Day Boy by Trent Jamieson Read Free Book Online

months old and it doesn’t quite fit across the shoulders, and my wrists poke
out, and rupture the formality with white skin, tendons and knobs of bone. My right
wrist is bruised.
    Dain tilts his head, purses his lips, frowns. All hurt to me offends him. All such
hurt he feels as his responsibility. Doesn’t he get that I’m the one meant to be
looking after him?
    His eyes drop to my feet.
    ‘Matching socks,’ Dain says. ‘Matching socks, if you please, Mark.’
    I don’t please to do anything except fall back into bed and never get up again. But
I grunt, squint into my drawer, and make sure my socks square up—how does he know?
How can he tell? But he’s always right—and that my shoes are shining (after a last
bit of spit’n’polish).
    ‘Quick, boy,’ Dain says.
    I was, and I am! Wasn’t he watching?
    ‘Quick!’
    The wind’s got up, the sky’s clear, and the moon’s setting itself to wane. No one’s
about, but you wouldn’t be at this time of night. It can be seen as an open invitation
if a Master’s in a mood—and they always are, of one sort or another. Moody as the
storm-thrashed spring, Dain says, every single one of them. The Night Train’s come
and gone, not even an echo on the horizon or a beat on the tracks.
    Town Hall’s on Main, near the square. The Constabulary’s part of it, built into the
western edge. It’s an old white building—far older than the troubles—always smelling
of fresh paint. People got pride in this town: as long as there’s paint, this hall
will be painted.
    We aren’t the last to the meeting but we’re not the first either, and I can tell
that annoys Dain. But he’s been tetchy all the last few nights, like a prickle in
a sock. Like the one in my sock, the matching one, digging in and I can’t even scratch
the bugger.
    Two Masters come in late, smelling of blood, eyes as wide as plates, neck veins thick.
And the Parson twins are dressed shabby, one of them hasn’t even managed to match
his shoes. I flash them a grin a touch superior, until Egan gives me a look that
would freeze the blood of a normal boy and chills mine right enough.
    Five Masters together, in Town Hall. What a solemn splendid thing! There hasn’t been
a proper meeting in months, and certainly not one that required me or the other boys
to be here. The floorboards creak and crack with their footsteps; the gravity of
such inhuman men. They can be as light as breath, but here they are weighty. The
windows are misting. The Masters are darkness and luminosity and that shifts, depending
on their mood. They’re marked with ash-burnt Suns, their bangles clatter and their
eyes give out their radiance.
    Here they are Egan, Dain, Sobel, Kast and Tennyson. The uncontested rulers of this
town, have been for generations. And there it is in them, that displeasure, the intensity
with which I’m considered.
    Everyone knows why we’re here.
    There’s five Day Boys looking at me, eyes sticky with sleep. They appreciate this
about as much as me, only I’m the one to blame. Even Grove is giving me surly looks.
    It’s Egan that gets the meeting started, being the senior. Grove stands behind him.
Sobel and Dougie to his left. The rest of us around on the other side of the table.
Dain has his enemies, even here, even in this small town. And I think what that must
be like, to have those foes, to have them so close across all the centuries. I couldn’t
bear Dougie for six weeks, let alone a century.
    ‘Time,’ Egan says, his voice so smooth it could grease a rusted lock. ‘Gentlemen,
it is time. Our dear moon has found her breath at the top of her climb, and now,
past pause, she falls.’
    The room shifts, broadens and narrows like it’s grown alive, like it’s moved back
a ways but is focusing hard on us. Sometimes the sky feels like that. Dain says
that predatory sky’s one of the reasons why we need them: you need a monster to keep
a monster from the gate. I don’t know. But it makes my skin crawl,