sound was incredible, a thousand wings, beating the air. It sounded like the shuffling of velvet cards, amplified a hundred times over. Deafening and soft, thunder wrapped in soft leather. The rushing darkness passed and passed, a seemingly endless parade of wings and beaks that flowed like a skyborne river of ink. Distant yelling, the thudding of doors, then a sharp splintering sound and they were away. The hallway was silent.
The girl was panting in terror. Slowly she stood, hands on knees, until she was straight. She stared out at the empty hallway, the fluttering ghost of a feather all that remained of the thunderous visitor.
'Now, love,' Wilson said as he lowered himself from the ceiling on his spider arms. 'I want you to not shout at all.'
She shouted a great deal, mostly in terror. She backed away from him, until she bumped into me. I took her by the arms and spun her around.
'It's okay, alright? Everything's fine. We just…'
She fainted. I sighed and let her fold onto the floor gently.
'That was well done. When are you going to get it?' I asked. 'Look at you. People are terrified of you, Wilson. Especially when you drop from the ceiling like that.'
'Not my problem,' he said, picking up the girl's kitchen knife and stowing it into his vest of blades. 'Those were crows.'
'Yes, they were.'
'Meaning he's still here.'
'Meaning his pets are still here,' I said. 'And maybe him. That's what I'm hoping.'
'Yes,' Wilson said, grinning his thousand-tooth grin. 'Hoping.'
'Don't kill him outright,' I begged. 'Just this once, don't kill him outright. There are probably some questions we should ask.'
'Probably. But let's find him first. Crane and his little army of crows.'
We put the kitchen girl into a cabinet and hoped that wasn't some kind of death sentence. That makes two unconscious girls I've left in certain danger in the last eight hours. Just like a hero.
It was pretty clear why those two house guards had gone over the wall at their first chance. There were dead housies scattered throughout the living quarters, and a whole pile of them in the dining room. I wondered if Angela had even made it to the Council session, but saw no evidence of any family members. Just guards and servants. Most of them looked to be resting peacefully, only the group in the dining room showing wounds. Those guys died violently. Everyone else might have just lain down, with their eyes open and looks of terror on their faces, and just stopped moving.
'Our friend Crane, he likes to find a variety of ways to kill,' Wilson said. We were standing at the foot of the grand stairwell. This would get us to the fourth floor. We'd have to look around for the tower stairs from there. Wilson bent to examine the body of a manservant draped at the bottom of the stairs. He had taken a tumble, but nothing that looked fatal. 'Interesting.'
'Too many things in this venture can be described as 'interesting,'' I said. 'I don't like it.'
'Perhaps you should hang out with people who are interested in less morbid things,' Wilson said. He produced a pair of long tweezers and used them to fish around in the servant's gaping mouth. With a tug that pulled at something deep in the servant's chest, Wilson held up the tweezers. They were grasping a twig. 'You can't tell me this isn't interesting.'
'I can, and I will,' I said, sweating nervously. 'About as interesting as getting fatally shot, at the moment.'
'Mm. Yes.' Wilson dropped the twig into a specimen tube and tucked it happily into his vest. 'Alrighty, then. Shall we continue?'
'Cheerfully.'
The rest of the main house seemed deserted. The higher we got, the more nervous I got. The stranger our surroundings got, too. The carpets were so plush under our feet they seemed rotten, like swollen sponges. Several of the household plants that the Tombs kept carefully manicured in various sidehalls had grown fetid, spilling out from their containers and crawling up the walls. One midget oak had burst its blue and white ceramic vase with an exuberance of root growth, and the branches scratched at the ceiling and walls with their dry leaves.
'It's a lively place,' Wilson said.
'Clever. This isn't natural, is it?' I asked.
'Oh, definitely not natural.' Wilson paused to examine the oak, brushing the enormous leaves with the back of his hand. 'Perhaps Mr. Crane is some sort of nature enthusiast?'
'He didn't seem the type,' I said. 'And again, this isn't natural.'
I pointed out a clock that hung from the wall of the hallway. The cogs had sprung free and unraveled into looping cords of ivy. As we watched, the pendulum burst like a seed pod, a thin fuzz littering the escapement as it collapsed.
'I'm getting nervous about breathing this in,' I said.
'Don't be,' Wilson answered cheerfully. 'We've been breathing it in for most of the last half hour. If it's going to kill us, the damage is already done.'
'Couldn't you lie or something? Pretend that it's perfectly safe?'
'You know better than that, Jacob. Come on.'
We continued to the top floor of the main house. Since the decline of their fortune, many families had shut up unused areas of their vast manors, and Tomb was no exception. The last two levels of the house were sealed off. Stiff tarp covered the archways off the stairwell that would usually lead to those halls. I was tempted to cut them open and see what might be hidden beyond, what fecund growths had taken root among the linens and the dust. My urgency to get to Crane and end this kept my curiosity in check.
The fact that everything was closed up made finding the path to Crane's tower simple enough. His was the only hallway that was open, and his was the only door that hadn't been sealed. Odd that they would put him way up here, so far from his supposed charge. Then again, if a man like Ezekiel Crane was in my house, I would want as much distance between us as possible. Distance and padlocks.
There was no way we were going to be able to sneak up on him. The staircase was a tightly coiled stone spiral, the steps worn by years of use. One of the original structures of the manor, I suspected, from back when the estates of the Founding Families were by necessity armed fortresses, rather than luxurious manors. Our feet were loud on the steps, and there was no other sound to mask them. Wilson led the way, walking carefully, his spider talons touching the walls on either side of the passage. Our hope was that he would be able to react more quickly to an ambush or sudden encounter. We needn't have worried about it.
Crane's room was empty. The walls were lined in empty cages and bird shit. The center of the room was occupied by a narrow bed, pushed up next to a desk. Books and papers were strewn across the desk, held in place by dripping candles and empty bottles of wine. It was a familiar scene. This time I was able to get a good look at the contents of the desk. I didn't understand them, other than to be sickened.
'Anatomical drawings, diagrams. Something that looks very much like a template for cogwork of some nature,' Wilson said, flipping through the papers. 'A genus of flora, overlaid with the typical mortal tree. Unusual stuff. Doesn't explain the ivy clock, or his dead friends in the river.'
'Is there anything we can use? Any clue as to what he might be after?'
Wilson shook his head grimly. 'Hard to say. Maybe if I had a week, or a month, I might be able to glean something from all this. This is not anything I'm familiar with. Not a traditionally taught science, whatever it is that he's practicing.'
'Take what you can. What you think looks promising.' I glanced at the stairway we had just left. This was the only way out. 'He's downstairs somewhere. I don't really care why he's doing what he's doing. I just want to stop him. Maybe if we…'
I drifted off. A very old piece of paper hung, framed, above the door. I reached up and took it down, laying it on the desk.
'Lettering's faded. This thing is old.' Wilson picked it up. No dust on the frame, or on the glass. He squinted at the paper. 'Like, 'historical document' old. And the language is hard to make out.'
'Is it Celestean?' I asked, averting my eyes.
'No, no. Nothing that exotic. Just old. Letters change, over time. Descenders shorten, people get lazy
