Scar Night Page 0,51

a pile of crates. For a few moments he lay there, grumbling incoherently, then he picked himself up and continued zigzagging along the street. “Come out, you murdering bitch!” Twenty paces later he fell to his knees, retched, then slumped to one side and lay unmoving.

Rushes of sharp, delicious pain prickled over Carnival’s skin. “Shhh,” she said, placing a finger to her lips, “I can hear you.” Her finger traced the gossamer lines around her mouth, then down across the raised white scars on her chin, before it lingered at the deep rope-mark around her neck. A thin smile stretched her lips.

Then she sprang from the watchtower and dove into the night.

* * * *

Oberhammer’s planetarium perched on the clock tower of his pinched grey mansion like a huge glass egg ready to topple to the lane below. Vines and brickleweed clutched its western curve and reached inside the brass skeleton, where facets had been smashed by thrown stones or decades of winter frost. But most of the panes were intact, painted black and dotted with pinholes. On sunny days these holes had once been stars to viewers within. A platform with twelve comfortable chairs remained inside, at one time kept perpetually level, through some mechanical wizardry, while the globe revolved on its wheels and simulated heavens rolled overhead.

Seated now in one of the observation chairs, Rachel gazed up at real stars shining through the broken glass and imagined illusions.

The planetarium had never been operational in her lifetime. Church intolerance had seen Oberhammer die poor, another crank who’d killed himself after his fortune dwindled. Like most developing sciences, astronomy had been frowned upon—decades of study brought to the temple, locked away, and forgotten. The masses need not be educated. Where was the merit in that when Ulcis waited beneath their feet, when Ulcis was everything? In another generation few would remember the scientist’s name.

Now Oberhammer’s mansion mouldered: windows boarded, its walls wrapped in chains to keep them from bursting under the weight of his folly above. The clock tower forever displayed thirteen minutes past nine, the time for rats and bats and lunatics, for every ghoul and demon conceived by Deepgate’s commoners. The scientist had stopped the clock at that moment, retired quietly to his drawing room, and opened his wrists with a razor—his valediction to the Church. Now the place was said to be haunted. Iril’s doors had opened here, and when the Maze opens its doors something is always left behind. Rachel recalled the stories from her childhood: the Grey Mummer, the Chain Creeper, the Nunny Lady—ageless sinners who had escaped an overflowing hell to walk in the house below her.

For an angel, there were so many ways into the planetarium, and so many escape routes. It was an impossible place to set a trap, and this, of course, made it perfect.

Rachel rose from damp cushions, feeling moisture seep into her trousers. Both planetarium and mansion hoarded old rain. Water dripped and trickled through the dank sealed rooms below and softened the fabric of the house. Corridors wept. Staircases slumped and ticked. Paintings blistered under bowed ceilings. She shivered, imagining the Creeper working his way up through the house to find her, the Nunny Lady stalking its corridors with her hatpins.

A flourish of controls reached towards her over the front of the viewing platform: a mechanical arm of tarnished levers and heavily corroded wheels. The chains linking this to the great clockwork engines below had been removed, presumably by the workmen who had originally closed down Oberhammer’s house, but Rachel tried turning one of the wheels anyway. It was immovable, welded with rust.

A howl, somewhere close to the south, made her tense. Carnival was nearby. Rachel fought the urge to leave her post, to scale the planetarium and find a vantage point where she could watch the angel’s approach. But her job was here in this cage. The Spine would steer Carnival towards the trap. All Rachel had to do was attract her attention. She slumped back into the seat, loosened the straps around her throwing knives, and waited. Oberhammer’s mansion grumbled beneath her, the way old houses do.

* * * *

Aseries of sharp concussions woke Mr. Nettle. He lifted his head, winced at the pain in his skull. There was a stink of whisky and dung smoke, and he was lying in an alley he didn’t recognize. Cobbles, wet with starlight, shifted and blurred before him, then bled together into a sloping channel that lurched sharply to