A Verger.
Medicine gripped his umbrella even more tightly, loosening the sabre it contained with a flick of his wrist.
He peered behind him: just rain and fog. The Verger filled the silence, perhaps in honour of Argent Lane, with his own whistling. Medicine felt the blood drain from his face, his lips thinned to a single nervous and angry line. The Verger whistled an old Confluence tune, a call to arms.
Bastard. Fucking Bastard. How dare he? Do not take up the challenge. Just keep walking. Bastard. Fucking Bastard.
Once round the corner, he ran, heading for a safe house on Wisden Street: a place that he had held in reserve for years. Most safe houses had burned in the last few days, greasy smoke rising into the rain. This one remained, empty, but its windows were broken. Blood stained the living room floor.
Footsteps echoed from outside. His nerve broke, and he ducked through a bolthole hidden in the living room that led, via a narrow stone tunnel, to a street two blocks behind. All the way, he walked with his sabre unsheathed and held shakily before him.
No one was waiting in the back street, but he did not hang around. Soon enough, the Verger was whistling again.
One place remained and he made his way there, all pace, through slivers of broken suburbs, wading along half-drowned streets, clambering over walls and under bridges.
Little traffic came this way. Those roads that weren’t covered in water were potholed, devourers of cart and horse. Empty side streets coiled and wound away from the city and the river. The city here had clenched around itself like a wounded beast. Medicine’s wet boots slapped down Cove Street and over the Cove Bridge. If luck were with him, he might lose his pursuer in the northern district, then come back via the Shine Bridge and into the rear of the Ruele Tower. The Verger’s tune followed him all the way.
At the Shine Bridge, Medicine stopped and peered down into the white water of the Weep. A steamer, one of the sail-steam hybrids, was making its slow progress against the river. A snarl of logs struck the boat. In a puff of flame it was gone, leaving a brief pall of dirty smoke to be snatched away by the wind.
The water seethed and what could only be bodies, dim desolate shuddering shadows, passed beneath the bridge.
Portentous and terrible, he thought, somewhat hysterically, and continued on his way over the Shine. When the Verger was done with his games, Medicine was certain he would find a turbulent rest in the belly of the Weep. He was not Cadell, he could not fight these men with their Cuttlefolk blood, nor could he bribe away the edge of their knives.
Once across, he glanced back along the Shine and started. A single figure slouched there at the end of the bridge, he blinked and the figure was gone.
Medicine sprinted down the next few streets alone, and there were no whistling or solitary figures to disturb his thoughts, he cast glances behind him every time he reached a street lamp, most of them bearing his portrait. Nothing.
In the absence of obvious pursuit, Medicine sprinted first down one lane then another, through back streets as narrow as doss house corridors. The city reeked, stonewalls covered in a patina of fungus. Dead things floated, bloated and stinking, in the shallows of gutters. This was Mirrlees now. Death’s rotting signature scrawled everywhere.
When he made the secret entrance to the Ruele Tower, he threw furtive desperate glances over his shoulder and found some small relief in the empty lane and the silence – if pounding heart and pouring rain could be called silence.
He tapped the wall in five places, and in the right order, and the wall slid back and opened a crack wide enough to admit a grown man. He frowned at the darkness beyond, unsheathed his sword, and slipped through the gap, letting the secret door shut behind him.
Inside, he dropped to a crouch and reached for the torch hidden to the left of the door. Nothing. His fingers brushed the floor. Something ran over his ruined knuckles. He flicked it away.
Where’s the damn torch?
The Verger’s knife pushed into his neck not hard or deep enough to draw blood. Medicine breathed deep the stale air. This last air, obviously, once the Verger was done with him.
“What do you want?”
“Mr Paul,” the Verger said. “Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine.”
The Verger’s old friend hammered into the back of Medicine’s head and he fell into the merciful dark.
Chapter 19
The lodes were wretched, their master cruel. Locked here. Locked here. Locked here.
The Lode stung him with its rising awareness, its memory of his blood and his guilt.
The water conducted the Lode’s power and as Cadell walked further up the stream it focussed on him. The water grew dense around his limbs, began to defy its natural tidal inclinations. Shapes took form within its depths. Lights winked into being. And all around it was an odd and breathless sort of shock. You are here. Why are YOU here?
Cadell reacted to the Lode’s shock, its recognition, with a sort of shock and recognition of his own.
Strange, the things you forget, he thought. The power and the agony.
Old code words, old data flickered to life in his memory, dim at first, they increased in intensity, beacons of energy to which he was drawn.
But he also sensed a hesitancy, a distant doubt. Was it his own?
Ah, but he always had doubts. Always. They rang in his bones and rattled, ancient as fear, in his skull. The Engine merely magnified them, as did its cruel punishments.
The Quarg Hounds howled, no doubt about their hungers.
He glanced over at David then back to the Hounds, they were at the hill, racing towards the pale bare rock of its summit. Fierce as they were and deadly, this weather was still too cool for them, the run and the rain had taken their toll. The beasts whined between each howl; dark blood streamed from their jaws. They were weakened, but what strength remained was more than enough to rend David limb from limb.
Cadell clenched his teeth. He could not put it off any longer, already his stomach was cramping, his ears ringing in anticipation. He took one final breath and raised his hands.
This was going to hurt.
“Now,” he cried. “NOW!”
And his bones turned to ash. Pain hammered into his skull.
“Now.”
The Quarg Hounds had reached the summit. On that final “Now” they stopped, as though yielding to his command.
But it was not the Roilbeasts that Cadell’s words commanded. The Quarg Hounds’ bloody snouts rose up quizzically.
One of them opened its mouth, then shut it, swiftly, cocking its head, as though it were listening to something distant but racing nearer.
Silence. The air cooled, something hardened within it, became crystalline and deadly.
Ice enclosed Cadell’s skin, burnt and bit deep. His body shook with energies and their absence, because that was the wounding truth of it.
His power was an absence, a vacuum, and a slowing, and all that lived quailed from it.
Insects fell, dead and frozen, out of the air, an entomological hail.
