Late that evening, as Shon, Peter and Midds shared the fire uneasily with a gaggle of web-children, Trethowan strolled down to the water’s edge and beckoned Kiera and me to follow.
He had been oddly quiet, for a man only too keen on making his opinions known. Whilst the web-children chattered at each other, Trethowan had brooded like a gaunt and bearded spectre. Now he was staring over the river, listening to the slap of water and the splash of its denizens.
“I had not thought to have my mind turn to Shadrapar again,” he said slowly. “I thought I was rid of it. I have lived amongst my people for long enough, and never looked back. For ten years now I have not so much as dreamed of that city. Now, though, a journey of only a few days closer has filled my head with it.”
“Do you want to come with us?” Kiera asked him, and he shook his head violently.
“No! Never! Just because I think of the place doesn’t mean I like it. I hate that damned city and everyone in it. If not for them, my children would roam their swamps without fear, instead of hiding away. If not for them, this world might have some grain of hope. You’re welcome to the place. Go, and forget all of this and pick up your lives as politicians and sociologists and whatever the hell your friends are. Go forget.”
“We won’t tell anyone,” Kiera assured him.
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said. “Will you even remember, yourself? No, your minds contract so that nothing but that awful city is in it. You will forget that there are other ways of living. Even Stefan here, who writes brave words about how to save the world, never dreamed of living outside Shadrapar. If the city can be saved, he thinks, then save it. If it cannot then he’d rather go down with it than find another way. I despair of the lot of you.”
“That’s unfair,” I complained.
He fixed me with a steely look and said, “Is it?” and I was not so sure. His bony shoulders slumped a little and he seemed to grow older there and then. “After all this time it still hurts, you know,” he whispered. “Shadrapar, that exiled me to the stinking Island. Shadrapar, blind and deaf by its own hand, ruthless to those who tell it the truth. Shadrapar. Home, damn the place, and damn the lot of you for making me remember it.”
“You heard what Peter said,” Kiera told him. “We’re coming back for Midds. Once we’ve… dealt with Gaki, however Peter intends to do that, we’re coming back. Nobody said anything about staying there.”
Trethowan snorted, unconvinced. “Oh you know Shadrapar. I would not trust myself, even, to go to that place and not be dragged in. I certainly wouldn’t trust you.”
“I may surprise you,” Kiera said acidly. “I’ve got little enough to go back for.”
“Then stay!” was his instant reply.
She shrugged her shoulders, dodging the issue. “I’ll be back this way some time,” she promised lightly. “Returning in triumph or shipped back to the Island. I’m sure they’ll find another prison boat.”
“And you, Stef?” Trethowan asked me.
I mirrored Kiera’s shrug. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be amongst civilised, educated people. I wanted to leave all this riotous nature. Privately, though, I thought that if Kiera returned to the web-children then I was likely to follow. How that would actually have played out, with a city of other distractions at my hypothetical disposal, I cannot swear. I may have said that I am inconstant.
“I will dream of it tonight,” Trethowan murmured. His armour of vitriol had fallen away and the old, old man inside was revealed. “In my dreams I will have forgotten my people and I will be there, back in the Academy, back in the cage of souls.”
“The what?” I demanded, suddenly shaken from my contemplative mood.
“It is a name I gave to Shadrapar. If you can believe it, when first I came here I bored the web-children with tales of the city and the wonders of civilisation. I spoke to them of the place that had cast me out, the lights and the sounds, the unfathomable complexity. They did not understand, and not because of any limit to their intellect. I tried over and over to make them see the point of Shadrapar, the reason for its being there. Then there came a day when I suddenly saw things clearly myself, and I realised that there was no point. Shadrapar has no purpose, no function. It exists for itself only, its own downward spiral to oblivion. It exists only to imprison the minds of those who dwell within it, so that their world shrinks until it holds nothing but their own desires, and they fight to stop you showing what’s beyond the bars. So I called it the cage of souls, so they would understand.”
“I have heard the term before,” I told him. “Although not from the web-children.”
Trethowan glowered out at the water. “There are others besides my children… Language is now the stock in trade of rather more species than even I care to name. The world seeks someone to record its dying hours.”
It was pitch dark by then, save for the cowering light of the fire, and the pairs of big, round reflecting mirrors that were the eyes of the web-children, casting back its light.
*
In the morning, Peter organised our departure in a businesslike manner that suggested he was avoiding thinking of other things. He took all the remaining food (Midds being provided for now) plus the gifts of the web-children. He took most of the weapons, but left Midds enough to defend himself against the terrors of the unknown jungle. Midds himself was not yet ready to concede that those terrors did not include the web-children, despite Kiera’s protests.
“Are you sure they don’t eat people?” he pressed her.
Kiera was beginning to get fed up. “Well I never saw any of them eying me as though I’d look better boiled, if that’s what you mean, and Trethowan’s been with them forever and nobody took a bite out of him. To tell the truth, I got more trouble out of that lecherous old man than I did from any of the web-children.”
Midds still looked uncertain.
“Look,” Kiera told him flatly. “They’re people. That’s all. So they live in the swamp and they look different. They’re just people.”
On a scientific level it was almost entirely inaccurate, and Trethowan would have been incensed by the suggestion that his beloved web-children had any connection with mankind. It made Midds relax, though.
Kiera and I joined Peter as Shon untied the boat.
“Maybe we should stay here with Trethowan,” I suggested. “We can wait until Midds is better, and then all five of us could go.”
“I have a plan,” Peter stated. “I thought of it last night.”
“You want to kill Gaki,” I confirmed.
“If he crosses my path then I will kill him,” Peter said. “I think that the two of us are going to have words at some point. That’s not the plan, though. That’s personal.”
“So what’s the plan?” Kiera asked him.
“We go home. We get some lads together – Shon can help with that I’m sure – and we get a boat.”
“A boat?”
“A big boat. Two big boats. Maybe three. We drive them upriver, pick up Midds. We go back to the Island. We tell whoever’s left in charge there that it’s over.”
“You are so mad,” I said.
“The Island is over. It’s doing nobody any good: not the staff, not the inmates, not the web-children even.” His face was set in uncharacteristically grim lines. “I can’t just leave it and forget it. I wish I could. It’s in my head. I can’t leave them all there, Wardens and prisoners, to rot in the swamps. We’ll turn up with our boats and say that anyone who wants can come and join us.”
“It won’t work,” I decided.
“It might. The Marshal will be dead by then, or I’ll kill him myself. Who else is going to hold everyone in when they all want out? We’ll get them into our boats and then—”
“Yes, and then?” Kiera pressed. “What next, admiral?”
“Then we go back to Shadrapar with all of those angry people and we shake some bloody sense into the Authority,” Peter stated. There was an appreciative silence.
“Do we indeed?” I said at last.
“We do,” he confirmed flatly. “The Angels are mostly gone, the Outriders cut down. Who’s going to stop us when we’ve got things to say? How to save the world, Stefan, is by getting your mates together and bashing on doors.”
I felt distinctly uncomfortable with this view of government.
“We’ve seen a hundred different signs that the old place is coming apart at the seams. Either nobody’s running the place, or the people who’re running it have all gone bad. It’s time for a change.”
“You’re talking… revolution,” I whispered. The ancient word, death and renewal in a single breath, sounded oddly appropriate in the jungle air. Why not revolution? I imagined President Drachmar, and found the image all too plausible. Could he be any worse than Harweg? At least Peter was starting out with good intentions.
“I don’t believe any of it,” I said slowly. “I can’t see it working.”
“It will work,” said Peter, and he believed it.
*
Everything we were taking was on the boat except us. Peter went over to Midds and knelt by him, saying, “I promise we’ll be back. I got you this far and I’ll get you home. Now just take it easy, heal up and ignore that old man because he knows absolutely nothing.” He said it loud enough that Trethowan, on the other side of the campsite, gave a snort of displeasure.
“Good luck, Peter,” Midds told him. “You take care of yourself.”
Kiera and Shon made their farewells too, and left me to have the last word.
“You were always a good Warden,” I recalled. “You were the first one I met after Peter, and you’ve always been a friend to me, as much as you could.”
He shrugged slightly, painfully. “Can’t escape your breeding, I guess. Go with God, Stefan.” He managed a weak smile. “Go with God.”
*
We were all looking for the other boat, all the way home. Myself especially. I reasoned that Gaki’s fuel would run out soon enough, and they would have as many problems as myself in activating the solar motors. I half-expected us to run across them paddling down the river, drifting with the current. Peter expected an ambush, Gaki and Hermione breaking out from the greenery to re-steal their boat back from us.
We did not see them on the river. Somehow they got all the way to Shadrapar before us. Just another one of life’s little mysteries. Perhaps Hermione was some kind of technical savant and had never let on.
*
We had some days on the river, using up our stock of conversation. Kiera remained reticent about further details of her past and Peter’s anecdotes seemed to have dried up as well. His speech of the morning had given a window onto a more vulnerable man than I would have guessed at. He had been made to be an amiable creature with enough easy charisma to get by without making any serious decisions. Except he had made a bad judgement call and killed the wrong man; his laid-back world had been torn apart and he had found himself on the Island. On the Island all the masks were put aside, and the ugly faces beneath were on parade. For me, it had been harsh. For Peter, it had been a forge. From the Marshal’s authoritarian brutality to the infighting Wardens and sullen prisoners, he had been given all the evils of the world in miniature.
Somewhere he had got the idea that he could change them. The fact of the Island, the lessons it taught on human nature, were a worm gnawing in him, and he had to try to dig it out.
It was Shon who spoke most. Shon, who was surely made to be a cynical, hard-bitten man, had caught whatever ideological disease Peter had developed. Shon was listing people who would sail with us when we had our boats, people who might steal the boats for us, where weapons might be had from. Peter’s revolution was to be founded on larceny.
I was thinking about the mob. I was thinking about Helman and Rosanna and Jon. The agitators behind that crowd had been selfish and evil reactionaries, and Peter was a good man. I was unsure that this was a material difference. I was also unsure that once a man has raised the mob (for there is really only one mob, waiting in potentia to be raised) whether anyone can keep it from the barbaric acts of violence it strains for. We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.
*
And then there came a sunset where we all decided not to camp. We did not take the boat to the shoreline and tie it up, or make a fire. We all knew, as though we could feel the city’s heart beating through the surface tension of the water, home was near at hand. The meanders of the river might keep us from seeing her, but we knew.
There was an unspoken but unanimous decision to press on, to catch the night and dock silently with the last of cities, without questions or prying eyes.
I will confess that all thoughts of Trethowan went from me. Living in the woods with savages was all very well if you were an exile and a hermit, but it was a poor substitute for home. Shadrapar, ancient widow-queen of cities, hive of corruption and vices, vessel of every ill and darkness that mankind ever conceived, and some that have simply arisen without anyone’s volition or consent. To hell with living in virtue in the wilderness, we thought: let us live in sin at home.
So much for our sense of proximity, or perhaps it measured as birds fly, and not by the curved course of a river. It was almost all of the night, before we saw the blotting of the stars that heralded our city. The trees had given way on either side to fields under their canvas covers, waiting for the farmers to expose them to the rising sun. Above, the sky was studded with stars whose reflections swum below in the water. Where the stars were not, where there was nothing but the dark, that was our home.
*
The docks were ever an old, abandoned place and we had little fear of discovery. What river traffic was there, after all, now that the prison boat was gone? It was unthinkable that any Shadrapan would want simply to gad about for the fun.
There were great rusting hulks of ships there, which had not moved in a hundred years. Peter was sizing them up even as I guided our craft to a secluded mooring.
“They’ll do,” he said.
“You won’t get them to move,” I returned.
“We’ll find someone who can,” Peter announced.
“I know some artificers,” Shon added. “They owe me favours.”
As the boat touched the rusted spiderlegs of the docks, Shon reached up to grasp the nearest rungs and began to climb.
The docks of Shadrapar are six great jointed arcs of age-corroded metal lancing out into the water from the body of the city. Their original purpose was lost to the minds of men and, now that the prison boat had foundered, they had no purpose left to them at all. The part of the city they jutted from was all empty shells of buildings which might have stored exotic commodities from other lands, when there were still other lands.
It was light enough by then to see Shon waving at us, and so we clambered rung after rung, with iron flaking off in our hands. I was waiting for the moment when some part of my soul joined with the greater soul of Shadrapar and proclaimed that I was home. It did not come.
Instead, I saw the other boat: Gaki’s boat. No craft from the city had point generators. It was docked a leg away from us, and Gaki had done some madman’s thing with an upright spar and a sheet, the purpose of which I could not guess at. All it told me was that they were here already, in the maze of Shadrapar.
Dawn was almost on us. The sky above was an old, faded grey, soon to host the bloated hulk of the sun. The four of us crouched on the metal of the docking leg, ready for discovery, but there was none. The docks were deserted. The predawn city was a soundless grey mirage.
Peter made a signal, and we dashed along the leg, as broad as a street but riddled with great holes with only the oily waters beneath. The shells of a previous age’s storehouses loomed abruptly before us in the gathering light. We all had a driving need to seek shelter, none of us welcome in our own city. Peter was pointing at a yawning hole in the wall of one warehouse, and we pelted for it as the sun heaved its bulk over the jutting points of the skyline. In our mad dash I tripped on some bundle that had been left on the dock and went sprawling on the ground, before clambering up to pelt after Kiera. At the time it was just an annoyance.
Inside the warehouse it was dark as we could ask, only the jagged gash of an opening to let any sun through. We huddled and watched the daylight reclaim Shadrapar from the night once more.
We could hear only our own harsh breathing in the echoing space. The city was silent.
“Where now?” Kiera was asking. “Shon, who’s your best friend here?”
Shon gave a few names and discussed their pros and cons. I was looking out at the docks, at the arches of the metal legs. Probably I was thinking about Gaki.
I saw the bundle I had fallen over and for a moment I thought it was a body, but it was too flat. I stared at it and something about it communicated an urgency to me; a message.
Shadrapar remained quiet. Nobody was stirring save for us: dawn was not a time when civilised people arose. I wanted to stay safe and sheltered in the warehouse, but my mind was hauling me out to look at that abandoned bundle.
“Stefan!” Peter hissed at me, but I was gone into the light, moving at a run to crouch beside it.
I stared blankly: whatever inner voice had told me it was so important was silent. It was clothes: a scuffed tunic, old patched trousers, boots. I picked up the tunic and found the meagre weight of a purse within it. Baffled, I stared at it. There were a few coins of low denominations, the kind Jon de Baron would stuff his pockets with. There was an old brass ring on the ground as well, bare of inscription.
I looked out at the city, which had yet to wake, and I saw something else. Ignoring Peter’s urgent gestures, I went to investigate.
I found some more clothes, shabbier than the first and with no purse to keep them company. My higher mind was going over mad fantasies of disguise, but the more grounded parts were feeling a chill of premonition. At last Peter and the others came to join me in the light.
We looked down the street towards the heart of Shadrapar, the looming Old Quarter, the factories of the Steel Town and the bleak hill of the Government District, and we saw nothing in the early morning light but some dozen other forlorn huddles of clothes lying discarded in the street.
And something was wrong with the view but none of us could put a finger on it.
Increasingly on edge in the silence, Peter ran past the derelict old storerooms to a house. The door opened without resistance and we all pushed inside. I could feel a crawling sensation clutching each inch of my skin: horror, more than a fear.
In the front room of that poor little house there was a table laid for a meal. Of the four chairs, one was empty. The others were draped with empty clothes. A man’s. A woman’s. A child’s. Their personal effects, their garments, their crockery and cutlery. Their house, but not them.
We ran out, for in that moment none of us could have stayed in that house a moment longer. We stood in broad view in the street and stared wildly at those unclaimed clothes that studded it, the only sign of a human habitation otherwise conspicuous by its absence.
Then I saw what was wrong with the view.
“The Weapon is gone,” I said. The most distinctive sight of Shadrapar, the centrepiece, the symbol of our city, that twisted spire of unknown metals that had forever stood as our potential saviour in the face of the city’s doom, was simply not there.
The city was silent save for the sound of our breathing.
“Oh dear God,” said Kiera. “Someone’s used the Weapon.”
I could not imagine it, but that silence was shouting at us, telling us in no uncertain terms that we had not come home after all. Home was a place we would never know again; all there was of Shadrapar was what we carried with us. The cage of souls was empty, and all the souls had flown free.