by Dan Stout
“My drug of choice goes in my mouth, not my eyes.” Micah raised her drink in toast. “Plus, if you’re right, then snake oil might be harmless for most people, but it’d be a bad, bad trip for someone like me.” She shook her head vigorously and flexed her fin until one of the ribbons braided through it fell loose. She caught it playfully in her teeth, snorting with laughter as it gleamed with the silvery sheen of runes.
“So the manna you use,” I said, keenly aware of the fibrous strands of invisible cobweb around me. “It’s not snake oil?”
“Nope.” She looped the ribbon around one finger and carefully rethreaded it through her fin piercing. “Not a drop of tears to be found.”
If that was true, then why did I feel its presence?
“But it’s new manna, isn’t it? From the strike, I mean.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s entirely next gen.”
“Well,” Donnie interjected, “hypothetically speaking, and all.”
“Yeah, hypothetically.” She trailed off as she drained her martini.
But if she didn’t use snake oil and I could still sense the cobwebs of bonding, then . . . I slid back into my seat.
New manna versus old.
The times I’d felt the tingle or fought through cobwebs—Jane’s vial in the alley, Sherri’s sudden strength, and Turner’s death. All of those had involved snake oil. But it wasn’t the addition of angel tears that triggered my reaction. It was manna from the oil fields. Older magic, performed by traditional sorcerers like Paulus and Guyer using manna reserves harvested from whales, didn’t have any resonance for me.
And if the manna was the key, then maybe Jane’s killing didn’t have anything to do with the drug trade after all.
Jaw clenched, I leaned forward.
“Micah,” I said. “You told me you used to have a corporate gig. Where did you work?”
“Telescribe Communications,” she said. “TCI. Big data. Big boredom, more like.” She giggled. “Donnie is so much more fun.” She rolled into Donnie’s side, chuckling as he tickled her back.
I knew someone else who worked at Telescribe. A man who’d been gravely injured, and had extensive experience with bodily restoration.
“You said an old coworker contacted you about a fix for . . .” I nodded apologetically to Donnie. He only grinned and waved, watching the air behind his hand as if it were trailing colors or sparks.
“Yeah,” she said. “Kind of a flake but he’s easy on the eyes.”
A handsome face at a fundraiser. Sculpted muscles and a jawline carved from granite. Skin so perfect he didn’t sport a single wrinkle.
“What was his name?” I had to ask, to hear it said out loud, even though I knew the answer.
“Mitri Tenebrae,” she said. “But the reconstruction work was just his way to get in the door. He really wanted to meet the CaCuris.” She sighed contentedly. “Why, what about him?”
My chair groaned as I sat back, absorbing the impact of her words. Tenebrae had taken a full backhand from Thomas CaCuri’s ring-covered fingers, but the sorcerer looked perfect at Gellica’s soiree the next day. At the time I’d admired his makeup job. But it had been much more than that.
We’d been searching for someone with the wounds on their hands because Mumphrey had found flesh on Jane’s teeth. But what if her killer hadn’t needed to bear those wounds? What if he’d repaired the damage using the same magical techniques he’d offered to Donnie? A sorcerer like that would be in dire need of manna, and would single-mindedly pursue anyone he thought could help him secure a source. Someone like Gellica.
I stood, all the pretense of friendliness gone from my voice. “I need to use your phone.”
* * *
Biggs led me out of the audience room and to a side hallway with a small phone table. I picked it up and he stepped away. I forced myself to control my jittering fingers as I dialed Gellica’s office once again. If she was with Tenebrae, she was in danger.
It rang through to her answering service, a bored-sounding assistant who seemed unimpressed by my insistence that Gellica call in to the Bunker for a protective escort. I hung up and stumbled away, thinking desperately, wondering what else I could do as I made my way out of the mansion.
I must have taken a wrong turn, because I emerged into the pool area. The backyard of the place had a bigger footprint than the apartment I grew up in, and attractive people in very little clothing strutted around in a half sober daze, wide grins and glassy eyes showing just how out of it they were. But the overwhelming sensation was of the webs, and the skittering, tingling sensation of tiny legs traveling up my arms, crisscrossing my body, my face, my mouth and eyes. The crowd writhed to the music. Celebrants at the back of the crowd had their heads thrown back, eye droppers in the air, tiny iridescent pearls of snake oil dripping into unblinking eyes.
I pulled back, but the webbing was so thick it almost pulled me in. The image of Dale Turner’s rippling arms resurfaced, and I struggled to control myself, not to boost any of the webs, not to strengthen or weaken the fibers running from and through the glassy-eyed sycophants who sheltered in the wings of Donnie Starshine.
I sprinted away from Donnie’s mansion, fumbling as I unlocked the door of the Hasam. I drove away, pawing at the radio and calling in to the Bunker. I put in a request for a warrant and a support team.
We were going to pay a visit to Mitri Tenebrae.
31
EVEN WITH THE BIGGEST PUSH I could manage, it still took a full day to get a warrant. Warrant writing is something of an art, and I was working on a tenuous-at-best connection between a pair of back alley murders and a powerful sorcerer aligned with the AFS military encampment. So I picked my audience carefully. Judge Robinette was a curmudgeonly son-of-a-bitch who delighted in any opportunity to annoy the establishment. I suspected he issued it because he simply couldn’t pass up the chance to publicly embarrass the feds.
While I secured the warrant, my partner had broken the news about Sherri to Ronald. One of the worst jobs in law enforcement. He’d left the kid in the care of the children’s services, and tried to leave the cat in the care of the kid, but that had gotten shot down by children’s services, who were working to place Ronald in emergency foster care. So Jax now had a rescued cat in his apartment and was trying to distract himself with a stack of paperwork on the arrests at the angel’s roost. When I crossed the Bullpen and waved the signed warrant, Jax abandoned his half-finished work with enthusiasm. Because some things can’t wait.
Jax and I rolled in to the Armistice with a full complement of patrol cops and a single divination officer. DO Guyer was along for the ride because we weren’t sure what we’d be getting into when we went looking through a sorcerer’s travel bag. And also because she told me, “If you turn up one more manna-rotted body without me, I’ll kick your ass.”
I paused at the door and looked over our team. I kept my pep talk simple.
“Pretend there’s a defense attorney watching your every move. Don’t give them the chance to throw out evidence or restrict information. No mistakes, no missteps, nothing to clean up later. We do our job correctly, right here, right now. Understood?”
The building manager opened Tenebrae’s apartment, saying, “Discretion and quiet in this matter would be greatly appreciated,” as we pushed past him and into the residence. Jax and I moved with the patrol, while Guyer stood in the wide living area that had been packed full of Titanshade’s wealthy elite a few days earlier. The patrol’s call of “Clear!” rang out from the kitchen and bathroom.
I glanced over the shoulder of the patrol officer who opened the study. The weird animal sculptures still peered down at us and the smell of clay was the same as before, but the air felt closer, the tingling cobwebs thicker and more tangible. The patrol stepped aside and called, “Clear!” and I walked past her, to the set of tools wrapped in canvas. Knocking it open
, an array of metal loops and scrapers spilled across the tabletop, along with a set of small-bladed metal implements, perfect for shaping details, that I now recognized as dental knives and spatulas.
From across the suite the call came from the second bedroom. “Locked!”
I called to Guyer. She was dressed far too sharp for the work about to be done. I wondered if she was hoping to get camera time, or if she had other plans after the raid.
“You want to magic that open?” I said.
She sighed and waved over the building manager. He unlocked the bedroom door.
“Manna’s expensive,” she reminded me. “No one locks doors with spells and incantations when a key will do the job just fine.”
The bedroom door swung open and the manager stepped back. As before, the room was dominated by a travel chest so large that I could have stood inside with room to spare. It was closed, as was the smaller box on the side table.
“Nothing too extraordinary,” said Guyer.
I eyed the latches running down the face of the steamer trunk. “We’ll see about that.”
On the other side of the bed, one of the patrol fiddled with the locked box atop the dresser, using a small pry bar on the lock. When it popped open, he immediately chocked out a, “Dammit!” He threw his arm over his nose and mouth, letting the pry bar fall to the carpet with a muted thud. Inside the box was a collection of human and Mollenkampi jawbones. We’d found our missing body parts.
* * *
We circled round, the tech’s camera popping and fizzing, recording the items for posterity and processing. The teeth, jaw, and mandible had tumbled out across the dresser top when the box opened. They looked as though they’d been exposed to a heat source, drying them out and preventing them from creating too much of a mess. The end result was a box of grisly, nightmare-inducing beef jerky. Guyer glared at the body parts, fingers intertwined in the hem of her cloak.
“Well?” I said.
“Definitely some kind of divination ritual.” Guyer crouched, examining the bones at eye level. Even I could see that some of the runes traced on the bones had been corrected, like a kid struggling with their handwriting. “Piss-poor work,” she said. “Looks like he had no experience with it.”
“I thought he was a communications expert.”
“Yeah, and you know how to make a long-distance call to someone on the coast,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean you can chat with your dead grandmother.”
“Fine,” I said. “But with what you see here, would he have been able to contact his victims?”
She mentally hemmed and hawed her way through the answer, before ending up on, “Can’t guarantee it, but yeah. Probably.” She rolled her shoulders. “I’d say the human remains look more promising than the Mollenkampi.”
Jax scribbled something in his notepad. “What about you? Could you contact them?”
She frowned. “Doubtful. Your guy’s already tried, likely more than once.” She eyed the remains once more. “It’s what I ran into with your male victim, what’s his name?”
“Turner,” I said. “Dale Turner.”
“Multiple attempts— It’s like seeing the figure of someone wearing layers. Each layer added on makes the details less distinguishable.”
I grunted and turned back to the grotesque display on the dresser.
“How much would this,” I pointed at the pile of rune-scratched body parts, “whatever it is, cost?”
“For someone not used to divination? Pretty close to my annual salary,” she said. “Which is why I think that whatever he tried with your Jane Doe didn’t work.” She indicated the Mollenkampi parts. “If it had, I doubt he’d have spent the time or manna on contacting the second victim.”
“If he’s so bad at divination,” said Jax, “why would he try it at all?”
“Low profile,” I said, replaying the conversation I’d had with Guyer in the body stacks. “Much simpler than holding a hostage. Assuming you’re okay with killing them.” I wished like Hells I’d heard back from Gellica by then.
The rest of our team was busying themselves by tearing apart the rest of the residence. One of them had been eyeballing the locked trunk while we talked.
“Am I clear to pop this thing open?” he asked.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Guyer?”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said. Then her eyes widened. “No, wait!”
The patrol cop backed away, hand frozen in the air. Guyer crossed the room and stared at the steamer trunk. She grabbed the lamp off the bedside table and tilted the shade back, shining its light along the lid like a makeshift flashlight.
“There’s something on here,” she said.
“Magic?” I asked.
“No. I don’t think so. Some kind of tripwire.”
“Great,” I said. “Okay, everyone out. Jax, call the bomb squad. Until we know what’s in there, we don’t do anything.”
It was a half hour wait for the bomb squad to arrive, and we had to evacuate the rooms on the rest of the floor and the floor below. Jax, Guyer, and I waited it out in the hallway. So much for the manager’s request for discretion.
“What I don’t understand,” said Jax, “is why the case would be booby-trapped, but not the room. What’s more important to hide than evidence tying him to multiple homicides?”
The squad arrived and suited up in heavily padded blast-suits. They went over the trunk and all the surrounding items. After a while the lead bomb tech came out and popped her helmet off. She had a round face, and the barely suppressed glee of an adrenaline junkie.
“Can’t say for sure what it is,” she said. “Can’t open the case without disturbing the wire, can’t move the case without snapping it.”
I peered past her, into Tenebrae’s room. “What happens if you cut it?”
“Don’t know.” She peeled a sweaty strand of hair from her forehead. “And you’re not going to like the answer when you ask how we find out.”
So the bomb squad went in to do their thing. They attached a remote snipper to the wire, then unraveled the control cord while backing up to a safe distance down the hall. The rest of us watched as, with a single nod of warning, the bomb tech clipped the wire. From inside Tenebrae’s room, a bell tolled, its sound deep and muffled. It came from inside the chest.
* * *
Once the squad was clear, we were left with the contents of the chest. The trunk doors folded outward, revealing a mirror-lined interior. With the doors open, it created a mirrored U-shape, like a portable changing room centered on the clay sculpture it contained. The sculpture was of Mitri Tenebrae, full scale and completely in the nude, an incredibly detailed work of art, except for a complete lack of hair. None of that was as disturbing as the fact that it seemed to be alive.
The steamer trunk contained an elaborate series of rods and supports, holding the sculpture suspended, like a human gyroscope, leaving it free to spin and move, which is exactly what it was doing. The clay Tenebrae twitched and moved like a living thing. The mouth even pursed and puckered from time to time, as if he were speaking, though it made no sound. It sometimes looked very, very worried.
“What is it?” I asked Guyer.
“Not sure.” She reached into the trunk and located the small brass bell that had rung when it opened, like a convenience store with a bell above the door.
“Can you tell if it’s magic?” said Jax.
“Like can I see the threads that connect the world?” she said. “The warp and weft that weaves us all into a universal constant?” She paused for a single, dramatic heartbeat. “Because no. I cannot. No one can.”
I held my tongue. To me, the invisible sensation of cobwebs wrapped round the statue were clear as day. Reaching out, I touched one of the metal struts that supported the gyroscope, and gave the statue free range of motion. Immediately a tingling wall o
f spiderwebs wrapped themselves around me. Tenebrae had bound even the metal in some way.
Guyer continued. “What I can say, however, is that’s pretty screwed-up shit. And if that’s not magic, I don’t know what it is.”
“What about the bell?” Jax asked.
“Definitely magic.” She moved closer to the trunk. “I don’t know what it’s linked to, but these,” Guyer indicated the glyphs imprinted on the bell’s sounding edge, “are for communication at a distance. And they are very well done. Not like the low-rent divination magic he attempted over there.”
“So it’s magic,” said Jax. “What does it do?”
Guyer peered at it again. “Like I said, it’s some kind of communication device. Nothing fancy. Maybe it rang another bell. Maybe it acts like a magical pager. I don’t know for sure.”
“And the statue is linked, too?” Jax said. “To Tenebrae?”
“Best guess,” said Guyer.
“It moves when he does.”
“Yeah, and it—” she pulled back. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” I asked.
“It’s a simulacrum. A bigger one than I’ve ever seen, but that’s what it is.”
“A what?”
“A re-creation of the subject,” she said. “Down to every detail. The fact that it’s showing him move means that it’s got a continuous link. Every cut and pimple he develops appears on the clay version.”
We watched the statue move gracefully in place. It mimicked climbing movements, as if ascending a ladder. When the motions switched to going up stairs, it was a good guess that it was a fire escape. We watched him reach his destination, the simulacrum’s leg swinging up, then over an obstacle.
“So it shows what he’s doing?” I said. “What’s the point of that?”
“If the sorcerer is skillful enough, and has enough manna, then he can make it run the other way, too.” She studied the thing with narrowed eyes. “Add a wrinkle to the sculpture, the subject’s skin puckers. Smooth it out on the sculpture . . .”