Day Boy (16 page)

The dark is closing in, I can feel it almost as tight as Egan's grip. I'm a-sweat
and a-shake, and I can't see them that would judge me. But I open my mouth.

‘I've always been loyal,' I say. ‘I've always served.'

‘And we would expect no less,' comes that burrowing voice. ‘But have you served us
well?'

There is a sudden quivering of wings or limbs, part insect, part warm flesh, where
those things should not share a likeness. It sounds wrong, and it settles into me,
that wrong, settles and builds. A shrill hissing floods the air.

‘Leave him with us. We will decide.'

Egan lets go of my arm and the door opens and shuts before my eyes can adjust to
the shifting light, but I get an image of so many dark shapes. And I am alone, and
in the dark with a Council of Teeth.

CHAPTER
22

THERE'S SILENCE FOR a while, just the sensation of eyes. Of being watched, and my
skin's crawling. Why do folks watch me so? But I stand there as quiet and casual
as I can. This isn't much different from them lost boys. So I tell myself.

‘Why should we not just kill you now?'

And I want to say that I am just now starting to live, that I'm missing home, missing
Anne, and the hot rasp of the wind through the trees, that I'm missing the rising
and setting Sun, the great big blind eye of the moon. But I stand still, not shaking
even as hands touch my face again and again. Fingers cold and urgent like stones
that have swallowed frost and forgotten to thaw, touch that hurts and numbs at the
same time so you can't tell the difference.

‘Speak to us.'

‘I have always served my Master to my best.'

‘Your best.'

‘Your best. We find that hard to believe. You have brought
dishonour on him, and
through him, us.'

And here, I truly see what I've always known. Dain is my Master, but he isn't his
alone. Dain has his masters too, and they are ancient in their mastery.

‘So killing me will honour him? Will honour you?'

‘Boy, do not argue. You've not the wit for it.'

I lower my gaze to the dark at my feet, which is just as dark as the dark before
me. Impenetrable and unknowable. There is no truth, unless it is the ultimate truths.
The darkness that is the end of all things. But how am I to know that? All I am is
a Day Boy, pulse aching in my throat.

‘Boy, you speak our name too often in vain.'

I try not to show my fear, but fear is all I am now. How could they know? They're
just prodding and poking, all the whispering voices.

‘You, Dougie. Yes, we know your names.'

‘The wind whispers them to us.'

‘And good Grove, of whom you'll be the ruin.'

‘We see disaster all around you.'

‘The last days of a Day Boy are a storm, spinning and wild.'

‘A battle of possibilities.'

‘Are you to be drawn here, or cast out?'

‘Are you to be a Master or a servant?'

‘Are you worthy?'

Don't argue, I'm thinking. Don't argue. Don't argue. I want to argue, I want to know
what the wind says, and why is it so cruel? It can't speak to them all the time,
the air is still a good bit of the time. What if I am only good when the sky is becalmed?
Are they watching then? I want to know all these things. But I keep my lips zipped,
and in truth it's all I can do
not to drop, shaking, on the ground and beg for mercy.
Maybe that's what they want.

A hand, hard as sticks, rough as a shattered stone, closes around my arm. ‘You're
such a little thing, not a thread of meat on you.'

‘Not a thread, but there's blood in my veins. And it is yours.' I try not to have
too much quaver in my voice but it is there. The air chills, my skin gets prickled
and bumped with the cold. I'm a nerve: busting and fearful. ‘All of it is yours.'

And at this moment it is. Is that what they want, an offering? I don't wish for the
ruin of my Master. I'm not one to roll over and spill secrets at whispers in the
dark, but I'd die for those I love. I tilt my neck. Not that they've need of such
acquiescence.

The hand tightens and then I am lifted up. Up through the dark, and all I can feel
is hot breath, the beating of dark wings. And I'd piss myself here if there was piss
in me but I'm dry and cracked as the red earth outside. My lips are tight against
my teeth. My balls have crawled halfway up my guts.

‘I could split your skull,' says a voice right in my ear. Skin's prickling now, that
voice is loud, so close. I can hear the clattering of its teeth. Feel the working
of its muscles, hard with exertion, but easy with it too, like it was born to flight,
not stone. ‘Split your skull and bleed the story from you. All your monkey words
and your fear and pain.'

‘Let me fall,' I quaver. ‘Let me fall.'

And it does.

I flip twice through the air, darkness, darkness and down and down.

And then there's hands snatching me up again. And this
time there might be a drop
of piss in me! I'm human after all.

‘Do not think you can tell us what to do. Down here we plan, listening to the wind,
down here we are thought and scheming, and you are part of that. All of you in the
open sky. We are the Stewards of Blood, the Council of Teeth, and you are a child
of sticks and bones with piss in your pants. We are those that rule—and we always
have been. We're the shadows that come spilling from the cracks with evening time.
We are the voice of reason and the despair that comes with it. Those we made still
think they're closer to you than to us, but they aren't, even if you can make them
think they are. For all their hungers they've not got a thimbleful of beating blood
within them. They've no pulse but for yours and that is why they cling to you so.
But here is where they will reside, one day, down in the dark, one by one. When we
call them to us.'

My feet thump onto the hard ground, and I land heavily and roll on my back into piles
of rocks and old bones. It hurts, but I stand. The earth is brittle beneath my feet.

‘Leave us,' the voices say. ‘Leave us, and call in the Master.'

I walk back through the door. It is opened before me, by something fast and strong,
another loud squeal, and into that lit hall I am almost pushed. Egan looks at me,
and I'm blinking like a newborn thing.

‘They want to talk to you,' I manage, and cough up a little dust. Egan's lips thin.
He straightens his jacket. Brushes at the shoulders, actually fusses a bit, and I
can see some of the man he was, or even the boy.

‘You wait here,' he says, turning to me. ‘No matter how long. No running off.'

I smile, sort of. ‘No run left in me,' I say.

Egan grunts and walks back into the Council. And I'm alone. Nearby in the hall of
cages one of them howls like a mad dog, and someone laughs. And I realise that the
heart of the Masters' world is all rage and madness. The heart of the world that
I live in is a beast cruel and sick.

I drop onto the ground, and push my palms into my eyes; my head is throbbing. I want
to be sick, but I won't throw up here.

‘You did good,' comes a whisper: Dav. And it sounds like the Dav of old, the one
who taught me to fight, to hold my tears, to be brave. ‘I can feel their satisfaction.'

I don't move my hands from my face. ‘I did nothing.'

But there's no answer.

Egan isn't that long, and when he comes back, he is quiet. A little broken in a way
I can't understand. And I can only guess at what he's seen. Because he can see in
the Dark: he has its measure, and it's terrified him.

‘What did they say?' And I ask it gentle, no arrogance at all.

For a moment I think he's going to say nothing, he just looks at me, and then he
smiles as if at some passing fancy. ‘That if I were to kill you, now would be the
best time. Perhaps the only time.'

‘So will you kill me?' I'm too tired to fight, even if I could.

Egan shakes his head. ‘Time to go home,' he says.

We don't speak as we walk back past them cages of madness. But this time there's
no reaching arms or cries. The Masters-in-waiting are silent, subdued. I don't see
Dav, even though I look hard.

Maybe he's hiding. Maybe he's ashamed. But he is what he is now. And the madness
will pass, because it must.

I raise my hand in farewell, and then those lift doors open, and Egan's shuffling
me through.

We take the lift with not a hint of conversation, up slow and steady, though I'm
remembering that dark flight, and it feels to me that this lift could stop, pause
and plummet at any change of heart in them below.

The Master at the door seems disappointed to see us pass, but we barely acknowledge
him.

Egan opens the door to our carriage. ‘Hurry, boy,' he says. ‘The Night Train waits
for no one long.'

But that night it waits for us.

I was too young to remember the insurrection, but the consequences…Dain says it
was the last gasp. Most of the town's adults up in arms. Killed two of Dain's closest
allies, wounded another so he had to be put down. But that wasn't enough.

The ringleaders, when they were caught, were forced to Change. When they were mad
with hunger their families were fed to them, and when that was done they were caged,
dragged to the centre of the town to await the judgment of the Sun.

And it found them wanting, as Dain might say. I heard it tore strips from them and
boiled away their flesh like the Sun burns away a mist. Only a mist don't go the
way they went, crooning and calling, pleading to the Sun, calling to the town to
join them.

And then, finally, screaming.

Cruel, monstrous.

Necessary, Dain said.

CHAPTER
23

I GUESS I'M running my mind over it the whole way home—picking at it like it's some
sort of ache and a puzzle wrapped in one. Egan doesn't talk, just me and him in silence,
and this time there's no books. So what can you do but pick at what's there and what's
been said? Two fools from the country and the wreckage I've made of my life. I could
have had more of these days of working, but all I did was cut back the share I had.
I knew that Dougie and Grove had their times extended but I'd never thought it could
really happen for me. Now I've gone and ruined it.

I sit and stare at the dark. Nothing to see but the dim lights of distant homesteads,
and I wonder at the lives of those who live there in that middle-of-nowhere grim.
How do you measure out such a life?

We stop near midnight in the centre of town, Mr Stevens there at attention. Must've
been expecting us, his beard's trimmed, and even though I'm still all thought and
fear—
there's a new boy coming, a new boy
—home brings out the grins. The sweat of
it, the heat, the smells. This is my home, and I can't help but feel a little heroic.
I've survived the City in the Shadow of the Mountain, I faced the Council of Teeth,
I stole the red nails. Who wouldn't be proud? Midfield seems a little smaller!

Egan smacks me sharp on the back of the head. ‘This isn't an occasion for swagger,
boy.'

And he is right. Dain! What will Dain think of me? Such a thought was a mere abstraction
on the train, now it's an impending terror.

Egan can see it in my face. Masters can see everything. ‘You know your own way home.
Can I trust you to make it there?'

‘Yes, sir,' I say.

‘Good.' And then he's gone, and it's just me and my dread and my shame.

I'm almost creeping when I reach the house, but it doesn't matter. He will be aware
of my presence.

‘Home,' I whisper as I open the door. I step through and the world tilts, and he's
there, dropping from the ceiling, darkness coalescing. A form both familiar and
like nothing I have ever seen before. His gaze swallows me whole. Studies me. Looking
for wounds, looking for the story of my week past.

‘I'm sorry,' I say, and that sets him off.

‘Sorry?' Dain rushes at me, like a storm made man-like but shorn of none of its rage.
The whole house quakes and bends, draws in and I am certain to be crushed in his
rage. I feel my own bones move in their joints. But I have met the fury of the Council
of Teeth; no matter my shame, I cannot submit. I tilt my head, let him come at me.

Then it is gone, that terrible pressure, and it is only Dain staring at me, and I
can't tell what he is feeling. But it is more full, darker, furious and smaller.

‘Sorry,' he says, and I cannot tell if it is a question or an accusation or an apology.

He shakes like a child—but I am the child, not him—I want to reach out and comfort
him, or run away and never come back.