Free Scar Night by Alan Campbell Page B

apparently spotted nothing of interest. “They don’t give you much, do they?”
    Rachel slipped a blowpipe into her belt, then hefted her crossbow from the dresser and began to oil the bowstring. “I have everything I need,” she said.
    “You any good with that thing?”
    “I’m still alive.”
    Mark sighed. He searched the room again, before his gaze returned to the crossbow in his sister’s lap. “I heard about the new soul-thief. The aeronauts are looking this way. Apparently most of the husks have been temple staff.”
    She ignored him.
    “Have
you
seen anything?”
    “Like what? Someone carrying a bloodless corpse?”
    Mark Hael was silent for a while, then said, “If you’re hiding something…”
    She snorted. “You know me better than that.”
    He threw up his hands. “No, Rachel, I don’t know you. I’ve hardly seen you in a dozen years. They’ve moved you from one backwater hole to the next. If you aren’t rotting down here in this monk-infested dungeon they like to call a school, then you’re traipsing through stinking, Heshette-fouled caves under some unholy mountain.” By now he’d found the wine on the dresser. She heard the stopper slide from the carafe, heard him sniff. “Low Coyle Valley,” he said. “Hardly worth the effort of pouring it.”
    “Then don’t.”
    Mark replaced the stopper. “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s been a difficult week for me.”
    Rachel’s teeth clenched. She set down her crossbow and went over to the window, her back to him. She leaned out and let the breeze caress her face. The foundation chains were silhouetted against the morning sky. She knew these chains well; they provided routes into every part of Deepgate—hidden routes. But she knew the city rooftops better. For four years now, she’d hunted them on Scar Night. Four years, totalling about fifty Scar Nights, and in that time she’d loosed nine bolts. The thing she hunted knew the rooftops better than anyone.
    A rook hopped across the ledge below, black as the iron around it. She watched it watching her. Was her quarry watching her too? Unlikely, she supposed, for Carnival shunned the daylight.
    Mark said, “Decent of Sypes to let Father go through. I don’t think there was a drop of blood left in him. Crumb saw the truth of that. Dry as leather, he said. Felt like slapping the fat little princess for talking about our father that way.”
    The benefits of being a Hael
. Mark’s rank in the aeronauts, her own acceptance for Spine testing, all won for them by the family name—a name dragged inch by inch from the League to Ivygarths by generations of iron smugglers, plantation slavers, and temple bootlickers.
    “You don’t even care,” Mark said. “After everything he’s done for you?”
    “Get out,” she snapped.
    “There was a time I would have slapped you for speaking to me like that.”
    Rachel remembered, but she didn’t turn round. Twelve years with the Spine was armour enough against Mark. It was armour enough against everyone. She sighed.
Almost
everyone.
    Mark’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I have the consent documents, the authorization for your tempering. The Spine masters are pressing me to sign.”
    Rachel stiffened.
    “I don’t know,” Mark said. “I’ve been thinking…Rachel, I don’t want you like them.”
    She closed her eyes.
    “They’re soulless.” He waited. “Nothing more than walking corpses. I can’t imagine you like that, my own sister. I don’t want to—”
    Rachel could no longer restrain herself. “You liar!” she cried, wheeling to face him. “You’re doing it to hurt me. You’re bitter because
you
failed their tests and I passed. You blame
me
for Father’s disappointment in you—”
    “You’re still an Adept.”
    “Do you know what I had to
do
to earn that rank? Do you know how hard it was?”
    Mark gave her a cold smile. “I heard about your little display.”
    “Display?”
She’d beaten every Adept, one after another, in