SEVEN

Initially their party passed through populated corridors, though Tom barely noted the fact. He spent the first part of the journey lost in thought. The sounds of movement, of conversation, the laughter of children and the scolding of worried parents – all the accoutrements of a living, bustling metropolis – washed over him to leave only the briefest of impressions. Afterwards he would recall people's faces: an elderly couple staring, two young children being held back by an anxious mother, and a smartly dressed youth looking puzzled, but he wasn't really paying attention at the time.

Kat's bartering with the Prime Master had made him feel uncomfortable and he was trying to work out why. It brought a number of matters sharply into focus, causing him to question things he'd previously taken for granted. First among them, what was he doing here?

Kat's reasons for coming along were clear enough. The leverage the Prime Master had applied was not so very different from the methods Ty-gen had used in persuading her to take Tom across the City Below: both boiled down to bribery. Was she really so materialistic, and was that a true reflection of how little their friendship meant to her? Or was he being naïve?

If Kat's motivations were so obvious, his were anything but, even to him. Throughout all that had happened he'd trusted in the Prime Master, who was undoubtedly a lot wiser than Tom, confident that the older man knew best and was happy to do whatever he advised. Kat hadn't.

It now seemed to Tom that all his life he'd been happy to let others make decisions for him, passing on the responsibility of his own life to somebody else. First it had been his mother, then Lyle and the leaders of the Blue Claw, and now the Prime Master. Maybe that was the real difference between him and Kat. Maybe that was why she always looked for the angle while he just went along with whatever others recommended. He'd been in a gang of one kind or another from the very first, and had never learned how not to be.

If so, maybe it was high time that changed. Thanks to Kat's example, he found himself wondering for the first time what he was likely to gain from all of this. Sure, he was trying to save the city, but that hadn't been enough for Kat. Was he a fool for not standing up for himself a bit more? He hadn't wanted to leave the streets and be taken under the Prime Master's wing, but it had been taken for granted that he'd go along with the process. He hadn't wanted to leave the city and go in search of the goddess Thais, but the Prime Master had been insistent, arranging matters without paying heed to his own concerns or desires. He hadn't wanted to return to Thaiburley with the weight of the city's survival resting on his shoulders, but the goddess had never allowed for any other course of action, and he didn't want to be heading off now into corridors infested with Rust Warriors to save the city and everyone in it, but no one seemed to consider the possibility that he might do anything else. And here he was, doing exactly as expected.

Of course Thaiburley's survival mattered to him, it was his home, but it was a lot of other folk's home as well. Shouldn't saving the place be down to other people? Tom felt a familiar sense of the inevitable, of life rushing past beyond his control. There had been times along the Thair's course when he'd felt swept along by circumstance in much the same way that a piece of flotsam is propelled by the river's current. If anything, events had only gathered pace since then, attaining a momentum that felt unstoppable, inevitable. Not that digging his heels in at this stage would have been a realistic option in any case, hemmed in as he was by Council Guards and the Blade. But, assuming he survived this, Tom determined that things were going to change. He'd make his own choices from here on in, no matter what others might expect of him.

How could she possibly be walking here? Where were the Blade that moments ago had hemmed him in? "You're not real," he said, as hope that the burden of responsibility might be lifted from his shoulders evaporated as rapidly as it had blossomed.

"Oh I'm real all right, just not physical. Matters proceeded far more quickly than I would have liked. You're not ready. The information you need is still being assimilated, so I sent part of me back here to help you, to guide you."

"For what?" Kat asked. The goddess had disappeared and he realised he must have spoken that last phrase out loud. "Are you still sulking with me for grabbing hold of you back in the Stain and hitching a ride?" Kat said.

Inside he was seething, wondering how much of his thought processes were now laid bare to the goddess, and whether that information was being shared with the real Thaiss back in her citadel, or was this aspect of her self-contained? Either way, he didn't like it and felt used yet again. With an effort, he stopped worrying about the goddess, reckoning there was nothing he could do about her presence no matter how much he resented the intrusion. To distract himself from fretting about this unwanted passenger, he turned his thoughts on Kat. It felt odd travelling with her again. Not awkward, just a little odd. He supposed it was because he'd grown accustomed to the reassuring presence of Mildra beside him – her warmth, quiet wisdom and gentle words. "Warm and gentle" were hardly the words he'd use to describe Kat. She was all spiky darkness and pointed steel to Mildra's comforting pastels and softness. He'd spent a lot longer with Mildra, of course, but somehow having Kat here felt more natural and, given what they were likely to be facing, he wouldn't have had it any other way.

Person of imPortance: not a phrase Tom had expected to ever hear said of himself. "Beats the hell out of me," he admitted. "It sort of crept up on me when I wasn't looking. But it doesn't mean anything. I'm still the same nick you took halfway across the City Below."

Tom had almost forgotten how unnatural the enclosed world of the Rows had felt to him when he first encountered it. Until Kat's comment he hadn't realised how quickly he'd adapted to this environment. "You get used to it," he assured her.

The longer Tom had spent in Thaiss's citadel, the more sense the initially random images and histories had begun to make, a process that continued after he'd left. As things came increasingly into focus, one particular piece of information stood out; not because it was obvious or recurring, but because it was completely absent. He'd meant to ask the goddess about it before he left, but in the end their departure had been so rushed that he'd forgotten to do so. Only now, as he marched through the corridors of the Heights towards goodness knew what fate, did the matter resurface.

The thing that his ever-inquisitive mind kept picking over was the fact that nowhere, in all that he'd seen and heard, had Tom discovered any mention of a name for the goddess's brother. It was as if someone had deliberately purged every trace of his name from the records, all records. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Tom felt certain this had to be the case.

"It was…" He hesitated, trying to find the best way of expressing the experience. "It was unlike anything I've ever felt before. At first there was this numbness that crept over my head, then it was as if everything was stretching, pulling upwards, and it hurt. For a split second as I fought back, before she was gone, I saw her; I mean really saw her for what she was."

"There were all these scraps of personality, tiny bits of those she'd killed, I guess, which she'd kept a hold of. I had the sense that there was something desperate in the way she clung on to them, as if they might replace some of what she'd lost… not real whole people, not by a long shot," he said quickly, remembering what Kat had once told him about the Soul Thief taking her mother. "Just their distant echoes."

"Originally, yes, like I said, a long, long time ago." Tom couldn't believe this; he was sounding like the Prime Master talking to him. "You see, Demons aren't alive in the same sense that we are. They're spawned straight from the core and linked to it far more directly than anyone – you do know that all the talented in the City Below and the arkademics and healers draw their abilities from the core?"

"Right. When that happens, the Demons are reabsorbed, they become part of the core again, and then a whole new generation of them is born. The Soul Thief must have been a Demon that somehow got left behind – not from the last generation, she's been around for too long, but the cycle before or even the one before that. Somehow she must have missed or resisted the call to return to the core with the others, fleeing down to the City Below and hiding out in the Stain instead. And she's been there ever since, living on the scraps of core material she's been leaching from the talented, using their link with the core to survive."

"Yeah, raiding the streets at intervals, whenever she's had to, picking off a few of the talented each time and draining them before vanishing back to the Stain; until the next time she gets hungry. So many people die on the streets, who's going to notice a couple more?

"And because she was so careful, people tended to dismiss her as an old wives' tale," Kat murmured. "A myth that was useful for scaring disobedient kids into bed." She shook her head. "What changed this time? Why did she attack so openly and take so many?"

Tom shrugged. "The core's corrupted. Everything's screwed up. Maybe she had no choice – maybe she couldn't get whatever she needed from just a few; or maybe the corruption fed through and drove her to greater lengths."

"Well, you say this core thingy is corrupted, what would that have done to the rest of the Demons, the ones still living in the Upper Heights? If they're so closely linked to the core, won't they have been corrupted too? Are we going to end up facing a whole army of Soul Thieves trying to stop us from doing whatever it is you're supposed to do?"

They came to a large, sealed door blocking the entire corridor. A pair of the Blade stood sentry before it. At the party's approach, one of the obsidian figures moved, pressing something in the wall, and the door swung ponderously open.

She kept her mouth shut though, as they crossed the threshold into a lighter, brighter world. The corridors here were wider, airier, and even Tom felt he could breathe more easily. Their party adopted a new formation. The Blade clustered tight around Kat and Tom as before, but the Council Guard spread out, some staying close while others provided both an advance and a rear guard – four ranging ahead of them, checking every branching corridor, and four lagging several paces behind.

This wasn't the only difference. The whole atmosphere of the city had changed. Gone were the voices, the bustle – the background noise of living so easily taken for granted and now noticeable only by its absence. Silence surrounded them. It was as if when passing through the door they had stepped into a completely different realm and were now moving through a city of ghosts, which, Tom supposed, in many senses they were. The sound of their footsteps reverberated through the stillness, so loud that each and every slap of leather on tile might almost have been a deliberate act of defiance.

Tom wanted to say something, just to hear a noise that was indisputably human, even if it was only his own voice, but at the same time he felt reluctant to break the pervading spell of silence. He willed Kat to make some irreverent remark, but she remained uncharacteristically quiet, perhaps heeding the captain's words or perhaps simply daunted by the eeriness that surrounded them.

In such unnatural stillness any sound was bound to be magnified, its significance exaggerated by unlikely portent. So it was with the peculiar series of noises that reached them from somewhere ahead, steadily rising above the karumph of collective footfalls.

A series of pronounced clicks and then a louder snap, as if something was being wound up and then released to smack against a wall. The pattern repeated constantly. Tom tried to picture what could possibly be causing such a sequence and drew a blank.

The way ahead opened into a large quadrangle. The ceiling rose to twice its former height, clearly claiming space from the Row immediately above. The floor changed abruptly from plain and functional to a mosaic of brightly coloured tiles. Corridors led from each of the four sides of the square while black-painted wrought iron stairways dropped down from a balcony above, presumably leading to the higher Row.

In the centre of this open area stood one of the most bizarre things Tom had ever seen. It was a square glass booth, the bottom part of which revealed an interlinking array of different sized cogs: some bronzed, others sliver, while a few of the smallest were jet black. In addition to these cogs there were coupling rods, metal strips, rubberized wheels and cyclical chains. The whole thing looked so intricate that Tom wondered whether it served any real purpose at all or was just there to provide decorative entertainment. The mechanism had obviously been active for a while and continued through its cycle as they traipsed through.

The Council Guards in the lead of their group split as they came to the machine, two passing on either side of it, while the Blade and those Guards who remained close to Tom and Kat moved as one to the left of the booth.

The top part of the booth featured four painted mannequins – two male and two female – all sawn off at the waist. They stared forth from alternate facets of the kiosk, so that the four formed an outward-facing cross. Brightly painted with long-lashed eyes, rosy cheeks and vacuous smiles that were doubtless intended to be endearing, but Tom found them vaguely sinister, particularly in these unnaturally still corridors.

The series of sounds which had so intrigued him as they approached were caused by the mannequin facing them, one of the female ones. Somehow, the mechanism must have become jammed in the "on" position, because her right arm, bent at the elbow, was in the process of thrusting out towards them. As it reached the wall of the kiosk a small slot opened, at around chest-height for a child, to disgorge a handful of brightly coloured tablets – presumably sweets – which cascaded down the face of the kiosk to join the growing mound of similar objects on the floor, spreading steadily outward from the machine to form a glistening rainbow pool.

The slot clicked shut and after a few seconds the arm moved slowly backward to repeat the process, presumably over and over again until either the sweets ran out or its power did. Each movement of cog against cog was accompanied by a theatrical ratcheting sound and the dispensing slot closed with an audible snap.

Kat bent down to pick up a couple of the sweets, popping them into her mouth. Tom stopped to watch her, and the whole party ground to a halt. "Hey, these are all right," Kat said, scooping up a large handful which she then stuffed into various pockets. "Want some?" She held out a few towards him, ignoring the guards.

He shook his head. It felt disrespectful, somehow, like robbing the dead. Sure, he'd done that himself alongside others from the Blue Claw in the past, but that had been in the City Below, where a corpse's possessions were no more than a resource to be recycled, where it was all about survival, and corpse frisking was an accepted part of the routine. This was a different world, though, and those sweets were intended for bright-eyed clean-faced kids in freshly washed clothes, kids who'd never had to face the things he had, who didn't even know they existed – until recently at any rate. Taking their sweets just seemed wrong, as if in doing so he would somehow be contributing what had befallen these unknown children and the robbing of their innocence.

She then sauntered back to join him and, following a scowl from Verrill, their little party was able to set off again, like some multi-limbed caterpillar. As they left the quadrangle, the sounds of the machine churning out its sweets receded with every new step.

The corridor on the far side of the square took on a different character to the one they'd walked through previously. Doors lined either side at staggered intervals, many brightly coloured, bearing decorative touches and ornate numbers which ran in sequence – 387 followed by 385 and then 383 – while doormats sat before several. They had entered a residential sector.

Most of the doors were closed, a couple stood ajar and a few were broken in, smashed apart as if made of eggshell, while some of the doormats had been kicked askew. Tom resisted the temptation to glance into any of these open dwellings, afraid of what he might see there, though they all seemed wreathed in darkness in any case. One, an allwhite door, bore a patina of dried, russet stains which he definitely didn't want to think about. He noticed Kat studying this intently and guessed she was imagining the deathblow that had caused it.

These were the first signs of actual violence they'd seen. The smashed doors, the dried blood, even the disturbed mats, combined to bring home the gravity of their mission and the dangers that lurked unseen around them.

It was a man, lying half in and half out the open door to one of the dwellings, his face down, arm stretching across the hallway. A pool of dried blood spread outward from where his mouth must have been, like some perverse cartoonist's speech bubble. The Blade and the Guards on the left hand side were forced to move around or step over him. No one made any comment.

Tom was used to bodies; they'd been an everyday fact of life for as long as he could remember, so he had no qualms in stepping over those sprawled across the centre of the passageway, and blood was hardly a novelty either, but he quailed at the sheer number they were coming across and wondered how many had actually perished up here in the Heights. It was clear that death had descended on these corridors suddenly and unexpectedly, and he could only hope that elsewhere there might have been more warning and fewer casualties.

The corridor opened into another broad square, this one far wider than the sweet machine's and with a higher ceiling. It went up four or five rows at least. As they entered, Tom stumbled to a halt. This time, nobody complained.

The quadrangle had evidently been designed as a leisure park of some sort. To their left stood a children's play area, complete with climbing frame, slides, swings, a tumble wall, and other items Tom could only guess at; to the left a series of tunnels, skating tubes, ramps and curved climbs, while ahead stood a tiered rockery of stone seats, steps, and plants. At the top of this array was what had clearly been a fountain, now toppled and no longer working. Several watercourses were cleverly interwoven with the flower borders and seats, leading to four curved ponds at the base of the arrangement. Currently bobbing on the surface of these ponds were a number of large and very dead fish, while the water around them was stained red.

Not that Tom spared these details anything more than passing notice, not even the dead fish. His attention was principally captured by the human bodies. They began at his feet, as the party entered the square. Closest was a woman, her abdomen ripped open; beside her lay a small child, perhaps her daughter, neck twisted at an impossible angle. The bodies and their blood carpeted much of the floor and rose to drape themselves over seats and pathways. They peaked where a man's form sprawled over where the fountain used to stand. Arms were outstretched, limbs ripped from their sockets, heads twisted and bludgeoned, while eyes stared sightlessly up at him, as if in accusation or perhaps desperately beseeching.

The flies didn't help. There weren't yet enough of them to be considered a swarm but there were more than enough for Tom. Disturbed by the party's arrival, the dark insects took to the air, the droning of their wings providing a flat and disconcerting soundtrack to the carnage around them. He swatted distractedly at one that zigzagged too close, missing it completely.

The metallic, slightly sweet smell of fresh blood seemed to have been with Tom since they passed the first body, but here its cloying presence tainted every indrawn breath and was accompanied by the stench of something rotten. The massacre had obviously been recent but enough time had passed for decomposition to begin – a couple of days ago or perhaps three, Tom judged; no longer.

He could picture it, people being herded and driven from the corridors that fed into the square, running from certain death until there was nowhere left to run. A mob of frantic, terrified folk erupting from the mouth of each passageway simultaneously, milling in confusion and horror, four panicked streams of the doomed colliding, to swirl together like water thrown casually into a bowl. A mother's hand clutching tightly to the smaller hand of a child, desperate not to lose that tiny strand of human comfort; her other arm reaching out to shove and pull people apart, to force a way through, to escape. Except there was no escape. Behind each knot of people a party of Rust Warriors entered the square, moving with efficiency and purpose, spreading out to form a cordon and then closing in, tightening that cordon with every step and killing as they did so.

Tom had no idea whether these vivid scenes were the result of his talent picking up on some echo of actual events or just his imagination working overtime. All he knew was that he was suddenly sweating and finding it difficult to breathe. His stomach convulsed again, and this time there was no stopping it. He bent forward and threw up. He felt somebody pat him on the shoulders, not in admonishment but in sympathy. Kat.

Tom found the best way to deal with this was to take it literally one step at a time and not think about how far there was to go or how many dead people he still had to pass. He half expected Rust Warriors to rush out of the side corridor and attack them at any moment, but their party crossed the open mouth without incident. Eventually they made it to the far side of the killing field, their passage contested only by the flies.

Kat summed up the sense of relief. "Thank the goddess for that!" she muttered as they stepped over the final outstretched arm and into the clear corridor beyond; a sentiment Tom suspected many of the guards in white and purple around them would happily have echoed.

They still hadn't encountered any Rust Warriors, but no one could doubt the enemy were nearby, not after what they'd experienced at the playground. This lack of direct confrontation began to play on Tom's nerves. It wasn't as if he had a death wish or anything, he would have been delighted if they could reach the core without meeting any opposition at all, but that was never going to happen. At some point they'd have to fight, they all knew that. The only question was when. The anticipation was becoming an irritation, the constant need to be alert fraying Tom's nerves. He found himself peering into the depths of every corridor they passed and scrutinising closed doors as if he might somehow predict which one was about to burst open and disgorge deadly ambushers.

Without any warning Rust Warriors erupted from a side corridor, falling upon the rearguard. The ambush displayed the sort of cunning Tom wouldn't have expected from Rust Warriors – the one he'd killed beside the Thair had seemed lumbering and slow-witted, though he wasn't sure why he'd assumed that – since it required them to stay hidden while the rest of the group passed by.

The first Tom knew of the attack was when a man screamed. He whipped around to see one of the Guards enveloped in the same eerie nimbus of light that had spelled an end to Kohn. All the guilt he'd felt then at his failure to react quickly enough to save his friend came flooding back.

The Council Guard were more than just ceremonial decoration, for all the purple-trimmed whiteness of their gleaming uniforms. They were expert swordsmen, strong men at the peak of physical fitness, chosen for their courage and prowess and schooled in the art of killing; warriors disguised in popinjays' clothing. The other three guards engaged the enemy swiftly and efficiently. Steel flashed and stabbed, blades sank into their opponents. But not a single Rust Warrior fell.

Tom watched helpless as one Guardsman's sword struck his nearest adversary once, twice, piercing stomach and then chest without any effect. A scything blow from his opponent then cut the man nearly in two, slicing through armour, flesh and bone with equal ease. Whatever the arkademics had done to empower the guardsmen's weapons didn't seem to be working.

Tom's view was then obscured as Verrill rushed past him, leading the other four Guardsmen from the main party to reinforce their colleagues. As he went he called out orders, telling the four-strong advance guard to lead the party onward.

On reflection, Tom would have been more impressed by the Rust Warriors' ingenuity had there been a second group waiting to attack from the front, but it didn't happen. Unless, of course, the ambush was intended to simply cut off any retreat and their party was already heading exactly where the Rust Warriors wanted them to go, perhaps towards where their main strength lay in wait. Now that was a sobering thought.

The road to Deliia was busy, far more so than Dewar would have expected even given that this was the great trade route. Riders flashed past them, individually and in small groups, while the caravan he'd joined proved to be one of several headed for the coast. Business must be booming.

The traffic was too heavy for any normal circumstance, though, and he began to suspect there was more going on than he'd realised, suspicions that were confirmed when they stopped to rest and water their horses a little after midday. Dewar engineered a conversation with a rider who was also taking a break from the road – one heading in the opposite direction. Dewar didn't press the point, he didn't need to; the phrase "rumours of war" told him more than enough.

By late afternoon as their caravan hove into view of the sea and Deliia's low-rise dwellings appeared as a dark stain on the horizon, progress had slowed to a crawl. They had joined a long queue of those waiting to filter through the city's gates.

It occurred to Dewar that he needn't have bothered joining a caravan at all under these circumstances and that, with such a constant stream, he could have ridden straight through and made better time. Too late for regrets now but there was no point in compounding the problem by staying with the wagons without good reason. He made his excuses and rode forward, bypassing the long line of waiting carts that clogged the road to the envious glares of their drivers. Even so, he wasn't the only horseman anxious to enter the town and still had to bide his time.

Eventually, as the sun set and the rosiness of dusk tinted the skyline, he found himself passing beneath the old walls of the town that was just a quick skip across the sea from the island on which he had been born and raised. Nearly home, and nobody had a clue that he was coming.