should have a bite to eat. They found a nearby restaurant where Ben was subjected face-to-face across their table to a now unfiltered barrage of Nicholas’s questions and jokes and reminiscences of times past, which made Ben regret even The House of Display and Records of Wands, which he now realised had at least protected him in some measure from Nicholas’s relentless friendliness. Eventually their meal came to an end; Nicholas insisted on paying the twenty-four strada bill, saying that when he ran out of money he expected Ben to support him, even into his old age, and he laughed to show that this was a joke; Ben somehow made himself laugh as well, by remembering how laughter was done.
Nicholas was too fired up by all the promise of the day to go home once they left the restaurant and insisted they wander around for a while, looking at the sights all around, asking Ben question after question about everything he saw, as if he were a small child in a circus. Ben dealt with it all as best as he could, enduring the unending evening by practising a large measure of self-control. Eventually, Ben suggested it was getting late and it was time to go home. That was when Nicholas surprised Ben.
‘All right, it’s time to go home,’ Nicholas said abruptly. ‘Now, let’s see. Where is home?’ He then turned around in a circle, pointing with one hand and then the other to exactly where they had been during the afternoon and evening, with all the connecting streets that they had walked along. In consequence of the map which Nicholas was drawing in the air with his hands, he now outlined a logical schemata concerning their journey home with regard to the particular route they should follow on the way back. Despite his enormous irritation at even having to stand next to his country cousin, Ben was so impressed by Nicholas’s performance that he nodded his agreement without properly thinking the matter through, so glad was he in any case to be approaching the end of this ordeal of an evening in Nicholas’s company. So they set off for home, with Nicholas now directing them one way or the other with his hands outstretched high in the air at every street junction, laughing cheerfully every now and then for no reason at all that Ben could see, and so their journey continued. But it dawned on Ben after a while that Nicholas’s proposed route would take them through a part of town that Ben would prefer not to travel through this late at night, and it was now that Ben properly thought the matter through, and having done so Ben came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road.
‘Mr Raspero,’ Ben said, ‘the route which you propose is inadvisable. It must be amended.’
‘And why so?’ Nicholas asked interestedly.
‘There are certain areas of New Landern that are best avoided at this time of night.’
‘And why’s that?’ Nicholas asked, still interested.
Ben sighed as if he was talking to an idiot. ‘They are best avoided, Mr Raspero. You are newly arrived in New Landern — trust me.’
‘But what are we talking about?’ Nicholas insisted on knowing. ‘Giant bears? Crocodiles? I mean, what is it we are avoiding?’
Ben took a very deep breath, sighed very loudly, took another very deep breath, and said, ‘Mr Raspero, New Landern is home to a wide variety of people, some of whom may as well be bears or crocodiles in human form; be that as it may, the route you have proposed passes directly through a part of New Landern which presents dangers that we will circumvent by adopting an alternate route. There are dark alleys on the route you have proposed that we should not walk through at this time of night.’
‘Do you know who you are, Ben?’ Nicholas asked.
‘We will go that way,’ Ben declared, pointing with his left forefinger to his left, ‘then past the Quella Monument, right onto Barclay Street and so on. Yes, that is by far the most sensible choice. It is the longer way, but much the safer.’
‘Your mother was Lena Raspero, granddaughter of the twenty-fourth Baron of Raspero,’ Mr Nicholas Raspero informed Mr Benjamin Clark. ‘There is Raspero blood in your veins, Ben, and that Raspero blood goes back to Daniel himself. For six centuries, the Rasperos have broken their enemies and left them in pieces on the ground, and now you are afraid to go into a dark alley! Think for a moment of how low you have fallen!’
‘It is not a matter of being afraid,’ Ben said sharply, ‘it is a matter of not being foolish.’
‘I’ll give you a choice, Ben,’ Nicholas said equally sharply, ‘you can come with me or go your way. It’s up to you.’ And with that he simply turned and set off without a backward glance. Ben hesitated and then followed him. Later in life, looking back on that moment, Ben wondered why he had after all followed Nicholas. He had every reason to go his own way, not least Nicholas’s open acknowledgement that he could, but he did not. He went Nicholas’s way, and it did not seem to him later that he had, in fact, made a choice at all. His feet, almost of their own accord, had taken the rest of his body with them as they went after his excitable country cousin. Perhaps it was that Nicholas had for the first time spoken sharply to him; perhaps without having realised it, he had fallen under the influence of Nicholas’s relentless friendliness, based as it was on something unconditional, a blood relationship that was neither deserved or earned but which simply existed. For whatever reason Ben followed Nicholas, his apprehensions growing with each street they walked along. Nicholas was as annoyingly cheerful as ever, directing their progress by raising his hands in the air at each street junction and pointing the way they would take with a laugh and by saying out loud the name of the street they were about to walk along.
Everything in general was becoming dirtier and less well-kept. Broken windows like missing teeth began to appear in the walls of the houses. There was a bundle of rags on a nearby street-corner that might have been the cloth wrappings of a human being, or might not have been. Passers-by looked at Ben as if it was obvious he did not belong here, but they did not look at Nicholas in the same way, Ben noted with a certain resentment. Nicholas had no fear of being there, and so his presence was ordinary and unremarked, but Ben’s fear was as obvious as a large red balloon in the hand of a child.
To Ben’s wide-eyed gaze the most innocent sight, such as a dog’s head looking out of a window, began to take on an air of malevolent unreality. The streets seemed to take on more than three dimensions in their journey through time as if shifting geometrically around a complicated axis. Weeds grew in holes where lamp-posts had once stood, taken away too long ago for their light to even be remembered now. The world itself was becoming darker than night.
The further they walked on their way, or Nicholas’s way to be more accurate, the more Ben’s apprehensions grew, but there was no backing out of anything now, and so it came to be that the two cousins turned down Octave Alley as they travelled together side by side through the dark heart of New Landern.
Octave Alley sloped downwards, its cobbled stones wet from a recent shower of rain. The eaves of the neighbouring houses stood over them as dark silhouettes against the nighttime sky. The bright moon, waxing in its second quarter, shone a silvery light over Octave Alley, forming numerous reflections like silver coins scattered here and there by a generous hand. The moonlit brightness of the centre of the alley, like a Milky Way all of its own, under the star-strewn dome of the nighttime sky arching above and the neighbouring inky darkness of the shadows of the houses lining the alley was a silver-splashed darkness which the two travellers passed through at that time.
Two men emerged from the shadows of a doorway to their left to stand in front of them. Ben’s heart leaped into his chest and he looked around, panicking and trying to decide how they could make a run for it.
‘Please help us, guvnor,’ one of them pleaded, in what might have been a poor attempt at pleading or a mocking pretence of pleading, ‘Me and me mate, we’re out of work see, we thought maybe a gent like you could help us out with a few spare strada, what you say, guv?’ He had a large scar on his left cheek that was so deep
