Scar Night (8 page)

“Beastly,” the Adjunct muttered. “Utterly beastly.” The place was a menagerie. Just think of the germs, the dirt brought in by all the animals. After this, he’d have to steep himself in lemon-oil from top to toe.

His robes were sodden around the ankles, and his slippers—well, he didn’t want to study them too closely.

Finally he found the head cook lying asleep on a makeshift bed of sacks heaped beneath a rack of eels, and he almost gagged at the stench. Even the smell of General Hael’s corpse had seemed more wholesome. The eels above him sweated oil in greasy drips that spattered the sleeping man’s fleshy jowls, making him mutter and twitch.

Fogwill prodded the dozing figure with his toe. “Wake up, Fondelgrue. Wake up.” Oil pattered on his own scalp.

Fondelgrue twisted himself awake with a groan, and scratched his swollen belly beneath a tunic that had once been white. Seeing Fogwill, he squeezed an eye shut, farted, and exhaled. “Crumb? What do you want?”

Fogwill noticed the dark spots now dappling his ceremonial robe and leapt back from underneath the eels, praying with all his heart that the foul odour emanated from the man before him rather than the creatures above. “I’m looking for Devon,” he said. “Have you seen him anywhere?”

Behind them, plates clattered and something smashed. Fondelgrue ignored the accident. “What would that poxy Poisoner be doing in here?”

“Maybe trying to tamper with the food again.” Fogwill shot a contemptuous glance at the gurgling, frothing pots, the smoking ovens encrusted with old food. “But I see you’ve got everything completely under control.”

The head cook slid a hand through his slick hair, then paused to examine something caught beneath his fingernail. He gave Fogwill a sideways look. “I think he tests his poisons and diseases on us.”

“I’ve heard him claim he comes here for inspiration.”

Fondelgrue smiled thinly.

“Well, if you do see him,” the Adjunct said, “please let him know he’s expected presently in the Sanctum—for a very important service.”

The head cook stifled a yawn. “It’s always bloody important with you lot.”

Behind them, a steward was yelling at a potboy. Something else smashed, but Fondelgrue didn’t flinch. Finally he grunted, and closed his eyes. “Well, you can see Devon isn’t here.”

Fogwill surveyed his surroundings again. Two potboys were wrestling in an aisle between banks of sinks and chopping boards. As they skidded and rolled around on the wet floor, one of them knocked against a table and a basket of cutlery scattered to the floor in a metallic hail.

“You have new staff, I see,” Fogwill commented. “Have they all been screened?”

Presbyter Sypes had a right to be nervous. With the Heshette enemy now decimated, there was always the risk they might turn to more subtle methods of revenge.
One cup of poison?

Fogwill took a deep breath, and regretted it immediately. A dog whined nearby, then ceased abruptly.
A dog?
He didn’t want to know. He glanced once more at the wrestling potboys, then set off in the opposite direction. The odour, he noticed with horror, pursued him.

Threading his way back through the great kitchen, he had to dodge countless cooks, dish-washers, beaters, carvers, vegetable choppers, stewards, maids, and porters. The kitchen was bursting with them—who would notice one less body here? Or even a dozen? How many had the Poisoner whisked away to his own foul kitchens over the years? Fondelgrue’s words came back to him.
I think he tests his poisons and diseases on us
.

By the time Fogwill found the door, he was beginning to imagine that every one of these cauldrons might contain unknown terrors. That meat—suspiciously tinged with green? This pallid fowl—what ailment distressed it so? The Adjunct then and there resolved never to eat viands prepared by this kitchen again. At least for a week or so. He would meanwhile press Sypes on the matter of security, oversee the changes himself.

A steward glided past balancing a silver platter full of pastries.

Fogwill grabbed one, inspected it closely. Did the cream it contained have a faintly sulphurous odour? He dabbed his tongue to the soft pastry: was there a hint of bitterness masked by its succulent, buttery sweetness?

He stuffed the entire pastry into his mouth, and left the kitchen, munching.

Some risks were just worth taking.

A
rch Chemist and Poisoner Alexander Devon lay awake, bleeding. Blood trickled from cracks furrowing his face and neck, across his chest, and from the broken skin under his arms and knees, and soaked into his old stained sheet. Blisters burst on his back when he moved. His lungs felt furred: every breath bubbled and stung, every cough expelled strings of fluid, which he spat into a bucket beside the bed. Raw eyelids rested like broken glass on his swollen eyeballs. When he turned to check the standing clock by the window, his bones grated and his muscles scraped against the inside of his skin. He was late for work, yet moving meant agony. But Devon rose from his bed anyway, and tried to force his grimace of pain into a grin.

Life, after all, was full of little challenges.

Elizabeth’s side of the bed remained smooth and dry. He pressed fingers to his lips and touched the place where her head had once rested. Years of washing the sheets had thinned the outline of her wounded body until there was nothing left but a faint line of old blood. One day, he supposed, all trace of her would fade completely.

He removed the sheet and dumped it in a basket, then he set to work tending his own wounds. First his arms: he dabbed the weeping skin with a soft cotton pad steeped in alcohol, smeared away the blood, and then gently bound himself with clean bandages. Next his chest: once the skin was clean, he tucked the end of a bandage under one armpit and wrapped it around and around himself down to his waist. A jolt of pain shot through his knees as he bent to attend to his legs and feet, but he took his time. It was important to cover every wound, lest more infection set in. The Poison Kitchens harboured every type of infection.

When he was done, he dressed himself carefully in his old tweed suit and tried to regain his composure for the day ahead. Every inch of him felt raw and brittle. He placed his spectacles on his nose. Though his sight was fading, his eyes still looked clear and warm. Once handsome in a roguish sort of way, his was a good-humoured face, still etched with smile-lines—a face that people would instinctively warm to, were it not for the cracks and blisters and weeping skin.

Devon’s flesh knew the touch of poison.

Morning filtered through the gauzy drapes of his bedroom window while, outside, the bricks and tarred roofs of the Depression basked in sunlight. Birds chattered incessantly, nesting here in thousands, away from the egg-thieves and from the scroungers who had stripped this derelict district bare so long ago. Devon closed his eyes, letting their melodies wash over him. Far away, the mourners’ bell chimed solemnly in the temple.

Elizabeth would have loved it here. He had looked forward to showing her this place once its conversion was finished; it was to have been a surprise. Clay pots and trenchers still littered the warehouse roof, while pebbles marked meandering paths through heaped mounds of imported Plantation soil. He’d planted orangegrass, bluewisps, and roses; put up trellises; and built a slender whitewood gazebo. But the flowers he had planted were all withered now, the soil dry and dead. He’d taken too long to prepare his surprise. Now only traces of her survived: the faded stains in the sheets he’d brought from their Bridgeview townhouse, a few of her perfume bottles, all empty now, and the painting of her that had cost him half a year’s salary to commission. Devon shared his new home with memories.

He picked up one of Elizabeth’s perfume bottles, and inhaled deeply. Even the scent was faint—like the ghost of some long-dead flower—but it bolstered his resolve as it always did. Gently he replaced the stopper and set the bottle down, his hand lingering on the smooth glass.

The sound of sobbing could be heard from his laboratory next door. Good, the girl was awake. He ought perhaps to make her some coffee and try to calm her down. But the coffee might interfere with the sedative he planned to use on her. He sighed. Maybe he would speak to her softly, and try to ease her pain. It wasn’t going to be easy, though: there would be a lot of pain. The poor thing would struggle desperately.

But life, after all, was full of little challenges.

6

THE SENDING

T
HE ODOUR OF
limewax pervaded the corridor, but its sickly-sweet veneer did little to mask the smell of decay. Iron chandeliers hung from chains fixed in the vaulted ceiling, and tiny candle-flame reflections glowed deep in the marble floor, but the light they provided seemed thin: stretched by the vastness of the space.

At the innermost end of the corridor, Dill stood by the Sanctum doors, and wished there were windows. Shadows crawled all around him, like things moving at the edges of his vision. But whenever he turned to look, there was nothing.

Something creaked above him. A chain moving in a stray draught, probably.

Dill avoided looking up; the things up there were worse than anything in the shadows to either side. Instead he fixed his eyes on the stable doors, anxious for them to open, yet hoping they’d stay firmly shut. Borelock tended the stables.

Another creak above, and Dill looked up.

On tall columns hung the remains of the Ninety-Nine, displayed like ghoulish puppets in chains which held their skeletal arms in place and their tattered wings outstretched. Some wore scraps of armour or peered over dented shields, but all of them brandished weapons: swords, spears, halberds, or pikes, all pitted, scarred, and rusted.

Dill shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His uniform felt stiff and uncomfortable; the sword hilt dug into his ribs. He clasped and unclasped his hands, studied the floor, loosened some buttons, and tugged at his collar, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from returning to the heights.

Gaine had told him stories of this gloomy place: winter storms when the whole temple swayed and the relics rattled their chains in howling draughts. Dill peered along their ranks, half expecting to find his dead father among them, but there were only the bones of the Ninety-Nine, staring out at nothing, collecting dust.

With a clank the stable doors on one side of the corridor swung open. Torchlight fanned out over the floor, bringing with it the odour of straw and animals. Borelock led two huge mares out into the corridor. Behind them, the soulcage rumbled into view on its wooden wheels.

A heavy structure of iron and tarred wood, the soulcage had been specially blessed by the priests to ensure that souls given over to the temple’s care were protected until the time they were released into the abyss. It was empty now, but when full was big enough and sturdy enough to keep fifty souls safe. In the dead, unblessed blood was dangerous. Hell opened its doors to receive unblessed blood, and when Iril’s doors were open there was no telling what might get loose.

With awkward precision, Borelock walked the horses across the polished marble floor. A sour line of a mouth jutted from his cowl; his chin protruded like a spike of bone. The rest of the priest’s body hobbled and shifted beneath his cassock as if there were more than one set of arms and legs under there. Once he reached Dill he stopped, clutching the reins with yellow-stained fingers.

Dill wondered if the priest’s eyes were yellow too. He swallowed, and said, “Fine animals.”

The nearest horse bared its teeth and snorted. Its coat gleamed black as a temple guard’s armour.

“Five years,” Borelock grumbled, “I’ve been driving this cage in your stead. Five years until the Presbyter saw fit to pluck you from your tower and put you to honest work. Don’t you think I’ve had better things to do with my time than face the scorns of those miserable bastards outside?”

“I’m grateful,” Dill replied weakly.

“Don’t mess it up,” Borelock said. “Mark Hael and his sister are in there.” He jabbed a thumb at the Sanctum doors behind them. “The late general’s son and daughter.”

Dill clambered into his seat at the front of the cage, and leather creaked. The seat was even higher than it had looked from the ground and Borelock had to throw the reins up to him. The horses bobbed their heads and whisked their tails, eager to be off.

“Wings,” Borelock said.

Dill spread his wings.

As the horses lurched into motion, Dill almost toppled back onto the cage bars. He pulled hard on the reins, but the animals ignored him. The soulcage lumbered forward, picking up speed.

“I’ll be watching you,” Borelock called after him.

They clopped along, uncomfortably fast, under the scrutiny of the decaying angels. Rust had eaten the name plaques beneath the skeletons’ feet, but Dill still recognized a few from his one previous visit down here.

He’d been eleven years old when his father had brought him to this dismal corridor, ordered the temple doors to be opened to let some light in, and left him with a slab of parchment on which to sketch the relics. In daylight, the skeletons had seemed less threatening, so Dill had relished his task at first, writing each name in his best hand beneath his sketches, determined to draw them all. That morning passed quickly, and occasionally Gaine returned, bringing him cups of sweet tea, to admire his handiwork. When they paused for lunch at a rough table outside the kitchen, Dill proudly displayed his drawings to everyone and anyone who passed by. Everyone had seemed impressed.

By mid-afternoon he’d drawn eight and was bored. They all looked the same. So he squeezed the remaining ninety-one of them into a giant battle played out on a single sheet of parchment—with a dozen stick-like Heshette enemies fleeing into the bottom corner. At Dill’s insistence, Gaine counted the pencilled archons and admitted that there were, indeed, ninety-nine in total. There hadn’t been space to fill their names in, but his father had liked his composition all the same. It was one of the last times they had spent together. Gaine had died only weeks later at the hands of a Heshette bowman. Presbyter Sypes had brought Dill extra candles that night, helped him set them up around his tower room.

The soulcage now passed beneath the archon with the lopsided wing, repaired at some point with brass staples, and there over on the left was the one who leaned out too far, ever threatening to drop its spear. Dill had originally sketched that one from the side.

Looking up at them now, Dill tried to fit the names he remembered to the skeletons’ bones. This one standing fierce and proud over his great sword, Simon perhaps—or Barraby? This one, more melancholy, resting on his spear, could he be Dolmen? And here, the toothy grin of a shield-carrier made him think of Praxis, the last archon before Callis to die. He imagined these angels as they must have looked in life: Ulcis’s elite sweeping into battle with their wings like shards of sunshine and their weapons glittering like ice crystals. Three thousand years had passed since the angels had risen from the abyss, and now their bones watched over the dead, and over the Soul Wardens who brought them into the temple.

He was twisting round, trying to identify the design on a shield that might have belonged to either Mesa or Perpaul, when the soulcage jerked to a halt with an irreverent thud. Dill spun round. One of the vehicle’s front wheels had collided with the column to his left.

The next few moments stretched into a long, sluggish dream. Both mares lowered their heads, chopped their hoofs against the floor, and bulled forward. Dill yelled. The soulcage groaned.

The column shifted…and teetered.

High above, the archon’s spine flexed and its legs seemed to move, as though the skeleton was keeping its balance. Slowly, the column rocked in the opposite direction. Chains creaked…Dill held his breath…the column tilted back.

And settled.

Dill breathed again.

There was a snap and the angel collapsed in a shower of bones. A helmet plummeted and hit the floor with a bang; a spear clattered on the marble and skittered off into the shadows. Bones rained down, hands and limbs and ribs smashed to fragments around him. The horses whinnied and stamped their hoofs in protest. The angel’s skull struck the seat beside Dill and ricocheted away. It flew up almost as high as the top of the column before descending again to hit the stone floor with a sickening crack. Its jaw snapped off, teeth exploded everywhere. The skull bounced again, and again, shattering more teeth each time, until at last it rolled along the passage and came to rest a dozen yards away, facing him.

Bone dust drifted down.

Borelock screamed. He flew along the corridor like a wraith, his thin arms flailing about his head. Dill sank lower into the driver’s seat and shuddered.

“Three thousand years,” Borelock was howling. “Three thousand years—preserved, protected, safe from decay and intruders. But not from you! Not from the wretched, clumsy, gangling paws of fools and children. Three—” He choked on the word.

Dill’s eyes flashed pink. A deeper, hotter pink than he had ever experienced before. He felt the blood leave his face, as though his eyes drew it into themselves like a searing beacon to proclaim his shame.

“A disaster,” Borelock wailed. He whirled round, finding yet more blasphemous evidence of destruction everywhere he looked. “Dust! One of the Ninety-Nine in ruin.” He rushed over to peer at the plaque affixed to the column, then threw up his arms. “Samuel. The Dawn Star, bane of Heshette, reduced to this. Destroyed!”

The Dawn Star’s jawless, toothless skull gazed back up at them from a carpet of broken bones.

“What will Presbyter Sypes say? Eh? What will he do? A whipping for you, no doubt. Yes, a whipping for you. Sorry and raw red you’ll be. But me? What of me?” He faced Dill, his chin jutting knife-like from under the cowl. “Go now. The Sending won’t wait. Punishment will come later, but now, go, go, and cage the dead. I must attend to this disaster myself. Go!”

Dill flicked the reins with shaking hands. As the two mares nickered and moved off, bones crunched and popped beneath the soulcage wheels. Dill left Borelock on his knees, sobbing and muttering as he picked up fragments of the fallen archon.

The journey along the rest of the corridor lasted a thousand quick, sharp breaths. At the far end, the horses stopped before the huge banded doors which opened on to the Gatebridge, and Dill found himself looking up at the last skeleton of all. There stood the bones of Callis, the greatest of the first angels. Ulcis’s Herald seemed to have deteriorated more than the archons he’d once commanded: countless staples held his old yellow joints in place. One bony fist clutched a mouldering book, the other a key enveloped by a hissing blue flame. The flame was supposed to burn eternally, but Dill had heard whispers that the priests often forgot to change the gas tank that fuelled it, leaving the light extinguished for days at a time. He bowed his head in reverence all the same.

Two guardsmen in black-enamelled armour pushed the temple doors inwards and bright sunshine leapt in.

Dill blinked. Six corpses lay wrapped in shrouds on the temple steps. Mourners crowded behind them, spanning the Gatebridge from side to side, and beyond them dozens of onlookers had climbed up to perch on or cling to the girders for a better view. A cheer from the younger elements of the crowd was followed by stern hushing from wives and mothers. Pillars of smoke rose from the Bridgeview townhouses. Somewhere distant, a blacksmith’s hammer pounded out dull iron notes.

Dill edged the soulcage forward, out onto the wide esplanade above the temple steps. Then he slid down from his seat and, fumbling with the key, finally managed to unlock the soulcage.

While the guards hefted corpses into the cage, Dill studied the mourners. Hoods hid their faces, but every head was turned his way. They were watching him. Someone pointed and whispered, provoking nervous laughs, and Dill suddenly remembered his eyes: they would be seashell pink in the sunlight. To his dismay, the colour only deepened.

When they had finished loading the corpses, one of the temple guards guided the horses round in a tight circle. Dill climbed back into his seat and flicked the reins. The beasts did not move.

The guard coughed, nodded at the soulcage.

Dill’s eyes reddened further. Once more, he slipped to the ground, and locked the soulcage. At the familiar sound, the horses began to move, so Dill had to scramble after them. A mourner stepped forward and threw up a shower of petals that drifted over both the angel and the dead.

The temple doors were heaved shut behind him and he was confined once more in gloomy silence. A single guard remained inside to escort the soulcage back along the corridor, but even with this limited company the vaulted space felt emptier than before.

Dill urged the horses forward. They were no keener to obey the reins than they had been a moment earlier, moving off only after a while, when they were ready. The axle creaked and the horses nickered. Ten paces behind them, the guard marched along in his armour, his footsteps resounding like a slow, metallic heartbeat. Any guard with a relative among the corpses could claim the right to escort the soulcage, and Dill wondered if this was true today. Did this man have a loved one among the dead? He glanced back, but detected no sign of grief in the man’s face, just weariness, and possibly boredom.

Borelock had meanwhile gathered the shattered bones into a pile beside their empty column and stood hunched over them, his rage still seething about him like an invisible cloud.

At last the small procession reached the Sanctum doors, where Dill checked his appearance. Flecks of dust and bone covered his jacket. He brushed them away as best he could, then finger-smoothed his tufted hair. Rushes of pink still shifted through his irises: he screwed his eyes closed and tried to shed the colour, but it proved hopeless. Something jabbed him in the back: a small bone, perhaps part of a finger, snagged in his feathers.

A key clunked in a lock. Dill stuffed the bone in his pocket, sat up straight, and pulled his wings tighter against his back.

Wrought ironwork as sharp as thorns hedged the Sanctum walls. Spikes of tallow hung from brackets set deep inside, where candles burned and threw clawlike shadows around a wide aperture in the floor. Blessings had been carved in spirals fashioned around the hole, to keep the dead from rising from the abyss below until Ulcis should release them. A chain ran up from a winch fixed to one side, through a system of pulleys set high above, and back down to where it coiled in loops on the floor. This was the very heart of the temple, the heart of Deepgate itself.