The City (27 page)

He would do his best to detach himself from Em first, to put her in a place of safety, but, much as he loved her, he knew he might condemn her with himself.

So the old general drifted from one little band of plotters to the next, never staying long enough to risk identification, always watching and waiting for the one man who could help him penetrate the
palace, then the Keep, and reach Araeon. To get into the palace you needed the right papers, the right face. The Keep was next to impossible to infiltrate and the Immortal was said seldom to leave it these days.

He caught Sully’s eye and the small man smiled slightly. He was the only one Bart had any time for, for the man listened to the bluster and idle threats of the soldiers and took them all in, revealing little. He wondered if Sully was a spy. In case he was being watched, Bart always took a roundabout route home and, if he was in any doubt, stayed at an inn overnight and returned in the plain light of day.

After listening to hours of pointless gossip, fuelled by ale brought by the whore’s ancient mother from downstairs, Bartellus resolved to abandon this group, but try to stay in contact with Sully. He would not attend the next meeting, but he would wait outside and follow Sully home afterwards. He had not the energy for midnight skulking this night.

Halfway through a meandering yarn by Vitellus he suddenly got up and walked to the door and left without a word. He heard them sneering at him as he went down the stairs.

In the Great Storm the rains had come down too hard and fast for the sewers and storm drains to cope, and the narrow streets of the Armoury had become raging rivers. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had died in the flash floods, drowned in the seething streets or trapped helpless in their homes. It was rumoured that the City’s gravediggers could not respectfully lay to rest all the corpses, and that after dark for weeks afterwards carts rumbled through the night carrying the dead out to the Salient to be dropped in the sea. Since then the quarter of Lindo seemed to lie lower, sinking into sodden foundations. Cellars previously dry lay under water, and residents whose homes already stood in the wet had been forced to move to the upper rooms, despairing of keeping their goods and furnishings dry.

The white cats of Lindo did not like to get their paws wet and had migrated to the upper levels – the roofs and upper storeys, the bridges and buttresses which supported the crumbling buildings. They abandoned the damp streets and waterlogged cellars to the brown rats, only coming down at night to feed.

Many of the cats were still pure white. Over the centuries they had
often mated with lower feline orders, but their bloodline was strong, and when a deviation occurred – brown paws or a ginger mask – it would disappear again in later generations. They mated often amongst themselves, and raised their kits in the nooks and crevices of the crumbling chimney stacks and rotting eaves on the north side of Blue Duck Alley.

The sky bridge between the House of Glass and the lodging house opposite was a highway for the cats. They would hunt at night among the hovels of the shack and shanty village south of the alley. Then, when daylight threatened, they would make their way to the glass-maker’s house, ascending its wedding cake of storeys with ease, and cross the wooden sky bridge to their nests.

Far below them Bartellus, returning home after midnight, gazed up and saw the white shapes gliding across the sky. He sniffed the air. The cobbled stones of Blue Duck Alley were cooling quickly, radiating their stored warmth into the night. And they told their own story in the smells they released. Bart guessed a barrel had broken when Doro’s alehouse had received a delivery, for good wood was hard to come by these days. The contents had sloshed down the alley and the stones were still sticky under his boots. There was the faint scent of herbs as well. Bartellus sniffed again. Perhaps cooking smells from Meggy’s lodging house, for the woman used cheap herbs to disguise the unwholesome whiff of cheaper meat. Or a whore had passed by recently, her skin rubbed with herbs to make up for lack of soap. And laid over all there was the familiar and sharp stench of blood and shit which signalled a death somewhere near the alley on this warm summer’s day.

Bartellus noted this with interest but without revulsion. In fact his stomach was grumbling. He had eaten a good rich stew at the Shining Stars, but that was long hours before, and he looked forward to a hunk of the bread he had purchased that morning, with cheese from the dairy in Parting Street, and onion relish he had bought from Meggy, which he guessed was made by the whore who rented her attic. Meggy’s food had improved considerably since the young woman had moved in with her two boys in the summer.

Bart glanced up at the attic window, where a faint light shone. He wondered if she plied her trade in the same room where she lived with her two boys. It was of no more than passing interest. She was scarcely more than a child herself, and thin as a sword.

He left the alley, ducking into the narrow passageway beside the House of Glass and dragging out the big iron key which opened the side door. The door was always locked. They had two keys – one was always on Bartellus’ person, the other hung on a hook inside the door. If Bart was out he locked the door from the outside. If Frayling needed to go out too, Emly used the second key to lock the door from the inside. Then Frayling had to knock to be let back in. There had never been a day in the last two years when all three of them had left the house at the same time.

He was expecting to be greeted by midnight silence, to slip quietly into his bed and permit thoughts of plotters and conspiracies to drift from his mind. But he was scarcely through the door when he was waylaid by both Emly, clattering down the stairs, and Frayling, looming suddenly from his ground-floor workroom.

‘There was a watcher,’ Frayling told him, glancing at Emly, who nodded. ‘A soldier. Miss Emly saw him. I think he means us ill.’

This amounted to garrulousness from the young workman, but worry was etched across his face, so Bartellus hid his amusement. He looked at Emly, whose face was anxious too.

‘When was this?’

Frayling burst out, ‘Four days ago, then again today. He was watching the house.’ He looked to Emly again. She nodded.

‘A soldier,’ she whispered.

They both watched him, looking for reassurance. He shook his head. ‘Why do you say he was watching the house, Em?’

‘He
was
,’ she answered. ‘Fair and tall,’ she added. ‘Red uniform.’

She was never a child to panic about trifles, so Bart knew she was probably right about what she saw. He remembered Creggan’s words about a soldier asking questions and a muscle in his heart cramped.

‘How old?’

She shrugged. She could not guess the ages of men.

Bartellus, his brow furrowed, threw off his greatcoat and climbed the stairs to the candlelit parlour, followed by the two youngsters. He crossed the stifling room and poured himself a glass of wine from the jug. He sat down in the comfortable chair he always used, and sighed.

Emly and Frayling stood waiting for him to speak.

‘This is not good news,’ he admitted. ‘This might be about my past – my past before I became Bartellus.’ He looked at Frayling, but if the youngster found his words surprising he gave no sign of it. ‘If this
soldier is watching us it might be he knows who I am. Then others may also know, and we are in danger and will have to leave here.’

And, he did not have to add, Emly could no longer pursue her vocation, and they would have to disappear, perhaps travel overseas, for Bartellus could now afford the life of a rich man if not his reputation.

Emly’s face fell and his heart was cut by the pain in her eyes.

’But,’ he said, cursing himself, for tiredness had made him careless, ‘it might have nothing to do with me. Perhaps he is merely planning to rob the House of Glass.’ He smiled at Em, seeking to calm her fears, but she stared back at him with big eyes and he remembered the little girl he had first met, eyes wide, blank with terror and dread. And he vowed to himself at that moment that if this watcher had truly found him, found Shuskara the lost general, then he would kill him, and kill whoever he acted for, and he would bury his past for ever.

He smiled broadly at Em and told her, putting confidence in his voice, ‘It won’t come to that. I’ll see that everything will be all right.’

He felt the warm solidity of certainty in his chest, and his spirits soared at his own words. He almost felt like laughing. In truth, he would kill a thousand men if it would put a smile back on his daughter’s face.

In the days that followed Em was consumed with worry about the threat of the watcher, despite her father’s words. But eventually fear of the unknown soldier had been replaced in her heart by fear of the trip to the merchant’s house.

Now the day had arrived, the warmest of the year so far, and Emly sat in a jolting carriage, her father beside her, followed by three carts holding the sea window as they made their way through the dusty City. At the last moment, leaving the House of Glass, Emly had snatched up her old veil to protect her from the sun and the hot swirling dust. Now she was glad she had it, for their little cortège was accompanied by an armed guard, employed by the merchant, of more than thirty soldiers. She and Bartellus sat in the open carriage facing backwards, watching over their precious cargo. Bart was quite at ease among so many soldiers, and they joked and laughed with him as they marched alongside, but Em found it hard to bear the covert looks of the men, and she ducked her head and looked down at her
best blue dress. As ever, she stroked the tiny horse and dog attached to the veil. Over the years five more animals had joined their strength to weigh down the veil. But it was still the horse and the dog she loved best, and she galloped them across her blue lap, exercising them on this sunny morning.

She had kept the veil after they escaped the Halls, for it was her only possession apart from the ragged clothes the warrior woman had given her. In times of fear, and there were many in their first days out in daylight, she would clutch the wadded, dirty cloth in her fists, and gaze at the horse and the dog and pretend that she lived in a safe place and the two animals were her best friends. It was some time before Bart found them their first home, and a great deal longer before she started to feel secure there. Then she washed the veil over and over, cleaning out the last remnants of the sewer, laying it out in the cleansing sun to dry. Spread out, she could see it was cunningly made of a shiny thread that was fine but tough. It was a long time before she noticed there was a pattern in the lace. The pattern had probably been clearer, she thought, when the veil still held its tints. There were animals concealed in the stitchwork, following each other in a circle. Once she found one, the others were easier to see. There was a dog and a horse, a strange misshapen creature she discovered was called a wyvern, a seahorse, a rabbit and a dolphin. And in the centre was a gulon, its bushy tail curled around the shape of a heart. Delighted, she had shown the animals to her father, but his eyes were too weak to discern them among the intricate threadwork and, besides, he wasn’t really interested.

The going was very slow and there was a long way to travel in the jolting carriage. They descended the winding length of Blue Duck Alley until they reached the wall of the temple of Ascarides. Then they followed the wall, with its sturdy lean-to shops and merchants’ houses, and passed the barracks of the Maritime Army, now empty and echoing, a dark place under the summer sun. They crossed the edge of Burman Far, Bartellus pointed out to her, with its temples and bathhouses, and went on to Otaro. They had travelled nearly half a day before they reached the Avenue of Victory.

‘Look,’ her father said, nudging Em. ‘You can see the Red Palace from here.’

Emly pushed back her veil and peered in the direction he was pointing. In the sun she could see distant towers gleaming.

‘Green?’ she asked, frowning.

‘Some of the towers are covered with gold, they say, more probably copper. But the old part of the palace is built of pink marble imported from the western continents many hundreds of years ago.’

Emly smiled politely, but she only wanted to learn about things that lived, that ran and swam and flew. Not old buildings.

The carriage and its following carts turned sharply away from the Avenue into a narrower street lined with high buildings. It was cooler here, where the sun could not reach them. The walls were high and looked damp, and green moss crawled up them, clinging to the dank brick.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said Bartellus quietly, and Em’s stomach clenched with anxiety.

They drew up outside a tall house, standing alone on one side of a quiet square. The square was six-sided, paved with warm golden stone, with a fountain in the middle. Em looked up at the house, of the same soft stone and decorated with carvings. There were many windows, and above each was a carved beast, an animal or bird or fish. Above the main door in front of them were two porpoises, leaping side by side. Em smiled to herself and her stomach relaxed a little. Perhaps this merchant had commissioned her sea window because he liked creatures of the sea.

As the carriage pulled up the main door opened and a flurry of servants rushed out. Two brought wooden steps to the carriage, for Emly and Bartellus to climb down. The same two then accompanied them up the three wide shallow steps to the door, hovering as if to catch them if they suddenly tumbled down. Inside the porch more servants offered Em and her father cool water in crystal glasses. Meanwhile the rest were busy unloading the glass panels as the soldiers stood by. Em could hear Frayling’s high anxious voice offering diffident orders.

They were shown through to the courtyard of the house which, Em was charmed to see, was a replica of the square outside, six-sided, with a pool full of colourful fish in the centre. Here the merchant met them, florid and sweating, effusive and kind. As Em gazed round the courtyard, taking in the windows and carvings, sidling towards the pool to look at the fish, he smiled and asked, ‘Do you like my house, Miss Emly?’