Transmuted (14 page)

However, the travels in such cramped quarters did not last. These tunnels were not the only part of the belowground community.

The markets were held in one of the rare caverns; a junction where many passages came to meet and canals carved into the ground allowed the stuff I dared not call
water
to flow away. It was no less cramped, but this was due to structures and people rather than the closeness of the walls. The markets were as brightly lit as day, but with a great deal more shadow thanks to the constant sputtering of the lamps.

We came upon the market without its usual excess of sound, which served as a warning all on its own.

Typically, the whole echoed like a roar. The sheer amount of residents, hawkers, buyers and other such vermin swarming near promise of food or coin or work provided a restless cacophony.

Instead, there was something less of a roar and more of a whispered murmur. Such a sound tended to carry similar refrain, regardless of what class might be causing it. It was one of curiosity, of uncertainty.

Of outright horror.

Something had upset the denizens of a world where murder was as likely as a greeting. The market was not the same as the Menagerie’s open stands and vending stalls. This was a thing built into the very walls, broadened by wood jumbled together and shored by whatever means possible. Ladders, stairs and rungs made of the bracing served as methods to climb, should one have need. Bridges held together by spit and willpower crossed overhead, some of wood and others of knotted rope. It was just as dangerous as Cat’s Crossing below the drift, but much more jumbled.

I was not inclined to risk it. Fortunately, there was no need.

A large portion of cluttered shacks and stands had been cordoned off. I saw men and women bearing those glints of verdigris holding off the curious. Some had only to glare, others to wave them away with a friendly word.

Still others bristled with weapons bared—often a hunk of wood with nails driven through.

The poor man’s billy club.

Uriah gestured us down a narrow lane. “Gird yourself,” he warned.

The faintest of fragrances tickled my nose, but with my olfactory receptors long since beaten into submission, I could not pin it.

I did not long have to guess.

The first sign of murder most foul came upon the stoop—a splash of blood dried nearly brown. The shop was not a structure, as such, but the walls that had come to mark its interior had been nailed in place as support for higher stalls and platforms. A door had been cut into the planks, leaving an uneven edge.

Uriah stopped just outside. “Your service begins here.”

I studied the blood by his filthy boot. “What do you want us to do?”

“Find who did this,” he said grimly. “Find them, and if you can’t drag them to me for proper vengeance, then put a bloody end to them yourself.”

As a rule, I had never accepted notices demanding murder. It was not a line I was comfortable crossing. Of all the notices I had ever claimed, only one had ended in murder by my own hands.

It was a stain I carried, and I did not want to broaden it.

Nor did I care to tarnish it with the blood of others.

It was an odd sort of way to honor the man who had been first my friend, and then my rival.

Hawke, on the other hand, had no such compunctions. He sniffed at the air, his eyes sliding beyond us to the crowds. “One night?”

“If you cannot achieve this in one night,” Uriah said, “then there is no foul.” It seemed an odd way to demand service, but that was the Underground. It wasn’t so much honor as the expectation of our word kept that demanded we work as we had committed.

Were we to slack in our commitment, he would know.

Such was the nature of things.

Zhànzhàn approached my side. “This is not the clean work of an assassin.”

“You can tell simply from one splash of blood?” I asked her.

“From this one, yes.” She entered the doorway first.

It felt like a challenge.

I darted inside before either man behind me could protest.

Eventually, I might learn something of patience. Perhaps if I were to throw myself headlong into more scenes of visceral carnage, the instinct for caution would one day develop. As it was, this was only the second such scene I had ever stepped into—literally speaking, no less.

That something soft and viscous squished beneath my boot struck my flailing senses first. That it was attached to the shredded remains of a torso without limbs or head followed swiftly after.

Nausea surged within me.

The Chinese girl stood in the midst of such slaughter that even the lamps could not distinguish what was blood and what was shadow, and she did not quail.

What terrible things had she seen—had she done—that this did not affect her? Oh, how I hated the Veil and all it stood for.

A firm hand gripped my upper arm. It kept me from swaying, but I wrested free, determined to stand under my own power. The look I turned upon Ashmore was one of desperate restraint. “Do not,” I hissed, barely a sound through clenched teeth.

If I unclenched them, I might lose what little remained in my belly.

My tutor’s features were a pale mask beneath the dirt we all wore. He did not reach for me again, and I understood this a measure of acknowledgement. “This is not the work of humans,” he said tightly.

My heart beat like a drum gone awry, too high in my throat and overly loud. No matter where I looked, there was death. The most awful of deaths, torn limb from limb and left to rot with soft organs hanging out. I’d seen this similar horror once before, only it were Bakers strewn like so much refuse—men I’d known.

I could not count how many poor souls had fallen to the claws of the beasts we hunted.

Too many.

But why had they marked this shop?

Globules of congealing mass squished and squelched as Zhànzhàn stepped through the carnage.

My jaw locked.

My tutor noticed. “You don’t have—” My chin lifted. Ashmore subsided mid-sentence.

“Do as you must.”

I would. I had to. There was no other choice for me but to follow that wretched girl across the blood- and limb-strewn interior. My pride would allow for nothing less. “What type of shop was this?” Ashmore asked, and I heard Uriah answer from outside, but not what.

His rumble seemed strained.

I blamed him not at all.

“Many things,” Zhànzhàn said as I halted at her side. She bent over the counters—or what planks and crates had served as counters. The long, glossy tail of her hair spilled down her shoulder. “Most is gone.”

“What was here?” I asked, turning to study the adjoining collection of what had been holding crates. Now they were splintered beyond repair.

A dusting of yellow marred the fractured edge of one strip of wood. It congealed to a bloody mess on the edge.

I bent with care, trying not to pay any attention to the sound the thick layer of blood beneath my boots made. The feel of it continued to press against the soles of my feet, a steady horror that weighted my forced calm.

“Medicines?” Ashmore said, and I glanced up with the wood between my fingers to raise my eyebrows at him. “Uriah says this was a known apothecary.”

“Just an apothecary?” I asked.

“And sundry,” Ashmore repeated when Uriah’s voice failed to reach me. I lifted the wood to eye-level. Yellow granules, not quite a powder, but fine enough to puff like one. I bent my nose to it, inhaled gingerly.

The faintest of impressions confirmed my suspicion. “Sulfur,” I called. Leaving Zhànzhàn to her own devices, I retraced my steps to show Ashmore the powder. “Uriah, did this place sell mercury?”

The man ducked to peer into the portico, such as it was. “Not often.”

“What else was sold here?”

This earned a narrowed glance—I might have thought it humor but for the sheer inappropriateness of that emotion given the carnage I stood in. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said,” I snapped. “What other services were provided here?”

Uriah hemmed and hawed for a moment’s breath, then sighed deeply and said, “Fencing ken.”

Ashmore was not as keen on the vulgar tongue of the streets as I. His puzzlement was clear enough that I translated the notion for him without asking. “A place where stolen goods are stored.”

Though I might prefer the concept of coincidence to one of fate, magic, or other such sundry, I was not so blind to the idea that I would ignore a clue when it appeared. Letting Ashmore retain the stick with its sulfur grains upon it, I fished the notice from my pocket and handed it to Uriah. “Is this the place a stolen diamond is bound to be stored?”

He did not take the notice, but glanced at it. That he was literate added to his mystique. “Likely,” Uriah said. “But this kind of coin don’t come easy. Not even to me.” Which meant someone with greater sources of wealth
and
a line into the Underground. That closed up suspects across the board.

Through his knowledge garnered from Menagerie dealings, perhaps Hawke would know of—
Oh.

Hawke.

Grasping the creaking planks for balance, I leaned outside the door and surveyed the exterior. Shadows loomed at the farthest expanses, hovered like physical entities wherever nooks and crannies allowed.

The people held back, the curious and the horrified, and talked among themselves. Some flung jeers at Uriah’s guard, and otherwise behaved as onlookers always did.

But it was not them I searched for.

“Ashmore,” I said, brow furrowing deeply.

“Yes?”

I looked back over my shoulder to find him carefully carving a bit of the sulfur-laden splinters from the wood. Where the knife had come from briefly bothered me, for mine had not been returned.

“Where,” I asked, “is Hawke?”

My tutor looked up from his careful task. “What?” Then, with more intensity and much less helpfully, “Where?”

Uriah stepped from his post outside the door and scanned the lane. “He was just here.” And now he was not.

I rubbed at my forehead. It did nothing to lift the pressure I struggled to focus through. Bloody bells and the Devil’s own, I would leash that tiger if it was the last thing I did.

Just see if I didn’t.

Chapter Thirteen

That I convinced Ashmore to let me search the immediate area for Hawke was a matter of simple logic. Somebody had to remain behind to watch our unwitting Chinese companion. Were she to misbehave, I trusted Ashmore to run her down a sight quicker than Uriah or I.

The former would not, by sheer fact that Zhànzhàn was no longer his concern. I would have taken great pleasure in reining the Chinese girl in, however I was not so arrogant that I thought it to be an easy matter.

Ashmore, on the other hand, seemed a better candidate for her obeisance and general safety.

Of course, I didn’t give my tutor much opportunity to argue.

He was still trying as I darted out into the narrow lanes.

I turned away from the crowds, slipping down a cramped alley that served as a thoroughfare despite its size. Signs of hard use remained everywhere—refuse and discarded items clustered under pools of light. Cloth hung from support beams nailed into place with no eye for aesthetic rhyme nor reason.

Shadows clung everywhere they could find purchase. Unlike the streets below the drift, there was no sense of movement here. Only the stillness, unique to the Underground, that came with no breeze, no sky.

No daylight.

It was as much luck as an eye for likely passages that crossed my path with Hawke’s. I found him crouching at a crossroad formed by uneven planks, one hand braced upon the ground, and his face tilted to the air.

His shoulders had eased, but it would be a fool who mistook the display as letting down his guard. He could launch into motion from such a position in less time than it took to scream.

Thoughts of slipping up behind him were quickly dispelled when his head turned just so, favoring me with the angle of his jaw and a twist of bared teeth. It was as much a personal warning to me as it was general notice of something amiss.

“There’s something here,” he said by way of greeting.

I never expected an apology from Hawke. Not even should he worry his companions.

Hawke was Hawke. Intelligent beings let him well enough alone.

I did not feel all that intelligent.

I approached on nominally soundless feet. Were it any man but him, I doubt I would have been heard at all. “You wandered off.”

He graced me with no answer.

I bit back a tart word and asked, “Is it a thing you smell?”

“Smell,” he repeated grimly, “sense. Something of the sort.”

I halted behind him, close enough that I could stroke a hand down the thick plait of his hair, if I so chose. That my fingers twitched to do just that earned them a burying in my pockets. “Can you place it?”

“No.” A breath, and then with less certainty, “Not entirely. Something about it seems familiar.”

“Well, well,” I said before I could stop myself. “So even Micajah Hawke has moments of doubt.”

He rose so swiftly—a breathtaking release of agile strength—that I took a step back before I could refrain. The look he favored me upon turning, arrogant beyond measure, said he expected no less.

Because I was, in the end, myself, I regained that step. Took another closer, as though to dare that conceit.

How much did it say of my desires that even smeared with the ambient coal and grime of fog and sundry, I still found his attraction to be near insurmountable?

Too much, I’d wager.

Deliberately, I turned half from him to survey the shadows beyond us. “Can you trace it?”

“No.” He lifted a hand to his face, cupping his mouth and nose. Frustration twisted his features. “There is too much in the way.”

I expected as much. “Then let us return,” I suggested. “We can do little enough out here alone.”

Prophecy had never been my gift. If anything, a skilled fortune teller might do well listening to my words and predicting the very opposite.

As it turned out, we could do a great deal out alone. Primarily if that function included the role of bait.