The Twisted Path, a Twenty Palaces Novella

by Harry Connolly

  “The predator wanted the cold,” I said, my voice shaking like a junkie about to fall off the wagon. “It wanted that room.”

  “It’s growing,” Annalise said, frowning at my wrist.

  “In a few hours, I might not have been able to resist.”

  Annalise nodded toward something behind me.

  There was a long metal table in the corner. It looked like something a medical examiner would use to cut up a body, and as soon as the thought entered my mind, I noticed the sluice, drainpipe, and oversized bucket.

  Mounted on the wall by the end of the table was a magnetic rack filled with restaurant-quality cutlery. Even from here, I could see that nothing had been cleaned properly.

  Was the freezer for Ana or her victims? I didn’t know and I hoped to never find out. With any luck, she would be dead very, very soon, and I would get to kill her.

  Roman’s voice echoed down the stairs. The Kiels had been spotted leaving their bank in downtown Lisbon.

  I looked around. “Burn this place to ash.”

  Before:

  There was only one thing to say to that.

  “Fuck you.”

  I turned my back on them—goose bumps running all the way up to my scalp—and headed to the door.

  It was only five strides to the hall, but they were the longest moments of my life. None of the peers drilled a lightning bolt into the back of my head, or set me on fire, or turned me into dust. They could have done it, or something like it, but they didn’t. Then I was out the door.

  Annalise was gone. I walked—walked—to the elevator and rode down back down to the lobby.

  Time to eat. I wasn’t really hungry, but it was early enough for a cup of coffee. Besides, I’d skipped the most important meal of the day. If the assholes in the society planned to kill me, I was going to squeeze a meal out of them first.

  I went into the cafeteria and got myself a tray. Elderly women scooped food onto my plate. Switch out the old women for old men, and I could have been back in prison.

  Except not really, because this was the nicest cafeteria I’d ever seen. Everything was clean and the formed plastic furniture was comfortable, like a brand-new McDonald’s. It’s also possible that I don’t eat in nice places.

  I carried a wedge of scrambled eggs, a plump red sausage, a little brown roll, and what looked like a tiny pie—barely larger than a quarter at its base—to a little table in the corner. Only the little roll was actually good, although the eggs were okay. I ate it all, though. Because of the spells Annalise had put on me, I needed to eat meat to survive.

  “May I join you?”

  It was Callin. He stood over my little table with a crooked smile on his face, as though asking permission for anything was his little joke.

  A few of the other peers were in the buffet line. I shrugged. “If it’s going to be a crowd, we should move to a bigger table.”

  Callin glanced at the ceiling, then turned toward the large table in the center of the room. It was then that I realized the room had fallen silent. Every face was turned toward him. The little crowd at the center table jumped up and moved away as though it had caught fire.

  I sat. Callin sat opposite, drinking his tiny cup of coffee. They didn’t offer regular coffee, just little shots of espresso. I hadn’t touched mine. Shots of espresso were a white-collar thing, and I wasn’t a white-collar guy.

  Csilla Foldes was the only one who didn’t join us; maybe her lucid moment was up. When they’d all gathered, I said, “So, are we going to play a bunch of bullshit games or are we gonna have a real conversation?”

  “You understand, I hope,” said the man with the slicked-back hair, “that we could kill you at any point. Easily.”

  I tried the tiny pie. It was nasty. “Yeah, but saying it makes you look weak.”

  He bared his teeth at me. Callin tilted his head back and laughed. The dude with the beard spoke up. His accent was different from the others’ but I’m not good with accents. “He’s right, Alexandre. Stop threatening our employees.” He turned toward me. “Callin said you would not respond well to assertive talk.”

  Assertive. These guys tell me they’re thinking of killing me, and he calls it assertive.

  Callin cut a slice of his sausage, sniffed it, and dropped it onto his plate. “What have you been told about the reasons we have called you here?”

  “That Annalise and me are having some success, and that I’m a wooden man who keeps surviving jobs that should get me killed.” Wooden man was my role in the society. It meant that I was supposed to be a distraction while my peer staged the real attack. It wasn’t a job that came with a retirement plan. “You want to know how so you can duplicate it.”

  “No,” Alexandre said, smirking. “We are wondering why you and Miss Powliss are going on so many missions while the rest of us have nothing to do.”

  What the hell? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  They were all studying my expression with skeptical little smiles on their faces.

  “It means that our war is nearly won,” Pratt said. “After more centuries than you or I could count, summoning spells are going out of the world.”

  He looked like he meant it. He was too full of himself to bullshit someone like me, a guy he thought was a nobody.

  “How are you winning anything?” I asked. “The society hunts down spells and destroys them, but people go online now. Some asshole could take a picture of a spell, post it, and fifty thousand people could download a copy. A million.”

  “Except we’re ahead of them,” Pratt said, still smirking. “We’ve been ahead of them for decades. We hire the best people and we pay them a fortune to put us in the place the rogues want to be before they can get there. When someone posts a spell online, even in the secret places, we’re already there waiting for them. The dangerous ones are the ones who don’t go online.”

  “They’re the careful ones,” Callin said. “Older. Like us.”

  I looked at their faces. They looked like average assholes. Pratt looked about thirty-five years old, while Callin and the dude with the beard looked mid-fifties, with Alexandre somewhere in the middle.

  Except I knew each had lived a century or two, at least.

  “The younger, sloppier ones,” Pratt continued, “were dealt with ten or twelve years ago. Everyone started going online, but we anticipated that. When the Internet was just three machines chirping over a phone line, we had our people in place. We had a few busy years, but it’s paid off. Things have been quieter than any of us can remember.”

  “Okay.” What else could I say? “I guess I… I heard you were losing this war.”

  Pratt spread his hands, still smirking. “Do I look like a man who is losing a war?”

  I decided not to tell Pratt what he looked like. “But you have a peer working against the cartels?”

  “The drug cartels,” Callin corrected, which I guess meant there were other kinds, too. “Organized crime has always been a concern for us, in part because they seek power wherever they can find it, and in part because governments want to tear them apart and uncover their secrets. The society would prefer that spells fall into the hands of drug-dealing psychopaths than government functionaries. For a number of reasons.”

  “Aside from the cartels,” Alexandre put in, “there is very little activity. Except for Annalise and you.”

  Callin spread his palms. “We need to know if the reports that Annalise sends us are accurate.”

  “I don’t read them.”

  “Tell us, then, about the missions. In your own words.”

  They wanted me to inform on Annalise. They thought like cops, and I was supposed to be their snitch.

  My first instinct was to tell them to fuck off again, but I knew it would be the wrong move. They’d come at me pretty hard up in room J, and they knew it. Now they were being reasonable—for peers of the Twenty Palace Society, at least—and they wouldn’t be warned off again.

  I tore off a hunk of brea
d and chewed it slowly. The one with the beard did the same. I wondered if he was mirroring me to try to build trust between us, but he didn’t look that clever.

  The thing was, Annalise was one of them. Unequal peers, Callin had called her once, years ago before I ripped him off and tricked my boss into attacking him. Unequal, maybe, but still a peer of the society. She didn’t have their raw power, but she was just like them…except she was out in the world doing shit while they lounged around.

  So, I had two questions in front of me. Did I think Annalise would send faked reports to the society? Fuck, no. Her mission was to save the world, and she took that shit seriously.

  Second, would she want me to tell them what we’d done?

  Alexandre smirked at me. “Your hesitation is answer enough.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You’re asking me to snitch. I’m pretty sure the boss wouldn’t mind, but…”

  “But you are a criminal,” Callin said, “with a criminal’s habits.”

  I shrugged. Then I told them about the jobs I’d done with Annalise: Seattle, Hammer Bay, Los Angeles, Washaway, even the little one from last week outside Vegas. I didn’t go into any depth, just gave them the basics: where we were, who we had to kill, what sort of predator we faced. I left out the innocent bystanders who’d been killed because we didn’t have all day and I knew they didn’t care.

  They were looking at me funny when I finished.

  “Well?” Callin said, sitting back. “Does anyone doubt him?”

  Alexandre scowled at me. “I’m not sure…” he said, because he still didn’t want to believe me.

  “Enough,” the guy with the beard said. “He has been more open with us than we are with each other, and Miss Powliss has ever been a dedicated colleague. Whatever is happening, the simplest explanation is not the correct one.”

  They all sat back.

  “If Annalise’s reports are correct,” Callin said, “then it appears that you have been instrumental in her success in a way that no other wooden man has ever been. During our busy years, we tried to make use of auxiliary agents—trained military operatives, big game hunters, professional bounty hunters—but most didn’t survive a single mission, let alone five.” He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he folded his hands on the table. “Raymond Milman Lilly, who are you?”

  I had no idea how to answer.

  After:

  We had no hope of picking up the Kiels at their bank, and I was glad. Banks weren’t the place to have a showdown of any kind, especially not a supernatural one.

  Instead, Roman told me he was taking us to a place with a name I couldn’t pronounce or remember, and that one of his people would meet us there with tickets.

  The airport? I didn’t like that idea, either. Better to throw down in a secure building with multiple security systems than a thin aluminum tube at 20,000 feet.

  But I was wrong. The tickets that were waiting for us were for a train, because Europe, I guess.

  Roman dropped us off and pulled away, heading back to the First Palace. We were met by an elderly woman with a crooked back and a sly expression. She carried the biggest handbag I’d ever seen.

  She looked us over. “I’ve never met peers before. Are you peers?”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “Well, then, let’s hurry.”

  The train station was all poured concrete arches underneath and high fancy lattice on the upper platform where we were supposed to catch the train. I would have gotten lost at least once trying to follow the signs, but the older woman led us straight to the platform we needed just as our train pulled in.

  It was red and white, with a fancy blue interior. Our seat numbers weren’t consecutive, but they were together, somehow.

  “Call me Maria,” the woman with the sly expression said. She nodded toward Annalise’s oversized firefighter jacket. “Madame, your appearance would attract too much attention, but the young man and I should move closer. Our targets have tickets all the way to Braga in the north, but they will almost certainly get off early. Probably in Oporto.”

  I shook my head. “They’ve already seen me.”

  “Too bad,” she said, laying a hand on my arm. “I like handsome young men who can save me from being eaten. If they gather their things early, I will notify Mr. Marchuk.”

  “No,” Annalise said. “For this, you’ll be talking directly to me. I will decide what to pass on to the Council. If Roman has an objection to that, he can make it to me.”

  The last sentence cut off whatever Maria was about to say. They exchanged phone numbers and the older woman hobbled toward the car in front.

  Annalise and I sat in silence as the train pulled out of the station. A little reader board above the exit showed our speed, and I was astonished at the way the numbers climbed until I realized it was kph, not mph. I took out my phone to convert them and was still impressed.

  Then I had an idea and spent the next twenty minutes fumbling with my phone and the translation program in it.

  “Did you know that Roman has his own Wikipedia page?” Annalise didn’t seem impressed. “Not in English, obviously, but my phone can translate stuff now, sort of. His first big case was a kidnapping. A Russian oligarch’s daughter. He tracked them down, slipped into the house at night, and walked out with her. Just like that.

  “After that, he broke up a smuggling ring selling guns overseas, helped seize a few drug shipments, and survived two assassination attempts. The translation is a little confusing, but I think one was by other cops.”

  “What’s your point, Ray?”

  “He’s an effective cop who broke big cases but got demoted a few times, too. He’s never going to be a big shot. Probably terrible at the politics, probably not corrupt enough. He’s too effective to fire, but certain elements would be okay with him becoming a martyr. Right? So, does that seem like the Roman we spent the morning with?”

  “People will surprise you, Ray. No one who meets you realizes that you’re the guy you are.”

  I had nothing to say to that, once I’d figured out what she meant. I glanced down at the mark on my wrist. It had grown past the size of a dime, much larger than the pinprick that had put me down for the count. It was a pretty emerald-green color now, and it looked like a piece of crystal, as though someone had glued costume jewelry over my pulse.

  Then I did the thing I’d been resisting since I woke up in the back of Roman’s car: I touched it. It wobbled like jelly. My stomach did a flip-flop—I’d expected it to be as hard as glass, but this was alive, like a jellyfish with facets.

  And my body had started to react to it. The skin around the mark was swollen and red. I was fighting an infection no antibiotic could cure.

  Of course, I had my ghost knife in my back pocket. I could feel it there. And I had used it to kill predators in the past.

  But that was unpredictable. If I didn’t kill the thing with the first cut, it might jump to someone else, or set me on fire, or fly apart in a million spores, or do anything.

  And while the infection might have looked like a spot on my arm—the sort of thing that could be managed with a machete—it was already inside every part of me. It was already in my head. Nothing else could explain how I’d felt at the threshold of that freezer. I’d practically swooned like a schoolgirl at her first boy band concert. And for what? A killing cold.

  “How do you want it?” Annalise asked. She was looking at my wrist too.

  “Did you bring your vest?”

  She nodded. Her firefighter’s coat—which she wore on missions because while she was bullet- and fireproof, her clothes weren’t—was fastened shut. Underneath I knew she had a vest covered with little colored ribbons. Some were green. Some white. Rainbows didn’t have as many colors. An alligator clip held one end of each ribbon to the vest. The other end had a little sigil drawn there.

  That collection was the main weapon in her arsenal, if you didn’t count her ru
thless will and terrifying strength.

  “Okay.” I didn’t even have to think about it. “The green fire.”

  She absent-mindedly touched her abdomen where the green ribbons were kept. “Are you sure? There are less painful ways.”

  I thought briefly of all the pain Annalise had given me over the years. “This thing loves the cold, so fire should be our first choice. Actually, our second.”

  I meant to say more, but the words wouldn’t come. Just for a moment. She waited.

  “How about this,” I said, after I’d run through the possibilities. “When it’s time, I’ll destroy my iron gate. Just cut through it. Then I’ll try the ghost knife on this thing.” I gestured vaguely toward my wrist. “If I can kill it and survive, great. Drinks are on me. If not, you’ll be right there with a green ribbon. But we should find a secluded spot.”

  Annalise glanced out the window. “The last time I was in Porto, there were plenty of abandoned buildings.”

  “Okay. Cool. If I can last long enough to be there when Ana gets handled, that would be great. If not, then not.”

  I was talking about my own death. Something that might happen later this week, or tomorrow, or tonight. I was talking about it the way a normal person would plan a picnic. It was sort of amazing.

  “All right, Ray. Let me know when you think things are likely to redline.”

  “Sure, boss. If you think I’ve waited too long, just ask me for the money I took from the Kiels. I’ll understand.”

  “I don’t want your money, Ray.”

  “You don’t need it. I know that much. But take it anyway. Spend it on something in my honor. I don’t know, order a restaurant meal you haven’t had before. You eat like a fussy old man.”

  Before:

  The peers didn’t like my answers and I didn’t blame them. I didn’t like my answers either. We went over my history: juvie, then runaway, then car thief, then Chino. We talked about the half-dozen times I went to a boxing gym (after “Any relevant combat training?”). We talked about growing up with my mother.