The courtyard was a tomb. A pocket of silence and dead air. Anja stood over the spot where the Unremembered had fallen, her knife clean, her breathing steady. She was a machine built for this place. Sineus tasted blood at the back of his throat, the price of their passage through the wall. He looked at the map in his hand, the brittle paper showing streets that were now just ghosts. It was useless. The power station was their goal, but on foot, they were dead.
— The canals, — Anja said, her voice flat. She gestured with her chin towards a narrow gap between two warehouses. Through it, he could see the flat, grey water, shrouded in fog. — It’s the only way.
They moved through the gap, emerging onto a crumbling stone embankment. The air here was different. It smelled of cold rot, of industrial waste, and the deep, damp chill of the Neva. Below them, a small, flat-bottomed skiff was tied to a rusted iron ring. It was covered in a dirty tarp. Anja pulled the tarp away. The boat was ugly. A simple motor was bolted to the stern. It was a tool, nothing more. She untied the rope without a word and dropped into the skiff. It rocked gently. She looked up at him, her expression impatient. He lowered himself in. The boat smelled of spilled fuel and stagnant water.
Anja pulled the starter cord. The motor sputtered, coughed a plume of blue smoke, and then settled into a low, angry growl. She took the tiller, and the skiff moved away from the embankment, gliding into the main channel. The fog closed in around them, swallowing the shoreline. The drone of the city faded, replaced by the chugging of their small engine and the sound of water slapping against the hull. They were in a different world now. A world of silence and grey shapes.
For a few minutes, there was only the fog and the water. Anja navigated by instinct, her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead. She knew the currents, the hidden sandbars. This was her territory. Sineus was just cargo. He sat on the damp wooden bench, his hands resting on his knees. He felt the cold seep into his bones. He watched the water, dark and oily, sliding past. It was thick with memories. The despair of drowned men, the fleeting joy of summer boat rides from a century ago, the constant, grinding misery of the barges that hauled coal to the factories. He tried to wall it off.
Then a light stabbed through the fog.
It was a brilliant, perfect cone of white that pinned their small boat against the dark water. Anja cursed, a single, sharp word. Another beam cut across their bow from the left, then a third from behind. They were bracketed. Three of them. He saw their shapes in the mist, dark and angular. Ordo Umbrarum gunboats. They were faster, heavier, and armed. The low thrum of their engines vibrated through the water, a predator’s growl.
— Hold on, nobleman! — Anja yelled over the engine’s noise.
She threw her weight against the tiller. The skiff lurched into a sharp, banking turn, the engine screaming in protest. A wave of cold, filthy water washed over the side, soaking him to the bone. She was aiming for the shadow of a massive, half-submerged barge, a rusted metal island in the middle of the canal. The searchlights tracked them, sweeping across the water, turning the fog into a blinding white wall.
Anja was good. She used the barge for cover, then darted out the other side, weaving between the stone supports of a railway bridge. But the gunboats were better. They moved with a coordinated, military precision, cutting off her angles, forcing her into the open center of the canal. An alarm bell began to clang somewhere on the shore, its frantic rhythm echoing across the water. They were a rat in a steel trap. He could see the figures on the decks of the gunboats now, small, dark silhouettes against the glare. They were closing. They had maybe a minute.
The world of solid objects and physical skill had failed. Anja’s courage was not enough. The boat’s engine was not enough. He had to find another way. Sineus closed his eyes. The pounding in his head returned, a familiar drumbeat of pain. He ignored it. He let go of the physical world, of the cold and the noise and the fear. He reached out with his other sense, not into an object, but into the water itself. Into its memory.
It was a chaotic storm. A million million moments all screaming at once. He pushed through the noise, searching for a pattern, a line. He was not looking for a single memory, but for the memory of a path. The repeated passage of other boats, other lives. The spectral wakes of forgotten journeys. And he found them. Faint, shimmering lines of pale light, a web of history laid over the present. Most were faded, broken. But one was strong. A clean, bright thread that led directly away from them. It cut straight through the massive stone quay that formed the canal’s eastern bank. A channel that had been filled in fifty years ago. The memory was old, but it was clear. It was a way out.
As he focused on the line, on the impossible path, he heard it. A faint, dry clicking that seemed to come from inside his own skull. The Ticker’s Rattle. It was the sound of reality straining, of two moments in time pressing against each other in the same space. The sound of a seam about to tear.
He had a choice. Trust the ghost-path in his head, or trust the gunboats closing in behind them. The price was simple. If he was wrong, the skiff would be smashed to splinters against a hundred tons of solid granite. A messy, final payment. He opened his eyes.
Anja was fighting the tiller, her knuckles white. The lead gunboat was less than a hundred meters away, its bow wave a churning white V in the dark water. They were out of time. Out of room.
— Left. Now, — he said. His voice was calm, clear. He had made his choice. He would pay the price if he was wrong. — There’s a channel under the quay.
Anja glanced at him. Her face was slick with spray, her eyes wide with concentration and a flicker of disbelief. He saw the question in them. He saw her remember the wall. The impossible passage. He saw her weigh the certainty of the gunboats against the madness of his command. It was a choice that lasted less than a second. It was a choice that would last forever.
She did not speak. She did not question. She simply obeyed.
She threw all her weight into the turn, her body straining. The skiff responded, its nose swinging hard to the left, away from the open water, away from any hope of escape. She aimed it directly at the solid, unforgiving wall of the stone quay. The wall was a sheer cliff of dark, weeping granite, rising ten meters out of the black water. There was no archway. No opening. Nothing.
The roar of the gunboats grew louder behind them. The searchlights converged on their small boat, bleaching all color from the world. There was only the black water, the white light, and the grey wall rushing towards them.
The stone filled their entire world.
