Lye Street (10 page)

As the afternoon before Scar Night drew on, the city tensed. Labourers, eager to finish their work by sunset, bustled through Deepgate's crooked lanes with hoppers of stone, iron and aggregate for the ongoing construction and expansion of the Warrens. Smiths worked harder at their forges. Priests rushed from home to home with their census books, and merchants chose to leave early for the River Towns.

People became edgy.

More brawls than usual broke out. In the League of Rope the tinkers and scroungers faced increased persecution. There was a small riot, and one serious house fire which claimed the lives of an elderly man and a goat.

The Tooth arrived, loaded with Blackthrone rock and mortar for the temple's new Rookery Spire. The great machine loomed above the edge of the abyss, its funnels disgorging black smoke into the heavens, reminding the faithful of the power of God.

When night fell, Carnival went to Lye Street.

Her broken wing and hands had healed, leaving fresh scars in her pale flesh. Since she'd rubbed off the witch's paint, a sense of calm had come over her. She no longer feared what she might find.

A gaping window admitted her to the top of the lye tower. She found herself in a cramped room with dead bees upon the floorboards. A skeleton lay on a mat in the corner: the remains of a woman, still wearing an old fashioned brown frock. Someone had left flowers around the body, but they had withered long ago. Ash from the lye vats below covered everything in a grey veneer. A number had been scrawled on the wall opposite.

510

A doorway led into an inner hall which opened into three more rooms. Carnival wandered into the first of these.

This chamber was identical in size and layout to the first. Fragments of a smashed mirror lay strewn across the floor. The lack of ash on the glass made the angel think it had been broken recently. She saw a name scrawled on the wall.

Henry Bucklestrappe

Carnival returned to the hall, and then entered the third room: another chamber, similar to the first two. On this wall, somebody had written a second name in chalk.

Flora Whitten.

Fragments of chalk still lay on the floor beneath it. Carnival picked up one of these pieces and copied the name,
Flora
, writing it underneath the original. The handwriting matched, just as she had always known it would. She let the chalk fall to the floor.

In the last room she found a single word, written in her own hand.

Rape.

A small diary had been left for her on the window ledge. Carnival picked it up. It was ancient, mould speckled, with a tarnished silver clasp. The leather bindings were falling apart, the pages brittle and yellow. She held the diary to her chest and peered out of the window. From the base of the lye tower, the street rose to the temple watchtower at the opposite end. Carnival could see the silhouettes of winged statues, falcons, perched upon the building's summit, and the outline of a ballista. A Spine assassin patrolled the spaces between, nursing a crossbow in the crook of his arm.

The cobbles below the watchtower glimmered faintly in the starlight, but the tenements on either side of the street were dark and shuttered, heavily barricaded against Scar Night.
Against her.
Deepgate remained silent, but for the ever-present sound of creaking chains

Someone was hammering on the door. It being Scar Night, Sal Greene decided not to answer. He wasn't that dumb. Instead, he remained exactly where he was under the upturned bathtub and hugged Ellie and Mina closer to his chest.

The pup yowled.

Mina nuzzled it and giggled.

A male voice shouted up from the street outside. "Open up, citizen. Presbyter Scrimlock's orders."

Scrimlock's
orders? Greene lifted the bathtub.

"Dad?"

"Stay here, princess; look after Mina. I'll just be a minute."

He padded down the stairs, and unbolted the door.

Six Spine assassins stood in the street outside, their pale, wasted faces like those of the dead. Was this about the smuggling investigation? The bastards picked a fine night to batter on his door.

Greene shot a wary glance at the old lye tower beside his house, alert for wings, before he returned his attention to the assassins. "If you're looking for the House of Fans," he said, "you've come three streets too far." He pointed up the hill. "What you need to do is go back up Lye Street, left at the watchtower–"

One of the assassins interrupted him. "We are not searching for a brothel, Mr Greene." She had the same dull, vaporous eyes as the others. Scrapes in her leathers indicated heavy use. "You are required to come with us for your own safety."

So Cope had been right. The Church knew all about the angel's curse.

And they thought a nice conversation under the darkmoon would be a good way to start ensuring his safety?

"Thanks, but I'll pass." Greene closed the door.

He managed to get ten steps down the hallway before they broke it down.

Darkmoon had risen by the time Carnival closed Flora Whitten's diary. She wondered why the girl had chosen to use a rope instead of a knife in the end. So as not to spill any blood?

To ensure she'd go to Heaven?

The angel slipped the small book into a pocket in her leather jerkin. It fitted snugly, as though it had worn a space for itself over many, many years. Had Carnival always carried the book with her?

She gazed out across the starlit rooftops.

How many more secrets had she hidden from herself? What part of her had always known the truth about Henry Bucklestrappe's crime, had made him a promise, and then strived to keep it all these years? Carnival must have watched and persecuted his family for generations. It seemed to her that she harboured a ghost inside, the shadow of a murderer who had stolen her memories and who roamed the city while the angel slept.

Now this ghost had brought her to Lye Street, to murder someone the angel didn't know: Sal Greene, a man innocent of his ancestor's crime yet doomed to die for it. Who had Flora Whitten been? Had Carnival known her? Or had the scarred angel just happened to find the girl's diary all those years ago?

She pulled out her knife and studied the hilt, the circle marking she had drawn on so many walls throughout the city. Then she brought out the crumpled flowers and ribbons she'd taken from the witch. For a long moment she looked at what she held in each scarred hand.

I can make all that is ugly about you beautiful.

Carnival threw the knife away, and heard it skitter across the rooftops. Then she tied the flowers and ribbons into her hair.

The sound of crashing timbers came from the street below.

From the lye tower window, Carnival watched six temple assassins drag Sal Greene out of his house and then herd him up Lye Street towards Barraby's watchtower. The thump of blood rose in her ears and soon drowned out his curses. She could suddenly smell the building around her, the stench of ash and rainwater and brick. A sharp pain in her fist made her gasp. She was clutching a shard of broken mirror in her bloodied fingers. Dark, terrible eyes peered back at her from the glass. She did not recognise the face in the reflection, but the face clearly recognised her. She stifled a scream.

Was this insanity?

Carnival met that lunatic gaze for as long as she could bear, then flung the piece of mirror away and heard it shatter against the wall.

She sucked in a deep breath, and another. And then she concentrated, squeezing the window ledge until the sound of howling faded from her veins.

Quickly, she climbed through a hatch in the floor, down the ladder into the dark belly of the tower. Huge vats loomed under a canopy of rusted pipes. Water dripped, striking eerie, soulless notes in the gloom. The heartbeat of the building itself. Beside the vats she found a stone trough full of brown liquid.

Carnival slid Flora's diary into the caustic solution and watched it sink from sight.

She left through the front door.

A blow punched air from her lungs, pitching her backwards. She crashed against the door frame, the impact jarring her newly-healed wing. When she opened her eyes she saw that she had been engulfed in a chain-mesh net. Carnival hissed and ripped the fine metal links apart, shedding the remains of the net like a flimsy cocoon.

She looked up.

Temple assassins swarmed over the rooftops on both sides of the street, more Spine than she'd ever seen together before. She heard the whisper of steel, the click of bow latches, the squeal of windlass coils being rewound. Six of the assassins were spinning metal nets around their heads, while a score of others loaded bolts and harpoons into their crossbows.

With a powerful thump of her wings she took to the air. She dragged herself skywards, skirting laundry lines, until she came almost level with the tenement roofs. Here her enemies surrounded her.

They loosed their weapons.

She dived below a thrown net, banking and weaving through a flight of harpoons, but then an impact spun her around in the air. Lye Street reeled, and suddenly she was falling. Her foot snagged one of the laundry lines, which stretched and snapped. She hit the ground and rolled, both wings crumpling under her back. Her head struck something hard, metallic. A plate bolted to the street? For a heartbeat her thoughts spun in confusion.

Where was she?
Why
had she come here?

A harpoon jutted from Carnival's shoulder. She noticed a slender cable, attached to the missile's shaft, rising up towards the roof of the building in front of her. From above came the sound of winches turning. The cable drew taut, then Carnival felt herself being dragged rapidly across the cobbled ground.

Fury bucked inside her.

Snarling, the angel ripped the harpoon out of the dense muscles in her shoulder, sending an arc of blood as high as the rooftops. Her wound burned savagely, but it would heal in moments. She could already feel her blood clotting, swelling up inside her again, coursing through her veins with renewed vigour. Scars itched and flared on her arms, her face, her fists. Her dark eyes thinned.

Her knife! Where was her knife?

A cry came from the watchtower at the top of Lye Street. Carnival spun to see a group of assassins bundling a man through the tower doorway. Their glances met. His eyes widened in terror. She recognised him.
Bucklestrappe's descendant.
But then the door boomed shut and he was gone.

Bolts and harpoons whined all around her, ripped holes through her wings. Nets clashed against the cobbles, but Carnival ignored it all. With her scars now writhing, tightening around her chest and neck, she roared and spat blood and set off through the onslaught, heading up Lye Street towards the tower door.

Barraby's watchtower stood pinned within a thicket of chains, all radiating outwards like a child's drawing of sunbeams. Windows gaped in its walls, as black and empty as the abyss below the courtyard foundations, as thin as murderholes. A lean man might squeeze through such a gap, and yet Carnival would have to damage her own wings in order to follow. The door itself looked heavily reinforced. She took to the air again.

Two Spine were working furiously on the summit of the watchtower, cranking an old lye ballista around on its cogged pivot, trying to bring its caustic load to bear on the angel. She tore out their throats with her hands and flung their corpses over the parapet.

Missiles whizzed over her head, their crescent tips flashing in the starlight. She ducked, searched for cover. On the rooftops on either side of the street, the temple assassins surged closer, a dark wave of them.
So many!

Then she saw the hatch in the tower roof.

She threw it open and plunged through.

She was in a dim stone chamber without windows. Against the outer wall, a curved stairwell sunk through the floor into deeper gloom. The rest of the space had been filled with clay pots, stacked one upon the other.

Carnival listened hard, hearing nothing, then stole down the stairwell.

Darkness filled the narrow space, yet the angel moved easily down the worn steps, her feathers brushing the roughcast wall. She passed a murderhole and peered out, but the narrow opening looked out across the rear of the courtyard. She saw nothing but rusted chains and the smokestacks of a foundry beyond.

A hissing, crackling sound came from above. Glancing back up the stairwell, the angel spied a quiver of white light.

Her instincts saved her. That uncanny wiring of nerves, which had so often driven her beyond the boundaries of pain and endurance, screamed at her now.

Move!

She threw herself down the steps as a massive concussion shook the building. She heard a
crack
, followed by the crash and rumble of stone. The watchtower lurched. Chunks of masonry poured into the stairwell, sealing it behind her. The air fogged with dust or smoke. Grit hissed through cracks in the darkness above.

Coughing and sputtering, Carnival picked herself up.

A second blast rumbled through the tower, this time from below.

The basement?

Carnival tore down the stairwell and reached a landing. An arched portal opened into another dismal chamber, lit by a single cresset set in a wall sconce.

The man she'd come to kill stood there, gazing at a sword on the floor.

"I picked the sword up," he said wearily. "Then I came to my senses and put it back down again. I've been walking around the bloody thing for a while now, trying to figure out what to do with it." He glanced up at her. "I don't know if they let me have it because they actually thought I could protect myself from you, or if it's just some kind of a joke. You know how Spine like their little jokes?"

Carnival stepped into the room.

Sal Greene put his hands in his pockets. "They used blackcake to blow the roof," he said. "And to seal the basement too, from the sound of things. I suppose it's a trap and I'm the bait. You ever see so many assassins in one place before?"

When the angel didn't answer, he went on, "I always reckoned this night would slip by me, one way or another. I tried to have you killed, you know? For the sake of my family. Didn't do me much good." Sadness clouded his eyes. He turned away. "You suit your hair like that, all spidery and windblown... And I like the ribbons." He sighed deeply, and took an unsteady step. He was shaking. "That's not going to work with you, is it? Not a chance..."

Carnival heard a scraping sound outside, followed by four loud bangs, like hammer blows.

Greene stared at the wall. "Just tell me one thing," he said. "What did Henry Bucklestrappe do to you?"

She grunted. "You don't know?"

"No."

"To me? Nothing." She heard the scuff of boots in the stairwell behind her.

Greene shook his head and smiled sadly. "You were looking out for someone else then? I never imagined it was that." He met her eyes again. "A friend of yours?"

The angel gave him an awkward shrug. She didn't know.

The old man frowned a little, but he had a look in his eyes which might have been wry amusement. "I wasn't lying about the ribbons," he said. "Makes you look... I don't know, like you give a shit about something other than killing every single person you meet."

From outside the tower came the rasp of a hundred blades being drawn.

Carnival felt the darkmoon thirst rise inside her, quickening her pulse, inflaming her scars. Her hands tightened into fists. She wondered what she'd done with her knife. She reached for her breast pocket, but it was empty.

Behind her, the footsteps grew louder. She heard the scrape of steel against the stairwell wall. The temple assassins had almost reached her. The Spine sword lay on the floor before her, its hammered steel edges gleaming in the light of the cresset. Carnival moved to pick up the weapon, but stopped.

I can make all that is ugly about you beautiful.

The angel raised a hand to touch the ribbons and flowers she had woven into her hair, and she thought about the hellish eyes she'd seen reflected in the shard of mirror. Was that how she appeared now? Despair swamped her heart. Tears prickled the corners of her eyes.