“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 flatt
ened 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.
16
Blacksuits swarmed over the buildings and through the alleys of Alt Coulumb like ants at an abandoned picnic. One crouched at a roof’s edge and glowered into the city with eyes that saw a broader range of light than the eyes of man. Another leapt from flagpole to flagpole, canvassing the Pleasure Quarters. A group of fifty cased the city one block at a time, moving with silent care down side streets.
The sight of them was enough to quell most of the sparks of civil unrest scattered throughout the city, and where mere sight was insufficient, they intervened in person. A middle-aged grocery-store owner struck a reedy young woman trying to steal food, and raised his hand to strike again; a rain of black fell over them, and when it lifted both were gone. A clutch of angry young men near the docks gathered to hear the protestations of a doom prophet, and twenty Blacksuits suddenly stood among the crowd where none had been before, watching and silent. The prophet’s wrath broke as the eyeless stare of Justice settled upon him. Words of fear and hatred faltered on his tattooed lips.
But though the Blacksuits dealt with the criminals and madmen that lay within their path, they did not hunt humans tonight. They hunted men of stone.
A gargoyle had stolen a witness from Justice’s infirmary, or perhaps had been disguised as that witness, or perhaps—Justice’s many minds were divided on this issue, and the debate raged across the brains of a thousand active Blacksuits, dancing through their neurons and arguing about the tables of their cerebra. A Stone Man was on the run, that was certain, and there was no such thing as a lone Stone Man. Dead Seril’s children moved in groups, or not at all.
Justice weighed the hearts of others, and did not spare much thought for her own. Had she examin
ed her emotions, she might have recognized the petulant ire of the chess prodigy thwarted in mid-game. Mortals were meddling in Justice’s sphere, and she was jealous of her sphere. She needed that Stone Man, and his brethren: parade them before the madding crowd, hang murder and blasphemy about their necks, and peace would return. Hate directed was easily controlled.
Blacksuits flocked in Alt Coulumb, a murder of silent crows with human bodies. Though the Stone Man had confused their scouts and their pursuers, for he was fast and could assume many shapes, he was mortal, limited, fallible. He played a smart game, but he would make a mistake, and the murder would descend.
Justice waited, sharpening her sword and polishing her scales.
*
“No Tara here either,” Captain Pelham allowed as they sprinted out of the warehouse, night watchmen in hot pursuit.
Cat almost rolled her eyes, but that would have entailed taking them off the pavement, and in this part of town you never knew when a pothole or a mugger’s tripwire might send you sprawling.
Captain Pelham had ordered their driverless carriage to stay as far back as possible without losing Tara as she wove into the waterfront district, then out, then in again, tracing a labyrinth of which only she knew the paths. Maybe it was a Craft thing, or maybe she was trying to throw off pursuit. On their most recent pass through the waterfront, they turned a corner and saw Tara’s carriage pull away into obscurity, with Tara herself absent.
She must have abandoned the carriage to proceed on foot. Lacking a better option, they resorted to old-fashioned legwork, and had thus far eliminated a little more than half the warehouses in the area. Which meant, as Captain Pelham had reminded her with more good humor than she felt, that a little less than half remained.
It was hard to determine which warehouses were occupied and which abandoned. Near the docks, keeping one’s property in good repair was a counterproductive endeavor. Clean, well-tended buildings hold valuable cargo. Dockside warehouse-keepers realized long ago that a few broken windows and vulgar scrawls of graffiti, fire scars on one wall and water damage on another, made it harder for the casual thieves abundant in this part of town to tell marks from firetraps.
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