“You sure?” He looked down into the well, a little doubtfully. “If you whisper up in the dome in St Paul’s, they can hear you all over.”
“Not down in the basement, they can’t. There’s no one between here and there.” This was the other place we came to hang out, as witness all the cigarette-stubs on the ironwork beneath our feet. It was astonishing the whole place hadn’t burned down yet, though I thought Reno probably had something to do with that. Fire doesn’t work too well around angels, perhaps.
“If there’s an Ear around, they’d hear us.”
“Yes – but that’s true anywhere.” An Ear is just what the name suggests, anyone with hypersensitive or directional hearing. They don’t even have to be magical. Most of them are, of course, given the company, the nature of the Overworld – but half the young of the Overworld are geeks, one way or another. A kid with an electronics kit can be an Ear too. “All I’m saying is, this is as safe as anywhere I know. Even Reno doesn’t hear us up here. As far as we know.” If she did, she’d never acted on what she overheard.
As far as we knew, she hadn’t.
It’s hard to tell, with angels. Everything’s conditional.
“Go on, then,” he said. “Talk to me.”
So I did. Mostly I told him about my morning, Jordan’s parents, what I’d done. How Jordan had reacted.
He whistled softly through his teeth – then looked briefly pleased at the echo-effect as it rolled around the gallery, and did it again. Then shook his head and looked back at me all solemn and said, “You betrayed him?
You
did?”
“Yes. I suppose. I just – no. It’s not betrayal. Someone had to stop him, that’s all. Sometime. He couldn’t go on for ever, tearing his parents apart and never being whole himself. Always on the run from who he really is. Someone had to stop him, and – well, it fell to me. It felt like mine to do, I was right there, you know? And Ash was dead, and...”
And I seemed to have stopped; that was the limit of my justification, a rock wall that I ran into every time.
He shook his head again and said, “I guess... Well, I guess I don’t know, Desi. Fay wouldn’t have done that. I thought you and he...”
Never mind what he thought, and never mind the truth of it. My turn to shake my head, just to shut him up. His hands were locked around the railing, on either side of me: not actually touching, but ready to grab in case I toppled. Just in case I toppled, I thought he was making that quite clear. I wasn’t going to topple. My own hands had found their way around his waist, which I hadn’t meant to happen; I was undoubtedly only holding on, arms and legs together, because of that lethal drop behind me. Just in case I toppled.
“So it’s Jordan chasing you?” he said. “That makes sense.”
Why you would come to me,
he meant. I thought he meant.
“One of,” I said. “He didn’t send the Corbies.” He didn’t have time; they were surely hunting me before ever he had cause to. And he wouldn’t do that anyway. If he came for me, he’d come himself. If he could still be bothered.
“No,” Jacey agreed. “No, I’m sure not.” Even though that still left his parents as favourites for our current predicament, willy-nilly.
Except that the Corbies must have known whose flat they were breaking into, who I had run to. If their commission came from his father – well, they weren’t stupid. They might stop to check. To check back,
do you still want us to...?
They might even talk to Jacey.
That girl: do you know your parents want us to...?
They hadn’t done that, though. They’d just blasted in like he was nothing, one more mundane to be brushed aside. Which made no sense in that scenario.
I said slowly, “Reno said she shouldn’t be surprised, to see me back. Given who had been asking for me, she meant.”
He said, “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but – well, when I left here, it was Reno found me the gig.” She was the only one who knew, the only one I’d ever trusted to know where I’d gone after Savoy. Who I’d gone to serve.
“Wait. You mean, when you went to be a daemon? This is where the change happened?”
“That’s right. Fay in, Desi out.” Poor frightened desperate Fay had run to Reno, or been led that way. She’d stayed a while, but she never meant to linger. A conversation, an interview, a contract: Fay disappeared, and Desi took her place. No less frightened, maybe no less desperate – you’d have to be desperate to sign that contract, but of course it was Fay’s name at the bottom; yes, signed in Fay’s own blood just for the drama of it, for the gesture, because she was a silly young girl and sure to be impressed – but cooler, that at least. Stronger already, and focused. Employed.
Not quite protected any more, but even so: beginning to think she could maybe look after herself. So long as no one found her for a while.
So she left Fay behind, and Desi went out into the world, and you could argue a long time over whether she was trying to find herself or lose herself entirely. Both at once, I think, and not a little bit of each but altogether.
“So who, then? Who took you into service?”
Did I hesitate? I’m not sure. Maybe I was only waiting while the conviction grew, feeling it happen, knowing that I did need to tell him now. Discovering that I trusted him, still or again.
Maybe that. Or maybe I did just hesitate, maybe it was as big a step that faced me as that fall that lurked behind. At any rate, I was silent long enough for his face to change, for him to think that I wasn’t going to tell him.
His hands shifted, from the rail to my hips. Maybe that was meant to be persuasive, the familiar touch to help me over that last difficult hurdle; maybe he meant to shake the truth out of me. Or to lift me down off the railing, make me disentangle myself from him and stand on my own two feet, face him directly, only so that he could push me away as I seemed to be pushing him. Maybe. I don’t know; I didn’t ask.
I didn’t get the chance to ask.
His face changed again, to a sudden sharp focus as he stared up over my shoulder.
Hullo Aspect, my old friend.
It was something in Jacey’s expression, I suppose, hurling me into alert mode before I knew that there was any reason for it. My Aspect snapped around me, settled into the very bone of me, unsummoned but absolutely there as I flung myself backward across the railing.
No time to turn around, to peer, to have him point. I just locked my legs around his waist and hung upside down over that long fall to the hallway far below, feeling his hands’ grip tighten, feeling utterly secure. Trusting him entirely after all, immediately and no question.
As a teenager I danced, I did gymnastics, even before I ever heard of Aspects. I’ve always been good at knowing just how I stood in the world. Or hung, or spun, or dangled. Proprioception, they call it. Upside down was no problem, it was only the quickest way to get a sight of the glass dome overhead; and I only needed to find what it was that had alerted Jacey.
Even knowing where to look, though, it still took me a moment. That was infuriating. He was a Power, sure, where I was just a daemon – but, hell, I’d been
designed
for work like this. Designed and trained and aimed like an arrow. What he had, he was only born with, and it wasn’t like he worked it much. Or at all. Or –
There. Barely more than a speck, a fleck against the sun’s bright glare. It could almost have been a flaw in the glass, a bubble in the curve of the pane; it could almost have been dirt on the outside, a smut of soot or a crow’s feather, anything. It could almost have been a sunspot, massive and deadly and endlessly distant, nothing to worry about. But it wasn’t.
It was dark and living, growing. Coming.
Beware the Hun in the Sun.
They must have been reading Biggles.
Out of that fierce light it came, and of course it was a bird, a black bird, a crow, diving like a gull, like a missile, wings folded. All beak and thrust, and utterly unnatural.
It struck a single small pane dead centre – aimed like an arrow, yes – and there was a shatter of glass and blood and feathers, a falling and a drifting and presumably a death.
I was barely paying attention, except in so far as the Aspect logs everything. What concerned me more what was was coming after.
This time there was no looming shadow, no acrobatics in the air, no show for us to watch and wonder at. Just that narrow cast in the sun’s eye like a squint, like a promise not yet realised. One bird wasn’t it.
One bird and another, and another, and another: like links in a chain drawn taut, all diving on the same line, firing like bullets rat-a-tat through that same broken window, supreme marksmanship.
One by one they burst into that lofty space, and flung their wings out to lift themselves abruptly, bone-breakingly out of their plummet; and one by one they survived that brutal decelaration, and circled high in the dome there as more and more of them threaded through the window, tugged like knots through the eye of a needle on a thread invisibly fine. They massed together until it was hard to make out individual birds among those clots of black.
Then all those separate clots eddied into one, and came to settle on the gallery and were a man, just one man, one Corbie coming striding over the ironwork towards us.
It hadn’t taken long, but time enough to think, that much at least. I don’t know about Jacey, but for me it was time enough to make a choice.
I didn’t give Jacey any choice at all.
He thought he could take them both, but there was no way I was letting him face even a single Corbie, if there was any chance at all that he was wrong.
I reckoned up the risks, made a decision and went further.
Further over.
All the way.
People often say that when I have my Aspect on, it makes me feel more solid, heavier, as if I acquired gravity with a flick of thought. Maybe they’re right; it can feel that way to me, too. When you can punch your fingers into brick, you need another way to think about the world, and physics, and physicality.
But I think it’s mental more than aspectual. Aspective. Aspectant. Whatever. Or maybe it’s instinctual. Instinctive. Cats can do it. Tybs can be so light on his feet in your lap that you think he’s all fluff and no body; then he curls himself up for a sleep and suddenly you’re cuddling a cannonball in a fur coat.
Anyway. I had been hanging back over the edge there, trusting Jacey to counterbalance me, both of us caught in equipoise, almost no work at all for either one.
I trusted him; I guess he trusted me.
Now I made myself abruptly heavy. You wouldn’t have moved me, if I’d been standing on the ground. Suspended in mid-air, nobody could have held me then: not even a Power.
Jacey would have let me go, except I didn’t let him.
With my legs locked tight around his waist and my hands reaching up now to grab his arms, there was no way he was slithering free to be left behind for the Corbie.
I toppled backwards, and he came too: over the railing and down, down and down into that long waiting fall.
CHAPTER SIX
H
OW FAR WAS
it?
Thirty feet or so, I guess. I wasn’t really counting.
Mostly, as we fell, I was unhooking myself from Jacey, fending him off. Either one of us would make a softer landing for the other, but – well, sometimes it’s not about sacrifice. Not when one of you is feeling particularly... concentrated, and the other is an unknown quantity. On an earthly scale, Jacey outweighed me by a distance; add that he’s the son of two Powers, possibly the sum of two Powers, and I wasn’t sure that he couldn’t push his fingers into solid marble if he felt like it.
Into solid marble, or into solid me.
I just didn’t know. I’d pulled him off the balcony in case we were wrong one way; I pushed him away from me as we fell in case we were wrong the other way. I didn’t want to break his ribs, landing on him; I really didn’t want him to shatter mine.
Two young fit people who know what they’re doing shouldn’t be too shaken by a thirty-foot drop. We’d both done parachute jumps, individually and together; we’d both done martial arts. We knew how to fall, in a simply human way – as witness, here we were, falling – but we knew how to land, too.
Besides which, he was Jacey Cathar and I was Desdaemona. I really wasn’t worried about the fall, or the coming to ground after.
So long as I wasn’t wrong about Jacey the other way. So long as we didn’t find out the hard way – the extremely hard way – that actually he had human-normal bones in there. Thirty feet onto parquet is really quite a long way to fall, if you’re not ready for it. Perhaps I should be pulling him close, falling beneath him, giving him that softer landing after all...
Thirty feet is plenty of time to second-guess yourself. If you remember your high-school physics, maybe it doesn’t seem so much – thirty-two feet per second per second, it only takes a second to fall that far – but trust me. Second thoughts don’t take as long as that. Your mind fills fast when it’s flooding with fret and regret.
Still. I’d done what I could, or at least what I’d done; it was done now. Nothing to do but fall, until we hit.