“Unmake it!” a second ogre bellowed, at a matching volume, from the opposite side.
Rose turned, and she saw the resemblance.
The Barber had cut, and these two ogres had once been one. Now they were his. Cut in a way that served him.
There would be no help from them.
In a low voice, Ainsley murmured. “I can use the candle to bind one. I can’t use it to bind both.”
“Open the gates!” the first ogre cried.
“Ruin to all things!” the second howled, louder than before.
Rose was already running, hurrying to catch the others.
The second ogre hurled something. It might have been a concrete block. He threw it underhand, like a human might throw a softball. It sailed.
Lola managed to deflect it with a gesture, a stone in her free hand.
“Crack the walls!”
“Let darkness bleed through!”
The loud cries were stirring attention.
Now they had company.
Broken, cut, distorted things. The Barber’s creations, sheared into shapes that pleased him. They emerged from buildings, and they flowed from windows, or appeared on rooftops.
They moved, shuffled, and crawled with little noise. Only periodically did one whimper. Rank and file, in the service of other things. A hunchbacked figure, cut with the shears. A gaunt figure.
Things, if she was judging the ogres right, which had been predisposed toward destruction before, made into something worse with a careful cut.
They ran, and the hordes closed in. Evan used his flames to drive them back and leave trails of flame that guarded the flanks. Green Eyes went after one leader that strayed too far from his group, biting into his shoulder and neck, then scrambled to escape the hail of thrown objects and weapons.
But Rose felt her progress diminish. She wasn’t moving slower, but her strides covered less ground, all the same.
She turned, walking backward, and she saw the pursuer, the possessed lawyer, with a demon hound at his side.
Chanting, gesturing.
Binding her into place, so the hordes could get her.
Rose drew and aimed her unloaded gun, pointing it at the lawyer.
He stopped trying to bind her, saying something to protect himself instead.
The binding that was leashing her to one place still lingered. Each step was less effective than the last, as if she were walking up an icy slope, sliding back a distance with each step she took.
“Ainsley!” Lola cried out. “Get Rose!”
Ainsley threw pins in Rose’s direction. Each pin traveled a measured distance, stopping at the cardinal points around Rose’s feet. Faint lines marked a binding, etched into the street.
Ainsley blew out the candle, and blew away the binding.
They’d still lost their head start.
The Barber’s creations were closing in.
Too many for it to have touched each with the shears. The cut was some effect the demon had worked across his domain, to alter vestiges.
Standing against them was akin to trying to withstand a tidal wave that looked to crush her against the beach. Except they were far more brutal and savage. Far less kind.
“Give me names!” Lola was saying.
Mags provided them.
“Now!” Lola said.
Mags cut Lola with the athame.
In a flash, they were moved.
Shifted to a building interior.
As a group, they collapsed.
“I’m No good to you now,” Lola said, looking down at her palms. “Did all I could. Pulling us along a connection. That lawyer found us, he’ll find us again.”
“You did good,” Rose said. Whatever you did, it has to be better than that.
“I know you’re there,” Mags said, quiet. “Come on out, guys. If you’re still okay.”
Rose found her way through the building interior. Blades, like great shears or kniveblades, punctuated the inside of the building. Each was stained with blood.
Not like the abyss had been. Not a trap, or a way of attacking the residents. They’d been a singular, decisive cut.
Rose saw vestiges emerge, untouched by the barber. Ones that had dodged that strike.
“There we are,” Mags said.
They were children, partially hollow, broken and occupied by other things.
Rose couldn’t look straight at them. It struck a little closer to home.
She looked outside the window, instead.
To the Barber’s tower. To the gateways that surrounded it, fabricated by Faysal Anwar, and to the teeming horde that stood between them and it.
Had the way been clear, it would have been a ten minute walk.
But as things stood, she was far less confident than ever.
16.07
“Guys, these are some of the vestiges from Johannes’ domain,” Mags said.
Rose tore her eyes away from the scene outside. Calling it a revel would be wrong. There was no celebration at work. There was only chaos. Countless broken wretches were spending as much time harming one another as they were milling aimlessly. Reacting to touch with violence. The aggressor and the victim, fight and flight. In some cases, where there was enough mean going around, as was the case with the ogres, each side got two very different kinds of viciousness. Raw barbarism in one, sadism in the other.