‘He’s sick,’ Eli said, squatting down beside it, shining the light over its body and face.
‘Really,’ Ev’r replied wryly.
‘Look,’ Eli said, noticing how the creature’s waxy, colourless skin blended with its shadow cloak. He leaned closer and saw an extremely faint bloodline mark – the triangular pattern of a Midnight Man, mixed with something else. Eli squinted. It was the green and brown scales of a non-venomous human-breed snake line.
‘Wow!’ Eli said, his fingertips tingling with the excitement of discovery. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. All the cross-bred Midnight Men the government executed were mixes with other spectral-breeds – none of them were outside of the race. Human-breed and spectral-breed are completely incompatible. How would it even happen without the human-breed getting killed?’
‘Artificial insemination – experimentation,’ Ev’r said. ‘You think babies are only made after people fall in love and get married, do you?’
‘No,’ Eli mumbled, though he had been imagining how the scene would look when a pleasant-faced human-breed girl brought a bloodthirsty, feral Midnight Man home to meet her parents. He examined the man more closely, noting his gaunt face and protruding cheekbones, his stick-thin arms.
‘He’s starving,’ he said. ‘He can’t feed properly.’
‘What do you expect from a mix like that?’ Ev’r replied.
‘Well he must be able to eat something; he’s survived this long.’
‘It’s because of the metamorphosis,’ Ev’r said.
‘I don’t understand.’ Eli shook his head.
‘Look at him – all that skin drooping around his face and neck. That’s the way the Midnight Men are before they mature. Before their changing time, they can get away with eating any kind of meat, but when they come of age, they have a day when they have to feast properly on the near-dead – then they change, but if they don’t feast they die. It’s a protective function of the species – only the strong survive. I would have thought someone like yourself, professing to be intelligent, would already know all this,’ Ev’r said with a sneer.
‘I never claimed to know everything about spectral-breeds,’ Eli said. His eyes returned to the prone man. ‘I don’t think he wants to eat the dead or near-dead. Did you see his face when he saw the blood? He was horrified.’
‘Sounds like his problem,’ Ev’r said.
‘He’s part human-breed, though.’ Eli spoke his thoughts aloud. ‘I wonder if the whole devouring near-death thing could be diverted somehow. Maybe he doesn’t have to eat dead flesh. It doesn’t look like it agrees with him anyway.’
‘A vegetarian Midnight Man?’ Ev’r raised one eyebrow. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Maybe we should take him with us and try to help him.’
‘Hell no,’ Ev’r spat. ‘You want to escape the authorities, find a cure for a Ravien-bite, defeat the Skreaf
and
drag an illegal, dying cross-breed along for the ride. What’s wrong with you?’
The man’s eyelids flipped open. He stared at them and his mouth gaped open in a silent scream. His skin blended into the shadows of his cloak and he vanished completely. Eli saw the shadows stirring as the man ran through them, out of the chamber and out of sight.
‘Problem solved,’ Ev’r said. ‘Look at this bunch.’ She nodded to the pile of corpses. ‘They’re all Galleys.’
Eli stood and shuffled nearer to the bodies, shining the light onto them, over their horn-shaped Galley bloodline marks and green clothes. Ev’r was right. They were Shawe’s men. Eli recognised the dead staring face of Shawe’s cousin, Malcolm, and a chill spread over his skin. His heart thudded faster. Copernicus, Diega and Silho were last seen being captured by Shawe – who had left the city and never returned.
‘Are they here?’ he squeaked, more to himself than Ev’r. He ignored the smell and started searching through the bodies. Each had dark stains all over their skin.
‘Dark magics,’ Ev’r said beside him. ‘Death-curses.’
‘Skreaf?’ Eli whispered.
‘Probably. The magics were strong enough to kill the Skither when it fed on the corpses.’ She pointed to something sticking out of the giant monster’s mouth. What Eli had thought was the creature’s tongue was actually someone’s arm. He gagged.
He voiced his fears to Ev’r. ‘Maybe Copernicus and the others are here – dead.’
‘Hopefully,’ she said.
Eli blinked back tears and then his logic kicked in. ‘I’ll run a test.’ He took the scanner from his pocket and set it to body shape. He keyed in the approximate dimensions of his boss and teammates, then ran the scanner across the pile of dead and over the Skither in case it had already swallowed them. The machine beeped – no matches.
‘I don’t think they’re here,’ Eli said, almost not daring to hope. He looked over all the dead bodies – at least half or maybe more of the Galley gang members must have been there.
‘We should bury them,’ he said. ‘It’s the human-breed way. They’d want that.’
‘I hate to be the one to break the news to you, Snack-size,’ Ev’r said. ‘But corpses don’t
want
anything, and we have to get out of here before the demons find us again. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.’
‘Let me at least cross them into the afterlife, then,’ Eli said.
‘Cross them?’ Ev’r sneered. ‘Since when were you human-breed?’
‘Never, obviously, but
they’re
human-breed so it’s the right thing to do.’ Eli stood in front of the bodies and crossed himself three times in the human-breed way.
‘Go to the ancestors,’ he said, not knowing what else to say. Something shimmering beside the corpses caught his attention and he bent down to examine it. He lifted up Diega’s silver coin, the
Ory-4
in its morphed state. As he stared at the coin a possible sequence of actions played in his mind.
‘Shawe must have captured the commander, Diega and Silho. Then the witches attacked and killed the Galleys, and somehow the others escaped into the desert. Otherwise they’d be here. We need to search for them.’
Ev’r shook her head. ‘Do you know how vast the Matadori is?’
‘Very vast?’ Eli took a guess. ‘But I have equipment —’
‘Which doesn’t work out here. Besides there’re no guarantees they are here, maybe the Skreaf took them. Either way, do you actually think the witches are going to wait for you to regroup with your little friends before they strike?’
Eli had to shake his head.
‘Then let’s go.’ She held out her hand.
‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not going back into the Murk. Do you know how much that hurts?’
‘We can travel the hidden path and it will take us seconds to get to the city or we can walk and it’ll take us weeks. What would you prefer?’
Eli took her outstretched hand.
‘You have to want to sink in otherwise it won’t work,’ she told him. ‘No one unwilling can be dragged into the Murk, except through dark magics.’
‘I want to,’ Eli whispered.
‘Sure you do,’ Ev’r mocked.
Eli gritted his teeth as the ground gave way beneath his feet.
26
S
ilho sat slumped on the speed-drift platform, staring up at the monolithic wall encircling Scorpia. Above the impassable black stone fortress, the upper levels of the city reached high into the sky, stretching up to Paradise and falling so far short. Silho heard voices from the wall calling her, dragging her in. Flashes of their memories intersected her thoughts. Her hands strained against the restraints and her skin froze, then instantly began to boil. Her heart began pounding frantically, then almost stopped. She trembled all over and gasped with stomach cramps that contracted all her muscles, making her double over with pain. She felt like smashing her head against the platform to knock herself out.
The only thing that stopped her was the Wraith, Raine. The strange spectral-breed whispered constant reassurances beside Silho’s ear. Her voice was so soft and cool that it could have been just a breeze, except Silho knew full well there was no such thing as a gentle breeze in the Matadori. She shivered despite the heat and her restraints clanked together. The handcuffs binding her hands brought up a hazy memory of her father being dragged out of their house by soldiers. He’d been cuffed just as she was now . . .
When her father was framed by the Skreaf and executed, we believed we’d lost the last Omarian
. . . The truth spoken by the he-Wraith continued to reach her battered mind in degrees, spreading ripples of shock through her body. She had always believed her father was innocent, but hearing it from someone else . . . It removed all the whispers of doubt that had plagued her in the mid-dark when she’d lain wide awake chasing sleep. A second of unanchored euphoria fought through the pain, but almost instantly faded into hollowness because she was still here and he was still gone and there was so much left unsaid and so many questions unanswered.
Silho returned her gaze to the wall and saw the commander walking back towards them. He had left her and the others waiting on the hover platform while he’d gone on foot to the Scorpian Gates to investigate the line-up of people stretching from the only official entry to Scorpia far back into the desert. When he was close enough to be heard, the commander shook his head. ‘Palace enforcers and Regiment soldiers are double-scanning everyone. They’re scoping for us. We have to find another way in.’ He stepped onto the platform.
‘What about the access tunnels into the Gangland?’ Shawe said from beside Silho, the taint of Araki heavy on his breath.
‘No good,’ Copernicus replied. ‘We need to get as close to the underside as we can, preferably inside Moris-Isles itself.’
Shawe scratched his chin and the others sat silent in thought. Finally the gangster said, ‘There is a way directly into the Isles, but you’re not going to like it.’
‘Tell me,’ Copernicus said.
‘The Brown River. The main sewer line. It runs through the whole city.’
Diega cursed under her breath.
‘If that’s the only way then we’ll have to use it,’ Copernicus said.
Shawe gave a rumbling laugh and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. ‘The man who sweeps his room seventeen times a day and bleaches his underpants thinks he can handle swimming in other people’s —’
‘I can do whatever is necessary,’ Copernicus cut in. ‘Can you?’
‘You know it.’
‘Then sober up.’
Shawe took a defiant swig from his flask, but then pocketed it.
‘Around the wall – that way,’ he said to Diega and pointed east. ‘I’ll tell you when to stop.’
Diega glared at him, refusing to take his orders.
‘Do it, Diega,’ Copernicus instructed.
‘Yes, do it Diega,’ Shawe echoed with a smug smile.
‘Shut it,’ the commander snapped at the gangster.
‘Why is he still with us?’ Diega demanded.
‘Because you need me,’ Shawe said.
Diega gave a nasty laugh. ‘Like a hole in the head – like a rash that won’t quit.’
‘You’d know all about that,’ the gangster bit back.
‘Copernicus – seriously, it’s me or him,’ Diega said.
‘I agree,’ Shawe said.
‘How about I shoot you both,’ Copernicus said, drawing his electrifier and pointing it at one and then the other. ‘We’re facing a demon army without any backup. I need soldiers, not squabbling children. You’re just slowing me down.’
‘She started it,’ Shawe said.
‘Not another word, Shawe,’ Copernicus warned him, his voice dangerous. ‘Diega, fly.’
The gangster muttered something. Diega gritted her teeth and drove the platform eastward around the great wall.
Shawe called out when they reached a row of large circular metal hatches embedded in the black rock of the wall.
‘The centre one,’ Shawe told them.
Diega set the platform down and the others stepped off. Silho felt Raine’s silky hands helping her to sit up. As soon as she did, the world spun around her and the call of the voices in the wall grew louder. The Wraith’s words did nothing to help her now.
Copernicus turned to them, his eyes seeing beyond the surface, analysing the situation. He approached Silho, taking a syringe full of a green liquid out of his weapon belt.
Raine stood up in front of Silho. She hissed, ‘She needs to stay awake. She needs to overcome the sickness.’
‘What my soldier needs is my business,’ the commander told her. ‘Move.’
The red eyes of the he-Wraith flashed behind the grey of Raine’s stare. The sky above them darkened, but Copernicus didn’t back off. He sidestepped Raine and crouched down beside Silho. He spoke and his words cut clearly through the babble inside her head. His voice was even comforting.
‘This will help you for now. We’ll figure out something more permanent once we find shelter.’
‘Thank you,’ Silho managed to whisper and meant every letter of the words.
He held one of her arms and pressed the needle into the skin. He pushed down on the plunger, but the liquid didn’t budge. The transparent plastic of the syringe fogged over. The substance inside was frozen. Copernicus looked up at Raine.
‘Thaw it –
now
.’
The Wraith shook her head, the silver strands of her dark hair shimmering. ‘I can see. You are motivated by your own fear of the past, not by her pain. We will not allow you to compromise Silho’s progress.’
The commander’s fury surfaced like a sudden deadly storm, but vanished again immediately as he regained control. When he spoke his voice was flat, devoid of emotion.
‘You’re right. I am afraid. I’m afraid of what I’m seeing inside my soldier. I’m afraid that her pain will grow until her mind is gone and her heart stops. I’m afraid that the blind fanaticism of the spectral-breed standing before me will prevent me from administering the aid that she needs before it’s too late. And I’m afraid that afterwards there will be nothing much left of the spectral-breed once I’m finished with her.’
‘She’s far stronger than you think,’ Raine responded. Her eyes shifted rapidly as though the he-Wraith was trying to take over their form.
‘Your other half doubts her,’ Copernicus said. ‘So you’re divided against yourself. You’re confused and I’m supposed to trust your judgement over my own?’
‘You can trust that we’d die for Silho, for her cause,’ Raine said. ‘She needs to overcome her physical pain. She needs your help – but not in this way. You have to teach her. Only you can. How long she suffers is up to you.’
‘Are we doing this or what?’ Shawe called back to them from where he and Diega stood beside the wall.
‘I’m holding you responsible for whatever happens to Silho after this,’ Copernicus said to the Wraith.
‘My thoughts spoken,’ Raine countered.
Copernicus gave her a dark look. He lifted Silho in one arm, carrying her so that her face pressed against his shoulder. Inside her mind she was screaming at Raine to let him help her, but she couldn’t make a sound.
The commander stopped beside Diega and nodded to her. She tightened the sling tying SevenM to her body and said, ‘
Dimenef traml
.’ The hatch shrank down, exposing a gaping black hole in the wall.
The evil stench that blasted out forced everyone to step back. Diega gagged.
Shawe wafted the air towards Copernicus’ face and said, ‘Smell that aroma . . . it’s a million times worse down there. Sure you can handle it?’
‘Follow me in,’ Copernicus responded. He carried Silho to the hole, climbed through and dropped some distance into the pipe below. They splattered down in knee-high filth. The all-consuming stink hit them so hard that Silho’s senses cleared a bit. The commander swore and she heard Shawe laughing at them from above. Copernicus took the light-blaster from his belt and shone it upwards, catching Diega dropping down. Shawe followed straight after, spraying everyone with muck. Diega snarled a string of curses in her native language.
‘Did I get you?’ Shawe laughed. ‘My apologies.’
Copernicus directed the beam of light into the gangster’s face, forcing Shawe to look away. He then turned and headed down the pipe.
The water level rose steadily the further in they went, and soon they were swimming. Copernicus and Diega dragged Silho through. The voices she heard down here were softer, but they whispered darker things, haunting her mind. Shawe started singing an off-key Galley tune. Silho kept her mouth shut and tried to breathe as little as possible, until something huge and slippery eeled around her legs. She gasped, sucking in some of the filth and gagging it back up. Blinking into light-form vision, she stared down into the murky waters. The body-lights of something massive were circling underneath them.
‘What’s that?’ Diega said, as it touched her as well.
‘Probably just a Spitting Myban,’ Shawe said from behind them. ‘Harmless – except in mating season.’
‘What happens in mating season?’ Diega asked, anticipating bad news from the smug look on Shawe’s face.
‘They spit out live offspring that burrow into the skin of whoever they come across. The little ones feed on body fluids until they’re big enough to break out.’
‘When is mating season?’ Diega said.
‘Who knows?’ Shawe replied with a grin in his voice.
Silho heard the Wraith hiss a Cos enchant, ‘
Sapphire
.’
Whatever the creature was, it dived away until Silho lost sight of its body-lights.
‘Left!’ Shawe bellowed. ‘The second ladder.’
They followed his directions and found a rust-eaten ladder leading up to another sealed-off hatch. Diega tried to morph it, but this one didn’t change.
‘Must have something living growing on it,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to clean it.’
‘Out of the way, sunshine.’ Shawe palmed her aside and climbed the ladder. It creaked and groaned, straining under his weight. He pressed against the porthole with one hand and it broke upwards. The gangster hauled himself out of the hole and reached his hands back down. Copernicus lifted Silho into the gangster’s rough grasp and he dragged her up onto a backstreet in Moris-Isles. He leaned her against a wall and straightened to eye the few passers-by. They rushed past.
A sudden onslaught of voices and images filled Silho’s mind. The force of the attack sent her sprawling onto her side. The mental pain of the visions was starting to overcome the physical pain of the drug withdrawal. The skin of her face and head felt too tight for the bones. From somewhere among the lost voices in the walls, Silho heard Jude calling to her –
I’m under attack as well. Look at your locator. Can you see me?
Shawe pulled Silho upright and studied her with sharp green eyes. ‘Girl, you don’t look so good,’ the gangster murmured. ‘How about a smoke?’ He took out his packet of cigarettes, but it was drenched with sewer water. ‘Maybe not,’ he said and threw them into the gutter. He took out his flask instead and put it up to her lips. The fumes alone made her head snap back.
‘I said no, Shawe,’ Copernicus said as he and Diega emerged from the porthole in the footpath.
‘Then what? She needs something.’
Copernicus glanced around them. He slipped a syringe out of his belt. Immediately the plastic fogged over again as the substance froze. Raine stepped up out of the ground beside Silho. She and the commander exchanged loaded looks.
Shawe glanced from one of them to the other and asked, ‘So what are we doing here?’
‘We have to go to the place where the Skreaf took Jude and try to find a lead,’ the commander said.
‘Follow me,’ Raine hissed. ‘I’ll take you.’
‘Will you,’ Copernicus said dryly. He took the dissipater restraint off his belt and wrapped it around his wrist ready for use. ‘Just in case.’
Raine regarded him with ambivalence. She turned and drifted away down the street. Copernicus lifted Silho and the ground blurred beneath her as the commander’s soundless steps moved through Moris-Isles.
Raine took the team through the underside suburb, bringing them to the street to where Silho had fled the night before. She recognised the Burrower hole through which Raine had dragged her to save her life. Beyond that was the place where the witches had surrounded Jude. The walls of the alleyway were blackened and sprayed with white machine-breed blood. There was a sticky pool of it on the ground.
The team entered the alley. Copernicus studied the blood-spatter pattern and the blackness of the walls. He set Silho down on the ground and took a Grenyen Glass light, designed to detect the presence of magics, from his weapon belt and shone it on the stain. Everyone jolted. The black was not a simple stain. It was a mass of overlapping Skreaf symbols, the triangle within a triangle within a square. Demon faces, an echo of the magics that had created the stain, pushed out of the blackness and snarled at them. Diega stumbled back and struck her ankle against something hard buried in the garbage strewn on the ground. She bent over and dragged out Jude’s communicator. The internals were completely burnt out and obliterated. Copernicus took it from her and examined it before handing it back. Diega’s face set into a stony expression.
‘They’ve left no tracks,’ the commander said. He glanced at the Wraith. ‘Do you know where they took the prisoners?’
Raine shook her head. ‘We’ve told you everything we know.’
Silho looked at the pool of drying white blood and a blinding flood of flowing colour drowned her senses. Distorted sounds first shrieked then bellowed, booming in her ears, shaking her skull. Several clear images fought through the confusion. She saw Jude being struck by a curse and falling. White blood sprayed from an injury to his neck. The witches gathered around him and she heard some words –
now . . . go . . . take him . . . the holding . . . this one . . .