Scar Night Page 0,13
candles had burned down to stubs of tallow. Ash smouldered in the hearth. Sunlight streamed through the stained glass in the eastern wall. Dill’s gluey eyes focused on the image portrayed in the window. His ancestor Callis, Herald and commander of Ulcis’s archons, held his wings outstretched and his sword aloft before a group of cowering heathens. Motes of dust drifted before the glass angel, changing from pink to blue to gold.
Dill sniffed, wiped his lips on his sleeve of his nightshirt, and rose stiffly from his mat. He stretched arms, legs, and wings before he realized his eyes were itching terribly.
He groaned. Please…not today, not for the ceremony .
But no amount of pleading would make a difference. Dill’s eyes were the wrong colour: completely inappropriate.
Nerves. He was bound to be nervous. The darkness in his dream had unnerved him.
And today I wear a sword for the first time.
He would have to attend to his eyes later; first he had to wash. The water in his bucket was freezing, but he drenched himself until he gasped, then stood naked, soaked and shivering, with his bony arms wrapped around his ribs, his feathers damp.
The uniform lay there on the stool, precisely folded where he’d left it last night, a stack of heavy velvet, fine brocade with glints of silver. The boots standing beside the stool were new and smelled of polished leather. But the sword above the mantel outshone all else.
The blade beckoned him, but he couldn’t touch it, not yet. Everything must be perfect first, and he had to take care of the snails. There were only seven this morning: one by the hearth, one under the window, the others clinging to the walls at various heights. The largest was the size of a walnut, the smallest the size of his little fingernail. Gently, he removed them and put them in the snail-bucket along with the others. About forty in it now, he noted. The promise of rain must be bringing them out in such numbers.
Wherever did they come from?
Dill had spent years trying to figure it out. There was a narrow space under the balcony door, and also under the door to the stairwell, through both of which they might have entered his cell, and there were also a few dark holes where mortar had crumbled from the damp walls. But he’d watched those same openings for hours at a time without ever seeing a single snail slither through. The empty rooms beneath his cell were thick with them, but those rooms were permanently dark and there wasn’t a brand or taper bright enough to make him want to venture far inside them. Not that those snails down there ever seemed to move either. Snails, being snails, only moved when no one was watching them.
A sudden roar rattled the windowpanes. An explosion? Dill wheeled, confused, expecting to see the walls topple, and he almost knocked over the snail-bucket. But everything remained solid. The noise outside died away.
The door to his balcony had jammed shut, as though its arched frame had shifted during the night, but he finally got it open with a kick and squeezed his wings through.
Crisp morning air: the flagstones chilled his bare feet; the parapet felt cool when he leaned against it. Deepgate spread below, bright in the sunshine. Had a chain snapped somewhere, some part of the city collapsed into the abyss? He leaned out further to get a better view.
Heavy with balconies, the townhouses of Bridgeview slumped at odd angles around their dappled courtyards, walled gardens, and fountains that glittered like smashed glass. Beyond that, neatly pitched roofs crowded the chains in Lilley and Ivygarths. Further out, smoke rose from a thousand chimneys in the Warrens. And, out on the fringes, the League of Rope clumped around the chain anchors, under the Deadsands, like driftwood on the shores of a lake. There was no sign of disaster.
Another deep roar. Rooks burst past his tower with cries of alarm. Dill raced around his balcony to investigate.
Fat black lettering on the tail-fin proclaimed the warship to be theAdraki . She was turning slowly, edging closer to the temple. Propellers twice the size of a man thrummed on either side of the brass-etched gondola suspended beneath the envelope. Four aeronauts in white uniforms stood on the aft deck, peering over the sterncastle rail between the aether-lights and docking harpoons. The signalman spotted him and waved his flag in a clipped semaphore message that Dill doubted was civil.
Dill