The Deserter Page 13

  ‘The lift cars are no longer working, so we will be forced to take the stairs. It is not very far, but it may take us a day or more to reach the top. We will have food and supplies for the journey, but listen to me now, because I won’t be able to repeat myself later: I am an old woman and this body might not be able to take the strain, despite the Medicine I’ve had. If I die, you must cut off my left hand and take it with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Stopmouth. ‘You do us great honour.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, not for food, you disgusting savage! I can’t believe you can still talk like that! Just promise me you will take my left hand with you. And promise me you will not eat it. Is that clear?’

  The hunter shrugged, unsure of what he had said to offend.

  After that, Jagadamba took them down a set of anonymous streets where a warm mist billowed around them – steam, it was called. Nobody sat in this corridor, nobody at all. It was the loneliest place Stopmouth had seen since his arrival. Hiresh didn’t like it at all.

  The floor was slick beneath their feet and Stopmouth had to steady the other two when they skidded. Once or twice he even ended up on his bottom, and when Hiresh helped him up again, the floor seemed to suck at the loincloth the Arjunas had dressed him in.

  Steam washed the paint from their bodies so that they left little puddles of it behind with every footstep. So much for secrecy, thought Stopmouth.

  They came to a small, plain door. Unlike many others that the hunter had seen here, nothing disguised it and it bore the words emergency only in the speaking pictures of the Roof. More of the moisture that coated the surfaces of the area seeped out from underneath.

  ‘Remember this tasty hand, savage?’ asked Jagadamba, holding up her left arm. ‘This is what it can do. Remember this.’ She pressed it against the door. It turned green and swung open.

  ‘But are we really going?’ asked Hiresh. ‘We can’t be … Surely we can’t be—’

  ‘You don’t deserve to be!’ said the old lady in triumph, and then, a little more seriously, ‘Once we’re in here, we’ve given them the slip. But we won’t be home and dry, by any stretch. It’s the Emptiness. Remember that.’

  ‘This is madness,’ said Hiresh, rubbing furiously at the lump on his arm, smearing the damp gold paint. He turned to Stopmouth and whispered, ‘She’s really doing it. She’s taking us Upstairs.’

  ‘Not you, big man!’ she cackled. ‘They’ve not yet built stairs that could hold a weight like yours! But Upstairs, yes. Where the Seculars don’t dare to travel. Where Indrani waits with her secret, which you’ – she pointed at the hunter – ‘will help us to find!’

  ‘I don’t know what secret you’re talking about,’ he said.

  ‘Neither does she,’ said Jagadamba, ‘but every Warden, every Commissioner, is looking for her, so you can be sure she knows something. When we know it too, they will fall. I’m sure of it.’

  Beyond the door, a set of steps lay before them, corkscrewing for ever skywards. Jagadamba pried a panel loose from the wall.

  Clever, thought the hunter. The old woman or her friends had hidden a large stash of food and clothing there.

  While she sorted through it, Stopmouth looked up into the stairwell and immediately wished he hadn’t. He felt like he was falling into it.

  Some buildings at home stood several storeys high, but not this, not like this, rising up for ever, or what seemed like it. And what would be waiting for them at the top? The so-called Upstairs, with just as many endless parks and corridors and streets as on the level where Hiresh lived.

  Stopmouth clamped his eyes shut against the dizziness and made sure that when he opened them again he was looking down, at the steps themselves. Trails of slimy liquid ran along the left side nearest the wall, lumpy and sluggish under a dim green light.

  ‘It feels … strange here,’ he said. ‘Like night.’

  ‘It’s cold,’ said Jagadamba. ‘Don’t you have cold on the surface? Never mind. Take this …’ She handed him a bundle of heavy clothing. ‘You’ll be glad of these robes now—’

  ‘What are those things?’

  ‘Boots, savage, boots.’

  He shook his head, not wanting to trust his feet in them, and she shrugged. ‘You’ll be sorry. I’m going to shut the door. I have to. After that, no more Roof, you hear me, savage? No more. Just remember my tasty hand in case you need to get out again in a hurry! Now, inside.’

  Hiresh didn’t follow them straight away. Stopmouth could see a troubled look on the boy’s face. As if he were torn between his friendship for Stopmouth and the thought of entering this horrific afterlife of slime and … and cold. The door began to close in his face, and it was as if he remembered something important. He slid inside, his skinny body just clearing the edges of the doorway.

  Jagadamba snorted and made a nasty remark of some kind. Stopmouth had been ignoring her insults so long, it took him a moment to realize he hadn’t understood a word she’d spoken. All three looked at each other. Stopmouth could see Hiresh was frightened, eyes flicking everywhere. Jagadamba stopped needling her companions. A convulsive shiver passed through her whole body.

  Stopmouth was trembling too and he seemed to have no control over it. But even more disconcerting than that was the way bits of spirit puffed out of everybody’s mouths in white clouds with every breath. He tried catching it to shove it back inside his body, but it was useless. Hiresh too seemed to find it surprising, although he made little effort to prevent it.

  All three stood there, shivering together, miserable together. Stopmouth’s two companions looked like people who’d been expelled from their tribe, whose Tallies were to be publicly snapped in two.

  And then the hunter realized something. He wasn’t dying. He wasn’t losing his soul. If anything, the opposite had happened. All the swarms of people with their colours and their stenches were gone. He was free. Free of the Roof.

  Jagadamba made more words and signalled that they should follow her. Then, for the steps were just a little too high for her short legs, she climbed them, one at a time, keeping away from the rivulet of slime near the wall. After a moment Stopmouth followed. Hiresh came last of all.

  The small group trudged in silence, Jagadamba moving up a step, pausing, up a step, pausing. Stopmouth concentrated on the sound of her breathing, worried about her, but also wanting to distract himself from this strange feeling of daytime cold. Bit by bit, he picked up other sounds too – a drip-dripping of some liquid that echoed through the stairwell; irregular clattering noises, like bones rolling down steps; a humming sound that dominated everything else.

  The hum was not completely constant, but came in waves and pulses. It reminded the hunter of nothing more than the heartbeat of some great creature on the threshold of death.

  He already hated the burning touch of cold metal against the soles of his feet, but didn’t trust the foot coverings that Jagadamba had handed out.

  ‘I f-feel like I’m b-being watched,’ he said to his companions. ‘Don’t you?’

  They stopped to look at him. He’d forgotten that they couldn’t possibly understand him. Strange to hear the echo of his own stutter. Onwards again, up through the sickly green light of the stairs. Fourteen steps followed by a landing, followed by another fourteen steps. Every four landings brought them to a filthy door sealed by grime. Writing covered these entrances, but the hunter had lost the ability to read it. He wondered if somebody had once lived behind them, but clearly no one did now.

  After only ten flights Jagadamba sat down and signalled the other two to join her. Stopmouth’s body missed the easy exercise and began to shiver. He took the disgusting food she offered – he couldn’t remember what it was called any more. It wouldn’t fill him, though – that he could be sure of. He ate quickly, then stood again for warmth. He paced around the little landing. He could see where slime seeped and dribbled from under a gap running the length of the wall. The metal around the gap curled away from the liquid, afraid of
it. Further up, at face height, thousands of tiny brown holes pitted the surface. He heard Jagadamba heave herself up. Moments later, she was at his side, passing the palms of her hands over the little holes, muttering to herself in what could only be worry.

  Then she barked an order and pushed Stopmouth towards the stairs. Time to get moving, then, he thought.

  There seemed to be no end to the steps or the landings. The stairwell spiralled sickeningly, endlessly upwards, and he still felt as if they were being watched. Friendly eyes, he hoped, anxious for the group’s arrival, like the guards in the towers back home.

  As they climbed, the pitting in the walls became more pronounced. Holes appeared, some as large as his fist, and soon they were seeing places where only threads of blackened metal held the wall together. Sickly smells of rot wafted through the gaps, where enormous chambers echoed to the sounds of dripping slime. Long rounded objects filled these spaces for as far as the light could reach. When the hunter made moves to step through and examine them further, Jagadamba gripped his arm and shouted angry gibberish at him while her snaggle tooth flew up and down. She was still afraid. So he shrugged and let her lead him away. His feeling of being watched was stronger now.

  Jagadamba tired quickly, and the breaks became ever more frequent. It seemed to Stopmouth as if she was trying to find a place to halt for the night, but she didn’t like the idea of stopping where the walls had been eaten through.

  The travellers were forced to walk right up against the rail, for the slime ran over large sections of the staircase, and the floor looked weak wherever it flowed. Many of the landings were coated with the stuff. Eventually, however, they found a dry one. The wall here held a door that looked much cleaner than usual, and there were only two small holes to either side of it as well as a few pinprick-sized pockmarks.

  Jagadamba heaved a sigh. She did not refuse Stopmouth’s arm as he helped her to sit, and he could feel a fierce trembling running through her entire frame. She badly needed this rest and the sleep that would come with it, although the loss of time frustrated him. How many days did the tribe have now? He tried to count the sleeps he’d had since arriving here, but couldn’t be sure if he’d lost three or four of his precious days.

  Hiresh huddled close to Jagadamba for warmth. Soon the hunter was alone. He felt cold too, but wasn’t ready to sleep. Besides, he was curious about the chambers they had passed during the day and the strange objects they contained. Perhaps he could find something to use as a weapon. Nobody could live in a place like this – there simply wasn’t anything to eat. But he still had that horrible feeling of being stalked and he wanted the reassurance of a dangerous object in the palm of his hand.

  He padded down a few levels until he came to a hole in the wall large enough to duck through. The only light came from the stairwell, and within moments his feet were covered in cold slime. He shivered and tried to pick up the pace, but without proper visibility he knew he couldn’t move too fast.

  The smell of rot was strong here and it was colder than on the steps. He could feel, in the quality of the sound, in the currents of the air, just how large the room was. The ceiling must rise all the way to just below the landing where the others were now sleeping. Perhaps another chamber started there, and another above that, for who knew how many levels? The thought disturbed him and brought home yet again the true power of the Roofpeople. That they did nothing with such power other than laze about, entertaining themselves with the suffering of others, was disgusting beyond measure.

  ‘I hate them,’ he said, his voice echoing. Not Jagadamba or Hiresh. Not Indrani – of course not Indrani! But the tribe of them. The great emptiness that was their tribe. The Roof itself and all it stood for. He hadn’t fully realized it until now.

  His feet began to feel itchy. He ignored the sensation as he padded towards one of thousands of long oval metal cases that filled the chamber. The smell of rotting was particularly strong here. On the top was a hard transparent sheet. He couldn’t quite make out what was inside, but his hands, feeling around the metal body of the cylinder, found little knobs that could be some kind of clasp, such as a woman might make of bone and thread.

  ‘Let’s see what we have here,’ he muttered.

  That was when he heard the screaming.

  Hiresh. He’d left them alone. How could he do that? He was already running up the stairs on feet that had started to sting.

  It’s just a dream, he was thinking. There’s nothing dangerous in this place except the Wardens, and he could handle the likes of them, surely?

  Heartbeats later, he arrived just in time to see the door beside Jagadamba close with a thump. It had been clean, he remembered. Cleaner than any of the other doors. Wallbreaker would have realized what that meant, but not his stupid younger brother, too distracted by new sights and smells to remember survival. Idiot, idiot.

  Jagadamba lay where he’d left her. She was up on one elbow, jabbering and pointing at the door. He ran straight past her and yanked at a knob that protruded from it, pulling with all his might. It creaked a little, but held. He pounded at the metal, hearing it ring hollow, but having no other effect.

  ‘Hiresh!’ he called. ‘H-hang on, Hiresh, we’ll g-get you. We’ll f-find a way in!’

  He felt a tugging at his arm. The old woman had climbed to her feet and was pulling his elbow. He couldn’t believe it. She wanted them to run off, to abandon Hiresh!

  ‘He is Tribe!’ he shouted at her, amazed by his own anger, the speed of his thumping heart. He shook her off and beat at the door again. Then he remembered her famous left hand. She seemed reluctant to give it, but he pushed it against the door anyway and waited for the magic to work. Nothing happened. He allowed her to pull away. How? he wondered. How could he get in? If this were another cavern like the one he’d visited below, there might be a way through the rotted walls one storey up.

  ‘We’ve got to go up,’ he said to Jagadamba, his voice still full of panic. Why had Hiresh been screaming? What awful things were the Wardens doing to him?

  Jagadamba sneered. She wrapped knotted fingers around the door handle and twisted. The whole thing opened easily. She stood back to allow him entry. As simple as that.

  He pushed past. Time was slipping away with every heartbeat. Pale lighting similar to that of the stairwell worked to throw long shadows from row after row of cylinders. This room totally lacked the smell of rot he’d encountered on most of the landings below. The air hummed, and only a little slime gathered here and there in greasy pools. A large object had been dragged through one of these down the central aisle between cylinders.

  Stopmouth tried to get control of himself. Why am I rushing? he wondered. This wasn’t the surface. The dangers were surely milder and he didn’t want to run into an ambush. He followed in the direction of the slime trail, avoiding the pool itself, for the skin of his feet still burned and itched after his last encounter with it. A little further into the room, another pool showed him his quarry hadn’t altered direction. In skirting it, however, and with one of the pale light sources directly overhead, Stopmouth finally caught a glimpse through the transparent sheet that covered one of the cylinders. He stopped dead, his heart suddenly frozen in his chest.

  Inside, curled into a ball, lay a … a beast. A non-human creature, all eyes and whiskers. Short tusks sprouted on either side of a wide mouth. How could there be beasts in the Roof? Only humans lived here, or so he’d been led to believe. Down on the surface, yes, there were beasts aplenty there. They fought and ate and died, and when a species became extinct, magic made another set of creatures appear in their place. Magic. In all his life, Stopmouth had never needed any other explanation for where his prey came from. And here it lay before him.

  The creature looked as if it was sleeping rather than dead. He glanced into other cylinders. Dozens upon dozens of them held beasts just like the first. All the cylinders were identical except for one. Right near the main aisle, a jagged hole gaped in the clear sheet. Somebod
y had broken this one open and torn the jaw off the sleeper inside. The rest of the flesh had been left to spoil, and to the hunter, that made no sense at all.

  With shaking hands he removed a shard of the broken cocoon. As he’d hoped, it was sharp and dangerous, perhaps as sharp as the worked shell of an Armourback. Brittle, though, so he’d have to be careful with it. He longed for a spear-shaft to attach to it.

  He proceeded with caution, trying to concentrate on following the faint traces of slime through the cavern. At the far end stood another door, his probable destination, but he’d be stupid to assume that. The cylinders now held a different type of beast, with scaly skin and no obvious eyes. The sleep of one of these creatures had also been disturbed. A single piece of flesh missing. The pattern repeated itself with two more species before Stopmouth had reached the far side of the cavern. With every grisly find, his fears for Hiresh’s safety increased.

  He twisted the handle of the final door as Jagadamba had taught him, no longer caring if an ambush waited. He jumped through into a room where long ropes hung from the ceiling, hissing and sparking at their torn ends. Slime ran thickly from holes in the wall. He found himself on a high circular platform looking down into a round room made up of elaborate cages full of shadow. Rivulets of slime ran down walls three times the height of a man, and in several places it disappeared through blackened holes in the floor.

  Somebody shouted out below, the voice muffled by humming and sparking.

  ‘Hiresh!’ called Stopmouth, then cursed his own stupidity for alerting the kidnappers to his presence. He sprinted around the platform until he found a set of dripping metal stairs. Halfway down, and with Hiresh’s panicked voice still calling out, the steps groaned, and suddenly Stopmouth was crashing with them to the floor of the round cage room. He rolled when he hit the ground, coming up in a pile of loose hard objects.

  Bones! he realized. Hundreds of bones, possibly all belonging to the same species of beast. He had no time to investigate, though, for Hiresh’s voice had been silenced.