moved its bone limbs. They made it look like a huge, horrible puppet.
The long bones it had in the approximate place of forearms looked like they’d been taken from horses’ legs, sharpened to a point.
They didn’t have much time. Somebody was going to come investigating the noise.
Sin waited to hear the click of bones on the stairs once, twice, three times.
Then Alan stepped out from his place against the other wall, took aim, and fired. The human skull on top of the creature exploded into dust and fragments.
Somebody was definitely going to come investigating
Sin darted up the stairs, pressing her side to the wall. Once she was a few steps up she launched herself off the wall and into the tower of bone.
Her knife found the ribbon tying the fox skull to the horse leg. When she slashed it, the creature’s arm fell off.
She grabbed at the thing and climbed it, using the pieces of bone as handholds, and scythed ribbons to cut it off at the point that was more or less its knees.
It was still able to lash out at her, now little more than a rattling whirl of bone, like a mobile over a cradle come to life and turned savage and hungry. Shards of bone stung her face. She thrust her knife through the tangle.
The creature collapsed into a heap of knots and bone, not an instant before Sin heard someone clattering down the stairs.
Sin leaped up and away, ducking her head to hide the cuts on her face. When she glanced up apprehensively, she was in equal parts annoyed and relieved that it was only Nick.
He stood with a short sword in hand, the broken window behind him, body braced for a fight. His eyes lit on his brother. “Don’t tell me I missed all the fun.”
“Maybe next time we’ll save you some,” Alan said, grinning.
And then they heard a door open down the hall, and Sin restored her knife to its sheath. When she looked up, Ms. Popplewell was advancing, and Alan and Nick had both hidden their own weapons. Alan was wearing a very convincing air of shock and helplessness.
Nick looked vaguely homicidal, but that was sort of his default expression.
“What on earth is going on here?” demanded Ms. Popplewell.
“That’s exactly what I would like to know,” Alan said. “Does this happen often? Somebody chucked this disgusting heap through the window—any one of us could’ve been really hurt!”
The rising note of indignation in Alan’s voice was good, Sin had to admit. Damn good.
Just in case Ms. Popplewell’s eyes strayed either to the cuts on Sin’s cheeks or Mr. Tall, Dark and Homicidal, Sin decided to attract attention by covering her face and saying in a fraught whisper, “It was just so loud—”
“There, there,” Alan murmured soothingly, patting her on the back.
“I didn’t know what was going on!” Sin exclaimed. She let her shoulders go up and down once, but decided that sobbing might be a step too far.
“Has this happened before?” asked Alan, sounding scandalized.
“No!” Ms. Popplewell exclaimed, her voice harried and not suspicious at all. “Cynthia, perhaps you should go to the nurse’s office. Don’t worry about missing French.”
“Thank you,” Sin offered piteously.
Nick spoke for the first time.
“Can I go to the nurse’s office too?”
Ms. Popplewell looked at him. It obviously took her only one look to decide. “No.”
“I’m traumatized too,” Nick claimed, his voice completely flat.
“He’s a delicate flower,” Alan said under his breath.
Sin started to wend her way obediently toward the nurse’s office just in case those two brought the whole house of cards down on their heads. She made sure to keep her shoulders a little sad and hunched, lest Ms. Popplewell look after her as she went. The key to a performance was in the details.
She did cast one fleeting glance back, caught Alan’s eye, and sent him a small smile. In a flicker almost too brief to notice, the corner of his mouth turned up in response.
That evening Sin slammed into the wagon that Merris used as her office whenever she was traveling with the Market. Merris looked up from a tablet on her desk, her eyes filled with blackness. The chair on the other side of Merris’s desk was occupied by someone who had got there before Sin.
Neither of these things did much to improve Sin’s mood.
“I was attacked today,” Sin announced without greeting either of them.
“Well,” Merris murmured. Her voice always had a different inflection now that she was carrying a demon: almost like a foreign accent, a flavor of some faraway and terrible land. “We are at war.”
“Which I’d understand, if I’d been attacked by magicians!”
Merris’s office was set up to impress, with heavier furniture than a wagon should have, a charm set up on the desk that changed colors depending on whether the people in front of her lied or told the truth, and wall hangings depicting scenes from old books. One was all black strokes on red paper, and it showed a crowd of beggars trying to fight a genie, uncurling from its prison and looking murderous. Sin did not think that would go well for them.
