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Teela crouches on a rooftop, staring down at the street below.

The Eye of the Storm

- An Attack of Wind

This extract from The Eye of the Storm comes from several chapters in. Teela has apparently killed her surrogate father, Steeltooth. She can remember killing him, but she cannot remember why she did so. Now on the run from both the authorities and her fellow-thieves, she is piecing together the sequence of events that led to her crime. After a less than informative interrogation of the sinister 'Ironman', a crooked artificer whose help she has enlisted to investgate a strange machine that was found near Steeltooth's body, she overhears a conversation in which she and Steeltooth are mentioned along with a name - 'The Quaad'. When the Ironman leaves for a secret assignation, Teela follows him in the hope of discovering more...

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"Death comes in many forms and usually unlooked for; the healthiest and most robust of men can be carried off by nothing more than, say, an attack of wind." [The Philosophies Of Mischkir, II. iv]

Night-time, thieves' time, and I was prowling, eager to be doing something after the frustration of the night before. My quarry was the Ironman and my destination was the same as his - the House of Dark Delights. Where he, the fox, would take myself, the hound, after that rendezvous I did not know.

I had taken to the rooftops, both for secrecy and for the unobstructed passage they allowed me; none but other thieves would be abroad tonight here in the upper reaches of the city - reaches mapped and known to us, the stalkers of the night, wholly unknown to the mass of grubbers down below, oblivious to the world above them that they never saw, still less suspected. Above me, tattered clouds raced past, their moon-cast shadows shifting on the slates and stone beneath my feet. Below me, following my route it seemed, a darkness crawled through Old Draffe's mazy streets, a darkness compounded of torch-smokes and river-fog, smothering the watch-fires at the gates and shrouding the town in a blanket that the pale light of a gibbous moon could not dispel but only emphasize by lending the shadows a shifting, nacreous quality that was not at all reassuring to those who passed along the thoroughfares and alleys.

The darkness did not differentiate by class or wealth; it crept along close by the guarded palaces and mansions of the Merchants' quarter, rolling along Gold Street and the Spiceway, where thick curtains of costly material and shutters of gilded oak were closed against it (closed against me and my kind too - not that I could not have got in and rifled through the riches hoarded up behind those walls, but I had other business on my mind tonight). It threaded its way through the tangled streets of the Artisans' quarter, snuffing out the forges on Iron Lane and Copper Street and obscuring the trade-signs that lined the sides of Cutpurse Alley, and noiselessly filled the squares and plazas like a cold, silent tide, more liquid than vapour. In its inky shadows all sound was lost, or if not lost then lent an eerie isolation, so that those who walked abroad walked softly, and even in the taverns and wine-shops all conversation was muted to a whisper. Yet the streets were not silent in Rogues' Hole where my pursuit now took me, nor were they deserted. Here, life - and its attendant, death - went on as usual; friendships were lost, enemies reconciled, bargains struck and plots hatched, blows were exchanged, backs were stabbed, and pockets were picked, as if the darkness were a commonplace, a fact of life. And here, perhaps, it was.

At last I squatted, panting, on the roof-ridge of the Church of Hresh the Sea-god, one more among the tribe of hideous gargoyles that had colonised the parapets. Hresh himself had fallen out of fashion some one hundred years before and now his house on Earth had fallen into disrepair. What price the promises of priests of immortality for man when gods themselves are transient and die! The roof was full of holes where tiles of gilded lead had fallen or been stripped away by looters who no longer had the fear of Hresh's wrath to give them pause, and roof-beams - rotten now and gnawed by boring-beetles - showed like bones beneath my feet. It was precarious to say the least in its decay, but still it was the tallest building of this area and, better, overlooked the gaudy frontage of the House of Dark Delights and so had some use still, if only to an outlaw thief.

The House of Dark Delights. I shuddered as I looked at it. At first glance it was splendidly ornate, a strangely gorgeous thing to find amidst the squalor of Rogues' Hole. But in the tarnished glamour of its peeling gilt and silver-leaf facade, and in the line of chipped and mutilated statuary that framed its doorway, flesh-pink paint upon the amputated stumps of limbs now faded by the elements to leprous-grey, there could be seen - for those that knew what it contained - the signs and symbols of the horrors that it held in its corrupt and secret heart.

The House of Dark Delights was known to most who parasitised Draffe's dark underbelly. In a city where to be notorious was commonplace, the House still owned a special notoriety. Said to be run by a syndicate of shadowy figures, including - so my sources said - at least one sorcerer gone-to-the-bad, it was the jewel in the tarnished crown of the Web, the grouping of organised criminals that had tentacles throughout the whole of Draffe, both Old and New, extending even into government and royal circles.

It was the House's boast that there was no wish too bizarre, no carnal fantasy, no dark desire that was impossible for it to satisfy, and certainly no-one ever had been found who would admit to having suffered disappointment there, no matter what it was that they had asked for. Make of that fact what you will. It was said that the House's staff, to satisfy some of the darker and more outré wishes of their customers, would literally stop at nothing, utilising great variety of means to achieve their ends - the kidnapping and mutilation of young children (who were then raised deep within the House for those who liked to take their pleasure with freaks or cripples); commerce with the lower planes (for those whose secret wish was for the dark hallucinatory ecstasy of the incubus or the succubus); flesh-grafting and the interbreeding of species (to produce strange hybrids and chimerae); all these had been laid at the silver-over-lead door of the House of Dark Delights, as well as those more 'ordinary' sports involving animals, hermaphrodites, young children and the rest.

For these and other reasons, honourable thieves avoided contact with the House and all its grisly works. I was intrigued by the Ironman's presence here, however. The House's specialised nature was reflected in its tariff. Those who came here did not have to ask the price of any of its wares, or, if they did, could not afford them. Either friend the Ironman was a man of independent means (of which I had my doubts) or he had recently acquired great wealth (if so I would have given much to know from where) or else he had some high-placed contact from within those who controlled the House itself. This last, and to my mind, most probable surmise opened a seething mass of possibilities. It would be interesting at the least to have a chat with him about his whereabouts the night Steeltooth was killed, and other matters appertaining to the case.

Breath coming quick but silent, I grinned ironically at my reflection in a puddle, teeth and eye pale glimmers in my soot-grease blackened face. My limbs and body too were blacked. My breech-cloth, breastband, gloves and oversocks were all of black-dyed wool and - with my oilskin roll of tools - were all I wore (clothing 'cumbers movement and the swish and slide of fabric can be heard by those whose ears are keen - so my teachers taught me, and in this, as in much else, they had the right of it). Black silk wrapped the metal on me both to hide its glitter and to muffle any noise. I looked like part of Night herself, a smaller darkness in the greater dark, and even moonlight, friend and enemy at once, could not discern me.

The line and black-steel grapnel that had given me access to this last roof I coiled around my waist again, and then I settled down against the scaly chest of one of the carved sea-beasts lining the roof's edge. The cold stone chilled the sweat that trickled down my ribs and back. I flexed my shoulders, cramped with climbing. Far below my vantage point, there was the sound of voices raised in raucous celebration and the entrance of the House of Dark Delights threw smoky yellow light across the street. I fixed my eye there and began my watch, unmoving but for those small tensings of the muscles that keep the limbs and mind awake and supple through a long and cold surveillance.

The clouds had thickened and what breeze there was had dropped by the time the Ironman left the House and emerged into the street. The air was moveless, heavy with incipient rain, and from the docks a bare half-mile away the smell of tidal-wrack and rotting fish hung in the air. The Ironman staggered as he left the smoke-filled doorway, catching himself against one of its verdigris-greened caryatids. I chuckled to myself, my task made easier; a drunk, as every padder knew, was easier to tail, his wits and senses dulled by wine.

He turned to face the wall and urinated like a horse, then, clutching at the wall for support, made his way up the muddy street, fastidiously picking his feet over the piles of decomposing rubbish and glancing about himself fearfully as he crossed the deep shadows between the few isolated pools of torchlight.

I was about to follow when my eye was caught by several strange phenomena that closely followed his departure. As he passed between the shadows of the lop-limbed statuary along the House's front, one of those shadows seemed to detach itself from the wall and followed close behind him noiselessly. At the same time the nearest torch guttered and went out as if snuffed by a stray gust of wind, and a few scraps of rubbish rose and danced briefly in the air before sinking back to the puddled ground. An unremarkable event perhaps...except that there was no wind at the time; my bare skin would have felt the barest breeze, had there been one to feel. I wondered briefly, cursed myself at my distraction, dropped the single storey to the ground and dogged his footsteps, silent shadow in the deeper shadows of the streets.

We penetrated deeper into the maze that was Rogues' Hole. Sickly-sweet odours of incense and hallucinogenic drugs from burning censers, smells of garbage and excrement, the sour reek of cheap wine, all swirled about us in the foggy dark. Somewhere nearby a dog growled, the growls turning to yelps as a harsh voice cursed thickly, and once an agonised scream was choked short in a bubbling groan followed by a horribly suggestive silence. Such things were commonplace within Rogue's Hole. A wind had started to rise and stale draughts of air muttered among the alleys, plucking at the Ironman's clothes and tugging at his hair with insubstantial hands. The moaning of the wind held an odd, almost vocal, note like the keening of lost creatures forlorn and very far away.

He slowed his pace, and once or twice he stopped and cast about, muttering to himself. Perhaps the vicarious excitement of the last night's drinking and debauchery in the crumbling underworld of the town began to pall as drunken mirth gave way to unease. I had been watching him the whole night through. What an appetite he must have had for so-called pleasure! He had spent most of the night within the House of Dark Delights, its outré attractions heightened even more, no doubt, by drink and drugs.

He struck out with more confidence towards the eastern quarter of Rogues' Hole and I, above him, followed, meditating grimly on his destination.

The streets were empty now - even the blackmailers and whores, the thieves and beggars, kept away from these alleys, leaving them to other things, things that it was not good to inquire into, things that were thought to leave humankind alone so long, and only so long, as they were left alone. The stink of the maze-like, crumbling buildings grew worse, laden with decay and laced with the pungent odour of narcotics. The sound of fighting and the faint clash of steel were blown in intermittent bursts on the still-rising wind.

We entered the Rats' Nest, a tangled web of alleys not much wider than the span of outstretched arms, now long disused and all-but-unmapped. What, I wondered, was the Ironman doing here? So far as I knew, none came here except the odd cut-throat disposing of a deader too well-known or else too heavy to entrust to the secret and eternal tomb of Draffe's dark rivers and canals. I climbed a rotting wooden stair, taking to the roofs again to keep my quarry better in my view - a single corner missed and I would lose him in this maze of passages. He took a piece of paper from a pocket, scanned it briefly, and pressed on. That paper would be mine, I swore, before the night's end.

Once or twice, as he staggered on through the demon-haunted and increasingly wind-blown darkness, I heard the muttered chants of warding prayers come from him, and I knew he was remembering the dreadful tavern-stories of what happened to those foolish or unlucky enough to be caught alone and at night by the terrible atavistic creatures that swarmed in the warrens of Rogues' Hole! I chuckled at the thought that, all unknown to him, one of those creatures followed him now, flitting at his heels like his own shadow turned against its owner! Indeed, I laughed out loud, though softly. I had no need to muffle any noise I made now. The wind, ever stronger and more angry, moaned and skirled around the masonry, masking all other sounds. I stopped to slip my over-socks off, grateful for the added purchase bare feet gave among the loose slates and the crumbling stone of the Hole's roofs. And as I paused, so he paused too, to catch his breath, safe in the temporary respite of a spill of torchlight. Above my head, a sign named this street as Death Run. For those - unlike myself - of a morbid turn of mind the name, in retrospect, may well have had a grisly aptness in the light of the event that now occurred.

A sudden shriek of wind dived down and shook the Ironman hard with unexpected violence. Dust-devils danced and spiralled in the street and somewhere rubbish shifted with a booming clatter. A tension filled the air and all my flesh went into goosebumps, the hair on my arms and thighs rising and stirring. I was nervous suddenly, for no good reason, muscles tensed involuntarily in fight or flight response. I flicked a glance around the street but there was nothing there that should not have been there. The air smelled icy suddenly, just as it does before the onset of a winter storm, and underneath the skirling of the wind I thought I heard another sound, improbably, a creak and splitting as of winter ice beneath the unwary foot, a sound both faint and ominous. I put a steadying hand against a wall and gasped in shock, jerking my palm away from cold so sharp it burned. My fingers came back wet from hoar-frost that, impossibly, now rimed the stone. I looked back to the Ironman, standing all alone, his figure silhouetted by the dim glow of the watch-torch at the street's far corner, light that normally would have been bright against the night and now was weak and pale as if its radiance was somehow being sucked away. Again there came that faint and menacing splintering such as the surface of a frozen pond makes in the moment just before it splits. I had the sudden picture of sheet ice being tested somehow, something pushing through it from some dark and submerged place...

Angry at myself, I pushed the image from my mind. My nostrils stung with cold. I locked my jaws to stop my teeth from chattering. A drop of cold sweat ran into my eye and, in the blink it took to clear it, something came.

It stood, impossibly, not three feet from the Ironman. Whence or how it came I could not and still cannot say. But it was there. At first glance, seemingly, it was a tall man shrouded in a hooded robe. But that impression did not last. The robe, or rather, the appearance of a robe, was sombre silvery-grey and seemed to shimmer slightly. What looked like creases in the fabric were just vague shadows more akin to concentrations in a vapour than the mouldings of a solid object, and the edges of the cloak (if cloak it was) faded away into the foggy air in a way that hurt the eyes to look on. There was a powerful wrongness about the figure, an insubstantiality, more than could be easily explained away by darkness or the city's night-fogs.

The wind whipped at the Ironman, shaking at his clothes and hair with cold ferocity. His mouth worked, but no sound emerged. The cloaked thing - I was thinking of it as a 'thing' by now and, more, as one that in a saner world should not exist - raised what could have been seen as hands (although they moved too fast to be more than a blur) and swept the hood back. The Ironman's eyes popped and he made a little 'whooshing' sound as if he had been elbowed in the stomach. His mouth hung open and a shrill wail came from him.

There was no head beneath the muffling folds of the cloak. Where there would have been eyes had there been a face to house them were two faint and cloudy orbs of light like candle-flames half-seen through fog. Around them was nothing but a swirling disturbance in the air resembling a heat-shimmer. Periodically, the shifting air-currents would focus and stabilise, forming an eerie approximation of features sketched almost invisibly upon the air.

The wind screeched round the stone walls of the alley but the foggy substance of the thing did not move in the gusts. There was a chuckling sound that might have been the wind.

The Ironman gaped and babbled for a moment before desperately finding his voice for one question.

"What are you?" he cried, hysteria bubbling in his voice. There was silence for a scant few seconds. Then the wind began to speak. The words were crude at first, an eerie susurrus, but the hisses and the whispers coalesced, took audible shape. There were just four words.

"I am your death."

Sudden realisation must have burst upon the Ironman. He scrambled to his feet and tried to run, but wind came blasting at him out of nowhere, sending him reeling back as if from a terrible punch. Blood appeared in one of his nostrils. Suddenly the alley was shaking in a hurricane gale. The winds howled and roared around the confined space, hammerblows so strong that they seemed like solid force knocking loose masonry from the buildings and sending garbage and cobblestones hurtling through the air like shrapnel. I clung to a projection of my sheltering wall as cobbles lifted and the heavy red-clay roof tiles crashed down all around me. My face and limbs were numb with cold or with reaction. I discovered I was cursing quiet and deadly all the while, as if profanity could give some measure of protection against the flaying supernatural gale. Through streaming tears I watched the Ironman's final moments, hypnotised by fascinated horror.

The Ironman stumbled to his knees, where the wind tore at him, worrying at him like an animal. His clothes shredded and tore and crimson drops spattered his face and hands where sharp stone splinters sliced his flesh like needles stitching some macabre tapestry with gory threads. He gasped and whooped as he tried to breathe but the wind rammed down his throat and burst his lungs. His face went purple and a gout of scarlet blood ran from his mouth. Winds hunted up and down the alley like a pack of dogs. The vapourous thing stood in the middle of the storm, impervious and undisturbed, the flying missiles passing through its insubstantial form, quite unregarded.

The Ironman had ceased to struggle now, and his limp, unresisting body was being tossed and toyed with as if a giant invisible cat were playing with a mouse. He no longer cried out as the wind struck at him, and his head flopped horribly on his neck like a broken doll's. Then, quite suddenly, the gale stopped. For an instant time seemed to freeze as the flying debris halted in mid-air, then pattered to the ground as the force that held it aloft vanished. The Ironman's body collapsed with a soft thump. The alley was filled with a silence the more shocking for the preceding tumult. The smoke-thing stood impassively, contemplating the huddled body and the wrecked street. Then its substance began to dissipate, shreds and tatters of grey smoke curling away and vanishing into the air like wind-blown vapour. Within seconds only the glowing, smoky eyes were left, if eyes they were, and then they flickered like cold stars passing behind clouds, and went out. There was a last chuckle of wind. A chill rain began to fall. Shivering with cold - and fright, it should be said if I am truthful - I sat and waited on developments. I had no wish to leave my cover to investigate; not yet.

Some time passed slowly by. At last my trembling stilled and I felt bold enough to leave my hiding place. Still keeping to the shadows, with my heart-beats bumping at my ribs, I risked a glance into the alley. The Ironman's body lay there still, a heap of rags that once had lived and breathed and now was nothing more than alley refuse. But above it stood another! A dark, cloaked figure, strangely hunched, now stood above the body, focussing the dim light of a dark-lamp on the corpse. The muffling cloak hid any form or feature, but I heard it speak a few indistinct words in a croaking voice that somehow made my flesh creep. The timbre of the voice was heavy, dull, somehow undirected, as if the mind behind the words were elsewhere and what spoke was just the mindless apparatus, like the voice heard through a speaking-tube or from another room, conducted by an intervening trick of acoustics. The figure stood and stared down at the body, silent but for the dreadful, low murmuring.

In the dark-lamp's narrow beam the Ironman's features were congested, torn and bruised, and the eyes, bloodshot and glazed in death, were wide, their panic-struck expression fixed for ever now. A gloved hand reached from underneath the cloak, fumbled in the folds of clothing at the Ironman's side and came back with the paper he had glanced at earlier! I felt a bleak despair wash over me; events were running wild tonight. How many different pieces were there to this puzzle? And how did this night's grim events fit in? Who - or what - was now engaged in stealing information that was rightly mine from underneath my very nose? I thought of leaving my concealment and confronting the hunched figure but some innate sense of self-preserving stopped me. If it should chance to be in league with what had killed the Ironman I wanted no part of it. Rage shook me at this latest turn of fortune.

At that very moment the figure seemed to start, and then it looked at me! I had not made a sound, I knew, and in my blacks and soot-grease I was quite invisible, but somehow it knew that I was there! It looked at me, and for the second time that night all the hairs on my arms and legs stood up and prickled. The cloak's hood hid the brow and eyes in shadow, but the lantern's light made every other feature clear. There could be no mistaking. The face that stared at me was Steeltooth's!

I stared at my dead father. His face was somehow bloated and fallen away at once, the skin all raw and bloodless, mottled. He shifted and his eyes flashed at me from the hood's concealment, eyes that were not human eyes at all, but ghostly green-gold discs like those of a cat caught in a lantern's beam at night. His mouth dropped open and he made a sound, a frightful gasping groan, such sound as corpses are said to make when moved, empty of meaning, mere mockery of life. The eyes blinked once, and then he moved. I tried to follow him, but somehow, though I kept my gaze fixed on him, he eluded me, his solid presence slipping into vagueness as I strained to keep my eyes on him, as if he slipped between the interstices of the air itself, merging ghostlike with the night. Only the faintest chink of metal brushing metal made his departure less spectral than that of the wind-thing earlier. I shivered harder, and found myself weeping, tears burning my eye and running down my cheek.

A mangy yellow dog trotted out from behind a pile of refuse and sniffed inquisitively at the still body of the Ironman. Lifting its muzzle, it howled once, a plaintive cry at the gibbous moon that hung now, low and bloated, in the sky. It sniffed the air and whined, then looked at me. I looked at it. We grinned a crazy grin one to the other, dog and I, and then I thought I might go home.

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