The Shattered City (25 page)

Rhian smiled. ‘All of you, look after yourselves,' she echoed, and was it Velody's imagination or was she looking directly at Macready? ‘Look after each other.' Rhian went to join Delphine and the Duchessa.

Velody closed her eyes. It was still there, that beacon future, bright and fierce. She could see everything. It all made so much sense that she ached with it. ‘Heliora should go with them,' she said.

Ashiol looked at her as if she was crazy. ‘Why?'

Because that's where she is when the sky breaks open
. ‘The Duchessa may be a target again, when the battle comes. The nox knows her now. Neither Rhian nor Delphine are experienced in the ways of the Creature Court.'

‘I may as well be useful,' Heliora agreed.

Swords, they were going to need swords, too. Velody looked up and saw Crane watching her steadily. He knew there was something going on with her, even if no one else did. Velody just gazed at him, their eyes locked together, hers silently pleading. Crane broke first. ‘Come
on, Heliora. You know you've been dying to play sentinel again. I'll show you how it's done.'

Heliora laughed suddenly. ‘Are you going to share your swords with me, pretty boy?'

‘I wouldn't go that far.' Crane gave Velody one last meaningful look before he and Heliora went over to join the Duchessa's makeshift retinue.

Thank you, thank you. I'm sorry.

Velody looked back to Ashiol. He didn't seem to know what she was up to. He just looked like he usually did — sexy and hungry and ready for battle. ‘We should go,' she said.

Ashiol nodded once and turned to the untidy stage tent. ‘Lords and Court! Attend your Power and Majesty. The circus is over … but we have an encore to perform.' He turned back to her, eyes glowing. ‘Together,' he said, with an intensity that surprised her.

If only that were true
. ‘Together,' Velody agreed, tasting the lie on her tongue.

T
he sky was a bright, angry red. Velody, with Ashiol at her side and the Lords and Court at her back, emerged from the tunnels into the city above to find that nox had fallen early and the moon was rising, full and perfect, glowing with scarlet light.

‘Hard to see how that could be a good omen,' Poet said in a quiet voice.

‘Never seen it like that before,' said Warlord.

‘There are no cracks,' Livilla said. ‘No points of weakness. Apart from the colour, the sky looks
quiet
. Where are they going to come from?'

‘Everywhere,' Priest said. He spoke so rarely now that it was easy to forget he was there. Velody noticed that the other Lords were still reacting uncomfortably to him, unwilling to entirely believe that he was the same man he had always been. ‘They will take our sky apart and start on the city, brick by brick.'

Lennoc just stood there, glowing in his unfamiliar Lord form, and said nothing.

‘If we can just get through this nox,' Velody said in a steady voice. ‘The circus did its work, we'll have the protection back and the city will mend itself at dawn.' She didn't know how she managed to sound so confident, but someone had to be.

‘Also there will be fairies who leave cakes on our pillows in exchange for our baby teeth,' Ashiol growled. ‘So that's all right, then. Here it comes.'

The sky began to crumble, from edge to edge. The moon brightened in the darkness.
Now
.

A long tearing wound sliced across the sky, and dark shapes bled out of it.

Velody called the Creature Court into the sky, and not one of them hesitated to answer her battle cry.

This is how it starts, and this is how it ends.

 

The sky was angry. That was just fine with Ashiol because he had gone so far past angry.

Fucking fucking fucking Aufleur. This city had been biting and gnawing and chewing at him since he was a boy, destroying any chance he might have had at a normal life, and what did he have to show for it?

Another battle. A red moon. Fine dust pouring out of cracks in the sky, drifting on the breeze with an odd kind of beauty to it. Velody. Always Velody, floating there in the sky beside him, brave and uncompromising as she watched the dust fall. Damn her to the seven hells too.

The dust scattered in wide arcs across the sky and then shaped itself into arms, legs, muscles, blades. A living foe.

‘Frig me sideways,' Poet said in wonder. ‘Devils. After all this time. Devils.'

Ashiol said nothing, but an old conversation with Garnet filled his mind and his memory. Always Garnet.
Why do we always have to fight lights and fire and — all this insubstantial shit? Why don't we ever get people to fight? Real enemies — warriors with faces to smash in, veins to bleed, swords to duel against? Where are the fucking devils?

Someone had replied:
Be careful what you wish for.
For the life of him, though, Ashiol could not remember which of them it had been.

‘They could as easily be angels,' Livilla breathed. ‘How can we tell?'

‘It doesn't matter what they are,' Velody said, ‘we have to fight them, force them back. Or we lose everything.'

Game on. Ashiol hissed low in his throat, the sound of a cat faced with an enemy far larger and more fearsome than he.
Game fucking on
.

 

Fighting the sky had never been like this before. Velody slashed and burned her way through the army of dust devils, her chimaera form glowing with dark animor. Her blood felt hot and pounded inside her veins as she battled.

‘We're not getting anywhere,' Poet yelled from nearby. His hands and feet, glowing white in Lord form, dissolved the devils when he hit them, but they would simply reshape themselves elsewhere.

The dust felt hot to the touch, and made Velody's chimaera skin itch where it brushed against her. She let out a cry, the animor exploding in a burst of light from her throat, and the nearest devils vanished under her assault.

There were always more.

She blasted a second group of them, who had clustered around Poet. He emerged looking unflappable, as usual. ‘Much obliged, Lady Majesty.'

‘Ever a pleasure,' Velody said, the words coming strangely out of her thick chimaera body. She could see Ashiol and Warlord fighting more of those things, surrounded by Warlord's many courtesi. Livilla and Priest were further across the sky. Lennoc was doing well on his own, his slender brighthound bodies darting quickly back and forth, never letting themselves be caught.

The devils stopped. All of them. A momentary pause, but it was noticeable. Their faces (if you could really say that those were faces) all turned inexorably in one direction.

Velody whirled around to see what had caught their attention, and saw two figures on the roof of a temple high on the Avleurine hill. Kelpie and Macready, both with skysilver swords flashing.

Warlord moved first, a dark streak across the sky, but then the devils moved, all of them converging at once upon the two sentinels.

The devils were faster.

 

Macready didn't realise the fecking devils were coming for him and Kelpie until it was too late and they were on top of them. He fought with sword and knife, the skysilver carving up the devil figures, though the dust kept reshaping into new bodies. The air was filled with howls and cries that didn't seem to come from fecking anywhere.

Kelpie went down first, under a wave of glittering bodies. Warlord swooped over them, blasting the devils back into the dust they came from.

Macready stepped back, once and then again, until he was standing right over Kelpie, protecting her from the hordes.

One of the devils seized Kelpie's fallen Sister, waving the sword in something like triumph, and another dragged her knife right out of her hand.

The devil holding the sword seemed harder somehow — leaner and sharper and more real. Macready feinted and lunged at him, and the tip of Tarea met resistance instead of gliding through an insubstantial body.

Feck it.

Velody was yelling at him from somewhere. ‘They want the skysilver!'

‘It makes them stronger,' he yelled back.

But then the dust came down around him, thick and fast, and there was no holding on to his blades, not when he could not see or breathe or …

He let go. He hated himself for doing it, but damn it all. He wasn't the Silver Captain. He wasn't going to die, not here. He relinquished his blades and let the dust take him.

For a moment, he couldn't move; there was just heat and dryness sucking the moisture out of him, and his head was full of that bastard Garnet and the pain in his finger as it was severed from his hand …

Some time later Macready coughed, and lifted his head from Kelpie's chest. She was breathing too, but barely, the sound ragged and scraped. He looked up and saw the Creature Court close around several solid, real devils who no longer looked as if they were made only of dust and moonlight.

‘Where is my bloody sword?' Kelpie demanded through a throat that could barely produce a sound.

‘Gone,' said Macready. Both his skysilver blades. Both hers. ‘They're gone, my lovely.'

He would have preferred to lose another finger.

 

The streets were bright and cold — too cold for Felicitas, despite the eerie red light that made it look like there were fires somewhere. It was so long since Isangell had walked the streets like an ordinary citizen. The last year had been spent in private mourning for the old Duc, her grandfather; running the city behind closed doors with her ministers and priests, allowing half a dozen fair-haired priestesses to perform her ritual roles in public.

Perhaps it would be better if she had kept up that tradition. Though the memory of seeing the false Duchessa take a sword through her chest still chilled her. Everything had gone dark in that moment, but part of Isangell had reacted viscerally, had felt something hard bite into her flesh.

There were some duties Isangell would rather not personally fulfil.

This Creature Court, these people of Ashiol's, they frightened her. The young man with the swords acted with the assurance of a soldier twice his age, but there was only one of him. When Isangell went out, it was usually with at least a quadrigo of lictors.

Ashiol's eyes had slid away from Isangell as soon as his people started talking about the sky. It was as if he could not stand in two places at once — could not be whatever he was to them and his daylight self in the same body. Could not care about her and the animals in the same thought.

She had seen so much today. Isangell did not want to
think about this new knowledge, about the worlds of strange illusion Ashiol had opened her eyes to. She wanted to block the images of the crazy circus from her mind, to forget entirely about men who shaped themselves into beasts and birds and bats. If at the same time she could forget Ashiol telling her how he had tried to hang himself, that would be more than acceptable.

There was not enough nettlebane in the world for this. Isangell's head ached.

It should not be dark this early; the hour was not approaching sunset and yet it was dark, the only illumination coming from that terrible crimson full moon hanging overhead. The old Duc had always been frightened by full moons. The first undeniable sign of his failing mind had been one Ides, when he attempted to personally draw every curtain in the Palazzo, to keep the bright moonlight out. Isangell still remembered that look of weary comprehension on her grandmama's face, as if she had been waiting her entire marriage for this moment, the first of many partings from her husband. The beginning of the end.

Isangell was accompanied by demoiselles, at least. Ashiol had not gone so far as to spit in the face of propriety, even if they were not exactly the kinds of maids and ladies-in-waiting to whom Isangell was accustomed. The blonde demoiselle spoke well, as if she was used to being among the Great Families. The other tall and quiet demoiselle, Rhian, had rougher hands and a rougher accent, though she seemed in all other ways respectable.

Then there was the one they called Heliora, who looked like a street drab, and must have had the pox, to do that to her hair. The others listened to her instructions, and there was a strange power about her.
Isangell felt as if she had known this demme in another life; her voice seemed so familiar. Perhaps it was something she had dreamed.

The young soldier stopped suddenly, drawing the lighter and more silvery of his swords with a hiss. ‘Stay back.' His entire body was composed as if he faced some dreadful creature, though there was nothing but air between him and the street.

‘I see nothing,' Isangell protested, but stopped when Heliora reached out a commanding hand, gesturing for her to halt. Heliora peered at the air before the soldier's sword as if it personally offended her.

‘We are not supposed to see it,' said Rhian in a low voice.

Delphine made an odd noise in her throat. ‘I see it,' she whispered. ‘Oh, saints, it's true.'

 

They just had to get the Duchessa back to her fancy Palazzo and then they could go home, all of them. Delphine could pull a blanket over her head and wait for Velody to return and tell them that, once again, the city had been saved in that odd invisible way they were supposed to believe in.

Delphine was so far from believing. Yes, there was an uncanny magic to these people; she could not sit through that whole ridiculous circus and accept that it was stage trickery that turned that creepy Poet from a horde of white rats into a man (it had taken every strength she had not to scream at that part of the show; it still made her shiver to remember being trapped in his dressing room).

What Delphine did not believe was that this battle of theirs was as dire and serious as they all seemed to
think. She had convinced herself that it was a game to entertain them all, to keep them from clawing each other's eyes out. Really, if today proved anything it was that they would all be better off channelling their energies into musette melodrama.

The small gang who had been charged with accompanying the Duchessa made their way through the Lucian district, circling the Alexandrine hill to make the most direct way to the Balisquine and the Palazzo.

Crane of the puppy-eyes stopped up ahead of them, drawing that sword of his like he knew what to do with it. While her ladyship and Rhian wasted time speaking of what they could not see, Delphine was too busy being overwhelmed by the fact that she could.

Saints, she was one of them, she really was; there was no denying it now in the face of
this
.

The creature was big, taller than Crane, shoulders wider than those of any man Delphine had ever seen. Its body was formed from a powdery dust the colour of moonlight (ordinary silver moonlight, not the blood red light that filled the sky this nox), and its face … Delphine gasped as the
thing
bared sharp teeth in a mouth entirely the wrong shape, below a nose that resembled that of a stone gargoyle rather than any actual person's.

If there were saints and angels in the world, then this was surely a devil.

‘I can't see it,' said Heliora, her voice ragged and miserable. ‘I can't see anything any more. I'm not even a sentinel any more, I'm
nothing
.'

‘Believe me, it's not pretty,' Delphine said sharply. Oh, help. It was true. If she could see that … thing, then she really had been contaminated by the world that had swallowed Velody up.

Macready had been right, damn him. Heliora might not be a sentinel, but Delphine was.

Crane stood between the demmes and the devil, sword and knife at the ready. The creature he faced did not have any weapons. That was good, right?

The glittering dust swirled, losing the devil shape to form a cloud that wrapped itself around Crane. He coughed and fell to his knees.

‘No!' It was Heliora who moved; Heliora who couldn't even see what he was fighting. She slammed into Crane from behind, and his choking cry expelled some of the devil dust from his lungs. He toppled to the cobblestones, limp but —