Marcus Sedgwick - The Book of Dead Days

Willow frowned.

“ ‘Dead or dangerously sick’?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

“Well, I think Boy was as confused as you. This is, however, where I get my mistrust of doctors in general. The man was a charlatan, and nothing he did had the slightest to do with my survival and recovery.”

“And Kepler?” asked Willow, thinking of the doctor they were about to meet.

“Kepler is no ordinary doctor. In fact, Kepler is no ordinary man, and will do the best that can be done for my arm.”

A mile or two across the City, Boy was nearing his destination-the wide and relatively clean street known as the Reach. Halfway along it lay the official residence of the Master of City Burials. Like many of the organizations that ran various aspects of City life, that of City Burials was a little strange. Like the others, it operated from the official house of its Master. Each one was a small governance in its own right, with its own set of laws and rules, and those in charge giving orders to those who obeyed, with the Master himself at the top.

Each was housed in a grand building, a reminder of the City’s ancient and proud past. Some were now more than a little worse for wear, according to the prosperity of the Chamber or Society that operated from them.

Of course, all these organizations were ultimately ruled by the Emperor, but in practice no one knew much about this. Emperor Frederick was a strange and remote figure, hidden away in the Palace. Something of a city within the City itself, the Palace occupied a vast area atop a low hill near the banks of the river. It was composed of a huge variety of buildings of various ages and styles clambering over one another for supremacy, and all surrounded by a high, crenellated wall. The title Emperor was something of a joke-a pathetic hangover from the days when the City had been ruled by a leader of awesome power, when there had actually been an empire to rule, of which the City was its magnificent capital. Not anymore. Gone was the Empire, gone was the power and the glory of the City, and all that was left was Frederick, the last of his line, with no offspring to rule after him.

It was more than ten years since anyone outside the Palace had seen Frederick, and only then by accident. Life in the City functioned largely without him.

The building that housed City Burials was splendid and opulent. Death was always good business, and since the Master’s men coordinated all aspects of a person’s life after death, from mortuary services to undertaking to burial and funerary rites, he was very wealthy indeed.

Boy stood on the other side of the Reach in a doorway opposite the ornate building. It stood imposingly, its front doors up a flight of at least a dozen stone steps, each door three times Boy’s height, heavy and solid. On them hung huge polished door knockers shaped like lions’ heads.

There was an inscription in the stone above the doors.

“Latin, I suppose, Valerian,” Boy said to himself, and smiled. Then the smile drifted from his face. Valerian was in trouble. It was more than just a broken arm, and it was up to Boy to find the solution.

He swallowed, looked up and down the street and crossed. He skipped nimbly up the stone steps and, reaching up on tiptoe, swung one of the lions against its base.

The loud metal clunk seemed to echo the length of the street, but as Boy looked around nervously he was relieved to see that no one was paying him any attention. Nor, unfortunately, did anyone inside the building seem to have heard.

He swung the lion harder and waited.

“Side entrance,” said a voice beside him.

Startled, Boy looked to his right and noticed a small hatch set in one of the soaring pillars. Inside the pillar was a little room in which sat a tiny old woman with a wrinkled face and an expression to match.

“Come about a death, have you? Round the side.”

“Yes-no-not exactly.”

The woman was unimpressed.

“Death? Round the side. Side door, see? That’s where you register.”

Boy was puzzled.

“Then what do you do?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, “I tell people about the side door.”

“That’s it?” Boy asked. “That’s all you do?”

“It’s important. Someone’s got to tell people about the side door. For deaths. Important,” she added.

“And I wonder,” he said, “who tells me where to go if I haven’t got a death to register.”

The woman blinked.

“Well,” she said, peering anxiously around before answering, “well, I could, probably, tell you.”

“Oh, good,” said Boy. “So where do I go to speak to the Master of City Burials?”

“Well, then you’d want to knock on the front door there and… What ?” She spluttered to a stop. “What do you mean? Don’t waste my time!”

“No,” said Boy earnestly. “No, I really need to see him. My master sent me-his name’s Valerian. He said to say he sent me. We have to find out where someone is buried.”

“You can’t see him. You think proles like you just wander in off the street for a chat?”

“But, look,” he said, “the thing is, Valerian, he’s a friend of the Master. And he needs to find out something, about where a grave is-”

“Listen to me,” she said. “No one gets to see him.”

“But I have to see him!” cried Boy.

“No!” snapped the woman. “He’s very busy working on his animals in the Dome. He won’t think about anything else. No one talks to him.”

“What’s he doing with animals? Doesn’t he have lots of work to do for the cemeteries and so on?”

“Well, I don’t know, of course, but he’s been working in the Dome with his animals for years and it must be very important because he is the Master and it must have lots to do with burying people or he wouldn’t be doing it.”

Boy was puzzled, but he nodded.

“What is he doing with them?” he asked. “What are the animals for?”

“Well, nothing much. They’re dead, you see.”

A creeping little curiosity inside Boy told him he was going to have to find out what the Master of City Burials was doing before he went back to Valerian.

This was something Boy was good at.

Creeping and climbing around the dark spaces of buildings that no one even knew existed was something he had always done. Even Valerian had to admit that Boy was very good at not being seen.

Standing back in the street he had immediately spotted the dome the woman had spoken of. It was a huge glass roof made of hundreds, probably thousands of individual panes of glass. They arched in a single beautiful sweep from some part of the building out of sight from where Boy stood. He’d spent a long time stalking the area, and now dusk was coming. In the half-light, the Dome shone with the light of a thousand torches-or so it seemed to Boy. It was a glowing, shining, crystalline bubble that gleamed out of the filth of the City like a diamond in a dung heap.

Boy had scouted around the streets that joined the Reach and found a small alley running into the center of the block. There was a narrow but sturdy iron gate across the entrance to the alley, but Boy was over it before he had even wondered what he was doing. If he had stopped to think, he might have noticed that he was actually enjoying himself. This was like home to him. It was familiar ground-running, climbing, hiding in the dark, with a mission to perform for Valerian. It was almost like normal.

He skipped down the alley as lightly as a rat, realizing as he went that the alley was some kind of rubbish heap for all the buildings that ran behind it. Walls rose up high on either side of him, but just as he expected, there were little gates into the back courtyards of each building.