At the moment Greenwise was working with two fiefs. The Whoresellers fleshed out their pimping with fencing and protection rackets, and the Bitter Men were strong-armers and housebreakers daring or lunatic enough to try and crack a target this big. Greenwise Artector, erstwhile big man about town, was hurrying through the narrow covered streets of Helleron’s poorer quarters in company with a pack of Fly and Beetle thieves, a lean and loping Scorpion who was second in command of the Bitters and a halfbreed locksmith and appraiser that the Whoresellers had hired. He himself was along with them because he had kept one of Scordrey’s men on his payroll for years, knew three quiet ways into the man’s house and had a very good idea of where the strongroom was and how to get into it.
Helleron was a cramped city, and a cunning man who knew the right paths and shortcuts could make the transition from the gutter to the mansions of the rich in surprisingly few steps. So it was that Greenwise and his crew were passing through the slums along the back of a row of refineries, but ahead of them rose the roads where the houses grew larger and the streets were better lit.
There were watchmen, of course, the city’s militia, but the Whoresellers had greased a fair number of palms these last few nights, and if any watchman turned out to be incorruptible enough to get in the way, then Greenwise reckoned it would be a poor night for that man. The same would apply if they ran into a Wasp patrol, especially as the Imperial hand lay light on the richer parts of the city – only two or three soldiers at a time.
The ground shook, just a little, but at first Greenwise assumed that some machinery in the refineries was responsible. Nobody else raised the issue, so they were soon on their way.
‘This alley takes us to Shoffery Row,’ he murmured. ‘From there to Servil Street, where there’s a tunnel that can take us to Brackish Lots, practically behind Scordrey’s house.’
‘Handy,’ the Scorpion grunted.
‘It is indeed. It’s how his staff receive deliveries without the great man’s view being cheapened,’ Greenwise explained, thinking for a moment about the recent times when he himself had lived with such considerations.
One of the thieves twitched. ‘Curse me, what was that?’
‘What?’
‘Anyone feel that, the ground . . .’
‘Just some engine . . .’ Another, dismissively.
‘No, wait,’ the halfbreed locksmith broke in. ‘That was . . . That was no machine, that was . . . an earthquake?’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ someone said derisively, and the slowest-witted of the thieves wanted to know what an earthquake was. But by then Greenwise was feeling decidedly uncomfortable; something was communicating itself to him via the soles of his feet.
Then the entire city of Helleron seemed to lurch and slump fluidly beneath them, spilling them all off their feet as, behind them, several hundred yards of low-rent workshops and refineries – and at least a hundred homes – just fell into the earth.
Greenwise cried out, but his voice was lost in the colossal scraping and rumbling of stone, the shrieking of metal, wooden beams snapping and cracking like munitions. And the voices: hundreds of voices in a moment’s hideous realization, shocked from sleep, caught while at work, ripped from their dreams in the night’s quiet.
He went running back towards the broken edge of the city, aware that half of his confederates had already made themselves scarce. Given the shadow life he led now, he should have done the same, but the night was wild with the screams of the injured, the cries of children. He was not the man to turn his back on all that.
And besides . . . he needed to see. Because this was impossible, what had just happened. He needed to bring his eyes closer, so that they could take in and comprehend the ruin of so much in such a fractured moment.
The street was already slipping and canting even as he ran, the earth still about its vengeful night’s work, but he scrabbled to that broken edge, intending to find a way down, to help the trapped, the hurt. He could still hear yells and wailing and sounds of horror, but he put it down to the simple mechanical damage. He had not thought to see his city under attack.
The earth was boiling with them. His eyes would not take it in. From the cracks between the shattered buildings they came seething out, a riot of armoured forms like no kinden he had ever known, and moving like nothing human, as though he was watching some spreading, foaming plague – a contagion in human form. They were swarming over everyone down there, and he saw blades glitter and flash, bright silver on the descent, but red as they were lifted once again. They were butchering everyone trapped down there – literally, hacking them limb from limb without the mercy of killing first, then just carrying off the severed pieces.
No, they were not killing them all. He saw struggling, living forms carried away on that churning tide, being hauled back within the earth as they wept and kicked and screeched. The children! They were taking the children.
He staggered back from the brink. Going down to help was no longer an option. Those below were beyond any help a mere human could give.
The street tilted further, and he felt the ground beneath him shift and shudder as though it was being eaten away from below, hollowed out to an eggshell thinness, like ice about to crack.
He ran. He ran towards those grand houses that he had planned to prey on that night. The quiet streets were beginning to fill now: with watchmen, Wasp soldiers, servants, the great and the good tottering from their doors, half asleep, to demand what was going on. He was Greenwise Artector, most wanted man in Helleron, but right then nobody cared.
Ahead of him, suddenly looming from the night, was the townhouse of Corda Halewright, a fellow magnate back when the world hadn’t fallen completely sideways and gone mad. Greenwise had the crazed idea of banging on her door and begging for sanctuary, because even familiar enemies were to be preferred to what he had just seen. He shouldered past a couple of militiamen who were just staring back towards the devastation, and he staggered on towards that remembered building, feeling the earth jump and shudder beneath him. And slide.
He actually saw it slide. Before him, three of the grandest houses in Helleron were suddenly on a slant, tilting and tilting further as the ground beneath them cracked and decayed, falling away to reveal impossible depth, rifts reaching into the earth’s innards, and from those rifts a swift-surging swarm of something that was not humanity but wore its shape.
Greenwise cried out, backing away, even then feeling the flags beneath his feet peel away into the abyss, one after another, until suddenly there was nothing beneath him and he was teetering on the very brink.
A hand took his shoulder, hauling him away from that hungry profundity, landing him on his back, and he saw – his world skewed further with it – three Wasp soldiers step past him, hands out to sting, the gold fire flashing and flashing as they struck downwards at that advancing host. One of them turned, dragged the former magnate to his feet with a grunt of effort and gave him a shove.
‘Get out of here!’ the soldier snapped, and Greenwise stumbled away, but where could he go? All around him he could see the facades of buildings running with fractures as their foundations were tested and found false. His ears were ringing with the groans of broken stone, with the appalling composite wail of hundreds of people in pain and fear, with the shrilling of children.
Then they were before him, the enemy. Their faces, their movements, everything about them spoke of an abdication from the human race.
He took up his crossbow and a bolt, but that was all he did. Some vital connection between the objects he held was missing in his mind. The principles, the learned motions, all of it was gone from him in that moment, and the weapon fell from his numb fingers.