The bubble crushed the creature into an undifferentiated black mass. A small open space remained at the top, containing a pair of desperately snapping mandibles. Still the bubble shrank, and these too vanished, leaving a viscous sphere four feet, three feet, two feet, one in diameter.
Ms. Kevarian strode into the room. Her heels tapped a funeral beat against the stone floor. By the time she drew within arms’ length of the bubble of shadow, it was an inch and a half in diameter, vibrating softly. As she extended her free hand to pluck it from the air it was an inch around. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, half an inch.
She opened her lips, put the pill of darkness inside her mouth, and swallowed.
A hint of pink tongue darted out to lick her upper lip. She turned to Abelard, who almost winced from the strength of her gaze. “Be glad,” she said, “I came along when I did. Impressive alarms you have in this Sanctum.”
He nodded, shivering. “What…” Vocal chords, like the rest of his muscles, were uncooperative. “What was that?”
“One of the gods’ own rats,” she said. “Rousted from hiding. Angry, hungry. Could have used salt. Where did you find it?”
“Be-below,” he managed.
“You should get your temple cleaned more regularly.” She crooked a finger at him. “Come. We have work to do.”
*
Shale’s red dot bounced like a child’s ball around the map in Tara’s mind. Every time she thought he reached a final hiding place he reversed course and veered again toward Midtown, darting through underground tunnels and sprinting down the tracks of elevated trains. Tara directed her carriage to wander side streets and keep away from main thoroughfares until at last, presumably after being found by his Flight, Shale came to rest at a warehouse three piers north of the
Kell’s Bounty
’s mooring.
This was a dead and dangerous strip of city, where bleak talon-scarred buildings faced the night with shattered windows and broken doors. Dim streetlights illuminated loading docks strewn with rotted lumber and decayed canvas. In daylight, the warehouse would have looked like a health hazard. At night, it menaced from every approach.
Tara paid the horse and dismounted two blocks from her target. Navigating the dockside streets back to the warehouse proved less difficult than she feared. A gang of cutpurses tried to mug her, but they were no trouble. Thieves in this city fled from a little fire and the barest hint of death.
Her true quarry would not be so easily cowed.
No sentinels guarded the warehouse doors, nor could she see anyone lurking on the rooftop. Not that she expected to. The Guardians knew Alt Coulumb in their blood, and blended into its shadows and murk like wolves into a deep forest. That bum sleeping under a ratty blanket, curled up near a streetlamp with a liquor bottle in one limp hand, might be one of them, or the doxy limping along the street, or the drunk pissing against a wall half a block down. Even in their true forms, any shadow could shelter them, any stone protrusion provide camouflage.
Five minutes were too many to waste outside an abandoned warehouse debating whether to enter. Raising her chin, Tara crossed the vacant lot and climbed the ramp to the loading dock. She picked her way through the detritus of economic endeavor to the doors, one of which still stood. The other, unhinged, had collapsed onto the rock floor within. She stepped over the threshold.
Decayed and long picked clean of valuables, the warehouse did not seem an ideal headquarters for a religious insurgency. One expected gargoyles to prefer the peaks of skyscrapers, where they could open their toothed maws to drink in the rising moon, not a place like this, a bare slab floor strewn with broken crates that had served as rats’ nests before the cats moved in. High, broken windows admitted the streetlamps’ yellow gas glow and the pale reflected light from the clouds above. At the far end of the warehouse, a long-abandoned foreman’s office rose twenty feet above the ground on rotten wooden pillars.
Tara’s mental map was accurate, but not precise. Shale was somewhere in this building, but she could not tell more. She had expected him to run until his people found him. Had he set an ambush instead?
Sudden movement seized Tara’s attention. A shadow shifted behind a pile of broken crates, too big for a rodent or a cat.
Wary, she stepped forward. Her hand rose to her heart, and with a twist of her wrist she drew her knife, crackling and blue. It cast a pool of cool radiance at her feet. The noise and light gave away Tara’s location and her skill with Craft to any hidden observer, but she lacked subtler weapons. She skirted to the right as she approached the pile of broken wood, to keep out of striking distance as she rounded the corner.
Behind the crate, Tara found only bare stone.
Had she imagined the movement? The night was dark and the building disturbing, but surely she was not so unnerved as to leap at shadows? Frustrated, she glanced about the warehouse for a potential cause: a swift scuttling lizard, an assailant trying to lure her into position, an urchin taking shelter from the night and the fierce dockside streets.
Nothing.
With an inward groan, she straightened, lowering her knife-hand to her side. Had Shale slipped her tracing charm? He would have needed to tear off his face and let it heal over. Did his powers of regeneration extend that far? Replacing a face was no simple affair of regrowing flesh. Sensory organs had to heal as well, and thousands upon thousands of nerve endings. The magnitude of power required, not to mention the pain …
As she contemplated the pain, the floor opened beneath her and she fell, arms flailing, into the abyss.
Blacksuits swarmed over the buildings and through the alleys of Alt Coulumb like ants at an abandoned picnic. One crouched at a roof’s edge and glowered into the city with eyes that saw a broader range of light than the eyes of man. Another leapt from flagpole to flagpole, canvassing the Pleasure Quarters. A group of fifty cased the city one block at a time, moving with silent care down side streets.
The sight of them was enough to quell most of the sparks of civil unrest scattered throughout the city, and where mere sight was insufficient, they intervened in person. A middle-aged grocery-store owner struck a reedy young woman trying to steal food, and raised his hand to strike again; a rain of black fell over them, and when it lifted both were gone. A clutch of angry young men near the docks gathered to hear the protestations of a doom prophet, and twenty Blacksuits suddenly stood among the crowd where none had been before, watching and silent. The prophet’s wrath broke as the eyeless stare of Justice settled upon him. Words of fear and hatred faltered on his tattooed lips.
But though the Blacksuits dealt with the criminals and madmen that lay within their path, they did not hunt humans tonight. They hunted men of stone.
A gargoyle had stolen a witness from Justice’s infirmary, or perhaps had been disguised as that witness, or perhaps—Justice’s many minds were divided on this issue, and the debate raged across the brains of a thousand active Blacksuits, dancing through their neurons and arguing about the tables of their cerebra. A Stone Man was on the run, that was certain, and there was no such thing as a lone Stone Man. Dead Seril’s children moved in groups, or not at all.
Justice weighed the hearts of others, and did not spare much thought for her own. Had she examined her emotions, she might have recognized the petulant ire of the chess prodigy thwarted in mid-game. Mortals were meddling in Justice’s sphere, and she was jealous of her sphere. She needed that Stone Man, and his brethren: parade them before the madding crowd, hang murder and blasphemy about their necks, and peace would return. Hate directed was easily controlled.
Blacksuits flocked in Alt Coulumb, a murder of silent crows with human bodies. Though the Stone Man had confused their scouts and their pursuers, for he was fast and could assume many shapes, he was mortal, limited, fallible. He played a smart game, but he would make a mistake, and the murder would descend.
Justice waited, sharpening her sword and polishing her scales.
*
“No Tara here either,” Captain Pelham allowed as they sprinted out of the warehouse, night watchmen in hot pursuit.
Cat almost rolled her eyes, but that would have entailed taking them off the pavement, and in this part of town you never knew when a pothole or a mugger’s tripwire might send you sprawling.
Captain Pelham had ordered their driverless carriage to stay as far back as possible without losing Tara as she wove into the waterfront district, then out, then in again, tracing a labyrinth of which only she knew the paths. Maybe it was a Craft thing, or maybe she was trying to throw off pursuit. On their most recent pass through the waterfront, they turned a corner and saw Tara’s carriage pull away into obscurity, with Tara herself absent.
She must have abandoned the carriage to proceed on foot. Lacking a better option, they resorted to old-fashioned legwork, and had thus far eliminated a little more than half the warehouses in the area. Which meant, as Captain Pelham had reminded her with more good humor than she felt, that a little less than half remained.
It was hard to determine which warehouses were occupied and which abandoned. Near the docks, keeping one’s property in good repair was a counterproductive endeavor. Clean, well-tended buildings hold valuable cargo. Dockside warehouse-keepers realized long ago that a few broken windows and vulgar scrawls of graffiti, fire scars on one wall and water damage on another, made it harder for the casual thieves abundant in this part of town to tell marks from firetraps.
Time ran short. They needed a new tactic.
“Let’s try down this way,” Cat said, pointing to a dark alley that led off the main street. “Shortcut.”
“Sure you aren’t luring me down here so you can force me to suck your blood?” He said the last bit with a heavy Old World accent, and a fanged leer that disappeared when he saw the anger on her face. “I was joking,” he said, lamely, as she strode past him.
“What kind of joke is that?”
“The kind where I make light of your nearly killing yourself.”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“So do most suicides.”
Cat’s mouth tightened. Her hands shook, and she stilled them. Not enough time in the suit today, which left her drawn and irritable. Pelham’s fangs, while glorious, were a poor substitute for Justice. She stalked down the alley, and he followed. “It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been bit.”
“You’re a practiced user, then. Which is so much better.”
“I’m not
using
you.”
“Of course you are.” He pointed to his mouth. “You need this. You use me, and people like me, to get it.”
Shadows clustered around the trash bins ahead, and a rank stench rose from the open midden to their right. She turned on her heel to face him. “You get something from the deal, too.”
“You think I need your blood? Shit, look, not every vampire is a wrinkled-leather leech like those kids you score off in the Pleasure Quarters. Some of us have good relationships with the people we drink from. Some hunt. Some retrain, or drink off animals. Don’t make assumptions to soothe your grungy little addict’s ego.”
Outrage widened her eyes, and words of rebuttal strangled one another in their rush to escape her throat. Fortunately for them both, the muggers Cat had noticed lurking in the alley before she left the main street chose that moment to attack. The first, a beefy young man with garlic on his breath, grasped Cat’s neck from behind with massive hands, and was quite surprised when she grabbed him by the groin and used his own momentum to throw him into the midden. His three comrades had already jumped forward, blades out, and had no chance to flee.
Ten seconds later, Cat held one mugger in a painful arm lock, while Captain Pelham stood between the remaining two unkempt men, immobilizing both with the pressure of his hands on the back of their necks. Their swiftest comrade lay moaning in the filthy pit.
Cat’s captive twisted in her grip until she cranked his arm, whereupon he let out a high-pitched whine and ceased struggling. She glanced him over: long, elf-locked hair, several days’ stubble, three earrings in his right ear and one in his left. He wore a brown wool shirt that, somewhere in the mists of history, had once been yellow, and a pair of leather breeches more breach than leather.
He had been ill used recently, not just by Cat. Stripes of burned flesh raked across his face and chest, beneath sharp tears in his shirt. No natural fire had caused such damage. This had struck swiftly as a whip, not lingering long enough to catch his clothes aflame. “Hello, boys,” she said. “We’re looking for the young lady who gave you those scars. Dark skin, five-seven, curly black hair, curvy, freckles. Last seen surrounded by a halo of flame?”
“We dinn’ see nuffink,” Cat’s captive gargled through the blood that gushed from his nose and mouth.
“Let’s try again.” Cat applied more torque to the mugger’s arm, and something in his shoulder crinkled like crushed foil. “Tell us where our friend went, and we’ll go away. Otherwise, we’ll stay right here.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. His eyes were wide, and scared.
She smiled. So did Raz.
*
As night deepened, the crowd beneath the Sanctum swelled. The original protesters were so diluted by the new arrivals that they vanished like drops of ink in a pool of clear water. Patient silence replaced the earlier fearful, angry cries. The Sanctum pointed like a confused compass needle into the clouds, and the people of Alt Coulumb stood or sat or knelt beyond the cordon of Blacksuits and watched the black tower’s pinnacle in hope.
Following Ms. Kevarian down the Sanctum’s front steps, Abelard recognized, or thought he recognized, a few faces within the crowd: a Crier they had passed that morning, a candy seller from his excursion into the Pleasure Quarters the previous night, a young woman from the Court of Craft. Even a few Northsiders had come in their suits and ties to watch, and wait. Before, the crowd was unified by anger. Now they stood as individuals, together.