They cut a trail deeper into the night, as if it were a forest. With every step, the air grew heavier. A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul. From all around them came the cries of miserable, disturbed sleep.
They stopped in Flyside, a few streets from the militia tower, and took water from a pump to wash and drink. Then south through the morass of alleys between Shadrach Street and Selchit Pass, bearing down on Aspic Hole.
And there in that near-deserted and unearthly place, Isaac had bade his companions wait. Between sobs of desperate breath, he begged them to wait, to give him half an hour with her.
“You’ve got to give me a little while to explain to her what’s going on…” he pleaded.
They acquiesced, and hunkered down in the darkness at the base of the building.
“Half an hour, ‘Zaac,” said Lemuel clearly. “Then we’re coming up. Understand?”
And so Isaac had begun slowly to climb the stairs.
The tower was cool and quite silent. On the seventh floor, Isaac heard sound for the first time. It was the sleepy murmur and unceasing flutter of jackdaws. Up again, through the breezes that passed through the ruined and unsafe eighth floor, and on to the building’s crest.
He stood before Lin’s familiar door. She may not be there, he reasoned. She’s probably still with that guy, her patron, doing her work. In which case I’ll just have to…leave a message for her.
He knocked at the door, which fell open. His breath stalled in his throat. He rushed into the room.
The air stank of putrefying blood. Isaac scanned the little attic space. He caught sight of what awaited him.
Lucky Gazid gazed up at him sightlessly, propped on one of Lin’s chairs, sitting at the table as if at a meal. His shape was outlined in what little light crept up from the square below. Gazid’s arms were flat on the table. His hands were tense and hard as bone. His mouth was open and stuffed with something that Isaac could not clearly see. Gazid’s front was utterly drenched with blood. Blood had slicked on the table, seeping deep into the grain of the wood. Gazid’s throat had been cut. In the summer heat it thronged with hungry little night insects.
There was a second when Isaac thought that it might be a nightmare, one of the sick dreams that afflicted the city, spewing out of his unconscious on a slick of slake-moth dung and spattering into the aether.
But Gazid did not disappear. Gazid was real, and really dead.
Isaac looked at him. He blenched at Gazid’s screaming face. He looked again at the clawed hands. Gazid had been held down at the table, cut and held down until he died. Then something had been shoved into his gaping mouth.
Isaac picked his way towards the corpse. He set his face and reached up, pulled from Gazid’s dry mouth a large envelope.
When he unrolled it, he saw that the name carefully written on the front was his own. He reached inside with a nauseous foreboding.
There was a moment, a tiny moment, when he did not recognize what he pulled out. Flimsy and almost weightless, it felt as he drew it out like crumbling parchment, like dead leaves. Then he held it in the faint grey light of the moonlit room and he saw it was a pair of khepri wings.
Isaac let out a sound, an exhalation of shocked misery. His eyes widened in horror.
“Oh no,” he said, hyperventilating. “Oh no oh no no no…” The wings had been bent and rolled, and their delicate substance was shattered. They desquamated in great clots of translucent matter. Isaac’s fingers trembled as he tried to smooth them down. His fingertips brushed their battered surface. He was humming a single note, a tremulous keening. He fumbled with the envelope, brought out a single sheet of folded paper.
It was typewritten, with a chessboard or patchwork standard printed at its top. As he read it, Isaac began to cry out wordlessly.
Copy 1: Aspic Hole. (Others to be delivered to Brock Marsh, Salacus Fields)
Mr. Dan der Grimnebulin,
Khepri cannot make sounds, but I judge by the chymicals she was exuding and the trembling of those bugger legs that Lin found the removal of these useless wings a deeply unpleasant experience. I don’t doubt that her lower body would also have been righting us had we not strapped the bug-bitch in a chair.
Lucky Gazid can give you this message, as it is he I have to thank for your interference.
I gather that you have been trying to squeeze in on the dreamshit market. At first I thought you might have wanted all that ‘shit you bought from Gazid for yourself, but the idiot man’s wittering eventually turned to your caterpillar in Brock Marsh, and I realized the magnitude of your scheme.
You would never get top grade ‘shit from a moth weaned on human-consumption dreamshit, of course, but you could have charged less for your inferior product. It is in my interest to keep all my customers connoisseurs. I will tolerate no competition.
As I have subsequently learnt, and as one might have expected from an amateur, you couldn’t control your damn producer. Your shit-fed runt escaped through your incompetence, and liberated its siblings. You stupid man.
Here are my demands, (i) That you give yourself up to me immediately, (ii) That you return the remains of the dreamshit you stole from me through Gazid, or pay me compensation (sum to be arranged), (iii) That you pursue the task of recapturing my producers, along with your pathetic specimen, to be handed over to me immediately. After such time as this, we will discuss your continued life.
While we wait to hear your response, I will continue my discussions with Lin. I have been enjoying her company greatly over these last weeks, and relish the chance to deal with her more closely. We have a little wager. She bets that you will respond to this epistle while she still retains some of her headlegs. I remain unconvinced. The current rate is one headleg every two days we do not hear from you after today. Who will be proved right?
I will rip them from her while she twitches and spits, do you understand? And within two weeks I will tear her carapace from her headbody and feed her living head to the rats. I will personally hold her down while they lunch.
I very much look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Motley.
When Derkhan, Yagharek and Lemuel reached the ninth floor, they could hear Isaac’s voice. He was talking slowly, in low tones. They could not make out what he was saying, but it sounded like a monologue. He was not pausing to hear or see any responses.
Derkhan knocked on the door, and when there was no answer, she pushed it tentatively open and peered inside.
She saw Isaac and another man. It was only a few seconds before she recognized Gazid, and saw that he had been butchered. She gasped and moved slowly inside, letting Yagharek and Lemuel slip in behind her.
They stood and stared at Isaac. He was sitting on the bed, holding a pair of insectile wings and a piece of paper. He looked up at them and his murmuring subsided. He was crying without a sound. He opened his mouth and Derkhan moved over to him, grasped his hands. He sobbed and hid his eyes, his face twisted with rage. Without a sound she took the letter and read it.
Her mouth quivered in horror. She emitted a mute little cry for her friend. She passed the letter to Yagharek, shaking, controlling herself.
The garuda took it and perused it carefully. His reaction was invisible. He turned to Lemuel, who was examining Lucky Gazid’s corpse.