When limbs start flying, Gideon doesn’t hesitate. He runs.
Voice 2 is very displeased about what it perceives as base cowardice. It rants and raves, but Gideon tunes it out. He’d take being a coward over being dead any day.
Besides, he has a cunning plan.
As he runs to the far side of the square the viric filter slides over his monocle, revealing reflective surfaces all around with a tell-tale green glint. It’s no substitute for the protection and utility of his old cosmogone spectacles, but the Bazaar made it quite clear what they thought about traitors to the noble Glassman profession. When the Special Constable squad came round after the truth came out, the head thug ground the spectacles under his boot with an ugly chuckle. Voice 1 was inconsolable.
Yet another abuse of authority. The Bazaar oversteps too far and too often.
But enough about that. His time as a Glassman hadn’t ended well, but he had kept a souvenir – one that he fashioned himself for Shroud business. The Shroud had little supernatural power to wield in the War of Illusions, or so it appeared to those aware of the hidden struggle. Gideon’s role was obscured behind veils of myth and superstition. He liked it that way.
Assassins, after all, aren’t known for their love of the spotlight.
He needs more height to make sense of the battlefield. The crowds in Seven Devils Square are thin and getting thinner, but they are still very much in the way. Gideon bounds up to a wrought-iron fire escape staircase attached to the side of a brick tenement building. The ladder dangles a few feet above the ground, so he jumps, grabbing on to the bottom rung with both hands and grunting under the strain of bearing his own weight. Then he climbs hand-over-hand until he finally reaches the first landing of the fire escape and collapses like a fish out of water.
EXHAUSTED ALREADY? YOU REALLY MUST BE OUT OF SHAPE, jeers Voice 2.
For once the voice is right, but he would never admit that. Unfortunately, it’s in his head, so it hears anyway and radiates insufferable smugness.
After climbing a few more storeys up – a little more slowly this time - Gideon licks his finger and tests the wind, and makes a show of judging angles for any passing employers who happen to be watching him climb up a fire-escape.
The device – he prefers to think of it as that instead of a weapon – is in his coat pocket. A tangle of long barrel segments, assorted vents and sprockets assemble into a very small rifle of burnished brass. He puts the parts together automatically, his hands moving from experience. The device looks more like a child’s idea of a gun than an actual gun – it is covered in vents and tubes that serve no obvious purpose, and there doesn’t appear to be anywhere to load ammunition.
Finally, he slides the scope into a long rail on the top of the gun. Voice 1 squeaks in anticipation – the scope is one of his finest, offering magnification far beyond the reasonable and fitted with a full array of flawless lenses.
The barrel is narrow, and if it fired bullets, its calibre would be a mild annoyance to anything larger than a house-cat.
Gideon doesn’t hunt big game. He hunts strange game.
Fingerkings are hard to attack on their home turf. When they enter the Neath, they’re usually puppeteering some poor human’s body. Where they don’t think to protect themselves is in their reflections. The Folding Snake-Skinner Rifle is designed to exploit that weakness. When a Fingerking is around, mirrors near them offer a glimpse at their true form in the Mirror-Marches – much like cats, though he has no quarrel with them – and the rifle can fire through a mirror.
The Shade doesn’t have any connection to Parabola that Gideon knows of, so mirrors won’t act as portals while it’s around. What mirrors are very good at, though, is reflecting. The rifle reaches its full potency when its beam passes through a mirror. Multiple reflections will amplify it further.
Gideon attaches the rifle firmly to the railing of the fire-escape and scopes in. Having a spotter would be handy, but there’s no time for that now. He’s surveyed the square – on the far side his colleagues struggle fruitlessly with the Shade, blood and limbs flying. In a square this size, the junction of seven separate streets (an inauspicious number), there are countless mirrors and reflections. The monocle shows them all in green.
All he has to do is get the right angle to reflect his beam from multiple mirrors, and the Shade will be struck down before it even knows what hits it.
It’s a little like playing pool. He has to judge the angles and the ricochets to strike the ball into the pocket. The only trouble is that, like so many of his devices, he only has a single shot. At the core of the weapon is a Ray-Drenched Cinder that can be excited to produce a burst of cosmogone – it may be a Neathy colour, but it’s the colour of remembered sunlight, and that memory of law is enough to kill a Fingerking.
Will it work on the similarly impossible Shade? There’s only one way to find out.
Gideon finds the first mirror, up on the second floor in the clothing department of a large shop. He adjusts a dial on the scope and the magnification ticks up, the next mirror lurching into focus – this one is further up, on the top floor of a tall building, but it’s angled down so its reflection shows a café down at ground level. He zooms in further and further until the Shade is in his sights at last.
Got you.
The melee is chaotic. The Shade weaves between attackers seamlessly, delivering a thunderous punch to Lady Orosenn’s jaw before clashing blades with Frye and tussling with Dirae. Gideon aches to pull the trigger, but while it’s engaged with those three he daren’t fire for fear of hitting them.
Henchard charges, and gets a knife in his back from Emma for the trouble. Then the Shade slams his head into the cobbles with a sickening crunch.
An opening. While his colleagues are reeling under the Shade’s assault, the Shade itself is unmolested for a split second. He has a clear shot. Voice 1 hums ever louder.
Gideon pulls the trigger.
The device lets out a fearsome roar of power, steam blasting from the vents all down the sides. A beam of pure golden light erupts from the barrel, visible to all around as it hits the first mirror, then the second, then the third, describing a triangle across the Seven Devils square. The beam strikes the Shade directly in the torso and continues blasting for several seconds.
Gideon observes it through the sights. Then it looks directly at him. It seems completely unharmed by the ray, and it holds up its shining scimitar into the beam –
no no no no no no no no, squeals Voice 1.
Gideon dives to the floor of the fire-escape a scant moment before the device is struck by its own reflected beam. He covers his eyes, not daring to look directly at it. He hears cracking and popping as the device’s metal warps. More and more steam fills the air as it overheats, and finally the beam stops firing.
When he dares to look again, the device is a mangled mess of components dripping from the railing and the Shade is unharmed far below.