'I can't, Cherry. I don't have the strength. I just want to die.' Signy gave way to the tears that were always behind her eyes.
Cherry's head jerked back up. 'Don't say that,' she mewed.
'I haven't got the strength,' whispered Signy. 'It takes me all my strength just to stay alive. I can't fight him, Cherry. He's destroyed me.'
'All you have to do is live,' pleaded Cherry.
Signy shook her head. 'Find me Siggy, Cherry, and I'll live forever if I have to. If you don't, I swear I'll be dead by the spring, if I have to hold my breath to do it.'
Cherry began suddenly weeping and holding on to Signy's crippled legs. 'But I love you, I love you, I love you so much…' Cherry clutched tight and wept bitterly.
Signy looked down at her coldly. 'Find me Siggy, and you can stay with me forever.' A little tired smile stalled on her face. She bent down to touch Cherry just as she changed into a cat. Her fingers stroked the fur, felt the quiver of excitement as the little animal rubbed her head against her fingers. Cherry was full of life, but it seemed to Signy as if her own touch was dead.
Cherry twisted, turned, and ran out of the room. A second later a little brown bird took off in a whirr of wings from the window-sill and headed north, to the slums of the halfman lands, to the market place, to no-one's land – anywhere Cherry could pursue her search for the lost brother.
Behind her, Signy stared at her hands and felt the great width and breadth of the darkness inside her. Every morning was an emptiness that seemed to stretch on forever without shape -black, black, black. She would have put an end to it ages ago but for the lingering, and dwindling hope that her twin Siggy might still be alive. Cherry was her only hope of finding out.
'Not much longer now,' she promised herself. She was looking forward so much to the day when she could put herself out of all this.
When the old gods returned to the new world, they brought things with them. Rumours: there were giants again in the frozen north, weren't there…? It was probably true. Nowadays not all monsters were brewed. Trolls, dwarfs, imps and even dragons – as if there weren't already enough monsters in a land ruled by Conor.
And what did these gods want? The man with the broad-brimmed hat and one eye had been seen more than once, often in the thick of battle. A god, or god-like, certainly; but whose god? There were others, too – figures who appeared in the ploughed fields or on the riverbanks, gods who appeared among machinery or in the weaponry. All of them demanded their own particular sacrifice.
Among them was a certain red-headed god whose appearance always made things turn out unexpectedly. Crookedly. Loki, the trickster, the sly one, the riddler, shape-changer.
A witch had been found living on Conor's Estate some years previously. It was clear she was a witch, even though she was beautiful and young. The rumour was that when they cornered her she turned into a bird and tried to fly away out of a window, but the window was already shut and the girl was taken. She would have been found guilty anyway. She had slit pupils, a line of fur down her spine and a tail. Anyone with halfman blood inside the Wall, let alone the Estate, was found guilty as a matter of course.
She was tried and found guilty and executed by fire a few days later. Her screams were said to resemble those of a cat. She struggled and begged and promised, but when it became clear that all her arts could not save her, she yelled through the fire and named a certain house in a certain road, where in an alcove in a collapsed wall they would find her young.
The people went and found there two young baby boys, tabbies, with retractable finger nails. They were taken away and destroyed. No one noticed, hiding in the corner, trembling with youth, a small tortoiseshell kitten with green eyes and white whiskers.
Cherry had only the vaguest idea of what had happened to her in between the time her brothers had been taken away and the time she found herself looked after by the dog people in the halfman lands. She remembered only that when she was very, very hungry indeed, a man with long, flaming red hair opened his mouth and swallowed her up, whole. She remembered some time later being vomited up at the feet of a startled group of dogmen, one of whom had later given her to Signy.
She had seen the red-headed man on other occasions. Once in a dream, although she knew it was for real. He took from a leather pouch at his side three shapes.
'For you, daughter,' he said. 'Remember.' And he dropped them onto her one after the other; a bird, a nut, and a girl.
Cherry's search had carried her far and wide, as far as a child, a cat or a small brown bird could look, from the towers of central London, now occupied by Conor's troops, to those other great towers in the freelands, in the new city of Ragnor. But the shape-changer did not expect to find Siggy in any of these places. He could not have gone far with those injuries. If he had made it to the wealthy rulers of the halfmen, Cherry would certainly have heard about it; they knew of her. How could they forget the day when Loki made a gift of a kitten to one of them? No. The chances were that he was still hiding out with the old pig-woman she had seen find him in no-one's land. The question was – where? She might still be in no-one's land, or in the halfman slums, or she might have passed under the Wall and be keeping him in the human slums. Either that or, as Signy believed, he had already died.
Two or three times a week, Cherry went shopping in the markets. It was no unusual sight to see girls of fourteen and younger out for the family shopping. Sneaking in and out of the tower, which would have been all but impossible for a person – or even a cat – was easy for her. Money was a problem, but Cherry was gifted with a degree of foresight, aided by her natural cunning. While Signy was on the roof of the water tower contemplating suicide, Cherry had been taking precautions. She had broken up pieces of her mistress's jewellery and hidden them away, behind the light fittings, behind the skirting boards. Every now and then she dug out a little diamond, or snapped the gold band off a bracelet. It was enough for the bribes she needed.
Out here was a world of contrasts. Pigs guzzled rubbish in the streets and were nudged to one side by fine, wide cars, painted in bright colours. Goats nibbled at the remains of trees in suburban gardens; men in expensive suits, women dressed for cocktail parties, stepped in between the puddles, surrounded by armed bodyguards. Gangs of children, out to beg, mug or steal, searched the darker corners for rubbish, or for anyone foolish enough to be alone. The entrance to an expensive shop, selling jewellery, exotic foodstuffs or drugs or drinks or high fashion clothes, might be choked by the stink of a gutter full of raw sewage, blown on a gust of wind from just around the corner. Huddles of starving children shivered in corners and waited to die.
Today Cherry was searching in Leytonstone market. It was close enough to the Wall to attract a good few halfmen, and so all of life came here at some time or another. You could buy guns, wool, tools, pigs, radios, anything necessary or unnecessary to a life in the city. Cherry argued and bartered with the stallholders, abused their fruit, took a bite from an apple and said, no. She made jokes, friends and enemies, but above all she collected gossip. She didn't care if she irritated or gave pleasure so long as people talked to her. Half the market knew the girl with the strange eyes, who had money to spend and who loved to hang around the stalls sharing gossip. Cherry had a great deal of gossip to tell, and a great deal was told back to her. If anyone knew anything about a man with a broken face and hands, this was the place to find out about it.
As she was easing her way through a long row of narrow stalls later that day, Cherry was almost bowled over by a whacking big man steaming round from behind his butcher's stall onto the street. He grabbed hold of a rubbishy-looking old woman by the shoulder and shook her. She was as much pig as she was woman, maybe more, and starved half to death. She was just skin and bone under those rags. Cherry could hear the breath rattling in her lungs as he shook her. She must have been driven under the Wall to search for food, as many halfmen were now that Conor's wars cut off supplies.
'You thievin' old bag…' The man rummaged rudely about in her rags and dragged out a sheet of pork ribs. He shoved the old woman back so hard she would have fallen if the street hadn't been so packed.
'I don't want to see you about here one more time!' bellowed the trader. Cherry, who was standing with her back to the butcher's stall, watched the old woman stagger off into the crowds. Yes, yes, yes! That was the one. Thinner, much thinner. But the same one, she was sure of it.
The stallholder ran back round to serve a customer, his eyes bulging as he realised that in trying to recover his pork ribs, he'd left the stall unattended.
'Just plain greedy, some people,' said Cherry quietly to him as he pushed past.
'Light-fingered old bitch… She's lucky I let her off. She'd have 'er hand chopped off if I shopped her for that. Old sow. Half pig herself if you ask me.'
