Scar Night Page 0,71
sick-house full of plague victims. This entire district is rotting, ill .
Ropes threatened to snap. One cut would bring the whole nasty, ugly, filthy, smelly lot down into the abyss. With each step taken, Fogwill worried that it might be his last. Even those nets he could glimpse beneath the boards offered him little peace of mind. For the most part they were thin and frayed and looked too frail to support the weight of a dog, let alone his own portly frame. The darkness didn’t help. Occasional brands gave the timbers a buttery glow, but for the most part Fogwill was left to stumble along under the weak moonlight, his hands never leaving the street-ropes on either side. So soon after Scar Night, the moon was still a slender crescent. League-folk rarely ventured out at night and the streets were empty, but the lack of louts and cutthroats was little consolation. The man he was going to see was more dangerous than any of them.
* * * *
The crippled thaumaturge lived inside the Sparrow Bridge in Chapelfunnel. A towering wooden construction built upon a granite deck, the bridge spanned the abyss between Tanners’ Gloom on the west side and the old coalgas towers on the east. Once open to the sky, and wide enough to allow two carts to pass side by side, Sparrow Bridge had formerly been a symbol of the district’s booming coalgas industry. In years past, workers could peer over its balustrades and see a canal of air and chains plough deep into the Warrens, hedged on both sides by walls of good strong flint and trunks of smoke. But prosperity brings wealth, and wealth brings men, and men need to be housed. Now Sparrow Bridge towered to four storeys. Homes had been built above, stacked one upon the other like children’s bricks and sewn up with chains bolted to any anchor available. Pinched roofs bucked across its summit in a ragged line. Forty or so families had lived in the bridge before Thomas Scatterclaw settled here. Carts still trundled through the long tunnel below the houses, loaded with leather for the Chapelfunnel market or steel from the dismantled coalgas yards, but now moving only one at a time, and only in the daytime.
Mr. Nettle looked up at the bridge. Scaffolding clung to the outside of the houses, but it was sagging, the poles and ladders rotten. There were holes in the roofs where shingles had come loose. Broken windows fronted the abyss, all of them dark but one, high up, where a dull red light glowed.
“Iron, is it?”
Mr. Nettle turned towards the voice. The man emerging from the tunnel sat on a low, wheeled platform and pushed himself along with bandaged hands. As the man drew near, Mr. Nettle saw that his legs had been severed below the knee. Despite this, he remained powerful. Muscles bunched on his broad chest. His arms looked strong enough to break a horse’s neck. Two deep scars, like sword wounds, running down his left forearm made Mr. Nettle think he might once have been a soldier or a temple guard.
“Is it enough?” Mr. Nettle asked.
“Depends what you want,” the man said. Wheels squeaked under him. “But no, in the end it won’t be enough.”
“That supposed to be a riddle?”
The man grunted. “Danning is my name. Want to know what happened to my legs?”
“No.”
The other man grinned. “You’ll want to speak to Mr. Scatterclaw. Upstairs. I’ll take the iron.”
“Might be he can’t help me.”
Danning shrugged. “Not my problem. That’s how it works here.”
The scrounger hesitated. Smith’s pig iron was a fortune to someone from the League, enough to feed him for six months or more. If the thaumaturge was unable to help, Mr. Nettle couldn’t imagine any future for himself. But what if Scatterclaw could help him? That future might be worse than none at all.
“Can’t make up your mind for you,” Danning said, “but it seems to me you’ve risked plenty coming here already.” He smiled, but it was not a kind smile. “Mr. Scatterclaw knows you’re here. And if Mr. Scatterclaw knows, the Maze knows.”
Mr. Nettle released his grip on the trolley.
Danning tilted his head. “Door beside the red window.” He pushed himself over to the trolley, grabbed the handles, and eased them back so that they rested on his wide shoulders. Then, grunting, he set off the way he had come, six wheels squeaking now.
The scaffolding wobbled the whole way up. Greasy ropes protested and soft planks