Mick handed me a pencil, and I quickly scrawled my name.
After tucking his ledger back into his coat, Mick grinned at me. “Brach is holding an unnamed prisoner at Newgate. Special quarters. No visitors, save Brach himself.”
“Come on,” I said, and took off toward Newgate.
“Remember, Mr. Solomon,” Mick called after us, “if you somehow survive your trial—and I’m rooting fer ya—sooner or later, I’ll call your mark.”
I barely heard him, running full out, praying there was still time.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
By using praise and blame to habituate souls to love what they should love and hate what they should hate, music education will make possible the emergenceof an irrational kind of virtue, one that is independent of reflective thought.
—Plato,Republic, quoted in theShiguan Articles of Order
He chargedup Old Bailey Road. It was still early evening, but Bayswater was nearly empty. And the sky—or whatever passed for sky in the Strata—had darkened to a soot grey. Rain started to fall, thickening the air with the smell of wet stone. Cassius pointed through the gloom. Just beyond a gallows—where prisoners ascended steps, speaking in hushed tones to a priest who scribbled in a handbook—stood Newgate Prison.
“How do we get inside?” Church reassembled his cane-knife. “There are at least a dozen bobbies out front.”
“Right. Stop here for a sec.” I unshouldered my sling pack and fetched the thread Owen had given me. “This will make us look like police.” I focused on the bobbies and lashed my arm,then quickly formed bindings for the rest of my friends. “Okay, let’s go.”
We strolled through the front gate, garnering little more than passing glances from the guards. Inside we came to a clerk’s desk, where a frail, bespetacled old man sat staring at his pocket watch.
“Prisoner transfer,” I said.
The old gentleman started and looked up from his timepiece. “You Mick’s boys?”
“Of course not,” I said. “We serve the lord mayor.” The old guy laughed. “Who’ll it be?”
“Special lockup,” I told him. “Name’s not to be used.”
The clerk touched the side of his nose. “Big fella just went up to fetch ’im.” Oh, hell. “Which way?”
“Cell at the end, facing the press yard.” The old guy pointed down a dim stone hallway.
I broke into a sprint, my friends behind me. Our running steps echoed loudly in the bare corridor. I pulled out my lantern, commanded the ghost stone to light, and readied my bow. Two stout guards, one bald, the other with a mess of grey hair, stood at the door.
As we came to a stop in front of them, my heavy breathing clouded the air. My friends’ and the guards’, too.
A sickening feeling opened up inside me. Brach hadn’t called the wraith with his viola for me, he’d sent it to kill Henry. My accusation had forced Brach to get rid of him—the last bit of evidence that could prove he was responsible for the murder.
“Open it,” I shouted.
The grey-hair did, and I rushed into what looked like a perfect replica of Henry’s flat. The light from the window was dim, the air hard and bitter cold. And I suddenly felt an almost overpowering despair, like the whole world was crashing downon me. I slammed my fist into my leg to break the spell, just as something shrieked near the kitchen.
In the corner by the fireplace, a massive creature was hulking over Henry. The beast had no hair, no ears, no nose to speak of, and its jaw and cheekbones had ripped through the skin of its face. The flesh on its arms and legs had torn and split, too. In other places, thick scar tissue crisscrossed its skin. I would have preferred another big hound.
Henry’s wife, Martha, was beating at the creature’s back with her fists. I bowed my lantern hard, driving a shock of revelatory light into the dark room. Henry’s shadow was dark like a mortal’s but had the soft edge of a semblance. It was his soul. Martha’s was the same. The creature’s shadow flared against the brick fireplace. A thick violet rim, and Orcus bindings.
In the wraith’s shadow roiled dense, shimmering patterns. There had to be thirty different gleaming songs, a frenzied cacophony—so many souls trapped together. The wraith shrieked again, and I could hear voices—“set us free,” “cut them down,” and one withered voice above the rest, “he is like us and we will have him.”
Something flashed in its eyes. Pain maybe. But I couldn’t see its Rupture, and I certainly didn’t have the necessary context to give it the willing heart of a ward. All I could do is try to bind it until I did.
The wraith used my light to peer intomyshadow and began to drone, a deep, beautifully resonant note. The skin on my wrists began to itch and ache, and the sutures inside my shadow began to pull.
I didn’t have it in me to take another assault in that wound, and doused my lantern. “Straight-up fight this time.”
“You sure, Jack?” It was Chuey. He already had his macuahuitl out. I nodded. “Be glad you can’t see the real thing.”
