Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles (29 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The sweets—and whatever army they’d mustered—had wasted no time. While I’d crossed Limehouse and Poplar, then done it again in reverse, they’d set their own plans into motion.

Hell had come to the Karakash Veil’s doorstep.

Black smoke hung over the Menagerie as I approached the eastern gate. Smoke that was not shifting, as expected of the aether-fueled apparatuses that were meant to keep the grounds clear.

It did not require any particular intelligence to suppose that Delilah had taken my order to heart.

Fierce girl.

I could not see the grounds beyond the wall as I approached it, but I heard the noise clearly. Voices rose on the blackened air, yelling orders, screaming; the report of irons discharging peppered all, and I wondered how long before the police engaged. There was little doubt that the Limehouse Station had been bought and sold by the Veil, but certainly no amount of bribery could hide what sounded as a full-scale battle behind the Menagerie walls.

Though high, the stone facing was riddled with ridges and clefts, the sort only the terminally deranged might consider scalable. I didn’t tend to think of myself this way, but I knew some who did, and it suited me for the moment.

Who in their right mind would want to get
in?

I snorted as I looked up at the top of the wall. I backed up until a good space between provided ample room, crouched to steady my limbs and my nerves. My shoulder wouldn’t enjoy this, nor thank me for it, but as long as it obeyed me, I would mend.

“One,” I whispered, and eased into a stance better suited for sprinting. “Two...” A steadying breath. “Three, and...” I darted towards the wall. A pace away, I grunted, “
Allez
,
hop!
” and leapt for the top.

My fingers hooked the edge, the soles of my boots caught on the rippled facing, and only a twinge from my shoulder provided any discomfort. I held most of my weight on my left arm, easing my right into balance rather than strength.

It was no graceful climb, I was not quite so agile as Flip might have been, but I scaled the whole with some effort and a curse or two.

The grounds unveiled before me stole my breath.

The source of the acrid smoke thick in the air came from the fires glowing brightly even in the shaded daylight. The market stalls had been set ablaze—likely coated with kerosene or oil. Wood would never burn so black.

Beyond, a roiling cloud rolled over the private gardens, and I suspected the cabin ensconced within had gone up, as well. To my right, far in the distance, the Veil’s manor remained untouched—a fact that gave me some pause.

Were it my task, I’d burn that first. Unless the previous were meant to draw the Veil out?

If so, it had obviously worked. A bitter wind whipped over the Menagerie, carrying soiled smoke and a choking fragrance that reminded me rather much of overly bitter spirits. Patches of the Menagerie had turned murky with the low-hanging smolder, and between such shrouded pockets, I spotted corpses left to blacken and burn.

Knots of men and women clashed, and among them were the Veil’s warriors—notable primarily for their pale tunics and wicked grace.

Blood, fire, fear and pain.

War
.

I had seen something similar once, confusing though it had been. Zylphia’s original mutiny, forced too early to save me from the mad ringmaster Hawke had become, and colored by flashes of what I later understood to be alchemy and magic.

Certainly, I was no stranger to death, but this jarred my spirit in a completely different way.

I knew this Menagerie. I had spent many a night here, roaming its paths and searching for quarry and coin. I knew what it was to give the footmen in their formal livery the slip, to laugh and dance away just out of sight; carefree and often caught in bliss, I had made of this a sort of second home.

A place where I could go to see Hawke. To thwart him, to torment him in my own childish way.

And now I watched it burn.

It shouldn’t have caused such an ache in my breast, but I rubbed at my chest as it hurt. I was no longer quite so arrogant as to believe this my fault, yet it still stung.

I would mourn this loss as I mourned the loss of all my homes. Yet as I thought it, as I recognized the hurt for what it was, I knew that I would sacrifice this home again if it meant saving my friends.

As I crouched atop the narrow wall, a shout of alarm from my left drew my eyes. A small group of Bakers hemmed two sweets I only recognized by nature of their appearance—even frightened and overwhelmed, their looks were unmistakable. They clung to each other as four Bakers warded off a single Ferryman wielding a club. Not a dog, thank heavens, but fierce enough.

Across the way, I saw two figures in leather aprons, the sort like to be caught elbow-deep in the mechanical devices of the Menagerie, and whether they were fighting the Veil’s men or for them, I didn’t know.

Friend and foe mingled until blood bound them all.

In the distance, the red canvas tent I despised thrust into the blackening sky. It was one of few not yet burning, aside from the manor, and I suspected where I’d find Hawke.

His cage, after all, was held below ground. And where Hawke was, I’d find Communion.

That was my target, then.

Setting my jaw, I stayed atop the wall and ran lightly along it as though it were a wire and I the act. I wobbled some, but thanks be to whatever fortune guided me, I did not fall—nor did the myriad shots heard echoing across the grounds threaten me.

Once I could make the run direct, I slid from the top of the wall, caught the edge to slow my descent and swung myself down. The very instant my feet planted upon the mucky ground, I launched into a sprint. Raw determination, fear for my friends drove me; were I less concerned, I might have thought of revenge.

“Please,” I panted to myself and whatever gods might be listening from Ashmore’s bag of exoteric tricks. “Please, let them be all right.”

Everything else could wait.

Or, as it came to be, not.

When the noise lessened around the tent, I wondered why. As I approached it, I realized the men who loitered on the outside weren’t mine—most wore the white tunic and black trousers of the Veil’s warriors, and they looked prepared for a plan that did not bode well for any.

I drew up hard, darted back into the gloom lest I be seen, and squinted through the acrid smoke.

Corpses dotted the ground, splayed where they dropped. The air was thick with the stench of char and blood.

A few Ferrymen—or perhaps not them, precisely, but blokes hired for muscle—waited among the Chinese warriors, each holding a weapon of some sort, but they looked much more uneasy than the implacable servants conversing with each other.

The boom of a long-gun split the air and one of the Englishmen waiting for orders abruptly staggered. He hit the ground as his mates jumped away, cursing harshly.

The seven servants turned as one to watch the man bleed, then looked up at the tent.

So did I.

A glimmer of movement, a sudden bend of the big top’s frayed cover, and I realized that a shooter waited above. One of Communion’s, no doubt.

Had they managed to corner Hawke inside?

I could only assume so. Ishmael intended to end the threat of the Ferrymen once and for all.

Which was why, I realized, the shooter was ignoring the Chinese servants of the Veil and focusing on all the others. We couldn’t tell the difference between them what could turn into whatever it was the dogs did and them what didn’t.

Brilliant. Brutal, but effective.

Another shot rang out, and the bloke closest to me grabbed at his shoulder and shouted. Blood bloomed between his fingers as he sank to his knees. I counted six seconds, and on the mark, a third shot dropped him where he crouched.

Six seconds later, the second closest fell.

The men scattered, even the Chinese servants, and when I realized a path had opened, I frowned.

Was I invited, then?

Fair enough.

Holding my breath, lungs aching from the smoke, I lowered my head and sprinted for the canvas curtain. As I readied to force the flapping entry aside, I caught glimpse of two figures in white leaping for me from my left.

I put on a burst of speed, the canvas brushed my fingertips, and then tore free of its moorings to discharge a wild, tangled ball of flesh and limbs directly in my path.

I was so much smaller than the combination of Ferryman and Ishmael.

It was as if I’d flung myself at a trampoline. I rebounded from them, flying backwards in a graceless tumble, hitting the ground and skidding along it for a moment before gravity let up and my limbs could remember which belonged where.

The chaos that filled the air didn’t just smell of smoke and sound like war, but turned to vicious hunger and howling fury as Ishmael and a rabid creature who’d once been more man than beast ripped apart.

Senses reeling from my unwitting roll, I elbowed myself up—flinching at the hurt lacing through me—to shove a muddy hank of hair from my face.

It had been a very long time since I’d seen Communion outstripped by another man. Squaring off, it was obvious that the former was the larger, burlier figure, but the Ferryman’s twisted limbs and the predatory manner in which he crouched, one hand braced upon the ground, worried me.

The two servants who’d lunged for me had hastily backed away, and this worried me further.

“Cherry!”

I shook my head at the familiar voice.

“Up here,” Zylphia called, and I looked up to find her crouched on the edge of the canvas, far above. My first inclination was to fear for the child she carried.

My second was to be grateful for the keen eye and steady aim that allowed her to use the Springfield hoisted in her arms. Either she’d kept it, or borrowed it anew from Booth’s armory.

Third came the fury that she’d put herself and her child in such danger.

I waved at her. “Get back!” I shouted.

The beast’s head turned so quickly, I imagine joints popped. Eyes gleaming with that eerie animal sheen pinned on me. They widened, nostrils mimicking the flare as though searching for my scent.

Ishmael took advantage of the distraction to lunge at him.

A servant made the same move, and was rewarded by an immediate shot cracking through the growling fury of the beast’s rabid hunger. The man flew back, heart’s blood staining his muddy tunic.

The twisted Ferryman met Ismael’s bulk with unmatched ferocity, and instead of twisting away from the larger man’s grasp, he thrust himself into it, drove himself into Ishmael’s space until I was sure they’d tangle and fall.

Blood gleamed like a black sheen on the Baker’s face, colored his sleeve and trousers. He’d been worked over already, and the scratches at his cheek looked eerily like claws.

Zylphia, from what I could see, was unscathed, but if she stayed up there and we lost, that wouldn’t remain the case.

The combatants wrenched apart, gladiators without a ring, and blood spattered the dirt. Another gunshot found a man crouching behind barrels and he screamed, splaying over the contents.

I all but vibrated in place, racked my mind for the alchemical Trumps that were all I could utilize in such a manner.

None came to mind.

Worse, merely considering the attempt drove such exhaustion through me that I staggered.

I did not see the figure that leaned from the entry torn aside by the Ferryman’s clawed fervor. An arm wrapped around my throat, a hard edge drove into my back, and nausea filled me as I was swept off my feet and into the circus interior.

Chapter Thirty

I would
not
be made victim again.

My captor, caught by surprise before my feet cleared the threshold, grunted as I fought like a wet cat in his grasp. His arm tightened over my throat, already painful from Osoba’s failed attempt to end my life.

I drove an elbow into a gut softer and more vulnerable than I expected, and as a torrent of French hissed in my ear, I realized exactly who had claimed me.

“Fool,” I spat, and rammed the back of my skull into the face of Monsieur Marceaux.

Cartilage crunched. Searing pain rang like a bell through my head, and Marceaux howled, letting me go to clasp both hands to his streaming nose and split lip.

Outside, I heard a shot that didn’t sound like Zylphia’s Springfield. I heard a woman’s shattered cry.

A howl tore from the creature’s chest—ragged as the bestial fury I’d heard from the Ferrymen—and I lost all sense of justice. Without a weapon in hand, all I could do was rely upon my feet and fists, and I applied them to the staggering ringmaster without mercy.

He’d never been one for fighting on equal footing. Fear had been his greatest tool, the fear he sowed and men what did his bidding. In the vast emptiness of the smoke-filled tent, he had nothing.

And I... I had so much anger to give.

I drove a fist into his belly, caught him by the back of his neck and drove his chest into my upraised knee. He yelled and grunted and screamed and sobbed, cursed and flailed, but he did not know how to fight as I did—and I had learned well.

A pillar shuddered as he collided into it, one of them holding an unlit lamp high where crowds wouldn’t accidentally spill it. I slammed my boot into his back, forcing his chest against the thin post, and then rammed my knee into the same aching spot he’d done for me.

His body rolled like jelly left out too long. “Mercy,” he groaned, sagging to his knees and gripping the post between mottled hands. “Please!” He wore clothing too fine for the likes of him, but they were stained with blood and dirt.

I didn’t think this minor punishment enough.

But I had never been a murderer by design.

I hesitated, panting for breath, fists shaking for want of delivering such hurt that he would never forget. He sobbed, pitiful and weak, pallid jowls wobbling and his proud mustache a wilted, soot-smeared mess.

He suited this empty circus. The stands were bare, and without the lights cast and the bodies to fill them, they looked worn and tired. The rings, vast mechanisms utilized by pulley and gear, seemed like little more than emaciated remains to me.

The columns supporting the canvas, ropes hanging from above for use by workmen later, looked too skeletal to support the madness this place had engendered.

I forced out my words. “Where is Hawke?”

“I don’t know,” he cried out, flinching. “I didn’t do anything!”

Do? “
What
was done?” I asked between clenched teeth, thrusting my face close enough that he shrank against the pole, clutching it for dear life.

“The juice.” He wrapped both arms over his mottled, balding head. “It’s the juice, I swear!”

I caught his collar, twisted it in my fist and jerked him back. His neck bent hard, and I loomed until naught but fierce reflection filled his eyes. And still, I saw no recognition. No awareness of who I was—or what he had made me.

I caught his throat in the other hand. My nails, short as they were, bit into his flesh.

He whimpered.

“Where does it come from?” I demanded.

“An alchemist,” he sputtered. “It’s an alchemist, a...” A bit off phrase in French that had me closing my fingers in warning, and tears ran from bloodshot eyes. “The Veil!” he croaked from around my grasp. “The Veil takes his blood and does something and I’m to g-give it to the Ferrymen and
I
swear I don’t know.
”

His breath, fouled and flecked with spittle, washed over me. Disgust filled me, drained my anger so rapidly that I could barely stand to look at him, much less force the issue.

He was old. Much older than I had thought him, and weaker than I’d ever allowed myself to imagine.

A broken man beyond his prime, serving debts for a lifetime of manipulation.

I was better than him. I was better than
this.

I let Marceaux go, wiping my hands on my filthy attire as though it might somehow cleanse me of my association with the weak-willed showman with a crippled conscience.

“Get out while you can,” I said, though it cost me a great deal to say it. I wanted to punish him, to demand of him that he remember me—one of too many children plucked, drugged and enslaved.

But as I turned my back on the trembling, fetid excuse of a man, pathetic nightmare that he was, I could not bring myself to revisit those old wounds.

I was not that girl anymore. Sober, though never far from the need; no longer a criminal. No longer a coward, content to hide behind my fears.

I was Cherry bloody St. Croix, and I had more important matters to tend to.

I strode from him with my shoulders straight, feeling oddly as though I could breathe again. The burdens I carried were mine to hold, but among them, I was surprised—relieved—to learn that the good monsieur was no longer one.

He, on the other hand, did not feel quite so magnanimous.

His first mistake was that he had not recognized me for the urchin he’d trained. The second mistake was to rush me from behind.

I firmed my legs, caught his outstretched arm as it came over my shoulder, grunted, “
Allez
,
hop!
” and utilized his own massively frenetic momentum to throw him over my shoulder.

It was all too easy when the power came from his own bulk.

He went sailing over my head, and in the split second where our faces came close together, surprise—genuine, shockingly intense—filled his florid face.

He had honestly thought to best me.

How long had Marceaux lived in a world of his own design?

Perhaps even longer than I.

And him without the strength of a friend to show him the way out. I pitied him.

Gravity slammed him to the ground, and he rolled, shouting and grunting, all the way down the steps that led to the rings. I followed in his wake.

When he clambered to his feet again, wobbly but determined, I took advantage of his dizziness to push him against a larger column. The ropes hanging beside it swayed.

“Get you,” Marceaux muttered through the blood sliding from his swollen lip. “Get you, I will. Nobody...” His eyes crossed. “Nobody makes a fool of... of...”

“There, there,” I said quietly, and wrapped the ropes around his chest. I tied them tightly enough that he’d come to regret it when he was finally found and released. I had suffered those stinging needles before, and did not wish them on anybody as a rule.

Except him.

Leaving Marceaux mumbling in my wake, I clambered over the narrow divide separating the rings from the stands, and approached the circle that had briefly been mine. I was bruised and battered all over, but I called this one something of a victory.

At the very least, I’d learned for certain that the Ferrymen dog serum was made of Hawke’s own blood.

And that I was strong enough to overcome more than one of my own demons.