The Mime Order (28 page)

And manacles. My breath stopped in my throat.

There
were
manacles
on the walls.

Jos had said that a gutterling who’d dared to come near this place had never been seen again. I moved slower, listening for footsteps. When I reached one tunnel, I could see people in the market above through circular grates in the ceiling. Their shadows flickered past. I kept close to the walls, though I doubted they could see me.

I dug a bag of climbing chalk from my backpack and drew a tiny line on the wall. As I followed the passages, I marked each one with chalk. One unventilated room was enormous: a great underground vault, at least a hundred feet long, not dissimilar to the Garden’s market cavern. The ceiling was low, with vast, sweeping arches. It looked as if it was being refurbished. A spotlight cart stood in the far corner, casting harsh electric light through the arches. Crimson curtains had been hung over the walls, some half-attached to rails, and tables and chairs scattered around the place. I checked the æther and darted across the stone floor, heading for a passage on the other side of the vault.

A thin, filthy cat bounded from under a table and streaked past me with a yowl. I slammed my back against the wall, my heart clobbering my ribs. The animal disappeared into another tunnel.

If a cat had found its way down here, there must be another way out. It was a small comfort in this place. I could imagine them dragging Warden’s dead weight through the passages.
Nearly there
. I pictured the room with arches, but got nothing in return.

The fuzzy sound of a radio soon came to my attention, tuned to Scion’s only news station. I switched off my flashlight and peered around the corner. An old signal lantern sat on the floor in the next tunnel, illuminating the door of Warden’s prison.

The guard was a slim man with artificially orange hair, slouched against the wall, bobbing his head to the radio. A few days’ worth of stubble had crawled down his neck, right to the hair on his chest, and a coat of dirty grease lay on his skin. A summoner. I’d have a
big
fight on my hands if I faced him. Summoners could pull spirits across vast distances if they knew their names.

I fitted myself into an alcove. Like an arrow, my spirit streaked through the wall and into the guard’s dreamscape. By the time his defenses came up, I’d already nudged him into his twilight zone. When I snapped back, my temples thumping, I heard a distinct sound of a limp body collapsing on stone.

When I reached the tunnel, I found him on the floor, face down. He was unconscious, but breathing. There was no padlock on the door; just a chain that prevented it from opening more than a few inches. Nobody had expected a break-in. I pulled away the chain and stepped into the cell.

13

Thief

Handcuffed to a pipe in the light of a dead-flame lamp, his head hanging between his shoulders, Arcturus Mesarthim looked nothing like the keeper I’d shared a tower with for six months. His clothes were plastered with filth and dust, and beads of water seeped from his hair. I dropped my flash-light and fell into a crouch beside him.

“Warden.”

He didn’t answer.

Fear came snaking around my chest, pushing against anger. Someone—multiple people, by the looks of it—had beaten the shit out of him. His aura was a candle in a draft, flickering and weak.

White breath billowed past my lips. My boots could hardly grip the icy floor around him. With a running nose and trembling hands, I grasped his shoulders and shook him. No breath lifted his chest.

“Warden, wake up. Come on.” I tapped his cheek, hard. “
Arcturus
.”

At the sound of his true name, his eyelids parted. A dim, yellowish light bled into his irises.

“
Paige Mahoney.” It was almost too soft to hear. “Good of you to come to my rescue.”

Relief crashed over me. “What did they do to you?” I could hardly get the words out through my chattering teeth. “Does the guard have the key to your chain?”

“Leave the chain.” A rattle escaped his throat. “You ought to leave. My captors will return before long.”

“I’ll be the judge of when I leave.”

Outside the door, I rolled the guard on to his back and rummaged through his pockets. With one heavy key I unlocked Warden’s manacle, freeing his wrist. I scooped an arm around his shoulders, trying to pull him into a sitting position, but he was a dead weight.

“Warden, you
have
to move. I can’t lift you.” I pulled the lamp closer. Green-black stains were blooming under his skin in curious patterns, like fern frost. “Tell me where you’re hurt.”

His gloved fingers twitched. I turned my flashlight downward. A bangle of scarlet poppy anemones hung on his left wrist, the sort of thing I’d often twisted together with daisies as a child. The whole of his arm was peppered with necrotic tissue, shot through the smooth dark gold of his skin.

“They are like irons.” His eye-light was fading. When I reached for the first chain, it flared up again. “Don’t.”

“We don’t have time to—”

“I have not fed in days.” The last word ended in a growl. “The hunger is taking me.”

“It isn’t taking you anywhere. I am.” I took his face between my hands. “Terebell and Errai sent me to find you.”

Some of the light returned to his gaze. “You look different,” he said. “The mind-sickness . . . I will not remember you, Paige . . .”

He was delirious. “Warden, what do you need? Salt?”

“That will wait. I have no bites. It is the fever in my mind that must be dealt with first.”

“
You need aura,” I realized.

“Yes.” Each breath ground through his throat. “They have tormented me for weeks, letting me take only a little at a time . . . keeping it just out of my reach . . . I confess, I am starving. But I will not take yours.”

I smiled grimly. “Good thing there’s an alternative, then.”

The guard really was having a bad night. I took him by the wrists and hauled him into the cell on his back. Dry groans punctuated each pull on his arms. I shackled him to the pipe and held my knife to his throat. Warden watched in hungry silence.

“Did this one beat you?” I said.

“On multiple occasions.”

The guard stirred. Blood slithered from both his nostrils, right down to his chin. “The hell did you do to me?” His breath smelled of stale coffee. “My head . . .”

“You work for the Rag and Bone Man,” I said, smiling. “Tell me who he is, or I’ll ask my friend to drain you very,
very
slowly of your aura. How would you like to be amaurotic, summoner?”

When he found a knife at his throat and a chain at his wrist, the guard struggled. My knee pinned his free hand. “Better rottie to the core than sleeping with the bloaters,” he hissed. “Rags will throw me in with weights on my ankles if I say a word.” He took in a deep breath and shouted, “Sarah Whitehead, I summon you to—”

I slapped a hand over his mouth.

“Try that again and we’ll skip the draining,” I said, leaning close to him. “I’ll just shoot you. Understood?”

He nodded once. As soon as I removed my hand, he said, “Bitch.”

Warden played his part beautifully. He shifted toward the guard on all fours with the slow precision of a predator, his pale yellow eyes like a wolf ’s in the gloom. Muscle shifted under his skin. The man yanked at his chain in a panic, kicking at the floor. Even I
shivered.
Rephaim looked relatively human by daylight, but in the dark, they lost the veneer of humanity.

“Call him off.” The closer Warden came, the more the guard pulled at his manacle. “Call him off, brogue!”

“I’m afraid he’s not a dog,” I said, “but you’ve treated him like one, haven’t you?” My knife dug into his neck. “Tell me who the Rag and Bone Man is. Tell me his name and I might let you live.”

“I don’t
know
his name!” he shouted. “None of us know his name! Why would he tell us?”

“What was he planning to do with the Rephaite? Who’s he working with? Where is he now?” I grasped his throat and angled the knife toward the underside of his chin. “You’d better get talking, summoner. I don’t consider myself patient.”

He spat at me. Warden’s face turned utterly cold. “You’ll get nothing out of me,” the guard repeated. “Nothing.”

I pushed my spirit against his dreamscape, hard. More blood swelled from his nostrils. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t tell you,” he choked. “He’s only here once in a blue moon. We take orders from his moll-isher.” When Warden moved toward him again, he gasped for air. More than air. “You said you’d call him off!”

“I didn’t, actually,” I said.

There was no violence. Nothing but a look. Warden stared at the guard and breathed in. His chest expanded, and his eyes scalded like signal lights before filling up with vivid orange. The guard slumped against the frozen pipe, his aura thin as tissue paper.

A ripple went right the way through Warden’s body. Ectoplasm glowed in the veins beneath his skin, which suddenly appeared translucent. I stayed where I was, keeping a few feet between us. When I lifted the flowers from his arm, a deep growl rumbled up from his chest.

“My captors ventured outside for food,” he said. “They will not be long.”

“
Good. I’d love to meet them.”

“They are dangerous.”

“So am I. So are you.”

His eyes were growing brighter. They flooded me with the stranger memories of my imprisonment. A gramophone’s blacklisted music, telling lovers’ stories to the gloom. A butterfly held out inside caged fingers. His lips on mine in the Guildhall, hands gliding over my hips, my waist. I tried to focus on removing the next flower chain, but I was too aware of his movements now. Each rise and fall of his chest, each flex of tendon in his neck.

Above us, the pale moon was just visible between the metal slats. When there were no chains left, I took my burner from my backpack and stuck a new module between my teeth while I pried the back cover off. Warden let his head fall back against the wall. I stayed beside him as I called the I-4 phone booth, hoping on hope for a signal. We weren’t too far underground.

“I-4,” said a courier’s voice. The line was bad, but I could just about hear.

“The Red Vision,” I said. “Quickly.”

“Bear with me.”

I didn’t have much time to bear with him. Warden’s eyes strayed to the summoner again, to the wisp of aura that still clung to him. After a minute, Nick spoke: “Everything okay?”

“I need a lift,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“Camden. The warehouse at the top end of Oval Road.”

“Ten minutes.”

The line went dead. I pulled out the identity module and slid it into my back pocket, then took the signal lantern in one hand and hoisted Warden’s heavy arm around my neck. He grasped my shoulder as he stood. The weight of his hand sent tremors down my sides.

“Where is the way out?” he said, his voice low.

“
I came in through Dead Dog Hole. The canal basin.”

“I was taken through the black door, but the unreadable guard is always there. I presume we will not be leaving through the basin.”

“We wouldn’t get through,” I said.

“Perhaps there is a way to access the warehouse, as this was once its basement.” His grip on my shoulder tightened. “You still have the guard’s keys, I take it.”

“Naturally. Can you walk?”

“I must.”

Our progress through the tunnels was slow: Warden was sporting a bad limp, unable to walk on either leg for long. It seemed incredible that a tiny red bloom, as light as a feather, could do so much damage to a Rephaite’s anatomy. They were muscular, statuesque creatures, impossible to take down with physical force, yet the key to their downfall could fit in my palm. I handed him the lantern and wrapped my free arm around his waist. His proximity made me cold, then warm. I could feel the labored weight of his breaths against my hair.

The next tunnel curved around a corner. The lantern’s light seemed very small, casting a tiny circle around us. I shone the flash-light beam up a vent, but it was a dead end.

“How did the Rag Dolls capture you?”

“With poppy anemone. They must have been watching me for some time, marking my movements. Or perhaps they knew, somehow, that I would go to I-4,” he said. We kept going, turning into yet another passage that looked identical to the last. “They came for me during the day, when I was resting. They blindfolded and bound me with the flower, then transported me here in a large vehicle.”

My heart rate was climbing. The Rag Dolls shouldn’t know a thing about the Rephaim, let alone how to capture them. When I saw a familiar chalk mark, I wilted.

“We’re going in circles.”

Warden
was growing stronger; I could feel it in his hand, its grip. “Do you sense Dr. Nygård?”

“Yes. He’s close.” I tensed. “There’s someone else, too.”

“With him?”

“No. They’re coming from a different direction.” A small group of dreamscapes had detached themselves from the hive of the market. “Three people.”

As soon as he said it, a whistling came from above. A bird’s call in the middle of the night. Jos. I let go of Warden and took out my revolver. “Are any of the guards full-sighted?”