Page 1 of The Unweaver

Chapter 1. Death Trap

London. December 18, 1920.

Cora Walcott stared down at the remains of the Chronomancer’s head. A grisly trench of mutilated flesh where his face should have been stared back.

The faceless corpse sat in a chair, knocked flat on his back with knees still bent. Cora toed the limbs with her boot. Stiff with rigor mortis, but rot had not yet begun to bloom on the carnage. The moment a man became formerly sentient viscera had passed a couple hours ago. He’d laid in a pool of his own congealing innards since near midnight.

Amidst the gore glinted a gun. The bullet had ripped through soft pink consciousness and blasted it out of hard white bone, scraping away his face and spraying it across the tunnel walls.

Peering through the veil of time hadn’t spared the Chronomancer this fate. Someone had reduced the once fearsome time mage to meat.

“This is Moriarty, the Chronomancer?” Cora asked.

Behind her in the candlelit gloom, Teddy shifted. His eyes darted to the corners where darkness dwelled. Sweat trickled down his brow despite the underground chill. Her twin didn’twant to be in the tunnels under the Silvertown docks any more than she did.

The once thriving dockyard along the Thames was now an abandoned ruin, shell-shocked from the Great War. Unbeknownst to humans, the docks were also disputed territory between London’s rival gangs of mages, bound by the Covenant to secrecy and hiding their magical misdeeds in plain sight. The Realmwalker himself was vying for ownership.

“Do get on with the communing, Cora dear,” Teddy said into the eerie hush. “Ask the Chronomancer Mother’s questions and let’s get the bloody hell out of here.”

Teddy didn’t need his Animancy to sense that her truest desires were in full agreement. The Walcott twins’s spirits had been woven from the same thread. Animancy and Necromancy, life and death, harmonious in their symmetry.

“Do you have Mother’s interrogation questions?” Cora said.

Teddy handed her the note. Over the pink paper scented faintly of gingerbread their eyes met, and the unspoken truth passed between them. The Chronomancer’s death was the tipping point into another gang war.

The mage gangs battled constantly for dominance. Since autumn had faded to winter, the violence had only escalated. With the aftershocks of the last gang war still reverberating, one didn’t need a Sciomancer to divine the portents of more bloodshed on the horizon.

The prolonged tension that had passed as peace, balanced on the head of a pin, ended tonight.

Cora’s hands shook as she scanned Mother’s questions, gleaning what secrets the Chronomancer had been killed for.

Communing with a faceless corpse would prove challenging. But the price of not doing Mother’s bidding would be taken out in Cora’s flesh. She’d be lucky if a face was all she lost. She crumpled the note in her fist.

Another note. Another favor.

Mother’s note, summoning Cora to the docks, had arrived as they often did—at the worst time.

* * *

It had been near midnight and the jazz clubs were just getting started.

Cora had been halfway through her set playing piano at the Starlite Club, straining to follow the band’s lively tune over the drunken laughter. Payday at the factories meant a rowdier crowd. A feat in and of itself, given the typical patrons of what might generously be called a dive.

The sour tang of sweat and desperation was thick on the stale air. Men, grimy from soot and quiet misery, blew their wages on piss beer and coffin varnish. Flappers, covered in rogue and beads, preened for their groping affections. The band serenaded them all with almost decent jazz.

When the set finished to scattered applause, Cora felt the weight of Mother’s note in her pocket like a tug on a leash. Owens, an ornery crow and Mother’s intermediary, must have slipped the note to her unnoticed while she played. Scrawled in Mother’s spidery handwriting was an address that made her heart pound against her ribs.

The Silvertown docks. A death trap.

Cora wondered what corpse awaited her there and if she’d join them before morning dawned.

Simmering tensions between the Realmwalker and Verek’s gangs were reaching a boiling point, and now Mother was sending her secret Necromancer into the heart of disputed territory. Signing Cora’s death sentence with a flourish of her pen.

What was Cora being punished for? She hadn’t done anything. Lately. Inciting another gang war had certainly notbeen in her plans for the evening. She shoved the note back in her pocket. Another note. Another favor.

A favor that was not a favor, from a Mother who was not her mother.

The woman who insisted she call her Mother had taken Cora into her brood thirteen years ago. Mother brought orphaned mages with broken wings and spirits—like Cora, like Teddy—back into her nest and taught them an obedience she called love. Her pets, a menagerie of Bestiamancers, skulked through London and whispered tales of intrigue in her ear while she watched from her perch like the magpie she transformed into.

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