The Book of Dead Days (11 page)

There was an inscription in the stone above the doors.

“Latin, I suppose, Valerian,” Boy said to himself, and smiled. Then the smile drifted from his face. Valerian was in trouble. It was more than just a broken arm, and it was up to Boy to find the solution.

He swallowed, looked up and down the street and crossed. He skipped nimbly up the stone steps and, reaching up on tiptoe, swung one of the lions against its base.

The loud metal clunk seemed to echo the length of the street, but as Boy looked around nervously he was relieved to see that no one was paying him any attention. Nor, unfortunately, did anyone inside the building seem to have heard.

He swung the lion harder and waited.

“Side entrance,” said a voice beside him.

Startled, Boy looked to his right and noticed a small hatch set in one of the soaring pillars. Inside the pillar was a little room in which sat a tiny old woman with a wrinkled face and an expression to match.

“Come about a death, have you? Round the side.”

“Yes-no-not exactly.”

The woman was unimpressed.

“Death? Round the side. Side door, see? That’s where you register.”

Boy was puzzled.

“Then what do
you
do?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, “I tell people about the side door.”

“That’s it?” Boy asked. “That’s all you do?”

“It’s important. Someone’s got to tell people about the side door. For deaths. Important,” she added.

“And I wonder,” he said, “who tells me where to go if I haven’t got a death to register.”

The woman blinked.

“Well,” she said, peering anxiously around before answering, “well, I could, probably, tell you.”

“Oh, good,” said Boy. “So where do I go to speak to the Master of City Burials?”

“Well, then you’d want to knock on the front door there and…
What
?” She spluttered to a stop. “What do you mean? Don’t waste my time!”

“No,” said Boy earnestly. “No, I really need to see him. My master sent me-his name’s Valerian. He said to say he sent me. We have to find out where someone is buried.”

“You can’t see him. You think proles like you just wander in off the street for a chat?”

“But, look,” he said, “the thing is, Valerian, he’s a friend of the Master. And he needs to find out something, about where a grave is-”

“Listen to me,” she said. “No one gets to see him.”

“But I have to see him!” cried Boy.

“No!” snapped the woman. “He’s very busy working on his animals in the Dome. He won’t think about anything else. No one talks to him.”

“What’s he doing with animals? Doesn’t he have lots of work to do for the cemeteries and so on?”

“Well, I don’t know, of course, but he’s been working in the Dome with his animals for years and it must be very important because he is the Master and it must have lots to do with burying people or he wouldn’t be doing it.”

Boy was puzzled, but he nodded.

“What is he doing with them?” he asked. “What are the animals for?”

“Well, nothing much. They’re dead, you see.”

A creeping little curiosity inside Boy told him he was going to have to find out what the Master of City Burials was doing before he went back to Valerian.

This was something Boy was good at.

Creeping and climbing around the dark spaces of buildings that no one even knew existed was something he had always done. Even Valerian had to admit that Boy was very good at not being seen.

Standing back in the street he had immediately spotted the dome the woman had spoken of. It was a huge glass roof made of hundreds, probably thousands of individual panes of glass. They arched in a single beautiful sweep from some part of the building out of sight from where Boy stood. He’d spent a long time stalking the area, and now dusk was coming. In the half-light, the Dome shone with the light of a thousand torches-or so it seemed to Boy. It was a glowing, shining, crystalline bubble that gleamed out of the filth of the City like a diamond in a dung heap.

Boy had scouted around the streets that joined the Reach and found a small alley running into the center of the block. There was a narrow but sturdy iron gate across the entrance to the alley, but Boy was over it before he had even wondered what he was doing. If he had stopped to think, he might have noticed that he was actually enjoying himself. This was like home to him. It was familiar ground-running, climbing, hiding in the dark, with a mission to perform for Valerian. It was almost like normal.

He skipped down the alley as lightly as a rat, realizing as he went that the alley was some kind of rubbish heap for all the buildings that ran behind it. Walls rose up high on either side of him, but just as he expected, there were little gates into the back courtyards of each building.

He guessed where the gate for the Burials building would be.

There beyond lay the Dome, and for the first time he could see the stone building that it rose from. In a way he was disappointed that the shining glass roof rested on anything at all-it was so magical it ought to have floated in the air.

He looked to the gate. No way to climb over this one- it was set into the solid stone wall-but he had his bent metal pin out of his pocket and into the lock in a moment.

The gate swung and then he ran, quickly but cautiously, to the base of the Dome.

Some rather elaborate block work made climbing the building as easy as walking up stairs, and soon he was crouching against the glowing glass of the Dome itself.

He looked down at what lay within, and his jaw dropped. He had listened intently to what the old woman in the pillar had said about the Master of Burials and his animals, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw now.

Darkness was settling over the winter cityscape as Valerian and Willow got to Kepler’s house. On the way Valerian chatted almost casually to Willow, mostly about Kepler, about how he had been born of noble family but had turned his back on his aristocratic lineage for the pursuit of knowledge. Valerian looked up at the darkening sky. “The end of the twenty-eighth,” said Valerian mournfully. “Three days…”

Valerian rang the bell. Kepler’s house was narrow and tall, by no means as large as Valerian’s, but in a far better state of repair. This was a much cozier neighborhood, of terraced houses for the well-to-do if not the rich.

“No light within,” said Valerian, frowning.

“Shall I knock?” asked Willow, but Valerian put out his good hand to stop her.

“He must be out,” said Valerian, but there was no certainty in his voice. “But… he goes out no more than I do. Try the bell again.”

Willow stepped forward. “Valerian!” she whispered. “The door is open!”

“Careful, child,” said Valerian. He shoved the door further open with his boot, and they listened hard for a minute. The street behind them was empty and quiet. They took two steps into the hall and then pushed the door shut behind them.

“Kepler?” called Valerian in a stage whisper. “Kepler? Are you there?”

There seemed to be no one in the house.

“I think we can risk a little light.”

Willow started to hunt in her pockets for a match but was puzzled to see Valerian step over to the wall to turn a small metal knob set into the wall itself.

Immediately a dim, flickering light sprang up in a chandelier above their heads.

Willow let out a small shriek.

“Valerian! Your magic
is
real!” she cried.

“No, Willow, no,” said Valerian. “This is not my magic, but Kepler’s genius. He has greater knowledge than anyone in the world of electrical phenomena. He has installed an automatic system of electrical light in his home. He says one day all houses in the City will have the same. He’s mad, of course, but you have to admire his invention. My simple chemical lights at the theater are child’s toys compared to this.”

Valerian walked into a room leading off the back of the hall and turned another knob, throwing light across what was clearly Kepler’s study.

Willow followed, openmouthed.

“There’s a large array of electrical cells in the cellar,” explained Valerian, but this was lost on Willow. She marveled at the lights on the walls.

“There’s no flame!” she said with disbelief.

“No,” said Valerian, “but please concentrate.”

“Where is he?” asked Willow, dragging her gaze away from the magical lights.

“We must search the house. Something is wrong.”

Valerian winced as he spoke.

“Damn this arm!” he moaned. He rummaged in his deep left-hand pocket and pulled out another of the small bottles. It was at least his third, and pulling the cork with his teeth, he finished it off.

“Disgusting!” He spat, setting the bottle down on Kepler’s desk. “You start at the top and work down, room by room. If you see any more of those,”-he glanced toward the bottle-“bring them with you.”

Willow didn’t move. “Valerian?”

“What is it?”

“Do I have to go upstairs by myself?”

“Yes. You’ll be quicker than me. Don’t tell me you’re getting scared like Boy? Go. I’ll be down here.”

He turned to the desk and began to open drawers and flip through books. She saw him look with interest at a piece of paper covered in writing and diagrams, which he folded roughly with one hand and put in his pocket. Then he went on rummaging.

Willow didn’t understand how that would help find Kepler, and wondered who was really the more scared of what lay upstairs. But she turned and, with her heart in her mouth, set off for the upper floors.

Willow thought about using the electrical light system, but it was probably dangerous. Seeing that Valerian was poring intently over papers at Kepler’s desk, she lit the stub of the candle from the cemetery expedition with a match she had found beside the fireplace.

She reached out a shaking hand to the first door she came to. Taking a deep breath, she turned the knob and pushed the door gently, and waited. Nothing. Holding the candle out in front of her she moved slowly into the room. A bedroom. There was no one there, nothing strange.

As she went through room after room and found nothing extraordinary in any of them, she began to calm down. This was just a normal house, the home of an educated man, with normal things in every room. Only the strange electrical switches on the wall showed that it was anything other than totally commonplace. She noted that the bed was made in what she assumed was the main bedroom, with clothes in neat piles on boxes, and everyday things sitting just where they should be.

There was no sign of violence, or robbery, or even untidiness anywhere.

Mystified, she went back to the study to find Valerian.

He was not there.

She swung around as if she was about to be attacked from behind at any moment.

No one there.

“Valerian! Valerian, where are you?”

She noticed a small door standing open in the far wall of the study. It was a secret door; she could see that it was made to look like part of the wooden paneling of the wall when it was shut.

Had it been open when they first came in? She crept across the room, trying not to make a sound.

Valerian,
she thought angrily,
where are you?

When she reached the small doorway she was not surprised to see a tiny flight of steps that turned immediately and led down, she presumed, to the cellar.

“Valerian!” she called.

Curse you,
she thought.

Still holding her lighted candle, she put her foot on the first step and began to descend. Two more steps, and she noticed there was light coming from below, that strange yellow electrical illumination.

She blew out her candle and went down.

She stopped abruptly at the bottom.

Valerian stood with his back to her, perfectly still, staring at the floor.

Around the walls were ranks of clay troughs, piled one on top of the other, so that there was almost no wall space left uncovered. In the top of each Willow could see metal plates, and from these came copper wires, which trailed crazily all around the stuff. There was an awful smell of some chemical. Willow supposed this was the source of the weird lighting.

But Valerian was staring instead at the floor space in the center of the cellar.

He turned and saw Willow. “No?”

“There’s no one,” said Willow, coming forward.

“Look at this.” Valerian nodded at the floor.

It took her a moment to work out what she was looking at.

The floor of the cellar was made of packed earth, rammed as solid as brick. In its dusty surface someone had dug a crazy pattern of trenches, each a few fingers wide and maybe a few deep. They crisscrossed and joined and snaked along and turned corners and struck out at odd angles, seemingly at random.

And they were filled with water. At least, Willow assumed it was water-it was hard to tell in the dim light. Whatever it was, it was liquid, a little murky from the packed soil channels through which it ran. For it was not still; somehow, it was moving.

Willow turned, and Valerian anticipated her question.

“There’s a small device at the far end, pushing it around. It is powered by the cells, just like the lights.”

But that posed another question.

“What… is this?” was the best way she could put it.

“I haven’t the slightest idea. I rather fear it means my friend has gone mad.”

Willow saw one more thing.

On the far wall, across the other side of the watery maze, was a blank space, not hidden by electrical paraphernalia.

Some words had been painted hastily on it with a thick brush. Willow recognized them as more Latin. “What does that say?”

“The ramblings of a madman,” said Valerian sadly. “ ‘The miller sees not all the water that goes by his mill.’ ”