They turned the final corner of the alley. He should have expected something like this, he supposed. No varied raft of smells like that would come from a few vagrants sleeping rough beneath the skins of stolen furbats. But it still came as a shock when he saw the hundreds of people, the alley widening into a street, the chaos of a town that seemed so different from the one he had just left. Back there Pavisse was a rough place built well, a once-proud town turned sour after the Cataclysmic War had robbed it of magic. Here… it was newer, Rafe knew, but a place such as this did not thrive on hope. It lived off bitterness and crime, desperation and hate. It had been formed after the Cataclysmic War and was a product of it.
The street curved into the distance, passing beyond view maybe five hundred steps away. Some of the buildings may have been the rear facades of those he had just passed in Pavisse’s main street, but back here they were deformed, half-collapsed, mutated by the additions and changes wrought by their strange inhabitants. A heavy machine formed part of one building, its use long since forgotten but its exposed innards curving up toward the sun, making room for a few tall, thin fledgers to lie back and chew their drug. The machine was rusted where it was metal, smoothed by time where it was stone, and there were bones too, the flesh of its biological parts long since rotted away and added back to the ground. The building had seemingly grown around it, and Rafe wondered what had been here first: machine or construction. Perhaps one had been to support the other, although Rafe could not now guess at which way this could have worked.
There were more machines, small and large, a few with obvious uses-those that had moved as transport, others that had probably once ploughed and planted in the fields-but most with purposes lost in the turbulent mists of time. They were all incorporated in some way, chopped and changed and altered as if those that had used them were frustrated at their lack of animation. The channels were there within these machines, the empty reservoirs and sacs and current routes that had given them the strange life they once lived, but they were dead. Dead as the sand beneath the dwellers’ feet, dead as the air they exhaled, dead as the corpses Rafe saw in the gutter in one or two places. There was a fledger, his or her body twisted and ripped from whatever had killed it. There was also something else, something that must once have been fodder because of its size, exposed ribs torn back and knotted by the accelerated growth, slabs of flesh and muscle ripped from its wet corpse. As he watched, disgusted and terrified, a small lizard darted from a rent beneath one of the larger machines, buried its nose in the fodder and darted away again, dinner in its mouth.
The fodder shifted, turning its misshapen head and uttering a low, wretched groan.
“Mage shit!” Rafe exclaimed.
“Leave it be,” Hope said, walking by without giving the pitiful thing a second glance.
Help, it hissed. Rafe looked down, but the fodder was not looking at him. Perhaps the sound of its plea had simply been air escaping its slashed neck.
“Leave it be!” Hope said again. She’d turned back to him now, conveying the same message within her stare. Rafe glanced around. A few people were watching him. A female fledger, bald, eyes yellow as a rancid wound, beckoned him over with one impossibly long finger. She was naked, and hung from a twist of metal and stone with one hand. Her body was speckled with soft black spots. It looked as if she were rotting from the inside.
“Fun, stranger?” she said. Her voice was strangely quiet, high, musical. Almost hypnotic. “Fun with me, stranger?”
“Not with you, no!” Hope said.
The fledger hissed and dropped from her perch, landing on the street wide-legged and crouched into a fighting stance.
“Paid you already, has he?” she hissed.
“He’s with me, yes,” Hope said. Rafe glanced sideways and saw that she had one hand inside her jacket. Furbat, he noticed, picking out a crazy detail in this loaded moment. Furbat jacket, so old that the leather was denuded of all fur, shiny with age, darkened with sweat and rain and who knew what else. This jacket had seen its fair share of years and places. How much of this had been upon Hope’s shoulders, and how much on other peoples’?
The fledger hopped a few steps closer like a jumping spider. Rafe could smell her. Rank, rotten and sad.
“Fledge, young one, stranger, a bit of fledge with my legs around your face, you’ve never eaten so well!” She thrust her groin forward and displayed the hairless crack there, like a jagged slit in the earth.
Rafe could not help looking down. There were speckles of fledge across her pale yellow thighs, a mustardy trace that hinted at more drug within.
“I won’t warn you again,” Hope said. Something in her voice brought a moment of silence, a period of nervous calm. But there were others watching now-fledgers, coal miners, people who simply had nothing else to do-and the fledger did not wish to lose face.
“Screw you, witch!” she said.
Hope brought her hand out from her pocket. Even before she opened her fist Rafe saw the fledger’s eyes widen with fear. The others backed away as well, suddenly having more urgent things to attend to. There was real terror here, Rafe saw, a rich reverence the fledger must have held for Hope from the first moment. But the confrontation was all about face and respect, and once begun, her pitch had to be carried through, one way or another.
Hope held a handful of spiders. One was green, another bright orange, the third black. All of them were fat and fast. She lobbed them at the fledger and muttered something under her breath, and then she walked quickly away.
The fledger leapt onto the uneven wall and pulled herself up, grasping at uncertain handholds and rusted projections before she disappeared up and over onto the rooftop, moving like the spiders she fled. The orange arachnid followed her up, while the other two went in opposite directions along the base of the building as if to outflank her.
The fledger screamed all the way.
“What was that?” Rafe asked quietly. They were walking quickly now, the screams of the fleeing fledger echoing from above. A small smile perked the corners of Hope’s mouth. “Those spiders, Hope. What were they? They were following her.”
“Of course they weren’t,” Hope said. “They were only wood spiders. I colored them myself. I always carry a couple in a skin-sac in my pocket, just in case. Often come in handy.”
“But why…? What do they know? The fledgers, the people?”
“They know that I’m a witch. That’s enough. I’m a witch, I throw spiders at them, they’re going to run.”
“No spells? No magic?”
Hope paused and glanced back along the street. Like a stone thrown into a pond, the ripples of their passing had already settled back to nothing. The street’s life had returned to normal, and if she was still screaming, the fledger was now far too distant to hear.
“No spells,” Hope said. “No magic. Because magic has gone. You know that as much as anyone.” She stared into his eyes. “Maybe more.”
“But… I thought witches…”
Hope smiled sadly and shook her head. “Not even witches, farmer boy.” The tattoos on her skin seemed to stretch to make her smile more solid. And even though her comment sounded dismissive, Rafe heard more respect in her voice than he’d heard for a long, long time. Respect, and perhaps fear.
They continued through the streets, the warrenlike maze of alleys and roads and courtyards, all of them that much wilder than the greater part of Pavisse, that much more downtrodden. Yet the life here seemed faster and more intense, as if this part of the city was reveling in the fact that it was hidden within the greater whole. There was drinking and fighting and fucking in the streets. Bodies too, victims of drunken brawls or robbery or dark, seedy revenge. A couple of the dead were covered with ragged blankets as if to hide their wounds from sight, but each corpse was being slowly eaten. Rats, lizards, wild dogs, carrion snakes as wide as Rafe’s arm and four times as long, all of them emerging from beneath the buildings or out of the ground, snatching their fill and then disappearing again. Rafe wondered what must exist beneath the streets to give birth to such a variety of wildlife, all of it fattened on carrion. He paused, kicked away sand and stones from around his feet until he found solid ground beneath.