Smoke and Summons (Numina Book 1)

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  Rone agreed with a nod and let Sandis lead the way. The halls were lit just enough for a security guard to pass through. She checked the path, then hurried down the hall to a stairwell. Waited. Rone thought he heard footsteps above them. Sandis must have heard them, too, because she forwent the stairs and continued down the hall, testing one door—locked—and then a set of two—open.

  They stepped onto scaffolding that surrounded scads of expensive-looking machinery. Large machinery. On the ground beneath them, assembly stations stretched between the various machines.

  Sandis grabbed the precarious railing at the edge of the scaffolding, and for a moment, Rone thought she was going to jump. But she merely peered into the darkness beneath them, searching. A few heartbeats later, she stumbled back, spinning around until her eyes landed on his waist.

  She rushed toward him and grabbed the belt cinched over his trousers.

  “I’m not necessarily complaining—” He grinned. Yeah, they were running for their lives, still, but he couldn’t help it. “—but this isn’t exactly how I thought this would play out.”

  Thoroughly ignoring Rone’s half-honest joke, she undid the buckle and yanked the belt out of his trouser loops fast enough to hurt. Then she rushed to the door, crouched, and knotted the leather between the handles.

  Speeding for the stairs, Sandis waved for Rone to follow her. He should have nabbed her a darker dress. The light color of the linen she wore shone like a beacon against the shadows, but at least it made her easy to follow in this unknown territory.

  They slunk down to the main floor. Tiptoed around the assembly lines and workstations. Sandis reached for a table and pulled it toward her. The legs screeched against the floor, and they both froze, worried the sound had carried. Rone allowed himself two breaths before grabbing the table opposite her and hefting it up, testing its weight. “We’ll have to pick it up,” he whispered. “Where do you want it?”

  She gestured with her head to a corner behind a large, bulbous machine, similar to a furnace. It sat near the dark wall at the back of the room, a ways below a high window. A good place to hole up, though not the most comfortable to sleep.

  Rone lifted the table up until two of its legs were off the ground. Sandis got her shoulder under her side of the table and did the same. As quietly as they could, they moved it to the spot she’d chosen, gingerly setting it on its side, forming a short wall in the shadows. Sandis leapt over the thing and went to retrieve another table, which Rone helped her move beside the first.

  Grabbing his arm, Sandis said, “There’s a shallow bin over there, against the far wall.” She pointed. “It holds half-assembled rifles. Bring me some.”

  Rone glanced in that direction, a question forming on his tongue, but the sound of footsteps overhead made him swallow it. Nodding, he jumped the tables and hurried toward the bin, careful not to knock anything over. His heart started to pulse in the thick artery of his neck. He had to cross the entire floor, but he got there without incident. Inside were a handful of rifles, though it looked like someone had sawed them in half. Stocks, bolts, levers. He grabbed two, one in each hand, and hurried back.

  A thump, again from above, but farther . . . what, north? Like a body dropping. A security guard? Had they been found already? Maybe they’d been watched the whole time, and the scout had simply waited for reinforcements to strike.

  Rone jumped the tables again, and for an alarming second, he didn’t see Sandis. She emerged from the narrow pass near the wall, her skirt folded against her waist. She knelt and let its contents spill—a bunch of metal that Rone slowly recognized as various firearm pieces. The assembled bits of a firing mechanism, minus the trigger guard. A barrel and chamber. A magazine.

  She grabbed one of the half rifles from his hand and began assembling it like it was a children’s puzzle. Her hands moved like birds, piece after piece snapping expertly into place.

  “This is why you kept asking about guns,” he whispered.

  She nodded. “I worked here for a long time. Including at the end of the line.”

  “End of the line?”

  She raised a completed rifle to her shoulder and peered over it. It lacked a scope. “Testing.”

  Rone almost whistled, then remembered himself and stopped. He’d never actually fired a gun before meeting Sandis. He didn’t own any. His father hadn’t believed in them, of course, and he didn’t use them in his own business because they were too bulky, too loud.

  Sandis moved faster on the second firearm, though one of the parts got stuck and she had to disassemble and reassemble it. Finished, she handed it to Rone.

  More footsteps, far away. One story up. Rone doubted the guard had suddenly multiplied. They’d been followed, which probably meant Kazen hadn’t been killed in the alley. He and Sandis either needed to find a door out and hope it wasn’t being manned or stay very, very quiet.

  Sandis bit her lip. Stood.

  Rone grabbed her wrist.

  “I need ammunition,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”

  She sounded confident, so he let her go, and she danced away into the shadows. Rone strained to listen to the footsteps. They came and went, sometimes closer, sometimes farther. Sweat licked his palms.

  Sandis returned with a box, and Rone tried not to let his sigh of relief be audible. As she knelt on the ground and began loading the rifles, a new question came to mind.

  “Sandis,” he whispered, despite knowing that, for now, they were alone. “Who’s Anon?”

  She glanced at him, confused.

  He pointed toward the scaffolding. “You said Anon broke the lock.”

  Her eyes saddened. “He’s my brother. Was.”

  The one she’d been looking for when the slavers had found her. That story still sounded so odd to him. Random slavers in Dresberg, kidnapping citizens in alleys . . . He pushed the skepticism away. Sandis wouldn’t lie about that. He hadn’t known her long, but he was sure of her honesty.

  “You never found him,” he tried.

  She shook her head. “No, but he’s dead.” Her body wilted under the statement. “Drowned in a canal.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Kazen told me.”

  “And we trust him now.”

  She lifted her head. Swiped hair from her face. “He’s gone, Rone.”

  “But how—”

  “He hadn’t come home for three days . . . That’s why I was looking for him when . . .” Her throat tightened around the words, and she shook her head. “I know Anon. He would have come after me. Even if it was a lie . . . if my brother came looking for me, Kazen wouldn’t have liked it, you know?”

  Rone nodded. Either way, a dead brother.

  He bent his knees and rested his arms on them. For a moment, he thought he heard footsteps in the room . . . but no, those came from above.

  “My father worked in cotton,” Sandis continued. She’d set the guns aside and cleaned her thumbnail with her other thumbnail. “I’m not sure what happened. Someone smoking inside, maybe. But the place lit up. He died in the fire. When I was branded . . . I wondered if his death felt something like that.”

  Rone’s shoulders drooped, and something pinched deep inside him. She had a way of messing with his insides. “Oh, Sandis.”

  “My mother gave up living after that,” she went on. “Just . . . stopped going to work. Stopped eating. Stopped drinking. Lay in our flat until she died. Anon got a job here first.” She scanned the shadows. “We managed to keep everything afloat for a few years. Then he went missing . . . You know the rest.”

  He frowned. Yes, he knew the rest. “How old were you, when they died?”

  “I was eleven. Anon was nine.”

  Rone rubbed his hands together. He wasn’t cold, but it gave him something to do. It was no wonder she wanted to find this Talbur guy so badly.

  Sandis knew a little about his mother, and she’d gotten to see in person what a winning father he had. That ball of guilt moved back and forth
inside him. The story of his mother would have the same depressing notes if he didn’t get her out of Gerech soon.

  “Three years ago, when I was twenty-two . . .” Already the story sounded awkward. He’d never told it before. “I was still working in the sewers. Still cleaning Kurtz’s street.” He chuckled. It wasn’t funny, really, but he couldn’t help it. “I was picking garbage out of one of the sewer tunnels. When the collection is slow to pick up people’s trash, they like to throw it down the manholes. Real generous of them.”

  Sandis smiled.

  “Anyway. I was scooping something out of the water when the tunnel collapsed.”

  She stiffened. Waited.

  “I obviously made it out all right,” he said, “though a big chunk of something hit me in the back. Messed up my shoulder.” Thinking about it made the muscles ache anew, and he reached back to massage a knot at the base of his neck. “I clawed my way out of the rubble. The concrete had crumbled all the way to the street. Some sunlight came through the wreckage, and it glinted off something. Even though I couldn’t move my arm and I was bleeding from my head, I dived for it. No one around here turns down gold.”

  He pulled his fingers from his sore shoulder and pulled the amarinth from his pocket. Tossed it up, caught it. “Found this sucker. The first Kolins, they leveled everything out when they came here, but they didn’t clear it all. I assume there was some sort of crypt over that tunnel. Not sure—never searched for bodies. I was going to sell this, but some bastard went bat crazy trying to steal it from me. If not for Kurtz, he would have gotten it.”

  “Kurtz saved you?” she asked.

  Rone laughed. “I saved myself. Second time I ever got to use what he taught me, you know? Anyway, it took me a while, but I figured out what it was.” He let out a long breath and stuffed the artifact back into his pocket. “From there I conjured Engel Verlad, quit my job, and started making more money.”

  Sandis nodded, slowly. “And what does Engel do?”

  Rone shrugged, the action tugging unpleasantly on his shoulder. “I do what others are too scared to do. Steal things, spy, deliver one person to another.”

  She pulled back from him. “Assassination?”

  Rone shrugged a second time, then resumed rubbing that knot. “I don’t know what they do with them. I don’t ask. I won’t kill anyone myself, though. Those jobs I turn down.” He wasn’t a killer. Maybe Kurtz’s philosophies had stuck more than he’d like to admit. Maybe his father had drilled morality into his brain too solidly, before he left. It was why he didn’t work for mobsters or grafters, if he could avoid it. Their jobs got too dirty. Too political.

  He let the amarinth dangle from his finger. “It was a job I did . . . the one with Marald Steffen—”

  “The old man you beat up.”

  His lip twitched. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  Sandis shrugged.

  “It was a job I did for him that got twisted and put my mother in Gerech. I tried to pay off the warden and turn myself in, but . . .” He shook his head. “God’s tower, I hate this place.”

  They were both quiet for a moment. Rone didn’t have anything more to say. Sandis was probably judging him. Here she was, running for her life to find family she didn’t even know, and he’d let his innocent mother get thrown into prison. He knew what she’d ask next. Why not sell the amarinth, Rone? Wouldn’t that be enough money? But she wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t—

  Sandis pushed herself onto her knees and pulled Rone’s hand from his neck.

  “What—” he started, but Sandis gently eased his head over and prodded the area.

  “This side?”

  His injured shoulder? “Uh, yeah.” She pushed a tender spot, and he started.

  “Turn around.”

  Rone wasn’t sure what was happening, but the footsteps above quieted, so he did as he was told, putting his back to her.

  Her fingers followed his shoulder blade, then his spine. “The grafters don’t employ doctors,” she said, her voice close to his ear. “But Kazen makes sure his vessels are in good health. We don’t work as well otherwise.”

  “You talk like you’re a thing.”

  “To him, I am.” Her touch crept up to his neck. “I’m glad you don’t think so.”

  “Why would I—”

  She shoved the heel of her hand into his neck and wrapped her other arm under his shoulder, pulling it in the opposite direction. A sharp pop sounded in Rone’s bones, and he barely had the forethought to stifle his scream. He ripped himself from Sandis’s grip.

  “The hell, Sandis?” he asked, rubbing his shoulder . . .

  It felt better.

  Rone paused. Felt for the knot he’d been working. Couldn’t find it. “The hell, Sandis?” he asked again.

  She sat on her heels. “Better?”

  Rone rolled back his shoulders. “Yeah. What did you do?”

  “We have to learn a lot of self-care, with the grafters,” she said as he settled back down. She looked away before adding, in a softer tone, “They fight back sometimes. The people Kazen sends us to punish. They can’t hurt the numina, but they can hurt us. We learn how to fix it when they do.” She hesitated. “I’ve only seen one other vessel die, right after I met Kazen. That was the angriest I’ve ever seen him.”

  “Even in the streets? Chasing you? Us?”

  She nodded.

  Rone shook his head. “That guy is psychotic.”

  They fell silent again. A police whistle sounded somewhere beyond the factory’s thick walls. Rone held his breath and listened. It didn’t sound again.

  Maybe the scarlets had found the grafters and were going to do something about them. Now that deserved a chuckle.

  Without the distraction of conversation, each passing minute put him more on edge. Where were the grafters? When would they strike? His eyelids felt thick, but he was too anxious to sleep. His nose itched, then his leg, then his hand. The more he thought about it, the more he itched.

  He pulled out his amarinth again, fiddled with it. Rolled the loops around themselves.

  Sandis gasped and clawed at her heart.

  Rone straightened. “What?” He looked around, searching for a grafter.

  “I . . .” She shook her head. Pulling his focus from the machinery, Rone noticed she was staring at his amarinth. “I . . . felt something. I was watching it, and . . .”

  “And what?”

  Her eyes met his, dark and endless and frightened. “It was like . . . burning copper. It hurt—”

  Her words cut short as the door to the scaffolding—the same one they had come in through—shook. Something rammed into it, but the belt held.

  Sandis grabbed her rifle. Her right ring finger trembled.

  She didn’t want to kill anyone, either.

  Reaching for the other rifle, Rone watched her crank the lever on her weapon, never taking her eyes off the door. She put the butt to her shoulder mechanically, like she was making a conscious effort not to tremble.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. Her dark eyes met his, and for a split second, he forgot there were grafters at the door. Forgot she was a vessel. Forgot that this night might end with them both dying.

  Maybe he should kiss her. A last hurrah before mortality failed him. But if they lived . . . how mad would she be that he’d taken such a liberty?

  The door shook. Sandis stiffened, her gaze shooting back over his head.

  A knife blade thrust between the doors and sawed at the leather belt holding them closed.

  Chapter 16

  Sandis struggled to clear the sensations the amarinth had left in her mind as she readied the Helderschmidt lever-action sixty. It hadn’t been a vision, exactly, but an impression of something like . . . metal. This heat had not felt like Ireth’s familiar heat—it had hurt, like nails digging around her heart. And the smell that had accompanied the impression . . .

  It smelled like Heath.

  Nausea assaulted her stomach. The grafters finished c
utting through the belt and crept onto the scaffolding like spiders, searching. The lighting was poor, but Sandis had no trouble identifying them. Guards always carried lamps.

  Maybe if she and Rone stayed quiet enough, the men would give up and leave. But she didn’t believe the thought even as it flitted through her head.

  Rone was so still she couldn’t even hear him breathe. His face was turned away from her, watching the shadows on the scaffolding. Sandis held very still, palms sweating around the rifle. She tried to focus on the warmth funneling from Rone’s calloused hand into her shoulder. It was a safe sort of warm. It kept her calm, even when the hunters were so close.

  Rone leaned in, his nose almost brushing her cheek. She shivered from the nearness and from his breath touching her ear. “Numina?”

  She shook her head. None had been summoned, at least. She could only sense a numen that was summoned and near, not unoccupied vessels. But it made her hopeful nonetheless.

  A grafter ventured down the stairs while another lit a lamp. The burst of light reflected off Ravis’s shaved head, and his narrow body created a shadow like a crooked tree across the far wall of the workroom. Staps was directly behind him, followed by several mobsmen with Straight Ace’s colors.

  Rone shifted onto the balls of his feet, ready to fight, but he had no amarinth, and every one of these men was armed. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of Sandis’s neck. For a moment, she considered calling Ireth . . . but her energy was too low. Even if she succeeded, another half summoning might knock her out before she could tap into Ireth’s fire. She’d be unconscious for another six hours. She couldn’t leave herself so vulnerable. She couldn’t put the burden of their combined safety on Rone alone. Besides, this was a firearms factory. Dabbling with uncontrolled flame was too dangerous.

  Though she couldn’t do so now, she had summoned him, partially. She had brought a level-seven numen into her body and held on. She was stronger than she thought.

  She was strong enough for this.

  The lamplight only reached so far, and the machine they’d chosen as their hideout shaded them from its glow. Ravis and Staps whispered to each other; Ravis turned around and went back the way he’d come. Six men had been left behind.