The Peacock Cloak by Chris Beckett Read Free Book Online Page B

both jumped.

    The harsh white sunlight hurt their eyes and at first they could see nothing but its overwhelming glare. But they could feel the heat of a tropical sun on their skins immediately, and smell the city smells of sewage and sweat and rotten vegetables. And they could hear the shouting and screaming of a hysterically excited crowd.
    They were standing in a market square strewn with diamonds and bits of plastic box, and all around them men, women and children were jostling, shoving and screaming abuse at one another as they scrabbled on the worn paving slabs for the precious stones.
    “Holy crap,” breathed Pennyworth, whose glistening face was now grey as a corpse’s.
    Nearby, a tall woman with a baby on her back stood up, triumphantly clutching a single diamond in her fist, and glanced in their direction. The baby was screaming and screaming, but she was oblivious to it. Her hard, bloodshot eyes darkened as she saw the new arrivals with their piled boxes of jewels. There were four bloody scratches on her right cheek.
    “ Get them !” she shrieked.
    The actual words were unfamiliar to the two thieves, who knew no languages other than their own, but the meaning was very plain. Immediately the woman started to run towards them. A few other people reluctantly lifted their heads, saw the two thieves, and took in the implications. And then there were more shrieks and more people looked up. In a matter of seconds half the crowd was heading straight for them.
    “Throw it down, Pennyworth,” yelled Shoe. “Throw down the whole boxful and run!”
    He hurled the contents of his box out into the crowd, followed by the box itself. Pennyworth gaped at him for a moment, then looked back at the faces rushing towards him, crazed and murderous with longing. He swallowed once, then flung out his own box just as the tall woman with the scratched face was almost upon him. Once more there were diamonds everywhere. The crowd screeched as it took in this second helping of instant wealth. (The first lot had appeared out of nowhere only a few seconds previously.) Everyone dived to the ground, snatching and snarling and clawing. The boxes were torn to shreds in moments.
    Dodging pedestrians and rickshaws, the two thieves ran. But they’d only covered the length of one block when Pennyworth fell to his knees with a sob and threw up copiously, immediately scrabbling in the vomit for stones.
    “I’ve got to crap,” he whimpered to Shoe, “I can’t hold on any longer.”
    His foolish octopus limbs dangled into his stinking sick. Passers-by turned to stare at them. Rickshaw drivers beeped horns to try and make them look round.
    “Well crap yourself then, Pennyworth. We need to move.”
    Shoe looked back the way they had come. Any moment now, he knew, the diamonds on the market square would be exhausted and the first hungry outriders of the crowd would start to come after them.
    He pulled his sick companion to his feet, and put an arm round his shoulders to hold him up, trying not to breathe in too much of Pennyworth’s spreading stench, but gagging all the same. He looked down the streets to the left, the right and straight ahead, weighing up his options with a speed and detachment that came from long experience.
    But even as he did so, other thoughts came unbidden into his mind.
    “There’s probably another well buried under that market square”, he found himself thinking. And he remembered what Officer Graves had said about the Old Empire and its playful mysteries strewn out across the stars, and it seemed, in that moment, to make sense to him. And with a sudden pang of loss, so sharp as to bring tears up into his eyes, he recalled the room with the pool.
    “Hey! There they are!”
    “Over there!”
    The harsh shrieks of recognition were coming from the direction of the square.
    “We’ll go to the left,” Shoe decided, “the road’s busier and it’ll be easier to hide.”
    Then he tightened his grip round his foolish