that around this time Kepler and Valerian had fallen out, or at least lost touch. They had not seen each other until a few years back. Boy could remember when Valerian started visiting Kepler in his tall and narrow house across the City, and after a while Boy began to go along now and then.

Valerian had once been very wealthy, which was when he had bought the huge and rambling house, now a decayed shadow of its former self. It had been purchased from the family of a judge. It was still an opulent building then, a worthy residence for one of the City’s highest officials. But Valerian seemed to be rich no more, and over the years the house had gone to seed, as had the neighborhood around it.

Boy did not know how Valerian had lost his money, but he seemed not to care very much for anything, except the hours he spent shut away in the Tower, doing heaven knows what with his infernal contraptions and reading books from the teetering piles that lay around the room.

Boy loved the Yellow House despite its empty rooms and shamefully dirty corridors, if only because it was the only place he had ever called home. If he kept out of Valerian’s way, or at least did nothing to upset him, Boy found a little peace inside its walls. And there was the small paved garden outside the kitchen door, where on hot days Boy would cool himself among ferns and vines that sprouted from the high, damp stone walls, making the garden a secret space. There was a small well in the center of the paving. Sometimes Boy imagined that he could hear rushing water, like a river far beneath him, though he knew it was just his fancy. The river was a sluggish, smelly beast, miles away from the house, and the well was a dry, bottomless hole.

Now, standing outside in the night, Boy put his hand against the flat panels of the door, willing it to open. No luck. It was a cold night and he was naked under his coat except for the sackcloth leggings. Boy hoped Valerian would still be awake when he got back. He kept strange hours-working through the night, sometimes resting fitfully during the day and then getting up in the early evening to perform at the theater. Boy glanced up at the Tower high above the street, but he saw no light within. This was odd. It would be unlike Valerian to sleep at night! Had Valerian gone out again himself? The house was so large that if Boy was in his room he wouldn’t have heard the front door close.