They went out through the broken windows, into the rain.
Magnus went first, with Petra in his arms, stepping from the sill into the shadow of a buttress and out of the shadow of a chimney stack on the roof of the house next door.
It was harder than it had ever been.
The shadows felt thick and slow, like wading through mud, and when he came out the other side his legs nearly went from under him.
He turned and reached back and Silas came through the window after him, bleeding, swearing, dragging Irina by the hand, and the three of them crouched together on the wet tiles in the dark and listened.
The Lesser Town was full of the dead.
Magnus could feel them, through the new blood-sense Ferrante’s blood had woken in him: a web of cold, quick presences closing around the church from every side.
In the street below.
In the alley behind.
On the roofs across the way, moving fast, light-footed, the way the enforcers had moved.
Ten.
Fifteen.
Twenty-two.
He stopped counting.
And beyond them, faint, like a smell of smoke on the wind, he felt the others.
The ones who weren’t coming for him.
The strays and the fledglings from the Black Rose and a hundred cellars like it, all across the city, crouched in the dark with their heads down, waiting to see what would happen.
Not helping.
Not hunting.
Just waiting.
“Which way?” Silas breathed.
Magnus didn’t know.
He looked out over the roofs, the steep red tiles shining in the rain, the spires and domes and chimneys stretching away in every direction like a stone forest, the castle black and enormous on the hill above them, and the river somewhere below, unseen, a long dark absence in the lights.
The river.
Running water.
He didn’t know how he knew it.
Something in the old blood.
They don’t like the river.
Never have.
Go down to the river.
“Down,” he said.
They almost made it.
They went over the roofs of the Lesser Town in a long, staggering, stumbling run, Magnus in front with Petra, Silas behind with Irina, leaping gaps between houses that Silas would never have managed alone and that Magnus barely managed with the old man’s weight on his back for the last of them.
Twice the enforcers found them, and twice Magnus stepped into the shadows and dragged the others through with him, and came out somewhere else, gasping, half-blind, his two hearts laboring in his chest like an engine about to throw a rod.
The third time, he couldn’t.
He reached for the shadow under a parapet and it simply wasn’t there.
The door was shut.
There was nothing left in him to open it.
They came down off the roofs into a little square by the river, at the foot of the Charles Bridge, the old stone bridge with its double row of black statues, saints and kings and martyrs, marching away across the water into the rain.
It was four in the morning.
There was nobody there.
The tourists were gone, the stag parties were gone, the street sellers had packed up their stalls.
There were only the statues, and the gas lamps, and the rain.
And the enforcers.
They came out of the alleys on every side of the square, without hurrying.
They knew they didn’t need to hurry.
Twelve of them, then fifteen, then twenty, in long dark coats, their eyes catching the lamplight.
They spread out across the cobbles in a long, loose ring, closing off every street and every alley and the steps down to the water.
And then they stopped, and waited.
And Luca Ferrante walked out of the darkness under the bridge tower, with his ruined hand wrapped in a silk handkerchief soaked through with black, and his beautiful gray suit spattered with his own blood, and stopped at the edge of the ring.
He was not smiling now.
“I will give you one more chance,” he said quietly.
“Because the Duchess would be very disappointed in me if I didn’t.
Kneel.
Now.
Or I will take the old one apart in front of you, one piece at a time, and then the other one, and then I will take you to Venice in a box.” Magnus set Petra down, very gently, on the cobbles at the foot of a statue of a saint with a cross in his arms.
He straightened her coat.
He brushed the wet hair off her face.
Then he stood up and turned to face them.
He had nothing left.
He knew it.
Ferrante knew it.
Every enforcer in the square knew it; he could feel them knowing it, through the blood-sense, feel them relaxing, feel the hunger in them start to rise.
He could not step into the shadows.
He could not make a blade.
He could barely stand.
Behind him Silas was gripping his stick with both hands, his old face set and gray, and Irina was pressed against the base of the statue beside Petra’s body with her eyes squeezed shut, murmuring something in Hungarian over and over.
A prayer, maybe.
Or a name.
Ilona.
Ilona.
Ilona.
“No,” Magnus said.
Ferrante sighed.
“Take them,” he said.
And every light in the Lesser Town went out.
It happened all at once.
The gas lamps in the square, the floodlights on the bridge tower, the streetlights along the embankment, the neon in the windows of the shuttered cafés, the red lights on the castle walls high above, the long sparkling strings of light along the bridges, every light on both banks of the river as far as Magnus could see.
One moment the city was glittering in the rain.
The next it was black.
The enforcers stopped.
Even vampires, Magnus would learn later, did not like it when the lights went out all at once.
It made them think of old things.
Of the times before.
And into the sudden dark, from the direction of the river, came the sound of an engine.
A big one, revving hard.
Then headlights, blazing, white, blinding, as a battered black Land Rover came up the cobbled ramp from the embankment road and straight into the square, scattering enforcers in every direction like pigeons, and slewed sideways across the cobbles with a shriek of tires and stopped a yard from Magnus with its passenger door already swinging open.
“Hello!” said a voice from inside.
Cheerful.
Male.
English, with a faintly old-fashioned, upper-class drawl.
“Sorry we’re late.
Frightful traffic.
Are you the one who killed Veyr?
Never mind, doesn’t matter, get in.” A young man leaned across from the driver’s seat.
Or rather, a vampire who had been a young man once: tall, rangy, with untidy dark-gold hair and a long, laughing, aristocratic face and eyes the color of brandy.
He was wearing a beautifully cut midnight-blue overcoat over a T-shirt that said I SURVIVED THE CORONATION OF 1838, and he was grinning like a man who was having the best night of his life.
Behind him, in the back seat, a second figure rose up through the open sunroof with something long and heavy on her shoulder.
A woman, small and slight, with a sharp pale face and short black hair and a pair of night-vision goggles pushed up on her forehead.
She swung the long heavy thing toward the nearest group of enforcers, and Magnus saw that it was a grenade launcher.
“Eyes,” she said, in a flat voice with an American accent.
She fired.
The round hit the cobbles at the enforcers’ feet and burst, not in fire, but in light.
Pure, white, searing light, bright as noon, bright as the dawn in the chapel window, so bright it was a sound, a roar, a weight.
The enforcers it touched screamed and went down, smoking.
The others threw their arms across their faces and fell back.
Magnus felt it on his own skin, like a slap of boiling water, and staggered.
Behind him, Silas shouted.
And a third figure came out of the back of the Land Rover in a single unhurried movement and walked past Magnus into the square.
He was enormous.
That was the first thing.
Six foot six at least, and built like a door, with skin the deep warm brown of polished walnut and short gray-flecked hair and a broad, calm, lined face.
He was wearing a battered old leather flying jacket with a faded military patch on the shoulder, and he had a medical bag in one hand and nothing at all in the other.
He walked straight to Silas, and took the old ghoul’s arm, and looked at the gash across his forehead, and clicked his tongue.
“That’s going to need stitches,” he said, in a deep, slow, American voice.
“Come on, now.
Let’s get you in the car.” He turned to Irina, still huddled against the statue, and crouched down in front of her, and held out one huge hand, palm up, the way you would hold it out to a frightened animal.
“Ma’am,” he said gently.
“You’re all right.
Come on, now.
We’re going to get you somewhere safe.” Irina opened her eyes and looked at him.
And whatever she saw in his face, she took his hand.
“Vale.” It was Ferrante.
He had come forward through the smoke and the screaming, into the edge of the Land Rover’s headlights, and he was staring at the young vampire in the driver’s seat with an expression of cold, incredulous fury.
“Adrian Vale,” he said.
“Of course.
Of course it would be you.” The young vampire in the blue overcoat leaned on the steering wheel and beamed at him.
“Luca!
Darling.
How’s the hand?” “This is not your affair.” “Oh, I think you’ll find it is, actually.” Adrian Vale swung himself out of the driver’s seat and stood up, leaning on the open door, quite relaxed, as though he were chatting to an old friend at a party.
“You see, I’ve just been looking at the map, and I do believe this square we’re standing in is in the parish of Malá Strana.
And Malá Strana, if I remember my history, which my tutors always said I didn’t, is the old sanctuary quarter of Prague.
Neutral ground.
Under the Night Laws.” He smiled.
“Article seven, I think.
Lyra?” “Article seven,” said the woman in the sunroof, reloading.
“No blood shall be taken by force within the bounds of a sanctuary, upon pain of the Crown’s justice.” “There you are, you see.
Article seven.” Ferrante’s face was very white.
“There is no Crown,” he said.
“There has been no Crown for a hundred and twenty-nine years.
The Night Laws are a children’s story.” “Mm.
Yes.
That’s what Mother says.” Adrian tilted his head.
“Though I’d point out, Luca, that whether or not there’s a Crown, there is most definitely a Crimson Court, and that I am, regrettably, still technically a member of House Vale of the Crimson Court, and that if anything were to happen to me here tonight, in a sanctuary, at the hands of the Duchess of the Blood’s personal staff, then my lady mother would be obliged, for the sake of the family’s honor, to take it up with Seraphine Valemont.
And Seraphine would be obliged to take it up with your Duchess.
And then everyone would be obliged to take it up with everyone, and it would all get very tedious, and quite a lot of people would end up as ash.” He spread his hands.
“Whereas if you go home now, we can all agree that nothing happened, and the Duchess need never know you lost a fight to a fledgling in a deconsecrated church.” For a long moment, nobody moved.
Magnus watched Ferrante.
Watched the old vampire’s dark eyes go from Adrian to the woman in the sunroof with her launcher, to the enormous man helping Irina into the back of the Land Rover, to the enforcers smoking and moaning on the cobbles.
And then, last of all, to Magnus himself.
He held Ferrante’s eyes.
He didn’t look away.
He had nothing left, and he knew Ferrante knew it.
But he didn’t look away.
Ferrante looked at him for a long time.
“The Duchess will remember this,” he said at last, softly.
“All of you.
She remembers everything.” He turned, and walked away into the dark under the bridge tower, and one by one, the enforcers followed him, dragging their wounded, until the square was empty except for the rain, and the statues, and the Land Rover with its engine running.
Adrian Vale let out a long breath.
“Well,” he said, “I can’t believe that worked.” The safehouse was a bookshop.
It was in the Old Town, on the other side of the river, down a crooked lane behind a church: a narrow, crooked, five-story building with a sign over the door that said ANTIKVARIÁT in faded gold letters and windows so crammed with old books that no light could get in or out.
The ground floor was a maze of shelves.
The upper floors were rooms full of more books, and armchairs, and blankets, and a kitchen with a refrigerator that hummed in the corner and held, Magnus discovered when Noah opened it, nothing but rows and rows of blood bags, neatly labeled, sorted by type.
“Hospital surplus,” Noah said, seeing his face.
“Expired, mostly.
Day or two past the date.
Can’t give it to a human patient, but it’s fine for us.
Better than fine.” He took one out, O-negative, and held it out.
“Here.” Magnus didn’t take it.
He was sitting on the floor of the top-floor room, in the corner, with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up.
He had been sitting there since they arrived.
Silas was in an armchair by the window, with his forehead neatly stitched, asleep.
Irina was curled up on a sofa under a blanket, asleep too, or pretending.
And Petra was on the long table in the middle of the room, under a sheet.
The big man had carried her up the stairs himself, very carefully, and laid her down, and pulled the sheet up, and stood with his head bowed for a long moment before he turned away.
The woman with the grenade launcher, Lyra, was sitting on the windowsill across the room with a pistol in her lap.
She had not stopped pointing it at Magnus since they got out of the car.
Not obviously.
It was just there, resting on her knee, with the muzzle somewhere in his direction.
He could smell the silver in the bullets from here.
Adrian Vale was lying on his back on the floor in the middle of the room with his overcoat off and his eyes shut, eating crisps out of a bag.
He did not seem to need to eat crisps.
He seemed to be doing it out of nostalgia.
“Who are you?” Magnus said.
It was the first thing he had said since the bridge.
Adrian opened one eye.
“Ah.
Introductions.
Of course.” He sat up, and brushed crisp crumbs off his T-shirt, and gestured around the room with the bag.
“That’s Noah Graves.
He’s a doctor.
Well, a medic.
Hundred and fourth Infantry, Normandy, 1944.
Got bitten in a barn in the Ardennes by something nasty while he was patching up a German boy who’d been shot through the lungs, and he’s been patching people up ever since.
Runs a clinic, in Vienna.
Our kind.
Strays and fledglings and ghouls.
Anyone who needs it.
Doesn’t charge.” “Mostly doesn’t charge,” said Noah mildly.
“Sometimes I take cookies.” “That’s Lyra Belladonna, who is currently pointing a gun at you.
Don’t take it personally, she points a gun at everyone.
She points a gun at me about once a week.” “Twice,” said Lyra.
“Twice a week.
She was a computer programmer in California in the nineties, until she was turned against her will by a very unpleasant man in Silicon Valley, whom she subsequently killed with a fire axe.
She’s our archivist.
And our hacker.
And our driver, apparently, God help us all.
That was her, with the lights.
She broke into the Prague power grid.
She can break into anything.” “I can’t break into you,” said Lyra.
Her flat dark eyes didn’t leave Magnus.
“Yet.” “And I,” said Adrian, with a little seated bow, “am Adrian Vale, second son of House Vale, black sheep of the Crimson Court, a deep disappointment to my mother, the despair of my tutors, and the reason we were in Prague tonight at all.
Because every few weeks, Luca Ferrante holds an auction in a warehouse in Holešovice for unclaimed ghouls and stray fledglings, and every few weeks, we come and steal as many of them as we can and take them to Vienna.
To the Hidden City.” He smiled, but it was a tired smile.
“We were here for the auction tonight.
And then Lyra picked up some very excited chatter on Ferrante’s channels about something that had walked into the Black Rose and made every vampire in the room bow.” He looked at Magnus.
“So we came to see.” Magnus looked at him.
Then at Noah, still holding out the blood bag.
Then at Lyra, and her gun.
“Why?” he said.
“Why what?” “Why help us?
You don’t know me.
You don’t know what I am.” He heard his own voice rising, cracking.
He couldn’t stop it.
“You saw what I did in that church.
Lyra’s right to point that gun at me.
I don’t know what I am.
I don’t know what’s in me.
And everyone who’s ever tried to help me has—” He stopped.
He looked at the long table, at the sheet.
The room was very quiet.
“I know,” said Adrian softly.
All the play had gone out of his voice.
“I know.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry we were late.” Noah put the blood bag down on the floor beside Magnus, gently, and went and sat in the armchair across from him, his big hands folded between his knees.
“Son,” he said.
“I’ve been doing this a long time.
Eighty-two years.
And I’ve seen a whole lot of vampires who’d just lost someone.
Most of them, the first thing they do, they go out and find someone to hurt.
Doesn’t matter who.
Just someone.
So the hurt goes somewhere.” He nodded at the window, at the dark city beyond it.
“You had every vampire in that square scared to death of you tonight.
You could’ve gone out after Ferrante.
You could’ve gone out after anybody.
Instead you’ve been sitting in that corner for three hours with your back to the wall, guarding a dead girl and two sleeping ghouls.” He paused.
“And I watched you in that square, before the lights went out.
When Ferrante told you to kneel.
You couldn’t stand up straight.
You had nothing left.
And you still told him no.” Magnus didn’t answer.
“I don’t know what you are either,” Noah said.
“Nobody does.
But I know what you did.
And that’s enough for me, for tonight.” He nodded at the blood bag.
“Now drink that.
You’re no use to anybody starved.” Magnus looked at the bag for a long time.
Then he picked it up, and bit into the corner, and drank.
It was cold.
It tasted of plastic and preservatives and very faintly of a stranger, a man, he thought, someone healthy, who had walked into a hospital one afternoon and rolled up his sleeve and given away a pint of himself for nothing.
It was nothing like the hiker in the clearing.
It didn’t fill him with life, or light him up.
But it filled him.
Slowly, steadily, like water filling a cracked jar.
He drank all of it, and Noah gave him another, and he drank that too, and slowly, slowly, the shaking in his hands stopped.
“You never have to bite anyone again,” Noah said quietly.
“If you don’t want to.
Did anybody ever tell you that?” Magnus shook his head.
“Well,” said Noah.
“Now somebody has.” They burned Petra at dawn.
It was the old way, Noah said.
The oldest way, older than the courts, older than the King.
A vampire or a ghoul who died went to the fire, at sunrise, and the ashes went into running water, so that nothing could ever be taken from them, and nothing could ever be made of them, and they would go wherever running water goes.
To the sea, maybe.
Or further.
Magnus thought about a vault under an English country house, and a heart in a golden box, and a glass case full of bones.
He thought that whoever had first made that rule had understood something important.
They did it on a stone landing stage on the riverbank below Kampa Island, in the gray before sunrise, while the city was still dark from Lyra’s blackout and nobody was awake to see.
Noah built the pyre from wooden pallets he found behind a restaurant.
Adrian, who turned out to be surprisingly good at it, sang something in Latin, very softly.
Lyra stood a little apart with her arms folded and her pistol finally holstered.
Irina held Silas’s hand.
And Magnus carried Petra down the steps from the embankment in his arms, for the last time, and laid her on the pallets, and put the old silver cup on her chest, because he could not think what else to give her, and she had always been the one who kept it clean.
Then he lit the fire.
And as the flames climbed, the sky behind the castle began to go gray, then pale, then pink, then gold.
The others went up the steps, into the shadow of the embankment wall.
Noah called to him.
Adrian called to him.
Magnus didn’t move.
He stood by the fire, at the edge of the water, and watched the sun come up over the spires of Prague and lay a long gold road across the river toward him, and the light hit his face, and it burned.
God, it burned.
Like boiling water.
Like the chapel window.
His skin blistered and smoked.
And healed.
And blistered again.
And healed.
He stood there in it for a whole minute, while the fire burned down and Petra went with it.
He would not leave her to go alone.
It was the only thing he could still do for her.
When it was done, he gathered the ashes in his hands, still hot, and knelt at the edge of the landing stage, and let them go into the river.
They spread on the water like smoke and turned gold in the sunlight and were carried away downstream, under the bridges, toward the sea.
And then he went up the steps into the shadows, with his face healing, and found the three strangers staring at him.
All three.
Noah with his mouth open.
Lyra with her hand halfway to her gun.
And Adrian, very still, very pale, with an expression on his long, laughing face that Magnus had not seen there before, and could not read.
“A fledgling,” Adrian said, very quietly.
“A week old.
Standing in the sunrise.
For a full minute.” He swallowed.
“Lyra.
In the Black Rose, tonight.
When they said everybody bowed.
Did you feel it?
Just now, at the bridge?
When he looked at Ferrante?” Lyra didn’t answer for a long time.
“Yes,” she said at last, very low, as though it cost her something.
“I wanted to kneel.
I’ve never wanted to kneel to anyone in my life.” Adrian looked at Magnus for a long time, there in the shadow of the embankment wall, with the sunlight spilling gold across the river behind him.
Then, slowly, he smiled.
Not the party smile.
Something smaller, and stranger, and much more real.
“Come to Vienna,” he said.
“Please.
All of you.
Bring the old gentleman and the lady.
There’s a place there.
A city, under the city.
There are people there like us.
Thousands of them.
People who’ve lost things.
People who are trying to work out how to live.” He spread his hands.
“There’s a clinic, and a library, and a terrible nightclub where I’m banned from the karaoke.
There are schools.
There are families.
There’s nobody who owns anybody.” Magnus stood very still.
Somewhere nobody owns anybody.
He looked at Silas.
The old man was leaning on his stick at the foot of the steps, with Irina holding his arm.
His stitched forehead.
His healed arm.
His tired, ancient, stubborn face.
Silas looked back at him and said nothing at all.
He didn’t need to.
Magnus didn’t trust them.
Not yet.
He didn’t know if he would ever trust anyone again.
But he looked at the river, where Petra had gone, and he thought about what she had said in the rain under the black spires, and he knew what she would have told him to do.
“All right,” he said.
“Vienna.”