Transmuted (34 page)

“I’ll take the other, then,” I said, ignoring him. “I can move quick and fast in the dark, and I’m armed enough for just about anything.”

“Except Osoba,” Hawke said tightly behind me.

I reached into my pocket for the vials I’d placed there. They were wrapped in cloth to mind the glass, but the cloth was of a loose weave, and would not keep the serum within from affecting its intended target.

I carried three. “One of these will be enough to slow him,” I said, handing one to Luther, one to Communion, and keeping the third for myself. “It will not stop him as the others, for he is something different.” No thanks to me. “However, it will allow you to run or, perhaps, slow him down.”

“What about him?” asked a younger Baker, gesturing to Hawke. His chestnut skin was smeared with the grime of the Underground, giving him an odd half-mask.

That he asked at all said he wasn’t as familiar with the ringmaster as Ishmael and I.

“He can handle Osoba alone,” Communion answered for us all.

A grunt, acknowledgement with the thinnest of patience, was all Hawke allowed.

“Cor,” muttered the young man.

“If you stumble across them,” I said to Luther, “do not engage them. Don’t be seen, and don’t try to rescue anyone yourself.”

Luther had been part of this world for long enough. Whatever peculiarities I had brought Communion, Luther had come to understand how we operated.

He slung the large bit of wood he carried, nails pounded into the tip, and doffed a cap he did not wear. “As you like it.”

One by one, the groups filed into their respective tunnels.

It worried me that Zylphia had not been able to leave another scrap. Had she been found out? Or had she simply been unable to drop any more?

At the last, Hawke and I faced each other in the dark.

I could not see him but for a faint glow about the eyes.

A shimmer of blue flickered to life at his side, and as my eyes widened, the ghostly sheen about his hand lifted to my cheek. It did not burn.

“Survive this,” came the command, ragged at the heart.

“Only if you do,” I returned.

He understood the challenge. I knew this much instinctively. Hawke always understood me—my needs, my fears. My efforts.

There were many things left unsaid between us, things that seemed important. I had claimed him, as he had claimed me. I had all but sworn my life to his.

The softer words of love did not sit comfortably on either of us, and yet something about the moment demanded I try.

“Cage, I—”

His thumb pressed upon my lower lip, a bit of censure and—my heart staggered a bit in my chest—in place of a kiss. “I am already clumsy enough.” It seemed less a confession than an admission torn from him despite his efforts.

And for all they did not profess forever, his words found that aching hole inside my heart and nestled in.

I nodded, a jerky motion.

Without another word, he slipped into the dark.

I did not hear his footsteps as the Underground swallowed us all.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Aside from the guide required to get inside the Underground safely, I was well used to operating alone within. Or rather, I had been in the past.

As the tunnel closed around me, my footsteps rustling softly in my leather boots, I thought of the emptiness I walked into. Any one of these tunnels could lead to the Veil’s hideout, or all of them.

The Underground was not the sort of place one mapped on paper.

My night vision was not so strong as Hawke’s, but I’d spent many years cultivating my senses in the dark. Unlike the Bakers, I needed no firm light to make my way through the tunnels.

Should I be hounded by Osoba in this dark, I might regret this choice. However, even them what lived here couldn’t see perfect without some element of light to go by.

A shame I had no Trump to force light to me as Hawke seemed capable.

With all that happened around us, I forgot often that he claimed power with his blood.

It seemed I attracted those who did.

Except my staff. They were all everyday sorts, the kind of men and women that folded one into the family and loved as I had never known it from my own.

The dark and quiet was no place to be following such thoughts to their logical source. Knowing that Fanny would not be waiting for me when I returned was a rock in my heart that I could not take the time to nurse. Not yet.

I promised that after, when the Veil was ended and Zylphia returned, I would grieve properly. Mourn properly.

I would apologize to Booth and Mrs. Booth.

Until then, I had a job to do.

And an obstacle to force my way through.

The first I noted of the ambience was a bit of a prickle along my senses, a subtle shift of current or pressure. I couldn’t be sure what it was, but it halted my step.

That pause, brief as it was, allowed for a tiny sound to trickle to my ears—a faint click, a whisper of a scrape.

I dropped to the mucky ground.

The report of a pistol discharged thundered through the passage, echoed in shattering reply. I flinched from it, but wasted no time to recover. With my ears ringing, I darted into the dark and found my assailant.

She was caught attempting to re-load.

I only gathered her sex by way of the noise she made as I dropped her with a kick to the jaw.

I took her weapon, checked it by feel, and discarded it for the fact it would take too long to reload.

Leaving her behind, I slipped to the side of the passage and carefully pushed ahead. A second sentry, warned by the discharge of his mate’s pistol, waited with thinly controlled nerves.

He bore no firearm, but as he shifted in the faintest light afforded by a very small lantern nestled into a shelf cut into the stone sides, I caught a glimpse of verdigris.

Uriah.
This was his man, one of them.

What in the name of the Devil’s own daughter did Leopold Uriah have to do with the Veil?

Aside from promising to mind Lài’s sister, that was.

Hell and bloody posies.

I’d been charmed by Uriah’s affable deal-making, after all.

And I had no time to be slow.

I rushed the bloke from the dark, coming in low and tight. His eyes found me a titch too late to be much use, and the pipe he brought to bear sailed over my head. It collided with the wall, a resounding clap of metal against brick, and chipped off a bit of stone that flew every which way. A thin twitch of pain was all I noted before my fist caught in his collar.

He was easy to maneuver, yelling as he was from the shock of the abrupt halt the wall had made of his swing.

Smashing his face into the same place as he’d hit was pure poetry.

I left him groaning in my wake, sprinting now that I’d gotten a taste for the fight. Though I was ready, braced for other sentries to challenge my progress, I found none.

Uriah had left only two in this tunnel?

I was insulted.

And then I came upon a dead end, and frustration bit. Had I chosen the wrong tunnel? Were the sentries merely decoys?

I touched the wall, splayed my hands upon the cold surface. My body thrummed with energy, with reckless abandon, but I was awake to my own peculiarities now. A bit of tar might have soothed this, a bit of a grain to make of this a grand lark, and for all that, I swallowed down the need and forced myself to
think
.

This was the Underground. Even blank walls were more than what they seemed.

Very slowly, I felt my way along the wall. I did not have to search for long. The cool, rusted coarseness of metal bars riveted into the wall provided a path.

Up, not in.

I looked up, squinting through the dark. Was it my imagination, or did there appear to be something of a glimmer above? A bit of light coming through a grate or some such?

Well, well. At the very least, I might be able to tell where I had ended.

Seizing the rungs in hand, I made short work of the climb. As I’d thought, there was light—overly bright after spending too long in the dark. It pooled through a gutter that should have been sealed by a metal grate and was not.

Even better.

I pulled my way to the top of the ladder, a simple enough endeavor requiring very little skill. As my head cleared the surface, I noted the thrust of wide, flat structures laid out side by side. I could smell nothing, as ruined as my olfactory capability was after the stench below, but the gentle lap of water slapping against docks was not alien to me.

Warehouses, I thought, and why not? Such large structures often remained empty until work demanded they be stocked. Goods could be held there indefinitely, and then ferried off.

Few workers remained at night.

I grabbed the corner of the ledge in hand, prepared to pull myself completely out of the hole, when a step behind me crunched on graveled rock.

“Well, well, well,” said a lighthearted voice. “A red bird, damp and dirty.” A man’s voice. A jeer. The tone seemed familiar. I couldn’t place it.

Nor could I turn as quickly as I wanted when my feet had nowhere else to step but a narrow iron bar.

Bracing my elbows against the ledge, I craned a look over my shoulder.

Mouth stretched into a wide, welcoming smile, as fit a jester’s grin as any, Meriwether stood poised over me, a club held high.

I did not need any sort of gift of prophecy to know where this was going. I had neither the ability to leap out of harm’s way, or of falling back into the hole without severely injuring myself in the process.

I would be less useful with a broken leg than I would with a headache.

My teeth bared. “So all this stench led to you,” I said, wedging my fingers into a fractured seam. Every muscle in my body braced for what I knew would come. Despite it, I softened my mockery not one bit. “I should have guessed.”

“Aye,” Meriwether replied lightly. “But you didn’t. Did you?”

I was given no opportunity to reply. The club he carried whistled in warning, his whole body turned with the swing, and pain slammed through my head. My vision went red, yellow and white.

The seam I’d forced my fingers into bit, and bones snapped like matchsticks in the dark.

Before the stars had cleared, my senses went black.

My grip upon the ledge failed.

The last I knew, there was nothing to catch me as I fell.

***

Perhaps it was due to my determination to see this through. I’d favor that explanation over the more likely one that all the jostling woke me from my daze.

Whatever it was, I was well awake by the time I was thrown bodily onto a stone surface.

I groaned my protest.

Jagged fingers of ruinous agony forced their way through my brain. The whole of my head throbbed in time with my heartbeat. Though it hurt to do so, I forced my hands beneath me—and promptly bit back a shattered sound of pain as the fingers of my left hand tore furrows of agony up my arm.

I managed halfway before the world turned upside down around me, my stomach flipped with it, and I bent over, retching out whatever last remained in my belly.

No relief there. It hurt like the very Devil rode roughshod over me.

“Hey, don’t do that,” called Meriwether. That bastard. I’d known he meant to cosh me, but he didn’t have to hit me that hard.

“Leave her,” came an order.

“But the markings—”

“All fluids of life are useful,” interjected the other voice, both familiar and abhorrent. I lifted my head, the skin of my lips burning from the acid of my retching, and struggled to peer through the lights that popped through my vision.

The pain of my head, of my broken fingers, made it difficult.

I had been taken to a warehouse whose walls were blackened and roof was damaged. Fires occasionally happened in the docks, and this was no doubt one of them what hadn’t been mended after such an accident. The sky rose endless and black above us, but the moon filtered gloomy light into the dark.

It was near half, already well on the way to setting but more than enough to see by.

And there was much to see.

The interior had been swept clean, but dug into the floor were deep furrows as I had never seen. Though I could only see the details of those lines carved around me with any degree of clarity, the overall pattern seemed alchemical in design—mystical in imagery. A large circle covered the floor, with four more intersecting the outer border at intervals I assumed sat at each direction.

By state of the moon’s placement, I figured that I occupied the southern ring. Across the way, seated with spine rigid and nightclothes stained filthy, Zylphia occupied the northernmost ring.

A gag in her mouth forced her silence, and her hands were bound tightly behind her, yet her eyes bore a faint red sheen that put in my mind of those things I thought I’d dreamt in my opium haze those long months ago.

Between us, caught in another circle but neither bound nor restrained in any way, Ma Zhànzhàn sat in that uniquely Oriental way. I suspected it was meant to suggest serenity of some kind.

Her eyes were closed, her demeanor lacking any signs of wounding.

How, then, had they taken her? If she had betrayed them, why was she in the circle?

The fourth circle, the western ring, remained empty.

I forced myself to my knees. The world tipped in warning, but setting my jaw against the bile locked in my throat, I steadfastly ignored the nausea that came from the powerful blow to my head.

The loss of mobility in my left hand was slightly more problematic.

The edges of the circle around me looked unfinished, as though dug out with haste. New, then, or new enough that the elements had not softened the cut.

I reached for the furrow.

Fire bloomed. Blisters erupted across my fingertips, and I snatched my hand back with a startled, painful cry.

“It is best,” said that voice once more, “that you refrain from poking at matters you do not understand.”

I dared not tuck my fingers into my mouth, for the remains of grime and worse still clung to them. Instead, holding both injured hands against my chest, I lurched to my feet. Three paces was all the circle allowed.