City of Light & Shadow (40 page)

  Thaiburley's new de facto ruler smiled as he approached. Tom felt a lurch of loss at the sight. He still couldn't believe the Prime Master he'd known was gone, and it felt odd addressing anyone else by the same title, especially someone he knew.

  "The view is extraordinary, isn't it?" Thomas said as he reached Tom.

  His younger namesake could only agree. The cloud cover was high this day, giving a spectacular view over the mountain peaks. Tom could even follow the course of the Thair for a little way. It was odd to gaze down upon a stretch of river which he must have travelled along while aboard Abe's barge. The Thair seemed so small from up here. He wondered whether the Prime Master might have come up here to watch the barge the day he'd left. He didn't dwell on the view, though, not wanting to risk a return of the vertigo that had troubled him in the past. Instead he returned his attention to the city's rooftop.

  "There's still a place for you on the council, you know," Thomas told him. "You'd make history: the youngest councillor the city's ever seen, by a decade or three."

  Tom smiled but shook his head. "Thank you but no. That's not for me and we both know it. Just thinking about it scares me worse than the Rust Warriors ever did. Whatever powers I can or can't call upon, I don't know enough to make decisions for the whole city. I'd only end up making a mess of things."

  "You have good instincts, Tom. I believe you'd do a lot better than you suppose."

  Tom snorted. "I doubt that. Besides, where's the fun in being stuck in stuffy meetings the whole time?"

  "You've got me there," Thomas agreed with a wry smile. "Where indeed?"

  "Look, if you meant what you said about plans to regenerate the City Below, let me get involved in that. I could do some good down there. I know the streets and what's needed for the people in them. At least that way I wouldn't be sitting around wondering what the breck everyone else was talking about, which is what would happen if I sat on the Council."

  "Yes, I
am
serious about rebuilding the City Below. It's been sorely neglected over the years, and this seems the perfect opportunity to do something about it. So much major work is going to be needed in different parts of the city, especially the Heights, that we might as well expand that to include the under-City as well, to roll everything up into one big redevelopment project. Your help with that would be greatly appreciated, thank you."

  Tom felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from him. The prospect of spending the rest of his life in the Heights had grown ever less appealing as time went on. He knew that some people would be expecting him to do exactly that and had almost been willing to go along with those expectations, particularly given his own growing sense of alienation from the streets. The more he considered the possibility, though, the more he realised that it simply wasn't what he wanted. In fact he hated the idea. As he'd determined en route to the core, it was high time he shed the mantle of others' expectations and started determining his own destiny. Tom wasn't a street-nick anymore, but nor was he a cloud scraper, and the streets were still his home.

  "I hear you met Thaiss herself," Thomas said, a little too casually. "How did you find her?"

  
By walking a brecking long way,
Tom felt tempted to reply. Instead, after a moment's thought, he simply said, "Odd."

  Thomas smiled. "I'm sure. Living that long must be… difficult; I mean, it must have a profound effect on who you are. What I suppose I'm getting at is, did you think her entirely sane?"

  Tom considered the question for a moment, largely because he didn't really know how to reply. "I'm not sure I'd have any way of knowing," he said at last. "How do you judge the sanity of a god?"

  Thomas laughed. "There is that, I suppose." After a slight pause he added, "One thing I don't understand is why she didn't come back with you. I mean, if Thaiburley means so much to her and she knew the city was in such deadly peril, why didn't she return here in all her glory and sort the situation out herself?"

  
She did,
Tom thought,
if only in my head.
"I don't know," he replied. "I've wondered about that myself and, well…"

  "What?"

  "I'm not honestly sure she could. She's lived in that citadel for so long, relying on her machines to keep her alive… I wonder whether she can live anywhere else anymore."

  "Dependent on the machines, you mean… in effect confined within her own citadel? Now there's a thought."

  A strange look passed across the Prime Master's face just for an instant and then it was gone.

  "What?" Tom asked.

  "Oh, nothing. I was just thinking that perhaps it's as well Thaiss never visits her city these days, that Thaiburley might be better off with a goddess who only wakes up once every century or so, allowing our society to develop without constant interference. That's all." He smiled at Tom. "Anyway, I've a meeting with the reconstituted council to prepare for. So, if you'll excuse me." With that, Thomas left him.

  Tom reflected on what struck him as a strange conversation. He thought back to the questions that had troubled him during his time at the ice citadel and the suspicion that he wasn't being told everything. He'd learnt a lot since then but still didn't have all the answers by any means. However, he was young, he was powerful, he had access to the city's core and knew how to reach Thaiss's citadel. The answers wouldn't elude him forever.

  He watched Thaiburley's new and vigorous Prime Master walk away and couldn't help but wonder… would it really have mattered who had won here? After all, from everything he knew, Thaiss's brother had never sought to destroy Thaiburley as such, merely claim it as his own. He'd used some pretty nasty tactics, true, but perhaps he'd needed to in order to stand any chance of success. From the point of view of those living in the city, particularly in the City Below, would one god be any worse than the other?

  When Tom had replenished the core, he'd felt the corrupting influence – the essence of Thaiss's brother – flee to the City Below. Everyone assumed that it had fled to Insint, a natural ally, but Tom wasn't so sure. After all, it now emerged that Insint had been linked with the Maker in some way and ultimately been responsible for sending Tom up-City in search of a Demon's egg, which Thaiss's brother would surely have known was a myth. So perhaps the two were never actually allies in the first place.

  Someone else, though, had been in the City Below at the time.

  Tom had done a lot of thinking in the past few days, about Thaiss, her brother, the city, and the core. Everything he'd learned had been fed to him through the filter of the goddess's own prejudices, and one thing he'd learned from a life spent on the streets was that there were always two sides to any story. Memories of his merger with the core still troubled him, and he realised this was far more than just an energy source. How much influence did it have on events? Had it got what it wanted? Had the core decided that Thaiburley was due a change?

  One thing Tom had come to realise about Thaiss and her sort was that they played the long game. It seemed to him that if an intelligence as old and cunning as her brother was supposed to be had gained controlling influence over the core, that intelligence would have made contingencies, preparations in case its grand scheme failed.

  There were many in the streets who maintained that a name held power. Certainly Tom had felt a kinship with his namesake, the arkademic now the Prime Master, ever since he heard Magnus call his victim "Thomas" and realised that he and this man shared the same name. Yet he could have sworn he'd witnessed that Thomas being murdered, stabbed to death and then flung from the city's walls – the event that changed his life forever. He'd been told afterwards that only the skill of Thaiburley's finest healers had saved Thomas. But healers drew on the core for their talent. A core which, by that time, had been corrupted by the intruding essence of Thaiss's brother and which, Tom was becoming increasingly certain, had a will of its own. What if it wasn't the healers' skill alone that so spectacularly brought a man back from the brink of death?

  Thaiburley's new Prime Master looked back, smiled and waved as he entered a stairwell and disappeared from sight. Tom reflected on something, one of the titbits of information that had bubbled to the surface as all the knowledge and history he'd assimilated at Thaiss's citadel finally settled into place. Buried within so many other facts was a detail that had otherwise been conspicuous by its absence.

  He now knew the name of Thaiss's brother. His name was Thomas.

 

 

 
 

 

ANGRY ROBOT

 

A member of the Osprey Group
Midland House, West Way
Botley, Oxford

OX2 0PH UK

 

www.angryrobotbooks.com
 

A hundred reasons to live

 

Copyright © Ian Whates 2012

 

Ian Whates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

 

ISBN: 978-0-85766-189-0

EBook ISBN: 978-0-85766-191-3

 

Cover art by Greg Bridges.

Set in Meridien by THL Design.

 

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD.

 

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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.