Lye Street Read online

He'd gone on to describe the scarred angel's vendetta against the descendants of Henry Bucklestrappe, and how he would pray to Ulcis to keep them all safe.

  Trust in the god of chains, son. The faithful will prevail.

  Yet the letter proved that Mack Greene had had reservations. He'd left strict instructions with the family solicitors not to deliver his warning before 1012, the very year his son was due succumb to the curse. He hadn't done this to hide the awful truth and so spare Sal fifty years of worry. No, he'd done this because he'd been a bastard. Had Greene known of the family curse fifty years ago, he'd have sold the house at once and fled across the Deadsands, spending his father's fortune in every gin den and brothel from here to Sanpah.

  But then Mack Greene had always disapproved of his son's godless, wandering nature. This was the old man's way of reprimanding Sal from the grave.

  The prospector grumbled, "I don't run from my troubles any more, Laccus. I'm too old for that nonsense now."

  "Here's to dead angels." Ravencrag clinked his glass against Sal's then raised his own and hallooed like a priest at the Sinner's Well gallows: "Every fifty years! How the hell does a creature with no memory remember? Your great, great granddaddy must have seriously pissed her off."

  "He had that way with women. Much like yourself."

  The phantasmacist grinned.

  "But what if the demon doesn't agree to help," said Greene, who had begun to feel wheezy and uncertain. Two fists of virgins' gall stones? "I mean, what if he doesn't want to kill the angel?"

  Ravencrag looked thoroughly unconcerned. "Then he'll probably just slit your throat and stuff your soul in a bottle of wasps. Torture it for all eternity, that sort of thing."

  "Nothing too bad, then?"

  "You shouldn't worry about it." He took another sip. "I don't. I think we should talk about my bonus now."

  Frankly, Ravencrag could stuff his bonus up his arse. Greene didn't intend to give him a penny of it. Spooky maggots notwithstanding, the phantasmacist had no real power. But the demon? Now that was a whole different level of nastiness. Two whole fists of gall stones? Removed from virgins? In this city? Greene wondered if Ayen's former cutthroat would accept two fists of spinsters' teeth. He might, at least, be able to purchase those from the Heshette. The prospector's supposed wealth had been a carefully constructed web of lies. He had the house in Lye Street, of course, yet he'd nothing but cobwebs left in his coffers. Ravencrag and his penchant for expensive grimoires had eaten the last of it over the previous few months. Greene had probably financed the Phantasmacists Club out his own pocket.

  His daughter Ellie and her husband Jack would receive a poor inheritance, he feared. Yet he'd done everything he could to ensue they wouldn't be burdened with the angel's curse. They were happy here in Deepgate. And that, after all, was the main reason he'd stayed in the chained city himself.

  Tortured in a bottle of wasps for all eternity?

  The prospector sighed.

  The things I do to keep my family safe.

  Chapter Three

  It was dusk when the ox carriage reached the chained city. In the west, only a red ribbon remained of the departing day, like a forest fire raging across the horizon. The air above the abyss rim remained cool and fresh, heavy with the smell of wet metal and rust.

  The beasts snorted and steamed as the vehicle rumbled to a halt behind them, its yellow wooden slats bright in the sunset. It had halted close to the edge of the precipice, in what appeared to be a deserted settlement of adobe huts, all shadowed by great hummocks of stone, logs, slate and lime. The carriage door creaked open and a man hopped down. He strolled to the lip of the chasm, to where a broad wooden rope bridge dipped away into the city. He was of average height and weight, but with clear, quick eyes and an energetic gait. A tall black hat sat at a jaunty angle upon his head, and he wore an ancient red leather topcoat full of numerous pockets, heavily patched and patterned with black wire filigree, feathers and teeth. In one fist he clutched a walking stick (a gut-sticker, disguised) which he dug into the bridge planks to measure their strength and degree of decay.

  The greasy wood crumbled under the point of his stick. "Rotten," he said.

  "Just as I said, Sir," the coachman replied from his high sprung seat at the front of the carriage. "The main route down to the temple won't be finished for months, and that woodway's not strong enough for oxen and carts. If you don't mind, I'll have to drop you here."

  Othniel Cope gave the man a curt nod, then turned back to admire the view. "This is fine," he said.

  Deepgate spread out below him, a vast metal web suspended over the mouth of the abyss. Anchors driven into the bedrock around the chasm perimeter supported the weight of the chains, yet despite their obvious girth and strength, the city sagged towards the centre in an enormous bowl of ironwork and dismal dwellings. Only the Church of Ulcis rose to any significant height. And yet even that great black temple appeared to be unfinished, for Cope spied acres of scaffolding clinging to its distant spires and turrets.

  He pointed with his stick. "When will the temple be completed?"

  "The Church of Ulcis?" the coachman said. "Another ten years, Sir, if the priests are to be believed. But they've being saying that for the last five hundred years. I doubt we'll see the Rookery Spire finished in our lifetimes."

  "Not in your lifetime, at any rate," muttered Cope.

  The coachman turned on his seat and began to unstrap his passenger's travel bag from the roof of the carriage.

  Building work appeared to be underway throughout most of Deepgate. A mass of townhouses clustered around the temple itself, all interwoven with arched bridges and streets suspended within wickers of chain, yet further out the structures thinned, becoming an unruly mess of hemp rope and timber shacks. Stanchions held pulleys and bucket lifts – evidently for moving materials and equipment – while slender walkways dipped, rose and zigzagged through it all like drapes of lace.

  One of these walkways climbed, by way of a series of beams and platforms, in a crooked line from the centre of the city up to the very edge of the abyss before them. It was wide enough for two oxen to walk abreast, although it looked perilously fragile and steep in places. "Has something delayed the construction of these hanging roads?" asked Cope.

  The coachman continued to untie knots around the luggage. "The workers are waiting on more sapperbane," he said, "but the Tooth won't be back from Blackthrone for another week. Once we get some decent cross-chains down there, we'll be able to bring beasts down into the Warrens." He tugged at a clasp. "Stone and timber has to be bucket-lifted or manhandled down a block at a time for fear of collapsing the woodways, and we keep losing ropes, pulleys and timber to the bloody scroungers."

  "Scroungers?"

  The other man grunted. "They live in those shacks on the fringes." He freed Cope's travel bag and handed it down to him, before returning to loosen the straps around his own luggage – bales of some foul-smelling animal skins, from what Cope could gather.

  "Most of the new immigrants don't have a penny," the coachman went on. "Beggars and cut-purses coming in from the river towns. We put up woodways... they strip them for pulpboard and hemp, or steal what they can from the labourers' camps around the abyss. Then they build their own hovels on any bit of chain going free down there. No permissions, no planning, just leagues of rope. Half the Holy City is a slum."

  "The Church does not object?"

  The coachman shrugged. "Presbyter Scrimlock's been trying to get them all recorded on the census. But there's an endless stream of new arrivals." He heaved one bale over the luggage rack and let it fall to the ground, and then started untying another. "Some of them crawl around in the nets under the Warrens, looking for rubbish that's fallen from the streets above." He shook his head. "Even the children are at it, gangs of them. What kind of man would let his young ones clamber around in those nets, eh? Thieving little shits, just like their parents. They take what they want. It's not right when the rest of us are forced t
o pay so much for everything."

  "Not even your refuse is safe from theft?"

  "Principle of the thing, Sir."

  Cope withdrew a silver watch from his one of his many pockets and glanced at it. "You have arrived precisely on time, despite the floods, and so you have earned the truppenny bonus I promised."

  "Very kind of you, sir." He hefted a second bale over the side of the carriage. "Sir?"

  "Yes?"

  "Forgive me, but..." He hesitated. "...the folks in Sanpah know of you. They say you're a thaumaturge, that you can work magic." He glanced down at Cope, then quickly away again. "I was wondering if I could ask you a question?"

  "By all means."

  The coachman gestured towards the abyss. "What's really down there?" he asked. "I mean, the Church says this, and the heathens say that. I believe the Church, don't get me wrong, it's just that..."

  "You can't be certain."

  "Aye."

  "And you'd like to know for sure."

  "I would, sir. It seems to me that we're putting so much effort into building the city... and we're paying so much tax for it and all..."

  "And you want to be sure your investment is sound?"

  "Investment?" The man grinned. "That's it exactly, Sir."

  "Glad to help," said Cope. He pulled his gut-sticker free from its sheathe and buried the thin metal spike in the nearest ox's rump. The beast bellowed and bulled against its harness and, kicking out with its back legs, struck the underside of the driver's seat. The coachman lost his balance and fell sideways across the leather cushions. Cope drove his gut-sticker deeper into the ox's flesh.

  The animal bolted.

  The carriage leapt forward. Dragged by the panicking beasts, the heavy vehicle clattered onto the walkway. Hemp ropes stretched under its prodigious weight. Planks dipped, buckled, and split beneath its wheels. As the driver struggled to clamber free, the carriage slewed to one side, buckling the walkway itself. One of the rear wheels slipped off the edge. The axle hit the deck, then chewed through dozens of boards as the oxen continued to drag their burden forward. Both animals grunted and stamped, their hooves scrabbling to find purchase on the planks. But the carriage weighed too much. It slid off the walkway, taking the harness, oxen and the coachman with it.

  Cope watched the vehicle plummet fifty feet before it struck a foundation chain and burst apart. The driver and his animals slipped between the surrounding rope-work and shacks, and disappeared into the vast darkness of the chasm below. For a long moment, the surviving ropes all quivered.

  The thaumaturge withdrew a tiny ragged dog from one of his topcoat's inner pockets, then held it up close to his face. "Happy now, Basilis?" he said.

  The pup growled.

  "Such a simple question to answer," muttered Cope. "Still, I've saved us a truppenny."

  Cope returned the tiny dog to his pocket, picked up his travel bag, and set off down the walkway – cautiously, for it had been badly damaged.

  Chapter Four

  The queer messages began to appear everywhere Carnival went, always one step ahead of her movements, as if their author had intimate knowledge of the dark and derelict places she frequented. In a basement of a pendulum house Ivygarths:

  The TRUTH lies in LYe STREET.

  In an attic in Lilley:

  ReDeem your self, BITCH! The tower in LYE.

  Each time she found another note, her terror grew. The words were becoming increasingly hostile and demanding, the charcoal lines more savagely scrawled across brick or plaster. And always, beneath each missive was the same rude drawing of the knife Carnival carried. These images seemed to mock her, for she feared that she knew who was behind them.

  Her nightly flights through the city became desperate hunts for a place where she could hide, not only from the Spine, but from these written demands. The worst messages stirred deep memories, like flashes from long buried dreams, which she battled to contain.

  A gallows noose...

  A pocket book...

  A feather dissolving in dark waters...

  In an upper room of a tall flint townhouse, a place full of tallow pools and cobwebs, she found an old woman who had died in her bed and been partially eaten by an army of cats. The creatures sat on furniture, watching the angel with their emotionless blue eyes. All three of the dressing table mirrors had been smashed. Words had been cut into the wallpaper with a knife.

  BEWARE A CAGe hdden. Lie Street.

  MURDERER.

  WHITTENWHITTENWHT. LYE STREET.

  Carnival squeezed her hands over her ears, as if that might block out her internal screaming, and fled. She tore across the moonlit rooftops, stopping, searching, running from the words she found. She abandoned one hideaway after another, and then, when she could not think of another place to go, she fought her hideous fear of the abyss and dove down beneath the streets and houses of Gardenhowe.

  Iron foundations loomed overhead, immense and black and scabbed with rust. The chains above her creaked and groaned under the weight of sixty thousand homes. The endless darkness waited below. A tangible presence, it seemed to compress the blood in Carnival's muscles. Her heart strained. On she crawled, through girders, pipes and filth. Welds cut her wings and hands, scratched her old leather vest and breeches, but she didn't slow. She scrambled through fallen detritus snagged in a hemp net, through broken furniture, booze bottles and tin cans, dead pigeons and rotting clothes.

  Rust had eaten through the side of an under-floor rain cistern, forming a jagged hole. The angel folded her wings tightly against her back and climbed inside the tank. It stank of old water. Her hands moved through slime. Crouched, she rested her wings against the wall and closed her eyes.

  She heard the city shifting above her, the ticking metal and grousing chains, and she could almost imagine echoes answering from the abyss below, deep mournful sounds like the cries of gods.

  She opened her eyes.

  Scratched into the rust before her was another message. It was faint, but Carnival's night eyes read it easily.

  Listen to the corpse in LYE STREET.

  The angel heard screaming, close to her own ears. It sounded like the shrieks of a madwoman.

  Chapter Five

  Sal Greene awoke in his chair before the fire. His daughter was standing beside him in her crumpled nightdress, shaking his shoulder. She looked sleepy. "Father," she said. "Did you not hear the ruckus? He was banging on the door loud enough to wake the street."

  "Ellie?" The prospector rubbed his eyes. "What's wrong?" His first thought was that another Dalamoorish assassin had arrived at his door with a babe in a basket, but his panic subsided when he saw the note in her hand.

  "A lad brought this for you." She handed him the folded scrap of paper and scowled. "It's from Mr Ravencrag."

  "When did this arrive?"

  "Just now."

  Greene picked up his reading glass from the mantel and squinted through it. It was the summons he'd been waiting for. His excitement and his apprehension grew. "What time is it?"

  "After two."

  "Gods balls," he muttered. "I must have dozed off. Sorry you were disturbed, princess. How's Mina?"

  "That one could sleep through a war." Ellie gave him a weary smile. "She's as bad as you."

  Greene returned his daughter's smile. Sometimes Ellie reminded him of his poor sister Margaret, who had been killed by the hooking cough when they'd both been young – and sometimes, like now, she was the image of the Dalamoor Princess he most suspected to be her mother, although he could not remember that woman's name. He'd been blind drunk at the time and the Vizier had had nine daughters. A year had passed before the sallow-skinned knifeman had turned up at his house in Deepgate, carrying Ellie in his arms, and a curt note from the Vizier in which the word 'bastard' had been used in several different, but colourful ways.

  He took his daughter's hand and gave it a squeeze. "Did Jack wake?"

  "No."

  "Good, he needs his rest."


  Jack had moved into the house after he'd married Ellie. Greene had always felt a twinge of guilt that he hadn't been able to help them more. A young couple ought to have their own home. However, the townhouses in Ivygarths and Lilley were far beyond his means. Jack's job as a skilled woodworker entitled him to a place in one of the Workers' Shares in Dourbridge, but if they had to live in the Warrens, then wasn't it better to be here with him than crammed into a lower tenement with four other families? Besides, Greene liked having his family around, especially little Mina.

  "I don't like Mr Ravencrag," said Ellie. "The things people say about him. I don't trust him."

  "I don't trust him either," Greene gave her a kiss on the cheek, "which is why I spend so much time down there. Get back to bed now, lass."

  Presbyter Scrimlock's lackeys had not yet seen fit to proclaim Lye Street safe for carts, oxen and camels, so Greene was forced to walk all the way from his house to the Phantasmacists Club in Ivygarths. Despite his woollen gloves, the cold night air stole into his hands and gnawed at his arthritic joints. The pain had worsened these last few years. Often he wondered if a speck of isinglass or quartz had become trapped in his knuckles, some fragment from a mine he'd once looted. Still, he thanked the gods that he was mobile. Unlike Ravencrag with his weak hip, Greene could hurry when he felt inclined to, as he felt inclined to now.

  He was going to meet a demon.

  But when Ravencrag opened the door to his apartment, he wore a dark expression on his hawkish face. "There's no demon," he hissed. "Just some sprat claiming to be his representative. Frankly, I'm not impressed."

  Greene pushed past and immediately saw the cause of his colleague's doubts. The man could not have been more than twenty years old: foppish and handsome, but with an arrogant twist to his lips. He wore a red leather topcoat festooned with pockets, yet extravagantly patterned with black wire and tribal fetishes, and he carried a walking stick, topped with pommel made from animal teeth. Clear blue eyes studied Greene from beneath the brim of a tall black set at such an angle that it appeared to be in danger of falling from his head.