Early Riser

The John Edward Jones

The smell of smoke grew stronger as we drove north out of town, and we soon entered a landscape of fire-consumed desolation. We passed carcasses of terraced houses and pit workings blackened by decades of fire, then a burned-out bandstand and abandoned cars, their bodywork rusted to a wafer. I noticed that the snow, which had blown into drifts eight foot deep in town, had gradually thinned out as we drove until there was no snow or ice at all, and the trees seemed not devoid of leaves by virtue of the Winter, but by incineration.

‘We’re in the fire valleys, aren’t we?’ I asked, a mild tremor in my voice.

‘We call it the Scorch up here.’

After five minutes of the charcoal-toned landscape, we stopped outside a Dormitorium, the only one still occupied in a clutch of seven, the rest burned out and abandoned. The John Edward Jones was higher than the others – at least forty storeys – and looked to be typically K-14: a mixed-sleep-ability Flopshop, a place where one could hibernate or nap on a budget, with staff on hand to rouse any Winterer who had slipped unthinkingly too deep into the abyss. It would have been cheap, too, out of town, and in the Scorch. I picked up the bouzouki, climbed out of the cab and was immediately struck by the warmth in the air. In Cardiff and Merthyr it had been about ten below, but here the temperature was somewhere around Low Ideal. The smoke was heavier than in Merthyr, and drifted across the road, the fumes occasionally punctuated by acrid whiffs of sulphur. As I looked around, a dead tree on the ridge-line suddenly burst into flames.

Muted chatter greeted me from the Winterlounge as I walked in. Although I couldn’t see the sleepers, I knew they were close. There is something about a Dormitorium that gives them away. The faintest smell of rotten eggs, a taste, a sound – a presence.

The lobby was lit sparingly with low-wattage bulbs, but made warm and welcoming by the orange glow from the fireplace. The portress was behind the reception desk and looked up at me with a quizzical expression as I approached. She had luxurious auburn hair, a nose with an interesting kink and was wearing spectacles.

‘Food, flop, laundry, booze, drowsy, blackjack, cage-fighting or poker?’[30] she asked, reeling off my options.

‘None,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a Footman. Fiftyish, medium height, shabby combats. Came in here with a dead woman.’

‘What, like in a body bag or something?’

‘A nightwalker.’

‘That would make more sense,’ she said, ‘not a lot, but some. Let me guess: you want her back?’

I sighed. No one in the Winter seemed the least intimidated by a Winter Consul, nor rated my chances. Perhaps it wasn’t the uniform, but the resolve of the character inside it.

‘Yes, I want her back. Which room did you say?’

‘I didn’t. Want some advice?’

‘Does it involve leaving right now?’

‘It does.’

‘Then no thanks.’

As I pondered my next move, a man moved from the Winterlounge to the elevators, and within the soft caress of fresh-moved air I detected a faint whiff of carbolic soap. The smell of cleanliness stuck to medical professionals as yeast to a baker. If Foulnap wanted to farm Mrs Tiffen it would require extensive funding and logistical support – so he’d need a medic at the outset to confirm viability. All I had to do was to follow the medic all the way to Foulnap.

‘Listen,’ I said to the portress, ‘if I’m not down in thirty minutes, call Logan at the Mrs Nesbit’s station branch and tell him he needs a new Novice.’

‘Shall I just call him now?’

I gave her a glare that was totally wasted. She said ‘Okey-dokey’, then returned to her magazine.

I picked up the bouzouki and followed the medic into the elevator, smiled, apologised and double-clicked the button I’d seen he’d already pressed – the twenty-first floor. The doors closed and I felt my heart start to thump. I could see the man was wearing scrubs underneath his suit and he looked at me suspiciously, then at the bouzouki, which was probably the best disguise one could have. Winter Consuls don’t carry musical instruments. And even if they did, it would never be a bouzouki. A viola, maybe. Or a tuba.

‘I had an aunt who played the guitar,’ said the medic.

‘It’s not a guitar,’ I said in a calm voice, surprising myself.

He sighed deeply.

‘She wasn’t my aunt. Winterplayer?’

I thought quickly.

‘I’m accompanying a… pantomime horse act.’

‘Which end do you play?’

‘I’m the arse. Our equestrian gavotte is to die for.’

‘I’ll keep an eye out for it.’

The lift doors opened on the twenty-first floor. I trod the worn carpet behind the man in the scrubs until he stopped at a bedroom where I wished him sound napping, then continued to where the circular corridor would place me out of sight. I waited until I heard the latch click shut, then doubled back to the door to listen. There seemed to be a discussion going on inside, and to a mixture of relief and dismay, I heard Foulnap’s voice clearly.

I took the Bambi from my holster, noted my hand was shaking, replaced it and retraced my steps to the elevator lobby, where I paced back and forth, pondering whether high ideals actually were a luxury – something to aim for, rather than to try and attain on my first Winter. I could walk away now, tell Logan I couldn’t find her, and that would be it. I could start my career properly, alive and having learned an important lesson.

I pressed my forehead against the cold doors of the elevator. Sister Zygotia had been a harsh critic and guardian – and, yes, a terror with a scrubbing brush at bath time – but had always maintained that one followed the course of honesty and righteousness, no matter what. If I walked away now it wouldn’t be the start of my career, it would be the end.

I paused to gather my thoughts, drew my Bambi again, and then, with a hard knot of fear and nausea in the pit of my stomach, walked back down the corridor. I stopped outside Foulnap’s room, and with shaking hand unlocked the door with my Omnikey and let it swing open.

Foulnap was on the phone. The medic I’d followed was to one side, and looked startled when he saw me. Sitting on a chair was a third man of Nordic appearance who had a fresh bite mark on his cheek. When he saw me, Foulnap ignored the Bambi I was pointing at him and simply told the person on the other end of the line that ‘There was a f—ing moron trying to piss in his pocket’ and he’d call them back.

‘By all that’s pointlessly brave, Worthing, is that you?’

He seemed more impressed than worried.

‘You can do this,’ I said, voice quavering.

‘I can do this?’ echoed Foulnap in a relaxed manner. ‘Then what are you here for?’

‘I was talking to myself,’ I said with a croak. ‘What I meant was that you can’t do this.’

I could see my hands tremble and felt a cold sweat crawl up my back. Foulnap was right. I was a f—ing moron. I should have just walked away.

‘That’s much clearer. So: why can’t I do this?’

‘Because—’

Whump

I’d not been paying attention. Foulnap had drawn and triggered his Bambi in less time than it took me to realise that he could. I barely had time to register the shock wave rippling in the air before I was lifted from the ground and thrown backwards into a chair that had been placed next to the door, reducing it to matchwood. I fell to the floor stunned, my head spinning from where it had thumped into the wall just next to the light switch.

‘Lobster,’ said Mrs Tiffen from the bathroom.

My vision returned to reveal Foulnap standing over me with a look of annoyance. He relieved me of my weapon, then shook his head sadly.

‘That’s the thing about good advice,’ he said. ‘It’s really a lot better to heed it.’

Foulnap’s colleague, the one with the bite mark on his cheek, rose and pulled a weapon of his own from a holdall. Only it wasn’t a hand weapon, it was the twenty-KiloNewton Thumper, normally used for riot control and punching pressure-holes in snowstorms. Deputy Consul Klaar had been repeatedly pummelled with something like this outside Nightgrowls. She’d liquefied internally under the shock waves and by the time we found her she’d leaked out, pooled in the footwell and frozen solid. They’d taken her to the morgue with the floor mats still attached.

Foulnap helped me sit up and I touched my mouth where it was bleeding.

‘Believe it or not, I was as green as you when I started out,’ he said in a gentle voice, pulling my lower eyelid down to peer at the whites of my eyes, a simple way to check if there was any lasting shock damage, ‘full of dazzlingly good intentions but as stupid as the Winter is long.’

He stared at me for a moment, then pushed the slide release pin on my Bambi, twisted the vortex chamber and drew the Venturi tube backwards. In an instant the weapon was in five pieces. He poured the components into my pocket with a metallic rattle, then dropped the power cell in last as if to punctuate the gesture.

‘I tell you what I’m going to do,’ he said. ‘You’re completely unimportant and a very, very small fish, so I’m going to throw you back. It’s win-win: you don’t have to die, and I don’t have to kill you. Do we have a deal? It goes without saying that you’ll not speak of this.’

I stared up at him. I could feel the taste of blood in my mouth, and my head ached badly. But through the lens of abject failure, my next course of action was suddenly brought into a sharp and painfully illogical focus. If I couldn’t leave with Mrs Tiffen, I wasn’t going to leave at all. My career ended right here, in the fire valleys north of Merthyr, defending someone who wasn’t able to care that I was trying to save her from a fate that she could never be troubled about. Perhaps that was what being a Winter Consul was all about. Defending the inalienable rights of the unaware.

‘There’s no deal,’ I said, my voice cracking, my mouth dry with fear. ‘Mrs Tiffen comes with me. And yes, it goes without saying we’ll forget this ever happened.’

Foulnap stared at me in disbelief and I exhaled and opened my mouth. Shock damage can be lessened if airways are open. But that didn’t happen.

‘What the hell’s going on here?’ came a voice from behind me, at the door.

It was Logan. I suddenly felt unassailably relieved – so much so that I actually felt tears well up in my eyes. I was safe.

Only I wasn’t. Not at all. Not even a tiny bit.

‘It’s not my fault, Jack,’ said Foulnap. ‘I thought you said your new Novice would be a pushover?’

‘I may have underestimated Worthing’s sense of intestinal fortitude,’ conceded Logan, staring at me with a sense of respect, I think. ‘This is all my fault; I never should have let Charlie even attempt to search for Mrs Tiffen.’

I closed my eyes and felt a tremor of fear. Logan had a different tone to his voice. I realised now why I’d taken it this far; I somehow knew Foulnap didn’t have murder in him. But Logan did. He would have called ahead to Foulnap to pluck Mrs Tiffen from my grasp on our way through to give him some deniability. He and Foulnap would be in the farming scam together. It would all have gone according to plan, too – except for me.

‘Maybe we can trust the Novice,’ said the man with the Thumper, who seemed to have changed his tune. ‘I didn’t sign up to all this in order to start killing Consuls.’

‘I’m with Lopez on this one,’ said Foulnap, giving a name to the third man in the room.

‘We can’t risk any of us being discovered,’ said Logan. ‘Besides, Aurora’s in town.’

Lopez and Foulnap exchanged nervous looks.

‘She is?’ said Foulnap. ‘How did she get wind of us?’

‘We don’t know that she did. I’ll deal with Worthing, you deal with Mrs Tiffen. Get up, Charlie.’

I climbed unsteadily to my feet and he gestured for me to leave the room.

‘You should have listened to me earlier,’ he said as we padded around the circular corridor, ‘and just let it all go.’

We stopped outside the elevators and Logan pressed the call button.

‘Can I ask a favour?’

‘What?’

‘Will you tell Sister Zygotia where my body is?’

‘You’re being overdramatic, Worth—’

Bing.

The bell sounded and the elevator doors opened to reveal Aurora, who looked about as surprised as I’d seen anyone for a while, and her hands instantly went to draw her Bambis. Logan had the advantage and swung his weapon in her direction. He had a clear shot, could have thumped her dead there and then – but he paused.

What happened next seemed to occur with treacly slowness: I dropped to the floor as the twin pressure waves[31] that erupted from Aurora’s weapons plucked at my clothes like a rush of wind before impacting on Logan’s chest; I heard every atom of air expelled from his lungs with a crack, then saw him blown at incredible speed into the wall opposite with a sound like a log falling on wet leaves.

There was a momentary pause. Logan was still upright, partially embedded in the lath-and-plaster, a look of bitter resignation etched into his features, the whites of his dead eyes livid red with burst capillaries. Aurora dropped the used power cells from the butts of her Bambis and quickly reloaded; the smell of hot electrolyte filled the air and mixed with the coal-smoke to create a sickly-sweet aroma.

‘Shit,’ I said, defaulting to pointing out the bleeding obvious with my sudden change of fortunes, ‘you just killed Jack Logan.’

‘Shit,’ she said, as surprised as I was, ‘so I have. Toccata will be seriously pissed off.’

She took a step closer to where Logan was embedded, shrugged and said:

‘Well, can’t be helped.’

‘What can’t be helped?’ I asked as I climbed to my feet. ‘Logan dead or Toccata being pissed off?’

‘Both. Where was he taking you?’

‘I think he was going to kill me.’

‘Then you owe me a life-debt. Lead the way to the Tricksy nightwalker, Bucko, we’ve a train to catch. And hey, here’s the plan: you do the talking and I’ll stand there and look menacing. Yes?’

I was, I think, stunned. In shock. I’d not seen anyone die before. Few did. Because the old, the weak and the diseased were winnowed out by Winter’s sympathetic hand, the only deaths I’d been aware of in the Summer were accidents, which probably explained the almost ridiculous levels of public curiosity surrounding traffic fatalities. Two weeks after I’d taken up residence in the Melody Black, someone was hit by a removals van outside. You could barely move for onlookers.

‘Okay,’ I said.

Fortified by Aurora’s fearlessness, I led the way back around the corridor. As soon as we stepped into the room the guy with the Thumper thought he’d have a go, but one of Aurora’s Bambis took his arm off at the elbow. She didn’t pause for a moment and stepped forward to hold the second weapon a foot from Foulnap’s face.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, his voice unbowed but with the reality of the situation sharply in focus, ‘what do you want?’

‘Mrs Tiffen,’ I said.

‘You’re making a serious mistake, Worthing, Aurora is not looking after your best interests.’

‘And you are?’

‘It’s really complicated.’

‘You seem familiar,’ said Aurora to Foulnap. ‘Do I know you?’

‘Nope,’ said Foulnap, ‘just a Footman trying to turn a profit.’

‘Do it another way. House painting, for instance, or plumbing, or invent a game like Jenga or Cluedo or something.’

Foulnap moved to the bathroom as the medic went to Lopez’s aid, and a moment or two later Mrs Tiffen was in the room, as blank as ever. I gave her the bouzouki, which was still lying on the floor, and she instantly began to play ‘Help Yourself’ as we headed towards the elevators.

The train was still standing at the platform when the cab deposited us outside the station, and I could see Moody tightening the ratchet straps on the flatbed while, near by, a clearly agitated stationmaster consulted a large pocket watch.

We’d made it with seconds to spare.