The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam (20 page)

Churr was delirious, muttering a low stream of words to herself that Alan couldn’t make out. And Alan, for his part, was trying to stay low so that the Clawbaby didn’t see him. The Clawbaby was what he had taken to calling the big thing with glowing green eyes that had attacked them at The Cup and Skull, because of its metal claws and its baby cries. It was down here with them, he knew it. The glow of its eyes was the same as the glow of the
sludge that had greeted them when they opened that door. Perhaps the Clawbaby had beaten them here and was just keeping itself submerged, slowly following them by walking along the bottom of the swamp. Though not them:
him
. Alan knew that it wanted him, and him only. He wondered how he knew what he knew about it. He wondered if they were connected.

‘So where is the Boatman, then?’ Nora asked.

‘Crocodile got him,’ Alan said.

‘There are no tooth holes in his cloak,’ Nora replied.

Alan shrugged. He realised that contradicted what he knew, but his mind was sluggish and he couldn’t get past the contradiction to think about it. ‘There’s a fog in my head,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you.’

‘Hunger, exhaustion and the proximity to Dok,’ Nora said. ‘Dok reaches out and gets into you. It corrupts over time. It has twisted many. Some are more susceptible than others. Many find themselves drawn to it, and without knowing why – without even knowing that Dok is the source of their problems – they wander on down here. Dok has claimed many souls.’

Alan could not construct a meaningful response. He fell back on habit and scrabbled around in his bag for the bottle of whisky they’d found in the old desk. There was not much left.
There never was
.

‘Soon we will find the Pilgrims,’ Nora said. ‘Then we will be able to clear your head.’

The channel narrowed. The sound of dripping water was constant, and too loud. It echoed. It felt invasive. Soon the raft really did encounter a shoreline, of sorts: stinking mud humping up from out of the thick liquid. The mud was full of rubbish – bones and sharp metal wire. Churr and Spider kept falling over, which they found hilarious. Watching them, Alan struggled with a monstrous anger. How could their spirits be so light? But the journey meant so little to them, of course; for them it was just an
adventure
. Nora tied Eyes to Alan’s back and he followed her carefully through the filth. He listened to Churr and Spider giggling behind him.

The channel ended at a gateway in a wall as huge as those at either side. The heavy, ornate gate was lying in the iridescent mud, slowly corroding. Nora led the party through the gap. There were cobbles protruding from the mud. Eyes was heavy on Alan’s back, and the
breath that escaped his mouth as his head lolled from side to side smelled intensely bad.

They travelled at a painfully slow speed, following the shoreline until they found themselves on a causeway crossing an expanse of oily sludge. Then those intestinal trees closed in again and Nora led them through a squat forest, bidding them to stand only on the roots. Between the roots was the oily sludge, and here it stank, reminding Alan of the drains in the House of a Thousand Hollows’ after a monsoon.

Alan had to stop frequently to put Eyes down. Sometimes his old friend would cough and splutter and speak unintelligible words, but he would at least swallow fluids – a bitter sap that Nora bled from the trees, then boiled and cooled – and he would eat, if someone pushed tiny morsels of food between his lips. They ate snail, mostly, or if they were lucky, Nora snared them a snake. And Spider was good at identifying the myriad varieties of mushrooms that sprouted from the damp tree trunks around them.

Alan knew night from day only by Nora’s new routine. Every evening she took herself away from the group to perform a sequence of movements that she called her ‘carto’. She started standing straight, feet together, palms towards the sky, and then she stretched as if pushing away something hanging over her. She moved through stances and poses, sometimes fast and sometimes slowly,
incorporating wide, sweeping movements and tiny, more intricate motions that Alan couldn’t quite make out. She finished by placing her hands over her ears and raising one leg so that she was standing on one foot, lowering herself into a one-legged crouch, and then gently starting to spin. It was not obvious what started the spin, or how she did it, but the spinning speeded up and up, until she was nothing but a blur, and then suddenly she stopped.

She was never dizzy afterwards.

After watching her perform the carto back and forth along a wide, low branch, Alan asked her about it.

‘I have to be receptive to the spirit of Gleam,’ she said, rummaging in her satchel for a glowing crystal. ‘The spinning is how I draw it into myself. I draw the spirit in, and it tells me a little about Gleam. Then, when I sleep, I dream through what the spirit has told me, and when I wake, in the morning, I have worked it out a little. The carto is how I learn the way. And it is also how I record my findings. See this?’ she said, and took hold of a small green gemstone dangling from a twisted branch on a leather thong. ‘I hang one of these before performing the carto. The stone remembers that I was here. When a Mapmaker performs their carto – they are all different – all of the hung stones sing out to them. They are like beacons, radiating the spirit. They tell Mapmakers where others have been, and they give a little more detail than if there were no green gems in that place. Next time a Mapmaker comes near here and they carto, they will receive
visions of this particular place, and they will know that one of us has been this way before them.’

Alan stretched. He was lying across a knot of fat roots, and it was not comfortable, but it was still a blessed relief for his aching back. The swamp forest was alive with sound and movement: unfamiliar birdcalls, the occasional insect chirrup, and fireflies. Eyes lay on his side on top of another bunch of roots, Spider was collecting fungus and Churr was hunting for large cricket-like bugs that she liked to toast.

‘But if there was no stone hanging here?’ he asked.

‘They would still receive the spirit. But the spirit is more abstract. It is a voice that you have to decipher. And you have to dream to decipher it.’

‘So you’re only doing this now because nobody has been this way before? No Mapmakers?’

‘Yes. Before we took the boat, all of that has been mapped. And I had been to that doorway before too, so I did not need to perform the carto, and nor did I need to record my journey for the others. Whereas now … now, the stones I leave behind will tell the Mapmaker tribes what is here – what I have found.’

Alan leaned forward, and whispered. ‘I actually thought you lot had been down this way before.’

Nora frowned. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘I thought you’d been everywhere.’

Nora shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but we are better
at navigating than anyone else, even if we haven’t been to a place before.’

‘So,’ Alan said, ‘Daunt doesn’t employ any Mapmakers.’

‘We are not
employed
by anybody.’

‘No, but … you know what I mean.’

‘Well. She may have secured the services of a renegade.’

‘Like you.’

‘Like me, but one who does not adhere to the principle of the carto.’

‘Won’t your carto and your … What do you call them? Green gems?’

‘Yes, green gems.’

‘Not very imaginative.’

‘We rarely need to speak of them.’

‘Won’t it all give away where you are?’

‘The process does not reveal the identity of the Mapmaker.’

Alan paused, then asked, ‘And what’s the spirit of Gleam, anyway?’

‘It’s …’ Nora opened and closed her hands as she tried to put it into words. ‘So many questions, Alan. Gleam is not alive, but there is a force in it. We do not know where it comes from. It is not a soul … it is a feeling. A nature. A spirit. “Spirit” is simply the best word for it. There is a spirit in all of the structure. Structures – structures both
old and new, but it is stronger in the old. The superstructure has the strongest spirit of all.’

‘And what is the spirit telling you about where we are now?’

Nora sighed. ‘It is difficult to know,’ she said. ‘The spirit here is sick, warped. We are nearing a great corruption.’

‘Before I went into the Pyramid,’ Alan said, ‘my parents used to tell me stories. I remember books, but I haven’t seen any books since Modest Mills was destroyed.’ He picked absent-mindedly at Snapper, lying across his stomach. ‘Some of the stories were adventure stories, and there’d be dangerous moments in the stories, scary bits, all of that.
Threats
. But there’d be nice moments too, happy parts where everybody was just kind of able to relax.’

‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘I’m tired of feeling threatened. Of feeling scared.’

‘I thought that that was the primary appeal of the Pyramid? If you live in the Pyramid then you don’t have to worry all of the time.’

Alan frowned.

‘What I find interesting,’ Nora continued, ‘is that there are no books in the Pyramid.’

A firefly drifted blurrily through Alan’s field of vision, leaving a bright trail across the criss-cross network of branches above him. ‘No books,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you: there’s nothing in the Pyramid but Stationing and Bleeding.’ He thought of Billy and Marion. ‘There are people,
of course there are, but you never see the ones you love because your Stations are scheduled that way deliberately. One gets in from their Station as the other is going out to theirs. It’s so that you’re not tempted to make love out of cycle, see.’

‘You have scheduled love-making?’

‘Of course. The Astronomers dictate when you can make love. It depends on your birth skies, how the moons and stars and dragons burned when you were born. They look at yours and your partner’s and that determines the optimum birth sky for your child. The conception has to occur nine months before the optimum birth sky so they schedule the Stationing accordingly.’

Nora laughed. ‘I do not believe that can work. Some things cannot be managed in such a way.’

‘They try.’

‘So no child is ever born beneath the wrong sky?’

Alan felt the darkness pressing in. He looked around for another firefly. He could not speak until he found one. He sat up and watched the little creature dance. ‘They cannot completely control the love-making,’ he said slowly, ‘that is true. But to answer your question – no. No child – no living child – is ever born beneath the wrong sky.’ He watched Nora as the weight of his words sank in. ‘It’s one reason that they named the Discard the Discard.’

Nora looked as sick as he felt. ‘What is their reason for this?’ she asked eventually.

‘They want citizens perfectly suited to the Stations,’ Alan said. ‘Like I said – there’s nothing else. There’s nothing else they care about.’

‘But what are the Stations for?’

Alan shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Nobody else does either. It all just keeps going. That’s what it’s all about: keeping going. Perpetuity. It’s a giant machine that mustn’t ever stop. But nobody in there sees it that way. They see the Stationing as intensely personal, something that they have to do for themselves, to make themselves better people. The Stations are all rituals. Oh, that’s right – there
are
books. Books for each Station – they contain all of the recitals, the details, the precise instructions. They’re bound in ancient metal and chained to the walls. But they’re not like the books when I was a child.’ He paused. ‘Maybe I’m the one who’s wrong, though,’ he said. ‘Maybe if I’d done the Stationing with all my heart, and the rituals, then I wouldn’t be in this mess, and my family wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe approaching them as personal rituals is exactly what we should be doing. Maybe that’s what they’re for: making your life work.’

‘But the babies,’ Nora whispered.

Alan looked at her. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘The babies.’

‘Everyone else in there, they’re okay with that?’

‘It’s not that they’re okay with it. It’s that they don’t think there’s another way.’

‘You do, though.’

Alan snorted. ‘Must have been born beneath the wrong sky,’ he said.

‘There are no skies down here.’

‘No,’ Alan said. ‘No, there aren’t.’

*

The next night, they saw a distant fire flickering through the trees.

‘Daunt’s people?’ Churr ventured. ‘We’re bound to run into some eventually.’

‘Most likely,’ Nora said. ‘I’ll go and find out.’ She had performed her carto and spent some time meditating. Spider had been collecting firewood – generally bits and pieces of old furniture from the abandoned brick towers of Glasstown – but his backpack was now empty, so they were not lighting their own fire that night. All they had for light were a few small starstones, which Churr had wrapped up as soon as she’d spotted the other fire. Nora melted soundlessly into the darkness between the trees. Her silence was quite unnerving and Alan was reminded of the unease she had originally stirred in him; he had forgotten it during their conversations, which were, generally, far longer and far easier than those he had with any other member of the party. Eyes was incoherent when he did speak, which was less and less now, Churr was still distant, and Spider had never been talkative.

They held their breath as they watched the faraway flame and listened. The swamp was very faintly luminescent here in the forest – the gutwood, as Alan thought of
it – but not enough to shed any light upwards. Sometimes he could make out somebody or something moving against it – a brief and incomplete silhouette – but he didn’t know if that was Nora making her way towards the fire or not. Though he knew that Nora was more capable of defending herself than the rest of them put together, worry rose in him. What if they were Daunt’s people, and there were lots of them? What if Nora was surrounded?

Or what if the fire was a decoy?

A hand on his shoulder. He spun round.

Nora was standing behind him, a finger across her lips. ‘They are far away enough for us to speak quietly,’ she whispered. ‘But no screaming, please.’

‘By the Builders!’ Alan breathed. ‘You scare me, Nora!’

‘There are two of them,’ Nora said. ‘Daunt’s people: two men, bearing the symbol.’

‘You didn’t kill them?’

‘No.’ Nora looked puzzled. ‘Did you want me to?’

‘No.’ Alan glanced around. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I thought it was better that they don’t know we’re here. Let them return to Daunt and so let us avoid arousing further suspicion.’

‘Which way were they going?’ Churr asked. ‘Were they on their way back up? Were they carrying much stock?’

‘Yes, I think so. They had full backpacks, at any rate, and we have not noticed them travelling alongside us, have we?’

‘We need that stock,’ Churr hissed. ‘That’s how we begin. The bug value of all those mushrooms – we could buy a gang or two with that. We can buy bandits.’

‘Let’s just get to Dok and get back again,’ Alan said.

’That wasn’t the arrangement.’

‘Yeah, but—’

‘Daunt still doesn’t know it’s you she’s looking for, does she?’

‘No, but—’

Churr put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Hey! Your lady, she looking for a thief? We’ve got him over here!’

Alan froze.

Churr’s shouts were followed by what felt like a deathly silence. Then, raised voices from the distance.

‘Thanks, Churr,’ Alan said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Now we’ve
got
to kill them,’ Churr said.

‘I know that. That’s why I’m pissed off.’

‘We’re not all here for the same reasons,’ Churr said, drawing her knives. ‘Remember that.’

Movement and noise, the flapping of unseen wings and ragged croaks that could have come from birds or toads. There were splashes as swamp creatures slipped beneath the surface. Silhouettes obscured the orange flames as they moved through the trees towards their target.