Idle Hands

Book 2: The Factory Trilogy

by Tom Fletcher

Genres: Fantasy; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Can Wild Alan unite the Discard against the tyranny of the Pyramid? Idle Hands is an ancient disease that once tore through the Discard, and if Wild Alan doesn't find a way into the Black Pyramid to administer the cure to his son, Billy, it will soon be stalking Gleam once again. Even with Bloody Nora's help, there's only one way in - and that's through the Sump, which was sealed long ago to contain the horrors within. And for Alan, the Black Pyramid will be even more dangerous. Thanks to the disease, the Pyramidders' fear and loathing of the Discard is reaching fever-pitch - and Alan is the most well-known Discarder of all. Bloody Nora has her own agenda. All the information she needs to complete her people's Great Work is hidden in the Pyramid - but just by being there, she is violating a centuries-old treaty between the Pyramid and the Mapmakers, which could spark conflict between the two greatest powers that Gleam knows. ' Gleam's combination of dystopia, mythic quest, music and squishy monsters is hugely entertaining' SFX

Release date: July 27, 2017

Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

The claw that held the pen juddered across the scroll. The scroll spooled from the desk, filled with words of black ink. Maybe they would be read, and maybe they wouldn’t. The claw continued regardless. It was made of metal and protruded from the desk. In more lucid moments the man behind the desk wondered how the claw worked, how it knew what to write, what machines drove its motion. But he did not have many lucid moments.

The scroll piled up on the black and white tiled floor. The white tiles reflected the orange-pink light of the dying day. The man behind the desk stood at the floor-to-ceiling window and looked through the glass at the inhumanly scaled ruins standing vast and sharp and black against the molten sky. He rested his forehead against the smooth, cool surface. His skin burned and his mind was full of fiery visions: shapes of bone and flame forming and breaking and re-forming in his head. Patterns in spilled blood came unbidden to his mind’s eye, and saliva flooded his mouth. The lust for blood was growing stronger.

After the episode passed, after his hands had stopped their twisting, after the shaking had ceased, he returned to the desk and cast his eyes over the scroll. The reports from the Sump and Swamp were still coming in. The levels were approaching tipping point. Already citizens and prisoners of the Lowest Levels had been warped and broken by the seething magics that were accumulating. And of course the warping and breaking had been happening in the Discard for decades. But soon the containments would give way, the Sump would be unleashed into the Swamp, and that which had been buried would return to the world.

The man turned to a parchment thick with spidery scrawls that he’d written with his own hand: blood stocks, from the Library. He looked at the figures without reading them. He didn’t need to read them; he knew them backwards already. There was not enough blood. Even though he’d increased the Bleeding frequencies, there was not enough blood. And there would not be time for enough Bleedings to deliver it.

‘Troemius,’ he whispered. His throat hurt.

A tall, masked Arbitrator stepped silently forward from the corner of the room.

‘More blood,’ the man behind the desk said. ‘For the Library. Discard blood. Constant harvesting now. We don’t have long before . . .’ He paused. ‘Speak to Larissium. She will advise on how much more blood is required to initiate proceedings.’

Troemius nodded, and moved wordlessly away across the tiles.

The man behind the desk watched him go. He could feel another episode coming on. His mind was spinning away from him and his head was starting to hurt. The horns that had long ago sprouted from his skull were heavy; he bowed his head and closed his eyes.



The hangover closed in before the night was out. It was rotten and quiet and totally malevolent: an undead beast with venom on its claws, lurking just beyond the edge of vision.

Alan focused on the task at hand: Walk. Walk. Let the hangover come. Carry on regardless. His mouth was dry, his skin sweaty. The rainy season was nearly upon them and the air was close. Small black flies swarmed up from stagnant pools and buzzed angrily around the blooming flowers that grew from cracks in the grey stone ground. The insects must have all hatched over the past day or two, spilling from their soft eggs, breaking free in the rank heat. If rainy season was coming soon, then spider season would be coming sooner. Spider season: when you couldn’t take a step without finding the trailing thread of a baby spider wrapped around your face. As a child he’d believed that all spiders floated down out of the sky, come from the stars, maybe dropped by the Dragons that sped sparkling through the bright night skies of his long-ago youth. What he’d give to be that child again, with the life he’d had before the Arbitrators came with their knives and fire and burned it to the ground. He laughed and cried as he remembered how little he used to know, and how happy he used to be. He wasn’t crying for himself though, not any more. Billy. Billy. Billy. His son should be free to look up at those skies, free from curfews and Stationing. Free from being bled dry, from being hollowed out, from being scraped clean. That’s what the Pyramidders were: they were all husks, all wrung out and used up – and for what? For what? They were used up and ground down into dust for nothing but the service of that great stone god they lived in.

And of course, there was the other thing. Billy wasn’t just imprisoned in a way of life that he hadn’t chosen; he was sick, infected by a parasite that even now was working its way through his body. What did Idle Hands look like? What was it? Some kind of fungus, he knew that much. Eyes McAlkie, Alan’s old friend and mentor, had stabbed Billy, his son, just a boy, with a blade that had been covered in something sticky and black: a medium for the demon that would corrupt Billy’s brain and turn him into a different kind of husk, a violent, rapacious host body.

Get a fucking move on. Walk. Walk fast. Let the headache worsen. Let the vomit come. Time now was for nothing but this. Alan was retracing the route he’d taken not all that long ago, although it felt like deep history. He walked a shiningly smooth path built into a concrete cliff face. To his right, the cliff fell away into a ravine. To his left, great statues looked down from over the top of a dark grey wall, their ancient features eroded into twisted expressions. In the distance, he could see a thin arc of stone shining by the starlight: the bridge spanning the ravine.

Last time he’d come this way he hadn’t been on foot, and he hadn’t been alone; he and his companions had been mounted on motorcycles. Churr had been there, the erstwhile toad-sweat harvester who was now building her own trade empire out of the ruins of Dok. There had been Spider the tattooist, dear old Spider, who had been killed by the Clawbaby. Eyes, Alan’s saviour, mentor, oldest friend and betrayer, had been killed by Alan himself. And there was the Mapmaker, Bloody Nora. Alan had last seen her fighting the Clawbaby, but he had to believe – he had to believe – that she was still alive, because without Nora, his attempt on the Pyramid would be futile. He’d still try it, but he was in no doubt that if he traversed the horrors of the Sump and braved the security of the Pyramid alone, then he would die. And he didn’t want to die, and certainly not before getting to Marion and Billy and warning them of the parasite that was slowly drifting through his son’s blood. And he probably couldn’t leave it at that; for all the harm the Pyramid had done, there were good people living inside it, people like Marion and Billy. If he was too late to stop the spread of Idle Hands at source, he’d have to warn the inhabitants. But Management . . . what about Management? Management mandated the Bleeding; they mandated the taxes and raids, the partnering and the regimented coupling and the Discarding of babies conceived outside of the correct astronomical windows. Alan spat, but his mouth was dry and nothing came out. He would get to Billy and Marion, and then he would find Management and kill them. He’d crossed that line now: he’d killed – and he hadn’t only killed, he’d killed his best friend. If he could do that, then surely he could kill some callous, bloody-handed robe easily enough.

But all this was moot if Nora was dead. And if she was, then that meant the Clawbaby was probably still alive, and Dok – Churr’s new empire – would be nothing more than yet another lifeless ruin, of the kind Gleam was already full of.

It hurt his eyes to open them fully. A dull ache was growing in the back of his skull. His stomach was a translucent sac stuffed full of filth, wobbling around inside him. If he moved his head even slightly the world tipped wildly, so he kept his head down and his woozy sight trained on the path ahead: the path that led to the bridge. The bridge that crossed to the Oversight. The Oversight that would take him to Mother Margo. Mother Margo, who watched over the bikers’ fuel supply and was thus better placed than most to gather and disseminate information. And if she couldn’t help – well then, he’d just have to walk all the way to Dok and deal with whatever he found there. Or die. He took a swig from the old Dog Moon bottle he was clutching in white-knuckled fingers, though it didn’t contain whisky, not any more. Swallowing the water was difficult – his throat felt all stuck together and it made him want to vomit, but he managed to hold the liquid down. If spider season was on the way, then he was in for an uncomfortably hot few days, as exposed as this area was. And so it was important to drink the water, though he’d’ve preferred whisky. But that wouldn’t be a good idea.

Besides, he didn’t have any left.

*

The inhuman scale of Gleam meant things were even further away than they looked, but as his perception of distance flexed and warped, so did his perception of time. The placing of one foot in front of another required no conscious thought, no exercise of mind, and he passed into a kind of waking unconsciousness. The hangover endured. Tall sprigs of lavender thrust up from between cracks in the stone. Alan ate one of the rat pasties he’d bought in Market Top before setting off. It was a chore; the pastry was stale now, and the filling past its best already, and his stomach was not feeling good. But he needed the sustenance.

He fell down when he came to the bridge and went forward on hands and knees, not trusting to his sense of balance. The air was still and so humid it felt wet, though the sun had not yet risen. This was where Eyes had fallen, and Alan had pulled him back up. He remembered Eyes’ entreaties to let him die – he should have. He should have. And then Eyes wouldn’t have infected Billy with Idle Hands. And Eyes was dead anyway, so he might as well have died on the bridge. Nothing else would be any different, except Billy would not be sick. Maybe Billy didn’t even know he was sick yet. The first symptom of Idle Hands was loss of control of the fingers; they would start moving of their own accord. What would Billy make of that? What would any six-year-old make of that? Alan imagined his son looking wide-eyed at his own wriggling fingers, terrified, tears spilling down his face. He’d shout for his mother, and Marion would come running, and she too would be terrified. How long would it take for that first symptom to manifest itself – a week? A month? Alan found himself gasping for breath as he pictured the scene. He stared down at the surface of the bridge between his hands, paralysed. Gleam stretched out endlessly all around him: a pre-dawn mess of concrete and marble and wood and rust and glass and chitin and moss and bone and swamp in every direction. It was frozen and brittle, on the verge of shattering completely. The edge of the bridge called to him: he could end it all, right now. But only for himself. Everybody else would have to carry on living with the chaos he’d wrought.

He pushed away the picture of Marion and Billy and his breath came back. He gulped, and swallowed air down. He flexed his fingers: he could move his hands again. He breathed out, deeply, and felt as if Gleam too exhaled with him.

He had to keep these thoughts at a distance if he was going to do any good at all. That was something whisky helped with, and he wished again that he had something stronger than water in his Dog Moon bottle as he started crawling across the bridge, moving slowly and carefully. He felt like a slug or a snail, leaving behind a trail of sweat. He could hear the calling of birds, and at the apex of the span he stopped a while and watched them wheeling and diving far below.

He got back to his feet.

He walked and walked. The dawn was met by a chorus of broken corvid voices and more melodious songs from small, bright-bodied birds that flitted across the plant-cracked stone of the Oversight. Alan pressed on as the sun rose until his soles were sore and his legs were burning. He was perspiring heavily in the fierce heat, and the red of his skin deepened as noon approached. Snapper bounced against his back with each step, its strap chafing through the thick, rough fabric of his sweat-stained shirt. Good old Snapper. At least he still had Snapper. He’d give the guitar a tune when he stopped. I don’t have time to stop. He swung the guitar round and tapped its body, listened carefully to the sound it made. The air felt thick. Rodents scurried and hopped from his path. It wasn’t that long since he’d last come this way, but the grasses and shrubs had grown monstrously in that time. The constant buzzing of insects gnawed on the edges of his consciousness. Occasionally beetles arose from the plants, deeply whirring like tiny machines. He walked and walked. He picked at plants that he recognised and ate their leaves and buds. And he bore on as the sun sank, its light coloured now by the swirling striped moons, Satis and Corval, that had come to dominate the sky in the late day.

As the sun met the horizon, Alan squinted; what was that low block silhouetted against the sunset? Not Mother Margo’s oil store; it wasn’t the right direction for that. And as he watched, he saw there were two or three of these things, and they were moving. Probably a caravan, maybe traders. He sighed. He was so hungry. He was rationing the horrible pasties, and eating grass and grubs was not exactly hitting the spot. He didn’t have much water left either. But he couldn’t head for the caravan; he couldn’t deviate from his path, not for a caravan that he probably would never catch up with anyway. He was headed to Mother Margo’s and then Dok to find Nora. And then on into the Pyramid, to deliver Billy the antidote he required. And then back out of the Pyramid, alive. Though to be honest, he wasn’t sure how likely that last step was.

As he walked and as the landscape grew dull around him, his feet got heavier and heavier, and his water bottle lighter, and as his pace slowed, his thinking grew wilder. Fantasies and horrors whirled through his brain.

When he got to the Pyramid he would heal Billy and Billy and Marion would help him escape, and escape with him. Marion would still love him. Marion would hate him, but Billy would show her that her hate was merely anger, and then she would love him. Marion would hate him and attack him, kill him. Marion would kill him before he healed Billy. Billy would hate him. Or he’d give Billy the Green’s Benedictions, but they wouldn’t work. They’d make Billy worse. Or he’d get there and Billy would already be a mindless animal, eyes bloodshot, fungal horns sprouting from his sweet little skull. Or he’d get there and Billy would be fine, the parasite would have failed, or was never there in the first place. Panic unwarranted. And they’d all escape together.

There was another thread to the fantasies, though; they didn’t simply consist of healing and escape. There was bloodshed, too.

Alan would get there and save the day and Billy would be healed and Marion would love him and they’d escape, but not together. Billy and Marion would escape, but Alan would stay behind. He had work to do before joining his family in the Discard. Alan would stay behind and take his revenge. He’d wreak bloody havoc on the Pyramid, on the Arbitrators. He’d find the Commander who killed his parents, who stalked his nightmares and his memories, and he’d kill him. He’d find Tromo, who’d held Billy hostage and blackmailed him into this whole mess in the first place, and kill him. He’d find the Arbitrators who’d tortured and broken Eyes, who’d forced hatred deep into his heart, and he’d kill them. And he’d kill whoever was responsible for the Bleedings, for the fear, for the Discard raids. He’d work his way right up to the top and kill the Chief Architect. He’d tear the Pyramid down, he’d blow it up. And then he’d return to the Discard. Except it wouldn’t be the Discard any more – there would be no Pyramid left for the Discard to be an alternative to. It would all simply be Gleam.

But first: save Billy. Billy was the reason he kept putting one foot in front of the other.

And to do that – Mother Margo’s, Dok, Nora, Pyramid. Margo’s, Dok, Nora, Pyramid. Margo’s, Dok, Nora, Pyramid.

The caravan wasn’t the only sign of human life Alan encountered as the days rolled by. He found scorched black patches on the stone, a couple of broken abandoned butterfly nets, and on one occasion a still, straight plume of cook-fire smoke visible against the starry sky. He didn’t bother with fire; he had nothing to cook. He finished his rat pasties, chewed on leaves and roots and swallowed fat grubs whole, grimacing. And he tried to keep walking. Sometimes he had to stop, but if he could walk, then he did.

There were no streams or even puddles on the Oversight, and now he’d swallowed every last drop from his water bottle. And he was still sweating copiously. His stomach and head hurt, but this wasn’t like the hangover; this felt different. His eyes itched, and he was struggling to swallow. There were little succulents with fat round leaves nestled in cracks in the ground, but the moisture they contained smelled acrid; he thought he remembered being told they were safe, but he wasn’t sure and so decided against them. A fine rescue mission this would turn out to be: Wild Alan, fool of fools, good at nothing but drinking, dying for want of a drink. And probably never to be found. Maybe never even to be missed.

The Oversight stretched out before him. The sky was bright blue, and clear. Beetles trundled along beside him, many black and shiny, a few bright and spotted. Out of habit he kept his eyes peeled for the highly iridescent sheen that marked out bugs, whose dead bodies were used for currency, but he’d never seen one alive, and neither had anybody he knew. Maggie the Red had once told him that there were none left living, but surely she couldn’t know that for sure, not really. He did see a yellow-and-orange striped beetle just bigger than his fist – he’d never seen one that large before, not this high up.

The skin of his face and hands came up in great puffy blisters under the hot sun. His once-white shirt was now stained yellow and brown with sweat and old blood and Green knew what, and it clung damply to his flesh. He longed to take it off, but he knew better than that. He couldn’t recall when he’d last shaved; he just knew his beard itched maddeningly.

In the end he ran the risk and ate the succulents. Safe or not, there was liquid harboured within those fleshy leaves; it was viscous and sticky and it tasted foul.

He felt as if time were speeding up: the sun’s arc was moving faster and faster until each day was over in a matter of minutes. The moons danced a complicated dance, Satis and Corval crisscrossing each other’s paths across light skies and dark. Alan could hear the music they moved to, the playing of distant strings, as the days and nights flickered by. He began to realise that not only had his hangover not dissipated but his headache was growing worse, and he was now dogged by constant nausea. The great flat expanse of the Oversight sometimes felt soft beneath his feet, sometimes unstable, as if it were tilting beneath his weight and might at any point tip to the vertical, dropping him. He could hear voices, hoarse, unkind voices, whispering into his ears – he did not understand the language but the tone was bitter and scornful. Sometimes he thought he saw hunched figures hiding in the long grass; they had nasty faces and he tried not to look at them, but he sensed they were all around him; he could feel the warm breath on his face.

He didn’t know how many days he’d been awake, but he didn’t want to go to sleep for fear of what these figures would do to him. But even before setting out to find Mother Margo, peaceful slumber had been difficult. As his mind let go of waking thought, it invariably filled up with images of bloodshed, offal and violently distressing scenarios usually featuring Marion and Billy. The deep, dark semi-coma of extreme drunkenness was the closest thing to rest that Alan had experienced in years, but it had been a long time since he’d drunk himself into that blissful stupor.

He felt something on his hands, and when he peered down, he found them draped in trailing threads of spidersilk. The air was full of it, strands falling like strange rain, and spiders floated towards him, legs wriggling – but they were larger than they were supposed to be. Or maybe they were just very close, hanging right in front of his eyes. Soon they were all over him, and all over the Oversight, busy at their work, and it wasn’t long before he was wearing a ragged, insubstantial shroud, and everywhere he could see was dressed in webs. Heat emanated from everything.

He saw not just baby spiders but his old friend Spider, riding alongside him on a gigantic motorbike, beard and long hair swept backwards by the motion, red shirt ruffled in the wind, and yet somehow he was travelling no faster than Alan’s slow trudge. He looked happy – he had been very happy on the bike. His eyes were smiling and his fingers were laden with gold rings and the gold bled into the colour of the bike, which reflected the brief fire of the sunset. Then the sky was dark blue, and so was the bike, and Spider sped up. Alan called after him, but Spider did not look back. The motorcycle accelerated, going faster and faster, until it was streaking away towards the horizon as the stars wheeled dizzily around and the firmament changed colour again and again, and then Spider was gone once more.

The next thing Alan knew, he was crawling on all fours: one hand, then one knee, then the other hand, then the other knee. His palms were bleeding and coated in shreds of spiderweb. He could feel the Oversight shaking, strange old energies vibrating through the stonework of Gleam, almost as if vast machines had started powering up inside the ancient tower of which the Oversight was just the top. The voices in his ears were growing in volume, merging into a long, low roar. Consciousness came and went. He knew he had to eat, and kept trying to feed himself, but each time he rediscovered that his hands were empty.



The rumbling roar had been the last thing to leave him, and it was the first thing to come back. At first he was aware of nothing but that thunder, then he felt cool air on his skin. Cool air. That was unusual enough to prod his brain into action. He realised that he must be waking up.

The sound was that of engines: he was strapped onto the back of a motorbike, surrounded by the fire, fumes and lanterns of what looked like a hundred other bikes, and all of them were racing through a black night. He immediately saw – and was relieved to find – that the days and nights were no longer only seconds long; the darkness was steady. The smells of oil and leather filled his nostrils. There was a large, rotund figure sitting in front of him; it was wearing a tight black vest with a face on the back, partly obscured by the biker’s thick, greasy plait. As Alan’s eyes adjusted, the image resolved itself into the long face of a goat, slot-eyes gazing coldly out, long horns curving into vicious points.

Alan’s hands were cuffed, and with a jolt of horror, he realised that Snapper was no longer on his back. He looked the goat in the eyes. Well. Nothing else for it.

He leaned forward, caught that greasy, matted rope of hair between his teeth and wrenched his head backwards, hard. The biker leaped in his seat and howled, so loudly that Alan thought he could hear the shriek over the sound of all of the engines around them. The bike wobbled, then swerved, peeling off from the pack as the biker tried to regain control of it, and as the rest of the hot, buzzing swarm moved on, suddenly reduced by speed to a mass of giant fireflies, they were alone on the Oversight. The biker twisted slowly in his seat and backhanded Alan across the face, a lazy movement, but still Alan felt metal studs break the skin and blood burst from his nose. If it hadn’t been for his being cu. . .