Five minutes were too many to waste outside an abandoned warehouse debating whether to enter. Raising her chin, Tara crossed the vacant lot and climbed the ramp to the loading dock. She picked her way through the detritus of economic endeavor to the doors, one of which still stood. The other, unhinged, had collapsed onto the rock floor within. She stepped over the threshold.
Decayed and long picked clean of valuables, the warehouse did not seem an ideal headquarters for a religious insurgency. One expected gargoyles to prefer the peaks of skyscrapers, where they could open their toothed maws to drink in the rising moon, not a place like this, a bare slab floor strewn with broken crates that had served as rats’ nests before the cats moved in. High, broken windows admitted the streetlamps’ yellow gas glow and the pale reflected light from the clouds above. At the far end of the warehouse, a long-abandoned foreman’s office rose twenty feet above the ground on rotten wooden pillars.
Tara’s mental map was accurate, but not precise. Shale was somewhere in this building, but she could not tell more. She had expected him to run until his people found him. Had he set an ambush instead?
Sudden movement seized Tara’s attention. A shadow shifted behind a pile of broken crates, too big for a rodent or a cat.
Wary, she stepped forward. Her hand rose to her heart, and with a twist of her wrist she drew her knife, crackling and blue. It cast a pool of cool radiance at her feet. The noise and light gave away Tara’s location and her skill with Craft to any hidden observer, but she lacked subtler weapons. She skirted to the right as she approached the pile of broken wood, to keep out of striking distance as she rounded the corner.
Behind the crate, Tara found only bare stone.
Had she imagined the movement? The night was dark and the building disturbing, but surely she was not so unnerved as to leap at shadows? Frustrated, she glanced about the warehouse for a potential cause: a swift scuttling lizard, an assailant trying to lure her into position, an urchin taking shelter from the night and the fierce dockside streets.
Nothing.
With an inward groan, she straightened, lowering her knife-hand to her side. Had Shale slipped her tracing charm? He would have needed to tear off his face and let it heal over. Did his powers of regeneration extend that far? Replacing a face was no simple affair of regrowing flesh. Sensory organs had to heal as well, and thousands upon thousands of nerve endings. The magnitude of power required, not to mention the pain …
As she contemplated the pain, the floor opened beneath her and she fell, arms flailing, into the abyss.
16
Blacksuits swarmed over the buildings and through the alleys of Alt Coulumb like ants at an abandoned picnic. One crouched at a roof’s edge and glowered into the city with eyes that saw a broader range of light than the eyes of man. Another leapt from flagpole to flagpole, canvassing the Pleasure Quarters. A group of fifty cased the city one block at a time, moving with silent care down side streets.
The sight of them was enough to quell most of the sparks of civil unrest scattered throughout the city, and where mere sight was insufficient, they intervened in person. A middle-aged grocery-store owner struck a reedy young woman trying to steal food, and raised his hand to strike again; a rain of black fell over them, and when it lifted both were gone. A clutch of angry young men near the docks gathered to hear the protestations of a doom prophet, and twenty Blacksuits suddenly stood among the crowd where none had been before, watching and silent. The prophet’s wrath broke as the eyeless stare of Justice settled upon him. Words of fear and hatred faltered on his tattooed lips.
But though the Blacksuits dealt with the criminals and madmen that lay within their path, they did not hunt humans tonight. They hunted men of stone.
A gargoyle had stolen a witness from Justice’s infirmary, or perhaps had been disguised as that witness, or perhaps—Justice’s many minds were divided on this issue, and the debate raged across the brains of a thousand active Blacksuits, dancing through their neurons and arguing about the tables of their cerebra. A Stone Man was on the run, that was certain, and there was no such thing as a lone Stone Man. Dead Seril’s children moved in groups, or not at all.
Justice weighed the hearts of others, and did not spare much thought for her own. Had she examined her emotions, she might have recognized the petulant ire of the chess prodigy thwarted in mid-game. Mortals were meddling in Justice’s sphere, and she was jealous of her sphere. She needed that Stone Man, and his brethren: parade them before the madding crowd, hang murder and blasphemy about their necks, and peace would return. Hate directed was easily controlled.
Blacksuits flocked in Alt Coulumb, a murder of silent crows with human bodies. Though the Stone Man had confused their scouts and their pursuers, for he was fast and could assume many shapes, he was mortal, limited, fallible. He played a smart game, but he would make a mistake, and the murder would descend.
Justice waited, sharpening her sword and polishing her scales.
*
“No Tara here either,” Captain Pelham allowed as they sprinted out of the warehouse, night watchmen in hot pursuit.
Cat almost rolled her eyes, but that would have entailed taking them off the pavement, and in this part of town you never knew when a pothole or a mugger’s tripwire might send you sprawling.
Captain Pelham had ordered their driverless carriage to stay as far back as possible without losing Tara as she wove into the waterfront district, then out, then in again, tracing a labyrinth of which only she knew the paths. Maybe it was a Craft thing, or maybe she was trying to throw off pursuit. On their most recent pass through the waterfront, they turned a corner and saw Tara’s carriage pull away into obscurity, with Tara herself absent.
She must have abandoned the carriage to proceed on foot. Lacking a better option, they resorted to old-fashioned legwork, and had thus far eliminated a little more than half the warehouses in the area. Which meant, as Captain Pelham had reminded her with more good humor than she felt, that a little less than half remained.
It was hard to determine which warehouses were occupied and which abandoned. Near the docks, keeping one’s property in good repair was a counterproductive endeavor. Clean, well-tended buildings hold valuable cargo. Dockside warehouse-keepers realized long ago that a few broken windows and vulgar scrawls of graffiti, fire scars on one wall and water damage on another, made it harder for the casual thieves abundant in this part of town to tell marks from firetraps.
Time ran short. They needed a new tactic.
“Let’s try down this way,” Cat said, pointing to a dark alley that led off the main street. “Shortcut.”
“Sure you aren’t luring me down here so you can force me to suck your blood?” He said the last bit with a heavy Old World accent, and a fanged leer that disappeared when he saw the anger on her face. “I was joking,” he said, lamely, as she strode past him.
“What kind of joke is that?”
“The kind where I make light of your nearly killing yourself.”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“So do most suicides.”
Cat’s mouth tightened. Her hands shook, and she stilled them. Not enough time in the suit today, which left her drawn and irritable. Pelham’s fangs, while glorious, were a poor substitute for Justice. She stalked down the alley, and he followed. “It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been bit.”
“You’re a practiced user, then. Which is so much better.”
“I’m not using you.”
“Of course you are.” He pointed to his mouth. “You need this. You use me, and people like me, to get it.”