Scar Night Page 0,107

skeleton click into motion.There . He stopped. For half a heartbeat he’d glimpsed movement in the void. Tiny lights. He edged the handle back a fraction and the lights appeared again, very faint, twinkling.

“You see them?”

Two, three lights. They drifted slowly through the darkness, changing shape, occasionally winking out and on again. “I see them,” he breathed.

“The souls of the dead,” the Adjunct said.

Dill strained to see more clearly, trying to discern the shapes of people in the lights. But they were too distant, just pale shifting glimmers. If only Rachel could see this …He watched the ghosts until they moved out of sight. Even after they had disappeared, he kept his eye to the glass for a long time, hoping they would return, but he saw no more.

Eventually Adjunct Crumb placed a hand on his shoulder and gently moved him aside. “You’re lucky to have seen them, very few people have—especially at this time. Normally they only appear around the time of the Sending.”

“They welcome the new dead?”

Adjunct Crumb appeared to suppress a wince. “So we believe.”

Dill gazed at the eyepiece of the aurolethiscope and wished the Adjunct would let him take another look, but the priest settled back into the chair and regarded Dill thoughtfully. “We have enemies all around us,” he announced.

“The heathens?”

“Certainly.” He hesitated. “But I fear we now have a new enemy, a more dangerous one.”

Dill nodded. Is this why he summoned me? They need my help against Devon? Rachel had already told him all the news: how the Poisoner’s angelwine had driven him insane. Now he was loose in a stolen warship brimming with weapons, and the city was preparing for the worst. Abruptly Dill felt breathless, squeezed between excitement and fear.

“Do you remember the oath you swore to serve and protect the temple?” Adjunct Crumb continued.

The ceremony had occurred on his tenth birthday. Standing on the brink of the abyss, with a million candles shining in the Sanctum walls, Dill had pledged his allegiance before Presbyter Sypes, Adjunct Crumb, and Gaine. They had named him temple archon and presented him with the old sword that now hung at his hip. “I’ll do anything you ask,” he said.

Adjunct Crumb looked into the eyepiece of the aurolethiscope. “Tell me, what do you know of Carnival?”

“The Leech?”

The priest frowned. “She’s been called many things,” he said. “Although I’m not sure I approve of ‘The Leech.’ A commoners’ term if ever I’ve heard one.”

“She’s a monster, a soul-thief,” Dill said. “Rachel told me about her.”

“That’s as well. I know we sometimes keep things from you, but it’s for your own good. An angel should not be unnecessarily burdened with life’s cruelties.”

But an archon should be told about the temple’s enemies.

“Carnival would make a strong ally.”

Carnival?

“She…” Adjunct Crumb turned the aurolethiscope handle round idly. “I know what she’s done in the past. She’s a tormented creature, but I fear now she may be the lesser of two evils.”

Dill was speechless. How could Devon be worse than Carnival? How could anyone be worse than Carnival?

The Adjunct kept turning the handle this way and that. He didn’t appear to be concentrating too hard on the view. “Carnival is a demon in every sense, but she’s a demon that we know, even if we don’t understand her.” A ruby on his finger sparkled in the candlelight. “I am not proposing we forgive her, but”—overhead the cogs clicked—“beyond Scar Night, life goes on.”

“Why would she help?” Dill asked. “I thought she hated us.” He’d almost said: hated you..

The aurolethiscope settled to silence. Adjunct Crumb leaned back and folded his fingers beneath his chin. “We have something she desperately needs.” He went back to watching the abyss. “It has come to my attention that she is aware of the existence of Devon’s angelwine.”

“But it’s lost. It fell—”

“And she must never be made aware of that fact. If she learns we no longer have it, our advantage becomes worthless.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Adjunct Crumb was turning the handle again. The whole machine ticked, clacked, and whirred. “I want you to deliver a message to her,” he said.

Dill’s wings twitched involuntarily. He felt his eyes frost in fear. “Me?”

“It will be easier for you to find her. You can fly.”

“But, I’ve never flown before, I don’t…” The lie crushed his voice to silence. Pulses of white and green ran alternately through his irises. Fortunately the Adjunct did not turn away from the aurolethiscope to notice them.

“It’s about time you learned. It must happen