She was crouched in a shadow at the edge of the flat roof, listening for bells or raised voices. There were only the sounds of the Docklands at night: the Thames sloshing gently against pilings, the groans of old structures settling into new positions as the wood found a more comfortable resting place, the faint skittering of rats. The occasional snatch of faraway conversations caught on a breeze added to the tumult, too mixed in with the rest for her to discern meaning. It was nothing to concern her.
Her tentacle hauled the unconscious guard up to her level, and he swayed before her as she considered him. She still had the anaesthetic-soaked tentacle around his face, its sweet but cloying scent dimmed by distance yet detectable on the breeze, and she pulled it away before it cut off his breathing. She wanted him unconscious, not dead. Her third tentacle set his knife soundlessly on the roof as the first one laid him down gently beside her.
She rolled him onto his side so he wouldn’t choke and checked his airways. The risk of him choking on his own tongue was low, but not zero, and she didn’t want anyone dying tonight. Satisfied he’d live, she looked him over, searching for identifying marks. He was around 5 ft 6 and weighed maybe 11 stone. That was an observation of his height and build, though. She couldn’t easily guess weights any more, but she could lift five or six men his size with her arms, and maybe double that with her tentacles.
She huffed slightly as she realised she was getting distracted again, and turned her attention back to the thin, wiry man. He had a rat-like look to his face, and a heavy jacket that made him appear bulkier. An old pink scar twisted one cheek. She couldn’t see any tattoos without stripping him, and she wasn’t doing that for someone who hadn’t treated her to supper.
He was missing two fingers on his left hand, the pinky and the one beside it.
One of her tentacles settled lifelessly on the roof as a small piece of silk sliced an end away from her sleeve. The finger-length tentacle started tapping at a small lever on a metal base that was strapped to her wrist. The base was an aetheric bronze alloy painted a matte black and covered by her sleeve, etched with shallow micro-runes she couldn’t even see. Her bibi-daj had drawn them out on paper, but they were just spirals, rings, and offset-loops to her. The end closest to her elbow had a slide-out section that held the aetherium pellet that powered the entire thing. The rig sent out a pulse of one of the natural energies in a twenty feet aetheric current, that could be received up to a distance of almost a thousand feet away.
She didn’t really understand the theory. It was difficult for one of the experi, non-sorcerers, to understand it when they struggled to even see the runes, which was why rune-smiths were almost always praediti, gifted, those who could see and hear and manipulate the natural energies.
She didn’t need to understand its construction to use it, and her silk quickly tapped out the description of the man before her. The reply came a few seconds later, the quartz bracelet on her other wrist vibrating with each pulse. Dot dash. Dash dot. Dash. Dash dash dash. It went on and on, until she knew the man before her was Antonio Freni, and other important details about him.
“Now then, Antonio. Shall we become better acquainted?” she asked, then searched his pockets without waiting for an answer. The first thing she found was a packet of Woodbines. She crushed them, making sure every single one was broken as the sharp, acrid scent of tobacco burst across her fingerless silk gloves, then slid them back into his pocket. Smoking was a sign of weak character, and utterly vulgar, so in her mind that was as helpful to him as putting him on his side had been.
His other pocket yielded a wallet. It was dark leather, folded in half, and when she opened it a betting slip fell out. She tucked it back inside. There was a photo of what was probably his mother, and a pawn ticket for an engagement ring. According to the note, it would cost £3 to get back.
She considered it for a moment. “I do hope you didn’t steal that ring, but you have no warrants out on you currently. Mayhap this will encourage you to stay right-sided.” She slid three one-pound notes into his wallet and put it back in his pocket.
Then she stole his trench lighter.
Her mother wouldn’t let her buy one, because lighters encouraged laziness. Besides, she reasoned, it wasn’t like he needed it, with all his cigarettes broken. This might even encourage him to quit. Taking his lighter was practically heroic, and with the money she’d given him, it wasn’t even theft.
She’d bought it.
Her mother was not going to accept that excuse. “Sek,” she swore, as she rose to her full height. She took a deep breath, then walked to the edge of the building and stepped off.
Her tentacles whipped around her, finding the purchases they needed, and she swung gently down to the ground, then brought them in close to her back, where they sat like a rucksack. Her knee-length jacket flared open from the waist down as she walked, and her silk-lined boots were soundless on the stone.
She reached the edge of the building and paused. From the rooftop she’d observed the two guards around the corner. She could have dropped on them from above, but that wasn’t in the spirit of tonight’s test.
She’d memorised the blueprints, and they should be in front of the main door. One of them had a Lewis gun in his hands, and the other had a Webley revolver holstered at his waist.
She smiled beneath the plain white volto that covered her face. She’d been in the shadows too long; it was time to let them fear her. No one ever won a war by hiding, except maybe Zenith. She stepped around the corner, her eight tentacles exploding almost-soundlessly forward. There was a faint whisper of noise from them as they rubbed against each other. Two seised the first guard by his Lewis gun, a third grabbed the second guard around the torso, pinning his arms against him and coiling tight. A fourth took the first guard by the ankles. The fifth and sixth went for faces, silencing screams. The seventh grabbed the lamp post near them and pulled her forward, into the fray, and the eighth pulled the second guard’s handgun from its holster and tossed it onto the roof.
She hadn’t accounted for the first guard’s sloppy trigger discipline, and he let off a burst of bullets before the anaesthetic-soaked tentacle around his face dropped him. The bullets harmlessly hit the ground a few feet away, kicking up a spray of concrete flakes. The second guard stared at her, wide-eyed in terror, as she landed lightly before them just as the gunfire died away.
She dropped the first guard as she tossed the second one through the doors and deposited the Lewis gun on the roof beside the handgun. With a second glance, she saw the thrown guard slumped in front of the closed doors, groaning, his legs bent at unnatural angles. She’d expected the doors to shatter in a shower of wood splinters, but they were solid metal and stayed resolutely closed. That had been an oversight, but oversights were learning opportunities.
“Very well. The second method of entry it is, then.”
She quickly sent a pulse of Morse code from her aether-brace, and thirty seconds later, the building plunged into darkness as the electricity was cut. Her tentacles grabbed surfaces around her and slingshotted her into a high window as she pulled herself into a ball. Her hood sank over her face, attaching itself to her chest and covering her head completely. Splinters of glass harmlessly struck her and fell aside, and a moment later she was in the warehouse, rolling across the floor.
There was yelling around her, from different sources and distances. Yelling. The tinkling of falling glass raining on hard concrete flooring. An overpowering stink of faeces and filth. She uncoiled and shot upright, four tentacles steadying her. Two grabbed the ceiling and two more the floor, as her clothing shifted through different shades of black and grey to camouflage her and add to the confusion. Even if the criminals could see in the dark, the shifting colours and styles and sizes she wore would give them no details about her: it would be impossible to even tell height, weight, or gender from the few sights she’d let them already have.
Gunfire rang out, but the bullets were below her. The roof of the warehouse was high enough that, suspended between it, she was eight feet in the air, and no one seemed to know where she had gone.
It took her a moment to steady herself. The scents truly were overpowering, the noise was a tumultuous din, and it was hard to focus through so much else, to understand what was going on. Sense and sound were overwhelmed, sight was cut off, and she wasn’t going to lick the warehouse, so she closed her eyes and focused hard on her sense of touch.
If her skin had been exposed, she would have been able to feel the movement of wind against it and determine position from air displacement, but it wasn’t, so she focused instead on sensing heat. It was nebulous at best, vague sensations of hotter patches in the cool room, but the barrels of the guns were infernos to her.
After a moment, as the gunfire stilled, she dropped to the ground and landed in a crouch as those same tentacles grabbed the three closest men and pulled them into the air.
Someone was screaming. Someone was yelling, asking what was going on, but with a lot more swearing in the questions. From the stink, someone had maybe pissed themselves, though it was hard to tell as the entire warehouse stank. It smelled like uncleaned animal pens, the disgusting scent of old and new faeces, urine, rotting food, unwashed flesh. Someone was shouting that they needed the lights back on. Another burst of gunfire died quickly away, leaving behind the metallic scent of hot metal, and someone asked where she was. One of the men she was holding aloft was crying and repeating the words of a prayer, over and over, as if God could protect him from her. Her hood had pulled back from her face, though it was still too dark to see.
That could prove troublesome.
She’d found the first three by heat alone, but that might not work for everyone. She slammed two of the men she was holding together and dropped them, rammed the third into the ceiling and dropped him too, and walked forward. To her left, one of them saw something and lifted his gun, silently taking aim. He spat out a hail of bullets in the completely wrong direction, but the yellow-white muzzle flash was enough for her. A tentacle flicked out to disarm him, and he screamed as his fingers broke when she took away his gun. The same tentacle pistol-whipped him, and he fell soundlessly as she dropped the gun with a clatter.
Another man came running towards her, a knife held out in front of him as if he knew how to use it. He was close enough to see her. The pistol-whipped gangster she’d dropped flew through the air, slamming into the knife-wielder’s side and knocking them both several yards away. She pulled the tentacle that had tossed him back closer to her as her sleeve tapped the Morse code “lights,” and the lights came back on as the electricity returned.
Previous Chapter: Prologue
Next Chapter: Chapter Two
Author’s Note
The goblinpunk queerguide has a craft focused chat on ring construction and bracketing in fiction. Yes, the very first chapter has a chat about construction as a whole and endings matching beginnings.
I probably know what I’m doing. You can check for yourself here.
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