A white-hot sheet of fire ripped through me.
Something inside my mind shrieked, shriveled up, and flamed into nothingness.
I opened my eyes to find myself curled fetus-like next to a column, a couple feet from the edge of the balcony and empty space. Over me swayed a charred, bloody, convulsing Ash. One of his hands braced against the column, while the other clutched his lightning hook. It trembled, and little arcs of electricity darted out of the loop.
When I tried to uncurl, I discovered that I barely had the energy to twitch. “What…happened…?” I mumbled, moving my lips with great effort. My throat felt raw, and the root of my tongue ached.
“Yougot – possessed.” Ash’s voice squeaked out of his lungs in odd, jerky gasps. “You – werebabbling – ina – non- non- non-human language.” His knees buckled and he collapsed next to me on the cold stone floor, his eyelids drooping shut.
Forcing myself to roll over and scrabble into a sitting position, I propped myself against the column and surveyed the room. Every other human in sight was glowing electric blue and gibbering or lying deathly still. Through the door throbbed the echo of boots pounding up the stairs. “We need to get out of here,” I muttered.
All of a sudden, blue light flared in the doorway. Ghostly shrieks and human screams erupted in the stairwell: Faith’s spectral slaves fending off the Crows to buy us time.
Ash’s eyelashes fluttered. “Youhave…climbinggear…right?” he breathed.
I patted my waist, where I’d coiled the rope, to reassure myself that I hadn’t lost it. “Yes.”
He tried to stand and failed. “Carryme…down?”
“Of course.” While he crawled to a pile of Lyssa’s loot and scavenged some silk scarves, I wedged my grappling hook between two stones in the floor and tested it. I thought it should hold our weight. With my help, Ash tied himself to my back, and I carefully lowered us over the balcony.
But I hadn’t accounted for how much life essence the ghost had drained from me.
My hands slipped.
With a strangled cry, I grabbed for the rope, but Ash’s weight threw me off-balance and I missed – and then we were freefalling down, down, down, towards the tiny dot of Lyssa’s body.
Apparently, the poetic justice we wrought applied to us too.
“Faith!” I tried to scream, but the wind carried away my voice. “Cricket!” Waving my arms, I flailed wildly at the wall. My fingertips brushed stone, and for a second, I thought I’d found a handhold – but then they slipped off a patch of moss and we were falling again. “Faith!” I cried. “Faith, help!”
The courtyard was getting closer and closer.
I’m not ready to die! Grandfather –
All of a sudden, the entire world turned icy and blue, as if I’d tumbled into a jelly dessert. For half a second, howls of pain nearly deafened me. And then we were back in open air, falling just a tiny bit slower.
“What was that?” Ash shouted into my ear. His arms were wrapped around my neck in a stranglehold.
I gasped, “I don’t know – ”
We plunged into a mountain of bright blue gelatinous forms that writhed and oozed electroplasm as we ripped through them. Little by little, we began to decelerate.
That was just as well, because that was when we hit a pile of human bodies with a horrible crunch.
“What – ?” I didn’t even know if Ash or I or both of us cried out.
Beneath us, possessed Crows moaned and rolled weakly aside, breaking our fall and gently lowering us to the ground. At last, we came to a stop on the flagstones of the courtyard, surrounded by a ring of corpses.
Still tangled together by Lyssa’s scarves, we lay there, stunned and limp.
A cheerful face framed by long, platinum-blonde hair filled my vision, upside down. “Isha! Ash! What a pleasant surprise for you to drop in on me like this!”
All I could do was moan.
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Still gloating over the success of her horrible, horrible plan, Faith untied the scarves and started to help us up – but recoiled when she saw Ash’s blood.
“I don’t want to ruin another pink dress,” she clucked. “Here, Isha, why don’t you sling his arm over your shoulders like this. Then you can support him until we find Sawbones.”
Too exhausted to object, I swayed a little under Ash’s weight but managed to stay upright.
Faith nodded approvingly. “Lyssa, by the way, is dead. She’s in this vial.” She waggled a spirit bottle at us.
Ash stared at it blankly. I couldn’t summon the energy to care.
Skipping ahead, Faith led the way to the Lampblacks’ headquarters, where she assured us Sawbones had prepared a triage station. As I staggered along behind her, I dully noted the thugs in black overcoats who were streaming the opposite way. Despite their rush, they parted around our little crew and gave us a wide berth (which, now that I thought about it, was yet another nautical term). Bazso was nowhere in sight, but that was all right. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him just then anyway.
When we finally tottered up to the coal warehouse, Sawbones was leaning against the door, chugging whiskey straight from the bottle. Entirely unsurprised by our state, he took one last swig, plunked the bottle on a crate, and shouted over his shoulder, “Danfield! We got our first!”
A skinny, nervous young man in a white coat scampered outside and skidded to a halt when he saw us.
“Yeah, it’s going to be like this all night. I mean, not exactly like this, but kind of like this.” Rolling up his sleeves, Sawbones jerked his chin at the young man. “This here’s Danfield. He’s a student at Charterhall. Bazso thought I’d need some assistance.”
“I’m a second-year at Charterhall University,” Danfield specified hesitantly, as if he thought we might reject his services if he didn’t provide the proper credentials. “I’m studying natural biology in the School of Natural and Unnatural Philosophy.”
“That’s okay,” Faith consoled him before she wailed at our usual doctor, “Sawbones! Sawbones! It’s terrible! I’m horribly, horribly injured! I have a sunburn, and it just won’t go away!” Keeping one eye on the new kid and switching seamlessly to her most bored tone, she added as an afterthought, “I suppose you should probably take a look at my comrades too. Eventually.”
Poor Danfield goggled at her, unsure whether to take her seriously.
“Ugh, we’re dying over here,” snapped Ash, who was obviously in no mood for theatrics but hesitated to vent his frustration on his savior. “We need urgent medical assistance – preferably not sawing our bones off, if that’s what they teach at Charterhall.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Help them inside,” Sawbones ordered his new assistant, who looked too flustered to take offense at Ash’s words.
While we were busy planning and executing our score, the Lampblacks had converted the warehouse’s entire central space into an infirmary. Two operating tables waited just inside the door, and under the grimy steel girders marched rows and rows of cots.
Sawbones directed us to the back corner, where he ordered, “Lie down. Let me have a look.” I was only too happy to obey, while Ash didn’t exactly have a choice. “Which one of you is worse hurt?” the doctor asked, looking between the two of us.
“Him,” I said at the same time that Ash said, “Me. I was electrocuted, I was sliced, I have visions of the Sun – and I fell off a tower.”
Danfield choked back a strangled gurgle.
“It wasn’t even to catch a kitten this time,” Faith supplied for his benefit. Perching on the cot next to mine, she propped her chin on her hands and observed us all with amusement.
“Here.” Sawbones shoved the whiskey bottle in my direction. Struggling half upright, I took a grateful swig, dulling the pain while the doctors sewed up Ash’s wound and palpated his belly to assess the extent of internal bleeding. “I can do absolutely nothing for your visions of the Sun,” Sawbones informed Ash at the end. “I’m a street doctor, not one of those fancy Whisper physicians.”
“Danfield?” Ash asked, his voice stronger now.
The student blushed and shook his head, shamefaced. “We haven’t gotten to that part yet,” he mumbled. “Maybe next year.”
He and Sawbones repeated the palpation on me, determined that I wasn’t dying, and proclaimed that they could do absolutely nothing to replace the life essence the ghost had drained. “Given enough time, your body will regenerate on its own,” Danfield advised.
By then, the first injured Lampblacks and even Red Sashes were stumbling through the door, calling for help. With a firm “Rest, both of you,” Sawbones hurried to meet them. His rather-more-legitimate assistant ticked off all the boxes on his mental checklist for examinations and then trailed after him.
I was just dozing off when Ash’s voice demanded, “Where’s Spider? Someone should go find Spider.”
“Not me,” Faith informed him, stretching out full-length on her cot, folding her hands behind her head, and shutting her eyes. “I’m too injured to move.”
“Is there anyone else…?” Ash surveyed the room, trying to catch the eye of one of the uninjured Lampblacks.
It took some time, but eventually he managed to convince one of them to put word out on the street that the Insect Kids should report to the coal warehouse. All five appeared at once, Sleipnir gamely hopping at their heels. Although the children lingered fearfully in the doorway, Sleipnir streaked across the infirmary as soon as he saw me.
“Hey! What was that?” cried Danfield, spinning around with a scalpel in hand.
“That’s just Isha’s dog,” snarled a waiting Lampblack who had her hand pressed over a bullet hole. “Unless you can regenerate legs, ignore it.”
Wide-eyed, shaking his head, Danfield turned back to his patient.
Thus unmolested by notions of infirmary hygiene, Sleipnir jumped onto my cot and took up a protective stance. I petted his head weakly, and he licked my hand.
Loudly, Faith whispered, “Your dog might be developing a taste for blood! I’m afraid it’s going to devour Ash! He’s in terrible danger!”
I just petted Sleipnir some more. After getting half-eaten by her ghost, I didn’t have the energy to deal with her. Disappointed, she settled back down.
Rolling onto his side and propping himself up on one elbow, Ash called to the children, “It’s all right! Come over here!” Obediently, they started to tiptoe into the coal warehouse, hugging the walls and sneaking peeks at the gang members, who were too busy to pay them any attention. While he kept an eye on their halting progress, Ash said to me, “Thanks for getting us out of there, Isha. Next time, maybe we should stay further away from trouble.”
I wholeheartedly agreed. “Next time, maybe we should come up with a better plan for getting out of a tower.”
A quarter of the way into the room, the children bunched up like ducklings when Sawbones hurtled past.
Absently, still observing them, Ash remarked, “I’ve heard of this substance called ‘float oil.’ I think we really need to invest in emergency samples. Next time.”
“That’s a good idea.” It certainly beat falling through a bunch of ghosts and then onto a heap of human beings. At the memory, I shuddered, and Sleipnir licked me harder.
“Don’t I get credit for my incredible ideas?” protested Faith, shooting up on her cot with an injured pout. “What about that conclave of corpulent corpses that I collected for you to collapse upon?”
“It was….” Ash trailed off, searching for the appropriate adjective.
“Certainly effective,” I finished drily.
Ash did me one better. “Hauntingly beautiful, Faith,” he said, a faint, rueful smirk twisting his lips.
“Effective,” I repeated, more emphatically this time.
Faith tipped her head all the way to one side and reconsidered her last alliteration. “Well, I guess technically they weren’t dead, so does that make them a bountiful band of bodies?”
Ash actually chuckled at that. “A baleful band of bodies, perhaps.”
“Mmmm, that’s good,” Faith marveled. “I like you, Ash.”
“Oh, Faith,” he sighed. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
I just put my pillow over my face, although I removed it again at Faith’s trumpet, “Here’s our pack of orphans!”
Timidly, the children crowded into the space between Ash’s and my cots. Locust immediately clambered onto mine, jostling me until Moth snapped at him to behave, and wrapped his arms around Sleipnir.
Looking from one to another, Ash asked the children, “Well, what did you think of your first score?”
“Oh, wait, sorry!” Faith interrupted. “I believe the correct terminology is an outfit of orphans, not a pack.”
“Is it?” asked Sawbones over his shoulder. Since Danfield was darting back and forth between the two surgery tables, operating on two patients at once, Sawbones was stitching up the arm of a Lampblack who lay on a nearby cot.
“It is now,” she informed him, then reconsidered. “Or, how about oodles? Oodles of orphans sounds pretty good.”
“Well,” Sawbones replied wryly, “you certainly have oodles of orphans now. An entire orphanage’s worth, if I heard correctly.”
“They run an orphanage?” Danfield asked from across the room, aghast.
“Yep,” said Sawbones. He emphatically snipped off the thread. “All set,” he told the Lampblack. “Get more bandages from the storeroom. We’re running low.”
As the Lampblack sat up and tested his arm, Ash looked at the Insect Kids, who were gaping at the man’s bloody sutures. “Report. How was your run?” he repeated. Softening a little at their petrified stares, he soothed, “It will get better. Yes, there are fights – ”
“We know,” murmured Spider, very carefully not looking in Faith’s direction.
“But we’re not normally involved in quite this way,” Ash reassured them. “You did well, to still be here. Did you run into any trouble?”
Cringing as if she feared a beating, Moth whispered, “So, we…we kept our heads down and mostly watched.”
“And set fires!” Beetle reminded her. “To ‘distract the Crows,’ like Mr. Slane said.”
“Your timing was good,” Ash praised. “And what about the ritual?”
There was a little shuffle, and then Spider produced a filthy burlap bag, which he handed reverently to Ash. It clinked.
Ash undid the top to reveal little glass vials that glowed weakly. Even though the children had clearly struggled with the life essence extraction ritual, he nodded his approval. “We will get these to my mother and give you your reward, as appropriate. There is always a value in services well done, and for the rest of the week, your allowances will be doubled.”
Grins broke out on the children’s faces, and they chirped out a chorus of “Thank you, sir!”
Having thus encouraged them, Ash proceeded to lead them through a postmortem of the score and to critique their technique “so you can do even better next time.” Chin in her hands, Faith actually watched the entire lesson with rapt attention. At the end, Ash inquired offhandedly, “Have we told you that you’ll be getting some new friends soon?”
The children shook their heads. “No, sir,” Spider answered for all of them.
“Ah. Well, you will. We seem to have come into possession of – what’s it called, Isha?”
“Strathmill House,” I supplied.
“Yes. Strathmill House. Have you heard of it?”
“It’s that fancy orphanage in Crow’s Foot,” said Beetle slowly. “Miss Yara suggested we go there….” She darted a sidelong glance at me, obviously wondering if I’d planned to get rid of them all along.
Missing or perhaps mistaking the cause of her anxiety, Ash promised, “It’s going to be quite a bit fancier soon. The orphans there are good, but not as good as you….” And he rambled on about Strathmill House, its matron, and its inmates until he ran out of energy.
The children gazed somberly at him and did their best to absorb all these changes.
At some point during the night, Cricket appeared as well. Naturally, the first thing the little ghost did was attach herself to Faith and demand electroplasm. “Patience, dear,” chided the Whisper, petting her absently. “The electroplasm will appear in good time. Although – if you have a particular request – I hear Isha over there is quite tasty. Isha, can you come over here for a second?”
I didn’t even twitch an eyeball in her direction.
I did, however, put the pillow back over my head.
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Over the next day or so, the Crows’ centuries-long rule came to an end. As stipulated in the Tangletown parley, the Lampblacks and Red Sashes consolidated control of Crow’s Foot and the Docks with Bazso as ward boss of the former, and Mylera the latter. To my relief, they didn’t slaughter all the Crows; most of the rank and file saw which way the wind was blowing, surrendered, and switched sides, swelling each gang to twenty-odd members.
Although I pestered every Lampblack and Red Sash who staggered into the infirmary, none of them had seen Skinner, Stev, or Noggs.