Crusader

by Andrew Smith

  Voz stood in the doorway and brushed the hair out of her eyes for a second to survey the scene before letting it drop back into place. She walked up to the counter, mouth set in a firm expression of irritation. “I need something soothing,” she said, and everyone who heard believed her.

  “Voz! My, how unusual to see you this far into the city.”

  “Yeah, but like I said, I need something soothing, so I thought I’d check the herbal tea sitch over here.”

  “Of course.” Mme. Rumella prepared a tea ball, turning over her shoulder to say, “I’ll make you my favorite. It’s a specialty the my supplier, Vijay, and I thought up. It’s a green and black combination with chamomile and jasmine.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Voz hollowly.

  Mme. Rumella went to her with the steeping cup. “Dear, do you need to talk?”

  “I don’t know,” Voz lamented.

  “Just take a seat here at the bar, alright? Let me take care of Jason and we’ll chat.”

  Voz just and sat, staring, waiting for her tea to become ready.

  “Refill, lamb?”

  “Not a chance!” Jason smiled

  Mme. Rumella chuckled to herself as she made him another cup of tea and sent him back to his seat by the window. She walked back to Voz. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  “It’s just... Do you ever get sick of axioms?”

  “Which did you have in mind?”

  “Power corrupts.”

  “That’s the abridged version. It’s awful that no-one can be bothered to say it correctly. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Sounds like the French royal motto, doesn’t it?”

  Voz gave her a wan smile. “I’m not sure saying the full version will stop every disagreeable bastard from trying to recruit me to their world of disagreeable bastardness.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Most recently? Last night.”

  “Really?”

  “At my favorite place in the whole city, too. It’s so irritating.”

  Mme. Rumella nodded sympathetically. “Who was it?”

  “Some necromancer, and, well, you know how they are. He cast some silence spell and crept up behind me, and then he asked me to do his bidding. When I told him no, he threatened to force me. By mind control, probably, I don’t know.”

  “What happened then?” Mme. Rumella asked.

  “Oh I screamed at him and kicked him in the face. I don’t think he’ll be bothering me again: no-one is that stupid. It’s still bothering me though. Nobody has ever said they would force me before. I was... Scared.” The word sounded alien to her.

  “I don’t think you have anything to be afraid of, Voz.”

  “I suppose. I’ve never heard of anyone being able to utilize mind control, well except, y’know, my mom. But siren song can’t effect other sirens, so I guess I’m just being paranoid.”

  “I see,” said Mme. Rumella, dark thoughts of a rampaging Voz filling her head. Then something clicked. “This necromancer, was he older, graying temples, pointed features?”

  Voz shook her head. “No, younger. Huge shoulders, blond-and-blue-eyed type. I’d never seen him before,” she added.

  “No, no you wouldn’t have,” Mme. Rumella said distractedly. She scanned the room for Mary, but she had gone. “It’s like they’re all out at once,” she said to no-one in particular.

  “What?”

  “Well, Lionel the Necromancer is suddenly everywhere, Damon McLenen is up to something, Delilah Runestone is untidying my shelves, And now, Ruin.”

  “Ruin?” Voz sounded no more informed than she had been

  “The man who approached you, Voz.”

  “Never heard of him,” Voz remarked.

  “No, no you wouldn’t have...” Mme. Rumella said again. She scanned the room for Mary, but she had gone

  * * * *

  The conference room of the Grace’s Fever Detective Agency was of considerable size, and had a big impressive table in the middle of it. There used to be a speakerphone in the middle. Once Grace learned there were no phones, she lobbed it out the window and watched as it shattered on the ground a hundred feet below.

  One wall was mainly windows, the spaces between the blinds revealing another day of thick fog in San Francisco. The other walls were covered with maps. A few months ago, they had been maps of the San Francisco metropolitan area. And square. They were now mainly circular maps, like most maps of the Woven City and the world in which it rested. One map showed to the boundaries of the city, itself circular and nearly nine hundred miles in diameter. Another included the seemingly endless miles of surrounding forests, and another the sea. Another showed the entire known world, city to forests, to sea to deserts, and finally to mountains. No-one knew what lay beyond the mountains. Whatever it was out there, it was either so terrible or so wonderful that without so much as a rumored exception, nobody had ever returned

  There were a few linear maps that showed specific eras of the city, the circular streets uncurled. Grace Owen was pointing out the haunted manor she had visited on one such line to assistant detective Van Jefferson. Van pointed out that he was the one who sent her there, and that was when she punched him in the shoulder. Van was tall and lean with short blond hair and a darker five o’clock shadow that appeared daily at eleven in the morning.

  “So in conclusion,” Grace stated, “never go in there never never never ever, never ever.”

  “Gotcha,” Van replied, miming a gun with his fingers and making an accompanying clicking noise

  “So this case is as fun as a barrel of angry red ghost monkeys. What have you turned up?”

  “Not much. As in nothing,” he added. Van paused. “Grace, are you sure we shouldn’t drop this case?”

  Grace was uncertain as to the nature of his concern, but decided it was a moot point. She was not going to drop the case. “What, because of a little haunting? Nah,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand

  “Grace...”

  “We need to change tacks, that’s all. Stick more to our usual plan.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “First, I want to go to they guy’s apartment. I know that he’s supposed to be Mr. Predictable, but maybe he just got sick of his job went on a long vacation without telling anyone.”

  “How do we get in?”

  “I would say breaking and entering, and if that fails, buttering up the landlord.”

  “A world without search warrants...”

  “Getting that kid-in-the-candy-store feeling, are we?”

  Van simply nodded. Grace smiled.

  “After that,” she continued, “we might want to go down to the Mulhoy and ask some questions firsthand.”

  “Make it a proper investigation,” Van concluded

  “Yeah, I thought we’d try something new.”

  The Mulhoy was housed in a South African building from the latter half of the twentieth century, and was not far at all from the Grace’s Fever offices. Grace stopped in quickly to ask where Clement Jones lived, and was off again. They arrived at his apartment complex, a really awful prefab from Thailand, two blocks away, only minutes later.

  “This is truly ugly,” Van commented.

  Grace nodded mutely as they entered. Jones’ apartment was on the second floor. They walked up the stairs and, out of pure wishfulness, tested the handle. It was locked. The second thing Grace had learned, the first being the Peeler flare, was how to open a basic lock. Unless it had sorcerous defenses, any lock, bolt, combination, or key, would open under the Apriti spell. She removed her Focus from her purse

  “Apriti,” she said, in the Italian imperative form, tapping the lock with her wand. Grace was shocked that the Apriti spell worked. “Must be a cheap apartment,” she remarked to Van as they went inside.

  The apartment had one bedroom, a combination kitchen/living/dining room, a bathroom and a closet right next to the door. “I’ll take the bedroom,” said Grace as Van opened the
closet to peer inside.

  “Didn’t take an umbrella,” he noted.

  Television didn’t work in the city, or at least, there were not enough people willing to make it work, so more people here had working bookshelves. Clement Jones did not, Van discerned as he walked through the living area. Grace popped her head through the bedroom doorway.

  “Luggage is still here, drawers and closet are all pretty full.”

  “Are there any bookshelves in there?”

  Grace looked back into the room, then back to Van. “No, why?”

  “Anything else? A desk maybe?”

  “No. Basic sleeping space. Hasn’t so much as put a picture on the wall... Why do I get the feeling that this furniture came with the apartment?”

  Van nodded thoughtfully. “This man is so incredibly boring that I can’t even comprehend it,” said Van in his usual deadpan voice.

  Grace couldn’t help but smile. Her partner always amused her, though she was never sure whether or not he intended to do so. “It looks like he positively did not make it home and...” She sniffed. “Oh man.” They walked over to the kitchen area. A package of spoiled beef sat out on the counter

  “He must have left it out to thaw,” said Van. He tapped the rancid stuff with his wand and sent it away. Out the window.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Grace asked

  “Abduction,” said Van darkly.

  Grace shook her head. “You know, you’re the only person I know who wouldn’t make a joke out of that question.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The real question is how do you hide in this city? I mean, you’d have to get where you were going before anyone knew you were missing, which shouldn’t be too hard. And considering we’re in a city the size Libya, there’s plenty of space to get hidden. But then, you’d have to stay inside for basically ever.”

  “Grace,” said Van, and summoned up a platter of sushi, which hovered just outside the window.

  “Food is not what I’m talking about, Van. I meant that if you were to go into hiding in this city, you’d have to pick a small secluded area and never leave, like for centuries. Or more.”

  “Ah.”

  “Unless,” Grace said, thoughts formulating, “unless you went into the forests. What if he went into the forests?”

  “I’m not going in there, and neither are you,” Van warned her, and dispelled the sushi. “Hm. Now I want sushi.”

  “I didn’t suggest that we follow him,” Grace said.

  Van crossed his arms and gave her a wan smile. “When you say ‘maybe the person we’re looking for is here’, it automatically means ‘let’s go there and check’.”

  “You’re just saying that because it happens to be true one-hundred-percent of the time,” Grace complained.

  “It’s kinda why you got shot.”

  “Am I ever going to live that down?” When Van shrugged, she shot him a look and headed for the door. “Come on, I’m tired.”

  “When are we going to visit the Mulhoy?”

  “Later,” she muttered.

  * * * *

  Mary sat in her chaise lounge. A cup of tea rested on the nearest table, and on her lap, her old journal. It was a leather bound volume, with a circle of gold on the cover containing her seal. There was a combination letter ‘M’ and ‘F’ with a circlet above. She had thought about changing it, making a new seal, but had never got round to it. She really should thought, especially considering that the ‘F’ was for ‘France’, and she’d had nothing to do with France in hundreds of years. Her thoughts drifted back to what Tina Virtue had said to her last week. That she would always be her title and there was no arguing with Tina Virtue.

  She loved the city, and protected it with her life. Nobody was king here, and her favorite part of her job was putting down anyone who thought they would be. Still, a small voice in the back of her head kept warning her that the world was going to ask her to do something she didn’t want: to take a crown, in exchange for all the time it had let her live without one. It was why she always visited Fernando. An oracle was someone who knew what the world was going to ask of its inhabitants, or that was how Mary looked at it. And she was always waiting for the day he would tell her that she would again be shackled to a throne.

  She took a sip from her tea and ran her hand over the symbol of Mary, Queen of Scots.

  * * * *

  Voz drifted down the River. The gondola swayed gently beneath her. She wanted so much to go and watch the sun setting over the sands and stare up at the stars of ancient Egypt. To see the river of water reflected in the river of stars in the sky. But her nerves had other ideas. She had never been afraid, not really. Her parents had shown her her strength at an early age, and she knew it would always be enough. She had even heard of mind control, the thrall of the dark ones. It had never frightened her until someone had threatened her with it.

  She had no idea whether it would work on her, and that was the worst part. Many creatures, sprites for instance, were completely immune to mind-reading and mental servitude. The particular details that she herself was immune to siren song, and that all known forms of telepathy were lost to ages before the city even existed were not as comforting as they ought to be.

  Voz wished she could talk to her parents, but the banshee and the siren lived deep in the forests. Not only did they live with some characters as unsavory as they were, those characters weren’t Voz’s parents, and would probably try and kill her. She may be about the most powerful person in the city, but the forests were another thing entirely. The radius just of the forest ring was over nine hundred miles, and some of the trees of the outer rim made the last ice age seem new. There were stories of dinosaurs out there, and Voz was quick to believe them. She had heard the idea referred to as the ‘inverse square of believability principle’. The more ridiculous, the more outlandish the idea, the more you should probably believe it.

  Voz wasn’t particularly worried about dinosaurs. Any pterodactyl that tried to make supper out of her would soon find itself julienned and ready for serving. Unless they were magical dinosaurs... Voz looked suspiciously around her, as though someone nearby might have overheard the thought. In which case, she would have to blush severely

  The evil angry gods were what really worried her.

  And strangely, at this moment, what comforted her. No-one here in the city, not one person, was as powerful as some of the forest beings. My mom could beat up your mom, she thought bizarrely, and had to laugh at herself.

  “Alright, feeling better now,” she said aloud. She stood up proudly, causing the gondola to tip, and falling into the River. Moments later she resurfaced and spat a mouthful of water into her boat. Clinging to the side with one arm, she said, “Good thing this dye is permanent.”

  * * * *

  Leila had just received a sheaf of ancient papyrus from Egypt with a note attached from the Hall of Apocrypha in the Hagia Sophia. Heard you finally found it. Good work, it read. On the desk before was the Crook of Osiris.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Leila to the empty room, for what must have been the dozenth time. You really never know what’s going to turn up, do you?

  The Crook, part of a matching set that included a flail, still missing, of course, was discovered in an archaeological dig. Nobody on the crew had expected to find such a treasure. Because the dig was in Boston. Now that the Crook had been discovered, there was much more work to be done. A field agent from the museum was searching through every area of the city of Bostonian origin for clues as to how the artifact made its way there. The Museum projected that the results would come in the next couple of weeks, since any Boston areas would be scattered over the past few centuries.

  Leila had to add the Crook to the card catalogue, and sift through the papers from the Hall of Apocrypha to see how much she could include in the official description. Anything that seemed like conjecture, rumor, or blatantly fabricated lies would be included as an addendum and marked as such. L
eila tapped her Focus against the desk, and thought of red ink. Her pen could be any color she wanted, and she changed colors a lot solely because it was the only piece of sorcery she could perform without speaking.

  She flipped through the papyrus. Somewhere between the hieroglyphics and her eyes, they became English, and a surprisingly descriptive English at that. She again thanked the clever people at the Hagia Sophia. The papers told of the incredible powers of the Crook, and, even having lived here for a year, Leila still dismissed most of it as total garbage. No one thing could do so much, it simply wasn’t feasible.

  Besides, as far as she knew, Osiris never existed. There certainly were beings whom most called gods, though Leila had issues with the designation. Whether the ones of myth were real, or the real ones made it into normal-world myths was always tricky to discern. A field agent from the museum had once secured an interview with the Roman goddess Vesta, one of only two Mediterranean gods who took residence in the city. She talked little about her own powers, but commented on her likes and dislikes, and her organization (the Vestal Virgins), shared a few favorite recipes, and provided a laundry list of gods whom she believed never existed. Osiris, the tops in ancient Egypt was on the Vesta List, as it was known in the museum. Vesta had said that she had tried to get appointments with him for centuries, but the real Egyptian gods, most of whom were unimpressive according to Vesta, had given her the runaround for so long she was certain that he was a hoax.

  Leila sighed and put down the papers. She removed her glasses and leaned back for a momentary break. The British Museum’s field agents were part archaeologist, part journalist, part power broker, and part cat burglar, and nearly everyone on staff wanted to be one. Not least Leila herself. But it took years to become one, and she was, meanwhile, stuck down here in the basement with the card catalogue. Not that she didn’t enjoy her work, but it was frustrating. Angus Chang had told her that it took him a hundred years to become an agent, and not to worry. Her mind had not adjusted to the time scale around here. Try as she might, she could not imagine the sun would rise and set as normal, or really as a shattered mirror of normal, for hundreds, even thousands of years, and she would still be alive. Perhaps in ten or fifteen years when she still looked twenty-eight, then it would really hit.