Scar Night Page 0,83
neck. His handkerchief was filthy.
The door to Crossop’s warehouse opened onto a gloomy stairwell. Clay growled, “Don’t like the look of this. What you want us to say to him if he’s there?”
“Tell him I’m concerned, and I’d like a word.”
“That’s it? We marched out here for that?” Clay huffed, and then ordered his temple guards to enter the warehouse.
That was the last time Fogwill saw any of the captain’s men alive.
The explosion shook the Depression. Stones and bricks and timbers and mortar burst upwards. Smoke mushroomed from the roof of the warehouse.
Fogwill fell back with a jolt onto his rear, his ears ringing with the sound of the blast.
Clay grabbed him, was shouting something, and at first Fogwill couldn’t hear.
“I said get away,” Clay cried. He yanked Fogwill’s cassock. “The debris, man! We’ll be crushed.” The captain dragged him down the lane towards the doorway of a derelict factory. Fogwill slipped and stumbled, trying to remain upright. He glanced back.
The upper half of the warehouse was now missing. Flames curled up the inside of the walls and lapped at glassless windows. Black smoke spewed from the yawning gap where the roof had been.
Clay pulled him into the doorway just as the debris began to fall. Bricks shattered on the cobbles. Iron spars and burning timbers crashed into the lane or ripped through eaves and tore gutters free. Grit fell like rain.
Fogwill squeezed his hands over his ears.
The sky darkened. A dense pall of smoke was spreading over the Depression. Lit by the distant flamestacks, the expanding cloud seemed to smoulder at its extremities like molten basalt. There was a low, thunderous rumble, then Devon’s former apartment collapsed inwards.
“Move!” Clay rushed back into the lane.
Bricks were still crashing down all around them. Fogwill hesitated.
Stones pinged against the captain’s armour. “The chains are going!” he shouted. “Whole district’s going to fall.”
The Adjunct looked back at the ruined warehouse. Heat from the fire slammed into him. Flames fifty feet high engulfed a knot of brickwork and chains that shifted and tightened under collapsing walls and chimneystacks. Even as he watched, those same chains were snapping, whipping everywhere.
Fogwill ran after Clay, wheezing.
They reached the end of the lane just as a mighty roar rocked the ground beneath them. The cobbles shuddered and bucked and Fogwill was thrown off his feet. He rolled like a barrel and struck a wall.
And then there was silence.
“Iril be damned,” Clay breathed.
The Adjunct picked himself up, dusted himself down, and looked back.
Crossop’s warehouse was gone. Half a block of the Depression was gone. Where moments ago there had been factories and foundries, there was nothing but a vast hole, veiled in dust and smoke.
Clay grunted. “There goes the neighbourhood.”
* * * *
Angry storm clouds brought an early darkness to the city. Wet gales spun weathervanes, slammed shutters, and drove sheets of rain against the windowpanes in Presbyter Sypes’s library.
Sypes sat at his desk with his eyes closed, rubbing his temples. “How long had he been spying for you in the Poison Kitchens?”
Fogwill paced before the Presbyter’s desk, his head low, and toyed with his rings. Every word Sypes spoke felt like a slap. “Several weeks.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
“No, I thought it best—”
“To undermine my authority?” Sypes’s bony fingers tightened around his walking stick. “Do you think I am too old, too weak, too confused to make decisions?”
“I was trying to be discreet.”
The old man’s brows lowered and he pointed the stick at Fogwill. “This is what you call discreet? Now your…assassin has vanished. Devon is missing. And I have a hole in my city large enough to swallow half of Sandport.”
“Let’s send a unit of temple guard. And more Spine—”
“More!” Sypes’s roar drowned the wind-lashed windowpanes. “What do you expect to find—Devon signalling his whereabouts from a rooftop? A trail of corpses?” He slammed the stick on the desk. “Yesterday I knew exactly where he was.”
“Yesterday you brushed my suspicions aside.”
A scowl. Fogwill stopped pacing.
“You knew? And you did nothing? You were prepared to allow the murders to continue? The theft of souls ?”
Sypes avoided his eye.
“For God’s sake, why?”
The old man’s lips crinkled, as though he were chewing on something unpalatable. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something you need to see.”
They left the library and took one of the acolyte stairwells deep into the heart of the temple. At the bottom of the stairs Sypes lifted a brand from its wall mount and led Fogwill through a network of dank passages and cellars which