Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  He couldn’t find the Worldcracker for her, but there was something else he could do. He put out his cigarette and swept aside the empty pints. He hauled his satchel onto the table. “You’ll be needing this, then,” he said, pulling the zip.

  A chamois sack nestled between towels from Val’s hotel. Val lifted it out and wadded the towels back in to stop them from seeing the monogram. Just in case.

  Alyx pulled the sack across the table. It clinked. She opened the drawstring.

  Blank IMF tags, silver-alloy oblongs with a logo of the scales of justice embedded in them, ready to be inscribed with fake names and attached to worthless relics. Each one was worth as much as you could imagine charging for an AAA-rated saint.

  Val had stolen the tags from the IMF’s vaults, a capital crime.

  “There’s not very many here,” Alyx complained. “Is this all you could get this time?”

  8

  Leonie

  Ten Minutes Earlier. Southwark

  Leonie leant on the riverfront wall, nibbling a cornetto. Her left arm locked her ugly, polka-dotted handbag against her hip. Unfortunately that left her short of a hand to fend off Ed, who kept sliding his arm around her waist, taking full advantage of their cover.

  They were just a couple of lovebirds skiving off on a breezy afternoon, watching the boats on the river. Never mind that no one in their right mind would stick around here to watch the rag ʼn’ bone dinghies ferrying loads of scavenged tin cans to the jetties, unemployed cuddies dangling lines in the water, and bare-legged children digging for clams in the raw sewage exposed by low tide. The mud stank, too.

  “What a waste,” Ed sighed.

  “What is?”

  “You. I reckon you just haven’t met the right fella.”

  “Sod off. I’m not a lezzie. And no, I’m not going to prove it to you, so don’t get your hopes up.”

  Ed smirked. Leonie suspected he had orders to grass on her if she said or did anything treasonous. As if she would! She knew that she was lucky to still have a job at all. Company London turned out to be Lord Day’s private intel unit, mainly dedicated to trailing lords and ministers from townhouse to office to private dining club and back again. It was dead boring, in comparison to Ireland. But today, for a change, they were watching a reliquary expert from the IMF.

  Based in Germany, the IMF was the international authority responsible for the assay and valuation of holy relics. It was called the International Monetary Fund because holy relics were money, the hard currency that always held its worth. IMF personnel were thus pretty much untouchable. Even the foreign ones were designated as trustworthy … and Thames water was good for your health, drink it by the gallon. But everyone had to at least pretend to trust the IMF, or the whole international financial system would collapse.

  So why had NatChiv decided to shadow this bloke?

  And what was he doing in Southwark?

  Leonie crunched the last of her cornetto and dropped the wrapper over the riverfront wall. “My turn.”

  Ed took her place, elbows on the wall. She leaned beside him, facing Queen Sabrina Estate Building 3, a stout ebony tower collapsing into the Thames at a rate of several inches a year.

  Quickstone was mysterious stuff. Some people said it was a magical substance, some said it was an African plant. In either case it had been invented or discovered during the First World War, and used to add an extra layer of fortification to strategic castles. After the Second World War it had been hailed as the perfect construction material. Non-flammable, pretty much invulnerable, and cheap. Just plant rattoons and grow your own buildings. A whole class of people, such as the husband of Leonie’s sister Mystie, earned good money as quickstone masons, deploying their knack—it was like fancying animals, a gift that a few lucky sods were born with. But of course there turned out to be a catch. Forty years or so after the first quickstone buildings went up, they had started to slump.

  The front door of Queen Sabrina 3 had a tarp instead of an actual door. It opened onto a low flight of steps that had come away from the quickstone. Boards had been laid over the gap, which rattled every time someone went in or out.

  Women in headscarves carrying jerrycans of water. Vaunters ambling out to the corner shop built like a wooden barnacle onto the foot of the tower. Do-gooders from the Royal Mercy bustling in to see their charges. And the sick, the sick—men crippled in accidents, women with puckered wattles instead of jaws from working in match factories, people crippled in childhood by polio—she felt queasy at the very sight of them, the sick, the poor.

  Her gaze ranged higher up the black cliffs. She saw waste-paper baskets, ashes, and the dregs of teapots emptied out of windows. She saw women screeching back and forth from one estate building to another. She saw smoke drifting out of chinks, people burning coal and scrap for heat, since the power to these officially uninhabitable buildings had been cut off.

  “You have to wonder,” said Ed. “What’s he doing down here?”

  “I’ve been wondering that since we got here.”

  “I mean, would he be here to assay a living saint? You’re not going to find many saints in Southwark.”

  “Commoners can be saints, too.”

  “Yeah, but all the best ones are noble.”

  “Well, you know what they say about the sanctity crisis. If it’s suffering that makes saints…”

  “There’s a sanctity crisis because we’ve got it too easy these days? I’ve heard that one, too.” Ed shook his head. “That’s propaganda, so we won’t complain about our savings getting inflated away.”

  “But if it is true, then this place might be fairly crawling with living saints. Which might be why our bloke is here.”

  “On the other hand, he might just be visiting his cousins.” Ed snickered. “Sullivan, that’s a cuddie name.”

  Leonie glanced up and down the street and saw Valery Sullivan, senior IMF reliquary expert, halfway to the corner and moving fast.

  “He’s out,” she blurted, and depressed the pressel of her body set. “Sullivan is ex black!”

  Why hadn’t she seen him come out? Because she’d been talking to Ed. Stupid. Sloppy.

  She started after him, angling her arm to point the end of her handbag at his back. The bag had a camera inside, the lens camouflaged amid that ugly pattern of polka dots. She pressed the shutter trigger in the bag’s handle. Click. Click.

  “Backdraught has the trigger. Frog is following,” Ed said, wandering away along the waterfront.

  She needed a shot of Sullivan’s face to prove she’d got the right bloke. She walked faster, overtook him, stopped at the next corner, and impossibly, she’d lost him in the crowd—no, there he was.

  Click.

  Skinny little creep in a black leather jacket, carrying a satchel.

  Click.

  Hairknot said knight, gait said lowborn. Speaking of that hair, could it be dyed? No one had hair that black apart from Orientals.

  Click.

  By the time Sullivan reached the el station, she’d shot almost a whole roll of film. Ed took over from her and followed him onto the train. They tag-teamed him back to his hotel, the Lion’s Arms, a Wessex franchise inn near Piccadilly Circus.

  Leonie went into the shopping mall across the street and settled into OP 2, a stock closet at the back of a costume armor boutique on the fourth floor, right across from Valery Sullivan’s window. She watched his curtains until five o’clock and then exited the closet, squeezing between a rack of plastic breastplates and a full tank suit complete with helm and arms belt, also 100% plastic. The things people paid good money for.

  “See you tomorrow, love,” the boutique owner said, winking.

  This was one nice thing about working in London: everyone cooperated with Intelligence Company operations, never asking any questions, more than happy just to think they were doing their bit for King and country.

  What a shame they were actually accomplishing sod-all.

  If they were serious a
bout gathering intelligence from Valery Sullivan, they ought to’ve bugged his room. But no, that would risk offending ‘our friends’ in the IMF.

  Ed had waited for her at the café on the corner. Not wanting his company, but too weary to shake him off, she walked with him along Regent Street.

  The long autumn night had closed in. Foggy halos ringed the streetlights. People streamed along the pavements on their way home. Leonie felt separate from the crowds, as if she’d lost her ability to blend in, here in her own city. She kept checking shop windows to make sure they weren’t being followed. Old habits were hard to break.

  “You heard the rumor?” Ed said.

  “What rumor?”

  “Operation PREDATOR. We’re going to give the boyos a whacking they’ll never forget.”

  “That’s just wishful thinking. I’ve had letters from my mates in Ireland, they’ve heard nothing.”

  “Well, maybe there’s things they don’t know. Maybe there’s things you don’t know, love. Maybe …”

  “Maybe what?”

  Ed’s pale-lashed eyes were enigmatic. He spat on the pavement. “What are you doing tonight? Fancy a quick one?”

  Automatically, Leonie shook her head. “Got a hot date.”

  “There’ll be a few shut faces! Who’s the lucky fellow?”

  She hunched the shoulder nearest to him, closing him out. “None of your business.” All she really had to do, of course, was give Sam her whacks and make sure the twins did their homework.

  “Fair enough,” Ed said. “One of these days, then. We normally go to the Seven Claws; you can come and stand your round. No lezzie jokes, promise.”

  “All right.”

  “All right. Mind yourself.” He vanished into the crowds.

  Leonie slouched on towards the Regent Street station, half hoping he’d forget the invitation. But she did miss the piss-ups in the bar at Castle MacConn. It was different here, harder to get to know people, when most of them lived off base. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she’d tried very hard. Maybe she’d stop resenting Company London so much if she climbed down off her high horse, as Una would say, and made some friends.

  9

  Val

  At The Same Time

  Val stumbled into his hotel room, first rubbing out the Latin he’d written under the doorknob to keep the maid service out. He hadn’t been followed back from Southwark, as far as he could tell, though you couldn’t really tell on London’s packed el trains.

  He closed the curtains, took off his scarf, and emptied his pockets onto the bed.

  “Fuck you, Alyx. ‘Not very many this time’? Fuck you.”

  He plunged through the obstacle course of petri dishes and retorts on the floor, into the ensuite bathroom, and poured Alyx’s flask of ‘holy water’ down the toilet. The light from the forty-watt bulb made everything look exhumed. Val’s own reflection in the mirror fitted right in. He dyed his hair black because it was naturally red, a giveaway sign of incurability. But the dead-black hue made his pale complexion look deathly. No wonder Alyx had been so solicitous of his health. If he died, she’d lose a major source of funding.

  He hadn’t ended it with her. He had to end it. He couldn’t go on like this.

  The wallet made from Heinrich Ende’s skin lay on the bed, mocking his cowardice.

  Let her go. Just let her go. She’s not eight years old anymore, she doesn’t need you to look after her…

  He sat down on the floor with his back against the wall. Slid down the wall until he was lying on the floor. Rolled onto his side, cheek on the sticky grey carpet.

  This hotel was a dump. That was why he’d chosen it. Leaks patterned the ceiling. Mint-green pellets of poison and traps strewed the floor under the bed. Val himself was responsible for the fresh stains on the carpet, and the smell.

  He had left his portable primus stove turned on low when he went out; now the smell was strong enough to rise and walk. A mixture of pig’s blood and tinned fruit simmered on the burner, sending steam down a tube to a flask with Tower of London scrawled on its label. This was Val’s actual (not official) reason for being here. He was a conciliator, one of the magicians that the IMF secretly employed to prop up the international relic market and the bond markets that flourished like mushrooms atop the world’s shrinking base of hard currency.

  The phenomenon popularly dubbed ‘the sanctity crisis’ was well known to the IMF. It could more accurately be described as the bottom of the sanctity cycle. Periodically throughout history, the number of living saints – and hence, eventually, the number of holy relics in circulation – had waned. This had always led in the past to war, which restored the stock of saints through the martyrdom effect.

  The solution to the present sanctity crisis was thus obvious… and, in a modern world armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles, unthinkable.

  The IMF had set itself the task of trying to break the sanctity cycle before it triggered a third world war.

  The Fund therefore secretly recruited magicians wherever it could find them. It lured hedge wizards from the backwoods, wooed seers and dowsers from their illegal lairs in the wealth divisions of Great Houses, and scooped self-taught magicians like Val out of the nooks and crannies of the black economy.

  During Val’s six years at the IMF, the Wessex case had been his bane. Now it had reached a whole new level of difficulty.

  What could you do about a royal House stupid enough to blackmail its single biggest taxpayer with murder charges?

  The chattering classes believed Piers Sauvage would be released as soon as his mother coughed up. But that had to happen soon. The bond markets were gyrating, while the pound skyrocketed against the German mark on the assumption that House Sauvage would be repatriating substantial funds to mount its legal defense, or simply to buy the Crown off.

  Well, he just had to do what he could.

  He rolled onto his stomach. Propping himself on his elbows, he probed a petri dish with his finger. It contained a sludge of spoilt corned ham (Lion brand), water (from the moat of Tower of London), and sodden paper shreds, originally a photo of Madelaine Wessex torn out of a magazine, which Val had chewed and spat out. Over the surface of the curse material a meniscus of magic, visible only to his second sight, stretched like rubber around his finger. That was the Latin he had worked into the material, now reacting with the substances in the dish to create a curse.

  The Agency’s conciliation policy was homeopathic. Little problems cure big problems, that was the principle, and so they used curses to create little problems. It worked, up to a point. Better at closer range: the efficacy of curses decreased exponentially with distance, although their duration increased. The productivity equation usually worked out to between 100 and 200 yards. So this weekend Val would join a sightseeing tour of Tower of London’s outer ward, where he’d slip away for a few minutes and plant his curse under a bush.

  Poor, long-suffering Princess Madelaine had a bad week ahead of her.

  Val was well aware of the irony that he was supporting the IRA with one hand and working to prop up the Wessex regime with the other. But the apparent paradox vanished on closer examination. The IRA and House Wessex needed each other. It was a love-hate relationship.

  He crawled over to the bed. A tangle of little brown limbs lay in one of the Catch-‘Em-Alive traps he had set. He released his catch, holding it by the scruff of the neck. “Brownie, brownie,” he murmured. Smallest and least dangerous of the fey, the brownie gazed at him with trusting eyes. “I’m sorry, wee one,” he whispered, and broke its neck.

  Processed food gone bad. Rotten meat. The bones and gristle of roadkill. The blood and spittle and urine of the ill. And the bodies of fey. All precious substances in the upside-down world of magic, where sickness was power.

  10

  Vivienne

  The Next Day. October 17th, 1979. London

  The art gallery was a deconsecrated church. The altar had been turned into a bar. It was very tre
ndy. Alas, the strip lighting reflected off the surfaces of the paintings, so that you had shuffle around them and squint to see what they depicted. But no one was here to look at the paintings.

  Vivienne Sauvage stifled a yawn and stuck a cigarette in her teeth to wake herself up. Two or three men jumped to light it for her. Vivienne was perfectly aware that she was famous mostly for being an artist who was also a peeress, and she didn’t care. Her art was nothing more than an excuse for her to absent herself—mentally and often, as today, physically—from being the Countess of Dublin.

  “No, not from a photograph. From memory,” she said.

  They were standing in front of the painting that lent its title to the show: William Swordless (oil on canvas, 1962). Done in Vivienne’s trademark style, jewel-bright pigments slathered with deliberate sloppiness inside black outlines, it depicted her late husband after a tourney, his destrier’s head drooping, his own head drooping, the victor’s armband dangling carelessly from one hand. “This was the year he took a first in the tilting at The Arches, the year after we were married.”

  So long ago now that she could almost forgive herself for having married William Wessex for all the wrong reasons. Chiefly to punish his brother Tristan for the tragedy at the old Cumberland place. The miracle of the thing was that she had grown to love and respect Wills. His death, six years ago, still haunted her.

  On the other hand, he was well out of the current bloody state of affairs.

  “There’s not been a champion like him since,” said Sir Bob Griffin, the governor of Belfast. Fat, ruddy, lowborn, Griffin was a walking or rather a waddling insult to civilized sensibilities, his neckerchief stained with the residues of his last three or four meals, his body odor battling the cologne he seemed to have bathed in. Their unspoken pact was that he kept the peace in the north of Ireland and she didn’t ask too many questions about how he did it.