The crash of the rubber-tired ambulance hitting the clinic railway cut had sent a shock wave through the lower yards, but on the high terrace sixty feet above, the violence had taken a stranger and colder turn.
Captain Vance had not reached the cut rope before a shadow detached itself from the timber roof edges of the disused laundry hoist. It moved without the wild, scuffling rhythm of an escaping conscript. Its boots made no sound upon the frost-slicked flags, gliding across the mortar joints with the sickening, oiled smoothness of an iron piston sliding through a greased bore.
It was the driver from Bevin Soot’s delivery heavy cart.
Beneath the low brim of his oilskin carter’s hat, the driver’s face caught the sickly emerald corona streaming from the Great Quartz dome. The skin was entirely devoid of human color. A flat, matte, zinc-gray that had never seen sunlight, smooth as unpolished slate. There were no pores, no sweat glands, no crow’s-feet around the eyes, and no downy hair upon the jaw. The mouth was a straight, level fissure cut through the gray flesh without red lip tissue, fully dry and motionless. The creature didn’t inhale. No vapor plumed from its nostrils into the biting frost. Even so, the wind off the ridge blew hard enough to rattle the copper flashings.
