The Relic Guild (24 page)

Van Bam nodded, and his expression was grave. ‘It could not have been an easy time – for you or them.’

Was this genuine sympathy? Clara couldn’t remember the last time she had experienced it, and she wasn’t sure how to react.

‘No, it wasn’t easy,’ she said, her voice trembling slightly. ‘My mothers protected me. They’d learned enough tricks during the old times to teach me how to control my magic, and made sure no one ever discovered my secret.’ Clara took a deep breath. ‘But I …’ Tears stung her eyes, and she felt too embarrassed by their presence to continue.

‘Please, go on,’ Van Bam encouraged.

‘I lost Gerdy and Brianne on the same night,’ she said bitterly. ‘They were killed in a tavern brawl, and I was left to fend for myself. I moved to the Lazy House and …’ She glared into the Resident’s metallic eyes, daring him to judge her. ‘I’ve been a whore since I was fourteen, Van Bam.’

‘But not anymore,’ he said softly. ‘That life is behind you now.’

Clara nodded, and in doing so dislodged the tears from her eyes and sent them running down her cheeks.

‘Although,’ Van Bam continued with a hint of amusement in his voice, ‘becoming an agent of the Relic Guild might be just as undesirable an alternative, yes?’

She laughed then, with genuine gratitude.

Van Bam bobbed his head to her. ‘Thank you for your honesty, Clara. Your trust is not misplaced.’

With a
click
, the outline of a door appeared on the wall behind Clara. She quickly wiped the tears from her face as Samuel entered the room. He ignored her and Van Bam and moved straight to the table of refreshments. Selecting some meat, he crammed it into his mouth almost angrily and then poured himself a cup of coffee. He seemed agitated as he picked up a slice of bread and ripped off a chunk.

Samuel turned to Van Bam, the coffee cup in one hand, the bread in the other, his mouth still full. ‘Any word from Hamir?’

‘Not yet,’ Van Bam replied, clearly amused by Samuel’s restlessness. ‘Where have you been?’

Samuel made a grumbling sound as he swallowed. ‘Thinking.’

Van Bam’s look of mock surprise forced Clara to stifle a laugh.

Samuel glared at her. ‘I can’t stand all this waiting around,’ he said, biting into the bread again.

Van Bam shook his head and his amusement disappeared. ‘We can do nothing until Hamir is finished with Hemlock, and that could be some time yet. Perhaps you should get some rest, Samuel, instead of walking the corridors like a caged animal. You too, Clara – your rooms are prepared.’

‘I don’t need to rest,’ the old bounty hunter retorted. ‘And since when did I have a room at the Nightshade … Van Bam?’

The Resident had frozen in his chair again, and his head was tilted to one side.

‘He’s listening to the Nightshade,’ Clara told Samuel with a smile. ‘It speaks to him.’

Samuel ignored her and took a step towards the Resident. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

‘I have just received a police report,’ Van Bam said seriously. ‘There has been a disturbance in the western district.’ He rose from the armchair. ‘Come with me, both of you.’

Of all the rooms Clara had seen inside the Nightshade so far, the room to which Van Bam now led her and Samuel was the most astounding. When she entered, Clara thought at first she had stepped outside: the predawn streets of Labrys Town stretched before her, as real as if the damp cobbles were actually beneath her boots. But although she could hear the sound of the wind, the rumble of distant trams, she felt no chill in the air and no scents filled her nostrils. Most disconcerting of all, the imagery was moving, slowly, as if she was floating, drifting through the town. Clara found the effect disorientating and gripped Samuel’s arm to steady herself.

He shrugged her off.

Van Bam called this room the Observatory, and he explained to Clara that she was now looking through the eyes of Labrys Town.

‘We are in the western district,’ Van Bam said. ‘Reports suggest that the disturbance was coming from this building here.’

The motion stopped in a plaza of quaint little shops, and the three Relic Guild agents stood before perhaps the quaintest of them all: a small and neat looking building called Briar’s Boutique.

‘It belongs to an antiques dealer,’ Van Bam told them. ‘One of the very few that remained in business after the war.’

‘Looks quiet enough,’ Samuel said.

Clara agreed. The door to Briar’s Boutique was closed, and the lights inside were dead. The shop looked so homely and unassuming it almost appeared asleep. There were no signs of a disturbance, and if there had been one it was long over. And there was no one around in the plaza.

‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ Samuel added.

Van Bam gave a slow nod. ‘The police received an emergency signal from a neighbour. Screams were heard coming from inside – along with the sound of things being smashed.’

‘Perhaps the owner disturbed some burglars?’ Clara suggested.

‘I do not think so,’ the Resident replied.

‘Why don’t we just go in and look around?’

‘Because this is a private shop, Clara, and not an official building – it has no eye devices inside.’

Clara looked at the Resident. There had been a strange, distant quality to his voice as he stated the obvious, and he seemed troubled as he scrutinised the building.

Samuel seemed to notice this too, and said, ‘What is it, Van Bam? What can you see?’

‘Magic,’ he replied.

Tentatively, Clara took a step closer to Briar’s Boutique and peered through the window. The imagery inside was shadowy and vague.

‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.

‘And nor would you,’ Van Bam told her. ‘But the magic is there, nonetheless.’

‘Moor?’ Samuel asked.

‘Perhaps a residue of his presence. It is weak, a barely detectable trace, but more than enough to be worthy of investigation, yes?’

Samuel’s back straightened. ‘I’ll check it out,’ he said eagerly.

‘Take Clara with you,’ Van Bam told him.

Clara bristled as she saw a look of irritation flit across Samuel’s face.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’ll get going.’

‘Good.’ Van Bam continued his intense perusal of the antiques shop. ‘I will ensure the police keep clear for the time being, and monitor your progress from here.’

Samuel opened the observatory door and gave a curt gesture for Clara to follow him.

Chapter Eleven

In the Shadow of the Genii

Shortly after the Resident’s black tram headed off towards the western district, a long cream-coloured cargo tram pulled into the forecourt outside the Nightshade. A crew of six tired-looking warehousemen disembarked and grouped beneath the predawn sky. Closely following them was a blue and white striped police tram, which remained parked in the tunnel that led to Resident Approach. Two police officers emerged and headed over to the crew. Any conversation that occurred between them was short and half-hearted. They knew they were being watched.

Van Bam had remained in the observation room following Samuel and Clara’s departure. He viewed the denizens through the security eyes outside the Nightshade, and he reasoned that even if they had been able to see their Resident’s ghostly image hovering out beside them in the morning chill, their attention would remain preoccupied with the strange, stone archway on the left side of the forecourt: the last functioning portal in Labrys Town.

Soon, the portal would activate. The day’s deliveries would begin. And the warehousemen, overseen by the police, would carry out the mundane service that was so vital to the survival of one million humans.

In the interim, Van Bam’s unseen phantom looked up to the lightening sky and the fading image of Silver Moon. Was anyone up there watching
him
?

Something Samuel had said was tapping at the back of Van Bam’s mind:
what could Fabian
Moor possibly achieve by returning to the Labyrinth?
Petty revenge was highly unlikely, and it would be unwise to trust anything Charlie Hemlock had revealed of his own volition. But was Hemlock the only denizen Moor had employed? There were certainly plenty of other shady characters in Labrys Town whose thoughts didn’t extend beyond filling their pockets with money. Was it only a matter of time before Moor began employing denizens who held higher, more official positions, too? From the councils and guilds, perhaps? The police? Yet even if he did, what ends did he hope to achieve? Fabian Moor was a creature of higher magic; he had no need – or love – for human servants. What was he seeking in Labrys Town?

Van Bam’s thoughts were disturbed as the group assembled beside the cargo tram stirred.

The portal had activated.

Within the tall and wide archway of stone, a sheet of deepest black rippled slowly as it reflected light like liquid glass. The air was filled with a low, undulating hum, as though a mighty fan was powering up. As Van Bam watched, the blackness bulged outward and then prised apart, like a flower opening its petals, to reveal the head of a large floating platform.

While the police officers supervised, the crew of warehousemen moved forwards to help the platform’s passage from the portal. These platforms were huge: fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long. The packing crates and metal containers on this one had been stacked six or more high and eight wide. A green cross painted upon the sides of the crates marked them as medical supplies.

For the past forty years these deliveries had come, seven days a week, eighteen hours a day, three or four platforms an hour. They brought ores and rolls of materials; sacks of grain, flour, sugar and salt; dried fruit and meat; powdered milk and egg; herbs, spices and medicines – all the rations that kept the denizens alive. Long ago, the Aelfir themselves had chaperoned these deliveries; had stayed in Labrys Town for pleasure and to conduct business with the merchant guild. Then, during the Genii War, the Aelfir had stopped coming. Only essential supplies were brought to the Labyrinth, and those deliveries were chaperoned by the Thaumaturgists’ mighty automatons.

But no one had accompanied the imports since the Genii War had ended, and nothing could be exported in return. The platforms the goods arrived on were designed to be easily broken down and used at the lumberyards. The sacks, crates and metal containers were sent to the recycling plants, and the power stones that enabled the platforms to float were distributed among the weapons-smiths and appliance factories. Nothing was wasted in Labrys Town. Even the nightly rains mixed with the sewage beneath the streets and were filtered through sanitation plants and stored at the water reservoirs.

Trade with the Aelfir had died decades ago, and not one person in Labrys Town knew which House resided on the other side of this one-way portal, not even the Resident.

The delivery at last broke free of the liquid blackness, which then wobbled and became a flat sheet of glass again. The undulating hum lessened and fell silent. Deactivated, the portal waited for the next delivery, which would come in the next twenty minutes or so. The warehousemen steered the cargo over to the tram; when it had drifted close enough, one of the policemen pressed the power stone in the side of the platform and removed it from its casing. The platform settled down onto the forecourt floor. The crew, wasting no time and always under the supervision of the police officers, began loading the crates into the tram, ready for transporting to the storage warehouses on the south side of town.

Van Bam had lost count of the transactions he had witnessed down the years, enough, certainly, for them to seem a banal formality, the supervision of a conveyer belt. Beyond the Nightshade’s forecourt, other cargo trams and police escorts would be lining up along Resident Approach, each ready to take the next delivery, and the next, and the next after that. Exactly as they had done every day for the past forty years.

As the warehousemen continued hefting crates, Van Bam began pacing the observation room.

Whatever Moor’s motivation, if he sought to seize control of Labrys Town he would first need to have command of the Nightshade – and that he could not accomplish, not with the help of ordinary denizens. Decades back Moor had attempted to extract knowledge on how to enter the Nightshade from Relic Guild agents – secret knowledge, subliminal information that the agents themselves were unaware they carried, information that could help Moor bypass the Nightshade’s defences. It had been reckoned that the probability of this unconscious knowledge being real was low to non-existent. But was it
possible
? Did
the Nightshade have a blind spot that it had
unwittingly imparted to the unsuspecting magickers of the Relic Guild
? Was that the reason why Moor had taken Marney alive
? Even if it was, the question remained: what did Fabian
Moor want?

As Van Bam gave a snort of impatience
, a warehouseman was approaching the Nightshade. He carried a wooden
crate, which he placed down on the floor inside the
line of security eyes before heading back quickly to rejoin
his fellows. Van Bam stared at the shape of a
square that had been burned into the crate’s wood
, the symbol of the Nightshade. This was a special delivery
for the Resident, a gift from the Aelfir on the
other side of the portal. Van Bam received these crates
two – maybe three – times a week. They were always filled
with fresh fruit or meat, or some other rare food
that most of the denizens had never even seen let
alone tasted.

In the beginning, Van Bam had felt some
guilt for receiving these special deliveries – though never enough to
share them with his people. Over time, he came to
expect them, to look forward to them, to feel he
deserved them. These delicacies were a privilege, reward for his
tireless work, a perk of his position. And Van Bam
had long ago forgotten how to feel guilty about enjoying
them.

Gideon decided it was time to interrupt his musings
.

I was listening to your conversation with Clara, earlier, my
idiot.
His voiced was laced with his usual spiteful
amusement.
I don’t think she appreciated your prying into
her personal life
.

Van Bam sighed.
I disagree.

Oh?
Do tell.

Clara has been without true friendship for a
long time – perhaps all her life. She needed assuring she
is not alone anymore.

Friendship?
Gideon paused for a heartbeat.
Is that really all you have in mind, my idiot?

However Van Bam replied to that question he knew it
would not be the right answer for Gideon, so he
remained silent and resigned himself to whatever caustic remark was
coming next.

You see,
the ghost said,
I’m wondering
if there is something about our young changeling that reminds
you of someone else. Marney, perhaps?

Van Bam’s mood soured instantly, but again he said nothing as the voice in his head continued
.

Marney did leave her mark upon
the girl, after all. Do you have hopes that Clara
will help you rekindle an old love affair?

That is
enough, Gideon.

Gideon’s chuckle was cruel.
Marney hasn
’t called you to her bed since the day you
became Resident, my idiot. And you won’t rediscover her
warmth in an ugly whore. Whatever message she has left
in Clara’s head, I very much doubt it’s
a love letter to you.

Van Bam quelled his rising anger. After forty years, he was well used to Gideon’s malicious nature, but still the ghost could occasionally manage to make the Resident seethe.

Gideon,
he thought softly,
if
you do not have anything of use to say, please
leave me to my thoughts
.

Oh, yes, I have been
reading your
thoughts.
And all they do is lead you
in circles. I, on the other hand, have been pondering
our predicament more constructively.

Van Bam took a deep, calming breath as he watched the warehousemen continue to load the cargo tram.

Go on
, he thought.

So glad you asked
, Gideon sneered.
Tell me – where do you suppose Fabian Moor
has been hiding for the last four decades? Certainly not
in Labrys Town, I think we can agree.

Van Bam considered for a moment. He had been so wrapped up in Fabian Moor’s return that he had not stopped to dwell on where he might have returned from.

Samuel
said he summoned a portal to capture Marney.

Yes
he did, didn’t he …?

As usual, something in Gideon’s tone suggested a hidden catch, something Van Bam had not yet grasped.

There was nothing surprising in what Samuel had told them. The Genii had at one time been Thaumaturgists, and it was well known that their magic could bridge two far-apart places, literally bring them within stepping distance of each other. It was by that same magic the doorways of the Great Labyrinth had led to the Houses of the Aelfir. But during the war, the Timewatcher had prevented the creatures of higher magic from using it to enter the Labyrinth by casting a defensive barrier.

Plucking this thought straight from the Resident’s mind and latching onto it, Gideon said,
But the Timewatcher’s barrier is
no longer in place, my idiot. With Spiral defeated, the
Genii dead, and their allies gone, there was simply no
need for it. The Timewatcher abandoned us, and Her Thaumaturgists
disappeared with Her, leaving the Labyrinth as a forbidden zone
that no one could reach. After all, the Aelfir certainly
aren’t powerful enough to create portals. Fabian Moor, on
the other hand,
is
. With no one watching over the
Labyrinth, he is free to come and go as he
pleases.

Van Bam pursed his lips.
Free to go where?

Ah, now you’re thinking, my idiot. I suspect the
Genii has a special little place to which he retires
after a hard day’s work.

You think he is
travelling between realms?

I think he is a creature of
higher magic and can do what he damn well wants.
I think he can materialise in any part of this
town at will.

Van Bam shook his head.
When Moor
appeared to Samuel, he opened a portal out in the
Great Labyrinth, where it would not be detected. If he
is summoning portals within the boundary walls, I would know.
The Nightshade would warn me.

Like it warned you that
Clara, a magicker, was hiding among your denizens?
Gideon said bitterly. He made an angry noise.
The Nightshade cannot see
everything, my idiot. You should have learned that by now
.

Van Bam had no answer to that, and he looked up at the sky again.

Consider this,
Gideon continued.
We
are yet to see evidence of Moor’s feeding habits
. There have been no signs of the virus he causes
, and his golems remain as hidden as their creator. There
are plenty of denizens in this town who wouldn’t
be missed if they disappeared. Perhaps Moor is smuggling his
victims to and from a sanctuary beyond the realm of
the Labyrinth.