The White City

23

There’d been some supplies in the building, presumably kept to feed travellers: those had been quickly exhausted by the sheer number of hungry pirates. It wasn’t Mary’s problem, though. It had been made quite clear that she and Dalip were to concern themselves with the maps and nothing else.

She didn’t know what to make of that: it wasn’t like she had any secret knowledge that would help in either ordering the individual fragments, or making sense of the whole.

Dalip knew more about Down stuff than she did. Mama was better at jigsaws. All she was, was a better thief than Crows.

First thing in the morning, Simeon had hand-picked two small groups, who would leave the valley together, then separate. One was to head back to the pirate ship and collect Mama, the other was to scale the cliffs at the Bay of Bones and retake Mary’s boat. The captain had shown more excitement over the possibility of new sailcloth than the use it was to be put, but she understood why, and gave him the compass to help the second group navigate their way back to the White City.

The city itself was quiet, but not calm. Tension seethed behind every barred door. She didn’t quite understand how the pirates had taken the place so easily: they’d killed several of the Lords and Ladies’ servants, but there were still more. Simeon’s crew were more prepared to use violence, which counted for a lot in her experience◦– one scary fucker could intimidate a whole street◦– but the figure in the robe yesterday had been able to grab a sword and force it down. And just how many bosses there were was a mystery.

They had to be planning something. This was their manor, and they’d try and take it back, no matter what. All the more reason for them to start soon, and finish sooner.

The egg had burned bright all night. It was still alight in the morning, and showed no sign of going out. They had almost too much light.

Dalip suggested putting the egg higher, near the ceiling. There was nothing to hang it with, or on, but he said he’d come up with something. Mary used the time to start the laborious task of laying all the maps out on the floor. If they were folded, she would carefully open them out. If they were crumpled, she would press her palm on them and try to iron out some of the creases.

There were so many of them. Each one a journey, sometimes short, sometimes long, from portal to castle, where, inevitably, the journey would end. She’d laid out ten, so she left a gap, and started on the next batch. She was up to nineteen when she heard the shot.

She stiffened and sat up. The echo of it came and went, came and went, then faded away.

Dalip barrelled into the room. ‘What was that?’

‘Someone’s got the gun.’

‘The gun? What gun?’

‘The ferryman had one.’

‘He has a gun?’

‘Didn’t you see it? Over the fireplace?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Didn’t you see the ferryman when you crossed the river? He’s in the hut just behind it.’

‘We swam the river and sneaked past. What sort of pirates knock on the door and ask to come in?’

‘The sort that just got shot at. Fuck. I forgot. Otherwise I would have told you.’ She got up and peered through one of the window slits. ‘Can’t see anything.’

‘Just when you think it can’t get any worse. I need to find the captain: what sort of gun was it?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘Was it long, short, modern, old?’

‘I don’t know!’ She threw her hands in the air. ‘Long. Like you’d find in a war film.’

‘Some sort of rifle, then.’ He turned and disappeared again.

She’d forgotten about the gun: with everything else that was going on, it had just been one of those perfectly normal things. Monsters, pirates, doorless buildings, crappy little towns pretending they’re cities.

So when Simeon appeared with Dalip, she shouted out: ‘I didn’t know you hadn’t seen it. It’s not my fault.’

‘Mary,’ said Simeon, ‘not everything is your fault.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘We are now, however, trapped in the valley. We are also one man down, which sorely grieves me. I’ve sent remnants of that party across the river and up to the top, to see if they can find an alternative route down. Barring that, we wait till nightfall’s dark embrace and ambush the shooter. It loses us a day, and it brings my crew discomfort. Maintaining discipline on these fellows just became a great deal more difficult, so I implore you to redouble your efforts.’ He looked at what little had been done so far. ‘Time is not our friend, shipmates: it is our enemy.’

He left, leaving Dalip and Mary staring at the maps.

‘Right,’ she said. She picked up a handful of paper and shoved it at Dalip. ‘Without Mama, we’re going to have to go even faster. You sort these out. I really hope something comes up, because otherwise, we’re screwed.’

‘It’s only one rifle.’

‘So? One bloke with a rifle and box of bullets, waiting for anyone coming down that path, could hold off a fucking army.’

‘He has to sleep sometime.’

‘Does he? If he’s one of those face-peeling things, he probably doesn’t need to eat, sleep, shit or breathe.’ She waved his objections away. ‘Come on. Get on with it.’

She turned her back on him and deliberately concentrated on her work, arranging the maps in groups of ten, going back for more when she was done. He was doing the same, following her lead, and by the time they had finished, the floor was half-covered.

They met in the space in the middle, the egg on the floor throwing strange shadows up at their faces.

‘How many’ve you got?’

Dalip looked behind him. ‘Eighty-seven.’

‘One hundred and twenty-four. That’s…’

‘Two hundred and eleven. Any way you look at it, it’s a lot of maps.’

‘So what do we do now? Apart from wait for the next shot?’

‘We had two maps together beforehand. At the beach.’

‘And then?’

‘Mama might not be here, but we can still use her method.’ He turned slowly, taking in all the maps, stroking at his beard. ‘We find everything with a coast, and try to line them up.’

They toured their respective collections, gleaned the maps that clearly had a coastline drawn on, and reconvened.

‘We know,’ he said, handing her his maps, ‘the coast goes roughly east-west. Make a line right here on the floor. Just lay them out, and I’ll be right back.’

‘Where are you going?’ She held the papers against her to stop them spilling.

He wouldn’t say, just skipped away and out.

She’d just finished laying them in a row when Dalip returned with Simeon.

‘I cannot be the wet nurse to this enterprise,’ he was saying. ‘Do you know how much there is to being a pirate captain?’

‘Unless there’s anyone else in your crew who knows exactly where they are by the shape of the coastline, then you’re the only person who can help. We,’ and he pointed at himself and Mary, ‘can stare at these until the sun goes out. But if you can do what you say, this is going to take you ten minutes.’

Simeon tutted and looked at all the scraps of paper. ‘Ten minutes?’

‘Not those.’ Mary laid her hand on the nearest strip of coast. ‘Just these.’

She passed up the map, and he took it reluctantly, inspecting it almost sideways, as if to give himself an excuse for not resolving the lines and marks.

‘This,’ he began, ‘is not straightforward. There are inlets and promontories, bays and islands. The shape and nature of the land is complicated.’

‘We know,’ she said. ‘But we have no idea what we’re doing here. Dalip’s right: if you want this finished, we need someone who can at least give us a start.’

‘The reason,’ said Simeon, ‘I keep all this knowledge in my head is so the geomancers can never take advantage of it. A drawn map of it all? By God, I hadn’t thought about the implications of this.’

She stood before him. She didn’t know what else to do. It didn’t seem right to bat her eyelids or wheedle. Her pitch had to stand on its own two feet or fall under its own weight. ‘This is the way we break the geomancers, or not. If it doesn’t work, we can have a big bonfire of it all.’

The decision appeared to almost break him. He shuddered and squirmed, turning away and turning back. In the end, he said, ‘Very well.’ He got down on his hands and knees, and silently started to order the fragments to make a seamless whole.

Not quite seamless. As he worked, he pushed pieces of paper this way and that, creating gaps where there was missing coastline, and overlapping some where there was continuity. When he’d done that, he turned whole sections to represent the actual geography of Down.

It was, Mary guessed, the first time this had ever happened, and she was a witness to it.

While Simeon was still working, she looked for her own map, and finally spotted it, right at the centre of what was emerging: a block of land thrust out into the sea. To the east and west, the land retreated◦– to the east, a long, finger-like bay, studded with islands, to the west, the open ocean.

‘Is this what it looks like?’

‘I suppose it does,’ said Simeon. He stepped back and raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘From the sea, you’re presented with a line, cliffs or hills or dunes or estuaries, and you make sense of it that way. You know what’s before you, and what’s to port and starboard, where the safe havens are and where the dangerous coasts lie.’

‘This is where we started,’ she said, and she pointed. ‘Here. We walked inland along the river to about here. Crows’ castle is over here. Bell’s, up here, between the two mountains.’

‘We found you, Singh, just here.’

‘There’s a portal on this island. Opens up during the plague.’

‘And I started over here.’ Simeon dabbed his finger down on the far side of the landmass. ‘My lodgings were in Guildford Street.’

Dalip squeezed in between them. ‘We were in Down Street. That’s only a couple of miles away.’

‘And yet here that is a distance of some hundred miles.’

‘If you controlled the portals, you could cover that in half an hour. You’d not even have to break into a run.’

‘Such is the power offered by this prize.’ He gave the maps one last look. ‘You’ve plenty more work ahead, so I’ll take my leave. When we can source the materials to aid you, I’ll send them along. My first priority is to deal with that damnable rifleman.’

He left them, with Mary squinting at the outline, trying to see a pattern.

‘I don’t get it.’

‘I don’t think we’re meant to yet.’ Dalip looked at the unsorted maps. ‘We have to try and make a record of what we have so far, even if it’s rough.’

‘We’ve got no paper, no cloth, no pens and no pencils.’

‘There’s a pen and ink back on the ship.’

‘Everything we need is back on your ship or mine.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘This is stupid. There’s one rifle in the whole of Down and it’s pointing at us. We have to be able to do something about that. I mean, we’ve done plenty of stupid shit already.’

‘You can’t turn into a giant bird,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to think of something else.’

‘All we need is a fucking pencil and paper. How hard can that be? Anywhere else and we’d nip round the shops. Here, we have to make it our fucking selves.’ Her gaze fell on the bag she’d made for the maps. ‘Open that up. Cut the thread until it goes flat.’ It was her turn to say: ‘I’ll be right back.’

She climbed down the nearest ladder, not particularly caring if anyone was at the bottom. She ran out into the courtyard, where some of the pirates lazed and played dice. It had gone dark again, and she hadn’t even noticed. The sky was a deep, dark blue, while the square yard was lit with lanterns. It looked, for a moment, like one of those classical paintings they’d shown her to try and interest her in something, anything, other than getting into trouble. The light was warm, illuminating the crew’s faces and casting soaring shadows against the pale stone walls.

And she stood in the middle of it, a girl in a red dress.

It wasn’t what she was here for. She oriented herself, and headed for the place where she’d eaten her bowl of food, and the woman had pulled her face away.

When she found it, she saw that the fireplace, far from being cold, was blazing away, flickering bright flames from the pile of wood that was burning.

To the half-dozen people present she said: ‘What did you do with the ashes?’

They hadn’t done anything with the ashes. They’d just knocked them to one side, and built a new fire. She could feel the heat on her face and arms as she approached and crouched down. The logs crackled and spat, and the pops they made startled her, making her jerk back, much to everyone’s amusement.

She wasn’t with them, even though Simeon had extended some sort of protection over her. With the fire in her face, she was intensely aware that she was blind behind her. She ignored the feeling, got out her dagger, and started gingerly fishing around in the white ash. She’d scrape around for as long as she could, then pull her hand back to cool off.

She had retrieved a few small pieces of charcoal, and was in the middle of recovering the mother lode, a piece the length of her finger, when she realised the laughing had stopped and apart from the spitting fire, the room had grown quiet.

‘Whatever you think I’ve done, you’re wrong,’ she said. She didn’t turn around.

‘She is dead,’ said Elena.

‘I know. I was there. If I could’ve stopped it, I would.’

‘You made a deal with Crows.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘You betrayed him like you betrayed Luiza.’

‘I lied to him because I didn’t want him to get away with it. I never lied to you. I’ve never lied to you.’ That was probably a lie, too, but she had her fingers on the precious stick. She dragged it back and let it lie on the hearthstone. She was sweating, and not just because of the heat.

‘You are being protected because of the maps you stole. The maps Luiza died over.’

Mary straightened up, dagger in hand.

‘Elena, have you done something we’re all going to regret?’

Elena, white and pinch-faced, said nothing.

‘Those maps are your ticket out of here. What kind of fucking idiot would destroy that, just to get back at me, over something I haven’t even done?’

Still nothing.

‘Where’s Sebastian?’

The other people in the room had silently travelled from being neutral observers to being actively interested in the outcome of the confrontation playing out in front of them. One of them scraped a chair as he rose, and headed out into the night. Another quickly followed. The rest moved to block the doorway.

‘If anything’s happened to Dalip, I’ll run you through myself,’ she said. She was trembling. But there was nothing she could do.