The Book of Dead Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

invisibility as he passed through the City at night.
    The City was looking its best. Some of its unpleasantness was obscured during the holidays. As was the custom, evergreen branches had been brought in to decorate houses, shops and other buildings. It was also traditional to burn candles at this time, and windows everywhere twinkled with pretty lights that burnt long into the night.
    Night. It was all he seemed to see, especially during these winter days. Valerian kept Boy busy with this and that all through the small hours, until finally, just as dawn was creeping over the City, he would let him stagger off to his cot to slumber the day away; then, shouting through all the floors of the house, Valerian would rouse Boy for another evening’s performance in the theater.
    “I am a vampire,” Boy said grimly as he stole down Dead Duck Lane. “That’s it. He’s a stinking vampire and now I am too!”
    Realizing he was talking aloud, he looked rapidly around him, but he had gone unnoticed.
    Boy thought again about what had happened to Valerian. It was only a recent thing; maybe just a few weeks or months ago, Valerian had become more irritable than usual. His moods had always swung rapidly from one extreme to another, but now they seemed fixed. Surly and preoccupied, he was less violent, less vitriolic. He spent hours on end in the Tower, only emerging to get Boy to run an errand. Boy had delivered a lot of letters for him recently, and collected many in reply.
    Letters,
thought Boy.
Letters?
    It reminded him-there had been one evening, one evening in particular, when he had delivered a letter to Kepler. Kepler lived a good way across the City, in the University Quarter.
    Boy didn’t like Kepler much. He wasn’t sure why exactly; there was something about him Boy just didn’t warm to. Maybe it was because Valerian listened intently to what Kepler had to say, but showed little or no interest in any opinions Boy might have.
    Kepler was thin like Valerian, but shorter and with none of Valerian’s strength. He was always muttering to himself, and tended to scurry about, like a rat, Boy thought. But if it was true that Boy didn’t like Kepler, it was also true that he was fascinated by him, for he was as much of a hoarder of strange devices and peculiar mechanisms as Valerian.
    As well as being a Doctor of Medicine of the Human Animal, Kepler made specialized studies into the field of the Heavens. He had all sorts of equipment with which he looked at the stars. He recorded his observations in huge leather-bound books, having noted the motions of planets, stars and moons through his metal-and-glass devices. Kepler had told Boy that he could then make all sorts of predictions about people and their behavior, just by knowing when they had been born. Increasingly Boy had gone with Valerian on his visits to Kepler’s house. He would sit quietly in the corner of Kepler’s room and marvel at the astounding discussions they would hold.
    Boy wished someone could tell him about
his
life, predict what would happen to
him,
just by setting his date of birth against the position of the stars. He knew, though, that even Kepler could not do that, because Boy did not know when he had been born.
    Once Boy had been worried about this. He had even been bold enough to speak to Valerian about it.
    “Who do you think my parents were?” he had asked. “How could I find out?”
    But Valerian scoffed. “You will never know, nor does it matter one jot. Nor,” he added, “do you need to know. You are Boy,
my
Boy, and that is enough.”
    Boy always tried to do what Valerian told him to- things were safer that way. So Boy tried not to think about the matter any more, but it was not always easy.
    On this particular evening, however, when Boy had delivered the letter to Kepler, the Doctor had said, “Wait,” and sat down to write a reply. Boy had watched him as he scratched away with a sophisticated silver-nibbed fountain pen on a sheet of