She was crying. She didn’t know why. Just that everything she had inside was emptying out, spilling on to the floor, draining away. Bile, bitterness, guilt, shame, rage, fear, hate. She was sobbing and shaking, and Crows was content to let her. He placed one of his hands on her shoulder, just to let her know he was still there, and he was waiting.

‘Sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘I must sound fucking nuts.’

‘When I came here, I was a sailor, a stoker, working below decks, a man who fed the boilers and oiled the machines. I sweated while the Chief got drunk and got paid a hundred times what I did. I was chased here, to Down, by a gang of knife-wielding men who wanted to carve their names on my belly, to see if I bled black.’

He reached down and lifted her up. Easily. She would remember that moment, of being picked up and set on her feet.

‘I have scars, like you,’ said Crows. ‘But that was from then. You are here now, and Down welcomes everyone equally. The magic is not in what you do, it is in what you become. Down changes everyone according to their nature: the good become saints. The wise become sages. The compassionate become healers. The strong become heroes. But it also turns the greedy rapacious, the liars into traitors and the genuinely wicked, oh, you must watch out for them …’

14

14

Down. She’d called it Down. That was all she gave away. Dalip had given more in exchange, much more.

The guard who’d shown him in had dragged the dog out by its hind legs, leaving a trail of shining blood from the wounds that Dalip had made. The biggest thing he’d killed up to that point had been a fish, and that had been the day before yesterday. And fish were different: cold blooded, scaly, slippery and a source of food. He was used to seeing it on his plate in a variety of guises. Dogs were different. His next-door neighbours in Southall had two pugs, ugly but endearing little things. While people had fish as pets, the quality of the relationship they had with dogs made knife-fighting with one, even one as dementedly angry as his opponent, a different prospect entirely.

He’d first kept it at bay, turning and keeping the blade-point at its muzzle as it circled him, looking for an opening. Then as it lunged at him one more time, he caught it on the nose. What had happened after that hadn’t been pretty, but at least it had been relatively quick.