“Honestly, we don’t know. I’m here to both protect you and learn about you.”
“You’re spying on me?”
“Not the way I see it, Virgin. And if I was, would I have told you this?”
He had a point, but then I didn’t really know how tricky Sixkiller could be.
“We’re getting off at the next stop,” I said, shutting the conversation down for now. “Please don’t pull your guns on anyone unless you absolutely have to.”
TWENTY-TWO
Oil-streaked, privately-owned Velora Line buses sat parked like spokes in a wheel around the Mystere bus stop. They waited there for the visitors to transfer across and plant their butts on the soiled vinyl seats. Once full, they’d rumble them over the bridge into Divine Province.
Everyone who stepped foot on these Velora Lines had to DNA-accept a personal indemnity waiver. The city was quite sure it wasn’t taking responsibility for citizens and tourists who decided to get their kicks on Gilgul Street.
I led Sixkiller off the city commuter bus we were on and bypassed the Veloras, heading straight for the bridge on foot. “We’ll walk across this time. I don’t really like Velora Lines. You could catch anything travelling on them.”
He strode easily beside me, his head swivelling left and right as he scanned and evaluated the location.
I tried to see it through his eyes. Bus depot, light industrial buildings and chicken wire compounds right up to a rivet-heavy bridge. Dull water squeezed past underneath. Sun biting our backs. And flies…
Ahead, the piecemeal urban sprawl of Divine was given context by the scent of a thousand incense burners. Not beautiful. Not ugly. But somehow a very badly conceived juxtaposition of landscapes.
The sound of fluttering wings and a stir in the air alerted me to Aquila’s presence. She glided down in front of us, landing on the Mystere side of the bridge’s handrail.
I glanced at Sixkiller. He saw her, I could tell from his smile.
“Your disincarnate is solicitous.”
“And yours isn’t.”
“I’ve been in many threatening situations over the years. Mine is… selective.”
“So it doesn’t turn up to warn you anymore?”
“Only when things are… precarious. How do you plan to find this Kadee Matari?” he asked.
“It’s siesta time in Mystere. Quiet on the streets and in the bars. We cross through there quickly and into Moonee. I’m pretty sure she’ll find us.”
“Pretty sure?”
“You got better intel than that?”
“Kadee Matari is in on our watch list, only…”
“Don’t tell me: you can’t find her to watch her?”
“You truly have a way with words, Ranger.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s called being direct. You should try it sometime.”
He chose to ignore my barb, lengthening his stride so I had to keep a quick pace to stay abreast of him.
We brushed past some dazed revellers trudging home by the bridge walkway.
“Hard night,” observed the Marshal.
“Or week,” I said. “Gilgul Street… can be hard to break free from once you’re there.”
He made a noise in the back of his throat. Disbelief or disapproval? Hard to know where the Marshal’s moral code truly lay.
I just kept on walking fast anyway.
Gilgul Street was just as I’d told him it would be – down to a trickle of pavement gawkers. Many of the street stalls were hooded or shuttered, and the neons, though switched on, were a dull, barely perceptible gleam in the glare of midday sunlight.
The bridge led directly into the intersection of Seer Parade and Gilgul, and I veered to the Seer side of the triangle. Though the music on the sidewalk changed at each premises we passed, the whining melody of spirit music seemed to underpin each tune. It made me sweat a little harder and walk a little quicker.
Welcome to Mystere, where you can meditate your way into madness.
While Gilgul was normally three deep in trinket and food hawkers, Seer Street was five deep in mystics and mediums. Corah had been smart, locating her business on Gilgul Street. It set her apart from the rest – gave her visibility.
I wondered what had happened to her after the diner opening. Last I’d seen her, she’d been appreciating the Marshal’s testosterone display with the bouncer.
Why had she wanted to come to Chef’s opening, anyway? That question still bugged the hell out of me.
Not quite as much, though, as the bombshell Nate Sixkiller had just shared with me – my dad and the Mythos and the secret service and… murder. That little sequence of notions set my guts on fire. I tried putting it out by asking about Corah.
“What happened to Corah the other night?” I asked casually.
“Your friend?”
“Corah is not my friend. She’s just someone I’ve known for a long time.”
“Like Ms Jenae?”
“No,” I corrected. “Caro is my friend.”
“I escorted your acquaintance, Corah, out for some supper.”
“W-what!” I spluttered.
“She seemed a mite upset, so I found a place that served refreshments. The host had hustled you off and shut the restaurant. Nothing more to be done thet I could see.”
“You weren’t curious to find out whether I managed to locate Teng’s apartment? That’s why we went there, as I recall.”
“Figured you’d had a rough night and might need some time.”
We walked on in silence until we reached the end of Seer Parade, where it connected with Mason Way. Just before the intersection, I deviated into an alleyway heading west and encountered a rusted metal gate. I gave the gate a shove and it opened, sliding along well-greased tracks.
“Gets some use,” said Sixkiller.
“By certain sorts.”
“So, you located the apartment Teng was in?” he asked, following me.
I bit my lip to hold back showing my satisfaction. “Yeah. Got inside there, too. Nothing really to show for it, though, other than a near miss with the police. You were busy defending Corah’s honour, I hear.”
“Damn fool cussed her out.”
“You should learn to let people fight their own battles, Marshal.”
“That’s where we’d be in some disagreement, Ranger. Not everyone can do that.”
I stopped just before the end of the alley. “Well, let me tell you something, Corah isn’t one.”
From the other end it looked like a blind alley, but from down here, there were thin gaps at the side of the wall that led into another narrow lane.
We squeezed through single-file. The hidden lane was piled at one end with crates.
We walked toward them slowly. Halfway along, I paused and turned to him. “From here on in, the rules change, Marshal. Trigger-happy could equal dead. You got me?”
He raised his hands, fingers wide in a gesture of placation. “Your place, your rules.”
I stared at him. Was he taking me seriously? His deadpan expression made it so hard to tell.
“Look,” I said in earnest. “I’m sure you’ve been in more than your share of rough places and no doubt handled some mean hombres. But to get by in this part of Divine Province, you need guile and a lot of luck. Not firepower.”
“You’ve been here a lot?”
“No. Once or twice only, when I was following up leads on my dad’s death. But I’m native to this area of the city. I get the undertones.”
“I’ll follow your lead all the way, Virgin.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Deep breath, and I climbed over the loose barricade of pine crates into the area the locals called Moonee.
TWENTY-THREE
Moonee was a tiny pocket of the city’s coastal mass that hadn’t been affected by the shift away from terraced hi-rise, hi-density living.
Other than some office clusters in what had been the old central business districts of individual cities, Moonee was o
ne of the few high-rise residential builds left on the East Coast.
Of course, the old CBDs didn’t exist anymore. Or at least, the buildings were still there but not as markers for individual downtown hearts. But Moonee had been built as a detention facility for illegal immigrants. When the city had subsumed the entire eastern landscape, the refugees had stayed on here, but the money for services had evaporated. Utilities were still extended to the area, but maintenance and policing were hit and miss.
It became a cauldron of cultural and spiritual splinter groups. Once you entered one of the terraced high-rise buildings, there was no clear exit. Entire floors were taken over by factions, which meant that homemade stairs had been attached to the sides – none of them built to safety standards. Sometimes, they were little more than a rope and some chinks in the wall.
More people died falling to their death in Moonee than from any kind of crime.
You had to know where you were going here; it was too easy to stumble onto the wrong level of a building and wind up assaulted and pushed out a window.
I didn’t know where Kadee Matari resided, but I knew someone who could probably get word to her. Though I imagined that the moment we stepped over the crates in the alley, she’d known there were strangers in Moonee.
Sixkiller’s hyper-awareness had me on edge as we walked the almost-empty street that ran between the dozen tenements. Up on the balls of his feet, fingers flicking at his sides; I sensed he was itching to pull his guns. Maybe he could feel the thousand eyes on us as well.
“Easy,” I said quietly.
“Where are we going?”
“Across the road. Tenement number four.”
The guy I wanted to see resided in the bottom floor in what had once been a foyer with a reception desk and lift wells. Now it provided living and storage for a man who ran Moonee’s communication hub, selling access to the local CC network and wireless Internet.
Which meant he already knew we were coming.
I crossed the empty street and stopped in front of a rectangular advertising sign covered by scratched plastic. The girl in her underwear had long brown hair and a coy look. I stared straight in her eyes. “It’s Ranger Jackson from Park South. I want a meeting with Kadee Matari.”
For a long, long moment, there was no answer. Maybe he was out, maybe he’d died. Maybe someone else had taken over as gatekeeper and feed provider in Moonee.
I slipped my hand inside my jacket and rested it on the grip of my pistol. Some movement in the undercroft of the opposite tenement caught my eye. A door opening, perhaps.
“Welcome back, Virgin. I missed you,” said a deep, mellifluous voice emanating from around about the poster girl’s mouth.
“Can you help me, Rombo?”
“I already have,” he said.
I heard Sixkiller’s quick intake of breath, then felt the prickle of something sharp at my neck.
“Keep still,” said a clipped, foreign voice in my ear. I complied, hoping Sixkiller would do the same.
A hand fished inside my jacket and removed my gun. Then it propelled me sideways past Rombo’s foyer to the narrow conduit between buildings four and five.
I found myself looking up at a gate and stairs made from steel rods of varying lengths. A rough spiral of wire circled around them like a cage.
“Climb,” said the voice again.
I angled my head just enough to see that the man who had possession of my gun and held a long blade knife to my throat, had long hair knotted at the base of his neck and a face pierced with gold chains.
Behind him, two men with similarly styled hair held guns at Sixkiller’s head. His holsters were empty and so was his expression. Something told me it was a look that might be dangerous.
“What about my colleague?” I asked.
“He stays. Insurance,” said my chaperon.
“Let me speak to him.”
The man nodded once and let me turn to look at Sixkiller. “Please just wait. I will be fine, but I need the bone feather.”
The Marshal moved his hand very slowly to his jacket. He withdrew the talisman and handed it to me.
I slipped it into my pocket and turned back, placing my foot on the first rung. “How far?”
“Until I say.”
I hated heights, really. That is, I loved to stand on a mesa and watch the sunset, and to climb the rock fingers of Los Tribos. But this kind of situation flat-out turned my insides to shitty water– slippery foot pegs, barbed wire to catch me and a weapon at my back.
Coward! I chided myself. This might lead you to Dad’s killer.
That thought alone got my legs working.
I concentrated on each step without looking down. My arms and legs burned with the effort, and sweat blurred my vision. Slow, slow progress took me up past the fourth floor until the pegs literally ran out. The building ran ten or fifteen stories high at least, but this particular staircase had run its course.
I looked straight ahead along the length of the wall and saw other stairs dotted across the width of the building. Not all of them reached the bottom or the top.
What kind of crazy system was this?
“What now?” I called back.
“Wait,” said my escort from below me. “Hold.”
I clung to the top peg and hunkered against the wall, not sure what to expect.
A rope and hook flew past my face, lodging in the corner of an open window above us. The face-chain guy climbed over me, using my body for purchase, and swung lightly through. A few seconds later, a rope flew down and lassoed my shoulders.
He poked his head out. “Tighten at the waist.”
I did as I was bid.
“Now get your hands on the ledge and pull yourself in.”
I was neither agile nor imbued with killer arm strength, but the threat of falling to my death proved a powerful motivator. I latched onto the ledge and heaved arse.
Between my desire to get off the ladder and the face-chain guy hauling the rope around my waist, I catapulted through the window in ugly but effective style.
It was hard to hide how badly I was trembling when I righted myself. I badly wanted a toilet.
The face-chain guy had other ideas, though, pulling me up by the lasso and tugging the rope in a way that meant I had to follow him. I stumbled after him, looking around. Most of the internal walls had been gutted, leaving a large open space, partitioned by clusters of wooden and brass statues and curtains of dreamcatchers.
I smelled hashish and sandalwood and meat cooking, each scent fighting for dominance and yet mingling to create something organic and holistic as well. On one side of me, over near the front of the building where the windows were, three large ovens squatted next to each other. Pots bubbled on the cooktops, and the oven lights flickered. Without getting any closer, I could tell that it was curry in the pots and hash cookies on the cooling oven trays.
A busy kitchen’s a happy kitchen.
The face-chain guy brushed through drapes of chimes and feather charms, and stepped around large Buddha and Shiva statues and rearing brass serpents. The serpents creeped me out the most with their bright green eyes and tarnished skin.
When we were almost, I guessed, at the other side of the building, we reached one of the few internal walls, which was painted with Indigenous artwork. In front of it sat a young woman on a worn but one-time-quality armchair. The right side of her face was quite beautiful; the left, a mess of scars. On one knee she balanced a tablet; on the other, a jewelled pipe. She tapped slowly at the tablet between sucks on the stem.
The face-chain guy slung me down on the floor in front of her.
She didn’t lift her eyes for several more puffs, but when she did, I was mesmerized by them. Glassy green like a sea creature, and the force of her personality radiated through, striking me hard.
“You’ve had little rest of late, Virgin Jackson.”
“You know me?”
“In the way that a person knows about history,” she sai
d.
I had no idea what that meant. “I’ve been told that you are the one who could help me with the answer to a question.”
“And were you also told about the dangers of coming to me?”
“I’ve been here before. I know the dangers.”
She sucked thoughtfully on the pipe again. “Aaah, yes… about your father.”
I did a bad job of hiding my surprise, but she went on anyway.
“You expected I would just give you what you want? Why is that?” she asked.
“Because I think that my question affects you. And that I am connected to the answer. It may be that you have things you can learn from me as well.”
Her laugh went off like a crack of thunder in the room. “A sense of conviction is a gift like no other, Ranger. You have my attention, so ask me.”
Strange as it was to be treated as child by a woman younger than me, I reached slowly into my jacket pocket and brought out the bone feather. “Can you tell me the significance of this?”
“Where did you find it?”
“Taken from a man following me in the Western Quarter.”
She frowned, shifted both the tablet and the pipe to a side table and took the object from me, rolling it in her hands, sending the feather into twirling flurry. The bleached white bone stood out starkly against her olive skin.
“Tell me how you see yourself to be part of this.”
“First, a man tried to kill me in my home. He wore the tattoo of a group who call themselves Korax, after the raven. Then a creature attacked me in the park. I came close to bleeding to death from my wounds.”
“What creature?”
“It looked like a crow but much larger; I’ve been told it is called a Mythos.”
She closed her eyes, appearing to drift off to sleep, then she blinked them open. “Do you believe, Virgin?”
“How is what I believe relevant to any of this? I just want to deal with what’s happening. People are trying to kill me.”
“That’s where you are wrong,” she said. “Belief is everything. Belief is the foundation of our reality.”
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