City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [139]
With all three of its throats slit, it bled slowly to death.
*
And in a distant, unremarkable house, far from the scene of the carnage, an old woman sat staring at her runes, screeching a torrent of abuse against the beast’s destroyers.
‘Fat lot of good your magic is, if the damn thing’s dead,’ Malum complained.
‘She is evil, with her relics!’
‘I suppose I’ll get the lads to hunt her down after all, if there’s no quicker option.’
‘How will you know where to find her? Magic is the best—’
‘You’ve tried and failed, so leave this to my lot.’
‘You didn’t see what I saw, through its eyes!’
‘And what, dare I ask, did you see?’ As if it could possibly be anything either natural or sane.
‘Another man. A soldier. You have seen him, maybe? One of the Night Guard.’
He stormed out of the room. Fuck this, it was bad enough being abandoned by your wife, but to find she was running around with another man . . . He had never felt so humiliated. They both had to die, immediately.
He grabbed the relic he’d given to the witch, determined to sell all Beami’s crap in the market tomorrow.
‘He looks like a wolf!’ the witch wailed after him, as he strode out into the cold. Her words followed him down the street, either as an echo, or in his head, he couldn’t tell which.
But on his way back, he did something unexpected. With the relic – that extension of Beami – in his hands, he meandered along the lanes where he had once gone walking with her. He headed past the boarded-up stores where he had bought her presents, past bars and bistros where they had shared intimate conversations. Whenever one of his gang members approached, he ignored them, keeping his head down and his hands in his pockets, and tried to identify the moment where he had let things reach the point of no return.
Most of all he was bothered at why he had become so concerned over someone else. How was it that he, a leader of men, a half-vampyr, who could get anything he wanted, now found himself with his wife walking out of his life, and with only emptiness in her place?
Tonight he was a hollow man.
THIRTY-SIX
Jeryd drank tea, chatted with the waitress as she came to the end of her shift, but mostly he made some ephemeral notes that quickly became doodles. He watched her talking to another old rumel, and wondered if this was all she ever had to do, and if it got boring.
He sat waiting at a table by the window of the bistro, biding his time and thinking about all the things he had seen so far in this intense city.
The street door opened, a little bell rang, and Jeryd peeked up, still fractionally on edge. As if a giant spider would come waltzing in through the front door . . .
Bellis, Abaris and Ramon strolled in. ‘Come along with us, Jeryd,’ Bellis called out. ‘Tonight, we converse in higher places.’
‘Don’t you fancy a drink?’
Bellis patted the inside of her tweeds. ‘My own supply. But something warming first, to help it along my system, would be delightful.’
*
Up on the flat roof, Jeryd handed over his gift of maps one by one in the darkness, so Ramon and Abaris had to tilt them this way and that to catch some of the dim light from one of the street lamps below. They whispered swift and private matters, which merely heightened Jeryd’s curiosity as to what hell they were up to in this city. After some curt discussion, each map was pocketed.
The completion of the exchange prompted Bellis into motion, and she bounded forward keenly to produce her relic. ‘Now then, what we have here is a wonderful device designed to attract spiders.’
‘That it?’ If Jeryd was being honest, it didn’t look like much, merely a narrow obsidian rod with a glowing bulb at the top. It seemed even less impressive given that the weather had turned even more sour, and he was freezing.
‘Of course it is, you silly man,’ Bellis added. ‘Its structure is made from tektites, a mineral originating from another world – ha, we always say that, don