GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS

Malarkoi, by Alex Pheby

(Book 2 of Cities of the Weft)

I. The events of the previous volume, in summary

· Nathan fishes for flukes in the Living Mud with the Spark, an unpredictable and uncontrollable power he has inherited from his father.

· The Spark Itches if Nathan doesn’t Scratch it.

· One day he makes a limb-baby and sells it to a tanner.

· Nathan takes the money to his poor mother and dying father.

· The money is fake.

· His mother orders Nathan to go to the Master for work.

· The Fetch takes Nathan and some other boys up the Glass Road to the Master.

· One of the boys is Gam Halliday.

· Gam tries to recruit Nathan into his criminal gang.

· Nathan refuses.

· Gam goads Nathan into Scratching the Spark Itch by teasing him.

· The Fetch beats another boy to death for the disturbance Nathan and Gam make.

· The remaining boys are delivered to the Master.

· Gam is rejected at the gate and returns home.

· In the Underneath, Nathan saves a boy from falling to his death.

· The boy is revealed to be a girl – Prissy – and Nathan feels an immediate sympathy with her.

· The children are washed by a team of laundresses.

· Bellows, the Master’s factotum, examines the boys, discarding some, including Prissy, and takes the others to see the Master.

· The Master hires some of the boys for unspecified work, but declines to hire Nathan.

· The Master can sense Nathan’s power.

· He warns him against Sparking and sends him back to the slums.

· At home, Nathan’s father is dying of the lung worm.

· Nathan wants to Scratch the Spark Itch, but his father forbids it.

· Nathan promises to get medicine, but he has no money.

· In the slums, Nathan Scratches the Spark Itch, angrily, to kill a fluke.

· The fluke evolves into a rat, which bites Nathan’s hand. From then on, Scratching the Itch burns the wound and makes Nathan’s arm increasingly immaterial.

· Nathan goes into the Merchant City, hoping to steal money for medicine.

· He steals a wealthy old woman’s coin purse, but is caught by bystanders.

· Gam rescues him before he can be punished and takes him into the sewers.

· The two boys go to Gam’s hideout, the club house, an abandoned subterranean gentlemen’s club.

· Prissy and Joes, the other members of Gam’s gang are there.

· Nathan, having fallen for Prissy, joins the gang.

· The gang go back to the Merchant City on a job to steal money from a haberdasher.

· Nathan panics when Prissy seems to be in danger and almost kills the haberdasher with the Spark.

· With the money they have stolen, the gang go to see the gangmaster, Mr Padge, to buy the medicine for Nathan’s father.

· Mr Padge gives Nathan the medicine, but refuses to take his money, establishing a debt on Nathan’s part.

· Nathan returns to the slums. His mother is entertaining a gentleman caller with a fawn-coloured birthmark.

· Nathan gives his father the medicine, but it’s clear that it won’t be enough.

· Nathan agrees to get more.

· Unable to bear being at home, Nathan returns to the club house.

· The pain of the rat bite gets worse, as does his Itch.

· At night the club house is full of ghosts who seem to recognise him.

· The next day, Gam takes Nathan to steal bacon from a warehouse.

· From there they go to the Temple of the Athanasians, a brothel where Prissy’s sister works.

· Prissy will be sold to the brothel unless she can compensate her sister for the lost income.

· Nathan agrees to a risky criminal job for Mr Padge in order to get the money for medicine and Prissy’s buyout.

· Gam, Prissy, and Nathan go to burgle a palace by entering through the sewers.

· Nathan uses his Spark to open a safe and retrieve the document Mr Padge hired them to steal.

· On the way out, Gam pushes Prissy into a crowded room and indicates that Nathan should rescue her by using the Spark.

· In the room are various nobles, the chief of whom is the man with the fawn-coloured birthmark.

· Hiding his surprise and horror, the man allows the children to leave before Nathan can kill everyone with the Spark, and gives him a gold coin.

· Back at the club house, Prissy questions Gam’s actions, but he won’t be drawn.

· The gang take the document to Mr Padge who gives them another job – to steal a locket from a merchant’s house.

· Prissy uses her share of the money to pay off her indenture.

· Scoping out the next job, with time to kill, the children visit the zoo and give buns to the alifonjers, Prissy’s favourite animals.

· The gang decide to burgle the merchant’s house by going in from the roof.

· They bribe the Fetch to take them up the Glass Road, slipping out near the roof of the merchant house.

· Gam agrees to lower Joes, Nathan and Prissy down to the roof by rope.

· Nathan, then Prissy, successfully make the rooftop, but Joes, seemingly betrayed by Gam, falls and dies.

· Nathan tries to resurrect Joes using the Spark, but it doesn’t work.

· The remaining children have no option but to complete the burglary, but inside they are interrupted by the magical dogs Sirius and Anaximander. 

· Anaximander, who can talk, threatens the children with death, and Sirius eats the faces from Joes, whose one body has become two bodies.

· Nathan and Prissy return to the roof and attempt to descend to ground level by rope.

· They are left dangling above a fatal drop: the rope is too short.

· Having received new instructions from the Master via Sirius’s magical organ, Anaximander rescues the children.

· The dogs accompany the children away from the merchant house, having secured the locket Padge hired them to steal.

· The party go to find Gam, hoping for answers regarding the death of Joes.

· They find Gam in a gin-house, but he is unwilling to talk.

· The gin-house patrons attempt to steal Anaximander – he disembowels one of them and they give up.

· The gin-wife objects to the mess Anaximander has made, and the dog agrees to provide a service for her.

· Nathan, Prissy and Sirius go to the slums.

· Nathan has no medicine for his father, who has become even more seriously ill.

· Nathan’s mother begs Nathan to use the Spark to purge the lung worms.

· Nathan agrees, revelling in his disobedience.

· The procedure starts promisingly, until Nathan’s father rises up and prevents it.

· Nathan’s mother urges Nathan to defy his father and cure him, but Nathan cannot break his father’s interdiction.

· He promises to get more medicine and runs to Mr Padge.

· Padge has kidnapped Gam and is holding him hostage until Nathan gives the locket they stole from the merchant house.

· He also wants him to sign the document they stole from the palace.

· Nathan isn’t interested, he only wants medicine.

· Padge takes Nathan to the house of a pharmacist, and the two extort medicine from him with menaces.

· Nathan hands over the locket and signs the document, which he cannot read, paying his debt to Padge and releasing Gam.

· On release, Gam admits he let Joes fall and die on the orders of Mr Padge, who had threatened to have his assassins kill and mince Prissy.

· Sirius alerts Nathan to the fact that his father is in danger and the party run to the slums.

· There they find Bellows and a contingent of gill-men.

· When Nathan reaches his father, he is dead.

· Without his father’s influence restraining him, Nathan fills with the Spark.

· The gang are summoned by a signal back to the club house where they find the ghosts of Joes who warn Nathan against a trap.

· Nathan, feeling that Bellows has killed his father on the instructions of the Master, vows revenge regardless of any trap.

· Nathan begins to glow blue with Spark energy and his arm loses its materiality.

· The gang go to the Fetch and threaten him with murder if he doesn’t take them up the Glass Road to the Master.

· Reluctantly, he agrees.

· They are met at the door of the Master’s manse by the Master and Bellows.

· The Master denies the murder of Nathan’s father and forces Mr Padge, Prissy, and Gam to admit that they were part of a plot against Nathan instigated by the Mistress of Malarkoi, the enemy ruler of a neighbouring city.

· Unable to understand their treachery, Nathan turns his back on his companions and goes with the Master into his manse.

· The Master has created a talisman – the Interdicting Finger – from the locket Mr Padge had them steal, combined with Nathan’s father’s severed index finger.

· He puts this around Nathan’s neck, which calms his Spark.

· The Master gives Nathan an ointment for his arm and leaves him in the care of Bellows. 

· Bellows begins Nathan’s education.

· Nathan learns of Malarkoi, the enemy city, and its Mistress.

· He is given educational toys that teach him how to behave.

· Whenever he feels trapped, or angry, or violent, the locket around his neck dampens his spirits.

· He is fed, watered, clothed, and indoctrinated in the ways of the Master of Mordew.

· Nathan is given a magical book that teaches him how to read and write.

· In the background to this new life, he sees fleeting glimpses of a girl in a blue dress.

· He no longer feels the Itch to use the Spark.

· Magical artefacts manipulate Nathan into believing his friends betrayed him.

· When he learns that Prissy tricked him into loving her, he goes to the zoo and kills her precious alifonjers.

· The next day the Master comes to him with a magical dagger and shows him how to use it.

· Convinced the boy is under his control, he removes the locket that contains the Interdicting Finger.

· Nathan is given the magical book, and the dagger, and is sent to Malarkoi to destroy its mistress.

· The book catalyses or inhibits his Spark, the dagger directs his violence.

· In Malarkoi, Nathan meets the Mistress.

· She is expecting him and seems resigned to her defeat at his hands.

· She fights him nonetheless, and steals parts of his body to make a magical knife of her own.

· She summons the gods of Malarkoi to defend her.

· On the verge of his defeat, the book catalyses Nathan’s Spark and burns everything but the Mistress away.

· Seeing she is defeated, she offers her life to Nathan, and asks him to give the knife to her daughter, Dashini.

· Nathan kills the Mistress and lets out an unrestrained burst of Spark energy that scours Malarkoi for miles around.

· Using the Spark in this profligate manner reduces Nathan’s material presence.

· Nathan returns to a hero’s welcome in Mordew, the Master heals him, but Nathan knows himself to have been manipulated.

· The Master sends him to see the girl in the blue dress, the imprisoned daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi, Dashini, captured behind a sphere of magical glass.

· Dashini has spent her captivity unsuccessfully inventing magical methods of escape.

· She has made masks that allow her to possess some of the Master’s staff.

· She gives one to Nathan, and that night they possess the Manse’s Caretaker and Cook.

· Nathan takes her to the library where the Master has stored some magical books.

· Dashini uses one to summon the ur-demon, Rekka.

· Rekka, determined to destroy its summoner, destroys the glass quarantine that has been imprisoning Dashini.

· Dashini, free, transports Rekka to the centre of the Earth, and she and Nathan try to leave the manse.

· The Master has magical barriers that prevent them from leaving.

· Dashini takes them below to a chamber in which the corpse of god – the source of the Master’s power – is contained.

· Nathan takes God’s eye and uses the power to return to the slums.

· No longer constrained by the locket, and empowered by the eye of God, Nathan brings revolution to Mordew.

· He creates an army of flukes from the Living Mud, sets fires, drives the slum dwellers into the Merchant City, and then destroys the Glass Road.

· Each act makes him less and less materially present in the world.

· He reunites with Gam, Prissy, and Sirius, and finds his mother.

· She has joined forces with Anaximander, and takes them all to the man with the fawn-coloured birthmark.

· This man has access to a merchant vessel, and the party leave Mordew burning behind them.

· When the ship is at sea, Bellows boards with a group of gill-men, determined to bring Nathan back to the Master.

· Nathan is exhausted by his use of the Spark, and the eye of God, and is now defenceless.

· Mr Padge, who has stowed away on the ship, emerges with Prissy as a hostage.

· Nathan agrees to return with Bellows peacefully if Bellows rescues Prissy.

· Bellows takes a magical weapon and attempts to kill Padge, but Padge has magical protection.

· The weapon’s effect is turned on Bellows, devolving him back to a boy.

· While Padge is gloating over his victory, Gam stabs him in the back in revenge.

· This was Prissy’s plan all along, she providing the necessary distraction that allowed Gam to sneak up.

· Padge dies.

· Nathan goes to comfort Bellows, but the Master appears and takes Nathan away.

· Taking advantage of Nathan’s lack of material solidity, the Master crushes him.

· Once Nathan is compact enough, the Master empties the locket he’d previously kept Nathan’s father’s Interdicting Finger in, and replaces it with Nathan’s remains, creating an artefact he calls ‘the Tinderbox’.

· It had been the Master’s plan all along to make Nathan overexert himself, magically, so he could make this Spark weapon, which he intends to use against the Eighth Atheistic Crusade – the militant wing of the mysterious ‘Assembly’ – who are approaching Mordew, intent on destroying it.

II. Dramatis Personae 

Adam Birch   A boy taken apart, made words of, and bound into a magic book. His author, the Master of Mordew, wanted him to be part of his war story, but Nathan Treeves took the book from the shelf and returned him to his brother, Bellows. Now, free in the world, who is to say what tales Adam prefers to tell?

Anatole   Just because a man dresses well and keeps himself in shape, that does not make him worthy of respect. Nor do those who sing nicely necessarily have sympathetic hearts. Sometimes men overshadow their appearance with evil deeds, and make their voices fearful things to hear by virtue of their reputations. Anatole, one of Mr Padge’s assassins, wears well-tailored clothes, fitted tightly, and has a practiced and melodious vibrato, but you should run at the sight and sound of him unless you are tired of your life. He thinks he is currently engaged in punishing the murderers of his former employer, but if he is ever done with that, he will be free to kill again, something he does at even the most negligible slight.

Anaximander    One of only a very few talking dogs, he has been confined to Mordew all of his life. Now he roams abroad, following Clarissa Delacroix, his new service-pledge. While he is a very faithful pet, his attention is often drawn to the new and interesting things he sees. To these he applies his logics, seeking to understand the world as it is, though perhaps this blinds him to matters closer at hand. 

Bellows   Boys often become men, the progress of time leading them usually in that direction, but Bellows is an unusual kind of thing. Made in the vats of the Master, his adulthood was brought on magically, and by magic it has been reverted, recreating from a metamorphosed butterfly its previous caterpillar. What effect this has on a person’s mood and character is anyone’s guess, but intuition suggests that it will not be universally positive.

Captain Penthenny   When Penthenny sailed her ship away from Nathan, having performed the service of crossing the sea with him, she had no intention of returning to the waters surrounding Mordew. Her fish, though, has intentions of its own, and it is too large and wilful to deny. So it is that she comes back to the place she has foresworn, muttering under her breath and taking fortifying swigs from any bottles of liquor conveniently at hand.

Clarissa Delacroix   Unfairly overlooked, in the main, by the plot of the previous volume, Clarissa Delacroix, Nathan Treeves’s mother, has a larger part to play in this one, though perhaps no less mysterious. The dramatis personae of Mordew described her as being made from scraps of cloth, brought to life by the Living Mud. Since that passage was written from the perspective of the storyteller Joes, as a description it is only figuratively correct. In fact, she is a powerful weft-manipulator, survivant of the ongoing Weftling Tontine, and she has been in the slums, gathering Sparklines that will allow her to cast the magics she needs to bring her every desire to life. There are extracts from her diaries at the end of this volume if you require clarification.

Dashini   The Mistress of Malarkoi’s daughter, and supposed inheritor of her mother’s city. Free at last from the Master’s quarantine, she is delighted, but anyone who has been confined alone for years will know that it leaves scars: distrustfulness of the world, lingering sadness, and a difficulty in relating to other people. Still, there is always magic, and the possibility that events will make up for the past. Surely?

Deaf Sam   Those with disabilities, through their struggles, can learn a superior understanding of the plight of humanity. This might lead to an empathy for others that guides a person’s actions in their life, and which can make them kind and thoughtful. Not so Deaf Sam, one of Mr Padge’s assassins, hired to punish that man’s murderers. If he has any empathy, it is not often expressed when he is working. Wordlessly, he will strangle a baby in its crib when he is paid to do so. While his deafness mutes that child’s cries, the sight of its shocked expression, wide mouth, red face, and, eventually, the slow dwindling of the light of life in its eyes affect Deaf Sam very little, if at all. Lover of the assassin Sharli. 

Gam Halliday   He had his eye popped by Mr Padge, and his teeth removed by flukes, but these flaws were remedied by Nathan Treeves when he filled Gam with the Spark. His material form was returned to that which God had intended for Gam: eye and teeth intact. Then, since Nathan’s actions tend to excess, these items were evolved towards those proper to angels. Now one of his eyes sees with unusual clarity, and his teeth could chew stones if there was any need to do that. If only Nathan had filled Gam’s conscience with the Spark… Gam is tortured by guilt for all the terrible things he has done, and he receives no pleasure from his restored and improved organs. 

Giles   The aristocratic owner of the ship on which Nathan and his party left Mordew. He, along with his wife Iolanthe – listed directly below – were bullied into taking intolerable urks, dogs, and dirty renegades aboard their precious vessel. It was the man with the fawn-coloured birthmark who forced them to do it, but where is he now?

Iolanthe   ‘Not here,’ is the answer (see above), and Iolanthe, used to being the bully herself, is unlikely to leave off bullying Giles for long. ‘Get these horrible types out of my sight,’ is what Iolanthe is thinking, and she’s preparing to express the thought verbally the absolute moment this story begins, though we won’t be around to hear her.

Joes   Killed in the world, Joes was magical enough to survive briefly as ghosts, hovering between the material and immaterial realms in the weft inconsistent city of Mordew long enough for them to represent their death as service to the erstwhile Mistress of Malarkoi. As the Mistress’s people have heavens created for them, she creates a heaven for Joes, despite never having met them. Consequently, it takes her a little while to get it right.

Mick the Greek   Nothing is known of Mick the Greek, except that he is one of Mr Padge’s assassins, contracted in advance to kill that man’s killers. Like all of us, he is manipulated from birth to death by higher powers.  You might think that this is not true of you, but you are wrong. One day you might understand your error, if you live long enough to develop wisdom. Mick the Greek will not – he will simply appear where his goddess wants him to appear, and fulfil the role she wants him to fulfil. He will give up his life’s Spark for a purpose he will neither know, nor benefit from. If you think this is unusual, then you are naïve.

The Mother of Mordew   The embodiment of a place, and an avatar of a god are not the same thing, but the Mother of Mordew is both. Patron deity of assassins, she both works in their interests and, in a very fundamental sense, owns their lives. What a goddess does with her acolytes is her business. If she puts them here, where she wants them to be, or there, where they might become sacrifices, that is her prerogative. No one has the right to question her: not them, nor you. Gods will be gods, so the saying goes, and another saying says that gods move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. The Mother of Mordew proves both these dictums correct.

Nathan Treeves   He is dead, and it is unusual for people for whom that can be said to trouble the world anymore, except as a ghost or a memory. Nathan, though, inheritor of the will of the weftling, bound to the material realm through his remains in the Master’s weapon, the Tinderbox, pawn in the schemes of the occult Tontine magicians, can expect no eternal rest. He exists painfully in the immaterial realm, where he should not be, and from there he is summonable, if one knows the method, into an intermediate realm. With enough Spark, he might even be returned to the material world. He has a home there – Waterblack, the City of Death – which would seem to be appropriately named to host him. What would he do there? To whose benefit? To what ends? This book does not answer these questions, though the next one might.

Niamh   Love is a beautiful thing, it is said, and even constitutionally irritable sailor-women like Niamh can enjoy it, if they find someone loveable. She is the first mate of Captain Penthenny of the Muirchú, and, should both of them survive, she might also become her wife.

Portia Hall   The given name of the former Mistress of Malarkoi. An avatar of her is dead in this world, but that needn’t trouble a goddess. Her primary iteration is protected within the nested intermediate realms that centre on the Golden Pyramid of Malarkoi, currently inaccessible to those who do not know the back way in.

Prissy   Buffeted hither and yon by the winds of fate, Prissy will become heartily sick of the entire business. Isn’t it often the way that people who feel like this are the ones who are buffeted further? Pushed past their tolerances, they harden themselves to the knocks life gives them, and this makes them capable of enduring heavier and heavier blows. Eventually they become immune to their pain, and it is at this point they are perfectly suited to their roles in history. They might not like it, but they are now uniquely qualified to do things that other people would not want to do, would not be able to do, and would not be capable of withstanding.          

Sebastian Cope   The Master of Mordew’s real name. He deserves no sympathy – he has committed many crimes – but that is not to say that he is not a man like any other, possessed of that breed’s foibles, insecurities and weaknesses. It is customary to paint the antagonists of history as one-dimensional monsters, but Sebastian has many dimensions to his monstrosity, so it is only fair to recognise them here.

Sharli   Who do we mean by this? The Sharli who was employed by Mr Padge for murdering people? The agent of the Women’s Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade who took her place in order to spy on Mordew? The former assassin taken back to the Assembly for education into its society? The recreated original the Mother of Mordew mistakenly re-iterated on the Island of the White Hills, not knowing she had been replaced, who she then ordered to murder Bellows and Clarissa Delacroix? They are all the same person, depending on what you believe, or completely distinct. All of them, to some degree, are or were the lover of the assassin Deaf Sam. Some of them will live out the events of this book, some will not. It will be up to you to determine which.

Simon   An assassin who found himself too beautiful and therefore made himself look like a rat.

Sirius   He who consumes the flesh of the weftling assumes divinity for himself, though if he later vomits his meal up, that divinity is lost. This is a lesson Sirius, companion of Anaximander and pet of Nathan Treeves, learns as he searches for his service-pledge. Nathan’s remains, we should remember, are in the locket that forms the magical artefact, the Tinderbox. Since this is in the possession of the Master it brings the two into conflict – to ends the Mistress of Malarkoi directs. 

Thales    The Thales of ancient history was a philosopher who preceded another philosopher, Anaximander, amongst many others. To announce the identity of the Thales of this book here, before its beginning, would spoil his eventual appearance in the narrative, but the fact provided above will allow any curious person to make an educated guess at who or what he might be.

The Druze   A neuter assassin. Describing them in English is difficult, since the language tends to reserve neuter pronouns for objects, but is that their concern? Not at all: they have the right to be addressed in the way proper to them, and if we find it difficult to write about them or read about them then that is our problem and not theirs. Never refer to them as ‘he’ or ‘she’ – they are skilled in the killing arts, and should they hear your misuses you will find yourself pierced, crushed, suffocated or in some other way rendered dead before you can repeat your mistake.

The Great White Bitch   Not everybody knows what an avatar is, but it is an aspect of a god that exists both as part of, and independently of, a godhead. If one god can be father, son, and holy ghost, then cannot other be mother, mistress, and bitch? The answer is that yes, they can. The Great White Bitch is a god in the form of a dog. By the end of this book she will have borne Sirius Goddog’s children.

In the pages of this book, in addition to those introduced in the first volume, you will find many unusual things, including, but not limited to:

accounts of the thoughts of magical, but mute, dog

an alarm that tells a man when he has had too much stimulant

annealing vats

an assassin who announces himself in song

assassins paid to avenge a man’s death

avatars of a hidden god

a basilisk with eight legs, used for transport

a boy’s brother’s frozen corpse, standing on a table

a brig

a candidate to replace a man whose employer wrongly assumes them to be dead

a city in ruins

a city stretched magically into the sky

a civil war between person-headed snakes

a clock that tells the time in this realm, but also in other realms

a conversation on the topic ‘what is fire?’

a dead girl, alive for no obvious reason

decapitations

a depressed boy child

disembodied organs that move

a dog rowing a boat

a dog that cries tears of sadness

a dog who digs through a wall

a dog who eats a god’s face

a dog who makes lists of things he hopes to do so that he doesn’t forget to do them

dogs that fight to the death

doors that require blood sacrifices to open

an enormous quarantine, large enough to contain a pyramid

exact copies of people who challenge each other for the right to exist

an excess of cattle-headed people

fields of dying dragons

a file, or possibly a rasp

firebirds in much better condition than one is used to

fish mutated by the proximity of god’s corpse

a frozen corpse, shattered to pieces

a fusion of finger, oyster, and octopus

a ghost standing at a forty-five-degree angle

a girl who suffocates to death

a god’s face worn by a dead boy

a great many babies

a high wall of briars

a hollow hill

innumerable intermediate realms

inscriptions in Latin that no-one can read

interventions into the state of the weft

an inverted black pyramid

the last firebird sent against Mordew

magic lists

a magic map

magic spells that go wrong

a man booby-trapped with an explosive jacket

a man hiding in ambush under a lid

a man turned to stone

a mirror Master

a mis-shelved magical book

moving pavements in place of roads

a mystical meeting place where magical creatures can commune

a near endless repetition of the same day

a new Glass Road

notes for a book on pyroclastic revenance

people breathing underwater through the use of magic

a person hiding in ambush under a carpet of turf

psychic influence across the boundaries of discrete realms

puppies born unnaturally quickly

a rebellious mouse, intent on revenge

replica vats

Rescue Remedy

sailors in love

self-melting solder

senses overwhelmed

sickening geometries and perversions of architecture

sigils cast in copper

the smell of sandalwood

spells with names

spiked, stinging monsters

a stone oak

stories told of Heartless Harold Smyke

the tabard relic of the hermit saint Zosimus

a tale of an infant used for a war between rival tribes of fairies

time moving in various ways

translation concussion

a tumbling wall

tunnels that give access to anywhere in the world

an underwater cave

various ominous glows

a vent in the seabed

a very many pyramids

a whitlow, untrimmed

a woman standing in a fire

III. Setting

Malarkoi is a sequence of nested intermediate realms each governed by, and for, a patron god – and its people – under the aegis of the Mistress. Each realm is tied to, but is not identical to, the Golden Pyramid of Malarkoi, and ancestral grounds on the Island of the White Hills – the country surrounding the city. Each realm has a portal-henge that gives access to the next realm in the nest if traversed in the correct order, with the necessary sacrifices. Eventually, it is possible to reach the Mistress’s realm, which is an almost entirely material realm of her own making, except that within it she maintains an accessible series of bespoke infinities, or heavens, which she creates to the whims of her people. She does this as a gift for their worship of her, which they demonstrate with their tribute.

IV. Prologue

BETWEEN TWO GREEN HILLS IN AN ENGLISH VALLEY, over a slowly curving loop of river, Portia etched the lines that delimited her Pyramid. They undercut the landscape as if they had been scraped through the real, revealing gold beneath.

She made the base a kilometre square, the apex a kilometre high.

It was a sunny day in August, and she was far enough away from the battlefront that the smell of burning tyres, something she’d come to believe was ubiquitous, barely registered.

When the lines set, she brought into existence enormous, triangular plates of gold and rested them against each other with spells. They joined seamlessly when she provoked the necessary Spark.

There wasn’t much more to it than that.

She stroked the pregnant curve of her belly, flattening the creases in her cheesecloth dress. The breeze was soft on the down of the back of her neck. From somewhere came the screaming of a seabird.

Magic, once you have the trick of it, makes impossible things easy.

That’s the point.

She still had to make the doorway, fill in the interior, build a stairway, make pipes for water. She’d have to make good. These were all easy things, though, once she found the right page in the right book. She could do it all from the safety of inside.

When it was done she could turn her back on the sacrifices. They weren’t even worth the trouble of burying – she had no intention of coming out of her new home, or of cutting any windows.

Let them rot unregarded.

The countryside of southern England has beauty to a certain sort of person. Quiet, unassuming, subtle, its folds and ripples can satisfy those of an unambitious, static, insular temperament. Portia might even have been this sort of person, once.

But the weft…

Because of the weft, because of what she’d seen in her scryings, because of magic, because of the war, because of the Tontine, because of God, she could turn her back on all of it. Easily. As if it wasn’t any loss at all.

Inwards, that was the direction, and the Pyramid.

The baby kicked and Portia took this in the same way a horse takes being kicked by its rider: it spurred her forward.

So it was that Portia Jane Dorcas Hall, who would become the Mistress of Malarkoi once that city was named, left her home country, never to return.

PART ONE:

The Mistress of Malarkoi’s Mysterious Ways
 

I. Her Wetnurse

WHEN DASHINI CAME TO HER MOTHER, Portia had no milk for the child, so she scryed the weft for a suitable run of events until she found an adequate place. Though it seemed bizarre, so did all the other places her spells showed.

Eventually, everywhere seemed bizarre.

There, within a version of the county of her upbringing, was a hill that had been hollowed out, and in it a tribe of strange people lived. Where a person has a human head, these had the heads of cattle, and they were all naked.

Dashini wouldn’t stop crying, so even if there were things that spoke against it, Portia brought this place into the Pyramid.

She was so tired, it didn’t matter that this place was strange and dreamlike. Tiredness makes everything seem like a dream, and every dream is as strange as the last.

She made three doors – one in from the outside world, in case she needed it, one out to the second Level, and one she used from the Pyramid stairwell. She took the crying Dashini through this last door.

The baby seemed as if she would cry herself to death before she ever stopped, and was only silent for the brief moments it took for her to drag breath into her red-lipped, red-gummed, distended mouth.

Portia took her to the first cattle-headed woman she saw, who pushed the child away, as did the second, but the third was suckling a cattle-headed infant, her free breast blue-veined and swollen.

Dashini could smell the milk, turned her face urgently from side to side. Her bawling temporarily stopped, and she mouthed for a nipple. The cattle-headed woman – if she had a name, her tongue was inadequate to speak it – latched Portia’s daughter to her, and the near silence Dashini’s suckling made was like beautiful music to the Mistress’s ears. She was so moved by this music that she wept, lying on the dark earth, her nose in the loam, her eyes closed, and, without knowing, she slept.

When she awoke, it was Dashini who was sleeping, her cheeks red with her satisfaction, her belly round.

Portia whispered to the cattle-headed women, ‘This child will be to you as a daughter is, precious and worthy of love. Take her, and care for her, returning her to me after seven days.’

She kissed Dashini on the forehead with exaggerated gentleness, so she wouldn’t wake her, and left the girl there.

II. Her Pawns

THE ASSASSINS EMPLOYED BY MR PADGE were sitting at a table outside The Commodious Hour, his restaurant, shaded by a green and red striped parasol, sipping at pipes of opium, and wetting their dried throats with wines of rare vintage. The atmosphere was heavy with late summer pollen and the drowsy humidity of an endless afternoon. They sat, seven of them, a little slouched, long of limb, alert – though secretly so.

White, poppy-tinged, milky smoke trailed past their parasol up into the thin air, defying the pull of the earth and drawing the eyes of wealthy diners. These good folk scowled to see reprobates of this type – unwholesome looking, exquisitely dressed, and possessing none of the deference they ought to have for their supposed betters. The assassins pursed their lips and let their cheekbones cut, and rather than speak circumspectly of their business, they did it loudly, advertising being a necessity in their line of work, and épater les bourgeois, as the old words went, has long been their motto.

One of the assassins, whose name was Anatole, and who was dressed in a suit so tight that every contour of his lithe and sinuous body was clearly and obscenely visible, said to the others, ‘The only thing the contract killer must respect is the contract. What are we without it?’ and while there are no gatherings of assassins that possess absolute accord on any subject, this one came close. In the silence that dominated  the aftermath of Anatole’s utterance, more opium gathered in every lung, and some of the seven reached for their smelling salts to bring the semblance of liveliness back to their minds.

Next to Anatole was a pretty-looking person, all ringlets and almond eyes and glistening lips, quiet, shrinking into her chair. On each finger she had rings, and every one had been taken from someone she had killed, all at the direction of Mr Padge, who had recently sequestered himself in his office, having delivered a lunchtime peroration to the gathered that had now concluded.

He had given them the contract to sign, and they would sign it in blood, as was customary. The quiet, pretty assassin was called Sharli – on that day at least – and she cleared her throat to reply to Anatole. ‘We must honour our pledges since our livelihoods depend on them.’

A waiter came with more wine, the tab going to the house, and in turn he filled Anatole’s, Sharli’s, the Druze’s, Montalban’s, Deaf Sam’s, Simon’s, and Mick the Greek’s glasses, each of them nodding to him before the Greek pushed a generous tip across the table from them all. Assassins live or die at the whims of blind contingency, and this makes them both superstitious of mind and very free with any small sums of money that might influence the vagaries of fate, the reciprocal play of which might somehow come to influence matters where luck is involved. Which is to say that they are generous tippers and hope that the world will reward them for it.

Some of the assassins reached for their drinks, jitters to be calmed, others watched the ripples on the surface of their wine, transfixed by the patterns the opium renders so significant-seeming, others still licked their teeth and wondered at the time.

Padge, earlier, had hired them all for insurance.

He had paid the assassins, with promises, to kill, when necessary, whoever it was that should kill him, and the terms of this arrangement were outlined in the contract that rested between the seven of them, curling back into a scroll between the small plates and empty bottles of the long, but dwindling, lunch.

Padge had come and he had said, smiling over a three-storey platter of iced seafood that has since been eaten and cleared away, that he wanted them, for a share of a sum he would outline, to promise him that if he were ever done away with, that they would make it their business to return the favour to his murderer or murderers.

In other company there would have been a polite outcry at the unlikeliness of this eventuality and wishes given for many more years of safe passage about the city – empty flatteries – but assassins are of a different breed, and instead signs were made against the Evil Eye and solemn nods were nodded. White-haired Montalban, seven feet tall, rubbed a tattoo on his elbow and thereby opened and closed the pink beak of the albino falcon that was the emblem of his ancestors’ house in a faraway city he was now unable to name. He said, ‘Consider it done, Mr Padge,’ and though the others might have haggled regarding remuneration, this set the tone of the group’s replies.

Next to the contract, where it then was, lay seven blank pieces of paper. To the other patrons, picking at their quail bones and squaring away their napkins, these might have been seven separate bills, or perhaps copies of a list of specials, turned over so the unwritten-on sides were visible, but an assassin knows magic objects when they are put down in front of them.

This had all taken place, this meal, back before the city had fallen into revolution, before Nathan Treeves’s treachery, before the exodus, before the rising of the Mount, and Padge had said: ‘When I die, these papers will magically provide each of you with the name of my killer, or killers, and there will be a map to where they are. This map will change if they move, and the name will change if they call themselves something new. Your job – your last job for me – will be to locate the people or person on this list and kill them. When that is done, a new message will be written, and it will give you directions to my hidden wealth which is, as I’m sure you can imagine, considerable.’

An assassin takes on new information with a studied neutrality – there is nothing to be gained from raising an eyebrow or throwing up one’s hands when others speak – but a group of assassins together know from the very smallest reactions what their fellows are thinking. It is a kind of language, this hypersensitivity to posture and flow and nuance, and though no-one not fluent in body-speech would have known it, Padge’s words were shocking to the seven.

As custom dictated, it was decided that the group should all visit the Mother of Mordew, and that they would allow her to hold the contract, since all such important trade documents were deposited with her by preference, she being the patron deity of their union.

 ***

The Mother of Mordew – a secret presence in the city to all but a very few – was to be found in an abandoned and collapsed coal and tin mine on the tip of the Northfields. A tumble of rock, a cave entrance, an oily pool, a discarded iron earthmover: these things together do not deserve a name, but they were known by the assassins as the Cave of the Matriarch, and here it was that the Mother resided, trapped, it would seem to the ignorant, behind a mesh of wire, the extent of her prison disappearing off into a dark fault in the mountain.

In this part of the city it was always raining, and Simon – a rat-faced fellow whose unusual ugliness, recently adopted as camouflage, was all the incentive onlookers needed to pass their eye elsewhere – scuttled, collars drawn up on jacket and overcoat, the peak of his cap dripping, between the rusting heaps the miners had left behind once their coal and tin had been exhausted.

The others watched from the shelter of a corrugated iron, the sound of torrents thudding on the rusting metal. Simon did not have a tail, but the end of his whip trailed behind him as if he did, and when he changed direction to skirt around this or that obstacle, he might also have had whiskers, so stiff and thin were his moustaches.

When he reached the allotted spot, his heels digging into the slag at the mine entrance, he stood back and whistled. He made three long notes to a tune he had memorised earlier.

Was the Mother of Mordew magical? It is almost certain that she was, since she had been in that place all the life of the city, and some said she came into being with it when the Master raised it out of nothing, but magic or not, she did not appear instantly, as if summoned. No, the entrance to her place stayed dark, and there was no sign of her candle, nor of her entourage.

After the whistles, there was no movement or indication of anything but the feeblest sorts of dead-life, splashing in the rain, driven here by what temporary and unknowable motivation was in them.

Simon looked back, pawed at his moustaches, shrugged his thin shoulders.

Sharli took tobacco from her pouch and, with a thin liquorice paper, rolled herself a cigarette. Her fingers were wet, but she was skilled enough to manipulate even the most rain-soaked of fixings. She clicked and a flame emerged from her palm. ‘You can’t expect the Mother of Mordew to come…’ she said, pausing to draw the flame into the leaf, ‘…running at our say so.’

Such was the rightness of her words that the others made cigarettes of their own, or tamped their pipes, or took from the folds of their cloaks the devices which provided them with their preferred stimulants, and the assassins thereby collectively salved their addictions, even Simon, who took snuff laced with nerve-fire as he waited in the rain.

***

Time passed, as it must, and to alleviate our boredom let us turn to an illustration of what manner of people these assassins were.

Because they were prohibited by order of Mr Padge from assaulting patrons at The Commodious Hour, there are no opportunities to show them at their work there. It is hard to attract customers to a restaurant, even when the food is excellent, if there is an expectation that murder might follow the meal. But, if and when, say, a dismissive eyebrow was raised at, say, Montalban, by, say, a merchant of figs living up in the Pleasaunce who laughed to his new, younger wife and whispered in her ear making her look back over her shoulder, snigger, cover her mouth, shake her head slightly, and cleave closely to him as they went to collect their coats, then while none of the assassins punished the assumed insult on the premises, they did not let the possible slight pass.

No, instead they called over a serving boy and, for the consideration of several brass, had him follow the pair home, then to return to report on their address.

Later, when the restaurant closed for the evening and the sting of the moment had passed, but on point of principle – that being that no disrespectful action can be allowed to stand unpunished lest it encourage disrespectful actions in others – they went together to the place the boy had indicated. Sharli knocked at the door, and when the maid answered she was pulled by the arm through the doorway so that she stumbled over the threshold onto her knees. While she was down there, she was very susceptible to a knife through the spine at the base of the skull, and easy then for Sharli and the Druze, coming out of the shadows, to drag back through the doorway into the parlour and out of sight, doors closing behind.

A signal can be made to assassins waiting at a distance by leaving the gaslight on in a front room, and then drawing and undrawing the curtains three times. This is easy to do, works at range, and is much less conspicuous to occupants of the property and passers-by than a loud yell, or something of that sort. The curtain code is what Sharli did as the Druze scoped out the scullery, drawing room, kitchen, stairs and backyard by standing in the hall by the coat stand and looking around.

An elderly housekeeper will die at almost any provocation – her arthritic neck is easy to snap, she can be suffocated silently in moment, even the shock of finding an assassin in her domain can do it – and a butler isn’t much more trouble. By the time Mick the Greek and Anatole were letting themselves in through the front, the dead of the lower floor were bundled down the cellar stairs, and the Druze was indicating that the coast was clear.

Sharli opened the back door for Deaf Sam and Simon, who went upstairs noisily, the mud of their boots staining the runners, the banging waking the previously sleeping children who then lit candles in their first-floor bedrooms.

Those who are not used to killing might think that children are easy to do, but the opposite is the case. Adults tend to freeze under threat, conveniently remaining in place, but children will run. Because they are little, they’re difficult to catch. They’re also nimble and some are not terribly sensible. Nimble ones will dodge between your legs, swerve past you at the last minute, or wriggle out of your grasp. Not sensible ones will leap out of windows, or fling themselves down stairwells. Deaf Sam and Simon were seasoned, though, and knew how to quickly smother boys and girls with their bedclothes, knees on little wrists, wadded sheets in little mouths.

Sharli had done the maid, the Druze the staff, Deaf Sam and Simon the children, so Mick the Greek and Anatole went up to the second-floor master bedroom, and here were the insulting pair from the restaurant, backed up against the wardrobe in their pyjamas.

The man who had raised his eyebrow had a pistol.

A piece of advice: if you have a pistol and intend to use it, do so without delay. If assassins appear in your doorway don’t shake and shiver and try to bargain them away with threats. Just shoot them.

They may, if you are lucky, not be wearing lead breastplates beneath their shirts. Anatole certainly wasn’t, and if the man had shot him, the assassin might well have been killed. True, Mick the Greek would have used the opportunity to take the weapon, but at least the man would have given as good as he’d got. As it was, he told the two to ‘back off’ and scarcely were the words out of his mouth than Anatole had doused the weapon with water from the jug on the nightstand, wetting its gunpowder and making it unable to fire.

The man tried the trigger a few times, but all it did was click, and while he was standing there, clicking away like a fool, Mick the Greek put a stiletto blade up through the new, young wife’s left nostril, into her brain.

She slumped to the ground, never to rise again, and Anatole dragged the man screaming down the stairs, the other assassins following quietly and casually behind when they’d passed.

By this time Montalban had arrived and was waiting in the drawing room to punish the insult. He had pulled a chair over to the middle and put it on the intricately woven rug. The pattern of the rug was of putti and angels and seashells and golden trees and columns and beautiful maidens and all the wonders of the arcadian world. It is best that we see those things rather than what happened next, because it is easier to focus on beauty than it is on pain, and while images are not enough to relieve the tortured, we have not offended an assassin and can be more easily distracted.

***

Anyway, time passed waiting for the Mother of Mordew, and eventually, when everyone was thoroughly wet through, there came a whistle that indicated that the Mother was on her way.

Close on this whistling, the wire fence in front of the cave entrance filled with eyes, some low, some high, and some in the middle range. Fingers curled between gaps. The eyes were huge and wide of pupil, the fingers were long and uncut of nail, and the group of faces behind were all in shadow. This was the Mother of Mordew’s entourage – troglodytes from deep potholes intersected by the mines, wan and nervous and out of their element on the surface.

Then here was the Mother.

A person’s mother is often like they are – more motherly, but the same in many inheritable respects. If this mother had been alike to the assassins, despite their variety, she would have been a beautiful thing, slender and dangerous and nicely dressed, but she wasn’t like that at all. She was alike, instead, to Mordew, since she was its Mother not theirs – conical in shape, her skirts caked in the dirt of the base, tapering up to her waist which was reined in with a leather band. This was the support for a torso of more figurative similarity to her city – it swelled like the eruption of a volcano to her head, her skin caked in coaldust, her hair lava-red, spurting in all directions.

She turned her eyes on Simon and they shone as brightly as a lighthouse lamp, and her teeth too, that were like the dangerous white rocks at the base of a cliff from which the same lighthouse lamp protects mariners.

Simon bowed his head, deferentially, but before he could raise it again, she had seen the others where they smoked, and indicated for them to come forward.

The assassins knew her appearance well, but that did not make it any less fearsome or easy to see. Each previous meeting had been like a trauma to their dignities, since she would put them in their place and render any pretence they had of their brilliance an obvious self-delusion. She was, after all, and regardless of what the Master of Mordew said, the first of this city, even though, like many wise mothers, she chose to keep her offspring at arm’s length, postpartum.

‘Open the gates,’ she said.

They were opened, and while this process took place – something that involved several of her troglodytes turning wheels simultaneously, which pulled at chains, which undid bolts, and which then allowed sprung hinges to do their work – Simon skittered back on his toes, knees high and urgent.

The others welcomed him into their huddle, where he peeked out from between them.

As a group they should have felt emboldened, since there were seven killers here, notorious and formidable, but they did not feel this. When the Mother came towards them, striding over every obstacle the junkyard presented as if it did not exist, skirts rippling, they felt instead that their collective presence made them more conspicuous. Each briefly considered edging away to fend for themselves, but when they remembered the lonely vulnerability of the friendless, none of them did it.

‘Bring me the contract and slit yourselves in readiness. I am the law for you reprobates of this city, and my justice requires blood.’

She was light and dirt and teeth and eyes and red hair. Her words rumbled out from inside, battling with the phlegm the mine soot made in her lungs. This voice was high, but it was harmonised by the sound of rock-falls and cracking fault lines from beneath her corsets.

Her troglodytes stood tall as she spoke, and though it was evening, they shaded their eyes as if from the brightest noon. They squinted and looked sidelong, only briefly, but each drew a bead on one of the assassins, and with the instincts that killers have for aggression, the group knew that they were being sized up.

Deaf Sam came forward, unfazed by the Mother’s voice since his ears couldn’t hear it. His mode of communication was blunt – pounded fists and palms, curves and loops done with a finger, bitten lips, and extrusions of the tongue – but it was effective. He said, though the translation is inexact, that the Mother need come no further, and that he would act as the liaison.

The Mother pulled back her lips in what might have been laughter and came over to the group, growing in height as she left her cramped tunnel, filling the air and towering above them all. With her breath she scorched the soft hairs on the assassins’ skins, curled their starched collars and cuffs, snatched the air away from their lungs before they could get the goodness from it.

It takes a terrible sight to intimidate killers, but she was that sight and none of the group could speak.

‘You seven are the only ones left in this city who venerate me, agreeing to abide by my edicts,’ said their Mother. ‘All the others are dead. Let me tell you, my faithful, that this city will soon be scoured and rebuilt. It will stretch up into the sky and become a mountain. I know your business here, which is to offer me your contract to vouchsafe. Although the event for which you are contracted has yet come to pass it will do so soon, and with it will come fire. Also yet to come to pass is the giving of secrets, from a son about his mother. These secrets I already know, and so I will add a name of my own to your contracted list, Clarissa Delacroix, who is a threat to us all. Though it should be enough to remove a danger from our collective, I will pay an additional bounty for her death of money and a special knife, useful for killing. Approach! I will lead you down into the caverns and mines and thereby protect you until the time comes for you to execute your commissions, you who are all that remains of my cult in this city.’

 She took them into her mines and caves, and from here she directed them to the future places that she needed them to be in. Anatole, she sent to the deck of the merchant vessel on which Gam, Prissy and Dashini would be found, so he could force them on the path that she had descryed for them, and eventually provide the Spark that would open the Door to the first Level.

Simon she had emerging from the future soil on the approach to the Golden Pyramid, reducing the time that would be available to the fleeing children, forcing them to make for the back door.

Montalban, she made appear in a future tree, so that the children would be outnumbered and not pick the other assassins off with magic and violence.

Mick the Greek she made ready to be sacrificed if Dashini needed magic.

The others she sent to do other things.

 *** 

Time did not mean to her what it means to us, nor did space operate in the normal way in her tunnels, since she was a thing of the weft – what the Assembly would call an anomaly, or a parasite – and it is enough to say that all this was done through manipulation of the weft, and if one wishes for a clearer answer than that then an intrascope may be procured from the Assembly under certain courses of study, or Clarissa Delacroix might be induced to teach you the INWARD EYE if you can offer her some advantage, and then you can see for yourself how it was done, if you have the wit to understand the weft, which most do not.

Down there she took the blood record of the assassins’ pledges, and placed the contract in her Ledger, a book which was like scripture to these godless scoundrels, and its keeper their goddess.

Her tunnels were first crude mines, and then huge vacuoles in the earth, spiked on the insides with stalactites and stalagmites, but eventually they became like the impressions a worm leaves in soft soil, and wormlike in colour – slightly pink – and moist like they are too, glistening with the condensate of the breath of the troglodytes who shone and polished the surfaces of her lair until what little light there was down here – most of it coming from her hair – bounced from surface to surface and rippled every inch and made it move like an undulating worm in a fourth way.

Down, down they went, and into the mountain sides, and it was clear that the Mother of Mordew’s realm of influence did not stop at the Sea Wall boundary but encompassed great distances in every direction. Her burrows were deep and complex and never was a dead end reached, every tunnel bifurcating, trifurcating, once, twice, over and over. If one pulls a seedling from the ground, its roots do this, and more so do those of a bush or a tree, but her complex was most like to the strands a fungus colony extends out into the world, the extents of which are difficult to define, because they seem to go everywhere.

The Mother of Mordew led them through her place, less dominating in size again now the roofs were low above their heads. When the passages narrowed, she shrank with them, until, rather than giant, she was now a miniature of herself, and the assassins had to go down onto their hands and knees so that they did not become wedged.

Lungs felt the compression, bent over, and that sense that human beings who live above ground do not realise they have – which is of the risk of being trapped underground, and which makes images in the mind of their head wedged between two rocks so that they cannot go forward or back – began to fire warnings at the assassins, making them pant anxiously. Several of them – again, spread across the various occasions when they were led down there – turned involuntarily back, hoping to ascend to the fresher air and roomier environs of the surface, but when they tried there was the Mother again, the troglodytes with her, exactly where they had been before.

 ***

At some point, she turned to them all and said, ‘The service I now do you is done as a mother does service to those she has birthed, which is without thought of payment, but in expectation of never-ending love from those for whom she works.

‘You are my children, you vain assassins, and not by any virtue that you possess, but from my boundless grace, which you have received by cleaving to me in faith.’ She was tiny now, as if she could be picked up and put in a pocket.

The assassins were on their bellies, gasping for breath, baking in their own heat in the deep and fractal underground. She came up to them, her blackness blacker even than that sunless place, and like a stone or a pebble abrades the path of a fast-flowing stream, she bashed against them, laundering them as clothes can be laundered by the same stones in the same streams, cleaning them of the filth of the there-and-then, purifying them of the particular, until each assassin, alone with her, knew the state of themselves behind the material realm.

• Alex Pheby’s Malarkoi, the second book in the ‘Cities of the Weft’ trilogy, will be published in SEPTEMBER 2022. to Purchase the first Cities of the Weft novel, Mordew, head here.