City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [135]
Now he needed help.
She lived at the other side of the Ancient Quarter, the witch, some distance away from the Onyx Wings, in a street that was perhaps the very oldest in the original city. A chilling sea mist had rolled in for the evening, smothering the streets, allowing every corner even more anonymity. Flares of torchlight punctured it occasionally, providing enough guidance for him, though he knew the route by instinct – after all, he had been born and brought up around here. Up ahead someone had abandoned a box of wasted biolumes, their impotent glow revealing only their inevitable death.
The witch had helped him with so many things. After he had been bitten, and he discovered he could not bear to be in sunlight any more, his reaction was one of a violent allergy – but the witch had concocted one of her treatments and healed him, so that he could face sunlight again, and maintain a normal existence.
He found her door, a squat panel of wood set in a damp corner, lichen and moss caking the surrounding stonework, and he knocked twice and stood waiting, his hands buried deep in his pockets. The door opened with a creak, showing it was darker inside than out.
‘Sycoraxe,’ he greeted her.
The old woman stood there hunched in her shawls, holding a thick wooden staff with a lizard’s face carved on the top. Her hair was white and straggly, her face broad yet clearly undernourished. Two blue eyes examined him with ferocity from amid sagging flesh.
‘Another potion this time?’
‘I’m after something more potent.’
Sycoraxe grunted and let him in, leading him through the cold darkness of her hallway and into the kitchen.
‘She left me. The bitch has left me.’ He explained his predicament, and the witch watched him, just like she always did, saying nothing, reading between his words for any extra meaning.
‘Take off your mask. I’ll return presently.’ Sycoraxe set off through the house, shifting back and forth, humming to herself between rooms. All the while he sat in a chair feeling miserable.
Eventually she returned, carrying an open book in her hands. She gaped at its pages as she spoke to him. ‘You wish for her to be deleted, I take it?’
He pondered for a moment about the chances of renewal, about rebuilding something. He couldn’t have this sort of thing happen to him, couldn’t let the lads find out, because he’d then be a joke to them, wouldn’t he, a man whose wife fucked off.
‘Of course I bloody do,’ he mumbled finally.
‘You can’t do this yourself?’
‘I don’t know where she’s gone.’
‘As you wish,’ she replied. ‘I have a little something I’ve been working on for some time, but never found an opportunity to use it. I’ll need some of her belongings, of course. Particularly, get some of those execrable relics, if you can.’
‘Fuck are you going to do?’
‘Just fetch some of her belongings, and one or two things of your own, while you’re at it.’
*
Malum skulked off into the night, wondering what the hell Sycoraxas planning. More than once he had called upon her to find her busy with some unnatural thing contorting in spasms, but he had known better than to ask about it. She was a legend throughout the underground, a being from another time entirely, and her name was whispered with fear.
No doubt she would be overjoyed to have this opportunity to try out some new-fangled evil.
He hacked his way through chill winds, reaching his home through a dank sea mist. Beami hadn’t yet taken much, not that he knew precisely what had gone – just a sense of something missing from the house. The bedroom first, where he gathered a pair of her breeches, and a long skirt she hadn’t worn since the ice had taken a firm grip. He then proceeded downstairs, still drunk with frustration, into her workroom. Oddly, he couldn’t remember the last time he had actually been there.