Black Blood

by John Meaney

  Perhaps he could take out five of the Robbery-Haunting bastards before turning the gun on himself. With one round to spare, of course.

  Brian had always been a careful man. Or a careful… whatever.

  Donal hadn't known about the old shaft leading away from the storage rooms. After awakening, he had stood listening to Brian talking to the bigots from R-H, and searched inside, finding memories of what he had heard while in coma. Standing there, he had noticed the microcurrents of air as they played across his skin; and that was how he found a private way out.

  There were no secret exits or entrances to HQ, of course. What he found was an old vertical shaft that allowed him to climb up five stories within the building, before clambering out onto an administrative level. From there he used a subterranean exit—actually a sequence of heavy portals guarded by deathwolves and bored-looking uniformed cops who made no comment about the stains on Donal's clothing from the climb—and passed through the semiexpensive stores of Kulring Mall, before riding to the surface.

  He returned to Darksan Tower on foot. Once inside his apartment, as decorative flames rose from the floor grilles, he stripped down to his skivvies, fetched the manticore-gut skipping-rope, and began to jump. It allowed him to think.

  His physiological processes appeared to have reset themselves. The earlier injuries might have been less due to the physical trauma of falling than to the side effects of being caught by two part-conjoined wraiths: struck not just on the surface but internally, where the wraiths might have partially materialized inside him, or allowed energy to spill through.

  As if recalling a dream, he understood the new wraith Aggie's explanation of how she was the fusion of Gertie and Xalia. And he remembered that Harald and Viktor were going to Mordanto, without having made their reasons explicit.

  He allowed himself to continue jumping for an hour. Going on for longer would have been easy, but it was time to get the investigation moving once more. Let Harald and Viktor pursue whatever they were after. He would ring Kyushen first, find out whether he'd learned anything other than thaumaturgic engineering esoterica, then try to find out whether this Illurian phone company, Central Resonator Systems, had offices in Tristopolis. Someone had to install the damned phones.

  Still in his shorts, he sat down on the bed, next to the phone. Just as he was reaching for the handset, intending to ring St. Jarl's, it rang. He picked up the receiver.

  “Riordan.”

  “This is St.-Jarl's-the-Healer Hospital. I have a call for you, sir.”

  This was too weird.

  “Thanks.” Then, as the background noise changed on the line: “Hi, Kyushen. How's it going?”

  “I'm disappointed, Lieutenant,” answered a feminine voice. “Boys with toys. I suppose you would remember the hardware, not the people with the healing touch.”

  “Uh-huh.” Donal gave a wide smile. “Some people have claws, as I recall.”

  “Ah, that we do.”

  “So how are you doing, Sister Felice?”

  “I'm quite uninjured in all the excitement, and of course Kyushen arrived after it was all over, so he's fine too.”

  “Excitement?”

  “Or maybe you should think of it as a jailbreak, from the Secure Unit for the Criminally Ensorcelled. Someone broke it open.”

  “So you're not just calling to check up on me, Sister Felice?”

  “Of course I am. And to let you know that Marnie Finross is no longer in our establishment.”

  “Eyes?”

  “I read about her nickname in the Gazette. Yes. Me, I saw the guys who sprung her. I thought they were lawyers.”

  “What—?” He thought about the way she'd said she was uninjured. “Were people hurt?”

  “A few. They blew up the walkway, ruptured the defenses, and all the nuts—that's a medical term—got loose.”

  “Damn it. I hadn't heard any of this.”

  “Police HQ is a big place. And I hear you've a lot going on in the big city.”

  “Yeah. Listen … you and the other Night Sisters better stay in the hospital for now. Let ordinary human friends do the shopping for you.”

  “We're healers.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyone can go crazy. I've not seen it happen with a whole city.”

  “No, but it can. Maybe the whole of the Federation, for all I know.”

  “Hades, Lieutenant. You know how to cheer a girl up.”

  Donal, still sitting on the bed, turned to look at the pillows.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “Sister Felice, I need you to do me two favors.”

  “Two more favors? All right, what are they?”

  “The first is, call me Donal.”

  “Ah, yes.” There was a soft sound, partly laughter, partly something sibilant and less human. “That I can do.”

  “And the second is to look after yourself. I mean, really watch out.”

  Now there was a silence.

  “You do the same, Donal.”

  Then a click sounded, and the line buzzed. Donal held the receiver for a few moments, before gently replacing it on the hook.

  He rose to his feet, padded barefoot across the dark, polished floor, picked up his discarded suit jacket, and reached into the pocket. The eyeball that he drew out was less sticky now. It was still clear, although opacity should have long ago set in.

  He placed it on the bedside cabinet, next to the phone.

  “Friends,” he said.

  After a moment, he walked out into the hallway. The walls were dark-gray and polished, decorated with inverted mirrorlike shields that were more than twice Donal's height. Not knowing how he knew to do this, he picked a certain shield and tapped it, then spoke keywords he had never uttered before.

  The shield swung back, revealing a small open hatchway. Inside was a dark, narrow, vertical shaft. Donal poked his head through the gap. There was a ladder on the opposite wall, and it appeared to disappear downward forever, and to lead upward. Since the apartment was on the 227th floor, the roof was the only thing higher.

  The rungs and struts of the ladder glowed a soft gray-green. Trying not to think too much about what he was doing, Donal swung himself onto it. Still dressed only in shorts, he clambered upward.

  Soon he came to a door that opened from the inside, and stepped through, onto the roof. He was at the base of the complex, dark spire that rose from the building proper. On all sides, dark narrow cables hung in hypercosine curves, linking the city's towers, along with narrow stone channels no wider than a hand.

  Donal walked to the very edge, feeling the cold winds against his cold skin, knowing that sudden turbulence was a constant danger here. He stared across the tower roofs and spires, the whole of Tristopolis laid out beneath a hemisphere of blank, dark-purple sky.

  My city.

  But not if the Unity Party had its way.

  It's still my city.

  He stopped breathing, and allowed his thoughts to slow, distorting the physiological passage of time as he waited.

  Waiting …

  Eventually, there was a scarlet glimmer. A pair of eyes, and then another. Then a hint of dark fluid movement among shadows on nearby towers.

  Soon afterward, they began to slink along the narrow cables and stone channels, eyes glowing brighter as they drew near.

  The cats—Laura's cats—were coming.

  The taxi dropped Lexar off on a narrow strip of sidewalk at the edge of a seven-spiral intersection where people rarely walked. The traffic was heavy and the air smelled bad, but this was the way that Lexar usually came. He edged along a dark stone wall until he reached a massive round steel door bearing the skull-and-Ouroboros insignia.

  “Bone Listener Lexar Pinderwin,” he said loud enough to be heard over the traffic.

  There was a grinding noise, and the disk-shaped door rolled into its groove. What it revealed was a stone tunnel inside which dim flamewraiths barely flickered. Lexar stepped in, waited for the outer door to shut, and th
en waited again for the inevitable scanfield to descend and pass through him. Then he continued to the inner door, which likewise ground open. He exited to an enclosed but roofless nine-sided courtyard.

  Two men in uniform came out of a small guardhouse.

  “Bone Listener, hey. How's things?”

  “Doing okay. Listen, I'm not on the roster, but the other day, I left some of my instruments behind. Can I go down and fetch them?”

  “I'll have to ring down,” said the other guard. “Hang on.”

  He went into the guardhouse. His colleague and Lexar stared up at the sky, from which a quicksilver rain was falling, then at the liquid metal puddles forming on the black, uneven ground of the courtyard.

  After a minute, the other guard came back with a clipboard. Westside Complex—Visitors Sign In was printed across the top.

  “Here you go, Bone Listener. Just write Pavel Layne in the ‘Visiting’ box, and sign as usual.”

  “Nice of Pavel to take responsibility for me.” Lexar signed the sheet. “There you are.”

  “Have a good day.”

  “You too.”

  Lexar crossed the courtyard, passed through a short passage, and came out at the edge of a vast, stone-walled pit that seemed to descend forever. Skulls decorated the walls, and the farther down the pit one traveled, the odder (as well as more worn) the features appeared. He had never been able to determine whether the older skulls had been sculpted or if they represented individuals who had actually lived. On the one occasion he had asked Dr. d'Alkernay about it, her answer had been a smile and a shake of her head, nothing more.

  Iron tracks zigged and zagged their way down the walls, and into the depths.

  Lexar waited.

  After four or five minutes, a bone-and-iron open-sided coach came lurching up the vertical pit wall, clanking and shaking where the rail changed angle. When it reached the top, Lexar stepped in and sat down, grabbing hold of the smooth-worn iron handles.

  There was a jolt, and the small coach began its descent. It was a process that Lexar was used to, but not one that he ever expected to like. He occupied himself with a series of focus exercises, alternately opening and closing down his senses to the background resonance pervading this place. Finally, the coach lurched to a halt, and Lexar exited to a stone chamber, where Pavel Layne was waiting.

  “Lexar. Good to see you again so soon.”

  “Only because I'm forgetful. Will I be able to get into the exam room?”

  “Sure. It's not been used for anyone since that alderman … uh, whatever his name was.”

  “Finross,” said Lexar. “Your guys are busy, though?”

  “As always. You want to say hi to the grads?”

  “Yeah, I'd love to.”

  Lexar had helped out on the graduate training programming for the new joiners whose abilities in osteoanalysis rarely matched their knowledge of thaumadynamic processes. No one expected them to be Bone Listeners, but they needed sensitivity far beyond that of ordinary humans. Among other responsibilities, osteoanalysts were supposed to pick out, from among the piles of corpses destined for the reactors, any deceased artists whose bones contained the interference pattern of their dreams.

  “All right.” Pavel walked with Lexar as far as the trainees’ workroom. “I know I'm supposed to stay with you, but we really are busy. You'll be okay by yourself?”

  “Sure. I think I know the way by now.”

  “Then take it easy. I'll try to catch you before you leave.”

  “See you later.”

  Lexar tapped on the door and went inside. Young men and women in pale-gray lab coats were gathered at benches and corpse examination tables.

  “Hi, folks,” said Lexar. “You all doing okay?”

  “Hey, Lexar.”

  Most of them were working on a single bone, set in a resonator cavity. Oscilloscopes and fluxometers traced the changing potentials of necromagnetic fields.

  “Lexar, you know you told me to read up about arthritis-mediated defects?”

  “Uh, sure I do.”

  “Well, I've been boning up on it…”

  There was a second's pause, before the other trainee analysts groaned.

  “Oh, please.”

  “… but we need more people. I mean, we're working with a skeleton staff.”

  “We so do not need this.”

  “And you'll excuse me,” said Lexar, “because I need to go off and be sick.”

  He crossed to the door at the far end, and headed toward the room where he had worked with Alderman Finross's corpse. He let himself in—the scanfield recognized him—and looked around the still, quiet chamber. Overhead was the inverted tree in which the quicksilver flock slept.

  From his pocket, Lexar pulled a stethofork and several other instruments, including a small resonator blade. He could claim that he'd left them here, and had just picked them up. After having prepared himself for sleight of hand while Pavel or one of his colleagues watched, it was almost disappointing to be here in the room by himself.

  But to find the proof he needed, he would have to venture farther. He used an exit he would not normally take, and followed a short corridor to what was supposed to be a secure door. A fossilized knuckle larger than a human hand lay on the floor, propping the door open. Half of the osteoanalysts used this route during their breaks.

  Lexar went through, and descended a helical flight of ceramic steps to the Necrotonic Diffraction Analysis & Resource Classification Department, known to the workers as Sifting & Lifting. Here, osteoanalysts and their colleagues made the final checks and decided on which route the corpses would take, as secondary-or primary-grade material.

  Here, the corridors were tiled in white, as were the processing chambers that opened off them. The first chamber was busy, and Lexar passed it by. Two doors later, he found a chamber in which corpses lay on three of the thirty-three white slabs, but no analysts were working. He went inside.

  Lexar had sensitivity, allowing him to work without instruments even at times when other Bone Listeners, like his colleague Brixhan, deployed most of their detection devices. Even so, when he placed his hands atop the first corpse, it took a while before he could come to a conclusion. He shook his head.

  Then he moved to the next body, repeating the procedure, before taking a small platinum rod from his pocket and forcing the needle-end through the hardened flesh. He closed his eyes to concentrate. Again he shook his head, and removed the rod. He looked at the next body, wondering if it was worth—

  Voices sounded from outside, and he ducked behind a slab. His vision tunneled inward, as if someone were painting black around the periphery of his visual field, and a rushing sound filled his hearing. This was neurochemical stress, the side-effect of adrenaline dumping into his system, and part of his mind was interested in the phenomenon, even while the rest of him was panicking.

  After the voices had faded as the people walked past, he became aware of the sweat layering his skin, now beginning to cool.

  Abandoning the room, he checked the next chamber along the corridor—too many live people working inside—and the next—empty of corpses—and then the third, where the small shapes lying on the slabs looked promising. Two analysts were talking, leaving the room, and Lexar moved back out of sight. When they were gone, he entered.

  Yes, the bodies were all of children. He should have thought of this before.

  The first, when he scanned it, was obviously intact. Perhaps he should have stopped to think about the tragedy—the aneurysm was obvious to him, like a groan overlaying soft flute music—but he had to keep moving. He checked the next dead child, and the next, until the fourth boy. This was it.

  Quickly, he checked the bodies on the next two slabs. Similar cause of death.

  “Shit.”

  He looked down at the pale, purple-bruised face. Then he lifted his resonator blade, and thumbed it on. The vibration was strong but without sound.

  “Forgive me.”

  It w
as obvious to his senses, but not to an ordinary human's. They would need proof, via dissection and an optical microscope. He lifted the dead boy's left hand, and swept the resonator down, just above the wrist.

  The cut was clean.

  In the pit, lying on its side, the motorcycle's engine growled. But its wheel, bent in half, squealed when it tried to turn. Undefeated, the motorcycle extruded its parking stand, slowly, slowly, trying to push itself upright. For several moments, it might have been succeeding, despite the fluids that gushed from its cracked carapace. Then the stand gave way, and the Phantasm crashed to its side once more.

  Its headlight flickered, then resumed its green glow, weaker than before.

  At ground level, propped against the ruin that surrounded the pit, Alexa Ceerling sat with her chin on her chest, her eyes closed, her rib cage scarcely moving. Even the mournful sound of oil tankers passing on Shatterway Sound could not penetrate the depths of the deep, final trance enveloping her.

  A white lizard came close, sniffed at her leg, then backed off. But it did not go far. Its fellows stood motionless on the rubble, waiting without emotion.

  Lexar returned to the graduates’ room, and crept up behind the trainee who'd made the smart remarks earlier.

  “Is that a humerus you're analyzing?”

  “Shit! Oh. Sorry, Lexar. You startled me.”

  “Funny. But I think you're going out on a limb with that one.”

  The other trainees shook their heads, smiling and wincing at the same time.

  “You guys take it easy.”

  “See you, Lexar.”

  “Yeah, see you.”

  Lexar was grinning as he left the room. Then he was alone in the corridor, and when he shrugged, he could feel what was in his inside pocket. The grin tightened into a grimace.

  “Lexar!”

  He almost let go with his bladder. Then he was in control, and turning around.

  “Pavel. I thought you were busy.”

  “I am. Are you going now?”

  “Yeah, I must.”

  “All right. I'll see you out.”

  As they walked, Lexar was conscious of the heft of the instruments he was carrying. Swung hard, they might make useful weapons. But if Pavel knew what he'd been up to, it wouldn't be one soft-bodied analyst between Lexar and freedom, it would be the full complement of the Westside Complex security force.