By the time they reached the three-hundred-foot landing, Ren Vale’s vision was beginning to fracture into four incompatible sharp-angled realities.
He stumbled against the glazed brick wall of the chimney pipe, his right shoulder slamming into the hot baked-clay surface. He didn’t feel the heat. What he felt was the phantom agony of a crossbow bolt punching through his collarbone. A wound that had healed forty years ago in a war he had never fought, under the banner of the Ash Emperor.
At the exact same instant, the back of his throat flooded with the taste of sixty-year-old vintage port wine and imported bergamot tobacco. At the same time, his left lung burned with the rotting, rotten-egg thick spit of Brother Ren’s passed plagues.
And beneath it all, hammering through his nervous system like a runaway steam piston, was the Coward’s manic, automatic terror.
His heart was racing at a terrifying hundred and sixty beats a minute. His pupils were dilated to the very edge of the gray irises, twitching from shadow to shadow. Every time a rust flake drifted from an overhead bolt, his body jerked wildly into a defensive crouch, his right hand clawing wildly at his belt for an exit key that didn’t exist.
