California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “What’s your name?”

  “They call me Max.”

  “I meant your real name.”

  “It’s my name.”

  “What was your name before you were made a hound?”

  “Max is my name now, inspector.”

  Shoppers shuffled cautiously past them, parting as though they were an island in a stream.

  Gabriel had done a little bit of digging into the records and learned that Max was brought into the kennels when he was seventeen, a late age for a hound. He’d served the kennels for a decade and a half before turning on his handler and beating him to death with a trashcan lid.

  Gabriel made some calculations on his mental abacus. He predicted transactions of favor and obligation he’d have to perform, and he came to a decision.

  “Max. Well, okay, Max. We took you from your parents, stole your dignity, unmade you so we could make you something else. We use you, and when we’re not using you, we keep you in a cage. I understand. I’ve worked in Ministry human resources, so I’ve seen it. We kill what you were because it’s not convenient to keep it around. But you’re different. You’re prouder than most. Or more reckless.”

  Max didn’t betray even a flicker of having been touched.

  “If it sounds like I’m threatening you,” Gabriel went on, “I apologize. What I’m asking is for you to deal with me as though I were an intelligent adult. Do that, and I’ll deal the same way with you. Fair?”

  Max said nothing.

  Gabriel stepped up close to him. He reached for his neck. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, unnecessarily perhaps. Max made no movement. Gabriel unbuckled his collar. “Shall we continue?”

  Max’s throat moved as he swallowed. “They’ll make you put the collar back when you return me to the kennels.” Then he turned and resumed sniffing.

  They passed through the food court and the toy market and the clothing market without pausing, but after a circuit around the candle market, Max wanted another go ’round.

  “Is there something here?” Gabriel asked.

  Max looked sharply at him, as though surprised he was still there. “It’s better if you let me work without talking.”

  “A concentration thing. Okay.”

  “Not so much concentration as … When I’m sniffing, I’m in a different place. Talking brings me back to this place.”

  “Sorry.”

  After a few minutes, Max came to rest before a stall of votive candles. The shopkeeper broke out in a terrified sweat, but Gabriel ignored him.

  “It’s faint, but there’s magic here,” Max said. “It’s something designed to defy detection. It’s designed to confuse, or…”

  “Render invisible?”

  “Yes,” he said. Maybe Gabriel was only imagining respect in the way Max looked at him now. “It’s faded and subtle, but … well, it’s hard to guess.”

  “Go ahead,” Gabriel said. “It’s okay to be wrong.”

  “I think it’s sint holo. But there’s a lot more magic, too. Whoever came through here was lousy with magic.” He seemed certain now, almost defiant.

  “Can you trace it now that you’ve got the scent?”

  “Yes.”

  Max took a route that included some dead ends and turnarounds, but when he brought Gabriel to the apothecary’s market, things began to feel right. Gabriel did not consider himself an osteomancer, but his training and exposure to osteomantic material sometimes gave him a sense for when he was in the presence of power. And there was definitely the buzz of something here.

  “Our sint holo user?”

  “Yes,” Max confirmed.

  “Can you tell where he went from here?”

  Max looked like a man resigned to something horrible.

  “It’s okay if you can’t.”

  “I can’t,” said Max.

  Gabriel stepped away to look for a police call box, but when he spotted a patrolman leaning against a post eating a papaya spear, he called to him. First annoyance and then menace crossed the patrolman’s face as he swaggered over, hand on the pommel of his cleaver-club.

  “What?”

  Gabriel displayed his ID tag, and the patrolman straightened. “May I help you, inspector?” he amended.

  “Yes. Please take every apothecary in the market to Ministry headquarters.”

  “Every one … sir?”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said, more sharply. “Bring them to Section D.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll need the reason we’re apprehending them, sir. For the paperwork.”

  “Questioning,” said Gabriel.

  * * *

  Gabriel installed the apothecaries in a conference room. It was a nice room, with dark oak wood paneling and a long mahogany table surrounded by good, leather-upholstered chairs. Each chair had a green-shaded brass lamp set before it, and beneath the lamps had been placed yellow legal pads and color pencils. On the wall hung an oil painting, six feet across, of the Hierarch on Mount Wilson, depicting his famous victory over a squadron of American B-29s. He stood on the mountain’s peak in silhouette, his sword raised overhead and crackling with lightning as bombers fell in flames and oily smoke.

  The apothecaries were brought cookies, coffee, tea, cola, lemon-lime, water, wine, or beer, according to each one’s desire. A functionary explained to them that the Ministry was seeking a sint holo user whose presence had been traced to their sector of the market.

  Gabriel watched the apothecaries through a two-way mirror. They’d been understandably terrified when first brought in, but now, after Gabriel had established a nonthreatening tone and shown them hospitality, most of them seemed to have relaxed. A few even summoned outrage at their continued detention.

  “Why bring them in when I could have sniffed them at the market?” asked Max, pulling at the collar of his coveralls.

  “I wasn’t expecting you or the Garms to find anything. Honestly, tracing our sint holo user to a specific quarter of the market makes you a hero.”

  “Are you going to torture them?”

  “I’m trying something else first,” said Gabriel.

  Max accompanied him into the conference room.

  “How much longer is this going to take?” one of the apothecaries demanded as soon as Gabriel crossed the threshold. “I’ve got a business to run.” He was a smallish man with jade teeth.

  Emboldened by his outburst, a few of his fellows nodded and made supportive noises. But others seemed to remember where they were and remained stiffly silent.

  “No more than an hour, I think,” Gabriel said, addressing the room rather than the outspoken apothecary. He was no fan of giving grease to a squeaking wheel. “But that’s largely dependent on you and the rate at which you metabolize osteomancy.”

  Rather than paying attention to Gabriel, three of the apothecaries were sketching feverishly on their legal pads. One was working on a landscape, another rendered a still life of one of the green-shaded lamps, while the third was doing some kind of abstract.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, metabolizing osteomancy?” spat Jade Tooth.

  Another apothecary began sketching so hard she snapped her pencil. She snatched neighbor’s pencil and resumed drawing a very credible giraffe. Gabriel had no idea why a giraffe, but she was clearly inspired.

  “I’ll explain myself,” he said. “Your beverages were laced with an old preparation that was popular with artists in the 1920s. It’s called Muse. It enhances your ability to translate thoughts and memories into two-dimensional images. Muse improves hand-eye coordination and fine motor control. It also enhances other, more ineffable qualities that, for lack of a better term, we’ll call the ‘artistic impulse.’ And it increases recall to the extent that one’s observations become sharper in retrospect than they were at the time the observations originally occurred. It should work its way out of your systems within a few hours.”

  Most of the apothecaries were now sketching away. Gabriel would have to call for more paper and pencils.<
br />
  “What I’d like you all to do now is draw for me every face you encountered in the market the day before yesterday. Everyone you sold to, talked to, or even just caught sight of in passing. That should be several hundred drawings for each of you. When you’re done, you will be returned to your businesses.”

  He leaned over the pad of an apothecary who was still drawing a tree. “If you’d rather work on another project, I’d ask that you postpone it until you’ve met my request. If you find you can’t, I’m afraid I’ll have to send you to one of my interrogators who uses pain instead of osteomantic assistance.”

  The tree-drawer paused, his hand shaking. Then he turned the page and began sketching a face.

  * * *

  The next day, Gabriel visited the morgue, a sunless, stone-lined chamber in a subbasement of the Ministry of Osteomancy. There was no particular reason why it had to be kept so far out of sight, except the specialists who worked here weren’t particularly pleasant to be around. Gabriel descended the long flight of stairs with Max trailing him. Max moved tentatively.

  “You’re used to leading, not following,” Gabriel said.

  Max looked at him.

  “You can walk ahead if you want.”

  “I don’t know where I’m going,” Max said. “If you’re not going to keep me on a leash, you could at least tell me where we’re going.”

  “Fair enough. But can you tell me one thing?”

  “I can tell you if I know it. I don’t know much. I’m a hound.”

  “Why did you kill your master?”

  Max’s answer came without a moment of hesitation. “I wanted to die.”

  Gabriel found himself frozen, halfway down the stone steps. In the dim light, Max’s eyes were the brightest things in the stairway.

  “Why, Max?”

  “I thought I already said, Inspector Argent. I’m a hound.”

  “Do you still want to die?”

  “Not before I’ve had a chance to pee,” said Max.

  Gabriel nodded. “Then you have something to live for. Come on.”

  They continued down the stairs and came to a room the length of a high school gym. Technicians sat on benches behind long tables, piled with file boxes and folders. There was no conversation, no music, only the shuffling of paper, the soft noise multiplied by volume and repetition into a mechanical crackling. The air smelled of paper dust and ointment.

  “Who are these people?” Max whispered, as though they were in a library. It occurred to Gabriel that Max hadn’t been in a library for a very long time.

  Almost all the workers were stoop-shouldered old men and women with failing eyes and sun-starved flesh, sorting through old crime reports, mug shots, and composite sketches of criminal suspects, subversives, and insurgents. Younger workers lugged file boxes between towering shelves and the worktables.

  “Our memoraticians,” said Gabriel. “They’re fed a mix that enhances memory, concentration, and facial recognition.”

  He approached Station 21-A, where a man in a sweater vest sat with his back to him. Gabriel watched him work for a few minutes, sorting through piles of photos with lists of physical descriptors at his elbow.

  Once it became evident that the man was never going to acknowledge his presence, Gabriel coughed into his hand. “Excuse me, you’re the supervisor down here?”

  “I’m busy,” the man said, continuing to sort.

  “Which is laudable. I’m Inspector Gabriel Argent.”

  No reaction from the man, but Gabriel thought he detected a hint of a smirk on Max’s face.

  Gabriel tried again. “I brought down a sketch of the sint holo suspect at Farmers Market. I heard you were able to ID him.”

  The memoratician stopped and turned around. Gabriel was surprised to find him grinning.

  “Oh, that one. Yes, yes, I have something to show you. You’ll find it quite interesting.”

  The man sprang up and led Gabriel and Max on a near chase through a labyrinth of shelves, over to a corkboard. There, partitioned off by a border of yarn, was a sketch of a narrow-faced man, brown-skinned, probably some Hispanic in him, with unruly black hair. Gabriel put him in his late teens to early twenties.

  “We ran the sketches from the apothecaries you brought in. Eight hundred seventy-three in all. Of those, five had criminal records, all for minor offenses. I had them sent up to your office.” The memoratician’s eyes sparkled like a dog playing fetch. He pointed at the drawing of the narrow-faced man. “Now, this one is different. Look at the photos.”

  Two prints were pinned below the sketch. One of them of them was a group shot taken at a backyard party. A red pen circle had been drawn around a woman holding a piece of cake on a plate. There was some resemblance to the narrow-faced man in the sketch. The skin tone. The eyes.

  Max edged closer to the corkboard, sniffed, perhaps instinctively, and turned away in dejection.

  “You don’t recognize her, do you?” said the memoratician.

  “No,” Gabriel admitted. “Should I?”

  “That’s Messalina Sigilo. Born in Northern California.”

  “Illegal immigrant?”

  “No, she came over legally during the Pax Monterey, but there are notes in her file about suspicions of espionage. Never confirmed. It’s believed she tried to return to the Northern Kingdom ten years ago. She didn’t make it. And her son, Daniel, was killed during the crossing. This is all in her file. I’ve sent everything relevant up to your office.”

  “Thank you. And what about the man?” Gabriel pointed to the other photo, a formal portrait of a gray-haired Anglo, mid-forties. He did look familiar.

  “That’s Sebastian Blackland.”

  “Blackland. The osteomancer?”

  “One of the Ministry’s top R&D men,” said the memoratician. “An intimate of the highest echelons. Married to Messalina Sigilo. He was taken in the Third Correction.”

  Nothing unusual about that. Few high-level osteomancers survived the Hierarch’s purges.

  “What’s their connection to my sint holo suspect?”

  “They’re his parents,” said the memoratician.

  “So the boy who died when Sigilo was crossing the border, Daniel … that was my suspect’s brother?”

  “No, they only had one child.” The memoratician withdrew another photo out of his file. It was a grainy blowup of a boy, sitting on the edge of a palm planter, balancing a piece of cake on a paper plate. “This is a zoom from the Sigilo picture. We use over seventy different measurements of shape and proportion for facial recognition. It’s Daniel Blackland, age six. And this,” he said, indicating the apothecary’s sketch, “is him at age twenty-two. Daniel Blackland. Son of a spy, son of an osteomancer, presumed dead, but, apparently, still alive in Los Angeles.”

  TEN

  Emma set a chip the size of a postage stamp on the conference table. “A fossilized scale from a Draconis colombi. That’s a Colombian dragon, or firedrake, for you nonmagicians.” She winked at Jo, Moth, and Cassandra, who stood around the table. “This is the first significant osteomantic obstacle we’ll be facing. Harder than steel-reinforced concrete. Pressure-rated to over seventy-two hundred pounds per square inch. A six-thousand-degree acetylene torch won’t even give it a rash.”

  Daniel picked up the scale, shocked at its heft. No bigger than his thumbnail, it must have weighed five pounds. He dropped it on the table with a thunk.

  “This is just a sample sliver I smuggled from the catacombs,” Emma said. “The vault door below Cross and Carsson’s is made of this, and it’s two feet thick.”

  Most heists were actually just strong-arm robberies. Walk into a jewelry store with guns drawn, holler a lot, in and out in a few minutes. Even an elaborate job, like the Kent depository, the biggest cash robbery in the history of the United Kingdom, was essentially just a tiger kidnapping: Abduct the manager and the manager’s family and hold them at gunpoint until the manager gives you access to bales of money. Daniel’s personal favorite
heist was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum job in Boston, in which the robbers disguised themselves as cops and convinced the security guards to let them in. They’d worn fake mustaches. Fake mustaches! How could you not love it?

  Fake mustaches, however, would not get them into the Ossuary.

  “So how do we breach it?” Cassandra said, squinting at the scale chip.

  “Seps venom is the only thing I know that burns through firedrake,” Emma said.

  Daniel had never worked with seps, but he knew it was one of the most corrosive substances in existence. The Hierarch used it to destroy an entire armored tank division in the Death Valley Standoff. Sometimes archeomancers uncovered a bit of it, but seps venom hardly ever left European shores. Finding it in Los Angeles wouldn’t be easy.

  Daniel turned to Otis, who’d been watching the meeting from the back of the room. “Got any seps in stock?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Surprised. You’ve been handing over bone like it’s Victory Day.” Otis was coy about how he’d come into grootslang and gorgon blood. Even for him, this stuff was hard to get. But he’d clearly tapped into some good treasure, and he wasn’t afraid to spend it.

  “I don’t have seps,” he said, uncrossing his arms. “But I know who does.”

  * * *

  Five days later, Daniel had his crew prepped to go get it. This would be a good test. If they couldn’t handle a residential burglary, then no way could they pull off the Ossuary job. Better to find that out now.

  He still couldn’t believe he was going to break into the house of a Los Angeles god. Not that anyone else on the crew considered Wilson Bryant a god, but his father would go on for hours about the mystical brilliance of the music he made as leader of The Woodies, especially on their breakthrough album, Animal Talk. To which Daniel’s only ever response was, “The cow goes moo.”

  Bryant lived in a two-story Malibu beach house elevated above the surf on pylons. A lot of celebrities insisted on living in this pretty part of town, and every few years their houses were swallowed by the sea or consumed by fires in the canyons, or swept down the hills in mudslides. They would come on television, looking stylishly disheveled, and proclaim how they weren’t going to let misfortune break their spirits, and how they were going to rebuild, and Daniel would throw a shoe at the TV.