The Adjunc will find you again. I can't protect you. Stop.
He tore the paper down himself.
Back at the millinery he paced back and forth as sunlight crept in, warming the wooden rooms. He was too angry to sleep. With fists clenched he stalked up and down the stairs, seeking an answer. On the roof he shouted into the sunlight, so strange to be out in the day.
"Show yourself!"
Not a leaf in the park rustled, nothing moved.
"I just want to know about her," he called. "Please!"
It didn't answer, and that infuriated him further. There had to be some trick to how it stayed so invisible, but he couldn't fathom it. Yet he would. Like every task his mother had set him as a child, like the time she'd abandoned him in this place at only four years old, he would solve the puzzle.
He only had to come at it from the right angle. And the angle for this had to be the pattern.
He dropped into his bedroll with thoughts of the pattern buzzing in his head. All through the long, warm day he dreamt and woke fitfully, running mazes in his mind.
* * *
He woke with a map of the city buzzing in his head. He emerged into the night, eschewing his usual routine, to push through the sparse crowds of the Carroway markets. In the scrivener's street he bought a bucket of whitewash, a brush, and a chunk of black graphite from a stallsman who tried hard to peer into his cowl.
"Induran, are you?" the man asked, taking his money. "What you want to wash anything for?"
Men nearby laughed. Sen sped back to the millinery, where he recklessly lit a fire in the main hall, uncapped the can of whitewash and began to paint the walls. Using the old larder as a stand he painted the ceiling too. It took a long arduous few hours, but he did it with a rapt sense of focus. When it was complete, he began to sketch directly onto the white with the graphite chunk.
He started with a map of his posting route round the surrounding districts, of Belial and Carroway, the Slumswelters and the Calk. Then he started adding in the order of disappearances as best he could remember them, trying to string each instance on the map together with lines that would equal the creature's route.
Through the night he kept at it, covering the walls and ceiling with increasingly byzantine tracks more complex than his scars. He worked until his graphite chunks were ground to nubs, theorizing routes and hitting endless dead ends, realizing every time afresh that the creature's route was impossible, even by horse or rickshaw, even tugged by a Gull or suspended from a zeppelin. The city itself ruled it out.
Into the day he continued seeking a pattern, casting his mind back on what he'd felt, what he'd seen, what could possibly be, until finally it came to him as the sun rose high in the sky. He lay back on the floor and laughed, looking up at the scrawl of black graphite on the wall and ceiling, as thousands of possible new routes wrote themselves across his mind.
The creature didn't obey the city. It didn't use only the streets or the rooftops, but every possible path, in ways Sen had never considered before. There were countless underground bi-rail tracks and sewers riddling Ignifer's city, even beneath the dark side. There were places where those tunnels meshed with long terraced rooftops, Levi weirs, canals, all interwoven with the canopy of revelatory lines that connected everything overhead.
The creature had to be using them all. It was the only thing that explained its bizarre route, its incredible speed, and the fact that Sen had never seen it. Lying there, he smiled, because he could run those routes too, now that he knew about them. He had climbed up the dizzy heights of the cathedral, and dug down into the depths of his mother's grave, making him at home in both places. He could walk a roof or scurry along in a sewer if he had to. He felt the old joy course through him, of solving one of his mother's puzzles.
His hand shook as he scrawled his message on all the papers that remained, something like three hundred. He packed his paste can and brush, but only stopped himself at the door, as he realized his vision was blurred, his hands were shaking, and the street outside was in broad daylight.
He would not make the same mistake again, to leave himself exhausted and prey for the Adjunc. Hugging the bag full of papers to his chest he returned to the larder room and nailed the door shut to wait for fall of dark, sensing the creature nearby like one of his starry heroes, watching down.
HUNT II
He woke in the night feeling refreshed and ready. The creature was there still, hovering at the edge of his senses. He snatched up his bag and paste buckets and started out into the city.
After pasting a lightning route of one hundred, he climbed up to the rooftops in Lord Quill Square. Looking out, he felt new routes writing themselves atop the city, by rooftop and sewer, by bi-rail and revelatory cable, spreading out beneath the heavy dome of stars. He felt the tone of the creature's thoughts shift to match. They were always simple, perhaps even bleak, but this disrupted them. It hadn't expected him to climb up and join it, and that buoyed Sen on.
"I'm coming!" he shouted.
Likely it would be several streets back from him at that point, peeling away at the postings he'd already made, so he started running toward it along the roof's spine. Slates slid out underfoot as he dashed across the top of the city, but he didn't care, feeling a high euphoria that urged him on. At the roof's edge he took to the wireways, half balancing and half slipping his way across a thatch of revelatory and telegraph tubes, conjoining to the next row of roofs where he could run again.
Peering down, he saw that here his papers remained, pasted like white revelatories in the dark streets. He thought back to the map he'd scrawled across the millinery ceiling, guessing that the creature had either taken a different route from the start or was adjusting to match him now. He recalculated while he ran, and at an intersection leaped down from the roof, caught a revelatory lamppost and shuffled down, only to clamber back up a new building's front and veer sprinting off along a new row of roofs for the Calk, heading there in as straight a line as possible.
It felt like flying, speeding overhead while Allswellmen trudged below, tolling out their mournful low calls and lighting revelatory lampposts as they went. In moments he was at the district's dusty outskirts, twice as fast as he ever could have reached it before. The sense of the creature was strong here, and here he found the first missing paper.
His heart thumped hard in his chest. It was working.
He dropped to the street and slapped up another sheet in its place, then set back to running, this time for a park off Grammaton Square. There was no direct roofway, though there had to be sewers that ran underneath. He ran down the off-Slumswelter street, saw an open sewer drain at the gutter-edge beside a gleam-eyed drunk, and made for it, sliding bodily through the open grating and down.
He dropped onto slick stone below, dank with waste. The air stank so badly it stung his eyes, but the sense of the creature just ahead of him in the darkness abruptly sharpened. It knew he was there. He'd stepped off the old map and into its hidden world, one that bypassed everything he'd known, and he could feel its fear. The stench was terrible, but it couldn't put a dent in the thrill he felt.
He started along the sewer embankment carefully at first, taking the measure of the slimy flooring and the various lead pipes running either side, edging rats into the water, but soon he was running. Scrolling the map in his mind as he ran, he passed under the Delmington usury yards, under the Grammaton itself, then climbed back up in the Boomfire, through a back-alley midden behind a familiar damask lair.
On a clapboard sign nearby, splayed with the various shades of damask on offer, he saw his posting was gone, with the sense of the creature hanging in the air around it. He pasted another in seconds and sped off again.
For hours he ran back and forth, wheeling around his route like a manic Gomorrah fly, re-posting as he went, above the dead gray streets of the Slumswelters, along the dusty white Calk wall, down the vacant Carothaby bi-rail line suspended over grimy Carroway back-alleys, to the Levi bank a
nd back again, tracking the creature by intuition even as it tracked back along his route. His pack lightened, his heart thumped, until a little after the Grammaton tolled for five he found a posting only half-ripped away from the wall of a tumbledown Belial apothecary.
The sense of the creature was so close he could almost taste it, bitter like a rotten hawkenberry. He slapped up another copy and sprinted on, feeling the city move beneath him like a living thing, its secret pathways opening only to him. He chose directions unconsciously, routes glimpsed as part of the whole, moving in a blur of growing certainty until almost every page he hit on was half-ripped.
Sometime after his two hundredth posting he saw the creature clearly for the first time.
It was an insect-thin figure in the distance, bowed beneath a bulbous sack and tearing at a posting stuck to a foundry's brick wall. Sen's heart lurched with a dizzying double beat, then he dropped his pack and bucket of paste, slid hand over hand down an anchored revelatory tube from his rooftop perch, and landed across the street from it.
It turned slowly, and for a moment Sen's knees weakened as he met its Sectile eyes.
A Spider.
The caste was Unforgiven, excised in the city centuries ago as monsters. He'd only ever heard of them in the legends of Saint Ignifer, but here one stood before him, fear blooming off it. Its shaggy black head was monstrous and lumpish, too large for its shrunken body, and ripe with eight bulbous compound eyes. Within its lipless black mouth waggled dark stubs where long mandibles should have protruded. It stood on two stick-thin Sectile-limbs, with two raised to the wall, while only bulges within its brown mocking coat hinted at four others.
Sen stared at it, and it stared at him, the moment stretching out in the pink dawn light.
"What are you?" Sen asked at last.
The sound broke the spell. The Spider hurled its sack of reclaimed papers down and took off down the nearest alleyway.
Sen tore after it. His feet hammered the cobblestones, his arms pumped, and the strange Spider bolted along with an awkward and rolling grace, its four limbs twisting in unnatural ways. It turned left onto a hawking street just beginning to fill with morning crowds and sped amongst them like water through a sieve, never losing pace as it darted left and right, always ahead.
Sen chased it the length of Carroway toward the intersection with the Haversham tradeway, where it made an impossible jump up the side of a blacksmith's workshop, its long arms grappling at the gutter-lip and carrying it over the roof without breaking momentum. Sen didn't pause for a moment, ran directly at the point where the smith's corner abutted a nearby coopery and threw himself at it, kicked off and caught the lip, hauled himself over the timber roofline, and stood to let out a feral cry. The Spider lurched at the far end of the rooftop and dropped off the edge.
Sen flew after it, the stacks of market goods blurring with bodies and faces in the street below. At the roof edge he leapt to the ground, rolled, and charged down a narrow alley without even stopping to look, feeling the creature's route stretching out before him like a map in his mind. He sprinted down an alley, sprang over a cracked copper sink and ducked the detritus of a fallen plaster wall, then burst out through a dash of hawkenberries onto the Haversham.
The incense markets were warming up for a day of sweet fog, and already the air was wreathed with dense plumes of Coriole, topaz and roasting Aragon lamb. Dense thoughts battered at Sen's mind, but he was too intent to be distracted, strapping his hood tighter as he darted amongst them, glimpsing the Spider jack-knifing along a rooftop three stories above. Sen launched himself at the nearest drainpipe and came up to a stunning view of the city, overhung by the massive mountain in the distance, cut in half by the creature's thin silhouette.
Standing there he felt as though he'd already caught it. He knew this city and he knew the Spider's mind. He let out a triumphant cry and dashed along the steeply sloped rooftops, tiles slipping free under his weight and raining down to smash in the street below. At the end he leapt as the Spider had, caught a telegrammatic wire which bowed under his weight, dropped into Carothaby crossing, then dashed after a flicker of movement into the bi-rail underground opening.
He skipped down the dark moss-grown steps, leaping around the slow-walking day's riders as his maps of the city both above and below clicked into place. He vaulted over the brass-ring ticket turnstiles, sending up jeers from the stationmaster's office, and leapt the final stone steps three at a time down to the long shadowy platform as a train was just steaming away. He sprinted after it, darting between shufflers in their egress, and as the last carriage winked into the dark tunnel he sprang after it. He snagged a handle on its back and tugged himself in before the soot-blackened tunnel wall could swat him off.
His arms throbbed with the shock, but he hung on in the burning smoke-trail from the train's furnace as it picked up steam, churning north. He could scarcely breathe, but he was so close to the creature now, invisible in the dark. It was inches from him only, he could almost reach out and grab it.
Soon the train began to slow for Vox Populi station, there was a sound somewhere behind and the sense of the Spider weakened, so Sen dropped off the back. He landed awkwardly on a rail hoarding but managed to roll in the gravel and regain his balance, then stood still for a moment in the near-black tunnel, listening as the train steamed on into the station. There was a light shuffling from his left, where the tunnel forked toward the Calk, and he raced after it.
Quickly the dull light of Vox Populi station faded and he ran on in the dark, over rails and scattering gravel chips. He ran by feel, listening to its Sectile feet clicking off the rusted railings just ahead. He imagined the lines of the tunnel curving into the dark ahead, and knew from his maps that there were vent-chutes to ground nearby, chutes so thin he might not be able to follow the Spider within.
His legs were exhausted, but he redoubled his efforts, gravel spitting against the rails in his wake. Just ahead he heard a change in the Spider's momentum, a creak from its joints, and flung himself into the air after it, hands outstretched.
His palm jammed into a sharp crevice of the Spider's leg as it rose upward, leaping for the flues. Its momentum tugged Sen into a jolting forward swing, off-balance, then he was falling. They hit the rails together, Sen crunching hard onto gravel, shocking the breath out of him, while the Spider cracked down across the rails. At once it tried to flee, yanking painfully on Sen's fist still wedged into its Sectile casing.
In the faint light cast by the pinhole chute above, he could just make out its struggling outline. He yanked back, while scrabbling in the gravel with his free hand until he caught upon a chunk of rock, which he swung round to crunch between the creature's many eyes. It cried out and Sen cried out too, pulling himself closer to strike it again. The rock crunched into chitin, a spurt of dark fluid spurted across the back of his hand, and the creature dropped limp to the rails.
Sen fell to his knees panting. In the weak light he disentangled his left hand, blood rushing from it freely. It was serrated across the palm in a ragged line, and he tugged off his outer tunic and balled it tightly as a bandage, which he held over his head to slow the flow. Blood dripped into his hair and down his face, but steadily ebbed.
He looked down at the stick-thin Spider before him in disbelief.
This feeble creature had killed an Adjunc. In the wan light viscous blood leaked down its forehead casing. His eyes fell to its sides, and with his foot he spread the long mocking coat away from its body. Emerging from its midsection were four short stubs, shorn at the first joint, where stalky limbs should have sprouted. They waggled as the creature lay unconscious.
It was wheezing and bleeding, so he did what he could for its wounds, tamping them tight with its own coat. Then he bent to the rails nearby, unearthing gravel around the iron spars like he was digging up rocky potatoes. When he had hollowed out enough spaces, he threaded the Spider's remaining limbs under the rails and wedged them in tightly with gravel, until it was spread
-eagled to the tracks, immobile but for the wheezing breath drawing in and out of its mouth.
* * *
It came to with a jerk, tugging on its pinioned limbs and snapping its jaws, swiftly learning the confines of its prison. Its compound eyes roved the darkness until they set upon Sen, then it began to thrash, frenzying itself against the rocks and rails. Sen watched as its movements only jammed it in tighter, until it finally stopped struggling.
"Who are you?" Sen asked. "Why are you following me?"
It began to laugh. Its pink mandible stubs spread wider, its blood-rimed mouth-hole opened to reveal a sliver of gray tongue within, and several long bellows gushed out. The sound reverberated around the empty tunnel like mad thunder, tumbling away in the darkness.
The laughter stopped as the creature choked on blood and spat it out. The echoes died away.
"I am no thing," it said. Its jaw distended as it spoke, producing a harsh and guttural voice. "I have followed no one."
Sen gazed down at its black Sectile eyes, glinting faintly in the dark. It laughed because it was ashamed, he could feel that much. Something of it felt like the mad Autist with the coal-eyes he'd seen bobbling through the Slumswelters, but here the chaos was guided, controlled.
"Did my mother send you?"
The Spider's eyes flared briefly wide, but it said nothing.
Sen stepped closer, his heart hammering. "She did. Tell me."
"I cannot help you, little boy."
"That's a lie! You've been following me. You killed the Adjunc."
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 16