by Victor Milán
“You were exceedingly large?”
“I was enormous. Over two hundred and eight centimeters tall, and strong as a corpse-wagon horse.” He chuckled ruefully. “With possibly some yet to grow. They say that the wild card has a mischievous streak, that grants those whom it touches what they most desire. Though I hate to think so many people long to die in horrible fashion. So say, rather, it’s influenced by what dominates one’s subconscious at the time of changing.
“I was bookish, uninterested in sports and less in the lifetime of manual labor my father planned I should follow him in. I became obsessed with the thought that my size was a cross, and wished profoundly to be smaller. I was lucky, I suppose, in the joker I drew. Though I never envisioned becoming as you see me.”
I prayed to the Virgin to draw the Black Queen, Candace thought, because that was the only way I saw to escape the Hell I was trapped in. I didn’t get that wish. But, indeed, Darkness permeated my mind, my soul, and so.…
“Apparently the wild card agrees with you,” Candace said. “You seem to have aged quite well.” He must be at least in his eighties now, in February of 2014.
“In a way,” he said. “But that’s one of the gifts Mama Evernight grants to those who agree to help her in special ways.”
She didn’t really want to explore that subject much further at the moment. “So she can do more than just sting?”
“Oh, so very much more,” said M. Sluggo. Slugs writhed all over him in merriment. He seemed a cheerful sort. Toby nodded his black and white head and let his big pink tongue loll extra-far over his pink gums and black underlip. “She can make you feel goo-ood. She spoke in your mind as she did Benoît’s that first day back, didn’t she?”
That alarmed Candace more. “Did she read my thoughts?”
“No,” the Archive said. “She cannot do that. But she can read the chemicals in your blood, and the electrical impulses which sing along your nerves—sense your mood, your feelings. And she can manipulate them in order to communicate her thoughts directly into your mind. Although she finds that strenuous, and prefers to talk through her Speakers.”
“But she seemed to respond to what I was thinking.”
“Out loud, right?” Sluggo asked.
“I guess. How did she know what I said?”
“Her fibrils can do a lot more than sting or sample your biochemistry. They hear, and smell, and taste, as well as touch. Though they cannot see; Mama is blind, which scarcely inconveniences her.”
“Taste?”
Candace thought about the whiff of sewage in the water by her boots after she left the tourist parts of the Catacombs, and her stomach turned over. Wow, I’m learning so much about myself down here. Such as that apparently I’m still capable of getting grossed out.
The three laughed, in their various ways. “Our Mother cannot afford to be squeamish, you see,” the Archive said. “Her body needs sustenance, and lots of it. In time, everything that dies below Paris, she consumes. And a great many things come here to die.”
“And her—fibrils—extend into the sewer system?”
“A rich source of nutrients,” the Archive agreed.
“How far do they go?”
“Throughout much of the ancient subterranean network that underlies Paris,” the Archive said. “Somewhere upwards of a hundred and sixty kilometers of tunnels, currently. The rest she either is still gradually infiltrating, or does not care to, for her own reasons.”
They passed an opening to a large side-passage, or possibly chamber, dimly lit by electric lights hung from the limestone ceiling. Parts of it were obscured by sheets of plastic hung from lines, or other makeshift sight barriers. In the area she glimpsed, Candace saw living people among the bones.
They were working, or talking, or just hanging out. Some faces were additionally illuminated by screen-glow from laptop computers or smartphones. Another sawed with a hacksaw at a piece of metal on a stout bench. Some sewed, some did things she couldn’t make out. Most chatted; many laughed. Children played.
Some were obviously jokers, some were not. At least one was an ace of sorts: a little girl of maybe ten squatting in a red dress with daisies printed on it, her face all solemn with concentration as she entertained half a dozen younger kids by passing a lively orange flame across her palm and over her knuckles, like a magician walking a coin over her hand.
What shocked Candace was how normal they looked, after all the dark glamour people on the surface had built around Evernight. They were clearly poor people. But they were nothing more or less. Just people, leading their lives as best they could.
“Huh,” she said. The Archive glanced up, saw the direction of her eyes, and smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “This is the real underworld. This is what Mama Evernight devoted her life—and whatever’s come after—to building and maintaining for us.”
“Not very Infernal, is it?” M. Sluggo asked.
“I’m reserving judgment on that one,” Candace said.
* * *
“What’s going on,” Candace asked what she had mentally dubbed the Three Fates in confusion.
“We speak—”
“—For Mama Evernight.”
“She connects to us with her fibrils—”
Candace forced her reeling mind to quit focusing on the fact that the words came out of the mouths of three presumably different people in sequence, yet as smoothly as if spoken by a single person, and concentrate on what Mama Evernight was saying through them.
“—and stimulates the words inside our minds, in a way familiar to you by now. We also supply whatever trace nutrients are currently needed to keep her and her fibrils aware and functioning. In return she stimulates in us a profound sense of well-being.”
Great, Candace thought. Mama’s Milk is morphine. Well, whatever works.
“I’m no physiologist,” she said, understating mightily as curiosity got the better of judgment, again, “but it seems like she—you’d—need a lot of processing capacity to handle all the information your, uh, neural network provides you. And even in your current condition”—whatever you’d call it—“don’t you need more than just, uh, food to function?”
“Mama’s cerebrum has absorbed and supplanted most of the bier beneath her,” said the Archive. Though her three escorts had extinguished their torches when they entered electrically lit tunnels long before they reached Mama’s resting-place, they’d all accompanied her here.
“I have other assistants,” Mama’s serial voice said, “who share their bodily-organ functions with me. They lie in separate chambers; I call them my Sharers. Those who converse for me I call, unoriginally enough, my Speakers.”
Madly, Candace wondered what Mama called those who handled excretory duties. Never mind, she thought. I don’t need any asshole jokes just now.
But she felt compelled to gesture at the walls and say, “Are they—?”
“Compensated, among other ways with a deeper sense of bliss than my Speakers are. After all, the Sharers not only do not need to move, they do not need to. And yes, most of them are voluntary.”
And yes, you’ve reminded me how absolute your law is down here, Candace thought. “I’m told my brother is here,” she said. “I need to see him, please. I—I haven’t seen him in years. I thought he was dead.”
“The fugitive from the Leopard Men,” Mama said.
Candace nodded.
“He is here, and safe. He brings danger with him. But I shelter him.”
“Why?”
The three Fates shrugged as one, which Candace had to step hard on herself to keep from dissolving into hysterical laughter at. Not because she was afraid of offending Mama Evernight. Because she was afraid she wouldn’t stop.
“In a way, he belongs. He is one of my children: he’s broken. Too broken to function on the surface. Evernight isn’t just for jokers, you know. You, an ace, are broken, too, or you would not be here.”
Seeing Candace’s expression through her
Speakers’ eyes, Mama said, “How could I not know? I tasted your blood, child. How well I know the bittersweet tang of the alien virus.”
“What about the Cataphiles? Are they all broken, too?”
“Not in the profound way you and my other children are. They are but hobbyists, and never penetrate to this side of the secret entrance they showed you from the Gate of Hell area. Not if they do not wish to receive a brisk warning—at best.”
Candace moistened her lips. Despite the humidity down here, they had grown rather quickly dry. “May I see him?”
“Yes.”
Candace felt her whole body slump as tension gushed out of her. She actually swayed, once, as she stood. “Thank God. And thank you, Mama.”
“Wait and see. Now, as for your ace: you need not divulge your powers at this time, since you clearly do not wish to do so. I try to allow my children the greatest possible freedom. However, though you have comported yourself well so far, I must urge you to continue to act in strict accordance with the laws of hospitality. Specifically, the duties of a good guest, which you are in our house—my house.”
So I’m a good girl, am I? I’ll show you, you sanctimonious cadaver. She held her head higher and stared Mama Evernight in the hollowed, ossified eyelids where her eyes used to be. “So long as I don’t feel threatened, I’ll behave.”
“Oh, I do not threaten. Rather, I warn. Briskly, as I warned you. If the situation merits it, I shall issue a second, sterner warning.”
Candace was already repenting her brief episode of oppositional defiant disorder. But not enough to let go of it completely. “And then?”
The Fates smiled. “If you keep misbehaving,” they said as one, “Mama spank.”
* * *
When her burly joker escort opened the door with a pangolin-scaled arm, Candace’s heart jumped into her throat.
It’s him! It’s really him!
He looked at her and his brown eyes got wide. But he said in low voice, “Call me Hébert.”
He spoke Lingala, a major lingua franca in both Brazzaville and its twin Kinshasa, as well as in much of the Congo River basin. They had grown up speaking it as a second language, after French. Emotion almost choked off her reply. “Cécile.”
Then tears flooded her vision, and they hurled themselves into one another’s arms so hard they almost clashed foreheads, and for a time there was nothing but hugging and sobbing incoherent endearments, the simple joy and grief of two lost children who had found each other again.
Almost nothing. The survivor part of Candace’s brain didn’t fail to notice the door was promptly shut behind her. And locked. A stout door.
Finally they broke apart in unison—in Candace’s case, at least, largely for air. With deep inhalations came a return of control. And attentiveness. Her brother’s room, she saw in a quick glance around, was tiny and spare, with bare limestone walls enclosing a bed, a chair, a writing desk, and even a flush toilet. Not bad, she thought. For a cell.
“Sis,” Marcel said in French, with the tears still streaming down his dark face. “You’ve got to get me out of here.” He spoke French now. His earlier use of Lingala meant he thought Mama didn’t know that language—and was probably listening.
“First,” she said, forcing her mind and soul to steady, “you need to tell me how you came here. How the Hell did you wind up with the Leopard Men?”
“The same as you did,” he said, with an alkaline rasp. Lingala again. “They kidnapped me. It was when they rounded up Mama and Papa for liquidation for asking too many questions about what happened to you.”
Candace clamped her mouth down on the puke that tried to gush up from her knotting belly. Knowing intellectually what had happened to her parents was one thing. Having it confirmed … But you “knew” Marcel was dead, too. Hold onto that.
“It was your success in their child-ace force-growing program, you see. They wanted to see if you and I shared a predisposition to draw an ace from the wild card.”
That rocked her back in horror. “They dosed you with the virus?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t pass their preliminary tests. They were only looking for candidates who might become not just aces, but a highly specialized kind.”
“Were-leopard.”
He nodded and continued in French. “They kept me on anyway. They needed somebody to clean their latrines and wait on them—that was beneath the dignity of one of Alicia Nshombo’s crème de la crème, you know? When it all came crashing down and they had to flee, they took me with them. Because they still needed a lackey.
“By the time the group that had me made its way here, they’d found a new use for me. They were already building a new organization to carry on the Revolution. But they discovered I liked to learn and do book things, and that turned out to be more useful to them than shining their shoes and cleaning their weapons. By the time I turned thirteen, I was accountant for Léon. He’s chief of the Leopard Men cadre here. He’s a true Leopard.”
“A shape-shifter?” Candace sucked in a sharp breath. Supposedly the were-leopard ace was Alicia’s own: the power to grant the gift of shape-shifting to a few, fanatically loyal, especially gifted followers. And supposedly it died with her. But it hadn’t.
There were never more than a handful of true Leopards. Fewer survived the PPA’s fall. Any are too many, she thought. “I’ve heard of him,” she said. She forced a shaky smile. “I can believe that’s what they wound up having you do. You always were the studious one.”
The Leopard Men who ran the child-ace horror camp were the kind of swaggering bullies, not necessarily stupid but aggressively anti-intellectual, who’d taken to calling themselves “Alpha” in the USA. They’d find clerk-work womanish and weak.
He grinned. “And you were always frivolous, hein?”
She shrugged. For an accountant, he’s turned out pretty sturdy, she noted. Apparently even being a clerk for the Leopard Men’s shiny new criminal operation was strenuous. Once a runt even shorter than she was, at seventeen he’d shot up to 172 centimeters, seven taller than her, and filled out considerably. More wiry than bulked-out, but well-packed with muscle.
“So why did you blow up a bus kiosk? That’s the kind of no-question terrorist attack my contacts tell me the Leopard Men have been staying away from since they got here. Also, it was lame.”
His smile got wider. “It stirred up the French, though, didn’t it?”
“The Western powers are all paranoid about terrorism. The idea someone might do to them what they’ve spent centuries doing to us terrifies them. Which I guess makes sense. But all the more reason to ask why they had you do such a thing, when the Leopards’ve worked so hard to make themselves look like nothing more than a criminal gang elbowing for power in the big city.”
“They wanted to test my resolve. Also send a message to the Corsicans, the Maghrebi out in the banlieues, and the Traveler mob what could happen to them if they kept trying push the Leopard Men off the top of the heap.”
That’s stupid, Candace thought. And utterly characteristic of Leopard Men. She was lucky, in a perverse way, that her training had been mostly masterminded by the American ace Tom Weathers. Who even if he did turn out to be just another brand of evil imperialist, and crazy to boot, was a thoroughly professional revolutionary terrorist. And an experienced one. He’d taught her well. “So how did you wind up here, of all places?” she asked. “You’ve always been afraid of the dark.”
“I freaked out. The blast scared me so much I shit my pants and just ran. That’s why I’m wearing these castoffs the Evernighters gave me. The hole I ducked down brought me straight to Mama’s people.”
I was wondering why you were dressed like a street beggar. The Leopard Men had always been sharp dressers, affecting dark suits and neckties even in the hot, humid Congolese bush.
“I guess they were right to test me, no? Because I failed. When I calmed down, I realized they’d figure I was going to sell them out. And I’d heard of this p
lace. You can’t be on Paris’s underside and not. We—the Leopards and I—even knew where some of the entrances to Mama’s little kingdom were. Why not? It wasn’t as if even they dared to try to come to Evernight without permission.”
“Which Mama wasn’t about to grant them.”
“Oh, no. She hates terrorists. She doesn’t like plain violent criminals much better.”
“So why did they take you in?”
“They said it was because I belonged here. I was broken, as they put it: a young, exploited kid, forced to do things I didn’t want to, scared shitless—literally—and looking for a way out. A refuge. Evernight’s all about refuge. So they’re sheltering me. Even though it’s bringing the exact kind of heat on them that Mama’s tried for years to avoid, they tell me.”
“Are you worried they’ll turn you over to the authorities?”
“They’d never turn anybody over to les flics. Mama’s even more absolute than the Corsicans about that. If they decide I’m really a terrorist, they’ll just send the National Police my head, along with a note handwritten by Sortilége. She’s one of Mama’s Speakers, even though she’s mute. She only communicates by Tarot readings and writing on an Android tablet. She has really beautiful penmanship, I guess.”
“Is that why you’re so eager to get out? It looks to me as if this place is just what you’ve been hoping for: a safe haven.”
“Sis, it’s the closeness. And the dark. You remember. I always slept with a night light, and you always used to tease me.”
She grinned. “It was my job as your older sister.”
“You didn’t have to enjoy it so much. But—I guess I have a touch of claustrophobia, too. They kept us locked in cargo containers when the Leopard Men first smuggled me into France, as many kids as they could cram in each. A lot of us freaked out. I did. But I never fell to the bottom of the heap and suffocated, anyway.”
She shook her head. The Nshombos and their goons had so much to answer for, she thought. But, on the bright side, most of them did.