CLEAVER FLAY
Skulking in the shadows at the back of the butcher’s shop, a tall, beefy man with a pointy bald head watched the kerfuffle opposite. He liked it that he could see them but they couldn’t see him. That kept everything neat. And tidy.
‘Insects,’ said Cleaver Flay in a flat voice.
His almond eyes narrowed even more in the half-light and a lopsided sneer disfigured what would ordinarily have been full, sensuous lips. A woman’s lips, almost. Lips that were meant to be kissed but hadn’t been for a long, long time.
And still he stood there. Quiet as the dead. A dead man standing. Just those black eyes flicking back and forth on either side of his hooked nose. For Cleaver Flay was a man of distinct habits. He was a neat man, whose wardrobe upstairs boasted exactly eight pairs of white trousers, eight starched white shirts (sized XXXL), and sixteen blue-and-white striped butcher’s aprons with tie strings that he had extended so they would reach around his enormous stomach. He needed 16 aprons because he changed them twice a day. Because of all the blood.
And they were as clean as clean can be. As clean as Cleaver Flay’s fingernails. As clean as Cleaver Flay’s hands, scrubbed red raw every morning and night with a wire brush and disinfectant. As clean as Cleaver Flay’s vast body, covered in animal fat every other morning and razored free of every last strand of hair.
THE DRAGON
And it got nearer and nearer until the source of it reached the edge of the small sleeping space Jago and I had cleared out in the corner. Then, with the light show fading a little, and another sad little ‘eeeeek’, what looked at first glance like a hairless rat poked its head out from under a roll of rotting carpet and looked at us with a quizzical turn of its head.
“Eeeeeeek,” it went again, and tottered in to plain view, one of its black, beady eyes fixed on us and the other on the pouch that Jago had dropped when we thought the place had burst into flames.
“What is it?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “A lizard? I’ve heard tell of them. Look at its skin, though.”
“It’s the same as the pouch,” agreed Jago, “but brighter.”
The little creature was now nudging the pouch with its nose and making pathetic mewling sounds. It looked like someone had crossed a snake with one of the gargoyles you see on old buildings around the City. It was about the size of a small kitten, had a short, stubby tail, a longish neck, and its legs reminded me of a rabbit’s – the back legs longer than the front paws so that it could sit upright if needed. But perhaps the most astonishing thing about it was its skin; it was everything that the skin of the pouch was but 10, 20, no, 100 times more vibrant. It was an ever-shifting rainbow-coloured kaleidoscope, a breathtaking iridescence that rippled with every movement of the creature’s body.
THE KITTEN TAPPER
DS Locke, on the other hand, had never felt so liberated. His fingers fiddled absentmindedly with an ‘amulet’ that hung around his neck on a piece of rough twine. He caressed it, feeling the slight raised nodule where the twine had entered the kitten’s decapitated head, and the little misshapen skull, flattened on one side where he had ‘tapped’ it, and then continued to where the twine exited the other ear.
It was, he thought, a bonzer necklace. And didn’t they just love it when you stroked their ears?
And all around, in the sea in which he floated, in the primeval mental soup that seemed to connect them all, there she was. She who whispered of the wonderful things to come, of the Empire of the Wolf and their places in it.
His place in it.
Locke stood outside the door which kept him from the prize – the scarred boy – and thought so hard that it hurt; it felt as if his brain were floating free and bumping against the inside of his skull.