“And if I could get some schematics of the catacombs and Ossuary, I might be able to predict where Blackland will attempt his breach—”
“You’ll have everything you’ll need. I’ll see to it personally. We’ll be in touch.”
Szu offered his hand. Gabriel took it. He could almost feel the power vibrating in Szu’s grip.
“Inspector Argent, you took a great risk to give me insight into Mr. Blackland’s psychology. Please rest assured, your service to the Hierarch is appreciated. I will make sure he knows.”
That did not make Gabriel feel good at all.
He gathered his file folders and retreated, tracing his way back through the hallway of dead glamour mage trophies, and into the reception hall.
“They’re fake, you know,” Max said, when Gabriel rejoined him.
“What’s fake?”
Max pointed at the skulls in the glass case. “The wolves. They’re made of plaster. For show. They’re fake.”
On the elevator ride down, Gabriel recalculated the life expectancy of a SMAC team veteran. Bloody days ahead.
* * *
The parking garage was a warm, moist place. Reflections from fluorescent lights wriggled in the black waters. A valet ran off to fetch Gabriel’s boat.
“How did your meeting go?” asked Max.
“I think I gave Fenmont Szu a nice prize to bring his master. He’ll be rewarded. Not sure how. When you’re already at Councilor Szu’s level, I don’t know what else he could want, besides the crown.”
“What about you? What do you get out of it?”
“Maybe they’ll throw me a bone. That’s not what I came for. I discovered a security threat, and I brought it to the attention of people who have the power to deal with it. I’m satisfied.”
Max scratched an itch behind his ear as the valet pulled up with Gabriel’s boat. “You’re not very ambitious.”
“Thank you.”
Gabriel reached for the ignition and Max grabbed his wrist.
There was a frantic, angry look in the hound’s eyes. His lips curled back in a grimace, showing his white teeth. Gabriel had just told the hound that they were likely off the Blackland case, which meant Gabriel didn’t have any more use for him, which meant Max would be going back to the kennels, which meant he’d be tranquilized and strapped down to a steel table and injected with lethal toxins, for the crime of killing his master.
“Max, I—”
“Get out of the boat.”
Max didn’t wait for Gabriel to comply. He grabbed Gabriel by his shirtfront and pulled him out of his seat. Gabriel’s hands scrabbled over Max’s face, his nails raking across his nose. He’d never been a fighter, but he could gouge out an eye as well as anybody. His fingers ended up in Max’s mouth, and Max bit down as he hauled Gabriel out the passenger side. They dropped into the water, and before Gabriel could scream or grab a breath, the hound dragged him below. By now, Gabriel knew what was going to happen. If Max was going to kill him, he could have done it in the boat. The wild expression on his face hadn’t been murderous rage. It had been terror.
Gabriel broke free of Max’s grip so they could both swim unencumbered. With a muffled boom, a pressure wave smashed into him.
Gabriel’s head cracked against the dockhouse canal bottom. A flood of water polluted with diesel fuel and motor oil filled his mouth and throat. Blood clouded from his nose. Disoriented, he turned his body until his stinging eyes sighted the surface. Fragments of his boat swirled in the bubbling water. A roiling carpet of flame bloomed above.
Fingers wrapped themselves around Gabriel’s ankle. He didn’t fight them, but let Max’s powerful strokes tow him beyond the flaming gasoline and oil above, and back to the surface. Gabriel coughed and choked. Between gasping spasms, he managed to suck down small gulps of hot, bitter air.
“Firedrake bomb,” Max said in his ear. “Smelled it just before it detonated.” His face was blackened with canal sludge. A gash over his eye bled.
“Out,” Gabriel managed to croak. “Get us out.”
Max snatched hold of Gabriel’s jacket collar. He swam through billowing smoke and raining water from the fire suppression system until they reached the boathouse exit. Gabriel forced himself up the iron rungs of a maintenance ladder, up to the sidewalk, where he refused the help from a few passersby. He and Max jumped into the boat of a gawking taxi driver, and Gabriel dug out his ruined wallet and shoved a wad of bills at the driver. The money was soaked and it stank of fuel and oil and firedrake, but it was money, and the taxi driver made it vanish.
“Where to?” the driver said, already pulling into traffic. Sirens wailed in the distance.
Fenmont Szu had tried to kill him. Why? Because he’d admitted he’d wanted to kill the Hierarch when he was ten years old? That didn’t add up. And Szu didn’t have time to rig a bomb between Gabriel’s admission and when the bomb went off, anyway. No, Szu or someone else must have planned to kill Gabriel even before Gabriel came here.
So, Gabriel wasn’t supposed to know about Daniel Blackland, then. Why not?
“Where to?” the taxi driver repeated.
Gabriel didn’t have an answer, but he’d find one.
FOURTEEN
A broad arch of jagged stone towered over Daniel and crew like a mouth of broken teeth. Daniel aimed his flashlight down a long passageway. Odors of patient vigilance told him he’d come to the right place. Daniel couldn’t see them, but there were eyes in the walls. They looked for intruders, and they never blinked.
Cassandra unpacked the pieces of her rifle and screwed the barrel into the action.
“One hell of a circus shot,” Jo said skeptically.
“Well, Cassie’s one hell of a clown,” Daniel returned.
“Bet you a taco she doesn’t make it.”
“Bet you two tacos she does.”
Ignoring them, Cassandra attached a reel of galvanized steel cable to the rifle. She affixed a disc the size of a poker chip to the end of the cable and smeared it with epoxy from a tube.
“Okay, Moth,” she said. “Hoist me up.”
Moth kissed her on the cheek for luck and let her climb on his shoulders. Then he rose to his full height, providing her with a tall but ungainly sniper’s nest.
The things I make my friends do, Daniel thought. But if Cassandra had any misgivings, she wasn’t showing them. Instead, she peered down at Jo.
“I’m getting all the tacos.”
She braced the rifle against her shoulder and clicked on her targeting laser. A filament of green light penetrated the dark and made a spot some four hundred feet away.
“Steady?” Cassie asked Moth.
“Like a rock,” he said, and Daniel felt a wave of affection wash over him. Moth was a self-mutilating, self-regenerating half-mad man, but he would hold Cassie as still as a granite mountain. And Cassandra, without the benefit of magical assistance, was about to make a ridiculous shot. Daniel would have bet a thousand tacos on it.
She licked her lips. “Take a breath,” she said, and when Moth did, she squeezed the trigger. The cable shot out, and the sound of the disc hitting its target reported back with a dull spack. Still perched on Moth’s shoulders, she glued a hook to the arch above her head, detached the reel from the gun, and connected the cable to the hook. Then she affixed a second reel to her rifle, Moth took a couple of steps to the side, and she shot out another cable. Two parallel cables stretched down the corridor, spaced three feet apart, taut as guitar strings.
From a pocket, Cassie produced a folded square of Mylar. She hooked it on to one of the cables and let it unfold. The bottom edge was lined with lead weights, making the Mylar curtain hang flat. It was a perfect mirror surface. She hooked another curtain to the second cable, and then Moth finally let her down.
Grabbing rods sewn onto the leading edge of each curtain, Daniel stepped out, pushing the curtains forward to extend them. Together, he and his crew progressed between the curtains down the corridor.
Th
e Hyakume was a beast made of eyes. Three dozen vat-grown eyes were planted into sockets in the wall, wired through optic nerves to a security station housed deep in the catacombs. The eyes kept a constant vigil, staring straight ahead. They had no lids to blink. As a surveillance system, they were almost perfect. But they were stupid, mesmerized by their own mirror reflections in the Mylar, and as the crew walked the mirror curtain down the corridor, the eyes saw only themselves.
Once the crew made it to the end of the corridor, Jo handed Cassie a white paper bag. She peered inside.
“Oh my god. I don’t believe it.” Cassandra showed the contents of the bag to Daniel. “She actually brought tacos.”
“I didn’t think Daniel would plan a lunch break, so I came prepared.”
Emma raised a disapproving eyebrow. “Really? Tacos? Now? You’re what Otis calls the finest thieves in his employ?”
“We’re not in Otis’s employ.” But Daniel confiscated the bag and stuffed it in his backpack. “For later.”
Armed with friends and a sack of tacos, he led his crew into the shadows.
* * *
They paddled an inflatable raft through a tunnel of bone. The ceiling was a basket weave of human ribs and ulnas and tibias, the gaps joined by smaller wrist and hand and foot bones, the remains of thousands of dead. This was merely one surviving tunnel of what used to be miles of them. In more prosperous times, before Daniel’s father was born, the underground was an amusement park for the kingdom’s elite. The banquet halls and movie palaces and playhouses were built in spaces excavated by the Hierarch’s magic, and eventually brought down by the Hierarch’s earthquakes. Except for this one last canal, which had served as a kind of elaborate dumbwaiter between the private offices of the catacombs and the Beverly Hills delivery annex.
“Can I ask a sensitive question?” Moth said, drawing his paddle through the ink-dark water. “Who did all these bones belong to?”
At the raft’s prow, Emma peered ahead, into the darkness. “Not everything in Los Angeles was built on magic alone. Some of it was built with slaves. With prisoners of war. They built the tunnels with their own bones.”
The sounds of traffic and pump works above filled the darkness with a low, eerie rumble, like the hushed conversations of giants. There were still three miles to go before the cistern and the workshops, and then the Ossuary itself. That’s when things would get difficult.
Emma deserved credit for getting them this far. She’d provided the map and identified alarms and surveillance for Cassandra to disable with screwdrivers and magnets and wire cutters. But Emma’s reliability only made Daniel more uneasy. He didn’t like being dependent on her.
They passed into a chamber. Ragged and moldy tapestries hung like cobwebs before walls plated with scapulas. Femurs, arranged in fluted columns, soared to a domed ceiling, the remains of boys from Sacramento and San Francisco and Fort Bragg, and Kansas and Nebraska and New York and Connecticut, and Chumash and Cupeño and Mohave Indians from California, and all the enemy captures from the Hierarch’s wars. Places like this were where the Hierarch flung his toothpicks.
Daniel dug his paddle into the water. “Faster,” he said.
In an hour, the raft bumped against the bricked-up wall at the canal’s terminus. Beyond this point was another world, the occupied catacombs beneath the Ministry of Osteomancy headquarters. There would be experimental workshops and storehouses and offices and restrooms and a cafeteria for the workers. There would be alarms and surveillance and live guards. There would be employees.
Emma turned around in the raft and regarded Daniel. “If you’re having second thoughts, now would be a good time to abort.”
“Anyone?” Daniel said.
“Was having second thoughts part of the plan?” Moth said.
“I don’t recall,” Jo said. “There were some shitting-in-our-pants parts of the plan, but not second thoughts.”
Daniel laughed. “Cassie?”
“I have second thoughts every minute I hang around you guys. But I’m good to go.”
“Okay,” Daniel said. “Let’s Jacques Cousteau this shit.”
* * *
Swimming was glorious. Daniel knifed through the water, thirty feet down to the bottom of the ruined pump works. Beneath dolphin-smooth skin, a layer of fat kept him warm, and the only thing dragging him down was the pack looped around his waist, containing his gear and clothes. He could barely see through the dark and murk, even with a miner’s lamp strapped to his head, but he could detect the location and movements of his crew, as if the contraction of their muscles sent electrical signals to some new part of his brain. He hadn’t changed shape, but the essences of sea creatures were strong enough to make him feel as though he had.
They reached a monstrous nest of pipes and valves. Twisted rebar reached from a pile of debris like the tendrils of some great, frozen anemone. A fur of algae coated everything. The crew spread out, searching for the portal Emma said was down here. Jo flashed her headlamp twice, and they swam over to see what she’d discovered: a circular grate the size of a manhole in the terminating wall.
Moth and Cassandra unpacked their handsaws, impregnated with firedrake-scale dust. They went at the grate, the screech of their saws bounding off the walls. After several minutes, they cut through the last bar and let the grate rest in the muck. Daniel took the lead, swimming into the gloom. If Emma’s map was accurate, the tunnel ran twenty yards before ending at the bottom of the cistern.
Pressure squeezed his chest. Troubling aches built up in his legs. He checked his watch. They’d been underwater almost sixteen minutes, and his lungs were remembering they liked air. In a little while, they’d be screaming reminders at him.
He sensed movement ahead. Emma had said to expect carp or catfish. And she’d cautioned that down here in the dark, with traces of osteomantic residue at the bottom, the fish may come in odd forms.
Daniel turned to signal a warning with his headlamp when blades came down in front of his face.
His first thought was he’d run into a bear trap big enough to take off his head. Scrambling to get away, he caught sight of teeth in the narrow beam of his light, incisors the size of pizza slices, and empty eye sockets in a skull three feet across. What the hell was this? Some kind of big, fucked-up, osteomantic coelacanth?
He pulled his leg back, not quick enough. The fish had him. Its teeth tore into his calf and shin, all the way to bone. It thrashed, jerking him around like a dog with a chew toy. The water turned red. With a dull crack, his knee popped out of its socket, and the air rushed out of his lungs in an explosion of bubbles and a gargled scream. He reached for his headlamp, hoping to signal his crew to turn and swim away, but the lamp wasn’t there.
His only hope was to kraken-shock the fish, and his fingers were already tingling when sense took hold through the pain. He remembered he was underwater. Releasing electricity might stop the fish, but conducted through water, it would also electrocute his friends.
The fish jerked its head, teeth still grinding down on Daniel’s leg. His vision tunneled, and he ran down his options, and the only one that promised any hope of success was to stop struggling. Maybe while the fish was busy eating him, his friends could escape. This was a dismal plan and it probably wouldn’t work, because his friends would never leave him. They would stay with him underwater, even if it meant drowning. They loved him.
Something sliced through the water near his face, cutting a trail of bubbles. Moth’s arm came down, swinging a length of rebar. Moth struck the side of the fish’s skull and it cracked like a dinner plate. Another blow, and shards of bone separated and fell amid the storm of blood and bubbles. Half the fish’s upper jaw and a dozen teeth were still embedded in Daniel’s leg, but he was free.
He fluttered away, and the fish opted not to pursue. Instead, it turned toward bigger prey: Moth.
Daniel kicked to reverse course and intercept the fish before it could get to him, but he was too sluggish. Fast as a spear from a
gun, the fish fell upon Moth. Again and again Moth hammered the fish’s teeth with his rebar, shattering several of them with each blow, but the fish was undeterred. It lifted its head upward, raising its remaining teeth high like the knives of a dozen assassins.
The fish brought its jaw down, and six-inch teeth sank into Moth’s neck and back. He trailed blood like a cape as he slowly sank.
Bursts of orange light fired all around Daniel, and he braced for an attack from a new source, but the light came from calcium flares lit by Cassie and the others. Cassie had already assembled her cable gun and was taking aim. She fired, and a hook on the end of steel cable whizzed over Daniel’s head to strike the fish in the spine. Half a dozen vertebrae cracked apart into nuggets, but even damaged, the fish zeroed in on her.
With awkward flicks of its tail, it moved slower now, but it still gained on Cassie as she swam away. She dropped the cable-reel gun and scrabbled in her pack for something to help her, but she had nothing useful against the fish.
Jo and Emma converged on her, trying to pull her from the fish’s path, or distract the fish, but they were getting tangled up with each other, like a giant bait ball.
Daniel held perfectly still. He closed his eyes and examined his cells. He looked even deeper down, to the cells that were in the process of reverting to their customary, human configurations. He was an osteomancer. His father had altered him and trained him to be a vessel for magic. Osteomancy wasn’t just a family of drugs that gave him new abilities for a short period of time. Osteomancy was his fuel, his building material, a force that he could master.
The panlong was a water dragon, sleek and smooth and graceful. Kolowisi, from fossils excavated from the bottom of the Rio Grande, was a creature of the black depths, honored by the Zuni Pueblo. The essence of bagil, smuggled from the Northern Kingdom, lent the speed and ferocity of the great crocodilian creature.
Daniel had blended these elements for underwater swimming. Now, he drew upon their full power.
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