by John Meaney
“What are you two talking about?”
Alexa pointed at Laura. “Your girlfriend, Lieutenant Riordan, isn't just your superior officer. She's one of the richest women in Tristopolis.”
Laura shrugged. “Stinking rich,” she said.
Alexa pointed at Donal. “But you better still remember what we said.”
Donal nodded.
“I won't forget.”
But Alexa was frowning, and Donal thought that he understood: after talking about the dangers of undercover work, he was volunteering to do the same kind of thing across the border in a foreign country, where the justice system was swifter and harder than the one at home. And while he would not hurt Laura deliberately, if he got himself killed, that would be the worst thing that could happen to her. All this, Donal read from Alexa's expression.
“If we don't get a more specific lead,” he said, “then I'm not sure it'll be worthwhile going to Illurium at all. Can you cancel that ticket without losing your money?”
Laura shook her head. “Doesn't matter. But you know that Harald has a lot of contacts in Illurium. You'll have resources to call on.”
“Snitches,” said Donal.
“Maybe. I think some are more highly placed than that.”
Alexa said, “How can we get more leads? There's nothing to go on.”
“The Ugly Twins,” said Donal.
“They're not talking, are they?”
“Not yet.”
Next morning at five o'clock, the smell of coffee woke Donal. Laura, already dressed in an olive-green skirt suit, was holding a silver tray with a poured cup of coffee.
“Uh,” said Donal.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
“Mmm.” Donal took the coffee and sipped. It was hot. “Ah . . .Thanks.”
“You sure you don't want me to meet the charming egghead for you?”
“Yeah. No.” Donal rubbed his face. “You'd frighten him off, dear.”
“Is that a compliment?” Laura leaned down and kissed him. Her cold lips felt extra-chilled this morning. “Or an insult?”
“Not fair. I'm defenseless.”
Laura ran her hand down his cheek. “Easy prey.”
“I—” Donal picked up his wristwatch from the crystalline bedside table. “Look at the time.”
“You don't want me to join you in the shower?”
“Well, Dr. Jyu will wait for us, I'm sure.”
“You're not sure at all.”
“Um, no . . .”
Laura was already walking out of the bedroom. “Don't be late. I'll wait by the front door.”
The Vixen pulled up just behind the purple taxi that was dropping off Kyushen Jyu, at the steps of police HQ. Donal and Laura alighted and turned to watch Kyushen, who hadn't noticed them.
As Kyushen passed the deathwolves, the wolves' eyes glowed amber—that was more or less normal—but then the entire pack, FenSeven among them, lay down on their bellies, front legs outstretched, and opened their mouths in lupine grins, tongues lolling and teeth bared.
“That's quite a display,” said Laura.
Donal caught up with Kyushen in the main lobby. Kyushen had already caused a wave of diagnostic hex to pass over Eduardo's counter block where his lower body was melded into the desk itself.
Eduardo was grinning. “Why, thanks, Dr. Jyu. I never really thought of myself as special in that way.”
“Are you kidding?” Kyushen gestured into being a silvery mist, which formed itself into floating runes. “Best hemimorph I've ever seen, and the integration gradient is spectacular. You mind if I write you up for one of the journals?”
“Uh, sure. I mean, no, I don't mind. Will my picture be in it?”
“Yeah,” said Kyushen. “Definitely some TRS, maybe some—”
“What's TRS?” asked Donal.
“Oh, hi, Lieutenant. Thaumatic Resonance Scanning. Don't your forensic folks use it for analysis?”
“I don't know.” Donal thought back to the shattered room in the OCML where Dr. d'Alkarny's body had been found. “The prisoners I wanted to, er, introduce you to—”
“Oh, the test subjects. Sure.”
Eduardo frowned, but whether it was the reference to prisoners as test subjects or whether he resented Donal's taking Kyushen's attention, Donal could not tell.
“They killed the Chief Medical Listener.”
“Surely she didn't try to listen while they were still alive. Why would she be amused by them, anyway?”
“Huh?” It took Donal a second to recognize Kyushen's misunderstanding. “No, I mean, they really killed her. Literally.”
“They murdered Dr. d'Alkarny?”
“That's what I'm telling you.”
“Awesome. I mean, really bad.” Kyushen put his hands in his pockets. “Like, how far do you want me to go?”
Donal said, “What?”
“Look, human thought is kind of transient, but it's formed from neural patterns that build up over time. Pattern persistence is . . .Say you have an image you form habitually in your mind.”
Donal's eyes shifted to the left as he thought of Laura.
“That's what I mean,” said Kyushen. “You've just instantiated a pattern that you've used before, though each instant—that's a technical term—is uniquely different from the previous instants.”
“Um. . . If you say so.”
“But you also learn, for example, strategies of learning. That produces metapatterns that are used to create patterns, which are then instantiated. Got it?”
Donal decided it was time to show that cops aren't stupid. “And there are metametapatterns, I take it, that produce metapatterns.”
Kyushen smiled. “You've got it.”
“And when you asked about taking it all the way?”
“When you look at the room around you,” said Kyushen, “most of it is hazy background, but you build a mental model of what the room looks like.”
“All right.”
“But hidden parts of your mind might find details that the foreground patterns ignore. There are tricks to pulling new patterns out of background haze. You're filtering through a debugging frame because the whole point is you're stochastically analyzing apparent noise that the foreground didn't . . . sorry, am I losing you?”
“No.” Donal stared into Kyushen's eyes. “You were trying to tell me how difficult your job is.”
“Partly that, maybe . . . But the tracing tools dig deep into neural structures. Pain is entirely a neural construct.”
“You mean, the deeper you dig, the more it hurts.”
“Well, oversimplifying—yes.”
“And you want to know how much pain the suspects should undergo.”
“Yes.”
“If you take it all the way, extract everything you can, will it kill them?”
“Unlikely. It's just . . .”
“What?”
“Well, they'll probably wish they had died. The process may last minutes or an hour, perhaps two hours at the most. But time flow is a matter of internal mental states.”
“You mean it'll last longer for them.”
“For years, or at least that's how it'll feel.” Kyushen gave a soft smile. “Maybe even centuries. Longer than a normal lifetime.”
“So you'll be doing them a favor. Making it feel like they live longer.”
“In agony.”
Donal shrugged. “Actions bring consequences.”
Kyushen nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “They do.”
Harald walked into the task-force office and sat down at his desk. There, he stared into space, not speaking.
“Hey,” called Alexa. “Are you all right?”
Harald looked at her. “I don't think so.”
“So what can I—”
But Harald had already opened his desk drawer and pulled out yellow report folders. He placed them on his desk blotter and began to leaf through loose typed pages. It was movement for movement's sake: Alexa could see that Harald wasn't really
reading the reports in front of him.
Laura came out of her office, pulled a visitor's chair into the gap between Harald's desk and Alexa's, and sat down.
“Any news on the pterabat?” Laura asked Alexa.
“Sorry.” Alexa checked the list of official addresses and telephone numbers she'd written down on her notepad. There was now a line drawn through every number.
“I tried every official agency I could think of,” she added, “starting with the Federal Air Force and the Civilian Flying Authority. I even tried the weather service, in case one of their observation balloons spotted anything.”
The wraith-enabled sentient balloons were often referred to as Behemoths, an emotionally charged term that Alexa avoided, in case Xalia was offended. Not that anyone had seen Xalia for a while.
“What about the FAF? A pterabat can't cross into federal airspace without anyone noticing.”
“Come on, Laura.” Alexa tapped her notepad. “The border's thousands of miles long, in largely unoccupied territory. The chances of seeing an intruder are minimal if they keep low to the ground, beneath the scanseers' hex casts.”
“Is that an expert opinion?” Laura gave a half smile. “You sound pretty definite.”
Alexa colored a little. “I got one of the CFA officials talking. He's a nice guy.”
“Oh, yeah?” managed Harald, though his voice sounded empty: ribbing Alexa, but unable to put his heart into it. Not with Sushana still critical.
“What did he tell you?” asked Laura.
“Just what I said. The broadcast masts send out their waves at a thousand feet. In bad weather at night, even a pterabat can fly below hexar altitude and avoid the banshee patrols.”
Harald rubbed his face. “Did it definitely come from Illurium? The pterabat, I mean. Couldn't it have taken off and landed inside our own borders?”
“Well, David said—” Alexa stopped, and looked at Laura, then Harald. “Leave me alone. He is nice. He works for the CFA's safety board, and he said that a pterabat is too large for a normal small airfield, certainly not the kind of thing you can care for on an isolated farm or whatever.”
“He's not married, is he?” said Laura. “This David?”
“I don't—Look, he might not even call me again.” Alexa blew out a breath. “Thanatos. Anyway, David doesn't think you could arrange the flight from anywhere but an airport unless you were very well organized. And there were no flight plans of pterabats that could have matched our suspects. None at all.”
“But it's not impossible,” said Harald.
“No. A pterabat could have taken off and landed inside federal airspace. It's just not likely.”
“Why do you ask?” said Laura. “You have any other information, Harald? A reason for discounting Illurian involvement?”
Harald shook his head.
“Just being logical, is all. Making sure we don't focus all our attentions on one trail, when it's not a definite one.”
Laura said, “You were the one staking out the embassy.”
“I followed the driver to—” Harald stopped. “I've got nothing against Donal.”
Alexa looked surprised.
“What's wrong with Donal?”
“I just said—”
“What you said in words and how you tensed up your voice are two different things,” said Laura. “I heard it, and so did Alexa.”
Alexa looked unhappy. Then she nodded.
Harald closed his eyes, exhaling, then opened them again. “Vilnar assigned him here, remember? Whether you recruited Donal or not, it was still Vilnar who he reported to before and who agreed to second him to you.”
“What are you saying?” Laura's voice was like ice.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You asked me.” Harald stood up, report folders in hand. “I'm going to the hospital. Give Viktor a break.”
Laura looked at him for an endless moment, then said, “All right. Send Viktor home to rest.”
“I'll try.”
Laura watched Harald go, expecting the door to slam behind him. When it gently clicked shut, she gave a tiny jump nonetheless. Then she realized that Alexa was watching her with care.
“Do you think I'm losing it?” Laura asked Alexa.
“I hope not,” said Alexa. “Because if you are, so am I.”
Unsure what to make of that, Laura nodded and returned to her own office, where she could stare at the big wall map of the city she'd pinned up and wonder what to do next.
It resembled dissection.
When Donal entered the interrogation room, the sights that hung before him were not what he'd expected. Instead of a screaming, twisting body streaked with wet, glistening blood, he saw a still, pale, dwarfish body almost obscured beneath the multitude of bright, multicolored images suspended in the air throughout the room's space. The suspect looked to be in a coma, his face rigid.
Meanwhile, Kyushen sat against the far wall before a small table, manipulating a rack of delicate equipment such as Donal had never seen.
Still, it looked like vivisection: but of the mind, or perhaps the soul, rather than the body. Frames of golden light hung in the air, bearing legends such as:
[[image schoolJourneyDaily [
qlist: [duration: variSec dftval=30min,
painLink: Beating* dtfval = new Beating(severity:=3.2),
adrenalDump: seq
tempList: seq
.stratagem.levelOne).
]
plist: [ flee (inp SurroundPic: minGestalt, inp Howling:
audioChord)
[ initRun(speed:=currentState.physioMax()),
attempt [ executeStratagem(nearFit(tempList))]
success [ wait(22), watch(maxPoss), continue]
otherwise [ initRun(speed:=recalc())]
self.propensityElasticity:=sub1.
]
]
] end_image]]
None of which made sense to Donal. The frames were stacked into patterns linked by rune-labeled arcs, like containment–materialization, precursor, and conjuration.
“Oh for fuck's sake.”
Donal deciphered what the shining frames meant by remembering his own childhood.
That bloody orphanage.
Because these were the prisoner's memories of being beaten up while traveling to and from school. These were the behaviors that had turned him into what he was.
Kyushen leaned back in his chair and wiped sweat from his face.
“Sorry, Lieutenant. Tough work. He's been neatly ensorcelled with protected hex.”
“Er . . . You mean you can't get into his mind?” Donal gestured at the images. “But aren't these—”
“Part of Dilvox's soul, yes.”
“Dilvox?”
Kyushen pointed at the strapped-down dwarf. “That's his name.”
There was a glowing light in Kyushen's eyes that had nothing to do with the flame script reflected and dancing across his corneas. He was a knowledge seeker. This was his drug of choice.
“So . . .” Donal looked around at the glowing frames. “Are you getting near the core of his thoughts yet?”
“Oh, no.” Kyushen looked surprised. “That'll take hours, at least. These are mesolayer templates for recurrent behavior. I need to send him into deep trance.”
Kyushen's fingers moved across the dials and tiny switches. New, complicated geometrical patterns of dark blue and dark green shifted into being among the flame-script frames.
“We can perform instant traces and step through the actions of his potentiated thoughts.”
“Potentiated,” said Donal.
“Yeah, stored.”
More displays opened up, and then Kyushen's fingers moved across the equipment once more. This time the captive dwarf moved beneath his bonds. Then he screamed, a howl of awful agony that Donal had never imagined a human throat could utter.
Donal opened his mouth to tell Kyushen to stop, then saw the sardonic ex
pression on the man's face: the expression that said, All laypersons react this way. Donal clamped down his feelings.
“Is that all you can manage?” he said. “A bit of pain? I can do that with my bare hands.”
“Wait 'til you see this.” Kyushen twisted three dials. “Now I have him reliving his memories of three nights back.”
This time the howling was loud enough to make Donal curl up with his hands over his ears, and it continued until he could take no more. He stumbled toward the interrogation-room door, and it swung open at his approach. He stepped through, and the big door swung back.
Ensorcelled bolts clicked shut of their own accord. In the corridor outside, there was silence.
“Thanatos,” said Donal, to no one there.
But perhaps a ripple of movement passed across the wall, just beyond the edge of his peripheral vision. Donal squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them.
“Shit,” he muttered, knowing he would have to go back in.
My prisoner.
For no good reason, Donal reached inside his jacket to his shoulder and drew out his Magnus. He clicked open the catch, slipped out the magazine to check the heavy load, then pushed it back in place.
Donal grabbed the door handle and went back inside the interrogation room.
* * *
Xalia was in darkness, rising through cold stonework, aware of the vertical rivers of not-quite sound defined by a nameless sense that was akin to remote touching: a tactile sensation of icy metal pipes that were yards away.
Xalia's density in the material dimensions was close to zero, maintaining the minimum containment necessary to stop dissipation. She was on a knife edge no human could appreciate: rotate any more of her self out of the mortal universe, and she might never find her way back.
She had been in Darksan Tower and with Laura's permission had roamed up and down the shafts and communicated with some of the wraiths imprisoned there. The tower was a vast, labyrinthine, ancient place, but it paled beside the dark history and complexity of police HQ.
Ward fields repelled Xalia.
If it hadn't been for Sushana in the hospital and for the dead Mina, there was no way Xalia would have tried to penetrate this place.
The ward fields stretched horizontally across the whole of police HQ at this level. Layers of standing hex waves filled resonance cavities in the stone floors for only one purpose: to prevent quasi-material forms like Xalia from passing through to the upper levels of the building.