The pigeons were a worry. She kept an eye on them: they didn’t seem to be watching her, but seeming could be a long way from truth. It would find a way in eventually, and besides, she had work to do. She hauled herself to her feet—body aching, veins humming with strange power—and set out.
Sen wasn’t under house-arrest, he just wasn’t allowed to leave the house. It had been a rough few days. There were bin chickens watching the place. He’d stepped out for five minutes to grab a rice ball, and come back to find a dead rat pinned to the door. The other two cops were no help: they wouldn’t believe him about the Sparrows, and they seemed fine with all the soldiers.
The bloody soldiers! More of them every day, coming in by train and by boat until they outnumbered the cops. Taking orders from somebody about something and getting very aggressive when asked about it by some two-bit sergeant with a dicky leg. He’d been praying, but things were only getting worse. He poured himself another whisky from the homeowner’s ‘hidden’ stash and shotted it down. It might get him in trouble, but he figured it was a lesser evil.
“Wasn’t your mum teetotal?” said Wajet.
Sen whirled around, forgot about his leg, stumbled and collapsed into a comfy chair.
“How in the everloving fuck did you get you in here?” he said. Wajet grinned at him.
“Amazing how quiet you can move when everybody thinks you’re noisy,” he said, with the finger-wiggling mystique of a mountaintop sage.
“That sounds very convincing but it doesn’t mean a bloody thing, mate,” said Sen. “I’ve got no time for blokes who speak in origami. Say it plain.”
Wajet sighed. “My husband and I used to break into here to fuck sometimes,” he said. “It has nice beds. Anyway Sen, got a gift for you. Heard you got given one of them godsawful department-issue canes for your leg. Went out and got you a replacement.”
“You crossed the wall and broke into what is technically a police department to give me a new cane? Are you mad?”
“Exceptionally mad, sergeant. Have you met me?”
You had to give it to Wajet, he was very good at failing to answer the question. He was canny, behind all the bluster: big words hiding little lies. He would’ve made a good politician. Sen took the cane, gently, as though it might explode. It rattled as he took it. He bit his lip, then stared at Wajet.
“This is a sword-stick,” he said. “You’re being all coy, but you broke in here to give me a sword-stick.” He twisted the head of the cane, and pulled. It rattled again, but didn’t come free. Something in Wajet’s eyes betrayed him for a second: he hadn’t expected it not to come free. To his credit, he recovered quickly.
“Of course not, Sergeant,” he said. “That would be illegal.”
Sen handed it back, and shook his head. The last time he’d seen Wajet, the man had been leaving with Yat, the night everything went wrong. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been talking about him, raving that he was coming for her. This was a trap.
“You want to help out, get me the fuck out of here and get me my bloody rookie back.”
Wajet rebuffed the cane, pushed it gently back.
“If I can do the first, will you trust me to work on the second?”
Sen cocked his eyebrow. He liked to think he was good at reading people, and that had almost seemed sincere.
“Go on,” he said.
“The owner of this house had a tryst with an unfortunate alchemist on the other side of the wall. He had a tunnel built that leads from the wine cellar, under the river, under the wall, and all the way to a hotel on the grand canal. There’s a fake wine barrel you need to roll out of the way. I can show you which.”
“And Yat?” growled Sen.
“I can tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that I left her in perfectly awful company,” said Wajet.
“Good people, though?”
Wajet nodded.
“Good people,” he said. Low, sincere. Not making eye contact, but not because he was hiding something—because it was hard for the man to be sincere. He was a joker, and he joked when things got difficult. Sen could relate.
“You’ll get her back?” said Sen.
“Hold onto that cane, and she’ll come to you,” said Wajet.
It couldn’t be worse than the one he was using. He tested the grip a few times. It was comfortable. It was just the right length, too: no more leaning over to reach a cane made for a shorter man. The metal inside rattled around.
“You’re crooked,” said Sen.
“As a corkscrew, my good man,” said Wajet. “And as honest an officer as you’ll ever meet. The barrel you want is Carnili Del Piacco, with a chalk mark on it, back against the wall. And now, I need to go. I suspect it’s going to be a busy night for both of us.”
Sen nodded. He gripped the handle of his new cane like it was a lifeline. He’d prayed for deliverance, and here it was in the strangest bloody form. He’d been wounded and pushed around. He’d been cooped up for a week. He was pissed. It was time to raise bloody hell.
Sen slipped into the cellar when the two other officers—the two he’d taken to calling his wardens inside his head—weren’t looking. The barrel was huge, but weighed almost nothing: it had been made out of cork, painted to look like hardwood.
They must’ve bored out the tunnel with some sort of chemical reagent: an astringent oxide reek hung in the air and stained an oily rainbow all over the bare stone. Little bits of mycelium broke through here and there: the place was well-made but hadn’t been maintained in a long time. The new cane helped immensely. He couldn’t figure out how to get the blade out, but he was sure it was in there. The thing was weighted well: he guessed there was a layer of lot shot keeping things balanced. It was amazing how much of a difference it made to have something built for his body.
He emerged from the tunnel into a sauna. It hadn’t been used in a long time, and there was green mold growing in the pools. A chipped fresco on the walls showed jungle beasts cavorting with nymphs. Up the stairs, through the changing rooms, into the hotel proper. It had seen better days. Nice foyer: tall staircase on either side, heavy railings: good cover. Move some of the couches over and you’d have a decent start on fortifications. He made a mental note of the location, then set out.
Yat worked her way through town, and something pulled at her: some titanic weight in the distance: a lead ball on a rubber sheet, bending the city’s threads around it. She crept towards the disturbance, checking her corners, keeping her back to the walls. The noise hit her first: cheering, shouting, the crackle of gunpowder discharge. Then the smoke: acrid and chemical, low to the ground. At first it sounded like a fight, but as she got closer she realised what she was approaching: a party.
Trust Hainak, of all places, to throw a party while on the brink of war. She’d seen some fireworks earlier, while out at sea, but it was different from inside the city: they shook the streets like an artillery barrage, and thickened the air. That’s why the docks were deserted: the siren songs of wine, fireworks and good company drawing all the sailors away from the water. A group of men went by in an ox costume, while a little girl ran alongside them collecting donations. An Erzau priest watched the men go by: Yat could make out his scowl even at a distance. A band must’ve figured out how to hook up their instruments to the horn network. It was tinny and hard to make out, but the audience were too drunk to mind. Something with instruments she didn’t recognise, like pan pipes but heavy and liquid; like water running through bamboo and pushing out the air ahead of it.
Something was moving towards Yat: something fraying, strange. She took a step back, and narrowly avoided collision with a drunken reveller. He saw her, started to smile, then stopped and tried to salute. His legs were incommunicado with the rest of him, and he tripped and fell.
“Vnin ‘nstabl,” he said, his cheek scraping the cobblestones.
Const
able? She’d ditched the uniform back on the Kopek but as she looked down, she realised she was back in her blues. Same as when you died: exactly the same.
There was something wrong with him but she couldn’t place it. Folks had gotten drunk back on the ship but their threads hadn’t been like this. Being fair, none of them had gotten this drunk. There was something heavy about them: dense, but not strong. They had something febrile about them: something quivering and watery. She knelt down. His nostrils were red, and snotty. His breathing was heavy, and liquid.
“Are you alright, Sir?” she said.
He smiled. He didn’t seem to notice he was horizontal.
“‘ys ‘fficer,” he said. “Jst‘adafew.”
She could hardly arrest him; she’d end up in a cell herself if she went near the station.
“There you are, Bantar,” said somebody. “Not giving this nice lady any trouble, are you?”
Yat tried her best to look casual while she sized them up. Tall, stock, uniformed. Not police: army. Extensive scarring on his hands: telltale sign of combat enhancement. Walked with a slight limp, which meant he was no longer active service: probably lost the leg and it they couldn’t get it to grow back right. Maybe handsome once, but his ears and face had a chewed-up look to them.
“C’mon,” he said, picking the man up by his armpits, “let’s get you back to your friends, aye?”
She should’ve stayed quiet. It was the smart thing to do, but courage had been serving her better than servility for, well, about a week. She was willing to accept it was a new experiment with inconclusive results, but she wasn’t going to let this go unchallenging.
“You sure he should be drinking?” she said. “I think he’s done for the night.”
The big man laughed. “Nah miss, he’s just getting started, aren’t ya Bantar?”
He started to haul, and the hobnails in Bantar’s boots clattered along the cobblestones.
“Br?” he mumbled.
“Yes,” said the big man, “beer!”
He was smiling a lot, but Yat didn’t believe it—he was all teeth, no joy. He looked like he was working. She should’ve left it alone, but she couldn’t. Something was going on, and this was her town.
“Who’s your commanding officer?” she said. Sure he was army, but they didn’t have jurisdiction in Hainak: if they ever got called in, they worked under police supervision. It’d happened a few times when Yat had been a cop: riots and whatnot where they needed backup. The soldiers did what the cops told them, then hopped on a train and went back to being soldiers: went … somewhere else. Somewhere that ordinary citizens didn’t talk about. She swore she’d known once, but the memory just wasn’t there.
He stopped, and eyed the stripes on her uniform. “None of your business, constable,” he said. He let the last word fall out of his mouth, like it didn’t matter at all. With almost sarcastic care, he lowered Bantar to the pavement, then stepped over him. He was rubbing his right thumb between his left thumb and his forefinger. It was an oddly gentle movement for such a large man. “But you can call me Mr Źao,” he said. He took another step forward.
Her hand flew to her hip, and she felt the weight of her cnida, her thumb moved to the button and—
She felt a steel blade pressed against her neck, not quite hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to send the message.
“This is my colleague,” said Źao. “Mr Źu.”
She didn’t turn, but somehow she knew what the man behind her would look like: wiry frame, sharp teeth, probably concealing a familiar revolver somewhere on his person.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes,” said that familiar, soothing voice. “Oh indeed. Pleasure to see you again, constable. ”
They’d caught her unawares twice now: she’d been too busy watching the big man to notice the little one creeping up behind her. The difference was, she wasn’t powerless this time. She wasn’t scared, or high. And he didn’t have the element of surprise: Źu had blown it to gloat. That was his first mistake.
The blade was metal, so that was no good: she tried to move her power along it, but it was totally inert. The ground was stone. She reached down anyway. In a nicer part of town it would’ve been granite, and she would’ve been screwed. Down in the Shambles, they laid whatever stone they could get their hands on, and the whole of Hainak was built on a bed of limestone. Thousands on thousands on thousands of tiny skeletons, all pressed together by enormous geological pressure. Creatures that lived eons ago, that would be unrecognisable to her even if she could see them, but creatures nonetheless. Bone. It wasn’t great for living material, but it did the trick.
She pushed the button on her cnida, let the vine roll out and hit the ground, then—
Heard a scream behind her, felt the blade fall away, jumped to the side and saw the earth erupting with dozens of vines wrapping around Źu, stinging and stinging and stinging, leaving purple welts on his skin as his tongue swelled up and the muscles in his neck went far too tight. The cnida was running into the ground, branching out, feeding on the energy from the limestone, and growing larger. She tried to read Źu’s threads, and that was the mistake.
He glowed like her. He’d been concealing it somehow, but in the throes of agony he couldn’t hold it back any more. She had reached out to read him and in doing so, connected in braid of lightning. It was rushing into her, hollowing him out. She couldn’t stop it: the connection between them was coring him, draining him, emptying him. Something vital ran down the connectors into her and she felt the golden fist inside herself curl and uncurl. She couldn’t stop the flow: she was drinking him like she’d drank the bird but magnified a thousand times. He was like her, and she was killing him, really killing him. It only took a fraction of a second to unfold.
She couldn’t focus on anything but the connection between them, and that’s when Źao hit her. She’d expected him to fight stupid: all shoves and haymakers. He certainly hit hard, but it was precise—in exactly the right place that would’ve ordinarily laid her out cold. She staggered, and felt the connection between her and Źu tearing. He was still stuck in the vines and she tried to refocus on them: to get them back under control. That’s when the screaming started.
A cracking of stone rang out from somewhere nearby, then a cacophony of shouts that quickly gave way to screams. She sensed a new network of threads emerging somewhere nearby, and realised with horror that the vines were spreading: radiating out through the limestone and bursting up through the ground. Judging from what she could hear, right in the middle of a group of revellers. It wasn’t random: the cnida was hungry. She tasted copper, and felt her hands start to shake. Then Źao hit her again. He wasn’t trying to knock her out any more: his huge scarred fist went for her throat. She managed to lower her chin just in time, but the impact sent her staggering back into Źu. The tentacles brushed against her, but didn’t sting: she was still the heart to their network, and they recognised their mother.
Footsteps: heavy boots. Lots of heavy boots. She grabbed Źu by the shoulder—little dying ember, almost empty—and she tried to reach into him like she’d done before. There was so little left, but she grabbed it and pulled.
He went.
There were no other words for it. He’d been in a bad way and fading fast, but he’d been very much alive. When she pulled, she took everything. The change was so small, and so total—he was alive, then he was not. She took his spark, pushed it into the vines, and watched as the street around her exploded into a sea of stinging tentacles. Źao disappeared, and she couldn’t sense him amongst the new forest of life she’d created. There was something else though: many somethings, close to the ground. They’d been so similar to the limestone that she hadn’t noticed them: millions on millions of tiny, tiny somethings all packed together inside Bantar’s mouth, and esophagus, and stomach. Millions of little spores, barely alive, that had been tearing t
hrough his body and eating from the inside-out and yet still starving and starving until here comes the food.
She did not see what happened, but she felt it: an eruption from somewhere inside the strange anemone she’d summoned. Little spores, moving along the network she’d created. She tried to shut them out: the dense cnidocyte turned inwards, and managed to keep them away from her, but she couldn’t stop them racing through the rest of her vines, erupting out into the stragglers from the party, into the approaching reinforcements, erupting high into the air and moving on the wind. The screams stopped, but it did nothing to calm her. Her heart pounded, her head and her back hurt. Źu’s carcass was trapped in there with her. She wanted to spit on him, to scream and hit him, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch him. His skin—which had been purple when he died—was quickly turning black. His tongue lolled madly in his open mouth. His knife lay on the ground, and the lion-head revolver was strapped to his hip.
From somewhere outside her terrible new haven, she heard the same heavy boots, but not stomping now: shuffling, clicking together. Something forced its way through two thick vines: a leering face with milk-white eyes. A blank, but not. It lunged at her, teeth gnashing. The stings didn’t seem to hurt it and there was nowhere for her to go. She stepped back and brushed against Źu, whose body was still warm. Her hand touched metal, and she knew instantly what it was: she grabbed the gun, hands shaking, then raised the barrel and fired.
She had expected it to be loud, but not this loud. She had expected it to buck in her hand, but not like this. The concussion almost broke her wrist: she felt bones grind together as the revolver smashed backwards into her hand. She’d been aiming for the middle of the blank’s head—no torso visible, just a welt-covered face intruding into the anemone—but the bullet caught it on the right temple and tore open that entire half of his skull. She only saw a second of it: the shot sent the man twisting away and out of sight.
The Dawnhounds Page 17