“You’re insane,” she said.
“At least I’m good at it.”
“You can set me down now.”
“Oh.” He seemed to notice for the first time that he still held her cradled to his chest. “Sorry.” With a flourish, he stood her on her feet. She almost lost her balance and fell into traffic, but caught herself and slid instead into the coachman’s seat. “Occupational hazard. Pirate and all.”
She glowered in response and offered him a hand down.
*
Abelard climbed three, four, five rungs at a time toward the Efficiency Office. Deterred but not destroyed, the shadow creature loped through the darkness after him. With a surge of terror-born strength he burst from the wet, warm air of the boiler room into light.
Scrambling off the ladder, he found himself surrounded by sound and fury. Alarms rang from all corners of the room—coolant alarms mostly, judging from the sonorous, basso profundo chorus of the Praise of Sacred Fuel—and Technicians rushed about checking chromed dials and pressure gauges and shouting to one another. Abelard’s warning cries were lost amid the din.
Grasping a nearby table leg, he pulled himself to his feet. A startled hush fell over the room as the maintenance monks noticed his torn garments and the blood seeping from his legs.
“Something’s down there! In the boiler room! Big.” He sucked in breath. “Black, sharp…”
The astonished monks gave no sign they understood his words. They took him for mad, no doubt, another unfortunate cleric broken by the stress of the last few days. Two burly brothers approached, wearing fixed expressions of concern, to escort him out. Abelard pulled back. “Tell Sister Miriel!” Claws clicked on the ladder below. “It’s coming! Get fire!”
Each monk grasped one of his arms and pulled, guiding Abelard toward the nearest door despite his squirming resistance. Others raised their heads from their work and blinked wide uncomprehending eyes, a clutch of tonsured seagulls. The creature would tear them apart before the light killed it. “It’s coming!” Abelard lashed out with a wounded leg and kicked the back of one captor’s knee. The man toppled and let go of Abelard’s arm.
Free, he spun and pointed. “There! Look!”
Some of the monks listened, finally, and they did not return to their work.
A black, viscous thing bubbled up from the boiler room, thousand-eyed, probing with jagged limbs at the world. It thrashed and broke a nearby desk to splinters. Monks scattered. Opening many mouths, the creature let loose a terrifying hiss.
Religious men often think about death, and Abelard had given some thought to his last words. “I told you so” had not been on the list.
The creature roared, and lashed out with a claw of living darkness. Abelard ducked, and it skewered the monk who held his right arm. The man burst like an overripe fruit pricked with a needle. Abelard darted for the door.
He took five steps before he was brought up short. The air about him grew sharp, as before the onset of a thunderstorm.
Ms. Kevarian stood at the door of the Efficiency Office. The cant of her head and slant of her mouth reminded Abelard of a desert lizard he had seen once in a cabinet of curiosities. The scholar who owned the cabinet introduced to his audience a species of scorpion whose sting could kill a grown man in seconds, then placed the scorpion in a glass tank with a flat-headed yellow lizard. The lizard regarded the deadly insect in the same way Ms. Kevarian regarded the shadow swelling and burning in the center of the room.
The scholar had explained, with a carnival barker’s timing, that this lizard’s diet consisted chiefly of scorpions.
Ms. Kevarian’s stillness broke into sudden motion. She cupped the fingers of one hand as if scooping sand off a beach. Behind Abelard, the shadow creature leapt toward this interloper, barbed stingers tense to strike.
Ms. Kevarian raised her hand to the level of her eyes, and with practiced deliberation closed her fingers into a fist.
A rush of wind from nowhere flattened Abelard’s hair and nearly plucked the burning cigarette from his lips. Lightning burst within the chamber walls, but there was no light and no sound of thunder, only a concussive wave. When he opened his eyes, the creature hovered a few feet off the floor, revealed in full grotesquerie and caught in a bubble made from solid air. Angry scrabbling talons glanced off curved transparent walls. Ms. Kevarian’s grip tightened, and the bubble began to shrink. Claws raked ineffectually; limbs buckled and bunched against one another like wet towels pressed against a glass door. Still Ms. Kevarian squeezed and still the invisible sphere tightened. Spider-arms melded into thicker tentacles, and were crushed back into shadow. The creature’s hisses were plaintive in the silence that accompanied Ms. Kevarian’s working of Craft.
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.