Teo pushing her chair back from the table. “What’s wrong?”
“The water’s black.”
“What do you mean?” Before he could answer, she reached the kitchen door and saw, smelled, for herself. She blanched. “Gods. What is that?”
She sounded more shocked than a broken sink would warrant. Caleb began to turn, to see if he’d missed something.
Several small, sharp knives struck him in the back at high speed. He fell, cursing. Hooked claws tore at his skin. Groping over his shoulder, he felt a shell of slick, curved chitin, cold as ice. Small legs scraped his hand. He ripped the creature from his back and threw it across the room. A black, sharp blur, it struck the wall and splashed into a hundred fat droplets. Caleb bent forward, and panted. He heard Teo swear, and looked up.
The droplets had grown legs, pincers, snapping mandibles, multifaceted eyes. Sprouting from the wall, they skittered across the floor toward him.
Tzimet.
In the water.
“Shit!” He staggered back, flailing for a weapon. From the sink he heard a clatter of claws and teeth. His clutching fingers found Teo’s knife block. He drew a cleaver and whirled to face the sink, from which reared an insect the size of a small dog, mandibles gnashing.
The cleaver passed through the creature’s head, struck the sink, skidded and sparked. Caleb slipped and fell, still holding the knife. The creature hissed, and the droplet-bugs advanced. Teo grabbed a broom and struck the little bugs with its bristles. The sink-thing flopped onto the counter, and thudded to the floor a few inches from Caleb’s leg.
“What’s going on in there?” Sam, approaching from the living room. “You two better—” She cut off, and drew a heavy breath.
Caleb raised the knife as the sink-creature scuttled toward him, recovered from its fall. Not that the knife would do much good. He needed a broom of his own, or a stick, or—
A frying pan slammed down onto the Tzimet, pulping shell, claw, leg, and staring eye, and shattering ceramic floor tiles. Sam raised the pan and brought it down again. The wet black smear stopped moving.
Sam extended her hand to him. Blond hair frizzed into a halo about her head.
“Thanks,” he said, his voice heavy with shock.
“No problem,” she replied. “I can’t believe that worked.”
Teo had given up sweeping the bugs away in favor of spearing them with her broom’s bristles. She struck, and the creatures popped into tiny, inert puddles. “What are these things?”
“Tzimet,” Caleb said as Sam pulled him to his feet.
“Like at Bright Mirror.”
“But smaller.”
Caleb heard a scream from the apartment next door.
“What in all hells is going on?” Teo asked, but Caleb was no longer in the kitchen to answer her.
He ran out of Teo’s apartment toward the neighboring flat. The door was closed; he knocked, and wished he were sober. The woman inside cried out again, and he struck the door with his shoulder and all the strength his scars could give him. The door burst off its hinges, and he stumbled into a grim gray living room heavy with the stench of sulfur and burnt metal and old blood. A gray-haired woman in a bathrobe swung a thick pillow against a horde of animated shower-droplets, spiders carved from black ice. Caleb grabbed towels from the bathroom, and tossed them to Sam and Teo as they ran in through the front door after him. Together, they smothered the little evil things with the towels. The towels, at least, did not rise up against them.
The neighbor stared dumbfounded at her stained rug and linens, at her traitor bathroom, at Caleb.
“Water inspectors, Ma’am,” Caleb lied, and flashed his RKC identification. “Reports of hard water in this area. I have to take a sample; do you have a small bottle I could borrow?”
The neighbor was an amateur chemist, and from her back room workbench (alchemical sigils shed dim light on glass retorts, phials of quicksilver and phosphorescent dye; a dead mouse, arms and legs pinned to the points of a triangle), she produced a small test tube with a rubber stopper, which he filled with water wrung from the towels.
Placing the tube in a pocket of his blazer, he made a quick excuse—“more apartments to see, sorry for the inconvenience, please direct any questions or concerns to customer service”—and backed hastily through the front door, urging her not to open her taps until further notice.
In the hall, he exchanged harried looks with Sam and Teo. Sam’s skin flushed red with action and anger; Teo tried three times to speak and at last stammered: “What the hell, Caleb?”
“I don’t know. We locked the Tzimet in Bright Mirror. They couldn’t get out.” But his mind betrayed him with images of Mal’s necklace, of the white-winged woman burning in the sky over North Station, of his father. The Tzimet could not escape unaided, but there were forces more pernicious and persistent than demons working against the city. “We need to get to the office.”
From down the hall came another cry, deeper, a man’s. Teo glanced from him, to Sam, then back in the direction of the scream.
Before she could say anything, Sam interrupted. “I’ll take care of it. You two get to work. Fix this.” Before either of them could object, she sprinted down the hall, a towel clutched in each hand.
“She’s a keeper,” Caleb said when Sam was out of earshot.
“I’ll get my coat,” Teo replied.
Pedestrians shuddered on the sidewalk, wearing housecoats and trousers, crying or shouting, clutching cuts through clothes and skin. Wardens clogged the sky. One broke a high window in the Seven Stars, and jumped inside. Glass shards rained down, and Caleb took cover under his jacket.
Caleb and Teo caught a driverless carriage across town. Skyspires drifted in the evening clouds. Crisscross ribbons of traffic coursed through the heavens along lanes marked by hovering lanterns: west to the suburbs, east or south toward the nighttime carnivals of Monicola Pier and the Skittersill. Buses of day laborers floated back to their tired camps in Stonewood amid the skeletons of trees. The sky was mostly empty of Wardens.
“Looks like the Tzimet haven’t spread far,” Teo said.
“Not yet.”
The carriage turned onto an elevated road, and streets sank out of view as the horse surged to full gallop. They had the road to themselves. Few carts or wagons crossed the city’s center so late; the densest traffic was farther south, near the port, where trucks pulled by oxen and giant lizards bore freight from the oceangoing ships docked at Longsands to warehouses in Skittersill and Fisherman’s Vale.
They descended from the elevated road to surface streets. A fight boiled outside a busy nightclub: girls in short spangled dresses and young men in wide-brimmed hats flailed at one another. Water sellers hawked refreshment to the drunk and disorderly. Those carts would have long lines in front of them soon. For sixty years, the city’s need for water had been satisfied without fail by the taps, pipes, wells, and dams of Red King Consolidated. That chain was broken.
At last the darkness of the 700 block closed around them. No streetlamps here, where they would wash out the starlight great Concerns needed for their Craft. The pregnant moon shone overhead. Pinprick stars winked in distant mockery.
Caleb shivered. In Camlaan and Iskar and Alt Coulumb—across most of Kath, for that matter—poets wrote odes to the beauty of the stars. The Quechal knew better. Great demons lived between the stars, and in them, beings immense in power and size, who sucked the marrow from suns and sang songs that drove galaxies mad.
There were demons on earth, now, too.
He watched the skies, and thought about death, riots, and Tzimet. To full-grown, healthy men and women, creatures like the ones he and Sam had fought presented little danger, but not everyone was full-grown and healthy. Many would fall, and die, tonight. The stars would watch, and hunger.
The usual protesters chanted outside 667 Sansilva. Teo and Caleb left the cab and shouldered past the crowd toward the pyramid. A squad of RKC employees had erected complaint booths in the parking lot, in front of trucks stacked high with pipes and wire. Good. They already knew. Some emergency policy, gathering dust in the
