PART ONE
The Winding Way
I speak of the city of Ludwyche, and of the river Nysis which flows through it down to the sea, and of the ghostly Faynr who haunts the river a full sixty miles from head to tail. I speak also of the dragon Haakenur, who died that Ludwyche might be born, and from whose body the ghost Faynr did arise. I speak of these things and of subsequent happenings by which Kethra ebbed and flowed in fortune, from the Year of First Arrival onwards.
Mistress Pynne – A Chronicle of the Kethran Isles, Their Varied Peoples, and Their Rulers.
THE NEVER-NEVERS
Cady woke up at six o’clock, from old habit, groaned and sat up in bed. Her eyes were glued shut and her throat coated in sand. But all she had to do was grope out a hand to find her breakfast, set on the bedside table: a glass of malt vinegar in which a raw egg had been cracked. She drank it down with glee. Then she got up, belched, and managed to get to the toilet just in time to have a piss and a shit. The day was set fair: distant shores beckoned.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
Cady was seventy-eight years old. She lived in a home for dried-up sailors not far from the waterfront in Anglestume. She needed to smell the salt air and hear the drumming of the wind in the masts and wires of the boats at their moorings. Without such, she would have likely stayed in bed until noon, drinking rum and singing the old songs. But sunlight called her out, and this day was no different. She washed her face and armpits and drew on her tattered smock and bell-bottoms and punched out the dents in her bowler hat. Her hair was short on top, long in the back, braided in a complex knot that only needed to be unwrapped once a month to be washed.
She was puffing on her third roll-up of the day by the time she reached the harbour. People laughed at her, or nodded, or made some snide comment. One or two had a smile for her, but she scowled at them all the same. She drew in clean air, mixed it with the smoke in her lungs, and coughed and brought up a great glob of phlegm. It hit the water with a splash: something nice for the fish to nibble on. Then she made her way to a building in a side street. The offices of the Amalgamated Union of Bargemen, Waterwomen, River Pilots and Apprentices was a crumbling edifice, eaten by salt. The door was locked. She banged on it and started to shout and swear. A panel slid open and a man’s face peeped out. At first all she could see was the dark grey triangle on his brow, but then his eyes came into view, and then his mouth.
“It’s pension day,” she told him.
“No, it isn’t.”
“I believe it is. Every Wednesday…”
“It’s not Wednesday.”
“Are you sure? You little pizzlecrack. You’re pulling one over on me.”
“Cady?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“Is it? Right. I see. But the thing is, I’m a bit bloody skint, Meesha, truth be known.”
“You always are.”
“In which case, how about a handout, a little payment on account.”
“On account of what?”
Cady’s anger spilled over. “On account of all my years of service on the goddamn stinking river, that’s what!” She could have added: on account of the mottled skin and the scarred hands, and the frostbitten fingers, the deep lines on her brow, the salt spray in her eyes, and the black mist
in her lungs, her pockmarked tongue, the stench on her breath, and never mind the dawn-lit departures, and the all-night journeys. And the untold people she’d delivered safely to their ports of call, and most of all those lost on the way, the drowned, the damaged ones, the dying…
The emotions took hold of her, and her body shook head to toe, and she wiped back the tears.
But she kept her silence.
Meesha, the clerk on duty that morning, looked at her with no little sympathy. But rules were rules, as he now pointed out to her: page nineteen, paragraph two of the union handbook.
“I’m sorry, Cady. You know how it is.”
“Do I?”
“Come back tomorrow, and we’ll have a nice little chat.”
The panel slid shut.
Harrumphing like an old tugboat pulling a liner, Cady trudged off back along the waterfront. Her friend Yanish had set up his rod and line with the other fishermen on the south quay. The light glinted on his binoculars as he looked out to sea. She made a careful search of her purse and found a few bits of brass and silver, and a couple more in the lining. And a fur-covered cough drop. She licked at this. Hmm, tasty. A bit of rot made things more beautiful. There were many secrets to a good life, and this was one of them.
The tin bell over the door rang as she entered Fable’s Corner Shop on Pebble Street.
“An ounce of Bosun’s, please.”
“And how are you, this morning, Cady dear?”
“As to be expected.”
Fable poured the rolling tobacco into the basin of a weighing scale. Cady watched the needle carefully. “A little more, I think. And a little more… That’s it, spot on!”
“It’s over the mark, actually.”
“Only by a few flakes.”
Fable tutted. She tilted the tobacco directly into Cady’s pouch, and then started to count
the pile of coins given in exchange, saying, “Some of these aren’t legal tender.”
“Are they not?”
“Blimey. This one’s got Queen Hilda’s face on it. That’s centuries old.”
“Let me see that.” Cady took the coin back. “Coo, yes. I might get it valued. It must be worth a fortune!”
The shopkeeper laughed gleefully. “Even if you had a fortune, would anyone ever see it? No, they would not!”
Fable Duncliffe was one of the few who gave Cady as good as they got. They were both old Wodwo stock, going way back, although Cady had more or less given up on her tribe. But Fable was proud, upstanding, well-rooted, and a bit witchlike, even if she did overdo it with the cackle. Her skin had that greenish undertone the older members of the tribe developed. She wore a floral apron and a hairnet. Her blue-tinted locks poked out through the mesh. Her eyes were red where they used to be white, and grey where they used to be brown. It might have been the aftermath of disease, or evidence of having seen too much, but Fable never said which, not to anyone.
Cady nodded at the bottles of boiled sweets on the shelf. “I’ve got a taste for those cough drops. How about a tuppeny bag? I can pay you tomorrow.”
“I can let you have half a dozen, on account.”
There was that blasted word again! Sometimes, Cady had to admit, these days her whole life was on account, always waiting for something that never quite arrived.
“Aye, that will do me.”
The shopkeeper counted the lozenges from the bottle. “One, two, three… Oh and by the way, some people were asking about you. Four, five…”
“About me?”
“And six. That’s right. Wanted to know where you lived. Strange looking, they were, the both of them.”
“I don’t like the sound
of that.”
“No, I was the same. I never told them anything. Because why, one of them being a creature of unusual nature.”
“How’s that?”
“You know, one of those artificial men.”
“A Thrawl?”
“The same, the very same. A terrible sight to look upon.”
Cady was lost in thought, mumbling to herself as she rolled a cigarette. “A Thrawl…”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t see many of those, these days.”
“No you do not, thank the Lord of all Flowers in his glory.”
“They were banned, weren’t they?” Cady dug in her pockets and brought up some specks of grass and seeds, which she sprinkled on the baccy.
“That they were. From all corners of Great Kethra, north, south, east and west. Banned, and then dismantled.”
“Not dismantled, put into storage, I think.”
The shopkeeper grimaced at this. She stretched her back, groaning, and then said, “Anyway, so the other one…”
“The other what?”
“The other person, looking for you. There were two of them, I said that.”
“Did you?” Cady lit the roll-up and drew on it. “Ah, that’s nice! Go on, go on.”
“The other one was a lass, a youngster, like. An Alkhym girl.”
“An Alkhym? In Anglestume?”
“My thoughts exactly. It can’t be right.”
Cady frowned. “How young was she, did you say?”
“I didn’t. But under ten years, most definitely. Because why, she didn’t have the whatsits, you know, at the temples, like. The antennae. The hesti, that’s the word.”
“I see.” Cady pondered for a moment. “And what did they want, these two?”
“I couldn’t say, we never
got that far.”
“But they were looking for me?”
“Oh yes. Asked by name.” Fable ran a yellow duster over the counter. “Your full-spoken name, mind. Arcadia Meade, like they knew you, good and proper.”
Cady was exasperated. “Luddin’ heck. Fable! You didn’t tell them where to find me, I hope?”
“I did not. Because why, I’m thinking you might not want to be found. Not by a Thrawl, at the least. Gives me the shivers, just thinking about it.”
Cady left the shop. Her knees were playing up something rotten as she walked back to the promenade. There was a little more activity now, as people went about their morning business. There were even a few holidaymakers, something the town hadn’t seen since before the war. One lad was running up and down the prom, screaming at the skirls, making them take off in a flurry of wings. He was going to get his eyes pecked out if he wasn’t careful. Bloody jumped-up little shit! Kids. More trouble than they’re worth, and they ain’t worth a freckle on a loblolly’s arse.
She cadged a lift on the back of the rag-and-bone man’s cart, taking the road that edged the salt flats, along the south coast of the island. She jumped off at Omega Point. It was here that the sea turned into the river, or the river turned into the sea, depending on your direction of travel. Cady had sailed up and down the River Nysis, from Anglestume to the city of Ludwich and back again, for many years, too many years, and knew all the calling points along the way. She watched the marker buoys turn restlessly on the tide, letting her mind drift over the steely grey expanse of the waters. The air stank: rotten seaweed, fish, the tang of salt. It got on the tongue, in her hair, her clothes, and she loved it to glory and back.
It was good to get away from the village. She usually came out this way, every two days or so, stopping here next to the jetty. The remains of a concrete gun casement had been invaded by lichen and bird shit. Behind her, the flats stretched away into the distance until they reached the wired enclosures of the prisoner of war camp, now empty.
The river was six miles wide here, the opposite bank a dark smudge of mist. Cady could just about make out the steeple of St Aethel the Martyr. Yet the estuary was quiet. Only a few boats passed by, one of them a cargo steamer, no doubt heading for the trading post at Maddenholt, the furthest people travelled upriver these days. It got her thinking of the years gone by, when the Nysis was filled with noise and life, with smoke from the funnels, the foghorns blaring, the waters jam-packed with barges, yachts, tugs, warships and dredgers, and her own river taxi chugging along, always with a full passenger load. The Juniper had been a small boat, a steam launch carrying a dozen passengers and a crew of two, herself and whatever young guttersnipe she could take on as deckhand. Aye, good days, bloody good days when they weren’t bad.
Damn, she was getting sentimental!
She wetted a palm and held her hand up above her head to feel the wind. South by south-east, seventeen maybe eighteen knots, holding steady. The tide coming in, easy like. The mathematics of flow and contraflow, the secret channels and sudden depths, the rocks that lay hidden, a quickening current. Cady knew it all by heart; she had spent too many years on the water – it never left you. In the end, only one thing mattered: the course of the river in her veins.
They called it the Winding Way, and by Lud they were right to do so, with so many twists and turns along its length from source to sea, freshwater to salt. But you could never get lost; the Nysis always carried you onwards.
And then Cady frowned. And froze, stock-still.
For she had heard a sound, a single breath, in and out.
Her optic gland tingled. Well fuck me. Someone had crept up on her.
Out here, in the flatlands.
She turned her head slightly and saw a flickering shape at the edge of her vision, the shape of a woman. But when Cady turned fully the land was empty all around, only the salt marshes and the dance of a skirl on the wing.
A crab scuttled away from her step. Silence settled into every dip and rise; even the river flowed on without a sound. She was tempted to scarper back home and kip down with a bottle of rum for company, a nice tune on the crystal set, and a racy book.
But the sound came again, a sudden exhalation.
Pfft.
The air flickered darkly and folded upon itself, some few yards away, in a different position from the first apparition. It took on a fleeting form, this time of a man’s shape, before it too drifted apart, and away, scattered on the wind.
Cady felt herself shudder, for she knew what this meant.
Pfft, pfft.
Her eyes darted this way and that as a third and fourth cloud of dust erupted from the ground, each forming themselves into the shape of a body. This time Cady went over to one spot, and caught sight of the seeds as they floated away. At her feet was the open funnel of a never-never, a flowering plant that usually dispersed its seeds in a random pattern – but every so often the seed clouds took on momentary human form. As now. Pfft, pfft, pfft. All across the salt flats the figures appeared, and disappeared. The skirls were going mad, scrawing loudly, swooping down to catch the seeds. It looked like the birds were attacking the figures. Cady looked on in both dread and excitement: it was that time again. And she sang out loud to a tune of her own invention, “Change is in the air, change is in the air!” She snatched a handful of the seeds from the nearest figure as it appeared, and held them in her palm, tiny blue ovoids – before popping them into a buttoned pocket in her purse. She would need them later, for the special pictures they could bring her.
The image of the seed people stayed with her as she tramped back into town.
She was knackered and her corns were throbbing by the time she reached the quay. Yanish was still there, fishing away, his keep net flapping with a couple
of haddock. He speared a tagworm on a hook, working deftly.
“Very nice,” she said, “that egg and vinegar you set out for me.”
He shrugged.
“The egg had gone off, just how I like it.”
Cady tutted to herself. How in Lud’s name do I tell him? Where to begin? Matter-of-factly she said, “The never-nevers were clouding, just before.”
“So?” He cast the line out over the waters with a nimble flick of the wrist.
“I mean really clouding.”
And the life came into his eyes, hearing this. “In human shape?”
“Exactly so.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Omega Point. But they only last a day or so.”
Yanish placed his fishing rod in the rest, leaned on the seat of his propped-up motorcycle, and lit a cigarette. “I’ll ride out there, this afternoon. I can get an hour off.”
But Cady’s voice lowered. “It’s a sign, a definite sign.”
“What are you babbling on about?”
Cady shook her head, clearing the thoughts away. “Yanish, some people might be asking after me.”
“Oh yes?” His attention was back on his fishing float as it bobbed on the water.
“I’m going to be busy. So I don’t need anyone bothering me, not just now.”
“Too late, old chiv,” he said.
Yanish Khalan was eighteen years old. He was born of the Azeel tribe and, like Meesha at the Union office, had a triangle of hard flesh at the centre of his brow – the aphelon, the sign of his faith. He had angular features, perfectly symmetrical, reaching a point at his chin. His hair was short at the back and sides, long on top and slicked back with oil, but teased into a long drooping curl at the front. He was always combing the style into place, trying to make himself look like one of those stars of stage and crystal. His work jeans and leather jacket were well-worn, but clean. Until last year, he’d always worn a tie, and Cady had bought him a pin for it on his birthday. She was pleased
to see he had the pin clipped to his lapel, like a badge. They’d known each other since Yanish was thirteen, when she’d pulled him out of the river, a bedraggled wreck of a boy. Both his parents had died in the war. Like many such orphans, he’d run wild, wild and free and fast enough to not see the brick wall that waited for him. Crack! He’d toppled over into the dark clutches of the Nysis.
“What do you mean, too late?” she asked.
“I talked to them already.”
“You did?”
He looked at her properly. “Sure, a girl, and a Thrawl.”
“That’s them.”
“They nearly caused a riot.”
“We don’t have riots in Anglestume.”
Yanish put on his “wireless news” voice. “Today in Sleepy Town, a commotion broke out on the waterfront, involving the townsfolk and walking talking machine man. Apparently, one old biddy threw a tray of cockles at him.”
Cady couldn’t help grinning. “Yes well… don’t let them know where I live.”
“I already told them.”
“Why? Why, why?” She fumed and spat and gibbered. “Why would you do that? Why?!”
“They’ve got a job for you.”
This gave her a start. Nobody had asked such a thing of her, not in a good long time.
“I don’t want a job.”
“You’re living off rum and cigarette smoke.”
“Diet of the Gods.”
Yanish pulled on his ciggie with a deft overhand grip, jutting it to one corner of his mouth. To Cady’s eye he looked like Claude Lumero in that crystal show, oh, what was it called now… She’d seen it last month… that war story… he’d kissed that woman who turned out to be an Enakor spy… Rendezvous at Midnight… something like that… But
her mind drifted along…
“Damn it!”
Yanish’s curse startled her. He had grabbed the fishing rod and was now jerking it backwards and to the side, trying to land a fish. But the line went slack.
“That’s your fault.” He flicked his cigarette into the water. “It’s your smell, it’s putting them off.”
Cady grunted. “Those two look nice enough.” She nodded at the keep net. “Perhaps tonight we can fry them up… um… what do you say? Oh, I know! I have to visit the outer fields later on, so I’ll gather some of my special herbs, I know you like those.”
He stared at her without speaking.
“The thing is, Yan, I need to talk to you. About the never-nevers.”
“What about them?”
Her lips moved in a curious motion, as though tasting the words before she said them. She longed to tell him the truth, but she knew that Yanish, for all his poise and aplomb, would be upset. And so instead, with a forced grin that showed off her missing teeth, she said, “Remember, the last time we partook, eh? The visions you had! You were squealing with delight, you were, talking of Queen Luda and how you’d like to climb inside the dragon’s womb with her.”
The triangle on Yanish’s brow brightened, showing his pleasure: he couldn’t hide it. “You and your outer fields! One day, I swear, I’ll follow you and find out where they are. Dig up my own supply. I’ll be sitting pretty!”
Cady snorted at such a notion. “You could follow me all the day long and you would never see where I was going.”
Yanish gathered in his line and placed his angling gear back in his pannier. With a swift blow he killed the two fishes and wrapped them in newspaper. When he stood up, his face caught the sunlight just so, and was tinted with lilac. Cady admired his looks, and she was awful proud of him, especially since he’d taken the job looking after the old folks at the hostel: all that mopping up of piss and vomit, ugh!
She said, “Tell me, at least, these people looking for me, what was the nature of the job on offer?”
“They wouldn’t say. But there was something wrong with the girl.”
“How do you mean?”
“She had the shakes. And her eyes were tuned out.” He kickstarted the motorcycle’s engine: it took him five or six thrusts of his boot before a gust of black smoke belched out of the exhaust. He had to shout over the noise: “Tonight, old chiv, we shall dine!” Then he set off along the quay, the sound of the engine backfiring heard long after he’d turned onto the prom road.
Cady sat down on an upturned lobster pot and prepared another roll-up, adding a dash of knill weed plucked from a gap in the stones. It crackled when lit, and gave off a lovely scent. Her nostrils tingled. And after a series of racking coughs and splutters, and a few choice expletives, she felt a lot better, a whole lot better. She decided once and for all that tonight she would tell Yanish everything, all about what the sight of the seed people meant, and her own true and secret nature. That would knock him for six, arse over tit, yes indeed!
She set off for Guillemot Lane, and the sailor’s hostel. Guillemot was an especially narrow gloom-laden street. The buildings leaned over almost to embrace each other.
“Oh buggeration! Bugger me backwards!”
There they were, waiting outside the door to her lodgings – a man and a girl. Cady ducked into a ginnel, peeking out from behind the wall. The Thrawl was chattering away, while the girl was just sitting there, staring into space. A tiny ball of twinkling violet light was circling her head, around and around; Cady had no idea what it was. They had a couple of suitcases with them, resting on the pavement, one brown and tattered, the other smaller with a flowery pattern. Cady wished she had her eyeglass with her, then she could have a good look at them, from a safer distance.
And then Mr Tattersall came out of his ironmonger’s shop and started shouting at the
Thrawl, demanding that he remove himself from the vicinity. The Thrawl stood up and placed himself in front of the girl. He was very tall and very thin, unnaturally so. But the girl remained calm; she reached up to play with the little ball of light, batting it this way and that.
Tattersall – who was a cantankerous soul, much abused in life, and wanting to visit the same on anyone he didn’t take a fancy to – made a rude gesture, the kind that only an Ephreme of a certain age would understand. Maybe the Thrawl had such things lodged in his brain, which acted, or so Cady had heard, rather like an encyclopaedia with endless pages – in which case he would understand just how rude Tattersall was being. But the Thrawl made no response. He just stood there, feet apart, arms at his side ready for action.
Tattersall bent down to the pavement. Cady wondered what he was up to, until she spotted the piece of chalk in his hand. He was drawing a sigil on the slabs, right in front of the Thrawl. The ironmonger was always boasting of his knowledge of the symbols of magic, and the casting of the runes. The Thrawl couldn’t resist this so easily; his eyes were drawn to the symbol, and a strange whining sound came from his lips. The girl looked worried. And then she too saw the sign written on the ground, and it had a far more drastic effect on her, given the fact that she was fully alive, rather than a man-made creature like the Thrawl. She spun around in a circle, and kept on spinning and spinning and would surely fall over, dizzy, or worse.
By now Cady was miffed, somewhat mightily. All she wanted to do was get back to her rooms and start the process of the never-never ritual. She left the safety of the ginnel and marched across the street, where she confronted Tattersall head on: “What in the pit of heaven’s arsehole are you doing, disturbing my friends?”
To which Tattersall replied, “Your friends? Specimens like this?”
It took all of Cady’s
willpower not to peek at the magic symbol. She stretched herself as lofty as she could, announcing, “My very good friends, sir! So sling your hook! Go on, bollock off, that’s it.”
This was enough to cause Tattersall to mumble and fret: “You’re as bad as each other,” and then to retire to his shop across the lane. As he retreated, the tiny wings that poked through the shoulder vents of his jacket wafted about ineffectually.
“Well, that’s sent him packing.”
Quickly she scuffed over the chalk drawing with the heel of her boot. The Thrawl looked at her. She did the same to him. The girl was peeping out from the Thrawl’s side. All that Cady could see for sure was a mass of flaxen hair, matted with dust and salt.
“What do you want?”
The Thrawl answered in a rasping tone; it was grating to the ear. “I’m waiting here to speak with Arcadia Meade. Otherwise known as Cady.”
“Why?”
“On private business.”
“You tell me what it is, and I’ll tell her.”
“Who are you?”
“Cady Meade, her own true self.”
“You’re Cady Meade?”
“I just said as such,...
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