Unarmed, she turned away to meet her enemies.
They clashed in the landing outside the chamber: an old, wiry assassin closely followed by three of his colleagues. His gaunt features and cadaverous eyes evinced no fear. With his sword drawn, he moved as quickly and gracefully as a man of half his years.
Carnival no longer had any intention of fighting or fleeing. A feeling of numbness had filled her limbs. She did not move as the Adept thrust his blade upwards at her heart. The steel point flashed, drove deep into the angel's leather armour. She felt the metal split her flesh, the weapon's edge scrape her rib.
Pressure in her chest forced her back. Carnival tasted blood in her throat. She leaned forward into the sword, and looked into her opponent's eyes. There was nothing there – no surprise or wonder at the angel's unusual actions, naught but the vacant stare of a temple assassin going about the business of murder. The Adept placed his free hand behind the sword's pommel, and twisted the blade.
The angel's heart convulsed. She gasped.
But then she felt the wound begin to heal. Refusing to suffer such punishment, the flesh beneath her tapestry of scars fought back. Her heartbeats strengthened and become steady again. Blood thickened around the gash in her chest, stemming the flow. She let out a wail of furious anguish. Her immortal blood would not accept her death.
From somewhere deep inside, her thirst took over.
Suddenly, without intending to, she was clutching the naked blade in one lacerated fist, pulling it back out even as her free hand shot up and seized the assassin's neck. She squeezed hard, crushing his windpipe and arteries, and then pitched him backwards into the other Spine.
The blade clattered to the floor.
Carnival screamed.
And madness took over. She set upon her foes, meeting their swords with her fists, knees and elbows, laughing and shrieking like a woman deranged. The Spine backed away. With her wings looming like a wall of darkness behind her, the angel advanced down the stairwell. She killed two, four, eight of them. She shattered their bones and broke their skulls. She ripped out their throats with her teeth. She wept and giggled and spat blood in their faces.
The Spine had no use for crossbows in such a confined space, so they fought with blades. And they fought with the skill of master swordsmen. Steel flickered in the gloom before Carnival, clashing and sparking against the stone walls, as the angel deflected an onslaught of blows.
They were quite adept for mortals.
And still they came, pouring up the watchtower's stairwell and in through the narrow windows. They closed on her from the steps behind, clambering over the bodies of the fallen, trying to surround her. In the narrow confines of the stairwell, they attacked from above and below.
She slaughtered them all. And when the dead blocked the passageway, she forced their broken corpses out through the windows so that more of her enemies could reach her. Yet her own savagery appalled her. Blood covered her scars and dripped from her broken fingernails. Her ancient leathers bore a thousand new cuts and abrasions. Amidst her fury she suffered bouts of anguish. She cried out, begging her foes to leave her alone, and then butchered them when they refused. Abandoned weapons littered the steps, but Carnival could not bring herself to pick any of them up.
In time she fought her way down to the watchtower antechamber, where she came upon a heavy door. The iron-banded beams had been designed to hold back an army. She waited a heartbeat before testing her rage against it. The barrier resisted the first blow, and the second.
And then more Spine reinforcements arrived.
Here the temple assassins had room to manoeuvre. Their boiled leathers gleamed in the torchlight. They flooded down the stairwell and into the antechamber. Blades arcing, they rushed to flank the angel, attacking as one. Steel flashed and hissed and cut the air around her. Carnival screamed and laughed and danced between the blows, the shadows of her wings towering behind her, until the last sword crashed to the blood-soaked floor.
She was alone.
Voices came from outside the watchtower. She heard a man praying, followed by the dull tones of another assassin. This second man said, "It's over."
Carnival flexed her shoulders and tasted the blood on her lips. The antechamber reeked of violence. Torches guttered and crackled in their wall sconces, illuminating the wet red arcs which spattered the stones and the corpses and the swords upon the floor.
It's over?
The angel grunted. She crouched, took a deep, snarling breath, and then threw herself at the door.
It burst like so much rotten wood. Cool night air rushed in.
Two men were outside. A Spine Adept had been thrown backwards by the force of the breaking door, but he was already rising to his feet, his sword ready. The other man wore the cassock of a priest. He was kneeling to one side of the doorway, staring up at the angel in terror. "She's here," he hissed
Carnival gazed past the two men, to where the chains around Barraby's watchtower cut the night sky into countless triangles. Stars glittered among the spiderwork iron, bathing the scene in silver light.
She spied movement everywhere: the silhouettes of fifty or more Spine. They were scaling the chains lithely, dropping down to the courtyard below, converging on her. All Adepts? Carnival tried to force her lips into a smile, but the expression felt ugly and unnatural.
She glanced down at the kneeling priest and said, "Run."
When dawn broke, a long line of priests arrived with mops and buckets to wash the flagstones around Barraby's watchtower. They lit incense burners and prayed for the lives of all who had been lost. None of Deepgate's citizens knew
exactly
what had happened, or what had gone wrong, but rumours abounded. Presbyter Scrimlock, it was said, had locked himself in the temple library and refused to come out.
The sudden appearance of an old man at the watchtower door was never recorded, at least not in the official account, but other writings agree that he stepped out of the building nevertheless. He wore a heavy woollen topcoat, covered in dust. When he saw the sun he lifted his chin and took a long, deep breath.
Then he strolled down Lye Street to number 34 and let himself in.
Some claimed that Sal Greene had been involved in the disappearance of a phantasmacist, a known scoundrel who had run a gentlemen’s club in Ivygarths, but no formal charges were ever brought to bear. Temple census documents show that he lived a long life among the city chains without ever returning to the heathen cities he had known so well in his youth. When he finally died, his Sending was unremarkable.
His daughter Ellie became a seamstress, and was respected among the ladies of Lilley. She lived happily with her husband Jack, content to remain in Deepgate. Yet the old prospector's granddaughter, Mina, had obviously inherited something of his wanderlust.
Even as child Mina had been bold, widely known in the Warrens on account of the tiny mongrel she pushed around in a pram. Her mother's stable employment, coupled with a weakness to pander to her daughter's whims, ensured that Mina's dog was never seen in the same frock twice. It was a foul tempered creature, always growling and trying to bite anyone who ventured too close. Mina admonished it constantly with the back of a spoon. The pair became a focus for gossip in the neighbourhood. So much so, that when Mina left the chained city for Sanpah in her early twenties, some even said she took with her the very same ragged little pup.
The End
"Let my skill with a bow be judged when the stars flare and die, for I have shot arrows at all of them."
The Art of Hunting
Argusto Conquillas
8/4/900
"Ballistic weapons can be used effectively against a sorcerer, provided they are not aimed directly at the sorcerer."
Treatise on the Use of Imperial Ordnance Against Entropic Trickery
Colonel Thomas Granger
Prologue
A Tapestry of Sex
The shopkeeper stood seven feet tall and wore a fantastic turban, a twist of ice-cream silk laced with pearls. He ran his hand along the bookcase until he found the volume he was looking for, and extracted it with the deft flourish of a carnival magician. "This is the book you want," he said. "
A Tapestry of Sex
explores the art of seduction; it was penned by the greatest lover who ever lived." He paused in affected wonder. "Herein lie the secrets of Lord Herian Goodman – the methods by which he won the hearts of every man, woman, and cauldron abomination he desired. Take it, read it, allow yourself to be seduced by it."
Ida pressed the pages to her lips and breathed in odours of perspiration and exotic perfume. She could still hear the hubbub of commerce in the cavernous gloom around her, but the noise seemed suddenly distant. As her eye followed the neat printed words, her heart began to race. She had to buy this book.
The Trove Market had grown into a network of enormous brick vaults and sinuous passages that reached underneath the Imperial city of Losoto, its cluttered aisles defining tributaries through which endless streams of tourists flowed. They wandered through vast arched spaces, gaping at shelves ablaze with gold and silver trinkets, at glass orchids and jewelled clocks and alabaster birdcages, at endless stacks of boiled-black dragon bones. Painted saints and figureheads smiled back at them with eyes of candle-flame and lips like glazed cherries. Tiny brass machines chuckled and chirruped meaningless words, pulsing colourful lights to no apparent purpose. Old swords waited in cabinets for new owners. There were boxes of feathers and jars of colourful dust, bottles of jellyfish wine and cloaks woven from the hair of dead princesses. Manatee skulls lay next to miniature tombstones. Sharkskin men and women writhed and danced in tanks of brine, their grey limbs sliding fluidly behind the curved glass walls, their hair like green pennants. A million customers might pass through Losoto's underground market, plucking at the banks of treasure, and yet the stock never diminished. It could not be eroded. Every artefact in the empire found its way here eventually, to lie in wait for a spark of desire.
Ida clutched her book as fiercely as a mother holds a long lost child. "Goodman was an Unmer Lord?" she asked the shopkeeper.
"Lord, libertine, and a formidable sorcerer to boot. He lived in a house up there, less than a hundred yards from here." He jabbed a finger up at the vaulted brick ceiling, beyond which the streets of Losoto would be basking in the sunshine.
"Then this book is magical?"
The shopkeeper smiled broadly, displaying the diamonds set in his teeth. "Who can say? The Unmer invested so many of their creations with magic. You must read it all to discover its value. Passion, sexual ecstasy, horror and peril. Anything is possible between the covers of such a book."
She nodded urgently.
"But there's more," he added. "Now that you possess a map of seduction, you must acquire a compass and a sextant, so to speak, to facilitate your success." He steered her towards a dark cabinet stuffed with bulbous phials that gleamed like squid. "These Unmer potions have been dredged from the beds of sixteen seas. Look here." He picked up a green bottle. "Drink this to cleanse and revitalise your mind; it tastes like spring rain. And this –" He chose a tiny, empty jar "– is a singularly precious ointment."
"What is it?"
"Clarity."
"How much do they cost? I don't know –"
"And here is stamina." This bottle was sunflower-yellow, the next one pink. He scooped them into his arms like glazed fruit sweets. "And lucid dreams and lightness of step – ah, here is an enigma. This tincture allows one to see colours hidden in other people's shadows and thus perceive hidden intentions. These three are the bottled auras of young boys sacrificed at Unmer alters; their ghosts will be lingering nearby. How long do you plan to stay?"
"Excuse me?"
"Will you be in Losoto a week from now?
She shook her head. "My ship leaves tomorrow."
The shopkeeper threw up his hands with mock regret. Suddenly he seemed taller and wilder, an enormous blue-lipped djinn at the centre of the universe. Lanterns suspended from the ceiling whirled around his head like flaming bolas. His eyes blazed. "But you'll miss the rarest treasure of them all. My agent in Valcinder is sending me a jealous knife. They dragged it up from sixty fathoms down. A man died to procure it, and I am told it is superb."
Her head spun. "Is it an Unmer artefact? What does it do?"
"What does it
do
? The jealous knife allows two lovers to exchange tactile sensation. Prick
each partner's finger and thereafter each will experience the other's pleasure or pain. Thus a lonely wife might please her husband across great gulfs of separation, or a brave man endure the pain of childbirth in his woman's stead."
"But why is it called –"
He made a dismissive gesture. "The effect is everlasting. Relationships are not."
Perhaps Ida could remain a few days, and return home on a later boat? She had spent so much money already on this trip, but she absolutely had to have that knife. And possibly an aura or two, an Unmer sonnet, a dragon's eye, or a few vials of passion drained from a corpse. Leave the gold to the magpies; she would indulge her taste for Unmer sorcery. Yes. She simply must stay. She was about to say as much when she heard a great commotion from another part of the market. A woman screamed.
The shopkeeper stared past her, over the tops of the nearest shelves. And then he turned and walked briskly away down the aisle.
"Mr Sa'mael?" Ida called after him. "Mr Sa'mael?"
Other people were shoving past her now, quickly. Ida sensed a swell of panic building under the vaulted ceiling. She heard another scream, and what sounded like an explosion. Glass smashed. Suddenly the crowd surged, and someone knocked her to the floor. Ida cried out and cowered under her book as boots thudded past her head.
Silence followed.
Ida wobbled to her feet and swept back the tangled mess of her hair. Dirty footprints bruised her dress. Her arms and legs smarted. The aisles all around were clogged with wreckage from fallen shelves. It looked as if a tsunami had swept through here. The crowds had fled, but the marketplace was not deserted.
Ten yards away a little girl stood at the junction of four aisles, cradling a metal doll in her arms. She wore a red frock composed of many layers and frills that flared out around her boots like the petals of a rose. Her hair and skin were as white as bone dust, and her huge dark eyes brimmed with tears.
"Oh, you poor tyke." Ida moved towards the child.
From behind came the calm sound of a man's voice: "Ma'am."
Ida turned.
Five Imperial soldiers perched upon the tops of the shelves above her. They had climbed up among the boxes of treasure, three on one side of the aisle, two on the opposite bank. As motley a group as Ida had ever seen, they wore tattered black uniforms adorned with old clasps, buckles and pins. They wore whaleskin boots and gloves, and carried swords, gutting knives, and hand-cannons fashioned from dragon-bone and silver – these latter clearly salvaged from the seabed, for the stocks still bore the scars of barnacles. The man who had spoken crouched over a leather satchel, gripping the stub of a cigar between his teeth, and holding his firearm upright in one fist like a staff. His own uniform bore the bee-stripe epaulettes of an Imperial Guard Colonel. He was wiry, tough-looking but ungainly, with oversized joints and a neat cap of brown hair. Grey spots of sharkskin marred one side of his neck, and yet his pale blue eyes were as clear and hard as glass. His raggedy appearance seemed so much at odds with his apparent rank that for a moment Ida wondered if he'd mugged one of Emperor Hu's finest and stolen the fellow's getup.
"She's Unmer," he said. "She'll kill you without meaning to."
"She can't be Unmer," Ida retorted. "The Haurstaf would have sensed her."
The colonel looked at her without the faintest glimmer of emotion. "If you say so," he said. "Debating the situation further serves no purpose, Ma'am. Please move aside, we will remove you by force."
Ida did as she was told, stepping through the piles of glittering junk. Now that she thought about it, the girl's frock did look old enough to be an antique. An original Unmer garment, intact and undamaged by the sea? The sheer value of it astonished her. And wasn't there an odd graveyard smell in the air?
"But how did she get out?" she said.
"Crawled straight through a wall, I imagine."
"But the Haurstaf would have sensed that!"
The colonel puffed on his cigar. "The Haurstaf always seem a trifle lax when the emperor neglects to pay his dues on time. If you would be so kind as to make your way towards the nearest exit, we will handle the crisis from here."
The soldier beside him grunted. "Fucking extortion is what it is." A great dark brute of a man, he crouched on his high perch like some enormous ape, with the butt of his firearm pressed firmly into his massive shoulder and the barrel aimed at the child. On his forehead above his right eye he bore a small black tattoo. It looked like a shovel.
"Language, Sergeant Creedy."
"Well, it is," the other man persisted. "They let this one escape to teach Hu a lesson."
"Then they're not coming?" Ida said.
"It seems unlikely, Ma'am," the colonel replied.
She was about to protest the woeful inadequacy of this when the child cried out suddenly, "I want my mother." Her voice reverberated strangely in the vast space; it was accompanied by a queer crackling sound, like distant cannon fire.
The colonel reached into his satchel and pulled out a fist-sized ball of baked clay. A short fuse extended from its wax-sealed top. He examined the munition carefully, then glanced up at the vaulted ceiling. "Banks," he said to the second man sharing his side of the aisle. "I'd like your opinion on the roof."
This soldier was much younger than his companions, but he surveyed the gloomy space above them with the grim demeanour and confidence of a much older man. He sniffed and rubbed at his nose. "The Unmer built this whole place," he replied. "Those corbels date back to the Lucian wars. The problem is, I can't tell exactly what's above them from down here. We blow that roof, and we might bring down more than just rubble." He paused and sneezed into his hand. "Dragonfire would be better."
"Did you bring a dragon, Banks?" the colonel said.
The younger soldier looked like he was about to say something, then he shook his head wearily and returned his gaze to the ceiling. "We must be close to the Unmer ghetto, sir," he said. "Bring
that
down on our heads and the emperor will not be happy."
"What do the maps say?"
He blinked watery eyes, then gave a grunt. "What maps? Hu doesn't consider the Trove Market close enough to his palace to warrant the expense of a survey. The Haurstaf would know, but –"
"Blow the roof?" Ida exclaimed. "What do you mean,
blow the roof
?"
"Standard procedure, Ma'am," the colonel said. "Nothing for you to be concerned about." He stood up, stared intently at the little girl for a moment, then turned to the big soldier by his side. "Fire a round at the child, Sergeant Creedy. Aim for her head."
"Aye, sir." The huge soldier pulled back the weapon's firing lever, with a click.