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I was outside the south gate of the city. It had snowed hard the night before. A deep white crust covered everything and all around sparkled blindingly in the bright morning light.
Damn glare was giving me a headache so I squinted.
I was concealed, hidden behind a low ruined wall that generations ago would’ve been part of a stable block for outriders, messengers. Now birds nested there, and bindweed straddled and choked every piece of stone. It also formed a frame I was looking through.
“That’s a big hole,” I said and my breath steamed with the cold.
There was a great rent in the city’s wall like something had taken a bite out of the battlement and rubble, like ruptured guts from a stomach wound, spilled out all over everywhere. “And that’s where this thing, called The Terrant, went in?”
“Evidently,” said Bent. He was stood to my left, Smidgen to my right.
A bird cawed, took to disturbed flight but I ignored it, looked harder at the damage The Terrant had caused.
“What did you see inside?” I asked.
Bent had been on a reconnaissance mission. Earlier that morning, and more brazen than the sun failing to pierce the clouds, he’d ridden in through the hole on his horse.
“Desperation. No one dares the streets. You should be able to enter unseen. The Terrant is atop a tower.”
“Do you think he’s here?” I meant the Golem.
“No,” said Bent. “But there could be more Turned. This creature on the tower is acting as a beacon, calling out to them.”
“I thought it was the wind,” I mused. That annoying tone I could hear, barely audible and yet constant, was coming from the centre of the city.
“No, it’s The Terrant.”
“I’ll shut it up,” blustered Smidgen, hefting his mace up and tapping it into a hand belligerently.
“Time we went in,” I said ignoring him. “But let’s not look too conspicuous.” Too conspicuous, who was I kidding?
“I’ll go first.” Smidgen as eager as ever to protect me.
“No you don’t. With you in front I will not see anything. You get behind me and Bent.” I pulled my hood up and moved towards the wall. As an afterthought I called over my shoulder. “And bring the horses will you.”
I stepped over some red coloured rubble and I paused for brief thought. After those long weeks of running from one place to the next, of impromptu meals cadging food as when we could, of fighting to survive, I was finally back at Never.
And I still had the damn bag.
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Bergamot Bannin was Sheriff of Never. He was a tall man, fifty years old and had his silver hair pulled back into a greasy ball. He had dark bags beneath his sallow eyes, bags indicative of sleepless nights and worry for he was a Sheriff steeped in misery. The King had been murdered whilst repairing in his city, there were Turned in Never and many of his watchmen had been killed trying to prise the thing off the bell tower.
Dark days were these. Sad days to end his career with.
The cellblock stank of overflowing pisspots and desperation and Bannin’s already peaked disposition soured further upon entering this hub of despair.
There were no windows in this part of the Rampton Road goal house and the gloom reflected his mood. Yet even here was consolation, a glimmer of light in the beleaguered Sheriff’s rapidly darkening world, a hope to cling to, for he finally had Ordesky the Mouse behind bars.
“I hear you’ve been through quite an ordeal,” he said and Ordesky barely looked up from his own lap.
He sat on a crudely carved stool placed centre of his cell. Its three legs were of such disproportionate lengths that come the slightest movement it wobbled and grated on the straw covered cobbles.
“Do you know how long I’ve been praying to have you like this, forlorn, caged, trapped? How many years of my life I’ve wasted wishing that you’d just stop hurting my city?”
Again Ordesky remained silent, remained looking into his own lap like it held something of great interest there. His face was swollen were he’d been beaten. Perhaps his tongue had enlarged too. After all it was easy enough to bite in a fight and Maver Kane had treated him badly.
Absently the Sheriff shovelled at the straw with the toes of his shoes, built little mounds until eventually he said, “I don’t feel as I thought I would. I thought I’d be happy, excited, that I’d feel triumphant at finally putting away the city’s most prolific fence. But I don’t. Instead I feel sad for the passing of our King, for the death of my men, for the madness that has seized control of the world, and for the cursed Turned.” Bannin took a moment to light a candle, which he then placed in a square wall recess. Murky orange light erupted all ways, even spilling beneath the reinforced doors of the other cells, prompting excited murmurs, coughs and profanities as men reacted to the light and then settled down to be quiet again. Ordesky’s slight frame could just be discerned sat hunched over his stool.
“Why don’t you talk to me, Ordesky?”
A sigh from another cell and a rustle of straw as someone bunched up ready for sleep. There was no night and day cycle in the goal house. Routine and habit were memories of a free man’s lifestyle. You slept when you could, when the fear subsided just enough to let you.
“At this stage in my life I’ve lost the energies of youth,” admitted the Sheriff. He had a captive audience tonight. Better than that, he had a celebrity. “I’ve lost my drive, my ambition, my need to do good. I find no pleasure in anything at all and not even shutting villains like you away can lift my spirit above banal mediocrity. I lack an interest in all things, food included.” Bannin reached for a stool, dragged it across to Ordesky’s cell and, winching with pain, he sat down slowly. “For months now,” he said wrapping a hand around a bar to pull himself closer. “For months I’ve had to endure a pain down my left leg. Every morning when I wake up there it is, like my wife, waiting for me. It burns, like an arrowhead is buried deep in there. This morning I wake to find it’s not only my leg but my left arm that hurts too. It seems my body’s getting sick of me. I’m fast beginning to realise that there’s no such thing as a happy ending. I’m sick and too tired for games so I won’t play them, Ordesky. Do you hear me? I won’t play games.”
“I hear you,” Ordesky said miserably.
“It does talk. I was beginning to think you a mute. Where is he, Ordesky?”
The question Ordesky was most sick of hearing was the one he just couldn’t answer. Emphatically he said, “I don’t know.”
“That’s not helpful. Not helpful at all.”
“Look at me Sheriff Bannin,” Ordesky fanned his arms out, made a display of himself. He had cuts and bruises on his face and deep marks on his wrists where he’d been suspended by a cruel rope. “I’d have told Maver Kane if I’d known, just as I would you.”
“Ah yes, the infamous Kane’s hideout, beneath some bakery in Walled District. I’ve read the account you gave Watchmen Gleen.”
“Which you’ll do nothing about,” Ordesky flinched in case of repercussion to his sardonic tongue. None came.
“You think me a weak man, Ordesky? You think inaction on my behalf is borne from cowardice? You think I wouldn’t want to see that creature, Maver Kane, hung for all the bad he’s done to this city? Because I would. I want him done for just as I want every person who hurts a good law abiding citizen done for too. But it isn’t up to me to deal out every ounce of justice. I am one man in a city besieged by tragedy. You may not know this but last night a Turned broke into the city. Crazed people followed it, threw themselves upon my men with sickles and axes and other crude weapons. This Turned continues to be a problem too. Don’t you think I have enough to contend with without starting a war with Kane?”
“Since when have the concerns of the law been a problem of mine?”
Sheriff Bannin sighed. “A predictably unreasonable response, Mouse. Blinkered and self-serving to the end.”
“Then what,” said Ordesky finally looking up from his lap, “would you have me say?”
“I’d have you tell me where Flendin the Dark is because with him we just might have a chance of saving this city. Let me deal with the Turned and let Flendin take on Kane. Let us get rid of two evils. I can’t do it all myself.”
“Look, I don’t know where Flendin is. You’re going to ask me again where he is and I don’t know.”
Bannin coughed into a balled fist but said nothing. His leg and arm were hurting but he ignored the pain and pushed it to the back of his mind. He was on the verge of convincing Ordesky to reveal all. He couldn’t rush the process. He took a moment to reflect on what he should do next when he became aware as pink faces pressed hard against cell bars to hear the unravelling conversation better. It seemed that everyone was obsessed with finding Flendin the Dark, even those powerless to act upon the information. The old Sheriff had never known a criminal to be so loved as Flendin was and right then, sat on his stool in the gloom and the stench, he realised he was wasting his time trying to eke information out of anyone pertaining to his whereabouts.
He closed his eyes in frustration, balled his fists and tapped them on the end on his knees. Eyes shut he fancied his senses became heightened, could hear the measured breathing of the prisoners, the fizzle of the candle flame, the rush of urinary water deliberately missing the pot and running down a cell wall. Slowly he opened his mouth to speak and he said, “I don’t want to arrest him. I just need to find him.”
Ordesky said nothing but for the first time he looked at Bannin and held his stare.
The Sheriff finally had his attention.
This would be his last opportunity to impress the fence, to convince him to betray the thief. “I don’t care about Flendin taking the King’s shield,” he said, picking his words with care. “In truth the first I heard of such was when I read your statement. Let him keep it I say. With all the trouble in the city it seems a triviality now. But if he were back here he could deal with Kane. I’ve not the manpower and the Neverens haven’t been outside The Eagle and the Rose since the day the King was murdered. This city is going to hell and no one seems to want to do a thing about it. At a time like this Flendin could do the city a service.”
“Why would he want to do the city a service?”
“Because without it he’s nothing.”
“To you maybe.”
“Just tell me where he is. I will not hurt him.”
“But I keep telling you, I don’t know where he is.”
Angry, Bannin’s face flushed red and he stood up. “I’m too old for games. If no one else gives a damn then why should I?”
Ordesky grabbed the bars. “I give a damn, Sheriff Bannin. I give a damn.”
Bannin took a step towards the exit and half turning he said, “You’re making a mistake if you think to wait for him. He’s not coming for you, Ordesky the Mouse. In fact he’s quite forgotten about you. Wherever he is he’s forgotten about all his old friends.”
A watchman hurried down the stairs from the offices above. “Sheriff Bannin,” he shouted breathlessly. “Sheriff Bannin. I’ve been looking for you.”
“Calm down man. Now you’ve found me what is it?”
“It’s Flendin the Blade sir, he’s here. He’s been seen in the Old Quarter.”
The inmates pressed themselves hard to the bars and started to cheer.
Ordesky looked up at Bergamot Bannin and for the first time in weeks smiled.
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Some of the faces I recognised, others I didn’t. There was a great press of them now. Now word must have gotten around. So much for quiet integration, for sneaking undetected into the city. It was like all these people had been waiting for us or, if not us, some other form of salvation.
“We missed you, Flendin,” a woman in a blue cowl shouted.
“Thank the saints you’re back,” yelled a man from a doorway.
All the time I walked I scanned the crowds for Ordesky’s face. I couldn’t see him. Flowers were thrown, cold loving white serritans that Smidgen fed into his coarse hair. No one seemed to mind him or Bent for they cheered them also.
There were city watchmen interspersed with the plebeians. At first I thought they would challenge me but then I noticed they were calling my name too, and throwing their hands up and cheering and stamping their feet.
“Kill the Turned, Flendin the Blade,” a man grasped my arm and tugged me towards him. “Get rid of them for more arrive each day.”
Smidgen looked across to check on me and the man let me go.
There were some dead bodies casually rolled to the side of the thoroughfare. They weren’t Turned but simple folk, land workers from the south by the look of their attire. They must’ve followed The Terrant to Never where they met the swords of the city watch. There’d been so much death and destruction already, no wonder the citizens were pleased to see me.
People leered out from second storey windows and I acknowledged them with a wave and the adulation was deafening. Some old woman even offered me her daughter.
Bent leaned in close to me and said, “I hope we’re not going to Ate Street.”
He understood the power of my vanity and his timely words checked me.
“No, The Fortune of War,” I said. The Fortune of War was an inn, down The Moss. As badly as I wanted to visit the warrens, to smell their sweet smelling bodies, to touch their soft skin, now wasn’t the time.
I’d intended to see the warrens, to slip unseen into the city and pay them a long overdue visit, only sometimes the best plans amounted to nothing so I just seized the moment and waved back at the people.
It felt strange to be openly adored and by so many at one time. I’d always been popular, in a clique kind of way, yet this was a different type of adulation and I liked it. If it affected me then how would Smidgen be reacting to such prominence? A man so used to derision would surely be far out of his depth, out of his comfort zone. I turned round and saw Smidgen beaming back at me. Today, this very moment, he was loved and it was a feeling that he would never forget and I was happy for him. I threw both my arms up and the cheering reached a deafening volume.
I took the next left and the crowds were less packed here. The road narrowed and continued westward and above the snow flecked reds, greys and browns of the city rooftops I could see The Eagle and the Rose bell tower looming high into the leaden sky and for the first time I saw The Terrant; the evil clutch of legs that it was.
It was a curious moment that passed when I first laid eyes upon the Turned. It was wrapped around the top of the bell tower like a spider feigning death; legs all collected beneath and around itself, and it seemed quite harmless. I didn’t fear it though it did disgust me when I recalled what it had done in Audry and subsequent villages north to Never, and such wanton destruction seemed at odds with the recumbent thing now perched on top of the tower.
I sensed Bent stiffen next to me and I reached out to still him. Like with me visiting the warrens now wasn’t the time for action.
I turned away from the bell tower and the creature and headed for The Moss, an ancient moss covered tunnel that led to a small compound of buildings one of which was the inn, The Fortune of War.
I was back at Never and the people loved me more than they had ever before.
Flendin the Blade was happy to be back, Turned or no Turned.
I cast a final look over my shoulder at the thing as it passed from my sight. It flexed a spindly black leg and I couldn’t help myself but I shivered and the sensation felt as cold as death itself.