"What point, that you can sneak attack? We knew that already."
Her frown deepened.
"I'm serious," Sen said, rubbing his forearm now, where already a red mark was rising up. "They'd be useless against anyone with a normal weapon. I couldn't fight anyone with a sword."
"You might be surprised how well they can work against all kinds of weapons. But yes, generally, that's why they're an assassin's weapon." Mare said the words slowly and clearly. "But consider this. With a spike in the position I just showed you, you enter battle with your shield and your weapon raised at the same time. No need to swap hands, no need to pull back or change stance. Your arm is raised to defend, your arm falls to stab. They're simple, and used well by an expert…" She trailed off.
Sen looked at her with some residual anger. "How do you know so much?"
"I grew up in Indura. I had a set like this, but molded from wood. I used to sleep with one of them strapped to my hand, in case I was disturbed in the night. I tried to stab your Sister Henderson with it, the day she took me, but she was too fast."
Sen sombered at mention of Sister Henderson.
"She used them like this?"
He tried holding them both up at the same time, flattened along his forearms. It felt uncomfortable.
"Yes. The first Adjunc rained three blows down, and she deflected them all. See, if you hold the blade at the right angle," she modeled it, holding her forearm out at a steep decline, "and you take less of the blow, letting more of it slide off. You let the enemy overbalance, turning their strength and weight against them. She was an expert like I've never seen. Three shots from a beast that could level a Balast, and she guided them away from her body like they were nothing. The Adjunc had to reset itself, spinning its torso around, and by then she'd already lanced it three times, twice in the face and one in the chest."
Sen breathed out. It was hard to imagine Sister Hen fighting. She'd always been strong, he'd known that, but a warrior?
"It got her with its death throes, though," Mare said. "It went down thrashing, and she couldn't get out of the way fast enough. The next one came in hot, jumped over its dying fellow, and she got both spikes into its underside, but it trampled her. The ones that followed, well…" She paused. "It was ugly. They broke open the vault, but you weren't there. She lived for that much, I remember. She caught my eye, and managed to lift the spikes up a little so I could see them. Heart knows how she'd kept hold of them, when she'd just sunk them into an Adjunc chest. But she had. So I thought they might be for you."
Sen took a breath. It was a lot to take in. He'd been lying on the grass at the tower top while Sister Henderson fought to defend a vault he hadn't even been in. He rubbed his eyes, aware how closely Mare was watching him, as if waiting for him to say something appropriate. He didn't know what that might be.
"Thank you, Mare. Really."
She shrugged, maybe disappointed, as if he'd said the wrong thing. "Well, you have them now." She looked around the millinery walls. "I think your mother might have had a pair like them. Maybe I remember that, from when she brought me here."
Sen nodded along. "I remember. This is where she tended you."
"Right. It was quite a lot nicer, then. There was no smell, for one. There's also a much more direct route from the Abbey, for future reference. You came the slowest way possible. Just track the Haversham most of the way down, and…"
She went on explaining the route, while Sen rocked back slightly. He hadn't even really known he was coming here, when he'd set out, though it had always been a possibility. He'd planned the places he could go for months. In the end, this place had just emerged without him thinking of it.
"So what now?" he said.
She laughed. "Who knows? You find Avia? Until then, I can show you some tricks."
She got to her feet, and he just looked at her dully. His head felt full of cotton wool. He was tired, and weary, and sad.
"What?"
"Get up. Tricks with the spikes. Here, give me them."
He held them up and she took them deftly, then twisted her wrists smoothly downward, aligning the spikes down her forearms so they slotted inside her sleeves. "You conceal them like this. Get up close, and fill someone with holes."
Sen nodded. It was hard to concentrate.
"Sen," Mare said, her face sharp. "You need to listen to me. This is real."
"I know, I'm sorry, I just…"
She struck him lightly with the right spike, a flat blow across his thigh. The pain jerked him awake.
"Self-pity will kill you faster than Adjunc out here," Mare went on. "Snap out of it."
"Self-pity? I'm not, what do you mean? I'm just tired."
She hit him again, striking the other thigh, and he grunted. She wanted to make him angry, that was obvious.
"I don't need them," he said, aware how churlish it sounded. "I don't want to hurt anyone."
Mare laughed. "But you want to survive, don't you? Then you'll have to hurt people. That's the way this city works. You've done it before, and you can do it again."
He wanted to argue, because who had he ever hurt on purpose, but arguing seemed redundant. This wasn't the Abbey, and there'd be time to think later. He gritted his teeth and rose to his feet.
"So show me," he said.
She did. They trained for an hour, two, moving up and down the millinery rooms, halls, and stairs lit by torch-light, practicing movements Mare had used before, simulating an enemy holding a weapon, an Adjunc rearing back, anything they could think of. They exchanged the spikes between them, and every time Sen felt himself tired and flagging, Mare would just say, "Again."
They kept on until it grew light outside and the Grammaton chimed for nine, until blisters formed in the fleshy web between Sen's thumb and palm where his scars touched the spike hafts.
"Your skin will toughen up," Mare said, noticing. "But you'll have to practice."
It was some time after noon when they stopped. Sen was exhausted, panting and streaming with sweat despite the cold.
"You're a natural," said Mare. "The spikes are a good fit for you."
He slumped down by the fire, and Mare sat neatly nearby. The fire was down to ashes now, and he tossed on a few scraps of wood they'd used as makeshift swords. He sagged onto one elbow, realizing how drained he really was. When he closed his eyes, dark dreams of Sister Henderson fighting the Adjunc danced at the edge of his concentration. They were bloody and awful, but she'd fought.
It was not much to hold onto, but it was something.
They lay like that for a time, as the fire built back up and the sweat dried on their skin. Sen handed Mare an oatcake, and they drank water from the flasks in hazy silence.
"So how will you find her?" Mare asked, at last.
He blinked up from his fuzzy stupor. He hadn't thought much about that. He wasn't even certain searching for his mother was a priority, though he didn't know what else would be. He had to do something now.
"I don't know," he said. "But she told me to remember this place. There must be a reason."
Mare frowned. "So how? Are you going to go out on the street and look at faces one by one?"
"I haven't thought about it."
"Well, you should." She pointed at his face. "You can't ever show that, and you shouldn't even go out in daylight. Your scars are just coin for the Adjunc. You'll have to live by night."
He nodded. "I know that." He rolled one of the spikes slowly in his hand. It was hard to imagine what kind of life he might lead, on the streets. The purse of coins from the Abbey would only last for so long. He'd never be able to take a job. How was he going to survive?
Still, that seemed like a very distant question though, sitting now by the fire. "Perhaps she'll come to me."
"If she's even in the city anymore. If she knows you're here."
"So I let her know."
Mare gave him a blank look, but there was something there, a new idea that blossomed as he circled closer.
"The newspapers," he said, "they cover the city every day. But not only that." He began to warm to the idea, talking faster. "There were circulars pasted to the walls everywhere in the Slumswelter. An old Big-eye was hunting for someone, reading them out. I could do something like that, not a newspaper of course, but paste up papers letting her know I'm looking for her. I could do that at night."
Mare chewed her slack lip. "Maybe. I suppose somebody reads all that stuff."
They fell silent for a time, and in the silence Sen's mind worked with a new energy.
A newspaper. He'd read pieces of The Soul since he was able to read. The Bridgeling had formed the backbone of some of his lessons; about the city's system of trade, its laws and political power.
He could insert something like that into that world, and so put up a flag for his mother to see. He leaned back and closed his eyes, feeling the minds of the city turning like a tide beneath him, ebbing and flowing. All of these were the waters he had to navigate, and a message written on paper would be his sails.
It was an intoxicating idea, and thinking about it made him smile. Nearby he could feel the Calk at full grinding capacity, drifting with the simple thoughts of Balasts. Carroway was a quagmire of artisans laboring on precise craftsmanship, while the Docks were a rush of powerful primal drives. He imagined harnessing all of them, just like Mare had showed him how to harness his opponent's force with the misericordes.
The Haversham had been overwhelming the other day, but up here the sharp edges were smoothed by distance. The city was a living ocean, with a collective mind made up of its many castes and districts, and he was starting to grow used to it.
Against that rippling backdrop, Mare's mind had a cool, focused clarity. He could sense her thoughts were far away, intent on distant shores, primed with images of ships. He opened his eyes and followed her gaze out over the curve of HellWest bay, to the long dark blue of the Sheckledown Sea, and understood.
"You're going to leave the city," he said.
She turned to him and smiled. "You see that in my head?"
"I feel it. I don't always see things."
She leaned back. "It's my plan, yes. So how will it go for me, out there? Will I have a good life?"
He smiled sleepily. "I don't know. It doesn't work that way. I don't see things in the future."
Mare picked up a shard of broken floor slat and laid it on the fire. "Maybe your mother could. How else could she know we'd both end up back here?"
Sen had no answer to that. Perhaps it was true. Avia had chosen the five children when he was just a baby. She'd brought both him and Mare to this place before, and now they were here again.
So where was she? It was a puzzle he couldn't unknot by thinking alone.
"Where will you go?" he asked instead.
"Away," Mare said. "Somewhere far from Indura, where they don't care about this," she pointed to her sunken head. "About my caste."
Sen nodded. If it wasn't for his mother, he wondered if he would do the same. Get away from the city, to where nobody cared about his scars, and he wouldn't endanger anybody just by existing. Maybe some time he would. He wondered what kind of future awaited him in the city, what awaited Mare on the ocean. Gazing across the city's lights, he tried to imagine what fate awaited them all; Alam, Gellick, Daveron, even Feyon. What kind of person would she become, after what she'd done?
"I want to thank you, Mare. For coming, for bringing these."
"Thank me tomorrow," she said. "Get some sleep now. You'll need it, in the nights to come. Don't worry. I'll watch out for Adjunc."
He nodded. It was daylight out, and tiredness weighed heavy on his thoughts. "Just for a little while, then," he said, then lay back and curled into his cloak, letting himself doze.
When he woke some time in the middle of the night, she was already gone.
MILLINERY I
For a time he lay in the darkness, watching the sparkle of the city's orange lights through the hole in the wall. It was cold with the fire dead, and a wind blew stinging flecks of snow over the dead embers.
He didn't need to call out to know Mare was gone. He could feel her absence in the air, along with Alam, Gellick, Daveron, and all the Sisters. It was a bleak sensation, like being cut adrift from land, leaving him floating alone on this ocean of thought; a thousand different castes, a million people he'd never met, and none of them familiar.
He'd never felt so alone in his life. Already he felt a cutting sense of regret that he'd sent Alam away. All his high-minded sentiments about needing to do this on his own evaporated like morning dew. The emptiness inside hurt. The world around him was truly alien. The sense of the Slumswelters nearby was cold and unfeeling.
Cries rang out from nearby streets. Someone in pain, someone laying out a challenge. He could see the lights of the Boomfire, and watched groups of men shouting their way from dinning bar to damask house, starting brawls, hurling insults, vomiting in gutters.
The density of the city's minds paralyzed him, and he lay still and wept for a little while. He would never see Sister Henderson again. Probably he would see none of the Sisters, or Mare, or Alam, or any of them. His life as he'd known it had just ended. Now it was time to start again.
He stopped thinking. It wasn't helping.
He stood up.
Nobody greeted him, said good morning, offered a blessing of the Heart. There was nobody here to serve food in the refectory, to heat the water in the lavers so he could drink and wash, to sing in morning chorister and beat back the dark. Now he lived in the dark, and had to make it his home.
He spread out the goods from his pack. He had two flasks of water, and one was empty already. He had five oat cakes, some salted cuts of bacon, a roll of cheese and three apples. He counted out the coins from the purse; ten golden guineas, twenty silver shekels, and thirty copper bits. There was a small sewing kit, a knife, a small copper cooking pot and some more pieces of clothing, plus five small white candles with a flint and striker.
That was it.
"All right," he said. Then he said it again, using the sound of the words in the air like handholds, ushering himself up. There was a lot of work ahead, a lot of risks, and he had to start on them now.
First he wrapped himself in his winter cassock, gloves and cowl, and made another tentative tour of the millinery. It was dark and he didn't dare light a candle, now that he was alone. The building felt very different with Mare gone, like the life had been sucked out of it. The holes in the walls were mournful. The rotten stairs, the missing doors and shattered windows all spoke of years of neglect. The ground floor was near pitch dark, stippled with moonlight, and stank of sewage.
All of that could be fixed, he told himself. He could work on it and make it all safer, and warmer, and more defensible. It would take weeks or months, but perhaps it could be a good place. He bit his lip to force the fresh swell of tears away. There was no choice here. This was a necessity, and far easier than anything Mare had ever faced. She'd never had the tools he'd had, nor the money, and she'd survived.
He climbed a broken-runged ladder to the rooftop. It was barren but for a few scraps of insulating lead sheet, turned black with the rain. There were no carved statues at the corners, as there had been at the Abbey cathedral. No dense crop of grass, only smears of spilled oil.
Standing at the teetering edge he looked out at the overgrown park by the millinery's side, down on the nameless streets that crossed below, and wondered at the life the place once must have known. The view was impressive, but didn't carry the crystalline, distant perfection of the cathedral-top panorama. Back then he'd been stunned by the beauty of the city, and now he was just beginning to see the cold, cruel edge that this place held for an orphan child, out in the world alone.
He set to work.
On the ground floor he worked the old larder out of the frozen mud, and dragged it noisily up the stairs, working up a sweat. In the small back storeroom he set it against the wall of buckshot holes, then lay do
wn his blankets beside it. If any more shots were to come through the building's thin façade, this should protect him.
In a dark corner he pried out a loose floorboard with his misercordes, and set within it half of the gold and silver coins the Sisters had given him. That was enough to live for most of a year, if he managed it wisely. By candlelight he fashioned a belt and holsters for the misericorde spikes, using tough canvas strips cut from the pack. He looped it round his waist with the holsters hanging down his thighs, tucked inside his pants.
When he was finished tightening and adjusting, he could carry the spikes hidden from view. He practiced drawing them quickly through the slitted pockets, turning them, blocking and stabbing as Mare had shown him.
The Grammaton chimed for two in the morning. From the roof he looked out at its clock face, a small pale disc in the moonlight. He'd never seen it so close before, set into the huge pink Grammaton tower, in Grammaton Square where the Haversham opened out alongside Tiptanic gardens.
He ate a night lunch of oatcakes and dried bacon slices, then returned to methodical work, pushing thoughts of how Sister Henderson died aside. Using his spikes he pried up floorboards and nails from the ground floor and used them to stopgap the buckshot holes in the larder, using the haft of one of his misericordes as a hammer.
It was hard work, and when he was done his arms and legs shook with the effort, but the visible progress he'd made buoyed his spirits. It was good to work with his hands.
Dawn was closing in by the time he finished, but there was one more thing he wanted to do still. Ignoring the sick sense of longing to return to the warm and safe Abbey, he tugged down his hood and smeared soot thickly across his face, obscuring his scars. He checked his spike harnesses, counted eight silvers into the purse, then tucked it into his inner tunic and left the millinery behind.
The streets of the Slumswelters felt colder now, more remote. It was strange to think of the plague that had decimated this district, bringing it so low that few ever came, leaving the cursed streets abandoned. He circled round the park, peering through the knotty boughs of brunifer bushes to a brackish stone fountain, strangled by ivy in the center. A faint gurgling sound came from it, and he wondered if he could raise fresh water from it.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 13