Ember Beneath the Neon: Neon Wards And Old Ghosts

Quill's boots clicked against wet cobblestone, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the fog rolling off the river district. Maren walked half a step behind and to his left, her right hand resting inside her coat where the leather grip of a city-issue ward-stone sat warm against her palm. The stone pulsed faintly beneath her fingers, a slow heartbeat of stored light that most people in Vellum could no longer feel.

"You know," Quill said, his breath misting in the chill air, "most people celebrate the new year with wine, music, or at the very least a moderately attractive companion. You celebrate by dragging your informant on a midnight inventory."

"Most people don't have wards to inventory."

The street stretched ahead of them, empty save for the occasional flicker of a phosphor lamp overhead. The lamps hummed, a low electrical drone that Maren had learned to tune out years ago. Tonight it grated.

She stopped at the corner of Vellum and Cooper, where a thin spire of worked iron rose from a stone post half-buried in cracked pavement. The spire was hers. She had set it herself six winters ago, back when the city still paid mages to maintain the ward-net that kept the deeper ash-wastes from creeping into the lower districts. Back before the Cinder Court decided that a thinner net was a cheaper net.

The ward-stone in her palm flared once, then dimmed.

"Dead," Maren said.

Quill tilted his head, the collar of his coat turned up high enough to shadow the lower half of his face. "Dramatic word."

"Accurate word." She uncurled her fingers and showed him the stone. Its glow had gone from soft amber to a dull, ashen grey. "This post used to push back the bleed for a twelve-block radius. Without it, anything that wandered out of the Hollows tonight has a straight run down Cooper Street to the rail yards."

"Anything being what, specifically? Stray dogs? Particularly ambitious rats?"

Maren did not answer. She crossed the street instead, her boots splashing through a puddle that caught the phosphor-light and turned it briefly gold. Quill followed, because following was what he did, and because he had the professional curiosity of a man who survived by knowing which questions would get him killed if he asked them at the wrong time.

The second ward stood in front of a shuttered printshop on Lansing. Maren had installed this one in a rare moment of optimism, her first year working under contract. She remembered standing on a borrowed ladder, Quill's predecessor, a man named Dorran with ink-stained cuffs, holding the ladder steady while she inscribed the rune sequence into the iron. Dorran had told her then that wards were a kind of promise. You marked a place as kept, and the city remembered the keeping.

She touched the rune and felt nothing.

"Two," she said.

Quill's eyes moved over the street, the dark windows, the thin mist curling along the ground. "What happens to a ward when it goes dark? Does it just... forget?"

"Worse. It inverts. The rune eats its own light and starts pulling instead of pushing. Anything with a spark of ember-magic inside it, a hound, a ferrylark, even a cursed rat big enough to notice, feels that pull like a tide."

"And walks toward it."

Maren nodded. "Toward what was supposed to be safe."

The third ward was on the corner of Brick and Marrow, across from the old almshouse where the Cinder Court had stopped sending supplies three years ago. The building sat squat and blind in the fog, its windows boarded, its chimney cold. A faded municipal seal hung above the door, the gilt worn down to bare wood.

Quill waited on the far side of the intersection while Maren approached the post. The iron here was older than her, blackened by decades of industrial soot, but the rune she had etched into its face was still sharp-edged. She traced the curve of it with her thumb and felt the ward-stone in her other hand grow cold.

Not dim. Cold.

Her breath caught, a small tight sound that Quill pretended not to hear.

"This one's worse," she said. "The rune's intact, but the anchor's gone. Something tore the channel out at the root."

"Tore it how?"

"With claws." She crouched and ran her finger along a series of shallow gouges in the stone at the base of the post. The marks were too deliberate to be random, too parallel to be anything but a working set of talons. Each groove was the width of two of her fingers and deeper than any mundane animal could manage. "Ash hound. Probably a runner, scouting ahead of the main pack."

Quill was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost its performative edge. "The Hollows are twelve miles out."

"They were."

"And the wards are failing in the lower wards because?"

"Because the Court stopped paying for maintenance four years ago, and the runners I trained got scattered when they cut our funding." Maren stood, brushing grit from her knee. "You don't need to tell me what that means. I already know what that means."

"I'm not telling you what it means. I'm telling you what I'm seeing. Three dead wards in a six-block radius, an anchor ripped out by something with claws big enough to fit my fist, and a municipal almshouse full of people who haven't eaten a hot meal in a week." He stepped closer, lowering his voice. "That's a pattern, Maren. That's not an accident."

She looked at him. The phosphor light caught the angles of his face, the slight tension around his jaw that he usually hid with charm. Quill Devroe was not a man who got tense without reason.

"How long have you known?" she asked.

"Known what?"

"That the wards were failing. That something was testing the perimeter." She kept her voice even, the way her mother had taught her to keep her voice when the men from the works came to ask about the fires. "You sell information, Quill. You don't follow people on midnight walks for the exercise."

He smiled, briefly, the expression not quite reaching his eyes. "I follow you because you're the only person in this city who knows where the bodies are buried, and occasionally because I like your company. In that order. Usually."

"Quill."

"Six days." He held up a hand, fingers spread. "Six days ago, a runner I trust came to me with a tip. A brew-house crew in the rail yards had found tracks near the old switching tower. Big tracks. The kind that get reported upward and then disappear into a Court file that no one ever opens again."

"And you didn't tell me."

"I told you yesterday. I'm telling you now."

"You told me to meet you at the river. You didn't tell me why."

"You didn't ask."

The fog thickened around them, rolling in from the river like a slow tide. Somewhere in the distance, a foghorn sounded, low and mournful, the call of a barge making its way up the channel toward the markets. Maren listened to it until the sound faded.

"We need to move," she said.

"Move where?"

"Back toward the almshouse. If the anchor's been ripped, the inversion field's already active. Anything that wanders into it tonight isn't going to wander out again." She tucked the ward-stone back into her coat and turned toward the shuttered building across the street. "I need to get inside and warn them."

Quill caught her arm. His grip was light, careful, the touch of a man who had learned the hard way how Maren reacted to being held. "Maren. If there's a runner out here, the main pack can't be far behind."

"I know."

"And if the pack is in the lower wards, then whatever is keeping them out of the upper districts isn't the wards anymore."

"I know that too."

"Then why are we walking toward them instead of away?"

Maren looked at the almshouse. The boards over the windows were loose in places, gaps wide enough to let in the cold and wide enough to let something else find its way in. She thought of the families she had seen the last time she passed through, the children with ash-grey complexions, the elderly who slept on thin pallets because the heating system had been condemned years ago and no one had come to fix it.

"Because someone has to," she said. "And because if I don't, the Court will use it as another reason to stop funding ward work entirely, and then there won't be anyone left to put them back up."

Quill released her arm. He stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, watching her with the expression of a man recalculating odds he had already decided were bad.

"I'm going to regret this," he said.

"Probably."

They crossed the street together, Maren leading, Quill a half-step behind. The fog followed them, curling around their ankles, and somewhere in the distance, very far off and very low, something howled. The sound was rough and guttural, nothing like the clean call of a dog, more like metal scraping against stone.

Quill stopped.

Maren kept walking.

"If you have something useful to say," she said, without turning, "say it."

"That wasn't a dog."

"No."

"That wasn't anything that lives in the city."

"No."

He exhaled, a slow controlled sound that fogged the air in front of him. "How long do we have?"

"Before what?"

"Before whatever made that sound figures out where we are."

Maren reached the almshouse door and tested the handle. It turned, but the door stuck in its frame, swollen from years of damp. She put her shoulder into it and pushed, the wood groaning as it gave way.

"Less time than I'd like," she said, and stepped inside.

The almshouse lobby stank of cabbage and something sourer, the ghost of old sweat soaked into plaster that had begun to peel in long, scabrous strips. Maren wrinkled her nose but moved forward, stepping over a man who lay sprawled across the threshold, a threadbare coat pulled up to his chin. He did not wake. His breath rattled, but it was breath, and she had learned long ago to be grateful for such things.

Quill closed the door behind them and produced a small glowstone from his coat, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. The pale green light it cast made the lobby look like the inside of a drowned aquarium. Shadows pooled in the corners. The stairwell at the back of the room gaped like a throat.

"Top floor," Maren said. "The wards are weakest there. Someone's been picking at them."

"Picking."

"With magic. Not physically. The sigils are fraying along the north-facing wall. If we don't reinforce them tonight, by morning the lower wards will start to bleed."

Quill fell into step beside her as she crossed the lobby. "You know," he said, conversationally, "most people would consider a collapsing ward network someone else's problem."

"Most people don't live downwind of the Cinderfall."

"Most people don't live downwind of anything. They live in the middle, where it's safe."

"Quill."

"I'm making a point."

"You're making a nuisance of yourself. There's a difference."

He smiled, the expression flickering across his features like heat lightning, there and gone. They reached the stairwell. The first three steps were solid. The fourth gave a little, and Maren tested her weight before committing to it. The wood held.

They climbed.

The almshouse had four floors, and by the second, Maren could smell the wards. She had always been able to smell them, a particular ozone tang that clung to the back of the throat, sharp and clean against the miasma of the streets below. The Cinderfall had burned the magic into her along with everything else, or so the healers claimed. Maren was not certain she believed them, but she was certain of the smell, and tonight it was thinner than it should have been, watered down, like weak tea.

The third floor was silent. The fourth was not.

She heard it as she reached the landing. A low, rhythmic thrum, like a heartbeat heard through a wall. The building was settling. The wards were cycling down.

"There," she said, pointing toward the corridor that ran along the north side. The plaster there was darker, slick with condensation that should not have been there, given the temperature. "You feel that?"

"I feel that something in the walls wants out."

"Close enough."

She moved down the corridor, trailing her fingers along the surface as she went. The plaster was cold. Colder than the air outside, which should not have been possible, but the Cinderfall had done stranger things than this to the city's weather. Her fingers found the first sigil, etched into the wall beneath a window that had been boarded over with plywood. The lines of the sigil were faint, glowing a dim, irritated red.

"Here," she said. "Hold the light."

Quill held the glowstone closer. In its pale wash, Maren could see the damage clearly. The sigil had been scored along one edge, the line broken by something thin and sharp. Not a chisel. Not a knife. The break had a specific kind of cleanness to it that she associated with magic, with intention drawn rather than carved.

"Someone's been cutting the wards," Quill said.

"Someone's been trying to."

"And failing."

"So far."

Maren pressed her palm flat against the sigil and let the heat come. It rose through her slowly, a familiar tide that started somewhere behind her sternum and radiated outward through her hand. Her fingers warmed. Then her wrist. Then the air around her wrist, visible as a faint shimmer in the glowstone's light. The sigil brightened under her touch, the red deepening to orange, then to a steady, healthy amber.

She held it there until the line knit itself back together, the broken edge fusing like a bone reset. The smell of ozone sharpened. Her hand ached.

"Three more," she said.

"Maren."

She looked at him.

"Your hand."

She glanced down. The skin across her knuckles was flushed, the capillaries near the surface standing out in sharp relief. She flexed her fingers and felt the heat pulse through them, an echo of what she had just channeled. The fire had to come from somewhere, and tonight, with her reserves already low from the day's work, it was coming from her.

"I know," she said.

"You should let me."

"You don't have the gift."

"I have other gifts."

"Not the right ones." She turned to the next sigil. "Three more, Quill. Then we go."

He did not argue. He was learning, slowly, when not to.

The second sigil was worse. The break ran longer, and when Maren pressed her palm to it, the heat came harder, faster, a surge that made her vision swim for a moment before it settled into the steady burn she was used to. She gritted her teeth. The sigil mended. Her hand throbbed.

"You don't have to do all of them tonight," Quill said.

"Yes I do."

"They'll hold until morning."

"They won't, and you know it."

He knew it. The wards were interconnected. If one fell, the others would follow in sequence, a cascade that would strip the entire north face of the building bare by dawn. Maren had seen it happen before, at the Foundling Home on Halverston Street. The children had been lucky. The staff had not been fast enough.

She moved to the third sigil. Her hand was shaking now, the tremor visible even in the dim light. She pressed it flat against the wall and felt the fire answer, but weaker this time, reluctant, like a horse that had been ridden too hard.

"Maren."

"Quiet."

The sigil mended. The pain in her hand climbed past her wrist and into her forearm, a bright, specific hurt that she could not ignore no matter how she tried. She pulled her hand away and held it against her chest. The skin across her knuckles was no longer flushed. It was white, the color of candle wax, and it felt like she had pressed it against a stove.

"Two more," she said.

"You're not going to make it through two more."

"I'm going to try."

She turned toward the fourth sigil, the one at the end of the corridor, and stopped.

The door at the corridor's end, the one that opened onto the fire escape, was open.

She was certain she had shut it. She had shut every door in the building as she came in. It was habit, and habit was what kept the cold out and the wards in. The door was open now, a hand's width at least, and through the gap she could see the fire escape, and beyond the fire escape the fog, and within the fog the suggestion of movement.

"Quill," she said.

He saw it. His hand went into his coat, and what came out was not a glowstone. It was a length of pipe, narrow and weighted, that he held low against his thigh.

"What did you leave on the fire escape?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"Then we have a problem."

The door swung wider.

The first Ash Hound came through it low and fast, a shape that seemed to pour rather than walk, its body pressed close to the floor as it cleared the threshold. It was larger than Maren had expected, the size of a young calf, but its proportions were wrong, the legs too long, the shoulders too high, the skull pushed forward into something that was no longer a muzzle but had not yet become a snout. Its eyes were the worst part. They were not the eyes of an animal. They were embers, two dull points of heat that watched her with an attention she recognized.

The second Hound followed the first. This one was smaller, nervous, its movements quick and jerky. It slipped in behind the larger one and hung back, watching.

"Magic," the first Hound said, and the word came out wrong, more of a vibration than a syllable, felt in the teeth more than heard. "Magic here. Fire-singer."

"Felt you from two streets away," the second one added, higher, faster, the words tumbling over each other. "The little one. The pale one. We came up to see."

Maren's hand was still pressed against her chest, the burned skin screaming under her fingers. She did not have time to warm it. She did not have time to do anything except calculate.

Two Hounds. One door. No fire in her hand and no time to call it.

"Quill," she said, "the window."

"The window is boarded."

"The board."

He understood. He moved to the window she had indicated, the one with the plywood over it, and slammed the pipe against the board. The wood held. He hit it again. The plywood splintered, and a second blow drove it out into the alley beyond. Cold air poured in, carrying the smell of the fog.

"Out," Maren said.

The larger Hound moved to block the window. It was not fast, but it did not need to be. It settled into the space between the sill and the floor with the patience of something that had all night.

"No," it said. "Stay. Sing for us."

"I don't sing for strangers."

"Not strangers. Know your scent. Ashcroft scent. Cinder-burnt. Fire in the blood." The Hound's ember eyes narrowed. "You killed our pack-brother on the Wharf. We remember."

"I don't remember a Wharf."

"You would. If you remembered." The Hound's skull tilted, the wrongness of its anatomy throwing its movement off in a way that made Maren's stomach turn. "The little pale one tastes like ash. We would like to taste the singer."

The smaller Hound yipped, an eager, high sound that bounced off the corridor walls. It was getting restless. Its claws clicked against the floorboards as it shifted its weight, and Maren could hear the nails catching in the grain of the wood.

She had to fight. She did not have a choice. If she ran, they would follow, and if they followed her into the street, she would lead them straight back to the ward workers at the Foundling Home. She could not do that. She would not do that.

She pulled her hand from her chest and reached, not for the fire this time, but for the heat that lived deeper, the banked thing that the Cinderfall had put into her bones. It came reluctantly, slower than it should have, and when it reached her hand it was not the clean, bright burn she had been using on the wards. It was darker. Thicker. It tasted of smoke.

She held it anyway.

"Quill," she said, "the small one is yours."

"Maren, your hand."

"Do it."

He moved. She did not see him go, but she heard the pipe connect, once, twice, a meaty sound that the small Hound answered with a yelp. She had her own problem.

The larger Hound lunged for her throat.

She threw herself sideways, her back hitting the corridor wall hard enough to drive the breath from her lungs. The Hound's jaws snapped shut on the air where her neck had been, and she felt the heat of its breath, sour and metallic, wash across her face. Its body slammed into the wall beside her, and the plaster cracked.

She struck.

Her hand, wrapped in fire that was darker than fire should be, met the Hound's shoulder. The impact ran up her arm and detonated in her elbow. The fire caught. The Hound screamed, the sound high and keening, nothing like its earlier speech, and it rolled away from her, its shoulder smoldering.

The heat in her hand did not recede. It bit deeper, and she realized, with a distant clarity, that she had not been using her own fire. She had been using the residual ember-magic of the walls, the leavings of a Cinderfall that had poisoned the city's bones, and it did not care whose hand it burned.

She gritted her teeth. The Hound was getting up. Its shoulder was ruined, the fur and flesh beneath it blackened, but it was getting up, and the embers in its eyes were brighter now, fed by the same magic that was feeding her.

"Singer," it snarled, and came for her again.

She met it.

Maren met it.

She did not think. Thinking was for before, for the street, for the planning that had brought her into this tomb. There was only the Hound, and the weight of the thing in her hand, and the sound of her own breath sawing through her teeth.

The Hound came low. Its ruined shoulder dragged, but the other bore the bulk of its charge, and its jaws gaped wide enough to take her arm to the bone. She stepped into the charge instead of away, pivoting on her heel, letting its momentum carry it past her. The teeth grazed her sleeve. She felt the heat of the Hound's throat against her forearm, the wet rasp of breath, and then she drove the ruined pipe into the soft place behind its jaw.

The pipe punched through. The Hound made a sound like a bellows collapsing. Its legs folded beneath it, and it went down hard, its body twitching once, twice, then still.

Maren stood over it, her chest heaving. The pipe dripped. Her hand burned, the ember-magic still curling beneath her skin, and she watched, with a queasy fascination, as the dark fire ate the blood from the metal and left it clean.

"Maren."

Quill's voice. She turned. He was standing over the smaller Hound, his boot on its neck. Its yellow eyes stared up at him, and its muzzle worked, but it did not rise.

"Alive," he said. "The little one is alive. I think it is going to stay that way."

She walked toward him. Her legs felt distant, like they belonged to someone else, but they carried her. The corridor swam, the plaster dust and the reek of Hound blood thick in the air, and she realized, with a small jolt, that she was going to be sick.

She swallowed it down. "The door."

"Yes." He did not move his boot. "Maren. The lock is a Cinder seal. The kind that needs ember to open. I do not know how to open it."

She looked at her hand. The fire was still there, faint and hungry, licking at the calluses on her palm. She held it up, and the dark flames guttered in the draft from the collapsed wall.

"Get back."

He moved his boot, and the small Hound scrabbled away, dragging its broken foreleg. It watched her from the end of the corridor, its eyes two coins of dull brass in the dust. Maren did not look at it. She looked at the door.

The seal was a disc of blackened metal set into the stone, no bigger than her spread hand. A sigil was etched into it, the lines fine as a spider's work, and at its center sat a smaller circle, empty. She put her palm against the circle.

The fire in her skin answered. It poured out of her, down her wrist, into the metal, and the sigil flared orange, then white. The heat climbed her arm. Her vision went white at the edges. Somewhere, distantly, the small Hound whimpered.

The lock gave way with a sound like a held breath finally released.

The door swung inward on silent hinges. Beyond it lay a room, and the room held light.

The light was green. Soft, sourceless, the green of deep water or rotting leaves, and it washed over the threshold and painted Maren's boots in a color she did not like. She stepped inside. Quill followed, and the small Hound, against every instinct she had left, crept in after them, dragging its broken leg behind.

The room was a vault. Stone shelves lined the walls, and the shelves held boxes, and the boxes held papers, and the papers held, in neat columns of faded ink, the ledgers of a city that had forgotten how to keep honest books.

Quill made a sound she had never heard from him before. It was not quite a laugh. It was the sound a man makes when he finds something he has been looking for since before he knew he was looking.

"Maren," he said. His voice had gone very quiet. "Maren, look at this."

He lifted a ledger from the nearest shelf and carried it to the green-lit table in the center of the room. The table was stone, scarred with the rings of a hundred cold cups, and he laid the book open on its surface.

She came to stand beside him. The pages were filled with names. Hundreds of names, written in the careful hand of some forgotten clerk, and beside each name, a figure. Dates. Amounts.

"Bribes," Quill said. "Every city official who took coin from the Cinder Court. Look at the dates, look at the amounts. This goes back twenty years, Maren. Twenty years of ledgers, and every one of them is a nail in someone's coffin."

She scanned the columns. Her own name was not there. She had never been important enough to buy, and that was a small, bitter comfort.

Then she saw a name she recognized.

High Overseer of the Mage Registry: Halden Vant.

The words sat on the page like a stone in a shoe. Halden Vant. Isola's father. The man who had signed the order that put Ember Halls to the torch. The man who had eaten dinner with Foreign Envoys while the smoke rose over the city.

"Hounds," Quill murmured. "He kept the books. The man who burned every Ember Hall in the lower wards kept the receipts, because he was on the take the whole time."

She stared at the name. The green light made her skin look like something pulled from a riverbed.

"We can use this," she said. Her voice came out flat. "We can take this to the Registry, to the envoys, to anyone who will listen. We can burn him with his own ledger."

Quill closed the book. His hand rested on its cover for a moment, and she saw, in the green light, that his fingers were trembling.

"We can," he said. "If we survive the night."

The small Hound, from the doorway, whined. They both turned. It was looking down the corridor, the way they had come, its ears flat, its broken leg tucked beneath it.

And from that direction, very faintly, Maren heard the sound she had been dreading since she first set foot in the undercity.

A howl. Long, rising, hungry.

Then another, answering it from a different throat, a different angle. Then a third.

The pack had found them.

"We need to move," she said.

"The vault goes deeper." Quill was already gathering the ledgers, shoving them into a satchel that hung from his belt. "There is another door, behind the far shelf. If the maps are right, it opens onto the old canal. The water will slow them."

She looked at the small Hound. It looked back at her. Its eyes were still that dull brass, and its shoulder was still ruined from her hand, but it had not fled. It had followed them into the vault, and now it sat in the doorway with its ears flat and its broken leg tucked, waiting to see what they would do.

"Can you walk?" she asked it.

It bared its teeth. Not in threat. In something closer to embarrassment.

"Come on, then," she said. "Stay behind us. Do not get in the way."

It rose. It limped after them.

Quill reached the far shelf and pulled it aside with a grunt of effort. Behind it, a second door, this one plain iron, no Cinder seal. He hauled it open, and the smell of the canal rushed in, wet stone and stagnant water and the iron tang of rust.

The howls were closer now. She could hear the click of claws on the corridor floor, the snuffling breath of a beast trying to pick up a scent.

"Go," she said.

Quill went. The small Hound followed, limping hard. Maren took one last look at the vault, the green light, the shelves still half-full of ledgers that would have to wait for another day, and then she followed.

The canal was a throat of black water, narrow and cold, the ceiling so low she had to duck. Quill had produced a small mage-light, no brighter than a firefly, and it bobbed in the air above his shoulder. The small Hound pressed close to her leg, its broken leg trailing in the water, and she let it.

They splashed through the dark. The howls faded behind them, confused by the stone, by the water, by the maze of old channels that the city had forgotten it owned. Maren did not let herself think about what waited at the other end. She thought about the ledger in Quill's satchel, about the name she had seen, about the kind of man who kept receipts for the ruin he had sold.

At the canal mouth, where the water met the river and the sky was beginning to lighten above the rooftops, they stopped. Quill killed the mage-light. The small Hound sat down in the shallows, exhausted, its tongue lolling.

"We have what we came for," Quill said. He did not sound triumphant. He sounded tired, and older than his years. "The rest is just the work."

She looked at him. The river wind stirred his coat, and she saw, for the first time, the lines around his eyes, the gray at his temples, the cost of all his charming surfaces.

"Yes," she said. "The rest is just the work."

The small Hound lifted its head. It looked at her, and she looked at it, and something passed between them that neither of them had words for.

Then it turned, and limped back into the dark.