She would not miss, he knew, not even at the cost of her own life. Her hands moved without urgency, for apprehension was always the enemy of the professional craftsman.
The air roared with unholy concussions.
Lulu swayed, a monochromatic lilac, forever dwarfed by the world’s unfurling thorns. She tumbled back, her shoulder spewing crimson splotches.
Enk threw himself at her, caught her—as perhaps a dutiful betrothed should—and lowered her to the ground. He cupped her cheek, checked her wounds. He heard Tizkar roll to his feet, heard him fall upon prone prey like one ravenous.
“I-I have to tell you something,” Lulu said, wincing as he probed her shoulder with a finger. “I don’t want to die without—”
Enk scowled, listening to the shrill cries of the tormented, more gargling whimpers than piercing shrieks. His arm hairs stirred, but whether from excitement or horror was impossible to discern.
“You’re not dying,” he told her, pressing forward with his investigation. “The musket ball only grazed you. You’ll be fine as long as we get—”
“Shut up and listen. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
He pursed his lips. “Go on then.”
“I deceived you. . . .” her voice began, only to fade as her breath hitched in her breast. Tears streamed from her eyes. “I lied through omission. Last night went a little differently than you believed it did.”
“What are you saying?” he croaked
“We . . . we never had sex.”
Enk could only stare at her. All this time he had assumed that they had copulated, only to find out the truth now, after he had found solace and happiness in . . . in. . . .
Suddenly he was skipping backward, rubbing at eyes that burned and burned. Something venerated donned the guise of the most hated. He shook his head. This should not be possible! How could such luminescence be subsumed in the span of a single breath?
Not fair. It was not fair.
“Enk,” Lulu whispered.
Enk lowered his hands and watched the color drain from her face. They hung in a dwindling shroud of obsidian, pricked by the alabaster orbs appearing within distant windows.
“We-we need to . . . we need to leave.” He turned his back to her dismay, peered at Tizkar’s artistry.
The older boy stood amid bodies bent and broken by the hammer of his ire, repeatedly slamming the heel of his boot into a man’s jaw. Each blow drew a spasm of lifeless limbs and a new splatter of gore.
Enk went rigid, his knotted hands quivered at his sides. Passions curled like wisps of steam. He longed to join Tizkar, longed to unleash vengeance onto . . . onto. . . .
No.
He swatted wetness from his eyes.
He needed to leave.
They needed to escape.
“Tizkar, we ha—” He grabbed the older boy’s arm.
Eyes glossed with a maniac’s sheen, Tizkar whirled and slammed Enk into the wall, pressing a cavalry pistol under his chin.
“Stop!” Lulu began in protest, but Tizkar was already scampering back, muttering a stuttering apology.
But Enk felt no additional animus, despite the memory of Tizkar’s cannibalistic snarl. He pointedly avoided Lulu’s stare. Nearby abodes loomed savage and arboreal before them, glass-girdled apertures agleam for the aura of ersatz suns.
A geyser of waxing sounds made a wreckage of the sudden quiet, vehemence clutched above the bumble of pounding hooves—the harsh shouts of approaching thrashers.
“Let’s go.” Lulu careened toward sanctuary, clutching her wounded shoulder. Tizkar hastened to her side, wordlessly supporting her as they skirted the boundary of elevated lights.
Feasting on air, Enk trailed the fleeing pair, dashing from one penumbra constructed grotto to another. The ground disappeared before his lurching stride. Exhaustion scooped the strength from his legs, the sense of falling from unimaginable heights.
He stumbled, felt his belly swim up his throat for the reeling of the world, regained his balance and glanced back. Numerous lanterns shone in the distance, pinpricks of ivory stalled about the newest scene of aversion.
Enk coughed into the crux of his shoulder, freed himself from his stupor. He cuffed spittle from his chin, continued onward, clinging to recollections of his erstwhile home . . .
Laying curled upon his own bed.
Merka slathering ointment onto his chest.
Then he was beyond them, skidding to a stop beside Tizkar and Lulu and a manhole. He doubled, palms braced on his knees, lungs wheezing.
“Hold her,” Tizkar said, handing Lulu off.
Vertigo. Enk caught Lulu and staggered, battling to remain upright. She hissed in his ear, opened her mouth—as if about to speak—closed it again.
Tizkar uncorked the manhole and jumped into the sewer. Enk backed up and spat at the overwhelming stench of excrement, feeling as if he was only moments away from spewing the contents of his stomach. Lulu winced anew, seesawing at his side.
“Give her to me,” Tizkar said, his voice at once hollow and deep, as if a multitude of cavernous holes spoke through one mouth, a strange dance of unseen localities, as distant as the next loci was near.
Relief and satisfaction pooled like cool streams within Enk. Over. The ordeal was almost over. He lowered Lulu down to Tizkar, straining from the effort. When her booted feet joined the swill, she blinked up at him, clutched to Tizkar’s breast.
Hurt throbbed through him, a savage kick that left him trembling and aching. This was the sum of loving, an algebra that substituted given axioms for uncomputable values, a syllogism that put the lie to deductive reasoning. He averted his gaze.
“Come on.” Tizkar waved him down.
Enk shook his head, resolute even as he gagged on brimming passions. He need only glance at the sewer to realize that this was not where he was supposed to be, that despite all proclamations to the contrary, that the way back was not forbidden.
“Home,” he said between panted breaths. “I-I’m going . . . home.”
Fury fairly pulsed through Tizkar’s gray eyes. “What? Don’t be imbecilic! The streets are soon to be overrun with Peacebringers, you can’t possibly stay up there. It’s not—”
Lulu touched Tizkar’s cheek with scarlet digits. “Let’s go,” she told him in watery tones.
“You agree with this—”
“No, I think it’s needlessly reckless. He’s likely to get himself shot or worse, but look at him. His mind is already made up, and we don’t have the time to try to change it. Listen.”
The baying barks of distant hounds set Enk’s ears to buzzing, then echoed eerily through the subterranean hollow below him.
Tizkar’s face stiffened, a featureless mask that was replaced with a slight smile an instant after its commission. Yet his eyes exposed a soul thoroughly confounded, not by the horrors witnessed, but the sting of petty betrayals, by trusts misplaced.
Enk sighed inwardly. It was heartbreaking, to watch a friend grin through unshed tears. He wanted to explain, to leap down, to clasp Tizkar tight, but he turned away instead, understanding he had erred without comprehending how to make amends.
“Wait,” Tizkar called, stalling Enk’s retreat. “The manhole covering—would you. . . ?”
Enk nodded, rising from his half-crouch. He grabbed the circular construction of iron-and-stone and froze, seized by something unfathomable. A foreboding? Then anguish rented the air behind him. The bellowing of feminine lungs.
Chapter Thirty
By Night
The shrill reverberations of bellowing lungs pimpled Enk’s back with innumerable-appendaged dread, squeezed him within festering limbs. Horror, chelicerate in aspect if not form. His forearms trembled, hands still looped about the manhole covering. The scream belonged to Lulu, he knew, but it was the kind of knowing that provides no succor. A sudden longing for sleep galloped through the antechamber of his muddled mind. The night had already been too long, but the volume of her shriek was so loud. . . .
Enk abandoned his haul and leaped for the sewer’s yawning circuit. Broken and limping, he and Lulu had trekked their way through the Shade, little more than lurching shadows pelted by clouds of rain. He could not forsake her! Not to unknown terrors.
A jarring impact.
The ground clubbed Enk’s breast, and he loosed a reflexive oath for the rattling pangs in his chest; It was exhaustion more than his ailment that had fouled his footing. He peered down into the subterranean hollow, panting in the opened-mouth style of overworked dogs.
Tizkar stood below, a piece with a starry void, his false mane silken in the perpetual darkness, his cavalry pistol cocked and trained skyward. An air of necrosis fairly crackled about his shoulders and eyes.
Enk fixed upon the older boy’s manner, confounded more by the transformation than where the weapon aimed—at him. The metamorphosis stymied thought, spat hot coals as vapor across chest and limbs.
“What gave me away?” Tizkar asked with a note of sorrow. Lulu lay slumped against the wall behind him, eyes shut, whimpering through a clenched jaw.
“Gave you away. . . ?” Enk repeated, cadaverous lungs hooked about unseen air. Comprehension eluded, sailed across oblong depths, tracing ocher ovals that degraded into numerals.
Four. Four. Four.
An image expanded, swelled from the deep to bloat into clarity, four feminine forms, mouths slack and shrieking, pale hands latched about gnarled roots.
A remembering that made eyes itch and sting. Four instead of six. Two of the Scarlet Apron’s supposed victims had been missing from Minos’ mind! Nanefe Yosef and Zoe Toro, Lulu’s younger sister.
Enk hung riven before this vision, incredulous despite the preponderance of the evidence before him. “You . . . you’re the. . . ?” His voice sputtered into mist.
“Don’t tell me you hadn’t . . . I thought—” Tizkar clicked his tongue, his demeanor one of exasperation at one’s own folly. “All that work undone.”
Lulu cracked open horrified eyes. “Tizkar, what are you doing? Lower your pistol.”
“Oh, well,” Tizkar continued, shrugging away concern. “Either way, I could not allow you to leave, not now. Far too risky. Now, slowly climb—”
Lulu barreled into Tizkar’s back, catching him unaware. Enk rolled clear of the opening, inhaled a mixture of sewer gases and fresh air. The obstinate barks of unseen hounds pawed the night, circled and clotted about the fringes of veiled streets.
A roar that made ears ring. A fired pistol. The thunder of a lead ball striking stone, the rupturing of said projectile. . . .
“Run if you want!” Tizkar’s mocking voice called. “But you can’t escape me or what’s coming!”
Like any bewildered animal, Enk scampered on the ground, fleeing upon all fours, until he gained his footing. There was something in the older boy’s tone—a fury hidden beneath his sardonic tenor, perhaps, or an eerie twist of vocalities—something that panicked for hearing, worried for things alluded. He swung to the north, avoided the belching light of nearing lanterns.
How. . . ?
How deep had the deception gone?
A flurry of rememberings rising as murderous sputum from the violent pitch of spasming lungs. The whirling blur of Professor Sarr’s practice blade. His mother’s exposed buttocks. Encircling warmth. The stench of sulfur.
No-no!
Enk stumbled, crippled by these whirlwind revelations, slumped in the shadow of a dying street lamp. And all the while his heart bludgeoned his insides.
“Merka,” he muttered in agony, “he murdered her to get to me.”
But why. . . ?
Why this grand deception?
The barking of unseen dogs was now as near as Tizkar had been moments earlier—closer. But he did not care. He could not care, not with the ground becoming as smoke. He gulped for the stinging of slovenly lies.
This was what came of trusting others.
This was what came of opening your heart to the world!
A throng of bullish hounds came into view, their faces crazed and twisted, their lantern carrying handlers floundering some distance behind them.
The urge to wreak carnage seized Enk, and he turned his wrath upon them, roaring soundlessly, his insides knotted with a hurt that burned. A portal opened to plundered the world. Tremors through oceanic light. The increase of darkness as the flickering street lamp extinguished in full.
Whimpering, the dogs stilled before Enk, cowered by something unspeakable. He glared at them, and the ghostly liquid sang an aria within him, pleading to be unleashed in tones like the clash of distant thunder.
What do you see?
The hounds fled in random directions, their mulish barks once again booming through the dark. This development confounded their handlers, and some even cursed in derision as they separated to continue the search.
Enk knelt unseen, his fists balled and trembling. Less than a handful of the lanternless thrashers moved toward him, skirting the edge of his domain. Possessed by an understanding of his peril, he seized one of them as they passed, laying the man’s resistance to rest with a wordless command.
When the man’s clueless companions left, Enk exchanged wardrobes with the man, then sent him off with two directives: “lead them on a chase” and “don’t get caught before sunrise.”
Enk watched the nameless Peacebringer disappear, seeing double. He rubbed at his seething skull. For all his power, he was still human. And like all members of his species he had limits, limits that he even now broached.
He reoriented himself and hobbled onward, listening to the clamor of marching Peacebringers descending upon twilight regions. Thoughts of home waxed, becoming like a smoldering coal, a twinkling star high upon the northern horizon. For the longest time he had avoided thoughts of that place and what he had done, but now it helped keep his intellect from obsessing on Tizkar and his betrayal. Yet at the same time those two things were inexorably linked.
How could I have been so blind?
The monstrosity of the deception struck him anew. A sense of folding—of being touched, of being girdled by the specter of rapt mobs. Yet he pushed through this as he did all things and kept moving, putting one boot in front of the other.
Some time later, Enk found himself panting upon the very threshold of his estate, fingers wrapped about its outermost gate. Unlike so many of its neighbors, the ancient mansion remained dark, an implacable monstrosity unanswerable to any will but its own.
He slipped through its gate and waddled forward, retracing a familiar path through the dark. Agony pulsed through his lungs with every step. But what thing worthy of having was not as bitter as sweet?
Home. The promise firmed the earth beneath his feet, then quivered for wheezing gasps that failed to come. He crouched under his favorite oak, teetering on the brink of oblivion, running fingertips along what yet remained of his and Merka’s names.
He had failed her.
Merka’s murderer still roamed free.
Failure. He was a failure!
The loss of equilibrium. Enk dipped to the ground, pounding a fist against his chest, then coughed for the misery of inadequate lungs. This was not over, he decided, it was far from over. Tizkar would rue this day before it was all said and done.
But . . . first he would rest and gather his strength.
Then Tizkar would pay for taking Merka from him.
The whole world would pay!
Chapter Thirty-One
The Coming Storm
Kalum held a perfumed rag to his face, felt the contents of his belly swim for his throat for the way noxious fumes wafted up from the manhole before him. He lowered a lamp down through the circular opening, tracing with his eyes the strange curvatures the bubble of light revealed. He studied the floating feces, journeying elsewhere on gurgling streams. Then he was staring beyond them, at a dark satchel caught on the side of the sewer.
“Little late for a bath, don’t you think, Lord-Inquisitor?” Lieutenant Bo
dua Westlund asked from behind him.
Kalum dropped the scented rag into the sewer and rose from his half crouch, gazing out at the raving streets. Soldiers of the Guardians of the Flame, as far as the eye could see, clustered about the road like an army of ants. There, a handful of curious servants peaking out from behind closed gates. Here, a fat lord yelling at an unresponsive Peacebringer for answers. And steps away, Bodua sat atop his horse, running a hand down his narrow face.
“Imperials are the only people I know who would swim through a river of shit and call it a bath, Lieutenant.” Kalum motioned to the two soldiers holding the manhole covering, and they lowered it back into place, then backed a horseless wagon directly on top of it.
“Ah.” Bodua gave a gruff laugh. “But you forget, Lord-Inquisitor, you’re one of us now, that’s the reason I asked.”
Kalum's expression soured, but it had nothing to do with the quip and everything to do with the wildness that had been kindled within him, a sense that a part of him still slumbered, still dreamed.
Longing that knotted stomachs as fists.
Had he really kissed a Sophic Nun?
Bodua touched his forehead, his good humor all but gone. “We will run out of wagons before we do manholes.”
“When that happens rocks will do just fine,” Kalum said, handing his lamp to another soldier. “I made a mistake. I should have planned for this.”
“More of an oversight if anything, sir.”
“Still.”
Kalum climbed onto his steed, a nameless brown he had taken for his own, and kicked it into a canter. A narrow avenue of street had been left open by the milling mass of soldiers, allowing him to ride unhindered, passing the embroidery of gawkers threaded behind gates of black iron.
Talons of wind combed his hair, and memories began stirring within him
“Our Great Lord draws nearer, the Wearer of Nightmares himself,” the Great Dragon had said.
Kalum hunched his shoulders and narrowed his eyes. The remembering was almost narcotic, black ejaculate spewing from an engorged organ, pooling in the earth’s crevice, bubbling and broiling, rippling and shivering. . . .
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