Lights Were Going Out All Over the World—1883
Chapter 1: Kindred
Alice Quicke stood under a ragged plane tree in the gloom of Montparnasse, her hat brim dripping, the collar of her oilskin coat turned high against the rain.
She was quiet, dark-eyed. She carried a finger-blade hidden in her sleeve, another at her ankle. In one hand she gripped a four-foot-long iron bar, like a cudgel. A fiacre rounded the corner, clattering and splashing past, its driver hidden, side-lanterns swaying. Otherwise Paris was dark. The rain was dark.
She looked ordinary, to the ordinary eye. That was the thing about monsters: the real ones always did. She’d been in the city nearly a month, spreading a ripple of unease through any crowd. It wasn’t the clothes she wore, the trousers, the stained oilskin coat; in Paris, at least, a woman in a man’s clothes drew little interest. Though her knuckles were bigger than most men’s, and the backs of her wrists were scarred like a blacksmith’s, and there was clay clumped in her tangled yellow hair, none of that mattered. What mattered was the thin crescent of light in her eye, like a blade turned sideways, that warned off most inquiries. Four months ago she’d killed her partner and friend, shot him in the heart while looking into his eyes, and before that she’d seen horrors that belonged only in fairy tales, children afflicted with strange talents, and monsters too, real monsters, the kind she couldn’t stop seeing even after she’d shut her eyes. She’d been hurt badly by one of those monsters, impaled by a tendril of smoke on the roof of a speeding train. Whatever it was that had infected her then was in her still. In the mornings she’d awake in pain and press a hand to her ribs, to the old wound of it, imagining some monstrous thing uncoiling there, just under the skin, a part of her.
Now a figure in a mud-spattered cloak turned onto the boulevard, walking fast in the rain. It was Ribs. She carried a bull’s-eye lantern clipped to a belt at her waist. Alice stepped out of the shadows and together they hurried to a manhole cover in the street. Alice pried it up with the iron bar, the rain foaming over the edge, over the rusted iron rungs, pouring down into the sudden blackness. Ribs clambered in. Alice followed.
And then, clinging to the iron rungs, Alice reached up and dragged the heavy covering back into place, cutting off the rain. And in the darkness she followed her friend down, deep into the catacombs of Paris.
“Jesus,” she muttered, when she felt her boots collide with the bottom. Her voice echoed back. “Some light here, maybe?”
After a moment the shutter on the lantern opened. It was an old-fashioned candle lantern with a fish-eye lens, a beam of weak yellow light illuminating the gallery. Ribs had taken it off her belt and leaned it against the wall. Alice could see the girl drawing back her wet hood, smoothing her red hair. The air was cold, sour.
Ribs was grinning, gap-toothed, at her. “Not Jesus. Just me.”
Alice gave her a flat look.
“What?”
“I waited nearly an hour.”
The girl winked. “It weren’t my fault you was there early. Anyway I got us lunch. I don’t reckon you remembered to?”
“No one saw you?”
“Saw me?” Ribs’s tone was wounded. She sniffed, opened her cloak to reveal a package in brown paper, tied off under one arm. “Look at this. A baguette an half a cheese. No reason we got to be all bones, just because everyone else down here is, right?”
Alice suppressed a smile. Ribs was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old but there was something about her that made Alice think she’d never been a kid, not really. And something else that made her think she’d never quite be a grown-up.
The catacombs were thick with silence. Three tunnels branched off in different directions, tall and arched. Alice closed her eyes, and the dark ache bloomed in her side.
They were seeking the second orsine, a door between worlds, a way to cross into the land of the dead and find a living boy trapped within. It was somewhere under Paris. Dr. Berghast had told Alice as much, in his sunlit greenhouse at Cairndale long months ago, a bonebird clicking weirdly at his wrist, his eyes cold and dead. And almost as soon as she’d arrived in Paris she’d felt it, an ache radiating up out of the old wound in her side, a coldness that seeped down her left arm into her fingertips. It was as if the infected dust that Jacob Marber—corrupted talent, servant of an evil more terrible than anything Alice had imagined—had left in her was stirring, waking up. As if it knew an orsine was near. And like a hook in her side, tugging at her, it had led her forward, first through the crowded lanes and boulevards, across the bridges, then down into the maze of the ossuaries. Ribs, who’d come with her, could only trail along, watchful. Alice, for her part, just went where it hurt worst.
But they weren’t in the ossuaries now. There were miles of ancient quarries under Paris, tunnels and stairs carved out of the limestone, submerged chambers, wells hidden in the absolute darkness. Only a small part of it was known. There were stories of things living deep in the underground, pale creatures, vengeful spirits. Cutthroats and pickpockets. Stories of servants lost in the black when their lanterns extinguished, their bodies only found years later. Stories of sudden drops, of dead ends, of ceiling collapses.
Maybe some of it was even true. But Alice, for her part, figured probably the worst thing in that darkness was her own self and the thing that was inside her.
Ribs was looking at her funny. “So? Which way, then?”
Alice grimaced. She started down the left-hand tunnel, retracing their steps from the night before, following the line of red chalk they’d slowly been adding to. Ribs came along behind.
The tunnels were wide at first, dry. The lantern’s beam was weak and wobbled as Ribs walked. They could see a few feet ahead, nothing more. The tunnel turned and turned again, then they descended an iron staircase put in sometime in the last century, and crept past a well and through a fissure in the limestone. All the while they watched for the line of red chalk that marked their way. They came out in a long gallery, the ceiling supported by pillars, their shadows crooked and silent in the black. The air was colder. They hurried on.
They’d stop now and then for a sip of water or a twist of bread but they did not linger long. Ribs would climb up onto a block of limestone and sprawl out with her arms dangling, or flop down onto the ground if it was dry, and she’d breathe wearily in the bad air.
It was during one such rest that Ribs mentioned their friend, the dustworker Komako. She’d gone to Spain in search of an ancient glyphic, and its secrets about the second orsine. She’d insisted on going alone. “So bloody stubborn. Je-sus. I guess she’s probably all right, though?”
“That girl can handle herself,” Alice murmured. “It’s the glyphic I’d be worried for.”
She heard Ribs snort.
The darkness seemed to lean in, muffling their voices. Alice didn’t like the new tiredness she heard in her friend. She said, “We’re going to find this second orsine. You know that, right?”
The girl was quiet.
“Ribs?”
“Sure,” Ribs said at last. “But it’s after we find it what worries me.”
“After, we’ll get Marlowe out. That’s what’ll happen.”
Ribs rolled onto her side, raised her face. In the glow of the lantern it looked unearthly and pale. “It’s what else gets out I don’t like to imagine. Charlie was awful scared when he come out, back at Cairndale. I remember it.” The damp turned suddenly colder in the gallery. “I keep thinking bout him, like. At night. When I try an sleep.”
“Charlie?”
“Not Charlie.”
But Alice knew who Ribs meant. They didn’t talk about Marlowe, not often. She thought of the little boy she’d known, the calm certainty in his face, the way he’d chosen to believe in her goodness despite everything, the strange power that had been in him. It felt like a lifetime ago. That night she’d first seen his talent, the blue shine in that sideshow tent outside Remington. The rough men watching him with tears in their eyes. She wasn’t sure what to say. Ribs had sat up now and was pushing the tallow higher into the lantern, then taking out the spare candle she’d brought.
“You go into the dark because it’s where the bad things are,” Ribs murmured. “Because it’s the only way to fight them. I get it. But in the dark, it’s easy to start thinking evil is stronger than it is.”
Alice was quiet. Ribs surprised her sometimes. She could feel the little blade strapped to her wrist, the consolation of it. Sometimes, she thought, the bad things weren’t in the dark at all. They were right in front of you, in the light, the whole time.
She got to her feet. The rock overhead felt heavy, crushing. Beyond the candlelight, the dark seemed to go on forever.
“We should keep going,” she said softly. ...
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