The Year of Our War (14 page)

T
wo hundred years ago in Hacilith the air was dreadful. I remember that I was coughing so badly I dropped my guitar and doubled up, trying to spit. Babitt the dwarf perched up on the black iron railings.

“Put it this way, Shira,” he said eventually. “I wouldn’t give up your night job.” I remember the stench of the seagull oil which he used to set his hair.

I spluttered, “I can play it! But it would be nice if I could breathe.”

“Felicitia says you’ve made more money dealing and so you should stick to that. He says he can’t feed us. He says there’s no money left in our gang.” Babitt scratched at a hairy backside, which his patchwork trousers scarcely covered. I picked up the guitar, began to retune it.

Babitt was pudgy, hairy, short, and smug, I was tall and usually bemused; I’m sure we looked well together. We hated each other but Felicitia’s word was law. Once I remember he ripped off a pet shop and Babitt called me up one night and said, “Look, I have two thousand goldfish, what can you do?”

I said, “Didn’t you get the money?”

Patiently he answered, “Felicitia got the money. I got the goldfish.”

So, anyway, I explained to him that I’d given up dealing, because Peterglass had a contract out for me, and I was sick of having my clientele trail around after me everywhere like the undead. Babitt gave up scratching his arse and started scratching his mustache.

“Felicitia will be angry with you.”

“He could be pretentious at me, is that it?”

I crouched down and began gathering our coins before Babitt could get his hairy hands on them.

“You might not know this, but even Felicitia goes under if I stop dealing,” I added.

Babitt grinned, which was not a pretty sight. “Shira, I know it. You’ll never stop pushing cat in Hacilith. You’re hooked on the power, which is
worse
than being undead.”

“That’s all you know. The whole world will kiss my spurs.” I slammed my hands in deep pockets and slouched off toward Cinder Street. Babitt followed, his eyes at the same level as the guitar across my back. A smell of beer paused us on the steps of the Kentledge pub. We looked at each other, tempted, and eventually gave in. I held the door back while Babitt rolled inside, and dug in my pocket for the handful of grubby coins we’d collected that morning, offered them down in a languid hand for Babitt to translate.

“What are the little round ones with holes?”

“Buttons,” he said.

H
ACILITH
1818, H
OW
F
ELICITIA
D
IED

T
hunder in the morning seemed misplaced, storms should only happen at night. Five in the morning, bruise-brown clouds drifted in from the sea and collected over Hacilith, obscuring the dawn. I had been awake all night watching the person who was watching my house.

I don’t think she’s seen me, but I knew she had a crossbow because she had been practicing on all the cats of the neighborhood. I was out of the shop by the back door, and reached the street corner in the cover of a flaking brick wall. Crouching in litter and broken glass I glanced back to where the girl was waiting. She turned round and looked straight at me. I ran—

—Along a pavement spotted with chewing gum, over a narrow iron bridge, past the Shackle Sheds. The girl loosed her first bolt and it went far wide. I ducked. It hummed past me and lodged in the slats of a high green fence. I scrabbled over and paused for breath on the other side. The fence was covered in graffiti. The best graffiti was mine.

I ran on through dirty puddles and pigeon shit. She lost me at a block corner. I skidded and swore. She heard and put on speed. Hacilith’s thick air caught in my throat, early sunlight reflected on the filthy river. You can’t outrun a Rhydanne, I thought, as her second arrow missed my heel by millimeters. Who the fuck are you, anyway? The Bowyers’ bitch.

I cut across a rubbish tip. The passageways through the refuse were clear to me but the girl’s experience was of the other side of the river and she was wary. Half a kilometer out of her territory and she might as well have been in Scree.

I reached a warehouse by the dockside. Here, rings and iron mushrooms were set into concrete, which narrow boats used to moor and unload. The dock was silted up, derelict; it smelled of salt and decay. The warehouse was the size of three town houses, built of wooden planks now rotten and supported by sandbags. I hammered the fastest-ever secret knock on a smaller door set within the huge sliding gate at the top of a slipway, as the girl emerged, grease in her golden hair.

I slipped inside the warehouse, slammed the door, leaned against it, panting. The head of a crossbow bolt splintered wood by my shoulder. I flung open the door and found her five meters away. She hesitated in fumbling a new bolt into the breech. I unfastened the buttons on my shirt and held it open, giving her an excellent view of an excellent naked chest, then slammed the door again and barred it top and bottom.

Thin laughter trickled from the darkness behind me. My arrival had brought something back to life. A weak voice wheezed, “You’re late, goat-shagger.”

I
n Darkling, things were straightforward. Life in the mountains was simple—I went to bed early, and I was always hungry. Every day was the same; only some days we had more storms, and less food. But Hacilith city draws complication round itself like a cloak. I have a little of the city like pollution in me now. The city supports people who would never have survived in Darkling, for example, Felicitia.

“I had to wait till dawn.” I sighed, picking my way into the bleak space of the warehouse. Torrential rain thrashed on the corrugated roof.

“Thought you could see in the dark?”

“No.”

Felicitia Aver-Falconet lay on a moldering sofa by the side of a low table, the only furniture, in the middle of the pressed earth floor. He was reading by the light of candle stubs, fixed by their own wax to the tabletop.

Aver-Falconet ruled our gang. We were awed by his talk of expensive parties and fashionable society, boastful and offhand. But then, he was the grandson of Hayl Eske who lived at the Castle, and to us the Eszai in his ancestry put him on a par with god. Aver-Falconet had hurt me before, so I hated him. The Wheel he carved into my shoulder has lasted like a brand all my life.

Felicitia devoured my flesh with his eyes. The whites of his eyes were yellowish, and the pupils too high on them, as if they wanted to rise and hide under his eyelids.

“Have you got the drugs?” he asked, anxiously.

“Yeah.”

“Come here and make love to me, oh macilent boy.”

“No!”

“That Wheel on your arm means you belong to me.”

Felicitia wriggled to change position, but couldn’t sit up. He had lingered in the gin-shop with me, in the casino with Layce the cardsharp, and eventually malingered in our dockyard base, shooting up every few hours and reading melodramas. I pinched them when he had finished dog-earing the pages, because I had a vague idea that such knowledge might help me if I ever got to the Castle.

“You’re lucky, my bagnio boy,” he croaked. I continued to appraise him, his only clothes a stained leather skirt wrapped around well-shaved legs, and an ankle chain with a charm in the shape of a wheel. I knew it would be pure gold. I tingled with avarice.

“Oh, and why’s that?”

“That girl is an Eszai-good archer, my ophidian-eyed boy.”

“You know I can fly,” I replied, not without pride. “And I’m an Eszai-good runner. Layce told me so.” The concept that my ability to run, or fly, or fight could be as good as the Eszai was recurring in my mind with infuriating rapidity. I wanted to join them.

Felicitia hummed affirmatively. “I suppose you have to run fast to catch the goats,” he mused.

“I have to run fast to get this madness over and done with before my master wakes up. Are you better now?” I asked, with a mildly professional air. Felicitia was a wisp of flesh, a skeleton in makeup. I could see eye sockets, cheekbones, skin colored blue by innumerable puncture marks. His skin was pale, his mouth slashed with lipstick and a peroxide streak in dark brown hair. The fire in a makeshift hearth was down to smoldering ash scabs. It was becoming cold, but Felicitia wasn’t shivering. He was past shivering; his skin was as cold as the dock water.

“Now? What’s ‘now’?”

“Don’t start that again. Either you’re better, or you’re not. And if you’re not, then I don’t want to know.”

“Nothing matters but cat, my sweet miscegenation. Not even your indescribable beauty.”

“You’re going to die, you know,” I said softly.

“That doesn’t matter, my sweet itinerant,” Aver-Falconet assured me. “I’ll live in the Shift. I’ve been there for days…”

So you keep telling me. “It’s been
months
,” I said.

“I’m in love with the Shift,” he said simply. Informing me of a luscious secret, his cracked voice dropped to a whisper: “You can be anything there. Even female.”

I was disgusted. “What the fuck do you want to be a woman for?”

“For fucking,” said Felicitia, and sighed.

I was unnerved by his power, to break rules I did not know existed. Not regular rules, that were authorized by the Castle or by the Governor; I broke those every day. Felicitia played havoc with the rules of nature.

“There’s a marketplace with jugulars and ferret-eaters and buskers playing pangolins…”

I giggled. “That’s a scaly kind of animal.”

“No, you’re thinking of a peccadillo, my boy.”

Having no fixed point he thought free-form, and came up with plans that shocked us. “Layce loves you,” I said, biting my lip.

“Huh. You can have her, my avid lad.”

If only I could. She was under my power only because Felicitia was dependent on me. I stayed with him because I knew he wanted more than sensation—he legitimately needed escape; it was the way he was formed. I understood because I was a mountain creature stranded in the city, I despaired of fitting in. He was woman in the body of a man, and had taken to scolopendium as a prescription for frustration. I knew he shouldn’t have gone into East Bank with a grain-a-day habit. I would never get him back to the shop.

“I’ve brought your drugs, but I need the money first.”

“Hooked on it, aren’t you?” Felicitia rasped.

“What?”

“Hard cash.”

Oh, yes. Definitely. He offered me a key and I swiftly removed his week’s pocket money from a little strongbox under the table. I counted the notes three or four times, while Felicitia pursed his painted lips like a bar-room bitch. “That’s a hundred quid,” he snapped. “What do you spend it on, sexless?”

“Is it less of a crime if I spend it on books?” I was learning to read Awian, with the notion that it was a Castle language. I was weekly adding to Dotterel’s library back at the shop. Felicitia tutted; he thought that spending money on books was the biggest crime of all.

I touched a white square of paper in the left pocket of my fringed leather trousers. “What if I take the money and run?” I asked, half-jokingly.

Felicitia smoothed his skirt. “My angelic archer outside is waiting for you. At a word from me, she’ll finish you off.”

I didn’t understand. “It’s Peterglass of The Bowyers…” I said. I had assumed Peterglass was sending the assassins because he was a dealer and I was poaching his clientele.

“Yes, but none of them actually hit you,” Felicitia mused. I took an angry step and he gave me a pleading look. He would have loved me to touch him, so I didn’t. “I have been paying Peterglass’s archers to ensure they are poor shots. Peterglass doesn’t suspect their treachery; he still wants you dead.”

I couldn’t believe this. “Why protect me?”

“Because you make the best cat, my amatory boy.
Obviously
.”

This isn’t what I wanted to be! Felicitia and I weren’t keeping each other alive; we were keeping each other half-dead. I had become his personal dealer. I wanted to serve Dotterel, run marathons and read books. I wanted Layce, money, freedom, and thought I could gain them by mountain-boy meekness. Cold fury condensed in my mind; there was a faster way.

I bowed and thanked him. I am a great believer in getting my arse-licking over and done with. Then I put my hand into the other pocket, where there was a folded packet identical to the first, which I used when I wanted to rid myself of debtors and freeloaders. I passed it to Aver-Falconet with all due ceremony.

“Cook it for me, would you?” he asked.

“That isn’t in the contract!” I didn’t want to touch the stuff more than was absolutely necessary. “It’s enough for a week,” I added sweetly.

“Enough for a week. One week! There’s enough for a month in me now.”

I
loved the chemist’s shop, and every morning, when opening the shutters, would gape up at the green and gold lettering above the windows—Dotterel Homais. I hoped one day it would be my name up there—ambitions all confused with those of joining the Castle Circle, which I thought were unrealistic. Perhaps I would keep my master’s name up as an honor: Dotterel and Shira.

Thin shelves of glass bottles in the window were filled with colored water. They gave a riotous display with each rare beam of sunlight. The dispensary smelled of spirits of wine and dusty paper. Some labels on the sprays of plants hanging from the ceiling to dry were in my writing. For the first time I had a feeling of belonging.

As well as my love of niche, I was awed by the novelty of authority. I respected my master. I regarded him as a genius and (because he could speak Scree) as a savior. The terms of my apprenticeship, which would be complete in a year, were framed in ebony and behind glass, hung in the gallery of my memory. As Felicitia, now lying on his side in order to reach the table, dissolved an alarming quantity of the poison I had sold him, I ran through those rules. Felicitia gave me a wry glance; he didn’t understand that words written on paper were sacrosanct.

Word for word my indenture was, to learn the art and mystery of my master’s craft for the term of seven years. To neither buy nor sell without the said master’s license. Taverns, inns, or alehouses I shall not haunt. At cards, dice, or any other unlawful game I shall not play, nor from the service of my said master day or night absent myself but in all things as an honest and faithful apprentice shall and will demean myself toward my said master and all his during the said term.

That’s six of seven years of living a double life, Lord Aver-Falconet. You don’t need me to tell you the tension. I’ve infringed each and every one of those rules even though the contract was written on paper. I knew that if Dotterel had the slightest suspicion of what I was doing I would be homeless again, and a Rhydanne wouldn’t survive a week in a workhouse.

“I hope this is good stuff,” Felicitia said, his voice juicy with anticipation. I inclined my head for shame, which he took to be honor. “The last one Shifted me for a day and a half,” he chuckled. He pushed a needle, still hot from the candle flame, in through his Wheel tattoo. I flinched, and looked away.

He knew something was wrong, and started cursing. Pain turned the curses to screams. Rigid, his back arched, the tendons in his neck standing out, blind eyes bulging.

That’s the effect of scolopendium mixed with strychnine. I watched in horror. I could have given him a faster death, but I’d planned a slow reaction to give me time to escape. But I was transfixed, and stared at his clawed convulsions, listened to gasps of agony. Eventually he slid off the divan. I gazed at the blank wall and waited till his varnished fingernails had stopped scraping at the floor. I glanced at him and looked away disgusted. His face was black.

“Felicitia?” I murmured. “My love?” If it were at all possible for him to return from death to hear that, he would have. I therefore reckoned I was safe. Drenched in Rhydanne superstition, I thought his animated corpse would grab my ankle.

I tried in vain to close his vacant eyes, and my fingers got sticky with mascara.

Closing a dead boy’s eyes is supposed to be easy. It was impossible to close his mouth. I stripped off his jewelry. The objects on the table I threw on the fire, getting a little comfort from the brief heat. The novel and the anklet I pocketed.

Jant, you killed one of your own gang. But he wasn’t really living anyway. Neither are you. You’re Peterglass’s prey now. Shit. I have to get out of here.

Wind shaking the walls reminded me of the world outside. Let’s go; there’s nothing besides remains here. Leaving Felicitia’s minute and twisted corpse I ran to the door and risked a glance outside. The crossbow-girl had gone. Another training then kicked in—all that Layce had taught me. The sparse furnishings went on the fire. A tin of paraffin stood by the door; I doused it on the walls, walking round the vast empty building, splashing enough to overcome the rain. Then I stood back and threw what remained onto the pile of furniture. Starved yellow flames sprang up and crackled; within seconds the whole building was alight.