its torso. She couldn’t even be sure it was human. Parts of it appeared to be fashioned from the same wood used to make the crate. It was like a knot of muscle and bone intermingled with white-pine joists. Watery, weeping eyes lolled madly in its hairless skull. Clearly it was distressed. A pitiful wail issued from its drooling mouth, and Rachel turned away in abhorrence and shock.
How could the Spine stoop to this?
Rachel began to thread her way back through the crowd. But the show was not over yet, for worse was still to come. Mina Greene lifted her hands again and addressed the audience. “This horror, when left alone, tries to mimic its environment. You can see how it has copied the crate. It’s like a seed that doesn’t know which plant to become. Now watch closely.”
“No!” The thing on the stage wailed in a voice made thick by saliva. “Please don’t do this.”
Rachel glanced back to see Greene stooping over the thing and whispering something to it. What she saw next stopped her in her tracks.
The creature’s shape began to change. Its limbs grew longer while its head sank like a bubble of pink mud back into its neck. As the crowd looked on in amazement, its torso swelled and split into two amorphous lumps. These then stretched and flattened, the skin darkening all the while. In moments, the creature began to resemble something else entirely.
Cries of disgust and alarm went up from the audience, and then suddenly there was complete silence. Nobody in the crowd uttered a word.
The thing on the stage had finished its transformation. The hideous knot of muscle and bone had disappeared. In its place stood an ordinary wooden chair. Greene scraped it forward and then sat down in it. “You all have these in your homes, right?” she said. “Chairs, I mean, not demons. Well, don’t try this with them.” She produced a knife hidden under the folds of her gaudy dress, then stabbed it into the wooden seat between her thighs.
Blood dribbled from the damaged seat and spattered against the stage underneath it, accompanied by an eerie sound, like the distant echo of a scream. From the chair? The shape-shifter was still conscious?
“This is how demons are formed,” Greene said. “It’s a type of Mesmerism, and there are things in the Maze who use such techniques to mould your souls into any form they like.” She paused for a moment, and Rachel saw her glance at a small prompt card pinned to the side of her wagon. “The Maze of Blood is aptly named,” she went on in an overly dramatic voice, “for its halls and corridors exist as incarnations of living souls. The dead don’t wander Hell; they are the bricks and mortar from which it is built.” She rose from her chair and made another flourish with her hands. “Thus Iril is both the Maze and the shattered god who lives within it. Similarly, when this pathetic creature died, it became forever a part of the Maze-a living, breathing,
Rachel pushed on through the crowd and hurried back to the tavern. With Spine agents about, she had risked much by attending such a public spectacle. The show-woman’s words echoed in her mind.
Had the young angel been a victim of this unholy Mesmerism himself? And
Walking briskly back through the darkening lanes, dodging streams of brown water thrown from the doors of the mud-brick houses on either side, Rachel wondered how Mina Greene’s demon had come to be in Deepgate at all. Wraiths and shades were known to haunt the darkest parts of the chained city, but those were ethereal: phantasms attracted by past violence and shed blood. Yet this shape-shifter had been corporeal. If it was truly what the show-woman had claimed it to be…
Perhaps the recent death toll had caused a larger or more permanent rift to open between the chained city and the Maze of Blood? After all, tens of thousands had died when Alexander Devon had brought his monstrous machine to Deepgate’s doorstep. Rachel didn’t much care what would become of the crippled city. When she’d seen it last, it looked all but ready to collapse into the abyss beneath it.
“Miss Hael!”
The former assassin almost collided with Olirind Meer as he emerged from a side street. Sweating and disheveled, as though he had been running, he now stopped short, startled by her presence. “What are you doing here?” he inquired in tones which verged on panic. “It’s almost dark. Why aren’t you in your room?”
“Keep your voice down, Olirind, please. I had to go out. There was something I needed to do.”
The tavern proprietor glanced behind him, then back at her. “Quickly now,” he whispered. “You must come back with me at once. There are Spine everywhere.”
With barely another look in his direction, Rachel strode on ahead of him. “You can’t be seen with me,” she reminded him. “I’ll speak to you later.”
Leaving Meer standing bemused at the junction, she hurried back to the tavern.
Dill was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his sword, when she entered the room. He hadn’t touched his bowl of chowder. “I feel better now,” he said. “I’m sorry I’ve been distant lately.”
“We’re leaving,” she said.
He accepted this without complaint. “Did you discover something while you were out?”
“Only that Olirind Meer is a slimy, black-hearted wretch. I think he’s just betrayed us.” She opened the wardrobe and took out the satchel containing her leather armour and knives. “I met him out on the street,” she went on. “He was hurrying back from the direction of the Avulsior’s residence, and he did not look happy to see me.”
“Maybe he happened to be in that part of town on his normal business. When he saw you, he just became worried that you’d be spotted.”
“We’ve passed each other on these streets before, and he knows well enough to look the other way-nothing more than a passing glance between us. Otherwise he’d implicate himself if I was discovered.” She laid her leather vest and breeches on the bed, then opened the dresser drawer and began stuffing loose clothes into the empty satchel. “But this time he wasn’t concerned about being seen outside with me. He even offered to walk me back to the tavern. He was far more worried that I wasn’t here in our room, where he could-”
She stopped speaking suddenly, listening, then rushed across to the door and turned the handle. The door remained firmly shut.
“Shit,” she hissed. “Did someone come here while I was out? Dill, did you see anybody tamper with this, with the frame around this door?”
“I…” He looked helpless. “I don’t know. I was sleeping.”
“Get ready to fly. We’re leaving right now.”
But just as Dill rose from the bed, the ceiling above his head collapsed in a shower of broken plaster. Something huge and metallic, like a spike, crashed down through the roof and embedded itself in the floorboards. Through the clouds of dust, Rachel spotted a trembling chain and a flexible tube leading back up through the hole above. Then she heard a low hiss and realized what was happening. “Poison gas,” she cried. “Don’t breathe.”
Ferrets, Deepgate’s aeronauts had called them. Fired from warship grapple guns, the huge iron spears were capable of delivering toxic gases most effectively into sealed buildings. They’d used them on the Southern Clearances to pump lime gas into an underground network of Heshette tunnels, killing thousands without ever having to land one of their warships. Even now such a vessel would be hovering overhead, pumping invisible fumes into Dill and Rachel’s room. The gas leaked through holes in the shaft, while the barbs along its length could be detached and repositioned to determine more precisely how deeply it embedded itself into a building. The process to seal the door had been more subtle: a chemical solution painted on the inside of the frame designed to foam and swell upon contact with some silently administered catalyst vapor.
Rachel cursed her own foolishness and she cursed that bastard Meer for his treachery. Why had she trusted him? Why had she trusted
The Spine would have anticipated that she would hear their footsteps in the hall outside, and they had used her recent excursion to prepare this trap. And now they knew she must try to escape through the window. Hacking
