Bone Song

by John Meaney

Strong feelings roiled in Donal, preventing his reply.

  Vaults filled with obsidian sheets of runic transcriptions floating among the racks, vibrating against their tethers; strange half-physical, half-discorporated bird forms who cried out and wept as they recited the recorded conversations of long-dead men in the exact tone of voice—so the Archivists claimed—of the original speakers.

  There were pits of magma fire where the researcher could chain himself (or herself) and relive the Farseers' visions of distant events, for as long as they could stand the pain. There were sealed-off shafts from which subtle rustling and the occasional inhuman groan emanated, with no explanation provided to the ordinary visitor.

  Worst of all were the Vacua, those zones of nothingness that could drive even a federal spellbinder into madness. They promised the wisdom not of fact but of intuition, to any who could withstand the nine-day torture it took to traverse a Zone.

  Such was the outer ring of the Archives.

  Donal's coat flapped in breezes of alternating cold and hot vapors as he passed along the half-lit colonnade that ran alongside the Junior Archivists' pit. The wizened, gray-skinned forms mostly sat, bent and unmoving, poring over ancient records written on faded skin, some of which was not human.

  They all appeared to be working on the same project, but Donal knew better than to stop and ask them what they were doing. One of them looked up, his eyeballs crawling with tiny red mites, each giving and receiving the blood of the Archivist's fellows, sharing the stuff among the thirty-seven-strong team. Lines of the tiny mites stretched across the desktops, in their endless march among the ancient-looking Junior Archivists.

  Just why the Archivists shared their blood, and in such a way, was another mystery closed off to outsiders.

  “What the Thanatos are you doing here?”

  The voice was harsh and loud, causing Donal to stop and scan to every side before looking down at the ten-inch stone figure standing near his foot, gesticulating.

  “My job,” said Donal, drawing out his Magnus. “What about you?”

  “I'll accept that answer,” said the little homunculus, and then it began to shiver . . .

  “Hold on.”

  . . . and melt, as it slipped down and soaked into solid rock and was gone. Donal reholstered his Magnus.

  “Nice place you've got here,” he muttered to no one and nothing.

  In the distance, there might have been stones falling into dank pools, or perhaps the sound was of laughter, mocking Donal's presumption in entering the Archives.

  Donal continued until he was in a chamber of razor-edged glass sheets arranged in a haphazard fashion at every possible angle in three dimensions—and possibly beyond. Occasional twistings occurred at the edge of Donal's vision field, where he glimpsed geometrically impossible arrangements of glass that blurred or became invisible when he tried to stare at them directly.

  “Lieutenant Donal Riordan,” he said, “badge number two-three-omicron-nine, requesting Bone Listener assistance for Archive exploration.”

  Around him, huge glass sheets seemed to rearrange themselves, although he could not actually track any motion. It was as if the glass moved without moving.

  There was the potential for the new arrangement to slam into existence where Donal stood, carving him into geometric blocks of meat. The Archivists' criteria for acceptance often seemed arbitrary to the outsider, and cops told rumors of investigating officers chopped apart for no reason, except perhaps that the Lattice required fresh bones.

  The air shifted—somehow, in some direction not easily perceived—and then vibrated in Donal's ears, with deep harmonics he felt only in his gut.

  ~~We require this knowledge: Why are you here?~~

  Donal clenched inside and fought his reaction to the subharmonics. To show fear was to lose: the orphanage had taught him so.

  “To track down a network of corrupt sorcerers and politicians,” Donal said, “and take the bastards down.”

  There was a silence like the false calm of water flowing massively fast but without surface turbulence to reveal its power. Beneath, there was the sense of dark beings carrying out portentous unheard conversations. Donal's safety meant nothing here.

  Laura had expected him to follow the paper trail, not the bone trail, but the real information was held in the Lattice. It always had been. There was every reason to suppose it always would be.

  ~~The diva's killers?~~

  “Yes. Among other things.”

  ~~Do they not sing, the bones?~~

  Were the subharmonics mocking or sympathetic? Donal could not tell. Those words disturbed him, yet he had half-expected them, in this place.

  “If you say so.”

  ~~We taste them on you still.~~

  “Fuck off.”

  The sound that echoed among the glass sheets now was laughter, but not from any human throat. Donal felt the blood draining from his face, from the skin of his torso.

  “Are you going to fuckin' help, or what?”

  Now the sound that washed around him was a torrent of strange whisperings, layer upon layer of them, building up a thunder that drowned even the blood rush in Donal's ears.

  Then:

  ~~Yes.~~

  A pale white light floated in the air at his head height. It shifted shape: first a tiny winged human, then a kind of wriggling, featureless white caterpillar, then a convoluted tangle of finger-thick cords, like some form of living knot. Whether it was alive, Donal could not tell.

  As he focused on the knot and took a step forward, the glowing shape morphed once more, turned itself inside out, then glided through the dank air to Donal and stopped.

  It hovered.

  “You want me to follow?”

  Donal stepped one pace in its direction, and the glowing shape drifted a yard farther. Donal followed again, and the shape began to move steadily, into an arched, darkened tunnel formed of cubic stone blocks that were worn and distorted with the centuries.

  Somewhere, something screamed. Donal forced himself to ignore the sound.

  There were steps leading downward, which Donal descended carefully; it would be easy to slip and end up lying there with a broken leg. In this place, there was no certainty of help.

  Then there was a series of twisting tunnels, some that were intended to be straight but had warped into irregular configurations, others that deliberately wound back on themselves. In one place, where a fluid that smelled like blood trickled between the stone blocks, the tunnel was a slanting spiral that corkscrewed downward.

  This was deeper into the Archives than Donal had ever wanted to go. And all the time, the glowing shape led the way, occasionally morphing into bizarre forms, always to return to the knot that perhaps approximated its true shape.

  In an area floored with sandy dirt, ringed by openings to seven dark tunnels, the knot stopped its onward motion and twisted in place, hanging there.

  “This is as far as you go, right?” said Donal.

  The shape gave one final twist, then creased over in the middle as if bowing, shot off into one of the tunnels, and was gone.

  “Thank you,” Donal called out after it.

  “You're welcome,” said a dry voice behind him.

  Thanatos . . .

  There had been no footstep, no sensed presence, but when Donal spun around, the woman looked solid enough: tall, pale skin, a bald forehead, and lank milk-colored hair that began halfway back along her scalp and hung to the small of her back.

  The woman was lean, but her wrists looked thick and strong, her jaw square, her gaze calm but redolent with something more, as if she had looked upon things that Donal could only half-imagine. Those eyes had dark-brown irises that were double the normal diameter, so that only tiny hints of white appeared at the corner of her eyes.

  She was a Bone Listener.

  “I'm Feoragh Carryn,” she said. “You can call me Feoragh, Lieutenant.”

  “In which case I'm Donal to you.”

  Feoragh ac
knowledged this, inclining her head. Then: “Do you have a worthwhile search goal? Something worth bothering the Lattice for?”

  “I don't know,” said Donal. “I know nothing of the Lattice, but it's worth a lot to me. The case is . . . political . . .”

  Feoragh frowned.

  “. . . which I don't give a rat's ass about,” Donal continued, “but it makes it hard to track down the killers. And if I do find the triggermen, the principals are going to be protected by massive layers of indirection.”

  “Killers,” murmured Feoragh.

  “Including the killers of Maria daLivnova, the diva. They tried to take her bones.”

  “Ah.”

  When Feoragh blinked, her eyes went momentarily black.

  Donal shivered.

  “Tell me more, Donal. Tell me everything you know.”

  Donal related what he remembered. The period before his hospital stay was a little blurry, and the final days in the cabin, before Laura broke in and pulled Donal away from the bones' spell, formed a traumatic pain buried in his subconscious, but he could remember enough.

  There was the meeting with Commissioner Vilnar that had started it all, the newspaper clippings from foreign cities about theatrical celebrities dying unexpectedly. Donal surprised himself by recalling all the names and locations—or at least he thought he remembered them all.

  Then there was the meeting with Malfax Cortindo—

  “Oh, yes,” said Donal. “I nearly forgot. There was a letter from Alderman Kinley Finross, who arranged for me to visit the Energy Authority. He obviously knew Cortindo . . .”

  Beneath Feoragh's dark and steady gaze, Donal found he was able to recall the letter word for word.

  Then he told her of the visit itself. When he talked about picking up the bone and slipping into dreams, Feoragh sucked in a breath. And he told her of Cortindo snatching the bone from his grasp, dumping him back into the real world after three hours had passed, though it had seemed only a minute.

  Finally, voice unsteady, he related the diva's final performance, the ensorcelled audience, and his flight with the diva down through the tunnels that led to the Energy Authority.

  “That was a mistake.” Donal's chest was heaving now, his skin covered with a slick layer of sweat as though he had been running. “Because, of course, Cortindo was behind it.”

  He told of the confrontation among the reactor piles, surrounded by ensorcelled workers, and Cortindo giving the order to fire.

  “I could . . .” Donal's throat felt as if the diva's ghost were strangling him. “I hesitated. I could have saved her, but I froze for half a second . . .”

  “Ah.”

  “. . . as if I wanted her to die. As if I wanted to touch her bones, caress them. Shit. You know . . .”

  Do you feel the bones?

  Yes.

  Always.

  Donal stared at the Bone Listener.

  “Yes,” murmured Feoragh. “I do know.”

  And Donal realized that Feoragh Carryn knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “Malfax Cortindo,” he said after a moment. “Thanatos. I didn't check the autopsy report.”

  “I can find out,” said Feoragh. “Come with me.”

  They walked along a sand-floored stone tunnel and stopped before a plain green door. Feoragh opened it and went inside. There was a simple wooden desk, sealed document boxes on a shelf, and a solitary telephone. Feoragh picked up the phone.

  “Padraigh Fasheene,” she said. “If you would.”

  Donal shook his head, smiling at his own preconceptions. He'd been expecting some kind of esoteric device, not a telephone.

  Feoragh covered the mouthpiece with one hand. “Padraigh's my cousin. Works for Mina at the OCML.”

  “You mean Wilhelmina d'Alkarny?”

  “Who else?”

  “That's—good.” He'd been about to say it was an interesting coincidence, her cousin working at the Office of the Chief Medical Listener, but then he realized that perhaps it was no kind of coincidence at all. What did he know about Bone Listeners?

  “Could you ask your cousin,” he said, “what the—”

  Feoragh held up her hand.

  “Padraigh, the autopsy on Malfax Cortindo . . . Yes, the one from the Energy Authority.”

  Donal watched, trying to read something into Feoragh's tense pale features.

  “You're sure,” said Feoragh: not quite a question.

  Again there was a delay while Donal failed to guess what Feoragh's cousin was saying on the other end of the line.

  “Yes? All right . . . Could you get her to notify Lieutenant Donal Riordan when it happens? If it happens . . . Fine.” She glanced at Donal with those too-dark eyes. “Thanks, Padraigh.”

  She put the handset down.

  “Don't tell me,” said Donal. “They've lost the report.”

  “Hardly.” Feoragh shook her head. “They haven't done the autopsy yet. Cortindo's body is suspended in a stasis hex.”

  “But . . . that's impossible. I was in the hospital for two weeks.” Donal knew there couldn't be that many bodies in the morgue. Not even the lowest-priority case could be held back this long. “What's going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don't believe—”

  “By order of Commissioner Vilnar's office,” said Feoragh in a hard tone, “absolutely nothing is happening.”

  “Oh,” murmured Donal. “Like that.”

  “Exactly like that.”

  Donal stared at the wall, seeing nothing. Vilnar had put him on the diva assignment originally, but Laura believed that had been because Vilnar was under political pressure.

  Could Vilnar really be holding back his own department's investigation?

  Except that the task force had federal authorization. It wasn't truly under departmental jurisdiction.

  “All right.” Donal was trying to work out whether he could ask Feoragh to circumvent the restriction, to somehow get the OCML to carry out the autopsy anyway. It seemed unlikely. “What about the information trail? In the Lattice?”

  An odd smile pulled at the muscles of Feoragh's face.

  “Well, that's why you're here, isn't it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let's go.”

  It was impossible to tell how big the Lattice was. Donal followed Feoragh along a convoluted route that led in the end to a long low chamber filled by struts and nodes—the struts made of titanium-wrapped bones, the nodes formed of carved bone inlaid with strips of some green-and-black mineral.

  The chamber reminded Donal of a wine cellar. It was arranged so that Feoragh, provided she was willing to crawl on hands and knees or to stretch up onto tiptoe, was capable of touching every bone node with her bare hands.

  But that was only one chamber, one tiny cell among thousands—maybe tens of thousands or more.

  They had used a stone bridge to reach this place, and Donal had stopped at the midpoint to look over the edge, into the shadowed abyss. It plunged down as far as he could see, and the police department's medics had always rated Donal's distance vision as excellent. There were narrow bridges everywhere, entering the vast subterranean edifice that contained a three-dimensional array of bones many times bigger than the greatest buildings Donal had ever heard of.

  Far below, on separate bridges, Donal had made out the figures of three Bone Listeners: two entering the Lattice, one shuffling and bent over, stopping to catch his or her breath partway across the bridge's span. Did they pay a price for working in the way they did?

  “I'm ready.”

  Feoragh's voice brought Donal back to the moment, to the cold chamber in which they stood. This close to the Lattice, Donal felt as if the air was fractured and his body was brittle. He thought if he turned too quickly his eyes might fall out.

  “For the information quest,” Feoragh added. “You might want to listen to anything I say. Because if I speak it means I'm not retaining what I hear.”

  The atmosphere was differe
nt from the Energy Authority with its rows of reactor piles. There, a form of chaos had lapped at the edges of Donal's awareness, threatening always to explode, but here in the Lattice cell, it was more as if glass razors filled the air. There was a sharpness, a density that scared him.

  “We need links,” he forced himself to say, “between the diva and Alderman Finross, and between—”

  “That much I remember.”

  Whether Feoragh was offended, Donal could not tell. She was slipping into some form of trance state, though not a relaxing kind: her limbs twitched, a short-lived rictus jerked several times across her face, and her eyelids fluttered for longer than seemed probable.

  Then Feoragh's dark eyes snapped wide open, and she was expressionless as she walked into the midst of the Lattice and reached out toward a node. Her sleeve dropped back, and as she reached, a sharp-edged node cut a thin red arc on her pale skin. Tiny beads of blood glistened as Feoragh's fingertips touched the node.

  The blood drops grew smaller and sank inside the bone, like water into a sponge.

  Feoragh's mouth stretched open as she screamed—except there was no sound. To Donal it seemed that she was howling in agony, but the sound failed to reach him: something in the air cut the vibration apart and fed on it, absorbing it.

  Then Feoragh bowed her head, and Donal thought he saw some dark vibration ripple along the struts, play across the nodes, and flow outward into the greater Lattice.

  I'm sorry.

  But this was what Feoragh did for a living.

  It hurt her—in fact, it seemed to be torturing her—but Donal knew that he would ask her again to engage on an information quest if it was important. In fact, it seemed to him that a touch of ruthlessness was required in order to be a successful candidate in the first place: the Bone Listeners did not respond to everyone.

  And there were rumors of candidate clients who had entered the depths of the Lattice buildings—if not here, into the core—and simply never returned.

  Feoragh shuddered once more.

  “Going—”

  Her voice reached Donal as if through ocean waves, attenuated and broken.

  “—to Ill—”

  Strange ripples broke up the air.

  “Illurium. That's where—”