Storm Thief (15 page)

Moa breathed.

That was enough for Rail right now. Breath meant life, and with life there was the hope of waking. For a time, he had believed she would not even make it this far. He had feared that the short and hurried journey from Territory West 190 to the hidden sanctuary of Kilatas would snap the last fragile thread tethering her soul to her body. But she lived.

The cave was plain and bare, cut roughly from the rock with a heavy drape across its entrance. Faint daylight bled in from outside, pushing through the drape and around its edges. It spilled across the boy on the chair and the girl on the floor, wrapped in blankets. The blankets were of coarse buta-wool, cut from the shaggy livestock of Orokos. They protected her from the cold edge in the air, the nipping breeze from the sea.

Rail watched her, hoping it was only sleep and not a coma that kept her this way. He had to believe she was resting, recovering. But there was no way to tell. A Revenant had touched her. Would she wake possessed? Would she wake at all?

It had been three days now since they had escaped the district that he had led them into. The first day was the worst, when they were carrying Moa. Rail knew nothing about medical procedure – he hadn't even known to check for a pulse when Moa had fallen – but he had heard somewhere that moving a sick or badly injured person was liable to finish them off. And yet there was nowhere closer than Kilatas that Moa could be treated. No hospital in Orokos would take ghetto folk.

So they had to carry her, through tunnels and down secret pathways, along dark streets. A golem and a ghetto boy with an unconscious girl, trying to avoid attention. It was a miracle they were not stopped by Protectorate soldiers, but with Rail as a guide they managed to pass through two districts without being spotted by anyone in authority. They could only hope that nobody who saw them decided to report it.

And so they had found their way to Kilatas, following the directions Moa had given Rail long ago. Though the route had changed somewhat since she had last passed that way, most of the major landmarks were still there and they coped well enough.

They went to a bar owned by a man called Whimbrel. At first they were greeted with suspicion, and he pretended to know nothing about any place called Kilatas. But Rail had been told the old passwords, and it was enough to convince him to come out and see Moa. He recognized her immediately, and took them the rest of the way himself, through hidden ways and past guarded gates and along mazes of tunnels. Down, down, deeper into the stone island. And finally to their destination.

Moa had held on throughout the journey. The doctors had seen to her, and made their prescriptions, but all they could do was make her comfortable and stable. They were as confused as Rail by what had happened. She had been brushed by a Revenant. She should be dead. There were no exceptions.

Well, no human ones, anyway
, Rail thought, remembering Vago.

Apart from a bad case of chill sweats from being out in the rain, which they had treated with old folk remedies, Moa didn't appear to be any the worse for her encounter. Except that she would not wake up.

Rail had barely left her side since they had arrived. Vago hadn't come to see her once. The thief-boy was bitter about it. Partly, it was because the golem seemed to be entirely unconcerned by Moa's condition after all Moa's kindness to him. But it was also because he wanted to take his frustration and grief out on someone, and Vago was the best target.

The golem stayed away, however. He was somewhere nearby, his movements shadowed by guards. Nobody was sure whether they could trust the monstrosity that Moa had brought them. These people were awaiting the return of their leader, Kittiwake, to make a judgement. She would be back in a few days, they said. Until then, Rail and Moa would not be allowed to leave and Vago would be guarded at all times.

People had come to visit. People who knew Moa from before, or who had known Moa's father. But they could do nothing, just as the doctors could do nothing. Rail was surly with them. He didn't know them, and didn't trust them alone with Moa.

He brushed her lank hair back from her forehead. Without the heavy make-up she wore, she looked different: smaller and more vulnerable. If he had been asked to do anything to make her better, to take on the Null Spire itself, he would have agreed to it then. But there was nothing he could do. He was helpless, as helpless as he was against the probability storms. No matter how much he tried to fool himself, it was always this way. How much could one boy do against a world like this?

Maybe Moa was right. Maybe it was all a matter of seeing what chance brought you.

He could remember the day they met like it was yesterday. The years before that, though he could recall them well enough, seemed somehow dimmer in his memory. He had always had a marvellous ability to carve his life into episodes, to cut the past loose and distance himself from it.

He had done exactly that when he ran away from home as a child. He was unhappy, so he changed his situation. It was that simple, even at that age. His mother and father treated him as well as could have been expected, but it was a savage world they lived in and they were all starving. He had heard the usual myths about how it was better elsewhere, about other districts where ghetto-folk were treated with the same respect as everyone else. When a fast-talking drifter came through his territory, he was bewitched by the man's stories of opportunity and adventure. He left with the drifter, without saying goodbye to his parents or the few friends he still trusted.

Of course, the stories were just stories. Eventually Rail realized that. The problem wasn't the district he lived in, the problem was Orokos. But the city was all there was. There was no way out of it, and nothing beyond the horizon but the endless ocean. So he had to learn to live with it.

He and the drifter parted company, and Rail ended up in another ghetto, little better than the one he had grown up in. He thought about going back home, but there had been so many probability storms since he had left that he wasn't sure he could find the way. He didn't care enough to try, anyway. The past was the past; no need to revisit it.

One day he had found himself roped in as a lookout for a couple of acquaintances who were robbing a grand old house. When that went well they asked him to do it again, and when
that
went well they took him to Anya-Jacana. The obese thief-mistress liked him, and extended her blessing to him. He could be a thief if he wished, under her protection, as long as he made sure she got her cut. And so he began to steal.

Rail never had a problem with theft. A tough upbringing had left him with one rule which he lived by: to think of himself above all others. You had to be selfish to survive. He knew it was wrong to take what wasn't his, but it was somebody else's definition of wrong. He needed the money and his victims had it. If he was smart enough to take it off them and they were foolish enough to let him, then that was how it would go. In the ghettoes, it was every man, woman and child for themselves.

Moa never believed in that. Perhaps that was what attracted him to her. He didn't
want
to be so hard-edged, he just felt he had to be. Moa's occasional flurries of good-heartedness were what gave him faith in humanity, that life didn't have to be the way it was, that not everyone was beyond saving. Even him.

Being a thief came easily to him, and he had a talent for it. Without that talent, he might not have survived when he suddenly found it almost impossible to breathe during a probability storm. It struck without warning when he and some associates were on their way to liberate Protectorate technology from a canalside warehouse. Not knowing what else to do, his companions aborted the mission and took him back to the thief-mistress.

She could help him, she had said, but not for free. He was desperate enough to do anything at that point. So she gave him the respirator that he had worn ever since, and she made him pay it back at an extortionate rate of interest. He had still not rid himself of that debt, and probably never would. The interest accumulated faster than he could make money. It didn't matter. Anya-Jacana didn't need the money, she wanted his service.

He had been bound to her by fear, and he had thought he would never be free of that. But now he had run. He could never return to the ghetto. He was adrift. But at least he was adrift with Moa.

 

Rail had sat faithfully by her bed for several days, but he had to eat and attend to other matters, and that meant he had to leave her alone sometimes while he went to buy food or use the crude toilets in the tiny settlement nearby. And sometimes he simply had to get out of there, to walk around for a while and clear his head.

“Don't go anywhere,” he joked weakly at her, each time he got up to leave. Then he pushed aside the drape, and stepped out into Kilatas.

The sight of Kilatas in all its shabby glory always made him feel even more tiny and insignificant. He held on to the metal railing that ran along the path outside the cave and looked across the secret sanctuary, and marvelled at what had been made here.

Kilatas was built within an immense chamber of rock, at the very base of the black cliffs that supported Orokos. Hundreds of feet above, the city bustled on unaware, while down here at sea level lived a community – one of many, no doubt – that existed beyond the laws of the Protectorate. The cavern roof soared high overhead, packed with stalactites, blackened with bats in patches. The greater part of Kilatas was taken up by a huge saltwater lake, from which dozens of bleak islands rose.

Most remarkable was the western side of the cavern, where there was a great natural wall. This wall was only a half-dozen metres thick, and beyond it was the endless ocean and the sunlight, which beamed in through several gaps in the rock. The gaps were high up on the wall, massive jagged rents that allowed the day's light in to brighten the cavern. Kilatas was always dim, except in the early evening when the sun blazed directly on to the outside wall. But that was the price they paid for their limited freedoms.

The dwellings of Kilatas had been put wherever they could fit. Some, like the one where Moa lay, were just caves cut out of the rock. There were many of them, high up on the sheer sides of the cavern, linked by precarious paths to other parts of the community. In other places, where the walls of the cavern were only a shallow slant, thick clusters of buildings had grown, dozens of huts and simple shacks of wood and metal. They were constructed with whatever was available, using skills learned in the ghettoes.

But most of the dwellings were on the islands that stood in the lake. They clung to the bare rock like limpets. A dizzying network of rope bridges connected the islands to each other, a rickety web stretched across the water.

Beneath all this chaos, among these shaggy clots of civilization growing doggedly on the cold stone, there was one thing that drew the eye, one focus around which the whole hidden community revolved: the shipyard.

It was to the shipyard that Rail was heading now, and he made his way down the winding path that hugged the cliff. His hand ran along the thin metal barrier that protected him from a terrible drop to the water below. The path took him through a knot of mismatched huts that had been built on a flat shelf in the cavern wall. He was barely acknowledged by the people there, who sat repairing nets with twine or turning spitted fish over small fires. Their clothes were threadbare and their faces were drawn. They hauled themselves about wearily.

Rail didn't look at them. He had long ago learned to shut out the sight of other people's misery. He had grown up in ghettoes, after all, and this place was no better. It could do him no good to sympathize.

Is it worth it?
he thought to himself.
What's the point of pretending to be free if you starve?

Kilatas might have been beneath the gaze of the Patrician, but it was also beyond his help. Though Rail hated to admit it, the foul nutrient gruel that the Protectorate provided for the ghettoes had stopped him going hungry more than once. Here, there wasn't even that. He had heard people whispering about Kilatas in the ghettoes like it was some kind of promised land, where their poor oppressed people could find dignity. But there was no dignity in scratching out an existence like this.

No wonder they wanted to leave. Between the Protectorate stealing away their loved ones and the hopelessness of their situation, he could understand why they would want to believe in another place where things weren't so terrible. He could understand even that they would risk their lives for it. Humankind wasn't meant to be crushed this way. Sooner or later, they would find a way out.

Even if that way out led only to death.

His mind full of dark thoughts, Rail walked on. Eventually the path took him down to where the cavern floor was more of a gentle slope than a cliff, and buildings sprang up everywhere. There was more life in the eyes of the people now. They called to each other and made jokes, and the children played. Nearer to the shipyards, they felt nearer to the heart of Kilatas, closer to its purpose. For Kilatas wasn't a place where these people intended to live out their lives. Kilatas was a place they intended to
escape.