Hale, Ginn

by Wicked Gentleman (lit)

  "Yes."

  "Then let's have a look, shall we?" He stood up and went to his shelves. I watched as he slowly paced past the first two shelves and then whipped one of the thick, black record books out.

  "It would be under Sykes, would it?" Brown asked.

  "Yes." Though I could see what he was obviously doing, I couldn't quite believe it. I glanced again at the shelves and shelves of record books that filled the room.

  "Here it is." Brown sat back down behind his desk with the big book open. "Hmm, flying and resisting questioning." Brown looked curiously at the page and read on a little. "All that trouble just to keep your friend from getting a trespass fine." Brown looked up at me. "It took them quite a while to get his name out of you, didn't it?".

  "You have a copy of my legal record?"

  "Yes. Albert and the Brighton abbot are old school friends, so the abbot has been kind enough to let our firm keep copies of the records involving Prodigals." Brown flipped the page and then turned it back. "You don't have much of a record. It looks like you've managed to keep a step ahead of the law for the most part."

  "For the most part, yes," I replied.

  I knew in the back of my mind that there had to be records of my birth and education, even my arrests and time under the prayer engines, but I had imagined that all those things had been filed far away in some dark basement. I hated the idea that my life could be fingered through by a stranger at his leisure.

  "You are quite the specimen, aren't you, Mr. Sykes?" Brown turned the book so I could see it. He taped his thick finger on a small tracing of a photograph. It took me a moment to recognize my own body stretched out on the table. I stared down at my own furious gaze without interest. My memories of that time were sharper than any smudgy drawing could ever be.

  As quickly as I could, I read through the dozens of comments and tracings of my effects at the time of my arrest. I wanted to know what Brown or anyone else with access could know about me. The page was clotted with trivialities: my shoe size, fingernail lengths, a tracing of my business card, and a long string of initials where one officer or another had checked the record out. W.J. H. appeared a dozen or more times.

  It only took a moment for me to realize where Harper had come across my business card. He would have known all of this about me before he even walked through my door. It shouldn't have surprised me.

  Brown turned the book back to himself and read over it for a few more moments.

  "His uncooperative nature and refusal to testify have put us in a position to assume guilt...Still no statement...Questioning with silver-water...Ah, and ophorium." Brown made a little clicking sound with his tongue. "Just to keep your friend from getting a fifty-coin fine? I'm not sure I would believe that myself. Were you holding out on something else?"

  I stared at Brown flatly.

  "I suppose if you wouldn't talk, then you won't just tell me now." Brown seemed amused. "You know, Mr. Sykes, if our firm is to represent you, it's in your best interest to tell us the full extent of anything you've done."

  "I'll keep that in mind." I managed to get the words out civilly. The deep desire to slash Brown's face had seized me the moment he began reading from my record. Those months had been my ruin and he read over them as if they were prices on a menu. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself.

  The scent and taste of acidic sickness, something between excrement and bile doused in heavy rose perfume, washed into my lungs. I coughed and Brown pushed the record book to the side of his desk.

  "It's getting late," he said.

  "Should I be going?" I started to stand but Brown held up his hand for me to stop.

  "No, I'm sure Albert will want to speak with you." He smiled at me as if we were friends. "No, I was thinking that I ought to get a little something in me. I'll send Tim out for some supper. A little snack for you too." Brown stood and started for the door. "It'll be my treat. You just wait here. I won't be long." He stepped out and closed the door.

  I waited a moment, then checked the door. Brown had locked me in.

  Chapter Eleven

  Blue glass

  Just the fact that I had been locked in made me immediately want to escape. I walked to the window. It was painted shut, but the glass was thin enough to break through.

  I stopped myself. Crashing through the second story window would be an act of desperate panic, a last resort. I wasn't sure that the situation merited that.

  There were reasons other than murder that Lewis Brown would want to keep a Prodigal from roaming freely through the building. Brown could have just wanted to keep me from bumbling in on another interview. It was equally likely that he kept the door locked out of habit.

  My instincts urged escape. I could easily knock out the glass with Brown's chair and be out. But my instincts weren't paying me to be here in the first place.

  I looked down at the street and wished I could see Harper. The second story only provided me with a view of roofs and the tops of a dozen or more hats. Below me people made their ways back home. Offices and shops were closing. It would be night soon. The darkness drifting in over the sky calmed me.

  I decided to investigate Brown's office and the disturbing smell that hung in it. I took a deep breath and spread my arms out. As I blew the air out of my lungs, I slowly drifted up. I continued to rise until my head lightly bumped into the ceiling.

  The air near the ceiling was rank. I nearly gagged, and when I opened my eyes, they stung. The tops of Brown's shelves were filled with rows of blue glass jars. Some were large apothecary jars; others were smaller, perfume bottles. All of them were filled with dark thick liquids.

  I drifted closer to the jars. The smell was nauseating. I squeezed my nostrils closed with one hand and read the pieces of paper that were attached to the rows of blue bottles. One big container read, Strength Beyond Numbers: Abaddon. Another was marked, Power to Churn the Waters: Rahab. I frowned and scanned across the multitude of labels: Beauty, Wealth, Control of Fire, and even the Lordship Over Insects was cited, and a name written beneath that. Many of the bottles were nearly empty. But the one nearest me was completely full.

  I picked up the small bottle, hardly larger than an ink vial. It was sealed with a waxed lid. Its paper label was crisp and white, still untouched by time. It said, Prophecy: Roffcale.

  Holding the vial in my palm, I sank back down to the floor. I broke the wax seal and almost choked on the smell that seeped up. It was the same pungent scent that had pervaded the cell where Peter Roffcale had been murdered. Rosewater poured through the soured smell of his blood, urine, and shit.

  Magic potions made from the bodies of Prodigals. Wasn't that what Sariel had said?

  The door opened behind me, and I shoved the vial into my jacket pocket. I quickly turned to face the man who had entered the room. He was much taller than Brown, but just as muscular. His hair and beard were white, but he seemed youthfully fit in spite of that. His skin was tanned and flushed with a healthy glow. He smiled at me as if I were his favorite nephew.

  "I'm truly sorry about the delay in meeting you, Mr. Sykes." The big man held out his hand. "I'm Albert Scott-Beck."

  Out of habit I took his hand. He smiled even more brightly and didn't release my fingers from his tight warm grip.

  "May I ask you a question, Mr. Sykes?" He was close enough that I could smell the blood and rose perfume on his breath. His fingers felt like steel shackles encasing my hand.

  I remembered that the blue glass jar marked Strength Beyond Numbers had been nearly empty. I wondered how much of it Scott-Beck had running through his veins.

  "Who sent you in here?" he asked.

  His hand crushed brutally around mine. I slashed my free hand up and drove my long nails into the flesh of his throat. His skin was like horse hide. My claws barely cut into it.

  In an instant, Scott-Beck stepped aside and twisted my hand violently. Cracking pain burst through my arm as a bone in my wrist snapped. He twisted my hand far
ther and I stumbled on my feet, dropping to one knee.

  He kicked me hard in the chest. My ribs cracked inward. My lungs crushed in as the air was forced out of them.

  "Who sent you, Mr. Sykes?" He was still smiling as if this had just been a friendly tussle.

  "You're going to kill me whether I say or not, aren't you?" My voice was barely audible.

  "Of course." Scott-Beck squeezed his fingers around my broken wrist. "But it's up to you, how I do it."

  "Please, don't." I closed my eyes as if that would hold out the pain. "The man who hired me..." I carefully dropped the fingers of my free hand down into my coat pocket. "He didn't tell me his name, but he wore an anatomist's pin. He was blonde and young." I closed my hand around the vial.

  "An anatomist?" For a moment Scott-Beck's attention shifted from me to the man who hired me.

  I lunged forward, smashing the vial into Scott-Beck's groin. The delicate glass shattered and Scott-Beck howled in agony. I jerked my hand free of him and scrambled for the window.

  A brutal weight slammed into my back and crushed me face down to the hard wood floor. I hadn't seen Brown come in after Scott-Beck, but I recognized the smell of him on top of me. I tried to twist out from under him, but his weight on top of me was immovable. He seized a fistful of my hair, jerking my head up. The tendons of my neck strained as he pulled my head back so that I was looking up at him.

  "It seems that you still don't know how to answer a question properly, Mr. Sykes." Brown's face was flushed deep red. His expression was one of pleasure, almost arousal. He slammed the side of my face down into the floor. A deep explosion of pain and dizziness rocked through my skull. He pulled my head back up and slammed it down again. I fought against him. Brown threw his weight against my straining neck and my head cracked into the floor again.

  My throat and shoulders spasmed with tearing pain. Blood welled out from the side of my head where my skin had split upon impact with the floor. My vision wavered as a ripple of darkness passed through my consciousness.

  Brown lifted my face again, and this time I hung limply in his grip.

  "What about it, Albert?" Brown asked. "Shall I split his little skull?"

  "We want to know about the girl first." I heard Scott-Beck walk up on my left. "Ask him who she is."

  "Well, then?" Brown shifted his weight on my back, rocking his groin against me as if I were a two-penny whore. "Where's the girl you've been working with, Sykes? What's her name?"

  "I think it might be something like...Fuck You!" I could hardly think for the pain, but it didn't make me any more cooperative.

  "Listen, Sykes. I can make you wish you were back in the Inquisition House." Brown pulled my head back a little more. I could see Scott-Beck out of the corner of my eye. He stroked his thick white beard and studied me. In my beaten state, I suddenly thought that he looked a great deal like a painting I had seen of Father Christmas. He considered me as if it pained him to see that I would be going down on his naughty list. "I don't know how far you're going to get with him—" Scott-Beck's words were cut short by a sharp rap at the door.

  Scott-Beck walked back out of my view, but Brown remained on top of me. I heard Scott-Beck open the door.

  "What is it, Tim?"

  "There's a man from the Inquisition here." The secretary sounded slightly flustered.

  "What does he want?"

  "He says he's looking for a Prodigal named Belimai Sykes." The secretary's voice dropped to a whisper. "He won't go away."

  "How inconvenient." Scott-Beck walked back to where Brown had me pinned. He dropped down beside me and took a firm grasp on my throat with both his hands.

  "Lewis," he said to Brown, "you and Tim go down and get rid of the Inquisitor. I'm afraid that we're not going to have all the time we would have liked with Mr. Sykes."

  As Brown rose off of me, Scott-Beck lifted me by my throat. I scrambled to gain my footing. Brown caught my arms and jerked them back behind me. Pain seared through my broken wrist.

  "I was hoping to have a little longer with him," Brown said.

  "Next time," Scott-Beck assured him. "Perhaps with the girl."

  "Fair enough." Brown retreated back through the door with the secretary.

  Scott-Beck sighed and then shoved me back against the desk. His expression was resigned, not even slightly perturbed. I knew from the sheer number of bottles on the shelf above us that he had murdered many Prodigals before me. If it had ever troubled his conscience, he was long past that now. Like the Confessors who had tortured me in the Inquisition, he was utterly at ease with himself and what he did.

  I hated Scott-Beck for that.

  Rage gave me a burst of strength. I kicked him as hard as I could and shoved against him. Scott-Beck stumbled but caught himself before I could twist free. He slammed his fist into my bleeding head with professional ease.

  My vision went entirely black. Blind nausea swelled through me, enveloping all other sensations of my body. I rolled back into a senseless darkness and collapsed onto the desk.

  Often in the last six years I had thought of my own death as a comfort. I had thought of it as I slid a needle into my soft flesh and imagined that it would be as easy and restful as the ophorium that poured into my blood. But now I knew I didn't want to die. Too much had been taken from me already. My life was all I had to claim.

  A burst of stabbing agony brought me back up. Scott-Beck was leaning over me with one hand planted directly on my throat. My shirt and vest had been torn aside, and a bowl was tucked up next to my bare chest. With his free hand, Scott-Beck continued to slice a scalpel deep into my stomach.

  Fury surged through my body. I had never felt anything like this before. A deafening roar ripped up from my throat. The sound of it was like a thunder clap. The window exploded. Scott-Beck took a stunned step back, the scalpel falling from his fingers to the floor. For a moment I thought my scream alone had caused all the blood to drain from his face.

  Then I felt the heat of flames bursting up across the floor. I turned my beaten face and saw the Prodigal girl from Saint Christopher's Park hovering just outside the open window. Scott-Beck took another quick step backwards.

  The girl moved forward, crouching on the windowsill. Her cracked red eyes followed Scott-Beck's every motion. I didn't think she was even aware of my presence.

  "I can smell his blood on you," she said to Scott-Beck. "You murdered Peter."

  Scott-Beck started for the door. The girl was faster than him. She sprang into the air and hurled one of her black-bladed knives. Scott-Beck dropped to the floor. The knife whipped over his head and drove into the wall. Flames burst up from the blade and spread across the wallpaper.

  Scott-Beck barely paused. He lunged to one of the far shelves and snatched a box off of it. The girl rushed after him.

  I rolled off the desk but didn't have enough strength to support myself. I slid down onto the floor. Flames climbed up the desk and consumed the wall behind me. I glanced back at the window, but there was no way I could get through the fire to reach it. I grabbed the back of a chair and pulled myself up. The motion sent bursts of pain through my body, but I forced myself past it. Already the heat of the growing fire distorted the air. Smoke caught in my lungs. If I didn't get out, I was going to be burned alive.

  I stood in time to see Scott-Beck grab the girl's leg as she sprang at him. He slammed her into the floor with a brutal, practiced force. Then I saw what he had gotten from the shelf. He had a pistol.

  If he killed her, there was no chance I would get out of the burning office. I grabbed the scalpel Scott-Beck had dropped. Its metal body was searing hot, but the burn hardly registered against the waves of pain that ran through the rest of my body.

  I hurled the scalpel so hard that I almost fell again. The blade sank deep into Scott-Beck's neck. He stared back at me in utter shock.

  All it took was that moment. The Prodigal girl drove one of her knives into Scott-Beck's arm. The pistol fell from his hand and a shot rang
out.

  Then there was a second and a third. I realized that they had come from the stairs. The door burst open and Harper rushed into the room.

  "Belimai!" he called, then he stopped dead still at the sight of the girl. "Joan?"

  The girl didn't even look at him. She leapt back out of Scott-Beck's grasp and then hurled another blade into his chest.

  "Joan! No!" Harper caught her and pulled her back from Scott-Beck. Even with Harper's holding her, the girl didn't spare him a glance. She kept her eyes on Scott-Beck alone.

  The hilt of her knife jutted up from Scott-Beck's ribcage. It glowed as if it were molten. Scott-Beck grasped it, desperate to pull it free of his body. Flames burst up over his hand. For a moment the smoke in the room smelled strongly of roasting meat, and then geysers of white-hot flame exploded up through Scott-Beck's chest. The man's mouth opened as if to scream, but only flames came rushing up into the empty air.

  The Prodigal girl smiled as if she were at a carnival.

  "You'd better get your friend out of here, Will." She pulled away from Harper. "He's been hurt rather badly."

  I thought Harper was going to say something more to her, but then he rushed forward to me.

  "Can you walk?" he asked.

  "A little." I swayed on my feet. The heat of the fire all around us was astounding. The smoke was beginning to bother my eyes. It was good that Harper had only been in the room for seconds. His body wasn't made to withstand this kind of heat and smoke. He coughed and wrapped his arm around me.

  "Lean on me," he said.

  I did. We got out of the room as fast as we could. The Prodigal girl just watched us and then floated up to the top of the shelves. I heard the sound of bottle after bottle smashing. Harper all but dragged me down the stairs. Halfway down he had to kick Brown's body out of his way. The secretary, Tim, lay with a bullet hole through his head at the foot of the stairs.