“That duck has been in the same family for three generations,” said Dr. Crisp.
“The duck is immortal?” I squeaked. People looked around in surprise, and I flushed.
“The duck is… long-lived,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
“We don’t know how long-lived it will be. The only way to know if the duck is mortal is to stay alive until the duck dies.”
“That’s very scientific,” I said. “But that duck could drastically alter the way this organization is run. Finally, we’ll have clear insight into upcoming events. And as far as we know, it will be an asset forever. Think of the good we’ll accomplish!”
He smiled, and then the door of the duck’s room slammed open. Everyone’s head jerked around in shock.
Henderson stood in the doorway, his hands soaked in blood, feathers in his hair.
“This duck tells me nothing!” he shouted.
For a moment, we all froze in horror. Behind Henderson, Lady Farrier looked as if she was going to throw up, and Sir Henry was holding his head in his hands. Henderson took a deep, shuddering breath, and spoke again, this time quietly.
“This duck tells me nothing.”
“And so you felt compelled to kill it?” asked Bishop Alrich dryly. Henderson looked at him, his hands shaking. He took a step toward Alrich and then, showing the first sign of genuine insight all night, elected not to take another.
“What did you do to the duck?” asked Gestalt in a tense voice.
“I followed all the traditional procedures,” said Henderson. “I used a purified blade. I invoked all the beneficent elements…”
“You cut the duck open?” I squeaked.
“How else does one examine its entrails?” he snapped.
“How about an MRI?” proposed Eckhart, lighting a cigarette. Henderson shot him a look.
“The auguries are only revealed in the creature’s death,” said Henderson.
“Or not, as the case may be,” said Alrich.
“I can’t understand it,” said Henderson. “Everything was done as prescribed. That is how you take information from waterfowl.”
“You unbelievable cretin,” said Gestalt. “We’d already verified that the duck could provide accurate answers to spoken questions.”
“What?” said Henderson weakly.
“What?” said Wattleman, looking up.
“I don’t believe this,” said Farrier.
“Should we kill him?” wondered Eckhart.
“That might be best,” mused Farrier. “Bishop Alrich?”
“I just had dinner,” Alrich murmured.
“We were just thinking about killing him, not draining him,” said Eckhart.
“And then perhaps we could try reading his entrails?” proposed Grantchester.
“Now, wait just a moment!” shouted Wattleman. “Clearly, this was a horrendous mistake, but what’s done is done, and we must adapt to these new circumstances.” He spoke firmly, using every shred of authority he could muster. At that moment, he was not a man who had just seen the dream of decades messily and unnecessarily killed in front of him. He was a general. Our leader. It was impressive, I admit, and we all settled back warily. Henderson surreptitiously mopped his brow with the sleeve of his hessian garment.
“So… not killing him then?” asked Eckhart. I let out a snort of laughter, and everyone looked at me.
“Sorry,” I said in a small voice.
“Mr. Henderson,” said Wattleman (I noticed that he’d dropped the “Master”), “has signed all the usual confidentiality declarations. In light of this debacle, we will impose additional restrictions upon him. Rook Thomas, I am certain that you can arrange this.”
“Yes, Sir Henry,” I said, wincing as he called me Rook. I had no idea how much Henderson knew, but using Checquy titles in front of him could only further prove our strangeness. Beyond our doings with an oracular duck. And our apparent eagerness to kill him.
Aaaand the guy with the condor on his head who’d just walked by the door to the hallway, which some waiter had left open.
“Good girl,” said Wattleman, and he proceeded out of the dining room, followed by the rest of the Court.
It was now up to me to take Henderson up to my office and nod as he signed sufficient forms to ensure that he never spoke about the Checquy, the duck, or anything he’d seen.
So that was my day. I must admit that although I feel bad for the duck, I also feel pretty bad for myself. Now I know how little time I have left, and there is so much to get done.
Love,
Me
35
Someone here has got to have a fucking aspirin.” Myfanwy groaned. “I mean, I once read that these incident vans are equipped to reconstitute people who have been dissolved by acid.”
“Well, actually, I don’t think—” began Cyrus, but Myfanwy waved him quiet.
“I don’t care, I don’t care!” said Myfanwy. “I am seeing spots, and if this doesn’t stop, in a few moments everyone is going to be seeing spots. Somebody get me an aspirin, please.” Various flunkies were dispatched as Myfanwy was ushered to the trailer. The dim sunlight was blinding, and she covered her eyes with her hands and allowed herself to be gently guided by Ingrid and one of the large bodyguards.
The pain grew greater the closer they approached the police station, and the sensations reminded her of the skinned Belgian in his tank, the effect his warped biology had on her. Grafter work for sure, she thought bitterly. However, whereas the encounter in the car had turned her stomach, whatever was in that police station was grinding on her thoughts.
“Rook Thomas?” came a deep but hesitant voice that reverberated through her skull. The large bodyguard’s hand tightened on her shoulder.
“Yuh?” she snapped. She peeked through her hands and caught a glimpse of gigantic gloved fingers.
“I’m Pawn Steele” came the diffident voice. Through her migraine, the name stirred a memory.
“Pawn Steele. You were at Bath, right? You were the one who went in with the chain saws and cut everyone out of the pods in the basement.” Myfanwy remembered him well. A gigantic man whose ancestors had clearly come to England by means of some boats with dragons on the prows. Since today’s society frowned on the family trade of pillaging, he’d been drawn into the Checquy, where his potential for directed mayhem was appreciated.
“Yes, sir.”
“What can I do for you?” she asked, trying to ignore the sir.
“Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this site smells the same as the incident at Bath,” said Steele.
“Smells? No, I hadn’t.”
“Well, one of my gifts is a heightened sense of smell,” said Steele.
“Really? Take my hand,” said Myfanwy, ducking her head away from the sun. As soon as she felt his skin against her fingertips, she reached out through his senses. The smell of chemicals and fungus swept through the scent centers of her brain, bypassing the inconvenient route of her nose. “Oh, yeah. It’s the same.” What had Shantay called it? “Like a gigantic porcino mushroom—only this time it’s like it’s been doused in formaldehyde.”
“Exactly,” said Steele. “Is that… is that your headache?” Myfanwy hastily broke contact.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “Yes, it’s the same smell, and the events are linked. But I’d appreciate it if you kept that information to yourself.”
“No problem, Rook Thomas. But I was thinking that if you like, I could just go in. I could get all armored up and hack those people out.” His voice was enthusiastic, and even through the pain, she could feel his heartbeat increasing at the prospect.
“I see what you’re saying, Pawn Steele, and don’t even think about it.”
“Hells, yeah! I’m on it! Wait, what?”
“I’m sorry, Steele, but in my last operation, the manifestation ate three Checquy teams, including one team of Barghests, before we went in, and I almost had my brain broken down for fertilizer. Now t
hat police station over there is giving me a bitch of a headache, so no one is to approach it. I don’t want any more members of the Checquy to be sucked into amorphous entities, especially since we can’t guarantee that it will treat them as gently as last time.” Belatedly, she recalled her observer status. “Is that all right with you, Pawn Cyrus?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay. Now, will somebody please get me a fucking aspirin!” The noisy bustle of the control room died as Myfanwy and her entourage entered, and everyone took on a hunted expression. For a moment, Myfanwy was ashamed, but then she decided they could probably all bear to shut the hell up and turn off the lights for a few minutes.
A Checquy doctor came in and ran her ungloved hands over Myfanwy’s skull and down the nape of her neck. She muttered to herself about node sensitivity and then injected Myfanwy with something that fizzed in the syringe and had the effect of draping a soft wet blanket over Myfanwy’s brain.
“You’ll feel some fogginess for a few minutes,” rasped the doctor. “And then you will need to urinate for a few more minutes.”
She moved away as the workers resumed chattering and Myfanwy waited for her feet to touch the ground. Everyone seemed to acknowledge that she would not be making any contributions for the moment, so she settled back with her eyes closed to listen to those around her and try to prevent the top of her head from unscrewing itself and letting her brain glide away on cotton wings.
“Pawn Carmine has a variant of millimeter-wave vision,” someone was saying. “He says there’s a cube of flesh in the front room and no other life forms in the building.”
“So they’ve all been absorbed?” asked Cyrus.
“Presumably” came the answer. “That cube fills the entire room. We can’t see through the windows because the flesh is pressed up against them.”
“Do the doors open inward or outward?” asked Cyrus.
“I’ll ask Carmine to check.”
“He doesn’t get closer than twenty meters,” warned a woman with a Scottish accent.
“He’s also telescopic.”
“Or he could just use binoculars,” said the Scot. The intercom crackled.
“This is Pawn Carmine,” said a calm voice over the speaker. “The doors open inward—they’re made of wood with windows.”
“Wasn’t there furniture in there? A counter or something? Chairs?” asked the Scottish Pawn.
“Yeah, but it looks as if it’s all been shoved out of the room or crushed against the walls by the expansion of the cube.”
“Is the cube, I don’t know, doing anything?” asked Cyrus.
“It’s pulsating gently.”
“How big is it? I know it fills the room, but can we get measurements, please?” said the Scottish woman, who appeared to be Cyrus’s second-in-command.
“It’s five meters by four meters,” said a little drone at a computer. “And two point five meters high.” That’s a pretty big cube of flesh, thought Myfanwy.
“Pawn Motha is just arriving from Wells,” said the little computer nerd. “She’s equipped with magnetic resonance. We’re setting her up with some binoculars twenty meters from the police station. If you want to wait a moment, she’ll be able to give you some idea about what’s inside the cube.”
“Pawn Carmine, you can see through walls but you can’t see through skin?” asked Cyrus.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ingrid, I need to go to the loo,” said Myfanwy quietly. “Where is it?” They excused themselves and Myfanwy found herself in a cubicle smaller than an airplane toilet. It did have a connection to the intercom, however, so she was able to listen to the report of Pawn Motha with the MRI eyes.
“Okay, I’m getting some interesting structures here. We’ve got some layers of extremely dense muscle on the outside, but it’s not uniform.”
“What do you mean?” asked the Scot curtly.
“Well, Pawn Watson, it’s a patchwork. I can see where different sheets of muscles have been fused together. The seams aren’t bulky, but they’re definitely welded together from separate sources.”
“You say it’s dense?” asked Cyrus.
“Yes—and a good half meter thick. I don’t know whether it could stop a bullet, but it could handle quite a bit of force without rupturing. I’m guessing that it’s been taken from a few sources and merged together. The strength of any section is going to depend on the sources.” Myfanwy frowned, tensed some muscles to stop any incriminating sound effects, and flicked the intercom button.
“This is Rook Thomas. Cyrus, I would anticipate that some extreme muscle-strengthening agents could be present. We’ve seen them in effect before.” She was thinking of the alarming transformation of Van Syoc. “Please continue.” She clicked off the voice switch and listened to the commentary proceed.
“I can see a couple of tattoos,” said Carmine. “There’s a little distortion on two of them, and one of them is really stretched out. I think it used to be an anchor.”
“Check the police roster for former naval men” came Cyrus’s voice.
What was that medicine? Myfanwy wondered, still in the cubicle. I don’t think I’ve drunk this much. There was the coffee I scraped off the desk, that amber liquid Ingrid poured for me, that goop they made me drink before they scanned my stomach in those delightful medical examinations, the water I had when I got in last night, and that weird layered drink… She tallied beverages and then called to Ingrid through the door.
“Yes, Rook Thomas?”
“I’m going to need a bottle of water when I get out of here,” she said loudly before turning her attention back to Motha.
“All righty, so beneath the muscle strata we have a cage of bones. It’s asymmetrical,” Motha reported. “There’s a pattern, but there are gaps. It’s really quite fascinating, like a mosaic.”
“So it’s like armor?” Watson asked.
“No, the structure probably does provide some armoring, but the flesh isn’t compacted within. It’s honeycombed. It has pockets of air and pockets of fluids, which are providing some internal support. It’s brilliant,” she said breathlessly.
That’s centuries’ worth of Belgian alchemy for you, thought Myfanwy, who was coming to the end of her bladder and wondering if her brain had been drained. The headache was completely gone, and the fogginess felt like it had been peed out as well.
“Anyway, if I’m right, the bones have been scattered around inside the mass,” said Motha. “I think they’ve been disassembled within the cube and redistributed.”
“Organs?” asked Cyrus.
“They’re in there, all right. Strung together and fluttering away. They’re packed in very efficiently, and cushioned by more fluids. And the brains are hooked up!” Motha sounded entirely too enthusiastic, thought Myfanwy. “Well, actually, there’re only parts of the brains; it looks as if some slicing and dicing has been done.”
Who is this woman?
“Anyway, they’re surrounding a central brain, which has had considerable modifications as well. And there’s some metal and ceramic stuff in there—appliances, I’m thinking.” Myfanwy remembered the satellite phone they’d found in Van Syoc’s brain and spine. Odds were that skinless bastard from the limousine was listening in on the police station.
“Eyes?” asked Myfanwy as she washed her hands.
“I’m not seeing any,” said Motha. “Carmine?”
“Nothing on the surface” came the contribution. “Nor ears. Nor hair. Not even body hair, so far as I can see.” Myfanwy came out of the lavatory and accepted a bottle of water from Ingrid. One of the large bodyguards was waiting outside the bathroom, while the other lurked about at the end of the hall. The entourage walked back to the command center, and Myfanwy looked around for Li’l Pawn Alan, her eyes finally settling on the corner of the room where he seemed to be hiding, far out of everyone’s way. Myfanwy nodded to him absently and retook her seat.
“The press has begun asking questions,” said Watson, the S
cottish woman. “Do we have anything planned out? Any instructions from the Rookery communications section?”
“They’re still working on it,” said an Indian woman at a monitor. “Because of the gunshots, they can’t use a nonviolent excuse like they did in Bath. And since we’re not allowed to mention ter—”
“Don’t say it!” exclaimed Myfanwy, Cyrus, Ingrid, the two large bodyguards, and Li’l Pawn Alan. The Indian woman blinked under the onslaught, and shrugged.
“In any case, reports are beginning to pop up on the Web, though thankfully not from any reputable sources,” she finished before turning back to her monitors.
“Rook Thomas, I don’t think there’s a way we can retrieve those people,” said Cyrus to her seriously. “The ones in the cube.”
“I concur,” she said gravely. “The only thing we can get out of this situation is the end of it. And that must be done as quickly as possible.” The thought of the civilians who had been plugged into the Grafter war machine turned her stomach. And she seriously doubted that the human block had been placed there simply to fill up space in a Reading police station. “I want to see the cube obliterated as soon as possible. In fact, I think the entire site needs to be cauterized. What are our options?”
“Well, ordinarily, Rook Thomas, I would think about standard demolitions or some sort of fire agent. However, taking into account the, uh, information you shared in the car, I’m not sure how successful those would be.”
Man, the stories of the Grafters really took hold here, didn’t they? thought Myfanwy, eyeing Cyrus. He was a decorated Checquy operative of high rank, but now he was sweating and red-faced.
“In these circumstances,” continued Cyrus, “I’d think it would be best if we combined explosives, napalm, and the abilities of Harper Callahan. Do I have your authorization to summon him?”
“If I recall correctly, Harp Callahan is nine years old and is still at the Estate. He has not yet risen to the rank of Pawn, right?” asked Myfanwy, already knowing the answer. The purple binder had taken care to lay out the details of the Checquy’s deadliest weapons in its early pages.
The Rook: A Novel Page 43