The rain in the lower quarters of the Veridian Spire did not descend in any clean or cheerful fashion, but rather gathered itself in the air and upon the stone, until the whole district seemed steeped in a clammy and ill-favored damp. It clung to the leaning walls, to the mouths of broken gargoyles, and to the black cobbles of the lanes, where old filth shone faintly in the gutter-water. It was not a kindly night, nor one in which sensible men went abroad without cause. For that reason it suited a hunt well.
Nearly a full year had passed since Seiyuu Walderose had been bloodied in the vaults beneath the Spire and taught, at cost, the folly of power spent for spectacle rather than purpose. Eleven months had followed, marked not by ease, but by the stern and unvarying discipline of Lirael. Her lessons had entered into his limbs and breath alike. He crouched now upon the slanted roof of a mean tenement in the lower district, his dark cloak soaked through and hanging heavy about him, yet he felt no discomfort in the rain beyond the fact of its presence. His Ashen Aura had been drawn so close to his flesh that it was no broader than a whisper. He bled no heat into the night. He cast no discernible pressure into the warding currents that crossed the streets below. He had become, by long practice, the sort of absence that men failed to notice until too late.
Waste nothing, Lirael had said to him so often that the words no longer sounded like memory, but like law. A hurried breath is a leak. A locked elbow is a broken seal. Power lost through carelessness is no different from coin scattered into a river.
Below him two figures moved through the glistening dark.
Seiyuu tracked them not by sight alone, for mist and failing lamplight made poor servants, but by the shape of their mana as it pressed upon the night. The first was easy to read. He strode with the swollen confidence of a man too long unchallenged in foul places, and the corruption in him was broad and clumsy, though potent. Dark heat rolled from him in thick and unhealthy tides, seeping into the puddles through which he passed. There was little discipline in it. It was the power of rot: forceful, decaying, and prodigal. A priest of the Ashen Dawn, Seiyuu judged, and not one of their highest order, but seasoned enough to be dangerous.
The second figure came behind him beneath a sodden cloak. His gait was less certain, and his mana, though suppressed, was of a different kind altogether. It was not wasteful, nor yet properly governed. Rather it had the look of something tightly wound out of fear, held in check by pressure rather than mastery. There was notable capacity there—raw and undeniable—but it had not been taught peace. It had been taught restraint as a starving dog is taught stillness.
Seiyuu dropped from the roof.
He landed lightly in the alley below, the force of the descent dispersed by a minute shift of frost-mana through his joints, no more than was needed and nothing wasted. His boots met the wet stone with scarcely a sound. Then he followed after them at a measured distance, neither hurrying nor falling behind, and the rain closed again over his passage as if no one had gone that way at all.
They moved deeper from the merchant lanes, where even at that hour some dim signs of life yet clung to the streets, and entered the quarter called the Sunken Ward. There the city gave up all pretense. The stones were broken or missing. The ground itself showed through in places, dark and cracked like old bone. Here and there the remains of foundries rose in blackened ribs against the night, and windows gaped open where no light had burned in years. The Spire above ruled all, but not all of what lay below it was equally cherished. There were districts in every great city that power abandoned when maintenance no longer justified cost. So it had been in Seiyuu's former life, and so it was here.
The two men came at length to a ruined cathedral whose upper works had half collapsed inward. Time and neglect had done their work upon it, though the bones of old dignity remained in the height of the arch and in the fragments of colored saints that still clung to the broken windows. The Rot-priest pushed aside a fallen iron grate and entered with his companion. Seiyuu did not follow by the same way. Instead he climbed the crumbling outer wall, set hand and foot with deliberate care, and slipped through a gap in a shattered pane high above the nave. There upon a narrow rafter he settled in silence, looking down into the dim interior.
A single witch-light hovered over the ruined altar, and by its sickly green cast the place appeared more grave than sanctuary. Broken pews lay in heaps. Water dripped through unseen cracks in the roof. Moss had crept between the old flagstones. It was the sort of place to which men brought secrets they did not mean to survive them.
The priest turned upon his companion with open contempt.
"You are too slow," he said, and his voice, though not loud, carried harshly beneath the broken vaulting. "You start at shadows. You listen too much to your own fear. The masters below have no use for a hand that trembles."
"I am not trembling," said the younger man, and at the sound of that voice Seiyuu's stillness faltered for the briefest instant.
The answer had pride in it, and education, and beneath both a strain he knew well enough.
The cloaked figure cast back his hood. The witch-light fell across a face Seiyuu had not expected to see again in such a place. Fair hair, once carefully kept, now hung in disordered locks darkened by rain. The features were the same, but sharpened by privation and by some inward grinding pressure that had worn away whatever idle arrogance had once adorned them. The old ease was gone. In its place remained only the hard and hungry watchfulness of a creature too often cornered.
It was Silas Blackwood.