I’ll take one of the motorbikes, it’s the only thing for it. I couldn’t really say how long it’s been since I last got on a motorbike, but my hope is that the gay coat makes the gentleman. One is sputtering on its side on the ground, the engine’s still running. I stand it back up and I’m ready to set off towards the Iron Fist, when I’m overcome by doubt and I stop in my tracks. I leave my new vehicle on its kick-stand and limp to the back of the van.
Ugube didn’t ask me where I was. He didn’t ask me about the goods, or the driver. Four professionals come out of nowhere and ambush me on the way to the warehouse. Four pigs.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Gods, please tell me it’s just because I’m a junkie and I need to sleep.
I open one of the crates.
It’s empty.
Or, full of shit about to hit the fan.
Ugube has tried to screw me over big time.
“Shit!” I scream, flinging one of the lids into the road. I open them all, one after the other, in the increasingly vain hope that it’s a trick to get through the checks or something else. It isn’t of course, and then it wouldn’t make sense to set all this up with me on board. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing.
A fucking trap.
Clearly, there’s a bullet in the back of the head waiting for me at the bar. Ugube wants me dead while I’m actively working at pissing off a more important dynasty, when there’s no going back. I’m alone and injured, I daren’t risk using my mobile or credit card. Result: my life is worth less than my weight in dog shit. And I don’t see anybody selling dog shit.
The dramatic turn of events in the last few minutes leads me to reconsider the usefulness of that nine millimetre magazine. There’s no point shooting a machine gun when I have my faithful companion with me, but the bullets are the same, who knows when I’ll be able to go home and get a fresh supply.
Before leaving the scene I stick a corner of my trusty raincoat into the petrol tank of the van, to use as a fuse. I’ve got more chance of winning the lottery than forensics have of worrying about collecting fingerprints at a shoot out on the Sixth, but all I need is some wanker from the disciplinary committee knocking on my door and asking questions about my involvement in a massacre in the slums so I’d better be on the safe side. I light the piece of fabric and hotfoot it towards the motorbike. I instantly regret jumping onto the chrome chopper, when my wounds irradiate pain through my entire body until my teeth vibrate, despite the horse-dose of anaesthetic I prescribed and administered to myself ten minutes ago.
I have to get to the boot of my car before I bleed to death. There’s no point thinking about everything else until I perform this pressing task.
And then, even though it is desperately sad, but I must confess that riding a bike after all this time without falling off like a total idiot requires my full attention.
At least I’m too busy to shit myself.
Farther down the road, a roar covers the rumble of the cylinders.
“Do you need any help?” The customs officer is concerned when he sees the sorry state I’m in.
“Yes, I need you to raise that fucking bar,” my throat rasps behind my badge.
The grey jacket delivers and I set off again before the bar has reached the top. I graze it with my head. My vision is blurring now, I almost veer off into the other lane and end up like a mosquito on the windscreen of a truck.
At the lay by I break too hard, the back wheel skids on the dirt road and I fall off. I get up, moaning like a fifteen-year-old girl who’s just lost her virginity. Almost there. When I get to the car, I drop the keys three times while I laboriously fumble with the lock of the boot. I fling it open and scratch the back looking for the false bottom, meanwhile a black curtain is falling in front of my eyes. I finally find the hidden flap and pull it. I’m on my knees, the top half of my body inside the car. I’m groping blindly, tossing aside the various useful objects I keep in the car for emergencies, until my fingertips chance upon cold shatterproof glass. I hope it’s glass and not a reinforced cylinder.
I open it and drink. A fifty-fifty chance is better than zero in any case, which is what I’ve got left at this moment in time. I knock back my head and drain the liquid into my mouth. I can feel part of it dribble down my cheeks.
It tastes of strawberries, thank the Gods.
The healing potion takes effect immediately. My vision clears and my wounds close. I exhale a crescendo of sighs, which culminate in a hearty curse. I look at the metallic container of the vial of black fluid, the alchemist’s fire, which bursts into flames after a few seconds in contact with the air. In any case, this nasty surprise from Ugube has just cost me a year’s salary.
I stand in the rain for a good few minutes washing off as best I can the bloodstains and the worst of the dirt. I look at my miserable reflection in the mirror several times, but in the end I’m forced to settle for a pretty wretched version of myself. I go back inside to the dry interior of the van and light a cigarette. The dashboard registers twenty past eleven.
I was betrayed, now I’m hunted too. Escaping the clutches of a prominent figure in Nectropis is virtually impossible. Identification spells, like the ones used in the divination section of the Guard, are of a high level, but they can easily be bought, providing you have enough money. I’ve got an unbearably heavy feeling on my chest, a rock that’s trying to suffocate me: for the most part, on a rational level I understand it, that anxiety comes after a brush with the abyss, so a kind of “artificial” bleakness. The rest of it, however, is all terror, more than justified in the present situation. I resist the temptation to give up, but it takes an enormous amount of willpower.
The command to survive manifests itself directly in a plan. The first necessary step is to drop under the radar of the bad guys, so I need to find myself an operational base of some kind, far away from all the places I usually hang around. Just to be clear, when I say operational base I mean a place with a bed and a toilet. I need to rest, otherwise I’ll soon fall victim to some lethal distraction or other. A small light feeling then goodbye Arkham, a day of mourning for Saros. From there, I don’t know how, but I need to find Gilder and put an end to this story.
But one thing at a time. Getting off the radar is my first job. As long as I keep moving unpredictably, with a bit of luck the pit bulls will continue to follow my trail but they won’t be sinking their teeth into my lovable buttocks.
I put the car into first gear and head off towards the Bazar.
Saturday night, the most hectic neighbourhood of the Ninth is heaving with a colourful mixture of its regular dregs of society and middle-class types looking for thrills, a change from their routine life. Mother of whores, if they did a swap with my Saturday night they’d chain themselves to their slippers and knitting for the rest of their lives. The street stalls are on the rustic side, somewhat slumlike. Different coloured sheets of material, loosely draped across the crowded street, press against the ceiling, a short distance above the multi-ethnic stream of people. Years of municipal determination to install some form of public lighting were regularly stymied by the local custom of nicking off with the light bulbs, until a progressive administration chanced upon the perfect way to remove the problem from the district and save face at the same time, by declaring it to be “picturesque” and “of touristic interest”. On that basis, subsequent administrations gradually removed all urban restrictions, and saved just the essential legislation regarding structural stability. Illegally-constructed buildings and the ferocious entrepreneurial spirit of the native traders acted in perfect synergy with the legislative anarchy, and transformed a fetid fortress of depravity into a characteristic market of sin. A ‘tremendous success’, this is how the mayor described the establishment’s definitive completion of that glorious surrender.
The r-0/9, designed to support heavy traffic just like all the other ring roads, has narrowed to the size of any other lateral road, and the streets that radiate from it are an elaborate maz
e of alleyways, many of which allow for only one person at a time. There’s no guarantee that within the Bazar, buried inside Nectropis safely away from the beady eye of the satellite, the physical structure still features on official maps. I wouldn’t deserve the barrage of insults I receive each day as a cop if I didn’t know my area like the back of my hand, so this is how things really are. The street stalls are wooden structures, their simplicity is ingenious: very lightweight, a trader can move them with surprising speed, by applying force to a particular point the whole thing can be picked up in one go; each one is open to passerby one side only, the other three are covered by curtains of various colours, thus creating a compartment similar to other fairs, like tiny stands, each trader is in charge of the lighting for his own space. The draped material growing out of the ceiling in the end removes all the recognisable ‘natural’ points of reference, plunging the clientele in a kaleidoscopical pandemonium of soft lights, reflected and dimmed by the omnipresent curtain. The impenetrable guild of thieves manages the flow of traders, and they are constantly moved around according to a system which has never been completely deciphered, so that those in the know are perfectly able to navigate the alleys while visitors are at the mercy of the chaos.
Before I arrived and brightened his gloomy existence, Mequire, still Lieutenant, got a bee in his bonnet about destroying the ancient consortium of pickpockets and hired an eminent mathematician, who, basing his decisions on constant information gathered by a massive deployment of officers, was supposed to crack the code. Over a month of surveillance, agents disappeared on more than one occasion, some for four even five days at a time, later they declared that they’d… got, lost. At one point, they realised that their radios and mobiles had been stolen, and from that moment on they started walking around in circles. Sometimes all the streets looked different, while others, the street which looked the most promising instead ended up bringing them back to where they started, in front of the same trader who encouraged them at the beginning, laughing heartily. Occasionally, a particularly warm-hearted person offered them food with an amused smile. In short, despite these obstacles and despite the fragmented nature of the information obtained, the mathematician (clearly, a real champ) one fine day declared he was close to finding a solution. The next morning, the scientist, trembling, presented his resignation to Mequire, and informing him that he was already at Nexus, and on his way to his house on the coast where he was planning to move to permanently. On the same day, Fingeruphisarse was taken off the case but his imminent promotion to captain was also announced. Career over. Now I don’t know if this actually happened, but I have great respect for the guild. They’re not all smiles and jokes, but if you know your place they can be very civil people.
As I make my way through, I piss off a couple who are busy inspecting a gold watch, they are almost certainly about to get ripped off. Here we have an additional example of how ingenious the guild is, the code is stratified according to different levels of use, let’s say. Certain road signs are easier to read than others, but in order to get to the most important, the richest and most illegal activities one has to be escorted by a guide or be initiated, as in my case. The colour key has to be combined with the shape of the crossroads and of tiles so as to be able to identify, for example, the street which leads to the arms market, to the clandestine boxing cage or to the exotic drugs and poison bank. In order to find what I’m looking for I have to go down the street marked with yellow and black squares twice, then I follow the directions for brothels twice, so a red curtain and squares again. Everyone jostles me all over the place, laughing and swearing. The smells are powerful, I’m probably near the smoking dens, where one can consume opium and solat while reclining, like real caliphs.
Promising myself I’ll come back once I’ve saved my anus, I buy a piece of wet coconut from a kid and give him the change from a fiver, identifying myself as a friend of the guild. Duty paid, no robbing, thank you. I chew on the piece of coconut and warily look around, I wouldn’t like to run into any of Ugube’s retailers. Khan is too smart to make noise on someone else’s turf, but you never know.
I pretend to be concentrated on a rare, fake copy of an embarrassing sex manual for dwarves when two ogres noisily lumber through the passageway. Out of the corner of my eye I watch the coconut seller deftly relieve one of the pigs of his wallet, who doesn’t suspect a thing. He looks a bit taken aback when he notices that I’ve caught him red-handed, I wink at him conspiratorially to reassure him before he is engulfed again by the crowds. I go through two different commercial areas, which can be identified by the dominant colour of the soft light given off by the street lamps. The pink colour indicates the stalls with the con artists, where hundreds of brainless oafs are irrevocably fleeced, and green is for the area of small-scale fences. The thinning of the crowds means that I’m going the right way, I’m headed towards the less picturesque part of the Bazar. I have to look around me a few times before I spot the last sign, a small triangular, black and yellow chequered flag, innocently sticking out of a copper umbrella stand. Partially hidden thanks to the perspective tricking the eye, it looks like a dead end of no particular interest. When I go down the alley I have to turn sideways when I go past drainpipes on both sides. In the end this odyssey is rewarded by a square measuring five metres by five metres, there’s a tiny, pretty stone fountain in the middle. Six more alleys lead to this place, and as always I am impressed by how complex this castle, the Bazar, is. I wouldn’t even buy a dog kennel off an architect who didn’t appreciate it as much as I do. I wonder if, for once, if the corruption which devours Nectropis has actually contributed to making something which is right and sacrosanct, such as making this wonderful beauty spot.
An old woman with an imposing white beard under her chin, more akin to a pubic bush than a tuft of whiskers, is smoking a long pipe and gently rocking to and fro with her eyes closed, she looks as though she’s napping. The last time I came here I went to the Alchemist’s shop. That’s how he introduces himself, just ‘the Alchemist’, but rumour has it that he’s actually Eifalm the Sadist, a sprightly old fella who was unanimously expelled by the consistory of archmaguses because he created over one hundred and thirty pain ointments, which were particularly popular with torturers all over the world. This time I need to see the Sorceress.
Sorceresses are often mistaken for psykers when they begin to explore their individual skills, but it’s an easy mistake to rectify.
Psykers’ telepathic skills lead to madness: the poor things gradually start tuning in to the thoughts and emotions of people around them and end up going mad, deafened by the mental chaos. Doctors, respectable turnkeys in the institutions these poor souls are locked up in, prefer to responsibly talk about ‘symptoms’ rather than ‘powers’ when they refer to their skills.
A sorceress is quite different. It is said that, during conception, an irregularity in the magic substratum brings a rare level of energy to the place where the spermatozoa meet the egg to do the dirty deed. Ergo, telepathic powers depend on genes, but arcane energy doesn’t. However, a sorceress, or sorcerer, is basically a natural witch. They will never reach the peaks of power belonging to a real wizard, but unlike the latter, a sorcerer will have a rudimentary understanding of all the five schools of magic, the combination of which produces a strange ‘sixth school’. It is a generally-held belief that the popular “witches”, typical of medieval mythology were actually sorcerers and this particular sorceress looks a lot like a witch in every respect. The soft blue light is enveloping, protective. The water in the fountain is a gentle whisper which doesn’t disturb the quiet. On the contrary, it caresses the silence which reigns here, it is broken only by the shy squeak of wood. It seems like the ideal place for a romantic restaurant, once you remove the hideous crone on the sinister rocking-chair. She’s like a severed limb wrapped in a pink bow. I take a cigarette with me and approach her, the snoozing hag doesn’t display the slightest flicker of interest.
“Mad
am?”
I try again after waiting for a few fruitless seconds, my voice a tad louder this time, but only get the same result. Granny’s a heavy sleeper. I’m going to have to shake her a bit, but the idea of actually touching her doesn’t exactly thrill me to the core. I used up my ration of luck when the machine gun jammed, so you can rest assured that she’s a bitter old witch, cavalier with her curses and hates being woken up from her nap. I stretch out my hand towards her shoulder covered by a moth-eaten purple shawl. Gently does it, she might even wake up without me having to touch her.
An irritated meow behind me makes me jump when I’m just a few millimetres away from contact. The mangy cat haughtily stalks between my legs, its tail upright like a question mark, and rubs its face on the legs of its mistress.
A resinous tidal wave of skin furrows her brow, bringing her back to the twilight life of senility. As though she weren’t creepy-looking enough, the witch also sports a blue glass eye, it looks even more penetrating than the real one. She looks at me from under her eyelids at half-mast, smacks her tongue against her toothless gums a couple of times and yawns.
“Hmm… hello.”
She sucks in a hefty lungful of smoke and produces a series of perfect smoke rings.
“I’d like … to buy an amulet.”
“Your payment is ready,” announces the scrawny one. Basically, she’s the archetypal witch from fairy tales, a badly-dressed, annoying old woman.
“Payment?”
The sorceress takes her time to answer, filling the gap with more smoke rings.
“For the help you’re going to give me.”
She strokes the feline’s head and receives a generous profusion of satisfied purring in return.
“Do you know something, madam? For once I’d like to pay like a normal person.”
“It was in your interests.”
“What was?”
“The help you’re going to give me,” she answers with just the slightest hint of frustration, as though she has to keep repeating the same thing and I’m too brainless to understand her.
Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets Page 22