lift me down off the railing, make me disentangle myself from him and stand on my own two feet, face him directly, only so that he could push me away as I seemed to be pushing him. Maybe. I don’t know; I didn’t ask.
I didn’t get the chance to ask.
His face changed again, to a sudden sharp focus as he stared up over my shoulder.
Hullo Aspect, my old friend.
It was something in Jacey’s expression, I suppose, hurling me into alert mode before I knew that there was any reason for it. My Aspect snapped around me, settled into the very bone of me, unsummoned but absolutely there as I flung myself backward across the railing.
No time to turn around, to peer, to have him point. I just locked my legs around his waist and hung upside down over that long fall to the hallway far below, feeling his hands’ grip tighten, feeling utterly secure. Trusting him entirely after all, immediately and no question.
As a teenager I danced, I did gymnastics, even before I ever heard of Aspects. I’ve always been good at knowing just how I stood in the world. Or hung, or spun, or dangled. Proprioception, they call it. Upside down was no problem, it was only the quickest way to get a sight of the glass dome overhead; and I only needed to find what it was that had alerted Jacey.
Even knowing where to look, though, it still took me a moment. That was infuriating. He was a Power, sure, where I was just a daemon – but, hell, I’d been designed for work like this. Designed and trained and aimed like an arrow. What he had, he was only born with, and it wasn’t like he worked it much. Or at all. Or –
There. Barely more than a speck, a fleck against the sun’s bright glare. It could almost have been a flaw in the glass, a bubble in the curve of the pane; it could almost have been dirt on the outside, a smut of soot or a crow’s feather, anything. It could almost have been a sunspot, massive and deadly and endlessly distant, nothing to worry about. But it wasn’t.
It was dark and living, growing. Coming.
Beware the Hun in the Sun. They must have been reading Biggles.
Out of that fierce light it came, and of course it was a bird, a black bird, a crow, diving like a gull, like a missile, wings folded. All beak and thrust, and utterly unnatural.
It struck a single small pane dead centre – aimed like an arrow, yes – and there was a shatter of glass and blood and feathers, a falling and a drifting and presumably a death.
I was barely paying attention, except in so far as the Aspect logs everything. What concerned me more what was was coming after.
This time there was no looming shadow, no acrobatics in the air, no show for us to watch and wonder at. Just that narrow cast in the sun’s eye like a squint, like a promise not yet realised. One bird wasn’t it.
One bird and another, and another, and another: like links in a chain drawn taut, all diving on the same line, firing like bullets rat-a-tat through that same broken window, supreme marksmanship.
One by one they burst into that lofty space, and flung their wings out to lift themselves abruptly, bone-breakingly out of their plummet; and one by one they survived that brutal decelaration, and circled high in the dome there as more and more of them threaded through the window, tugged like knots through the eye of a needle on a thread invisibly fine. They massed together until it was hard to make out individual birds among those clots of black.
Then all those separate clots eddied into one, and came to settle on the gallery and were a man, just one man, one Corbie coming striding over the ironwork towards us.
It hadn’t taken long, but time enough to think, that much at least. I don’t know about Jacey, but for me it was time enough to make a choice.
I didn’t give Jacey any choice at all.
He thought he could take them both, but there was no way I was letting him face even a single Corbie, if there was any chance at all that he was wrong.
I reckoned up the risks, made a
I didn’t get the chance to ask.
His face changed again, to a sudden sharp focus as he stared up over my shoulder.
Hullo Aspect, my old friend.
It was something in Jacey’s expression, I suppose, hurling me into alert mode before I knew that there was any reason for it. My Aspect snapped around me, settled into the very bone of me, unsummoned but absolutely there as I flung myself backward across the railing.
No time to turn around, to peer, to have him point. I just locked my legs around his waist and hung upside down over that long fall to the hallway far below, feeling his hands’ grip tighten, feeling utterly secure. Trusting him entirely after all, immediately and no question.
As a teenager I danced, I did gymnastics, even before I ever heard of Aspects. I’ve always been good at knowing just how I stood in the world. Or hung, or spun, or dangled. Proprioception, they call it. Upside down was no problem, it was only the quickest way to get a sight of the glass dome overhead; and I only needed to find what it was that had alerted Jacey.
Even knowing where to look, though, it still took me a moment. That was infuriating. He was a Power, sure, where I was just a daemon – but, hell, I’d been designed for work like this. Designed and trained and aimed like an arrow. What he had, he was only born with, and it wasn’t like he worked it much. Or at all. Or –
There. Barely more than a speck, a fleck against the sun’s bright glare. It could almost have been a flaw in the glass, a bubble in the curve of the pane; it could almost have been dirt on the outside, a smut of soot or a crow’s feather, anything. It could almost have been a sunspot, massive and deadly and endlessly distant, nothing to worry about. But it wasn’t.
It was dark and living, growing. Coming.
Beware the Hun in the Sun. They must have been reading Biggles.
Out of that fierce light it came, and of course it was a bird, a black bird, a crow, diving like a gull, like a missile, wings folded. All beak and thrust, and utterly unnatural.
It struck a single small pane dead centre – aimed like an arrow, yes – and there was a shatter of glass and blood and feathers, a falling and a drifting and presumably a death.
I was barely paying attention, except in so far as the Aspect logs everything. What concerned me more what was was coming after.
This time there was no looming shadow, no acrobatics in the air, no show for us to watch and wonder at. Just that narrow cast in the sun’s eye like a squint, like a promise not yet realised. One bird wasn’t it.
One bird and another, and another, and another: like links in a chain drawn taut, all diving on the same line, firing like bullets rat-a-tat through that same broken window, supreme marksmanship.
One by one they burst into that lofty space, and flung their wings out to lift themselves abruptly, bone-breakingly out of their plummet; and one by one they survived that brutal decelaration, and circled high in the dome there as more and more of them threaded through the window, tugged like knots through the eye of a needle on a thread invisibly fine. They massed together until it was hard to make out individual birds among those clots of black.
Then all those separate clots eddied into one, and came to settle on the gallery and were a man, just one man, one Corbie coming striding over the ironwork towards us.
It hadn’t taken long, but time enough to think, that much at least. I don’t know about Jacey, but for me it was time enough to make a choice.
I didn’t give Jacey any choice at all.
He thought he could take them both, but there was no way I was letting him face even a single Corbie, if there was any chance at all that he was wrong.
I reckoned up the risks, made a
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