Cloud Castles (16 page)

‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman …’ was the best I could manage. She started to get up, and I drew the pistol and motioned her down. She stiffened, but when I didn’t fire she subsided again.

She kept on looking at me. ‘You don’t add up.’

‘You can’t,’ I grunted. ‘You started with two and two and you get twenty-two. Or 1726.’

She slapped the smooth marble tiles violently. ‘What the hell are you on about? I’ve got to know!’

‘Whistle for it,’ I told her. ‘There’s something going on here, all right, but I’m damn sure it’s nothing that ever entered your narrow little horizons. Better to keep your nose out of this. And your one-track mind!’

She bridled. ‘I could say the same to you! That
Autobahn
incident – do you know what that was? Can you protect yourself against another?’

I groaned. All I could see was bed as a beautiful vista, sixteen floors up. ‘Yes, yes, yes …’ I had to do something about what I’d got caught in – to get some advice, some thinking done – but first of all I needed sleep. I reached down, seized her collar again and yanked her to her feet. I skidded her over the smooth floor, too fast to make much fuss, straight at the glass doors. The porter was nowhere to be seen, and that was just as well. I tabbed the lock and they sighed back as we hit the mat; I threw her stumbling out into the night. I looked up and down the road; there was nobody at all in sight, and only the occasional siren broke the silence. The sky was growing pale, the street lights looking dimmer. It’d be dawn soon; I’d have to leave my next move till evening. I needed the sleep, anyway.

I raised the pistol, saw her start, heard the sharp little gasp. I clicked on the safety, then the magazine release, shucked it out and put it gently down on the
pavement. My toe spun it twenty yards or so. Then I unscrewed the silencer and dropped it in my pocket.

‘Wipe the magazine before you put it back in,’ I said, and handed her the pistol. ‘It’s a rough night out there. You may need this to get home.’

I turned on my heel and stalked back through the door, trying not to look as if I was hurrying, but all too alert in case she made a grab for that magazine. But I caught a glimpse of her in the glass, just standing there unmoving, staring after me. In the pale light, with all that taut malevolence drained from her face, she looked more as she might have – not at all bad, really. But I still legged it for the stairs at speed, trying not to think of the sixteen flights between me, a shower and bed. For the moment that was the most terrifying prospect in the world.

Evening brought others. I saw nothing of the day; I was asleep, dead to the world, for some eleven hours; and I woke with a head like a football, over-inflated, a tongue I could have lathered and shaved. But a bath and a meal restored my interest in the world, and in the news of last night. The rioting had died down with the morning light, but the city was still in deep shock. The police had arrested a few looters and minor troublemakers, but I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that the organized gangs had simply faded away. They were still being ‘actively sought’, and lines of enquiry ‘followed up’ only I knew just how far they’d have to follow, right outside the bounds of ordinary human experience. I was headed that way myself.

If I could get hold of a car, that is. Duly slept, showered and shaved, I spent an interesting hour or so trying to scare one up; they were heavily in demand right now. The remains of mine had been hauled away somewhere, but my suitcases were picked up more or less intact, though heavily scorched and dented on the outside; the explosion had blown them into a doorway. Eventually, by pulling strings on the C-Tran account, I got the use of a hideously expensive luxury saloon, not at all my kind of car; but I’d had interesting experiences around where I was going, the kind that put you off wandering too far on foot. Now, though, I was beginning to wonder if I wouldn’t be better off that way. In the early days it hadn’t always been easy, finding my way to the Tavern; but lately the old Morgan seemed
almost to have learned the way itself, rumbling easily through the streets of the old port, across the cobbles, down the dark alleys that lead to one place or many, always guiding me towards the light and the warmth of a place I felt truly at home.

Now, purring along in this sleek self-satisfied monster with my sword bumping and rattling uneasily on the back seat, I began to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of jinx. It was so alien here; the shadows of the old warehouses more or less slid off its mirror-bright metallic paintwork, the romance of the old street names – Danube Street, Orinokoo Lane, Chunking Square, Hudson Quay – hardly penetrated its tinted glass. All it found me were the modern redeveloped quarters, more yuppified even than my flat block, full of little boutiques and restaurants with festoon blinds and brass circulating fans, discos whose pink neon signs obscured the ageless stone shells they briefly inhabited. Around and about we went, three times by different routes; yet always we fetched up back here. I began to feel as if barriers were being raised across my path, all the more solid for being unseen.

Exasperated, I tried something I hadn’t for years; I braked outside a local pub, one of the seamier, unreconstructed jobs, and asked a pair of ancients coming out if they knew where the Illyrian Tavern might be, or one Jyp the Pilot, if he was in port. They glared at me and muttered something about never hearing the name, then toddled off on their sticks, looking back and grumbling to each other. I sighed, mooched inside, ordered a pint and repeated my question. Often the question warmed the atmosphere immediately; but this time it produced only a sour shrug from the barman, and a sudden looming shadow at the far end of the room. A massive man in black donkey-jacket and jeans, white-haired and balding, with a ruddy sailor’s complexion over his yellowing white jersey, rolled up to the bar and leaned on it, that bit too close to me. ‘What’d be yer business wi’ any such fella, eh, jimmy?’

I looked at him. I didn’t like being loomed over. ‘Who wants to know?’

He didn’t answer for a moment. ‘That yer set o’ wheels outside, jimmy?’

‘It is.’

‘Better get it out o’ here then, or something might happen
tae it. Dead rough neighbourhood, this is.’

‘I’ve got business here. I go when I’m good and ready.’

He raised his glass to his lips, and talked around it. ‘Fella might get himself an awfy sore face wi’ an attitude like that.’

‘Just what I was thinking.’

He made a mock-surprised face and looked around the bar, courting a laugh. He didn’t get it. There was a taut, repressed atmosphere in the place. An ancient one-bar electric heater was scorching the lino as it obviously had for years, and the faint sickliness caught at the throat. He put down his drink deliberately, and pushed himself upright; so did I. There was more to this than met the eye; and if I wanted to know what it was, he was the obvious person to ask. He might take a little persuading, though.

The barman hurried over. ‘I’ll have no squarin’ off in here. Drink up and get out, the pair o’ you, or I’ll have the cops here in two minutes. C’mon, piss off!’

Neither of us bothered with our drinks. Slowly, keeping an eye on each other, we moved to the door. I opened it; he stood back, and I went out first. But I was still on the step when his heavy hand seized my shoulder, and I was thrown away back against the grime-blackened wall. The huge man swung himself out, and grinned at me, nastily. For the first time I noticed how large his teeth were, great splayed and distorted things, and how yellow. ‘I could settle ye inside or out,’ he grunted, ‘one way or t’other. But this way’s better.’

He hadn’t scared me before, but the sheer strength of that hand altered things a little. And the teeth. Urgently I looked around; the street was empty, the light fading from the sky. From the occluded moon the shadows of the vast Victorian buildings poured down into the narrow way like pools of ink, dark, heavy, impassable. But one of them, above its crumbling ornament, cast a shadow tracery like a gigantic web, and my heart pounded harder at the sight of it. Then the man was looming over me, his white hair falling forward over his face, and his face swelling with it, growing longer, narrower. His lips curled back and blackened, a stench of breath rolled over me and hot slaver fell on my face. The hands that lifted were fingerless, featureless mitts – until black claws burst out between the coarse white fur. Then the moon sailed out into a wide gulf in the clouds. Eyes, narrowed and darkened, glittered above me with
hotly vicious rage. The largest living land carnivore, I knew, could have looked a tyrannosaur in the eye; he glared down on me from around eleven feet, an adult male polar bear.

But I had seen the shadowlace, the mastheads of great square-riggers that docked here, scoring the sky. And as the moon crossed it, without any visible change or shift, the gulf in the clouds became, for an instant, that window opening upon wider seas, the glittering steel blue of the cloud archipelago. A wild joy overtook me at the sight of it, the infinite road I’d sailed so often. I laughed in the creature’s face, and thrust out my hands; I expected a crash of glass, but instead came the faint whirr of an electric window wind. I was getting better at this. Then, with a swift spinning rush of air, the sword slapped down into my open palm. As quickly as that I lashed out, pushing the creature back across the battered dustbins by the door, and grabbed him by the greasy fur that had been his sweater. I ran the blade up under his jaw, where the slightest thrust would send it up into his brain. ‘And the inlay’s silver, in case you’re wondering. So one twitch too many and you’ll never taste another seal, friend. Now – where’s the Tavern?’

There was an abrupt inflowing, and suddenly my fingers were sunk in a coarse jersey once again. ‘Is it you that’s got the Spear?’ gasped the big man, man once more.

‘You’re awfully inquisitive for somebody who’s about to have no head,’ I told him, and shook him by his sweater. ‘What if I was? You thinking of claiming a fiver for spotting me or something?’

‘There’s prices oot on yer bloody head!’ he growled, trying to twist away. ‘You’ve got the smell o’ it on you! I’m no’ taking you near ony mate o’ mine!’

‘Prices?’ I demanded. ‘You mean, more than one? And what mate? You mean Jyp? He’s in port?’

His eyes were wide, and he was sweating. ‘Lissen, if it’s you stole that spear, what the hell use have ye for me? Or Jyp? What’ve we ever done tae you?’

‘I don’t want to harm Jyp, you bloody fool!’ I barked. ‘I’m his friend! I want his help! And for some reason I can’t get through to the Tavern!’

‘Are ye surprised? After yon rioting? The Wardens
have a’ but built a bloody wall! You ken fine what could’ve spilled over into here wi’ the Children loose!’

‘I do, Paddington, I do,’ I murmured, and backed off, letting him stand up. ‘I saw some of it. The Wardens, eh? But we’re already over the boundaries, or you couldn’t have changed and I couldn’t have called my sword. So, you can guide me from here, can’t you? Get in the car!’

‘If you’ve got the Spear,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘There’s no barrier could stand against that …’

‘It’s not that simple.’ I flung open the door. ‘Get in.’

The big man was shaking like a leaf, but he didn’t move. Deliberately I tossed the sword onto the back seat. He started as if I’d kicked him, and shook his head wonderingly. And then, mistrustfully, he opened the driver’s door and clambered in. ‘Jist who are you?’ he demanded. ‘You’re not like any sorceror I ever met.’

‘Top marks, Paddington. I’m not. Now – which way?’

The way there had never seemed so long or so winding as it did tonight. Through the old docklands we crawled, afraid of missing a turning, dwarfed by the gloomy bulk of the warehouses around us, stone ghosts of a vanished empire of commerce – vanished, that is, within the Core. In everyday ordinary streets they were more than half of them empty, eyeless shells with windows boarded or broken, grass growing between the crumbling bricks. In places they were demolished, their places taken by rusty corrugated-iron sheds, half-empty industrial developments, timber yards and small grubby engineering shops, or simply vacant lots where the grass and the fireweed blew. But around and behind those streets, in their shadow, older thoroughfares still ran, and tall buildings filled with strange merchandise from every corner of the Spiral, for sale to stranger places still; and above their roof-tops towered the webbed rigging of the tall ships that bore it. We passed a mule train, laden with heavy sacks, led by men with hawk-nosed impassive faces, and it was only then that I began to trust my ursine navigator. The men carried bows, and they glanced around suspiciously at us. We passed a strange silent truck, gleaming in white and gold, that came rolling smoothly down one main road on two black spheres, apparently unattached. The big man and I exchanged glances; even aspects of the far future could be reached along the Spiral, for those who were clever enough to navigate there. But it wasn’t that popular, the trade being low and the culture shock
immense. And on the pavement outside one warehouse, hooded crouching figures were gesticulating over piles of sacks that twitched. I accelerated past there, and the big man nodded.

‘Spooky,’ he said succinctly.

I might have pointed out, when I was new to this game, that the same could be said of him; but I’d already called him Paddington, and tact is something you learn early. Or never.

‘Turn left down here,’ he said, and where a minute before I’d noticed only a wall there was a narrow lane. And at its end, glowing against the night, mirrored in glistening puddles, were the warm red-curtained windows of the Illyrian Tavern.

‘You left your drink,’ I told him, as I swung the car across the junction, and onto the stone-flagged court at the side of the Tavern. ‘I’ll buy you another.’

‘I thank you,’ he said. ‘But if ye’ll but let me out, I’ll be on my way. No insult tae you, for I see you’re something of a leader of men; but I want nothing of yours, or that clings about you. I smell danger in the being with you. And so may Jyp; but that’s for himself to say.’ He clambered out, tossed his white head and sniffed the air. ‘You’re expected,’ he grunted, turned and lumbered off into the night.