Chapter 62: THE COLD ONE
The Cinderhound came first.
The lane mouth of the corridor flared once. Heat into a space that had been cool. The Cinderhound’s body filled it shoulder to shoulder for the length of one stride. The heat came off it in a wave the corridor caught and held.
It crossed the brazier mark.
Miasma let the acid go.
Not the deposit. Not the thread. The spray. A fine mist off her spines, the green catching the corridor’s width from wall to wall.
The Cinderhound ran into it mid-stride. The mist hit the eyes first. Then the open mouth. The heat coming off the Cinderhound’s throat met the acid going in and the reaction was immediate.
The Cinderhound put its forelegs down wrong.
It came onto the corridor floor in a slide its body had not chosen, the heat coming off it still, on a body that had stopped knowing where its own air was.
Miasma was already moving.
The thread came out of her fast, fine, the kind of thing the eye built into a thread only after the line had landed. The first line caught the Cinderhound’s forelegs at the knee. The second caught the rear. It went down with the heat still pouring off it.
The Frostmane Lynx came in behind.
It came silent, the breath visible in white pulses: three breaths in, two breaths in, one.
It saw the Cinderhound down. It did not stop. A Frostmane Lynx that did not stop at a downed handler-beast was a beast ordered to keep coming. The handler was still standing at the corridor mouth, then, with a voice in the beast.
Nyx took the Lynx where Nyx was already standing.
The dark of the corridor moved.
The Lynx ran through the space where Nyx was standing. Its pale fur vanished for a stride.
When it came out the other side it was on its left flank. The foreleg hung wide off the shoulder. Nyx had been inside the joint for the length of one stride, the way it had been inside the scavenger’s spine.
The Lynx’s body had kept moving. The leg had not.
It was on the floor.
It was not dead. The chest was working. The wide-set eyes still tracked Nyx in the dark. The breath came back in white once.
A Lynx down sideways was a Lynx that found its feet in two breaths and went for the throat of whatever put it down. A Lynx that found its feet was a Lynx Nyx would have to put down again. And Nyx was a half-sized dark thing that had already spent the one move it had.
Aiden stepped.
He did not cross the corridor.
The world folded the way it had folded the day he had been on the wall at the lower grounds with a thousand-sided coin’s worth of grey in his hair.
One step became none. Cool air on his face. The brazier mark was three meters behind him. His boots were on corridor stone he had not stepped to. The chest caught once. The grey came in at the edges and went back out.
He was at the wall a stride behind the Lynx’s prone left flank.
He was inside the half-breath the Lynx had to find its feet in.
The Lynx had not seen him cross the corridor because he had not crossed the corridor.
The knife went in below the ribs. The thing below the ribs of a Lynx was the same wet pump as the thing below the ribs of a scavenger.
The knife found it on the second push. The breath that had been about to come back in white did not come back in any colour at all.
Nyx held its place.
It did not come off the Lynx until the chest stopped working.
Aiden took the knife out. He did not move from the wall until the breath in his own chest had caught up to the breath the Lynx had not.
Once. The clock’s empty now. The next thirty seconds I’m just a man with a knife and three meters less.
A man at the corridor mouth said something the wall took most of the sound off.
Aiden did not move from the wall.
He counted to thirty.
Miasma held the thread. Nyx held the Lynx. The Cinderhound lay webbed in the corner of the corridor he had set the trap in, the heat off it still going into the corridor stone, the eyes still tracking him.
Thirty came.
He came off the wall.
He walked to the corridor mouth.
The handler with the Cinderhound was gone. The corridor mouth opened into the alley, the alley into the herb lane.
The lane at last bell took a man fast, if the man knew it. This one had known it well enough to be down it before Aiden reached the mouth.
The handler with the Lynx was on the lane stones. On his side, hand against his ribs, eyes open. Not dead. Not getting up. A clean shallow cut across his chest. Not a beast’s work. A blade, and not one Aiden had used.
Aiden stood at the mouth.
He looked up.
Two roofs over. The notch in the chimney. The line of sight he had given Nyx and Miasma when they sat on his own roof and faced east.
A man stood on it.
His coat had nothing on it. The woman in row six had had nothing on hers. He was at the lip of the roof with a glass on a wire in his hand, the kind a man used for a thing he wanted to see precisely.
He had been there long enough for Aiden’s beasts to have known it before the two in the lane had come up Aiden’s wall.
Aiden looked at him.
He held a second longer than he needed to. Making sure Aiden saw him.
Then he closed the glass on its wire.
He did not run. He stepped off the back of the roof the way a man stepped off a thing he had measured. Gone before Aiden’s eye reached the place.
That was the operation. The two in the lane were what the man on the roof came to watch.
He has the read on both beasts now. But not the blink. The corridor walls held what the roof couldn’t see.
Coade is tomorrow. The panel is two days. The read is already moving toward Vane.
He stood at the corridor mouth.
The Frostmane Lynx had stopped breathing. The handler had not. The Cinderhound was webbed in his corridor behind him, the heat off it still on the walls, the thread holding.
Two beasts to do something with by morning.
A man in the lane to do something with by morning.
A read on his beasts already moving across the city toward a house that was going to put it on the back of a slip on a panel in two days, and an inner-ring tamer he had not yet been in front of who he had to be in front of before the read got to where it was going.
Four years his hands had been full at last bell. Tonight they had been empty for one bell.
They were not going to be empty for the next.