The dead-eyed man tilted his head. “Darkmoon is rising.” At this unvoiced command, the Spine slipped away into the night, leaving Rachel alone.
Do nothing? She turned one way, then cursed and turned back again.No, I’m going to find a tavern, bang on the bloody door until they letme in, then sit and have a drink like a normal person. Maybe meet a man…Maybe…
Maybe it wasn’t too late for her.
She stormed off into the rain. The streets were deserted, but she sensed atightening in the air all around her. A thousand noises came from the dark homes: shutters checked; nails driven into wooden boards; doorjambs and iron grates secured; chains and padlocks locked and tested. Deepgate was tensing for battle.
“Coin for a pilgrim?” A filthy figure huddled in a doorway, long, greasy strands of hair and a food-crusted beard poking from under his hood. “Sir, the darkmoon is coming, the rain is fresh and clean, and here we are alive. You have blood in your heart, and I have glue in mine. What a glorious thing! Spare me a coin.”
A Glueman? The skin beneath those rags would be yellow and viscid; the tongue thick and weeping chemicals. His blood…unusual. “Sir?” she replied.
“Ah, good lady, then. Young by the sound of your voice, pretty too, yes, yes, now I hear the breasts, oh my, the thighs, the strain of some tight fabric—is it leather? How wicked. Yet without a man to walk at your side on this foul night. Has he thrown you out, or died and left you wandering dazed and broken by grief? Severed? My condolences, poor puppet.”
Rachel realized he was blind. That’s why he heard me pass . “All this from one word?”
“Six words now, kitten, each weighted with enough pain to crack cobbles. And longing too. So conflicted, confused, poor thing. I hear an undercurrent of desire. I hear…” He paused, as if listening, then lowered his voice. “Oh, my shame, that’s it. You are quite wet, aren’t you, quite wet?” He began to rock backwards and forwards. “Speak two words for me. Two words to know your soul. For me, please, please.”
The assassin sighed. “Which two words?”
The beggar shifted closer in his rags, whispered, “Dirty boy.”
“You want me to say…those words?”
“Say them, I beg you.”
“I will not.”
“Please,” he said.“Please.”
“Not a chance, beggar.”
“Puppet, have pity. Look how broken and lonely I am, how desperate. My brothers lost in rendered shipyard nets. My wife disappeared with a penniless reservist of dubious gender. My old Glue-father snatched away for throwing pebbles at the Avulsior. My mother—”
“All right.” He was going to rouse the whole neighbourhood. Sheepishly, Rachel swung a look around her to make sure no one else was nearby, then quickly muttered, “Dirty boy.”
“Lust! Delight!” the beggar cried. “Now come here, sit in my lap.”
Rachel frowned.
“I heard that frown.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Sitting on the ground, begging.”
Rachel’s lips quirked. “Very clever,” she said. “Can’t you find somewhere safer to sit than this doorway? Your Glue-blood might protect your soul, but not your flesh. Nothing is certain tonight. You’re still in danger.”
“Ah, but Carnival and I have an understanding.”
“And what would that be?”
“I don’t kill her, and she doesn’t kill me.”
“A fair deal.” The Spine Adept found herself smiling. “You’ve spoken to her, then?”
“I heard her wings above me and called out to her. She swooped low and gave me a gift.”
“A gift?”
“A fine gift! A haunch of lamb, sweetly cured and smothered in redberry sauce. Look here…” The Glueman reached inside his rags, drew something out.
A dead rat, the head chewed down to the bone.
Rachel’s smile withered. “She gave you…this lamb?”
“On my soul, I swear it. And so you see I have nothing to fear.”
“You are…fortunate.” She reached into one of the pouches at her belt, pulled out a copper double, and carefully pressed it into his hand.
“Vengeful Ulcis bless your nights,” the beggar said, then more quietly, “and spiteful Ayen bless your days.” He winked a sightless eye. “Not that I pray to either of them. I am bound for Hell.” He said this with pride. “So I embrace Iril: there are wonderful benefits in being damned. The Maze is growing. I hear its stone passages creeping through the derelict places in the city. Sometimes I hear the thump of blood.” He pocketed the coin. “This will buy wine for our feast. You must share it with me, I insist. There’s meat for two, and with you so recently widowed, so supple, we might—”
“Thank you, no. I must get back to work before…” The words were out before she realized.
“Work?”He scrambled away from her, and hissed, “Spine. Get away from me, bitch.”
Rachel just stood there, unmoving.
“Ichin Tell’s whore,” the beggar growled, clutching his rat. “I’ve nothing for you.”
Rachel wheeled, her heart stuttering.
“How many knives have you cleaned in your life, Nightcrawler?” the beggar cried. He was eating his trophy now. “Scar Night is her night…The dark of the moon…One soul for the angel…Spine blood for Iril…” He giggled. “But no souls to nourish the Maze. You gave them away already!”
The assassin strode away, leaving the beggar to his feast. She walked on for miles, losing herself among the dripping chains, and passed four taverns, but did no more than glance at their solid, bolted doors.
The rain had ceased at last, leaving the night air scrubbed and cool. Fresh wind from the north gusted and dragged rags of cloud across the stars. Snake-scale tenement roofs glistened faintly, but the streets between were dark. Every shutter had been drawn against the night, every brand smothered, and every gas lamp left unlit. Very few were abroad in the city now. No one but herself and those who hunted her.
With ragged wings folded tight against her back, she squatted on the roof of the Ivygarths watchtower, bracing herself against the chill wind, savouring its force. Tall stone falcons perched at each of the eight corners of the octagonal watchtower, blindly observing the city with grim determination. Carnival’s face was expressionless. Her long black hair whipped around countless scars: scars across her cheeks and forehead, scars across her nose, her neck; scars beneath her moondark eyes. All of them knife cuts, except one.
These watchtowers had been built an age ago: Carnival could not remember when, only that there had been a time when the skyline was different. From their weather-bitten stones she judged them to be more than a thousand years old. Perhaps the Spine had once used them? A vague memory stirred in her, like poison bubbling over the lip of a cauldron.
Another watchtower…Crumpled battlements…Smoke…Blood.
Scars tightened around her heart. She almost cried out, drove her nails into the heels of her palms until the emotion passed and she was left breathless and trembling. Something terrible had once happened in Barraby’s watchtower, the place they now called Sinners’ Well. She did not want to know what.
Other parts of Deepgate pained her too: Canner’s Nook and the Thousand Brick House and the nets below Chapelfunnel Market. Fragments of old, old memories surfaced whenever she drew near to these places; memories that drove her away from them, snarling and gasping. She had been in those places once, she supposed, and people had died.
The abyss was the worst. She had tried more than once to fly down into that darkness, but each time the rope scar around her neck constricted until she clawed for breath and thrashed back up towards the city. The abyss terrified her.
Now she surveyed the city patiently. Her hunger was building—she could feel it behind her eyes and in her veins—but it had not yet grown beyond her control. So she waited, searching for some overlooked weakness: a forgotten attic window; loose tiles on a storm-damaged roof; a smokeless ch
imney or an unlatched shutter thumping against its frame in the wind.
Nothing. There were no obvious openings, no easy ways into the houses. Her prey had long since learned to be thorough.
Carnival was pleased.
A mile to the west, she spied a shadow move. One of the Spine, a heavy crossbow in his arms, ran crouching across the rooftop of the Goat and Crab Inn in Merrygate, and ducked out of sight behind a chimney. The ninth assassin she’d seen tonight.
His leathers so much darker than the slates. Does he know? Is this poor camouflage deliberate?
Carnival gripped the ledge tighter as the scars on the back of her hands began to itch. Her heartbeats quickened; she moistened her lips. Part of her wanted to go after this assassin, yearned to go after him. She clamped her jaws together, and squeezed the ledge until her fingers hurt, then gasped. The hunger subsided.
A trap. It has to be.
She closed her eyes and listened for quiet sounds beneath the buffeting wind. Fragments of hushed conversations drifted up from the nearest homes.
“…no, both of them, sleeping…” A mother’s voice, concerned for her children.
“…it’s locked, I checked…” Another woman, older, speaking to her husband.
She heard the crackling of coals on a hearth, footsteps on a wooden floor and the clink of cutlery. She heard someone crying and the shreds of an argument.
And then she heard the drunk.
“Goddamn bitching murdering bitch!”
Her eyes snapped open, and she darted to the other side of the watchtower, heart racing, blood pounding behind her scars, making them throb.
“Filthy scar-faced whore.” He was down in the street a few blocks away, shouting up at the rooftops. A big man, staggering all over the place, swinging a cleaver at the shadows with one hand and waving a bottle at the air with the other. He lurched suddenly to one side and crashed into a pile of crates. For a few moments he lay there, grumbling incoherently, then he picked himself up and continued zigzagging along the street. “Come out, you murdering bitch!” Twenty paces later he fell to his knees, retched, then slumped to one side and lay unmoving.
Rushes of sharp, delicious pain prickled over Carnival’s skin. “Shhh,” she said, placing a finger to her lips, “I can hear you.” Her finger traced the gossamer lines around her mouth, then down across the raised white scars on her chin, before it lingered at the deep rope-mark around her neck. A thin smile stretched her lips.
Then she sprang from the watchtower and dove into the night.
Oberhammer’s planetarium perched on the clock tower of his pinched grey mansion like a huge glass egg ready to topple to the lane below. Vines and brickleweed clutched its western curve and reached inside the brass skeleton, where facets had been smashed by thrown stones or decades of winter frost. But most of the panes were intact, painted black and dotted with pinholes. On sunny days these holes had once been stars to viewers within. A platform with twelve comfortable chairs remained inside, at one time kept perpetually level, through some mechanical wizardry, while the globe revolved on its wheels and simulated heavens rolled overhead.
Seated now in one of the observation chairs, Rachel gazed up at real stars shining through the broken glass and imagined illusions.
The planetarium had never been operational in her lifetime. Church intolerance had seen Oberhammer die poor, another crank who’d killed himself after his fortune dwindled. Like most developing sciences, astronomy had been frowned upon—decades of study brought to the temple, locked away, and forgotten. The masses need not be educated. Where was the merit in that when Ulcis waited beneath their feet, when Ulcis was everything? In another generation few would remember the scientist’s name.
Now Oberhammer’s mansion mouldered: windows boarded, its walls wrapped in chains to keep them from bursting under the weight of his folly above. The clock tower forever displayed thirteen minutes past nine, the time for rats and bats and lunatics, for every ghoul and demon conceived by Deepgate’s commoners. The scientist had stopped the clock at that moment, retired quietly to his drawing room, and opened his wrists with a razor—his valediction to the Church. Now the place was said to be haunted. Iril’s doors had opened here, and when the Maze opens its doors something is always left behind. Rachel recalled the stories from her childhood: the Grey Mummer, the Chain Creeper, the Nunny Lady—ageless sinners who had escaped an overflowing hell to walk in the house below her.
For an angel, there were so many ways into the planetarium, and so many escape routes. It was an impossible place to set a trap, and this, of course, made it perfect.
Rachel rose from damp cushions, feeling moisture seep into her trousers. Both planetarium and mansion hoarded old rain. Water dripped and trickled through the dank sealed rooms below and softened the fabric of the house. Corridors wept. Staircases slumped and ticked. Paintings blistered under bowed ceilings. She shivered, imagining the Creeper working his way up through the house to find her, the Nunny Lady stalking its corridors with her hatpins.
A flourish of controls reached towards her over the front of the viewing platform: a mechanical arm of tarnished levers and heavily corroded wheels. The chains linking this to the great clockwork engines below had been removed, presumably by the workmen who had originally closed down Oberhammer’s house, but Rachel tried turning one of the wheels anyway. It was immovable, welded with rust.
A howl, somewhere close to the south, made her tense. Carnival was nearby. Rachel fought the urge to leave her post, to scale the planetarium and find a vantage point where she could watch the angel’s approach. But her job was here in this cage. The Spine would steer Carnival towards the trap. All Rachel had to do was attract her attention. She slumped back into the seat, loosened the straps around her throwing knives, and waited. Oberhammer’s mansion grumbled beneath her, the way old houses do.
Aseries of sharp concussions woke Mr. Nettle. He lifted his head, winced at the pain in his skull. There was a stink of whisky and dung smoke, and he was lying in an alley he didn’t recognize. Cobbles, wet with starlight, shifted and blurred before him, then bled together into a sloping channel that lurched sharply to the left, fifty yards ahead. Tenements brooded on either side, like flint muscles straining against chains. He heaved himself upright and tried to figure out where the hell he was and what he was doing here.
Then he remembered.
He turned round just in time.
Carnival flew at him like a demon, wings wide, hair wild, eyes black with fury.
Mr. Nettle raised his cleaver.
She grinned.
Then veered to the left as a score of crossbow bolts smashed to fragments on the cobbles between them.
Mr. Nettle wheeled.
Spine, dozens of them, on the rooftops. “Civilian,” a voice called down, “get indoors immediately. If you do not have a residence in this district, temporary sanctuary may be granted in one of the Church boltholes or beggars’ nooks for a fee of six doubles or one and a half pennies—”
“Piss off,” Mr. Nettle yelled. He turned back to the angel.
Carnival was thrashing skywards through a second barrage of crossbow bolts. Several ripped through her wings, while others punched deep into her ancient, mould-patched leathers. She howled and headed away from the Church’s assassins.
Mr. Nettle ran after her.
The alley emerged into a broader lane he recognized at once. Narrow and undulating, Cage Wynd sank gradually from the old planetarium in Applecross, running south over a series of humped bridges towards the shipyards. Its name came from the grates and spikes bolted over every window and door. The chainmen and yard workers who lived here had access, more often than not, to more iron than the smithies did. Everyone but the Church knew they were at it: for every two tons of iron that went missing in Deepgate, one of them ended up here, smuggled in and put to use securing local homes from attack. Whole façades of heavy bars and plate and needle-sharp points—it felt like you were standing in the open jaws
of a monster. With its sheer weight of metal defences, it was a wonder Cage Wynd hadn’t dragged the whole district into the abyss years ago. Even the old planetarium surmounting the mansion at the top of the lane had been stripped of its cogs and support joists—the brass and steel recycled into makeshift armour for the many tenements below. Little more than brickleweed held the heavy globe to the clock tower’s summit.
Mr. Nettle heard a sudden hiss and looked up to see dark shapes swarm over the rooftops opposite. The Spine were loosing dozens of bolts at a spot higher up on his side of the street, just a short distance to the north. The scrounger grunted and set off again, crossing the lane to give him a better view of the assassins’ target.
They appeared to be driving Carnival north, towards the planetarium. Bolts glanced off flint, iron plate, and roof slates, thudded into exposed beams.
“Bitch!” Mr. Nettle threw his arms wide.
She twisted in midair, diving towards him.
Again, the Spine crossbows forced her back, further up Cage Wynd towards the planetarium. They would harry her thus till dawn, keep her moving away from the temple districts and the Warrens. Out of his reach.
The scrounger roared, and surged after her.
Whenever the Spine hurt Carnival she took vicious revenge. The more she was hurt, the worse her retribution became. Even the strongest barricades couldn’t keep the angel out when she was injured. Ropers and beggars hated the Spine for it, for they suffered most. Their pulpboard shacks in the League might as well have been made of paper. Those who could afford it had cages made inside their homes, and locked themselves and their children in. Sometimes it kept them safe; most often not. Carnival had been known to rip through a dozen such homes on Scar Night, tearing whole buildings free of the chains which supported them.
The Spine were hurrying now, their silhouettes converging on the planetarium under a vast expanse of stars. They had stopped shooting.
“Here, whore!”
But Carnival ignored him. Something else had caught her attention—something inside the planetarium itself. Cursing, Mr. Nettle studied the mansion below the huge brass globe. The old house stank of Iril. The clock tower had been bound in chains to keep the crumbling stone together; the windows had been boarded up, but there were wide gaps visible between the planks. Mr. Nettle thought he saw movement within: oddly shaped figures capering. Some said the corridors inside the house moved and shifted, constantly forming new mazes to keep the things trapped there entertained.
Scar Night; Book One of the Deepgate Codex Trilogy Page 13
