The holy wood the Church had sent over sat stacked in the precinct storeroom — ten kilograms, hardly an impressive haul, all of it sawn into long bars and sealed inside crates.
Thea drew out two hundred and fifty grams and tossed it into the fireplace.
Finished holy wood came out a deep, arterial red rather than the brown-gold of ordinary timber, because its raw material was the dragon's-blood tree — a species that wept a resin the color of fresh blood. The first step in refining it was binding that resin into the grain itself until wood and sap became one substance, and that fusion was what gave it its color.
It caught with a crackle and spat, popping in little bursts, and in the firelight Thea watched motes of phosphorescence swirl through the blood-red flame like fireflies caught in a current.
She raised her wrist, drew a blade across the vein, and opened a thin seam in her skin. Her brow furrowed — and at once the glimmering motes streamed into the wound.
The bleeding, which had been hissing out in a thin red thread, stopped instantly. But the cut didn't close.
Thea could feel a faint warmth kindling somewhere inside her, gentle as a winter afternoon's sun — and she understood, without being told, that the moment she willed it, that warmth would gather at the wound and seal it whole.
This, going by the description under Light in the Blood, was the Sequence 6 working laid directly into the injury: Rapid Mending, which could "swiftly restore non-fatal wounds."
Only once every last mote had vanished into the cut did a faint glow settle over it — and when that glow finally faded, there wasn't even a scar left behind. The wound was simply gone, as though it had never been.
An absurd kind of recovery, really.
By Thea's reckoning, the holy light produced from burning two hundred and fifty grams of holy wood could blanket her upper body for about four minutes, or her whole body for two. A full kilogram, burned down completely, yielded enough holy light to cover her entire body for ten minutes — and that, she decided, would count as one unit.
But her blood could only hold so much. Three units, and no more.
Night had fully fallen by now. Great Harbor had streetlamps, at least, so the going wasn't bad.
Walking after dark in Nuremport, though, was never exactly safe — vagrants, pickpockets, thieves, and worse haunted every corner of the streets.
If she happened to run into some petty thug tonight, she thought, she might even get to test her transcendent strength properly.
Converting fifteen percent of her soul to enhance her flesh by thirty percent had already let her handle the elephant revolver with relative ease. Push the conversion to thirty-five percent, and the thing practically felt like a toy in her hands.
These days, tucked inside her coat alongside the revolver, she also carried a short submachine gun with a twenty-five-round magazine.
She left Great Harbor behind and crossed into North Harbor.
Coo-coo~Coo-coo~
Earlier, on her way out of the Great Harbor precinct, she'd caught a handful of pigeons roosting in the nearby trees, wrung their necks, and laid out the Pigeon Ritual.
And sure enough — it had picked something up.
Quickhand Pete, or rather Orlando Duke, truly was a careful and cautious Seer. He probably had eyes posted all around his own mother's flower shop. The instant uniformed Scarlett had stepped through that door, the two of them had been marked.
Unfortunate, that.
I anticipated your anticipation.
Thea slid a hand into her coat pocket and closed her fingers around a fistful of sea salt.
Great Philosopher, Sequence Nine!
Salt for medium, soul for the stake — soul-strength down by thirty-five percent, body-strength up by seventy.
Crimson Cup — Light in the Blood!
She drew the blade across her forearm. Blood surged out in a hissing rush, and her body-strength climbed another twenty percent on top of that.
The holy light stood ready now, primed to mend whatever wounds came next.
In an instant, something settled heavily behind Thea's eyes — and then her sight, her hearing, her strength, her stamina, her perception, her coordination, her capacity to read a scene, all of it surged past some towering threshold into territory she had never once set foot in.
Even the faintest stir of wind brushing past her temple registered, crisp and distinct. The holy light coursing through her veins she could now feel clear down to her organs, a steady, radiant warmth.
What had been a smear of shapeless dark only moments ago now resolved into something almost painfully clear:
A shadow crouched behind an oak tree, some forty or fifty meters off. At that distance, in full dark, even a trained operative would have struggled to spot a trace of him.
But to Thea's eyes, he might as well have been holding up a torch.
The furtive figure wore a low hat and clutched a suppressed pistol, leaning forward in a slow, careful crouch.
Click.
Before the shadow could so much as register what was happening, Thea had already brought up the elephant revolver.
BOOM!!!
The primer detonated, and an 11.2-millimeter round screamed out and struck the man's wrist dead center. The revolver didn't so much as twitch in Thea's grip. A scream tore through the dark —
Bang! Bang!
Two more shots in rapid succession. The man, clutching what was left of his shredded forearm, was already turning to run — but two more rounds streaked past him, shaving the air on either side of his body close enough to part his coat.
The assassin in the dark was a genuine professional, a marksman of real skill — and the moment he understood what he'd just witnessed, his blood ran cold.
A fan spread. She'd thrown a fan spread — with an elephant revolver.
A fan spread meant firing in a continuous stream while sweeping the arm through an arc, scattering the shots across a fan-shaped field. The recoil demanded was so punishing that, by rights, only the Church's armored Templar Knights — bracing the kickback through their power armor — ever attempted it.
That first shot had blown his gun hand clean apart, which meant she knew exactly what she was doing. These last two had been deliberate too — close enough to terrify, far enough not to kill. She wasn't trying to put him down.
She was herding him. Forcing him to surrender. Forcing him to talk.
But how — how in the name of every saint could those slender arms have soaked up an elephant revolver's recoil thrown in a fan spread?!
"Keep walking. Lead the way. Take me to that Seer of yours."
Under the streetlamp's glow, Thea fired one more round into the ground at the assassin's feet. The shrapnel sprayed up and buried itself in his thigh.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"No name. They just call me White Cat... — fuck, I'm dying, I'm actually dying!"
"White Cat?" Thea glanced him over. A man in his thirties, by the look of him — except his hair had gone bone-white.
He was clumsily wrapping a strip of his own coat around his ruined hand, with all the finesse of someone who'd never dressed a wound in his life. Calling himself a dead man wasn't far off, either — left alone, he'd bleed out into shock soon enough on his own.
"Since you're already on your way out, you might as well be useful on the way down. Go find your precious Seer Pete and tell him this: come find me and settle his debt — or I'll go find him myself, tonight."
"Ha! You? Going after Quickhand for money? You're done for, lady. He's already pissed every gold pound away on stock. You know the poorhouse — the kids they sell out of there? Twenty gold pounds a head. That bastard's holed up living it up in the Siren's Song warehouse while I rot out here freezing my ass off! It hurts — God, it hurts — just put me down already, I'm not walking away from this!"
"Sold to who?"
"Foreigners!"
Thea drew the short submachine gun from inside her coat and pressed its muzzle to the back of White Cat's skull. "Well," she said, almost gently, "looks like I'll be paying him a visit myself, then."
— Bang.
— Bang.
Thea, draped in a heavy coat, kicked open the precinct's front doors and called out across the hall, "Scarlett! Suit up — we're heading down to the docks!"
She'd meant to have White Cat lead the way. Pity. Some cats just didn't understand plain speech — too feral to be tamed.
So she'd given him a clean, quick end instead.
White Cat that didn't come home all night — Quickhand Pete, careful as he was, and a Transcendent on the Seer's path besides, would notice that absence soon enough. Which meant Thea didn't have the luxury of taking her time. Speed was the only option left on the table now.
Scarlett came rushing down in a hastily fastened mail shirt, a straight sword belted at her hip and a shotgun gripped tight in both hands, falling into step right behind Thea.
The two of them tore out of the Great Harbor precinct and made straight for Coppertube Street, down by the docks. Most of the people who lived there were outsiders — sailors off foreign merchant ships, traders who'd come a long way to do business, and more than a few illegal migrants drifting in from somewhere further east.
Wherever that many strangers crowded together, the local gangs were never far behind. Great Harbor might be far richer than North Harbor on the surface, but its hidden underworld kept its own kind of order, just the same.
Deep inside Coppertube Street, storefront after storefront lined the road — most of them rented out by nearby factories to peddle samples or sell direct to customers. But the warehouses themselves carried no signage, and Thea had no intention of searching every last one of them by hand.
At one crossroads along the street, Thea led Scarlett barreling straight into one of those storefronts.
A hand-painted sign over the door read SIREN'S SONG — and beside it, DROWN IN SWEET DREAMS.
Outside, a small crowd of addicts lay slumped against the wall, limp as wrung-out rags. Whatever this shop was selling, it wasn't a mystery.
Lawrence Security...
Thea had genuinely believed the security firm had washed its hands of the gang trade for good. Apparently they'd simply traded violence for something tidier — gambling, vice, and narcotics.
Lawrence Security. The Serpent Party. Two halves of the same rotten coin.
Thea picked a fresh bottle of "Siren's Song" off the shelf and turned to the shopkeeper with a faint, knowing smile.
"A psychoactive, is it?"
"Yes indeed, noble lady! Our finest new tranquilizer, fresh from the Siren's Song works — a thousand times stronger than any common calming draught on the market! One sip, and you won't only see paradise in your dreams — you'll watch the kingdom of heaven descend right in front of your waking eyes! A genuine, certified divine experience!"
The shopkeeper, oblivious to the edge curling under Thea's pleasant tone, kept right on selling. "We even had it notarized through Lawrence Security itself — a dozen-odd scientists signed off on its effects, every one of them! Just imagine — even the sharpest scientific minds in the city sing its praises. That's how you know it's the genuine article.
"Seeing as you're a first-time customer, I can knock twenty percent off the price. For a pittance like that, this could be yours."
Something in Scarlett's gut said this was wrong. Her brow furrowed, and she eased the shotgun a little deeper inside her coat.
"How much?" Thea asked.
"Just twelve gold pounds." The shopkeeper beamed, oily as ever.
"I'll take one." Thea tossed a bill onto the counter, lifted a bottle off the shelf, and held it out toward him. "Drink it. Right now."
The shopkeeper's smile froze solid on his face.
It took him a moment to recover enough to force out a laugh. "Ah — esteemed lady, a fine medicine like this really ought to go to people of taste and refinement. Me, I'm just a simple man from the sticks..."
"Scared to drink your own product?"
"That's not — "
Before he could finish, both women had already drawn. The black mouth of the elephant revolver pressed flat against the shopkeeper's forehead, while Scarlett leveled her shotgun at his chest, eyes hard as flint.
Cold sweat broke out across the man's back in an instant. Shit — I had them pegged for nobles come to stock up, and they're robbers!
Thea's voice came soft and low. "Selling counterfeit medicine, hm? Do you have any idea what that's worth in a court of law? Of all the scum in this city, I despise you fake-drug peddlers most. How many lives have your kind wrecked, exactly? I could put every last one of you in the ground right now and sleep just fine."
The shopkeeper scraped together what was left of his nerve and forced his most ingratiating smile yet. "My deepest apologies, truly! We're more than willing to make this right — I can throw in ten more bottles, the genuine high-purity stock, free of charge! The trouble is we're out of it up front — it's all sitting in the cold-storage room out by the warehouse. If you'd just let me go fetch — "
There it is. Exactly what I was waiting to hear.
Thea lowered the gun and said, flat and cold, "Trying to slip away on me? Keep your Siren's Song. Take me back there now, and bring every gold pound you've got with you."
There it is, the shopkeeper thought back at her, just as savagely. Exactly what I was waiting to hear. You actually want to walk in there yourself? You think you're walking back out?
Where in the world did you get the nerve?
With that piece of junk that'll shatter your own wrist the second you fire it?
"This way, please, both of you — straight through the back, and we'll be at the warehouse in no time."
The shopkeeper bent nearly double, leading the two of them through, fitting a key into the back door. Beyond it lay a narrow, reeking alley running with filth, and at the far end of it, an old, weathered warehouse came into view.
Good. Found it.
Thea gave Scarlett a hand signal. She took point, the revolver's muzzle still pressed into the back of the shopkeeper's skull, while Scarlett fell in behind her, back to back, watching their rear.
Scarlett's transcendent trait was this: when she placed her back in the hands of someone she trusted, her sense of every weakness and threat in her surroundings sharpened tenfold. Turning to guard the rear now, her awareness of every sound, scent, and shifting shadow around her bloomed wide open.
The drift of tobacco smoke from inside the warehouse. The number of footsteps shuffling within. The cadence of low voices trading words behind the door... Scarlett raised four fingers toward the warehouse entrance.
Four men, just past that door.
Gun pressed into the small of the shopkeeper's back, Thea said, "Open it."
The shopkeeper's eyes darted side to side. He rapped twice on the door and called out in a thin, sing-song voice: "Little Red Riding Hood, Little Red Riding Hood, won't you let me in. Grandmother, grandmother, I've come home again. Wake the huntsman, wake your mother too — I've brought bread and wine, fresh and warm, for you."
On the other side, several broad-shouldered men froze mid-step, then snapped their pistols up toward the door — every one of them decommissioned police stock, and a few, by the look of the barrels, straight off an army surplus cart.
The last man, stationed by the red switch that raised the loading door, pinched his nose and called back in a reedy falsetto: "Little Red Riding Hood, Little Red Riding Hood, braid your hair up neat. Grandmother, grandmother, no need to fret — your gift's all wrapped, the nightingale rests its feet, so mind your step out on the street."
— He hit the switch.
RUMBLE — RUMBLE!
The door rolled up, and Thea found herself looking at four hulking men, each gripping a heavy-caliber pistol, glaring murder straight at her and Scarlett. The instant the shopkeeper saw those muzzles, he flung himself flat onto the floor, screeching at the top of his lungs:
"It's them! Shoot! SHOOT THEM!"
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!
The word shoot had barely left his mouth before a streak of muzzle flashes tore through the air — passing clean over the top of the shopkeeper's prone head.
He assumed it was his own men firing, and his heart leapt with relief. He stuck his backside in the air and craned his neck to look.
A handful of strangled cries rang out — and all four men crumpled in a heap, sprawled across one another on the warehouse floor.
Thin white smoke curled from the barrel of the short submachine gun in Thea's hand.
She planted her boot square in the shopkeeper's backside, leveled the muzzle straight between his disbelieving eyes, and said, almost gently:
"What exactly were you expecting?"