Lye Street by Alan Campbell, Dave McKean Page B

the angel ripped the harpoon out of the dense muscles in her shoulder, sending an arc of blood as high as the rooftops. Her wound burned savagely, but it would heal in moments. She could already feel her blood clotting, swelling up inside her again, coursing through her veins with renewed vigour. Scars itched and flared on her arms, her face, her fists. Her dark eyes thinned.
    Her knife! Where was her knife?
    A cry came from the watchtower at the top of Lye Street. Carnival spun to see a group of assassins bundling a man through the tower doorway. Their glances met. His eyes widened in terror. She recognised him. Bucklestrappe's descendant. But then the door boomed shut and he was gone.
    Bolts and harpoons whined all around her, ripped holes through her wings. Nets clashed against the cobbles, but Carnival ignored it all. With her scars now writhing, tightening around her chest and neck, she roared and spat blood and set off through the onslaught, heading up Lye Street towards the tower door.
    Barraby's watchtower stood pinned within a thicket of chains, all radiating outwards like a child's drawing of sunbeams. Windows gaped in its walls, as black and empty as the abyss below the courtyard foundations, as thin as murderholes. A lean man might squeeze through such a gap, and yet Carnival would have to damage her own wings in order to follow. The door itself looked heavily reinforced. She took to the air again.
    Two Spine were working furiously on the summit of the watchtower, cranking an old lye ballista around on its cogged pivot, trying to bring its caustic load to bear on the angel. She tore out their throats with her hands and flung their corpses over the parapet.
    Missiles whizzed over her head, their crescent tips flashing in the starlight. She ducked, searched for cover. On the rooftops on either side of the street, the temple assassins surged closer, a dark wave of them. So many!
    Then she saw the hatch in the tower roof.
    She threw it open and plunged through.
    She was in a dim stone chamber without windows. Against the outer wall, a curved stairwell sunk through the floor into deeper gloom. The rest of the space had been filled with clay pots, stacked one upon the other.
    Carnival listened hard, hearing nothing, then stole down the stairwell.
    Darkness filled the narrow space, yet the angel moved easily down the worn steps, her feathers brushing the roughcast wall. She passed a murderhole and peered out, but the narrow opening looked out across the rear of the courtyard. She saw nothing but rusted chains and the smokestacks of a foundry beyond.
    A hissing, crackling sound came from above. Glancing back up the stairwell, the angel spied a quiver of white light.
    Her instincts saved her. That uncanny wiring of nerves, which had so often driven her beyond the boundaries of pain and endurance, screamed at her now.
    Move!
    She threw herself down the steps as a massive concussion shook the building. She heard a crack , followed by the crash and rumble of stone. The watchtower lurched. Chunks of masonry poured into the stairwell, sealing it behind her. The air fogged with dust or smoke. Grit hissed through cracks in the darkness above.
    Coughing and sputtering, Carnival picked herself up.
    A second blast rumbled through the tower, this time from below.
    The basement?
    Carnival tore down the stairwell and reached a landing. An arched portal opened into another dismal chamber, lit by a single cresset set in a wall sconce.
    The man she'd come to kill stood there, gazing at a sword on the floor.
    "I picked the sword up," he said wearily. "Then I came to my senses and put it back down again. I've been walking around the bloody thing for a while now, trying to figure out what to do with it." He glanced up at her. "I don't know if they let me have it because they actually thought I could protect myself from you, or if it's just some kind of a joke. You know how Spine like their little jokes?"
    Carnival stepped into the room.
    Sal