A puff of smoke had drifted up from the high-backed chair facing away from him. Someone unseen was sitting there.
Mr. Nettle slunk back behind the window frame, his heart racing. How could the bastard get back so quick? That was impossible. Then who? An accomplice? He ground his teeth. The Poisoner he could handle. Two men might be harder.
He couldn’t see anything around the wide back of the chair. This meant the smoker couldn’t have spotted him either. If he moved quickly, silently now, he still had the advantage of surprise. Doubt held him back. Devon would arrive any second.
Hell with it.
He reached for the window again.
Just then, the door opened and the Poisoner walked in.
Devon froze. A factory worker was sitting in his chair, and the man was covered, head to toe, in soot. Such mess, quite frankly, was unacceptable here. “Can I help you?” he asked.
The worker pulled out a knife, a Cutter’s blade. In his other hand he held up the manacles Devon had used recently on the girl. “Bruises on the arms,” he said, then tipped his head at the letting chair and the blood-smeared tubes and flasks. “Been stealing souls, have we?”
Devon’s heart sank to his boots. Have I been wrong all along? He’d been unforgivably foolish and arrogant to assume it was Sypes who was protecting him. He said, “There is a perfectly rational explanation for all of this.”
Silence ensued.
“Tell me,” Devon said, “does Sypes intend to grant me a trial?”
A guarded look.
He doesn’t know? Not Sypes, then. But who?
“Fogwill,” Devon said, and saw at once the truth of it in the other man’s eyes. The Adjunct had gone behind his master’s back. He studied the would-be assassin carefully, and almost grinned when he noticed the tattooed knots, partially obscured by soot, on the man’s neck. A Spine reject, broken by the tempering process. Devon felt a sudden twinge of hope. There was still a chance, then. Broken Spine were notoriously unstable. This man would be a seething cauldron of ego and fanaticism. And, of course, quite insane.
Devon intended to stir things up.
“The Adjunct made a mistake sending you here,” he said. “You are a zealot, but without tempering you lack the capacity for restraint. This makes you easier to manipulate.”
“Think you can manipulate me?”
“It ought to be easy enough,” Devon said lightly. “All I have to do is anger you.”
The other man’s teeth flashed. “Your arrogance is astonishing,” he hissed. “Do you so much want to die?”
Pathetic, really. He just can’t help himself.
“Actually, no,” Devon replied. “Death is my opponent, and my work always sought to defeat him. Our forefathers almost succeeded in that a thousand years ago. You will remember the story of the Soft Men?”
The assassin’s expression darkened. “I remember their punishment.”
Devon smiled. “They developed a process to extract the soul and bottle it. Do you know what happens when a man consumes the soul of another? I will tell you. When flesh becomes saturated with the only substance that truly enriches it, the balance between the physical and metaphysical shifts. Will, so empowered, is irresistible. Desire can extend life, strengthen the body, heal wounds. Physical ageing becomes a matter of whim.”
He took a step closer to the letting chair and to the metal stand supporting the tubes. “This equipment is similar to what the Soft Men used. Thirteen souls are required to reach saturation point, a level of potency when the solution can be absorbed by a recipient. A single drop might sustain a man for many lifetimes; give him such control over his flesh that mortal wounds would become mere scratches. A man infused with angelwine is nearer, in every sense, to God.”
The assassin was now coiled like a spring, the knife gripped tightly in his fist. “You’ll not have your trial,” he snarled.
Devon plucked a small bottle from his coat pocket and held it up. Clear liquid sloshed within. “Eleven unblessed souls.” He pulled the stopper and sniffed. “Stolen from Ulcis, and no doubt hunted by Iril even as we speak. I wonder if the Maze can sense what it has lost.”
The assassin looked aghast, backed away. “Replace the cork,” he hissed. “Hide these souls before—”
Devon threw the contents of the bottle into the assassin’s face.
The man howled and doubled over, spitting, dragging his arm frantically across his face.
Devon grabbed the metal stand and swung it hard. The blow threw the assassin across the desk. He smashed through beakers and test-tubes, and dropped to the carpet.
Pain clenched Devon’s chest. He felt blood trickling beneath his bandages from freshly opened wounds. Wincing, he pulled another, smaller bottle from his waistcoat pocket and examined the pale red liquid within.
“Room for one more?” He held the bottle to his ear, then sighed, shook his head. “Iril take me, I’m talking to a bottle of souls.”
And part of me almost expected a response.
He tossed aside the other, empty bottle. “Waste of good Rhak,” he muttered.
Broken glass littered the floor. Devon crunched through it as he dragged the unconscious assassin towards the letting chair. “I am old,” he said, “and sick. But, unlike you…” He heaved the assassin into the chair. “I am alive. You, my friend, have been dead since birth.”
He tightened the straps around the man’s arms and legs. “Zealots,” he muttered. “Too easy to manipulate.”
Mr. Nettle was shaking as he perched outside the window and watched Devon bind the assassin to the chair. He watched Devon insert tubes into the man’s arms. He watched blood flow into a flask on the floor. He watched it all, but didn’t see. He was thinking about the angelwine.
Eleven souls.
Abigail’s soul?
She was dead, her body lost to the abyss, but her soul had never been given to Ulcis or taken by Iril. Her soul was trapped in this world, in the Poisoner’s elixir. Even now, there was still hope for her.
Could her soul be reunited with her body? Would she live again—not in the abyss or the Maze, but here in the city? With him?
Mr. Nettle knew what he had to do.
He shuddered.
He had to let Devon complete his work. When the angelwine became potent he would kill the Poisoner and take it. He would reclaim Abigail’s soul from the man who had stolen it.
And then?
Somehow, he had to get her body back.
15
BOOBYTRAPS AND SNAILS
AFTER THREE HOURS of restless sleep, Fogwill was up at dawn to greet the assassin. He paced before his cold, untouched breakfast, blinking tired eyes, twisting his rings this way and that.
By mid-morning there was still no sign of the man and he began to fear the worst. Noon came and went, and the Adjunct found himself standing by the window, staring listlessly at the view. Lowering skies pulled the horizon close, pressed down on the rooftops, and soaked the colour from everything. Spine were not late. Even broken Spine did not fail to report.
He knew the assassin was dead.
But that was the least of his worries. The smallest criticism of Devon’s work led to bouts of illness in the temple. What would the Poisoner do if he learned who was behind an assassin attempt? Fogwill winced. Slurry would be the least of it.
He had to act now, before it was too late.
So he sent runners to the Poison Kitchens to enquire after Devon, and instructions to Captain Clay to gather six of his men and meet him on the Gatebridge within the hour.
Clay trudged heavily out of the temple, his coal-coloured armour clinking, his face slumped under the grey weight of the afternoon heat. Six lethargic temple guards fell in behind him.
“Rain is overdue,” Clay said. “The clouds are pregnant with it, but keeping it up there to torment us. A foul day—and I’ve a feeling things are about to get worse. If we’re out here, I suppose you propose a march into the city.”
Fogwill moppe
d his brow. “We are going to the Poisoner’s apartment.”
“Bloody hell,” Clay said, “I knew it.”
The Adjunct chose to ignore this impertinence. Benedict Clay, for all his gruffness and bluntness, was a good man. “The Poisoner did not appear for work this morning,” he said. “I am concerned something may have happened to him.”
“And this requires six guards?” When Fogwill didn’t reply, the captain sighed. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t getting any cooler. We’d best make a start.”
The streets were quiet, and those people they passed went about their business sluggishly, hardly finding the energy to glance up from the cobbles at the Adjunct and his retinue. The temple guards sweated in their armour and Fogwill sweated in his cassock. Even the chains seemed to sweat under the burden of the city. When they crossed the Scythe at Docker’s Bridge, the air was turgid, with no hint of a breeze from the abyss, and Fogwill wondered if Ulcis himself was sweating down in the darkness below.
The Adjunct tried not to worry about what he might find in the Poisoner’s apartment, but he couldn’t help himself. If Devon had overcome the assassin, then doubtless he would have fled. And removed any evidence of his crimes? Almost certainly. Sypes would be furious. But would Devon’s disappearance convince the Presbyter of his guilt? Fogwill wasn’t sure. After all, he’d given the assassin free rein, told him to use his own judgement. That was like handing a lunatic a knife and telling him to go use it.
They reached the Depression by mid-afternoon. Under the faint red glow of the Poison Kitchens’ flamestacks the district simmered. Hot, foul air pooled where the factories and warehouses slumped in a bowl. Brickwork sweated in a dripping haze. Flecks of ash alighted on chains and cobbles like feeding moths, and blackened the sweat on Fogwill’s cheeks and neck. His handkerchief was filthy.
The door to Crossop’s warehouse opened onto a gloomy stairwell. Clay growled, “Don’t like the look of this. What you want us to say to him if he’s there?”
“Tell him I’m concerned, and I’d like a word.”
“That’s it? We marched out here for that?” Clay huffed, and then ordered his temple guards to enter the warehouse.
That was the last time Fogwill saw any of the captain’s men alive.
The explosion shook the Depression. Stones and bricks and timbers and mortar burst upwards. Smoke mushroomed from the roof of the warehouse.
Fogwill fell back with a jolt onto his rear, his ears ringing with the sound of the blast.
Clay grabbed him, was shouting something, and at first Fogwill couldn’t hear.
“I said get away,” Clay cried. He yanked Fogwill’s cassock. “The debris, man! We’ll be crushed.” The captain dragged him down the lane towards the doorway of a derelict factory. Fogwill slipped and stumbled, trying to remain upright. He glanced back.
The upper half of the warehouse was now missing. Flames curled up the inside of the walls and lapped at glassless windows. Black smoke spewed from the yawning gap where the roof had been.
Clay pulled him into the doorway just as the debris began to fall. Bricks shattered on the cobbles. Iron spars and burning timbers crashed into the lane or ripped through eaves and tore gutters free. Grit fell like rain.
Fogwill squeezed his hands over his ears.
The sky darkened. A dense pall of smoke was spreading over the Depression. Lit by the distant flamestacks, the expanding cloud seemed to smoulder at its extremities like molten basalt. There was a low, thunderous rumble, then Devon’s former apartment collapsed inwards.
“Move!” Clay rushed back into the lane.
Bricks were still crashing down all around them. Fogwill hesitated.
Stones pinged against the captain’s armour. “The chains are going!” he shouted. “Whole district’s going to fall.”
The Adjunct looked back at the ruined warehouse. Heat from the fire slammed into him. Flames fifty feet high engulfed a knot of brickwork and chains that shifted and tightened under collapsing walls and chimneystacks. Even as he watched, those same chains were snapping, whipping everywhere.
Fogwill ran after Clay, wheezing.
They reached the end of the lane just as a mighty roar rocked the ground beneath them. The cobbles shuddered and bucked and Fogwill was thrown off his feet. He rolled like a barrel and struck a wall.
And then there was silence.
“Iril be damned,” Clay breathed.
The Adjunct picked himself up, dusted himself down, and looked back.
Crossop’s warehouse was gone. Half a block of the Depression was gone. Where moments ago there had been factories and foundries, there was nothing but a vast hole, veiled in dust and smoke.
Clay grunted. “There goes the neighbourhood.”
Angry storm clouds brought an early darkness to the city. Wet gales spun weathervanes, slammed shutters, and drove sheets of rain against the windowpanes in Presbyter Sypes’s library.
Sypes sat at his desk with his eyes closed, rubbing his temples. “How long had he been spying for you in the Poison Kitchens?”
Fogwill paced before the Presbyter’s desk, his head low, and toyed with his rings. Every word Sypes spoke felt like a slap. “Several weeks.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
“No, I thought it best—”
“To undermine my authority?” Sypes’s bony fingers tightened around his walking stick. “Do you think I am too old, too weak, too confused to make decisions?”
“I was trying to be discreet.”
The old man’s brows lowered and he pointed the stick at Fogwill. “This is what you call discreet? Now your…assassin has vanished. Devon is missing. And I have a hole in my city large enough to swallow half of Sandport.”
“Let’s send a unit of temple guard. And more Spine—”
“More!” Sypes’s roar drowned the wind-lashed windowpanes. “What do you expect to find—Devon signalling his whereabouts from a rooftop? A trail of corpses?” He slammed the stick on the desk. “Yesterday I knew exactly where he was.”
“Yesterday you brushed my suspicions aside.”
A scowl. Fogwill stopped pacing.
“You knew? And you did nothing? You were prepared to allow the murders to continue? The theft of souls?”
Sypes avoided his eye.
“For God’s sake, why?”
The old man’s lips crinkled, as though he were chewing on something unpalatable. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something you need to see.”
They left the library and took one of the acolyte stairwells deep into the heart of the temple. At the bottom of the stairs Sypes lifted a brand from its wall mount and led Fogwill through a network of dank passages and cellars which appeared to be used for dry storage. Cobwebs clung to everything. After a while they came to a heavy metal door hidden behind crates. Sypes unlocked it and they descended another spiral staircase. Down and down, until Fogwill couldn’t believe it was possible to descend any further.
“We must be below the Spine Halls now,” he said.
“Part of the old dungeons,” Sypes’s voice echoed. “Disused now. Here, help me with this door.”
At the foot of the stairwell, the Presbyter unlocked another ancient door, and Fogwill helped him drag it open. They were assaulted by the most frightful odour. Rotting meat? Fogwill harboured no such illusions. It seemed every time the Presbyter led him somewhere it was to see a dead body.
“Another corpse?” he ventured.
“Yes, well, sort of. I have it locked in one of the cells.”
Then the old man was off into the dungeons. Puzzled, and not a little apprehensive, Fogwill scurried after him. Rusted grates in the walls marked the entrances to dark cells. The smell grew worse. Sypes’s brand guttered and plunged them into near-darkness.
“Useless thing,” the Presbyter muttered. “Hasn’t been tarred in years.” He halted outside one of the cells and beckoned Fogwill closer. “Be careful. Don’t get too close to the bars. It spits.??
?
“I thought you said it was dead.”
“I’m not entirely convinced.”
Fogwill peered into the cell. The torchlight did not penetrate far beyond the bars, and he strained to see. For a heartbeat he thought he discerned movement. From the back of the cell came the sound of a chain slithering over stone. He recoiled. “What is it?”
The Presbyter grunted, gave an impatient wave of his hand.
Fogwill looked closer. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he made out a shape. A wing? “It’s an angel,” he breathed.
“Not quite,” Sypes said.
Then Fogwill saw what his master meant. The wing was attached to a shoulder, the shoulder to a torso, the torso to a leg, arm, neck, and head. Or most of a head. The rest of the angel was missing. It appeared to have been divided, roughly, in half. It was gnawing on something white and wet.
“This thing,” the Presbyter said, “is Callis. Or part of him. The other half remains with Ulcis. Down below.” He rapped his stick on the dungeon floor.
“Darkness take me! What is it doing here?”
“What it’s always done. Speaking the will of its master. Issuing orders.”
“It can speak?”
“It never shuts up. This is the first time it’s been silent in a year.”
On cue, Callis spoke: “Feed me.”
“No!” Sypes boomed. “You’ve had enough.”
The sound of wet breathing issued from the darkness. “Never enough,” the angel hissed.
Fogwill was stunned. This pitiful creature was Dill’s ancestor, mutilated, left to rot in a dungeon for thousands of years. Then the angel’s words sank in, and he cast a wary eye at the Presbyter. “What are you feeding it?”
“Anything except what it asks for.”
The Adjunct swallowed. “But if this is Ulcis’s Herald, then whose bones stand in the Sanctum corridor with the Ninety-Nine?”