Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1

by Angela Slatter

  As I struggled, the grasp didn’t relax, but someone hissed in my ear, ‘You can’t do anything for them. Be quiet or it will come after us.’ Bela’s voice was so low I could barely make out the words, but I recognised the urgency in his tone, and something else: fear. If Zvezdomir Tepes was afraid, the world should be crapping its pants.

  We watched as the thing first bundled up the girl, then the guy; inside the maelstrom of its form I saw bodies pulled apart, limbs flying, then finally absorbed into the whirling darkness. When it was done, the creature moved back to the open mouth of the drain and disappeared within, leaving only a crumpled tartan blanket and a few crushed cigarette packets on a disturbed patch of sand.

  When Bela’s grip finally loosened I could feel the imprint of my teeth against the inside of my lips.

  I swallowed before saying, ‘So, is there something you want to tell me?’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brisbane’s City Hall is a beautiful old sandstone building, fully equipped with a clock tower, auditorium, marbled floors, myriad offices, moulded ceilings and chandeliers, not to mention the Shingle Inn Café. Apparently said café was so beloved of Brisbanites that when a fit of urban renewal necessitated its removal from the original location, the whole thing – from dark wood panelling to padded booths, scarred tables, comfy armchairs and dainty doilies – were put into storage until they could be reassembled in a new spot.

  Now it looked as if nothing had changed: all terribly normal, and Normal – and a useful place to hang out if you were waiting to be summoned . . .

  If you stood in the City Hall’s aforementioned auditorium, right in the centre of the mosaic depicting the city’s leopard-between-two-gryphons coat of arms, and whispered the right words, then the space around you would shiver and shift, opening a door in the air right in front of you.

  I didn’t quite have the pull to enter unaccompanied, hence Bela, my chaperone. Access to the seat of power was carefully regulated and jealously guarded. Normals didn’t have the monopoly on bureaucratic mechanisms or paranoia, and sometimes the Weyrd could be positively Byzantine.

  ‘Remember: the Archivist seldom receives guests. The only reason you’re here is because of my intervention.’ Which was Bela’s roundabout way of telling me to behave myself. ‘Don’t speak until spoken to,’ he continued, and I had to stop myself checking to see if he was ticking off the points on his fingers. ‘Don’t touch the books. Don’t ask her about anything other than the sirens, because that’s the only subject she’s agreed to talk about. Understand?’

  ‘Don’t put my hands or arms outside the moving vehicle? Yes, Zvezdomir, I understand,’ I said, and as he winced I felt a twinge of guilt. After all, he’d just kept me from getting eaten by whatever it was we’d seen by the river, so I thought I should probably be a bit more amenable. I could do that. I smoothed the front of my dress to make sure I was tidy, then touched his arm and said, ‘Just messing with you. I get it. I promise I’ll follow the rules.’

  The Normal section of City Hall was perfectly well lit, unlike the Weyrd area into which we stepped: that was distinctly dim. Suits of armour lined the round foyer, surrounding the central glyph in the floor, a mosaic made of precious and semi-precious stones forming two gryphons but without the leopard, just to distinguish it from the Normal coat-of-arms. The polished metal reception desk, looking rather out of place, was manned by two Weyrd guys who probably wouldn’t get far down the street without causing a riot: one was hirsute and distinctly fangy; the other was so thin and wispy he could probably slip under a door unimpeded.

  ‘Weapons?’ the hairy one asked.

  I shook my head, wondering if anyone ever said ‘Yes’ and handed over their knives, blackjacks, hawthorn stakes, crucifixes, swords, holy water, et cetera. The skinny one looked as though he might try a pat-down. Bela had warned me that could happen, and we both knew it wouldn’t end well – I objected to being treated like a potential criminal. The guy was probably very fast, but I was strong; I only needed to get hold of one of his digits and pop it out of its socket—

  My escort held up his hand and said, ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  Phew.

  I thought it spoke volumes about the state of Weyrd politics these days that this level of security was deemed necessary, that not even Bela could walk right in. Seats on the Council of Five were inherited and members, though long-lived, seldom had ‘old age’ listed as a cause of death. Memories were enduring things, and feuds between Weyrd families never simply died out, not unless the families died with them. The Weyrd hadn’t ever really taken to any sort of democratic system of protest, preferring older, more permanent methods of change: assassination was considered a perfectly valid form of social revolution, not to mention an effective way of silencing dissent. And not everyone was happy with the way the tribe had to live now.

  Mr Wispy led us along a corridor and stopped so abruptly in front of a steel-banded door that I almost ran into him. When he finally got all the various locks undone he gestured for us to go in. How does the Archivist get out at night? I wondered. Did she knock three times and wait to be released? Or did she just never leave? Maybe she had a secret tunnel somewhere. A memory rattled in the back of my mind: Ziggi mentioning that the old woman lived in, with a room somewhere in the bowels of the earth. A set of surprisingly well-lit steps led downwards, and I noticed a set of dimmer switches on the walls. The gentle flicker of flames might be the preferred illumination for mostly nocturnal creatures, conjuring reminders of the good old days, a time when people were rightly afraid of the dark, but fire and paper weren’t such a good mix, so for the Archivist at least, practicality apparently overcame nostalgia.

  We stepped into an enormous room with rows and rows of steel shelving stretching before us. It was cold – climate-controlled, I’d bet – and remarkably hi-tech. I could hear a server whirring contentedly somewhere nearby; there were a few whispers from the books shelved along the walls too. As we approached the far end I could make out a line of desktop computers taking up one corner, and a couple of microfiche readers not dissimilar to those at the State Library in the other. In between sat a large wooden desk blackened with age, like a kind of oversized mediaeval lectern with a tilted tabletop. It was the oldest thing in the room.

  Well, the second oldest.

  She was tiny, wizened; sitting on a high stool of chrome and plastic so she could reach her work surface, which held an illuminated manuscript. She glared over her hunched shoulder as if our echoing footsteps had disturbed her, then closed the book, pushed away from the desk and stretched as if she might reach the ceiling, her bones giving cracking protest. As she swung about to face us I noticed her ears were tiny vestigial flaps of skin. Her eyes were a deep pinkish red, her nose small but kind of squashed, and showing a little more nostril than I was used to. The battered leather orthopaedic boots she wore had once been burgundy, though her khaki overalls were pristine. A skullcap sat on her thick white curls. A cane was propped against the wall. She wore no jewellery of any sort; nothing so frivolous. She’d not bothered with a glamour as far as I could tell, she was unalloyed, without vanity, proud of what she was . . . then I thought again: if the Archivist didn’t go out, she didn’t really have a need to hide anything, so perhaps it was less bravery and more lazy arrogance. She gazed at me as if she had some serious reservations about my presence. In spite of myself, I felt a chill run up my spine.

  ‘Honourable Ursa.’ Bela intoned the name as one might a prayer. ‘This is Verity Fassbinder.’

  ‘Zvezdomir Tepes. And Grigor’s daughter,’ she said, narrowing her eyes, considering me. Her accent was not especially thick, not easily definable, but it certainly said ‘Old Country’, wherever that might have been for her. ‘What do you want?’

  If that was a warm welcome, I was likely to get frostbite.

  ‘Err,’ I began, my promise to behave warring with my natural urge – sadly, never far below the surface – to tell someone who was rude to m
e to fuck right off.

  ‘You are here to waste my time?’ she sneered, crossing her arms.

  The legacy of being Grigor’s child is this: many Weyrd, the elders especially, those who were around at the time, remember my father. They remember what he did and, most importantly, they remember that he got caught. They remember how their lives changed because of that. And in remembering that, they apparently cannot forget to number my breeding amongst my sins, most especially the fact that I’m neither purely one thing nor the other.

  The Archivist was obviously one of those Weyrd. I bowed my head so she couldn’t see the anger sparking in my eyes and said humbly, ‘I’ve come seeking your aid, Honourable Ursa. I beg your indulgence if I appear nervous: the depth and breadth of your wisdom is spoken of with great awe and respect. You will forgive someone who feels daunted at the prospect of speaking to you.’

  I waited a little longer to look up, and it was to see her positively preening, something that might even have been a smile hovering at her thin lips. I was pretty sure I could feel the weight of Bela’s gaze on me too, and equally sure his mouth was hanging open, just a little.

  ‘Ask your questions, girl.’

  ‘Sirens.’

  ‘Sirens?’

  ‘What could kill one? Not anything big and nasty, not something even Normals couldn’t miss. It must be something subtle, something that might slip beneath the notice of the Council.’ I buried my hands deeply in my coat pockets, though I knew I wouldn’t find warmth there either. ‘Something that could reach into a siren’s chest and squeeze her heart until it stops.’

  She slowly scratched her chin while I tried not to stare at the downy cluster of white hairs growing from it.

  ‘It doesn’t leave a mark,’ I encouraged.

  She shook her head slowly. ‘If I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she said rather tetchily. ‘No book contains everything, just as no mind can hold every piece of knowledge. Sirens – I don’t know!’

  I couldn’t help but wonder why she’d even agreed to speak with me if she had nothing helpful to say, but I managed not to pout, even though that meant all of my wheeling and dealing with Bela was for naught, and I was still going to have to uphold my end of the bargain.

  ‘But,’ she added after a moment, crooked index finger raised, ‘but it doesn’t sound like an ordinary hunter, not unless they’ve managed to summon something particularly vile and vicious for this task, like a ’serker.’

  ‘With respect, ma’am, I’ve seen a ’serker up close and personal, and they don’t do their wetwork tidily. They like tearing and rending and smearing – smearing is a big thing too.’ The memory of the ravening creature in that dark house made my leg ache in spite of all of Louise’s excellent care. ‘Whatever’s killing these women is relatively neat.’

  ‘Humph.’

  Despite my promise to stay on topic, I couldn’t resist pushing my luck – after all, she’d given me nothing. I figured I could try and get at least one of the other gaps in my knowledge filled. ‘I went for a walk by the river—’

  ‘Verity,’ warned Bela, but Ursa waved his unvoiced objections away. Her gaze was fixed on me as if weighing the worth of my words, as if I were suddenly of greater interest than first assumed.

  I told her all about the creature; not just how it had made the amorous couple vanish, but how it looked, how it sounded and moved and smelled. Ziggi’d sent me the link to the clip of the Fortitude Valley incident and, ignoring Bela’s silent fuming, I pulled out my phone and played it for her. I could’ve sworn her eyes shone as she watched the whirlwind of night and garbage at its endeavours, then she leaned back and made a humming noise, as if deciding where to start.

  ‘Well, that’s definitely not a ’serker,’ she said at last.

  ‘The thing that kills the sirens at least leaves bodies behind; this – this whatever-it-is – leaves not much at all, just a few bits of rubbish that fall off it. Quite frankly, if there wasn’t the risk of a horrible death, I’d hire it to clean my place, ’cause it can’t do worse than I do.’

  Bela made a strangled noise as Ursa turned to the book on her desk and for a second I thought myself dismissed. With painstaking care she flipped through it until she found what she wanted, then, gently, angled the volume so we could see the illustrations.

  A clever hand had drawn five figures, all of them vaguely human-shaped but none of them human. One appeared to be made of earth, the others of ice, fire and water. The final one, a cyclonic form of wind and collected dross, had cartoonish marks around its edges, as if to indicate motion. There were paragraphs beside each sketch, brief descriptions in Latin and Ancient Hebrew, which I struggled with, so long after university.

  ‘What do you know about golems?’ asked Ursa, and it sounded as if she might be gloating a little at redeeming herself so spectacularly after the siren washout.

  ‘The Prague kind or The Lord of the Rings kind?’

  Another noise from Bela; this one might have been a sob. Ursa stabbed at the image of the tempest-thing and glared at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, then, ‘I thought the Prague golem was made to protect people?’

  ‘Oh, this much you know?’ She curled a lip. ‘All well and good, little miss, if its creator has admirable purpose in making his “weapon”. But a gun is a thing without will, either righteous or ill, and the damage it does comes from the heart of the one who holds it. So too the golem: it’s a tool and has no more – or less – moral compass than the person who controls it.’

  ‘So you think what we saw is a golem?’

  ‘Made of intent and excrement and foul things, all wrapped around a human core.’

  ‘There’s a person at the centre of it?’

  ‘With the right spells, the right curses, it’s possible. A powerful mage or witch could do it. It takes much energy, much blood-cost.’

  ‘That thing doesn’t look like it would happily take orders. How could anyone control it?’

  ‘An iron will might master it. You must remember that a person surrenders part of themself to another when they become golem. You need to consider the heart of the thing, who it used to be: if they gave themself up willingly, then the desires of creator and creature may well align. That would certainly make the beast more malleable.’

  My breath caught as I shuddered. ‘Human underneath.’

  ‘Such a working must have a mortal nucleus because anything uncanny is already so touched by magic that enchantments of this sort would be diluted. They would not function correctly.’

  ‘Then what does it want?’

  ‘The thing itself? Now? To feed. That desire will grow stronger as its mortal element shrinks and is consumed. This . . . this is a transformation. Each time it happens, the human within will find a little less of themself to return to. Depending on how often it’s occurring—’

  ‘—it will burn out?’

  She blinked slowly, considering. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘How long?’

  The shrug took her entire body and made it shudder. ‘It depends entirely on the individual, what spark first set it on this path, how brightly that yearning still shines . . . it may be days, weeks, months . . .’

  I looked at Bela. ‘It doesn’t really matter how short its span, does it? It will continue to suck the life out of whoever crosses its path. It’s not like we can wait it out.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘As you say.’ Ursa’s expression combined horror and fascination. ‘This is what they didn’t write down about the Golem of Prague: that it was a real man under the mud and clay. A real man gave his life and soul to protect the people there. But even a little wickedness in the service of good darkens the soul and robs you bit by bit, because each time the evil actions become easier.’

  ‘How can we stop it?’

  ‘As with most things, you must find its maker. Identify the magician and the magic, then find the spells to undo it.’

  ‘What if we just kill the magician? Will th
at work?’ I asked.

  ‘Possibly, though it’s crude,’ she said with distaste. ‘But I’d not rely on that alone. Sometimes the creature’s desire to feed is strong enough that it will continue without its master’s hand.’

  So I could live with Plan A, killing the mage, but I’d still need to spend time coming up with a Plan B.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, truly grateful, and not a little surprised to have been given so much information.

  Beside me, I felt rather than heard Bela’s own sigh of relief. All in all, it hadn’t gone anywhere near as badly as it might have.

  ‘Oh!’ I said as if something had just occurred to me. ‘One more thing: were you by any chance offered wine a month or so ago? Made from the tears of children? Someone of your vintage might have been a target market.’

  Bela sounded as if someone had punched him in the gut and my conscience prickled, but I could always apologise later. The Archivist froze and gave me a killing glance, though I’d have thought it obvious by now that I didn’t shame easily.

  Through clenched teeth she hissed, ‘Such a thing is not allowed.’ Then she turned her back on us.

  By the time we’d returned to the reception desk Bela had recovered enough to say tightly, ‘I thought you’d dropped that? The Winemaker?’

  ‘You thought wrong.’ I stared at him for a long moment. ‘Really? After all this time, you thought I’d drop something because you told me to?’

  He kept his tone level and I had to admire his restraint. ‘And did you find anything? Apart from dead ends?’

  ‘No,’ I said sulkily. ‘Not yet.’

  When we finally stepped back through to the Normal hall, he continued, ‘So you’ll speak to Anders Baker now? And I mean now, as in prioritise his case so he stops calling me every hour on the hour?’