could, but Hadrian had suffered badly in the crashes in the armoured car and couldn't help screaming. Once they were secure, one of the men put on a thick welder's helmet, dragged the equipment over, and began to weld their chains to the iron girder.
He began with Had. There was the smell of hot metal, the singe of burning hair and cloth as the chains heated up. The links turned red; there was the sudden stink of scorched flesh, and Had began to scream like a madman. When he was securely welded to the beam, the man moved along the line and turned his attention to Siggy.
Only when the work was all done and the brothers had been gagged, did a door open and out stepped Conor from the shadows.
He did not look at them or address them. He came to stand by their feet and looked at their legs. Then he motioned to one of the guards and pointed at Siggy.
'The knife,' said Conor. 'Hand me the knife.'
The guard bent to Siggy's waist and removed the knife with the blue milky blade of chipped stone and handed it to Conor. Conor smiled, for the first time. He ran his finger along the side of the blade and said, 'You should have given it to me when I asked you,' as if all this had been just to get the knife. Perhaps it was. He stroked the flat of the blade carefully, and smiled once more.
'Leave them Outside for the Pig,' he said, and turned to leave.
Back in the fresh air, Conor stopped and leaned back against a wall. It had been a long day, and he had managed very little sleep for the past weeks. Seeing the brothers had exhausted him, somehow. He thought of Signy locked in her tower and winced. Behind him, he could hear the screams from the brothers as ten of his men heaved the girder up into the back of one of the trucks. Conor winced again, but he smiled a moment later.
He'd done it. He'd done what even the great Val Volson had failed to do; he'd united London. He was the one who would be remembered as King of London. And he wasn't done yet. He hadn't even begun. Next, it would be the halfmen. After that, the towns and cities around London -Ragnor itself.
And now he had the knife.
Conor looked down at the crude blade. His. He took it firmly by the handle, pressed the point against the brick of the wall he stood by, and pushed. The blade sank into the stone with a soft noise, as if he were pushing it into warm, dry sand.
Conor smiled with delight. He had not dared try this in front of Siggy in case it refused to work for him, but now he was sorry he'd doubted himself. Odin had meant him to have it after all.
He took the knife to draw it out again, but it refused to budge.
Conor hissed with frustration and heaved, but it was set solid. He looked around him to make sure he was alone before putting his all into it. It would be awful to be caught straining at this greatest prize of all like a silly weak boy. He tried again, put his foot to the wall, tugged and strained. But the knife was immovable. Now he would have to get his men to chip it out, and the word would be around the compound in a day. Conor was livid.
As he stared at the thing in the wall in hatred, there was sudden movement in front of him and Conor leapt up into the air with a squeal of fright.
It was a child, a girl aged about ten. She seemed to have come from nowhere. She had no fear. She stood there and stared as if she knew all his secrets.
'You're a fool,' said the child. 'Don't you realise that you love her?'
Conor gaped. The child scowled at him and walked away, turning into a doorway a little way along. Conor was still trembling – she'd seemed to spring out of the earth – before he was overtaken by a tremendous anger. He ran along the wall to the door and followed her in.
It was a small room, a storeroom for stacks of cheap plastic chairs. The only other door was closed and he would surely have heard it open. The girl must be hiding amongst the chairs.
Conor turned his rage on them, heaving them and hurling them to one side, but there was no one there – only a small cat that ran out past his feet. He got down to peer along the floor, but there was nothing to see. She must have slipped out after all. He opened the door that led into the building and looked down the corridor. Nothing.
As he stood there, confused and upset, it occurred in a flash to Conor that this was impossible, that the girl hadn't behaved like a girl, but had appeared like a dream and disappeared again like one. The most likely explanation for what had happened was that he had seen an hallucination – a waking dream. What the girl had said, he must have made her say. He sat down on one of the chairs. He began to tremble again. Inside himself he could feel an avalanche of tears. He sat and waited for them, but as usual they never came. His father Abel had done his work well when Conor was a child. No quantity of tears could break through the mask of iron the old man had built around his son's heart.
32
Siggy
It was early September, green just going yellow. Lovely day. Great swathes of fireweed gone all flossy. The air was full of fluffy seeds. There were blocks of woodland growing up in the old gardens, there were trees pushing up through the pavements, pushing through the roads, pushing down the walls. A whole house- well, a heap of rubble and a few walls, really, but it was all covered with this brilliant red creeper. Walls tumbled down, rubble piled up. It was a half town for the halfmen. You'd have called it pretty if you didn't know what was waiting there for us.
I thought of all the men and women who'd ended up like this, tortured and broken, set up to die in the worst way possible. Why go to such trouble to make us suffer? That was Conor for you. He didn't just want defeat. He wanted humiliation.
The Land-Rover bumped and banged over the pot-holes and bricks. Had was screaming and gibbering, he'd seemed to get everything worse than me and Ben. He'd broken his ankle and some ribs in the armoured car, and then when they found us Conor's men had really taken it out on him. They spent a good five minutes just kicking him. You could hear his ribs breaking. I thought it was going to be our turn next, but for some reason they didn't bother.
The Land-Rover ground to a halt and the soldiers jumped out.
'Feeding time!'
'You're going to see some sights tonight. You ain't gonna live to tell anyone about it.'
It took ten of them to lift the beam down. We hung groaning in our chains, then they dropped the whole thing heavily on the ground. One of them bent down and pulled hard at my hand to make me cry out. 'Doesn't hurt any less just because you're gonna die, does it, boy?'
They spent a little time tormenting us, kicking at our hands in the welded shackles to make us scream, but the officer with them put a stop to it. I think he and a few of the others might have been sympathetic – we could have done with someone to put some damp cloth between our wrists and the metal – but no one dared help us in case one of the others told. After he'd ordered them back into the cars he looked at us and just shrugged before he jumped in afterwards and they all drove off.
You want to be brave, for the others as much as yourself. But you can't. You can bite your tongue, you can pretend, but inside… that's something else. You can't help being afraid.
There was a building to one side collapsed like a pack of huge cards, layers of it all fallen down on top of each other. I think it had been a multi-storey car park. We were on a sort of meadow of dry, thin soil, full of moss and seedy little plants. I think it had been an area of tarmac once. Here and there little birch trees and buddleia pushed through. A rusted, half-torn-up metal sign with a few scraps of paint lay nearby. In front of us was a stripe of the same thin mossy ground, where a road once ran.
I said, 'Looks like a good place for a picnic,' but no one laughed.
As the day warmed up Had began to pant like a dog. He was so far gone. He was always the one with the cool head, but he was really suffering. He kept calling for water. Ben did a clever thing and started to sing to him, the songs our nan used to sing to us all when we were small. That calmed him down. Every now and then he seemed to come to.
'Have you got your knife?' he asked me. 'You can cut us free.'
'Conor took it, Had.'
'Conor took everything,' he said.
