Three Parts Dead

15

Tara’s scream did not stop Shale, but the shield of Craft she threw between them managed well enough. His talons raked across its translucent surface, once, twice, three times, scattering sparks that burned on tiles and furniture. She stumbled under the weight of his attack and fell, curling into a ball on the floor, but kept her hands and the shield between them.

Again he assailed her, and again her shield held. Tara gathered her legs deliberately beneath her and rose into a crouch. As she stood, she fixed Shale with the glare of a woman who could strangle gods on their thrones.

He froze for a fleeting moment, and through his eyes she traced the patterns of his thought. He had hoped to kill her quickly and flee to his people before the Blacksuits chased him down. Every wasted second reduced his chances of escape. Did his large ears detect the footfalls of Justice approaching their door?

Shale knew the steel inside her, and knew as well that he could not prevail against a Craftswoman and the Blacksuits together. He glanced over his shoulder toward the barred window. In that momentary pause, she drew her knife from the glyph above her heart.

There was no need to use it. He made the right choice, and leapt backward in a silver streak, somersaulting through the air to land facing the window. Tile cracked and splintered beneath his feet. One large hand ripped the metal bars free of their mooring, and another shattered the safety glass. Fluid as quicksilver, he leapt from the windowsill into space, teeth and claws naked and sharp, wings flared.

He landed with a thud on the fire escape of the building opposite, a God Wars–era pile of iron and red brick. Rusted metal creaked and bent under his weight but did not give. As Tara ran to the window he clamored up the metal frame, not bothering with the stairs. She marveled at him, swift, sure, strong.

But he wouldn’t believe in such an easy escape.

The sunset paled and the hospital lights guttered as she drank in tiny flames of ghostlight and candle. She cloaked herself with darkness and power. Shadows trickled through her muscles and covered her body.

Ten feet from here to the next building over, she judged. Four stories of fall. The hole in the wall was not large enough for a running leap. She climbed onto the windowsill as Shale reached the seventh story of the building opposite. One more level and he would flee faster than she could follow.

Tara leapt.

Empty air yawned beneath her. Arms straight out in front, fingers outstretched. She must have let out a battle cry of some kind, for Shale turned and saw her, almost soaring though she lacked wings. Seven feet. Eight. Reach. You can make it.

The tips of her fingers curled about the iron railing, then let go.

She fell.

She slammed into the fire escape one floor down. Had she not shifted power from her muscles to the shadows that protected her, the impact would have broken her elbow. Wind whistled about her; an iron rail bounced off her ribs. Flailing, she grabbed hold of a banister for a second. The sudden jolt nearly dislocated her arms. Her grip broke, but at least she was falling slower.

The paving stones hit her like a god’s hammer. Light exploded in her chest and behind her eyes. Through the haze that obscured the world, she saw Shale silhouetted against the clouds before he disappeared.

A flight of stone steps a few feet away led to the brick building’s basement door. She crawled to those steps and worked her way down them until she found a shady corner. Crouching there, she drew darkness close as a blanket. Anyone examining the alley from above would see only shadows.

She leaned back against the rough brick wall, and with her fingertips she tentatively explored the shelf of her ribs, her legs, her arms, the back of her skull. Her protective Craft had worked. She had a few bruises, one so deep it would surface slowly over the next several days, but no broken bones.

Her shoulder bag, with its needles and beakers and burners and silk and other implements of Craft, was a greater loss than any of her injuries, but there had been no other option. A savage assailant, hurried and carrying hostages, would not pause to collect their luggage. If the Blacksuits believed the gargoyle who stole their witness had taken her, too, they wouldn’t seek her out, and she would be free to work. Besides, leaving her belongings should dispel any suspicion on Justice’s part that Tara was kidnapper rather than kidnappee.

Still, she hoped she saw that bag again.

She waited, listening with shallow breath to the furor above as Blacksuits burst into Shale’s room. It took them seconds to digest the chaos, and perhaps a minute to notice the fire escape opposite, bent and twisted where Shale hoisted himself up. The frame had not been designed to support a thousand pounds of gargoyle.

On cue, three black glass forms leapt from the infirmary window and clattered against the fire escape. Limbs surged like pistons as they climbed. Soon they reached the rooftops and vanished, continuing their hunt.

As a courier and Guardian of Seril, Shale knew how to evade pursuit. The Blacksuits sought a gargoyle carrying hostages. Shale, unburdened, could outpace and outmaneuver them.

So far, everything was going according to plan.

Tara smiled grotesquely, then winced at the pain in her side.

*

Abelard closed his eyes and ran, following the red glow of the coolant line. He tripped over a toolbox left by a maintenance monk and banged his knee against a sharp piece of unseen metal. If either metal or fall injured him, he couldn’t feel it. The shadow creature’s claws had torn holes in his leg, and numbness spread from them. With each heartbeat his feet grew heavier. Behind, he heard the shadow’s limbs clatter over stone and metal, accelerating.

He could not rely on speed to escape, but in fifteen years of working in this boiler room, playing hide-and-seek and capture-the-wrench in its maze turns and dead ends, he had seldom relied on speed.

He leapt from the floor’s edge onto a scaffold and climbed down a quick ten feet through a narrow gap between a wall and a water reservoir. Before reaching the boiler room he stepped off onto a side passage. His hands shook as he unclipped a wrench from his belt and threw it underhanded back into the gap. It clattered off the scaffold as it fell to the boiler room floor, sounding a great deal like a scared young man fleeing a predator. He retreated twenty feet into the side passage, where a ladder descended into another part of the boiler room. With one hand on that ladder’s top rung, he crouched, turned, and set the bull’s-eye lantern before him.

There had been no light in the hidden room save the glow of what he felt certain Tara would have called Craft. This thing grew in and fed on shadow. Real light might blind or injure it. Abelard had no reason to suspect his plan would work, but he needed to try something. He couldn’t run forever.

He stilled his breath and readied his fingers on the lantern’s cover. Calm. Careful. Wait.

Exhale.

Above, almost inaudible, tiny claws scraped across metal. Closer, descending the scaffold. A distinct inrush of air, amid the hundred metallic sounds of boiler and turbine and piston. Was the creature smelling for him? Could it see in the dark? How well? How smart was it? Why was it taking this long?

He tried to pray, without bothering to think who might answer.

Clicking, clattering, closer.

The hiss of foul breath deepened and grew louder. It had drawn even with the side passage.

He flicked open the lantern’s lid, and hoped.

A beam of fiery light lanced through the cloying darkness. Narrow at the lantern’s aperture, twenty feet out the beam was broad as the tunnel’s mouth.

The shadow creature had grown. It nearly filled the eight-foot-tall passage, and longer, thinner thorn-limbs trailed beyond. Smoke rose from its body where the light touched. Jagged mandibles snapped open, and fanged mouths loosed a horrible, inhuman cry.

Don’t be smart, Abelard whispered. Be fierce, be cruel, vindictive, but, please, Kos, don’t let it be smart.

Scuttling on many sharp limbs the creature launched itself down the hall toward the lantern. Shadow-flesh shriveled as it moved. Light tore steaming gaps in its body.

Abelard breathed a silent prayer of thanks and descended the ladder as if in free fall.

*

The vampire’s fangs pierced Cat’s wrist, sharp as a bee sting. The pain was brief; his lips fastened reflexively on her wrist and euphoria spread from the wound as he began to suck. Pleasure tingled into her fingers, back up and around to her heart, from there to her entire body. Perfection enveloped the world. Knots within her soul untied, or else were sliced open by the sword of bliss.

Were her eyes open or shut? Was she still sitting up, or had she slumped against the vampire as the joy of him took hold? Was she even breathing?

Paltry, everyday concerns. Ecstasy ruled her soul.

She wasn’t supposed to be here. She had a duty, someone to protect. A woman. A woman who had told her a story.

The red sun’s bulk settled beneath the horizon, and the sky outside the window dimmed. Far away there came a crash of broken glass, followed by a cry Cat heard with spiritual ears: the cry of Justice, a summons to all Blacksuits to pursue a Stone Man who had abducted a witness and a Craftswoman.

Tara.

Tara had told Cat to check on the vampire. Here he was, unharmed, healthy, glorious. Hungry.

His eyes were open.

She saw satisfaction, confusion, and revulsion superimposed on his face. Roused from sleep, he found his teeth buried in a strange woman’s wrist. He was hungry, and his will was weak. He did not push her away. A beast within him woke, stretching and yawning in his red eyes. One clawed hand rose feebly from beneath the sheets and hesitated, uncertain whether to seize her or thrust her from him, unsure whether she was real or a predatory dream.

Cat tried to think through the rush. Why had she left Tara’s side? Her orders had been to watch the Craftswoman. Cat’s memory was hazy, but she recalled a story, a suggestion, a sudden desire.

Tara had done something to her. Twisted her.

The vampire’s hand rose, curved, to grasp the back of her neck.

Pulling her wrist from his mouth was as hard as turning from the gates of paradise. She fell back off the bed and sat down hard on the tile floor. The vampire snarled and rose to a crouch, silhouetted by the last rays of the setting sun. Her blood stained his lips and his chin.

“What the hell were you doing?”

Cat’s mouth fell open.

“What. I mean.” He wiped the blood off his chin with his fingers and regarded it in fascination and disgust. “Seriously, woman. What is wrong with you? Haven’t you ever heard of consent?”

She pressed her back against the wall and slowly stood. Blood pounded in her ears. The wound in her wrist had closed when his fangs left it, but it still hurt.

“I could have killed you,” he said.

“I…” Words were hard, imprecise. Fog clouded her mind.

“Wait.” Red eyes flicked from the crown of her head to the bottoms of her boots, and back. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Before.” She nodded. “When you spoke with … Tara.” She spat the name.

His tongue flicked out, and the blood on his lips disappeared. He wiped his chin on his wrist, and licked that clean, too. “Where is she? Why are you here?”

Shaking her head did not clear her mind. “I’m … She made me come here.”

“You’re an addict,” he said, with the distaste Cat reserved for words like “pusher” and “pimp.” “You’re an addict, but even an addict would know better than to give an unconscious vampire their blood. You’ve been … not drugged.” His eyes narrowed. Vampires could see beyond the normal range of human sight, she knew. “Something’s worked through your mind. Made you vulnerable.”

“Tara did something to me. I wouldn’t have left her alone otherwise.”

How could you let someone into your mind, Tara had said with mock horror, before she bound Cat in chains forged from her own need. Gods and goddesses, that bite had felt so good.

“Alone? Where?”

Cat didn’t answer. Justice depended on her, and she let herself trust Tara, let herself be betrayed. She shuffled unsteadily along the wall to the door, turned the handle, staggered out, and ran, lurching, down the hall. Justice railed in her mind for control, and she yearned to slip from the dead dry aftermath of the vampire’s bite into her suit’s cold embrace. If she did, though, Justice would know her sin. She could be dismissed for such a lapse, cut off from the the suit forever. She could not allow that.

“Wait!” The vampire—Captain Pelham—followed her out of the room. He wore boots and breeches already, and pulled a loose, unlaced shirt over his head as he jogged to keep pace. “I’m not staying in that bed one more minute. Something’s happened, and I want to know what.”

“That,” she said, trying to ignore the clenching nausea of blood loss, “makes two of us.”

*

Abelard heard a crash of broken glass above as the lantern shattered. Perhaps he had injured the shadow beast, perhaps not, but at least the light had slowed it. He needed every advantage he could seize. Sister Miriel kept the boiler room dimly lit so as not to damage the night vision of Technicians or maintenance crews bound for darker areas of the Sanctum. There were shadows enough here to nourish his pursuer.

He took his bearings, compression chambers to his left, yes, good, and the coal bins to his right, and ran. His cigarette he plucked from his mouth and gripped between two fingers. He needed fresh air in his lungs. Metal distended and tore behind him as the creature descended the ladder.

Winding through tubes and pipes, Abelard chose his escape path, clockwise through the compression chambers that ringed the boilers, and in through a narrow gap between a compressor and a stone wall. His heart lurched in fear as he imagined squeezing through a tight passage with the creature bearing down on him, but the next opening was three hundred feet farther along. Too far.

He turned a hard corner as a mass of shadow scrambled, slipped, and fell to the floor a few hundred yards behind him. Enough of a lead, he hoped.

He ran fifty feet. A legion of centipedes chased after, legs tickling rock and metal, the floor, the walls, the ceiling. A hundred feet, and the shadow’s speed redoubled. It smelled him. Two hundred feet, made in a mad rush, cigarette in one hand and the crystal dagger stuck through his belt.

The dagger had pinned the shadow creature to the altar. Could it harm the thing again, hold it down? Abelard hoped he did not have a chance to learn the answer to that question.

Two hundred fifty feet. Breath hissed through numberless mouths, near, so near. There, the narrow gap. He leapt into it. Cobwebs parted before him. A spider landed on his hand and fell away.

The centipede army drew even with the narrow crack and stopped. Its bulk closed out the dusk-red light. Long, thin arms slid through the crack after Abelard.

Metal caught his robes and he pushed through; fabric ripped as he tumbled into the room beyond. Or, as his torso did.

Long hooks of shadow snared his legs, and pulled him back.

Screaming, he fell. In desperation he planted one foot on either side of the crack and resisted the creature’s pull with all his strength. This only slowed his slide. He clawed for the dagger at his belt. His fingers closed around its hilt, and he stabbed at the tentacle gripping his left leg.

The crystal blade slid through the shadow and cut Abelard’s shin. He cursed, but did not drop the dagger. The creature’s strength grew as his faded. Nightmare mouths gaped above him, filled with nightmare teeth. Living shadow bubbled out through the passage, swelling in the vast dim space.

He was about to die.

In such moments, time expands. To Abelard’s surprise he found the sensation almost pleasant. He was about to be eaten by a giant shadow beast, through no particular fault of his own, and there was nothing he could do.

As the night-mandibles reared to descend, he raised his cigarette to his mouth and inhaled.

Its tip flared.

Flared.

Light hurt this thing, enough at least to anger it. What would fire do?

As the mandibles struck, Abelard plucked the cigarette from his mouth, held it as if the ember were a blade, and stabbed blindly into the shadow.

A roar shook the boiler room. Abelard sprawled back, legs his own again, cigarette still clenched in his fingers. The creature convulsed, outlined in orange flame that chewed its slick sharp edges to crumpled ash. The fire died as it consumed, and Abelard doubted it would kill the shadow, but he didn’t care. He was free, and safety near.

Lurching to his feet in a confusion of ripped robes and bloody limbs, he sprinted for the ladder to the maintenance office.

*

The sun set as Tara crouched in the basement stairwell. She imagined the chase above, Blacksuits swarming over rooftops in search of their winged quarry, who hid and ran, zigged and zagged, fast and brilliant. Night deepened and behind thick clouds the moon rose, granting Shale power and speed. The Blacksuits could not match him. When Professor Denovo defaced Seril’s Guardians and rebuilt them for police work, he would have reduced their dependence on the moon for power—a sensible design decision that left the Blacksuits slower and weaker than their stone adversaries at night.

When enough time had elapsed, Tara touched a sigil on her wrist. It glowed with inner fire, and she saw in her mind’s eye a map of the city from above, marked with a bloodred dot: the location of the tracking glyph she had cut into the back of Shale’s face.

He would never have told her what she needed to know. Nor could she hope to follow him across the rooftops when even Blacksuits could not keep pace. Besides, she believed him when he claimed not to know where his Flight was hiding. They planned to seek him when night fell.

Night had fallen, and Shale moved within her mind, hunting his people. When he found them, Tara would find her answers. Judge Cabot, Kos, and the gargoyles were involved in some deep, secret Craft together, of that Tara had no doubt. Of those three, only the gargoyles survived. Their testimony could prove the Church was not responsible for Kos’s weakness, and help Tara defeat Denovo. Tonight, she would convince the gargoyles to tell her what they knew. Or they would kill her. That was also a distinct possibility.

Tara stood, scaled the basement steps, and walked to the street. Carts and carriages rolled past on their private business. Across the rough cobblestones rose a soaring glass edifice bearing the red tau cross insignia of a Craft firm.

She squared her shoulders and lifted one hand.

A driverless carriage pulled to the curb. The horse eyed her ripped clothes and general disarray with suspicion as she climbed into the coachman’s seat. “Don’t give me that look,” she said. “We’re going to the waterfront. Now giddyup.” The horse didn’t budge. “I’ll tell you where we’re going when we get there,” she said, exasperated. “Can you please move?”

With a toss of its mane, the horse surged forward, and the carriage shuddered into motion behind.

*

The unified chant of “God is dead!” had faded by the time Cardinal Gustave emerged from the small door set into the Sanctum’s looming main gates. It was replaced, after the manner of mob cries, by a host of other slogans, which degenerated in their turn to meaningless roars. A few protesters regained their former ardor when they saw Gustave’s priestly robes, but these were outnumbered by the ones who fell silent when he raised his head and looked upon them with his hard gray eyes.

“Citizens of Alt Coulumb,” the Cardinal began. His voice suggested dark rooms and hidden mysteries.

“Citizens of Alt Coulumb,” he repeated. “I should say, rather, children of Alt Coulumb. What right, you may ask, have I to come before you? My God, they say, is dead, and with Him my authority. I stand before a tower raised to a vanished ideal, and I wear the livery of an absent Lord.”

These things were all true, yet when he said them the crowd beyond the cordon of Blacksuits did not scream their assent. Silence infected them, spread by those who stood near enough to feel firsthand the weight of the Cardinal’s presence.

“Children of Alt Coulumb, ask yourself: what burns even now within your hearts? What fire dances through the pathways of your mind? When you look at me, do you feel the hot flame of righteous wrath that devours brush and brambles and soon gives way to soot and dust? Do you feel the sickly greenwood fire of treason or the slow coal-burn of contempt?”

The crowd was silent, yes, but their silence was dangerous. Cardinal Gustave had placed a shell of words around their anger, and their anger bucked and surged against it.

“Children of Alt Coulumb, that fire is your God!”

Cries rose from the audience, disbelief and half-formed epithets.

“You claim to know the mind of God, you claim to know His nature and His shape, His truth and His power. You claim He is dead when you yourselves are the proof of His glory. What citizens of any other nation would hear such news and come before me, to protest in the shadow of God’s own temple?

“Children of Alt Coulumb, a fire burns within my voice. Within my mind. Within my heart. It is the fire of incense: a fire cultivated and refined through contemplation, strengthened through long practice and given proper fuel.

“That fire is Lord Kos’s breath within me. It burns quietly, and its burning is a pleasure to the wise. Children of Alt Coulumb, that fire is gentle. But do not mistake me,” he roared over a tide of angry voices. “Do not mistake me, it still burns!”

Before him he thrust his staff. His brow furrowed, and he drew in a measured breath.

A curtain of flame erupted from the staff’s tip, red and orange and yellow, and rose into the evening sky. It was the color of leaves in autumn, but it was not autumn leaves. It was hot like the sun, but it was not the sun. It was the fire of divinity. It eclipsed the world, rippled over the reflective skin of immobile Blacksuits, and cast the shadows of the mob upon the ground.

The frontmost protesters fell automatically to their knees, from awe and to avoid the searing heat. Some near the back scrambled to escape.

Quickly as it came, the fire dissipated. The Cardinal lowered his staff. Its copper-shod tip settled with a clearly audible tap against the Sanctum’s basalt steps. His body swayed, but within him, a thing that knew no age or weakness stood indomitable.

“Children of Alt Coulumb, your God slumbers within you. In days to come, He will rise once more. Only your faith is weak.”

The crowd remained bowed. Some, at the edges, slunk away.

Cardinal Gustave withdrew into the Sanctum shadows, and closed the door behind him.

*

A Blacksuit guarded the door to the faceless witness’s room, and only let Cat and Captain Pelham pass when she flashed the badge of Justice that hung around her neck. They found the room a mess of broken and burned furniture. Tara’s shoulder bag lay open on the floor, the silver and crystal apparatus it once contained spilled out among splintered wood and shredded fabric.

“What happened here?” the Captain asked.

She had listened to Justice’s mind on the walk over, gripping her badge to hear as if through a layer of cotton the stream of deductions and observations that resounded clear and bright within her skull when she wore the Blacksuit. “A Stone Man burst in, abducted Tara and the witness, and fled.”

“Talon marks on the floor,” Captain Pelham observed. “On the wall, here, and around the bed.”

“The Blacksuits heard a scream, came running, found this.” She paced. “Godsdammit.”

“What? It makes sense, doesn’t it? You saved Tara from the gargoyles last night, and this guy”—he pointed to the broken bed where the faceless man had lain—“witnessed their crime. They came to clean up.”

“Tara invaded my mind to send me away. She must have had a reason.”

“Maybe the gargoyle interrupted her while she was doing whatever it was.”

“How?”

“Through the window.” Captain Pelham pointed to the shattered casement.

“If so, where’s the glass on the inside?” She knelt and swept her hand over the broken tiles, but discovered none. “See how these are bent?” She pointed to the bars. “Someone ripped the whole assembly out of the wall from this side.”

“If you can see that, can’t the other Blacksuits?”

“Not necessarily. They ran through, saw the Stone Man, and pursued. The examiners won’t arrive for another quarter-hour at least.” Her heartbeat quickened. If she found something Justice missed, she could use that to buy off her failure. She needed strong evidence, though. No mere guesswork would satisfy. “There was a Stone Man in this room. He didn’t come in through the window, but he left that way. Could the witness have been a Stone Man all along? Pretending to be faceless?”

“Hard to pretend that, I think. Someone pretty much has to steal your face.”

“Is there a way to break free of Craft that keeps you faceless, then?”

“Search me.” Captain Pelham examined the bent bars, the shards of glass, the splintered windowsill. Dusk washed the outside world in weak shades of gray. “The Craft pays well, but I try to keep my distance. On the first job I took from a Craftswoman, I ended up with a hunger for blood and a bad sunlight allergy.”

“Tara could have been in league with the Stone Men.” Cat clutched her temples with one hand. She was missing something. The world blurred, shifted, solidified. Everything would be fine if she donned her suit. All the pieces would fall into place.

No. Not yet. She needed a real solution.

“If Tara was working with them,” Captain Pelham asked, “why did they try to kill her last night?”

“I don’t know!”

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “you could ask her.”

“What?”

He raised a finger to his lips and pointed out the window and down. She joined him at the sill and saw Tara in the alley below, brushing dirt off her sleeves and straightening her ripped skirt and checking her collar as she walked toward the street. Her clothes were a mess, as if she had just been in a fight.

Silent, they watched Tara reach the curb and summon a driverless carriage. “We need to follow her,” Cat said.

“Follow her?”

Halfway out the window already, she paused, and swore.

“What?”

“She’ll be gone before we can get down if I don’t put on the Blacksuit, but if I do, Justice will know she controlled my mind and take me off the case.”

“I’ll catch you,” Captain Pelham said.

She tried to stop him, but he flowed past her like mist and fell to the cobblestones below; the force of his landing barely bent his knees. He looked up to her in the gathering night and held out his arms.

Captain Pelham was a stranger, an outsider, a vampire. He didn’t like her, and he had a rapport with Tara. If he dropped her, no one would ever know.

But he seemed like a good person, and if she didn’t trust him, Tara would get away.

Cursing herself for a fool, she jumped. Her fall seemed to take longer than his.

He caught her, light as a bag of down.

Being held was nice, and being this close to his teeth was a terrible temptation. So strong. Old, too, and what mattered more, original. He had been made a vampire by Craft, firsthand, not by catching the condition from another.

In Cat’s distraction she failed to notice Tara’s carriage pull away from the curb, but Pelham’s attention did not slip. He ran, the world blurring around them, and as her thoughts raced to catch up, he leapt.

Whipping wind, fluttering cloth, the street a surge of colors, and they landed—or rather he landed, with her still in his arms—stiff-legged atop the passenger compartment of an empty driverless carriage four cars behind Tara’s. The horse reared and voiced a whinny of outrage, but when Pelham said, “Follow that cab and we’ll pay you double,” it gave no further complaint.

“You’re insane,” she said.

“At least I’m good at it.”

“You can set me down now.”

“Oh.” He seemed to notice for the first time that he still held her cradled to his chest. “Sorry.” With a flourish, he stood her on her feet. She almost lost her balance and fell into traffic, but caught herself and slid instead into the coachman’s seat. “Occupational hazard. Pirate and all.”

She glowered in response and offered him a hand down.

*

Abelard climbed three, four, five rungs at a time toward the Efficiency Office. Deterred but not destroyed, the shadow creature loped through the darkness after him. With a surge of terror-born strength he burst from the wet, warm air of the boiler room into light.

Scrambling off the ladder, he found himself surrounded by sound and fury. Alarms rang from all corners of the room—coolant alarms mostly, judging from the sonorous, basso profundo chorus of the Praise of Sacred Fuel—and Technicians rushed about checking chromed dials and pressure gauges and shouting to one another. Abelard’s warning cries were lost amid the din.

Grasping a nearby table leg, he pulled himself to his feet. A startled hush fell over the room as the maintenance monks noticed his torn garments and the blood seeping from his legs.

“Something’s down there! In the boiler room! Big.” He sucked in breath. “Black, sharp…”

The astonished monks gave no sign they understood his words. They took him for mad, no doubt, another unfortunate cleric broken by the stress of the last few days. Two burly brothers approached, wearing fixed expressions of concern, to escort him out. Abelard pulled back. “Tell Sister Miriel!” Claws clicked on the ladder below. “It’s coming! Get fire!”

Each monk grasped one of his arms and pulled, guiding Abelard toward the nearest door despite his squirming resistance. Others raised their heads from their work and blinked wide uncomprehending eyes, a clutch of tonsured seagulls. The creature would tear them apart before the light killed it. “It’s coming!” Abelard lashed out with a wounded leg and kicked the back of one captor’s knee. The man toppled and let go of Abelard’s arm.

Free, he spun and pointed. “There! Look!”

Some of the monks listened, finally, and they did not return to their work.

A black, viscous thing bubbled up from the boiler room, thousand-eyed, probing with jagged limbs at the world. It thrashed and broke a nearby desk to splinters. Monks scattered. Opening many mouths, the creature let loose a terrifying hiss.

Religious men often think about death, and Abelard had given some thought to his last words. “I told you so” had not been on the list.

The creature roared, and lashed out with a claw of living darkness. Abelard ducked, and it skewered the monk who held his right arm. The man burst like an overripe fruit pricked with a needle. Abelard darted for the door.

He took five steps before he was brought up short. The air about him grew sharp, as before the onset of a thunderstorm.

Ms. Kevarian stood at the door of the Efficiency Office. The cant of her head and slant of her mouth reminded Abelard of a desert lizard he had seen once in a cabinet of curiosities. The scholar who owned the cabinet introduced to his audience a species of scorpion whose sting could kill a grown man in seconds, then placed the scorpion in a glass tank with a flat-headed yellow lizard. The lizard regarded the deadly insect in the same way Ms. Kevarian regarded the shadow swelling and burning in the center of the room.

The scholar had explained, with a carnival barker’s timing, that this lizard’s diet consisted chiefly of scorpions.

Ms. Kevarian’s stillness broke into sudden motion. She cupped the fingers of one hand as if scooping sand off a beach. Behind Abelard, the shadow creature leapt toward this interloper, barbed stingers tense to strike.

Ms. Kevarian raised her hand to the level of her eyes, and with practiced deliberation closed her fingers into a fist.

A rush of wind from nowhere flattened Abelard’s hair and nearly plucked the burning cigarette from his lips. Lightning burst within the chamber walls, but there was no light and no sound of thunder, only a concussive wave. When he opened his eyes, the creature hovered a few feet off the floor, revealed in full grotesquerie and caught in a bubble made from solid air. Angry scrabbling talons glanced off curved transparent walls. Ms. Kevarian’s grip tightened, and the bubble began to shrink. Claws raked ineffectually; limbs buckled and bunched against one another like wet towels pressed against a glass door. Still Ms. Kevarian squeezed and still the invisible sphere tightened. Spider-arms melded into thicker tentacles, and were crushed back into shadow. The creature’s hisses were plaintive in the silence that accompanied Ms. Kevarian’s working of Craft.

The bubble crushed the creature into an undifferentiated black mass. A small open space remained at the top, containing a pair of desperately snapping mandibles. Still the bubble shrank, and these too vanished, leaving a viscous sphere four feet, three feet, two feet, one in diameter.

Ms. Kevarian strode into the room. Her heels tapped a funeral beat against the stone floor. By the time she drew within arms’ length of the bubble of shadow, it was an inch and a half in diameter, vibrating softly. As she extended her free hand to pluck it from the air it was an inch around. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, half an inch.

She opened her lips, put the pill of darkness inside her mouth, and swallowed.

A hint of pink tongue darted out to lick her upper lip. She turned to Abelard, who almost winced from the strength of her gaze. “Be glad,” she said, “I came along when I did. Impressive alarms you have in this Sanctum.”

He nodded, shivering. “What…” Vocal chords, like the rest of his muscles, were uncooperative. “What was that?”

“One of the gods’ own rats,” she said. “Rousted from hiding. Angry, hungry. Could have used salt. Where did you find it?”

“Be-below,” he managed.

“You should get your temple cleaned more regularly.” She crooked a finger at him. “Come. We have work to do.”

*

Shale’s red dot bounced like a child’s ball around the map in Tara’s mind. Every time she thought he reached a final hiding place he reversed course and veered again toward Midtown, darting through underground tunnels and sprinting down the tracks of elevated trains. Tara directed her carriage to wander side streets and keep away from main thoroughfares until at last, presumably after being found by his Flight, Shale came to rest at a warehouse three piers north of the Kell’s Bounty’s mooring.

This was a dead and dangerous strip of city, where bleak talon-scarred buildings faced the night with shattered windows and broken doors. Dim streetlights illuminated loading docks strewn with rotted lumber and decayed canvas. In daylight, the warehouse would have looked like a health hazard. At night, it menaced from every approach.

Tara paid the horse and dismounted two blocks from her target. Navigating the dockside streets back to the warehouse proved less difficult than she feared. A gang of cutpurses tried to mug her, but they were no trouble. Thieves in this city fled from a little fire and the barest hint of death.

Her true quarry would not be so easily cowed.

No sentinels guarded the warehouse doors, nor could she see anyone lurking on the rooftop. Not that she expected to. The Guardians knew Alt Coulumb in their blood, and blended into its shadows and murk like wolves into a deep forest. That bum sleeping under a ratty blanket, curled up near a streetlamp with a liquor bottle in one limp hand, might be one of them, or the doxy limping along the street, or the drunk pissing against a wall half a block down. Even in their true forms, any shadow could shelter them, any stone protrusion provide camouflage.

Five minutes were too many to waste outside an abandoned warehouse debating whether to enter. Raising her chin, Tara crossed the vacant lot and climbed the ramp to the loading dock. She picked her way through the detritus of economic endeavor to the doors, one of which still stood. The other, unhinged, had collapsed onto the rock floor within. She stepped over the threshold.

Decayed and long picked clean of valuables, the warehouse did not seem an ideal headquarters for a religious insurgency. One expected gargoyles to prefer the peaks of skyscrapers, where they could open their toothed maws to drink in the rising moon, not a place like this, a bare slab floor strewn with broken crates that had served as rats’ nests before the cats moved in. High, broken windows admitted the streetlamps’ yellow gas glow and the pale reflected light from the clouds above. At the far end of the warehouse, a long-abandoned foreman’s office rose twenty feet above the ground on rotten wooden pillars.

Tara’s mental map was accurate, but not precise. Shale was somewhere in this building, but she could not tell more. She had expected him to run until his people found him. Had he set an ambush instead?

Sudden movement seized Tara’s attention. A shadow shifted behind a pile of broken crates, too big for a rodent or a cat.

Wary, she stepped forward. Her hand rose to her heart, and with a twist of her wrist she drew her knife, crackling and blue. It cast a pool of cool radiance at her feet. The noise and light gave away Tara’s location and her skill with Craft to any hidden observer, but she lacked subtler weapons. She skirted to the right as she approached the pile of broken wood, to keep out of striking distance as she rounded the corner.

Behind the crate, Tara found only bare stone.

Had she imagined the movement? The night was dark and the building disturbing, but surely she was not so unnerved as to leap at shadows? Frustrated, she glanced about the warehouse for a potential cause: a swift scuttling lizard, an assailant trying to lure her into position, an urchin taking shelter from the night and the fierce dockside streets.

Nothing.

With an inward groan, she straightened, lowering her knife-hand to her side. Had Shale slipped her tracing charm? He would have needed to tear off his face and let it heal over. Did his powers of regeneration extend that far? Replacing a face was no simple affair of regrowing flesh. Sensory organs had to heal as well, and thousands upon thousands of nerve endings. The magnitude of power required, not to mention the pain …

As she contemplated the pain, the floor opened beneath her and she fell, arms flailing, into the abyss.