Page 2 of The Unweaver

Mother had been the first to tell Cora the story of magic and mages. It had sounded like a fairytale to her then. But now, smoothing the wrinkles from Mother’s note, she knew it was a nightmare she couldn’t wake from.

Mother’s favors didn’t end inplease, butor else. She’d built an espionage empire on such one-sided favors. Cora no longer entertained fantasies of saying no to Mother. Theor elseimplicit to every one of Mother’s favors had burrowed under her skin and taken root.

I have only to makeonecall, my pet.

Cora was acutely aware how the life she’d invented for herself could be dismantled with a single call.

Money had been tucked inside her pocket along with the note. Twenty pounds. Her throat tightened. Enough to keep the wolves from the door and buy Teddy a Christmas gift.

She eyed the money warily. Mother’s favors were seldom paid, and never such a sum for Cora’s monstrous talents. Not even when she’d made Cora reanimate an exhumed banker for questioning. The corpse had not been fresh. Rancid flesh melted off its bones. Maggots wriggled from its rotting mouth and eye sockets as she tried to extract more than monosyllables from its slack jaws.

For twenty pounds, the Silvertown docks were sure to be a nasty favor. One that would haunt her. One she wouldn’t be able to clean from her hands no matter how hard she scrubbed, unable to meet her own eyes in the mirror.

But the deal was half now, half later. By the end of this wretched night, Cora could be forty pounds richer. An unimaginable sum.

She slipped the money into the pocket hidden near her heart. She’d sold her spirit before for less. Even if she loathed herself for it.

Pulling on the ermine coat she’d purloined from a matron too drunk on cordial to notice, Cora climbed out of the Starlite Club and onto the bustling street. Winter howled at her face. Clouds hung low in the dark sky, promising snow. She turned her collar against the biting chill and set off through sooty slush.

Bars belched their inebriated patrons out into the night. Passing around flasks of hooch, they stumbled back to their miserable lives or the next den of ill repute. This East End neighborhood catered to every kind of debauchery. Jazz clubs, opium dens, and brothels for myriad vices.

Ignoring drunken catcalls, she ducked behind a building and scanned the darkness. Sensing no one, she tapped the brick wall, and a hidden compartment swung open. She’d learned the hard way never to keep things where they were expected. Her supplies were cached around the city rather than the flat she shared with several other working girls.

From the brick wall Cora pulled out her most valuable possession. The cloak had cost several months’ pay and been worth every penny. Enchanted by a memory-siphoning Memnomancer, anyone who saw Cora wearing the cloak would forget what she looked like. They often mistook her tall, slender frame for a grim reaper, coming in the night to pluck from death’s spoils.

Tucking the cloak under her arm, she hailed a cab. “Where to?” the cabby asked as she slid inside.

“The Silvertown docks.”

He met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You sure, lady?”

“Just drive.”

He pulled away from the curb, his nose wrinkling. “Blimey, what’s that smell?”

Concealing the cloak’s odor was another matter. Permeated with sewer slop, compounded over years of slinking around for Mother’s favors, the cloak was of surpassing filthiness. What some described as the foul breath of death was actually the stench of their own shit tickling their nostrils. She cracked a window.

In silence they passed rows of ramshackle houses and boarded-up factories where the Great War’s boom had busted. The headlights scarcely pierced the thick fog swirling over empty streets.

A premonition of death, resonating like the pluck of a sour note, crept from the corners of her mind to the forefront as they neared the Thames. Was it the cabby’s death? Or her own death, at last?

A familiar helplessness swept over her. She could only sense death when it was too late. No matter what she did, the outcome was always the same. She’d stopped trying countless corpses ago. Necromancy was the ultimate exercise in futility.

Worry curdled to dread by the time they parked outside what remained of the Silvertown docks. Her hand hesitated on the door handle, half-concocted excuses tumbling in her mouth. She could tell the cabby to take her back. Tell Mother the docks had been occupied, and she’d had no choice but to leave. Take the twenty pounds and buy her and Teddy the first train tickets out of London.

But if she returned empty-handed, Mother would make her pay. The next favor would be crafted for her torment. Perhaps by making her commune with another slain child. Lord Winthrop’s drowned son, a casualty of his father’s politics, frequented Cora’s nightmares. Her hands had sunk into the small cadaver’s gray flesh like wet paper, only to ask the frightened boy’s spirit questions he didn’t know the answers to.

Another senseless death.

Cora parted with two precious quid and watched the cab disappear into the fog. Donning the fetid cloak, she pulled the hood low and fastened the mask. It was the witching hour. Even the birds were silent in this still moment between night and morning. A dirty breeze drifted off the dirty water, redolent with death.

Ruins loomed in the darkness. Piers jutted out like broken finger bones into the mist-wreathed Thames. Skeletons of warehouses rose from the rubble-strewn muck like fractured rib cages and splintered spines.

Beneath the gutted foundations laid a labyrinth of tunnels, dug during the Great War under threat of German attack. Ironically, the Jerrys hadn’t bombed them; they’d bombed themselves. The ruins were a silent testament to a moment’s explosive mistake.

Little had survived the accidental TNT detonation except the tunnels underfoot. It was a smuggler’s paradise on the Thames, a blank canvas upon which to paint a masterpiece of capitalism. No wonder the Realmwalker and Verek were so eager to shed blood for it.

Cora slunk through shadows, tendrils of mist chasing her ankles, towards a precariously intact warehouse when a distant scream rent the night. She stiffened. The scream might have come from across the Thames or across the years to scrape hereardrums. In places as saturated with death as this, there was no telling the screams of the living apart from the dead.

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