Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  And it's remarkably good at tricking itself.

  That's what magic is. Fooling yourself. Creating a state of voluntary schizophrenia. Just for a while. Where symbolism and metonymy become what they represent. But you can't be a madman and do magic. Well, at least, you can't be irrational. The whole point is to come back from the trip.

  Your brain, though, needs incentive to hallucinate.

  Or it needs meditation.

  I call it Gnosis, but you'll find it called other things. Gnosis just means wisdom. It's a receptive state where the... restriction of your sane, day-to-day mind relaxes. You need to work yourself into a state. Exhaust yourself. Get a fever. Orgasm. Pain. Breathing. Edge of sleep. Whatever. Something that focuses the brain tight and low.

  I can meditate on demand now, just need a few short breaths. Took me years to learn how. Meditation is the easiest when you know what you're doing, but that takes a while. Stick with the other methods but practice meditation. Always. Always, always. After a while, you'll have uses for it that you never could have thought of. I can touch the Gnosis whenever I like unless something's keeping me from it. Fear. Intense pain. Things like that. But a big part of what makes me a good magician is that I can enter it quickly. Easily. And keep it.

  You'll find the stillness of Gnosis when your mind quiets. When you find yourself free from restriction. When you move from symbol to symbol fluidly, easily. When you leave the restriction. When everything becomes immanent and strange. Or, a little less dramatically, when you can find the empty-skulled peace of the early morning stares.

  That's why a lot of people give up, you know. I think the city would be overrun with cults and sorcerers if it was easy. But you can chant up the Black Rites of Pluto all you like and nothing will happen. Not unless you've reached the one-pointed mind of Gnosis.

  So try it. Go for a run or invite over a generous boyfriend or, er, something. Dance like a dervish or hold your hand over the stove. Whatever you need to shut the brain down from thoughts, to enter into a new state.

  Then learn to keep it.

  Push it. Enter Gnosis and catch a bus, buy whisky. Call a friend.

  A favourite of mine is keeping it while walking, seeing what the magic needs from you. Seeing what it has to say.

  That's it. Find the stillness. Wear it like armour, become it like a still mist in your head.

  Because when you have the Gnosis, the one-pointedness, the rules of the world change, reality takes on strange new contexts and subtexts and that's where sorcery works the best.

  Gnosis. Find it. Keep it. Magic.

  Twelve

  Lionel is ready to share the lay of the land. I drink a brandy stinger, my secret cocktail shame.

  'Two years since you worked for the Library?'

  'About that.' I say.

  'You know we had a vampire uptown?'

  'No.'

  'Yeah, Scarlet led the kill-team on it.'

  'How many fatalities?'

  'Two. Hobson and that little girl with the freckles.'

  Straw. She should never have been on the that sort of operation. A sweet girl who read four dead languages. Hobson was just sharp-eyed little bastard who liked the bully-boy aspects of the work the best. Partnered with that prick Rosengarten a lot. Him I do not mourn.

  'It was a stupid fucking thing. Eating tampons it found in the rubbish. Someone had kicked out its front teeth. Probably some territory thing. It should have been an easy job but rumour is, they just went in blind and stupid.'

  Lionel goes on. 'That started things going bad for the Library. Back-footed them, though no one's ready to try anything yet. Jon was gone. We still have to talk about that, what happened with Jon.'

  No.

  He sees there's only a stillness for him and keeps talking.

  'You were gone and that meant that they suddenly had to use a lot more brute force solutions. And without Jon, that wasn't going very well.'

  Fame at last.

  'Are you going to be sensible if I start talking about certain people?'

  I wave with two summoning fingers, bringing it on.

  'Everett was doing alright. Worked the way up the ranks. Was a respected Library administrator and Lark, he was ok at the money stuff and had a glad hand. But you can have money and influence if you like but... that guy never understood the game like you or Mully. Suddenly, smaller groups were springing up all over the city. Cults of five people who should never have worked a summoning were suddenly invoking serious Gods. Things, and I'm talking about the last eighteen months, have been confused. Little cults, you know how they go. Raising up more messiahs than you could poke a fucking stick at. Evangelism.'

  'Fights.'

  'Yeah.'

  'Gallowglass was too big and too old to get involved in this. Hell, Bleak Elect weren't new, just small.'

  'Story isn't over, mate. See, a fresh crop of amateurs isn't unprecedented. It's not even always a bad thing. Remember 2000?'

  Eye roll. They turned on each other like dogs. Bullshit millennial frenzy that was really just trendy bullshit.

  'That was just a pain in the arse, mate. This isn't just apocalypse-nutters looking for a barney. Because in the last few months, they've been starting again. Fights in the streets, blokes getting pissed and chucking hexes around. I'm surprised no one's tried to hire you for a bit of help.'

  But they have. Last night I did that job with the Libertarias. Still. Why weren't people coming to me? Just popular I suppose.

  'What different to the millennium nonsense?'

  Lionel scowls, finishes his drink, rifles in his desk drawer and throws something out at me. I catch, inspect, swear.

  'What is it?' asks Bettina. I hold it up to her.

  'Calamity curse. You fix it to a place, a person if you can, then you sit back and watch the fun.'

  It's a long strip of paper, written in some Pictographic language that looks Chinese but probably isn't. Fire engine red and garish gold. I can feel it, a seething spell, looking for connections to sever, white hot with malevolence. Bad fucking magic. It doesn't just burst the pipes or sour the milk. It stirs up paranoia, fear and sickness. It infests a place like cockroaches, splashing madness and the worst kinds of luck around. It's cancer magic.

  'It's... very bad. And very powerful.'

  'You can read it?'

  No. I've seen it before. No need to give Lionel something for nothing.

  'I bought this off Ys, who bought it off Paiget, who reckons he found it when his boys got jumped by some fucking cheese-worshippers or some damn thing.'

  'Cheese-worshippers?'

  'Just joking, love. I just mean some small-timers.' Bettina smiles.

  'Why are you showing me this?'

  'Because there's more. Weapons. Black magic shit is flooding the streets at the moment and that's why all the newbie groups and the tiny little zero-percenters are all up in arms. These pricks shouldn't be able to get a hold of stuff like calamity magic. Shouldn't even know what it is, but someone's offloading it cheap and in bulk.'

  I hand back the streamer, glad to be rid of it.

  'Why isn't the Library on this?'

  'Perhaps they are? Perhaps they're weak? But you ain't the only one asking that question, mate.'

  'Thank you, Lionel.'

  Stand, handshake, all that.

  'So what's your plan?'

  'Don't know.'

  'Sure you don't.' He's not happy with my silence. Never is.

  'I owe you one.'

  That sweetens it. Far as Lionel's concerned, that's money in the pocket.

  In the alley outside, Bettina looks me up and down.

  'I liked that guy.'

  'Yeah, Lionel's ok.'

  'But you weren't square with him, were you?'

  'Didn't lie.'

  She crosses her arms. 'Didn't tell the whole truth.'

  Wants answers and it won't cost me to be honest.

  'My partner and I confiscated that charm ten years ago. It was our first bi
g job. I know who I took it off and I've a feeling she's the one who sold it to Lionel's frommage religion.'

  Jeancat.

  Thirteen

  Subway station, down into the irony heat, metal on the tongue.

  The rats that skitter across the station are doing it slow and sure. Something? Nothing. I don't care. I'm thinking of Jon. But they're sitting in a circle, one in the middle, that looks to be preaching. Rook trials down amongst the cigarette butts and wrappers and dirt.

  Fucking hell, Lionel. I could have put Jon out of my head if you hadn't said a word. Shake it off. Ignore the rats. Job to do.

  Jeancat is a dealer in rare artefacts with a speciality in weapons. Don't think guns and bombs, think curses and Aladdin's lamp if the genie had a strangler's grip. She's got a nose for these things. I've followed her about her work. Hit an antique store and what do you find? An interesting jug? If you've the taste for it, some interesting lighter, some desk from a designer you admire? A tarot deck drawn by a cannibal? I don't know, I only know books. Jeancat finds a phonograph that'll haunt your head if you play it in the right moon. Some found art nonsense that she recognises as some cockatrice trinket that'll poison your heart. Some renaissance faire type cashes in a collection, she finds it, recognises the runes, sees the ceremonial weapon for what it is.

  What really kills me is that she doesn't study. I pore over books and private journals written by schizophrenics and pamphlets printed by creepy Churches decades before, noting everything down, looking for patterns and notions. Someone like Jeancat annoys me, luck and some genius guiding her to payoffs and successes. So there's envy. But also, she specialises in making bad situations worse. She makes her money handing razor blades to children. So I don't fucking like her.

  Jon wanted to kill her, but Mully never allowed it.

  'We're Librarians and to catalogue knowledge is our work. Not murder.' That's the sort of thing the old chap says.

  Train comes and Bettina steps in front of me, happy to play her bodyguard role. Waves me on. We sit at the back and she keeps her eye on an Asian kid pacing the aisle. I frown at her and she glances at her knuckles. I take the message and glance at his. Old scars and tooth-shaped. Tough guy.

  I watch him as he runs out at his stop, straight as a shark with the blood scent and he locates and punches someone hard on the platform. Lose sight of that as we pull out. Shutting down people like Jeancat was the best part of the bully-boy job. I try not to think about Scarlet as we ride. Try not to think about her failures to keep the city under control. Or Everett. Fucking Everett.

  On the train, a cockroach starts to butt its head against a greasy metal pole with the ambition of a suicide.

  Fourteen

  Jeancat sits and thinks and drinks the sweet liquors she favours. Something cherry tonight.

  Jeancat came to the city when she was a child, fleeing some Eastern hell of war and starvation, where you'd get your throat cut for the wrong name or parish. She knew from the beginning she had some talent. She smells things that are magical, for good or ill. They fill her nostrils with a tiger's rankness. She hates them. She was raised strict Orthodox and she fears hell, no matter how much she tries.

  Money, she's made it, she's exercised power, she's had the proud humble before her and men of beauty have attempted and sometimes succeeded in seducing her but she knows she'll never get out of the bomb shelters and jeeps of her childhood. Will be that little girl trying not to gag on the scent of burning human meat forever. She fears death and hell and judgement, but doubts it will surprise her. Once a year, she worships, hoping to at least make her mother happy, as though the old woman, so shrunken and terrible now, still has that capacity.

  Jeancat isn't her name, it was just something that sounded class to her. She's 46 and her hair is streaked with grey that she pretends makes her look distinguished and not past the prime of her teenage years when the local priest killed himself for her love, while she laughed at his sad pleas. Her raw bones are thin, so thin and close to the skin: she sometimes likens herself in her mind to a praying mantis, enjoying the length of her arms, the prominence of her hip bones, the length of her raptor's toes. She has a conceit her bones are particularly white and sensual. She has a lip curl of devastating archness that is perhaps the only thing in the world she finds funny. Likes Midori and charcoal-filtered cigarettes and sex before fine dining.

  Contempt is all she feels for her clients. They traffic with damned forces and all she does is hand them their own rope. If they're so quick to deal out harm, let them deal with the consequences upon their own salvation and, if they should be so foolish as to harness weapons beyond their understanding, then isn't that a sweetness? A fitting sweetness? And if she makes a bit on the side, surely Jesus would understand.

  But Jeancat has a knack for hypocrisy, and so in her office, dark and red and cluttered, kept only to fool tax men, she keeps an amulet that spins when customers come calling with harm in their hearts. It spins now, hanging from the booklight she illumines her back room with while she watches a fat man try to tell jokes on a television.

  There's a .38 in the drawer and she takes it, hides it on a shelf and sets her back to the door. She expects a knock but too much advocaat and cherry vodka with dinner has made her foolish and she's forgotten to lock it. The tall woman, beautiful, hair pulled back severely, is a stranger. Some Chicano thug. No problem. Probably just a burglary.

  The in walks... yes, she recognises this one. Ten years on and the worse for it by the look of him. Starting to get fat and he could use use a bath and a shave and change of clothes.

  'Remember me?'

  'Bastard.'

  The tall woman with the forearms like anacondas laughs. 'Check it out, you're famous.'

  Wren is he called? Lark?

  He looks around, slowly, taking his time and shutting the door politely behind him. He sniffs as his head swivels, like a security camera in a bank. He ignores the stuff on the walls, lurid things for tourists and scum with money on an adventure. His eyes are blank and empty as a shark's. They stop on the icon her mother bought with them out of the ruins of their house.

  Lark's eyes slowly come to life.

  'You're blessed.'

  He laughs but it isn't happy. 'Someone dedicated you, when you were born, I mean right at birth, to something. Some spirit. Something. And it gave you your power. Hah. And I've been jealous at your luck.'

  Jeancat sneers at him, curling that lip she so admires. 'I don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about, pig.'

  The tough woman looks at him in surprise. 'Were you law?'

  'Sort of. To people like her.'

  He turns his attention back to Jeancat and he shakes his head. Slowly he takes something from his pocket. An electric lighter. Shows it to her.

  'One of yours?'

  'I don't know what you're talking about.'

  Irritation flashes across his face. He lights a cigarette very slowly, with a disposable he takes from a pocket, putting the quality piece in his pocket. She hides a sigh of relief but he is watching her face very closely. Jeancat knows exactly what that lighter is.

  'This is a weapon. I found it in with Gallowglass stuff, but they don't like weapons. This is a piece of rubbish with a fire spirit bound in. Anyone with half a month's training could make something like this. I'll ask once, did you sell it?'

  Jeancat says nothing. If there's one thing she hates, it's temerity from magician garbage. She hates the little chancers, all addicted to miracles and powers and tricks. This is her place, her livelihood. And she remembers this man, taking her stock not ten years past, daring to give vet her clients, sending little thugs around every few months to check her stores and finds.

  'I don't have to talk to you. You're not even with the Library anymore. You're as lonely as a spider.'

  'Jeancat. Listen. It's just you and me in the room. And her.' He points to the thug. 'And I don't think she likes you.'

  'Fuck you both.'

  T
he thug steps in, too quick, punches her once in the gut. Jeancat has taken dozens of blows and she knows real from scares. She falls and regains her dignity quickly, knowing it's just for show. The man whispers in his thug’s ear, low and fast as formic acid. Thug shrugs and it ends.

  'Go on. Let's get this started. Bring out your hammers and I will spit on them. You think I've never had your sort at my door before?'

  The man stops and breathes deeply.

  'I'm not a torturer.'

  Jeancat laughs.

  'Bettina just doesn't like you much.'

  'And I have such warmth in my heart for her.'

  He rubs his eyes. 'I don't suppose if I ask you nicely and tell you it's for an important reason and will save lives that you'll just talk to me?'

  'Stab the eyes of your mother!'

  'I love it when you get ethnic. Listen. Listen carefully. I don't want to hurt you and, while I'd be happy to shut you down, I'm not going break fingers here. But, to be blunt, I don't have time to fuck around.'

  He walks over and with a creepy delicacy removes the icon from the wall. He studies it carefully.

  'This is beautiful and old. Older than you'd know. Someone who loved you very much spent hours, days, doing a Working over it. Thinking they were giving you a gift. Giving you a sense for power, probably thinking it was evil you'd fight, never imagining you'd turn it into something so mercenary and grubby.'

  Jeancat has heard this before: judgements on her career. The lip does its sneering work.

  'But I can take it away. I can take this gift from you, your ability to scent magic, weapons, things to hurt people with. Imagine life then.'

  He kneels down next to her. 'I'm not bluffing.'

  'Drink your father's - '

  He simply stands. 'You're finished. I'll be back sundown tomorrow and you'll have my answers or I'll take away your only talent.'

  He throws a card on the ground, his details and walks out.

  The thug woman stares. 'He's going to fuck you up.'

  She leaves too.

  Fifteen

  They just wait, watching and she leaves the store.