Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman

by Duncan Eagleson

  “Breathe,” I said. Having no lungs, she couldn’t breathe, of course, but she could mimic the action, something that tends to calm you down, and she did, taking several long, deep breaths.

  “Help me,” she said. “I think this is death, and I’m not dead. I can’t be dead.”

  They all think that at first. But sometimes it’s true. Regular people with no training do soul travel here by accident. Now, I could create a door for her, let her move on to the land of the dead, something I’d been taught, though I’d never done on it my own. But what if she really was still alive? That would be bad. If I backtracked her to her body, I’d know for sure.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Polly.”

  “Okay, Polly, I want you to close your eyes and think about when things were last normal for you. Can you do that for me?” She nodded and closed her eyes.

  It was the better choice. When we located Polly’s body, she was indeed still alive. Once she was sorted out and back in her body, I was feeling sicker than ever. By the time I made it across the Oakwood Bridge to the building I thought was probably the Rustic, I was staggering and finding it hard to breathe. I made the shift and sank to my knees on the sidewalk outside the Rustic Tap, and vomited onto the pavement. I was heaving in great gulps of air, sweat pouring off me. Gradually, I got hold of myself.

  When I’d shifted, it had been night. It was now broad daylight. The afternoon sun made sections of the street glow like gold. I had been gone all of last night and most of today, probably seventeen hours or so. The extreme nausea was gone now, replaced now by an intense hunger.

  I got to my feet. Walking to the door of the Rustic felt like walking across a trampoline. Inside it was as dim as always. There were four or five customers in booths, locals, and one guy at the bar. It was Rok. I dragged myself to the bar, sat down. The bartender came over to take my order, and I asked for a shot, a beer, and a burger. I turned to Rok.

  “No hello? Nothing to say?”

  “Figured I’d let you order first. You’re probably starving.”

  “Yeah, actually, I am.” The bartender delivered my beer and shot. When I reached for the shot, Rok gripped my arm.

  “Get some food in first, or it will hit you too hard.”

  “Okay,” I said, lifting the other glass, “but beer this dark qualifies as food.” I wanted to gulp it, but made myself sip instead. “So, you’re skipping classes today?”

  “Waiting on you.”

  “What, so I miss a couple of classes this morning, you get all paranoid?”

  “You’ve been gone for three days, brother.”

  I gaped at him. I’d known, in theory, that the Otherworld could do that when you went there in body, distort time in all sorts of ways. I’d never experienced it first hand before. Subjectively, my mind was convinced the trip had taken an hour or two, three at most, but my body knew it had been three days. It made for a very schizophrenic feeling.

  “No wonder I’m starving. And you’ve been waiting here the whole time?”

  “Hell, no.” He laughed. “The story was all over the school, and after you didn’t show yesterday, a few of us started taking shifts, so nobody would miss too many lessons.”

  “Thanks. What about Brecht?”

  “He was here an hour after you guys shifted. Guess you owe a bunch of people a round.”

  When my burger arrived, I very nearly lived up to my name with it, but forced myself to eat slowly. You vomited in the Rustic, you got tossed out.

  I didn’t get tossed out. I put down a second burger, a bowl of soup, and two more beers telling Rok the story of what had happened, and getting filled in on how Brecht and I were the talk of the campus.

  Standing in the rain on the CA Tower roof, I wasn’t about to get into all that with this jabone. Before I could respond, the leader of our escort spoke up.

  “Sir, Mr. Roth requested we bring the Railwalkers to join him as soon as they arrived.”

  The man raised an eyebrow at the sergeant. “Don’t tell me. Roth asked them here to deal with the Beast?” he asked, and then looked us over again. “I suppose we’d better go, then.”

  As I turned to follow the uniformed guard, Rok got right up in the jabone’s face. I heard him say quietly, “He was guiding a soul home. How many souls have you guided, Grackle?”

  A grackle is a bird that, to those who don’t know any better, might look like a small crow. It had become a derisive term for Railwalker wannabes. I didn’t catch the guy’s reaction. I just followed the escort into the building. Behind me, I heard Morgan’s voice say, “Collar’s too big. Epaulettes are mounted the wrong way.”

  The conference room we were led to was large and nicely appointed. One long wall was an enormous window looking out over the winking lights of the city and the bay beyond. On the other was mounted a large reproduction of Bay City’s official seal, a gold ring enclosing a stylized wave design. There were two other people waiting there with the city boss.

  Micah Roth’s dark suit was expensive, with fashionably wide lapels, the shirt crisp and blindingly white, his tie perfectly knotted. But his face looked rumpled and worn. Meeting him, you could see how the man could have inspired a mixed bag of city people, politicians and bureaucrats as well as merchants and labor forces, to take up arms against an entrenched regime. He was not tall, but barrel-chested, and carried himself in a way that gave the impression of height. His hair and beard, jet black when I’d encountered him years ago, were now mostly gray and white, but his eyes were still sharp, large and dark with a piercing look. When he turned that laser gaze on you, he made you feel like the only important person in the world—a useful tool for a politician, and an effect that could be very reassuring or extremely uncomfortable, depending on why you had his attention. At the moment he was glad to see us, and in spite of myself I found I hoped we could keep it that way. When I greeted Roth, I left in the “Twenty-three blessings” line.

  “Micah Roth I am,” he said in proper reply to my ritual greeting, “Boss of Bay City. Welcome to our city, Railwalker. Come freely, go safely, and bless us with your corvine council.”

  Next to Roth sat a massive woman in a gray knit dress, a silk scarf pinned at her shoulder. She was a head taller than the city boss, even seated. I’d have guessed she’d be at least six feet if she were standing, and built to go with the height, a cataract of wavy hair as black as Roth’s once was only beginning to show some gray, and a face more handsome than beautiful. At the moment she looked tired, concerned, and kindly, but I had a feeling she could do forbidding just fine when she needed to.

  “Sarah Weldt, my chief policy advisor,” Roth said. We shook hands. She had a firm, dry grip, and a level gaze. I seemed to recall she might have been married to Roth at one time, but I wasn’t certain. Neither of them wore a ring.

  I introduced Morgan and Rok, and Roth introduced Merrin Gage, the chief of the city guard, and Guard Investigator Rainer Auden. Auden was the fellow who had challenged us on the roof, the one Rok had called “grackle.” Chief Gage was a tall, athletic man in his mid-thirties. Worried eyes peered out of an aquiline face; the short Mohawk above it would provide an opponent nothing to grab in a fight. Tattoos peeked out from the collar and cuffs of his dark blue uniform. It seemed unlikely that he’s achieved his post through politics. He looked like a man who would be absolutely confident on the street, but was afraid he might be out of his league in a council chamber. Roth drew us to sit at a large conference table, and Weldt called for coffee and tobacco.

  Sarah Weldt acted the JavaMama. The ritual serving set she used hadn’t been bought at a discount shop. The tray was walnut, inlaid with silver. The cups and pot were a strangely delicate-looking earthenware in the same shades. The communal cup had a shape like a cauldron on a short stem, while the individual cups were tall, cylindrical things, flaring at the top like the mouth of a trumpet. Each had a silver slotted spoon placed across it, a small cube of sugar standing upon it. The big woman gr
acefully raised the pot and slowly poured the black liquid over the sugar and into the communal cup, until the sugar dissolved. An experienced JM, she timed her pouring perfectly, so the last of the sugar vanished as the cup was just about full, the final drop sweeping away the last brown grain. The aroma of the coffee filled the room.

  She dipped the small silver ladle into the bowl of cream and placed a dollop in the cup. It spread slowly, marbling through the black liquid before dissolving completely, leaving the coffee a rich, dark walnut brown.

  Weldt raised the cup to the sky, then offered it to Roth. “May your inner eyes be opened as your need requires.” Roth took the cup, sipped, returned it. With the same formula, she offered the cup to me. It was good coffee, hardly cut with chicory at all, eighty percent pure, unless I missed my guess. When all present had sipped from the cup, Weldt repeated the pouring again, this time into the individual cups, which she offered to all.

  When we all had coffee, Roth took the pipe and filled it from the bowl of tobacco. He lit it, puffed, and delivered it to me. When we had all shared of the smoke, pipes and cigars were offered for those who wished to continue smoking. Roth and Weldt lit their own pipes, Gage and Rok each took a cigar.

  “Down to business.” Roth sat back with a sigh. “I suppose you know there is a killer loose in Bay City.”

  I allowed as how we hadn’t known until today; we’d been in the zones for several months, and mostly out of touch with the newsfeeds.

  “He began by taking people off the street—fisherman, teacher, prostitute. Now he’s killed two guardsmen, one of them the late Chief Adams.”

  Well, that explained why Gage looked a little uncomfortable. He’d only become the chief quite recently.

  “In summoning you to help, I hope everyone understands I mean to imply no offense to Chief Gage, or the men and women of the City Guard,” said Roth.

  Auden shifted in his chair, and Gage fixed him with a look.

  “None taken,” Gage said, still looking at Auden. “We all loved the Old Man...” He hesitated, glanced at me. “Well, maybe not everyone, but even the ones who didn’t like him respected him.” He stopped, went inside himself for a moment, sighed, and then continued. “The whole guard is foaming at the mouth to take this bastard down. But to take him down, we’ve got to find him, and the plain truth is, we’ve gotten nowhere on this, even while Chief Adams was still alive. Our best Investigators have come up empty. If you can help us find this killer, that’s all that matters.”

  “That’s all that matters to you, maybe,” Morgan said.

  If Gage knows his own men, I thought, he knows about the attitude problem on Investigator Auden. Chances were Auden wasn’t the only one.

  “It’s not unreasonable we should expect to encounter some resentment among your guardsmen,” I said, keeping my eyes carefully on Gage, not looking at Auden.

  “Maybe,” said Gage. “But they’ll keep shut about it and give you full cooperation, or they’ll answer to me, and they all know that.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Auden’s communicator gave a soft buzz and he excused himself.

  “Have there been no demands from this killer?” I asked. “No one claiming responsibility?”

  “So far,” said Gage, “confessions have been a handful of kooks, their stories easily disproven. And no, no demands. No notes, no vids, no audios, no nothing.”

  The phone on the conference table rang. Roth picked it up, said “What?” As he listened his expression went from slightly annoyed to absolutely grim. He said, “They’ll be right there,” and hung up.

  “Well,” he said, looking at each of us in turn, “I guess you’ll get a firsthand look at the Beast’s work. He just killed Phillip Czernoff, the city treasurer, in the lobby of this building.”

  4. THE BAR OF GOLD

  “What do you mean, he disappeared?” Dobbs demanded.

  Carter Evans cringed. He didn’t mind so much getting yelled at when he’d fucked up; that was natural, you had to expect that. But he hated it when his boss blamed him for things he couldn’t control. And he wished Dobbs would sit down. When the tall, gangling bar owner waved his big, bony hands around like that, Evans was reminded of his old man, the way he’d wave his big hands around just before he’d start cuffing you.

  “I mean he friggin’ disappeared!” Evans insisted. “He goes inside the fuckin’ jakes, and he never come out. I watched for a while, didn’t I? Then I goes in, and looks around, see? And he ain’t there. Nothing. Nobody. Zip, zilch, nada. Into thin air, like.”

  The very air of Dobbs’s private office, reeking of cigar and bourbon, evoked Old Man Evans as well. The beery, cigarette smoke-fogged atmosphere of the Bar of Gold itself, with its overtones of unwashed bodies and grace notes of vomit and antiseptic, was comfortable and familiar. When swimming through it, Carter Evans felt like one of the sharks. In Dobbs’s office, on the other hand, he felt like a delinquent kid.

  Hanover Dobbs sighed, set his cigar in the ashtray, and sat down. He’d been thinking he could have had this interview at a corner table in the bar, but with the turn it had taken, he was glad he’d brought Evans back to his small private office. He looked steadily at Carter Evans. The scruffy little turd blinked, but he didn’t back down. He believed what he was saying, that much was clear. Mutants were often rumored to have strange powers, but Dobbs was not ready to believe that even a mutie could walk into a men’s room and vanish. Evans wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer; the mutie could have slipped by him.

  “Anyone else come or go from the jakes?” Dobbs asked.

  “Sure, several guys, but not the mutie. I’d have seen him. I were watching close, Dobbsey, swear to the gods I were.”

  Dobbs mulled this over. A few of the men Dobbs employed on errands were either so completely intimidated by him, or else so worshipfully devoted to him, they would do his bidding to the letter. Evans fit into both categories. If Evans said he watched close, he had watched close. Dobbs felt sure of that.

  The little man had followed the mutie from the bar last night to an apartment—presumably the mutie’s own, though it was a bit more upscale than most mutants could afford. Evans hadn’t been able to tell which apartment he’d gone into, but the mutant had stayed there the night through and left in the morning. Evans had followed him to a dentist’s office, where the mutant spent an hour or so, and then to the Bock Street tram station, where he’d pulled his vanishing act. Dobbs considered the possibility that Evans had missed the mutie’s exit from the jakes because he was tired from watching the apartment all night. Possible, he thought, but less than likely.

  “You sure you didn’t just nod off and miss him?”

  “Absolutely. Oh, I might have dozed a bit while I was watching the apartment, but not once he left in the morning. Popped a couple of crackers about four-ish, just so’s that wouldn’t happen.”

  Crackers, Dobbs thought. That’s why he looked so wired. Dobbs wasn’t into uppers himself, but he knew enough about the drug to know that if Evans was on crackers when he was watching the jakes, there was no way he’d have dozed off. Nevertheless, even muties couldn’t vanish into thin air, so the fucker had to have snuck by Evans somehow or other. Had the fucker known he was being followed? Evans broke in on his ruminations. “I didn’t think I should follow him into the jakes. That woulda give the game away, wouldn’t it?”

  “Shut up,” Dobbs snapped, and Evans cringed. Fuck, Dobbs thought, I shouldn’t blame Evans. If the mutie was a clever dick, it was Dobbs’s own fault for setting Evans to follow him, instead of someone with two more brain cells to rub together. “No, Carter,” he said finally, “it’s alright. You did right. Go have yourself a drink, whatever you want. Tell Briggs I said it’s on the house. Then go home and get some sleep.”

  Evans burbled multiple thank-yous and bowed his servile way out.

  Hanover Dobbs poured himself a drink from his private reserve and re-lit his cigar. He hated mutants. He served them in his bar beca
use the law said he had to, as long as they could show they were properly registered with the city. Once upon a time Dobbs would have scoffed at the law, and any mutie who dared enter the Bar of Gold would have found themselves unceremoniously chucked out. But since he had decided to run for council two years back, Dobbs had changed his policies. He didn’t buy from runners anymore, his hooch and pot had all the proper paperwork and taxes paid on them, his little kitchen passed muster with the health inspector, and his games were all straight. Well, mostly straight. If his resident card sharp was caught cheating by city officials, Dobbs was prepared to fire him and pay the appropriate fines.

  Still, although he might be compelled by law to serve the muties, he didn’t have to make them feel welcome, and he didn’t. Yet this particular mutie continued to visit the Bar of Gold each Thursday and Friday night. Dobbs guessed the guy was just used to the stares and cold reception and didn’t give a shit. He didn’t stay long, anyway. He’d come in, have a couple of drinks, and leave. But his continued presence had drawn Dobbs’s interest. One time Dobbs had gotten behind the bar and served the guy himself, just to get a close look at him. He was tall—almost up to Dobbs’s own 6’ 1”. And strong. Dobbs had spotted the body of an athlete beneath his nondescript clothing, long and lithe, like a swimmer or a runner. He had no tail, no extra limbs; he wasn’t obviously distorted or crippled like some mutants. His mutie status was betrayed only by his albino coloring: pale, white skin and hair and pink eyes. For Dobbs this somehow made it worse. Mutants whose knees worked backward like an animal’s or who sported other obviously nonhuman traits were bad enough, but those whose appearance made them seem almost normal really twisted Dobbs’s short hairs.

  Dobbs couldn’t have said exactly why he was so interested in this particular mutant, except for the question of why the fucker kept coming to a bar where he obviously wasn’t welcome. But now he had a reason. You didn’t vanish—or appear to vanish—from public restrooms unless you had something to hide. And Dobbs had a feeling he knew what the mutie was hiding. There was a killer loose in the city, and given the nature of the killings it was a good bet the Beast was a mutant.