He dropped the skull, or tried. It stuck to his hand. He must have been too afraid to let it go. That had to be the reason. But at last the skull slipped from his palm into the packing shadows, and the box snapped shut. Corbin must have closed it. The evidence locker sub-basement felt too still, too quiet.
He cradled the box to his chest, carried it back across the circle, and offered it to Umar. “Take the thing.” Cold spread from the metal into his arms.
“Not now,” Umar said. “Follow.”
He ran. So did Corbin.
The sub-basement blurred around them, lockers and cages and unconscious guard, bare-piped basement and concrete steps. Then they were out in the yard, running under a coal-black sky tangled with ropes of green-purple light like sailors said they saw far north. But those were supposed to be soft lights, while these were hard like thorns, and rainbow blood flowed where they stuck. Umar climbed the fence first, held out his hands. Corbin tossed the box to him and followed. Chain links rattled beneath his weight like they hadn’t under Umar’s.
As he crested the fence, he heard a nightmare voice.
Stop.
Shit.
He fell hard. His ankle twisted. He felt no pain, from his ankle or from his torn soles—he was too scared for pain. Umar sprinted for the alley. Corbin’s legs wouldn’t do as he asked. A Blacksuit chased them. Only one, the rest on patrol or doing gods knew what, but one was enough.
Corbin ran into the alley, into Umar. Who had stopped.
“We cannot outrun it,” Umar said, and set the box down.
Light quaked monochrome again, leaving serrated patches of light and dark. Umar’s face looked like saws fucking.
Corbin tried to speak but made no sound.
Experience broke to key frames robbed of movement, like woodcuts in a children’s book. Umar looking up. Corbin turning. The Blacksuit frozen in midleap (it was a woman, under the Suit). Umar, dodging to strike the Suit’s face with his fist. The Suit fell, recovered. Hit Umar in the gut. Knocked him into the wall. Umar hit the Suit in the jaw with the heel of his hand. No effect. Suited fingers reached for his neck. Umar’s mouth snapped open. Glass wires flicked from between his teeth and caught the Suit, and pierced and peeled. The Suit staggered. She fell beside the box, silver pooling reflective from her skin to leave her human.
Motion returned, and color, the loud bark of those silent seconds’ sound released at once. Umar panted. Cuts around his mouth bled black. Corbin stared at the fallen Blacksuit. She lay still, but breathing.
Umar lifted the box. “Come.” His voice sounded less human now.
Corbin hobbled after him. With every turn and every block he expected Blacksuits to descend. Maybe Justice was distracted? Maybe whatever Umar did, or whatever the thing inside Umar did, broke the Suit’s tie to its Lady? But to think such a thing—to attack Justice herself, to fight her messengers and win—was to frame a world gone mad.
Madder still: to find, after a long run through twisting alleys, an open post office. To follow Umar in, watch him empty the steel chest’s contents into a cardboard box, tape the box shut, and write an address Corbin could not read. A clerk waited behind the desk, cheek puddled around his knuckles, bored, as if the day were sunless due to rain. The clerk looked twice at Umar’s bare chest, but only twice. “Anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or hazardous?”
“No,” Umar said, and paid what he was asked.
“What the hells did we just do?” Corbin shouted at him when they were safe in the empty street again, if anywhere beneath that sky could be called safe.
“We sent the package,” Umar said. “Now, you will lead us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Seril has touched you.” Umar touched Corbin’s forehead. “We have seen to the weapon. Now we must strike. Some within this city pray to her. She hides herself from me, but you can follow her. Lead me to them, and she will suffer.”
The words opened Corbin’s mind. He had been lost in the dream of Umar, carried in the big man’s wake. But Corbin heard the prayers Umar meant, the moonlit surf that washed through his nightmares. He heard his girls’ voices in that song. The world was mad. Great powers broke his family apart. Umar would help him stop all that.
He staggered west, following a distant song.
62
Tara climbed the mountain to meet her Goddess.
She walked steep trails until she found an iron ladder riveted to living stone. The ladder’s rungs chafed her hands. Fortunately she kept her nails short, and wore sensible shoes.
By three rungs she’d climbed past the treetops. Pines grew tall in these western woods. She’d never been northwest to Regis or the Maw, but people said the trees there were taller than mountains, older than the Imperium, older than most gods: broad, deep, ancient, and invulnerable.