Nineteen: The Job

Someone came at him out of the dark.

Jordan stuttered to a halt halfway to the nearest warehouse, but then he recognised Akiva at the same moment Usk gave him a hard shove to get him moving again. Three guards were already dead, and the other three were grappling with Devils deployed to distract them while the rest of the cohort broke in and made away with the goods. He couldn't see where the screaming had come from.

"They're starting with the furthest away," Akiva muttered, then vanished again as they reached the sheds.

"Get down there, kid," Usk said, and Jordan, throat closing around his fear, forced his feet into motion again.

Usk gave him a leg up onto the roof. Somewhere nearby someone laughed hysterically, yelling at the sky, which meant someone had had to resort to belladonna already – though Jordan wouldn't have been surprised if it was just a Devil greatly enjoying themselves.

He shimmied down a rope that had been left hanging through the ragged hole in the warehouse's metal roof, sliding half the way and blinking away tears as rope burn gouged at the shallow scrapes in his palms from the journey there. He cursed himself for not replacing his gloves as he stepped away to let Usk come down. He tried to calm his pounding heart; he had only ever done climbing like that with a harness and a helmet on, and had only put his feet over the edge this time because none of the crowding thoughts in his head were making a lick of sense. Whatever benefit the blackweed had given him had worn off already.

The warehouse was dim, lit by a single candle, and the walls were writhing with Devils. Crates and sacks of food stretched as far as the eye could see, both upwards and across. So much food Marick had planned to just burn. As Usk's boots hit the floor, a man scurried to the rope and climbed up it hand over hand with enviable ease, especially considering he had a sack of flour strapped to his back.

"You're late." Gelert finally appeared, a blackweed joint going under the bristle of his moustache. "Get grabbing."

Jordan didn't hesitate. He stumbled to the wall and began raiding shelves, weighting down his belt with sacks of grains. He filled his pockets with several jars of pickled vegetables and then turned to look for Usk, who, to a muted cheer from the Devils working around him, hefted a big barrel of something onto one shoulder that looked as though it should have taken two men to carry.

Going up was considerably harder than going down. Grappling with the scrapes on his hands, the added weight on his clothes, and the fact that a few months of training had not made up for over twenty years of laziness, he struggled up the rope clenching his teeth so hard that they squeaked. He smelled smoke and panicked, would have slipped back to the ground if Usk hadn't appeared the gap and grabbed him by the hand.

"Is it starting?" Jordan gasped. He readjusted his clammy grip, and with Usk's help finally hauled himself over the lip of the hole.

"It is. Do your thing."

Jordan spotted Devils on the ground splashing pitch around the base of the warehouse's wooden walls. On the roof of the next one along, figures were still swarming in and out of a gap in the metal and disappearing into the night. Glancing further down, he saw two Devils grab more buckets of pitch and start hauling them to the second warehouse. He paused, focused, made sure no one was at that moment scrambling out of the hole beside them, and then sent a flash of magic across his whole body to signal to Yddris that the burning was about to start.

A moment of breathless silence passed, save for the blood pounding in Jordan's ears and the distant splash of oil arcing from the cans.

Then the barracks blazed with light, and a whole unit of the guard came pouring out rattling with swords and armour. A dark cloaked figure appeared from the doorway afterwards and sneaked across to the castle's kitchen door, visible only to Jordan.

Gelert appeared in the hole in the roof. "What's happening?"

"Harkenn's twigged," Usk grunted. "You need to get the lads out before they hit."

"Nict's balls," Gelert growled. "Someone must have squealed, we ain't even lit the things yet."

He disappeared again, and a moment later began barking orders below. Usk tugged on Jordan's sleeve and indicated that they should climb down. With a jarring jump, Jordan slipped down the last couple of feet of the Devils' makeshift ladder, readjusting the grain sacks on his belt and willing his knees to stop shuddering from the impact. All around them dark shapes lumbered with heavy objects scuttled away into the night, in every direction, and the clank and roar of approaching guard was growing louder with each second. A second unit had probably been despatched from the castle itself now, to pincer the Devils between them and force them out down the slopes where they'd be easy targets. At first, Jordan was glad the plan had gone off well, but experienced a frisson of terror when he realised that no matter whose side he was really on, he was in danger.

"Look lively," Usk grunted, and a second later he found himself on his back on the ground, blinking at the sky with no breath left in his lungs. He sat up, the world spinning around him, just in time to see a helmeted head clang against the warehouse wall under Usk's huge hand. The guard let out a strangled groan, slipped to the floor and stayed still.

"What..." Jordan sputtered, but Usk was already hauling him to his feet.

"You're welcome. Unless you wanted his pike up your arse," the brute said. "I won't judge."

"I...no." Jordan couldn't tear his eyes away from the figure slumped on the ground. Nothing he had done with the Devils had resulted in anyone getting hurt – robbed and pissed off, maybe drugged once or twice, but no one got injured. Sound filtered through to him from the other warehouses on the row; the clang of weapons, voices pitched loud. He saw no flames yet, and dared to let out a sigh of relief, but then another guard was coming at them with his sword raised, yelling. Usk kicked him smartly in the face and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

"Do they train these clots?" he growled. "What the fuck was that?"

He led Jordan along the warehouse row, keeping low to the bushes bordering Harkenn's lawns. Smoke drifted through the hole in the roof of the second warehouse, causing Jordan's heart to clench until he realised it was a smoke bomb. Another Devil was already slopping oil over the back of the last building, a man with a weasel-like face and a stupid moustache – one of Gelert's cronies, probably.

"Alright?" Usk asked. The man paused in his work and grinned.

"We're still gonna burn these fuckers. And Marick'll burn whoever tipped off Lord Fancy-Britches."

"Sure," Usk said. "That'll be a spectacle."

"Whoever it is, they got it coming," the man turned back to his job with a furtive glance around for any guards, but they all appeared occupied inside the warehouses. Something thumped against the wall from the other side, making Jordan jump. "Wouldn't it be a turn-up if it was that white-eyed cripple...." He cut off, eyes bulging, when he suddenly found Usk's clenched fist forcing him to swallow half his teeth. The other hand bunched up the front of the man's clothes, lifting him partway off the ground. The pitch bucket dropped to the floor and Jordan surreptitiously nudged it into the bushes.

A burst of flame drew Jordan's eye, and he looked round to see Gelert running towards them with the last of his group. Someone inside was screaming – several someones.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Gelert yelled. Usk dropped the man, who stumbled away whimpering.

"Keep your yappy dogs muzzled, Gelert," Usk growled. Though the night was now full of noise and smoke, he made the threat perfectly clear in both his voice and his expression. "Your boys woulda done the same to me if I badmouthed you."

He stalked off, and Jordan followed, tripping over his own feet to keep the burning warehouse in view. The screaming was going quiet, though he couldn't tell if it meant whoever it was had got out, or...he suppressed a wave of nausea. When he was sufficiently ahead of Gelert, he signalled again to Yddris.

They dodged down the gap between the last two warehouses. Usk ploughed his way through the guards like they were dominoes, knocking heads against walls and blades through kneecaps, leaving Jordan to pick a shuddering path through prone forms he fervently hoped weren't dead. Though Arlen had been against the warehouses burning, Jordan knew there was no love lost between any of his group and the Harkenn household; Usk was just as happy to floor a few guards on the job as he would have if he'd been in favour of it.

He glanced around just in time to see the flames on the furthest warehouse flare green. The smoke pouring off it ceased billowing into the sky.

"That fucking witch man!" he heard Gelert yell. "Someone take that bastard out!"

The lawns were scattered with spilled food and split bags, helmets and abandoned weapons. Several patches of grass smouldered gently from dropped torches. Raziel appeared from between the next sheds along and lobbed belladonna into a clutch of guards, which also incidentally contained several Devils. As they all fell about laughing and talking nonsense, the munitions expert caught Jordan's eye, winked, and hurried away with a third abandoned pitch bucket.

Several Devils had set upon Yddris, who had finally joined the fray. None of them were straying too close, as it was still extremely dark and the Unspoken moved quickly. It was different to the demons Jordan had seen him fight – Yddris could fight as dirty as any Devil. As he watched, his tutor engaged in a hand-on-hand grapple with a Devil juggernaut almost as big as Usk, who would have borne the Unspoken to the floor if he hadn't received a head-butt that broke his nose. As soon as the giant was down, snarling with pain, the Unspoken darted behind him and delivered a kick to the pressure point at the base of his neck, knocking him out cold. A cloud of smoke from a bomb drifted past, obscuring Yddris from view, and when it cleared he had locked knives with another assailant.

Jordan didn't realise that his distraction had separated him from Usk until he turned and found a sword swinging towards him. He ducked, but lost his balance in doing so and ended up on his back a second time, the guard's sword arcing down again. He supposed that Harkenn explaining to the entire squadron that his signed Unspoken apprentice would be among the opposing side might have raised some difficult questions, but for the briefest moment he fervently wished that he had.

He rolled, and the sword plunged into the ground where his neck had been. He used the time the guard took to wrestle his blade free to get onto his feet, and had barely unsheathed his hunting knife when he was being harried again. He blocked a few swings with clumsy parries, trying to keep his eye out for Usk and on the blade at the same time. The guard ducked under one of his swings and was suddenly in close. In a burst of sheer dumb instinct, Jordan grabbed hold of the blade and felt it shear through the leather of his glove and then into his skin. He stepped back, pushing it away, and set off at a run with the guard close behind. His hand began to sting, and then burn, and his glove was soon wet and warm with blood.

He spotted Usk's huge form over the top of a small pitched battle between two guards and three Devils. It was hard to tell who was winning. Jordan ducked around them, but in the moment of hesitation his pursuer caught up. A gauntleted hand grabbed him roughly at the neck and he felt his hood slip. He slung an elbow behind him, but only succeeded in getting it pinned painfully to the side of his head.

"Dungeons for you," the guard panted. Jordan tried to put a heel in his crotch but couldn't reach, and the man was too strong for him to struggle free. Panic flooded him like a wave of ice, snapshots of what would happen if he was discovered here. His hand throbbed with his pounding heart.

The guard cried out and stumbled back. The smell of burning cloth reached him. He clenched his bloody palm around the flame that had sprung up there, hoping no one had seen it, and then he reached into a pocket and threw a vial at the soldier's feet. He stepped on it while stumbling around in shock, and Jordan wasted no time in running for it. His knees threatened to fail on him, but he fixed his eyes on Usk's silhouette and forced himself to keep moving. The Devil was laying about him with a baton that he'd stolen from a guard, and his assailants hovered in a circle around him with their weapons held out, like they might if they'd cornered a bear. Using his momentum and surprise advantage, Jordan barrelled into the back of the soldier nearest him and knocked them both prone. He began swinging punches with blind fear, tensed for a blade in the back any moment. Any that landed on him, he barely felt through the fear. After a struggle that left scratches on his face and blood all over the grass, Jordan staggered upright with a stolen sword.

"Good lad," Usk muttered, taking it. Two of the guards in the circle broke and ran. "Fuck me, kid, this your blood?"

The world swayed as Jordan nodded. "I, um...stopped a sword...by grabbing the sharp end."

"Do I need to tell you how fucking dumb that was, or have you learned your lesson?"

"Learned...and kept for...future reference."

A guard cried out and lunged at Usk, who swatted him back like an annoying fly. "Night take me. If you want to tell your opponent when you're about to attack, scream at them so they can mount a defence in time." He kicked another in the face. "I think it's about time we got clear of this, boy."

"Yes please," Jordan whimpered, hating how weak he sounded. It was one thing going against demons, entirely another against people. He'd been punched in school, knocked a tooth loose once when another kid rammed his bike, and been kicked down a slide as a kid, but he could say with confidence that he had never had someone come at him with the intention of killing him. Of course, there had been the incident in the castle during the siege, but even that was different – the thing clearly hadn't been human. This time he had seen a real, human face come at him with teeth bared and try to stab him, and he had burned and punched it back.

Sparks floated past on the breeze. The second shed was in flames, too, but Yddris must have been too preoccupied to do anything about it. As Usk dealt with the last of their attackers, Jordan eyed it, wondering if he would be able to do it. A wave of nausea passed through him and put paid to that plan.

"I nearly died," he mumbled, clenching his fist around the burning cut and watching the blood glisten in the firelight. A chuckle bubbled up from the pit of his stomach. "He could've run me through."

"What's that?" Usk looked around. "Don't you fucking snap on me now, kid."

"I can't do this," Jordan said. He wasn't sure who he was talking to. "I want to go home."

"Trying," Usk growled. He grabbed Jordan by the shoulder and began shunting him along. "If you'd just fucking move."

"No. Home." Tears splashed down his face even as he laughed. "Home home. Not this fucking pit."

Nictaven's current roared in his ears. He felt like he was sinking into it, drowning, the world swimming in and out of focus. The battle, bathed in orange light and beginning to abate, assaulted his senses in a blur of heat and noise. How much blood had he lost? Probably too much. There was a gap in his jaw where a tooth used to be. He tasted metal.

Usk's hand disappeared from his shoulder, and a clang and a shout reached him as if from miles away. Then the hand came back, gripping tighter when Jordan tried to shrug it off. Another hand took his other arm, and he looked dazedly around to find Jesper on his other side, chewing on his lip and silently conferring with Usk. They hurried away down the slope, keeping low to the shrubbery, but it seemed as though the Devils had been a formidable enough opponent that there were no soldiers spare to try and pick any off as they escaped.

"I think this might have been a step too far, huh?" Jesper said, in his usual nonchalant tone, even though he had a black eye and was limping.

Jordan didn't know when he'd stopped being able to hear the fighting. It felt like they'd joined it five minutes ago, and at the same like five years. His brain whirled with conflicting impressions and blood loss and nausea, garbling his words. "Wait, aren't we..."

"Gelert can handle the rest," Usk said. "You're out for today."

"One of them still burned."

"Probably for the best," Jesper said. "If it had been a complete failure Marick would be after all our arses."

Jordan nodded. They were creeping – as best they could, with Jordan so unsteady on his feet – through the brush alongside the path into the staff quarter, light glittering below. Jordan wondered if anyone down there in those tiny houses had any idea of the battle that had just taken place on the hill above them, and envied their ignorance. The last few yards they took at a run as the harsh cackle of wights echoed through the night, close enough to be concerning.

"I'm not going to get to Arlen's," he said, when they had to stop a third time for him to spit blood and dry-heave into a bush. "I'll go to Yddris's and report tomorrow night."

The two assassins exchanged a glance.

"I'm not bloody arguing," Jordan muttered to his knees as his stomach rolled again. "I'll sneak in the back and change, I have a spare cloak. There won't be anyone about anyway, Yddris is still up there."

He expected Usk to protest, but the Varthian only held out a hand. "Give us what you grabbed."

"Marick's not going to have my throat cut in my sleep if I don't turn up, is he?"

"No. Arlen will be pissed, mind."

Jordan couldn't have given less of a fuck what Arlen thought in that moment, and Usk must have sensed it, because he smirked and said, "Don't let that new spine of yours get too pushy. He'll cut you right back down if you do."

"I'll bear it in mind."

"And he'll hold you to tomorrow night, so you better show yourself."

"I said I would."

He didn't remember much of the journey back to Yddris's. Usk and Jesper left him at the bottom of the hill and he made his own slow way back, the strength leaving his legs with each step until he was shambling along. He was careful not to think too much, holding himself above the pounding of Nictaven's current with a titan effort. He wrapped his bloody hand in a corner of his cloak and squeezed to try and staunch it. When he reached Yddris's back fence, he almost brought it down with him as he rolled over into the courtyard.

Something bumped against his hip as he landed. He withdrew the hunting knife he'd forgotten to give to Usk, and when he saw the crimson glint of blood – he had no recollection of using it - he finally vomited, missing the gutter and spattering the courtyard.

"Fuck," he muttered, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. That was going to take some clearing up.

He stumbled into the house, assaulted immediately by warmth and the smell of cooking. Nika must have left a casserole on to cook while he went on patrol. Jordan ducked into his room, frowning for a moment at Ren's absence, but then realised he was still covered in blood and pitch and it spurred him into motion. He ripped off his soiled shirt and cloak and kicked them under the bed, and was busy trying to undo his trousers one-handed when a floorboard creaked outside.

"Thorne?"

He turned. Nika occupied the doorway, Ren chittering excitedly on his shoulder. They stared at each other for a long moment.

"Thought you were on patrol tonight," Jordan muttered. He had counted on it, in fact.

"I was. I've been back all of twenty minutes." The Unspoken stepped into the room. "What happened to your hand?"

Jordan looked down, saw his entire forearm caked in dried blood. Another unwarranted laugh wrenched itself from the pit of his stomach. "Papercut."

Nika was no more than a few inches away, head cocked. Jordan supposed his aura was giving him away like a beacon; sheer exhaustion was the only thing keeping him from burning the house down.

"I want to go home," he whispered.

Nika's embrace was gentle at first, and then tightened as Jordan's knees buckled, half-leading, half-dragging him to the bed. A heartbeat, a solid, real person who wasn't trying to kill him, who had never threatened to hurt him or his sister, had never forced him to do anything.

He clutched at the man's lean shoulders, pain forgotten, and sobbed.