The church doors crashed in. Thanatists, vestiges, and semblances flooded in and up against the barrier, shouting and brandishing their weapons. Parishioners inside the ward muttered and clung to one another. A few grumbled at the mob. Most could do little more than tremble. One boy had soiled his trousers.
“Keep the choir singing,” I told the priest. “Trust me, it helps.” “Whatever you’re doing,” he said, “p-please hurry.”
As the choir haltingly started to sing again, we rushed back through the crypt to the Abyssal Steps.
CHAPTER SIXTY
While it has been centuries since we’ve exercised the alliance between our two cities’ Strata,it may at last be time to do so again.
—Chancellor Grace O’Malley, intercepted missive to Luxor, Egypt
I ledmy friends down the Abyssal Steps, barely able to hold up my lantern. Sweat drenched my face, and the ache in my sutures was getting tough to bear. With Church’s help, I staggered down the stairway passage, which had been chiseled from cold ground. Here and there, it had caved in, forcing us to crawl over piles of rock and dirt.
The old pressure started to trip-hammer behind my eyes. I finally had to stop. The shimmering pattern in my shadow had gotten hard to see against the bright amber glow of my largest occlusion. The Essiene sutures still held the wound closed, but gold light seeped through gaping holes where they were stretching . . .
. . . I finish my prayer to the statue of Mary at St. Frances—the same prayer as every Sunday—to be with Mama. Then I blow out my candle and take it with me . . .
. . . Lady is sitting across from me in my flat, talking me through a breakup after the only girl I ever loved told me it was over. Lady never left my side for three straight days . . .
I remembered wanting to thank her but not being able to find the words. I wasn’t sure I knew how to deal with kindness any better now than I did then. I’d put this stuff away for so long.
We got moving again and soon reached a plain wooden door with iron bands nailed at its top and bottom. The wood was heavily knotted but still a smooth dark brown, as though oiled in recent years. A rusted deadbolt had been thrown back.
“Saxon Stratum,” Lakshmi said. “You need to rest again before continuing down.”
I nodded, traced the Who quote, and we stepped through into a curing pantry.
Blocks of wood hung from pegs, aging. Animal skins were stretched against the wall—for drumheads, most likely—and animal gut and horsehair had been twisted and pulled taut in an instrument string loom.
I dropped to a knee to catch my breath. Chuey doubled over, his macuahuitl dangling from one hand, his rosary clenched in the other.
Lady knelt beside me. “Your sutures are threatening to tear, Jack. And the rest of your pattern is quivering. I’m not sure you’ll make it down.”
I pushed myself up. “I just need to catch my breath.”
We found a door from the curing pantry and opened it. The sound of cracking wood and shouts echoed mutely from the next room.
“Lakshmi,” I said, “you better go in first.”
The raptorial led us into a large workshop, where, just ten feet from the door, several men were fighting back a mob. A few of the men were snatching instruments from the benches and walls, and trying to slide or throw the instruments our way—inside the ward—to save them.
Against the wall next to us, a man in a leather apron, holding a luthier knife, stood protecting a small boy and a handful of men and women. At their feet were lutes and fiddles and lyres.
Beyond the fight, a mob ripped tabors and pipes and bells from their stands—some they threw down and crushed beneath their boots, others they held up to taunt the luthier, who begged them not to harm the instruments or the musicians.
Just then, the whole front of the building rumbled and collapsed outward into the street. Stone and wood clattered around rearing, whinnying horses that were tied to the front of the building. The crowd outside cheered and stomped their feet, raising a thick cloud of dust in the twilight. Beyond them, London was little more than a village beneath a dusky sky.
I staggered to men and women standing at the back of the shop. They stared wide-eyed at the mob beating the shop workers and dragging them out into the street.
“Damnable Danes. Heathens!” shouted one of the women.
A muscular blond man at the front of the mob pointed back at her. “Christians!”
From the back of the riot, a tall fellow cried, “We all have the right to fight Heavenfield.”
Henry’s manual said that “Heavenfield” was one of the names for the topside world.
A moment later, from across the road, flaming arrows came hurtling toward us. We all instinctively ducked, before the arrows careened harmlessly off the ward. The archers, like most of the mob, wore the Shiguan mark, but also a cheek brand in the shape of a diamond atop an invertedV.
