Саймон Морден - The White City

The Lords could no longer protect them, feed them, and no longer needed them for their games in trapping travellers and extracting information from them. If Dalip’s calculations were correct, then all the portals, the lines of power, the places where villages and castles grew, had all just changed. Across the face of Down, geomancers would realise that their own manors had become unremarkable plots of land, and that their castles would inexorably sink back into the ground. Good luck to them trying to hold their little empires together.

She decided that no one was looking for her, or at her. It was time to descend into the valley and see what she could find. She remembered what it was like to change, and in doing so, changed. She perched on the precipice, the fires below reflecting in her black, glassy eyes. She leaned forward, and dropped down, spreading her wings as she drifted silently over the burning buildings, feeling the hot air rise and buoy her up.

She flew the length of the valley, banked and turned. About the only building that wasn’t on fire was the round one. Which was something, she supposed. She flapped and settled on the scree slope behind it, and changed back with a shiver.

It was chaos. Everything that could burn was burning. She supposed, with a twinge, that the maps would also be only so much ash by now, but they had at least served their purpose. She watched the flames a little longer, then started down towards the road. Away from the main buildings, there was no one, though by firelight she could see people in ones and twos, their arms laden with looted gear, heading out of the valley towards the gorge.

The heat grew, and became fierce, but it was cooler inside the long, low building with the broken-down door. The floor angled downwards, and just a little way in, there was a hole in the roof. She looked up through it and at the drifts of orange-tinged smoke that drifted by.

She clicked her fingers to raise a light, and slowly made her way in. The walls were made of the same rough stonework as everything else, but there was a cable tacked to the wall down the left-hand side. It was something so familiar, and yet so very out of place.

At the end, the tunnel◦– she had to be underground by now◦– turned a sharp left into a doorway, where only one door of a pair was left hanging. She held up her hand and tried to illuminate the dark space beyond.

‘Dalip?’

‘Just step in. The lights will come on on their own. Cover your eyes.’

She extinguished her flame, and eased around the door. The room, vast and cold, was flooded with light.

‘Fuck. That’s bright.’

‘You forget, don’t you?’

Most of the lights seemed to be high up, so she held her hand to her forehead to give her some shade.

Dalip was sitting on a raised circular plinth in the centre of the floor. It took her a moment to recognise him, dressed in black and not orange, and a moment longer to realise that there were one, two, three bodies on the ground in front of him.

‘Shit. You all right?’

Then she noticed the way he was sitting, slightly forward, slightly to one side, his left hand held across his body and buried deep in his flank.

‘I’ve felt better,’ he said. He screwed his face up, and tried a smile. He failed.

‘Let me see.’ She ran forward a few steps, and he waved her back.

‘I don’t think you can help.’ His eyes were closed, his skin sweaty, his breath deliberate.

‘Fuck off. I’m having a look.’ She knelt down in front of him and tried to move his hand. All of the cloth there was glistening. If hadn’t been black, it would have been red.

‘I’m serious. I think I’m holding my guts in.’ He grunted. ‘It… was worth it. The more complicated the mechanism, the less you have to break to stop it working.’

‘Lie down on the floor, or something.’ She saw for the first time that the whole expanse of the floor was smooth, slightly rubbery, like a hospital ward. ‘I don’t know what to do!’

‘Don’t do anything. It’s fine. It’s fine that you don’t do anything.’ He slid from sitting to lying, and he tried to lift his legs up on to the plinth. When he couldn’t, she did it for him and gently set them down.

There was a thick, sticky pool of blood now smeared across the whiteness of the plinth.

‘I need to find someone. You need… someone.’

‘Stay. Stay with me.’

‘Dalip. Dalip, no.’

He opened his eyes. They were milky white, and she gasped.

‘What the fuck happened?’

‘Crows happened. But it doesn’t matter, not now. Tell me what’s going on outside. You can use your magic, right?’

‘Yes, yes. It’s all fixed. The city’s on fire. The people are stealing everything and burning the rest down. It’s a proper riot out there.’

‘Never been in a riot.’

‘You had parents to stop you joining in.’ She looked around at the room, the bodies, the exotic machinery. ‘You did it, then.’

‘Yes. Take a look behind me.’ He rolled his head towards the centre of the plinth.

There was a lip, then a hole. In the middle of the hole was an intricately woven ball of metal strands, the size of a beach ball. It was now distorted, and Dalip’s machete was still sticking out of it, wedged between the severed wires.

‘That was it?’

‘That was it. I don’t think they’ve got a spare. At least.’ He stopped, grimaced, and continued. ‘They gave up at that point. The experiment is over.’

Blood was dribbling over the edge of the plinth, a moving red line, straight and awful.

‘I need to go and get help,’ she said. ‘That’s not good.’

‘I won’t be here when you get back.’

‘Where’re you going?’

‘I don’t know. I can, hope, I suppose.’

‘You’re not going to die.’

‘I don’t think I’ve got much choice.’

His eyelids fluttered.

‘You have to hold on.’

He sighed.

‘It’s fine. I have been holding on. I was waiting for you. Now I can go.’

His hand dropped, and she pressed her own in its place, feeling the warm, slippery ooze of blood coat her fingers.

‘You’re not going to die. You’re not going to die, you hear me?’

He didn’t hear her.

Waking up ought to have hurt less than it did. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d got there, only that he shouldn’t be able to contemplate either of those questions.

‘Well now,’ said Mama, ‘don’t you look like something the cat dragged in?’

He tried to speak, coughed, winced, and gave up. The square of cloth suspended over him from poles, like a four-poster bed, flapped in the cool breeze, and the hammock he was lying in swayed gently.

‘You’re not right yet, so don’t you go tiring yourself out.’

He blinked, and felt the grittiness of his sleep-filled eyes. The canopy rattled above again. He could see. That in itself was a miracle.

‘Wind’s picking up,’ Mama observed. ‘Maybe a storm coming over. It’ll have to find someone else to take. It wouldn’t dare have you.’

He could smell the brine, and hear the waves build and fall on the beach. If he looked to his left, he could see Mama, round and solid, sitting on a sea-chest, holding the little board-backed diary they’d found together. Beyond her was the bay: a curve of sand, a flash of surf, a hint of the forest beyond. To his right were the ragged cliffs carved out of cream-coloured blocks. Somewhere down by his feet should be a long boat, but he couldn’t raise his head that far. He couldn’t raise his head at all.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

He knew what should have happened. He’d wedged his bloodied machete into the glowing ball of energy embedded in the plinth. And then… then Crows had cut him open and left him to die. He’d realised how badly he’d been hurt, and that holding the edges of the wound together was only going to do so much. He’d been bleeding, inside and out, and it would only stop when he ran out of blood.