Scar Night (19 page)

T
he crippled thaumaturge lived inside the Sparrow Bridge in Chapelfunnel. A towering wooden construction built upon a granite deck, the bridge spanned the abyss between Tanners’ Gloom on the west side and the old coalgas towers on the east. Once open to the sky, and wide enough to allow two carts to pass side by side, Sparrow Bridge had formerly been a symbol of the district’s booming coalgas industry. In years past, workers could peer over its balustrades and see a canal of air and chains plough deep into the Warrens, hedged on both sides by walls of good strong flint and trunks of smoke. But prosperity brings wealth, and wealth brings men, and men need to be housed. Now Sparrow Bridge towered to four storeys. Homes had been built above, stacked one upon the other like children’s bricks and sewn up with chains bolted to any anchor available. Pinched roofs bucked across its summit in a ragged line. Forty or so families had lived in the bridge before Thomas Scatterclaw settled here. Carts still trundled through the long tunnel below the houses, loaded with leather for the Chapelfunnel market or steel from the dismantled coalgas yards, but now moving only one at a time, and only in the daytime.

Mr. Nettle looked up at the bridge. Scaffolding clung to the outside of the houses, but it was sagging, the poles and ladders rotten. There were holes in the roofs where shingles had come loose. Broken windows fronted the abyss, all of them dark but one, high up, where a dull red light glowed.

“Iron, is it?”

Mr. Nettle turned towards the voice. The man emerging from the tunnel sat on a low, wheeled platform and pushed himself along with bandaged hands. As the man drew near, Mr. Nettle saw that his legs had been severed below the knee. Despite this, he remained powerful. Muscles bunched on his broad chest. His arms looked strong enough to break a horse’s neck. Two deep scars, like sword wounds, running down his left forearm made Mr. Nettle think he might once have been a soldier or a temple guard.

“Is it enough?” Mr. Nettle asked.

“Depends what you want,” the man said. Wheels squeaked under him. “But no, in the end it won’t be enough.”

“That supposed to be a riddle?”

The man grunted. “Danning is my name. Want to know what happened to my legs?”

“No.”

The other man grinned. “You’ll want to speak to Mr. Scatterclaw. Upstairs. I’ll take the iron.”

“Might be he can’t help me.”

Danning shrugged. “Not my problem. That’s how it works here.”

The scrounger hesitated. Smith’s pig iron was a fortune to someone from the League, enough to feed him for six months or more. If the thaumaturge was unable to help, Mr. Nettle couldn’t imagine any future for himself. But what if Scatterclaw
could
help him? That future might be worse than none at all.

“Can’t make up your mind for you,” Danning said, “but it seems to me you’ve risked plenty coming here already.” He smiled, but it was not a kind smile. “Mr. Scatterclaw knows you’re here. And if Mr. Scatterclaw knows, the Maze knows.”

Mr. Nettle released his grip on the trolley.

Danning tilted his head. “Door beside the red window.” He pushed himself over to the trolley, grabbed the handles, and eased them back so that they rested on his wide shoulders. Then, grunting, he set off the way he had come, six wheels squeaking now.

The scaffolding wobbled the whole way up. Greasy ropes protested and soft planks dipped, but Mr. Nettle reached the uppermost catwalk without incident. The Chapelfunnel canal curved away below him, broken by moonlit chains into narrow strips of abyss. Beside the door, red light sweated through a warped window, blurred red shapes inside. Mr. Nettle stashed his backpack in the shadows and knocked.

A brusque voice issued from inside. “He’s here. Hide yourselves.”

The scrounger waited. He did not want to think about who or what Thomas Scatterclaw might be speaking to. Iril had opened many doors inside Sparrow Bridge.

“We have company,” Scatterclaw bellowed. “Do you want to frighten him out of his wits? Get out of my sight. All of you. Hide!”

Mr. Nettle listened at the door for a long time. He heard nothing further. No footfalls. Nothing. Not knowing what else to do, he knocked again.

A pause, then: “Come in.”

The door revealed a wall of broken glass. Razor-sharp shards of every shape and colour had been glued to a wooden partition set a few feet back from the door. Eight feet high, this partition stretched away on either side to the edges of a long room. It formed a narrow corridor from which a dozen other corridors, also faced with broken glass, led off into the interior. A red lantern depended from the rafters, its light the colour of blood.

A maze? The thaumaturge had built a shrine to Iril. Mr. Nettle stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The corridor was just wide enough to allow him to move sideways along it without tearing his clothes on the glass fragments. Mazes, in any form, were forbidden in Deepgate. Iril’s demons drew power from mazes. Not two months ago, an Ivygarths silversmith had been dragged before the Avulsior for crafting a brooch, it was said, of such intricacy that it had been likened to Iril’s corridors. But here was a real maze, a solid thing composed of wood and glass. The Church would burn it to the ground if they discovered it.

He edged along to the first intersection. Another corridor ran to a dead end twenty feet ahead. Six more branched off from it. Mr. Nettle called out, “Scatterclaw?”

“Over here.”

But the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. Mr. Nettle turned carefully into the sharp passageway and eased himself along, wary of losing his way. On one side he noted a crescent-shaped shard of glass, black in the red light, and tried to burn it into his memory. He decided on the third branch on the right.

A third lengthy corridor, at least forty feet long, with many more leading away from it. The scrounger frowned. From the outside, Sparrow Bridge did not seem wide enough to contain all this. He looked back, spied the crescent-shaped shard, then squeezed on between the treacherous glass walls and shuffled deeper into the maze. Something nicked his shoulder and he halted, felt blood trickle down his back.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Scatterclaw cried. “Stay where you are, all of you. He is not lost. You are not lost, are you, Scrounger?”

“No.”

“Then proceed.”

Sweat ran from Mr. Nettle’s brow, but he dared not lift his hand to mop it. There was barely room to breathe in here. He sucked in his chest and moved on again. Another opening led to another corridor and this one appeared to stretch for twice the length of the last. Walls of glass glistened blackly. Nothing made sense: the entire room could not be more than sixty feet wide. He glanced up and saw the lantern overhead. Had it always been hanging directly above his head? He was growing weary of this.

“Scatterclaw,” he shouted.

“Don’t linger. They know where you are.”

“Who?”

No reply.

Mr. Nettle cursed and moved on. He took a left, edged fifty paces, then a right. When he looked up the lantern was still there, directly above. Damn the thaumaturge. Wasn’t it enough that he’d paid a wealth of iron to speak to the man? Now he was expected to crawl through this trap. He’d half a mind to climb the partition, get a good look at the place, or use his cleaver to shave away some of the glass fragments.

But Mr. Nettle did neither. Thomas Scatterclaw was not a man he wanted to anger. Folks said he’d come across the Yellow Sea from a place where Iril was worshipped. They said he’d come here a hundred and forty years ago and his body had been grey and fleshless then. They said he’d pierced his lips, ears, and eyes with splinters of gallows wood so that he could converse with demons, and that he’d had nails hammered into his spine to keep his gaze from Heaven while he slept.

The scrounger waited for a dozen breaths, and then pushed on. A left, then another left. Twenty paces. A right. Ten paces. Another right. Always the same wickedly sharp corridors, always the same blood-coloured lantern overhead. Had he been tricked? Was he to spend the rest of his life in here? He wandered for what seemed like hours, down corridor after corridor, glass inches from his chest and inches from his back.

Finally he stopped.

Ten paces ahead was an opening in the left wall. But this did not lead to another corridor; it opened into a wider space. Even from here he could see another partition a short distance beyond, but this time a wall without glass. Warily, Mr. Nettle approached it.

Thomas Scatterclaw sat cross-legged in the centre of a box-like space some twenty feet across and hemmed in by partition walls. A deep-red robe and cowl hid every inch of him, but Mr. Nettle thought he saw bumps in the cloth on the man’s back where no bumps should be. On the floor in front of him, a rusty kitchen knife and a plain, chipped bowl. The bowl was full of blood.

Mr. Nettle grunted. “You the thaumaturge?”

“Take the knife and open a vein.” Thomas Scatterclaw didn’t look up. “Add your blood to this—to the dead blood.”

“What for?”

“Do it quickly.”

“You don’t know what I want.”

“No,” Scatterclaw said, “but Iril does. Quickly now, there are demons in here.”

Mr. Nettle glanced round. Nothing but the tired wooden partitions. No sounds, no creak of wood. The thaumaturge was trying to unnerve him.

“Now,” Scatterclaw snarled.

Mr. Nettle picked up the knife, and without thinking any more about it, cut across the back of his hand behind his thumb. Blood welled and trickled over his hand.

“In the bowl,” Scatterclaw said. “Hurry.”

Mr. Nettle did as he was told.

Iril’s priest appeared to shudder beneath his robe. He leaned forward and picked up the bowl, and Mr. Nettle saw that his exposed hands were black and gnarled as though they had been burned, the fingers twisted around each other like tightly woven roots. Had the thaumaturge done this to himself too? Scatterclaw tilted the bowl under his cowl, and drank.

Disgusted, the scrounger watched the man drain the bowl and set it down.

“Do not close your eyes,” Scatterclaw said. “Not for an instant. Do you understand? No more than a blink. They get in through your eyes but only if you cannot see them. They will try to sneak up on you, trick you. If they get inside you, you will never leave this maze. You’ll stay trapped in here with them until Iril comes for you.”

“Who?”

“The Non Morai.”

Again Mr. Nettle looked around anxiously.

“You’ll see them if you look hard enough,” Scatterclaw said. “And I advise you
do
look hard. Be thankful it isn’t dark, for darkness makes them bold. All that trouble on Cog Island was caused by the Non Morai at night. Doors from Hell attract them like flies.”

The light in the room appeared to thicken, until Mr. Nettle felt as though he was straining to see through a red veil. Walls and floor and rafters turned a dark, dark red that was almost black. He heard movement behind him and whirled round. Nothing. Now he could smell an odour like spoiled meat. Something moved at the corner of his vision, as though trying to approach unseen, but when he swung to look, there was nothing there. Yet Mr. Nettle felt an aura of malice in that empty space, so strong his heartbeats quickened.

Thomas Scatterclaw breathed slow and deep, and then spoke in a glutinous voice that was not his own. “How many are here?”

Behind him, Mr. Nettle heard a chorus of whispers.
Eleven
.

He wheeled, saw nothing.

“And a living soul,” Scatterclaw said.

Ours,
the voices hissed.

Thomas Scatterclaw, or whatever had taken possession of him, was silent for a long time, and then the cowl turned to face Mr. Nettle. “Your daughter is not with us. A living man has taken her.”

The scrounger’s fists bunched. “Who?”

“He is diseased. Hafe reaches for him.”

“Hafe?”

“The hell of the fourth angel. Halls of dirt and poison. Green ghosts, harrowcells, and flowers.”

Mr. Nettle frowned. The Maze, he suspected, was trying to confuse him. So it was with Iril. “Who is he?”

Voices then swarmed all around Mr. Nettle.
Close your eyes. Let us in and we’ll tell you
.

For a heartbeat the scrounger almost obeyed. It seemed the most natural thing to close his eyes, to let the voices inside. But some part of him resisted. “Who is he?”

The voices hissed, snarled.

Thomas Scatterclaw said, “Devon.”

S
moke rose from smouldering censers around the Sinners’ Well and hung in a fragrant pall between the severed heads. Nine of the twenty spikes were occupied: six men, two women, a child. Pulpboard signs proclaimed them blasphemers, Iril worshippers, or Heshette spies. All rooted out by the Spine, brought before Ichin Samuel Tell to be redeemed before the mob. Their bodies had been cast, still bleeding, into the abyss; the heads left as a reminder of Spine efficacy. Fogwill surveyed the scene through watering eyes and breathed through the folds of his sleeve. Was his man here? Was he too late?

Then, in the shadows, he spied the glow of a pipe. It lit up a narrow, dirt-streaked face, and then all was dark again. Fogwill approached his spy.

“Good evening, Adjunct,” the man said.

“Any developments?” Fogwill asked.

“No. He works late, as usual.”

“You managed to get away without any problems?”

The man sucked on his pipe till it illuminated ranks of narrow teeth, bony cheeks, and a knife-thin nose. “Left for a smoke, didn’t I? Half the workers do it.” He grinned. “Who was going to stop me? The furnace gaffer? He’s scared of me. I still got my knife, and they all know it.”

Fogwill glanced over at the nearest head. Crows had already taken the woman’s eyes and lips. He grimaced. “Why did we have to meet here? I abhor this place.”

“I like it here.” Smoke leaked through the spy’s teeth. “The heads tell me things.”

Fogwill tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. The man was a lunatic. “What things?” he asked, despite himself.

“Secret things,” the spy said.

“Blood has been shed here,” the Adjunct said. “It’s dangerous. God knows what
things
might be lurking here.”