Once he left the Wizards’ Quarter, Shadrak took to the rooftops, the fastest way to get across town without being seen. At least it had been back in the day, but he’d only made it as far as Thirty-Second Street in the Pioneers’ Mall District when he ran into scaffolding on the building he was heading toward, and upon the scaffolding, workmen. They were repointing chimneys and replacing the terra-cotta tiles the district was famous for. It seemed only yesterday they’d done the same thing, but he guessed it must have been years since he’d last come this way, back before he’d taken over the guilds.
Shadrak waited until the workmen were absorbed in their tasks, then made the leap from the rooftop he was on. He caught an upright of scaffold and swung onto the planked walkway—where someone had left a bucket filled with tools. He swore as it pitched over the edge and tumbled to the sidewalk. Tools rained down with a fearsome clatter.
“Oi!” a workman yelled from his perch beside a chimney breast.
Shadrak gave him the finger, then realized the commotion had drawn more attention than a troupe of naked dancers processing down the high street.
“You there!” a soldier in a galea and red cloak called up from below. He was talking to the workman, and Shadrak chose that moment to run across the walkway and fling himself across to the adjacent rooftop.
“Weren’t me,” he heard the workman reply. “There was this pasty-faced midget…”
Then someone blew a whistle, which was answered by barked orders and the stomp of dozens of boots, or more likely sandals. Shadrak didn’t stop to take a look. He didn’t need to. One stupid misstep, and now the Senatorial Cohort were on his tail.
By the time Shadrak reached the wrought iron gates of the graveyard, the whistles and cries had fallen far behind.
The gates were already open a crack, and so Shadrak slipped through without a sound. He left the gravel pathway for the cover of a nearby gravestone and hunkered down there for a moment. Methodically, he went through the ritual of touching the blades in his baldrics and patting the handles of his three guns. He almost cursed then. He’d given the flintlocks to Bolos Rancy, and the thundershot was out of bullets. It wasn’t so much a lapse of memory as a failure to break an unconscious pattern and plant a new one.
Having satisfied the compulsion to check his weapons, Shadrak poked his head out and scanned the graveyard. A couple of the statues he recognized from Magwitch’s viewing crystal. From there, it was an easy matter to plot a course to the crypt Ilesa, Jeb, and Nils had followed Bekra into.
A tingling sensation crept along his spine, and he froze, scarcely daring to breathe. Someone was watching him, but as he turned a slow circle he saw only broken statues and dilapidated sarcophagi. He knew the shadows, and he was an old-hand at reading the lay of the land, identifying the best places to hide and spy from. Either he was getting jittery, or it was something else… He suppressed a wry smile as he glanced up at the sky: Magwitch, most likely, and his scutting wizard eye.
He strained his ears as he reached the crypt, but there was no sound of fighting from within. The steps leading down were carpeted with moss, and the iron railings either side were brown with rust. Depressions in the moss marked the passage of booted feet. He crouched down to feel it: slick with dew. Rather than risk slipping and giving away his position, he got down on his belly and lizard-crawled to the bottom.
The crypt door was ajar, revealing a strip of absolute dark within. Carvings on the front of the door gave a name and a date, neither of which he could read, they were so far eroded. Icy sludge crawled through his guts, as if his body remembered things he seldom allowed his mind to dwell on: the Lich Lord’s castle in Verusia, the despairing screams, the torture chamber, and the cloying stench of blood.
He paused at the entrance to put on his Ancient-tech goggles, adjusted them to the dark, then breathed deeply to steady his nerves. Dank air, thick with loam. Mustiness, rot, and something else… Sulfur.
Again he listened, and again he heard no sound, other than the thudding of his heart in his chest. Pulling a dagger from his baldric, he slipped through the opening.
Everything within was limned in green by the goggles: stone-block walls, scrawled with graffiti and sweating moisture. Cobwebs thick with dust draped from the ceiling. To one side, a mural in faded pastels depicted a naked man nailed to a tree, and winged beings surrounding him. In the center, an ornate sarcophagus carved with interwoven thorns that surrounded a vignette of a pelican piercing its breast with its beak, a robed woman with a blazing sun behind her head and a crescent moon beneath her feet, and a seven-headed dragon with flaming wings.
Nils was seated on the floor, back against the sarcophagus, knees pulled up to his chest. He was pale-faced and vacant-eyed, and it was hard to tell if he was breathing. Jeb was off to one side, sprawled face down, gun in a death grip. Ilesa lay next to him, curled into a ball, hands covering her head.
Ignoring them for the moment, Shadrak moved silently around the sarcophagus to where there was an open trapdoor on the floor behind it. He peered into a pit with the mouth of a tunnel low down on one of its walls. Presumably another way out of the crypt.
Shadrak was left considering what to do next: tend to the others or press on alone? The latter was tempting, especially if it meant he got the ring back and could leave New Londdyr with no one getting in his way. Nine times out of ten, that’s exactly what he’d have done. When you were as stealthy as he was, it was a rare opponent who could avoid a knife in the back. But something gave him pause: the thought of what Bekra Cy had done to take out Ilesa and Jeb, neither of whom was any kind of slouch. Nils didn’t count: a good sneeze would have done for him.
“You don’t want to go down there after her,” Ilesa said from behind him. “Not without a plan.”
Shadrak hadn’t heard her move. Either she was as good as he was, or he was getting careless. He sat back on his haunches and faced her. Unharmed, it seemed, but dislodged strands of hair were in her face, and she was unsteady on her feet.
“Bekra hit us hard with sorcery, a kind I’ve not seen before,” she said.
Jeb groaned as he came round the side of the sarcophagus, holstering his gun. “Me neither, and I thought I’d seen it all. One thing I’m sure of, though: she ain’t no husk. They have a kind of scent we Maresmen are attuned to.”
Shadrak bit his tongue. It was hard not to label them amateurs and go after Bekra Cy by himself. Thing was, he had no idea what he was up against, and it had never been his style to take chances.
“A plan, you say? You got one in mind?”
Ilesa shrugged. “Let’s go up for air, put our heads together.”
Nils was still staring at nothing when they came back round the other side of the sarcophagus. To Shadrak’s surprise, Ilesa got down on one knee and stroked the lad’s face.
“Nils,” she said. “Are you in there?”
Groggily, he shook his head, and a whimper escaped his lips.
“Looks like shock to me,” Jeb said.
Ilesa stood. “Carry him.”
With a mock salute, Jeb bent down and scooped Nils into his arms. A wisp of gas trickled from the mouth-slit of his mask with the effort, and Shadrak took a step back.
“A man could easily take offense at that,” Jeb said. “But don’t worry, I ain’t a man anymore.”
Ilesa shook her head and slapped him lightly on the shoulder before slipping outside.
Jeb followed, carrying Nils, and Shadrak brought up the rear. Unable to see what was happening past Jeb’s back, he heard a clatter of weapons, Ilesa curse, then the flutter of wings.
Nils came tumbling back down the steps as Jeb dropped him and sprinted away so fast he was little more than a blur.
Four red-cloaked soldiers came into sight at the top of the steps, panting heavily from where they’d been running. Behind them, a sea of red as the Senatorial Cohort closed in.
Shadrak hopped over Nils’s limp body and leapt for the stair railings, swinging one foot to the top then backflipping to the roof of the crypt. An eagle circled overhead then soared away—Ilesa.
“Stop where you are!” someone yelled.
But Shadrak was already tumbling off the far end of the crypt and sprinting toward the back of the graveyard. He zipped in and out of tombstones then vaulted over the perimeter wall and lost himself in the tangle of overgrown woodland.
For a brief moment he felt bad about leaving Nils behind.
But it was a very brief moment.