by Jack Conner
CITY OF SHADOWS:
Part One of Two
by Jack Conner
Copyright 2014
Cover image used with permission
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Chapter 1
Shadows stalked him through the narrow alleys of Upper Lavorgna.
Stevrin hadn’t noticed at first, but the little noises he’d been detecting at the edge of his hearing had been growing steadily louder, closer, and there was no one else around. Something was following him.
There! A scrape behind him.
He whirled. Nothing—
No. A glimpse of shadow slipping away into the fog. Everything was fog and shadows. Clouds masked the stars overhead, and only one of the three moons peeked out, and that just a sliver.
Stevrin narrowed his eyes, trying to peer through the veil, but whoever or whatever was following him remained hidden.
Fuck this. Wrapping his hand around the knife he carried in his jacket pocket, he hurried on, down one alley, then another. Lit a cigarette to steady his nerves. He would lose whoever was after him soon enough. No one knew these streets better than he did.
Who could be after him? What? A fifteen-year-old orphan was easy pickings in this city, of course, but he wondered if it could be ...
Forget it, Stev. Gotta get to the Warren. Lives depend on it.
The fog thickened, curling around red-brick buildings, dark mountains in the mist. Broken windows glared at Stevrin hungrily. Bomb craters rent the road in places, and several of the buildings showed long scars patched up by mortar or different-colored brick. The war had ended five years ago, but its memory lingered in every slab and fissure. Ahead, the three tall towers of the Ungrid Factory belched thick columns of filth into the sky. The fog massed around Stevrin, foul and cloying, and he spat out the acrid taste. He could feel every pebble through the thin soles of his shoes.
Skritch.
He spun. At first he saw nothing, just roils of slowly-churning vapor. He started to breathe a sigh of relief, then—
A shape.
It glided closer, tall and indistinct, stepping toward him out of the fog.
“Gave me a start,” Stevrin said, experimentally.
The figure stepped closer.
Stevrin ran. Leapt a fallen trashcan, whipped around a turn. Barreled into another figure coming the other way. Gasping, he stumbled back.
“Hey, bub, watch--”
It grabbed at him.
He threw himself aside, slammed up against a wall. Rebounded quick as a cat and swiveled about, just in time to see the first one catching up to him.
He slipped under grasping arms, slashed out with his knife and bolted up the alley. Two sets of footsteps pattered after him. He sprinted hard and fast, ducked down a street, then an alley, then up another street.
“I don’t have any money!” he shouted over his shoulder.
They kept coming.
Stevrin rounded the final bend and the Warren reared out of the fog like some mythical castle. Once it had been a block of brownstones, but Octunggen bombs had gutted the interior and killed or driven off most of the residents during the war—or what this coast had seen of it, anyway. As far as Stevrin knew, it was still going on in some parts of the world. None lived there now but Dr. Reynalt and his more successful experiments. This part of town had yet to receive electric light-posts, and ghostly-white gas lamps lit
Dreb Street at irregular intervals, mere blotches of paleness in the gloom. Stevrin bounded up the short flight of stairs and pounded the thick metal door, grabbing the big brass knocker and smashing for all he was worth.
“Let me in, you bastards!”
Noises behind him.
Three dark shapes half materialized out of the fog, coming closer.
“Come on!” he said, kicking the door. “Open!”
Closer ...
The small metal panel in the door slid away and a pair of mismatched eyes glared out. One was red and one was blue.
“You again.” The voice was brusque and rasping.
“Open up you cocksucker!”
The eyes narrowed.
The shapes were almost on him.
There was a pop, a scrape, and the door swung open with a squeal. Gasping, Stevrin lunged through and shouldered the door shut behind him. With shaking fingers, he shot the bolts home, and as each one locked it issued a satisfying bang.
He half expected the door to burst open and the pursuers to flood in after him, but when nothing happened he slumped against the wall, panting. Sweat streamed down his face and soaked his hair. Shivers coursed up and down his spine. His legs shook. His chest rose and fell. His heart beat crazily. He stood in a dark, musty hall.
“What is it, lad?”
Stevrin sucked in a deep breath, looked at Maynard and grimaced. One of Dr. Reynalt’s highest assistants, Maynard was a sour-faced man, seemingly of middle years, in out-of-date formal attire. Long, stringy hair fringed his bald dome, which was composed of grayish, unhealthy skin, like that of his face. Dead skin. It looked to have been fashioned from at least three different sheets of slightly different colored flesh, and at each joining ran a line of neat stitches. Maynard’s right hand and left hand were slightly different sizes, and colors. One of the fingers had webbing between them, suggesting that its previous owner had been infected by the Atomic Sea.
“Shit,” said Stevrin, “I never thought I’d look forward to seeing your ugly mug, Maynard, you bastard.”
Concern touched the manservant’s mismatched eyes. “It was them, wasn’t it? Did you see ‘em, lad? Tell me!” As he spoke, he looked through the eye-hole.
“They stayed in the shadows. Never got a clean look at ‘em.”
Maynard swore. Evidently the pursuers had gone. Turning back to Stevrin, he said, “Think it’s them—whoever’s been taking people?”
Stevrin hesitated, then nodded. “Has to be. They weren’t after money, and if they were rapists I don’t think they’d be so ...organized. It was them. Hell, I almost got to find out what they were up to first-hand.”
“I’ll send some of the boys after ‘em. Scare ‘em off if they’re still around. Maybe catch ‘em and put the screws to ‘em.”
“I’d like to watch the screws part.” Stevrin took a breath, forced himself to straighten. “I need to see the doc.”
“Yar, I guess ya do, laddie. Ya wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“This shit’s got to end. If it doesn’t, the Div—”
“Yar. Come on.”
Maynard led Stevrin down the hall. Two homunculi, tall and gangly, listed from opposite walls, their mouths agape, hands closing and unclosing. Like all homuncs, they looked like blackened human corpses. Centuries ago alchemists had built the creatures in miniature, but over time they’d mushroomed until now they were as large or larger than those they served. The chemical-and-herb reek of the beings filled the hall.
“Git!” Maynard told them sharply. Collars about the two homunculi’s necks sprouted chains that connected with bolts in the walls.
Feeling his skin crawl, Stevrin sidled his way past them, looking with dread into their lifeless, waxen faces. He couldn’t tell if there was any real soul behind their eyes, but he doubted it. The Guild of Alchemists made them from earth and herbs and gods-knew-what-else. The
homunculi were thus the black of rich earth and utterly alien. Like the bodies, the faces had been carved to resemble men’s, but the carving had been rudimentary and more for form than function. They didn’t need to eat, or breathe, or smell, and yet they possessed the required apparatuses. Their eyes were the only things truly organic on them—human eyes, rolling in black sockets—eyes taken, Stevrin had always been told, from unclaimed corpses. Gods knew there were enough of them in Lavorgna.
The stolen eyes watched him, unblinking.
“Magnar on a stick,” he grumbled. “I hate those things. Why does the doc even use ‘em, anyway? He’s got the likes of you, doesn’t he? No offense.”
“The likes of me aren’t to be used as guard dogs,” Maynard said. “And trust me, laddie, there’s nothin’ you could do to offend me.”
“I’ll work on that.” With nervous hands, Stevrin lit another cigarette.
Maynard met up with a fellow Returner and whispered in his ear, Stevrin supposed about scaring off the bastards that had chased him. That done, Maynard showed Stevrin down one hall, then another. The Warren did not disappoint in being twisting and labyrinthine. Doctor Reynalt occupied the portions of the block that were still livable, and he’d had his people clear the sections out and even use the detritus to shore up and rebuild part of the structures that had been ruined by Octunggen bombs. He’d designed elaborate staircases and galleys and large open ballroom-type areas that resembled something more out of a palace than a brownstone.
Maynard didn’t take Stevrin through these more posh areas at the moment, though, to Stevrin’s disappointment. The manservant led in one main, regrettable direction: down.
“Hells,” Stevrin said. The doc was at work again.
An oil lantern hung on a wall near a spiraling stairway. Maynard plucked it from the wall in one hand, snatched Stevrin’s smoke out of his mouth—“Hey!”—with the other, and pressed it to the wick. Light flared. Shadows retreated.
“Son of a bitch,” said Stevrin.
Maynard grinned maliciously and shoved the smoke back into Stevrin’s fingers. There were still a few drags left, but the cigarette was crumpled and stained by Maynard’s dirty, oily fingers.
“Thanks for nothing,” Stevrin said, and flicked it away.
Maynard showed the way down a flight of steps to another metal doorway. Not for the first time, Stevrin found himself amazed by Dr. Reynalt’s security measures. He must fear the Guild of Alchemists a great deal, even more so than most people. After rapping on the door and being admitted, Maynard ushered Stevrin into the chamber beyond.
Though he’d seen it before, Stevrin felt his eyes widen, his breath quicken. The doctor’s laboratory occupied a large, domed room, stuffed with vast machines and equipment too complicated for Stevrin to take in all at once, or even several times. Toward the center of the chaos two great, bulky towers crackled with sparks high up top. A long, tubular construct snaked along the wall, making coughing, chugging noises. One wall was enclosed behind glass and featured a great mound of corpses and body parts kept cool by jetting gasses that made the wall look frosted. From a series of consoles, smoke belched up. It all stank of lightning, death, and grease.
A corpse lay on a slab between the sparking towers, strapped down and covered in nodes with wires sprouting from what looked like every inch of its body.
Dr. Reynalt stood over the slab, fastening on nodes, while a team of servants aided him. Some spun dials or punched buttons. Many looked hunched and misshapen. One had three arms. One had no lower jaw but a tube jutting up from its throat and sticking out past its upper jaw. A steel plate covered half of another’s head.
But of them all, though he was truly alive, the doctor stood out most – tall, proud, with dark hair and thick eyebrows, possessed of intense dark eyes lit by feverish energy, agleam by the light of spitting electrodes. He smiled savagely as he stared down at the thing on the slab: the corpse of a stocky, swarthy man—a corpse unmade and then remade, but not with all the same parts.
Drawing close, Stevrin nearly gagged at the stench of all the dead ones, or the near-dead ones, combined in this tight space, and he coughed against his hand.
Alerted by the sound, Dr. Reynalt wheeled on him.
“You!” A lock of sweaty hair fell over his high brow. “You’d better not be checking up on me, boy. I don’t appreciate being checked up on.”
“Not why I’m here. There’s—”
“Good! Then you’ve arrived most propitiously. It’s almost ready.” He gestured Stevrin forward. “Just look! In moments I will prevail over the death-bitch once again.”
Stevrin blew a cloud of smoke into his face. Maynard chuckled.
“We’ll see,” Stevrin said. “The last ones didn’t work out so well, did they?”
Dr. Reynalt scowled, looking momentarily troubled. “This one will be different,” he said, softly, emphatically, as if to convince himself.
Stevrin shrugged. “Not why I’m here.”
The doctor was hardly listening. He turned back to the thing on the slab, and the procedure resumed. Electricity crackled from the towering machines, and Stevrin’s hair stood on end from all the static in the air. He sucked on his cigarette as Reynalt ordered the slab raised, and Stevrin stared in fascination as the body ascended directly into the vortex of energy crackling and hissing and sparking between the great nodes of the towers. He could imagine the energy channeling into the gleaming silver mechanism installed in the corpse’s chest, the mechanism that served as engine and heart for the being.
As if on cue, the body arched, and a piercing scream echoed off the stone walls of the laboratory. The various servants of Reynalt hooted and cried out.
“Get him down!” Dr. Reynalt said, and his servants obeyed. Gears banged, chains rattled, and the metal bed lowered creaking back into place, but now the body strapped to it moved. Stevrin had seen the procedure a handful of times, but it never failed to unnerve him. What had been a cold piece of meat just moments before now stirred with life. Its eyes rolled frantically in their sockets, and a low moan escaped its lips.
Dr. Reynalt bent over the figure, which strained at its straps, and patted it on the head. “Welcome back to the world, my friend.”
The thing growled at him, there was no other word for it. There was little human in the creature’s eyes, only pain, and hate, and anger.
“Doctor—” Stevrin started.
Dr. Reynalt saw it too. Just as the thing that had recently been a corpse lunged up and snapped at the doctor’s face, he jerked backward. Sweat flew from his brow, and his eyes went wide.
Maynard put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay, Doc?”
Reynalt nodded shakily and regained his composure. Stevrin saw there was sadness in his eyes, not fear or anger. “Damn.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “I thought we might have saved this one.” In a lower tone of voice, almost a whisper, he added, “Why do they keep fighting me? All the procedures were correct ...”
The creature on the slab mewled and groaned, struggling against his leather restraints, but they were too strong.
“Power them down,” Reynalt ordered, indicating the machines that still crackled overhead, and in moments the roar and spark faded. Stevrin’s hair still stood on end, and he attempted to slick the curly, beer-colored tangle back into place, but it didn’t want to stay down. He sighed.
The doctor issued a few more orders, then stood staring dejectedly at the Returner. Stevrin vaguely remembered the man—Tollie, he thought his name was. Stevrin knew Dr. Reynalt made a fortune out of returning the loved ones of the rich and mighty to consciousness, but Tollie was not such a case. Would that he were. No, there was a much different and far less wholesome reason that Reynalt had been hired to bring Tollie back.
Dr. Reynalt glanced at Stevrin, as if just remembering he was there, and grunted. “Well, I suppose you can tell your mistress I failed once again. I’ve never run into such a streak of luck.”
“Your new pet ain
’t why I’m here.”
A look of comprehension came over Dr. Reynalt’s face. “Don’t tell me ...”
Stevrin nodded. He flicked his gaze to the body on the slab, then looked back at the doctor. “There’s been another one. If we hurry, we can still get to it in time.”
* * *
They arrived at the Divinity through the Below. Melias, pretty and seventeen, met them in the sub-basements, then showed them through the much-brighter halls of the temple proper. Stevrin had to blink his eyes at the brilliance after so long in the tunnels.
“Good job bringing the doctor in a timely fashion, by the way,” she told Stevrin over her shoulder.
“Yeah, well,” he said. “Nearly got killed an’ all.”
“Really?” Stevrin relished the trace (only a trace) of worry that edged into her voice. “Be more careful next time, Stevvie.”
Stevvie. He cringed. He succumbed to an embarrassing crush on Melias years ago, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Anyway, why can’t you just send me in a car?” he said.
“If we could use a car we wouldn’t need you, would we?” she said. “The whole idea is not to attract attention. That’s why you had to come here through the Below. No one must know what we’re doing.”
“We’re not going to the bedrooms this time,” Dr. Reynalt noted.
“The client apparently didn’t want to do it there,” Melias said. “We’re still trying to work out which Sister he was the guest of. Anyway, the body’s this way.”
The Grand Temple of the Most Divine Hyalith was, of course, a whorehouse. Once, Stevrin knew, it had been the main temple of the Hyalithins, a peaceful people that had apparently made the mistake of speaking out against the Order of Yreg-ngad, a rival cult. Long after the Hyalithins had been killed off, Agatha and the whores had taken over. They’d done a hell of a job restoring the place in the fifty years since. The halls were high and white, with intricate scrollwork, and the newly-installed electricity boasted of brisk business. Silken swatches of fabric overhung the electric lamps so that the light they cast was soft and colored—sometimes red, sometimes blue, sometimes green. It was like walking through a dream.