by Lara Adrian
If Joe was saying three days with such enthusiasm, they were probably closer to two weeks, which wasn’t a deal-breaker. But there were only twenty. Rumor was that Soledad had a hundred times that number of servants. Munira wouldn’t win a war with the packets, but …
“Tariq turned them down,” Joe said smugly. “ ‘Don’t need ’em,’ he told me. ‘I got teeth.’ ”
“I have teeth, too,” Munira said. “If they’re fresh, I’ll take them all, for a thousand each.”
“A thousand!” Joe spluttered. “Angel-face, that’s below cost! I’d be losing money!”
“I doubt it,” Munira said. She felt herself growing annoyed. Joe’s American bluster was charming in its grimy way. His American whining was not. “Come on, Joe. We both know you’d never pay more than a thousand for a score of those packets. And I have a lunch date, so let’s hurry. If we can’t do the deal, I heard that Wendy Feathers is back in town.”
“Already? Okay! Fine! But only for you, gorgeous.”
Joe’s heart wasn’t in the compliments anymore, which made Munira glad. If he’d looked too comfortable, she’d know he was cheating her. “And I’m going to need something special.”
He smiled. “What do you need?”
“What do you have?”
He pulled an iPad out of his satchel, tapped something on the screen, and handed it to Munira. “The prices for these items are not negotiable.”
Munira sighed. The packets were already going to set her back twenty grand, and with the price boost the kit was going to be fifteen. That left her with forty thousand U.S. to spend.
Joe’s list was longer than she’d expected—he really did have a lot of great gear to offer. Unfortunately, most of it was out of her price range. The first thing she did, though, was scroll down to L to see if he listed “Light of Ta’lab.” Nope. It was a long shot, anyway. She wanted the knit cap that rendered the wearer invisible to every sense, but it cost twenty times what she had.
With a tap, she reorganized the list by price, cheapest items at the top. Everything under forty grand was in potion form, which was okay. They’d work, but the effects wouldn’t last terribly long. Worse, the cheapest item she had any interest in at all cost nearly thirty grand.
She could only afford one.
First was a spirit-boosting potion. She’d taken this before: It brought out her ifrit aspects, allowing her to change shape for three to five minutes. Despite the fight with Alvara earlier, she thought she had enough fire left to become a column of smoke for five minutes, and that should be enough to get her down a narrow storm drain, past whatever undead things guarded the palace entrances. Probably. After that, it would be on her, the packets, and the kit.
Second was a spider-mimicking potion: It would make her sound and smell like one of the giant ambush spiders that hunted the treatment plant pipe. The creatures’ venom was valuable, and the collectors who went after it used the potion to capture spiders at the edge of their hunting grounds. Would it disguise her well enough to let her cross hundreds of yards of their territory?
Third, and last, was the potion of dreamless sleep, sometimes called Juliet Juice. If she drank it, she would appear dead to every natural and supernatural sense. Soledad’s servants, hunting for bodies to experiment on, would carry her down the hollow friction pile. It would probably get her deep into the palace without even breaking a sweat. Still … she’d be helpless until the juice wore off.
Those were her options for breaching the defenses of El Sótano. But which was the smartest way in?
Chapter 3
by Lucy A. Snyder
Munira bit her lip, stared down at the iPad, and considered her cash-limited options. Soledad’s undead guards would be a problem no matter the path she chose … but ugh, the ambush spiders. The creepy chittering noises the monsters made never failed to wreck her nerves. Even with a very strong potion—which she doubted Wide-Awake Joe was selling—she wasn’t sure she could convincingly pretend to be something she despised so thoroughly.
And the notion of drinking the Juliet Juice and leaving herself at the mercy of the creatures Below seemed less and less wise the more she thought about it. What if hungry sewer rats found her paralyzed body before the necromancer’s minions did? She shuddered.
“I’ll take the spirit booster.” She passed the iPad back to Joe. “And that—along with everything else—comes to seventy thousand, right?”
“Right you are.” He gave her a broad smile. “You’re getting all this for a song, gorgeous.”
She snorted. “Sure I am. Show me the merchandise, and I’ll show you the money.”
#
Five minutes later, Munira stepped onto the hot sidewalk outside the Clay Lantern, her suitcase heavy with potions and packets, but light on cash.
As she headed back to her office, she considered what she’d learned from Joe. If he was running low on supplies, then clearly she and poor mangled Tariq weren’t the only Retrievers whom Temesis had sent Below. What was the wizard up to?
She knew a little about the Light. Ta’lab was an old moon god; worshippers and travelers had sought knowledge of the future at his temples hundreds of years before the Oracle at Delphi would put the focus on Greece and the sun as a source of prophecy. In the seventies, UK archaeologists discovered the Light in Yemen. Once restored, it was kept behind locked doors at the British Museum, available only to “scholars” that Munira knew were European and Middle Eastern wizards who paid a handsome viewing price.
The Light had gone missing a decade ago, and soon after it was common knowledge all over Baja that Soledad had it. Not that anyone on this side of the Atlantic really cared. Ta’lab hadn’t been anyone’s go-to god for two thousand years, and the world was full of ancient oracular artifacts. And whatever the Light did, the Brits apparently hadn’t felt that trying to Retrieve it was worth tangling with the sewer sorceress.
So what could Temesis possibly want with it? He was rumored to own far more impressive prophetic artifacts. And why the rush to get the Light now, considering it had been Below for years?
As she unlocked her office, Munira realized that all the “whys” her mind could mill wouldn’t slow her deadline or make it any easier to find the Light. She had to focus on the job and worry about Temesis’s machinations later. When she knew her father was safe.
She opened the suitcase and pulled out the brown paper bag containing her standard kit. The disposable cell phone had a full battery and a Los Angeles number—she’d hoped it would trace to a more distant location, but L.A. was good enough—and the bottle of Impresso looked fresh. Excellent.
Munira was very good at her job, but even she couldn’t track a completely unfamiliar object. Studying a photo wasn’t reliable enough for get-in, get-out Retrieval. And calling her contact at the British Museum might attract unwanted attention. Fortunately, a bit of Googling and phoning connected her to a professor in Boston.
“MacDougal here … what d’ya want?” His voice was gruffly Scottish.
“Hi, my name is Sara Larson.” She covered the microphone with her left thumb and downed the coffee-flavored Impresso.
“I’m with Archaeology Magazine,” she continued, already woozy and tingly from the potion. “I’m doing a piece on Sheban artifacts, and I’m told you worked on some key digs?”
“Oh.” Now he sounded keenly interested. “Well, yes, but I was just a grad student …”
“You helped find the Light of Ta’lab, didn’t you? What was that like?”
As he reminisced, the potion took hold and her mind followed his voice into his memories until it seemed as though she were brushing the dirt off the ancient, intricate octagonal brass lamp with her own hands. Once she was sure she had a good feel for the Light, she thanked the professor and ended the call.
Munira closed her eyes and let her consciousness expand, drift, seeking the Light. She expected it would be casting a wise illumination in a meditation chamber … but the artifact was down in Soledad’
s laboracombs, where the sorceress kept barely living bodies on slabs and body parts in preservation jars for experimentation. The vision was strong: The shining brass lamp hung from a rusty nail on the cave wall, casting a peculiar blue light across the naked bodies of humans, animals, and demi-humans arrayed beneath it.
A pity she hadn’t bought the Juliet Juice. Then she remembered the possibility of rats …
Of course, using a spirit booster made wardrobe choices tricky. Synthetics wouldn’t change state with her; her natural magic couldn’t affect them. Natural fibers like wool and cotton could change … but her magic was more than likely to reduce them to ash. She could bring a change of clothes with her—she’d have enough power to levitate a few pounds while she was immaterial—but didn’t want to spend even a second naked Below.
Fortunately, she’d faced the same challenge the last time she’d taken a booster for a job—and she’d had more time and money to prepare then. Consequently, she’d acquired a genuine salamander catsuit and matching boots. The suit’s shiny lace-up leather look was a little too gothic for her tastes, but she hadn’t bought it for fashion. Made from the sleek skin of one of the legendary fire creatures, the clothing would turn to smoke with her and never burn.
After a trip back to her apartment to change and transfer her gear into a water- and fireproof backpack, she let her Retriever’s sense lead her to a storm drain that would provide the most direct access to the laboracombs. Following half an hour of walking—and only two propositions from strangers on the street—she found herself in a concrete spillway beneath the northbound Ensenada Highway overpass.
The spillway was dry, and the circular steel grate wasn’t bolted down. Gripping the grate, she pulled it aside, carefully lowered herself down through the drain, and dropped eight feet to the concrete floor of the catch basin. It was much drier and cleaner than she’d feared; there was only an inch of sandy mud squishing around her boots. The city got very little rain most of the time, but during hurricane season the storm sewers were critical.
At chest height was a set of pipes. The large ones would carry any overflow to the salty lake outside the city. Her sense told her that the smallest pipe, the one not quite big enough for an adult, the one that smelled of death, led to Below.
With a quick, silent prayer that the magic would last long enough for her to get clear of the pipe, Munira pulled out her spirit booster and drank it down. It tasted of alcohol and bitter oranges, like a shot of Curaçao liqueur, and for one bad moment she was afraid Joe had cheated her.
But then she felt the warmth spreading throughout her body and an adrenaline surge as her ifrit powers awakened. She was floating, and then she was fire and smoke, pushing her backpack ahead of her on a cushion of air. Being airy smoke made her feel more free and powerful than she remembered, and as she blew down the pipe, faster than any bird, she envied her father for being able to take this form whenever he pleased.
She puffed out into a large cavern and silently flew over the heads of the three huge, misshapen ambush spiders—sheesh, were those things everywhere down here?—and a squad of weird, stitched-together undead monstrosities she was happy to have only seen in passing. None of the guards seemed to notice her.
Joe’s potion lasted longer than she expected, and she wasn’t forced to re-form until she was well into the passageway leading to the laboracombs. It felt depressingly mundane to be standing there on two heavy flesh legs; her soul keened to be able to fly again. She told her soul to shut the hell up and dug out her Maglite and a couple of undead packets, just in case.
As she turned on the flashlight, something slithered into the light beam. It had cloudy undead human eyes and a reptilian body; it took her half a second to realize that Soledad or one of her minions had stitched a man’s head onto a crocodile’s body. The thing stared at her, opened a mouth filled with dog’s teeth, and took a breath, she guessed to holler an alarm—
She pitched one of the packets right into the thing’s mouth, and the paper egg burst in a puff of ash and salt and herbs. The undead creature dropped, now nothing more than somebody’s twisted taxidermy project. It smelled ghastly. Shuddering, she stepped over the corpse and continued on to the laboracombs.
Blue light streamed into the passageway from one of the rooms, and when she stepped inside, her initial view of the laboracomb perfectly matched her vision of the place. Wanting to spend as little time in there as possible, Munira scanned for guards; seeing none, she hurried past the slab-sleepers to the Light of Ta’lab on the wall.
She carefully lifted the precious brass lantern off its unceremonious rusty nail.
The moment she freed it, she heard a rustling of leathery wings from the ceiling. Her stomach lurched in panic and she looked up. Dozens of saucer-sized eyes reflected the blue lantern light back at her, and she caught glimpses of curving claws and sharp fangs.
“Thief!” one began to squawk, and soon they were all shrieking, louder than any air raid siren, wings flapping, preparing to fall on Munira like curses from the gods.
She clutched the Light to her chest and crouched, preparing to sprint for it—
—but then her eyes locked on the face of a nearby sleeper. It was Arielle, her sylph partner. Temesis must have recruited her before he approached Munira.
Damn him.
Chapter 4
by Kelly Meding
Indecision was not a place Munira liked to be, but it had rooted her to the floor of Soledad’s undead laboratory, a flock of winged monsters screeching overhead. She’d completed the job, in the sense that she now held the Light of Ta’lab in her hands. All she had to do was get safely out of El Sótano with the prize, hand it over to Temesis, and get her father back safely.
All manageable things, in theory, if her partner Arielle weren’t part of the sewer sorceress’s collection of bodies, chilling on a table and awaiting a horrendous fate as an undead experiment. Arielle was flighty, free-spirited, and entirely too reckless on occasion for Munira’s taste, but she was a damn good Retriever. More important, she was Munira’s friend.
She couldn’t leave a friend Below.
But she also couldn’t manage the Light, fight those carrion carriers leering down at her screeching “Thief!,” and carry Arielle out.
One of the carrion carriers dropped down from the shadowed alcove, away from its dozens of friends. It landed on the stomach of a nearby body, long talons cutting cold flesh. The thing was a horrifying amalgamation of a turkey vulture and a gargoyle—with none of the beauty of either—and it wouldn’t have shocked Munira to discover that Soledad had actually mated the two to produce such a monster. She also saw no signs that the thing was of necromantic origin, which concerned her a great deal.
Still, she yanked an undead packet out of her pocket anyway and lobbed it at the carrion carrier. The packet exploded against its hooked beak. Munira held her breath, waiting for it to drop dead. It simply sneezed through the cloud of salt, ash, and herbs.
“Crap,” she said. Fear ratcheted up her pulse, sending a warm flush through her body. Strong emotions ignited her ifrit half—a side of herself she had learned to control with an iron fist, lest the power of it accidentally destroy the very thing she went on a job to Retrieve. But if the carrion carriers weren’t undead, then they could die the old-fashioned way.
She hoped.
She remembered the Blur potion tucked away in her backpack, part of her standard kit. Smashing it on the ground created a flash of light that temporarily blinded anyone nearby to the presence of the potion’s owner. Granted, it usually only lasted about fifteen seconds, but it would make her and Arielle’s getaway a lot simpler—if only it didn’t require putting down the Light of Ta’lab to fish the potion out of the pack.
Munira had to risk her own fire, then, and just hope it didn’t damage the Light—or Arielle. She drew upon her ifrit half, feeling her skin heat and the air around her shift and shimmer. The power that she rarely used rose to the surface and enthralled her, mad
e even more pleasurable after her earlier smoky entrance into Below. Above, the shrieks of “Thief!” lessened, replaced by squawks of confusion. The carrion carrier nearest her screeched and flew at her, all black feathers and spindly wings.
She didn’t react fast enough, and it slammed into her stomach hard enough to make her stumble back a step—and nearly drop the Light. Agony seared across her belly and a sharp beak snapped at her eyes.
Munira didn’t waste a scream. Instead, she spit at it.
Her burning saliva hit the thing in the eye. It rolled on the floor, a flurry of leathery wings and squeals of agony that dragged cold fingernails down Munira’s spine and matched the pain in her stomach. Too bad she didn’t have time to spit on all of them. Once they smelled her blood, they’d be on her in force.
She wasn’t fond of blood, and looking at the source of her own pain was not going to help her get out of this. The carrion carrier hadn’t disemboweled her; a lesser wound like this could wait. Job first.
Munira pulled on her internal fire—on all of the power of her ifrit ancestry—and held it all tight in her breast. It centered there—burning, roiling, ready to be unleashed.
The odds of her fire going straight up and frying the carrion carriers into identical chicken dinners were about as good as the odds of her parboiling everyone in the laboratory, but she was out of options.
“Forgive me,” she said to Arielle—just in case.
“No need.”
Munira almost screamed at the familiar voice. Arielle’s eyes were open, narrow slits of cerulean blue, mouth flat in a grim line. The air elemental winked once, and a cool caress of wind brushed Munira’s cheek. She grinned. She remembered this trick.