There was no time to come up with an elaborate plan for how we were going to get into the Society’s lodge, or what we were going to do once we got there. Alonhall, fully in her Blackbird guise now, gave us an outline as we approached the building.
“As Blackbird, I have broad powers to investigate potential crimes. Delilah’s eyewitness account provides evidence. I’ll walk in and start asking questions, and hopefully they’ll tell us everything once they realize they’ve been had.”
“And what do we do?” I said.
“I’ve deputized you. You’ll provide the muscle in case things go wrong, which they very well might, and act as extra pairs of eyes keeping watch on my gorgeous and extremely stab-worthy back. Unless anyone else has a better idea?”
The first surprise came before we even made it into the building. The front gate at the foot of the hill was still guarded, not just by a lock, but by one of the Lodge’s eerily pale guards. In fact, I recognized this one from the ball.
“You are not allowed inside,” she said the instant her lantern’s light fell on us. “Lodge is closed to all outsiders.”
“I’m the Blackbird. Bluerose Security Intelligence, and this is very official business. Let me in.”
The guard’s expression went rigid, the tendons in her neck standing out like they were about to burst. For several seconds it was a standoff between her and Alonhall, with the rest of us slowly fanning out. In the end, I don’t think it was Alonhall’s will or the guard’s cowardice that broke the stalemate, but more that the guard finally figured out what to do about us.
She took a breath and screamed. “Government’s here! Everybody m—!”
She was cut off by Alonhall, who rushed forward with more speed than I’d thought she was capable of, drawing a small blade from somewhere in her uniform. She jammed that blade into the guard’s throat without an instant of hesitation, splattering herself with pale arterial blood and making me want to retch.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“If this were a normal organization,” Alonhall said, “she would have asked for proof of who I was, or calmly sent word ahead. An alarm like that means they have something to hide.”
“That doesn’t justify murdering a woman in cold blood.”
Alonhall looked down at the guard, who had fallen to her knees with a series of guttural gasps. “Old habits die hard.”
Suddenly, the guard grimaced, and taking the knife by the handle, yanked it out of her own throat. “Good news,” she said, covering the wound with one hand. “You can still leave with a free conscience. Because I’m not dead yet.”
She headbutted Alonhall directly in the stomach, giving herself enough space to rise back up to her feet. Everybody drew weapons: Laura, the guard, and myself our swords, Unity a club, Alonhall two more blades. It wasn’t the weapons being drawn that hit me hard enough to make my legs almost give out. No, it was the fact that when the guard took her hand away from her throat, there was no wound to be seen. Instantly, I saw her with new eyes. She was pale, hairless, incredibly tall and muscular: in other words, she was a stonewose.
“That’s how you’re staying out of sight,” I said. “You’re staying at the lodge. But… why?”
“None of your fucking business,” said the ghoul. “Now either back off right now, turn around and don’t look back, or I will kill you all.”
“This has escalated very quickly,” said Laura.
I, meanwhile, laughed. “No, you back off. Or do you want to find out how I managed to maim Ikamja the Unifier in single combat?”
The namedrop got confused looks from my companions, but the one I was actually talking to physically flinched, prepared to run at any second. Suddenly, this four-against-one fight had turned into a duel; the stonewose wasn’t paying attention to anyone but me.
“You’re lying.”
“Really? Think about it, I’m a human. How would I even know who Ikamja was without having first-hand experience of that sword-spear of hers?”
The stonewose continued to stare at me, her back hunching with predatory anticipation. I took a step forward, sword still raised. Then there was a blur of movement, two shouts mingled together. I lunged, but didn’t even get close. The stonewose had turned tail and was running up the hill towards the lodge, and Alonhall was swearing up a storm.
“Are you alright?” I said. Laura was closer, and already had her arm on Alonhall’s shoulder.
“I think she was trying to stab me. If I weren’t wearing armor, that might have actually done something. I’m fine.”
I reversed the grip on my saber, the mental preparations for my self-impalement having become so simple that I could turn my attention elsewhere. Specifically, up the hill, where I could already see movement. “You all run. I’ll catch up.”
The pieces were already beginning to fall together in my head, the connections between Tersine, the Lodge, the stonewose, and the bones which had begun to wash up on the Rass downstream from the city. I didn’t quite know enough yet to see the full picture, but that didn’t matter. You don’t need to see past the first couple of sentences of a cult leader’s self-righteous screed to get pissed off.
There was no hesitation as I placed the tip of my saber against my diaphragm and shoved it home. The pain was enough that I had to drag it out by starts and jumps, gritting my teeth against the screams as I did; but I knew I was going to be using that sword on more than myself, and I wanted it sharp. The sleeve of blood hung so tight to the metal that it looked like my saber had been transmogrified into red steel. The blood, pulled back toward my body, ran across my fingertips until nobody could have seen where the hilt ended and my hand began.
I dashed up the hill, letting my legs carry me with all of their speed. It had been ages since I’d had a chance to really run like that across open terrain, and even going uphill I soared. I caught up to the others well before they reached the front door, then charged past. A cordon of six or maybe seven stonewose had formed up to block the four of us from entering the Lodge, and I hit them like a bullet hits meat.
I don’t know what it was that made me fight like that. Maybe it was the knowledge that we were all together, that Alonhall and Unity and Laura were right at my back. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a fight in a while and whatever killer instinct Rook had installed in me was itching to get out. Maybe it was the knowledge that Anna, kind and gentle Anna who’d been with me since the beginning, was currently languishing in captivity. It could have been that, knowing what these stonewose had done, my willingness to show them any mercy had run out, and my innate human capacity for sadism was finally being allowed to show itself. Either way, I fought better than I’d ever fought before.
I didn’t have to be good with the sword; and given these stonewose were all expert warriors, whereas I’d never touched a sword until the last four months or so, I was never going to be good. Laura and Alonhall held all the skill in our group. Even Unity, who’d never been taught anything a day in her life, had a sort of wolfish cunning. Skilled I was not. But if I could move all hundred-some-odd pounds of myself around at Olympic-sprinter speeds, well, imagine how fast I could move a sword.
And I did move the sword. I moved it through limbs, against skulls, into torsos. I cut and stabbed and parried and hacked and blocked and sawed and hewed, heedless of any injuries I took in exchange. The others were at my sides, drawing attention, but I didn’t even notice. They were just shapes that I wasn’t supposed to cut.
At some point I took a blow to the stomach, with a blunt object or a blade I don’t know, but it was bad enough to make me vomit. I responded by hacking off the limb that had hurt me. Alonhall appeared, burying her blades in the stonewose’s throat to exsanguinate her while she was still reeling.
Blood loss. Regenerators are still vulnerable to blood loss.
The unprepared stonewose couldn’t do a damn thing to stop us. They couldn’t do a damn thing to stop me, even; at times it felt like I could have taken them all on myself, though I’m sure that was the adrenaline talking. The battle turned so quickly that most of them fell before they realized the tide was turning. Only two of them broke and ran. We’d been pushing forward to the door, so conveniently the best way out for them lay in sprinting down the hill and vanishing into the city.
Once the battle was done, I had just a few seconds while the rest of the team caught their breath. I spent that time staring at the bodies and dry heaving. Then it was time for Alonhall to pick the front lock, letting us into the Lodge.
I’d last seen the main ballroom floor in full decadence, lit by a thousand candles, scattered with tables full of hors d’oeuvres, swarming with servers and dancers alike, a live band playing from a stage in the corner. Now it was dark and empty, a storage room for shadow and distant, echoing noise. Wherever the rest of the stonewose were, it wasn’t up there.
So we paid that part, the face of the Society, no mind, and plunged into the labyrinth of passageways and rooms that made up the bulk of the lodge. If Delilah was right, then the members of the Inner Circle were somewhere back there holding a meeting. If they hadn’t heard the alarm, or if they were slow in fleeing, we could catch them and start asking some serious questions, especially now that someone had tried to kill us.
The further back from the ballroom that we went, the more chaotic the situation became. We found members of the night shift staff cowering in corners, mumbling about monsters—presumably stonewose—rushing around in the dark. Some had been given orders to gather up everything and leave at once, others to continue their duties no matter what. One of the offices had been ransacked and destroyed. A couple of times we even ran into panicked stonewose, who usually responded by turning tail and running. We tried following them, hoping that they were retreating towards some kind of sanctum or meeting room, but they inevitably led us to the exits or, in one case, directly into an ambush.
It was a very, very good thing that I’d taken the lead. None of the other three would have been able to survive taking the steel handle of a womancatcher directly to the face with skull-shattering force the way that I could. When the reverberating pop of my skull returning to its proper shape gave me back my ability to resolve what my eyes were showing me into concrete images, I had a stonewose’s boot on my chest.
It wasn’t much more difficult a fight than the one at the front door: easier, even, given that I was able to take one of the stonewose out by surprise. Still, it was a sobering reminder that we were in enemy territory. If it had been anyone else, anyone but me in front… The way that my head rolled for minutes after suggested that they’d be lucky to merely qualify as “brain-damaged.”
So we moved with as much caution as we could force ourselves to make. Every second was one that could make the difference between a successful raid and a waste of time, effort, and blood. But the back part of the Lodge just didn’t end; every new corner revealed a never-before-seen hallway, and at the end of that hallway was another empty game room or smoking den. I don’t know what the others were thinking, but it wasn’t long before I became afraid that we’d screwed it, gotten ourselves lost while the Inner Circle evacuated the building, chuckling and twirling their definitely-not-dimensionally-anachronisic mustaches.
Alonhall was, yet again, the one who saved us. We had just charged into another unfamiliar room, this one focused around an enormous brick fireplace and chimney, itself surrounded by a half-circle of armchairs. Combined with more chairs in the back, two clusters centered around a round table and a set of bookshelves respectively, there were enough seats in there for a substantial Inner Circle to meet.
“We’ve been-been going around in-in fucking circles!” Unity growled, her teeth gritting so hard I was afraid she was about to break something.
“This was such a mistake,” I moaned. “We should have taken more time, come up with an actual plan instead of just fucking Yoloing it.”
Laura shot me a look, one eyebrow raised. “And left Anna and the others out to hang in the wind? Shortcake, you and I both know that that was never going to happen.”
That at least got me to trade out my annoyance at myself for a bit of despair. “Right. Well we’re still fucked. How long have we been running around here, anyway? An hour?”
“Less than five minutes,” Alonhall said. She was staring at the fireplace, her arms behind her back in an at-ease position. “Emma, could you answer a question for me?”
“What?”
“Did you ever see a chimney on the outside of this building, when we were approaching it?”
The question staggered me for a moment. What did it matter if there was a chimney on the outside or not? But the way Alonhall said it, the quiet certainty in her tone and posture, that was enough to make me think that maybe she was onto something. A few moments later, my eyes went wide.
“No, I didn’t see anything. The roof is a single solid pyramid shape.” We all followed Alonhall’s gaze to the large brick fireplace that was the centerpiece of the room. The inside of it looked incredibly clean for a surface which had ever seen burning wood.
“Rich arseholes, putting a fake fireplace in their fancy meeting room just to look fancy,” muttered Laura.
“Oh, I don’t particularly think it’s just for aesthetics,” Alonhall said, still scanning the wall. “The columnar structure, attached to both floor and ceiling, serves quite excellently as a pivot, without compromising the rest of the room.”
It took me a second to parse what she was implying. “Oh my fucking god, are you saying this is a secret passageway? Are we on some fucking Clue shit right now?”
I rushed forward, knowing from decades of bad mystery shows the best way to locate hidden passageways: start randomly groping around at the wall for a release of some kind, or a button or something.
“Come on, help me search. If this is a hidden passageway, there has to be a release of some kind, or a button or something.”
Laura laughed—and to be fair I did look kind of ridiculous—before immediately joining me. For the next minute, we felt up every inch of wall, every brick, pushing and pulling and trying to find the secret latch. We quickly identified where the gap was, a point where the space between two planks in the walls had just a bit of wiggle. It was Laura who pointed out the marks, the place where fingernails had scratched against the material as though trying to grab for something.
It wasn’t a secret latch, but rather a secret compartment, cleverly disguised such that it could only be opened by first pulling and then pushing at a small segment of wood. Inside was a keyhole. I immediately began the search for a hidden key of some kind, and Laura followed.
About a minute into that second search, we were interrupted by Alonhall. “You’d have to be stupid to hide the key in the same room as the lock,” she said, slipping a set of lock picks back into the pockets of her uniform. “The members of the Inner Circle no doubt keep the keys on their person. Now, let’s see, there’s no groove or scuff marks along the floor, so…”
She pressed her hand against the material to one side of the lock; with a bit of effort, the entire segment of wall began to slowly rotate around the fireplace. There wasn’t the sound of scraping stone like I’d expected, just the low rumble of bearings turning. Almost immediately as the gaps opened in the wall, two things became obvious.
The first was that someone was down there: a trail of gaslamps illuminated the staircase curving downward, and wasting gas is even worse of an idea than wasting electricity. The second was that those people knew that we were coming. Even from the top of the staircase we could hear the sounds of muffled shouting and echoing footsteps from down below. Alonhall gave me a quick nod as I ran to the front of the group. Now that we had found what was likely the inner sanctum, I drew my revolver from my belt, holding it at my side as I descended.
My brain and body were at war over whether to hurtle down the stairs two at a time, or move slowly and stealthily so that we could get the drop on them. I settled for the worst of both worlds, taking long steps but very slowly.
The stairs went down for what must have been at least twenty feet, maybe twenty-five, with enough of a curve that you couldn’t see what was at the bottom for the first half of the journey. The further we went, the more distinct the sound of arguing became, though dozens of voices overlapping in an enclosed space was never going to be particularly audible. I heard snippets, though, just enough to start getting ideas of what was going on.
“—everyone out of here, right away—”
“—and just let the government—”
“—in the other room, waiting for us—”
“—better rebuild than spend our lives—”
The room below came into view. Scents drifted up: illumination gas, cooked meat, concentrated sweat. It was a long, wide, low room, laid out with tables and chairs and food for dozens and dozens, though nobody had eaten yet. The presumptive diners were instead rushing around in a blind panic, or clustered in shouting conversations, or waving weapons around.
There were two groups of people, roughly even in number. The first were the members of the inner circle, marked out by the fact that each wore an article of clothing, a vest or jacket or skirt, in an identical shade of dark crimson. The other group was the stonewose, identifiable as such by their mismatched outfits and pale complexions. What was clear, regardless, was that there were way too many of them, too many to count, infinitely too many to fight.
I shot a glance at Alonhall, one that I hoped would convey the magnitude of the problem. Her face was covered, but she did slip a hand into a pocket of her suit and retrieve the filament engine, flipping it open and slowly manipulating the inner mechanisms as she slowly moved to the front.
I had no idea what Alonhall could accomplish with the filament engine, but I was sure that it wouldn’t be enough. We were diving into the wolf’s den here; she couldn’t control sixty, seventy minds at once… could she?
I cocked my pistol, nodding at her as she passed. No turning back now.
We were almost at the foot of the stairs, almost in view. The chaos going on in the basement dining room was the only thing that had prevented us from being seen, and even so some of the women nearest the entryway were beginning to take notice. I’m sure that if I had been able to hear them over the din, they would have been asking who we were and what we were doing. Before any of them could get close enough to be heard, Alonhall made her grand entrance.
She rushed past me, then slowed down, strutting like they were already on their knees. With one final movement, she completed whatever calculation she had been performing on the filament engine before moving it into her off hand. Then she drew a pistol and fired it directly into the ground, the crack filling the entire room.
“Nobody move!” she screamed. “I am the Blackbird and I’d like to have a word. I don’t want to have to tell you about what happens to anyone who tries to leave.”
The power of Alonhall’s psychic command hit me like a wave, making all of my muscles freeze. Somehow, her words burrowed past the established, adult part of my brain, reaching instead for my inner child, who upon hearing a sharp word from a teacher or one of my parents would instantly freeze and await instruction. Laura and Unity reacted the same way, and throughout the dining hall in front of us, the panicked inhabitants went silent and still.
I remembered only belatedly that Alonhall hadn’t been talking to me, which was what allowed me to take her side. We were her deputies here; Alonhall took the lead. Still, as the rest of the group assembled around her, I was scanning our situation, and a few facts became clear.
First and foremost, we were massively outnumbered, at least twenty to one if not more. If even half of the people in that dining room were armed and willing to fight, then we were completely screwed in a fight. Our survival was entirely reliant on Alonhall’s force of will. A distant second, there were three doors out of the room besides the one we’d entered through: one on the far end, and two on the wall to our right. The third thing was that this room was kept lit by rows of gaslamps along every wall.
My brain desperately wanted to understand, to piece together the relationship between the stonewose and the Lodge. Already the information was assembling against my will, facts and memories collimating into conclusions that both terrified me and filled me with bottomless rage. Still, I let Alonhall talk.
“I have been given reason to believe that this Lodge has had dealings with the wanted Cassandran spy and terrorist Doctor Nika Tersine. Tell me everything you know about her, concealing nothing, and this may go somewhat smoothly.”
Instantly, a dozen voices from around the room began speaking at once. In the echo of the enclosed space, formed into a roar of meaningless noise.
Again, Alonhall rose above it. “One person! One person speak. Your leader, whomever had the closest contact with Tersine, your pick.”
There was a moment of terrified silence. My hands clenched on the sword and revolver, reading each cough and twitch as a realization that we stood no chance of backing up our threats. To my shock, they complied. One woman, a noblewoman with her white hair tied back in a severe bun, leaning on a cane, crimson gown spilling almost to the floor, stepped forward.
“Who are you?” Alonhall said, adjusting the arms of the filament engine while keeping her eyes locked on the newcomer.
“I am Lady Tantalia Applewine, Viscountess of Blackford. The Society has no single leader; but I will speak for it, if I must.”
Alonhall nodded coldly. “Very well then. Doctor Nika Tolva Tersine, tell me everything. And do not pretend that she has not visited your Society on many occasions; we have many reports backing this up.”
Lady Applewine licked her wrinkled lips. “She was—”
Before the Viscountess of Blackford could say any more, she was cut off by a voice, a much younger voice. It was muffled, wavering, uncertain, and it came not from within the dining hall, but from one of the two adjoining doors.
“What’s going on out there? I’m ready. I know something’s happening out there, even if I can’t see it… Are you going to get this over with or not?”
She referred Yolo instead of Leroy Jenkins. Luna these days.
Also I wonder who the person is