by Zan Safra
I drop down into the square and follow her, still faded. As I round the corner my foot slips on a patch of frost. I slide and catch myself on a drainpipe, rattling it. The girl turns.
I shove myself away from the pipe, but it’s too late. She sees me. She stares at me, stares at me, her gaze running me through like a blade—
I run. Her voice follows me, a splash of silver. “Wait! I only—”
I dash along the building, the Unnatural girl just behind me. “Stop!”
Another drainpipe appears ahead. I lunge for it and climb to the roof. Just as my foot leaves the drainpipe I hear it creak. The girl climbs after me, skirts billowing in the wind. She clambers onto the tiles. “I only want…to thank you!”
She catches my arm just as I slip through the roof. The floor of the garret hurtles at us. I slip us through before it breaks us, into the fly gallery. A hanging crosswalk springs out of the darkness to catch us and the girl tumbles down beside me with a cry of shock.
Ropes tear. The entire crosswalk overturns, flinging us off.
The stage rushes at us. Somehow I catch the girl’s wrist. The scenery chandelier hangs below, already mounted for Mircalla’s ball scene. I catch it, swinging us both to a halt.
A creak ripples through the chandelier’s chain. It isn’t a proper chandelier at all, only a part of the scenery, not strong enough to—
Half of the chandelier snaps, spinning us about. The wooden frame slips out of my hand. The boards of the stage slam into my back. The girl crashes down next to me. The chandelier falls, chain whipping, straight for us.
I shove her out of the way and roll sideways. The chandelier smashes against the boards.
I jump to my feet. The girl sits upright, panting, bonnet askew. She takes a palm-sized brass globe from her mantle and twists its halves. The globe unscrews to reveal a glowing sprig of lucifern ivy. She lifts it, illuminating the shattered chandelier, the dangling crosswalk, me.
She clambers up. I find my voice. “Why…why are you here?”
“To meet you properly.” She awkwardly straightens her bonnet. “You saved my life. Twice, now.”
Her eyes meet mine, but her gaze no longer pierces. It’s softer now, curious, as nervous as I feel myself.
She curtsies. “Ayanda Draculesti.”
I remember what I was taught and bow at the waist, right hand over my heart. The name they gave me nearly slips through my teeth. I catch it and crush it. “Yurei.”
I straighten. “How did you find me?”
“Oh. Um…” Ayanda draws a square of newsprint from her mantle. It unfolds as she holds it out to me. “You’re rather famous.”
Famous?
I take the paper. I can’t decipher the Continental alphabet, much less read Venetian, but the drawing accompanying the text tells me everything. A quintet of Naturals flees the garret in panic as a gruesome spirit emerges from the shadows, skeleton hands outstretched.
“You frightened that medium out of her wits.” A small smile crosses her face. “That must have been quite a scene.”
The medium. I remember her perfectly. I was interested when I heard that the managers of La Filomena had called for a spiritualist to discover more of el fantasma. I’d expected a blind woman with strings of beads, not the haughty woman who swept into the garret in a haze of perfume. I lurked in the corner as her assistants arranged her hidden devices, obvious tricks to produce knockings and other noises. All of it was carefully concealed by the time the sitters arrived and took their seats.
So it’s a ghost you want, is it? I thought. I’ll give you a ghost.
The air thickens, filling my lungs with stone. Idiot. I was such an idiot…
My heartbeat pounds at my temples. They’ll learn of this. The news will reach them eventually. They will find me. They will come for me.
“Yurei?”
The scar on my wrist burns. A phantom noose tightens around my throat.
“Yurei!”
Ayanda watches me, uncertain. “What is it?”
I can’t speak, can hardly think. She takes my hands. I can’t bear to meet her eyes.
“If you found me…” My voice is choked, not my own. “Others will.”
“They all believe you a ghost. Not an Unnatural,” she says. “No one knows who you are.”
I raise my head. Her brow is furrowed. Her eyes are deep, dark, nearly black, but still so bright…
She lets go, folding her hands. My heart calms. She’s right. There’s no sign it was me. They think me dead.
He’s dead. I’m Yurei now. Yurei.
She speaks, a flash of silver. “How did you frighten the medium? Some sort of illusion?”
I nod, daring another glance at her. Her face brightens. “Is that your ability? How do you do it?”
“I…I’m a conjuror.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Conjuror?”
I lower my voice, letting its flames wrap around her, seeping unheard into her ears. “See fire. Heatless flame.”
Balls of blue fire spark to life around me, trailing tails of flame. I tell them to spin, surrounding me like a whirlwind, and then burst, wisps of fire in the shape of moon moths. Ayanda holds out her hand, brushing a moth’s wingtips as it flutters past and dissolves into smoke.
She laughs, a burst of falling stars. “That’s brilliant! What else can—”
A shudder seizes her. She doubles over, hugging herself, shivering as though caught in a gust of frigid wind.
“Ayanda?”
A shock darts through me when her eyes meet mine. The light has left them. They’ve gone hollow, her irises voids, unearthly, unliving.
Her voice is low, its silver sunken to stony gray. “Stay here.”
She jumps from the stage and sprints down the aisle.
“Wait!” I follow her, catching her as she reaches the foyer. She runs for the doors and yanks at their handles. Wood splinters. The brass handles tear out of the doors and come away in her hands.
She stares at the handles, eyes darting from one to the other. When she raises her head her face is a still mask, struggling to hide the terror burning behind it. “The Dead are near.”
Her lightless eyes widen. “Belle’s out there.”
She throws open the doors and bolts out into the square. I run after her and catch her living hand. Cold races up my arm but I keep hold, fading us. The few Naturals left in the square ignore us entirely. I keep my voice to a whisper nonetheless. “We’re faded. Unseen.”
“Go back! You can’t manage this!”
She wrenches her hand out of mine and shoves me back, so hard that my feet leave the ground. I land in the middle of the square, somehow keeping upright as I slide over the frosty ground. Ayanda’s eyes narrow, growing distant. She runs for the granite church and disappears through its doors.
Go back…you can’t manage this...
To hell with that.
I follow her, turning my wrist. The metal weight of my weapon drops into my hand. I press one of its facets. The weight lengthens into a blade.
I slip through the church doors and into a darkened vestibule. Incense-soaked air envelops me as I enter the nave. Despite its size the church is cramped, dim, its only source of light a rack of burning candles. A sleeping organ looms on a balcony above. Shadows fill the vaulted ceiling, lurking swaths of darkness waiting to plunge down. All is silent, suffocated.
I sharpen my hearing, searching for Ayanda’s footsteps. I hear nothing, nothing at all, no fluttering of the birds in the bell tower, not even the drip of candle wax. The world has stopped, halted in time.
But something is here. I feel it, a ripple, a distortion, as though the world itself is recoiling, twisting away from something foul, poisoned, wrong.
Run…get away from here…
I grip my blade. I won’t leave without her.
It takes all of my will to unfade. I move up the aisle, clenching my blade so tightly that my knuc
kles begin to ache. At the aisle’s end a silvery wall glimmers in the dark, a gate guarding the chancel and altar.
The stench of spilled blood strikes me. A splash of red stains the floor ahead.
I dash for it. No…no, no, no…
I reach the pool of blood. A man lies in its middle, a steaming mass of butchered flesh and the scraps of a cassock. Great gashes score his face, leaving it a shredded, unrecognizable mess of gore, as though whatever killed him lingered there, rending his face to rags.
I have seen death.
I have never seen this.
“Ayanda!” I scream. “Ayanda!”
Echoes return, taunting me. Ayanda! Ayanda! Ayanda!
“Here!”
I whirl. Ayanda runs out of the vestibule, skirts flying around her, footsteps loud on the polished floor.
Footsteps I never heard approach.
She stops before me. The hoarseness grips my voice again. “I couldn’t hear you.”
She catches her breath. “I took care to remain quiet.”
The voice. It’s wrong. It sounds like Ayanda’s to my ears, but its woven colors are tarnished, thinned, a pallid imitation.
The creature wearing Ayanda’s form adjusts its bonnet. Its heartbeat is labored, a dull drumbeat. Its breathing is wrong as well: a long inhalation, a long pause, a long exhalation from a dust-dry throat.
“Let us go,” it says. “There is nothing here to be found.”
“What are you?”
Every trace of feeling vanishes from its face. The creature watches me through a vacant mask.
“I am Ayanda,” it says.
“Are you?” I tighten my grip on my blade. “Then tell me my name.”
The mask forms into an exasperated glare. “Why do you play this game? Let us—"
“Yurei!”
Different footsteps echo through the nave. Ayanda, the real Ayanda, runs from a side door, moving towards me through the pews. “What are you…”
She stops dead, staring at her double. The imitation turns to face her. I can’t believe I was fooled for even a second. Ayanda is vivid. The mimic is waxen, its dark skin bloodless, its eyes dry as charcoal. Its posture is stiff, its movements rigid. The entire creature is grotesque, a parody, an enervated corpse crawled from its coffin.
“Ayanda, run!” I scream.
Her eyes don’t leave the creature. She reaches into her mantle.
I unleash my voice. “Run!”
The noise explodes from my throat, thundering through the nave, sending cracks forking across the windows. Ayanda rocks backwards, gaze softening yet still flickering, struggling. It’s no use. No one can overcome my voice.
It takes hold. She wheels about and runs, out of the nave and into the shadows.
The creature turns back to me. I launch my weapon, spinning the blade over my head. The creature tilts its head like a reptile, eyes alight with an unearthly, predatory gleam. A gash of a smile splits its face.
A crack forks across Ayanda’s stolen form like a fracture in porcelain. Clumps of hair fall from her scalp. Her lips shrivel. Her eyes recede in their sockets. She rots before my eyes.
With a grisly crunch the illusion shatters. Something dark and billowing climbs from the dissolving shell, a form draped in layers of black, rising to a full, towering height.
I catch the blade and fling it. The point drives into the thing’s face with a sound like a knife puncturing rotten fruit.
A croak of laughter drips through the veil. Bony fingers wrap around the blade and draw it out, inch by inch, black slime stringing from its edges.
The hand twists, wrapping the cord around itself. It jerks, wrenching me into the air. I crash to the ground. My head strikes the stone, a blow that floods my head with light, and then—
Pain, pain, ripping through my shoulder, molten lead pouring into it, scorching it, petrifying my throat, strangling my scream.
The creature tosses the blade aside. My weapon retracts. I crawl backwards, pushing with my heels, dragging myself with my elbow. The creature advances, slowly, deliberately, savoring my fear.
Steps knock into my back. I grip them, shoving myself to my feet, and fall back against the silver gate. The creature nears, paces away now, reaching into one of its billowing sleeves—
I press against the gate and slip through it.
The creature halts, claws inches from the gate. I wait for it to tear it down, to grasp the silver and rip it apart, but it lowers its hand. A hidden gaze burns into me. Staring.
The creature growls. I’ve never such a sound, a human voice mangled beyond recognition, a travesty poisoning my brain like venom. The pain sears me, tears me. I stumble back and slip through the stone wall, into empty air.
Chapter Nine
Jette
FLURRIES OF TINY SNOWFLAKES spiral above the darkening square. Candelabra gas-lamps shimmer in the gloom, casting foggy light over figures hurrying through the snow. I shrink back from them as they pass, further into the shadows of the alley.
Hunger cramps my stomach. I have not eaten in two days, but that does not matter now.
I pull the hood of my pilot’s coat lower over my head and look out again. A canal, a granite church and some sort of theater border the square on three sides. Across from me stands a third building, an enormous hulk with a marble facade. It seems out of place, as though it grew out of the ground and shoved the other buildings aside. On the lintel above the door three carved words are plain.
ACADEMIA ALCHEMICA VENESIANA
I clench my fists around the cuffs of my sleeves, stopping the cold from creeping up my arms. Something is wrong with the Academia. When I look at it directly it seems a building as solid as any other. When I turn my head it changes. Out of the corner of my eye the Academia seems to slant, walls bending, towers tilting, turning it to a painting of an impossible, unearthly thing.
It reminds me of the Scholomance.
A lump of ice drops into my stomach. Some alchemical collegia are subject to the Scholomance and some are not. I know nothing about this one. The Academia is as secretive as the rest.
Collegia never reveal their researches. Even the Naturals might storm their gates if they knew.
I huddle into my coat. I do not know what to do. I had only a skeleton of a plan when we came here. I thought I would invent a better one when we needed it, likely on the spot. I am rather good at that.
Most of the time.
I squint at the last few Naturals crossing the square. They are as unfamiliar as all of the others. None of them could be Belle, not even in disguise. Wearing a chimerical illusion would not change her features.
I kick a patch of ice. This is useless. Belle may be anywhere, lost in a world she knows nothing of, with mobs of Naturals and that…
That thing.
I know what it was. One of the things that destroyed London. A vampire.
She fought it and lost. She was useless against that creature. She struck it with everything she had and it laughed at her.
There is a creature stronger than she is. A killer.
And Belle and Yurei are in the city with it.
I take another look. No one passes through the Academia’s doors, but I know better than to think the Academia empty. It is more than an academy. Full alchemists research there.
If I meet an alchemist, I am dead.
A plan, I need a plan…
Then I see him.
On the bridge crossing the canal is a man, standing at the top of the steps. He is clad entirely in black, from his hat to his shoes, holding the handle of a black umbrella in his black-gloved hand.
He has no face. Between his collar and his hat is only a grinning white mask.
He is staring at me.
My skin crawls. His gaze drips over me like a coat of icy slime.
I run down the empty alley, pulling open my coat to free my bandolier and staff. My brain races. The Scholomance. They h
ave found me, they must have…but not, that does not follow, the Scholomance would not bother with disguises…
I turn into another alley and stop dead. A man in a grinning mask stands at the alley’s end.
He is not the same man. He is dressed identically but is taller and thinner. He waits, stiff as an automaton. Watching.
Frost crunches behind me. Another masked man steps out from behind a corner and stops in the middle of the alley.
A weapon cocks. Before I can turn back a mass strikes me like a flying rock. I grab my arm. Something cold and viscous smears my hand, thick as the trail of a slug.
I feel something of glass snagged in my alchemized coat and rip it out. It smashes against the ground. An ampoule tipped with a broken needle leaks black slime onto the snow.
The masked man lowers a pistol crossbow. He reaches into his coat and takes out another ampoule.
You hurt me…
A bolt of red pain tears through my head. A growl. You hurt her…
The pain roars down my spine. The tentacles shoot through my veins. My blood turns to magma. My skin flashes gray.
The masked man loads the ampoule. The second man raises an identical weapon. They fire. I dodge one bolt. Smash the other out of the air—
Rage.
Rage.
YOU STRUCK HER YOU HURT HER YOU DIE YOU DIE—
No…
I cannot…I cannot do it again, I cannot let her, not again, not again, I can’t I can’t I won’t—
Rage. Fire. Pain. RAGE—
My colors flicker. She is winning. She is drowning me, throwing memories at me, fighting to hold me back—
There was fire. There was blood, blood everywhere, drenching my clothes and spattering my face and burning like acid in…it was in my mouth, it was in my mouth—
But I wrestle out and run. The world about me is a throbbing smear. Rage and fire boil. There is only fury and fire and pain—
Grab them tear them beat them rip them limb from limb—
NO!
Glass smashes against a wall. Darkness appears ahead. A tunnel. Sotoportego. I throw myself into it. Run. Run. I do not care who they are, I cannot…I cannot let her—
Bash them rend them break them crush them kill them—