City of Dreams and Nightmare (13 page)

Kat hesitated, as if listening. All Tom could hear apart from the cart’s squeaking wheel was the nearby calling of a street hawker and the rhythmic clanging of a blacksmith’s hammer somewhere in the near distance. He hadn’t heard the demon dogs’ howls for some time, not since they’d given the beasts the slip. He dared to hope the hounds hadn’t rediscovered their trail.

Evidently satisfied, the girl looked at him, briefly raising her eyebrows. “Ready?”

He nodded. “Is this far enough, do you think?”

“It’ll have to be,” she responded, turning around.

Kat let herself down backwards, clinging to the edge of the roof with both hands so that her feet almost reached the ground and then dropping the short distance that remained. Tom copied her. Two well-dressed women hurried past, eyeing them with obvious distaste, while the gaze of the drunk slumped in the doorway opposite was less accusing.

“This way,” and Kat was off again.

As far as Tylus could make out, there was nothing much wrong with Richardson. A little quiet, it had to be said, but he put that down to the lad being bullied by his fellow officers or singled out by the sergeant. Comments made by others in the squad room – jokes at the young officer’s expense – seemed to confirm his assumptions regarding the lad’s status, but Tylus suspected that he was merely lacking encouragement and a bit of self-confidence.

Certainly Richardson had quickly proved his worth in the Kite Guard’s eyes. From his new assistant he had already learned the names of the three major gangs whose territories overlapped the patrol area of this particular station: the Scorpions, the River Snakes and the Blue Claw. The first two he could understand, but had to ask about the Blue Claw. Apparently they took their name from a type of giant crab which lurked in the deepest parts of the Thair and was rarely seen. Reputedly as large as a house and famed for their ill-temper if disturbed, the meat of these formidable crustaceans was considered a great delicacy, but obtaining it was hazardous in the extreme, since the crabs were said to be capable of cutting a man in two with a single snap of their oversized front claw, which, of course, was blue.

Leaving out many of the details, including the embarrassing ones such as his own part in the street-nick’s escape, Tylus summarised events for Richardson’s benefit and explained the nature of his mission to the City Below. The guardsman thought the most likely starting point for any street-nick’s ascent via the walls would have been the very stairway by which Tylus first arrived in the under-City. He further explained that this particular stairway was controlled by the Scorpions, and anyone wanting to use it would have to come to an arrangement with them first, paying a sort of toll known as passage fee, which would be made in the form of either coin or bartered service.

This information lifted Tylus’s spirits considerably. He had barely arrived in the City Below and already his investigation was progressing with admirable speed. He could see the whole process unfolding neatly before him. The Scorpions would tell him exactly who had paid them to use the stairway, thus identifying the relevant gang and the guilty street-nick. Richardson, with his local knowledge, would show him where to find the boy and he would then make the arrest, taking greater care this time around, before escorting the lad up-City. Simple and effective; a resounding endorsement of investigative procedures properly applied. Even Sergeant Goss could not fail to be impressed by such alacrity and efficiency. There might even be a promotion in this. How that would stick in Goss’s craw.

The relationship between the street-nick gangs and the guardsmen of the Watch struck Tylus as an odd one. From the outside they appeared to be natural enemies and yet the two groups co-existed and even co-operated with each other on occasion. He struggled to fully grasp the dynamics of the situation and, en-route to the arranged meeting with the Scorpions, quizzed Richardson in the hope of gaining some insight.

“But it amounts to extortion, surely.”

“If you say so,” Richardson said, a little defensively, “but it works. Every stall holder and shop keeper pays the local street-nick gang a small tithe for protection and they get no trouble as a result. Keeps the peace.” Removed from the environment of the guard station, Richardson seemed to relax, and spoke far more freely than at any time before.

“But if all the traders in a given street were to band together and look out for each other, they could do the same thing, surely, cutting the street-nicks out and saving themselves the tithe.”

“That’s been tried, more than once. Most recently a year or so ago. Not on our patch, thank Thaiss, but we were among those roped in to bring the resultant fire under control. It was a nightmare – burned out three whole streets.”

“You’re saying the street-nicks set the fire? Surely not. Those other streets must have been on their turf too. The fire would have cost them dear.”

“Better that than let a rebellious bunch of traders get away with not paying their tithes. Others’d get the same idea and that would cost the gangs dearer still.”

Tylus mulled it over. “And if the watch comes across a group of shopkeepers or stallholders banding together to resist the gangs, they support them, I presume.”

“Nah. We have a quiet word in their ears and tell them to pay up like good little boys. Best not to rock the system.”

“What?” Tylus stopped dead in his tracks and stared at his colleague, appalled by what he was hearing. “The watch actually endorses these criminal activities?”

“Look, I don’t know how it works up-City, but down here our main concern is with keeping the peace, and you don’t do that by upsetting the street gangs and taking away their income. Now the way we go about things might not appear in any rule book, but then none of them rule books were written by anyone who ever had to try and survive down here. Maybe someday they’ll come up with a set of rules writ especially for the City Below, but until then we have to improvise our own.”

Tylus was impressed. This was the longest speech he had yet heard Richardson make. No question, the lad was coming out of himself now that he’d found somebody who was actually willing to listen to him. And what he said made a lot of sense, albeit in a twisted way. Tylus determined not to judge the officers of the watch too harshly; after all, he was the outsider here and didn’t have to live as they did. Even so, he was singularly unimpressed by what he had heard and was finding it hard not to condemn the whole ethos of law enforcement here in the basement world.

The young Kite Guard did have a more immediate worry, a matter he was shying away from thinking about. It occurred to him that the street-nicks they were on their way to meet were likely to be the very same youths he encountered on first arriving here – the ones he had handed out a beating to – or at least their fellow gang members. He neglected to mention the incident to Richardson, fearing that the guardsman might be less inclined to arrange a meeting if he knew about it. The bottom line was that Tylus had no idea what sort of a reception to expect from the Scorpions should they recognise him, which meant that, as yet, he wasn’t sure how to approach the upcoming meeting. However, so buoyed was he by the day’s successes that not even this concerned him unduly. He felt sure that things would go his way, even if he did have to wing it.

His confidence wavered almost at once. A trio of street-nicks waited ahead of them and in the centre stood the lad who had lifted his puncheon earlier that day, the one he had knocked over with his fists. He managed to stifle the smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth on seeing the boy’s bruised cheek, not to mention his red and swollen nose, but was completely unprepared for the look of horror that spread across the street-nick’s face at sight of him.

“It’s the frissin’ cloud scraper,” the boy yelled. Tylus had never been called that before but knew the expression: common street slang for anyone living in the Heights. “The one who topped Des,” the lad went on. “Run!”

With that, the trio of boys scattered, all disappearing down different alleyways.

“Go after the kid who spoke,” Tylus told Richardson, pointing as the boy disappeared around a corner. “I’ll try to cut him off.”

Richardson sprinted forward obediently in pursuit of the boy, while Tylus darted to the right, down a broader avenue which promised to parallel the alley they had taken. As he ran, he drew a deep breath and held his arms out stiffly and slightly behind himself.

Those who knew nothing about kitecapes tended to assume that they relied entirely on wind currents. They were wrong. The wind had nothing to do with a kitecape’s buoyancy or motive power but everything to do with deflection, misdirection and obstruction. A Kite Guard did not need the wind in order to fly, but did have to be well versed in the likely effects of its strength and direction or risk being dumped unceremoniously from the air, just as Tylus had been the previous night. To fly a cape you needed to know as much about running with the wind and tacking against it as any sailor; but, of course, all that applied only when there was a wind worth talking about.

In the confined environment of the City Below, just as in the corridors of the Heights, air movement tended to be slight and predictable. Tylus had heard that, given the right conditions, gales could sometimes sweep down the length of the Thair and through the cavernous underworld, but not today.

The only problem with flying in the Heights was the lack of opportunity to really let loose. Low ceilings and narrow corridors predominated, but there were no such strictures in the City Below.

Tylus spread his arms as he ran, and then leapt. Instantly the cape took hold, slicing through the air and lifting him upwards. He was aware of people staring and one child even cheered, causing him to smile. The low rooftops fell away immediately and the under-City spread out before him. The view was impressive, he had to admit; even more so from this close a range than it had been from the stairs when he first arrived. Not beautiful, perhaps, but certainly impressive.

He was surprised to realise that the stench of the place no longer bothered him. In fact, he barely noticed it – filtered out by familiarity as his senses came to terms with the environment. The gods knew what they were doing when they put together the human body; it was a truly remarkable piece of engineering, as indeed was the kitecape.

He dipped a shoulder, banking gently to the left only to straighten almost immediately as he caught sight of Richardson first and then the smaller boy fleeing in front of him. The guardsman didn’t appear to be have made much progress in catching the lad.

His view was abruptly obscured as a woman opened an upper storey window and prepared to empty a slop bucket, only to catch sight of him, presumably in the corner of her eye, after which she stared upward, open-mouthed. In the process she dropped the tin bucket, which clattered to the ground, much to the consternation of the well-dressed man it narrowly missed as he passed in the street below. He raised a fist in protest, caught sight of Tylus and promptly joined the woman in open-mouthed Kite Guard-watching.

Tylus was past them, overtaking Richardson as he closed on the boy.

The lad zigged to the left and zagged to the right, darting down even narrower alleyways. Tylus tensed his shoulders and rotated his arms a fraction. The cape responded by taking him higher, enabling him to keep track as the street-nick weaved his way through the backstreets. He hoped that Richardson could keep up, but didn’t want to call out for fear of alerting the boy to his presence.

During initial training, Tylus had listened attentively as the science behind the kitecapes was explained: the alignment of microscopic components within the cape’s unique structure, the redistribution of weight, lift gained by scything through the air, energy created by a Kite Guard’s own movement, all were said to play a part. Tylus hadn’t believed a word of it then and he didn’t now. Pseudo-science, used to baffle the gullible and mask the fact that something extraordinary was involved.

Why else would it take weeks to renew a damaged cape and make it airworthy again?

Tylus had soon reached his own conclusions. He had seen some of the things arkademics could do, knew they were privy to learning far beyond the reach of most people, and was convinced that something of the sort was invested in the kitecapes. Call it magic, call it hidden art or secrets, call it whatever you liked, Tylus didn’t care. All that mattered to him was that the capes worked.

The street-nick was changing direction so often in what was increasingly becoming a warren of alleys, that Tylus overshot him more than once. Finally the boy burst out into a broader avenue and the Kite Guard knew this was his chance.

Remarkably, Richardson had managed to follow the lad’s every twist and turn; either that or he’d lost the trail completely and blind luck saw him blunder out into the street close on the boy’s heels. Whatever the truth, the nick knew he was there and kept looking back over his shoulder, paying as much attention to what was going on behind him as to what lay in front.

Tylus swooped, coming down to street level ahead of the boy and flying straight at him. Just before the inevitable impact he braked, bleeding momentum, and lifted his arms slightly, bringing his body forward and underneath, raising his legs, ready to kick out so that his feet would hit the boy, bringing him down.

At the last instant the boy saw him and threw himself to the ground. Tylus sailed over the prone street-nick towards a collision with a very startled-looking Richardson. The Kite Guard fought desperately for elevation, the cape reacting with sufficient swiftness that, despite the brief intervening distance, Tylus only clipped the guardsman’s shoulder with a trailing foot. Even that he turned to his advantage, pushing off from Richardson’s shoulder and twisting around in the process, so that he was once more facing the fast-disappearing street-nick.

Again the Kite Guard set out in pursuit, but this time he was determined not to take any chances. He climbed rapidly, making sure to keep the boy in sight. Taking anything out of his belt while in the air was a hazardous business, since it meant folding half the cape and so losing the ability to fly, but he hadn’t wanted to waste time by landing, so, once he was high enough, he angled towards the boy before closing both arms, reaching for his belt and unclipping the netgun.