He cried out “Bratros,” pulled me forward, and we scrambled from the stony round, back toward the catacomb stairs.
High above us a rich, sonorous sound rose. I looked up to see the waelcyrge trumpeting her deeply curved silver horn. The sound resonated beneath our feet, and the stone effigies wewere running across began to shift, arms pulling free, bodies slumping up and standing. The horn sounded again, and the rising statues of black rock began shambling after us, bits of them cracking off and clacking beneath them as they came. A few went the other way, after Owen.
As we burst from the Dark into the graveyard, Cassius hit a headstone hard with his knee and toppled forward onto the dry grass. I stopped to give him a hand, but he jumped up and limped ahead of me toward the Strata stairs. Behind us we heard the shagfoal panting and hissing, its pounding hooves gaining on us. And just behind that the heavy thump of hundreds of stone feet.
At the catacomb steps, the ravens latched onto us and began pecking at our eyes. We both fell, trying to bat them away. The semblance woman screamed again—the howl like it was inside my head.
Cassius knocked the ravens back with his massive hands and grunted, “Go, Jack.”
I stood and stumbled up the first few steps, the centurion at my back. We pushed our way up through the darkness until I finally relit my lantern. But the jouncing light barely illuminated the stair walls.
I heard the shagfoal’s hooves clack on the stone steps behind us. The semblance woman shrieked again, filling the stairwell with her piercing voice. A raven landed on my back and stabbed its beak into my neck before Cassius swatted it down and drove his sword through it.
We rounded a turn in the stairs, giving me a quick glimpse at the semblance woman and the drooling, jaw-snapping beast charging up after us. Her eyes were wide and wild. The shagfoal brayed and picked up speed.
“Keep moving,” Cassius shouted.
I felt like I was a kid again, running up from the cellar, certain that something in the dark would pull me back.
At last, I saw a vague light ahead. A few moments later, I burst out into the sunlight of the topside world and stumbled to my knees. The woman’s screeching stopped. I clambered to my feet just as Cassius stomped out from the stairs, splashing mud up on us both.
We were at the center of a sunken ring of mausoleums beneath a large cedar tree. The ring was surrounded by oaks and the broader cemetery beyond. It smelled beautifully like cut grass, rich soil, and wood. We faced the doorway, weapons raised, expecting the semblance woman and her beast to barrel out at us. But they didn’t. Still, we stood waiting, ready. A minute passed. Two.
We were safe. I screamed with relief, but the sound died in my throat when I remembered Owen. I hoped the dark effigies hadn’t caught up to him, killed him.
The tailor’s sacrifice for his family still struck me. “How could Owen have a daughter in the Strata?”
The centurion wiped mud from his face. “Good men look after the young. It will always be so. Finding the girl alone in the Strata, he probably took her in as his own.”
The spirit of a dead man caring for a dead child in the slums of the Strata. Yeah, Owen was a good man, all right. One thing was for sure, people like Owen and his little family deserved the chance to progress and move on. If the topside world was killing that chance, I’d be hard-pressed to defend it. I didn’t really need another reason to try and make good use of the Orcus thread, but Owen had just given me one—for him, his wife and daughter, and all the others like them in the Strata.
I took a deep breath of fresh topside air. “Owen seemed surprised to see that waelcyrge. Why?”
“There are many waelcyrges,” Cassius replied, “but they are rarely seen, since they only conduct warrior souls.”
“So, was it just angry that we were interfering with the semblance, or was it working for the Shiguan? Bringing them fighters for their revolution?”
Cassius shook his head. “Hard to know. But waelcyrges are often likened to the horsemen of the apocalypse. It is said they are able to pass back and forth through the mountain of fire on the Asphodel Meadows.”
“To take souls home?”
“Or bring them back,” Cassius said. “What is sure is that with our interference of her sacred commission, we have made another enemy.”
“We seem to be good at that.”
“However, we have also made an ally,” Cassius added. “You now have a gifted seamster you can call on. One who will stand against men like Brach. That is no small thing.”
“If he made it.”
We walked out of Highgate Cemetery, rode the Northern Line south, and got off at Tottenham Court Road Station. A few minutes later we turned onto Manette Street.
I counted four Shiguan thanatists, each with vestiges at hand, prowling just outside the ward barrier. On the Iron Horse side, Sherzer and Delain were keeping an eye on them. We strode past Brach’s watchdogs into the protection of the Iron Horse ward, which had receded several more yards.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The province of the thanatist is the empire of the dead. So, it is rare to find a thanaturgic lamp-bearer capable of sending a spirit on to the peace all souls desire. This illuminates the different categories of thanaturgic practice.
—Gerbert of Aurillac,The Apocryphal Diaries
