The Black Rose (10 page)

There was a deep rumbling, and Sardâr ducked as the slab of ice was rent from its socket on the wall, the frozen girl pulled through the air to float beside Nimue. Before any of them could react, the Cultist had flung a fireball to the floor, where it surged upwards. Indigo flames licked the walls and furnishings, forming a superheated wall between the two sides.

Nimue raised her hand, the familiar, thorny rose lacing over it, and vanished in a swirl of black smoke.

Jack summoned his energy and held his palms up, drawing upon the moisture in the air. A sphere of water formed between his hands and catapulted into the heart of the fire. He waited expectantly for a hiss of vapor, but none came. Instead, the flames rose even higher.

“It's
Dark
alchemy,” Sardâr called over the crackling.

“We need something stronger.”

Bál raised his newly conjured axe. “We'll try something else, then.” He tensed his forearm, and a thick wreath of crimson flame unfurled from the end of the weapon, arching into the purple wall.

Jack's surprise at the dwarf's willingness to resort to alchemy was quickly outdone by his dismay at its complete lack of effect. The wave of indigo engulfed the crimson, growing even stronger.

“What are we going to do?” Ruth exclaimed.

With a loud crack, part of the floor collapsed, remnants of flaming furniture tumbling into the dark hole that had opened.

The four of them backed against the wall, and Sardâr began focusing bright light between his hands. Every few seconds, more of the floor disappeared in a flurry of sparks. The hideous furnishings had been nearly consumed; only increasingly charred plaster and wood remained.

Yells could be heard from the window near Jack. He leaned over and peered between the curtains at the street below. People were emerging from other houses on the street, staring up at the incendiary manor. As he watched, a wagon pulled up in front of the gates and a few navy-coated men clambered out to direct civilians away from the fire.

Sardâr's cry of pain pulled Jack's gaze back into the room. Loosened by the flames, a section of ceiling had collapsed, crushing one of the elf's legs. The light between his hands flickered and faded. The flames, seeming to sense this, took their chance. They began slithering over to him and wrapped their cords around his limbs, pulling him into the roaring fire.

Ruth and Bál took an arm each and hauled him back.

“This way,” Jack shouted, ripping aside the curtains and yanking the window open.

“We can't jump from here,” Ruth screamed, joining him at the window.

“What choice have we got?” Jack shouted.

The flames had consumed most of the room, leaving them with only a shrinking island behind the desk. Within moments, the desk was gone too, sliding into the corona oblivion below. Under other circumstances, Jack could have used the Seventh Shard to overcome this alchemy, but he knew that was exactly what Nimue wanted—for them to put out the fire and deal with the consequences whilst she continued with her plans unimpeded. At that moment, they had to flee rather than fight.

Jack and Ruth joined Bál in pulling Sardâr to his feet and assisting him to the window. Jack looked at the three sooty faces: Bál nodding, resolute; Ruth shaking her head, terrified; Sardâr grimacing, pained. He looked through the second-story window at the pavement below.

They jumped.

Perhaps naturally for someone who'd grown up on a steady diet of James Bond and
Die Hard,
Jack still retained some faith that leaping several meters down onto stone would be fine and would not hurt. It wasn't, and it did.

He hit the ground on his side and heard a couple of snaps, nuclear agony exploding across his upper body. He had spent three weeks in combat training, been hit by Dark alchemical lightning, and journeyed in and out of a volcano, and this still factored high on the pain scale. He tried to pull himself to his feet but was unable. He couldn't move his left arm at all, and even lifting his neck shot arrows across his nerves.

All he could see were the boots of those navy-coated men marching towards them. Ruth and Bál's explanations turned to cries of protest as they were hauled to the wagon. The dwarf's struggle was proving too much for the captor, but Bál was soon restrained by several more whilst one beat him to his knees with a truncheon.

Jack recognized his own voice shouting just as he felt a force on his shoulders. He was being dragged across the road towards the same wagon, his wounded arm scraping the street.

The pain was too much. He blacked out.

Jack became aware of the pain before he properly woke. As he rose out of the depths of his unconscious mind, the dull ache grew stronger and stronger, until he could feel he was lying on a hard surface. His eyes flicked open, and he got his first look at the room.

It was a small chamber constructed entirely of stone: underground, it seemed, by the way the barred window was crammed in the very top corner. The only light—that of the fog-masked moon and flickering street lamps—filtered through these bars, and from this Jack could just about make out the scene.

Sardâr lay on a bench opposite him, unconscious, whilst Bál slumped on the floor rubbing his truncheon wounds. Ruth, the only one who looked unharmed, was standing, apparently unable to keep still. Seeing he was awake, she flurried over to him.

“Don't even think about it,” she said as he prepared to hoist himself up. She smiled and stroked his hair lightly.

Despite the situation, he was struck again by how beautiful she was: her skin the tone and texture of warm chocolate, her eyes like large onyx jewels set in milky oases. The pain seemed to have made everything a little more poetic. He felt the almost euphoric urge to slide his fingers around the base of her neck and press his lips to hers.

The face of an irate dwarf plugged the empty space in Jack's vision, somewhat ruining the moment. “Have you learnt any healing alchemy yet?” Bál said.

“No,” Jack replied, trying to restrain his annoyance, “but I guess I can give it a go.” Trying to stave off the pain a little longer, he placed his right hand on the dwarf's shoulder and closed his eyes. He knew healing alchemy was tied to Light, and so he focused on accumulating the powers of the different elements around him: the street lamps for fire, the dampness for water and air, the stone benches for earth. He channeled all of this into the Seventh Shard. Seeing it shining even through his eyelids, he allowed it to flow down his right arm into the dwarf.

He opened his eyes.

Bál felt his bruises again. They seemed to have faded considerably.

“Great, now try you,” Ruth said.

Jack looked down at his limp left arm. He thought he'd probably pass out again if he tried to move it. It looked broken in two places, judging by the way he seemed to have mutated additional joints on the bicep and below the wrist. A month ago, he reflected, this would have been monumental. Now, though, it seemed an expectable part of the whole sorcerer-fighting experience.

He placed his good hand on the bad arm and closed his eyes again, summoning the same elements as before and channeling them through the Shard. It was much harder this time, not only because his energy was diminished but also because broken bones were a much bigger deal than bruising.

He opened his eyes. The breaks seemed to be gone—his left arm was smooth—but something was wrong. He swung his legs down from the bench to sit up straight. There was only a slight twinge of pain, but he could feel the healed arm was now several inches shorter than the other one.

“How does it feel?” Ruth asked sympathetically, clearly having noticed the difference.

“It's okay. It'll have to do until Sardâr can take a proper look at it. Is he okay?”

“I hope so. He's breathing, but that dark fire stuff can't have done any good.”

Jack got up and checked the elf's breathing. His face was pale and plastered with sweat, and he winced even in sleep.

“So this is prison, then? How long have we been here?”

“I don't think this is actual prison. I think it's just a jail cell. And I'm not sure how long we've been here. A few hours, maybe?” Ruth, sitting with her knees to her chest, looked anxious. Jack remembered she'd been imprisoned in Nexus: their current predicament couldn't be doing much to assuage her panic.

“So how do we get out, then?” Bál demanded.

Jack had to suppress another flare of annoyance. They were all in this cell. Just because Bál, a member of a royal family, had enjoyed free rein all his life didn't make this experience any worse for him than for anyone else.

“I don't know,” Jack said. “We can't do much until Sardâr wakes up. I don't really want to try any alchemy on him. I'm not sure exactly what's wrong with him. Ruth, don't you have that egg for
The Golden Turtle?
Can't you call up the crew?”

Ruth shook her head sadly and produced a mangled mechanism from her pocket. “It shattered in the fall. Ishmael gave that to me too.”

They passed the next few hours in uneasy silence. Jack put an arm around Ruth, and she rested her head on his lap. The cell stank—an unpleasant combination of urine and stale food that, contrary to expectations, seemed to become
more
noticeable the longer they stayed. Sardâr didn't move at all. Though very uncomfortable against the stone, Jack eventually followed the other two into sleep.

After some imperceptible amount of time, Ruth shook him awake. She was sitting bolt upright, pointing at the barred window.

Blinking to adjust to the darkness of the cell, he tried to see what she was gesturing at. Something obscured the streetlight: a crouching figure, rattling the bars.

Bál awoke with a start and, as if by instinct, reached for his axe.

Jack stood and, motioning the others to stay back, crept towards the window. “Hello?”

The figure drew out what looked like a glowing green wire from somewhere. There was a noise like a buzz saw, and the remnants of the bars jangled on the cell floor.

“Quickly,” hissed a Cockney voice, “someone will've heard that.” A rope was slung down to him.

Jack glanced into the cell, held up an index finger to Ruth and Bál, and proceeded to ascend the rope. It was a mark of his recent burst of fitness that he was able to do this with an injured arm: being bellowed at for his inability to climb a rope had been a recurrent feature of PE classes.

He pulled himself through the window, trying not to scrape the remaining edges of bars, and hauled himself to his feet. They were in a side alley, and the first vestiges of daylight were breaking over the soot-encrusted sky.

Jack looked at his rescuer and started. It was the boy from the factory. “Dannie! What are you doing here? I mean, it's great, but how—?”

“We'll have plenty of time to talk in a minute,” the boy replied, “but let's just get your friends out first. Oh, and there's something you should probably know.” Dannie pulled off his flat cap, and a tightly concealed bundle of dirty-blonde hair was let loose. “It's actually Danielle, but the name Dannie's fine.”

Jack stared at her blankly for a moment. “Erm, okay then. Let's help the others up.”

Getting Ruth and Bál out was easy, particularly once the dwarf got over the initial surprise of being rescued by a factory colleague… who'd turned out to be a girl.

Sardâr was more difficult. Whatever was wrong with him, he wouldn't wake up, so they had to find a way to maneuver him out of a window that was practically on the ceiling. In the end, they managed it by Bál supporting the elf's weight whilst Jack levitated him out alchemically. It looked a little like an alien abduction.

“Right, so where are we going? Back to The Kestrel's Quill?”

Ruth shook her head. “No point. The Cult will have left the city by now. And there's the small problem of us now being bankrupt escaped convicts. I think we should head back to
The Golden Turtle.”

They made their way down to the river as quickly and quietly as they could, a job made much harder because they had to carry Sardâr like a corpse. To any passersby, Jack thought they must have looked very suspicious.

The rising sun shimmered through the clouds of smoke and reflected off the rain-smeared rooftops as the river came in sight. The early risers were already up, including a newspaper vendor. Ruth peered round the corner of an alley to see her own face—badly rendered and made to look older and nastier—glaring at her from the front of a newspaper.

It was next to similar portraits of Jack, Bál, and Sardâr under a thickly printed headline:

She waited until the vendor was distracted selling a paper, then signalled for the other three to follow her across the road. Jack and Bál hobbled along with a limp, Sardâr clutched between them.

“I guess we won't be coming back here anytime soon,” Jack said as they reached the riverbank.