He was pointing.
Oh. Ugh.
I pulled the article of clothing away from my shoulder, where it had caught on a length of wood. A bra.
“No,” I said. “No you cannot.”
I felt something stir within me. It felt like the birds had, moving within, but considerably larger. Rose was trying to push me to say or do something.
Did she want me to give the goblin her bra?
“It’s for morale,” the goblin said. “If-”
“No,” I said, ignoring Rose’s stir protest. It hurt, in much the same way the branches poking through the skin had hurt both skin and branch.
“But-”
“You’re going to kill the monsters the Barber made because that’s what you do best. You are made for this. Be violent, be vicious, be wanton, you’ll probably never get an occasion quite like this where you’ll be encouraged to cut loose like this. Those creatures up there have been carved up by a demon, and they’re weaker, in many respects. Other stuff was highlighted as stuff was carved away, but Rose thinks of them as wretches. They’re weak, you pick on the weak. Be thorough, cut them down and put them down.”
One or two goblins grinned at me. Hard to tell in the dark.
“You know you’re dealing with goblins when a good pre-battle speech for the goblins demoralizes everyone else,” Mags said.
“What are we doing?” Ainsley asked.
“Get into the practitioner’s tower,” I said. “Run interference if you can do it without dying, but focus on getting to a place where you can be practitioners and work your mojo. If it looks like you’re going to die, try to take a few of them down with you, or slow them down.”
“You’re a hell of a lot more vocal than Rose,” Peter observed. “It’s almost reassuring, except for the ‘going to die’ part.”
I frowned, my eyes facing forward, at the endless darkness of the tunnel. Rose’s bundled clothes were tucked under one arm, the machete was in the other. I didn’t plan on keeping the clothes, but I wasn’t ignoring the possibility that I could throw them at someone or something.
I answered Peter’s comment, “She’s been busy thinking. Like this, she’s mostly free to piece things together, without outside distractions. I’ve just spent far too long being forced to sit and wait, wanting to help and being unable to. I’m ready.”
“I asked Rose, but she didn’t give me an answer before you showed up,” Lola said. “Is there a plan?”
“Remember that we can do this,” I said.
“That’s not an answer,” she said.
“She’s putting it together,” I said. “I was there in the background, watching her work at it. It’s predicated on a few simple ideas.”
“Do tell,” Lola said, sounding less than pleased. I suspected the pressure was getting to her.
“I did,” I said. “Remember that we can do this. That’s the basis behind the plan. The demons are essentially Faerie. Everything is Faerie.”
Our running footsteps marked the silence that followed.
There was a screeching roar from above us, the sound of metal tearing.
“I am super duper sorry, I really am,” Evan said. “But you’ve got crazy, Blake. Really crazy.”
“Evan-”
“I’m sorry that I said it,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over my protest, the words tremulous where the alcohol affected them, “But it’s got to be said! You’ve lost it!”
“I’m not crazy,” I said. “We challenge them the same way we challenge glamour. This is about belief. It’s about breaking from the conventions that shackle us. Humans and practitioners have a massive amount of power, and this is why the lawyers are doing what they’re doing. Rose and I caught on, but we didn’t buy into their deal and jump on board with them. Johannes caught on, and Faysal and the lawyers both went after him to take advantage of it. Humans are architects of change, and this threatens them to the point that they have to respond. They’re worried, and what we need to do is make those worries justified.”
“Oh,” Evan said. “What?”
“Easier said than done,” Mags said.
“Hell of a lot easier said than done,” I said.
“Push forward, do what you can. Keep an eye out and your mind open for possible chinks in the armor.”
“And some of us will even do it while wearing bras on our heads!” the small goblin cried out.
Rose nudged me.
Fuck it.
I hooked the bra strap from the bundle of torn clothes I had under one arm and tossed it to the goblin, who cackled merrily.
“We’re close,” Noah said.
I could see what he saw. A shaft of light leaked through a gap in the tunnel roof.
I could hear noises too, feel the tunnel vibrating slightly with the footsteps overhead.
Rose reshuffled memories. The memory she gave me was a heavy one, the sort of memory that burdened.
Her, inside Conquest’s tower, trapped.
The tower? I thought.
She was better at manipulating the memories than I was. The image shifted, an emphasis. A scrap of cloth on the edge of the tower, billowing in the wind. White.
Surrender?
No reaction.
No, white was Conquest’s color. Not surrender.
A flag?
The vision stayed. Rose, alone at the top of the tower, no exit, no good surface to scale. Even if she’d tried, there was no point in it. It was Conquest’s territory.
I see it. What am I supposed to do with it?
The image she showed me was one of the first I’d seen out of her eyes.
Johannes, emerging from the hole in the world that had swallowed up Hillsglade House and formed the Library. Not him. He held the pipes and the shears.
The memory came with the realization. He was the Barber.
“Here,” Noah said, interrupting my thoughts.
Rose had hated those interruptions. I was more willing to go with the flow.
“Here,” Noah said, again. “It was supposed to be here.”
We’d reached the end of the tunnel. It simply stopped. There was a barrier, with eroded concrete blocks worked into the soil.
“It’s his demesne,” Lola said. “He gets to decide the layout. That we got this close and got stopped… it’s…”
“A massive cockblock,” Peter threw in.
“I was going to say deliberate,” Lola clarified.
“It’s both,” I said.
“We need up and out,” Noah said. “It’s supposed to go up and into a church. This isn’t it.”
“The nearest church is a bit away,” Paige said.
“Oh, the demon doesn’t want a church so close to home? Who’d’ve thunk it?” Peter asked. Ainsley elbowed him, and he shot her an annoyed look. “Stop doing that. Seriously. I’m not good for much more than joking around and offering very basic observations to you jerks, in case you lose sight of the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest or however it goes. Until you come up with something better for me to do, let me have this.”
“If Blake is right,” Paige said, “Then you’re an important tool here. You’re more human than any of the rest of us. That counts for something.”