Wormwood Gate (11 page)

From the solemnity of his expression, Aisling was sure that the promise was binding – just as binding as the promise she'd made to the floating head. Perhaps that was the reason why Abayomiolorunkoje had given himself such a long make-name – the harder it was for people to call for him, the fewer such promises he would have to fulfil.

‘We don't need you now,' said the rabbit, ‘but if we do, we know how to get you.'

Abayomiolorunkoje nodded. ‘Good luck to you both!' he said, and walked on down the carriage.

‘That could've been worse,' said the rabbit.

Aisling nodded and looked out the window. The train was crossing the river now, over a bridge that was almost exactly like the DART bridge, but not quite. ‘We're nearly there,' she said, and a moment later a cultivated female voice announced, ‘
The next station is Tara Street. An chéad stáisiún eile, Sráid Teamhrach
,' and the train pulled in to Tara Street Station. Coney wriggled out of her grasp and leapt to the floor, then hopped out of the train to the platform. ‘Come on!' it cried, and Aisling scrambled after it.

‘Coney Bawn,' she said as they walked along the quays, ‘do you mind telling me something?'

‘Depends what it is.'

‘It's just that you're a white rabbit, and your make-name is “Coney Bawn”. Doesn't that just mean “white rabbit”?'

The rabbit stopped its slow loping and looked up at her, a twinkle in its eye. ‘What did I tell you? A real name tells you who you are. A make-name tells the world who you want to be.'

‘Who you – oh. So you're not – but if you're not a rabbit, what are you?'

The rabbit winked, which looked just as odd now as it had done before. ‘That'd be telling.'

Aisling rolled her eyes and resumed walking in the vague direction of Wormwood Gate. ‘Why does everyone here have to be so
bloody enigmatic
?' she muttered.

The rabbit ignored that remark, if it even heard at all, and just lolloped along beside her, occasionally pointing out things that had changed since the queen had taken the throne – mostly areas of waste ground where there had once been fine old buildings and were now building sites and brand new buildings all made of concrete and shiny glass. The new buildings seemed to shimmer as she looked at them, as if they hadn't quite made up their minds whether or not to exist. Aisling thought she understood that: if the City was a reflection of Dublin, or of what people thought and felt about Dublin, it stood to reason that new buildings that hadn't had time to be loved or hated or feared wouldn't seem as real here as the ones that had been around for centuries.

Though that didn't explain how the Spire had been turned into a prison. Perhaps the queen had enough willpower to transform it all by herself.

They came at last – by a somewhat roundabout route, and with much ducking into doorways and under arches to avoid guard patrols – to the stretch of the quays where Aisling remembered talking to the merhorse.

‘It was near here,' she said. ‘I don't know where exactly – it was such a shock, I wasn't in the best state to take notes. But definitely somewhere near here. A little to the south, away from the river.'

‘Good!' said the rabbit. ‘I was hoping you'd remember.'

Aisling started. The rabbit's voice sounded different; where it had been high and squeaky and androgynous, it was mellow now, a woman's voice. ‘What – are you –'

Coney loped off towards an alleyway, and Aisling followed, too astonished to wonder whether that was a good idea. When she reached the mouth of the alley, she was just in time to see Coney transform from a small white rabbit into a red-haired woman in a white hoodie and white tracksuit trousers.

‘Sorry about that,' said the woman, ‘but I couldn't be sure you'd take me where I needed to go if I told you everything. Now, let's dispense with make-names, shall we? You're Aisling O'Riordan. And I'm Molly Red.'

She held out her right hand. Aisling shook it, trying to disguise the way her own hand was trembling.

‘Molly Red, eh?' she said. ‘I've heard of you.'

6

The guard was silent as he led Julie to the gate. No matter how many times she whispered a plea for help, his jaw stayed clamped shut and he gave no more response than a small, firm shake of his head. She had no idea where she might find Molly Red, if she was even still in the City, or how she could track where Aisling had gone, or whether there was anyone in the City who could help her, so as soon as he left her at the gate she broke into a run, heading in a random direction, just wanting to put as much distance as possible between herself and the Tower of Light.

A dozen or more streets away, her foot slipped out of her shoe and she skidded to a halt, just barely stopping herself from falling flat on her face. She leaned against the nearest wall for a moment, panting and rotating her ankle, and looked around to see where she was. She didn't recognise the area at all: the alley she was in was high and narrow enough to block her view of any landmarks, and the buildings were of a kind that she couldn't remember seeing anywhere in Dublin – she had seen houses like that in English towns, Tudor or older, with low eaves and exposed wooden beams everywhere, but as far as she knew there were none in Dublin; they'd all been knocked down to make way for new ones in the eighteenth century.

That had to mean that this was a part of the City that came from the past.

Julie slipped her shoe back on and looked up at the sky. It should have been brighter, but there were dark clouds massing – not rain clouds: smoke clouds, thick and black and acrid-smelling. She must have been near one of the burning castles, then; and if this part of the city came from the past, perhaps it was the castle that had belonged to the Queen-that-was …

What kind of logic is that?
she thought to herself, irritated. But she had nothing else to go on, and that seemed to be how the City worked, in any case, as if it wasn't held together by the laws of physics so much as by chewing gum and good intentions. And now that the queen had no good intentions at all, it was beginning to fall apart.

She sniffed the air and set off in the direction the smoke seemed to be coming from. The streets in this part of the City were narrow and twisty, paved with irregular cobblestones when they were paved at all, and it seemed that every time she thought she was going straight in the right direction she would run smack into a dead end and have to retrace her steps. The fourth time this happened, she picked up a stone and scraped an X into the dead-end wall, just to make sure she wasn't going around in circles, only to find that when she looked back over her shoulder at it, the X had disappeared. At that, she flopped down onto the ground and groaned.

‘What did I ever do to you, eh?' she muttered, glaring at the houses and the cobblestones and the billowing smoke in the sky. ‘I don't know why you have a grudge against me, City, but it's getting really boring.'

The cobblestones did not reply. Julie sighed and stood up again. ‘Lateral thinking,' she said to herself. ‘What would Aisling do?' She looked up again and noticed something she hadn't seen before: there were telephone wires stretched between the houses. They looked very strange, juxtaposed with all that Tudor-or-was-it-medieval architecture; there was even a pair of runners slung over one of them, hanging by the laces.

Julie stretched up on the tips of her toes, her eyes narrowing. The runners were white, but the laces were red. Not something you would see unless you were looking closely. And was that the tongue of the left shoe sticking out, or a piece of paper with writing on it? The more she looked at it, the more sure she was that it was a piece of paper, and the more she thought about it, the more sure she was that a piece of paper stuffed into a pair of white runners with red laces hanging from a telephone wire could only be some kind of message.

She glanced at the house behind her. It looked gratifyingly climbable; she'd never had the chance to climb a medieval-or-possibly-Tudor house before, but with its low eaves, thatched roof (not slippery like tiles – lots of purchase for the feet) and exposed wooden beams, it looked like it might as well have had a ladder propped up against it.

She stuffed the stone she'd used to draw the X into her bag and, with a grin, she gripped the protruding part of the nearest beam and pulled herself up the wall, grabbing on to the edge of the thatch and swinging herself up onto the roof before she could lose momentum. She had to scramble around in a circle to orient herself, but before she could spot the telephone wire and the runners that were hanging from it, she spotted something even stranger: a graffiti tag that had apparently been spray-painted onto the thatch. It was quite a good graffiti tag too, not one of those blocky monstrosities that might as well have said ‘I WAS HERE', but an elegant multicoloured design in letters that were almost too pretty to be legible. After a bit of squinting and some redrawing of the relevant bits of the tag in her notebook, Julie came to the conclusion that the tag said ‘PIJONZ', which meant nothing to her, and so she turned back around to see if she could get a good shot at the runners with the stone.

There was a pigeon sitting on the line. Julie frowned. ‘Shoo!' she said, flapping her hands in the pigeon's direction. ‘Get off!'

The pigeon turned its head slowly round to face Julie. ‘Are you talking to me?' it said.

‘You
what
?'

The pigeon shuffled awkwardly along the telephone line. “Cos there's no one else here,' it said. ‘Are you talking to
me
?'

‘I'm not sure –'

‘Are you a spy?' the pigeon said, interrupting her. ‘You don't look like a spy, but then again, a spy that looked like a spy wouldn't be a very good spy. Well? Are you?'

‘I'm not a spy! Why would you even –' She stopped herself from finishing that sentence. There were plenty of reasons for anyone in the City to think that anyone else in the City was a spy, and just at that moment she couldn't think why pigeons should be exempt from the general paranoia. ‘Look,' she said firmly, ‘I just want to get a closer look at those runners.'

‘Do you, now?' said the pigeon, cocking its head to one side. ‘And what's it worth to you?'

‘Oh, for the love of – are you going to charge me? Is that it? You want me to bribe you to fly away from that wire?'

The pigeon puffed up its chest and shuffled back and forth in an affronted sort of way. ‘A bribe, is it? Is that what you think of the pigeon race? That we'll do anything for a few breadcrumbs?'

‘I never said –'

‘Seagull propaganda, that's what it is!'

‘What are you –'

‘Now, I'm a kind-hearted bird, anyone round here'll tell you that, but when it comes to seagulls –' The pigeon cooed suddenly and wriggled a little, and on the street below there was a moist
splat
sound. ‘
That's
what I think of seagulls. Dirty lying feckers, the lot of them. Are you with the seagull patrol?' it added abruptly.

Julie sighed. ‘Look, a spy might not always look like a spy, but I'm pretty sure a seagull always looks like a seagull.'

The pigeon laughed. ‘Shows what you know, miss. Shows what you know.'

‘In any case, can I see the runners?'

‘I don't know. How's your eyesight?'

‘I meant, can I get them? I need to look at them more closely.'

The pigeon shuffled closer, one step, two steps, three, then abandoned the shuffle and flew the short distance between the runners and Julie's feet. It looked up at her with a distinctly suspicious air. ‘You don't look like a seagull,' it said. ‘You don't smell like a seagull. But you can't always tell. Seagulls are cunning little feckers.'

‘Look, I'm not – how can I prove to you that I'm not a seagull? Wait –' She pulled down the shoulder of her top. ‘Look, here. See those marks? I got arrested last night. I was carried to the Tower of Light by a seagull patrol. Doesn't that prove that I'm not a seagull? I don't even
like
seagulls. Got no reason to.'

The pigeon fluttered its wings and flew up to perch on Julie's head, peering down at her shoulder. Its claws dug into her scalp painfully and, now that it was so close, she was unpleasantly aware that its plumage was none too clean. And what on earth had it been eating to have breath that smelled like that?

To her relief, the pigeon fluttered down again a moment later. ‘Good enough,' it said. ‘You're not a seagull. Now, what do you want the runners for?'

‘What? Now you want an explanation?'

The pigeon puffed up its chest again. ‘Look, I don't think you're aware of where you are, young miss. This here's pigeon territory, see?' It pointed a wing at the tag painted on the roof. ‘Not just this house, but the street, and not just the street but this whole quarter. Us pigeons rule the roost here, and nothing happens without our say-so!'

‘And are you at war with the seagulls?'

‘We've always been at war with them cockle-sucking feckers. Only, since the queen started losing her marbles, it's been ten times worse, seeing as now they're a
special patrol
.' The pigeon started shuffling back and forth on the roof, as if it were pacing; Julie noticed that one of its claws was badly deformed, so that it could only hobble. ‘They put on airs like you wouldn't feckin' believe these days, but they don't patrol the pigeon territories, oh no! They'd get mobbed if they tried.'

Julie perked up. ‘Really?'

‘Would I lie to you?'

‘And is this area the whole of the pigeon territories?'

‘No, no – the Viking quarter's ours too.' Julie started at the thought of the City having a Viking quarter, but the pigeon didn't seem to notice. ‘And some bits of the Liberties, but they're not, what you call it … secure. We're still fighting over them.'

‘So … if you're at war with the seagulls, you must not be too friendly with the queen?'

The pigeon stopped pacing and stared at her. ‘What have kings and queens to do with birds?'

It seemed to be a genuine question, and Julie was at a loss to answer it. ‘Well … I … I don't know.'

The pigeon nodded. ‘Us neither, and that's why this business with the seagulls is such a head-wrecker. It's not natural! Toadying up to Her Nibs like that, as if she had anything to do with the life of a bird. Eat your grub, find your mate, make your nest, lay your eggs, feed your squabs. That's us. That's the pigeons. It should be the seagulls too, only they've got corrupted.'

Julie pondered this. It would probably be rude to point out that spray-painting tags on rooftops and controlling territories in cities and, for that matter, talking to humans in their own language didn't normally have anything to do with the life of a bird, either, and even though she was rather curious to see whether the pigeon was aware of this, and what it meant by ‘corruption', she was also anxious to find Molly Red before Aisling could get too far away, and she suspected that this particular pigeon would be a frustrating person to have an argument with.

‘Do you know Molly Red?' she said.

‘I know
of
her,' said the pigeon cautiously. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘I think those runners are a message for me from Molly Red,' she said. She took a deep breath. In the wrong company, what she was about to say would be dangerous, but if there really weren't any seagulls around, she should be safe. ‘I want to help her overthrow the queen. If the queen falls, the seagulls won't be her guards any more, and that'll help the pigeons. So, really, it's in your own interests to help me get those runners.'

The pigeon looked at her consideringly for a moment, then it hopped a little closer. ‘you're going to overthrow the queen, are you?'

‘Well, not on my own –'

‘You and what army, then?'

‘I don't have an army,' she said. ‘Maybe Molly Red does; I don't know. But I swore I'd find a way to get the Queen-that-was out of her cage – to kill her properly, so she could come back again. I swore it. And I swore that I would leave the City of the Three Castles with a better ruler than it had when I came here.'

The pigeon chuckled. ‘You've got something, young one,' it said, sounding impressed. ‘Not sure what it is – maybe it's courage, maybe stupidity. Hard to tell the difference sometimes. But it's not enough. Pigeons don't do favours for nobody.'

‘But I just
said
it would be in your interests –'

‘
If
what you say is right, and
if
Molly Red has a hope in all the Realms Between of succeeding. Which I say she hasn't. Somebody else might, but you haven't mentioned somebody else, so that's by the by. So. A favour for a favour.
Comprende
?'

Julie sighed. ‘What kind of favour?'

‘Oh, well, it's a small enough thing you're asking, so … next time you see a seagull, throw a stone at it.'

Julie thought of the seagulls that had carried her to the Tower of Light, their sharp, piercing cries, so loud and high they were painful to hear, their talons digging into her ankles and her shoulders; she thought of how scared Aisling had been, so scared she could barely breathe. She thought of the stone she still had in her bag, ready to be used for marking another wall if that turned out to be necessary.

I can always miss on purpose
, she thought. ‘All right,' she said. ‘I'll do it.' For the third time, she felt the promise settling on her scalp and tightening slightly. It made her wonder whether there was a limit on the number of oaths a person could be subject to at one time. Did the feeling get tighter the harder the promise would be to fulfil?

The pigeon nodded solemnly. ‘Fair's fair,' it said, and flew the short distance to the middle of the telephone wire, where it picked up the runners by the laces and flew back again, dropping them at Julie's feet. ‘That's my end of the bargain. Now you – ah, bejasus! Feckin' seagulls!'