Nothing. Nobody answered.
He tried the pattern again. He was sure he had it right.
Still there was no sign that anyone had heard him. There was no handle on the door on this side. He kicked it, but it didn’t give. He swore and kicked it again.
“Rail. . .” said Moa, her voice thick with exhaustion. She sounded like she had already given up. “They’re coming.”
The steps were made of slatted iron, and through them it was possible to see to the bottom of the stairwell. There were shapes down there; quick, darting movements. The sound of hobnailed boots, now fast in a rattle, now slow again.
“Open this frecking door!” Rail cried, his respirator flattening the desperate edge on his voice. He pounded the rhythm again, and a moment later there was the sound of grinding as the lock was disengaged. Rail dragged Moa up again. An explosive shriek came from below, stuttering into rapid nonsense.
The door came open and they shoved through it. Moa fell out into the cluttered alleyway beyond. Rail was already slamming the door behind him. He caught a glimpse of one of the creatures, racing towards him as fast as a spider, and then the door crunched shut. The wheel-shaped locking mechanism clattered out a jerky manoeuvre, and the bolt thumped home.
Rail leaned against the metal for a moment, listening to the thwarted howls of the Mozgas. Then he turned on the one who had opened the door. The boy was runty and small, dressed in a waterproof poncho and wearing a battered hat, and he held a small, half-eaten pie in one hand. He backed away a little under Rail’s glare. The rain drifted down from the slice of grey sky visible overhead.
“Where were you, Fulmar?” Rail grated. “Why didn’t you answer?”
The boy’s face was a picture of fright. “You won’t tell Anya-Jacana, will you? You won’t tell her?”
Rail took a step towards him and snatched the pie out of his hand. At the end of the alleyway he could see the stalls of a street-market.
“You can’t do one thing right, can you?” he snarled. He crouched down next to Moa, helping her sit up. “Here, eat this,” he told her, his voice softer now. Moa took it from him wearily.
“What is it?” she murmured.
“Best not to ask,” he said. “Eat.”
“I was only gone for a moment,” Fulmar whined from behind him. “I got hungry. I’d been waiting for—”
Rail held a hand up to silence him, not bothering even to look. “I’ll deal with you later.”
“You won’t tell her, will you? Please?” Fulmar was almost shaking now.
Rail ignored the question. He was watching Moa take tiny nibbles from the pie. “OK?” he murmured. “Can you move?”
Moa swallowed and nodded. Gently, he helped her to her feet.
“Come on,” he said, as if soothing a child. “Told you I wouldn’t let them hurt you. I always look out for you, don’t I?”
She nodded again, barely seeming to hear him. The two of them walked slowly down the alleyway towards the market, his arm around her shoulder to support her, the rain soaking into their clothes. Fulmar cast a nervous glance at the metal door, where scratching noises had begun, and then hurried after them.
Cretch was watching the panopticon in his battered red armchair when Ephemera burst into the room and said: “Granpapa! Come and look at Vago!”
He tutted and waved at her to go away, not turning from the machine. It was a great brass periscope that hung from the ceiling, with knobs on either side which he was twiddling anxiously, making frustrated noises as he did so.
“Why do they make the writing so small in these things? Don’t they think of old men like me?”
“That’s why they have pictures,” Ephemera said, as if it was obvious. “Come on, come and look, Vago’s doing something silly!”
“What is he doing, child?” Cretch sighed.
“You have to come and look!” she demanded.
He drew back from the shielded eyepiece of the panopticon. He was tall and lean, too tall for the armchair he sat in, and his hair was white and wispy. A heavy, false-velvet robe was draped around him. He wore a set of goggles, attached by elastic to his head. They were black half-spheres of metal that fitted over his eyes, with a small hole in the centre in which glass twinkled like the lens of a kaleidoscope.
“Read this to me first,” he said.
Ephemera scowled at him. “You shouldn’t be looking at that thing with your goggles on,” she chided. “It gives you headaches.”
Cretch didn’t answer that. No matter how many times he told her he was blind without his goggles, she never understood. She didn’t understand anything. She was young, and she thought she would always be well-fed, healthy and strong. Didn’t know enough to be afraid when the probability storms struck the city, rearranging things, moving streets around. The storms might snatch a person away and put them elsewhere, turn children into statues of ice or make a man speak in a different language.
Ephemera never considered that she might wake up in the middle of a Revenant den, or with six fingers on one hand, or turned into a boy. She had always been lucky, so she believed it couldn’t happen to her. And maybe it never would. Nobody could ever be sure.
But Cretch knew very well what the Storm Thief could do, how he could turn a man’s life inside out, and he feared the storms deeply.
Anything could happen when the Storm Thief was abroad. He was a wicked entity who delighted in mischief, as likely to snatch a person’s purse as he was to shower them with jewels. He might steal a baby’s eyes and replace them with buttons, or turn a house into sugar paper.
The tale was old, invented long ago to make sense of the senseless. Parents used it to explain probability storms to their offspring. But though it was only a legend, they never quite managed to stop believing it themselves. When they talked of the damage wreaked to their lives in the aftermath of a storm, they still talked of a visit from the Storm Thief.
There had been a probability storm five days ago. Cretch had spent it in bed, trembling. Ephemera had played in the laboratory with her toys. But the storm that had raged last night was a natural one, and Cretch had slept like a baby.
Ephemera blew out an exasperated breath and snatched the panopticon from her grandfather. She rotated it around and looked into the eyepiece.
The picture, as always, was hard to see. It was brownish and flickered at the edges, and it seemed very far away. She adjusted the size to make it as big as she could and then turned the focus knob until everything became clear. It was still like looking at a scene down a long, rectangular pipe, but it was good enough. She had grown up with the panopticon, so she had none of her grandfather’s sense of wonder, he still found it a magical thing.
It looked like a battle was going on in there. There was no sound, but Ephemera could see a couple of Protectorate soldiers firing around the corner of a building. She was used to scenes like this. The Protectorate had been fighting the Revenants ever since she was born, and long before.
All children were taught the difference between the two sides at a very early age. The Protectorate, as their name suggested, looked after the people of Orokos. They were led by the Patrician, who was the ruler of the great island city. The Revenants were evil monsters that killed anything they touched. It was a simple enough lesson, even for a child.
The viewpoint of the panopticon moved and Ephemera saw a wall and a big iron gate, around which lay a lot of dead bodies. The soldiers were shooting bolts of glowing aether energy at swiftly moving shapes in the distance. Captions appeared at the bottom of the screen, in the spiky, complex symbols of the Orokon alphabet. They remained there for a few seconds, then faded away to be replaced by new ones.
“Protectorate forces won a great victory today,” she read. “Recent probability storm allowed Revenants into the Mereg Food Processing Complex. Troops have driven them back after days of fighting. Worker
s will return later today.” Her voice changed from a drone to a cry of appalled delight. “Eww! They just hit one!”
The picture switched to a dirty-looking man in a coat, with sharp features. His mouth moved, but no words came out.
“Spokesman for nearby Territory Northwest 43 expressed gratitude to troops.” She adopted a whiny voice as she mimicked the spokesman. “Without their help the people of my district would be starving now. We would like to thank the Patrician for protecting us from the terror of the Revenants. Later he –” She broke away from the panopticon. “Northwest 43 is a ghetto district. Who cares what stupid ghetto folk say?”
“Ephemera!”
She made a face. “What? They are stupid. Why else would they live in those horrible ghettoes? Don’t they want to be clean?”
Cretch put out his arms, inviting Ephemera to sit on his lap. She did so. He stroked her hair softly. It was a mass of bouncy ringlets, one side dyed black and the other side her natural white. She was wearing a dress of purple with silver lace trim, which she picked at as he spoke.
“Sometimes people aren’t all as hardworking as your Granpapa,” he said. “They’re in the ghettoes because they don’t want to work, or because they’re criminals. That’s why the Protectorate puts them there: to keep decent people like you and me safe and sound.”
“But they’re just lazy!” she protested. “And they steal stuff all the time, and you always read about them fighting on the panopticon.”
“Don’t be too hard on them, child,” Cretch told her benevolently. “They don’t have the advantages we have. No wonder they give up so easily. No wonder they become criminals. They’re inferior, and they know it.” He touched his granddaughter’s hair on the side where it was bright white. “We should have pity on them.”
Ephemera wasn’t remotely convinced. “We should just let the Revenants get them,” she said.
“Well, when you’re the Patrician you can decide that, hmm?”
She laughed. “Silly! I’ll never be the Patrician. He lives for ever!”
Cretch grinned, showing his brown-veined marble teeth. “Now what was it you wanted to show me?”
Ephemera’s face was a comical gasp. “I forgot! You have to see what Vago’s done!” She bounded off him and led him away and up the stairs.
Vago lived at the top of the tower above Cretch’s laboratories. It was a large five-sided chamber, crowded with brass cylinders and tanks that hissed and thumped, and strange valves and dials that moved of their own accord. The floor was iron, and it was hot and gloomy. There wasn’t much space to move between the banks of noisy machines. There wasn’t even room to lay down a bed, but then Vago didn’t sleep anyway.
He spent all of his time up here when he wasn’t assisting Cretch. Often he wandered about in the aisles between the steaming pipes, or talked to the faded painting that leaned against the wall in the little corner he had taken as his own. Sometimes he stood there and stared out of the large oval window that looked south across the city. Mostly he just thought about things.
He had a lot to think about, considering he was only a hundred and twenty days old.
Ephemera had brought a mirror up to tease him with once. After he had seen himself, he had been able to make sense of the distorted reflections he often caught in the curve of the brass cylinders. The thing looking back at him was a stranger, half of metal and half of flesh. It was hunched and long-limbed, towering in height. Built like a hunting cat, if hunting cats walked on their back legs. Brown, stringy muscle stretched across its gangly frame, studded with dull silver strips of strange machinery. A ridge of knifelike metal fins ran along its back, flanked by two slender power packs that hummed softly. And he had wings: great, leathery wings like a bat, that grew from either side of his spine and were reinforced with dozens of tiny steel ligaments. He had never understood why the wings were there. He was never allowed to leave the tower, and they caught on corners as he moved, making him clumsy. He had suffered more than one beating because his wings had knocked over something in his master’s laboratory.
“Granpapa says you’re a golem!” Ephemera had crowed. “You didn’t have a mama or a papa. Someone made you. Aren’t you ugly?”
His face was the worst of it. The skin was stretched tight over his skull, wrinkled and withered like a corpse. Most of the left side was masked in metal, and where his left eye should have been was a black orb instead. His other eye was yellow and mottled, looking out on the world with childlike wonder. There were hardly any lips on his narrow mouth, and when he spoke steel fangs glinted in the dim light.
“Am I ugly?” he had said. “Is that what ugly is?”
“Oh yes!” Ephemera had cried, laughing with glee. “Ugly is what you are!”
Last night, during the storm, a seabird had flown into his room. He was standing by the window in his little corner when it had flown in, and knocked itself dead on one of the pipes.
The event had made him sad. The seabird wasn’t ugly. At least, he didn’t think so. Even dead it was beautiful. Its feathers were sleek and soft, and he liked the feel of it on his skin. He remembered how it had flown, how fast it had gone. He stroked its wings and thought how much more elegant they were than the unwieldy things on his back. He flexed his own wings as much as space would allow. Was that what these were for? To make him fly? But how could he? He didn’t even know how to use them.
But he liked the seabird. So he found himself a piece of rope, and he tied it to the seabird’s feet with his nimble fingers, and he hung it around his neck. That was how Cretch found him, when he and his granddaughter came up the stairs.
“Look at him! Look at him!” she cried, hanging on to Cretch’s hand, dancing and pointing.
Vago appeared nonplussed. He didn’t understand what Ephemera was so excited about.
“Oh, Vago, what have you got there?” Cretch said. He came closer and peered at the golem’s bizarre pendant. Vago shrank back a little, though he was a clear foot taller than Cretch was. “Come, come, I won’t hurt you,” said the old man. “I just want to see.”
Vago reluctantly let Cretch lift the bird off his neck. He was never quite sure when Cretch was liable to hit him, though the knobbly walking-stick that was Cretch’s usual instrument of punishment was nowhere to be seen. The pain of those beatings was bad enough, but what was worse were the strange and terrifying feelings they provoked in him. Dark, hot, angry feelings. He didn’t know where they came from, but he feared what they might make him do one day.
“Fascinating,” Cretch murmured, turning the bird over in his hand. “Where did you find this?”
“It flew in,” Vago replied. His voice was somewhere between a whine and a growl, shockingly deep. Whenever he spoke, it sounded like he was straining the words out.
“Remarkable. I’ve never seen its like before.”
“But he was wearing it round his neck!” Ephemera squealed, disappointed that her attempt at ridiculing Vago hadn’t worked. Her grandfather ignored her.
“Well, I’m no expert, but I think you’ve got something quite unusual here, Vago,” he mused. “If I didn’t know better I’d think this came from outside the city.” He laughed.
“Outside the city?”
“Never mind. An old fool’s joke.”
Vago’s puzzlement showed in his one good eye.
“Don’t you get it? There is nothing outside the city, you stupid golem!” Ephemera snapped. “Orokos is all there is!”
Rail and Moa made it back to the ghetto by midday. The skies overhead were a monotonous grey, but the rain had stopped and left the city shining wet. They had spent the morning picking their way through the complicated districts of Orokos, detouring around areas where Revenants had taken over. They paused often to check with locals that things were the same as they had been before the last probability storm. Streets and buildings in Orokos had a disconcerti
ng tendency to move. Even entire districts had been known to get displaced.
Old folk still recalled the day when the whole of Orokos reversed itself, turning into a mirror-image. Buildings on the north edge found themselves on the south side, east and west flipped over, everything perfectly symmetrical. It wasn’t often you got an upheaval like that, they said. Generally the changes were smaller, such as when Moa, who had been right-handed all her life, woke up left-handed. Or when Rail’s lungs stopped working properly in the middle of a probability storm and he nearly died. He had been forced to wear a respirator ever since. The Storm Thief had stolen his breath.
The ghetto was a dense tangle of streets and alleyways. It had been partially enclosed by a wall, but like all walls in Orokos it hadn’t lasted. Within, rainswept plazas that had once been magnificent were crowded with rotting shanties. Vast, elaborate buildings reared above clutters of miserable shacks and houses. The grim façades of ancient mausoleums glowered at each other over thundering canals, and gaping metal archways led into the city’s subterranean depths.
There were gates watched over by Protectorate soldiers, who checked the identity stripes tattooed on every ghetto-dweller’s forearm. Ghetto folk were only allowed outside their assigned areas with special passes, and although people like Rail and Moa flouted the rules regularly, it was a dangerous game. If they were caught by the soldiers they would be taken away, and ghetto folk who were taken away never came back.
Rail and Moa got into the ghetto through one of dozens of back ways. They had lost Fulmar some while ago. Rail had promised that he would definitely tell Anya-Jacana about Fulmar’s slip-up unless he made himself scarce. He didn’t seriously intend to do it – Fulmar didn’t deserve the kind of punishment the thief-mistress would deal out – but Rail thought he could let the younger boy sweat for a while. Maybe next time he’d think twice before he deserted his post for a pie.