The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy

by Trent Jamieson

  Oscar grimaces, though I think he’s coming to terms with me a little. “How hard is it to phone, eh?”

  He opens the door to my office. Lissa’s sitting in one of the chairs.

  I turn to Oscar. “What’s this with the security breaches today?” I ask. He grimaces again and shuts the door in my face.

  “And don’t you have your own office, Ms. Jones?”

  “This was the only time I knew I would be able to see you,” Lissa says. “There’s not much window in either of our schedules … You look a little pale.”

  “I’ve been chasing shadows all day, not much chance to get a tan.” I drop into the throne. “How is it that everybody knows about Rillman except me? Did you know he’s regularly been crossing into the Underworld? Suzanne—”

  “What about Suzanne?” Lissa says sharply.

  I try not to look guilty. “Mr. D says she’s told him that Rillman has been making trouble for years. Just not here. Seems it took my promotion to bring him back to Australia.” It’s another thing Morrigan has to answer for.

  I sense another heartbeat in the building. “We have a visitor,” I say. “Clare Ramage?”

  “She’s good,” Lissa says. “One of the best I’ve found. Even has a bit of family history in the trade.”

  Oscar knocks on the door, then swings it open, giving me the thumbs-up, and a woman (Clare, I’m guessing) in her early twenties walks into the room. Tim follows her.

  I scan her face to see how she copes with this space. She tilts her head. Good, she can already hear the creaking of the One Tree. My mind’s not on the interview, though. I’m back at that odd morgue, trying to piece things together. Who was the assassin working for? And when did bodies stop being processed through the usual channels?

  I sit through the interview trying to look interested, but it’s Lissa who asks most of the questions. I hope I appear affable and bossish enough, and not that distracted. It’s over in under an hour. Once Clare’s gone, Tim and Lissa talk it through.

  “What do you think?” Lissa asks me. I blink at her.

  “About what?”

  Lissa snorts. “Clare?”

  I wave my hand absently at the door. “Miss Ramage was fine. Eminently employable.”

  Tim’s phone beeps. He grimaces. “I’ve got to take this one.”

  “Ankou?”

  “Nah, the Caterers. Since the ceremony they’ve been calling me every bloody second hour, because somebody went and left this to the last minute.”

  I don’t know whether to be offended that they’re dealing with Tim instead of me. “Yeah, you better.” Tim gives Lissa a look that I can’t read, and she nods. Oh no, this better not mean another lecture for me.

  When Tim’s out of the room, Lissa frowns. “You’re losing focus again.”

  “No, I’m not,” I mumble. How can I explain that, if anything, I’m more focused than ever before, it’s just the picture that’s changed. “Take my word for it, I’m not. Clare’s got the job, I can make her a Pomp tomorrow. Give her one more day to think about it, and to be normal, eh?”

  Lissa nods, tries to pull a smile, fails. I can understand why she’s worried about me, but she doesn’t need to be. Not about this. “You don’t want to give her too long.”

  “Worried she’ll change her mind?”

  Lissa gets up, pecks me on the cheek, walks to the door. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “You, me, Tim.”

  Lissa laughs. Bad examples, every one of them.

  I’m left alone. Lissa was the first person I turned into a Pomp: Lissa. She’d been one before, of course, but when she was resurrected back into her body, I’d had to return her powers. In those dark moments, as the Stirrers surrounded us, there had been an intimacy that was terrifying. We’d looked into each other’s soul and found an echo and a challenge of, and to, our own.

  I lean back in my throne and my eyes close, just for a moment. Knives. A swinging scythe. Mist the color of blood.

  I jolt awake. Fucking hell! A bloke could cut out his eyelids just to stop these visions.

  Something catches my attention. A differently beating heart, a slight change in electricity. Someone has shifted into my city unannounced. And not just anywhere …

  Now, that, I can’t allow.

  I squeeze my eyes tight, take a deep breath to prepare for the unpreparable, and shift myself to Mount Coot-tha. Old One Tree Hill.

  Someone’s on my turf and they shouldn’t be.

  20

  Mount Coot-tha. Heart of the city of Brisbane, and its Underworld twin. I arrive in the middle of a bunch of tourists. None of them seem that impressed with my swearing, or the way I hop around on one foot. This shift felt like a spear being driven into my thigh. That’s something new. I thought I was getting better at it. But it passes quickly, even if I’m red-faced with embarrassment.

  “If you’ve finished your little dance,” Suzanne says. “We can start today’s lesson. Though take your time, I’m finding this all very amusing.”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “Testing your abilities, and I must say that you surprised me. I didn’t really expect that you would sense me. If I had I would have showed up in, say, Tasmania. You get a gold star.”

  “I don’t like this shifting around, unannounced—it sends a bad message,” I say.

  Suzanne’s good humor slips a little. “It does nothing of the sort. If you can detect me, or any other RM, then they can detect you. They will know that you know they are here.”

  “No one can sneak up on me?”

  “Not quite,” Suzanne says. “An electrical storm can shield their presence, but an electrical storm is hard to shift into, and an RM who is in the middle of one tends to be wary.”

  “And why should an RM be wary of another RM? Aren’t we supposed to be all unified?”

  Suzanne raises an eyebrow. “Don’t be naive. RMs can hurt you more than anyone else, except, perhaps, for this Mr. Rillman. When an RM comes unannounced you be ready. And try and remember if you have crossed anyone.”

  The Kuta Cafe at the top of Mount Coot-tha is open, and up here, there’s a bit of wind, enough to take the edge off the summer heat. The last time I was here I spoke to Morrigan still thinking he was a friend. I know that Suzanne isn’t; even “ally” would be too generous a term.

  Brisbane stretches itself out around us, a vast carpet of tree-smeared suburbia. The CBD rises up in the east, a tight bunching of skyscrapers around which the Brisbane River wends, leading to Moreton Bay. A series of low, flat mountains marks the western horizon. The air is clear, a typical Brisbane summer’s day.

  But sometimes I’m seeing and hearing the Underworld simultaneously, a superimposed view of the land of the dead. The ruddy river. The massive root buttresses of the One Tree. The creaking, creaking, creaking as its mighty limbs are moved by the restless winds of Hell. Wal’s face shifts on my tattoo. He can almost take form here, and I know he wants to.

  “Do you want a coffee?”

  Suzanne shakes her head. “Just a quieter place, away from all these tourists.” She winces as though she has a headache. “It’s too bright here.”

  “Just about anywhere is quieter in Brisbane than this,” I say.

  I lead her up to the observation platform. It’s just us, now. Maybe our presence has something to do with that. Put two RMs together and there’s always a bit of electricity. Though there are some kids running on the lookout below. The air crackles with the buzzing of cicadas, the kids’ shouts and the ubiquitous creaking of the One Tree. This is my home.

  “Lovely,” Suzanne says. “Looking down at it from here I must say what a beautiful and intimate little city you have. But it’s not quite the right venue for what I have planned. Are you all right to shift again?”

  “Of course I am,” I say.

  “You’re getting better at it at last.” There’s a glint in Suzanne’s eye. “Deepest Dark then,” she says.

  I follow her there. And I don
’t throw up.

  “So, Faber introduced you to the Stirrer god?”

  “Up close and far too personal. It nearly killed me, thank you very much.”

  “Ours is a dangerous business. And none more so than when facing that god.”

  “Yeah, particularly when your guide lets go of your hand.”

  “I assure you that Faber was utterly mortified by what happened. At least you were quick-witted enough to do what had to be done.”

  “Yes, I was, wasn’t I?”

  Suzanne laughs. “There’s hope for you yet. You needed to see it up close. You needed to feel just what sort of a menace it has become. To understand why this thing terrifies us—all of us—in a way that defies the usual squabbles of the Orcus.”

  “I had an idea already.” When did Suzanne start taking this seriously? Is she playing me? But she’s always playing me!

  “No, you had no idea. This thing will be beaten, or it will destroy us. Life, and the Orcus. We thirteen have not faced such a threat in lifetimes beyond counting. There is nothing written about such a thing. But there are murmurings. It, or something very much like it, was defeated before. There are things you need to know. You’ve a rich heritage of which you are barely aware. Starting with the basics. Do you know why pomping hurts?”

  “Because it does. It makes sense, there’s that whole exchange of energy thing. If we’re going to take something out of our universe and put it into another, of course it’ll hurt.”

  Suzanne looks at me, and laughs. “Physics has nothing to do with what we are about, Steven.” Suzanne shakes her head. “No. The pain is an additive, something the Orcus constructed through ceremony and hard work, and then entered into the process. Pomping used to be pleasurable, addictive.”

  “That would have been dangerous.”

  “You have no idea. Before there were thirteen, pomping was a nightmare. One you perhaps know too well.”

  My ears prick up at that. Nightmares. She sees it and smiles.

  “Yes, we all have them. You’ve heard of the Hungry Death?”

  “Just a few stories, stuff Dad would tell me when I was a kid.” But the way Dad had told them, I’d never taken them seriously.

  “They’re just stories now, but there was a time when they weren’t.” Her voice slows and grows sonorous and rhythmical. “Long ago, before you and me. Before the world is the shape it is now, or shape it was before, there was only one Death. And it was called the Hungry Death because it was always hungry.” She crouches down and trails a finger in the dust of the Deepest Dark. Following her is a dusty wake, now thirteen trails, which then rise and race around her fingers. They coalesce into a form—vaguely human, vaguely Stirrer. She seems to shake her head at the whimsy of it, flicks her hand and the Hungry Death is just falling dust again, but it’s broken a little of her rhythm, for a moment she is just the cynical RM again. “If only it was that easy to dismiss. That painting of Mr. D’s, the lurid one by the peasant.”

  “ ‘The Triumph of Death’?”

  “That’s the one. Picture that. You got it?” I nod my head. “Now imagine that painting, but there is only Death. And it is everywhere. The Hungry Death was a walking, shifting apocalypse. Random and violent in a… I suppose… more focused way than our world actually is, and I would suggest that you’d agree that ours is a pretty random and violent one.”

  “What happened to the Hungry Death?”

  “You know. Close your eyes, and you know.” I do nothing of the sort, just stare at her. She blinks.

  “I don’t blame you,” Suzanne says. “When I tell you there were thirteen warriors who went to battle with it, do you start to get the idea?”

  I stare at her, dumbfounded.

  She sighs. “OK. Thirteen warriors. They fought the Hungry Death, and what a battle it was, fire and brimstone, storm and earthquake. All of that, real ‘Book of Revelations’ stuff. They fought it. And they defeated it. Six times. And each time it came back. They cut it into pieces. And it came back. They ground its marrow to dust and it came back. They even ground its marrow to dust and turned it into some sort of paste, and yet it did no good.

  “Finally a seventh, desperate battle. And this time, the earth a wasteland about them, the world a wound and the dying everywhere, they had begun to question why they had even tried fighting it in the first place. They held that Hungry Death down and this time they devoured it. Thirteen warriors, and each of them absorbed one-thirteenth of the Hungry Death’s essence. And it has stayed that way through time.

  “You see, it was never truly vanquished. Death cannot be. The Hungry Death lives on in each of the Orcus. It is our power, and the thing which each of us fear. That is what you dream about, Steven. Death untrammeled, blood and knives and the scythe. We all dream these dreams. It is why we don’t need to sleep—its power sustains us—and why we don’t want to.”

  I blink. “So I somehow ingested a thirteenth of the Hungry Death?”

  “Absorbed is perhaps the better term. The Negotiation, why do you think it is so brutal? To become an RM you must appease the Hungry Death, blood must flow, and it is the only way to draw it out of a previous RM. And once it’s within you … Surely you have felt it there? Not just in the dreams. Don’t you sometimes feel its delight in death and destruction? It’s the Hungry Death that makes it easier for you to deal with the things that you must see and do. And through you, it makes it easier on your Pomps.”

  “So what’s the All-Death? It spoke to me, and not just in a dream.”

  “It’s an aspect of the Hungry Death, too. We use it, of course, to generate the schedule, because it exists outside of time. Through it we know who is to die and when. It knows so much, and bereft of the Hungry Death, it is relatively benign.”

  “It didn’t feel benign when it grabbed me.”

  “I said relatively. It remains a part of the Hungry Death.”

  “So what was it, this thing in me before it became the Hungry Death?”

  “Something like the Stirrer god, perhaps. We don’t know. This all happened a very long time ago. Generations before even the oldest RM, before even the invention of writing.”

  “And all it wants is death?”

  “Yes, but not in the way that the Stirrers do. Which makes me believe it really isn’t like them. You must be able to feel it, the pure joy it takes in death. Stirrers wish an end to life, this needs life to sustain it. I know you feel it.”

  Yes, I do. Why wasn’t I told about this earlier? Mr. D with his all-in-good-time. My dreams have been such a horrible space, not least because of the pleasure I find in them.

  “To think of such a cruel thing in here,” I tap my chest.

  Suzanne pulls my hand away. “You mustn’t think that. It isn’t cruel, merely inventive. Couple that with a clever and cruel creature like Homo sapiens and you have all sorts of madness, all sorts of ways of killing.” Suzanne’s eyes gleam. “It is better that it exists inside us, spread across the world, and that it is only fed every few generations in a Schism and a Negotiation. Think of the ruthlessness that we forestall with our existence. Our world, our myriad of societies, exist merely because we have given people time. We have given them the space to live longer, to develop culture and technology. Death remains, as does genocide and madness, but it is not all encompassing.”

  I remember my Negotiation. The Orcus gathered around Morrigan and me in a circle, the hunger in their eyes. I now know where most of that came from. Come the next Negotiation will I look that way, too?

  “So I rule the land and the sea around Australia as Death, because once there were warriors and they killed Death itself.”

  “No, you cannot kill Death, only shape its form. And no, you do not rule the sea.”

  “Why hasn’t Mr. D explained this? Gaps, gaps! I’ve got so many bloody gaps in my knowledge. What does, then?”

  “Water, and the force within it. We’ve made our agreements with that force to cross the seas. But we have no power there. It does wit
h those souls who die within its substance what it will. I hope that you’ll never have to deal with it. Water is a cruel negotiator.” Suzanne shivers. “And that is your lesson for today. The Stirrer god is powerful. But there is a power within us, too. The secret is to use that power without destroying everything those first warriors fought for.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “I have a plan.” Suzanne puts a finger against my lips. “But that is for another time.”

  I’m still thinking about plans, and Deaths of the sea, when I shift back to my office. Right on target. Tim obviously senses my return because he gives a ragged cheer from his office.

  There’s a message on my phone. Lissa.

  “Call me, babe, when you get the chance.”

  I dial her number. She answers before the first ring.

  “That was quick,” I say.

  “I was just about to call you again. Where have you been?”

  I mumble something about Death Moot prep, feel a pang of guilt. If only she knew. Maybe I should just tell her about the deal with Suzanne now.

  “Steven, we may have a problem. Actually there’s no may about it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Stirrers. Something new. I suppose you could call it a nest of them. I need you to come here.”

  “A nest? Why the hell can’t we feel them?”

  She gives me an address in Woolloongabba. It’s a couple of suburbs south of the city. About ten minutes’ drive away if the traffic isn’t too bad.

  I look at the schedule. There’s no one spare. Besides Lissa and I should be able to handle them. I hesitate to shift there. If I can sense a shift they may be able to as well.

  Oscar’s standing outside my office door. I open it and he looks at me. “Going to need your help—and Travis’s.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “How fast can you drive that Hummer of yours?”

  Oscar gives me one of the biggest, maddest grins I have ever seen.

  21

  Idon’t expect to see Alex, but he’s there with Lissa. Both of them look pretty grim.