fey in Hawklam Asylum.’
One of the worldsingers flanking the door moved forward. ‘First Guardian!’
‘Stand back.’ Hoggstone’s voice was raised. ‘Damn your eyes, I do know how the order feel about the things we have contained in Hawklam.’
‘They are there for a reason,’ said the worldsinger. ‘The abominations they have endured have twisted the creatures’ minds far more than their bodies. Those things have as much left in common with beings such as ourselves as we do with an infestation of loft-rot beetles, and, given the chance, they would treat us much the same.’
‘It is their minds which interest me. We do not need many – just a couple with the talent to root out the core of the enemy in our midst.’
‘Soul-sniffers,’ gasped the worldsinger. ‘You believe the order would release soul-sniffers into the world.’
‘The people would not like it,’ advised Flare.
‘I am the people, sir!’ Hoggstone roared. ‘The voice of the
people, for the people. And I will not let the people fall under the spell of a horde of communityist rabble-rousers. I will not have the talent and prosperity of this nation run through a Gideon’s Collar like so much mince through a sausage grinder. I will not!’ Hoggstone slammed his writing desk and thrust a finger towards Captain Flare. ‘You think that if the people see the misshapen human wreckage in Hawklam Asylum the mob might stop worshipping the ground the Guard walk on. Start associating your guardsmen with feybreed abominations rather than the latest damn issue of The Middlesteel Illustrated with a stonecutting of your face grinning on the cover.’
‘It is possible,’ Flare acknowledged.
‘The art of leadership is knowing when the mob’s applause has become a self-destructive echo,’ said Hoggstone. ‘If the choice is the veil being pulled off your perfect persona or the state collapsing into anarchy and mayhem, I’ll choose the former over the latter. But do not worry, we shall keep the feybreed on a short leash and run them only at night. After all, it does not do to scare the voters.’
‘We will need to fashion special torc suits for them,’ said the worldsinger. ‘And organize teams to make sure the abomi nations don’t slip them.’
Hoggstone gestured wearily. ‘Do it, then. We need to know who is behind the unrest and when they intend to act, when they intend to take advantage of their mischief.’
‘As you will.’
‘As the people will, sir. And for the Circle’s sake, put the gag back on the royal pup before you leave the House. I don’t want The Middlesteel Illustrated running a story on him being seen naked within parliament’s walls.’
Ver’fey tapped Molly with one of her manipulator limbs, the short one under her big bone-sword arm. ‘Molly, we’re being followed.’ The craynarbian had never seen a creeper or vine in Liongeli, but she still had her jungle senses.
‘From where?’
‘As we turned off Watercourse Avenue.’
Molly swore to herself. They had set watchers outside the poorhouse then. Damn her family. It was one thing to know from your earliest years you had never been wanted, cast out like the previous night’s garbage. It was quite another to have your own blood trying to tidy up loose ends by slitting your throat. ‘How many?’
‘Two men.’
Molly pondered their options. ‘If it is me they want and they’ve clocked me, their numbers won’t stay at two for long. The gang that did for Rachael and the house will be swarming over Sun Gate.’
Ver’fey gestured off the street with her bone-sword. ‘We could play alley-dodge, then slice them good.’
Molly shook her head. ‘You’re a game bird, Ver-Ver, but the two of us are no match for a crew of professional toppers. End of the street, you jump left for Shell Town, I’ll cut right and lose them in the Angel’s Crust.’
Ver’fey made a noise of disgust. Like all her kind, she would only be seen dead in a jinn house – quite literally. The only effects the pink-coloured drink had on craynarbians were to make them vomit and to slow their hearts to a dangerously low palpitation.
‘Luck to us,’ said Ver’fey.
‘You blooming well look after yourself, Ver-Ver,’ said Molly.
They got to the end of the street and Molly lunged right and up Shambles Lane, the sound of Ver’fey’s heavy, shell-covered body clattering the opposite way fading as she found the narrow corridors of the Pinchfield rookeries. The Angel’s Crust was up the Shambles and on the left, a three-storey temple to Middlesteel’s sinners; the low-rent equivalent of Fairborn and Jarndyce. Two floors of drunken loutish revelry with bedrooms on the third floor, where women with low necklines and even lower morals plied Middlesteel’s oldest trade.
As she sprinted for the bright yellow light of the place, Molly caught a glimpse of two shadows racing after her. Even as she cursed, part of her was glad they had left Ver’fey to escape; the craynarbian girl could move fast over a short distance, but her armour made her a poor bet for a marathon chase. This was confirmation. Someone wanted Molly dead. Very badly indeed.
Molly hurdled a clump of collapsed snoring drinkers and hurtled through the doorless entrance. She blundered into a drinker, spraying jinn over the sawdust on the floor.
‘Crushers,’ Molly yelled like a banshee. ‘Get out – it’s a raid. Ham Street bawdy.’
The ground floor erupted in confusion as chairs wrenched back and the surge for the exits started. If there was an honest man or woman drinking or conducting business in the Angel’s Crust, they were here by mistake. Like many of the girls at the Sun Gate workhouse, Molly had earned pennies in the evening moonlighting as a watch girl at the Angel.
A pistol charge rang out by the door and something pinged off one of the roof beams, followed by a swell of uproar and even more confusion. Her two pursuers were in the taproom and Molly dived low, riding and hiding in the panicked flow of the crowd. One of the barkeeps shoved past her clutching an old black blunderbuss. She went under the bar and darted through to the cellar, racing around walls of piled oak jinn barrels, each burned with the red marque of its Cassarabian exporter.
Thank the Circle. The old staff chute was still there, behind a tattered cloth curtain. Their backdoor if a rival flash mob decided to move in on the Angel. Molly was careful to leave the cloth in place as she shoved off down the short slide, landing in a puddle of grimy water and rotting bottle corks at the foot of the tumbledown rookeries beyond.
The maze of corridors changed all the time as the inhabitants added new doorways or closed off collapsed tenements. Little chance of them catching her now. She navigated the claustrophobic streets towards the back end of the Guardian Rathbone atmospheric. Molly smelt it before she saw it; two columns of large stacks pouring dark coal smoke into the sky, keeping the atmospheric’s tunnels in vacuum.
Guardian Rathbone station was a castle of white marble stained black with soot, arched domes of glass and girders
