Chapter 52
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
By using praise and blame to habituate souls to love what they should love and hate what they should hate, music education will make possible the emergence of an irrational kind of virtue, one that is independent of reflective thought.
—Plato, Republic, quoted in the Shiguan Articles of Order
He charged up Old Bailey Road. It was still early evening, but Bayswater was nearly empty.
And the sky—or whatever passed for sky in the Strata—had darkened to a soot grey.
Rain started to fall, thickening the air with the smell of wet stone.
Cassius pointed through the gloom. Just beyond a gallows—where prisoners ascended steps, speaking in hushed tones to a priest who scribbled in a handbook—stood Newgate Prison.
“How do we get inside?” Church reassembled his cane-knife. “There are at least a dozen bobbies out front.”
“Right. Stop here for a sec.” I unshouldered my sling pack and fetched the thread Owen had given me. “This will make us look like police.” I focused on the bobbies and lashed my arm, then quickly formed bindings for the rest of my friends. “Okay, let’s go.”
We strolled through the front gate, garnering little more than passing glances from the guards. Inside we came to a clerk’s desk, where a frail, bespetacled old man sat staring at his pocket watch.
“Prisoner transfer,” I said.
The old gentleman started and looked up from his timepiece. “You Mick’s boys?”
“Of course not,” I said. “We serve the lord mayor.” The old guy laughed. “Who’ll it be?”
“Special lockup,” I told him. “Name’s not to be used.”
The clerk touched the side of his nose. “Big fella just went up to fetch ’im.” Oh, hell. “Which way?”
“Cell at the end, facing the press yard.” The old guy pointed down a dim stone hallway.
I broke into a sprint, my friends behind me. Our running steps echoed loudly in the bare corridor. I pulled out my lantern, commanded the ghost stone to light, and readied my bow. Two stout guards, one bald, the other with a mess of grey hair, stood at the door.
As we came to a stop in front of them, my heavy breathing clouded the air. My friends’ and the guards’, too.
A sickening feeling opened up inside me. Brach hadn’t called the wraith with his viola for me, he’d sent it to kill Henry. My accusation had forced Brach to get rid of him—the last bit of evidence that could prove he was responsible for the murder.
“Open it,” I shouted.
The grey-hair did, and I rushed into what looked like a perfect replica of Henry’s flat.
The light from the window was dim, the air hard and bitter cold.
And I suddenly felt an almost overpowering despair, like the whole world was crashing down on me.
I slammed my fist into my leg to break the spell, just as something shrieked near the kitchen.
In the corner by the fireplace, a massive creature was hulking over Henry.
The beast had no hair, no ears, no nose to speak of, and its jaw and cheekbones had ripped through the skin of its face.
The flesh on its arms and legs had torn and split, too.
In other places, thick scar tissue crisscrossed its skin.
I would have preferred another big hound.
Henry’s wife, Martha, was beating at the creature’s back with her fists.
I bowed my lantern hard, driving a shock of revelatory light into the dark room.
Henry’s shadow was dark like a mortal’s but had the soft edge of a semblance.
It was his soul. Martha’s was the same. The creature’s shadow flared against the brick fireplace. A thick violet rim, and Orcus bindings.
In the wraith’s shadow roiled dense, shimmering patterns.
There had to be thirty different gleaming songs, a frenzied cacophony—so many souls trapped together.
The wraith shrieked again, and I could hear voices—“set us free,” “cut them down,” and one withered voice above the rest, “he is like us and we will have him.”
Something flashed in its eyes. Pain maybe. But I couldn’t see its Rupture, and I certainly didn’t have the necessary context to give it the willing heart of a ward. All I could do is try to bind it until I did.
The wraith used my light to peer into my shadow and began to drone, a deep, beautifully resonant note. The skin on my wrists began to itch and ache, and the sutures inside my shadow began to pull.
I didn’t have it in me to take another assault in that wound, and doused my lantern. “Straight-up fight this time.”
“You sure, Jack?” It was Chuey. He already had his macuahuitl out. I nodded. “Be glad you can’t see the real thing.”
The wraith turned its head back on Henry. Martha began to scream and beat at it again. This time, the creature reached back and thrust its free hand into Martha’s chest.
“Jack,” Henry shouted, “save her!”
I was sure Martha would never survive, and we had only seconds to get Henry out of here.
“Save her!” Henry cried again.
I rushed forward, Cassius and Chuey at my sides.
Martha was thrashing on the wraith’s arm like a body impaled on a thick post. We were nearly to her when she let out a deafening scream and the wraith ripped from her chest a fistful of light.
She went limp. Her light coursed from the wraith’s fist into its body, crackling along the ragged edges of its torn flesh.
Then Martha was gone, an amber mist winking to nothing.
“No!” Henry screamed. The wraith whirled on him. We were caught behind it all now, as the creature plunged its great hand into Henry’s chest this time. My friend’s body convulsed as if struck by lightning.
I hollered for Cassius.
The centurion let out his war cry, leapt forward, and brought his sword down in a sweeping arc, severing the wraith’s right hand.
The creature roared, stepped back to the fireplace, and while glaring at us thrust its bloody stump into the flames.
The stench of burned flesh filled the room.
Henry collapsed to his knees, still trembling, his chest open and bleeding his soul’s light in thin streams. Lady rushed to him with her medic bag.
“Remember,” I said, “we need this thing to renew the ward. Cassius, draw it out. Lakshmi, Chuey, get in its blind side and hamstring it. Church, be ready to help take it down. I’ll try to impart my sigil to its bindings.”
“Orcus is a single-use catalyst,” Lakshmi explained. “We’ll have to cut its bindings, so you can rebind it with fresh thread.”
The wraith pulled its smoking stump from the fire and stepped toward us, a low sound rumbling deep in its chest. Cassius teased the beast forward with his sword while Chuey and Lakshmi circled wide. The wraith stomped toward me, floorboards shaking as it came.
Its jaw began to open. And open. The flesh at the corners of its mouth tore in ragged lines, like a freakishly long, jagged smile, blood spurting out over its teeth and chin.
Then it charged, braying in harsh cacophony. The scream prickled my skin, resonating inside my head and down through my wounded shadow. My vision blurred, and I stepped back. Lakshmi danced in, slashing its waist binding.
The wraith bucked, elbowed her aside, and took another step toward me. Chuey slammed his macuahuitl down on the tendon of its right foot, bursting the flesh open.
It howled and kicked back with its wounded foot, driving Chuey into the fireplace mantel. He smacked his head on the stone and slumped to the floor.
The wraith screamed again, launching itself at me. Cassius threw himself between us, absorbing the blow and sprawling to the floor at my feet. The wraith raised its foot over Cassius’s head, but Lakshmi was there, slashing the binding on its raised foot, as well as the tendons beneath.
The wraith shrieked and fell to one knee.
Church rushed, arms out, ready to tackle it to the floor. But the wraith whipped its arm around in a savage backhand, driving Church into the bookcase, where he crashed to the floor, hundreds of vinyl albums spilling down around him.
Henry lay on the floor, too, his face twisted in pain, as Lady knelt beside him, digging through her trauma bag.
Lakshmi danced in again, slicing the binding on the wraith’s one hand.
The creature bucked, roaring with an army of voices, and swung its smoking stump at her.
She leapt back, evading the blow, but leaving a clear path to me.
The wraith clambered up, its skin tearing at the joints.
It stomped toward me, limping on its cut tendons.
I raised my lantern again and pulled a fast bracing stroke for Church—his time in the British Expeditionary Force—then one for Cassius, his Legion training.
The wraith lifted its head and howled—a terrible song that seemed to alter the light of my strokes. When the reverberations of its music were gone, Cassius and Church fell face-first onto the floor.
It lowered its head and started toward me again. “Assault strokes,” Lady cried. “Concentrate on harm.”
I glared into the beast’s bloody face and played hard staccato notes on my lamp, sending shards of light into the wraith with the images of violent street fights back home. The wraith shuddered, but its shadow began absorbing the light as though it were nothing.
I dropped my bow and clutched my khopesh.
Then I signaled Lakshmi to come in from its back and started backpedaling to the far corner, waving my lantern wildly to draw the wraith.
Lakshmi darted in behind it as it rushed toward me and slit the binding on the remaining leg.
It shuddered and heaved violently, skin tearing and weeping blood and bile.
I dove, khopesh up, and drove my knife into its neck, severing its last binding. When the final braid fell away, the skin and meat of the wraith began to slough to the floor.
From my sling pack I quickly dug out the Orcus, which was vibrating harder in the presence of this wraith than it had the hellhound. Again, on instinct, I sang a few notes from one of my songs to quiet the thread—a few words about losing the one woman I’d loved. It helped even less this time—
The room went quiet. I heard only my own labored breathing.
Then the wraith roared, a deep, reverberating howl, and toppled sideways to the floor.
An immense gathering of souls rose from its bloodied corpse in the shape of a giant man—eight feet tall, and three feet broad at the shoulders.
It looked like something torn from the Endless Dark—wispy edges like mist or smoke.
I began to shield my eyes, expecting a violent wind like the one that had blown when we’d dismissed the hound at Highgate. But this wraith hovered over its own mortal shell, still thrumming with all the same power . . . and staring at me.