The bell in the south tower rang the wrong way. Not the long bronze peal that stitched the morning together for the close, but a stuttering clamor as if a hand had slipped, as if a prayer had tripped on the way up.
In the St. Alcuin's nursery, one of the smaller houses tucked inside Salisbury Close, its windows bright with paper suns and chalk sigils. Twelve children stopped their recitation. Chalk hovered uncertainly over slates. The little brass ward set in the lintel hummed and went flat, like a string cut at the bridge.
"Miss?" Jane asked. She was five and very serious about being five. Her hair was braided to regulation and her slate was neat, letters sharp like teeth. "Miss Kersey, why's the ward…"
The leaded glass shattered inward before Miss Kersey could answer. A shape hit the floorboards with a wet thud—Benedict, the beadles' runner—his throat red and open. Behind him came men in soot-grey, masks tight to their faces and lenses dark as wet slate. They wore no insignia. Their boots didn't squeak, even on spilled blood.
"Down," Miss Kersey hissed. She drew a line in the air and the chalk flared white, a little wall of faith the size of a prayer book.
The first man raised a pistol with a barrel like a church key. The report shook dust from rafters. The little white wall cracked, and Miss Kersey folded as if curtsying to the floor.
Someone screamed. Jane didn't. She had the peculiar stillness some children have when a thing is too large to fit in the mind. She remembered instead the lesson about doors and distances: a cathedral is a citadel first, a school second, a gate always. Evil doesn't knock; it knows the latch.
The soot men fanned out. Two went for the teachers' table. One stepped over Benedict without looking and came for the children, voice oddly calm through cloth. "Hands on heads. Eyes down. If you run, we shoot the child next to you. If you pray, we cut out your tongue."
He sounded like a man who had practiced not sounding like a man.
Jane did what she was told. Her fingers shook against her scalp. Nathaniel, who sat beside her, blushed red to his ears and pressed his lips tight as a knot. He was a lanky boy who always ran too fast during yard drills and scrambled words when he read aloud. He had once tried to shape a light to find a dropped marble and instead set his own cuff smoldering. He had laughed about it later, after the sisters scolded and stamped out the embers. He was laughing now, very small and fierce, like someone trying to scare the dark.
A second bell started up, far north in the Close. A third. The Close was waking: shutters thrown, boots, shouts.
"Fast," said the soot leader. He gestured, and two of his men hauled children to their feet by the elbows. "Bags."
Canvas sacks came out of nowhere. The men moved like a drill, practiced, clean. Little wrists were bound in twine. Jane clenched her fingers twice the way her father had taught, check the knot's lie, check your breath, count your heart.
From the building next door, the painters' guild rooms, which also held the small studio where David Charles Read and his wife Charlotte shaped pigments into saints and banners and small cheaply beautiful miracles came the crash of a bench turned over.
Charlotte saw it first from the tall north window: soot men moving the children like parcels. She tasted iron, and the old part of the mind, the soldier part buried under years of market days and quiet work, clicked into the world. She grabbed David's sleeve. "Read."
He didn't ask anything. He had a brush in his hand and put it down as if he were only stepping out to buy bread. He took up the old satchel from the back of the cupboard, the one with tool pockets that hid steel among bristles, and the two of them ran.
They were mild shapers, mannerly conjurers in the cathedral way: a light for a dark stair, a ward for a child's bed against night terrors, a draft of strength for an old man's knees on market day. War had taught them edgework they never spoke of, the thin place between a blessing and a weapon. You could bend a line without breaking it if your hands were steady and your faith clean.
They didn't bother with the stairs. Charlotte touched the iron of the casement and said six words her old sergeant would have flayed her for remembering, and the sash gave way as if to a friend, gently, elegantly, glass setting itself aside. They went out into the air, David lowering her by the hands, Charlotte taking his weight on the down stroke with a grunt. He winced and grinned and kissed her once, quick as a spark, because the world could end while you were arguing about who should go first.
They hit the cobbles in a roll that scattered white chalk dust from her pockets. David came up with a knife tucked alongside a brush, and Charlotte with one palm hot, the other already drawing sigils on the wind.
"Inside?" he asked.
"Inside," she said, and kicked the door.
The ward on St. Alcuin's had been tuned for nightmares, not men. It bent to Charlotte's hand like a reed and sprang back, humming madly to find its shape again. David went in low. The first soot man he met saw only the painter's apron; he didn't see the angle of the shoulders or the way the hand turned the knife like the hilt was a brush. The knife went in below the ribs. David caught the man as he folded, set him down as gently as he could, and was already turning to the next.
"Get the little ones," Charlotte said. She had both hands out now, fingers writing lines into the air. Light answered. Not bright, she hadn't that kind of gift, but sharp. Small hooks of radiance snagged at the eyes behind those dark lenses.
It wasn't enough. It was never enough. The soot men had brought other gifts. One of them raised a little fluted tin and blew, and the light hooks went greasy and ran down the walls like oil.
"Damn them," Charlotte said, which was both curse and prayer.
David was with the children, cutting twine, whispering, "Hands here. Quiet now, like mice." A girl with braids nodded, eyes wide. He pressed a brush into her palm, silly reflex, yet it steadied her. "You're very brave, Jane," he said, not knowing her name but saying it like a blessing. He had a gift for that: saying the right names.
"Read!" Charlotte's voice, sharp. He turned in time to see the soot leader level the church-key pistol at Charlotte's chest. David moved without thinking, a shoulder-forward bull rush that would have gotten him killed ten years ago. The leader fired. The sound was a flat slap. David felt the air go hard. He took the shot at an angle, and the round bit through meat, tore, spun away, howling like something with teeth. He hit the leader like a door hitting a man. They went down together.
Charlotte screamed his name and put a word into the scream that should not live in a schoolroom. The room shuddered. The window lead groaned. The fluted tin on the floor rang and split. For a half-breath, her light came back in chips, bright enough to cut.
Another man, there were too many, brought the butt of his gun down on the back of Charlotte's head. She dropped to a knee and kept the light alive because she was stubborn and small and in love, and because the children were watching.
The north door blew open. A man limped in, cloak thrown back, badge of the Cathedral's Esq Corps dark with rain. He had a father's haste and a policeman's eyes, which is to say cruel to himself, soft to a child. He saw Jane at once, of course he did, and in the same glance counted the living and the dead, the angles that mattered, the two guys on the left with their weight wrong, the fluted tin in fragments, the woman on her knees, and David with that look men wear when they're holding a hole closed with their hands and pretending it's fine.
"Jane," he said, as if they were at home and late for tea. "Down. Now."
"Papa," she said, and obeyed.
He raised his sidearm. It was an ugly thing, old and well-kept. He put a round through the eye lens of the nearest soot man and turned on his bad leg to carve another shot into the second's throat. He moved like a man who had been taught to move even when his body said no. A third man rushed him, and he caught the blow on his forearm, bones crunching like ice in a spring flood. He didn't cry out. He jammed the pistol into the man's chest and fired until the gun was only a click.
"Esq," one of the soot men spat, and said a word back that made the floor pitch. The father skidded, hit a desk, and went down on the leg that had never healed properly from a cavalry tumble fifteen years ago. He knew from the crisp bright salt taste in his mouth that it was broken again. He looked for Jane. She was where he had told her to be. Good girl.
"Out," the leader croaked from the floor, blood in his teeth. "Take three. Burn the rest if you must."
"Don't you dare," Charlotte whispered, and made the light into a blade you could almost see.
David pushed up on his good hand. "No," he said, conversational and breathless and very tired. He put his body between the nearest soot man and a small boy with ears too big for his head. The man's knife kissed David's side, and David gave him his throat in exchange for the time it takes to move a child. He lifted the boy up and away. The boy's name was not his to have; it felt like Nathaniel when he said it in his head.
The knife came back again, fast under the rib this time. It found something important. David didn't drop the boy. He took an uncertain step, then another. He made a small amused sound, as if apologizing for bumping someone on the street, and went down with the child cushioned to his chest.
The soot men were moving, four of them dragging three children, canvas sacks yawning. Charlotte crawled, left hand pressed to her temple, right hand trying to write a word on blood-slick floorboards. It smeared. The leader laughed without humor. He limped toward the door, one eye ruined, the other bright with purpose.
The father, the Esq, got his knee under him. He put the ruined pistol down because there were only so many miracles per day. He found a knife in his boot and threw it. It was a good throw. The knife took one man in the kidney. The man made an O with his mouth and let go of the little girl he'd been dragging. Jane scrambled and caught the girl's wrist and pulled, teeth bared.
Another soot man swung his weapon like a club and hit the Esq's left arm. Bone flowered white through skin. The arm went numb. The world narrowed. The father saw his daughter's braid, the careful morning neatness of it, and smiled through his teeth because the hurt needed a place to go that wasn't a scream.
"Run, little one," he said, and meant all of them.
They did run, some, toward the stair, toward the neighbors piling in as the Close woke for war. But the soot men weren't guessing. They were trained. They left two bodies and took two children still, the bags tight around thin shoulders. One bag thrashed with Nathaniel's stubborn, terrified strength; the other was very quiet.
The leader paused in the doorway. He looked back at Charlotte and at the father with one eye. "Doors open soon," he said conversationally, like a man commenting on weather. "The devils will take their tithe."
The father spat blood. "Not today."
"Today," the man said. And they were gone, quick and frank as wolves.
For a moment there was only the bell again, honest and loud, and Charlotte's small animal breath, and the wet effortful sound a man makes when he's dying but not ready for it.
David's hands were open. The boy Nathaniel wasn't in them anymore. David blinked up at the difficult ceiling beams and then at Charlotte. "Love," he said, as tender and surprised as the first time. "I kept one…"
"You kept all that mattered," Charlotte said, which was a lie told for both their sakes. She put her hand on his cheek, hot and then cooling, and leaned her forehead to his, and let the light go where it wanted.
The father crawled to Jane. He took her by the shoulders and checked her for holes as if she were a piece of equipment after drill. She was whole. He wasn't, but he was a man who didn't add up that kind of math until later.
"Papa," Jane said, very small, because bravery is a coin and she had spent most of hers.
"Yes," he said. "I know." He looked at his arm, at the leg lying wrong. He looked across at Charlotte and at David, whose chest did not rise. He looked at the door where the soot men had gone and at the little smear of blood at the jamb. He put a name to that blood with a kind of savage carefulness: debt.
"Listen," he said to Jane, because he had to put something in her hands besides fear. "You see the line of the stone there? The way it breaks to the south? Remember that. You will need it." He said it the way he had once told recruits where the sluices were, or how to tell a good horse from a loathsome one. He didn't know how to teach her to be without him. He could at least give her a corner of the map.
Outside, boots hammered. Bells shouted. The Cathedral breathed in.
Inside, Charlotte closed David's eyes.
And somewhere beyond the Close walls, two men in soot-grey carried a boy named Nathaniel toward a door that should not open for another twenty years, and planned to open it anyway.