Day Boy (15 page)

‘The Council,' I say. ‘The Council will eat me up.'

And there's such regret mixed with my fear. Egan's right, I've brought trouble and
shame to my Master, and he never deserved it.

Egan nods. ‘Perhaps, they have been known to do such things. Perhaps not. Now, I
will give you what guidance I can. And I will accompany you.' To find comfort in
Egan's company is an oddity. But here he is all that is familiar. ‘You must listen
to them,' he says. ‘You must be honest. You cannot hide. They know all the hiding
places in your skull and the deeper you hide, the deeper they will dig.'

We've gone down into the bowels of the city, down and around the Wide Circle Road
with its face-worn statues of the
Fallen Dark—here a stony hand raised against the
Sun, here a head tilted in direct defiance of the killing light. And then we're hurtling
towards the great tower of the Sun, its light burning through the cracks in the carriage.

At the foot of the temple we disembark, and I've never seen Egan's face lit like
this; there's a terrifying beauty in it. His skin as pale as cream and dark too,
like it's both night and day. He slides glasses with smoked lenses over his eyes,
and I'm left squinting.

In that awesome luminosity, Egan crouches down. ‘You must keep your mouth shut now,
boy. I know how hard that is for you, but you must if you wish to live. And you must
be brave. Fear and doubt could kill you here. You have never been in so much danger.
Death has set his throne down within these halls, and even I might not be able to
protect you.'

The Council of Teeth. The frighteners. Not a Day Boy who isn't warned of them, isn't
threatened with their scrutiny. We curse in their name if we're really crazy mad.
Council this and Council that. Not that they hear us.

We walk beneath the Luminance towards a small door. A Master is waiting there; he
looks at me, then Egan.

‘So this is the one?'

Egan nods. And I do my best to keep my eyes cast at my feet.

The Master of the door considers me with smiling deadly eyes. ‘Oh, I guess you believe
that you've seen things. Hah!' He lays a cold hand gently on my head for a moment,
then in a movement faster than I can see it, he's back at the door, swinging it open,
gesturing that we might pass.

Egan grabs my hand, and we walk through the doorway,
past its guardian. ‘Welcome.
Welcome, Master Egan and little squeaking Day Boy.'

The door shuts behind us and we are in a room big and wide. It hums, with the hum
of machines. If there's a stutter to my steps, Egan makes up for it. ‘If I had time,'
he says, ‘I'd have schooled you in this. But I do not. The Night Train runs late
because of us. Because of you.'

We walk across the room to another set of doors. They open at our approach, a small
room—almost a cage—one side lined with buttons. Lots of buttons.

‘This is a lift.' Egan says. ‘You'd have read of them no doubt. You are not to be
lifted, however. Not yet. We will descend before we rise again.'

Egan presses the bottom button, and the lift drops.

Down and down.

‘This was once an installation. Military. It housed all the sciences of violence.
The wickedness of man. But there were more wicked things in the world. And they were
waiting. Are you frightened?' Egan says.

And I nod, even as I am wrapped in the wonder of it: this falling box.

‘Good. Fear'll keep you honest.'

The doors open, and it's Egan who hesitates at the portal, and that fills me with
a grander dread. There's a scream somewhere: there is laughter, and the hint of
a low growl.

We enter a well-lit hall, narrow at first, that opens onto cages. I give the one
nearest a good looking-at and there's a still form in one corner. Just a lump of
folded limbs, bent neck and misery. But as we approach it stirs and then it's hard
against the bars. So fast it's less movement than magic, dark and swift.
An incandescent
gaze fixes on me like the North Star.

‘Mr Egan. Mr Egan, a gift for me?' The voice is scarcely a whisper. ‘A tender little
morsel?'

And I recognise him.

‘Dav,' I say.

‘Mark? Oh, Mark, of course it is. Been a good fella?' Dav stares at me, and I take
a few steps towards him.

Egan's hand closes over my shoulder.

‘Steady,' he says. ‘Steady. He is but part-way done.'

These are those that aren't discarded and didn't run. These are Day Boys yet to become
Masters. Shifting slowly from one form to another. And this is far worse than that
lock-up. Here's a hunger that reaches inside of me. I can feel Dain, and Egan and
all the others in these Masters-not-quite. I can feel the changes coming on them
without the Mastery.

‘Just a little,' Dav croons in a thin voice that penetrates. ‘Just a little. Come
here, Mark. I've new secrets to share.'

And what was still becomes motion. Like a flock of pigeons that's seen the hawk,
except I'm the prey and a hundred cages are rattled and tested filled with cries
and moans, and
just a little
.

Egan squeezes my shoulder. ‘Move,' he says. ‘Move. You're safe, these cages cannot
bend to their will, but it does not do to linger.'

It's a long walk down that hallway: the unbearable weight of all that hunger, all
those eyes new to predation rolling in their orbits, reflecting the light of the
hall. The air's hot and dry, and there's the thin smell of old blood and rancid piss.
And they beat their hands against the bars, and cast their shadows across the floor,
whip-like and hungry.

‘Just a little, Mr Egan.'

Hands reach through the bars. And I think of that other prison. The hungers so different
there, and yet I'd be dead and ruined just as quick.

‘Not enough blood in this boy for the least of you. And what there is is thin stuff,'
Egan says. ‘Not enough to fill you up.'

‘Just a little.'

‘No reason in them,' Egan says. ‘Not yet. Just hunger. Walk, boy, walk. You are safe
with me.'

Takes forever, that minute or two, but we reach the end of it. At last.

We turn into another hall and they stop their cries. More metal walls, a short one
ending in a door. No cages this time, no cries, nor sound but for our footfalls and
the beating of my heart. I can feel a panic rising.

‘Deep, breathe deep. A thousand terrors could not prepare you for this place; better
to trust in your breathing.'

The door is old and made of metal, but like timber it looks as if it's swelled some,
though I don't know how that can be. Rust stains the door, a deep flaking red towards
the bottom. One corner's buckled a little.

‘Prepare yourself,' Egan says, and he presses a hand against the door and begins
to open it.

It's always been blood, and human blood at that. Dain says that they can't subsist
on anything but. Some have tried, and it may work for a while, but that way lies
madness. Our blood is at once
calming and exciting to them. Those new to Mastery—and
thus not quite Masters, I suppose—will play with it. Or they'll deny their hungers
and seek some substitute.

Never lasts. There comes a point when they succumb. And if they don't they sink down,
low and lower. Grow more monstrous, and that's the thing, they become worse than
they ever feared.

Hunger's a nasty creature. We've all had our bellies empty, we know its pull. But
they've a hunger beyond hunger. Cruel and vengeful.

Was a Master once who fed only on swans. Had a madness, before the madness. Killed
a whole town. A Master such as that isn't a Master anymore, but something ill and
wrong, something that must be destroyed.

They say it was the swans that killed him, a mighty flock of them descending. Wasn't
nothing of the sort, Dain says.

It was the Council of Teeth.

CHAPTER
21

THE DOOR OPENS stiff and slow and shrieking. Even with Egan's great strength it's
a long time opening. And then before us is darkness. Such suffocating midnight. Egan's
fingers close around my wrist so tight I can feel the bones moving. He drags me through
and it's like he's dragging himself.

The door closes and it's dark, darker than anything I have ever known, and it takes
the breath from me: more than a punch. I am gasping and keening.

The sound of dripping water and something else, a dim rustling that grows louder.
And all I can smell is blood, it chokes the air. Nothing old or dead about it, this
is quick and new, and I can't help but prickle and fear at the sense of it.

There is a momentary flash of light, no more than a match lit, but it seems a brightness
grander than the Sun. A light of revelation, a filler of cracks and crannies. And
I see it all with such vivid and swift clarity. Maybe I die a little. Step from one
world to another.

Beyond the shallow pool they stand, coffins of stone or petrified wood heaped and
jumbled in broad pyramids.

No. That sounds too neat, sounds too much of man, and these aren't men. This is the
Council of Teeth lounging in these caskets, so many of them, the coffins extending
beyond my vision. Every eye is upon me. A driving, terrifying brightness. More powerful
than any Master I have ever seen, but these aren't Masters either. They're lords
beneath the mountain. This is the true City in the Shadow of the Mountain, here
where the dark dips deep and down and down and down.

And I close my eyes and I'm granted a vision. Of a midnight vehemence that unfurled
from these deep roots of stone, that spread bleak crow wings to beat against the
wind, to smother and to rule. It rose up, and fell again. And buried itself, patient
and deep.

Then all is of pitch again, complete and smothering, dark but for flashes of light
behind my eyes.

‘Still,' Egan says. ‘Be still.' And I realise that I am fitting and jerking, my eyes
rolling back, teeth clenching so tight they might crack beneath their own relentless
pressure. ‘Still.'

And I find the calm, his cold fingers tight around my wrist, his eyes staring into
mine, and there's light in that gaze and a path for me to follow, and I am home in
my skull, and the Sun is shining and the world is settled into its familiar rhythms.
‘Come back from those shudders,' he says. ‘Come back from the fear. Still. Be still.'

‘I'm here,' I say.

‘Good,' Egan says. ‘Because you must.'

‘So this is the boy?' A voice rises from the dark. Deep and as old as the rocks of
the mountain, the air sings and sighs like
the walls are covered in leaves or leathery
wings, and there is nothing cooling in that breath, it smothers and burns. ‘You are
here in the dark that reveals all. You are here in the heat that marks the wind's
demise, where old stone folds and sinks into the fiery heart of the world. All the
voices whisper here. Whisper and die.'

‘He is young,' another voice says, ‘to be the source of so much trouble.'

‘He has a knack for it,' Egan says.

There is a laugh that goosebumps me, I feel a little faint. Egan's grip tightens,
and a finger touches my face.

‘What should we do with him?' The finger pulls away. ‘Boy? What should we do with
you? I am sure you have an answer for that. If you haven't bitten off your own tongue.'

‘Let me go home,' I say.

‘Why should we?'

‘So I can repair what I have done. The dishonour of running. The dismay of my Master.
Let me finish my days in my home.'

‘We are not known for second chances. Gifts given are to be seized, not fled from.
You were to study the ways of this world, and instead you ran. What right do you
have of it now? What right of breath or heartbeat?'

I swallow, and I can taste my blood. ‘If I do not deserve this, then be done with
me.' If death is what is meant for me, then I would hurry to it with my blood quick
in my heart. Hurry to it, and have it finish me at once. I don't want any lingering.
That was my mistake when I saw the spiral; I should have stayed and faced whatever
threat it represented. I want to speak of it, but, instead, Egan's grip tightens.
And I know there
is no room for excuses. ‘Be done with me,' I say again.

There's a chattering laughter, a cricketing wave of it, that echoes in the dark halls.
Laugh ignites laugh which ignites more laughter. And I'm washed over by their humour,
made to feel like nothing.

‘You ran. You ran. And then, you have committed acts of theft, and lingered with
insurgents. And then, you let yourself be caught. To run, and return. To be so meek…'

‘He did what he did to survive,' Egan says.

‘And that is reason enough? A beast does that. Those newborn things in their cages,
they could claim survival is at the heart of their madness, too, and it would be
true. That is why we have cages, why we have punishments. We are the quiet after
chaos, we are the reason of shadows. The Council of Teeth, not just the bite.'