Boy shrugged.
“I fell over…”
“For God’s sake go and get clean! Then come to the tower.”
“Yes, sir,” said Boy.
He shuffled down one of the corridors that led off the hall.
“And be quick. You have work to do!”
5
Boy ran along two corridors and then up three flights of rickety wooden stairs to his room. “Room” was perhaps something of an exaggeration. Room, or space, was one thing the place he slept in did not have. There was a mattress, which was actually quite comfortable though it was just a shame, thought Boy, that he did not get to spend more time on it. The smallest of openings (“window” would have been too grand a word for it) let in some light. This was in the sloping roof that made up one wall of his room. His bed lay against the single vertical wall, the entrance lurked in one of the triangular ends to the space, and in the opposite one was a tiny door behind which was an even tinier cupboard. Inside the cupboard were all Boy’s possessions. A spoon he’d found in the street and particularly liked. An old pair of boots that were too small and worn-out to wear anymore. A silk scarf he’d stolen from a rich lady but that was too nice to wear. Some small empty tins that nested inside each other and some pencils that Valerian had given him to practice his writing.
This was his room.
The day Valerian had put him in it, Boy had come straight back down and eventually found Valerian sipping port in the library.
“But I can’t stand up in it,” Boy had complained.
“Then kneel down,” Valerian had said, and cuffed him round the ear.
Boy was used to clambering about in small spaces. He seemed to spend his life doing it: onstage in coffinlike cabinets and offstage in the theater too, slithering along to Korp’s supposedly secret box.
Small, cramped, dark spaces had filled Boy’s life. Long ago, he had even been hiding in one the day he was found by Valerian in an old church, St. Colette’s. Boy had crammed his narrow frame into a space at the top of a pillar in the nave.
Since he had been working for Valerian he had not seen much daylight, never mind been allowed access to such private information as what time it was, or what day or month, for that matter. It was, in fact, March 6 when Valerian had found Boy, but only Valerian knew that.
Valerian had probably chosen Boy, taken him on, because of his expertise at squeezing into ridiculously small spaces. Boy had forgotten much of that life; it was years ago, and unimportant compared to the business of every day. Every day, trying to avoid trouble, trying to avoid upsetting Valerian or getting something wrong and…
He could remember one thing about the day they met. From the small gap made where the arch fluted away from the pillar, he had seen Valerian for the first time. He was deep in discussion with someone Boy now knew to be Korp, from the theater.
Even then Valerian looked haggard and pale. His nose, long and fine, twitched in the dusty atmosphere of the old church. His skin was gray; so was his hair. He looked like a dead man walking. But his blue eyes were full of life, and his gaze roamed the dark spaces around him.
Then Boy had heard his midnight rumble of a voice, so deep the stone he was clinging to shivered with it.
“The doctor,” intoned Valerian, “pronounced me either dangerously sick or dead.”
It was while trying to understand the strangeness of those words that Boy had lost his grip and plummeted to the flag floor of the church, where he lay looking up at Valerian, scratching his nose nervously, his short-cropped black hair sticking up at interesting angles the way it always did.
“O-ho!” Valerian had said. “What have we here?”
And so they had met.
Now Boy pulled off his reeking clothes and stood naked in his dark space. He wondered what to do. The pile of clothes at his feet stank up at him. The bath was on the first floor. He had no other clothes, just a long winter overcoat.
He sighed, picked up the pile of dirty clothes and the coat and crept back along the tube to the ladder.
He dropped the clothes down to the third-floor landing, and followed them, shivering as he went.
6
Boy sat, scratching his nose. He was nervous because Valerian was pacing up and down the Tower room, crisscrossing the floor a dozen times, then pausing, staring into space for a short while before resuming his compulsive journey from the tall, narrow window in one of the sloping walls to the top of the spiral staircase, which was the only means of access by foot to the Tower. Large or heavy items had to be winched into the Tower through a trapdoor in the floor. Despite his nerves Boy noticed that, as usual, Valerian was perfectly happy to stride over the trapdoor. Boy knew the hatch was strong enough, but he would never walk over it, just in case. The trapdoor opened above the landing on the second floor; it was quite a drop.
The rest of the Tower room was filled with clutter, paraphernalia, ephemera, equipment, things and mechanisms of all descriptions. Astrolabes, hourglasses, armillary spheres, sextants, alembics, retorts, reduction dishes, mortars with pestles, crystals, locks with and without keys, knives, daggers, wands of brass and wands of wood, pots, bottles and jars were just some of the odds and ends that lay scattered around the Tower.
Boy knew what some of them were-things they used onstage. As for those he didn’t understand, Boy often wondered what they might be. Maybe they were more, and as yet untried, pieces of magical equipment for the act, though Boy had his doubts.
There was the great leather armchair in which Valerian would sit, often in a pensive mood, brooding over Boy knew not what, and there were books. Piles and piles and piles of books of all shapes and sizes, leaning at precarious angles against walls and chairs, and, Boy assumed, about all sorts of things.
Right in the middle of the Tower stood the machine. Boy always had trouble remembering what it was called. As he sat, waiting for Valerian to say or do something, he tried to remember its name. It had been designed and built by a man called Kepler, who was the closest thing Valerian had to a friend.
Boy had never seen the machine working, but since it had been installed Valerian had spent even more time in the Tower. It had a strange Latin name, camera obscura.
“Do you have no grasp of Latin at all?” Valerian had barked at him when the machine arrived. Boy had shaken his head.
“Idiot boy! It means darkroom. Camera-room. Obscura-dark. See?”
Boy had smiled nervously, pretending he understood.
“Oh, why do I try to teach you anything!” Valerian had snapped, and sat back in his leather armchair.
“Camera obscura.”
Now Boy had remembered, he felt pleased with himself, and sat, wondering what on earth it was that the thing did.
Valerian kept on walking. Boy sat in just his overcoat, scratching his nose harder.
Then Valerian stopped.
“I have a job for you,” he said.
I was afraid you’d say that, thought Boy.
“Yes,” said Boy. “Whatever I can do-”
“You can be quiet!” Valerian snapped. “Just listen, then do. All right?”
Oh, fine, thought Boy. He nodded.
“I…” Valerian looked out of the window and across the nightscape of the City. “We… I… have a problem. Things are not what they were. Things…,” he continued, “are… different now. Different. They have changed.”
He stopped and looked at Boy.
“Clear?” he barked.
Boy nodded furiously.
“Things have not happened as I had intended and now-and now time is not on our side. Far from it. We must act. Things have not gone… according to plan. So I have a job for you. Tonight.”
“Tonight?” asked Boy, then shut his mouth quickly.
“Yes. Tonight. The Trumpet. You know it?”
Boy grimaced. The Trumpet was an inn about three miles away, near the river-docks. He had been there once, and on leaving had prayed that would be his last visit.