“I’m pretty harmless,” Evan said. “Look at me. I’m a bird, I’m a kid. I’m dead.”
“All the same,” Johannes said.
“Now who’s being paranoid?” Evan retorted.
“Shh,” I said. I cupped my hand around him and lifted him to my left shoulder.
“Well?” Johannes asked. “Your discussion with Alister…”
“Was about wedding arrangements,” Rose said. “Wasting time.”
“Why?” Johannes asked.
“Blake?” Rose asked. “We’re on the same page?”
“No,” I said. “That may never happen. But I think we’re thinking along the same lines.”
“Convince me,” she said, her voice quiet.
I glanced at Johannes. He was rigid, jaw set.
He, I remembered, had a dragon and a giant at his beck and call. He had genies.
If we upset him, if and when we disrupted his plan for a deal, we might be dealing with those soldiers of his.
“Do you remember what happened, why I went to the Abyss in the first place?”
“Ur.”
“But why, specifically?”
“The ties were cut.”
“Nothing to hold me up,” I said. “Jacob’s Bell is the same. This house is the same. Connections matter. Everything we’ve dealt with to this point, they’ve proven how much those connections matter.”
I glanced at my friends. My hand still at my shoulder from where I’d lifted Evan up, I gave him a poke.
He pecked at my finger just before I let my hand drop to my side.
“Yes,” she said. “And the lack thereof.”
“The whole reason the house was worth money, is it’s connected to other things. Briar Girl’s forest, the marsh, the town. It’s tied to our family. You want to sink it? I’m thinking it’s going to get pulled into the Abyss, and as if it’s tied to everything around it, it’s going to drag other things with it. One of those things might well be me. If I took the deal, it would be me, minus the Otherness. Just a human in the Abyss.”
“Me too?” Rose asked.
I spread my arm and my partially-folded wing. “And Alister, because he’s tied to you? Drawn into a dark place, where there is only unrest, never a moment’s peace? It could pull in every prominent figure that’s tied to this city. That’s why Mara was so terrified that her house was gone.”
Alister turned to stare at Johannes.
The High Priest did as well. Sandra had strong ties to the city.
“With your collective consent?” I asked. “Johannes could empty the city of everyone and everything prominent, and leave the remainder of Jacob’s Bell intact. All he would need to do to expand his reach into what remained.”
Johannes shook his head slowly.
“All I’ve ever wanted was to better the relationship between man and Other, as Solomon did. Even with all the ugliness, I believe this world is better with magic in it. I swear to you, none of what he says was ever my intent, or more than an inkling in my mind.”
“But,” a voice spoke from the hallway, “It was mine.”
The dog strode into the room.
People gave it a wider berth than a simple white-haired dog might have merited.
“The demon would have had its way with all of you, freed of its confines, able to prey on you, until the Abyss caught it once more. A firmer, longer-lasting binding than any that man could achieve,” Faysal said. “The Seventh Choir of angels exists in abstract. We cannot and do not typically win direct confrontations. The demon gets what it desires, to undo the working that binds it to man’s word by taking the Thorburn family and associated individuals to pieces, and I achieve what I desire, stopping it in the longer term. Worth cooperation in the short term.”
The room was still.
“Well,” Faysal said, “That plan is spoiled. How unfortunate. It would be much tidier than this. Still, with most relevant parties here, we can get started.”
“Faysal,” Johannes said. “By these pipes-”
There was a distortion. A folding of space, complete with brilliant light. Faysal disappeared.
“Damn,” Johannes said.
The entire structure distorted, the walls sucking in, as if by an immense pressure, then ballooning outward. Glass and wood cracked. As floorboards and sections of ceiling twisted, light shone through.
The light was soon marred and masked by the smell of putrid meat.
I could smell burning hair.
“Run! Out of the house!” Alister cried out.
A small grace that the wall around the door had been blown open. The crush of bodies might have jammed all traffic, trapping us within. We were able to make our way to the hallway.
“Metal objects,” Rose cried out. “Anything reflective. Hide it! Don’t look directly at it!”
“How are we supposed to fight it!?”
“You don’t! It will destroy you!” she said, her voice high, imperious, altered by Conquest.
The smell was growing thicker.
I saw Ty hold his hand to his mouth. He’d thrown up, caught it, and now blocked his mouth. Rounding the stairs, he spit the mouthful to one side.
A fraction of a second later, the stairway and the rest of the house collapsed.
The noise was akin to an entire city folding in on itself. There wasn’t a sensation that wasn’t amplified a million times over, every inch of me that vibrated was shaking like it would simply tear into splinters and sawdust. Bone threatened to crack.
All light went out.
When everything stopped moving, we were in a heap.
The stairs that had led up now led down, haphazard, some only attached on the one side, others broken, some three feet below the stair that had sat next to it.
The house had distorted, and now sat warped. Bookshelves lay along every wall, largely empty, and even as I watched, script appeared on the spines, as the words were being penned in on the blank spines of books.
Water and dirt flowed in along the sides, streaming along the surfaces, turning what had been conventional novels into sodden messes.
A library? I thought.
We had light.
I stared up.
I hadn’t expected this.
We were at the bottom of a great depression. But there was sky above us. Clouds swirled, dark, but not quite pitch darkness. Somewhere off to the side, a light was shining, lighting up the falling snow.
Lying on her side, Rose reached a hand up, and caught one of the first snowflakes to reach all the way down to us, a hundred or more feet deep.
There was a rumble, as if responding to the thought.
We dropped by another twenty feet.
“Snow,” Rose spoke in a whisper, as the snowflake melted against her palm. “That means-”
“The time effect,” Alister said. “The floorboards broke.”
The bell started to ring again. Violent, discordant, never with a pattern. It, Molly was angry.
At the edges of the darkness, shapes began to move.
Called in from nearby sections of the Abyss by the peal of the bell.
As the snow had reached us from above, the smell reached us from below.
Even with my inhuman nature, it was almost enough to steal all sense from my head, to leave me reeling helplessly.
I heard a scrape. Metal against wood.
Footsteps, heavy.