Prowler shadows revealed thanatists, vestiges, and semblances, most of them bearing the mark of the Shiguan. They eyed us close, daring us to cross the barrier.
I turned to Chuey. “You still have your Bluetooth speaker on you?” “Is D minor the saddest of all keys?” He pulled the speaker from his pack and handed it to me. This baby could push forty watts.
I thumbed it on, paired it with my phone, and booted up Cannibal Corpse’s “Hammer Smashed Face.” I pushed the volume to the top and thrust the speaker toward the prowling horde. The brutal thrashing drums and riffs boomed. Some of the mob covered their ears, others threw hand signs used to ward off evil as they ran. But they all scattered away.
“Legions of the dead don’t like Cannibal Corpse,” I said. “Seems hypocritical.”
I shot toward Greek Street, motioning my friends to follow. With the wicked strains of Cannibal Corpse filling the air, we escaped unfollowed. I pulled the darkshine stroke severalmore times, guiding us down cobbled and muddied byways and through well-heeled crowds gathered near art exhibitions, bookshops, and academies.
We turned past a burned-out home onto Brook Street and came to a regal house so new I could smell the freshly cut stone. There was something familiar about it that I couldn’t quite place. I bowed my lantern one last time. The flare of the wraith’s coda pattern appeared near the roof.
“Get your weapons ready,” I said, and started for the open front door. Just beyond the foyer, a thanatist and three vestiges, all bearing the Shiguan mark, lay dead on the stairs. Blood was splattered everywhere.
“Part of a recovery team,” Lakshmi said.
I led my friends over the bodies and up the stairs to the top floor. In the uppermost hall, three more Shiguan lay dead, two whose semblances were floating above their vestige shells.
Just behind them, a door stood ajar.
I crept past the bodies, eased around the doorjamb, and peered into the room. It was the picture of Renaissance splendor: a vast apartment with high ceilings, dark wood paneling, silver candlesticks, and countless paintings depicting musicians in recital. Nothing had been disturbed, and the wraith was nowhere to be seen. But the air had grown suddenly chill, and my breath began to cloud. I focused on the wraith and tried not to let it affect my mood.
In the far corner a ladder ascended into what I assumed to be an attic crawl space. Above us, something crashed, rumbling the ceiling, and someone shouted. I rushed to the ladder, swapped my lantern for my knife, and started up.
A man screamed.
A moment later, I stepped into one end of a spacious attic, my friends behind me. The wraith stood halfway down the left wall. It still towered eight feet tall, but its smoky black form haddrawn itself into breeches, a doublet, and a long Elizabethan cloak.
On the right, facing the wraith, stood three vestiges: a tall chap with knee-high boots, a fellow with a hunched back, and a woman with a nose ring. Behind them stood the red-maned thanatist in the flowing chocolate coat and white ruffled shirt that I’d seen the night Henry was shot.
Against the far wall sat a desk littered with papers. Above the desk rose a large window, to its left a spinet, and to its right a lute and small wooden box. The wraith suddenly disgorged from its smoky form a vestige onto the floor. He lay motionless near several feet of binding thread, charred dark and smoking. The thanatist shouted to the tall chap. “Again, spool out more thread!”
The vestige raised a long spindle and spun it hard. Thread unwound like line cast from a reel.
The thanatist raised his lantern and bowed its rods in a fast seesaw motion. Light from his stone grabbed the thread midair and spun it in broad loops around the wraith’s chest and arms. The human form of it began to roil at the edges like billowing clouds. It shrieked and thrashed, trying to tear the Orcus loose.
“We can’t let them have it,” I said. “Help me get close enough to cut it free.”
We started forward. Lakshmi got ahead of me and kicked the hunched vestige against the wall to clear a path. The thanatist furiously played his lantern, tightening the Orcus, as he watched me close in.
Nose Ring rushed in from my side, but Chuey dove and tackled her to the floor.
The tall chap danced in with a set of axes. But Lady cracked him across the arms with her baton and drove him back with a blunt jab to the forehead.
The thanatist played a hard assault stroke at me. A percussive burst of light slammed into my shadow and dropped me to my knees. I couldn’t breathe. Then he played several bracing strokes, and his vestiges scrambled to their feet, forming a line in front of him.
The wraith screamed, a cacophonous bray that caused the Shiguan’s lantern to sputter as though the ghost stone would go cold. But the thanatist hummed the light to twice its prior shine and returned to his binding play. This time, though, he stroked two rods of the lantern. A dissonant harmony rang out, turning his lamplight into a flickering beam. He focused the shimmering rays on a deeper part of the wraith. I couldn’t see what, but whatever the thanatist had found caused the wraith to howl in a spectrum of voices.
Just as I caught my breath, Church hauled me to my feet and bowled ahead. “Follow me in,” he cried, and whipped his satchel around like a rotor, turning aside vestige weapons and clearing another path to the wraith.
I dashed in and slashed with my khopesh, cutting through the Orcus around the wraith’s chest. The thread flashed a bright crimson, amber, and gold, a rush of wind whipping back my hair, then it fell and began to darken.
“Fool!” cried the thanatist, playing frantically, trying to restore the thread. For a moment, it appeared his light would tie the ends together. But Lakshmi crept up from behind him and sliced his bowstrings with her blade. The bow clacked uselessly against the lantern’s brass support post. Before I could grab my own Orcus, the wraith let out another deafening scream that momentarily sapped my strength. In a whirlwind, it rushed past the thanatist to the far end of the attic, where it slammed great billowing fists down on the desk, cracking the frame and legs.
It then shot to the corner and stomped the wooden chest beneath its wispy dark boot, spilling out reams of paper.
Screaming again, it shattered the large window above the broken desk. Glass rained down in shards across the floor. The wraith spared a glance back at us, then rushed through the gaping hole, the black smoke of its coattails trailing as it jumped from the attic.
The thanatist and his crew turned on me.
