I need to write about the Underworld now, both because of Arves’ testimony and because it is important for later on. Cast your mind back now to that fear-ridden night in Emil des Schartz’ ruined printing shop.
*
It was gone midnight before the man came to us. It was a long, strained wait. Emil cranked out posters for an illegal knife-fight. I made hot drinks and watched the night draw on, dreading the sight of the sun. The Angels were after me and I needed darkness to hide myself in. If I was caught, I reckoned it would be the Island for me. The fullness of time, of course, proved me right.
He came out of one of the foul mists that occasionally rise from the river, and it was impossible to see anything but a long, vague shape until he was very close. When he did reach the door he had to feed himself through it a limb at a time.
“Sergei,” said Emil, a shade nervously. “Stefan, this is Sergei. Sergei, I’d like you to meet Stefan Advani.”
He was surely the most freakish sight I’d seen to that point, in a life not lacking. He always claimed to be six feet tall, and yet he was taller than Trethowan by a good foot and a half, making somewhere over eight. Perhaps his feet were bigger. This incredible height was supported by a long-boned and spidery frame mostly bundled in his great coat. There were a few stars and ribbons on the front that I did not recognise, stabs of colour against the drab olive green. His face, which was trapped between the high collar of his coat and an odd kind of peaked cap, was the palest I ever saw. I have seen dead people with more colour in their cheeks, and even the web-children had a healthier skin tone. Sergei’s face was long-jawed with brooding eyes and hollow cheeks on which an unfashionable bristle of stubble showed startlingly dark.
He looked down at me and said, “Why do I need to meet Stefan Advani?” His voice was more disorienting than his appearance, because he spoke very strangely. The thought occurred to me even then that he was a foreigner, not used to our language, but that was absurd. There was nowhere a foreigner could have come from and there was no other language still extant in the world. Even so, Sergei spoke awkwardly, and often had to reach for words and concepts. When he was under stress he had his own speech: a heavy, murmuring tongue unfamiliar to everyone.
He had a story to explain all of this. I cannot bring myself to believe it, but I will let you make up your own mind in due course. At the time I assumed he was a failed product of one of the cosmetics labs.
“Stefan is a fugitive,” Emil told him. “He needs to go to ground.”
“You vouch for him?” Sergei intoned. “The Meat Packers only yesterday hung up an Authority spy. Nobody is glad to see new faces right now.”
“He’s no spy,” Emil assured him. “They got three of his friends a while ago. Now the Angels are after him.”
Sergei stalked over to me. He would become a friend in the Underworld but at the time he terrified me. “You want there?” he asked.
“I… have nowhere to go. No money. Nothing,” I told him timorously. “If there is anywhere you can take me where the Angels do not go, I have to take that chance.”
“Good.” That pale visage swung back to Emil. “You have my goods?”
Emil gave him the handbills hurriedly and Sergei counted out a fair price.
“What will you do with those?” I tried.
“Have them distributed. Get the message to the people.” For a moment he looked deadly serious but then he smiled, and it gave his face a mischievous and altogether more human aspect. “A pastime only. Come, if you’re coming.”
He hunched himself through Emil’s doorway and poled out into the street. Emil wished me luck as I turned to follow. “I’ll see you again, if you last,” he told me.
*
I had to run to keep up with Sergei’s easy stride, and anyone looking out of their window would perhaps have seen a father and child taking a late stroll. Within twenty minutes, there was nobody to look out, because Sergei had taken a turn into a deserted stretch of city where the wells had dried. Nobody lived there, or at least nobody official. There was enough of Shadrapar still watered to house its population twice over. This derelict stretch was home only to the destitute and the outcast. I knew that the Angels made regular sweeps for business and pleasure. It was no place to hide. I put on an extra burst of speed to catch up with Sergei and asked him, “Where are we going?”
“Underneath,” he told me. “The Underworld. You did not know this?”
“Well, yes, but… I never really knew it was real. It was just a story.”
“The Authority likes it that way. They keep the people ignorant. If people knew that there was place to live, outside the Authority, who would want to stay? Revolution!”
The last word was shouted out loud enough to echo from the abandoned walls. Something shifted to our left and I saw a man sitting atop a cairn of fallen stones. He had a foot of knifeblade in one hand and watched us narrowly.
“Castor,” Sergei named him. “All quiet?”
“As a grave,” the man agreed, lingering over the last word. “Who’s your friend?”
“Someone will find a use for him,” Sergei replied.
We passed on with a thousand questions boiling in my mind, most of which were destined to go unvoiced. I had to deal with essentials first.
“What do you mean, a use?” I asked him.
“Underworld is a mess of factions. You must find someone who can use you, or what might happen? Dangerous place, underneath.”
“Can you use me? What’s your faction?” To be honest I wasn’t so sure about Sergei, but who else did I know?
“I am Executive Officer of People’s Collective,” Sergei told me with pride. “We have all the workers we can feed. Hard work, too. I am not sure you would like it.” Friends later, as I say, but at the time I think he didn’t like me much.
“How many people in these factions?” I asked him.
“In Collective? Nineteen,” he told me. “Others, thirty, fifty, seventy staff. Some only five, six. Very few people on their own. Someone will have use for you. You get three days’ grace.”
“How?”
“In the Temple: rules say every new face gets three days in the Temple. Make sure someone like you before then, or Organ Donor Boys will get you.”
I wanted to ask him what the Temple was and what the rules were. I wanted to ask him who the Organ Donor Boys were and what hard work was undertaken by the People’s Collective. I had so many questions I choked on them, and had to save my breath for keeping up with Sergei.
*
When I next opened my eyes it was to the star-studded sky, but the constellations were all wrong and some of them were on the blink. Between me and the firmament a kind of shimmering, dancing sheet of light crackled and skipped, changing colour and leaping from one edge of the sky to another. Then something like a monstrous spider cast in brass and tin crawled its way across the heavens and I screamed and sat up, because I desperately needed some idea of scale.
A face came into view as I sat up, considerately blocking most of my surroundings. It was a relatively comforting face: a woman’s, round and weathered and webbed with lines. Her dark hair was cut unfashionably short, and she was ten or fifteen years my senior.
“Easy now,” she said, and I felt her hands on my shoulders.
“Where am I?”
“Let’s take things one foot at a time,” she suggested, and another voice, weirdly inflected, called out, “He’s awake then. Is he mad yet?”
“Not yet,” the woman replied.
I remembered the second speaker’s name and said, “Sergei,” and the last night’s events came back to me. “I was going underground,” I remembered. “What happened?”
“You pass out on me,” I heard Sergei say. “Just fell down. When did you last sleep?”
I thought back. Some time back in the Wasted God Convent. It seemed a long time ago.
The woman drew back slightly, and I saw that I was in a room designed as a simple spherical cavity, lined in metal. Two-thirds of the way down, someone had laid a new floor of jaggedly-cut plastic slabs. I let my eyes wander up. The walls were impressed with many designs that might have been decorative, or inconceivably complex and long-deceased control panels and indicators.
“This is the Temple,” the woman told me. “And I am its priest for the time being, and was named Giulia Nostro.”
I mumbled my own name, and then, “This does not look like a temple.”
“What it was once, we don’t know,” Sergei intoned. “Now it is Temple. The heart of Underworld.”
I saw him standing out near the edge of the pirated floor. His impossibly tall, emaciated frame brought back a lot more of my recent past.
“What is it a temple of?” I asked, craning my neck. Above was that artificial starfield, lights moving and reconfiguring as I watched, whilst that fabulous electrical discharge whirled and jumped about the bronze ring that marked the sky’s edge a hundred feet above us. The Temple was huge. The spider patiently inching its way across the vault of heaven was as large as I was.
“What the hell is that?” I got out before my previous question was even answered.
“The Caretaker,” Giulia replied.
“What does it take care of?” I demanded, and Giulia said, “That,” and pointed behind me. I got to my knees as I turned about, which turned out to be appropriate. Before the three of us, fixed halfway up the curving wall, there was… Even now it is hard to do it justice. It was a white bubble, lit from within by a fierce argent light. Some kind of clear plastic had formed it, hollow or solid we could not tell. It was not empty, though. Through the cloudy white light there was the silhouette of a man – a giant taller than Sergei, heroically proportioned and just as naked. Through the light and the bubble’s distortion no more details could be made out, but it was an awe-inspiring thing.
“This is Temple of the Last Day,” Sergei pronounced. “And that is the Coming Man. They have their own mythology down here in the dark.”
“It is said that the Coming Man will descend from his state to save Shadrapar, when the end is nigh,” Giulia said. “I don’t believe it personally, but it’s up to you.”
“I thought you were the priest,” I said to her, still staring at the imprisoned giant.
“Purely a transient and secular position. I’m the representative of the Fishermen in the Temple. It’s my turn to be priest.”
“Too much,” Sergei said, striding over to us. “Give to him a chance.” He gave me his unnerving grin, showing far too many teeth. “Some go mad, coming down here. They cannot take the change. Pace yourself, or you join them. Nobody wants a mad man.”
“Factions…” And the remaining dregs of the previous night came back to me. “You said I needed to get myself a faction.”
“Three days,” Sergei reminded me. “You get three days in Temple. Have yourself patronage by then, otherwise, out into the dark. Not good thing at all.”
“How—” I started, and Giulia cut me off with, “Everyone comes here to do business. Even a few from Overworld who want our services. It all happens here. They’ll see you. If they want you, they’ll let you know. We have two other Wards of the Temple at the moment. You’re not alone.” She left me then and stood under the great burning orb itself, hunched over some kind of machine.
“How do you spell your name?” she asked, and I told her automatically.
“One of the duties of priesthood is maintaining Underworld’s chronicle,” Sergei said. “Everyone who arrives, who leaves, who dies; all agreements between factions. That is our law. It is the thing we must hold sacred or everything collapses. Each faction puts a priest up in turn, from the great to the very least. Abuse the power, they suffer next time round. I have been priest, too, in my time. Maybe you will be.”
“If someone wants me,” I said sullenly. “Otherwise I get thrown to the beasts.”
“Underworld has its ways with people,” Sergei agreed solemnly. “A use for everyone. Even if just as organs.”
I looked up at the bizarre angles of him, as he hunched over me. “Thank you for staying this long,” I told him.
“We are family, underground. We all have the same enemy: the sun, the surface. We fight amongst ourselves, but learn that we are family.”
*
The machine that Giulia was using took her words as she murmured them and brought them up in elaborate silver handwriting on a dark mirror. After Sergei had gone to attend to the business of the Collective, she showed me how she could move her hands over the mirror to call up past records. There were thousands of them, stretching back forever, priest after priest, and before the priesthood, others who had needed to record their affairs, their thoughts, their ideologies. Far enough back and most of them were in extinct languages, some of which I knew, others wholly alien. The oldest were drawn in alphabets that I had never seen before.
“People have always used this machine,” Giulia said. “The Caretaker has always maintained it.”
“What maintains the Caretaker?” I asked her, and she shrugged.
Later, when I was ordained as priest (as I would be) I would spend long hours searching through those maddeningly incomplete records of the elder days to find out how the Underworld society came to be. It seemed to spring to life complete and in its current form, some three centuries before, and although the names and slogans changed, the basic structure had somehow endured. There were no clues. As for the other doggerel fragments from ancient times, a last will and testament, a battle plan, a message to a loved one, they were just rags of the past preserved in that uncanny machine.
“What is the Underworld?” I asked Giulia that first day beneath the surface. “How is it here?” She told me that there had been a city on the site of Shadrapar for longer than anyone could know, and for all that time there had been excavations deep into the earth. Underworld was archaic transport systems, sewers and old conduits, shelters and war bunkers and concealed laboratories, cellars, buried storehouses and once-secure vaults. The Underworld people lived in only the uppermost sprawl of it. Below there was an uncharted and unending tangle of deeper chambers that were no longer the haunts of mankind and which had their own dark legends. There were expeditions sometimes. Giulia had a dream, I discovered, and it made her eyes shine with a mad fire. Giulia wanted to map it all.
“It must be finite,” she said to me. “It can be done.” From her tone, I had the impression that only she believed this.
*
Later, I witnessed my first Underworld deal, between the Meat Packers and the Friendly Society. The Meat Packers’ agent was a woman too perfectly finished to be natural, right down to the carefully calculated deformity of her right arm. Behind her were two muscle-packed bruisers sporting their artificially tampered bodies like badges of allegiance. The Meat Packers ran a black market surgery, and the implications of this made me shudder. The Friendly Society, conversely, were thieves, raiders of surface Shadrapar. Their man was a stocky, dwarfish creature wearing rich clothes badly tailored. He was smoking something aromatic, the smell just a stronger version of the metal-and-incense reek of the Temple.
The deal between the Packers and the Friendlies was as swift as betting over cards, and just as guarded and merciless. Giulia arbitrated between them, and in the end the final bargain was sealed within the Temple’s recording machine, thereby becoming law. Neither of the factions felt that I was recruitment material. The Meat Packers’ factor just looked at me once and then turned away. The little brute from the Friendly Society laughed out loud and said he didn’t want any failed book-boy in his crew, but he’d spread the word. I was not hopeful.
I asked Giulia whether her faction would take me. She told me that the Fishermen were scavengers, explorers. The depths belonged to the Fishermen and a few other bold factions. They fished for the relics of lost technology, and it was dangerous work. She told me that she didn’t think I would cut it. She was as kind as she could be but it was another rejection, and time was getting short. I was on the second of my three days of grace, by then. Of my fellow refugees, one had been cast out already, his time up and no faction caring for him. The other, a lean, rugged ex-Outrider hiding from retribution for some dreadful crime, had been snapped up by Giulia’s Fishermen, who had first call while she was priest. At the time, “fish” and “fisherman” were just words to me. I only understood the reference after being exiled to the swamps.
As it happened, I would accompany Giulia on a fishing expedition anyway. That comes later.
*
Food was brought to the Temple by Giulia’s confederates. It was uniformly a kind of chewy white substance a little like bread or bean curd. When I asked what it was, Giulia told me it was a fungus that grew in vast myoculture caverns beneath us, tended only by the Fermers. I assumed at the time that the Fermers were a faction.
*
The day after, which was my last day as Ward of the Temple, there was something called the Bazaar. I had, by then, solicited eleven different factions, and they had all discarded me as insufficiently practical. It wasn’t that they had no use for a man of letters, but none looked on me and saw a man who would survive their hard life. More, the learning they were most interested in was practical, mechanical. Anyone who could breathe life back into old machines was hotly sought after. Thelwel and his father would have done well there.
There were over a hundred factions comprising Underworld and most of them had turned out for the Bazaar, setting up stock in the Temple and the halls adjacent. It was a riot of noise, shouting and the occasional fist fight. No weapons, though: like the Temple, like all of their strange hand-me-down laws, the Bazaar was sacred. I saw that the Underworld would be better called the Between-world. It was strung out in a fragile lattice of old vehicle track, pipework and abandoned mines between sunlit Shadrapar and the unmanned depths.
You could find any treasure from up above in the stalls of the Bazaar, from food (a diet of fungus was tedious) to drugs, machinery, Academy tomes and toys, anything that could be stolen from the shining world over our heads. From the depths came ancient mechanisms and scrolls, plundered treasures, curios and junk. Much of it would find its way to the surface into the ever-revolving round of Shadrapan property. There were darker things, too: live Vermin and other creatures for the labs to experiment on; preserved organs ready for transplant, and probably not cooled from their original owners. I saw the gaily-bedecked stand of the Organ Donor Boys, their wares laid out in salvaged ammunition boxes. I saw the hungry eyes of the Boys themselves, half-hidden beneath the peaks of cloth caps, and a chill went through me.
The Bazaar was a hiring fair too: many of the factions provided services. There were bodyguards and thugs for the renting (I was particularly caught by the gaudy, illuminated armour of the Electric Gangsters and the implanted hand-knives of the Packer subsidiary, the Meat Carvers). Everything was ugly, dirty, torn, rusted and twisted, yet unashamed of it. Here was not the carefully engineered misshapenness of the very rich, but a natural grime, asymmetry and disfigurement. Nobody cared for that facade of manufactured decadence the Overworlders thought so vital. Above, the world was coming to an end, and one might as well face it with poise and dignity. In the Underworld, nobody thought of the apocalypse; the next day would be challenge enough.
And I traipsed from faction to faction trying to offer my services as an expert, as a scholar, as a willing pair of hands, and nobody cared. I grew tired of reciting my credentials, and made up a new set, and then another, grander than the last. They saw through me to the frightened product of a sheltered life, and turned their backs. I was rejected by explorers, agriculturists, vandals, surgeons, soldiers and thieves. I could feel my heartbeat quickening, air hitching in my lungs, the breath of the Organ Donor Boys on the back of my neck. I have never had such an acute sense of time draining away through my fingers, and no way to bring it back. I began to believe that my only future would be for sections of me to go on living within the tissues of strangers.
The factor for Altameir’s Crew, who were scavengers of Shadrapar Above’s abandoned quarters (and therefore had few entrance requirements) told me I was overqualified, and anyway the scavenging business had been better and another mouth to feed would bankrupt them. The Bazaar was drawing to a close. I could see empty places everywhere, all sold up. People were beginning to disassemble their stalls and load their carts, ready for the journey home. I saw the knifeblade shape of Sergei within the crowd and tried to battle my way towards him, to plead with him to take me in. Instead, the current of the crowd whisked me aside, because it was making room for something new.
I met a lot of outlandishly tall people in the Underworld. Even Arves was taller than me. This newcomer was short of Sergei’s height, but not by much, and within the dark and dusty shroud that served him as a robe, there was at least twice as much breadth. He was an odd shape in there, angles and projections as though he had bulky equipment strapped to his body. The robe was huge enough to hide four men or a multitude of sins.
Despite his height he was hunchbacked, so much so that I wondered if it was cosmetic. The hump overshadowed his bald head and brought his shoulders up higher than his ears. The one hand that dangled from a flapping sleeve must have belonged to a freakishly elongated arm, fingers hooked into a claw. He had an odd-shaped skull, long and swept-back, ears, nose and mouth all oddly delicate. His eyes were hidden behind panels of smoked glass, and from his feeling his way through the crowd I wondered if he was blind. He looked right at me, though. I was rooted to the spot. He seemed almost to unfold before me until he was craning down, bringing that face exactly to the level of my own, the shabby dark fabric of his robe curtaining out most of the world.
I had the instant understanding that everyone knew him and nobody had expected him there.
“That’s the one,” a voice declared, and I caught a glimpse, about the robe’s edge, of the Friendly Society’s agent. He had, after all, passed the word around.
The stiff claw of a hand latched onto my shoulder. It felt like a dead thing, locked in rigor mortis.
“What is your name, boy?” The lips barely moved, the sound wheezing out from some bellows deep inside. I gave my name unwillingly; I could not hold it back.
“Are you still unspoken for, Advani?” said a voice like the wind in forgotten places.
I thought of the Organ Donor Boys and made a decision. I told him I was.
“I will take you,” the creature, the hunched and distorted man, declared. “I was named Greygori Sanguival, and I will take you as my own.”
I had no wish to bind myself to this thing but, as I looked around, I saw something in the eyes of the spectators. They were afraid of this man, and by association they would stay away from me. In the service of Greygori Sanguival I would live in fear of him, but no other. It would be security, at a price.
“Then I am yours,” I told my own reflection, doubled and smudged in the darkness of his glasses.
He seldom came out, Giulia told me later. He had not needed an agent before because he had been more socially presentable; more human. The Underworlders had their own name for Greygori Sanguival. They called him the Transforming Man.