Chapter 54
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
A semblance rushes into a chapel, trying to avoid being consumed by a wraith. He pleads, “Father, can you save my soul,” to which the priest replies, “I’m sorry, my son, you’re mortally bankrupt.”
—J. Fred Muggs, failed humorist, “The Ironies of Necromantic Maturation”
I knelt on the hard stone and tried to renew Cassius’s bindings.
I touched them again and again, calling some of my best memories to mind, but the threads wouldn’t hold any light.
Somehow the wraith had drained their power, and I was growing emptier with each failed attempt to renew them.
Cassius’s semblance was pulling away farther and farther from his body.
Around us, stones continued to fly back into place, re-forming the walls and ceiling of the Newgate cell.
The grating of stone on stone was muted by a rushing wind that sucked like a great vacuum toward the darkness beyond the room.
Beyond it all, I heard a crowd of angry voices from down near the clerk’s desk.
Lakshmi peeked out into the hall. “Brach’s Guildhall battalion has found us.”
I bowed my lantern in a bracing stroke and focused the light at the centurion’s threads. His bindings flared dimly but winked out just as fast.
Perhaps I needed a stronger memory of his strength. I played a revelatory stroke to brighten his shadow against the corner wall, intending to find a powerful moment from his past.
The noise in the hall turned from shouting to the clashing of metal. The openings in the walls and ceiling grew smaller as the winds continued to whip stones back into their place.
Then an occlusion turning inside Cassius’s shadow pulsed like a heart beating in long, painful rhythms. It emanated from a raw scar with rough edges torn in the shape of supplicating hands holding a tobacco leaf and roughly circled by a chain.
I’d seen this scar in the body of the man wearing the corpse paint—the guy who’d shot Henry and me. Why was it inside Cassius?
I shifted all my energy into a hard bracing stroke bright with the memory of Cassius’s family and bathed him with it.
His eyes fluttered open and I fell back onto my ass, numb and shaking my head in disbelief. “Tell me it’s not true, man. Tell me it wasn’t you.”
He sat up, frowned, and hung his head. “Cassius . . . you killed Henry.”
I stared at him, unable to hold a thought, just wanting it not to be true. I shook my head again, trying to will him to take it back.
Shouting and footfalls grew louder in the hall, and the wind began to shrill through the closing stonework.
Cassius finally nodded. “I did, Jack. Not in this body, but it was me nonetheless.”
It all came clear. Cassius’s semblance had been bound to the body of the killer that had carried out the hit on Henry.
Then Cassius’s semblance had been transferred back to this body.
But murder left an occlusion in the spirit—be it soul or semblance—and so would show in the shadow of whatever body that spirit was bound to.
Chuey hunkered down next to me. “Jack, you can be angry later, man.
Right now, we gotta go.”
I started to get up, but Cassius grabbed me by the sleeve. “I am not a hero, Jack. I am a bound servant who forsook his people, who could not save his family, and who accepted the commission against you and Henry because I no longer cared what happened to me.”
“You serve Brach.” “I did,” he said.
“That’s why you were there that night. You were watching for us.”
Church stepped close. “Jack, I understand what you’re feeling, but we can’t even try to stop Brach if we don’t get out of here now.”
I ignored him and stared at the centurion. “Are you still working for him?”
“No, Jack. That night, after my semblance returned to this body, I ran. I ran because I could no longer suffer the indignities they asked of me. I was prepared to simply let my bindings run out, slip back to the Strata, and lose all memory. After so many years of servitude and killing, I wanted nothing more than to forget. But as I ran, I realized I would also lose fond memories, and that’s when something your friend Mr. Wilkinson said began turning through my mind . . . ‘There’s always a choice.’ ”
“So you came after me.”
“I knew you were close. I hoped to convince you to rebind me. Get away from the Shiguan. Since that moment, my loyalty—”
“You killed Henry,” I said again.
Cassius was quiet a moment. “You made me believe in your third option. You made me believe I could be something more than I am . . . Perhaps that was a false hope.”
“Does Emaline know about you?”
“My commission came directly from Muster Brach.”
Lady gently tapped my shoulder. “They’re coming, Jack. We have to go.”
Cassius struggled to his feet, gathered his weapon, and stared at me. I stared back. “Henry was the best man I ever knew.”
Cassius nodded and started for the door.
“I even asked you,” I called after him. “I asked you straight up if you killed Henry . . . and you lied to my face.”
He paused at the door and looked back. “I know, Jack. I am ashamed. And I am sorry. I have always managed to betray everything I love, even when it was not my intention.”
I felt like the kid at the window again, watching broken promises. The Essiene sutures in my wound throbbed and my head was pounding.
Across the hall, the Shiguan smashed in the door of a cell. The wind screamed through the last cracks in the walls and ceiling as stones began to seal them shut.
“I do not belong with you or your third option,” said Cassius. “Perhaps I never did.”
My mind cycled images: binding Cassius, and his vow to serve me; facing my would-be kidnappers outside my flat; the way he talked about his family at the Underworld; fighting the hellhound; even fighting the mature wraith here tonight.
He’d put himself in danger for me again and again.
I couldn’t deny that. The hell of it was, I considered him a friend.
But he’d killed Henry, lied to my face about it, and then kept that secret after everything we’d been through.
The Shiguan were at the door, and the last bit of cell wall had nearly fused shut. I could go to Cassius, forgive him, pull him back; or escape into the dark and leave him behind. Either way, I needed to get up. I just couldn’t find the will to do so.
Chuey hauled me to my feet. “Pull your head out, man. We need you.”
The cell door crashed open. Shiguan flooded into the room, shouting commands and waving spears. The wind shrieked through the last remaining hole in the opposite corner, pulling at our clothes.
I shook off Cassius’s betrayal—for now—and pointed toward the dark aperture. “Go.”
My friends dashed across the room and jumped through the hole into blackness. I stood there a moment longer, staring at Cassius—surrounded now by Shiguan—tears on his cheeks. Then I turned and dove after my friends into the dark.