Free Scar Night by Alan Campbell Page A

we’ll never see him again.”
    “Scrubbing vats?” Fogwill couldn’t hide the scorn in his voice. He had his own ideas about what happened to the temple staff who ended up in Deepgate’s Department of Military Science.
    Sypes’s tufted eyebrows lowered till his eyes all but disappeared in the crenellations of his face. “Will you go find Devon?”
    “I won’t have time to get out there. The ceremony…”
    “Then I suggest you try the kitchen.”
    “The kitchen?” The Adjunct’s eyes narrowed. “
Our
kitchen? The temple kitchen?”
    “I understand he’s up to his old tricks again.”
    Fogwill’s gaze dropped past his freshly laundered robe to his favourite blue plush slippers—a gift from Mother, each silver stitch lovingly wrestled by the old dear herself into vaguely floral splats. His powdered face sagged. “The kitchen,” he said, “of course. Where else would the Poisoner be today?”
             
    R achel Hael was hanging upside down in darkness. She concentrated on her breathing, her muscles, her heartbeat, constructing states of mind to control blood flow and respiration. She envisioned a bitter coldness to draw blood away from her skin, a threat to quicken her heart and brace her weary muscles.
    Spine called this process
focusing
. Fatigue, hunger, even thirst could be controlled for a time by any skilled Adept. She ought to be able to hang by her feet on this rope for hours, perhaps even days, without ill effects. But she’d been here for ten minutes and already had a blinding headache. Her Spine master, a thin man whose name she did not know, would have been scornful of her inability to focus, had he been capable of scorn.
    Of all the Spine Adepts, only Rachel herself was able to feel scorn, or resentment, or anger, or happiness. All of them weaknesses in an assassin, for emotion was anathema to the Spine. It marred purity of thought and purpose, precluded focusing, and hindered Adepts in the field. Emotion was not tolerated for long. In the Church’s eyes she was the weakest Adept of them all. She’d already proved that to them more than once.
    Someone tugged on the rope.
    She twisted herself up, slipped her ankles out of the cuffs, and climbed back towards her room.
    Her brother stood by the hatch in the floor. “Getting closer to god?” he asked.
    Rachel sat on the edge of the hatchway and pulled up the rope, winding it into coils around her elbow. “Helps me relax,” she said.
    He gave her a blank look.
    “The silence,” she said. There was a sea of silence down there in the abyss, miles of it all around, and for untold miles below her, but it didn’t calm her as much as it once had. These days it just took the edge off.
    “What if the rope snaps?” Mark asked.
    She shrugged.
    “Or someone cuts it?”
    She shrugged.
    “Gods below!” Mark cried. “The monks told me you’d be down there, but I didn’t believe them. Thought it had to be some kind of Spine joke—before I remembered the Spine don’t have a sense of humour.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Nice to see you too.”
    Rachel picked up her sword from the weapon rack and slid it into the scabbard on her back. She tied the poison pouches to her belt, plugged three short bamboo tubes into the harnesses beside them, and then sat down on the bed, feeding knives and needles into the appropriate slots in her leather armour.
    “We found him,” Mark said.
    She paused for a moment, then continued loading her armour.
    “Sypes expects us both present at the Sending.”
    “I’ve stuff to do.”
    “You don’t have a choice.”
    A bitter smile stretched her lips.
    Mark opened the window and leaned out, peering up at the foundation chains and the underbelly of the Gatebridge. “This has to be the lowest room in the temple. Is that some kind of symbolic statement? Keeping you lot down here in the foundations like this, in the darkness?”
    “Access.”
    “What?”
    “Never mind.”
    Mark looked round her room, but