The Sword of Feimhin (13 page)

Alan stared up into the sky. The moon was just about visible, even in daylight. It was what his mum would call an onion-skin moon. If the rumours of the eclipse were true … ‘An eclipse – God almighty! Mahteman has the King waiting for something really big – a sign that would frighten the Gargs out of their wits. He'll use it to dissuade the King from helping us.'

The Kyra pressed Mo, ‘Did this magician tell you when the shadow will fall?'

‘Exactly three days from now, mid-afternoon.'

Bétaald followed Alan's gaze. ‘We need to be sure of this. Three days, Mo – you're absolutely sure?'

‘I'm not, but Magtokk is.'

The Kyra confronted Alan, the oraculum of Bree pulsating powerfully in her brow. ‘A living survivor from the Age of Magicians who fears our common enemy. This might be a useful turn of events.'

Alan looked from the Kyra to Bétaald, then to Qwenqwo. ‘I have an idea – if Bétaald and Ainé are willing to go along with it. Maybe there is a way we could turn things to our advantage.'

*

There was an unusual level of witch-warrior activity all throughout the shoreline camp as Snakoil Kawkaw performed a furtive reconnaissance of the area around the soup kitchen. This was the hideout of his detested fellow spy, Soup Scully Oops. And it was where he had recruited his own spies: the bedraggled urchins that came begging for food. He had warned the brats against coming to him with empty paws.

‘
No news for me
,' he had impressed the mantra into their flea-bitten lugholes, ‘
no morsel for you!
'

Only two had returned to the vicinity of the two spies' tent, slumped with exhaustion and hunger, and one of them was that deaf cretin with the lousy hair. In fact, appraising the pair closer to, they looked alike enough, with the same tangled manes, to be brother and sister. Yanking them bodily to their feet, he hauled them behind the soup stand where they weren't likely to be overheard.

‘Well? What have you got for me?'

‘Please, Mister – we's starvin' hungry!'

‘You'll gobble my blade if you've come here wasting my time.'

‘There is something – honest!' The trembling wretch of a girl had a red stye, exuding pus, in the corner of her left eye. A bubble of watery snot dangled from the nostril below the stye.

Kawkaw squeezed the nearby ear, wondering if he saw a louse jump to the black hairs that grew thick on the back of his hand. ‘I am running out of patience with you brats. Will you enlighten me before I explode?'

‘She – the holoima, called Mo – an' the young shaman.'

‘Yes, yes –
yes
?'

‘The Garg prince carried 'um up into the mountains.'

Kawkaw saw the snot run down over her lip. He saw her tongue come out and lick at it, then dart back in. ‘And?'

‘We waited an' waited.'

He shook his hook, worn in place of his missing hand, and knocked the curve of it against her bony chest. ‘Must I hurry you with a clout?'

‘They come back down.'

‘So they went up – and then they came down?'

‘They looks different.'

‘Different?'

‘They's excited. I see it on they faces, in they eyes.'

‘Excited?'

‘Yeah.'

He tapped the hook harder against the bones. ‘Tell me more.'

Tears filled her eyes, running around the stye. ‘I dunno.'

Kawkaw scratched his chin with the point of his hook. ‘The Garg prince – he took them up into the mountains. To show them something?'

‘Then they comes down again.'

‘They must have said something. You must have overheard?'

‘Ask 'im – me brudder.'

He had no second hand to squeeze a second ear, so he
lifted the point of the hook under the boy's dirt-caked chin, hauling his face up until he stood staring up at him on tip-toe. But the wretch just made some kind of moaning noise.

‘What's this whining?'

‘'e's deaf.'

‘Well, what in a tart's kiss is the use of a deaf informant?'

‘'e can see they words – 'e can tell me what 'em says.'

‘He can see words?'

‘'e can tell 'em me – so I can say.'

‘He can read their lips?'

‘Is like I'm sayin' – yeah.'

‘What did he read from their lips?'

Her face contracted into an amazing myriad of wrinkles. ‘They was wisperin.'

‘But he – this wretch – he could still read their lips?'

‘They run us off.'

‘They saw you listening to them?'

‘They got them Shees ta scuss us.'

‘The witch-warriors shooed you off?'

‘Go – git!' She made shooing movements with her hand.

‘What did the cretin read on their lips?'

‘'e ain't stoopid. E's clever. Only 'e can't say it.'

Kawkaw shouted into the ear that was now red raw from his pinching. ‘What in the name of a cleggyarse runt did he read from their lips?'

‘They makes a discovery.'

‘What?'

‘Wor he seen – wor they sayed.'

‘They made a discovery?'

She spoke to her brother. He mumbled something.

‘A secret – he sayed.'

‘A secret? They discovered some secret?'

‘Yeah.'

‘They discovered something – when they were carried up into the mountains, by the Garg prince?'

She spoke to her brother. Even Kawkaw could read the fact he was nodding his head. Within the tent, Sally Oops was stirring. Kawkaw couldn't have the bitch getting an earful of this.

‘Aw, give us sum soup now, Mister?'

The moment he released the reddened ear of the urchin girl, the boy hunched down around her, with his bony knees upraised, and took her in his arms. Kawkaw stared at them, saw the fear in their eyes, their faces. They were right to fear – not just him, but the lady.
She'll kill them without a thought to ensure their silence
. It occurred to him that maybe he should kill them himself.

He held that thought for a moment, then ladled out a can of the thick, foul-smelling soup. He wanted them out of here, for at least a full day.

‘You hear anything else? You tell me.'

‘Yeah, Mister!' The girl couldn't wait to scurry away with the soup.

He twitched his head, as if pointing to the danger behind him. ‘You listen to me, you little ratarses. You heard nothing
about no secret. Got it? The witch-warriors scared you away.'

She stared up at him, nodding.

‘Now get out of here, if you want to keep your throats.'

Rain, rain, rain! It had soaked through the filth over the floor of what had once been some ancient kitchen, making them slippery as soap. Penny Postlethwaite's heart was pounding against her rib cage as she peered through narrowed eyes into the gloom of the alley ahead. The tarmac was so pitted with holes it was treacherous to walk in, especially in the dark, but it was the quickest way out of the ruins where she was hiding, themselves all that remained of a seedy hotel. Built out of rotting eighteenth-century handmade bricks, in daylight she would have been able to see the rising column of old fireplaces in the gable wall, one above the other, tottering into the heavens.

Stop! Look! Listen!

She did so, shivering, ignoring the downpour.

She knew they were still there. She could see the glowing ends of their cigarettes, three of them, performing a pantomime of moment from hand to mouth.
She assumed that they were Skulls. They had made cat-like meowing noises when they were chasing her. Oh, how she prayed that they had given up the chase. But if so, why were they hanging around in the pitch dark, smoking their cigarettes?

They must know I'm here
.

But she couldn't be sure of that. They might just think she'd be coming this way. Either way, she really had to think.

This late, and hanging around in the pouring rain, they must be drunk on cheap rum. Rum was the drink of the Skulls. Other gangs had chased her through the streets before, but that had been out there under the lights. All they had wanted to do was to frighten her, to humiliate her. But here – in the rain and the dark …

Penny was already close to home, close to Our Place, which was why she had come to a dead stop – she didn't want to lead them there.

She examined the tips of her knives, which she carried down the seams of her jeans, but she doubted they would do her much good against three well-armed Skulls. She thought about the thing in the box – the Scalpie's blade. Did the Skulls know she had it? She thought about hiding it somewhere here in the ruin, but she couldn't face the thought of parting from it, even though it was awkward and heavy enough to slow her down if she tried to run.

I'm being stupid, but I can't just leave it here, I can't. I just can't
.

Gully had criticised her for things like this, again and
again. He had warned her that she wasn't streetwise. ‘Penny, gel, you let things slow you down in the 'ead.' Maybe he was right, but still she couldn't abandon the blade; it was too important, and too closely linked to what she had seen. It was somehow a part of the two aliens with those black triangles in their heads.

She had no control over the mixture of panic and exhilaration that made her heart swell so powerfully, shoving against her ribs with every beat. In her mind she replayed the scene around the coffin: the Scalpie kneeling before the blade, the Grimlings buzzing everywhere, then the explosion of power from the alien woman's head and the coffin shattering, venting forth some kind of whirling weapon covered with glowing runes, only for it to land in the fair-haired man's upheld hand.

Gully – you've no idea! The things I've seen
…

He didn't believe her about the City Below – maybe he'd believe her now? But even if he did, how would he cope with the wonder of it?

Penny knew, now, that she had been right all along. The world wasn't like people thought it was. There really was a City Below. And it was hugely, monumentally, different from the city that people knew.

The glowing tips of cigarettes were moving. They were creeping closer to her, keeping to the shadows.

They know I'm here!

In her mind she saw the lines and curves and angles of the other lanes about her, all lost in the pitch dark. It was
as if she were probing her surroundings with a personal radar. She scuttled deeper into the gloom and rain, her senses on what her father had called auto-pilot, slinking along through the mental labyrinths of recall, through jumbled ruin after ruin, in a deliberately haphazard trajectory aimed at confusing her trail.

Stop! Look! Listen!

Only when her nostrils were overwhelmed by the stink of the soot and ash from the underground car park did she finally pause to get a breather. Again she waited. She had to keep Our Place safe. She waited several minutes. She forced herself to stop, look, listen again. Again she waited: another minute or two, her heartbeat pounding in her hollow chest.

Coast clear
.

Her spirits swelled with relief as she hugged the heavy wooden box close to her breast. The thing inside it was making noises. It wasn't just the beating of her heart against it, she could feel a vibration, like the ticking of a clock. It quickened as her own heart beat faster with excitement, until it overwhelmed her senses.

Like a heartbeat of its own!

She reached the airlock and rose through it, back pressed against the grimy wall of the lift shaft, her legs sliding her upwards with her precious burden. Then she was pushing the box onto the ledge in the great concrete abscess of wrack and ruin.

She could hear the muffled chorus of the dossers on the
floor below; the cacophony of moans and snores, the farts and sighs. The one voice – always the same quavering male voice – screaming, over and over, like a demented mantra, ‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up …'

She closed her ears to the vileness of it, closed off her mind.

In the deeper gloom Penny stood at the beginning of the I-beam, leaning with one hand on the cinder wall. She was listening to a deluge of rainwater, which had built up after hours of continuous rain and was now rushing and splattering to the ground. She was close enough to it to feel the mist on her face. She hoped that Gully would have collected enough to fill up the washing barrel.

She slid along the beam on her bottom, pushing the wooden box a foot or two ahead of her with each slide. Such was the buzz in her head she hardly noticed the time it took her to complete the crossing before she was standing, giddily erect, in front of the dolly with the box clasped in both her hands. She had to lift one knee to take part of its weight to free one hand and yank open the porthole, then, breathing hard, she hauled the heavy box up into the opening and shoved it out into the centre of the space. When that was done she stretched her shoulders, sighing with relief, and wriggled her shoulder blades to ease the ache in the muscles. She yanked, three times, on the cord.

But if Gully was home he wasn't answering. Gully
Pockets was what she called him when she was mad with him, like right now. She could imagine him, those worried eyes behind the smudged glasses, the fingers that were never still, always fiddling with those bulging pockets.

‘For goodness' sake!'

She hated having to leave the box inside the dolly. Nimbly, she wove her way back over the drop and searched with rising impatience for the knotted rope, then ascended ten feet or so to the engineers' ladder. As she emerged through the trapdoor at the top, into the map room, she took a good look around, fixing the remembered details that expanded into her creative world.

The signal that Our Place was safe was there in the half open door and the badly-chipped gnome that was keeping it ajar with its open arms.

She momentarily closed her eyes, comforted by the thought.

She hurried through the half-open door into the vestibule, noticing the puddles of dust in three places that marked new cracks in the ceiling, and a new scatter of raindrops from the leaks.

Gully was home, but nowhere to be seen.
He could only be up on the roof
, she thought.
In the dark, talking to his birds
.

She was glad about that because she wasn't ready to talk to him yet – she needed to be on her own. Pulling on the chain, she hauled the dolly up as fast as she could – she could tell from the weight of the dolly that the box was still there, but she didn't quite credit it until she had
thrown open the door and lifted it out to hold it, once more, against her breast.

All of a sudden it felt too heavy for her to carry.

But carry it she did, through into the engineers' office that had become their home. She flopped down with it on the floor in front of the tiny window and pulled back the blackout curtains so she could press her face against the icy cold of the glass. Outside was a never-ending vista of twinkling streetlights under an inky sky devoid of stars. London was an enormous animal, squatting within its lair: a deceptively dangerous animal – never more so than when you dropped your guard.

She rubbed her left cheek against the glass, as if she were rubbing against its implacable fur. She heard it growl back.

Gully's voice was insistent inside her head: ‘
Just one light in that window, Penny, and Our Place ain't safe no more
.'

She needed to examine her treasure, but she wasn't ready to shut out London.

Closing her eyes, she was back within the labyrinth inside her mind; the beautiful pictures sprouting and spreading until they became a maelstrom of moving shapes and lines and curves and angles, all coming together. The rounded knob of St Paul's Cathedral was at the centre of it: the eye of her creative storm. The City Above and the City Below were assembled into a living, breathing whole. She sensed it within her picture-mind; she sensed it so perfectly she could inspect and trace every wrinkle of its skin, every crevice and hair follicle, as the
great heart lumbered deep within and the great lungs sighed and breathed, the nostrils snorting.

The sounds of Gully's feet on the iron staircase brought her back to reality with a start. She waited for him, squatting cross-legged on the floor in the dark, with the box in her lap. She heard him draw the blackout blinds. When the light came on, rigged up from the battery he charged with the cycling dynamo, her eyes were momentarily blinded.

She heard his voice. ‘I got me a new one, Penny.'

‘Another injured one?'

‘Nah – just 'arf starved!'

She looked over at him, to where he was stroking the bird; a striking squab, piebald as a jackdaw. Gully trapped birds to eat them, but this one he would feed and then let it go again.

‘Look at you – you're soaking wet,' she said.

‘Bit a water won't do me no 'arm.' He lifted the wire door on the keep and shoved the bird in before turning to look at her. ‘You're wetter'n me, gel. You should take off them silver thingamabobs an' dry yer 'air.'

‘Maybe.' She couldn't stop the wave of shivering.

He sat down next to her on the concrete floor. ‘Wot's up with you?'

‘They were hunting me, Gully.'

‘Who was?'

‘Skulls. I didn't see them. Only the tips of their cigarettes.'

He had taken off his glasses to wipe off the rain. She watched him go through the routine of patting down his pockets, all six of them, the handkerchief emerging from the middle pocket on the right. ‘And they was huntin' you specific, like?'

‘I think so.'

‘But you ain't sure?'

‘I – I am sure. They chased me. They were making meowing noises. And then they were hiding – hiding and waiting for me.'

‘But why they got it in for you, gel?'

‘I don't know, but I was really frightened this time.'

Gully shoved his glasses back on his nose. His hands brushed through his sodden black curls. ‘Don't make sense.'

‘I think they might have been looking for this.' Penny's eyes fell onto the polished wooden box that lay, heavy, on her thighs.

‘Wot the 'eck is that?'

‘Gully, I saw them – I saw such things.'

‘Wot things?'

She was gazing down at the box, as if wondering at its presence, all of a sudden sensing the enormity of what she had done in stealing it and then bringing such a treasure back to Our Place. Had she placed both their lives in danger?

‘I had to bring it back.'

‘Wot you got there, Penny?'

‘Give me time, Gully. I have to gather my thoughts.'

‘Gather yer thoughts?'

She couldn't even begin to explain it all, not yet. She didn't know how to put it into words. She saw him, the young man, through the window of Oggy's Café, his face, his fair hair, his blue eyes peering out at her through the letters. She saw the thing in his head – in the girl's head too. She felt them reach out to her, their minds invading her mind, like two suns bursting into dazzling light. She knew then – she just knew for certain – that they where what she had been waiting for.

Gully climbed back onto his feet to shed his sodden denim jacket; the rain had just soaked through the hood. He gave it a quick wring, pattering water on the floor, then hung it on a screw that was sticking out of the shelves. Then he hauled out the cardboard box with their food in. He showed her the food he had bought from selling her sketches to the woman in the Post Office.

Then he glanced over at her, his face lowered, peering through the tangled bushes of his eyebrows. ‘You look 'arf starved, gel. You look worse'n the squab. You want me to make you a cuppa an' somefink to eat?'

Penny could barely nod back. She hadn't moved from her perch under the window, where she knew she was sitting in her own pool of wet. An excitement was growing in her, in her heart. She exulted in it. It was what had been promised her through all the pain. She whispered her triumph, feeling her cheeks glowing, into the gloom. ‘Gully, it's happening, it really is – it's what I've been waiting for.'

She watched him use a cigarette lighter to ignite the blue
flame on the Calor gas rings, linked with a red rubber hose to the cylinder.

‘Got us two eggs,' he crowed. ‘Wot about I make you a nice poached egg on crusty bread?'

‘Sounds good.' She nodded.

‘Noffink like a nice poached egg an' a hot cuppa.'