Scar Night (18 page)

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Rachel murmured.

Devon tilted his head and regarded her through the top of his spectacles. “In nature, deceit is a common method of ensuring one’s food supply.”

Beyond this conservatory, he led them into the cool interior of a high thin tower. A spiral of narrow steps protruded from the circular walls, rising to dizzy heights. Shelves cut into the stone followed the stairway upwards, each one packed with hundreds of murky bottles. To one side, a huge workbench brimmed with beakers, tubes, and flasks of coloured liquids and powders. There were also mortars and pestles of various sizes, brass burners, and clamps beside a stack of metal cages in which rats scratched and scampered.

“Here we combine and test our poisons,” Devon said.

“You use rats?” Rachel asked.

“Initially.”

Dill’s eyes followed the staircase up and up. It seemed to have no end.

“How many poisons are kept here?” he asked.

“Why, all of them,” Devon replied, dismissing the shelves with a wave of his hand. “Now, my friends, I must conclude our tour, sadly. I have an important experiment to finish this afternoon.” He gave them a warm, red smile. “But please, do not hesitate to return, should you wish to gain more intimate knowledge of my work.”

S
ome time later, Dill and Rachel sat on the platform overlooking the Poison Kitchens and watched the ash from its chimneys drift into the abyss. A faint, rhythmic clanking sounded over the divide. Rachel’s legs dangled between the bars of the balustrade. She peeled large flakes of rust from its iron rails and sent them spinning into darkness. “What do
you
think is down there?” she asked suddenly.

Dill gave her a puzzled look. “Ulcis, of course,” he said. “The city of Deep.”

“You really believe that? Everything they say? The city of the dead? The Ziggurat? The Garden of Bones? An army waiting to reclaim Heaven?”

“Don’t you?”

“I used to.” She brushed a finger over the flaking ironwork. “Now I’m not sure. Everyone seems to be waiting for something better, even if that means waiting to die. But that doesn’t mean there
is
something better, does it?” She looked at him, then quickly away. “The Spine act as the hand of God, but I don’t think even tempered assassins can hear Him. The closer I get to them, my colleagues, the more uncomfortable that makes me.”

Dill swallowed. She hadn’t even been properly trained? “You didn’t let them temper you?” he ventured.

She let out a long breath. “God, don’t you think I want them to? To be free of all this. It’s like a physical pain.” She pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead. “But it’s not up to me. My brother is head of the house now, and he won’t sign the consent document. He wants to punish me because I can do what he never could. I can kill, up close, and live with it. Stick a knife in a man and watch him bleed.” She grunted. “In a way that makes me even more of a monster than Carnival. They say she wounds herself after every kill she makes, hurts herself to ease her suffering.”

Dill frowned. “Wouldn’t that cause even more pain?”

“There are different kinds of pain,” Rachel said. “Sometimes one can blot out the other.” She scowled at her bandaged hands. “All my scars were given to me by others. I don’t need to inflict my own, never have. So maybe I don’t deserve to be tempered. We yearn for the needles because it’s death without the fear of death.” She laughed: a hard, brittle sound. “The Spine should be hunting me instead of her.”

Dill studied Rachel’s bandages and felt uneasy. “You fought her?”

Rachel shrugged.

“Where did she come from?”

“Straight from Iril, if you believe the priests. A demon sent to harvest souls for the Maze. Others claim she came from out of the abyss with Callis and the Ninety-Nine. When the angelwine finally wore off, she began killing to sustain herself.” She stared hard into the abyss. “I used to believe those stories about her were exaggerated, I believed that Carnival killed but she didn’t really take souls. I thought she was as mortal as you or me. But I’ve seen too many husks left after Scar Nights, and I’ve seen the way she moves: she’s too fast, too strong. And her eyes…so much rage, hunger. Always black.”

“Can you stop her?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then why do you try?”

A bitter smile. “I’m Spine.”

They were silent for a while. The flames above the Poison Kitchens roared intermittently, blazing brightly then diminishing. Fat gouts of smoke rose from the funnels, swelled, and fell again as ash. Beyond, the sun was sinking towards the abyss rim. Through the haze of pollution, the sky looked bruised and sick.

Rachel detached another sliver of rust and threw it into the darkness. “There have been expeditions, you know, down there.”

That surprised him. “Into the abyss?”

“Secret ones. Unknown to the temple. People have stolen airships, made balloons, strange winged things, all sorts of contraptions. Gone down there.”

“What happened to them?”

“They never returned.”

Dill stared into the depths. Even here in the evening light, the darkness of the abyss unnerved him. Rachel continued to throw flakes of rust, watching them dance below like tiny leaves. Across the gulf facing them a siren sounded and a warship disengaged from its refuelling berth beneath the Poison Kitchens. It floated gently down, then nudged its way out of the shadows and into the wide gap, tugged by guide ropes. He heard the distant sound of pulleys cranking and the shouts of dockhands. Then the great ship broke free and burned skywards with a deep roar, climbing steadily until it rose above the cranes and chains and pillars of smoke.

They watched the ship turn slowly, black against the sunset.

Rachel stood up and leaned out over the balustrade. Iron creaked under her weight. “If I fell over would you catch me?” she asked. She lifted her feet, supporting her weight on her stomach.

Dill got to his feet. “I can’t fly very well.”

“
Would
you try to save me?” She leaned further out. The banister creaked again.

He took a step towards her. “Please, it doesn’t look safe.”

“Would you try, even if you knew you couldn’t pull me back?”

“Yes.”

Rachel leaned back and put her feet on the ground, but she didn’t turn to face him. “Maybe you would,” she said softly.

13

THE LEAGUE OF ROPE

A
SINGLE BRAND
lent a ruddy glow to the rusted tin slopes and bleached wood of the League shantytown. Shacks hung skewed in their cradles, linked to the walkway by thin planks. Beyond the ropes, the lights of Deepgate dipped away and rose again far in the distance, broken only by the temple’s silhouette.

Fogwill watched reflections curl over Captain Clay’s black armour as the temple guard looked around in distaste. Boards creaked under the big man’s armoured boots. “Are you sure this is it?” he asked.

Clay wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air. “Smells like it.”

Fogwill didn’t need to be told. Something was rotting nearby. A dead rat, perhaps? And Clay had insisted that he come out here without perfume. His cassock retained a trace, as the captain had pointed out with a scowl, but not enough to mask this unholy stench. “Then you’d better go,” he said. “I’ll manage from here.”

The captain of the temple guard grunted. “Adjunct, this is the Dens.” He leaned over his pike. “This scrounger near strangled one of my men. Dirty great big ugly vicious bastard. Wouldn’t trust him as much as a bag of cats.”

“Nevertheless, I shall speak with him alone. Your presence would anger him
more
. I can find my own way back.” Fogwill suddenly realized what he’d said, and rather wished he hadn’t said it.

Clay hesitated, then turned, shaking his head, and marched back along the boards, with his pike held sideways for balance. The walkway lurched with his every step; support ropes twanged and fretted.
Ropes, not even cables here
. Fogwill held on tightly and tried not to look at the darkness beneath the shacks on either side, but it was hopeless: the abyss pulled his gaze towards it. He closed his eyes.

When the walkway had settled and the worst of his nausea had passed, the Adjunct stood alone outside the box made of timbers and tin sheets that, apparently, served as a house. Its single gaping window showed no sign of life within.

He ducked under the street-rope that supported this side of the walkway and eyed the plank spanning the gap to the front door. It was about four feet across, with nothing but a couple of rotted ropes to hold on to: nothing else to stop one falling into the darkness. He couldn’t see a net below.
There surely must be a net. Even here. It’s the law
. That thought didn’t reassure him as he tested the plank with his foot. It gave a sickening creak. Perhaps he ought to call over to the house for assistance? And thus reveal himself as the frightened whelp he was?
Very clever
. It might also wake the neighbourhood, and he didn’t want this neighbourhood woken. There was no alternative but to cross. Fogwill took a deep breath and edged forward, gripping both swaying ropes as best he could. Even in the dim light he could see the white marks round his fingers where he had removed his rings. The plank bowed under his weight as his slippers inched towards the middle.

Those four feet seemed to take him as long as the walk from the temple, and when he reached the door he was shaking. It took all of his courage to release his hand from the security of the rope and knock.

There was no answer.

Fogwill cursed. He ought to have told Clay to wait for him. This was not a part of Deepgate where it was wise to linger alone after dark.

He knocked again, harder.

“Closed!” a gruff voice shouted.

Fogwill leaned closer to the door and spoke as loud as he dared. “May I speak with you for a moment?”

There was no reply. Fogwill waited. He knocked again.

“Away!” the voice bellowed.

Fogwill flinched.
He’s going to wake the whole street
. “Please, it’s urgent.” The other shacks remained dark and silent. Hanging above the centre of the walkway, a brand fizzed tar into its drum. He lifted his hand to knock again when the door creaked open a fraction. No light came from within as he leaned toward the crack and whispered quickly, “I must speak with you. It’s about your daughter.”

“Bloody priest, leave me alone. Leech took her.”

The door slammed in Fogwill’s face.

“No,” he protested.

Fogwill heard movement inside the shack, and the door again opened a little. He decided to press his advantage. “I don’t believe Carnival was responsible.”

This time the door swung wide and the ugliest face Fogwill had ever seen emerged from the shadows beyond. He stifled a squeal. The face—and yes it was a face, now that he got a good look at it—peered up and down the street then settled on him. It sniffed.

“You stink,” Mr. Nettle said.

Fogwill’s relief at stepping off the plank dissipated as soon as the door closed behind him. Inside, he couldn’t see a thing. For an awful moment he was afraid he’d made a terrible decision in coming here at all. If he was attacked by this lout, he would be quite unable to defend himself. Clay had warned him this man was known to be violent, and he was certainly no friend of the Church. What if Fogwill was stabbed? Or worse? God help him, he might even be ravished.

Then Mr. Nettle struck a flint, and an oil lamp brightened the hall. Standing in the narrow space edged by pulpboard and tin sheets, Mr. Nettle raised the lamp in one fist and regarded Fogwill sourly.

The scrounger was huge. In his ragged dressing gown, he stood larger than a fully armoured temple guard, blocking the narrow hallway like a pile of builder’s rubble. His features were as rough and ill-defined as the hewn stone before a sculptor began carving the details. His flattened nose had been broken and set crooked, and stubble as coarse as iron filings covered half his face, while bruises covered the rest. Red eyes ringed with dark shadows glared down at Fogwill.

From the tiredness in his eyes and the hollowness of his cheeks, the man looked like he hadn’t eaten or slept in a week. He looked finished.
And
he stank like a dungeon.

“This way,” Mr. Nettle growled.

The scrounger trudged further along the corridor, stepping over bundles of paper and boxes of bottles, then turning his enormous shoulders sideways to get past a stack of crates propped against the wall. The whole house shuddered as though it might fall apart at any moment. Nails jutted randomly from odd places where they had been used to patch scraps of wood and tin on to the walls. On closer inspection, Fogwill realized that the walls themselves had been constructed from junk. Here, one wardrobe door formed part of the side wall, while its twin served as part of the ceiling. There, an old mirror frame, the glass long smashed, filled a gap between two struts. Rusted pipes and broken ladders acted as joists to support this patchwork. Evidently Mr. Nettle was no carpenter. There wasn’t a straight join to be seen. And what was that? A shield? He recognized the design:
a temple guard’s shield
. Fogwill edged through the space with his hands close to his chest, careful not to touch anything. He tried not to think about rats.

Empty whisky bottles had rolled down the slope of the living-room floor to gather against a faded advertisement for Whitworth’s Honey Washing Oil—a product, Fogwill suspected, Mr. Nettle himself had never used.

The scrounger cleared some boxes from an old chair, and piled them on the rest of the junk behind. He grunted, “Sit.”

Fogwill perched gingerly on the edge of the seat, one of whose arm rests was nothing more than a splintered spike. This was not at all how he had imagined a scrounger’s house to look. He had expected something more like an antiques shop: solid furniture, rare objects rescued from the nets, to be restored and resold. Not just paper and bottles, tin cans, bundles of rags. True, there were one or two unusual items that stood out from the debris: a marble clock with one hand missing, clearly not originating from this part of town; some large brass cogs that could easily have come from the Presbyter’s aurolethiscope; several garish paintings of city scenes daubed on pieces of pulpboard nailed to the walls; but most of it was simply rubbish. It packed the room from floor to ceiling. How could someone live in this filth?

Mr. Nettle put down the oil lamp and folded his arms, waiting for Fogwill to speak.

The priest smoothed his cassock, the plain black one Clay had insisted he wear. “May I ask what your daughter did for a living?” he asked in his creamiest voice.

Mr. Nettle grimaced. Finally he said, “Painter.”

Fogwill cast his eyes over the paintings. “She painted these?” They were particularly amateurish.
People actually bought these?

Mr. Nettle nodded.

“Excellent work,” Fogwill said hastily. “She had a good eye.”

“Penny apiece.”

Fogwill wondered if he should buy one to help smooth things over, before he remembered that he’d left all his money back at the temple, so decided to change the subject. “Mr. Nettle, do you know exactly where your daughter was when she disappeared?”

In answer, Mr. Nettle reached behind him and pulled out a ragged square of pulpboard. Fogwill saw it was an incomplete work, a first sketch, and quite as awful as the others. Nevertheless, there could be no doubt of the subject represented.

“She was working on this?”

“Found it in the nets down there. I searched there first.”

Fogwill studied the sketch. He recognized the neighbourhood. The chimneys and funnels of the Poison Kitchens rising in the background were unmistakable. This wasn’t proof, of course. The implications were there, but it wasn’t enough to warrant accusing Devon, even with Fogwill’s existing suspicions. Carnival had killed in every part of the city. He had to ask next: “Did she have bruises on both arms?”

The scrounger’s eyes narrowed.

“Were her arms bruised?” Fogwill repeated.

Mr. Nettle studied him for a moment. “Aye.”

Our murderer
. The scrounger hadn’t kept her on ice all this time. Fogwill cast his gaze over the other paintings: different scenes from the city in the same few gaudy colours. Obviously the girl had had a weird affection for red and yellow, as they were the only colours used, whatever the subject. “We’ve found others,” he explained. “The puncture wounds are the same, but the bruises…Those are not Carnival’s work. Carnival suspends her victims by the feet.”

“Who did it?”

“We don’t know.”

The scrounger pushed his face even closer to Fogwill’s. “But you suspect someone?” His tone was a threat.

Fogwill saw that the muscles on Mr. Nettle’s arms had become as taut as the street-rope holding a house. He squirmed inwardly, but forced himself to meet the man’s gaze. “No.”

The scrounger’s eyes stayed locked on Fogwill’s for a long moment, the bruises on his face seeming to pulse.

Fogwill struggled to appear calm. He smelled whisky on the man’s breath, and felt a trickle of sweat run beneath his own ear. Why had he dismissed Clay so readily?

At last Mr. Nettle stepped back. “Get out,” he said.

Fogwill crossed the plank in two strides and raced back in the direction of the temple, robe fluttering. The walkway buckled and tipped beneath his feet but he didn’t slow. He didn’t slow down at all.

M
r. Nettle dressed quickly. He stuffed his scrounging tools into a backpack: rope, grapple, hammer, spikes, a small pulley, storm lantern, and flints. He grabbed his water flask, a disc of hardbread, a pouch of raisins, and a cord of pigskin, and threw them in with the tools. Then he tucked his cleaver in his belt, wheeled Smith’s trolley out to the walkway, and began loading it with pig iron. The help he needed would be expensive. Maybe the iron would cover it, maybe not. It might cost him a lot more.

While he worked, a gust of cold air blew from the abyss and shook the League of Rope. Shanties swung and knocked together. Timbers boomed on pulpboard walls and nails scratched tin roofs. Even the Warrens were moving, down below. Gaslights shivered among the chains. Only the temple stood motionless, black and immense, windows like a jet of embers frozen high above the heart of the city.

The fat little priest had lied. Mr. Nettle knew it in his gut. The Church suspected someone. He rubbed a hand over his sweating face, sighed slowly.
Not Carnival?
Maybe the priests would do something about it, maybe not. Didn’t matter. Mr. Nettle planned to do something first, whatever the cost.

Sorcery didn’t exist. Everybody knew that. In taverns and grogholes throughout the Warrens, folk dismissed the idea loudly, laughed heartily at the merest suggestion. But a careful listener might note how they dismissed the idea a little
too
loudly, laughed a little
too
heartily.

When the trolley was fully loaded, Mr. Nettle spat on the ground, steeled himself, and set off to meet the only man in Deepgate who could speak to hell.

T
he further Fogwill got from Mr. Nettle’s house, the more his nausea and vertigo returned. Here, as in all areas on the outskirts of the city, the distance between the great chains was at its widest; more of each neighbourhood being supported by a less substantial web of chain, cable, and rope.

Everything wobbled, shook, and groaned. Wood sweated. The smell was frightful.
Like a sick-house full of plague victims. This entire district is rotting, ill
.

Ropes threatened to snap. One cut would bring the whole nasty, ugly, filthy, smelly lot down into the abyss. With each step taken, Fogwill worried that it might be his last. Even those nets he could glimpse beneath the boards offered him little peace of mind. For the most part they were thin and frayed and looked too frail to support the weight of a dog, let alone his own portly frame. The darkness didn’t help. Occasional brands gave the timbers a buttery glow, but for the most part Fogwill was left to stumble along under the weak moonlight, his hands never leaving the street-ropes on either side. So soon after Scar Night, the moon was still a slender crescent. League-folk rarely ventured out at night and the streets were empty, but the lack of louts and cutthroats was little consolation. The man he was going to see was more dangerous than any of them.