Inside the coal cellar, the air had been thick with the choking tang of powdered bituminous dust and wet earth. Len stood in the cold drizzle of the alleyway behind the eastern apartments. His right hand gripped the brass sounding pole, his breathing shallow and disciplined through his nostrils. The rain had picked up. It swept across the slate gables in freezing, level sheets that smelled of coal smoke and river algae.
Behind him, through the foundation wall, the muffled footsteps of the double faded as it reached the northern hall. The creature would discover the bricked-up archway in thirty seconds, realize the blueprint was four years out of date, and reverse its sweep. Len had half a minute to reach Bram Ash’s sentries at the southern road and get the warning up to the tenement landings.
He took three rapid paces through the freezing mud. Before his boots could reach the cobbles of the main alley, a thin, shrill cry pierced the gloom from above.
“Len! Len, please! The stairs are gone!”
Len stopped dead in his tracks, his boots sinking into the black mire.
The voice came from a second-story dormer window set into the slate roof of the tenement, twenty feet directly above his head. It was high, breathless. Then it choked with a wet, bubbling cough—the exact, clear sound of nine-year-old Avel Tern, Nessa’s son. The boy had suffered from a brutal lung fever during the sulfur fog two weeks earlier. That left him with a…
