Red Litten World

by Alexander, K. M.

  “No reason,” she said with a slight smile. She turned, walked towards Hagen’s room, then stopped and turn to look at me once again. Her long lashes blinked slowly and then she said, “Wal... I’m glad you’re okay.”

  I returned the smile. “Me too.”

  We stared at the mounds of paper spread out over the counter. Sleep had come quickly and I had spent the night in a restful abyss. In the morning I woke refreshed and alert, though I was ravenous. We’d cleaned out the pantry the night before, and it hadn’t been much.

  “I could probably get food from Elephant,” I said.

  “You think?” asked Hannah. She seemed in better spirits this morning, though she still seemed uneasy whenever we mentioned the research.

  “We’d need something, information to trade, but I’m sure I could convince her.” Returning to her lair wasn’t appealing, but we were hungry.

  “I don’t like it. How can you trust someone who hoards food while people – children – starve?” said Samantha. She began flipping through papers.

  “I don’t trust her,” I said. “But it’s an option.”

  “Let’s figure out this puzzle first, then worry about food.”

  My stomach complained at that, but I settled in, leaning heavily over the countertop. I never had the mind for research—all the books and translations. It made my head hurt. But this was my third crack at it, so I supposed it was time to get used to it.

  “Did we translate the Aklo?” I asked, looking at a series of copies Hagen had made sometime over the last few days. He nodded, and took a seat at a barstool.

  “I made some progress. I’m nearly done. I hate translating this shit, it always feels like bugs crawling around in my brain.”

  Samantha agreed. “The legends say Aklo is alive. That each word is a gateway for what it represents—a portal. There’s a story, pre-Aligning tale of an old wizard who wrote down a lot of tales in Aklo. As the words flowed through him they left behind remnants. He was slowly driven mad. He took his own life.”

  Hagen shuddered.

  “It’s a hideous language, vile to the tongue and the mind. I hate that we see it so often,” said Samantha.

  “I have my notes as well, er... my sketches at least,” said Hannah.

  “Let me see those,” Samantha said. Hannah handed them over and watched as Samantha flipped through the pages, studying the sketches.

  “Adderley’s not complete. His body was covering most of it. They match though, right? I’m not crazy?” Hannah asked.

  “Oh, they match,” said Samantha, almost in awe. She looked up at her brother. “Hey, do you have a copy of Fortier’s Compendium of Geases? It’s pretty recent, post-Aligning. Few hundred years old maybe.”

  Hagen thought about it and then nodded, slipping his paper and pen away and climbing the spiral staircase to the shelves on the second floor.

  “You recognize the mark?”

  Samantha nodded. “I just want to be sure.”

  Hagen returned a few moments later carrying two massive brown tomes bound in leather. Each was about the size of a small suitcase. He grunted as he hefted them on to the counter. As they banged down puffs of dust dislodged from between the pages and blew out in tiny brown clouds.

  “I have two copies, about fifty years apart. Different presses as well. One looks to be Reunified? Wilmarth Press?”

  “Yep, that’s one of ours. Is it the more recent one?”

  Hagen nodded and slid it closer and Samantha pulled it in front of her and began flipping through the pages.

  “So I finished getting this Aklo translated,” Hagen said after a few moments. “But it’s odd. It’s nothing at all like what I’ve seen in books. It’s rougher.”

  “Well, it’s written in blood,” Hannah said.

  “I don’t mean like that. I mean it’s simple... almost childlike. It’s not text taken from a tome or some pagan scripture. This is different. Like reading someone’s diary.”

  Samantha looked up from the copy of the Compendium and looked at Hagen’s notebook. She blinked and then grew still, her lips parting slightly.

  “Wait,” said Hannah. “Back up a bit. Where does Aklo even come from? How do we know about that?”

  Samantha frowned slightly. “Well, it’s kind of hard to believe.”

  “Try me.”

  Hagen adjusted his glasses and peered at Hannah. “Well, Aklo is pre-Aligning. You’ve heard the tales, the Firsts returning to earth and wreaking havoc?”

  Hannah let out a sigh. She had been with us on the Broken Road. Curwen had kidnapped her. She was as much a believer as the rest of us.

  “Aklo is their language,” explained Samantha. “Supposedly. Any records we have, real records, have been lost. All we have are manuscripts copied from manuscripts. For a long time no one believed it existed at all. For decades everyone thought it was a mistranslation. No one took it seriously.”

  “So what happened?” Hannah asked.

  “Well, we found a few full books of Aklo. It was during an expedition outside of the territories. Far to the east, past Leng, in the ruins of an old city on the shore of a dry lakebed. The archeological team had been looking for old technology when they discovered the tomes.”

  “The Farnese Manuscripts,” said Hagen, almost reverently.

  “It was the first time anyone had seen books like that. The church at the time labeled them blasphemous and they ended up on the forbidden shelf in some library. It wasn’t until hundreds of years later that they were found and scholars began to translate them.”

  “And? What was in them?” asked Hannah.

  “It’s far less interesting that you’d expect. It was a list of genealogies, nothing relating to the Firsts, but it was the first solid evidence of Aklo as a written language. Since then more and more books have slowly cropped up. Some real, many fake.”

  Hagen jumped in. “It’s easy to spot a fake though. It’s a raw language. Nothing like Strutten, Cephan, even Laningal. It’s bizarre and twisted, but very blunt. You can usually tell when someone’s forced it.”

  “Can it be spoken?”

  Samantha shook her head.

  “Not really,” explained Hagen. “Not by us, at least. Some have speculated that more bestial races, the bok or the lengish, might be able to, but I’ve never seen evidence of that. Mostly it’s seen as a forgotten piece of history. Well... until recently.”

  “Until recently,” I repeated coldly. My mind was distant. I had seen the language appear three times now. First with Peter Black and The Children of Pan. Then a second time in the den of Curwen, who had terrorized the town of Methow to madness and manipulated flesh to create horrible creatures. Now, once again, in Lovat, at the site of two murders.

  I picked up Hannah’s sketch again and looked at the twisted shapes of the letters. “So what does it say?”

  “It’s like an appeal. A sort of... prayer. Whoever wrote it is hoping to earn a place at the side of the master. The victim is a sacrifice for the master, a way to bind them together. Then there’s a stanza that looks like lines of a song, over and over, like a chant. At the end there’s a plea for mercy, and praises for the greatness of the master.”

  “What master? Do we have a name?”

  “No, no name at either scene. There is a reference to the master as Founder, but that’s all.”

  “Wait, a Founder? I know that term,” said Samantha.

  “Yeah?” said Hagen.

  “Wal, remember that book I had on the Broken Road?”

  “Um, vaguely. Written by some crazy lady. The, uh... Mason?”

  She smiled. “Close. Keziah Mason. A Treatise on the Writings of Keziah. She believed the Firsts talked to her in her sleep. She used the term Founder instead of First.”

  We all paused, thinking this over.

  “So we have two victims,” said Samantha. “One, a poor male kresh killed on Level Eight, the other, an elevated male human, killed on Level Nine, or what will eventually be Level Nine.”<
br />
  “That’s about as far apart in kind as you can get,” said Hannah. “A poor kresh and a hume doctor.”

  The conversation I had with Patrice in the Society chapterhouse came to mind.

  “Three,” I blurted.

  “What?” they all said in unison.

  “There’s three murders. When I went to the chapterhouse, the woman who ran it told me about another killing that matches our pattern. The victim was a dimanian woman named Bonheur.”

  “Bonheur,” repeated Hagen softly, his eyes narrowing behind his spectacles as he drummed the spurs along his knuckles on the countertop.

  “I don’t know much, but Mrs. Bonheur was found dead in her flat on Level Seven.” I let that sink in, seeing the reactions on Samantha and Hannah’s faces as they realized that was one floor below the kresh. “Her blood was covering the walls. Strange writing. No one could read it.”

  “She had a son, an Aimé Bonheur,” said Hagen.

  “Right. You know him?”

  “It was all over the monochrome a few weeks ago. Aimé was killed. He was about to start running the family business. He was found with his neck crushed. Still an open case.”

  “How long ago was Mrs. Bonheur murdered?” asked Hannah.

  I scratched my chin. “I don’t think it was too recent. Month? Maybe longer?”

  “So, before Taaka.”

  “Level Seven?” Hagan asked.

  I nodded.

  “Seven, Eight, Nine,” said Hagen.

  We were close now. I could feel it.

  “If I could only see the Aklo at Bonheur’s murder. In both Taaka’s and Adderley’s the Aklo was similar, but the chants were different,” Hagen said, he was speaking faster now, flipping pages of notes.

  “Could it be different killers?” I wondered aloud.

  Hagen shook his head. “No. I think it’s the same one, the lines were too similar. Everything had the same pattern. Lots of words being repeated.”

  “What were the chants?” I asked.

  Hagen scratched behind his horn and stared off for a moment before responding. “At the Taaka scene it was sing-songy, like the chorus of a song. Let me find it...”

  He pulled out a notepad and tapped some lines of Strutten.

  Samantha leaned over and read the first passage. “Take this gift. One more step. One more step. Upwards goes the Founder. Take this gift. One more step.” Samantha squinted. “Are you sure it read ‘step’? The descenders look off to me.”

  Hagen squinted at the notes. “My best guess. The lighting wasn’t very good and we got interrupted. I was just trying to capture it all before Bouchard kicked us out.”

  One more step. What did that mean? I wasn’t sure what to feel. Fear? I was sure it would come. Exhaustion? That seemed closer. Hannah moved away from the counter and began to walk a slow circle around the living area.

  I rubbed my eyes and slumped back in the same wooden chair I had sat in the previous night. I leaned back so my neck arched upwards and stared at the wall behind me, watching Hannah. There was something here. The writing. The song.

  The gift mentioned in the little chant was clearly the sacrifices, that was easy. It was the symbolism behind the other lines that was hard.

  Upwards goes the Founder. There was something there but what was it? Why did the sacrifices happen where they did? Why did Taaka, Bonheur, or Dr. Adderley matter? What purpose did their deaths serve?

  “Wait,” said Hagen.

  We turned to look at him.

  “The chant at Adderley’s scene.”

  “Yeah?” said Hannah.

  “It’s... well,” Hagen cleared his throat and read. “Take your servant. One more step. One more step. Upwards goes the Founder. Take your servant.”

  Your servant. You wouldn’t write that unless...

  “Suicide. He killed himself,” said Hannah.

  “After he killed the others. I think Adderley was our killer,” said Hagen. “I think all these deaths, the Aklo, was his doing. His death at Kiver’s party was the final ritual—a suicide—the final and ultimate sacrifice to his god.”

  “But if he’s dead,” I said. I recalled the news segment from earlier, the broker who had become the latest gilded murder. “...then his murders aren’t related to the gilded. Bouchard’s wrong. The murders are completely unrelated.”

  “A doctor,” said Hannah. “Who’d have thought...”

  I leaned back, remembering my brief encounter with Adderley as the blood rushed to my head. He seemed nervous, but otherwise harmless. Then again, so had Black and so had Curwen.

  So how was I supposed to approach this? We had Kiver’s killer, but the killer was dead. Any contact he had with the First was lost with him, wasn’t it? Should I just waltz up to the Shangdi Tower and say, “Hey, don’t fret. That guy we thought was murdered in your new flat, well, he killed himself. You’re safe. Sorry about Taaka?”

  “By the Firsts, it’s a pharos!” Samantha nearly shouted the words. I whipped myself forward snapping into a sharp seated position and looked at her. Awe had crept into her voice. She stabbed a finger at the book with a thick thump.

  “What? What’s that?”

  Samantha looked serious, her eyes flicking at her brother and then back to the paper. “Hannah, you’re sure this is right?”

  She stopped her pacing and looked at Samantha with an indignant expression.

  “Sorry, it’s habit,” Samantha said. “It’s just, they’re nearly identical and that means... well... it’s an altar. Each altar signals the next. Like a beacon. Ancient Curwenites called them a pharos. Just as their idols change so do their places of worship. They used pharos to guide each other from tabernacle to tabernacle, claiming they could hear the calling in meditation.”

  “A pharos for what? Guiding another group of killers? Kiver’s places are both large but it’s not like they’re temples,” I said. I pushed off from the chair and leaned over the counter to peer down at Hannah’s sketches. Dark lines formed the rooms of each murder scene in three dimensions. A symbol was drawn on the floor, two more on walls near the head and the foot of the symbol. It was well done. If only we’d been able to visit the Bonheur murder scenes...

  “In some belief systems altars have various uses. These are designed to be channels. Adderley meant them to direct a flow of whatever energy he thinks he’s unleashing when he kills.” She pointed at the two symbols copied from the walls found near Taaka. “You remember these on the wall, and this one on the floor?”

  Hannah nodded and then realized what Samantha was suggesting. She took a deep breath and leaned against the counter to steady herself. “They’re entry and exit points.”

  The pieces all fell into place. I traced a line with my finger from one symbol through the big symbol on the floor where the body had lain and then ended on the wall opposite. It lined up.

  “Which direction was Kiver’s old place?”

  “North-east... roughly,” said Hagen with a shrug.

  “And where in the room were the entry and exit runes?”

  Samantha looked down and studied Hannah’s drawings again and then looked back up. Her eyes blinked, her breathing grew more shallow.

  “In the new scene, where Adderley died,” she said and looked at me, her mouth a sharp line. “Wal... there’s no exit.”

  “He’s calling his Founder,” said Hagen, his voice soft.

  We all paused, letting that sink in.

  I leaned forward. “I bet if we traced a line we could draw it through Kiver’s old place, to his new place, and down to the Bonheurs’. I bet beyond that we’d find more. More deaths on each level moving down, down to the Sunk if need be. One straight line.”

  Hannah, Samantha, and Hagen all drew back from the pile of books and documents. They looked at me and then at one another.

  “Like a beacon,” Hannah said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.“But for what?”

  EIGHTEEN

  LOVAT SEEMED LIKE IT WAS WAKING UP FR
OM A BENDER. The rancid smell of smoke hung heavy in the air and few people were out and about. It was still freezing. My breath came out in thick puffs of white, little clouds that disintegrated as I walked through them.

  We saw a pair of dauger in dull masks wearing the bright yellow of city employees. They were taking a break from sweeping up glass and rubble. Gas masks hung around their necks and their jumpsuits were stained a gunmetal gray from the knees down. They shivered in the cold and passed a cigarette between them. They watched us as we passed, heads slowly turning to follow our progress down the street.

  “Hey, be careful,” called one. “Breakers are out!”

  “And LPD,” said the other, laughing. “You figure out who to avoid.”

  Samantha and I glanced at each other, and then plodded on. This city was eating itself. I never liked the police. Had my own reasons for not trusting them, but hearing others speak with such disdain made it seem like we were on the brink of a civil war. Maybe we were already there.

  I didn’t like being unarmed. Argentum was still out there. The city had strict policies about weapons, but it seemed time to ignore them.

  Samantha walked next to me, her back straight, eyes alert. She’d refused to let me venture out alone. Said every time it happened I ended up hurt. I supposed she was right. She had changed into roader boots that laced up mid-calf. They clomped on the cement as we walked, echoed off the brick buildings of King Station.

  Hagen and Hannah had gone to the big steel-and-glass library on Level Four. It was an ancient thing, pre-Aligning, stained with rust, many of its glass panels boarded over. It was rarely used but full of information. Lovat Police Department records were public after a year, and we hoped there would be some leads on Adderley’s other victims. It was a long shot. People died in this city every day. Thousands of them. If the police hadn’t clued in on a serial killer then Hagen and Hannah may not either. Still, the more we were able to find, the closer we would get to the lair of the First. If we could find it, maybe we could kill it. Before it killed anybody else.