The White City

26

He heard shouting. He was still befuddled by both sleep and Mary’s words. He dragged his hands across his face and sat back on his haunches. What was he going to do?

Apparently, the first thing was be interrogated by the captain.

‘Singh. Answer me plainly. Has she taken anything physical with her?’

Dalip looked around him. It appeared everything was still almost exactly where he’d left it. He had the maps, the sailcloth, even the charcoal, though much reduced.

‘No. I…’

‘And before she left—’

‘She’s gone? Gone where?’

‘She blackjacked the fellow I posted on the door and fled, last seen heading for the buildings north of here.’

‘Not back towards the entrance, or up the cliff?’

‘I can only conclude that she has gone over to the Lords of the White City. And even if she’s not made off with any actual booty, she knows what she knows. What did she tell you before she ran?’

‘Only,’ he said, and shrugged helplessly, ‘only that I had to work on the map. Work out what it all means. Is it true we’re leaving?’

‘Yes. And sooner now, if we can.’

‘And that Mary can’t come with us?’

‘Those are the rules of the ship. They’re older than my tenure, and if I broke them, I’d have a mutiny on my hands. Sometimes, Singh, it is that simple.’ Simeon nudged his hat higher. ‘By rights, I should sequester all of this and determine your part in this endeavour before letting you anywhere near the maps again.’

‘But I’m as close as anyone ever has been to cracking this.’ If Simeon took the maps away now, whatever Mary was doing would be wasted. ‘Let me keep working. It’ll take moments to collect it all together◦– just say the word and I’ll be ready to move out.’

‘You’ll come with us?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Are you sure your loyalties don’t lie elsewhere?’

‘No. I mean, yes. I’m sure.’

What he’d told Simeon wasn’t a lie, in as far as it went. He was acting in the crew’s best interests◦– and the interests of everyone on Down. He had to stay with the maps, wherever they went. Mary knew that. Of course she knew that.

‘If you two have hatched any kind of plot,’ he began, then stopped himself.

‘If there’s a plot, I don’t know what it is.’

‘I find two betrayals in one day a little hard to stomach. The person who makes that three will suffer my wrath.’ The captain narrowed his eyes. ‘Whoever that might be.’

‘I understand,’ said Dalip. He did. If he was to make the most of whatever time he might have, he had to start now. ‘I’ll just… crack on, shall I?’

‘No one realises how hard this job is,’ said Simeon, and stalked off, leaving Dalip with no doubt that if he put so much as a toe in the wrong place, he’d be in mortal danger.

He bent low over the cloth map, looking at the dots and lines Mary had made. ‘No pressure, then,’ he told himself. ‘None whatsoever.’

What did he have to remember? Lines went from portal to portal. No more than three portals in one line. Villages lay on the lines. Castles lay where lines crossed.

Was there enough information to arrive at a unique solution, or was he going to find multiple ways of joining the portals together, any one of which was as likely as the next? Could he, in fact, predict the pattern before he started?

If he was going to design a system from scratch, he’d want it to be simple and elegant. Something involving geometry. Triangles or hexagons. That was a possibility. The alternative was a hideous spider web of criss-crossing lines that made no sense.

He had stubs of charcoal, but he knew there’d be more rubbing out than actual lines. Something impermanent, then. He narrowed his eyes and thought about that, until he laid sight on the unpicked threads that had held Mary’s bag together. He collected the longer sections, and placed them on the floor next to him.

He held up the first thread, and laid it down from the Down Street portal, through the village they’d found, and up to Bell’s castle. But he could keep going: the line went just west of north, and through two more portals. That filled the complement of three portals. Another line crossed the coast where they’d waited for the boat to be built. If that lined up with the portal on the island that Mary had drawn in, then that would cross the first at Bell’s. But the two portals to the north-east didn’t make it a triplet.

The two to the east lined up exactly with Down Street. Down Street was already part of a different three. So if a portal could be a member of two different triplets, the number of possible matches had at least doubled. He could eliminate some of those by looking at the positions of villages. In fact, it wasn’t the portals he needed to be looking at at all. If there were dozens of ways to join them together in threes, he needed to ignore them until the very last moment. It was the villages and castles that revealed where the lines of power flowed and crossed.

He took away the second line. His confidence was high for the first: there was a direct path between the portal, the village and the castle. But there were two castles some twenty or so miles apart. Two crossing points on two separate lines: linking them also fitted the two north-east portals, but not the one on the island. If that was the case, then the island portal was on an entirely different line.

He could live with that.

Then he made the connection that when a village was close to a portal, it was likely that they were part of the same line. Villages in the middle of nowhere were more difficult to associate with a portal, and easier to fit to a castle.

Lines danced in front of his eyes. He could almost see it, yet every time he laid down what he thought was the correct track, he’d see that there was a better choice if only he used those markers rather than these. On adjusting it to lie along the new direction, there was an even better way.

No matter how many lines he laid down, no matter how often he changed them, nothing would come. There was no elegant solution waiting to jump out of the map and show itself. It was, in and of itself, the single most frustrating problem Dalip had ever tried to solve. He was so, so close, yet so, so far.

In the end, he staggered to his feet and rested his head against the far wall, beating it gently but firmly against the stonework. He couldn’t do it. It was defeating him, and would continue to do so. There was no one he could ask for help. No teachers, no professors, no colleagues, no draughtsmen. This was his task alone, and he was failing.

He turned around and hunched down, back against the wall, staring half at the map, half into the middle distance. He rubbed at his face with his fists, and took a deep breath.

So he couldn’t find a solution. There could be three reasons for that.

Firstly, that he was too stupid to find it. That was always his first thought. He didn’t claim to be a genius, and he’d always had to work hard to understand the things he’d been taught. But if he had all the information, then he was just a dot-to-dot away from revealing the picture. And it wasn’t happening.

Secondly, that he didn’t have all the information. He had a map made up of nearly two hundred other maps that he and Mary had cobbled together on a piece of cloth with some rough charcoal. He knew he didn’t have all the information. There were map fragments he couldn’t place, and there was also the physical limit of the cloth itself. The land it represented stretched far beyond its now-ragged seams, and there might be other continents, all with their own portals and castles.

What he did have was enough, he was certain of that. If there was a repeating pattern, then it would be repeated in the area he had.

Which left him with the third option: that the problem had no solution.

He’d often been given maths problems that had no solutions. Most of the time because proving the problem had no solutions was in and of itself the answer, and a test of his skill. And occasionally, there was no solution because there the question was wrong.

He went back to the map and looked at it with a different eye.

He started to look for things that were wrong, not things that were right, and the obvious◦– he struggled with how obvious it was◦– anomaly was the area around the White City itself. No lines crossed it. There were no villages, and no castles. The region that was void, dead to magic. He had always thought so, even calling it Down’s blind spot. But what if it wasn’t anything natural to Down? What if it wasn’t so much a blind spot as an open wound? The body would continue to function the best it could, even though it was injured, and possibly sick, infected.

What did he know? That the White City had been over by the coast, that it had been vast and grand, and then it had fallen. If it had been a castle, he wouldn’t have been surprised, because that’s what happened to castles when not enough people lived in them. It couldn’t, however, have been a castle, because there were no lines of power crossing at that point.

If the lines were taken away, the city would fall. The line would only fail if the portals… died.

Like the Down Street one had.

If other portals had failed before it, then the pattern had been broken before he’d arrived in Down, it would continue to break until each and every portal closed its doors. And in fact, the map was already wrong. Down Street was gone. Bell’s castle would have fallen anyway. Had she known it was failing? Was that why she’d been willing to throw her slaves’ lives away on one last mad scheme before the stonework started to crumble to nothing?

That explained why there was no pattern.

What it didn’t explain was why there were no lines going through the White City area, as if there was some force explicitly stopping them from doing so. It wasn’t just chance: the White City was legendary for its non-magicalness. It had been stable for decades, even hundreds of years.

So that was the answer. Down was not only broken, one portal at a time, it was also altered artificially.

Or.

Down was breaking one portal at a time because it was being altered artificially.

This world was linked to London through the portals. His London was in ruins. The portal had closed. What if the portal hadn’t closed because of the disaster, but had caused it? That would mean every time a portal closed, a London died. And if the whole network was unstable, it was going to keep unravelling until there was nothing left. Every London, throughout time, gone.

He couldn’t begin to understand how that worked. It was a preposterous conclusion, almost as preposterous as the existence of Down itself.

It would, however, explain why they survived. As the connection was severed, they were reeled in. Everything else was destroyed, except the tiny bit of London that was attached to Down that they, by sheer chance, happened to be standing in.

The odds that he was right with any of his speculation were extraordinarily slight. Yet it was the only over-arching explanation that covered all of the facts. He was either close enough to correct to make no difference, or he was fantastically wrong, and probably suffering from the same madness that afflicted the geomancers.

What it did mean was, there was something here, very close, that had both caused the initial problem, and was still causing it.

He had cramp. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had something to eat or drink. He sat with his legs out in front of him, groping for his toes with his fingers, and tried to stretch the pain away.

It was dark outside again. He’d worked the whole day. How could he have concentrated for so long without anyone coming to find him, or seeing how far he’d got? Or even to tell him to pack up and go because the scouting party had found a way down the cliff?

It was quiet, too. Before, there had always been some sort of noise drifting in from the courtyard◦– voices or the clatter of cooking pots◦– but now, with that absent, he found it strangely, ominously quiet.

He reached out and picked up his machete, making sure it didn’t scrape across the floor. His boots had tough, flexible soles◦– he could walk quietly in them. What he couldn’t do was account for every last creak the floorboards would make. Hands and knees would be better.

He set off towards the nearest ladder at what felt like a glacial rate, testing each move, holding his breath uselessly. Out of the map room, across the next. He could see the hole in the distance, but the ladder had been pulled up through and now lay next to it. He looked behind him, in front of him, and crawled nervously closer.

There was someone else there, propped up against the far wall. Dalip peered into the shadows, and saw it was the steersman, who raised his finger to his lips in a mime. He pointed downwards.

Dalip crept around the hole and up to the man. There was only so much they were going to be able to communicate through gestures. He put his mouth close to the man’s ear and whispered.

‘What happened?’

He turned his head, and the man whispered back. It made for a laborious, halting conversation, but it was all they had.

‘They came. All of them. Simeon went out to parley.’

‘Was Mary with them?’

‘The girl? No. They talked for a long time. He left with them.’

‘Why?’

The steersman shrugged, and Dalip remained baffled.

‘Where’s everyone else?’

‘They’re dead.’

Dalip jerked his head away. He stared at the steersman, then crawled over to the hole in the floor. He peered through.

There was a body in full view. It was just lying there, as if asleep, but there was no rise and fall of the chest, no languorous shift in position. A pair of feet showed through a doorway. Dalip crawled back.

‘Then why are we whispering?’

‘I heard something moving down there.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘They just fell over. No panic. No time to panic.’

‘Why are you up here?’

‘Simeon told me to keep an eye on you. Make sure you didn’t go anywhere.’

‘You pulled the ladder up.’

‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘The other ladders?’

The steersman blinked and shook his head.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Some time after the eclipse started.’

Eclipse. That was why it was dark. Not because it was night.

‘How long ago was that?’

‘A while. It’s finally starting to get light again.’

It was. It had turned from dark to grey beyond the slit windows already.

‘They’re going to come back, right?’

The steersman nodded.

‘Wait here,’ said Dalip.

He didn’t crawl. He ran. He ran to the map room, kicked the paper into meaningless drifts and seized the cloth map in both hands, shaking the loose threads off it and on to the floor. The charcoal itself proved remarkably resistant: it smudged, but the outline was still visible. He spat at it and beat it and tore at it, and only stopped when he noticed the robed figure watching him.

He snatched up his machete from where he’d dropped it.

‘You can’t have this,’ he said, holding the cloth behind him. ‘This is not yours.’

‘You believe you know better than us?’

‘I’m not the one who’s just committed mass murder.’

‘You tried to destroy this unit. Getting rid of dangerous pests is not murder, simply eradication.’

Dalip raised his sword. This was the one he’d pushed into the river. It had, apparently, just walked out again, upstream or downstream, and back into the city. Perhaps he just needed to try harder.

It was like chopping at wood. It stood passively while he swung and swung and swung, at the same point on its neck, and it grew clear that he wasn’t damaging it at all.

He dropped his shoulder and charged it. It rocked back on its heels, but without the precipice behind it, it simply put one foot back and steadied itself.

Dalip retreated, panting.

‘Show me the map.’

‘No.’

‘You cannot defeat me,’ it said. ‘You cannot kill what cannot die.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘Show me the map.’

‘No. There is an alternative to fighting you, though.’

‘Surrendering.’

‘Running.’