Still it did not move. The outsize sickle-claws of its fore-paws tapped softly on the cobbles. Some animal intuition was pricking it, a sensation of being watched, of the nearness of other beings.
Go, Kaiku urged silently. They were close enough so that she could see the glistening black nexus-worm buried in its neck. Heart's blood, go!
She could sense Lon reaching for his dagger, moving slowly, slowly. She wanted to tell him to stop, but she dared not make a noise, fearing that even the movement of her lips or the disturbance of her exhaled breath would tip the balance here and bring the creature down upon them. Her kana was on a hair-trigger, coiled inside her, ready to burst free in an instant.
The shrilling padded onward.
Kaiku could barely believe it. They watched it go, prowling up the lane, its sinuous form exuding a deadly confidence, its tail dragging behind it. She thought it was a trick at first, and she kept thinking that right up until the point where the Aberrant turned out of the end of the lane and was lost from view.
They sagged with ragged sighs of relief.
'I think we all owe Shintu a year's worth of thanks for that one,' Phaeca murmured, invoking the trickster deity of luck.
Lon was chanting a mantra of swear-words that were lurid enough to make even Kaiku uncomfortable.
Juto, visibly rattled, got to his feet and kicked the grille he had been trying to loosen. It broke free and fell into the basement.
'Come on,' he said in disgust. 'The sooner we're out of this gods-damned place, the sooner I get paid.' They came upon the pall-pits not long afterward.
Nomoru had still not returned, and Kaiku was worried despite herself. She did not like the surly scout – nobody liked her, as far as she could fathom, though she and Yugi did seem to have a tacit connection – but she had become used to her, enough so that her disappearance made Kaiku concerned for her well-being. Phaeca was more pragmatic: she was only hoping that Nomoru had not got herself caught or killed and alerted the enemy to their presence. But the Weavers seemed quiet now; in fact, there was a curious absence of them, for when Kaiku and the others first arrived in the city there had been periodic sweeps across the Weave to look for Sisters or other anomalies, and in the last few hours there had been none.
The pall-pits were set into the hillside at a slight angle, and from where the intruders hid at the edge of the housing district they could see the whole terrible scene. A great swathe of the city had been levelled to make space for the pits, and rubble still surrounded them, half-standing walls and split beams and spars of metal piled in heaps or leaning against each other to form bizarre and discomfiting sculptures of ruin.
Beyond the waste ground the disorder ceased: the pall-pits themselves were built with ruthless precision. They were two sets of concentric circles side by side, enclosed by a wall of metal. Each circle was stepped lower than the last as they progressed inward to the gaping holes at the centre, colossal black maws that exuded turgid, oily smoke in vast columns. Wide, smooth ramps led from the inner pits to their outer edges. The red light of furnaces blazed along the tiers, trapped behind grilles and slats and vents, painting the pits the colour of dirty blood. It sheened across a grimy warren of pipes.
They paused for a time in the shadow of the houses, surveying the cluttered waste ground. The glow from the pall-pits pushed back the darkness; they would be exposed when they broke out into the open. Lon was more nervous than ever now, glancing here and there, his fingers twitching as if playing some invisible instrument. He kept on choking back coughs, occasionally eliciting an annoyed glare from Juto.
'We'll never make it across that,' he murmured. Then, tangentially: 'Where is that bitch?'
Kaiku felt irritated that he should be abusing a companion of hers, no matter how disliked she was; it made her feel cheap and disloyal to tolerate it. 'Will you be quiet?' she hissed sharply, and he gave her a resentful glare and held his tongue.
'We'll make it,' Juto said, responding to Lon's first comment. 'The fog's coming. Let's wait a while.'
Juto was right. There was indeed a thickening in the air, the murk drifting down in veils too heavy to stay aloft. The rank taste in Kaiku's mouth that had been there since they had arrived in the city became more pronounced, an unhealthy metallic tang.
'Could have done with this earlier,' Juto observed, scrunching up his face.
'Does it happen often here? The fogs?' Phaeca asked.
'Once in a while. Not often. Seems we really do have Shintu on our side tonight.'
The haze sank into the streets quickly, concealing the pallpits and turning the waste ground into a red mist, in which shadowy shapes hulked like the carcasses of wrecked ships. At Juto's signal, they scuttled out into the disconcerting light, running low towards a heap of rubble and rusty iron beams. They skidded into cover in a scramble of loose stones, and Juto was just scanning to be sure all was clear for their next run when Lon grabbed his arm.
'We can't go,' he whined.
'What?' Juto said. 'Why not?'
'The fog. It's the demons. It's the demons!'
A spasm of disgust passed across Juto's face. Lon was cringing, his eyes darting about.
'Don't be an idiot,' Juto snarled. 'It's just fog. It doesn't mean it's the feya-kori's doing.'
'It's the demons!' Lon cried, trailing off into a strangled whimper as Juto grabbed him by the throat and pulled him closer, so that they were eye to eye.
'It's just fog,' he said menacingly. There was a moment when they held each other's gaze, and then Lon looked down and away. Juto released him. 'You're the one who knows the way into this place. Get moving, or I'll shoot you myself.'
With that, he broke cover, dragging Lon with him. The Sisters followed close on their heels. They charged through the dense red miasma, hid, looked around, ran again. Once Phaeca saw a dark shape lumbering at the limit of their vision, a mist-ghost that she swore was a ghaureg; but it did not appear again, and they had no choice but to go on. There would never be any better conditions for an infiltration.
Eventually they reached the wall of the pall-pits. It loomed out of the red fog before them, resolving into detail as they neared, a grotesque hybrid of stone and plates of metal. With Lon in the lead, they skirted round the curve of the wall, eyes straining for any sight of Aberrant guards in the swirling murk.
But fortune was with them once again: they reached Lon's secret entrance without being spotted. It was a square hole in the wall, where a panel had either come loose or been ripped off, hidden behind a pile of rubble and joists. Lon paused at it, looked pleadingly at Juto.
'It's the demons,' he whispered.
'Get inside!' Juto snapped, and they crawled through and into the pall-pits.
EIGHT
The murk was so heavy inside the pits that it was all Kaiku could do not to retch. Her eyes teared and became bloodshot, and her skin crawled. Her kana was ridding her body of the impurities she was breathing, and it was literally seeping out of her pores. She wanted nothing more than to be gone from here; but she had a task to complete, and there was no turning back now.
The tiers were mazed with huge pipes, or cut through with trenches. While it made picking their way to the centre a complicated task, it also kept them well hidden as long as they crouched. It was barely possible to see the next tier down anyway, and the pits themselves were only visible as a fierce red haze. They headed to the right side of one of the ramps that ran from the edge to the smoking abyss. While it would provide the most direct route, it was too exposed to travel on, and they found themselves wondering why it was so smooth and featureless when every other part of the pallpits was so densely packed.