by Bryan Camp
Not Leon Carter. He’s just the vessel. I’m talking about High John.
The golem pressed the sunburst medallion that granted access to Mourning’s office into place, and Jude braced herself for the crazed dance of the elevator’s travel. To Renai, Jude sent the mental equivalent of a confused shrug.
High John de Conquer? Renai thought, somehow making her mental voice sound incredulous. He’s King fucking Arthur as far as the loa are concerned, get it? We have to help him. You think death was bad? I don’t even want to think about what Legba would do if he knew we saw this and didn’t try to make it right.
I said I’d help and I will, Jude thought. Just try not to freak out in here, okay?
Renai somehow managed to make an incredulous sound in her mind. Whatever, dude. Can’t be worse than death.
As the elevator stopped its sickening sway and came to a stop, its door dinging open, Jude tried to keep her next thought to herself, that Renai was wrong, that what awaited them in this office might just be worse than death.
Jude couldn’t decide if it was a good sign or not that the golem didn’t follow her into Mourning’s waiting room. The horned little man behind the desk didn’t even look up when the elevator doors closed and vanished, simply said, “Mr. Mourning is not in at the moment. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back later.”
Jude’s face flushed, rage coming on fast and hard, gripping her and shaking her down to the bone, like a fever. Tricked, maneuvered, murdered, robbed, and now whatever was going on with Leon, and Mourning was at the center of all of it. She didn’t know why an angel was killing people or what it had to do with fortune gods and her own fate, but the being on the other side of that door did. She didn’t really want to be here, but she’d be damned before she let this little prick send her away without a fight.
She’d only taken a few steps into the room when Scowl appeared from behind his desk. He bobbed from side to side as he walked, blocking the way between Jude and Mourning’s door. From the waist down, Scowl had the hairy, naked hindquarters of a goat, his genitals swinging free, large and obscene. Jude closed the distance between them.
“You should not be here, Dubuisson,” Scowl said, all pretense of absent-mindedness gone from his voice.
So much for the innocent little girl approach, Jude thought. “Tell me about it. But Mourning sent his goon after me, so here I am. Whether you like it or not, I’m going in.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” Scowl said, looking up at her, showing no discomfort despite the way he had to crane his neck back. “I am under my employer’s protection, now. None of your cheap tricks will have any effect. Now go.”
Jude lifted her hands and started to turn away, as if she’d been bluffing, then spun and kicked Scowl square in his naked balls, hard enough to lift him off his cloven hooves. The satyr, the imp—whatever he was—went down in a heap, and Jude stepped over him on her way past. A better person would feel no satisfaction acting in such a way, but Jude’s essence, the core identity that apparently transcended time and even death, had always been a bit of a bastard. The corners of her lips twitched, the ghost of a smile illuminated by the glare of Mourning’s office as Jude threw the door open.
As always, the first step inside was blinding, the inhabitant’s presence like the white-hot center of a cutting torch flame. When her vision cleared, she saw Mourning lounged back in his seat, bare brown feet propped up on the desk. He wore a pair of crisp eggshell linen pants and an oxford shirt as black and glossy as oil, those sapphire eyes betraying nothing, not surprise at Jude’s entrance, nor anger or disappointment at the way the door had slammed open. He merely held up one immaculate finger, the casual dismissal freezing Jude mid-step. Mourning kept his attention on the elegant ivory curve of a telephone receiver in his other hand. “Do we have an understanding?” he asked. “Good. See to it.”
Mourning hung up, and the phone vanished as he turned—chair swiveling without a sound, feet making a smooth and effortless glide to the floor—his piercing and weighing gaze toward Jude. A Cheshire cat grin curled across his face, his skin the same reddish brown as the clay that Jude had walked on beneath the Mississippi, and he spoke, not to Jude, but to whoever occupied one of the other chairs in the room, hidden by the high back. “Look who has joined us,” he said, his voice purring, lisping, hypnotic, “just as I promised.”
A list of the worst possible people to be sitting in that chair ran through Jude’s mind, but the person waiting for her when she crossed that checkerboard floor certainly wasn’t on it: Celeste Dorcet.
Careful Jude, Renai thought. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Renai might have been quoting a movie, but she was right; Celeste wasn’t herself. Clearly, a loa was riding her. Whoever it was wore a three-piece suit in dark reds: scarlet vest, wine pocket square, even a tie pin capped off with a garnet. Something in the insolent smirk, the overtly casual drape of one leg over the other knee, told Jude that it wasn’t Legba. No matter their name, their presence here meant that Jude had been played. Probably from the very beginning.
Of course, she’d had that impression for a while now.
“Such a grim visage, M. Dubuisson,” Mourning said, using the gender-neutral honorific of a single letter, polite to a fault. “Perhaps a cocktail will remedy that. Mr. Cross, I trust you will have the usual?” Mourning held out his hand as he stood, gesturing for Jude to take a seat in the leather armchair next to the loa in red. Mourning moved to a fully stocked bar that hadn’t been there a moment before, glass ringing against glass as he pulled down bottles of rum and cognac and bitters.
Jude sat, the leather groaning around her, her fists clenched between her knees. “Coffee for me,” she said, not surprised to find a steaming cup of chicory already waiting at her elbow, but a little unnerved when her first taste revealed it to have been served black, the way Renai’s soul and this body liked it, not the cream-and-sugar way Jude preferred.
This guy is good, Renai thought.
You have no idea.
Mourning brought Cross his drink: half a glass of neat rum, into which he poured black sand from a small burlap sack with a faded label that read HAZARD POWDER COMPANY in a semicircle around two crossed cannons.
Jude and Renai shared a moment of revelation with the clarity of a fired pistol. Only one loa took his rum with a chaser of gunpowder: Kalfou, the dark and angry side of Papa Legba—the Petwo half—sinister in all the ways Legba was benevolent. Calling himself Mr. Cross was a joke that came from his title: Mait’ Carrefour, Master of the Crossroads and Closer of the Ways. When Haitian slaves studied Roman Catholicism, they recognized Legba in St. Peter, the keeper of the keys to Heaven. When they looked for Kalfou, they found Satan.
Jude took a sip of her coffee and wished she’d asked for something stronger. And yet, the rich scent and the burst of flavor and the lingering bitterness combined in a sense of protection and family, a connection to a whole host of good feelings that were not Jude’s, but were a conspiracy of this body’s tongue and sinuses and synapses unveiling Renai’s memories of early mornings with her father as a child. Memories that Jude allowed herself to take comfort in, even though she knew they were stolen.
Mourning leaned against his desk, taking a long swallow from a glass of amber-colored liquor with a sigh of delight. He glanced at the watch on the inside of his wrist, and his full lips quirked in a quickly smothered frown. “Now,” he said, “I trust you are prepared to discuss the exceedingly grave and urgent matter for which you were so—crave pardon—indecorously requisitioned?”
“Love to,” Jude said, managing to fill her voice with far more confidence than she felt, “but aren’t we missing someone?”
“I confess, I am at a loss as to who that might be.”
“Regal Sloan. Where is she?”
Mourning exchanged a glance with Cross. “Much as it pains me to admit it, M. Dubuisson, I do not have that particular piece of information at my disposal, nor anything as might regard Ms. Sl
oan at present. She is no longer employed under the auspices of this organization, nor has she been for quite some time.”
“But she’s the one who brought me the invitation to the card game.”
“Correct. I engaged her as a courier, as I believed—correctly as it happens—that a previous acquaintance might more readily secure your diligence and confidence, but I did so in an entirely unaffiliated capacity. ‘Freelance’ was the term she preferred. If you will recall, I attempted to obtain your services in a similar fashion, an entreaty you resoundingly decried.”
Jude took a long swallow of her coffee to keep from screaming. The steaming liquid went down hot, and the fact that the pain felt good was probably not a good thing. The whole thing had been a lie. Or worse: a trick. And Jude had walked right into it. Swallowed the bait, took the hook, and then, when she was of no more use, she’d been gutted like a fish. Fire bloomed in her belly that had nothing to do with the hot coffee.
Two can play that game, Queens.
“Fine,” Jude said, “you win. Regardless of how I got here, you got what you wanted: me in a room full of deities gambling to be the next luck god of New Orleans, and at least one of them is murdering the others while they wait for my hand to be revealed. I’ve got a day left to live and no more outs left to play, so it’s time to stop fucking around. What’s the scheme? What is it you want me to do?”
Mourning blinked, a slow flutter of his eyelids. “I must beg your indulgence once more,” he said, the hissing of his sibilants becoming more pronounced. “Your reference has caught me unawares. To which ‘scheme’ are you referring?”
Cross snorted and emptied his drink in one swallow. “He means your scheme, podna. He don’t get it yet. He’s trying to get you to reveal your master plan.”
“Ah, so I see,” Mourning said. “You have mistaken me for a creature engaged in a finite enterprise. I am no Atropos, to shear off the thread when it has reached its appointed culmination.” He pantomimed with two fingers a pair of scissors snipping closed. “Nor am I the watchmaker so oft alluded to, building my little wind-up toys and watching them run.” Mourning spun his glass around and around in a tight circle. “No, beginnings and endings bore me in every conceivable way, M. Dubuisson. I am precisely what is indicated just here.”
At this, he leaned over and gave the nameplate on his desk one sharp rap with his knuckle.
“Management. I exert my influence over the machinations of others, disrupting or enhancing as the situation warrants. So while your presumption that I have built this entire house of cards of my own volition is flattering, it presupposes that I have the capability or the desire to do so. Simply put, the game did not originate by my design, M. Dubuisson, nor do I have anything more than conjecture as to how it will conclude.” Mourning circled back around behind his desk, moving with the casual grace, the rolling-hip gait of an alley cat. “My concern is not which of the deities is ultimately victorious. It is in ensuring that whoever holds the winning hand is in some way indebted to me. Which leads us to the nature of our current palaver. Mr. Cross?”
Cross launched to his feet as if sitting still so long had been painful. Two long strides brought him to the bar, where he took the bottle of rum and left the glass. Gunpowder or no, he bit the cork out, spat it on the floor, and drank in gulps from the bottle. “Bright Eyes here likes the sound of his own fuckin’ voice, don’t he? I think he done talked enough for the three of us. Word is, you pissed in the vampire’s cornbread, got him riled up but good. That true?”
“I stopped him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Cross huffed, an indignant, offended sound. “You full of cacca-shit. Words ain’t nothin’ but stanky breath without something to show. So how ’bout it? You got something to show me aside from them pretty titties of yours?”
Jude tried to think of something, anything else she could give them that would count as proof, but even if the satchel hadn’t been stolen, she only had the one compelling piece of evidence. She dug through her duffel bag and took out the journal of maps she’d stolen from Scarpelli. “How’s this for proof?”
“For a dead vampire,” Cross said, “that looks a hell of a lot like a book.”
Jude couldn’t ignore the bait, even though she knew that’s exactly what it was. “Never said I killed him,” she said, “just that I stopped him.” Jude tossed Bienville’s maps onto Mourning’s desk, her anger starting to get the better of her. “He was using this to turn the city. I’m not sure how.” Mourning snatched it up with the fluid, predatory speed of a striking hawk. He studied its cover and spine as he eased into his chair, opening the journal and turning its pages with languid, casual flicks of his hand. At one point, he pressed his nose to the crease between pages and made an audible sniff.
“Ah,” he said after a few tense moments, holding the book out for Cross. “You see how clever our mutual adversary has proven himself? Scarpelli is attempting to access the city’s four qualities of being.” Cross examined it in much the same way, but whereas Mourning had been efficient and delicate, almost effete, Cross treated the journal with a savage disdain.
While he was occupied, Renai whispered to Jude, Any idea what they’re talking about?
I think so, Jude replied. She started to answer more completely, but realized that even sharing thoughts back and forth like this, it would take too long to consider and articulate into words. So, she tried something else. She opened up a part of herself to Renai, letting part of the demigod essence riding along in the young woman’s mind flow into her. The experience was something like recalling a dream days later: a series of thoughts and impressions that were suddenly there, as if they’d been waiting there all along.
Most people—even those who think they understand the supernatural—really have no idea how complex and how strange things can be. Humans easily recognize the gods that are most like themselves. But in the same way that gods come in a variety of shapes and sizes, no one type of consciousness has an exclusive right to godhood. Animals have their own gods, and so do trees, and computers, and storms. There are deities of mountain and ocean for whom a single prayer has lasted longer than the whole span of human existence, and there are virus gods, microscopic and fierce, whose entire immortalities pass unnoticed before our eyes.
Cities, too, can be gods. Some of the ancient city-gods have been asleep for centuries, places like Byblos and Nin, Samarqand and Ilẹ̀-Ife. There are other older cities that are still awake, mad old London and reserved Beijing. Jerusalem, who argues with herself in four different voices, and Mexico City, who only answers to the name Tenōchtitlān. The younger cities—Sydney and New York, Tokyo and Brussels and Chicago—are bursting with energy and myth, trying to figure out who exactly they are. New Orleans might be young and small among city-gods, since most cities take centuries to develop enough history and charm and myth to attain an identity, if ever, but the Crescent City has been a god almost from her very beginning.
Sal had said that humans were composed of more than body and soul, that the ephemeral aspects of existence could be split into at least two parts—essence and energy—one that was eternal and one that got recycled. Jude had been taught a similar thing, long ago, about cities. That their souls, for want of a better term, were three-part in nature: Strength, Luck, and Will, represented by physical aspects of the city. In New Orleans, strength was a musician whose name Jude had never learned; Luck was a fortune god named Dodge; and Will was a magician, the man who had taught Jude all of this: Eli Constant. Mourning seemed to be implying that there was a fourth aspect that Eli hadn’t told Jude about.
In the handful of seconds it took for all of this to flow into Renai, related pieces of knowledge washed back into Jude. The three-in-one concept of a soul seemed immediately familiar to Renai, like the human experience writ large. She’d learned, having been dead longer than Jude, that our own consciousness was more like a braid than a thread: the essence and energy that Sal had mentioned, but also a third piece, a th
ing that stayed with the body when you died—a thing the dead called your “voice.” If essence was your identity, the part of you that made you you, and energy or soul was the spark that gave you life, voice was your ability to impact the world, the part of you that didn’t just observe or exist but the part that changed.
The part that could make magic.
That part of you stayed behind when you died, which was why the newly dead could not speak. In fact, none of the dead could speak in the truest sense of the world; they merely shared ideas and concepts via something closer to telepathy. What Dodge had told her, in that card room in the afterlife, made more sense now, that if the dead could speak, none of them would be dead. That loss of voice, of the ability to impact the world, was the most crucial line between life and death.
Jude was shaken from her shared daydream with Renai by Cross slapping the journal onto Mourning’s desk and growling, a low, pissed-off rumbling deep in his chest.
“I trust this satisfies the condition of our arrangement?” Mourning asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Cross said, “deal’s a deal.” They shook, and then Cross turned to Jude. For a fraction of a second, the loa riding Celeste was revealed, as young as Legba was old, hat pushed back on his head by a pair of horns, black tears leaking from his eyes. Jude blinked, and the red-suited figure wore Celeste’s body once more. “Be seeing you,” Cross said, with a flick of his hat brim that seemed, somehow, vulgar. He went to the door and then was gone.
Jude and Renai and the bright god shared an uncomfortable silence, the last embers of daylight fading away from the view at Mourning’s back. “Now,” Mourning said, gliding to his feet and returning to the bar without making a sound, “shall we discuss your recompense immediately, or do you require a measure of fawning gratitude to accompany it?”
What, Renai thought, more a statement than a question.
He’s talking about payment. I did him a favor. He can’t have a debt like that hanging over his head.