12
“You’re a nutter, Myria,” Cassia whispered, pausing at the foot of the stairs. “I can’t show my face outside!”
“Well, we can’t plot the fifth lord’s downfall in there, can we?” said Leo. “They stopped serving drinks half an hour ago.”
It was the third hour of the morning, and the commotion of the bar had trailed off into a low background of groans. Myria and Leo were fresh in from the nighttime cool, each carrying a cloth package.
“We brought camouflage,” she added, unwrapping a cloak and mask.
Cassia threw them a dubious glance. It was the costume worn by revelers on Deus Mithian’s Night—a gaudy black-and-crimson harlequin cloak and a grotesque mask cast in an expression of yawning agony.
As with most Carinth festivals, the tale behind it was best heard on an empty stomach.
“It’s not Mithian’s for another three days,” said Cassia, swinging on the cloak. Myria produced a bottle of wine and pressed it into her friend’s hand.
“Doesn’t matter. Laugh and stagger, and no one’ll turn a hair. You’re hardly the strangest thing Carysium Street’s ever seen.”
“Not since you lost your face, at any rate,” Leo added. To save Cassia the trouble of hitting the man, Myria tugged a rough brown greatcoat from her parcel and thrust it at his chest. He swung the stained garment about his shoulders with a shudder.
“Didn’t think you’d be seen dead in a thing like that,” said Cassia, tying on her mask.
“Wear anything half decent where we’re going, and you’ll most certainly be seen dead in it,” said Leo. “Come along. Duty beckons.”
Myria swung a cloak over her gown, then led the way back up into the night.
True to form, nobody batted an eyelid at the sight of another drunken reveler who’d forgotten what day it was. A mile’s walk took them out of Carysium Street and into the natural darkness. From there, they crossed into the outskirts of Carintheum.
The industrial district wasn’t a pretty place at the best of times.
The night enhanced its menace. Manufactories rose in soot-stained hulks, still spewing silent thunderclouds of smoke.
Cursed runoff gathered in the gutters, where it hissed and simmered, burning moths and ossifying toadstools.
The air was thick with the taste of copper and coal.
They passed by an open breezeway, and the foulness of a bloodshop rolled across the street. That stink stirred something in the muddy depths of Myria’s memory. Cold metal at her back, the reek of rotten wood, rusted cables glinting in the red arcanic light—
Not now. Working.
Myria followed Leo down a narrow street, keeping close.
Most of the fellows she’d passed so far looked as though they’d stepped straight out of a Wanted poster.
They picked their way down a crumbling staircase, then out into an alley.
Mulberry fog spilled low across the ground, cut through with wire-thin lightning flickers.
The air stung to the touch. Two breaths turned her tongue as dry as chalk.
“Couldn’t you have hopped us straight there?” Cassia muttered.
“No. It’s cut off from the rest of the silver lining,” said Leo. “Besides, this place is a nightmare for silverwalking. The arcanic fabric’s too unstable, what with all the manufactories churning it up.”
The soot abruptly turned to metal underfoot. Leo crouched and felt across the ground, wincing at the touch of the pollution. The scrape of iron sounded from beneath the fog. He rose and gestured downward, and Myria closed her eyes.
“The sewers,” she sighed. It would be the sewers.
“Lighten up. You’ll see.”
Myria felt for the opening, then lowered herself until she touched the rungs of a ladder.
She climbed tentatively down and landed in a shallow wash of fluid.
The place was pitch dark. The strange plunks and trickles of a subterranean river echoed around her.
Mercifully, it seemed to be no more than rainwater and industrial waste.
She could hear scum-sprites hissing over the surface; those little nuisances only formed when a chance burst of arcanic energy hit the runoff from the curse refineries.
Leo dropped down beside her a moment later. He traced a doorway, bright as amber lightning in the dark, and Myria stepped through into the silver lining. The shadow world rolled out around her as she emerged into a low-lit workshop.
The strangest sense of déjà vu arrested her.
Steel tables crowded the bare stone floor, interspersed with trolleys strewn with tools.
Great iron tanks were bolted to the walls, pipes trailing from their sides.
Another blink of memory—the feel of some merciless force dragging at her, pulling something from her grasp—then gone.
“Looks like a professional setup,” said Cassia, following her in.
“Not the friendliest of places, but it’s secure,” Leo added, sweeping the illusions from his face. “It’s sealed off from the rest of the silver lining like a grave.”
“Then how did you get in?”
“Came up from underneath. They only barred the roof and walls, the silly sods. I’ve laid my own shields across the floor, though. They’ll only admit us.”
“Only?” asked Cassia, tugging off her mask.
“Us, or . . . someone who’s better at silverwalking than I am,” he admitted. “But don’t worry. Vixius killed most of those.”
Cassia snorted, but the silver lining swallowed the sound.
“It’s curious,” said Myria, instinctively lowering her voice. “Why abandon it? And why go to so much trouble to seal it off?”
“Well, they weren’t distilling lemon cordial,” said Leo.
“There’s arcanic extraction equipment, mementori tools .
. . looks like an old harvesters’ shop. Still .
. . Cass, try these.” He snatched a pair of gauntlets from a nearby trolley and tossed them to Cassia.
“Ought to help you channel your mercuria. Fix that lovely mug of yours.”
“I say, you blighter. You’re showing signs of near-human sensitivity,” she said, clipping them on. “Either way, though, I won’t be able to hold a false face for long. ’Fraid I mightn’t be much use.”
“I didn’t want you for your mercuria, old girl,” said Myria, shaking off that distracting sense of familiarity. “We need a machine whisperer. Once we have Lysander back, though, I’d wager he can stitch you up.”
Leo made a dubious expression. “Yes. Lysander. You didn’t mention that the first time.”
“Mmm. Wanted you to be outnumbered when I brought it up,” she said, but then shed her smile for sincerity. “I know it’s dangerous, old boy, but no more dangerous than hiring someone we can’t trust.”
“Lysander was a hireling.”
“He suffered just the same. That makes him one of us.”
A hook jerked in her chest as she remembered him, looking down at Hadria with a self-conscious smile, his hand a hair’s breadth from her cheekbone.
“Still don’t trust him,” Leo muttered, thrusting his hands into his pockets and scuffing out across the workshop.
“You don’t trust anyone who knows how to tie a cravat properly,” said Cassia. “Vixius knows Ly’s alive, though. If we break him out, the scum’s bound to suspect something.”
“All going well, that won’t matter,” Myria said. “Now, Cass. You spent years in Haideum, and I’ve learned plenty for myself. The defenses.”
Cassia flexed her gauntleted hands. A shimmer of color ran across her formless face, then vanished.
“Ouch. Damn. Well, there’s definitely no breaking out of there,” she said. “There’s no chance Leo could cut a gateway, not through all those patrium curses. They’re in every cell, every wall, inches thick. Around the eternity cells, they’re probably four feet deep.”
“They’d have to hire cartloads of arcani to sustain those,” said Leo. “No chance we could trick them all.”
“No need,” said Myria, beaming. “Prison gossip. Copperchaser Cendrius was put in charge a few years back. He laid off all the arcani and replaced them with therical equipment.”
“True,” said Cassia, “but it’s the good stuff. ’Fraid I couldn’t break it for you.”
She gave another twist of her fingers, and a hint of human features fled across the surging black. Myria smiled, flicking a scalpel from hand to hand.
“No matter,” she said breezily. “Marvelous notion, though. Routing all the castle’s protections through machines, then hooking them up to a single point of failure.”
Leo frowned, then straightened, eyes lighting with interest. “The arcanic grid? If we sabotage it—”
“They don’t rely on the grid,” Cassia put in, but her voice had turned more thoughtful than skeptical. “Too prone to outages. Still . . .”
“Copperchaser earned his name,” said Myria. “They’ve got three layers of power, each admirably economical. First, all those arcani in the eternity cells? The castle runs on the power they harvest from that lot.”
“But we can’t get to them without breaking down the same shields they’re maint—”
“Course we can,” she interrupted with a smile. “They feed the prisoners luminium to keep them churning out fuel. I’ve found the supplier. Slip a little something into the inmates’ daily bread, and it’ll run straight from their arcana to the castle’s power supply.”
“Hmm. That could work,” said Cassia, giving her a thoughtful sidelong look. “It wouldn’t knock the systems down for more than ten seconds, though. They’d switch straight to the next layer.”
“Yes. The independent generators. They’re fueled with cut-price bloodshop arcana. I marked the supply carts when I visited. It wouldn’t be hard to pollute their vats.”
“They must test the arcana before they use it, though,” said Leo. “Surely they’d detect anything dangerous before they let it into the pipes.”
“I expect so,” she said, “so we wouldn’t use something dangerous.
Just the shell. Something that’ll make the system think it’s being attacked.
Proper arcanic sampling wouldn’t pick it up, but I’d wager the filters in the pipes aren’t so discerning.
If they catch a whiff of something dubious, they’ll be set to blow a fuse and switch to the backup. ”