The White Wolf's Son: The Albino Underground

  Jack D’Acre wasn’t Oona’s brother’s real name. He had been homeless, hanging out in Covent Garden and Longacre, when his mates called him that as a joke because they thought he had a French accent. He didn’t know where he was from, though he vaguely remembered a time before he was blind. He might have dreamed that he’d lived in a cottage in the country, he thought, with woods all around. He remembered “a kind of brilliant darkness,” he said. He had lived there with Oona, his sister, and in those days they had been exactly the same age.

  It was odd talking to my great-uncle who was probably no more than five years older than I. He still seemed more like a brother. He had a restless, boyish manner. His white hair was cropped short, and he wore a pair of sunglasses to hide his eyes, but his resemblance to Elric and Oona was uncanny.

  “They also called me Onric,” he told me, “in Mirenburg. A weird name. I prefer Jack, don’t you?”

  “Well, it’s easier to remember. I’m a bit inexperienced at all this between-the-worlds traveling. I’m not sure I’d be able to do any of it without help. How did you go blind? Were you always on your own?”

  “Oona says it was during the Empire’s first experiments. I was only little when I was blinded. Some agent of Taragorm’s found me out on the moonbeams apparently. I must have been abandoned there. After that I was never on my own for long. I don’t know how I got away from Bous-Junge before. There was always someone offering to help me who I could be useful to. One bloke in Oxford used to take me out with him as a leprosy victim.”

  He laughed. “We got a lot of money thrown at us—from a distance. McTalbayne wasn’t the first by a long shot. I’ve done worse than he wanted me to do. At least I got regular food and my own box.” He chuckled again, his whole face opening up into an honest and at the same time very sad expression. Then he withdrew again. “All I had to do was be myself and create a diversion, wherever we were. Sometimes it was shops, sometimes streets. Mostly it was stealing from institutions, big stores, those who could afford it, though I didn’t really like doing any of it. After that bastard Klosterheim found me again he took me to Bous-Junge, as I said. Then to Mirenburg, where they were trying to forge that sword. Then back here. They know how to get onto the moonbeam roads, though they find it hard to use them. Klosterheim knew who my mum and dad were, he said. He claimed he would make it his business to get us together again. I think they might even have bought me from McTalbayne. I suspect money changed hands because I heard them talking later. I’ve got this very sensitive hearing. Five hundred quid, maybe? Only a couple of hours after we got off the Ferris wheel we weren’t in London anymore, as I said. That bloke Gaynor met us in Mirenburg. For a while they had me in the local fairground. I guess it was a way of hiding me from anyone else who might be looking for me. It wasn’t a bad scam, all in all. But things got more and more restrictive. They wouldn’t let me go anywhere without at least two minders, and not very far, at that. I heard them talking. The Dark Empire wanted to find out how to use the moonbeam roads. Klosterheim and Gaynor let them use me to listen to the sword blades. They wanted some other bloke to see me. They called him ‘our mutual friend.’ Never said his name. They made me work, testing those swords by their resonances. They were trying to make this one special blade, see. For a special customer they hoped to trick. At least that’s what I guessed. Anyway, we spent some time in that weird-smelling city, and then they brought me back here and locked me up in a filthy storage room of some sort. I think it had been a warehouse. I couldn’t get out. Mainly wanted me as bait for their trap … I didn’t know what had happened to my sister then, and I didn’t, of course, know about you or my father. Then I met you and guessed it was you they were after next.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Some big war or science project they’ve got on? What would your guess be? Human bombs? I’ve heard lately that the Empire’s losing ground every day. They were so confident of their own superiority, they never expected their slaves to rise up. They certainly didn’t realize the momentum that revolt would give Hawkmoon and the others. I heard Klosterheim talking about it just before Oona found me. Hawkmoon’s got a secret weapon, I think. That crystal my sister mentioned. The armies were actually fighting on the sea bridge, last I heard. Whatever it is they want from us, they want it bad.”

  “They want to kill us for our blood,” I said. “At least they want to kill me. Maybe they’ll let you live; I’m not sure. They’re falling back on witchcraft as they lose battles. Not human bombs but human sacrifice. Which, I suppose, is much the same thing in the end. And they don’t have any game plan for failure!”

  Jack nodded. “That makes a lot of sense. It’s all the new weapons they’re producing in Eastern Europe that’s nobbled ‘em. Weapons they designed themselves but were too busy and conservative to build in their home factories, where they’re still turning out the old models. It’s all they’re tooled up for. When that chap Hawkmoon turned up he was still alive, he gave heart to millions. He must be a pretty amazing person. Everyone but the Empire thinks he’s the cat’s meow. Even Meliadus is scared of him.”

  Jack’s features were expressive. He had learned to hate and to control his hatred in a way I’d never had to. “From what I heard before my sister got me away, he’s got them off balance. They’re still trying to get their breath back. A year ago they wouldn’t have believed they would have to worry about all these guys banding together against them. Up to then they’d had a lot of success with their divide-and-rule policies.”

  “How do you know all this? Just from listening?”

  “Sharp ears, I told you. I’ve been luckier than you. Because I’m blind, even Klosterheim and von Minct talk in front of me. They think I’m deaf, too.” He grinned. “But they keep quiet about meaning to sacrifice us to one of their gods, if that’s what they’re up to. Funny. I thought they were atheists.”

  There wasn’t any point in telling him more of what I knew. At least, not yet. Why scare him? But it was on the tip of my tongue more than once to reveal the grimmer truth. Of course, I was also a bit mixed up about their motives. “Anyway,” I said, “we’re valuable to them. They could have killed us at any time. How did you get away?”

  “Oona found me eventually and brought me here. The London Eye’s the secret, all right. I don’t think I ever want to ride another Ferris wheel again. You wait for hours to get on, and then there’s just a mild sensation of going up and down. Then you get off and you’re in Mirenburg or here or somewhere. I suppose it’s cheaper than running a plane of your own. I’d love to find out what that was all about.”

  “Well,” I said a bit harshly, “we might soon. I know they are ruthless and cruel. They’d kill us at the drop of a hat if they felt like it, but right now they need us a lot more than we need them.”

  “I wonder why,” he mused. “I mean, apart from throwing fits in the middle of Oxford Street shops and hearing voices in swords, I’m not exactly much good for anything.” He grinned into the middle distance. “They don’t think I’ve got royal blood, do they? Why sacrifice us? We’re not especially important. Apart from Oona, I haven’t got any family. All my friends have been killed. My sister’s the only one looking out for me.” He laughed again. “Klosterheim really didn’t expect her to turn up. He thought she was dead. She must have followed him here. Now we’ll wait and do what she tells us. If anyone can beat ‘em, she can. She’s playing a tricky game, I reckon.”

  “So are they,” I said. “She’s a brave woman, isn’t she?”

  “A bloody diamond,” he agreed.

  After that, neither of us had any clear idea how much time passed. When we got hungry, we ate from the small store of food and water Oona left us. We slept on piles of old fabric and talked about our lives. Jack said that Oona had called him Onric when she first recognized him. Their mother had gone off, he said, though he was unclear why and where. He repeated how he and Oona had lived together in a country cottage for a while, when they were little, in the days
before he was blinded. It had been some sort of explosion, he thought. For a while he remembered only darkness and confusion. “It was like I was blown out of one world into another. One time into another.” Maybe his father had rescued him … He next wound up in Bristol, adopted by a junkie named Rachel Acker, who kept him as a sort of talisman. She claimed he was her son. They both knew she was lying, but he got his food and keep, and she got her heroin. He said she was sweet to him when she wasn’t totally out of it. Then Social Services discovered them and wanted to take him in, so she took him and ran off to Oxford first and then London. He and Rachel worked out a reasonably unambitious little shoplifting scheme, which kept them going for some time, but eventually Rachel disappeared, probably over dosing somewhere. And that’s when McTalbayne had recruited him.

  I asked him what he thought of being part of a gang run by a modern Fagin, and he laughed. “It beats being banged up in some orphanage. I’ve heard about those places, and I know what they do to you. At least I was my own boss. Well, partly. It’s important to be your own boss. McTalbayne says it’s the secret of the British Empire’s success, our will to entrepreneurism.” He shook his head. “What do you reckon? Is this lot here”—sightlessly he lifted his head and waved his arms to indicate, I supposed, the whole of Granbretan—“I mean, are they the best the British can be?”

  I think this was an argument he had been having with himself. He didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t think of an answer.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” he said, lowering his arms. “I’m not barmy. I’m just getting bored and sick of this smelly hole. Do you think she’s been caught and isn’t coming back?”

  I had to admit I feared the worst. We were running out of candles. What food there was didn’t taste very good anymore, and by the next meal we would have no water. “It’s got to have been a couple of days, at least,” I told him. “Maybe we should do what she told us to do and head for the river. She seemed to think we’d know what to do. But there’s no Ferris wheel anymore, is there?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe she has friends who’ll know us.” He felt his way to the far wall and cocked his head, listening as I dragged stuff away from the little secret door. “Where does that lead to?”

  “Somewhere better than this,” I said. “It couldn’t be worse, could it? I don’t want to starve to death in here, do you?”

  He agreed enthusiastically. Since we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from, we decided to wait until there was nothing left to eat or drink. “I think our best bet is down there, from what I’ve heard,” he said. “It’s supposed to be full of escaped slaves, crooks and old con men, but I bet it’s not a patch on what I was used to…”

  “No cardboard boxes?” I asked a bit nastily. And he laughed.

  I took his hand.

  I became increasingly convinced that my grandmother had been captured or dangerously delayed. Soon after I made up my mind that she probably wasn’t coming back for us, there was a thump on the outside door. Nobody came in, but I heard guttural voices, the clank of armored men. A search party! The snuffling of large dogs. Another thump. Guards in conference. They were going to find a key and come back. We now had no choice.

  I took the two remaining candles from the shelf. Jack held them while I wound as much spare fabric as I could around both of us, in case we needed to keep warm. Then I opened the tiny back door, pushed Jack through and clambered in myself, pulling it and other stuff behind me. I hoped the searchers wouldn’t necessarily guess we had been there.

  The passage fell away steeply. It was dank, smelling strongly of foul water. From the fresh scrapes on the walls and floor, probably my grandmother had been there at some earlier point. The path was so slippery that we found ourselves sliding quite rapidly downwards, almost like a helter-skelter, as the corridor curved and twisted radically. It must have been some kind of old garbage chute, as it still smelled of what had been poured through it.

  We were a long way down before I heard a hint of voices above. They came closer. Men were shouting over the menacing noise of growling dogs. At last we hit fresh air, so cold it made us gasp and shiver. We stood on cobblestones. High overhead were the restless clouds which sat forever above the towers of Londra. Before us was a maze of little alleys, some of them blocked with rusted, rotting bars which were easily pushed down.

  Jack stood there shivering, wrapped in rags, listening and staring around with his unseeing eyes while I kicked in several different grates, on the basis that if we were followed we didn’t want to give them an easy clue to the way we had gone. Those dogs sounded businesslike.

  I grabbed Jack by the hand again and pulled him through the nearest alley, imagining I could already smell the river. But the maze was endless, twisting back and forth on itself, even though the river, surely the Thames, was only a few yards away some of the time! Every so often I heard distant explosions and saw whole squadrons of big, old-fashioned ornithopters lumbering through the air.

  Dimly I realized that a battle was taking place somewhere, though not directly over us. Jack’s ears were superb. He heard the different notes of engines and described air fights he thought must be happening over on what he called “the Surrey side” of the river, the South Bank. Were the Dark Empire clans breaking up under threat? Fighting among themselves? Were we witnessing the opening engagements in a civil war?

  The Empire must have been rotten through and through to have collapsed so thoroughly. Or had it always been stretched too thin, its power maintained by illusion, its victims too used to its dominance to realize their own numerical strength?

  We finally reached a small cut in the river, where a couple of old, filthy rowboats were tethered. Everything looked as if it hadn’t been used in years, and the Thames was dirtier than I had ever known it, with bits of nasty-looking debris floating in it. The water, reflecting lights and far-off explosions, was a murky crimson.

  As I pulled Jack onto a slippery little jetty a shadow rose from one of the skiffs. Our black panther! Now I knew which boat to use. “Good girl,” I whispered, rubbing her broad head as we climbed in with her. She looked expectantly towards the far bank. Maybe from there we could make our way to the coast, in the hope that Dorian Hawkmoon’s army had already invaded.

  It was not something I knew much about, but Jack couldn’t believe it, either. “What did my sister say about a crystal helping them?”

  “That’s all she did say. What is the crystal, anyway?”

  “I only know what I overheard Klosterheim and Gaynor saying. There’s some sort of crystal shard which allows you to move yourself and sometimes whole chunks of real estate through the dimensions. What purpose that has, I don’t know. Most of these people don’t seem to need a crystal to get from one world to another. Maybe it’s what allows you to bring something enormous through with you. Like an army. You know, not just yourself but tanks and planes or houses or something.”

  I could see how it would help Hawkmoon’s cause, at least in minor ways, to own such a device. With my grandmother almost certainly killed or captured, I should be grateful for any advantage. If we could keep out of their hands for a while, maybe Hawkmoon would save us. Gingerly I tested the rowboat, bouncing the end of an oar in the bottom to see if it was still riverworthy. The panther moved to the prow.

  The boat was sounder than I had any right to expect. All those years rowing on Grasmere were at last proving useful. I helped Jack sit down, put the oars into the rowlocks and maneuvered slowly down the cut, which was thick with filthy, smelly flotsam and jetsam, steering us in the shadow of a long wooden jetty. The stink of the river made me feel sick.

  Jack sat holding the tiller ropes, tugging them left or right at my command, so we got out fairly easily. I rowed under a series of jetties, making as little noise as possible. It grew pitch black quite quickly, except for the sky, illuminated by the flickering red glow from the Surrey bank, the occasional spurt of flame or a gouting explosion. The sky was thick with flocks of flyin
g machines, their metal wings clashing, their clawed landing gear stretched out as if they stooped on their prey, but we saw no direct fighting. I had the impression the battle order had changed. Perhaps Hawkmoon’s people were being forced back as the Empire rallied its strength.

  Eventually I judged it safe to push out into midwater and attempt a crossing. A horrible fog was rising, but I had spotted a potential landing place under cover of the jetties on the other side. As I crossed, the river would carry me down, and with luck I would wind up where I wanted to be. We were nearing the opposite bank when suddenly a white, brilliant light illuminated the whole scene. I thought we would be spotted for certain, but nobody shot at us.

  We landed and went ashore, scrambling to a low, narrow landing platform, up some steps to the main jetty, the panther leading and me pushing Jack as he groped for handholds. A narrow lane ran between two sets of tall warehouses, which looked as if they had fallen against one another and were now offering mutual support, like old drunks.

  And then the panther vanished again! All around us were chimneys and factories, just like in Mirenburg, and if anything, the stench was worse. We moved between rotting tenements, where not one person gave us a second glance. We were still bundled in our rags and looked just like everyone else on this side. This must be where they kept the drones of the Dark Empire anthill, without masks and, by the look of them, without hope.

  I led Jack deeper and deeper into the mass of wretched apartment buildings and thundering factories. His bone-white face was turned to the sky, which still raced red, and his skin reflected the flames. His hair was the color of cream, and his eyes were the color of blood. In the weird, sluggish, wavering light, he looked as if he were on fire. He sniffed his way through the swaying buildings, his head cocked for any threatening sound, but he missed the danger when it eventually came.