Scar Night

by Alan Campbell

  A ring of fresh corpses crumpled onto the bones.

  “Shit,” Rachel said, “she’s just warming up.”

  Figures kept massing around Carnival, but she was already moving again. She flitted over the powdery slope as though she weighed nothing. She leapt again, punched her fork upwards between ribs and into the heart of a wild-eyed woman, then withdrew it at once so as to catch a savage down-cut from a man to her left, stopping his knife between the iron prongs. An elbow shattered his face; then the fork licked out and he recoiled, screaming.

  The horde roared with bloodlust. Scores of frenzied men and women pressed closer, clawed towards her over the corpses of their fallen, snarling, hungry. Carnival wove among them, a dark whisper, and killed with a speed that continued to leave Dill stunned. Steel clashed with iron, again, again, again. Flesh ripped, blood sprayed, and howls filled the abyss.

  And still they came, relentlessly, in savage waves. They threw themselves against Carnival’s fury, only to be cut down. Carnival did not falter or slow. She whirled and spun like a fever nightmare. Lines of blood trailed behind her fork. Her hair flew wildly about the scars on her face. Blades sparked and clashed. Her dance was measured, precise; a methodical slaughter that Dill found abhorrent to watch. She didn’t bother to fly; she didn’t have to. None were her match in speed or strength. Corpses fell on corpses, and soon the mountain of bones was strewn with the dead and the dying.

  Now the horde began to hold back, uncertain, while Carnival stood on the summit of a pile of twitching corpses. Her wings unfurled suddenly like thunderheads, and her night-eyes thinned. She licked blood from one scarred arm and spat. “Dead!” she roared. “No souls!”

  Dill had never seen an army flinch before.

  Carnival beckoned them closer. They hesitated.

  “We have to get out of here,” Dill said.“Now.”

  “No,” Rachel said. “Look at this place. Dill! The bones, the forges, the path up to the surface. And look at them ! Fogwill risked everything to buy Carnival’s help, and now I know why. Don’t you see, these aren’t the ghosts in your Codex stories. These things have no souls. This is wrong, evil . It isn’t supposed to be like this. This is hell.”

  “You can’t stand against her. Nothing can stand against that .”

  “Not in a fair fight.”

  A guttural call went up from somewhere below and suddenly the air around Carnival was full of knives.

  The scarred angel seemed to flex, sidestep, twist. Her fork still moved so fast Dill couldn’t see it. Sparks showered around her: a hundred rapid steel concussions. The onslaught drove her to her knees, but her fork was still blurring, sparking, batting away the knives.

  Silence suddenly.

  Carnival stood.

  She was wounded. Two of the knives had found their mark. One lodged in her thigh, the other beneath her armpit. Blood welled, trickled down her side, spattering the bones under her feet.

  She grinned.

  The army charged in triumph. A visceral howl, and they surged forward as one.

  Dill moved to help her.

  “No.” Rachel gripped his shoulder. “Don’t go near her when she’s like this. She’ll kill anything that gets close.”

  Once more Carnival sprang to meet the oncoming horde. A vicious swipe sent the nearest two warriors reeling, ripped open. She drove her fist into a third one’s face. His head snapped back and he collapsed at her feet.

  More rushed in to flank her. Carnival dived beneath another net cast towards her. A withered, grey-skinned man snagged his foot in a rib cage. Carnival tore past him, slashed him open from groin to neck. She rolled, grabbed a skull, and shattered it against the forehead of another assailant.

  A score of knives flashed through the air. Metal clashed as Carnival’s fork knocked them away. All but one, which lodged deep in the nape of her neck. She staggered back, roaring in pain.

  And then they were all over her, pressing forward recklessly like wild beasts, punching and kicking and clawing at each other to get to her.

  Still she cut them down. She whirled among them, stabbing, slashing. Bodies sank all around her, or fell away screaming, clutching severed veins. But yet more poured in, wave upon wave—a frenzied howling mob, scrambling over the dead and wounded.

  Carnival was about to be engulfed by sheer weight of numbers, when she took to the air and kicked skywards. But a net snagged her wing. She shrieked in anger, twisted to tear it away, lost height. Another net engulfed her. A rope jerked back and the net closed tight. Trapped, she landed hard among the bones.

  Her wings thrashed inside the net. She attacked the thick rope with her fork, but it would not yield to the blunt iron. A white-haired warrior drove his knife in towards her. Carnival’s fork turned it aside, then ripped back up along the blade into his fingers. He screamed, and the knife withdrew. A fist slammed down. Carnival’s fist slammed back and the man toppled, gurgling, his jaw smashed open. Then they had the net surrounded, kicking, pummelling. Too many now. Those behind snatched up bones from the remains on the slope and moved forward.

  They were still beating her long after she’d stopped moving.

  Dill cast his eye over the mounds of fresh dead. The mountain of bones had acquired a new summit. Blood covered everything.

  “Can you still fly?” Rachel murmured.

  “We can’t leave her here,” Dill said.

  At the sound of his voice, men turned; all bruised and bloody skin with shattered teeth. Blades shifted in knuckled fists. Sinewy muscles bunched under rags. Sneering, they began to climb towards him.

  Rachel shook him. “Dill! We have to go, now !”

  For a moment he stared at her, confused. Carnival was still down there, helpless. She didn’t deserve to die like this. He was weak, terrified, but he was still a temple archon. He had to do something. His hand closed around the handle of his sword.

  “Dill!”

  “I—”

  Something punched him hard in the chest. He staggered back, winded, and collapsed. “Wha—? Rachel?”

  Her face had paled, her eyes wide open, staring. “Oh my God. Dill? Oh my God.”

  Dill looked down, to see his old chain mail had split open like paper. A knife was buried to the hilt in his chest. He reached for it.

  “No!” Rachel screamed.

  But the blood was already spurting from his heart, dark as death. It was the last thing he saw before he died.

  27

  Imprisonment and Sabotage

  There were disconnected moments of lucidity. Chains scraping. Constant pain. Air inhaled like broken glass. Hammering metal. Glimpses of iron bars, roaring flames, seared rock, melted rock. Manacles. Black and yellow bruises, soft as rot. Bolts snapping. Rattling keys. Fat cauldrons frothing, sucking, stinking. Blood and meat. Rusted hooks heavy with slabs of butchered flesh. Shards of light on steel—hacking, hacking.

  Darkness.

  Then cold, hard eyes. Teeth. Scars.

  And screams, terrible screams.

  At some point Rachel realized the screams were coming from her own throat.

  Someone was cradling her head, gently.

  “Drink.”

  Foul water sluicing over her parched lips.

  Pain.

  She was gagging, spitting.

  Drowning…

  * * * *

  …light from somewhere.

  “Don’t die on me, bitch.”

  Get away from me, bitch. A Glueman with long, greasy hair, folding himself into the shadows, eating.Scar Night is her night…. The dark of the moon…One soul .

  “Who?”

  Intolerable pressure on her chest. “Leave me alone!”

  “Drink.”

  “Dill?”

  He was smiling, waving his lantern, rainbow eyes and feathers glowing softly in a golden sunset. He snuffed the light. Day snapped to night.

  Catch me.

  “The pain!”

  Scars flared in the dark, then withdrew, leaving h
er alone with the pain.

  * * * *

  Rachel woke, choking, heaving for air. A river of nails brushed against her skin. Dried blood crusted the corners of her mouth like rust. Tongue swollen, dry.

  “Dill?”

  She lifted her head from rough stone, and gasped. Renewed pain drove spikes into her neck, along her spine, into her stomach. Cracked ribs? Something clawed at her ankle. She reached down. Found more blood. A manacle.

  “I’ll light the lantern.” A woman’s voice; a voice she knew.

  She heard a flint wheel turn.

  Tangles of dark hair did little to cover the bruises on Carnival’s face. Her scars seemed fresh and full of blood. The angel narrowed her eyes as the lamp glowed. They were in a stone cell with an iron grate for a door.

  “They threw this in here with us,” Carnival said as she lifted the lantern and shuffled over to Rachel. A length of chain rattled across the floor in her wake. One of her wings slumped at an odd angle. “Water too. And food.” Her tone was clipped, angry. “You don’t want to eat the food.”

  Rachel tried to speak, but her throat felt full of blisters. Only a weak guttural sound escaped her.

  “Look at you.” Carnival spoke through gritted teeth. “You’re almost as pretty as me.”

  “What…?” Rachel swallowed. “What happened?”

  Carnival merely grunted.

  Rachel tried to remember the fight. Images of blood and skull-like faces crowded back to her, indistinct, blurred. At once the blows she’d received seemed to cry out anew, pinched by the memory. She winced. She’d killed…how many? Clearly not enough.

  Carnival was rubbing the manacled flesh at her own ankle. Rachel stared numbly at the manacle for a moment before she realized it was connected to her own by a length of chain. A feeling of sick dread took hold of her.

  “Dill?” Suddenly she remembered his pale, panicked face, his eyes white as sunlit snow. “Oh my God, what happened to Dill?” He’d looked so completely alone. But the army had reached her then, and she’d been forced to turn and fight.

  “In the cell opposite,” Carnival said. Something in her tone, a hint of pleasure, made Rachel feel uneasy.

  Groaning, the assassin pushed herself upright, her legs shivering in protest. She picked up the lantern and staggered over to the iron grate, chain scraping after her. The lantern illuminated broken flagstones beyond the cell, and bars opposite, a mirror of their own. A passageway divided the two cells, stretched away into darkness on either side. “Dill?” she called.

  No answer.

  “Dill, please, are you there?”

  Carnival spoke from the edge of the lantern light. Her face was hidden by shadow but she sounded like she was smiling. “There was a lot of blood.”

  “Dill!” Echoes of Rachel’s voice receded down the passageway. Only thetap, tap, tap of dripping water answered. Anguish swelled in her stomach, engulfed her. She felt as if she were drowning in it. She collapsed to her knees and gripped the iron bars as though they could keep her afloat. Please, God, let him be alive .

  Suddenly Rachel didn’t know who she was praying to. Ulcis? There seemed to be no hope of salvation down here.

  Carnival said, “They’ll gut him soon enough.”

  “How can you say that?” Rachel snapped. “He might still be alive!”

  “He doesn’t heal,” Carnival said, “not like me .” Her last words were thick with venom.

  My poor Dill. Rachel thought of him flying around the temple spires, laughing, his stupid toy sword banging against his hip. She thought of the stupid, useless chain mail they had given him. His stupid bucket of snails. Tears prickled the corners of her eyes and she hugged her knees to her chin, dragging the chain closer. “I was supposed to protect him.”

  “From those things ?”

  “From you.”

  Carnival snorted a laugh. “He’s safe from me now.”

  “He wanted to help you,” Rachel said, “after you’d been injured. He tried to move so he could stand at your side. But I stopped him.”

  Carnival said nothing.

  Silence stretched between them. Rachel studied Carnival. Carnival peered back from behind her tracery of scars. The chain between them lay still, heavy on the cell floor. The angel’s expression was blank, just a scrawl of ancient knife cuts. But was there a glint of something predatory in her eyes?

  Finally Rachel asked, “Why are we still alive?”

  “Someone down here doesn’t like you,” Carnival said flatly.

  “How long till Scar Night?”

  “Soon.”

  The assassin found the flatness of Carnival’s tone more disturbing than her anger. Anger could be steered, antipathy and malice were malleable. A glimmer of emotion might have offered a pathway, no matter how narrow, through those scars. But this detachment seemed absolute, as if its purpose was to separate Carnival from her hunger.

  To protect her.

  Rachel felt a twinge of pity. The angel had spent millennia constructing her defences. But they weren’t enough. Rachel had seen Carnival lapse into fury too many times.

  She can’t detach herself completely. Darkness take me, even now she’s still trying. But it won’t hold. And so…the rage, the scars. How long now was it until Scar Night? Seven days? Six?

  Carnival appeared to read her mind. “Three days,” she said.

  Rachel’s hand went to her belt.

  “They took your weapons,” Carnival said.

  In Carnival’s eyes, Rachel thought she saw misery.

  * * * *

  There was a problem with the Tooth.

  It didn’t work.

  Callis, that pseudo-mythological feathered fop, had seen fit to sabotage it, and if Devon ever found himself in the Sanctum corridor again he meant to drag the angel’s damn skeleton down and show it what a mortar and pestle was for.

  He was starting to hate the confinement of the Tooth’s bridge. Three days in the sun and the stink of the dead saturated everything around him. A score of ropes tied to the base of the skeletal control panel disappeared through an open window. After the crash, there had been that many survivors from the Adraki for the Heshette to hang. For a desert people this method of execution might have seemed unusual, but the mimicry of the Avulsior’s stage was not lost on the Poisoner. The Heshette didn’t seem overly concerned with the smell, but then they didn’t have to remain in here every hour of every day.

  He opened the primer valve, an artefact like a boar’s tusk, and pulled back the first ignition lever—a slender, rib-like appendage. Blood—no, oil—surged within the controls.

  The floor vibrated slightly, then stopped.

  “Darkness take me!” Devon swung a fist at the mound of controls, only to strike himself on the leg with his stump, when the fist turned out to be no longer there. He slammed the lever back and pinched the bridge of his nose. If that shaft had broken, it would take a full day to repair. He almost spat. They didn’t have much time before the armada returned, reloaded, for a fresh assault.

  Not that it would be any more effective than the first attack. The Tooth was well sealed against gas, impenetrable to crossbow fire, and shrugged off incendiaries as effectively as a rock. But the Poisoner was not about to suffer more of the Heshette and their damp-rag-wrapped faces. That joke had soured as quickly as the air around him.

  What was more, the main city force would soon be assembled and ready to march against them. Heshette scouts reported massive construction work under way in the Deadsands, on Deepgate’s northern perimeter. They were building weapons: catapults, scorpions, rams, and siege-towers, cannibalizing half the League of Rope in the process. If he didn’t hurry, there wouldn’t be much left of the city for him to destroy.

  And there was Scar Night to consider. If he could attack when the population were afraid to venture out, so much the better. Moondark would breed unease, dissension—if not mass desertion—among the reservists.

  Devon left the bridge and trudged down th
e corridors to the engine room, where a hundred tapers burning among the piston shafts and walls of gears showed him the awful truth.

  The propeller shaft they’d stripped from the Adraki had jumped from its mount.

  Big Beard and Bigger Beard were straining against the steel mountings they’d fashioned to fit the bony depression in the ignition engine, trying to push the shaft back into place. Bataba had assigned these two to work for him. They had some clucking, unpronounceable camel-herder names, but Devon wasn’t interested.Big Beard andBigger Beard summed up their talents well enough. Wearily, he approached them. “What happened?”

  Bigger Beard glanced over his shoulder. “It came out.”

  “I can see that. Did the main engine turn?”

  Bigger Beard gave him a blank look.

  “The pistons, man. Did they move?” Devon sighed. “These…pillars, these.” He pointed with his stump.

  “No.”

  Devon inspected the damage. The securing bolts had sheared. Steel did not meld well with this strange ceramic, and at the speed required for the ignition engine to fire the primary, their hotchpotch assembly was too eager to fly apart. Not a disaster, provided they could find some more bolts in the wreckage of the two fallen warships. He sent the Beards out to look.

  Despite the setbacks, he was getting there. Apart from this one shaft that Callis had removed like a key, the engines appeared to be intact. Enormous crystal vats held fuel enough, he supposed, for a journey around the world. The external lights—apparently a derivative of aether—were functional, although most of the internal lights had succumbed to the rigours of Heshette infestation.

  But without main power, and with the hull air vents stuffed with rags and mud, the inside of the Tooth was like the inside of a labourer’s sock. Devon stole a taper and set off deeper into the machine, haunted by the echo of his boots. Lately he had been thinking more about Sypes’s refusal to speak. The old man was terrified not just of his god, but of anyone finding out his secret. Now Devon thought he understood why.

  Toppled buckets and shreds of cloth littered the passages, which stank of urine. The mess hall was mouldering, the galley a cave of rusted sinks and taps. A single bottle of brown fluid stood on a shelf like something feared or revered, but the pots, pans, and cutlery had long since disappeared into the Heshette hovels.