by Zan Safra
The other half of the room is a prison cell. A wall of iron bars holds nearly two dozen figures sprawled on the floor, thrown there like dolls.
I go to the gate. My light falls on face after face. A weathered sailor. A disheveled woman with a painted face. A beggar with broken teeth and a swollen eye. Every one of them is ragged, stained with dirt. Knobbly blackened veins crawl from beneath their sleeves and collars.
The muttering voices grow louder. Headed for the door.
I hide my luminant and pull at the barred gate. It is unlocked. I slip into the cell and lie down among the senseless moroi. The door creaks open. I shut my eyes and slip my gloved hand beneath my mantle.
The footsteps cross the room and stop at the bars. I open my eyes a slit. The two men standing there wear uniforms, long red military coats and black boots. Twin bandoliers loaded with ammunition lie slung across their chests. Rifles jut from behind their shoulders.
Skirts rustle. Two women, or things that look like women, emerge from the doorway. They move strangely, almost prowling, like lionesses on two legs. Their flesh is gray and mottled. Their hair is brittle and dark, tangled with decaying ribbons. Ruined ball gowns drape over their forms, one red, one black. Their faces are so sunken that they may as well be skulls, with eyes that shine like drops of mercury.
These women are Dead.
One of the men opens the gate. The Dead women creep up to it, bare clawed feet flickering beneath their skirts. The one in red gazes at us, licking her lips with a black lizard tongue. The one in black hisses, baring four rows of teeth. “Up, meat.”
The Naturals sit upright. I barely manage to do the same in time. They make no sound. The painted woman sits opposite me, staring through me, eyes vacant as a doll’s.
All of them rise in perfect coordination. The women adjust their skirts at the same time, with precisely the same movement. The men use the same leg to stand. They arrange themselves into two lines, silently.
I stand as well, hoping that no one notices that I am late. I stare at the painted woman’s forehead, trying to look dazed. The Dead woman in black spits, “Come.”
The moroi turn like automata. I slip behind a burly man large enough to hide me. The Naturals begin to walk, merging into a single file as we leave the cell. The Dead woman in red eyes us hungrily. She unfolds a hand, reaching for a limping man. The other snaps at her. “Vittoria!”
Vittoria withdraws her hand with a scowl. A chill sweeps over me as I pass her, as though the vampire is carved from ice. I lock my eyes on the burly man’s back and match my footsteps to his. My heart beats so violently that I am certain they can hear it.
They could lunge at me. They could order the moroi to attack me. And all I have is a drained califactor glove.
I march with the moroi, down a barely-lit staircase. It descends three flights beneath the earth. The steps turn from wood to metal. The air warms. The smell of the machineworks sweeps over me.
We pass through a hatch-like door that leads into a metal corridor, what Ayanda called a machinists’ passage. The column of Naturals turns right. We enter another passage, this one with black iron walls, lit by red alchemical lights. The vampires keep pace with us, the black-gowned one in the lead. After a time Vittoria leaps onto the ceiling, skittering along with us like a spider.
A door opens ahead with a thunderous croak. We march through it and into an iron-walled chamber. The column halts before two wide doors, each large enough for a carriage, leading into blackness. Three alchemists stand before them, two men and a woman, silver epaulettes gleaming on their shoulders. Black veins crawl from beneath their collars.
The alchemists approach. The woman’s expression is cold. The older man tugs at his collar nervously. The youngest carries a wooden case, his face slack with boredom.
They converge on the first moroi, a tall, rangy man in rags. The woman shines a light in his face, studying his eyes. The older man circles him, moving his arms, testing his strength.
The woman nods sharply. “Samca.”
The youngest alchemist takes something metallic from the box and presses it to the man’s forehead. Flesh sizzles. The woman points to the leftmost door and the moroi strides into the dark.
The woman with the painted face takes his place. She stands perfectly still as the alchemists examine her. The woman considers her. “Ajatar.”
The young alchemist chooses a different brand and sears her forehead. The painted woman follows the man through the door.
One by one they proceed. The female alchemist gives each of them a designation, words I have never heard before. A stout woman in a plain gown is a pricolici. A rough-looking workman is a ghul. A man in a gondolier’s overcoat becomes a second samca.
Another man limps forward, leaning on a gnarled crutch. The alchemists do not even bother to examine him. The woman jerks her head towards the rightmost door. “Foragio.”
The man moves on, leaning on his crutch. I know the word she spoke. Foragio. Fodder.
This man is meant to be eaten.
Stop! I scream in my head. Stop! Stop!
He does not stop. I want to drag him back and shake him awake, but my feet are rooted to the metal. He crosses the threshold and vanishes.
The line of moroi continues. Most are branded. Those who are weaker, who are sickly or more ragged, are foragio.
And there is nothing I can do.
“Halt.”
Vittoria detaches from the ceiling and lands in a crouch. “Amaranta.”
Her mercury eyes sweep over us as she sniffs the air. “One does not bear the lady’s blood.”
The other Dead woman bares her teeth. “Which?”
Vittoria straightens. “Turn, meat.”
The moroi face them. I close my fist, touching my fingertips to the glove’s trigger. The metal disk hardly warms.
The Dead women move out of sight. Their shadows slide over the red-lit walls, stretching, warping. They creep behind us. Cold breath snakes past the back of my neck.
One of them lashes out at the shadow of a man. Blood sprays from his throat. He falls, crumpling silently to the floor.
I strangle a scream. The vampire withdraws her hand, examining the blood that drips from it. “Not this one.”
The other lunges for a woman, burying her teeth in her neck. Flesh rips. She shoves the woman to the floor. “Nor this.”
The first attacks again. Another man falls. The Dead woman’s shadow extends a tongue to lick the blood from her claws. “Nor this.”
She moves down the line and stops behind me.
Time seems to slow as she draws back her hand, as I turn to face her, pulling my gloved hand from my mantle, and—
She lashes at me. I catch her wrist. The impact triggers the glove. A bolt of white quintessence explodes from my palm and flings her away. The Dead woman strikes the wall and falls to the metal floor.
I tear my staff from my belt. Vittoria climbs to her feet. Amaranta rounds on me, snarling like a rabid dog. They advance, bloody teeth bared. My back meets the wall.
A plan flits through my brain, stupid, mad, idiotic, but the only one I have.
“I-I…my name is Jekyll. Your lady and I have had words.” I lower my staff. “I want to join you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ayanda
I TASTE BLOOD IN the air, stinging, delicious, and smile.
The battle calls to me. The rock walls of the gorge tremble with its roar. A dead eye of a moon glares down on a mountain pass writhing with fire and bodies, my soldiers and the screaming wretches dying in their jaws. Fools who attempted to storm my fortress, only to feed my Dead.
I lean out of my tower, inhaling the blood, the death, the agony of the dying trees. Ash dusts the black scales of my armor, the ghost of forest and bone. My beautiful strigoi soars above the meat, snatching them from the ground, drenching their comrades in entrails. My fearsome nelapsi rampages through the pitiful mob, her blades and
teeth aflash. My third I do not see, my clever little—
Pain pierces my back. Spears of lightning course through my blood. A blade punches through my armor, again, again, again, as rageful screams fill my ears, the shriek of a voice I—
I scream and tumble to the floor. The Shadow Palace’s library surrounds me, its silver lights shining like captured moons, making the polished mahogany of the bookcases gleam. I climb to my feet, bracing myself on the green-velveted armchair beside me. I must have fallen asleep…
I reach over my shoulder to touch my back and feel only cloth. A dream. Only a dream.
I rub my eyes. What sort of dream was that?
A clank draws me back to full waking. The automaton Niccolo putters along the library’s balcony, dusting. This room is the largest in the Shadow Palace, four stories in height, its walls hidden by thousands of books of every age and design. The square room forms an atrium on the first floor, dotted with green armchairs and a chess table with pieces frozen halfway through a game. Books, maps, and scribbled papers lie scattered around me, scraps of the plan I’ve tried to form since the night in the crypt.
I’ve still nothing.
The foreboding I’ve felt since I woke this evening returns to me, vibrating in my marrow. Something’s wrong.
I stack the books on the armchair and head for the door. Something’s wrong…
The cold of the corridor chills my face as I step into the corridor. It reminds me of when I was small. I used to patrol the entire palaso every dusk, checking the closets for Dead creatures.
I wonder if I should do it again.
My mind churns. I’ve had no visions, not even of the murdered priest. I checked the evening gazette and found no reports of any murders, though the curfew is still in effect. No one’s foolish enough to let down their guard. Not yet.
I fiddle with the hatpin cuff under my sleeve. I can’t let this lie. The fiend hasn’t gone. I must find out more, find some way to destroy it…
How? Damn it all, how? How will I find it again? Set some sort of trap? Baited with what?
With me?
My throat tightens. The kudlak despises me. It speaks as though it knows me. I can still feel the hawser anchored in my heart, thin as a strand of spider’s web, but there. That impossible connection.
I leave the library. I can never tell Madrina. Andreas is forever missing. Yurei hates me. Jette wants nothing to do with me. Belle and I have hardly spoken.
What did I expect?
I sigh. I was stupid, so stupid. Somehow, in the back of my mind, there was the smallest hope that...
No. No. I don’t need anyone. I’ll contend with this alone.
I wander through the Shadow Palace, tugging at the locket around my neck. Andreas brought it to me from St. Petersburg. It’s lovely, etched with delicate designs and set with a ruby. I found a twist of paper inside, bearing the address of a certain palaso. I want to ask him what it’s supposed to mean, but he’s vanished as usual.
I reach the classroom, where Renzo stands before a chalk-covered blackboard, scrawling A gentleman does not bite for what must be the hundredth time. In the herbarium Beatriz chases one of her plants with a butterfly net. Pia is in the training room, a solid black shadow in the shape of a small girl. She claps her hands together and draws them apart, generating a fireball that she lobs like a grenade. The target explodes and tumbles to the floor.
An ordinary night.
The nervousness only worsens. A sudden movement to my left nearly makes me scream. Two red eyes peep through the leaves of a potted lucifern ivy.
“Fiorella!”
Fiorella ducks out of sight. I go to the plant and find her on the floor beside it, arms around her knees. She stares at the carpet, a tiny specter with undone ribbons in her hair.
“Fiorella?” I kneel beside her. “What’s the matter?”
She turns her head away, resting her cheek on her knees. “Where is Madrina?” I ask.
She rocks back and forth. “Teaching Milo letters.”
This isn’t like her at all. Fiorella is solemn but still lively in her own way. Now she shrinks, trying to make herself smaller, retreating into the ivy’s shade.
“What’s frightened you?” I ask.
Fiorella whimpers. I take her by the shoulders and rise. Fiorella lifts weightlessly from the floor. She clings to my hand, glass fingers cold, hanging her head.
“Fiorella, what is it?”
She doesn’t reply.
I’ve an idea. “Come along.”
Her hand tightens around my fingers. She sneaks glances from under her hair as we follow the corridor, as though expecting something to leap at us. As though she senses what I do.
The light changes from silver to gold as we reach my room. Fiorella floats to the bed and wraps her arms around a tasseled pillow. “Would you like your present now?” I ask.
Her eyes widen. She nods, ringlets bouncing.
I open my desk to find the clockwork butterfly. I added the finishing touches this evening: swirling patterns on its wings and a few dabs of polish to make its golden carapace shine. The chips of amber that comprise each eye flash like jewels.
Fiorella drifts from the bed. I set the butterfly on her outstretched palms. She marvels at it. “Pretty!”
“Go on, wind it.”
Fiorella takes the miniscule key and turns it with a sound like a winding watch. The automaton’s antennae twitch. Its iridescent wings unfold, delicate prisms projecting colors about the room. The butterfly cocks its head, studying Fiorella’s face. With a single flap it takes flight, fluttering in a circle, and perches on her palms again.
I stifle a sigh of relief. It functions perfectly. “She knows she’s yours. She’ll always return to you.”
Fiorella nods. “Her name is Farfala.”
“That’s lovely.” I brush a ribbon from her face. Fiorella floats back to the bed and nestles into the pillows, the butterfly landing beside her. Her eyelids flutter. I take a woolen blanket and cover her.
“Don’t follow the bad things,” she whispers.
I freeze. Fiorella breathes evenly, already asleep.
I go back to my desk to find my unfinished crossbow. I’ve only a few components left to assemble. I move the silver quarrel aside and slip a silver-painted wooden bolt into the mechanism, the one I plan to use during target practice.
Perhaps that’s what I’ll do, practice. Learning to shoot can only help me if I ever face the fiend again.
Or if it finds me first.
Something tugs inside my chest. The distant lodestone pulls.
I know what that means.
I drop the crossbow and run into the corridor. The tugging draws me towards the third-story balcony. I burst through the windowed doors and rush out into the cold. The moonlit square is empty but the pulling remains.
A noise cracks the quiet. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
I back into the shadows, my mind racing. I can’t believe what I’ve done. I never stopped to grab my weapon. My glaive and armor were there, right there, and now I’ll never reach them in time—
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
Something enters the square. Peeling leather boots drag against the ground. The rotten rags of a sailor’s coat hang from its bones.
The vampire crosses the square. Only a few locks of hair cling to its pocked scalp, dangling over a shrunken face with bile-colored eyes. Its black fangs are so large that they distort the creature’s mouth, freezing the lower half of its face into a grotesque smile.
Katakano.
The katakano stops below my balcony and cranes its neck. Bulging eyes find mine. It gazes at me silently, making no move to attack.
The spell shatters. The vampire lowers its head and moves on. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
I sneak to the balcony’s railing. A mat of thick spiderbone vines clings to the wall. I hide behind it, peering through its leaves. The katakano moves out of sight.
What does it want? The Dead creature isn’t hunting or wandering. It has a purpose.
Moonlight shines on the frosty leaves. The net of vines beckons.
My hands lock around the railing. No. What I’m thinking is mad.
The vampire leaves the square. The tugging lessens.
No. My weapon is out of reach and a katakano is as dangerous as any other varianta. Its bite can snap a thighbone. Its teeth can shear through flesh like knives through butter.
I slip my hand into my sleeve to find my cuff of razored hatpins. Four left.
The impossible strength trembles inside me. The vampire is still close enough to grant me that.
I gather up my skirts. This is absurd.
I climb over the railing. This is insane.
Oh, hang it all.
I jump and catch hold of the thickest vine. The leaves rattle but the vine holds. I make my way down, slippers finding purchase on the rough bark, and drop to the ground. I run across the square and down a narrow lane. After a moment I spot the katakano, moving at the same steady, dragging pace.
The guiding tugs me towards the left. Different footsteps pad towards me and a silhouette appears in a side alley. A threadbare burial shroud veils it, stained with filth and dried blood. This vampire’s face is hidden, all but for a fanged mouth glistening through a tattered hole in the shroud. The creature’s hands are mangled, fingers reduced to bloodless stumps. Eaten.
A nachzehrer.
I back behind a corner. The creature must sense me but it glides past without glancing my way. It follows the katakano.
I follow them. The vampires move north, down the jagged lane. I feel more tuggings, tremors from behind me, left, right, above. Movement flickers in the corner of my eye. Rooftop shingles rattle.
The Dead emerge.
A wolf-like pricolici creeps from a cellar. A serpentine moura slithers from a high window. Upiri slip out of a sotoportego. Tens, dozens of the Lesser Dead appear, vampires of every varianta. They crawl along walls, bound over rooftops, skulk down lanes. They pass me, ignoring me entirely, as though…
As though I’m one of them.