Scar Night Page 4

The guard’s words rang out like bells in the still morning. Deep inside, the scrounger felt some part of himself crumble. And with it, the gem of hope he’d guarded all night slipped away. Had he been wrong not to try to disguise her wounds? Suddenly he was weary, his head slumped to his chest. For the first time, he seemed to feel Abigail’s cold weight pressing down on his shoulders. He sank to the ground.

  And then his teeth locked together and his lips peeled back. Beneath his robe, the muscles in his neck grew taut, his shoulders bunched, his hands tightened to fists, and he was on his feet with a snarl, grabbing the guard’s throat with all of his strength, and forcing him back.

  The man stumbled, flailing an arm. He tripped over one of the corpses and hit the ground in a clatter of armour, his neck still tight in the scrounger’s grip. The pike toppled and landed with an unholy crack.

  Mr. Nettle’s hood fell back; his face twisted into a blur of teeth and stubble and murder.

  The guard wrenched at Mr. Nettle’s arm and struck it, pulled at the fabric of his robe. The sacking ripped but the arm beneath remained hard as iron.

  Mr. Nettle tightened his grip.

  Air burst from the guard’s throat; his eyes rolled back; his face darkened to crimson. He scrabbled again at Mr. Nettle’s arm, then at his face, fingers gouging. His gauntlets, stiff with frost, raked Mr. Nettle’s skin.

  Then something hit Mr. Nettle hard above his ear, pitching him sideways. His head struck the deck of the bridge and he rolled awkwardly, twisting the muscles of his shoulder. Darkness flickered through his vision. He ended up on his back, gasping. His ear burned, and his skull felt like it was shrinking. He shook his head, looked up. Spans of iron spun against the still lightening sky.

  A second guard stood there, livid in the dawn, armour gleaming, pike levelled.

  Mr. Nettle staggered to his feet. Blood streamed from a gash on his forehead, filling his eyes. The crowd of mourners backed away.

  He charged at the guard—or tried to. Pain hit him like a nail driven into the top of his spine. Everything suddenly lurched to one side; the bridge slid out from under him. His legs folded and he stumbled, brandishing his fists like a drunk, and dropped to his knees.

  The second guard stove the base of his pike into the scrounger’s stomach.

  Mr. Nettle curled and clawed at the wooden deck beneath him. Splinters pierced him under his nails. He bit down hard, tried to rise, and was struck again. And again. And again.

  The mourners looked on in silence. One of them crouched to inspect the injured guard. Pinned by his armour, the man coughed and spluttered and drew in great rasping breaths.

  Mr. Nettle had no idea how long he suffered this beating. After a time, he stopped feeling the blows as they rained on him. They came as quick as licks of flame in an inferno. He was only distantly aware of the sting of metal on flesh, the deck of the bridge rough against his cheek, the blood bubbling in his nose as he sucked in air. It might have lasted minutes, or for hours.

  Finally, the guard held back. “Get lost,” he said, panting. His arms trembled as he levelled the sharp end of his pike at Mr. Nettle’s throat. “Go! Out of here. Get lost.”

  Mr. Nettle tried to move, his muscles screaming protest. Torrents of fresh pain rushed through his arms and legs. He bit down on the urge to retch, and pushed back against the bridge, hefting himself onto his hands and knees. His left eye had swollen shut. At least one rib was cracked or broken. He spat a bloody tooth on to the deck.

  But he moved away. Without turning to face his attacker, he crawled back to his daughter’s body. Slowly, carefully, he replaced her arm in the shroud. Blood dripped from his face onto the linen.

  Then he gathered her up and forced himself to his feet. For a moment he wavered: she was suddenly so heavy. His legs shook, but he wrenched himself upright again with a loud gasp that echoed back from the temple walls.

  Unhooded now, with teeth bared and his face swollen and bloody, he started back across the bridge. His robe was torn and hung in strips about his arm. He swung a savage glare over the other mourners, who parted like a dark river before the bow of a ship, crowding as far from him as they could, only to follow his retreat with shrouded eyes. Nervous voices hushed as he passed.

  Mr. Nettle continued across the bridge with blood pounding in his ears and only silence in his wake.

  In the shadow of the girders at the Gatebridge entrance, he held his daughter over the edge, over the darkness, and looked down at the rumpled fabric covering her face, at the strands of hair that hung out from the cloth. Tears mixed with the blood on his cheeks as he dropped her into the abyss. The white shroud flamed for an instant in the gaslight and then she was gone.

  The cleaver handle dug into his ribs and, for all its cost, he felt like throwing the damn thing far into the abyss too. What use would it be to him now? How could he ever get close enough to his daughter’s murderer to use it?

  To kill an angel, he’d need to find a far more dangerous weapon.

  3

  Dill and Rachel

  Dill woke with a jolt, gasping for breath, still in the grip of his nightmare. He’d been alone somewhere in cold, crushing darkness. No, not completely alone: there had been a girl. Black eyes, red lips, white teeth . Even as he tried to remember, her face faded, leaving him with nothing but the feeling that, somehow, she’d been both beautiful and hideous.

  Had she been crying—or laughing?

  It was morning, and he was lying facedown on his mat in a pool of his own spittle. The candles had burned down to stubs of tallow. Ash smouldered in the hearth. Sunlight streamed through the stained glass in the eastern wall. Dill’s gluey eyes focused on the image portrayed in the window. His ancestor Callis, Herald and commander of Ulcis’s archons, held his wings outstretched and his sword aloft before a group of cowering heathens. Motes of dust drifted before the glass angel, changing from pink to blue to gold.

  Dill sniffed, wiped his lips on his sleeve of his nightshirt, and rose stiffly from his mat. He stretched arms, legs, and wings before he realized his eyes were itching terribly.

  He groaned. Please…not today, not for the ceremony .

  But no amount of pleading would make a difference. Dill’s eyes were the wrong colour: completely inappropriate.

  Nerves. He was bound to be nervous. The darkness in his dream had unnerved him.

  And today I wear a sword for the first time.

  He would have to attend to his eyes later; first he had to wash. The water in his bucket was freezing, but he drenched himself until he gasped, then stood naked, soaked and shivering, with his bony arms wrapped around his ribs, his feathers damp.

  The uniform lay there on the stool, precisely folded where he’d left it last night, a stack of heavy velvet, fine brocade with glints of silver. The boots standing beside the stool were new and smelled of polished leather. But the sword above the mantel outshone all else.

  The blade beckoned him, but he couldn’t touch it, not yet. Everything must be perfect first, and he had to take care of the snails. There were only seven this morning: one by the hearth, one under the window, the others clinging to the walls at various heights. The largest was the size of a walnut, the smallest the size of his little fingernail. Gently, he removed them and put them in the snail-bucket along with the others. About forty in it now, he noted. The promise of rain must be bringing them out in such numbers.

  Wherever did they come from?

  Dill had spent years trying to figure it out. There was a narrow space under the balcony door, and also under the door to the stairwell, through both of which they might have entered his cell, and there were also a few dark holes where mortar had crumbled from the damp walls. But he’d watched those same openings for hours at a time without ever seeing a single snail slither through. The empty rooms beneath his cell were thick with them, but those rooms were permanently dark and there wasn’t a brand or taper bright enough to make him want to venture far inside them. Not that those snails down there ever seem
ed to move either. Snails, being snails, only moved when no one was watching them.

  A sudden roar rattled the windowpanes. An explosion? Dill wheeled, confused, expecting to see the walls topple, and he almost knocked over the snail-bucket. But everything remained solid. The noise outside died away.

  The door to his balcony had jammed shut, as though its arched frame had shifted during the night, but he finally got it open with a kick and squeezed his wings through.

  Crisp morning air: the flagstones chilled his bare feet; the parapet felt cool when he leaned against it. Deepgate spread below, bright in the sunshine. Had a chain snapped somewhere, some part of the city collapsed into the abyss? He leaned out further to get a better view.

  Heavy with balconies, the townhouses of Bridgeview slumped at odd angles around their dappled courtyards, walled gardens, and fountains that glittered like smashed glass. Beyond that, neatly pitched roofs crowded the chains in Lilley and Ivygarths. Further out, smoke rose from a thousand chimneys in the Warrens. And, out on the fringes, the League of Rope clumped around the chain anchors, under the Deadsands, like driftwood on the shores of a lake. There was no sign of disaster.

  Another deep roar. Rooks burst past his tower with cries of alarm. Dill raced around his balcony to investigate.

  Fat black lettering on the tail-fin proclaimed the warship to be theAdraki . She was turning slowly, edging closer to the temple. Propellers twice the size of a man thrummed on either side of the brass-etched gondola suspended beneath the envelope. Four aeronauts in white uniforms stood on the aft deck, peering over the sterncastle rail between the aether-lights and docking harpoons. The signalman spotted him and waved his flag in a clipped semaphore message that Dill doubted was civil.

  Dill gave a hesitant wave back. He’d never seen one of these ships so close. Its silver envelope filled half the sky; and it was getting closer, descending past him to where a dock jutted out from the temple’s sheer walls. In his lifetime, no airship had used that mooring. Not even churchships were allowed this close, and this, the Adraki, was a warship, her deck-cages packed with drums of lime-gas and incendiaries. Clearly someone important was arriving. Abruptly Dill’s nerves were on edge and his eyes itching all the more.

  White as a coward’s flag, as the captain of the temple guard would have said. At least the aeronauts were too distant to see his fright. He closed his eyes and thought about Callis’s sword, his sword, but felt the white in his irises now edge towards purple. He shook his head and gripped the parapet tightly until their colour faded to a comfortable, respectable grey.

  “Leaders,” cried an aeronaut, tossing down a first coil of rope. Evidently, they were not prepared to use the harpoons this close to so much ancient stonework and glass. A dockhand snatched up the rope, fed it through a pulley on the docking gantries, and ran with it over to a winch. More ropes followed, and men scrambled after them.

  A call came up from the dock. “Leaders fixed. Ready to winch.”

  “Bring her in.”

  Ropes stretched and twanged as dockhands began to wind cables down from spools mounted on the airship deck. The warship’s engines roared again. It trembled, eased closer to the dock.

  “Hey, archon,” the signalman shouted, “want a race?”

  The other aeronauts laughed. “Leave the poor bugger alone,” one of them said. “Not his fault.”

  “I was only asking.”

  Dill lowered his head so that they couldn’t see his eyes become pink, then he followed his own wet footprints back the way he had come. The aeronauts could stuff their warship. Dill had his uniform now. And his sword, of course. He brightened a little; there was still time for some sword practice. He ran the rest of the way around the balcony, folded his wings, and ducked inside the doorway to his cell.

  But halfway through he halted, and blinked. A young woman stood waiting for him by the fireplace: small, gaunt, her fair hair drawn back severely from her face and woven into a tight plait in the style popular among nobles’ daughters. But this was her only concession to fashion, for she was bereft of jewellery, and wore beaten leathers bristling with weapons. A worn hilt jutted from the scabbard on her back, blue throwing knives and silver needles ran the length of her leather-sheathed forearms, while her belt held poison pouches, a blowpipe, and three stubby bamboo tubes tarnished with age. She had taken Dill’s sword from its mount, and was examining it. The sword was too big for him, but in her tiny hands it looked absurd.

  “Put that back,” Dill snapped.

  Dark green eyes turned to confront him. Her face was so white she looked ill. “Your sword?” she asked. Her gaze dropped to it briefly, then bounced back up to meet his.

  Dill remembered he was naked. He snatched up his nightshirt, wrapped it round his midriff, and glowered at her. “It is Callis’s sword.”

  “So they say.” She studied the weapon more closely. “It’s old enough. The steel is single-layered, brittle, heavy. Blunt. The balance…” She drew the back of the blade over her sleeve and then held it between both hands. “Does not exist. The pommel was sheared off at some point, not that it makes much difference. The guard…” She snorted. “Someone replaced this. It’s gold-leafed lead. You could dent it with a spoon.” She slid the weapon back into its mount. “Shiny, though.”

  Dill waited stiffly.

  “Rachel Hael,” she said.

  There was something familiar about her surname, but he couldn’t place it. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” she replied quickly, flatly, as though it were a reflexive answer to that question. Then she hesitated, seemed to realize she ought to say more. “I’m your overseer.”

  “What?”

  “Overseer. Tutor. Personal guard.”

  Rachel Hael was a foot shorter than himself, half his weight, and she couldn’t be more than three or four years older than him. She exuded all the scholarly air of someone who ate beetles.

  “You’re not my overseer,” he said.

  She was looking around his cell. “How many candles do you need here?”

  “John Reed Burrsong is my overseer.”

  “He’s been dead for seven years.”

  Burrsong was dead? That explained why Dill hadn’t seen the old man around for a while. But surely there were other soldiers, or scholars? The temple teemed with them: dusty old men with spectacles and beards. Men who remembered wars, and times when the water tasted better and everyone was polite, and would tell you about them with flinching eyes and great weary sighs. There had to be someone more appropriate. Someone older. Lessfragile -looking.

  “Sypes told me to watch you,” Rachel said. “And to train you, I suppose. Swordplay, poisons, diplomacy, that sort of thing.” She reached inside a pouch attached to her armour, produced a tiny book, and flipped it towards him.

  Dill glanced at the title. Desert Trade Etiquette for Merchant Noblemen by P. E. Wallaway. “What’s this?”

  “Something to do with diplomacy, isn’t it?” She glanced at the cover. “That’s what they told me. You ought to read it, if you get a chance. I’m sure it’s fascinating.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I don’t blame you,” she conceded.

  Dill bit his lower lip. This seemed all wrong. Had Presbyter Sypes finally succumbed to his encroaching dotage? A young woman armed with a book she hadn’t read and a sword she probably couldn’t pull out of its scabbard without hurting herself did not amount to a proper overseer.

  “I’m hardly thrilled myself,” she said. “Let me guess, orange means annoyed?”

  Dill looked away, tried to focus his eyes back to grey. Dust motes danced and sparkled before Callis’s window. His snail-bucket sat underneath it. He felt like kicking it.

  “Why do you have a bucket of snails in your room?” she asked eventually.

  “What?”

  “Snails?”

  “Because.”

  She waited.

  “Because they climb up here,” he said. “I put them in the b
ucket and take them away.”

  “Where?”

  He scowled. “What training have you had, anyway?”

  “Where do you take the snails?”

  Why was she talking about snails? He batted the book at her impatiently. “Down below, into the temple.”

  “Why?”

  “To let them go.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know!” It was just something he did. He didn’t want them here, so he took them away, released them in the corridors behind the priests’ cells. She was trying to distract him, and he wasn’t having any more of it. “Why you?”

  Rachel Hael let out a long sigh. “A husk arrived at the temple doors this morning. There’s talk of another soul-thief loose in the city, as if one wasn’t bad enough. Maybe it’s becoming fashionable.” She shrugged. “I suppose they’d rather your blood stayed in your veins.”

  This morning? “But Scar Night is tonight. The moon’s not yet gone dark.”

  “Really?” She yawned theatrically.

  So here was his pocket-sized overseer: a finch of a girl who thought she knew something about soul-thieves. Perhaps she’d read a book on the subject. The crackling in his eyes intensified. “What does that have to do with you?”

  “God knows.”

  But Dill suddenly knew. He recognized her uniform. He looked again at her sword hilt, and this time he noticed just how well worn it was. A feeling of unease crept over him. That’s why she’s so pale. “You’re Spine,” he said.

  “Spine.” She spat the word. “I hate that title. Temple backbone, very noble. I prefer Nightcrawler . Isn’t that what the commoners call us? Right up to the point where they get dragged off for questioning.”

  What was she doing here? Spine weren’t usually assigned other duties. They couldn’t be assigned other duties, not after their training. What was the Presbyter thinking of?

  Rachel interrupted his thoughts. “A message for you.” She threw him a package wrapped in thick paper. Dill fumbled in catching it and the package dropped to the floor and burst open.

  It contained an iron key on a chain, and a note from the Presbyter.