California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “If it’s not,” Daniel said, “I’ll be back.”

  “Good. Bring me a burrito, too.”

  Sully flipped a couple of switches on the projector. The lens cast a dusty cone of light, and wheels turned, clacking. A blurry image appeared on the screen. After Sully turned the focusing ring, his own youthful face looked back at him, and the steely-eyed submarine commander confidently barked orders at his crew. He was only on-screen for a dozen seconds before the clip looped back to the beginning. Again and again, Sully embodied the handsome submariner. Maybe it was a trick of flickering light and shadow, or maybe it was the osteomancy used to develop the film, but the age spots on Sully’s cheeks seemed to fade, and a few strands of dark hair appeared in the combed silver.

  Daniel secured the baggie in his messenger bag. He picked his way across the debris and found the door, and he was almost outside when Sully called back to him.

  “You know this is just a down payment, right? I did you a favor, and now you owe me one. That’s the way these things work.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said. “I know how things work. Take care of yourself, okay, Sully?”

  “I will, kid. See you next time.”

  The twelve seconds of the Sully’s youth continued to shine in the dark.

  “Next time,” Daniel said.

  * * *

  Daniel’s workshop was a plywood propped on sawhorses in the back of Otis’s warehouse. His shelves were boards and bricks, and he stored his osteomantic materials in a mechanic’s tool chest. Otis would have provided furnishings worthy of great magic if Daniel had asked, but Daniel didn’t want anything more from him than was absolutely necessary.

  He was supposed to be working with the seps venom, but instead he sat, contemplating a jar of dusky, oily fluid: the lamassu extract he’d spiked Emma Walker’s tea with in Chinatown. It hadn’t worked on her, but it had worked on him, unlocking memories of the last time he’d seen his mother. Not really unlocking the memories, actually, so much as amending them.

  He picked up the jar of lamassu and held it up to the buzzing fluorescent bulbs overhead. Even without unscrewing the lid, he could smell the ancient oil. It smelled like revelation. Like the flare of a lamp in a room best left dark.

  It’d been a long time since he’d been scared of magic.

  He set the jar aside and turned his attention to the seps venom.

  The snake’s skull looked as fresh as if it had been bottled yesterday, but if Daniel removed it from the preservative, it would crumble to ash in seconds. The jar was coated in finely ground firedrake scales, the only substance known to withstand seps venom, but even so equipped, there were a lot of ways he could screw this up. Spill the venom and it would eat through the jar, the worktable, the floor, the foundation, the fabled dragon heart at the center of the earth, and probably shoot up in an acid geyser on a quiet residential street in China. So, you know, thought Daniel, don’t spill the acid.

  From an awkward standing position, he worked a hand drill through the left maxilla and stopped when the drill bit neared the fang. The snake’s venom sacs had decomposed thousands of years ago, but if any osteomantic essence was left behind, Daniel would be able to cook it into a weapon.

  He smelled vanilla and tobacco.

  “Hello, Emma,” he said, without turning around.

  She dragged over a stool and sat beside him. “I’m going to try again. You have all the makings of a very good osteomancer.”

  “Enh. It’s like making brownies. Anyone can follow a recipe.”

  She shook her head, frustrated. “You’re planning to use the venom of a seps serpent. But you could be a seps serpent, just like you are kraken. It’s not a thing you do. It’s what’s in you. It’s what you are.”

  “You’re not the first osteomancer to take an interest in what’s inside me, once you’ve seen the actual insides of an osteomancer, it’s hard to take it as a compliment.”

  “Understandable. I’m sorry.” Emma peered at the skull through the glass. “I think you could be one of the greatest osteomancers ever.”

  He went back to drilling. “I don’t need to be great. I’ll settle for alive.”

  She examined his osteomancer’s torch, a contraption of copper and brass and knobs and valves. “Living is good. But since my interests coincide with yours, I’d like you to be the most effective osteomancer possible. Your kraken is a good weapon, and your sint holo is a good defense, but you’re capable of more. I can smell your magic. You’re redolent with power, but you don’t realize it.”

  Daniel was content to let the grinding of the drill speak for him.

  “Do you have any idea how much magic there is in Los Angeles?”

  “Clearly not enough,” Daniel said.

  “Aha. See, that’s what everyone thinks. But not so.”

  Daniel stopped drilling. “If you know about secret caches of osteomancy, that’s generally the kind of thing I’m interested in.”

  “Greedy lad, it’s an open secret. You’re breathing osteomancy. You’re bathing in it. It’s concentrated in bones, but the essence is everywhere. It’s in the soil and the air.”

  “Trace residues? Yeah, the world is magic, every particle of it. But there’s not a flame hot enough to cook it out.”

  “You’re the flame, Daniel.”

  “You sound like my dad.”

  She looked off in the distance, wistful. “If only. I heard he was working on concepts of direct absorption, taking raw magic directly, with no need of recipe at all. We all lost a lot when he died.”

  “I know. I never even learned how to fasten a necktie properly. Tried a half Windsor the other day and almost broke a finger.”

  “You’re not taking me seriously.”

  “I’m taking you more seriously than you might be comfortable with. Can you tell me anything useful about direct absorption, Emma? Any practical advice? Anything that’s going to help us get in and out of the Ossuary?”

  She smiled, as if caught cheating at cards. She was a smiler. “No,” she conceded.

  “Then you’re just teasing me.”

  Osteomancers loved to trade in secrets, whether or not they actually possessed them. He went back to drilling.

  “Otis told me about your lamassu vision,” she said after a while. “You think I’m responsible for it.”

  He pulled the drill out of the jar. “It came to me right after I ingested your essence.”

  “Lamassu is a finicky magic. It’s easy to misunderstand and misuse.”

  “Otis told me that.”

  “But you don’t believe him,” Emma said. “What do you believe, Mr. Blackland?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, honestly.

  “Then I don’t know how to help you,” she said, standing. “I don’t know how to convince you that you can trust me, that I mean neither you nor your friends any harm. I am Emma Walker. I work beneath the Ministry, and I want to help you get into the Ossuary, where you will find your sword. If you discover I’m lying, I know you’ll kill me or have one of your friends do it. That’s the risk I take, working with you. It comforts me to have that knowledge out in the open. I’m sorry I cannot provide the same comfort to you.”

  She smiled warmly and rested her hand on his shoulder for the briefest of moments, and as she walked away, Daniel listened to her footsteps fade, much sooner than her scents of vanilla and contained magic.

  He fired up the burner and reached for the jar of lamassu. With a pair of tweezers, he removed a small wad of paste. He let it heat over the flame, and when he smelled something like hot sand and olives and puzzles, he deposited the lamassu on his tongue.

  He was standing in a field with his mother. Several yards away was a bug-spattered car with the doors, trunk, and hood open. Cars were rare in Los Angeles, and Daniel found himself fascinated by the odd vehicle. It looked neither fast nor comfortable. A box on wheels. Three other cars surrounded theirs. They were on a farm of some kind, a space more vast than any in Los Angeles.
The air smelled of freshly turned soil and strawberries.

  Men in uniforms crawled through the car’s interior. Another threw a suitcase out of the trunk. It landed in the tan dirt and popped open. A pair of jeans spilled out. They were Daniel’s jeans, softened by wear, but Daniel had never worn them. He was confused and wanted to cry, but his mother’s firm grip on his fingers wouldn’t allow it. Things would be all right. His mom was here. She would keep him from floating away.

  All the uniformed men had holstered guns. One man, who stood just a couple of yards away, also had a rifle trained on his mother’s head. Another man had a Garm hound by the leash. Its slobber foamed on his shoes. And there was also a woman, interrogating Daniel’s mother.

  “How did you get across?” she said. Beneath the cap of her uniform, her hair smelled of rose hips and jojoba shampoo. She’d had eggs and green chile for breakfast.

  “I’ve told you six times already,” said Messalina Sigilo Blackland, incautious and angry. “When your man comes back—”

  “When my man comes back from the guard station, he’ll either bring word that you’re telling the truth, and I will apologize for my discourteous treatment of you. Or, he will bring word that you’re lying, and I will belly-shoot you, and you will die, moaning in the dirt.”

  “I got through by bribing the Southern kingdom guards,” Daniel’s mother said, her jaw tight.

  “I think our Southern counterparts are more loyal to their Hierarch than that.”

  “Anyone can be bought.”

  The woman looked as if she’d just heard a mildly amusing joke. “Are you offering me a bribe?”

  Daniel’s mother spat on the ground. She was not herself. “That’ll be the day.”

  “Maamah,” said Daniel. His voice was slurred.

  “Tell it to be quiet,” the woman said.

  His mother looked at him oddly, with a mix of familiar love, but also something else. Fear. Or maybe revulsion.

  “Hush,” she said.

  Down a dusty track, a rooster tail of dirt clouded the air, and soon another car drove up and came to a stop. A uniformed man got out and jogged over to the woman who smelled of rose hips. He spoke some words in her ear, too low for Daniel to hear.

  “Stand down,” the woman barked, and the man with the rifle lowered it. The Garm hound was led away to piss. The woman called out some more orders, and everyone started getting into cars. “You’ll ride with me,” the woman said to Daniel’s mother. “I’ll leave a detachment behind to watch over that.” She looked at Daniel when she said “that.”

  “He belongs to me,” his mother said. “He’s too valuable to be left with your guards.”

  The woman shook her head. “It’s Southern magic. We don’t know what it is or how it works, so arrangements will have to be made to bring it to San Francisco. It stays behind.”

  “He’s not dangerous,” his mother said. “I can control him.”

  “It’ll have to be examined by guild osteomancers while you’re being debriefed. If it turns out there’s no reason to keep it separated from you, it will be returned.”

  His mother was dirty and tired. Her hair hung like wet yarn in her face. Only now did Daniel register the scratches on her face, the torn skin on her knuckles. However they had gotten here from Los Angeles, there’d been costs. And Daniel saw in his mother’s face that there was only so much fighting she was willing to do to keep Daniel with her. He didn’t understand.

  “Maammah,” he said.

  What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he speak normally?

  “Maammah?”

  Uniformed men closed in around him as his mother got into the woman’s car, and her door was shut, and his mother looked at him one last time through the window, and what he saw in her eyes wasn’t love. Pity, maybe. Regret. But not love.

  He watched the car recede until it faded in its own dust cloud, and then he looked down at the shoes that fit him but were not his, and he was alone with the uniformed men.

  “How do we want to do this?” one of them said.

  “Make it quick,” said another. “I mean, Jesus, he looks like a kid.”

  One of the uniformed men came to stand in front of Daniel. He was a little older than the rest, and his face was kind.

  “Son, we’re going to check to make sure you weren’t hurt during your trip,” he said. “We just need you to kneel for a second.”

  “Maaamah?”

  “She’s fine, son. Just kneel. It won’t hurt. Trust me.”

  Daniel gazed up into his face. He was smiling and kind. His gun holster was unsnapped.

  Daniel knelt in the strawberry field.

  ELEVEN

  Real estate listings called the cabin-style house a “charmingly eccentric handyman’s special.” Gabriel would have called the place a haunted wreck. Cobwebs laced the weathered gray plywood boards over the windows. Orange-brown pine needles carpeted the cedar shingle roof. Someone had hacked at the weeds enough to form a path from sidewalk to front door, or maybe it was the work of deer and rabbits. No one had lived in Sebastian Blackland’s house since the Hierarch’s purge ten years before.

  “Smell anything?” Gabriel asked, following Max up the walk.

  “Raccoon urine and coyote scat. Some marijuana, but that’s probably from the neighbors. And somebody’s cooking tomato sauce down the canal.”

  Gabriel tried the front door. Locked. He spent a few minutes with his lock picks and pushed open the door. Afternoon sun spilled onto the scuffed living room floor. The stale odors of wood and plaster and dark mold wafted out.

  “How about now?”

  Max shook his head. “You weren’t really hoping to find magic after all these years, were you?”

  Gabriel stepped into the house. “No.”

  He’d read the post-arrest report, which consisted mostly of inventory. The Ministry had carted off Sebastian Blackland’s possessions and torn up the carpet and stripped the walls of paint. They’d taken his books and tools and bottles and jars. Anything osteomantic had been sorted and processed and either consumed or taken away to storage. Including Sebastian Blackland’s body. Carbon. Calcium. Phosphorus. Potassium and sulfur and sodium and magnesium. Copper, zinc, selenium, molybdenum, fluorine, chlorine, iodine, manganese, cobalt, iron. Trace quantities of lithium, strontium, aluminum, silicon, lead, vanadium, arsenic, and bromine. Also, sint holo, kraken, firedrake, aataxe, abassy, abada. Criosphinx. Hippogriff.

  Notably absent from the inventory were the unauthorized weapons he’d been working on, ostensibly the reason for his arrest and summary execution.

  Max paced the walls, sniffing. “If you were hoping you’d find Daniel Blackland here, you’re going to be disappointed. I could have told you that without even needing to make the trip.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’ve tracked a lot of fugitives. They don’t stay close to home. And they don’t come back to places they’re associated with. The only thing they want is a hole to hide in or a place to run. Every twenty-four hours they survive with their bones still inside their skin, they’re happy.”

  No, Gabriel thought. Not always. He’d survived a bad night when he was about the same age Daniel must have been on the night of his father’s death. He had lost a parent. He’d moved on, learned to survive. But he still couldn’t go a night’s sleep without smelling freshly spilled magic.

  Daniel didn’t need to come back here. He’d never really left.

  Max took this in, his face unreadable. “So what do we do now?”

  Gabriel breathed in the stagnant air of a cold trail. “Just our jobs,” he said. “Let’s just go do our jobs.”

  * * *

  “Are you fucking my hound?”

  Gabriel didn’t like meetings. He particularly didn’t like the kind that consisted mostly of his boss screaming from across his desk with spit-inflected profanity. Watanabe was round of shape with a peculiar pointy head and a face that reddened with anger. He resembled a radish. Like Gabriel
, he came from a family of osteomancers, and he’d gained his position in the Ministry by turning in his own parents on the night of the Third Correction. He might have risen even higher had he not run out of relatives to betray.

  “No, sir, I’m using Max for an investigation. I filed an NRT-3070—”

  But Watanabe didn’t want to hear about paperwork. In fact, Gabriel wasn’t certain the man could read.

  “The hound was supposed to be put down this morning. I went to the kennels myself to supervise. I woke up early for it. And when I got there? No hound.”

  What kind of man, Gabriel wondered, liked to start his day by watching something die?

  Gabriel opened one of the file folders he’d brought with him and placed the sketch of Daniel Blackland on Watanabe’s blotter.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Daniel Blackland, son of Sebastian Blackland and Messalina Sigilo.”

  Watanabe stared at Gabriel as though he were a piece of dry toast.

  “Sebastian Blackland was an osteomancer, specializing in munitions,” Gabriel pressed on, dauntless. “He was taken in the Third Correction by—”

  “Does this have anything to do with my hound? I asked you where my hound is? Are you fucking my hound?”

  Gabriel closed his eyes. “No, Minister Watanabe, I am not fucking your hound. As I indicated in the NRT-3070.”

  “I don’t have time for his, Argent. Wilson Bryant is missing a seps head, which you’d know if you weren’t so busy fucking my hound.”

  “If you’ll just hear me out—”

  But Watanabe didn’t want to listen to anything other than his own invective. While he railed at him, Gabriel kept his cool with visions of strapping Watanabe to a rock and letting condors eat his intestines. They were pleasing visions.

  Knowing Daniel Blackland remained alive was either a gift or a curse. It was the kind of information a savvy person could manipulate for their own gain. Bring in Sebastian Blackland’s son after all these years and you were a hero. It was the kind of knowledge some might kill for, just so they could claim credit themselves. Gabriel had taken a risk, coming to Watanabe with this. Maybe it was a good thing that Watanabe was too stupid to see what Gabriel was trying to give him.