'Do you want to go by the old house? I rented it to a tanner and his family – eight squealin' brats, all a match for you and your sister.'
Mayel shook his head. He didn't trust his voice not to betray the emotion he felt now. The Shambles was smaller to his eyes, ruder and meaner than it had seemed when he'd not known better. Guilt gnawed at him. He'd left with his father, hugging his sister tight so as to not lose her in the crowd of people fleeing the city. Their mother lay on the one bed in the shack they called home, dying of the white plague. With her last breath she urged them to flee. He could still see the blood-flecked foam bubbling from her mouth as she pleaded for them to save themselves.
For some reason his father had decided a life of service to Vellern would save them – and perhaps he'd been right, though Mayel had learned at the monastery that the white plague was nowhere near as contagious as the peasants believed it. Whatever the truth, they had set off on their pilgrimage to the Island of Birds. After a week of tramping dirt roads, his sister had stumbled, and never found the strength to get up again. The memory still left a knot in his stomach. He hadn't had the strength to hate his father then, but he'd made up for it later.
'I understand.' Shandek's voice was softer now. He knew the start of the story, and recognised the pain on Mayel's face. 'You never told me what happened to your da'.'
'He died,' Mayel replied flatly. 'After a few months he realised a monastery where they didn't make wine wasn't the place for him. Tried to slip away at night in a small boat. The Bitches took him.'
'The Bitches?'
'The rocks around the island. The monks always claimed that only people who'd fished the lake their whole life are able to navigate through them. They don't even let men from the village sail alone until they've thirty summers. Everyone else ends up smashed against the Bitches.'
'Right.' Shandek lapsed into silence. Sympathy was an underused emotion of his. What could a man say? Pity was a woman's prov¬ince, and he didn't like to intrude. Instead, he let his eyes wander the familiar lines of his home. After thirty-three summers of walking these streets, he could pick up the slightest change, whether it was a rise in fortunes permitting repairs, or the subtle indications that a man or woman were drinking more than they were working nowadays. Shandek kept an eye out for these people. It didn't do to have utter misery and complete poverty. It was like he always said: make sure the sheep are fat before you fleece them.
The sunken theatre occupied a sudden open space on the eastern edge of the Shambles, where the busy thoroughfare of Long Walk was an abrupt border to the district; folk tended to emerge blinking in t he newfound light after the narrow alleys of the Shambles. Dodging the carts and sliding through the currents of humanity that flowed back and forth, Shandek led his cousin across to where low stalls and harrows encircled the theatre, unconsciously echoing the barricade of shrines around the Six Temples further north. A pair of willow trees obscured much of the theatre's southern aspect, but Mayel could see building work going on.
'They're adding a tier?'
The sunken theatre was open, with an arched greystone wall run¬ning around three sides. At the stage end the ground fell away into a deep pit, within which a building looking like a warehouse had been constructed so its roof was level with the street. It served as both offices and backstage for the theatre. Mayel guessed that was where his so-called friend had died.
The low single-storey wall enclosing this large chunk of ground had flat-roofed rooms all around its interior. It looked small, compared with the space inside, like a child's toy made out of proportion. Mayel had remembered the theatre as more imposing, even without the wooden palisade now being erected to raise the height of the wall.
As he and Shandek got closer, they could see workmen and scaf¬folds behind the market carts that were trading as usual, ignoring the commotion behind them.
'Another tier,' Shandek confirmed eventually.
They had stopped by a butcher's stall. The woman who was running it wore a loose-fitting brown dress, low-cut and sleeveless, and Mayel could make out the tiny dark circles of blood dried into the material. He stared at the woman as her eyes drifted, listless and unfocused, over the street ahead. Her pallid skin was stretched tight over bones that looked too big for her body. 'Sign of a nasty habit,' he muttered, more to himself than his cousin.
'Eh? Ah, that one.' Shandek sniffed, though Mayel couldn't tell whether it was mild disgust or embarrassment – whoever supplied the woman might well be giving Shandek a cut of the proceeds. 'Been workin' hard on killin' herself slow, that one. Six weeks since her children died in a fire, and she won't see another six.'
As they spoke, the woman jumped at a crash from the scaffold behind. She looked fearfully at the wall a few yards behind her, as if watching it for danger. The wall itself was blank and featureless, yet it was at that she stared, rather than the windows of the new second floor above.
'Folk say she cracked before the fire,' Shandek continued, 'that it was her fault. It's said she'd been jumpin' at shadows, an' talkin' about daemons being after her girls. She set fire to the house to frighten off the shadows. Now she's got nowhere else to live. Either she sleeps in the temples, where the fires burn all night, or she's in the opium dens before nightfall. Her husband will be somewhere about here; she's only good for leavin' at the stall for a short while.'
Shandek fell silent, frowning at the woman for a handful of heart¬beats before nudging Mayel into movement, towards the theatre's main entrance. 'What with people runnin' from shadows, and these stories of a dark man walking the night streets, there's somethin' up with this city.'
Mayel didn't reply, but submitted to his larger cousin's urging. Even as they walked away, he kept his eyes on the woman for as long as he could. There was an echo of something in her face that made him shiver. For a moment, he thought he heard screams, and the crackle of flames. Then they passed around the corner and the spell was broken.
The main entrance was open, and freshly painted – as they turned in to the open gateway Shandek had to check his stride to avoid a man crouching at the right-hand gate, putting the final touches to the elaborate picture.
Mayel stopped and looked, trying to imagine the whole image, while Shandek muttered an apology for his foot clipping the painter's trailing heel. The painting was not what Mayel had expected, not the usual sort of scenes that hinted at the delights awaiting them within.
'The Broken Spear, Five Wives of the Sea – even The Triumph of Gods would be a more obvious choice than this one,' Mayel muttered.
Against a granite sky of roiling cloud, the aftermath of a battle on a bowl-shaped plain. In the background, a huge castle crowned by five massive towers. One of those towers had been shattered and flames, painted with such skill they seemed real to Mayel, licked at the castle wall. Before the walls towered the varied shapes of the Reapers, Death's violent Aspects, who embodied the ways men feared to die: the emaciated face of the Soldier glared down at the slain around his feet, while the Burning Man stood on a hillock behind him with arms outstretched like a martyr. The Great Wolf was a vague shape in the background, stalking its prey in the blurred shadows, and the Headsman reclined on a distant block of stone with his axe propped on his shoulder. Strangely, it was the Wither Queen who was painted in the greatest detail. Mayel felt her cruel gaze, her pale grey eyes, slice into him. Her lips as thin as dagger-blades were slightly parted, as though she was about to speak his name.