I turned and trudged through squelching gore to the double doors at the front of the hospital. I grabbed the handles and pushed. They held fast.
“Is the barrier inside the building or outside?” I asked.
“You don’t see a balewall in front of you, do you?”
I ignored her sarcasm. Too bad; Might could carve through bale, but not stone.
“Is interdiction a normal security procedure during a transient attack?” Croix pressed.
“Beats me.” Lorencz turned to Michael, waiting a moment before she remembered he couldn’t see her. “Nobilis?”
“If the breach is in an easily contained area like a building, and the sentinel is willing to sacrifice anyone inside to the transients, then interdiction is permissible,” Michael said, sadly. “If lives are lost and anybody complains, the decision gets reviewed by the Vigilance’s board of directors.”
“But this wasn’t your interdiction.”
“No, it is not.” Michael turned his blind face around as if he could actually see something. “I don’t have enough power to secure a building as large as Blackstone. This was either a group effort, or the building was interdicted by Saint-Cloud or Carel herself.”
“Carel,” Lorencz growled. “Saint-Cloud wouldn’t leave the Orderhouse, not on duty.”
“I agree.” Michael turned toward my partner’s voice. “Especially if Carel’s in charge of hospital security.”
“I saw her at the fire earlier,” Lorencz said. “But she mighta come here if she felt a breach.”
“Then we wait until she lifts it.” I shrugged. I was used to waiting.
“I can’t believe she’d lock us in here with a bunch of transients,” Lorencz bitched. “I mean, you, sure, Droit, who gives a damn about you, but I cracked the hopscotch case for her. And Aronson’s on her friggin’ board!”
“Good leaders make hard decisions,” I said, amused.
“As horrible as the decision to sacrifice hundreds of lives may be,” Croix agreed, “it’s certainly better than letting Yzyrche’s minions run freely through the city.”
“Utilitarian ethics,” Axton murmured.
“Well, whatever it is, it ain’t right.” Lorencz looked irritable.
Caked-on blood and sweat were pulling on my face as they dried. I ran a hand over my cheeks, feeling a crust crumble beneath my fingertips.
“Where can I clean up?”
“Do you think Carel knew we were in here when she set the barrier?” Lorencz was still worrying the subject.
“Of course she didn’t,” Michael said. “How could she?”
Axton stepped forward, catching my eye.
“This way, General.” He lifted one of the lamps that had survived the battle and walked down the corpse-strewn hall. The storage closet he opened was full of linens. I pulled out a clean sheet and used it to wipe off the blood, spit, and soot. After a moment, Lorencz and Michael joined us.
“So, can Might affect you if you’re not holding it?” Lorencz asked, toweling blood and sweat off her brightly dyed hair. Her cheap dye left stains on the sheets.
“I can feel it, but it’s easier to resist.” I pulled off my leather coat and handed it to Axton. “Hold this.” I rubbed down its dirty leather with another sheet.
“Then you blame your sword for your atrocities, Tegeus?” Michael challenged.
“You know me better than that, cuz,” I drawled. “I was vicious long before I got Might.”
Michael’s lip curled with disgust, but he didn’t argue.
“Does anybody know why Magister Carel would be providing sorcerous security for Blackstone?” Axton asked, still holding my coat and sounding as though his thoughts were miles away. We looked at him, then at each other.
“Let’s go brace the director again,” Lorencz suggested, as I finished wiping off my boots.
“You go ahead.” I tossed the sheet aside and took my coat back from the anatomist. “I’ll search for any transients that might have scuttled off.”
“Suck it up, pal.”
“I might not have killed them all.”
“Then we’d hear screaming.” Her gaze was mocking, and I narrowed my eyes.
“You’re being petty,” I accused.
“Don’t be such a swell. You already look like shit; keeping your boots clean ain’t gonna make a difference one way or the other.”
She was right, but I still resented it as I followed her back through the slaughterhouse muck. Croix was moving from corpse to corpse, doing his utmost to retroactively secure them all a place in heaven. We left him to it.
The director’s office was crowded; a number of physicians and their assistants had holed up in there during the fighting. I felt a twinge of satisfaction when they cringed as I walked in.
“Why is Magister Carel in charge of hospital security?” Lorencz demanded as the door shut behind us. I stood a step behind and to the left of her, ready for a game of bad cop and badder cop.
“It’s a confidential matter,” the director said, swallowing hard.
“Is she protecting Jaspin?”
“I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry. You’re a member of the Vigilance — you have to understand.” His eyes flickered past us, as if looking for reassurance someplace else. I turned. Nobody was behind us except Axton and Michael.
“No, I don’t understand.” Lorencz took a step forward, stabbing her finger at the director. “We’re interdicted. You know what that means? It means nobody gets in or out until whoever locked us in here drops the barriers. It means we’re trapped and if something decides to push its way through the Line again, we all get to face it together. If we’re lucky, maybe my mad-dog partner here will kill the transient before he kills the rest of us, but that ain’t a risk I wanna take. So tell me what’s going on. Why’s Carel in charge of security? What’s she protecting — the hospital or the city?”
The staff exchanged looks. They knew something. Maybe not everything, but something.
I could tear it out. I could spreadeagle the director over his desk and puncture the cartilage between his ribs. Then I could dig my hands into the wet muscle beneath and curl my fingers around the warm, sharp edges of his ribs to pry the two halves of his chest apart and reveal his squirming heart …
I twitched and forced the image away, lifting the hand that had unconsciously drifted over to land on Might’s hilt. Still not the time or the place.
“It’s in the basement, isn’t it?” Michael asked. “I can see something down there — something obscuring the Line.”
“Tell them,” said one of the physicians, her voice shaking. “I never liked having them down there in the first place.”
A few others nodded. I fixed my gaze on the director, returning to my previous line of thought and letting my face reflect it. His eyes flickered from me to Lorencz, and sweat gleamed on his high forehead. If I pushed his face into the desk, that sweat would leave a moist mark on the polished surface. But instead of yanking his ribs apart, I decided I’d rather hold him face-down by the neck and rip off his trousers —
I jammed my hands into my coat pockets, giving a low hiss as I pulled the leather around me. I didn’t like the way my thoughts were running away with me. It suggested poor self-control. And hard-ons are distracting.
“I think it would be wisest for you to comply with the captain’s wishes, doctor,” Axton murmured. “These are extenuating circumstances.”
The director wilted.
“It’s a private research project….”
“Private?” Lorencz stiffened, her thoughts leaping ahead of mine, but in my defense, I was distracted. “It’s the nixed kids, isn’t it? You’re supposed to be treating them. Don’t tell me Carel put them in your damn basement.”
The director flinched.
“The children are still here?” Michael sounded horrified. “I thought she’d moved them out of the city —someplace safe.”
“I expect she kept them here to study,” Axton said, his voice low. “Perhaps she hoped to figure out what the Banishat were doing.”
“Shit.” Lorencz turned and began pacing up and down the office. “Shit, shit, shit, and bloody double fucking shit.”
“This time we’ll have to kill them,” I pointed out. Might pulsed. I refused to dwell on the options it sent me. There was no way Lorencz or Michael would let me do any of that to the children. I didn’t even want to, not when Might wasn’t twisting my will around. Children are fine, in general. These children were just too much of a security risk.
“We didn’t kill them before, and we’re not going to kill them now.” Lorencz took a deep breath. “Nobilis Aronson, you said there’s a barrier down there?” She looked down, probably trying to discern it for herself.
“Yes. It’s similar to some of the balewards around the Vigilance.”
“Fixed?”
“I think so.”
Lorencz turned back to the staff members.
“How many kids are down there?”
“Five,” one of the physicians said, confirming our guess.
“Dammit,” she muttered. I wondered if I could kill Carel. Sentinels were challenging oppponents, and I’d never killed one so highly ranked. Still, Might would even the odds. “You seen another chit around, a girl named Milka, about the same age as the kids in the basement?”
More glances. A hesitant nod.
“She’s with the research team,” the physician who’d spoken up before ventured. The director glared at her. She glared back. “She’s some kind of assistant, I think, despite her youth. I’ve seen her talking with the arch-sentinel.”
“I warned you about unfinished business,” I said, vindicated. Lorencz shot me a sour look.
“Do you have access to the research team’s records?” Michael asked. The hospital director shook his head, forgetting my cousin was blind.
“They’re downstairs, with the patients.”
“I want to see them,” Lorencz demanded. “I don’t know what Carel’s up to, but those kids shouldn’t be anywhere inside the city. Hell, maybe they’re why the Line got breached here.”
“Perhaps you should check their tranquilization schedule,” Axton suggested. I looked at the director.
“We don’t have access to that information,” he replied, swallowing.
“When was the last time Carel was here?” Lorencz pressed.
“Yesterday — before the fire began.”
“I think I saw the girl here this morning,” a staff member volunteered. “Milka.”
“Do you think Carel would put Milka in charge of their medication?” Lorencz asked, turning to Michael.
“How could she? Miss Nevenek is only a child.” Michael shook his head, looking upset. “She’s twelve years old, as I recall.”
“Yeah.” Lorencz sighed and pulled out a new cigar, lighting it with a spark of balefire. “And I don’t know her well enough to call her and see if she’s still in the hospital.”
She drew on the cigar a moment, then turned back to the physicians.
“Okay. Here’s the deal. You camp out in the safest room you can find. I don’t know how long Blackstone’ll be under interdiction, so take care of whoever survived the rift and don’t do anything that’s gonna tempt a transient across the Line again. No amputations or anything like that, got it? We’re gonna take a peep at your secret project downstairs.”
“But — we were ordered not to venture into the lab,” the director protested.
“I wasn’t given that order.” Lorencz turned and left, flicking ash on the floor as she went. I hid a smile as I followed her. With her bright hair and that defiant strut, she looked like a little fighting-cock getting ready a rumble. Without the cock part, of course.