Chapter 6 #2
The corridor is empty. Where two armed men stood there is a faint discoloration on the stone floor, a smudge of ash that could be mistaken for soot, and nothing else. No bodies. No blood. No evidence that two human beings existed in this space four seconds ago except for the absence of them.
Bastian closes his mouth. He turns to look at Emery over his shoulder, and his expression is calm, and his breathing is steady, and there is nothing on his face that suggests he has just unmade two people with a sound. He has completed a minor task. He is ready to move on to the next one.
Emery clings to the wall and tries to organize his thoughts into something useful.
The thoughts are not cooperating. They keep circling back to the same two facts: this man can do that, and Emery spent an entire night naked underneath him.
He was at this man's mercy. He thought, for a full week, that he could kill this force of nature.
He planned it. He strategized. He lay in his bed at the Hollow after his bath and his dinner and his book and thought about the best angle to slide a knife between Bastian's ribs, and all along Bastian could have opened his mouth and turned him to ash before the blade cleared the sheath.
A figure appears from a side corridor.
Emery's body tenses before his brain identifies the shape, and then the shape resolves into something he recognizes: the patterned skin, unmistakable even in the dim light.
Pale white and deep black in sharp abstract patterns across every visible surface, stark and deliberate, contrast so sharp it barely reads as natural coloring.
Short white hair. A half-mask covering the lower portion of his face, leaving only his eyes visible, and those eyes are wrong in a way that takes Emery a moment to identify.
They don't reflect the lamplight. They absorb it.
The light goes in and doesn't come back, two small calm wells with no bottom.
He's got blood on his boots and his arms and a short sword in one hand that is very recently wet, and he regards Emery with the dispassion of cataloguing a situation and finding it roughly in line with expectations.
"Follow me," he says.
His voice is dry and level and comes from behind the mask in a way that makes the words sound carefully selected from a much larger set of things he could say, most of which are probably less polite.
Emery does not know him. He does not trust him.
He is also barefoot and barely dressed in a stronghold that wants him dead and his options, at present, are: follow the masked man with the bloody sword, or stay in a corridor with the Vesper who just dissolved two people and who is looking at him with an expression Emery still can't name.
The masked man is at least headed in a direction that seems to be away, which is the only direction Emery is interested in right now.
He goes.
The masked man moves with a motion that borders on contemptuous, treating the corridor and the men in it and the entire concept of physical obstacles as beneath his notice.
He steps over a body that Emery didn't see, crumpled in a doorway with a wound in its chest that is neat and professional and exactly where you'd put a blade if you wanted someone to stop living as quickly as possible.
The body is still warm. Emery knows this because his bare foot grazes the man's outstretched hand as he steps over him and the skin hasn't cooled yet.
"My name is Hask," the man says without turning around. "And we are leaving before Bastian brings this entire building down on our heads, which he will do shortly and with great enthusiasm if we give him the time."
Emery opens his mouth to respond and realizes he has nothing to say that isn't a question, and all of his questions are some variation of what is happening and who are you and how did you find me, none of which are useful in the immediate moment. He closes his mouth and follows.
The corridor branches. Hask takes the left fork without hesitation, moving with the confidence of having either memorized the layout or not needing to.
Two men come at them from a doorway on the right.
They are armed with short swords and they are angry and they are, based on the quality of their armor and the coordination of their approach, a cut above the men who had been guarding Emery.
Hask dispatches the first with his blade before the man's sword clears its full arc.
The strike is efficient and economical, a single motion that enters below the ribcage and exits the man's interest in being alive.
The second man adjusts, comes at Hask from the side, and Hask pivots to meet him.
Steel on steel. The sound is sharp and ugly in the close corridor and Emery presses himself against the wall because there is nothing else he can do, his hands are still bound and he has no weapon and the letter opener is still buried in a man's eye socket two corridors back.
Hask drives his blade into the second man's chest. It goes in clean and the man's legs give out and he drops, and Hask's sword is stuck.
It happens sometimes, when a blade finds the gap between ribs and the bone closes around it, gripping tight.
Hask pulls. The blade doesn't come. He pulls harder and the body slides toward him but the sword stays lodged, which is the kind of logistical problem that becomes a lethal one when you're standing in a hostile corridor with your weapon embedded in a corpse.
The third man comes from behind them.
Emery doesn't see where he comes from. A side door, a shadow, a corner they didn't check because they were moving too fast. He is bigger than the other two and he has a full-length sword and he is already mid-swing when Emery registers his presence.
The blade is aimed at Emery because Emery is the closer target and the unarmed one and the obvious choice, and Emery has nothing.
There is no world in which he deflects a sword with his forearms and lives to describe the experience.
Hask reaches out his hand.
The shadows move.
Emery has spent his entire life in the Underground, which means he has spent his entire life around shadows, and he knows what shadows do.
Shadows sit. Shadows pool in corners and under furniture and along the edges of things where light doesn't reach.
Shadows do not move. Shadows do not reach out from the edges of a corridor, shaping themselves into fingers, tendrils, hands made of something darker than dark that have joints and intention and purpose.
Shadows do not wrap around the raised sword arm of a man a step away from killing someone and pull.
But these do.
The tendrils, and Emery's brain insists on calling them that because hand-shaped darkness reaching out from the wall is not a phrase he has the capacity to process right now, wrap around the man's arm.
Around his wrist. Around the sword. They wrench backward with force, something that lives in the dark, native to it, breathing it, and the sound that follows is the sound of bone separating from flesh.
Not breaking. Separating. A wet, structural sound, a joint pulled past the point of return, and the man's sword arm comes away from his body at the shoulder in a spray of red that hits the far wall.
The man doesn't scream. His mouth opens, but what comes out is not sound.
It is silence. A silence so complete that it swallows the ambient noise of the corridor, the dripping, the distant crashes, the sound of Emery's own ragged breathing.
And then the shadows pull again, dragging the man forward, toward Hask, whose hand is still outstretched, and the man stumbles on legs that are no longer cooperating and lands in Hask's grip.
Hask's black hand closes around the man's throat.
The man's mouth is still open, still silent.
But now something is coming out of it, something that is not breath and not sound, thin and pale and drifting upward from between his lips, a spirit leaving the body it was housed in.
Emery watches the color drain from the man's face, not gradually but all at once.
The man's skin goes from flushed to pale to white to something that isn't a color at all, something that is the absence of color, the absence of warmth, the absence of whatever animating principle makes a person a person instead of a collection of cooling meat.
Hask holds him there for a moment that stretches too long. His eyes above the mask are calm and patient, the dark wells of them taking in the light and the smoke and the color draining from the man in his grip and reflecting none of it back.
He drops the body. It hits the floor with the hollow heaviness of something emptied. He pulls the sword from the other corpse, drives it between the ribs of the colorless one on the floor, and pushes it over with his boot. Perfunctory housekeeping.
Emery stares at him.
He had thought Hask was the safer option.
He is now very quickly reassessing this assumption, along with several other assumptions he has made in the past twelve hours, including but not limited to: that he understood the scope of what Bastian's operation involved, that the masked man who had knocked on the brothel door that first night was merely a bodyguard, and that the most dangerous thing in this corridor was the Vesper he'd left behind.
His wrists are still bound. He is standing in a hallway with two dead men and one dead thing and a creature that can reach into shadows and pull people apart and drain the color and the life and the warmth from a human body with one hand, and his brain offers him the helpful observation that his letter opener would have been very inadequate in this situation.