City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World)

by Barbara J. Webb

  Half a dozen men came out of the house, all armed. Three spread around the car, watching out into the night. The other three opened the back door and carefully removed Iris. They carried her inside. Vivian and I followed.

  Amelia waited just inside the door. I’d never seen her outside the office before, and she looked strange in a robe that had been thrown on over pajamas. Where another woman might have been diminished, receiving visitors in her nightclothes, Amelia was as cool and in-charge as ever. “Ash.” She looked me up and down, her eyes catching on the blood smeared on my clothes. “Are you all right?”

  That was a more complicated question than she knew. “I’m not shot.”

  “Good. There’s a bathroom down the hall. Go clean up. I’ll have someone dig up something fresh for you to wear.”

  I tried not to gawk on my way to the bathroom. Amelia was my boss, and I’d never looked beyond that to wonder who she was or where she came from. But this house—I knew P&B did well, but did it generate the sort of money to afford this house and all this security?

  I passed a lavish sitting room, complete with crystal chandelier and hand-woven silk rugs I suspected were real, not the cheap knock-offs they hawked downtown to tourists. The dining room had an ornate table of real wood—expensive to import, here in the desert—and shelves full of silver and porcelain behind the glass doors of the cabinet. And it wasn’t just the big things. Little touches, all over—a vase that matched the curtains, or an arrangement of silk flowers on the table—it all bespoke the kind of artistry and taste that could only be achieved with money.

  Just who was it I worked for?

  Even the bathroom was well appointed, with crystal knobs on the faucets and a gilded mirror over the sink. A delicate ceramic vase stood empty on the counter—how long had it been since it had held flowers?

  I stripped out of my bloody clothes and ran a small amount of water into the sink, trying not to abuse Amelia’s hospitality. I did claim one of the soft, embroidered washcloths from the rack that may or may not have been decorative. It felt good to scrub away the dirt. The cool water against my skin, the quiet isolation—for a few minutes, I could forget the strange horrors of the last few hours.

  But only for those few minutes. “Ash!” Vivian pounded on the door, then opened it wide enough to shove fresh clothes through the gap. “Hurry up. Amelia wants to know what happened.”

  Sadly, I’d been there, and I wanted to know the exact same thing.

  #

  Vivian waited for me outside the bathroom. I followed her to a more casual sitting room, where a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of tea had been set out. “Amelia thought you might be hungry.”

  Now I was staring at food, I was famished. “Where is she?”

  “Said she had to talk to the security guys.” Vivian went straight over and grabbed herself a sandwich from the pile.

  I followed suit. The first bite was cold and delicious—a blend of meat and cheese, some flavors I didn’t recognize, but I wasn’t going to complain. “Those guys—do they work for P&B?”

  Vivian shook her head. She talked around a mouthful of food. “Never seen them before. Don’t know where they came from, but Amelia seems to trust them all right.”

  I finished one sandwich and had started on the next when Amelia joined us. “Iris will be fine,” she announced, taking one of the thick, cushy chairs. “I just spoke with the doctor. He was able to remove the bullets, and with the foreign matter out of her body, her own instincts will take care of the rest.”

  “How soon before she’s up?” Vivian asked. Without being asked, she poured a glass of tea and took it to Amelia.

  Who nodded her thanks. “She’ll be recovered in a day or two, I would imagine.”

  “Remarkable,” Vivian said.

  “That she is. Thank you, Vivian. You’ve been a great help tonight, but I shouldn’t need you any further.”

  Vivian closed the glass-paned doors as she left, giving Amelia and me privacy. “What happened,” Amelia asked, concern softening her voice. “Did something go wrong with the magic?”

  “That’s…complicated.” I recounted, as best I could, what I’d seen in the pattern. I described the shadow-creature that had eaten Eddis with as much detail as I could, but Amelia’s blank look told me she didn’t have any better idea than I did what the thing might be.

  “So this thing, this creature, has been living in the Jansynian’s skin. That’s how the project got sabotaged. I’m sure of it. But then it gets more complicated.”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “What else did you see?”

  “Not there, not with the magic. Although—I have to say—something wasn’t exactly right with that either.” I flailed for the right words. “Like the pattern was fighting me. Or something was fighting the pattern. I don’t know that it matters, but I don’t know that it doesn’t.”

  She nodded, sipped her tea. “But there was more?”

  I recounted my call to Seana as close to word-for-word as I could manage, along with my own thoughts on the timing of Eddis’s death. His second death. “I knew I needed to explain to Seana—to warn her. I still do. But when we came out, we got jumped by a street gang. Thieves. They freaked out when they saw I was a priest. That’s how Iris got hurt.” Amelia’s lips tightened and I hurried on. “I don’t know what we would have done, except that we got rescued.”

  “By whom?”

  There was nothing to do but say it. “It was one of the Favored Children.”

  “The Favored Children are all dead,” Amelia responded automatically.

  “That’s what I thought, too, but—” I stopped. Was Syed even alive?

  Once again, I tried to remember every little detail to describe the encounter to Amelia. I hoped she’d notice some connection, some clue I had missed, but all she came up with was the same question I’d asked myself. “If this thing—Syed—made Iris forget it was there, why couldn’t it do the same to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Amelia stood up and went to the window, looking out over landscaping that had lost its war with the desert. Floodlights still lit the grounds. My opinion—they could stay on all night. Amelia leaned her forearm against the window, tapped her fingers against the glass. “This is getting esoteric. Outside my realm of expertise.” She thought a moment longer. “What do you know about the Silent One?”

  Time for another sandwich. Not that imparting the sum total of my knowledge was going to take long. “He’s the god of secrets. No one knows much of anything about him. I can tell you he’s one of the few gods who never created children to follow him. Syed was his Favored Son, but Syed’s human.” Or so I’d been taught.

  “There are stories, sure. Fairy tales to frighten kids. But there’re stories about all the gods. The only facts I know are that the Silent One had his temple in Tala like the rest of the Thirteen, where Syed has been his Favored Son for as long as people kept records. He didn’t have any other followers or any other temples. As far as we knew, he just minded his own business.”

  Amelia said aloud the thought that had been lurking in the back of my mind. “That would make him unique among the gods.”

  The god of secrets. “So that’s all of what I know. As to what I believe….”

  I hadn’t seen more than a glimpse of Eddis in the vision, after the shadow creature had taken him. How much could I trust of that one brief impression? “The shadow came from Syed. I’m almost positive. It belonged with him, seemed more part of him than it did with Eddis.”

  “Which would bring us to the question of, what does he want with Desavris?”

  “Maybe exactly what he’s gotten. Maybe he wanted to destroy the weather project.”

  Amelia turned to look at me. “Then I have to wonder, does he know about Spark?”

  Something tugged at the back of my mind. A memory? A suspicion? I couldn’t grab it. “I think it’s too dangerous to assume otherwise.”

  “I agree.” Amelia set her glass down
on the windowsill. “This technology—we can’t let him destroy it. It’s a matter of survival. I think it’s time to bring in more help.”

  “There’s more help?” I asked.

  “For this, I think yes. But it will take some time for me to get the right message through to the right people. I don’t want to draw attention. In the meanwhile, you need to check in with Director Seana. Warn her she could still be in danger.”

  That was one way to put it. “I’ll do that right now.”

  After everything else I’d done tonight, tossing off the pattern to make sure my handset was still secure seemed a trivial thing. I dialed Seana.

  She answered immediately. “Ash! Where are you?”

  I looked over at Amelia, who nodded. “I’m at my boss’s house. There’s been—I got attacked. But I’m heading your way now.“

  “I’m sending someone to get you. Stay there.” The line went dead.

  I slid the handset into my pocket, along with Seana’s data stick. I fished the Desavris security tab out of my bag and stuck it just below my collar bone, where it wouldn’t be obvious but was still easy to access. The rest of the bag—including my growing collection of guns—I left on Amelia’s floor. “What should I do after I’ve talked to Seana?”

  “Take your time with her. She’s another ally it wouldn’t hurt to cultivate. Find out how far behind they are with their rain machine with Eddis removed from the picture. Get back here when you’re done. Hopefully by then, I’ll have progress of my own to report.”

  “Good luck.” I was pretty sure we all were going to need it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dinner for Two

  This time, the Jansynian security folks were much more polite. They held the hovercar door for me and, after a cursory scan at the security checkpoint, even invited me to enjoy my visit.

  Riding up the lift, looking out into the Web, I didn’t see anyone I knew. I wasn’t surprised, as close as we were coming on towards morning. All reasonable people were asleep. I certainly wished I were.

  Even the Desavris halls were empty of everyone but me and my escort. Which surprised me. With Eddis’s sudden death, I expected more chaos—security people rushing about, or medical or something. But I’d never understood how Jansynians worked.

  Again, I was escorted to Seana’s office. She was at her desk. She looked up as I entered the room. Despite all that had happened, she showed none of the signs of agitation that had been there in our last meeting. Seana in a crisis was Seana at her best. She skipped over a greeting and went straight to, “Tell me what you know.”

  So much for small talk. “You’re in danger. More than you realize. Eddis was the saboteur, but Eddis wasn’t Eddis.”

  “Eddis is dead. He’s no longer a threat.”

  Her words were cold. Her eyes hard. Too late I realized how this would sound to her—the accusation it seemed I was leveling. Her husband had betrayed her. Worse, had betrayed the company. Except her husband hadn’t been her husband. And if the power the shadow-creature had could alter the surveillance footage, if Syed could make Iris forget his presence right in front of her, who knew what sort of misdirections this creature had been using to keep Seana and the rest of Desavris from seeing it?

  “Eddis is dead, but the monster inside him is still out there.”

  Seana raised an eyebrow and gestured for me to sit down. “You’re going to have to explain.”

  I didn’t try to sugar-coat. I knew this woman far too well to give her anything but the truth straight-up. I told her about my discovery with the research, the struggle I had getting the pattern to work, the vision, and the way the magic had exploded at the end.

  Whatever she was thinking, feeling, I couldn’t read it in her face. She got up from her desk, walked around to stand next to my chair. She looked down at me. “Truly, you saw this thing?” Her hand twitched, like she wanted to reach for me. My own hands felt weighted down by the gulf of years since we’d last touched.

  “There’s more.”

  She stepped back, putting a more professional distance between us. “What more?”

  I told her about Syed. What he’d done to Iris. What he’d tried to do to me. “I resisted him, this time. But he’s tied to this. Whatever magic killed Eddis, I would bet money Syed is behind it.”

  “And he’s here, in Miroc?” Seana took another step back. It seemed even Jansynians told horror stories about the Silent One.

  “Yeah. I don’t know what he knows, but I have to assume it’s a lot.”

  “And you resisted his power.” Seana went back to her chair. I could tell all this had shaken her. She sat down and folded her hands before her on the desk. She sat, silent and still for several minutes. I let her think.

  Finally, she looked at me again. “Tell me your analysis of the situation.”

  It sent a thread of warmth through me, that she would ask my opinion. “Everything ties back to Eddis’s project. I don’t know why Syed would want it stopped, but that’s about the only conclusion I can draw.”

  “He may have succeeded.” Seana leaned back in her chair. I’d never seen her so tired. “With Eddis dead, the research tampered with—I don’t know if we’ll be able to recover.”

  I fished the data stick out of my pocket. “Not all lost. I don’t think. I was able to pinpoint the files that got changed. At least, the timing of when Eddis was…taken. Could the rest of your team work forward from there?”

  I slid it across the desk, and she caught it. “It’s possible.”

  That was some relief, I supposed, that we might still be able to save Miroc. Nonetheless, I’d be sleeping with my lights on tonight. If I could sleep at all.

  Seana flipped the data stick through her fingers, staring at it. “I must admit,” she said without looking up, “when Eddis died, my first concern was for you.”

  The confession made my stomach lurch. Especially coming on top of everything else I’d been through today. “What?”

  She stood, still not meeting my eyes. “In all this, I never did get dinner. Although now it’s closer to breakfast-time. Either way, would you care to join me? For food? In my apartment?”

  I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. “Where he died?”

  “It’s been cleaned.”

  It was such a Seana thing to say. And I’d never been able to say no to her. “Sure, let’s go.”

  #

  When we’d been together, Seana had always come to my place. I’d tried to imagine what her own living space might look like, but had only managed an image of a better-organized, fancier-furnished version of my own home.

  Turns out, it was nothing like that. Or like anyplace I’d ever seen. Amelia’s house had been fancy, but in a perfectly normal way. Seana’s home was something else.

  At first, I thought we’d somehow gone outside. Except that even when the bird priests had summoned all the rain Miroc could absorb, it had never looked like this. The walls, the ceiling, even half the floor were covered with plants. Seana lived in a garden.

  And it was beautiful. Flowers I’d never seen before created living artwork along the walls and between the furniture. Here and there, fruits and vegetables peeked out from clusters of greenery. Even the lights had been embedded within the plants, giving the room’s illumination a soft, green feel.

  Seana pushed aside a curtain of tangy-scented vines covered in waxy white flowers to reveal a closet into which she kicked her shoes. She wandered through a sunken living-room, brushing her hand along a soft-looking hedge of ferns that defined the space. Ahead of her, stairs led up to an open second floor, where I could see a bedroom and into a bath area with the most decadently huge tub I’d ever seen, but Seana turned the other direction, towards the kitchen. “Are you coming?” she asked over her shoulder.

  I hesitated in the doorway, struggling against this reminder of the gulf between us. “Are you sure about this? Sure I should be here? Couldn’t it hurt your reputation?”

  Seana wav
ed the question away. “I’m the director of security for Desavris Intercontinental. This is the job I needed a pristine reputation to get. And now I have it.”

  Conscious of the dirt—and possibly worse—on my boots, I pulled them off and dropped them next to Seana’s shoes before I came all the way into her home. “This is amazing.” I dug my fingers carefully through the solid layer of foliage to find the wall beneath them, discovered a rough, porous surface. The plants grew out from it.

  I turned to catch Seana watching me, her face unreadable. “To be honest, I’ve never done much with it. Many people make their homes into a hobby. Intricate designs, living sculptures. Eddis and I never had the time.”

  “Does everyone have homes like this? With the plants and all?”

  That earned me an affectionate smile. “With the plants, yes. Look around you, Ash. The Crescent is a city in the sky. Below us is the desert. Where else would we grow anything?”

  I followed her into the small, sleek kitchen. In here, close at hand were a greater density of fruits and vegetables and greens, all carefully trimmed back from work surfaces. A flat stovetop and oven sat in the center of a u-shaped arrangement of countertop, with a sink off to one side. Along the counter were various smaller appliances, but I saw no storage anywhere. No cabinets, no pantry, not even a refrigerator.

  Seana woke up a touchpad on the wall. Her fingers tapped through menus faster than I could read them. A panel slid open next to me and a pot presented itself. “Fill that with water, please.” She typed some more and a different door opened, this time revealing a wrapped bundle of dry pasta and a bowl of olive oil, by the smell.

  I wanted to ask how all this worked, how the system was set up, whether everyone in the Crescent lived like this. But maybe this wasn’t the time. So I pushed aside the questions I wanted to ask and brought up the only subject that mattered. “How long do you think it will take, now, to get the weather satellite working?”

  “I’m not a scientist.” Seana requested a knife and cutting board from the magic panel and started chopping vegetables after setting the water on the stove to boil.