The White City

27

She didn’t know if she was a prisoner or not.

The idea of her having the upper hand over these… things was fleeting. She was simply stretching things out, trying to play the Lords off against the pirates, to give Dalip the time he needed. She was certain that if anyone could make sense of the map, it was him◦– not just because he was smart, but because, despite all his protestations, he seemed to understand Down.

There was nothing to say she couldn’t just get up and leave, not even when she caught a glimpse of Simeon through the open door. He wasn’t being frogmarched as such, but the robed figures guiding him were standing very close.

Despite their agreement to swap truths, those had been few and far between. Yes, they were from her future, in as much as she was as removed from them as she was from the Norman conquest, the Vikings and stuff like that. People from a thousand years hence turned out to be complete shits, rather than enlightened, peaceable and generous. There wasn’t much she could do about it, and she’d seen enough films to know that fucking around with time would end in tears, no matter how earnestly it was meant.

Down was their creation. That wouldn’t surprise Dalip: she guessed he’d already been thinking along those lines. They’d made it because they could, because thirty-first-century Earth was crowded with poor people and the rich deserved something better. When she’d suggested they build rockets and go to other planets, the response had been a long silence. Maybe they’d tried that and it hadn’t worked. Maybe they’d tried that and it had just turned out to be too far, too costly, and impossible to control. Or maybe it was too much like hard work, when the alternative◦– cracking the wall between one reality and another and living it up in Down’s vast and pristine emptiness◦– was easier, and they could keep out riff-raff like her.

And inevitably, it all started to go wrong. Down◦– so named because of some hand-wavy energy level thing, and not the disused Tube station◦– wasn’t what they anticipated. It gave them a world that was superficially the same while being built on a structure that worked to utterly different rules.

Their playground changed. People◦– uninvited people◦– started to turn up. What could only ever be described as magic started to infect both the new arrivals and the existing guests. The gatekeepers had abandoned their city by the sea, and then abandoned Down altogether: but they’d left intelligent machines to watch over everything and record their findings. It was useful, interesting even, to see what would happen.

The maps, and it always came down to the maps, were part of the monitoring process. The maps, the Lords insisted, belonged to them. Down was their experiment. She, and everyone else, were lab rats.

That made her feel just great, and screwed down her resolve to beat them somehow.

In return she told them about the fire, about the portal closing behind them and vanishing into the rock as if it had never existed. They listened intently. They asked questions about who had been in the group, and what had happened to them. They were particularly interested in Grace, but Mary couldn’t tell them much because she’d hardly known the woman.

And all the while, she was using up time, trying to goad them into acting against the pirates, to keep Dalip and the maps together for as long as possible. When they brought Simeon in, she thought she’d done it◦– they weren’t going to go anywhere without their captain, so the longer he was here and not there, the better.

Now she was alone in a room. The robed figures had drifted away, one by one, until the last one had got up and left mid-sentence. No explanation had been offered, because why would the scientist explain anything to his specimen? Where was Simeon? What were they offering him? Or were they threatening him? Why couldn’t they just take what they wanted? They still had servants to do the hard work. They didn’t even need to get their hands dirty.

She stood up from her chair and put her eye to the window slit. Outside, it was gloomy◦– she couldn’t work out why it was so dark when it should have been mid-morning. She squinted hard, making out the outlines of a dusty strip of land enclosed by the ubiquitous high wall. She could probably climb it if she had to, but if she had access to the front door, why bother?

There was nothing in the room apart from the chair she’d sat in. The robed figures had all stood, and one of the things that had been niggling at her expressed itself whole: where were the human comforts? These places were just a series of empty, dusty chambers. Apart from the place where she’d eaten which, she presumed, was part of the White City act, none of these buildings seemed much use at all.

These things weren’t human and had no human needs or wants. They were simply robots that reported back to their controllers. Their controllers who lived, not down, but up.

How were they talking to each other, if not through a two-way portal that was right here, in this valley?

She hadn’t seen one, which meant they were hiding it. It could be anywhere, but the place she’d want to look first was the big round building with no doors or windows. Of course, having no obvious way in presented its own problems, but that had never stopped her before. She’d been in all sorts of places she shouldn’t have.

Mary went to the door and checked the corridor. Two men stood either side of the doorway. Both looked at her.

‘Take me to the captain,’ she said. Not ‘where’s the captain?’ or ‘I’d like to see the captain’. If her status was ambiguous, she was going to make the most of that. The more powerful the decision maker, the more capricious their decisions, so who cared if two of their lab rats were in the same cage or in different cages?

She wasn’t going to be able to bounce these two like she had the pirate. They’d left her with her dagger, which was more than a little strange, but even if she stuck the blade in one of them, the other would take her head off with the sword he carried.

The men, used to obeying orders, didn’t quite know what to do. They looked at each other over her head, then shrugged. If no one had said they couldn’t, then they decided perhaps they could.

One of them led her, the other followed behind, and ushered her into another room. The similarity with hers was startling: the single chair, the slit windows, the single lantern. Simeon was pacing the room, up and down, the knuckle of his right hand between his teeth. When he saw her, he stopped.

‘What have you told them?’

‘What have you told them?’ she retorted. ‘You shouldn’t even be here.’

‘They made a compelling offer. To which, I believe I will reluctantly agree.’

‘What offer?’

He put one foot up on the chair and rested his elbow on his knee.

‘They want the maps, naturally. More to the point, they want the map that you’ve made.’

‘You told them about that? You fucking idiot!’ She stepped forward and kicked the chair away, causing Simeon to stumble forward. He was suddenly furious and raised his hand, ready to swipe it backwards across her face.

‘You black witch!’

‘Hit me and I’ll stick you.’ Her dagger was in her hand.

The servants at the door seemed content to watch and not interfere.

Simeon lowered his hand, slowly, and walked away. ‘Whatever circumstances brought the maps here, the Lords of the White City have a claim on them.’

‘You’ve changed your tune, mate.’

‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune.’

‘They’re paying you?’

‘Handsomely. Do you know how difficult it is to find manufactured goods in Down?’

‘Dalip told me you wanted to stick it to the geomancers.’

‘They’re giving me guns.’ He kicked the fallen chair aside, clearing the centre of the room. ‘With guns, no geomancer on Down will ever trouble us again. That’s the use to which I put the maps. You forget that they’re like coin here, and I’ve spent them wisely.’

‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Mary circled him. ‘Don’t you want to go back to London? What about your crew? You haven’t bothered asking them, have you?’

‘There is no way back. After all these years, I have to accept there’s no means of returning to the London of any age.’

She waited until she could look him squarely in the eye. ‘What if I told you that there’s a working portal, right here in the White City, and it goes both ways? Would that change your mind?’

‘Oh. You are mistaken. There is no portal here: portals require magic.’

‘You realise that those fuckers you’ve cut a deal with aren’t even human? They’re… things that people made years in the future and they’re getting their orders from the other side of a portal. Which has to be here, somewhere. Because where else would it be?’ She clenched her fists and stamped her feet. ‘We were so close! And at the last minute, the last second, you shaft us to get your hands on a couple of antique shooters. Well, fuck you very much. You could have gone home, and now you can’t.’

She stopped and turned. She had an audience. The two servants who’d served as her escort were now in the doorway, and behind them, there were the shadows of others.

‘What? Where I come from you pay to see a fucking show.’

‘Is it true?’ one of them blurted. ‘Is it true?’

‘That you can go home? Shit, I don’t know. I don’t know when you come from or anything. But I do know that Captain Crapper here has just blown the best chance you’ll get this side of forever.’ With her back to Simeon, she went straight to the point. ‘The round building: how do I get inside?’

‘You don’t. No one does.’

‘That’s just bollocks. There has to be a way in, because otherwise what’s the point of it being there? I’m guessing a tunnel from one of the nearby buildings◦– where you’re not allowed to go, but they are. Anything like that?’

‘There are so many rules, what we can do, where we can go—’

‘Then you’re just slaves and you need to get out.’

Simeon snorted behind her. ‘My crew are better than these whipped curs.’

‘Then do something for them,’ she said, ‘rather than doing something for yourself. Did they show you the guns before you told them about the map?’

He hesitated. ‘Yes.’

‘They are never going to give them to you, you know that? They are never going to give you anything that might let you hurt them.’ She waved her dagger in his face. ‘I mean, they gave me this. They insisted I take it. When I asked about the rifle over the fireplace, it was “you can’t have that”. Which do you think they trust me with? This, or that?’

‘What would you have me do, woman? My crew are my concern, and we are already overdue at the ship. I’ve had enough of this: I’m going to take what I can and get back to the sea.’

‘Go on then. Do it. I’ll clean up this mess.’ She addressed the servants. ‘Anything. Anything you can tell me would be good right now. I can’t keep making it up as I go along.’

They couldn’t even look at each other, let alone her.

‘Fine. Just open the front door. I’ll take it from there.’ She rounded on Simeon. ‘And you, you spineless prick, should be right next to me, fighting to save Down from these mentalists.’

‘Save Down? Down is a foetid rat-hole of anarchy and greed.’

‘Yes, and it could be so much more than that. But it needs us to do something for it.’

‘What, pray tell, might that be?’

She held her arms up. ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue. But at least I’m willing to try.’

She turned back to the servants, and pushed as many as she could back down the corridor. She knew the way out◦– she just needed their confused permission to let her leave.

As she bundled them forward, she could see one or two falter and try to argue, as they realised this wasn’t quite right. She started shouting at them to keep them going, disorientate them for long enough, and above all stop them from talking to each other.

She was there: an entrance hall, big enough for a party all on its own, and the locked door right in front of her. She elbowed her way through, and started on the heavy bolts top and bottom. The first one was straightforward. The second one wasn’t, until she put her shoulder to the door to release the strain.

Then the lock. Her hand was on the heavy key when she heard an imperious voice commanding her to halt.

She was as used to disobeying as the servants were to obeying. She hauled on it, and it started to turn.

‘Somebody stop her.’ The tone was exasperated and ancient, as if all the weariness of a century’s boredom had fallen at her feet. Hands came towards her, and she was forced to defend herself with quick, sharp jabs.

The robed figure strode towards her, knocking the men out of the way, left and right.

‘As useful as you have been, you are becoming a nuisance now.’

‘Knowing that makes me happy, you freak.’

It reached up. She deliberately stuck her dagger in its forearm. It paid no attention whatsoever to her actions and its fingers tried to circle her throat.

She ducked down and darted to one side, into the waiting arms of a man, who tried to grapple her squirming, stabbing, biting form. He reeled away, but she was set on by another two, who overwhelmed her and pinned her to the boards.

‘Get your fucking hands off me,’ she bellowed, but they gripped her even tighter. She could kick the figure as it approached, but that had about as much effect as sticking it with the pointy end.

It raised its cloth-bound foot, and stood on her chest, right on her breastbone.

How much did the thing weigh? It had barely started leaning in, and it felt like an elephant was settling on her. She tried to breathe, and couldn’t do more than sip air. The pressure increased, and even that mercy was gone.

She stared up at the mask staring blankly down. Those holding her arms weren’t looking at her. This was it, then. A stupid way to die, crushed like a cockroach by some machine that wasn’t going to be made for another thousand years. She was going. Her vision was closing down, like she was falling into a black well, and at the top, that mask.

Something wet splashed across her face, and in the next instance, the incredible pressure was gone. It was going to be agony to breathe in, but she did it anyway, and nearly passed out all over again.

When she moved, it hurt. When she groped for her dagger, which was just out of reach, it hurt more. When her hand jerked away from the severed arm that lay discarded next to it, that hurt the most.

Simeon was on top of the pile of shiny coloured robes. Banging its head against the angle between the wall and the floor, stamping down with all his might. While holding off those servants still upright with his sword.

‘You fucking hero,’ she gasped.

‘If you’re going, go.’ He grunted with the effort of keeping the thing down, pounding it every time it tried to rise.

She was almost sick when she staggered to her feet. If something in her was broken, then it would stay broken. Either it would eventually kill her, or it wouldn’t. The whole room seemed to spin, and she couldn’t make it stop, but at least she could head for the door, lean on it and get her hands to the lock again.

‘Hurry.’

The key turned. There was movement behind her in the corridor. A line of brightly coloured robes was heading their way. She pulled at the door with numb fingers, and cool air puffed in as it opened.

‘Come with me,’ she gasped.

‘Not happening.’ The thing had caught his ankle.

She watched as it snapped his bone like a twig, and Simeon lurched, caught himself on the wall, and started his inexorable slide downwards.

‘Don’t think badly of me,’ he said, and she was gone.