City of Ghosts

by Stacia Kane

  But she didn’t have time to worry about it just then. She was supposed to meet Lex in an hour to take a look in the tunnels, and she wanted to have a chat with Elder Griffin before she left.

  Goody Glass slammed her book on the desk with an echoing thud. “Art thou being impertinent?”

  “Impertinent” wasn’t really the word for what Chess wanted to be at that moment; “violent” would have been more accurate. Or “high,” but that was a given.

  What she didn’t want, though, was to get in trouble or stand there arguing any longer. So she clenched her fists behind her back and lowered her eyes. “I didn’t intend to be, Goody. But I need that book, and it’s not there. And I thought—You see everything that goes on in here, I mean, you know everything, so maybe you had some ideas.”

  Her respect for the Goody went up one tiny, unwilling notch when she saw the woman wasn’t buying her cheap attempt at flattery one bit.

  But at least she answered, stretching her black-cloth-encased arm to the phone on her desk. “It’s been a busy few days, Miss Putnam. I’ll call someone to help thee search for the book. What was the title?”

  Chess told her, and watched her mildly revolted expression switch back to fully revolted. “What need hast thou of that book?”

  “It’s research for a case.”

  “What sort of Debunking case involves research of that nature?”

  “It’s—it’s not a Debunking case. I’m working with the Black Squad, and—”

  Goody Glass shook her head. “Dangerous. Dangerous and unnecessary. I will call someone to look for it, if thee insist. It may take some time.”

  Chess opened her mouth to argue, but shut it again. What was the point? She’d go downstairs and tell Elder Griffin instead. He’d help her look, and wouldn’t Goody Glass love that. So instead she just forced out a terse “Thank you” and headed for the stairs.

  Shit. It was starting to get dark outside, and she didn’t have much time before she had to meet Lex. Either way, the book was a wash for the day, and since the Dedication was the next day she couldn’t count on having much time then, either.

  The ceremony itself would only take a couple of hours, but there was usually a meeting afterward to anoint a new Elder and discuss changes being made or whatever else came up, and those took the better part of a day.

  Elder Griffin wouldn’t be pleased when he heard the book was missing. And she wanted to show him the fetish. She’d never really worked with him before, not like that; he oversaw all the Debunkers but didn’t generally get involved. This was different. It might actually be fun to talk to him about it, to see if he had any theories himself.

  With all the work and planning being done, and the shock of what had happened, the hall buzzed with activity. A couple of Elders she’d never seen before whispered past her to disappear around the corner, the Liaisers huddled in a small group against the opposite wall, a few Goodys carried stacks of files up the stairs. All of them with somber expressions and hushed voices. She’d never felt so much tension in the building, so much fear coating her skin. It made her want to hide. Instead she forced herself to knock on Elder Griffin’s door. It opened so fast she wondered if he’d been waiting for her.

  “Ah, Cesaria. Good morrow. How fare thee?”

  The wan smile on his normally peaceful face looked like it hurt. She curtsied and greeted him, forced a smile of her own, and followed him into his office.

  He slumped into his chair with less than his usual grace. “Cesaria, how do you think the Lamaru have learned to create these psychopomps, to turn our own against us? Hast thou formulated a theory?”

  “I—Yeah, I have. I think I have. Here.” She hoisted her bag into her lap and pulled out the bagged fetish parts. “I—I was attacked. I’m fine, it wasn’t a big deal. But they had this. I think they got it from this street vendor in Downside, who sells potions. He’s been doing toad magic, I know, I—” She dug out the toad bone she’d taken from the bed. “These were all over his place. And he had a fetish that was more like a glamour, it changed my face and Lauren’s when we touched it. She took that one.”

  Against the pallor of his skin the dark smudges around his eyes were pandalike; the wide fear in those eyes was anything but. “Transformational magic. This is how they’re controlling our psychopomps.”

  Chess nodded. “I think so, I—You already know what happened in the slaughterhouse. What they were doing.”

  “I was informed, yes.”

  “That guy Maguinness, he was the one who bombed the place. He was trying to wipe out the Lamaru.”

  “So Lauren said. She seemed to feel that was proof he was on our side, working with us, no matter how wrongfully he chose to do it. I see by thy expression thou dost not feel the same. How do you find working with her?”

  She shrugged. “She’s okay. I mean, we’re not best friends or anything, but she’s okay.”

  “And you feel you’re being given an equal voice in the investigation?”

  “Mostly.” Discretion warred with the need to discuss her suspicions; suspicions won out. She told him about her little chat with Maguinness—a carefully expurgated version—and about Edsel’s information that the Lamaru had an enemy. “Lauren thinks he’s only peripherally related, that he has this personal problem with them and we should let somebody else deal with him. I think he’s important, that he’s the one who started all of this and sold this stuff to the Lamaru to begin with.”

  “Ah.” He sat back, clasping his hands in his lap the way he did when thinking. “You feel he’s working with the Lamaru?”

  “No, at least not anymore. I think he was, but—Have you heard of this Baldarel person? He wrote a book on ghost magic; it disappeared from the Restricted Room. Someone told me they’d heard the Lamaru were corresponding with him. Maybe he taught Maguinness, too. Maybe that’s how they met.”

  “I have heard of him, yes. At one point he desired to join the Church; this was before I entered training, I believe. A very powerful spellworker, but an unorthodox and unethical one.”

  “Where is he now? Can we get in touch with him?”

  “Hmm. I believe he passed to the City not long ago, or at least so the rumor states.”

  “So the Liaisers can find him? Can we—”

  He shook his head. “I apologize, my dear, but we cannot involve a non-Bound employee in the case. And”—he held up his hand—“I do not believe the Grand Elder will approve another Binding payment. Especially not now, when our very existence hangs by a thread.”

  Shit. The first thing she’d had in days that looked like it might end in an answer instead of more questions, and she was getting a big fat no.

  “Can we at least see if we can confirm his death?”

  If the Lamaru had been working with Baldarel, they might have killed him. If Maguinness had been working with Baldarel, he might have taken great offense to that killing.

  Of course she could still be right about it being related to nonpayment for supplies. Debunking cases were usually solved by following the money; she couldn’t help that her first instincts always led her straight into people’s wallets. But any new theory was a new chance to solve the case, right?

  Elder Griffin smiled. “Indeed. Wait a moment.”

  She watched as he pulled up a computer screen and started typing, soothed by the clicking sounds his fingers made on the keys but made ever more anxious by the frown darkening his face. “No. No, it appears he has not passed—at least, I find no certificate of such here. And no address.”

  Rumored dead, but not dead. An address the Lamaru were writing to, but no address listed in the Church system.

  Baldarel had disappeared. And Chess knew a damn good place to disappear to.

  If Maguinness and Baldarel were the same person, it would answer a lot of questions—how he’d known to find them at the slaughterhouse, for example. It would also create more. The Lamaru were learning from and at war with the same person?

  Unless Balda
rel had, by letter, advised them to visit “Maguinness.” He’d wanted to check them out in person, to see what kind of people he was dealing with, and she guessed he’d found out. And now he was slowly leading them into trap after trap. She almost admired him, but she was more terrified by him. Someone who could use the Lamaru like lapdogs—how appropriate—and get them running scared was definitely someone she didn’t want to fuck around with, and that someone knew who she was, had read her.

  But hadn’t come after her. Why?

  The whole thing made her head hurt; or would have, had she been capable of feeling physical pain. As it was she was simply tired, her thoughts running creaky circles in her head like an exhausted treadmill mouse. Baldarel and Maguinness and dogs and toads and Lamaru, rooms and streets crimson with blood … Terrible’s hands on her skin, his mouth on her throat—

  “I have an image here, if thou wouldst look.” Elder Griffin turned the slick flat screen of his desktop toward her; a flash from the overhead light turned it momentarily into a blank silver slab, revealing nothing. “Is this the man you encountered?”

  The screen cleared. With very little surprise Chess found herself nodding, staring at a picture of a young Arthur Maguinness—a young Baldarel—leering out of a grainy scanned photo.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  One who will perform dark magics will stop at nothing else; evil is evil.

  —The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 915

  She’d never been in this section of the tunnels before. Well, that wasn’t a surprise; she’d never been in a lot of sections of the tunnels before. With the exception of one night, when she’d used them to escape from the train platform outside the City of Eternity, she’d really only ever used them to travel between her place and Lex’s. And with the exception of that one night, never alone.

  Lex always seemed to know where he was. She generally had some idea, enough to be fairly certain she wouldn’t get totally lost down there—and there were exits—but nowhere near the kind of confidence he displayed.

  It wasn’t just fear of being lost that kept her from feeling entirely comfortable with the idea of wandering around alone down there, though. The night she’d made her escape from the platform—from the Lamaru who’d chased her there—she’d literally stumbled upon some of Slobag’s dirty little secrets: dead bodies in the tunnel, executed men rotting away beneath the earth.

  It wasn’t an experience she cared to repeat.

  Add to that memory the antipathy any witch felt to being underground, to the concerns and confusion over what she and Elder Griffin had discovered, and Chess would have been twitchy even without the Nips in her system. Or without the memories that refused to leave, or the jumpy, irrational certainty that Lex could tell when he looked at her that she’d been with Terrible, as though even after a couple of showers and a night of sleep he’d left imprints on her skin.

  Outside it was only five-thirty or so. Inside it was eternal fluorescent-bulb night, stark and unnatural, with deep shadows that moved when she wasn’t looking and snapped back into place when she turned around. Playing tricks on her, those shadows—the sneaky games of children, of twisted little bodies …

  Ugh.

  Lex must have noticed her shiver. “Be you wanted to come on down here, Tulip. Ain’t made you, I ain’t.”

  “I know, I just—How much farther?”

  “Ain’t much long now. You feelin it?”

  She thought for a second. Did she? Beneath the speed twitches and general nerves, the memory of Maguinness’s hideous family and … everything else …

  Yes. Something was down there, now that she focused on it. They weren’t close enough for her to get a read on it, though.

  She told him as much, and he nodded. “Aye, ain’t far now. You know what’s on the happening, though? Who it be? Ain’t like thinking of them Lamaru using my tunnels.”

  “I’m not sure it’s—Ouch!” She folded her arms over her chest, trying to think of another way to put it. “There’s this potions guy, set up a booth in the Market? My market, I mean. He’s got a cave, or something. Up at Ninetieth and Foster.”

  “He the one got this, then?”

  “I think so, yeah.” She thought so; well, no, she knew so. So did Elder Griffin. Hopefully so would Lauren, when Chess finally got in touch with her to tell her; she was out with her father, with their phones off.

  It didn’t matter much, really. Knowing Maguinness/Baldarel’s true identity was all well and good, but it meant absolutely nothing when they had no idea where the bastard was hiding.

  Lex led her to the right, into another, dimmer tunnel. “So more’n one set down here. Ain’t likin that, Tulip.”

  “Yeah. Me either.”

  His lips moved; the closest he could get to a smile. “Guessing you ain’t.”

  “When do the wires come out?”

  He shrugged. “Nother week or so, them tell me. Be good when they do.”

  “I really am sorry—” The apology ended in a gasp, a choke that bent her double. They were close now, she felt it, energy punching her suddenly like a surprise blow to the gut. The tunnels had a curious dampening effect on magic sometimes, she’d noticed; it didn’t dissipate the way it did above ground, becoming something one eased into, felt tingling long before reaching the actual place where it had been performed. Rather it stayed tight, lurking like a pocket of darkness between streetlights.

  “Got it now, aye?”

  She nodded. Oh, that was awful. Really, really awful. It wasn’t just the horrible sensation she remembered from the toad fetish, or the slithering wrongness of Baldarel’s family. Something deeper, more shocking clung to it, hung beneath it like slugs on the bottom of a rock. Death magic—death itself. The void a life left behind when it was ripped without mercy from a body.

  “Lookin kinda pale, Tulip. You right?”

  “Right—No, not really. There’s—Let’s just hurry up, okay?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what you’re wanting.”

  His fingers on her arm helped keep her feet steady; they sped up, feet making muted splashing sounds through the thin stream of …

  The thin stream of pinkish water, turning ever deeper red with every step they took. Lex noticed it at the same time she did; his muttered oath was like a spur in both of their backs.

  They didn’t have to go far. The body lay just around another curve. Chess saw the few light strands of hair beneath the sticky dark blood, saw the empty chasm where the chest had been—

  Vanhelm had been slaughtered. Not just murdered, no; no clean gunshot wound or slit throat. No death curse finally bringing an agonizing but outwardly unremarkable end to his life by a stroke, a heart attack, the slow shutdown of his internal organs.

  He didn’t even possess those anymore. He lay there staring at the ceiling with his milky eyes wide, his chest cracked open and plundered.

  But the thing that made her shut her eyes, that turned her instinctively to Lex to hide her face in his chest—making her feel like a total pussy for doing it but unable to stop herself—were the teethmarks.

  Three deep breaths of the clean detergent-smoke-and-Lex scent of his Blanks 77 shirt was enough to clear her head a bit, at least enough to force the bile in her throat back where it belonged. She shifted away, embarrassed, to see Lex’s own face pale above hers; but he lit a cigarette with a smooth movement and tilted his head back to blow out smoke. When he looked at her again his color had returned, his brows raised in the way they did when he was about to be particularly Lex-like.

  “That some shit, aye?”

  Absurdly, she laughed, a short gasp of laughter like the bark of a yappy dog. Dogs …

  Chess plucked the cigarette from his fingers and dragged from it herself, taking a step closer to Vanhelm’s ruined body. Okay. To say she hadn’t been expecting this was an enormous understatement. What the hell was going on? Could the Lamaru …?

  Well, yes,
they certainly could have. And Vanhelm had been working with dogs; the sorts of dogs who left teethmarks like—Damn, those were some big-ass dogs.

  Pulling a pair of gloves from her bag, she crouched by the body to take a closer look. Nothing like a mutilated corpse to get a girl’s mind off other things.

  Something wasn’t quite right. That Vanhelm had been attacked by dogs—that he’d most likely been killed by dogs—seemed plain. The long teethmarks, the way his throat had been—she swallowed hard—ripped open, the claw marks on his cheek.

  But while blood still colored the water flowing beneath and around him, growing paler now as he bled out, there were no splotches of it on the dry cement. A dog attacking and killing a human might eat that human’s organs; much as the thought made her stomach churn, she could see it happening. But would they have been able to eat an entire intestine without its touching the floor or leaving stains or marks anywhere else?

  And peeking into Vanhelm’s abdominal cavity showed none of the—well, none of the mess she would expect to find had dogs removed those organs. It looked like they’d been cut from him.

  So why would someone wait until he’d been mauled to death by dogs, then tidily remove his heart and stomach and … yuck, everything else?

  Someone must have had excellent control of their dogs. And someone must have needed those parts for a spell. Fuck! Murdered bodies had all sorts of power, power she didn’t even want to think about. Not that she had a choice. As with everything else in her life.

  Lex leaned over her, peering down. “Dogs ate him all up, aye?”

  “I don’t think so.” She explained her reasoning to him, stumbling a little over the words. Even in her line of work, it wasn’t common to utter sentences like “His stomach doesn’t appear to have been torn out.”