Mark Newton - The Book of Transformations

‘No,’ Liel replied. ‘But them banshees going all silent just ain’t natural, I can tell you that much. Word is, someone’s got their tongues.’

‘It’s easier, idiot, because who’s now here to scream for the dead? No one, that’s who. There’s less fear when you’re murdering someone, so it makes life easier. Now, stop being so pathetic. You should be more like your mate, Caley — he’s not chicken shit and he’s years younger than you.’

Liel squirmed a nod.

Brude couldn’t stand the scrawny man being so paranoid. He was eighteen, slow for his age, and his incessant paranoia was infectious. Brude turned his furtive attention to the edge of this iren, one of the largest in the city, where a few glass shopfronts were glittering like starlight.

Among them he searched for a name…

Granby’s Gemstones.

There it was, a decorative and faded green facade, its square sign creaking gently in the wind. In the daytime, people of the city would mill about outside this shop and goggle at the metallic trinkets and precious stones beyond the glass.

Shalev’s instructions were, as always, to the letter. Forty days had passed now since she’d been working with them — the anarchists. Forty days of furtive undertakings, though strictly speaking, they wouldn’t ever call it work; they wanted to refer to it always as a collective. Work was still a form of wage slavery, they claimed. Work was getting grimmer and grimier, poor conditions forced upon people by propagating the fear of how bad the ice would become. Other folk felt they wanted secure jobs in such conditions, despite the poor pay and treatment. They wanted to remain in their front-room cloth manufacturers, labouring under restrictive conditions by the underground docks, but Brude wasn’t into such self-abuse. Rumour had it that the Freeze was destined to keep the ice here for decades, so he was fucked if he was having any of that.

Shalev had given them hope…

Caveside was a different place now and it had all happened quite suddenly. Two months ago the enormous but overlooked sector of the city was practically a slum, an enclosed shanty suburb that housed the majority of the population. There was resentment against topsiders, deep unrest and petty crime had flourished.

But now? Now Shalev was manufacturing miracles.

First came her remarkable cultist-engineered seeds. Barren zones of land, on which nothing could ever grow, were suddenly able to support tight patches of crops. Tolerant plants could now thrive with little light or water, and what were back gardens only in name became allotments. Food bloomed in the darkness.

Poorer smiths began to manufacture things for Shalev in exchange for food, and weapons: clubs, daggers and maces spread amongst the Caveside dwellers. But whereas once these would have been used on one another, now Shalev brought them together as a group. Connections were made externally and, somehow, surreal though it seemed, crops were being exported out from under the city to rural collectives, in exchange for their support. A barter economy, one without money, grew quickly — out of nothing — and Brude didn’t quite know what to make of it all. But what he did know was this: Granby’s Gemstones was on Shalev’s hit list. That such a place could continue to exist was a symbol of the extravagance of the upper city, which flaunted such wealth at a time where thousands of refugees were dying right on Villjamur’s doorstep. It was a shocking, garish display of crass commercialism, Shalev had said. Or rather, that’s what people reported that Shalev had said, because the level of secrecy was immense for newcomers to their circles. Given the brutal determination of the military in this city to hunt her down, that was certainly understandable.

And all of this was why Brude and Liel were going to filch its jewels.

A couple of muscled lads were a whistle-call away, waiting with blades in case any of the city guard strolled by, but the added security didn’t fully reassure him. Brude and Liel flitted into the shadows as a priestess tottered across the ice to a nearby Jorsalir church, her skirts hitched up so the hem wouldn’t get wet. Once she had passed, the two men scurried along the perimeter of the open square, to the small alleyway alongside the jewellers.

Liel stood languidly, a blade clutched in his tiny fist. Brude searched in his own overcoat for the device passed along to him from Shalev.

Where is the damn thing, I hope I haven’t left the bugger in the caves. A-ha!

He whipped the object out with a conjuror’s flourish. It was a small tool that utilized some form of magic to cut through glass. Brude was adroit in urban techniques, having spent years educating himself in the ways of the thief, but this was something entirely new to his repertoire. He tilted the device, a long rectangular strip of brass, this way and that in the moonlight, discerning the correct side, then pressed it against the grainy glass for several seconds. He moved it along, held it for several seconds, moved it along, and so on, until he had drawn a barely visible circle about an arm-span across on the surface of the glass. Once the ends of the lines connected, he waited. The line suddenly glowed purple, flared brightly and, with a snap, the circled patch of glass fell in one piece into the darkness of the shop, whereupon it shattered. Liel and Brude quickly scanned the area in case anyone heard.

Liel tugged at Brude’s sleeve, and the thuggish man turned to follow his gaze.

‘Brude! Up there, Brude. Top of those walls, I swear I saw something.’

‘There ain’t a thing there, runt,’ Brude grunted. ‘Now come on.’ He heaved his boot up onto the windowsill, cleared the broken glass, then peered inside. In the near-darkness, he could see the glimmer of gemstones in their cabinets.

The wealth here is… staggering. Oh my… emeralds and rubies… Praise Bohr, it’s a fucking miracle all right. And a few were his for the taking, as payment, so long as he distributed the rest to the collective.

‘Brude,’ Liel whimpered, ‘you really should look at this. I ain’t kidding.’

‘Fucksake, what is it?’ Brude demanded, turning back.

Liel wafted his arm. ‘Up there, on them roofs. Few hundred yards away, a fraction left of the Astronomer’s Glass Tower.’

From out of the sea of fog and above the crenellated sector walls, a figure could be seen gliding from rooftop to rooftop, tiptoeing across the moonlit tiles — then, seemingly, it ran through the air over a gap of at least twenty yards, its arms and legs flailing, only to push itself off another set of roof tiles with the daintiest of touches.

Fluidly, it manoeuvred itself towards them.

‘Hmm…’ Brude placed his finger and thumb in his mouth and, very loudly, gave two sharp whistles. A moment later, boots were clattering on the cobbles: the back-up was arriving. ‘Tell them what’s going on, I’ll get some gems, then we fuck off quickly. Right?’

Liel nodded tentatively, his eyes still fixed on the approach of this rooftop newcomer.

Brude glanced at their comrades, three blond thugs standing furtively next to Liel, both kitted out in tight military-style clothing and both brandishing swords. Brude nodded to them, and they whispered back, ‘Evening, brothers.’

As Liel opened his mouth to explain the situation, and Brude poked his head back into the shop, a voice called out from across the street:

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, chaps.’ He was well-spoken, whoever he was, silhouetted against the moonlit glare on the wet cobbles, with his hands on his hips. A tail swished back and forth, and for a moment Brude assumed it was an Inquisition rumel. Brude pulled his attention away from the jewellers and, standing alongside his comrades, peered through the fog that had now made itself present at street level.