The White Wolf's Son (10 page)

I wanted to satisfy a question which had been nagging
at me. “You speak of the time you met my ancestor, yet he lived two hundred years ago. When did you actually meet him?”

“Perhaps some fifteen or twenty years since. As I said, mademoiselle, time in our city passes at a different pace to the time
you experience. I do not know why this is so, though I have heard more than one man attempt to explain it, and I myself once
kept an orrery and all manner of astrological instruments until they were stolen from me in one of the wars which occasionally
shake our city. It coincides with some cycle of the planes which make up our universes moving at a different rate, much as
planets go about the sun according to their own pace. I am not an unlearned being, yet I have been unable to discover any
treatise which sets out to explain this phenomenon satisfactorily. Be assured, however, that you are not the first visitor
to observe it. It could mean your parents have not even noticed you are missing.”

This seemed to cheer him up. It was only then that I realized how my kindly captain of rogues had been as anxious as I about
my parents’ fears for me. I moved forward and embraced him. His nose twitched; he made a gulping sound deep in his throat,
and I thought I saw something like a tear in his big vulpine eye.

The next few days were very frustrating. Lord Renyard’s men reported that Messrs. Lobkowitz and Fro-mental had indeed presented
themselves at the palace and had even met Klosterheim and von Minct, though the encounter hadn’t been friendly. Whenever one
of the rogues of the Deep City had tried to contact my friends, they had failed for a variety of reasons. Lord Renyard wanted
to hand me into their safekeeping but thought it unwise to
risk a journey across town. We must wait until they come looking for us, he thought.

“They do not know where to search for you. Klosterheim has clearly not shared any of his knowledge with them.”

Meanwhile I tried to puzzle out what Mrs. House could have meant in her reference to the one with no face, the Graal Staff
and so on. I wondered if the strange oracle was in her right mind. Maybe she was a bit senile. As Lord Renyard had hinted,
being a monster, being cut off from common experience, was inclined to make you lose your grip on ordinary reality. I was
getting very bored at Raspazian’s even though I had now made friends with Kushy and some of the other “tobymen” and “divers”
and had begun to pick up a bit of their language.

Lord Renyard eventually, reluctantly allowed them to take me out with them as long as I was disguised, usually as a boy. They
showed me their secret routes through the city, even taught me a way of crossing bridges underneath the general traffic.

Kushy called me his rum doxy, which was a compliment, meaning I was a pretty girl, and Kushy’s lady friend Winnie said she
thought I was a sweet lathy of a girl with a fine little knowledge box, who she wished her own daughter might be. Within a
week I became a bit of a mascot to those vagabonds and footpads and felt honored to be liked by them, even though I’m not
sure my mum and dad would have approved of my spending so much time in their company. Since I wasn’t allowed to leave Raspazian’s,
my new friends brought their own children to play with me. To pass the time, I let them teach me their tricks, including how
to pick a pocket or shoplift without being spotted!

Lord Renyard was gone more frequently, on mysterious business. I guessed he was looking for my friends. Kushy, Winnie and
the other denizens of Raspazian’s were careful to look after me, and I knew that although I was in perfect hands, I couldn’t
bear to stay there for much longer, no matter how slowly time was passing on my own plane of the multiverse.

Then one morning the decision was taken out of all our hands when, without warning, the tavern door burst open and there stood
Klosterheim, his pale eyes glaring in his skull-like face topped by a black, wide-brimmed hat. The rest of his clothes were
of the same Puritan cut as before, with a wide, white collar and cuffs. A big belt supported a sword and two pistols, which
he drew as he entered, flanked by soldiers with drawn swords, wearing the archaic armor of the ancient Greeks but with necklaces
of what I first took to be onions around their throats. They were tall, dark men with glistening black beards. Kushy and company
regarded them with some nervousness until, with a sweeping bow, Kushy took off his feathered hat and said with that whining,
mocking courtesy his kind always adopted to authority:

“Good morrow, gentlemen of the City Watch. Your visit’s a rare pleasure. What can we do for you?”

Klosterheim pointed at me. “That girl. She’s the one you kidnapped. Kill them all, guards, if they resist. You are safe now,
fräulein. I am here to take you home.”

I looked from Kushy to the guards. For a moment I was confused. “He’s the one wants to kill me,” I said.

Then, instinctively, I raced for the back room and slammed the door behind me, bolting it as Lord Renyard had taught me. From
the other side came the firing of shots.

I felt fairly certain that Klosterheim, having somehow got the city authorities on his side, would win this round. At any
moment they’d come bursting in. With my heart pounding, I opened the window of my bedroom and hopped out onto the tiles of
the roof below. I slid down it, grabbed a drainpipe and shinned down into the little paved yard at the back of the tavern.
I was hoping to hide somewhere nearby until they were gone. I took the bar out of its lugs, opened the gate and slipped into
the alley. By the time I had found a dark doorway in which to hide I heard shouts from the courtyard. Men raced towards me.
I had no choice. I crept into the yard behind me and hid among some stacks of crates and barrels. Fortunately their feet pounded
past in the alley. Only when it was dark did I risk sneaking out and making my way back to the tavern, just to find the gateway
closed again. I would have to risk going out into the street and entering through the front door.

As I slipped into the street leading to the square I saw a glint of armor. The city guards were still there, maybe left behind
by Klosterheim. I kept walking, dodging in and out of shadows with no clear idea where I was going. Eventually I came to the
unstable black marble that was the river, rows of deserted warehouses, and scuttling rats. I felt comparatively safe by the
water if I kept in the dark. Across the river the new town didn’t seem so full of soldiers. Sparks and flames gushed up in
the black factory smoke. I could smell that smoke from here. A weird hard-boiled-egg smell; it reminded me of Guy Fawkes Night
fireworks.

I thought I recognized the nearest bridge, the one Kushy and the others had shown me how to cross. A narrow walkway, used
by builders to make repairs, ran
underneath. You could get onto it, if you were nimble and small enough, by climbing up some ornamental ironwork and wriggling
through a pipe.

Very slowly and carefully I made my way to the base of the bridge. I could hear the rumble of carts, horses’ hoofs, marching
soldiers. But nobody bothered to look down as I quickly shinned up the ironwork, squeezed through the short section of pipe.
I climbed over the protective metal roof and swung down to drop on the walkway on the other side of a locked gate.

Then it was nothing to run softly over the wooden slats until I got to the other side, repeated the operation and found myself
beside more rows of warehouses, whose stink, I should add, was not any more attractive than that of the first. I had been
right. There were no soldiers on this side at all. They were all concentrating on the far bank.

I kept to side streets. The heat increased as I got closer to the great walled factories. Here Mirenburg made the steel for
which, in my own world, she was famous, producing a well-known make of East European car, the Popp. Now she was probably making
pikes and swords and cannons and stuff, more suitable for the customers of this age!

And then, as luck would have it, a squadron of mounted soldiers galloped along the thoroughfare ahead of me, just as I reached
the middle of a factory wall, with no street I could easily dodge into. They weren’t looking for me, I was sure, and were
probably on their way to the bridge, but they would recognize me if they saw me. There was a small door in the factory wall,
which I fully expected to be locked or jammed; to my astonishment, the handle turned. Without even a squeak of hinges I
stepped into the overheated darkness and closed the door behind me. I began to wonder if some goddess had her benevolent eye
on me.

The door led into a bleak passage, at the end of which were three more doors. Rather than waiting for the soldiers to go,
I let curiosity take me down the passage. Had I been sensible, I would have just hidden for a moment and then gone back into
the street. But I walked down the corridor, then opened the middle door a crack. I saw a turnstile and, behind that, people
doing various kinds of office work. Apart from their clothes, they could have been in any ordinary office from my own time.
Beyond them came the noise and bustle of the factory itself. I saw an occasional bright tongue of flame leaping into the air.

The door to the left was a disused office by the look of it, with a dusty desk and filing cabinets. But there was another
interior door beyond it. I had no light once I closed the door behind me, and had to fumble my way across the room until I
got to the other side. Again I expected this door to be locked. It was. But as I groped down its face, I felt a big key still
in its lock. With difficulty I turned it. Unlike the door in the wall, this one had been badly kept. I twisted the handle,
hearing a high-pitched sound. It cut through my eardrums and yet wasn’t completely unpleasant. There was a strangely thrilling
note to it. Then the noise died away. Something rumbled. Something raced and gushed. Something hissed.

I opened the door wider. It led out onto a gantry overlooking a busy factory. Molten steel splashed like lava from huge buckets
hauled on chains by sweating half-naked men, overseen by shouting foremen and other specialist workers, who helped guide the
buckets and tip them over a series of molds. The light was glaring, and
the heat was like a wall against my body. Flaming liquid steel gushed and splashed.

Through squinting eyes I saw the blind albino boy. He stood in a pulpit made of metal. His head was raised and set to one
side, as if he was listening keenly. At a certain moment he raised his slender white hand in the air. All work stopped. He
listened again, his crimson eyes reflecting the red-hot metal around him. Overhead more buckets rumbled and hissed; more molten
steel flowed down gullies. It was a very hectic factory, but I couldn’t really work out what was being made. The molds were
at most three inches wide and about three feet long. Were they forging rods of some kind?

I managed to wriggle into a space behind rolls of unused chain and get a better look at what was going on below me. As I watched,
one of the workers yelped. A tear of boiling steel had fallen on his shoulder. A medic came from the side of the room and
put a patch on him. He went back to work. I noticed that several workers had more than one patch. This had to be a dangerous
occupation. Why, I wondered, didn’t the factory supply them with protective clothing? I had a poor grasp of economics in those
days.

The blind boy fascinated me. He was about four years older than me. Like Monsieur Zodiac, he had long, milk-white hair, while
his skin had the sheen of bone. Unlike the workers, he had few patches. Even at that distance I could tell he was sweating.
His glaring crimson eyes seemed completely sightless. Had the glowing metal blinded him? His hearing, however, was unnaturally
sharp. For it was his hearing, I realized, they were employing.

The men paused so that a bucket of boiling metal was
near him, and he listened. Then he spoke to them and pointed in the general direction of some of the molds. The workers finessed
the bucket to their molds and again poured liquid metal. Occasionally some kind of boss came along and spoke to the men. They
kept their distance from the boy. They carefully avoided touching him.

I watched for over an hour as the albino paused, listened carefully, almost always rejecting the steel, very occasionally
pointing and giving directions. As the steel cooled in the molds, the lengths were brought to him, and again he would hold
them close to his ears, listening intently. Some of them he accepted, but most were rejected. This seemed to be the norm,
judging by the way the workers treated the routine. He was listening for some flaw, I was sure.

There wasn’t much doubt in my mind that the boy was related to my grandma and Monsieur Zodiac. Even the way he held himself
was familiar. Was he a prisoner in the factory? I couldn’t be certain. There were no guards about.

He worked constantly, listening, directing, listening, rejecting. Eventually I realized they were forging sword blades, which
would no doubt be polished, honed and decorated by other hands. But he didn’t pass many of them. I could tell he was listening
to the music within the steel. The blades spoke to him, and he accepted almost none of them, rejecting most.

Suddenly a klaxon sounded throughout the factory. Work was stopped, and men moved away to open packets of sandwiches and eat.
The blind boy was led to a spot only a yard or two below where I was hiding. As the men ate, the boy merely drank from a large
cup handed to him by a guard. The guards were not rough to him. In their
own way they seemed to like him, but they treated him very much as an alien creature, not one of their own. Now I had my chance.
When the space was deserted around him I risked calling to him, barely lifting my voice above a whisper.

“Boy! Blind boy?”

He looked up. He had heard me. He did not reply in a loud voice himself, but murmured.

“Girl? Overhead? Yes, she lies on the walkway above, hidden by chains, and—”

“I’ve seen how clever you are,” I told him. “But I’m not here to admire you.”