Nox heard them before he saw them.
Footsteps. Heavy, uneven, with a characteristic grinding of soles on wet asphalt. Someone was dragging something metallic, and the sound spread between the buildings, echoing off the walls, multiplying, turning into an echo. Nox counted the steps automatically, without even realizing it. Four people. Maybe five. He knew that gait as well as he knew the smell of burnt rubber, the smell of rotting water, the smell of smoke from factory chimneys that never stopped. «Black Fangs.»
He ducked into a side alley a fraction of a second before they came around the corner.
The brick behind his back was wet and cold. From the cracks came the smell of mold and something sour, stale, like water in a bucket that had been forgotten for a week. Nox pressed himself against the wall and stopped breathing. Not from fear. From habit. In the slums, your breath betrays you before your footsteps do.
The Fangs walked past.
There were five of them. Nox saw them out of the corner of his eye, without turning his head. One carried an iron rod on his shoulder like a club. A second was chewing something and spitting on the asphalt every three steps. A third wore a chain around his neck with a tooth pendant. Whose tooth, Nox preferred not to think.
They disappeared deeper into the street. Their voices faded.
Nox exhaled.
He stood for another minute, listening. Only when he was sure they would not return did he step out of the alley and look around.
Ravnes in the late hours looked as if the city itself had grown tired and lay down to die. The lanterns that still worked gave off a dim, yellowish light, more like the glow of rotten wood than normal illumination. The rest had been broken long ago, and no one was going to fix them. Who would fix them? The city guard only came down to Ravnes in large groups and only when absolutely necessary. The rest of the time, the lower quarter lived on its own, by its own rules, where the main law was a simple formula: the strong take, the weak hide.
Nox belonged to the second category. For now.
He was thirteen years old. Thin as a splinter, with ribs that stuck out under his old shirt with every breath. His hands were calloused and scratched, his nails broken down to the quick. His dark hair, uncut for a long time, fell over his forehead and into his eyes. He did not brush it aside. In the slums, a clean, tidy appearance was either a sign of wealth or a sign of weakness. Nox had neither.
He walked through the Ash Market and immediately understood there was nothing to find here. The Fangs had cordoned it off while it was still light. The merchants huddled behind their stalls, trying not to look any gang member in the eye. Nox could see it in their postures, in their slumped shoulders, in the way they kept their hands close to their goods. There was nothing to take here. Even the scraps had already been picked up.
The garbage heaps near the third quarter turned out to be empty. Someone had gotten there before him.
The tunnel under the old bridge was blocked by two guys with clubs. Young, about sixteen, but strong. Nox looked at them from a distance and walked away without getting close.
Four hours all across the district. And nothing.
"Lin is waiting," he thought, walking along the slippery asphalt. "She hasn't eaten since morning. Neither have I. But she is small. It is worse for her."
He stopped at a broken lantern. Beneath it, in the asphalt, was a manhole cover. Rusty, almost invisible under a layer of grime, but Nox had known about it since he was eight. Old Gras had shown it to him back then, a former factory worker who lived under the bridge and died there two winters ago. «If things get really bad,» he had said. «Go down there. It is scary, but no one will find you there.»
Nox pried the manhole cover with the toe of his boot. The metal squeaked and gave way. Cold air, rust, and stagnant water wafted up from the dark opening.
He climbed down.
The ladder was rusted. Nox knew by heart which rungs held weight and which did not. The third from the bottom was broken. The seventh was hanging on by a thread. He skipped them automatically, without thinking, the way you do things you have repeated long enough.
Down below was dark. Not just dark. Here the darkness was different, dense, almost tangible. Nox paused for a second, letting his eyes adjust. Not quite adjust, that was impossible. Just begin to make out outlines.
Underground rail lines. They said the first magic trains ran through these tunnels about two hundred years ago, when Mirtarind was still being built. Later, new routes were laid, higher, more powerful. The old ones were abandoned. Now there were only rusty rails grown into the floor and remnants of mechanisms that once did something. Nox did not know what. No one knew.
He walked from memory. Left tunnel, then straight to the fork, then left again. Water squelched under his feet. Somewhere in the darkness, something rustled, but not threateningly, something small. Rats. Rats were always here. Nox had long stopped reacting to them.
The smell grew heavier with every step. To the rust and water was added something rotten, earthy, as if wood were decomposing somewhere nearby. Maybe it was. Everything here decomposed. All of Ravnes slowly decomposed, and no one could stop it.
The pumping station opened up ahead.
The tunnel widened, the ceiling rose upward. Huge mechanisms stood silent, covered in a thick layer of soot and some strange slime that glistened even in the dark. Nox had never touched that slime. Intuition told him not to. He trusted intuition.
The walls were covered in symbols.
Nox had seen them before, but now, for some reason, he held his gaze on them longer than usual. The symbols were carved directly into the stone. Deep, with effort. Not paint, not charcoal. Someone had spent a lot of time to leave them here. Why? Who? When?
«Not your business,» he told himself. «Find food.»
He checked the corners. Looked behind the mechanisms. Nothing. The stash was empty. Either someone had taken it, or it had never been there.
Nox swore quietly under his breath and turned to leave.
And he saw the snake.
It lay at the base of the largest mechanism. Small, no longer than his palm. So dark that at first he took it for a piece of cord. But then it moved, and Nox froze.
Black. Absolutely black. No living creature is that black. Its scales did not reflect light, they absorbed it. Each scale was like a tiny piece of darkness sewn to the next. The snake lay still, but Nox could feel it watching.
He lowered his gaze to its eyes.
And froze.
Something burned in them for which he had no word. Not threat. Not the hunger of a predator. Something else. Something that sent goosebumps across his skin and made his heart skip a beat. Nox looked into those eyes and felt one thing: "I have seen her before. In a dream. I do not remember when. But I have seen her."
It was impossible. He had never seen a snake like this.
But the feeling did not go away.
The snake and the boy looked at each other. Time in the pumping station lost its usual rhythm. Nox did not know how many seconds had passed. Five. Twenty. A minute.
Then the snake struck.
He did not have time to react. At all. He did not even begin to move. It darted forward with such speed that the air hissed, and its fangs sank into his ankle through the fabric of his pants leg. A sharp pain, pinpoint, like a needle prick.
Nox looked down.
The snake was gone. It had vanished. Dissolved into the darkness as if it had never existed. Only two small holes in the fabric of his pants leg, only two dark dots on the skin of his ankle, from which blood slowly, too slowly, oozed. Black blood. Nox stared at it.
"Poison," came the first realization. Even, cold. "A venomous snake bit me. I need to get back up. I need to call someone. I need to…"
His legs gave way.
He fell to his knees. The pain in his ankle was already fading, dissolving, giving way to something else. Cold. Nox felt it distinctly: it started right at the bite point and slowly, very slowly, began to crawl up his leg. Not the cold you feel in winter when your boots get wet. A different kind. Deep. As if someone were filling his blood vessels not with blood, but with ice water.
He crawled to the wall and leaned his back against it.
"This is the end," he thought. Still evenly, without panic. Panic was a waste of energy he did not have. "I will die here. Lin will be left alone. Alone in that room with the rusty rod by the door, alone in Ravnes, alone in this city that does not care about her."
The cold reached his thigh.
Nox pressed the back of his head against the stone and stared at the ceiling. The darkness above him was absolute. There was nothing in it. Or was there?
The symbols on the walls began to glow.
A dim, deathly bluish light. Not bright. The kind you see on glowworms in the forest, on mold on stone in the lower levels, on old artifacts that have run out of charge. Nox looked at them and could not tell whether this was real or already a hallucination. His head was swimming. Sounds became distant, muffled. The drip of water turned into an echo of an echo.
The cold reached his spine.
And there everything changed.
Not pain. No. That would be too simple a word. It was as if someone had run a finger along his entire backbone, from his lower back to the back of his head, and under that finger, the skin split, parted, and something new grew out from under it. Something that had never been there before. Nox arched his back, hitting his head against the stone. His teeth clenched on their own.
He lost consciousness.
He woke up in darkness.
Complete. Absolute. The symbols on the walls no longer glowed. The pumping station was as it always was, dead and dark. Nox lay on his side, his cheek on the cold, damp floor. How much time had passed, he did not know. An hour. Three. More.
He tried to move.
His body did not obey well. His hands felt foreign, his legs barely bent. But he was alive. Alive. With a beating heart, with breath, with pain in his side from the cold floor. Nox slowly sat up, leaning on his hand. His fingers slipped on the slime. He did not pay attention.
His ankle. He looked at it. Two small scars. Dark, almost black. Deep, as if they had always been there. No pain. No blood. Just two scars.
Nox stood up.
His legs held him. Shaky, but they held him. He stood for a second, expecting to fall again. He did not fall. Then he walked toward the exit, slowly, keeping a hand on the wall. He needed to go home. Lin was waiting.
He walked through the tunnels and thought that his sister had probably long since realized he would not return with food. She was smart, Lin. Too smart for seven years old. She would not cry. She would just wait, because there was nothing else left to do.
That was worse than if she had cried.
Up above, a light rain was falling. Nox climbed out of the manhole and immediately felt it on his face. Cold, smelling of smoke. In Ravnes, even the rain tasted of factories. The sky was gray, without a single break. Somewhere up there, above the clouds, there were stars. Lin had once asked him about them. He told her what he had read in an old book he found in the trash. She listened as if he were telling her about something impossible. Maybe he was.
Nox went home.
Empty hands were heavier than full ones.
♢ ♢ ♢ ♢
Their home stood at the end of a dead-end alley that the locals called the Crack. Here, three buildings came together so closely that almost no space remained between them, and sunlight never reached the Crack. But the wind did not blow through, and that was more important.
The house itself was assembled from whatever could be found. A frame of thick pipes driven into the ground. Walls of metal sheets, some of which had clearly once been the skin of an airship. On some sheets, letters in Dwarvish could still be read. Nox had once tried to figure out what was written. It turned out to be something like "cargo bay number four." Not very poetic.
The roof was canvas stretched over a frame, and it leaked in three places. Under each hole stood a can. Nox changed them as they filled.
The door, or rather what served as a door, a metal sheet on hinges, he slid aside and entered.
Lin sat by the stove.
She sat right on the floor, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins. Her hair fell over her face. The stove was not lit. There had been no coal for two days, and she knew it, but she still sat next to it. Maybe out of habit. Maybe because there was nowhere else to sit.
When Nox entered, she raised her head.
She looked at him. Then at his hands. Empty hands. Her face did not change. No disappointment, no reproach. Only a quiet understanding that appears in seven-year-old children only when they have had to grow up too soon.
«You were gone long,» she said. Not a question. Just an observation.
«The Fangs blocked everything,» Nox answered, sliding the sheet back and propping it with the rusty rod. «I had to go down.»
«Into the tunnels?»
«Yes.»
Lin was silent. Then: «Was there anything there?»
«No.»
He took off his jacket and hung it on a hook by the wall. The jacket was old, patched in five places with different pieces of fabric. Each patch was a story. Nox remembered them all.
Inside his shirt, he found a handful of dried berries. He had forgotten about them. He had stuffed them in there in the morning when he found them under a stall at the market, and then there had been no time to eat all day.
He gave them to Lin.
She looked. Divided them in half. Half she held out to him.
«I already ate,» Nox said.
«No,» Lin answered. Simply. Without intonation. She just knew.
He took them.
They ate in silence. The berries were tough, almost tasteless, but his stomach accepted them with a gratitude that Nox preferred not to notice. Hunger in the slums was a constant, like the noise of the magic trains and the smell of smoke. You stop perceiving it as something separate. It is just there.
Beyond the walls, Mirtarind lived its night life. Somewhere near the port, a magic train was humming, leaving for another city. Its horn was low, drawn out, like the voice of something very large and very tired. Then silence. Then someone's footsteps on the roofs, fast, then silence again.
«Nox,» Lin said quietly.
«What.»
«Tell me about the stars.»
He looked out the window. Beyond the dirty glass was only darkness and smoke. But he knew the stories. He had read them. He had remembered them. For Lin.
«Tomorrow,» he said. «Now sleep.»
She did not argue. She climbed onto the bed made of old sacks and pulled up the blanket. Nox waited until her breathing became even. Even and deep, sleepy. Only then did he let his shoulders drop.
He sat down by the cold stove.
The silence in the room was alive. The kind that happens only late at night, when most people are asleep, and the world stops pressing on you with all its weight for a second.
Nox sat and stared into nothing.
And then the cold hit again.
Not gradually, like in the tunnel. Sharply. As if someone had turned on something inside him that ran on cold instead of fire. From his ankle, where the scars were, up his leg, to his spine, and there. There again. The same sensation as in the pumping station. A growing. A movement under the skin.
Nox clenched his teeth.
The tattoo. He remembered feeling it in the tunnel when he lost consciousness. Along his back. Along his spine. Alive.
He stood up, walked to the shard of mirror on the wall. Small, triangular, nailed at face level. He used it to see if anyone was behind him when he entered the room. An old habit.
He took off his shirt.
Turned sideways. Tried to see his back.
He saw it.
Along his spine, from his lower back to the base of his neck, stretched a mark. Black, shimmering in the dim light of the single candle burning by the wall. It was moving. Slowly, barely noticeably, like a living thread. As if someone had sewn something that breathes under his skin.
Nox looked at it for a long time.
He had heard of magical tattoos. Everyone in the slums had heard. They whispered that in the academies, you received them after years of study. That the rich children from the upper quarters got them after special rituals. That it was a rarity, a gift, a destiny.
No one said they appeared on a thirteen-year-old street urchin after the bite of a black snake in an underground tunnel.
Nox put his shirt back on.
Sat back down.
"Shadow," the word came on its own. From somewhere deep, from those stories he had heard out of the corner of his ear, from those words the old men whispered. Shadow. One of the nineteen. Rare. Dangerous. The one even mages fear.
"If anyone finds out…" The thought did not have time to form. He knew what would happen.
Lin stirred in her sleep. She muttered something, turned over onto her other side. Her face in the candlelight was serene. The way Nox never saw it during the day. During the day, she was always on guard. Always a little tense, always ready to jump up. But now, just a child. Just a small person who was sleeping.
Nox looked at her and felt something sharp in his chest. Not pain. Something more important than pain.
The cold in his spine pulsed quietly, rhythmically. The tattoo on his back lived its own life.
Nox lay down on the floor next to Lin's bed. Closed his eyes. He was too tired to think. Sleep came quickly, covered him completely.
And almost immediately, something woke him.
He opened his eyes and lay still, not changing his breathing. Instinct. The same one that lives in every slum child somewhere between the lungs and the stomach. It screams before your head has time to work, and it says one thing: "Do not move. Listen."
There was someone else in the room.
Nox could hear Lin breathing. Even, deep. He could hear the drip from the can under the hole in the roof. He could hear the distant hum of the city beyond the walls.
And he heard something else.
A quiet scraping at the door. Then silence. Then a smell. Sour, heavy, like rancid meat and raw earth. Not a human smell. Nox knew it. Everyone in Ravnes knew it.
A mutant.
He slid his gaze, not turning his head.
The creature stood by the curtain. Slightly shorter than an adult, but twice as wide in the shoulders. Its body was covered in something that from a distance looked like clothing but was skin, thickened, cracked, almost like bark. One hand ended in normal fingers. The other ended in a bone plate, wide, with a sharp edge. Growths stuck out from its back. They moved slowly in time with its breathing, as if living separately.
The creature was looking at Lin.
"No."
Nox stood up. Without unnecessary movement, without haste. He just stood and picked up the rebar leaning against the wall. The only weapon he had.
The mutant turned its head.
There was almost no face. Flat, deformed, with hollows instead of a normal nose and a mouth that did not close all the way. Its eyes were yellow, murky, like a dead fish's. They did not glow. They just stared.
Nox held the rebar with both hands. His heart beat steadily. Fear was there. Of course it was. But fear was not what stopped you. Fear was what kept you alive, if you knew how to work with it.
The mutant lunged.
Fast. Much faster than its build suggested. Nox dodged right, nearly falling, and the bone plate sliced through the air a centimeter from his temple. The wind from the blow pushed his hair. Nox struck the rebar against the growth on the creature's back. The metal clanged. The mutant did not even turn.
A blow from its free paw came from the side.
Nox flew into the wall. Shoulder, side, back of the head. The metal sheet rang from the impact. The world went white for a second. Then it came back, but blurred, swaying.
Lin woke up.
She cried out once, short, and fell silent. She huddled into the corner, pulled up the blanket. Smart. Do not run, do not scream. Do not draw more attention to yourself than there already is. She knew this. Nox had not taught her. She had figured it out on her own.
The mutant turned to her again.
"No."
Nox threw the rebar. It was useless. He jumped onto the creature's back, grabbing the growths with his hands. Burning hot skin under his fingers, hard as wood. The mutant roared. Not loudly, almost soundlessly, only a low vibrating tone that made the metal walls tremble. It tried to reach Nox with its hand, but its back was too wide, the angle awkward.
Nox held on. With both hands, with all his weight, his legs wrapped around the creature's sides.
The mutant began to shake him, trying to throw him off.
And then something happened.
Cold. Again the cold, but not quiet and rhythmic like all night. It struck from his spine into his hands, into every finger, down to the very nails. The tattoo on his back blazed with a pain so sharp that Nox opened his mouth involuntarily. But he did not let go.
The shadows in the room shifted.
All at once. The shadow from the stove, long and narrow, swayed left. The shadow from the curtain twitched as if from a wind that was not there. The shadow of the mutant itself, the dark mass beneath its feet, began to stretch upward, deform, reach toward Nox's hands.
Nox did not think about what was happening. He just held on.
The shadows wrapped around the creature. Not like ropes. They simply became part of it. They entered it, into that hot, deformed flesh. The mutant froze. For the first time during their fight, it froze completely. It stopped moving. It stopped breathing.
Then it fell.
Nox jumped off before the body hit the floor. He stepped back, tripped over a can of water, did not fall. He stood and stared at the motionless creature.
The shadows returned to their places. They just came back, as if nothing had happened. The cold in his hands faded. The tattoo on his back quieted to its usual quiet pulse.
Silence filled the room.
Nox raised his gaze. Lin was looking at him from the corner. The blanket pulled up to her chin. Her face was white as paper. Her eyes were wide open, but not wild with fear. She looked at him the way you look at something you do not understand but are trying to understand.
«Nox,» she said quietly.
«It is alright,» he answered. His voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat. «It is alright, Lin.»
«Your hands.»
He looked down.
Black mist was fading from his fingers. Slowly, in thin threads, it rose into the air and dissolved. Where he had touched the skin, dark smudges remained, also slowly disappearing. Nox watched this and did not know what to say. Did not know what to think. Did not know anything.