streets, safely out of the reach of snow and ice. People pointed and gasped at her progress, cheering in some quarters, but she tried to ignore the attention, and scooted after the delinquents. The weight of the world yanked her muscles down to one side, causing her body to ache, but whenever she concentrated, she found herself able to override the natural forces in order to maintain her upright position in this new plane. She leapt over open windows, across alleyways. Horses and carts rumbled by underneath to her left. The light of the day was vanishing fast — but she was gaining on the thieves.
She could see them now, aiming for the more concealed passageways, so she pushed herself away from the wall and back upright, gliding down to the ground. She ran through the air, towards them and, with one foot extended, kicked the neck of the nearest — who was no more than a boy. He lurched sideways, collapsing to the ground, dropping his bag.
Jewels spilled across the icy flagstones.
As Lan landed she thrust her heel in his stomach, winding him, then she peered up from her crouch to see the other vanishing down a dark passageway. With a crowd gathering round her, applauding her, Lan pulled some rope from her side-pack and tied the youth’s hands behind his back.
She marched him back to the Inquisition headquarters.
*
With a pocket half-full of jewels, Caley skidded into Caveside, through a wide opening in the rock that looked like the maw of a gargantuan beast. Resting his hands on his thighs, he heaved breath into his lungs, confident that that bloody Knight woman was no longer following him. Standing, he straightened his woollen hat and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt a little more, allowing himself to cool.
That was close, he thought. Can’t believe she caught Rend. The twat was always the careful one and now look at him.
He marched into the caves proper, his nose twitching at the stench of wood fires and something more unsavoury. The texture of the streets changed: lanes became thinner, and the buildings were taller, almost leaning on each other for support, with thick wooden beams and thousands of tiny coloured stones pressed into their surfaces. Many houses had once been whitewashed but were now all shades of grime caused by smoke from chimneys. Some of the houses betrayed an older history, having been carved out of the rock, and were rounded with crude circular windows. Warm light glowed from their insides, and when looking across the rest of the underground city, these windows were like starlight. It went some way to make up for the absence of stars and moons up above.
Not every Cavesider was poor. There were signs of wealth down here, from those who leeched a living off the outer city, some who dealt in illicit gemstones or middlemen who supplied cheap labour throughout Villjamur and surrounding farms; those people occupied the houses higher up, nearer the outer city, away from the decrepit sewers and poorly supplied shops.
The cobbles hadn’t been maintained, and more than once Caley caught his toe on a hunk of stone jutting out. Rotting vegetables and dead rats littered the side of the street, in places piling up against walls. A woman — one he knew to be a prostitute — was strutting into an alleyway, holding the hand of a client, something that was happening less and less these days. A tavern at the end of this stretch of road opened its doors to turf out two brawlers, who carried on their fight on the side of the street, whilst around them cats padded explorative paths into the darkness.
It wasn’t all bad, here — being sheltered by the caves, it was warmer than the outer city. And things were starting to change. People had more food these days, and money didn’t matter with the exchange irens operating without coin. Caley marvelled at how he could simply trade things without scraping around to find the money. People were in better spirits.
That was because of Shalev.
But he needed to let Shalev know of what had happened to Rend — they all stuck together, they were all one community. If someone was caught, they would have to deal with the issue. Shalev had made a family of these Caveside dwellers.
He sauntered half a mile deeper into the caves, across the border of what the Emperor was now labelling as Underground East and Underground South, in an effort to map out the urban sprawl. He headed through what was locally known as Blacksmith Plaza, Sahem Road, Mudtown and Carp Alley. There were passageways and routes here that few knew about, and through which even fewer had travelled, dirt tracks and alleys with hundred-year-old graffiti. A couple of old guys were playing a complicated board game on an upturned cask of beer, whilst somewhere inside an old pipe was whining out a folk tune. A dog trotted up alongside him briefly, then vanished into one of the alleyways.
He palmed hand-slang with a few of the kids he knew. The citizens he passed all knew him in one way or another, and that was good — because otherwise they might have killed a stranger, such was the level of secrecy around here. He saw more than one person instinctively reach for a weapon, these underground soldiers, these comrades without uniform.
Two of his brethren stood guard with fat sabres beneath their cloaks in front of a recent excavation into the cliff face. He nodded to them and entered. It was a magic-blasted route, a damp-smelling, claustrophobic passage, and, standing tall, he continued with one palm gliding against the smooth rock, focusing on the single spot of light in the distance.
Just as he reached it, a hand grabbed him by his shirt and he was yanked forward into the chamber beyond and sent sprawling across the floor.
‘Hey,’ he spluttered, rubbing his chin, ‘it’s me, retards, Caley.’
A row of swords were pointed towards him, glinting in the candlelight. Seven men and three women were staring down, and Caley squirmed under their glare.
‘Let him through,’ a female voice commanded.
As they stepped aside, Caley stood and brushed himself down, nodding to them all.
The room was spectacularly decorated in mosaics, echoing patterns Caley thought came from far-out islands — not that he’d been to any. There were bookshelves and workbenches and row upon row of relics and a fire in the grate. And there, perched on the end of a desk, was a woman with no hair, and bright-blue eyes. He was unable to guess her age, but placed her in her forties. She had a round face, not unpleasant, and her nose appeared slightly squashed, as if some invisible force pressed lightly on it. Wafts of incense floated around the room, and whether it was that, or the way she controlled the mood in the room, he felt utterly at ease.
‘What is it, brother?’ she asked.
‘I needed to see you, Shalev. Rend was taken when we was out nicking stuff from this rich woman. We got a good haul, look…’ He thrust his hands into his pockets, then offered Shalev a scoop of gems and necklaces.
Shalev smiled crookedly. ‘A good haul indeed, Caley.’
He loved hearing her talk — her tone was rich and rounded, her accent heavy and exotic. She invited him to dream of a world far from his own existence.
The others in the room began to stir, moving towards Caley’s hands, but Shalev asked a question out loud.
‘Do you think’, she declared, ‘it is right to be tempted by such trinkets? These are the things that separate them out there from you down here. The trinkets are obtained by forcefully removing their materials from other islands, often by slaves who have been forced to submit to the labour. And they are now used to keep you out of the newer houses, out of real daylight. Just you remember that. These are what repress you.’
Caley got a better look at the folk gathered here, most from the old unions, the smiths, or some who made a career scavenging the old mining deposits for remnant ore, and who somehow scraped a living. There were a couple of scholarly types, too, who went around as intellectuals, filling the back rooms of taverns with their theory. Still, they were good sorts. And all could not take their eyes off the contents of Caley’s hands, so he placed them on the desk behind Shalev to rid himself of the burden.
‘Good, Caley. You’re learning well. So, tell me — what happened to Rend?’
‘Give you one fuckin’ guess,’ Caley retorted.
‘Don’t speak to her like that,’ someone behind him said.
Shalev waved the comment away. ‘I’m not your superior,’ she reminded them.
‘ ’Xactly,’ Caley muttered. ‘You ain’t no real Council.’
‘They are our temporary Central Anarchist Council though,’ Shalev corrected, ‘and they have a role to play in
