Day Boy (4 page)

There's a gate hanging on its hinges, I give that some sweat too, and a creaking
floorboard (nothing under, because I checked). Gutters, gates, floorboards uncreaked.
George has done all right out of his visitor: a rough night for a gentle day.

I wait till he wakes, look at his books, nothing too salacious. And when he wakes,
we drink. Get him some more cold water, up from the basement.

‘Your Master doesn't take much,' George says, ‘but it hurts and wearies anyway, that
little bit.'

He doesn't take much. He takes everything.

Most of them sleep in wine cellars, our Masters curled up there far far older than
the grog, but Dain don't. He lies in a bed. Likes to be close to the air.

‘Something comes for me, boy—it'll do just as well down or up.'

I don't reckon there's a single boy who hasn't sneaked in to see their Master sleeping.
It's deeper than sleep. They're like stone. No breath, just an awful stillness. I
slapped Dain's face once, and he didn't even move. That's why they need us. They
sleep so deep, they sleep in the memory of their past, and that's an awful big chink
in their armour. Still, even then killing one would be hard. Asleep their skin is
stony, break most knives, turn or blunt most sharp
things. They can be dragged out
into the light, of course; burn away that way.

Best time for killing's the gloaming, we reckon. Skin's supple, penetrable as Dain
says, and they're dozy for an hour or two, not quite awake. Though they're quick
to wake if they sense a threat to them and theirs.

We boys talk about such things. Boastful like. As though we could kill our Masters,
as though they wouldn't have their hands—or worse—round our necks quick smart, snapping
and snarling and seeing us out of such stupidity.

I've seen Dain leave by the cellar window, I've seen him flow cross the night like
some dark breath blown by the moon. He's fast in the way an eagle's fast, in its
effortless diving flight and endless hunger. You don't kill that. Much easier dying,
and many have, many folk much stronger than me.

I sleep in the room next over, and I wake with his passage. That darkness coming
and going, it's stronger than a change in the air, or a smell, though it's both (he
can't hide his smell, the raw meat odour of him). It's electric. Makes your hair
stand on end.

I'm a Day Boy, but it don't preclude night works.

CHAPTER
5

I'M STILL MOVING slow by nightfall. My skin's too tight, my bones too sore. Dain's
home, watching me, going to work on his book like he does most nights when he's not
visiting or swinging wide circles around the town, keeping guard against the monsters.
He has a distracted look. He's still angry with me, and more.

He calls for a sherry—purely to be difficult I'm sure—and I bring it quick smart.
Put it on the table by his desk; there's a drop of the reddish liquid on the edge
of the glass and I wipe it away lest it drip on all that scrawled-on paper, stacked
neat to one side of him.

His study's always neat, that chair, his desk with the stack of papers that grows
steadily but never by much. He writes in ink, scratching away on one side only, and
most of those sheets find the bin. He goes through so much paper. I'm sent least
once a month to pick up a box when the Night Train comes.

Dain looks over at me, reading again the story of the bruises,
and I feel the shame
of them rising in my face. There's a softening takes place in his eyes; the sharp
line of his mouth finds a smudge. He puts down his pen. ‘Nothing but thugs, most
of those boys. Except Egan's. Grove, that one's been raised right; I know he's settling
on making him a Master. The rest are not shown any other way to be, they're left
to run wild. Don't make me think I've failed you.'

How is it that Dain can talk about his failure and make me feel it's mine? Because
it is, I suppose. I could have left that fight, I could have run, been marked as
a coward, though. What does Dain know of cowardice?

‘You've never failed me,' I say. ‘But this world's the rough one into which I'm thrown.'

‘And I can throw you out of it,' Dain says, swiping a hand at me, though not without
affection. I dart all a-wince backwards.

‘You've time to heal now,' Dain mumbles, waving an arm at some vague sentiment in
the air. ‘But it won't always be the case. This is not a time for you to start feuding,
the days are running down. And you must be more careful.' Dain rubs at his lip, his
face grown long. He sniffs at the air and draws in a breath that he doesn't need.
‘Now fetch me some paper and refill my good pen. And a finger of whisky, the black
label, you know the one.'

I do, and I know he's truly settled in for the night. Means I've got more grump headed
my way. He takes the whisky. Sips a little, rolls it in his mouth, sighs. Picks up
his pen again, then puts it down.

‘Why do you set yourself at failure, boy, with myriad other paths laid out before
you? You are a prince of these dry streets.
You've the gifts of your station, and
you cast it all aside with a smile. Never has a child been more determined for ruin.
Why? The love of falling? Is that it?'

‘I don't know. I try—'

‘Then don't! Stop trying.' He lifts a hand in disgust. ‘You can go to bed now. There'll
be a list as long as both your arms tomorrow.'

I groan.

‘Twice as long!'

Hot nights like this all you can do is toss and turn, the sheets all rasp and ruin.
There's night birds calling, and the town feels small, huddled against the greater
dark. The day's grown smaller, they say, and the night's grown huge and toothy. You
know what it's like when you can't sleep, and each aching fragment of the night
passes slow and steady, and the late hours lumber, full of thoughts that you wouldn't
think when your brain's Sunlit.

Most days I wish I was cleverer than I am. Cleverer and less mouthy. Grove gets into
trouble because he doesn't know better, and thinks too kindly of the world. I get
into trouble because I'm too impatient with it.

And time is running down. There's a city calling me, and I'll see it if I'm lucky
but I'm feeling my luck run thin, feeling old too. Choices heaped ahead of me, and
I feel so ill-equipped to make them.

I like to hold things in my hand, get a good grip of them. Like to work them out
and solve them. There's nothing of that now, no answers in this night-time murk.

The Night Train comes and goes, its cargo unladen, its
whistle calling out, and I'm
still awake. Still thinking. Thinking. Thinking.

When I tumble to sleep, it's a lean sort of thing, no meat or fat to the bones, just
a gristle of drinks not drunk, of girls not kissed, and a tall man, with a taste
for civility who's disappointed with what he raised.

Do the Masters sleep deep during the day, as their God traverses the heavens? How
can they not be stirred by the day, the furious quickener of blood? Yet I have seen
him abed, flesh hard as stone, flesh that you could not pierce with a knife. I've
placed a mirror to his lips and seen not a breath. I've called his name and he has
not stirred.

But do they rest?

He told me once what they dream of.

‘The Sun, blessed and pure, a long shore, a wave that breaks, and the hunt. These
are the endless things, so deep in us that we are nothing without them. We dream
of a place that is all predation: a place between the light and the dark where the
blood is hot and sweet, and everything is possessed of purity. We dream of that perfection.
But it retreats from us; no matter how we reach out or run we cannot catch it.

‘Oh, and sometimes in our dreams, when a boy is foolish enough—and he has to have
a lot of foolish in his veins—we hear him call our name.' Dain's face lost a good
bit of its whimsy. ‘Do not call me in my sleep. Do not disturb my dreams.'

Sometimes I looked in his eyes and all I could see was that shore, receding, receding,
but never quite gone. You can see time in
their eyes, a stream of moments shrugged
off. ‘What do we have without the oppression of time?' Dain once asked. ‘We've all
the crystalline perfection of forever.'

It's the sea that calls them, and the Sun that rises out of it.

CHAPTER
6

I SHOULDN'T HAVE been here by the river and I should've been watching, what with
the fact that this place is off limits to me, and also rightly dangerous. It's past
the borders that the Masters define as safe, and it's territory that is none of my
business. But I've been here before, and nothing went wrong. Just looking for yabbies
in the dirty water—you get a bunch of them, cook them up (all squealing, the damn
things cry for mercy no matter what Dain says) and they're tasty. I had a hunger
for them today, and there was already a bunch of them on the grass beside me, insecty
legs twitching. All that sweet meat not knowing what I had planned for it.

But I'm tired. And tired's halfway to blind, which is why I shouldn't have been here.

I almost miss the fella that comes out of the grass by the river. Slick and fast
as a snake. I get just a flash of that movement in the corner of my eye and I roll
and bolt straight into the water. So I'm only touched by the briefest passing of
the
knife: a slice, skin parting, blood spilling, but I'm not spitted on it, which
was what the bastard was aiming for. Then water soaks me or blood or both.

He grunts behind me and I'm already scrambling deep into water, fast as the fire
in that cut, fast as fear into the reeds and rocks and they're all slapping and scratching
at my feet, maybe even a big old catfish having a nibble as I crash past.

Don't have much on me. Just my pocket knife and the piss in my pants.

I shouldn't have been there, but I was.

Dain would be mad—even more than he is already. But that is a black cloud on the
horizon of later. Now is a knife at my back and the heavy breaths of a man too close
behind.

I've a choice: left or right?

Left leads against the flow of the river, and out of town. Right swings back around,
heads towards Handly Bridge. I've jumped off its edge often enough, but the man's
already crashing that way. I can swim but not that fast. And left there's bulrushes
and cover. So I go that way, hoping there's no one else. I slap against the weight
of the river, already up against my thighs, flicking my gaze back.

The man's giving chase with a machete in one thick-fingered hand. He's bearded, round
at the belly, arms thick as my legs. I know the type. I can smell the grog even from
here, drinks to keep himself brave. It'll make him clumsy, though. Probably been
watching me and mine, waiting for the right time. Waiting for one of us to do something
stupid.

And it had to be me.

I think of Dougie, Grove, the Parson boys, those crazy twins with the wild eyes,
and Twitch, nervous and laughing,
always running or riding or worrying. I'm faster
on my feet than all of them and I'm the one's going to get gutted by a drunk with
a big knife.

Not yet.

Not yet.

The reeds close around me, and I run where I know they're thickest and the water's
deepest, shouting:
Got a knife too. Cut you if you come closer.

He grunts again but he doesn't come through the reeds and I find myself a hidey hole,
been playing and hiding in these waters since I can remember—no matter that I shouldn't
a been there. Been clipped under the ear for it many times, too, given a bloody nose
and a head ringing. Dain's not cruel, not in that way, but some things he wants to
make stick, he says, since he can't watch over me when the Sun rises. Boys are allowed
some mischiefs, but they're not allowed everything. That'd be anarchy plain and simple.