Саймон Морден - The White City

‘You’re awake.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’

‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Like I need to talk to you. About what you did to me.’

She stopped smiling and stared at her sand-speckled feet. Mama rose from the sea-chest and slipped the book under its wooden lid.

‘Why don’t I give you youngsters some space?’ she said, and went to stand, trouser legs rolled up, in the washing waves.

Mary sat down in Mama’s place and wouldn’t look at him.

‘Mama won’t tell me,’ he said, ‘but I need to know.’

‘You were dying.’

‘I know. I’d accepted that. I’d done my duty: I’d fought bravely, and won through. It was always likely. It’s not like I wanted to die. I’m not a martyr, whatever Mama says. This, though, is unexpected. How did you keep me alive?’

‘It was all I had to work with.’ She bit at her lip. ‘Light and dark. That’s all there was. I didn’t know what I was doing, only that I had to do something.’

‘She won’t show me, or tell me anything about it. Is it that awful?’

‘No,’ she said, then equivocated. ‘It is a bit weird, though.’

He waited for her to explain, but she just knotted her fingers together in various permutations and looked uncomfortable.

‘Tell me.’

‘I… I just tried to stop the bleeding. It was all running out of you, and I couldn’t hold it in. I threw stuff at it and hoped.’ Her face grew pinched. ‘It worked.’

‘Tell me,’ he said, almost howling with frustration. ‘Just… tell me.’

‘Mama doesn’t think that’s a good idea. I… I don’t know. If you promised me you’d never look, then I’d tell you. But you’re going to look anyway, so what’s the point?’ She stood by the hammock and pushed the material down on one side so that she could take hold of his legs and turn him without spilling him on to the ground beneath. He let her guide his body, and realised that he wasn’t wearing the same clothes as he had been before. Of course. Not when the other set had been soaked with his own blood.

His bare feet connected with the soft sand, and the sudden change in orientation made him dizzy. He swallowed hard and concentrated on stopping the world, this world, any world, from spinning.

‘I think standing’s beyond me at the moment.’

‘You’re just saying that because you haven’t done it for a bit.’

‘How long?’

‘About a week.’

‘A… week?’

‘You were pretty beat up. I found Elena, by the way. I think I convinced her to come back.’

‘That’s good.’ He pressed his toes against the sand, feeling its texture and cool dampness as he burrowed them in. ‘Assuming you’re ready to forgive her.’

‘It’s okay. If she tries to pull any shit on me, I can take it from there.’ She slipped her hand under his shoulders, reaching around his back. ‘Ready for this?’

‘Not really, but let’s do it anyway.’

She counted to three, and lifted him. He hung on to her, draping his mostly useless arms about her neck. They stood like that for a while, her steadying him, him trying to work out which way was up. Every little movement he made sent the horizon tumbling.

It settled, eventually. She didn’t let go of him, but let him lean on her than her holding him up.

He gathered up his new, clean shirt, and lifted it up.

His torso was wrapped with bandages, which his dull fingers eventually untied and unwound. He could tell that something wasn’t quite right, because he couldn’t feel that he’d been cut at all. His mind remembered the strange tug and release of skin and flesh as it was first caught, then sliced apart. Yet his body had no memory of it all.

The bandages dropped away. He couldn’t see it all, but he could see enough. There was a puckered wound, where the flesh was gathered together by Mama’s neat stitching, that ran all the way from his front, around his flank, to where he couldn’t quite see at his back. It looked paler than the surrounding skin, not livid with infection nor black with dried blood. It wasn’t terrible to look at, although it was very long. He didn’t know how he could have possibly survived: one little nick on his intestines, and he’d have died of septicaemia.

Crows’ sword had done far more than that.

He could feel the ridges and knots under his fingertip, but there was no reciprocal sensation on his side. Odd, but not unusual. Then he realised that the skin hadn’t started to knit together, and never would. He placed one hand below the cut line, and one above, and gently stretched the wound apart.

There seemed to be a universe nestling in there. Holding the skin taut, he caught glimpses of stars, moving against the black of space. Whole galaxies were turning in the far distance. He stared for some considerable time, before letting go and allowing the wound to press together.

Some other reality had been incorporated into his body, filling the hole where his flank had been breached with its vastness.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘You did this, accidentally?’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose! I don’t even know what it is I did. You were losing blood, I wanted to seal it up. And I did it. It worked. You didn’t die.’

‘How far inside does this go?’ It was difficult to see, from his viewpoint.

‘I looked at it◦– into it◦– and I couldn’t see an end.’

He took his hands away, and let his shirt fall back down. He didn’t know whether to be grateful or terrified. He didn’t know if what she’d done changed him irrevocably or allowed him to stay the same. He didn’t know if it would grow until it consumed him, or if it would dwindle away as he healed, or whether he would simply be like this for ever.

One thing was obvious to him, though. He was now being sustained only by magic.

‘You know you’ve trapped me here, don’t you?’ He disengaged himself from her arms and took an unsteady step away. ‘I can’t leave Down. Not ever.’

‘What?’

‘If I step through a portal, back to London, where magic doesn’t work, I’ll die.’ He took another step. ‘All that, all that… effort. I did it because this place is worth saving. Not because I wanted to stay here for ever.’

‘It could have been worse.’

‘How?’

‘You could have died a week ago, Dalip. You could not be here at all.’

There was a shell on the beach. A little one, not much bigger than his thumb. He snapped it in two, held out his forearm, and ran the razor-sharp edge along it, splitting the skin like it was ripe fruit.

She started towards him, waving her hands, trying to stop him. But it was too late. He held up his arm to show her, and a swirl of stars moved behind the ragged gash, the same stars that passed in the dark of his eyes.

‘Tell me,’ he said: ‘what have I become?’

Down Station

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Gollancz

an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.

Copyright © Simon Morden 2016

The moral right of Simon Morden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.