The Penitent Damned(4)

"All right, all right. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for any Black Priests while I'm out there." Alex rolled her eyes. And I'll watch for dragons and bogeymen, too. "Now, let me tell you my idea —"



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Two globes of darkness encircled Alex's hands, flat black in the faint moonlight. She pointed one hand toward the roof of the other tenement, and extended her will. Blackness surged out in a long, thin line, like a rope made of pure shadow. She could feel it tense and quiver as though it were an extension of her own flesh, and she felt the force of impact as it hit the bricks and punched inward with a soft crunch. A hundred tiny black filaments radiated outward, scrambling for a hold.

She waited a moment, then tugged to make sure the grip was solid. Once she was sure, she took a deep breath, and stepped off into space.

For a brief, heart-stopping instant she dropped straight down, until the line of darkness jerked her arm up and turned the fall into a swing. A second later she was hurtling toward the side of the building with bone-cracking speed. She threw up her other hand, and a second black beam lanced out, this one straight into the brick wall.

The liquid darkness could be hard or soft, firm or yielding, as she required. In this case, an effort of will turned it hard and springy enough to kill the momentum she'd picked up crossing the gap. She let it evaporate, bit by bit, until she finally came to a stop with her feet against the wall, hanging from her shadow-rope, her weight supported by a few strands of braided darkness. From there it was just a matter of walking up, shortening the rope as she went, until she could throw her hands over the brick lip of the rooftop and pull herself on top.

Impossible. Alex grinned in triumph, face flushed. She wished the Old Man could see this. He had taken a long time to come to terms with Alex's strange power, but eventually its sheer usefulness had won him over. After that, he'd taught her a great deal about what could be accomplished by an athletic young girl with a rope and a head for angles.

"Elysium has a long memory." She shook her head at the memory of his disapproving frown. Maybe once upon a time, the Priests of the Black hunted people like me. There were enough stories about it, certainly. But as far as Alex could tell, there was no one else like her, not anymore, and no Priests of the Black either.

Distractions. Alex heard the Old Man tut-tutting in her ear. She got to her feet, carefully, balancing on the narrow brick pathway, and worked her way around the length of the roof. The information the Old Man had pried out of his reluctant contacts indicated that the archive occupied the northern half of the floor, and Alex glanced up at the stars to make sure she hadn't lost her bearings.

When she reached the northeast corner, she crouched, and let darkness roll out from her fingertips once again. It dripped down like molasses until it touched the flimsy, ancient shingles, then split into a hundred smaller filaments that drilled out through the wood like termites. Pieces began to fall away, just a dusting at first, then chunks the size of wood chips.

The tricky part was not letting anything drop before it had been sliced into small enough pieces that it wouldn't make a sound; the black tendrils crossed and re-crossed, and beads of sweat popped out on Alex's face with the effort. Eventually, a roughly circular section of the roof simply disintegrated into dust and splinters, falling away with a soft woof. Alex leaned over it and fired a shadow-line down, willing it solid enough to support her weight. She stepped out over the hole, balancing with both hands on the dark beam like an acrobat, and let it contract to lower her into room below as lightly as a feather.

That ought to be neat enough to please even the Old Man. As Metzing, he'd been famous not only for stealing what nobody thought could be stolen, but for making it look effortless. When they'd met, she'd only just begun her own career, and her brute-force reliance on her power to get past obstacles kept getting her into trouble. The Old Man had taught her the art of thievery.

He'd taught her a few other things, too. She'd been trying to avoid thinking about that part. But as she crouched in the corner of the darkened room, waiting for her eyes to adjust, she heard the soft tread of boots coming closer.

"Don't kill if you don't have to," the Old Man said. "Killing will make them quicker to chase and less likely to give up, and it'll be worse for you if you're caught. Besides, it isn't elegant." His lip twisted. "But if you do have to, you need to be quick, and quiet. Like this …"

A door opened, admitting a sliver of lantern-light. Alex blinked and swore silently. She was in one corner of a long, low-ceilinged room. Heavy, padlocked cabinets lined both walls, so wide that the space between was barely more than an aisle. It seemed terribly mundane for a place with such a dread reputation: one of the bottomless archives of the Concordat, where every dark secret in Vordan eventually came to rest.