‘Ah. An orphanage.’
‘No one calls them that any more. How old are you?’ To her eyes, he couldn’t be more than thirty.
Crows smiled and looked out over his kingdom of trees. ‘Who knows? If you do not count the days, keeping count of the years is impossible. The answer to a different question is nineteen thirty-eight.’
She looked him up and down. Eventually she said, ‘Fuck off.’
‘It is true,’ said Crows. ‘I take it you are from later.’
‘Fuck off! There’s no way you can be from the nineteen thirties. You should be an old man. And there weren’t any black people in London in the thirties; that was, I don’t know, after the war.’
‘War?’
‘Fuck off! World War Two, Crows. Bloody Battle of Britain and stuff. Churchill and Hitler. It’s history.’
He blinked at her. ‘Your history. Not mine.’ He waved his hand. ‘Actually, I’ve heard of the Second World War. I think a lot of people come from then. London was bad, yes?’
‘The Blitz. I can’t believe you don’t know about that. Bad? Bombs and everything. Fires and buildings falling down.’ Just like her London. She took several deep breaths. ‘You’re a fucking time traveller.’
‘No more than you. Down is joined to London, at different places and at different times. There are people here who are from different whens to both you and me. I think,’ he said, tapping his lips, ‘there will be a great deal of interest in you.’
‘Fuck.’ She sat back, bracing herself on her arms. ‘The geomancer.’
‘The one you call the wolfman works for her. He makes sure that those who pass through the portal get to her. One way or another. Were there others with you?’
She shook her head. ‘Seven of us.’
‘That many? I’ve never heard of such a thing happening before. Tell me, Mary. What do you do? What special knowledge do you have?’
Mary snorted. ‘I know nothing, Crows. School was a bit, you know, difficult. When you say “special knowledge”, what you mean?’
‘Scientists. Engineers. People who can recreate the machines of their world in this one.’
‘Is that sort of thing important?’ she asked. Dalip was just a kid like her; how much did he actually know?
‘It is one reason why you were being hunted by the wolfman.’
‘I… not me. There’s this one boy, he’s a university student. Something sciencey, I think.’
‘Did the wolfman take him?’
‘Dalip stopped them from getting me. So yes. Not before they beat the crap out of him though.’ She chewed at a fingernail. ‘What are they going to do with him?’
‘It is difficult to tell,’ said Crows. ‘This… boy. He must be very intelligent, yes?’
‘I guess so. A lot more kids go to university now than, than in your day. But, he’ll be one of the smart ones.’
‘This portal you came through, what year was it?’
‘Twenty twelve.’ She tutted. ‘I’ll miss the fucking Olympics. I love all that running and shit. Watching it, at least.’
Crows sucked air through the gap in his front teeth. ‘That is late. Very late.’
‘Does that make it worse?’
‘It might do. Who else?’
‘We were cleaners on the Underground. You know what the Underground is, right?’
‘Yes, we had that,’ said Crows.
‘So I don’t know. I guess if you’re a cleaner, it’s because you can’t get a better job elsewhere. There’s Stan◦– Stanislav◦– he was with Dalip, but he’s just a workman, I think, laying train track.’
‘Navvy, they used to be called.’ Crows unfolded himself and stepped out into the sunshine, shrugging off his cloak and standing there, warming his spare frame. ‘The question is, will she know what she has in your boy?’
Mary stretched her legs out in front of her, and compared his clothes to hers. Obviously, he hadn’t come through from the nineteen thirties, wearing trousers that ended mid-calf and a plain linen smock.
‘So what happens to people who come here? Where do they live? Where is everyone?’
Crows turned slowly, baking first his front, then his back. ‘Down is big. Very big. The portals are spread wide across the land. And the people are few. You can, if you want, find places where no one else has ever been, and just live there, perfectly alone, and not see another soul until one morning, you are too old to get up. For most people, well… there are the castles. There is one place, far away, which you would call a town. I saw it once, many years ago.’ He held his arms out, let them drop back down. ‘Do you see? You are used to London, yes? Millions of people. Here in Down, people are rare. Few come through the portals, and of those some die of injuries they gained while on the other side. Once here, they are vulnerable. Many become victims. Some get new injuries, and they die, or they get sick because they are unused to finding their own food. Some get into fights.’
‘You mean like the others who came through with me?’
‘They have been taken, but she is unlikely to kill them. They will have to answer her questions, and they’ll work for her in whatever role she sees fit.’
‘What? As slaves?’
‘Yes. They may become accustomed to their slavery, and become trusted. But they are still slaves, even though they wear no chains.’
‘Can we do anything about that?’ asked Mary.
‘She is a geomancer. Her power increases, while mine?’ Crows snorted. He lifted his hands to embrace his tumbledown battlements and open-air halls. ‘I have an army of birds and nothing more.’
‘There must be something we can do.’
‘Why must there be anything? Why can it not be hopeless and useless and all the other lesses? There is no law, that those that think of themselves as good must triumph over those they believe are eviclass="underline" sometimes the best we can hope for is to get out of the way. We have the whole of Down to explore, so why fight over this little piece?’
She didn’t know why, but then a thought entered her head and lodged there.
‘You fought, didn’t you?’
‘Ah. And I barely escaped with my life.’
‘So why are you still here, Crows?’ She stared into the far distance, beyond the broad, dark lake that started where the lines of hills stopped, to where she thought she could make out the coast. ‘Why not take your own advice and find somewhere else?’
Crows looked sour for a moment, his lips pursed as if he was sucking on a vinegary chip. ‘Something keeps me here. I do not know what.’
She did. ‘You don’t like losing, Crows. No one likes losing. What happened?’
He flopped back down next to her. ‘Before she came, there was peace here. People mostly got on, grew food, kept animals, cut wood, drew water, brewed beer, baked bread, hunted and fished, and there were enough of us to scare away the beasts.’
‘Beasts?’
‘Perhaps there is something in the way that this world is made, that if there is magic, there have to be beasts, too. Beasts are mostly just animals, but they don’t come from where we live. They come from our imaginations.’
‘Like the sea monster, you mean? It nearly ate Dalip.’
Crows nodded. ‘Yes, like that. So then she came, she and her men. She had discovered a new portal, and her devices told her that people would pass through it soon. She wanted the farmers and the trappers and the woodcutters out of the way, so that those who came through came to her, not them.’
‘But why didn’t she just camp out on the beach, rather than setting up shop miles away?’
‘When I say she had discovered a new portal, no one had yet come through it. She knew it was between her and the sea, but no idea where. The land was almost empty; it became so when she took the people and made them work for her. They cannot leave, because they believe there is nowhere to leave for.’ He smiled sadly, and hugged his knees. ‘They try. Even if they manage to get out of the castle, they are hunted down and brought back by the wolfman.’