What had Maxim done?
What was he yet planning to do?
She could hear the workings of the palace, but her husband’s mind was solid, impenetrable. No matter how hard she listened, all she heard was his heart.
IX
As night fell, the shadows bloomed.
They ran together with the river and the mist and the moonless sky until they were everywhere. Osaron was everywhere. In every heartbeat. In every breath.
Some had escaped. For now. Others had been reduced already to dust. It was a necessary thing, like the razing of a forest, the clearing of ground so that new things—better things—could grow. A process as natural as the passing of the seasons.
Osaron was the fall, and the winter, and the spring.
And all across the city, he heard the voices of his loyal servants.
How can I serve you?
How can I worship?
Show me the way.
Tell me what to do.
He was in their minds.
He was in their bodies. He whispered in their heads and coursed through their blood. He was in every one of them, and bound to none.
Everywhere, and nowhere.
It was enough.
And it was not enough.
He wanted more.
I
GREY LONDON
Ned Tuttle woke to a very bad feeling.
He’d recently moved out of his family’s house in Mayfair and into the room above the tavern—his tavern—that magical place once called the Stone’s Throw, and rechristened the Five Points.
Ned sat up, listening intently to the silence. He could have sworn someone was speaking, but he couldn’t hear the voice anymore, and, as the moments ticked past, he couldn’t be sure if it had ever been real, or simply the dregs of sleep clinging to him, the urge to listen to an echo of some peculiar dream.
Ned had always had vivid dreams.
So vivid he couldn’t always tell when something had truly happened or when he’d simply dreamed it. Ned’s dreams had always been strange, and sometimes they were wonderful, but lately, they’d grown … disturbing, skewing darker, more menacing.
Growing up, his parents had written off his dreams as simply an effect of his reading too many novels, disappearing for hours—sometimes days—into fictional and fantastical worlds. In his youth, he’d seen the dreams as a sign of his sensitivity to the other, that aspect of the world most people couldn’t see—the one even Ned couldn’t see—but that he believed in, fervently, determinedly, doggedly, right up until the day he met Kell and learned for certain that the other was real.
But tonight, Ned had been dreaming of a forest made of stone. Kell was in the dream, too, had been at one point but wasn’t anymore, and now Ned was lost, and every time he called out for help, the whole forest echoed like an empty church, but the voices that came back weren’t his. Some of them were high and others low, some young and sweet, and others old, and there at the center, a voice he couldn’t quite make out, one that bent around his ears the way light sometimes bent around a corner.
Now, sitting up in the stiff little bed, he had the strangest urge to call out, the way he had in the forest, but some small—well, not as small as he’d like—part of him feared that just like in the forest, someone else would call back.
Perhaps the sound had come from the tavern downstairs. He swung his long legs over the side of the bed, slid his feet into his slippers, and stood, the old wooden floor groaning beneath his toes.
He moved in silence, only that creak-creak-creak following him across the room, and then the oomph as he ran into the dresser, the eek of the metal lantern rocking, almost tipping, then humphing back into place, followed by the shhhh of tapers rolling of the table.
“Bugger,” muttered Ned.
It would have been dreadfully handy, he thought, if he could simply snap his fingers and summon a bit of fire, but in four straight months of trying, he’d barely managed to shift the pieces in Kell’s kit of elements, so he fumbled on his robe in the dark and stepped out onto the stairs.
And shivered.
Something was most certainly strange.
Ordinarily Ned loved strange things, lived in the hope of spying them, but this was a type of strange bordering on wrong. The air smelled of roses and woodsmoke and dying leaves, and when he moved it felt like he was wading through a warm spot in a cold pool, or a cold spot in a warm one. Like a draft in a room when all the doors were shut, the windows latched.
He knew this feeling, had sensed it once before in the street outside the Five Points, back when it was the Stone’s Throw and he was still waiting for Kell to return with his promised dirt. Ned had seen a cart crash, heard the driver rant about a man he’d crushed. Only there was no body left behind, no man, only smoke and ash and the faint frisson of magic.
Bad magic.
Black magic.
Ned returned to his room and fetched his ceremonial dagger—he’d bought it from a patron the week before, the handle etched with runes around a pentagram of inlaid onyx.
My name is Edward Archibald Tuttle, he thought, gripping the dagger, I am the third of that name, and I am not afraid.
The creak-creak-creak followed him down the warping stairs, and when he reached the bottom, standing in the darkened tavern with only the thud-thud of his heart, Ned realized where that feeling of strangeness was coming from.
The Five Points was too quiet.
A heavy, muffled, unnatural quiet, as if the room were filled with wool instead of air. The last embers in the hearth smoldered behind their grate, the wind blew through the boards, but none of it made any sound.