by David Hair
‘Totally. He’s after something in this building.’
Wiri looked out into the night, through the huge front doors, across the courtyard to the street-lights and the odd passing car. It was only ten, and the city was still largely awake. But the rain was sheeting down, turning it all into a liquid blur. The giant building felt very isolated all of asudden, sited as it was in the empty space between the streets and the sea. It never occurred to him to doubt the young diviner, and Kiki was very dangerous. He gripped his WT. ‘Mike, are you there?’
The WT crackled again. ‘Yup. What’s happening, chief?’ Mike was one of those Pakeha who called all Maori ‘chief’ and didn’t get how patronizing it sounded. Wiri wasn’t bothered enough to set him straight.
‘We may have an issue, Mike. Can you—’
The other man cut him off, his voice suddenly concerned. ‘Hold on, Wiri. We just lost a camera on Six. Damn thing was serviced only last week.’
There could have been any number of explanations, but to Wiri it meant just one thing —Kiki is here. ‘Mike, listen, something is going down. Get the pol—’
The WT went dead, in the same instant that every light went out in the whole city, and they were plunged into total darkness.
‘Holy Father!’ Sosefo blasphemed devoutly. ‘What was that?’
Wiri pulled out his torch and turned it on, while Evie fished out her cellphone. ‘The network’s down,’ she said tersely. ‘What’s on Level Six?’
‘It’s just a viewing platform.’ Wiri went to the big glass doors, and hit the release buttons, but nothing happened. ‘Has this place got an emergency generator?’ He struggled to remember the briefings they’d got when they started. ‘If we have, it should have kicked in by now.’
‘Dunno,’ Sosefo admitted, switching on his torch. ‘I ain’t got no phone signal either. Is this a break-in?’ A touch of anxiety entered his voice. They weren’t permitted for firearms, and if this was a robbery, chances were the thieves would be armed.
‘Yes, it is,’ Evie answered before Wiri could. She pulled out a pack of cards, flipped over the top one: a Six of Clubs. ‘He’s on Six.’
Sosefo stared at the cards, began to back away, then he decided it was a trick. He grabbed her shoulder. ‘What do you know about it, missy? You part of this?’
She tried to shake off the big man’s hand, but he was too strong. ‘Let me go! I’m here to help.’
Wiri patted Sosefo’s shoulder. ‘It’s OK, Sos, she’s cool. Let’s get to Mike; he’s alone on Three.’
The Tongan grudgingly let go of Evie. ‘If you say so, man.’ He looked outside at the rain hammering onto the plate glass. ‘Look, the whole city’s gone dark. Lightning must’ve hit the grid, eh?’
‘Something like that,’ Evie muttered. She looked at Wiri. ‘There’s something else up there …’
Wiri stared at her, as some kind of light seeped around her eyepatch. Fitzy was becoming agitated, his tail sweeping about as he went back and forth. ‘Evie, are you alright?’
‘No. I’m not.’ Another card fell into her hand. It was some kind of gaming card, a grotesque picture of an armoured and horned thing with a skull mask, titled ‘Bone Golem’. ‘Kiki’s brought something, especially for you.’
He stared at her, backing towards the stairs to follow Sosefo, who was hurrying up the stairs to Level Two. ‘I thought you said Kiki was here for something in the museum.’
‘He is. But this other thing is different: it’s looking for you.’
Wiri felt his skin chill. Then Sosefo called from above, at the top of the stairs to the Level Two. ‘Hey Wiri, you coming, bro?’
He glanced up at his colleague, then back at Evie. Pale light was glowing around her patch, brighter and brighter. ‘Right with you, Sos. Be careful.’
Then from somewhere high above, something cracked, and he heard Mike’s voice, shouting for help. Shouting—and then pleading. Wiri looked at Fitzy: ‘Stay with her!’ he snapped at the little turehu, then he spun, shone his torch up the stairs, and sprinted along the path of light it made.
Evie’s heart double-skipped at the shouting above, and she went after Wiri as quickly as she could, Fitzy bounding alongside. Not an athlete, so the sudden exertion had her gasping. She was swiftly left in the darkness, and had to stop and fish out another card: just a Magic the Gathering card, Lantern of Insight, which lit the stairs with a pale glow. Her left eyeball was throbbing, like a boil wanting to erupt, and she could feel its glow and its heat. That had never happened to her before in this world, only in Aotearoa where the intrinsic magic of the land often filled her blind seer’s eye with energy. But since the storm broke, it had been building up, demanding release.
Fitzy turned, barked sharply, his eyes luminous in the darkness as they reflected the card’s light. She recalled things that Mat had hinted at, about his friend Wiri’s strange dog, and there was certainly something in its intelligence and awareness that was more than canine, but she had more immediate worries.
As they reached Level Two, beneath a giant carved archway that ascended all the way to the ceiling high above, she could feel the oppressive presence of the tohunga makutu on the levels above. He was like a radiator of emptiness. Kiki Who Withers Trees. Evie had contended with his powers before, from a distance, and come off worse. Since then she’d learned more, but, as his presence grew, her own grip on her powers wavered. She felt horribly exposed and alone in the dark. The presence of the labrador beside her was her only comfort.
Drawing out another card, a duplicate of the one she’d left with at Arohata Prison, she whispered her mother’s name, as much in prayer as in summoning.
Faraway, a key turned in a lock, and a door opened.
Taonga: the treasured artefacts of his people. Kiki could feel them call to him as he passed down the stairs, through locked doors that yielded silently to his touch. He descended narrow stairs from the viewing platform, and emerged beside the lifts on Level Four, before a wide space. The café, and a balcony over an open space to his left. To his right, stairs ascended to the art section, and beyond them a display on Te Tiriti. But what he sought was in the Mana Whenua area, ahead and to the right.
Behind him, a hulking presence stalked, silent as a shadow and as hard to see, but bristling with suppressed menace. Even he could barely see his companion, but he could smell him, the stench of long-dead flesh like the smell of dried-up tutae scrapped from a boot-sole. Tupu: barely capable of speech or reason, but more than capable of killing.
Kiki extended his senses, perceiving the distant flicker of transient humans … and the brighter, more resonant spark of two others whose presence was more significant — Wiremu, and the little tohunga matakite, the one-eyed seer-girl. His eyes narrowed. He did not underestimate the girl, now that he knew her lineage. My granddaughter …
He turned to his massive companion. ‘Go silently. Kill the men. Bring me the girl alive.’
The giant growled, bared yellowed teeth, his breath like rotted meat, and then he was gone, sliding into the shadows. Kiki paused, listening. Wiremu and the matakite were below with another, but one man was isolated, alone, caught up with trying to restore his technological toys. He heard a shouted challenge, sensed a blow.
He heard a man beg; heard a crunching blow, and the dull thud of a body hitting the floor.
Kiki smiled. One down. He headed toward the Mana Whenua, seeking the artefact he’d come to find.
Wiri took the stairs in giant bounds, calling ahead. ‘Sos! Wait for me!’ Evie was somewhere behind him, but she had Fitzy with her and other resources: right now he was less worried for her than for the men he worked with. They had no idea what they faced.
The Tongan waited, catching the worry in Wiri’s voice. His torch searched the Level Three landing. The words BLOOD EARTH FIRE glowed in the torchlight — it was the section primarily focused on how land masses were formed from volcanic and tectonic activity. The words seemed ominous, like a prophecy. He and Sosefo shone their t
orches about, found nothing untoward. The security control room was in behind the lifts to their right. They paused, listening for Mike’s voice. But silence reigned, the only sound the roar of the storm outside.
‘Mike?’ Sosefo called, his eyes round.
Wiri shook his head, put his fingers to his lips. He waved the man behind him, and began to creep towards the door to the administration area. They both turned as Evie reached the top of the stairs behind them. Her face was turned half away from Sosefo, to conceal the radiance about her eyepatch. Wiri waved her back, frightened for her. And for himself. I have a wife and a child, and another on the way. And I’m not immortal anymore. The roof of his mouth was dry. But he still went on.
The corridor to the administration area was empty, a line of doors on either side. Wiri took the lead, stepping past each door with utmost caution. There was a smell in the confined area, an unpleasant reek of old death that was elusively familiar, but it faded as he went on, Sosefo wrinkling his nose as he followed him. But then that smell was overridden by a stronger, fresher one: newly spilt blood.
‘I am not liking this, boss,’ Sosefo muttered.
Wiri put his finger to his lips, then went on, slid around the next corner, which led to the security room. He sucked in his breath as the torchlight lit the corridor.
Mike lay face-down on the carpet, with the back of his head smashed in by some heavy implement. Fragments of bone were visible amidst the grey and red that seeped through his hair. His torch lay on the ground beneath him, edging his body in light. Wiri groaned softly, his senses taut as violin strings, his breath held as he searched the shadows.
Sosefo came up behind him, muttering a prayer. ‘What do we do, boss?’
‘We get out, and call the police,’ Wiri whispered. ‘This is over our heads.’ He tried to drag his eyes away from Mike’s body, but that stench of ancient sweat and shit and death washed over them both again. Finally he remembered it: he’d dwelt alongside it for centuries.
Tupu.
He turned to Sosefo, opening his mouth to tell him that they had to get out — now.
But he was already too late.
Evie watched Wiri and the other security man pad away to a door, slip through it and vanish, taking their torches. She drew the Lantern of Insight card again, then a tarot card: the malevolent reversed-King of Swords, gripping it upside-down. It bucked in her hand, as though pulling her towards a point above. She looked up, through the hole in the ceiling to the floor above, and was sure for an instant that a shadow had detached itself from the darkness and glided from sight.
Kiki is up there.
She considered waiting here for the men, and risking Kiki finding what he sought unopposed. To go on and encounter him alone was undoubtedly stupid. She bit her lip, and decided to do it anyway. He has to be opposed. Whatever he is doing is going to hurt more than just me. She hurried up the stairs. Fitzy looked up at her, bared his teeth but made no sound. She got all the way to the landing above, midway between floors before he caught her up, and together they ascended to Level Four.
The dim light of her card revealed distant displays of Maori treasures, and the Treaty of Waitangi. She stood at the top of the stairs, barely daring to breathe. At the very limits of her night vision, she was certain she’d seen a squat shadow in the doorway beneath a sign saying Mana Whenua. But she didn’t go straight there, not when she could sense the malevolence presence of her enemy so close that he might have been breathing on the back of her neck.
Fitzy was nervous, too, his posture low, softly growling at something unseen. He pressed closer to her, both guarding her and being guarded. Reassured by his presence, she began to engage her skills, pocketing the Lantern card and drawing new ones, placing them in the air about her like a shield. She anchored her defences with The Star, which doubled as illumination, and added the potent Ace of Swords, flanked by the Eight of Pentacles for craftsmanship, the skill to maintain a bonding. Then she palmed the Ten of Swords, her strike weapon, and began to edge forward. She had other cards, garish and fanciful ones from the gaming decks that might have worked against an ordinary person, but this was Kiki: she sensed that only weapons with the antiquity of the tarot would suffice against the ancient tohunga.
She and Fitzy moved as one, slinking through the deserted café, approaching the archway that lead to the Maoritanga display obliquely, slipping past the soft chairs and coffee tables until they reached the frame of the entrance, her eyes trying to penetrate the dark. Evie knew she was marking her own passage with the light of the cards, but she would be helpless in the darkness. She palmed another card unconsciously as she crept forward.
Somewhere in the darkness, away to her right, she heard glass crack, and a grunt of satisfaction. Taking her bearings from the sound, she stepped through the entrance and went left, into the shadow of a display of flax-work baskets and wooden carvings, then crept to a replica storage hut, beneath a primitive catamaran hung from the ceiling. Opposite across the walkway, a meeting house, a whare runanga, brooded silently. To the right of it, closest to the way she’d come in, was a storage hut on stilts. Beyond lay glass cases, their contents too far away to be made out. It was from there that the cracking sound had come. She peered into the gloom, heart thudding, throat so dry she could scarcely breathe.
A deep chuckle resonated through the space, emanating from somewhere beyond the whare runanga. ‘Welcome, Everalda,’ a voice rumbled, deep and scratchy with thick liquid vowels. ‘It is good to see that you are coming into your powers, Granddaughter.’
She’d had some time to come to terms with her ancestry. The last time the Goddess sought a mate, just as she is now, Kiki raped Aroha and she gave birth to Puarata … who seduced Donna Kyle and so she had me … It still made her belly churn to know that she was descended from Kiki Who Withers Trees. It made her fear herself, and what she might become.
Fitzy gave a small whining sound, deeply distressed. Yeah, me too. Sweat broke out inside her hairline, and beads of moisture began to slide down her forehead. The cards hanging in the air about her trembled as if in a hidden wind.
‘The tarot,’ Kiki noted in his rumbling voice, from a direction she couldn’t pinpoint. ‘The prime tool of any Renaissance or Enlightenment seer. A means of divination, a light against the unknown.’ His voice was respectful. ‘You use them well, mokopuna wahine.’
Praise from his lips was tainted. She struggled to block out his words and concentrate on seeking him. His voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and the shadows moved on all sides, flickering in the light of her Firecard. Muffled sounds reached her, of crashes and thumps below. Wiri was down there … She began to tremble, The Star card in her hands flickering as she tried to back out.
The light went out, snuffed like a candle and crumbling to ash in her hand, left her in almost total darkness. Her heart beat harder, painful in her left breast. She didn’t seek another light yet, though. Her link to the cards warding her remained secure, but Fitzy gave another whine, and then a growl, head low, belly to the ground, defiant but very scared.
Kiki’s voice rolled over her from all directions at once. ‘Mine is the older tradition, Granddaughter. I wield the powers of the shaman, born of a time before history, when mankind roamed nameless plains hunting beasts that are now extinct. A time when little was understood, and belief in the powers of the unseen was unquestioned. Men like me were guides in the darkness, and wielders of that darkness also. Against such a primeval power, your paper toys are nothing.’
Behind!
She spun, Fitzy whirled; but they were nowhere near fast enough. An invisible force slapped the labrador aside, hurling him against the wall. The turehu dropped limply to the floor. Evie had no time to react, because by that time she had been gripped by an unseen hand, her cards fluttering uselessly to the ground as she was slammed backwards against a display wall and held there, as though she were on the ocean floor and all the weight of the water pressed her down.
T
he tohunga makutu stepped from the shadows, his tattooed visage alight with vicious glee. His cloak shifted about him like a living thing, as he raised his carved staff and held it aloft, lighting her in a paua-hued glow. ‘Kia ora, mokopuna wahine.’ He stroked her face. ‘You belong to me now.’
The shadows behind Sosefo disgorged a vast darkness. The face that emerged was one Wiri knew as well as his own. Rough features, as though moulded from clay then carved by a chisel with crude spiral designs. Thick black curls caught in a topknot. Broken yellow teeth and a flared nose. The shoulders of a bull, slabs of chest and stomach muscle not quite running to fat. Blankly mad eyes.
Tupu!
Sometime before the coming of the Pakeha to Aotearoa, Puarata had discovered the art of capturing and enslaving a man’s soul. First he slew Tupu, then raised him again, his soul trapped in bone taken from the giant warrior’s shoulder-blade. For a time, having one deathless enforcer had been enough. But eventually, as the links between the tribes became more complex, a more intelligent slave had been required, someone more in tune with the evolving world. That slave had been Wiri. Or ‘Toa’, as Puarata had renamed him. He’d been tricked into fighting Tupu, killed, then reborn as the tohunga’s pawn, his soul trapped in a tiki carved from his own bones. So his life had been, for centuries, until Mat Douglas’s grandmother Wai had stolen the tiki, and Mat had freed him.
Wiri had thought Tupu gone, the tiki fallen into Te Reinga on that dramatic day two years ago when Puarata died. Evidently that wasn’t so. He didn’t dwell on it, not with his life at stake.
Tupu’s massive stone patu smashed down on the back of Sosefo’s skull with a sickening crunch. Blood sprayed, and the big Tongan crashed to the ground at Wiri’s feet, Tupu coming over the top of the falling body with a roar. But Wiri was already moving. His foot lashed out and caught Tupu in the chest, hurling him backwards. It bought him a second. He shouted for Fitzy while throwing himself at the glass wall that divided the corridor from a large office. He burst through as the entire panel gave way.