by Ian McDonald
‘I don’t understand. The Mackenzies killed Rafa and destroyed this place. Denny Mackenzie killed Carlinhos in cold blood.’
‘My account with the Mackenzies is settled.’
‘Ironfall? That’s not your account, Lucas. That’s my account. My account, and I will never be free from that.’
The laughter dies, the smile vanishes. This is the Lucas Corta Alexia recognises.
‘The Suns are our common enemy. They set us at each other’s throats. Allow me a little schadenfreude. It’s a rare commodity.’
‘Have you ever thought that maybe you’re so scheming, so twisty, you might trip yourself up?’
‘That’s why I employ you, Lê. I trust you to tell me the truth. There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s asked for an audience.’
‘This wasn’t on my agenda.’
‘Toquinho, have Nelson bring my guest up please.’
Three chairs. There are three chairs in Lucas’s mirador. How had she not noticed?
Escoltas in cream linen suits and broad-brimmed straw planter hats guide the supplicant into Oxala’s eye.
Alexia’s breath catches. This short, dark, powerful man: she recognises the haunted eyes, the smoking energy coiled tight in every muscle, the bright, terrible presence in his walk, his stance, his every move. This is the wolf.
‘Brother.’
‘Wagner.’
The greeting is perfunctory. Lucas can barely tolerate Wagner Corta’s embrace.
‘Sit, sit,’ Lucas says.
‘I prefer to stand.’ He cannot keep still; he fidgets from foot to foot, he cannot rest.
‘Stand then. My Iron Hand, Alexia Corta.’
Wagner purses his fingers, dips his head to Alexia in the Corta manner. Connecting with his eyes is like gazing into the sun-heart of a fusion reactor. Alexia returns the greeting, enchanted by his dark formality. He may be the most attractive man she has ever seen.
‘Senhor Corta.’
‘He is not a Corta,’ Lucas says.
‘Bryce Mackenzie has Robson,’ Wagner Corta says.
The corner of Lucas’s mouth twitches. The barb has driven deep. Alexia observes that Wagner has observed it too. The wolves have strong bruxaria, she has heard. When the Earth is round, they see what others cannot, they sense beyond the human spectrum, they join together into a pack mind greater, faster than their individual intelligences. They have phenomenal sex.
‘Robson was under your protection,’ Lucas says.
‘I was misled,’ Wagner says. ‘Betrayed.’
‘Betrayed?’
‘Analiese…’
‘The Mackenzie woman.’
‘They killed her, Lucas. Knife through the neck.’
Lucas does not flinch. Alexia can see the wolf within Wagner Corta thrash and claw. If it breaks free, all the escoltas in Lucas’s bodyguard will not keep it from tearing Boa Vista apart.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Lucas asks.
‘I need him back. I need him safe.’
‘Those are two different things.’ Alexia has been Mão de Ferro long enough to distinguish between Lucas indifferent and Lucas calculating. This is Lucas adding up, subtracting.
‘Safe. Keep him safe.’
‘You realise that my capacity to act is limited. Bryce Mackenzie’s purpose in taking Robson is to have a hostage. If I move, if I show my hand, Robson dies.’
‘I’ll go to Queen myself. I’ll make a hostage swap.’
‘Wagner, you are of no value to Bryce Mackenzie.’
The true legends are the broken ones: fragments of histories, tellings, embellishments, edits and re-edits. Truth abhors a narrative. Some families have a black sheep: the Cortas have a dark wolf. Lucas has never spoken of Wagner but Alexia has picked up scraps of family mythology from staff and security: the strange child who howled at the Earth, the madrinha who wanted more than to be just a rental womb for the Cortas, the life-long hatred of Lucas Corta for a man who was an affront to his mother, to everything his family stood for. He’s not a Corta.
But he is.
‘Alexia.’ Her name, not the apelido. ‘I shall be moving my official residence to Boa Vista. I intend to taunt Bryce. He is easily provoked. He will want to move to João de Deus to show that he is in control,’ Lucas says. ‘Wolf: you will live here. I cannot have you running amok every time the Earth is round. Toquinho has arranged accommodation. It’s in one of the construction barracks, it won’t be the most comfortable. It’s a laborious process, bringing Boa Vista back to its former glory. Then again, you never lived here, did you?’
‘Cut, Lucas. Always the cut.’
‘Thanks would be appropriate here.’
‘You’re not doing it for me. You’re doing it for family. For Rafa. For your mother.’
‘My mother.’
Alexia sees what Lucas is doing. In barbing his brother, cutting him, drawing painful blood, he is channelling the raging Earth-light inside his brother, like a rod calling lightning. Bleeding power and emotion that might lash out unchecked, that could threaten Lucas’s plans.
Your child taken by a monster. Your oko, your partner, your love knifed down, alone and defenceless. These Alexia cannot imagine.
‘Keep him safe, Lucas,’ Wagner says.
‘None of us are safe.’
Nelson Medeiros returns and Wagner understands that the meeting is concluded. When they are out of earshot, Alexia says, ‘So that was the wolf.’
‘Yes. Do you know why I despise him? Because he is free and has never given a second of thought to it. His condition absolves him of all responsibilities. Wolf, man; wolf, man; back and forth back and forth as the Earth grows round, and there is nothing he can do about it. It’s neurobiology, see? Wonderful. He is the victim of his condition. It will always be the sole force acting on his life.’
‘It’s not a condition, it’s an identity,’ Alexia says. Lucas hisses in derision.
‘That puts it beyond criticism? He’s given responsibility – keep my sobrinho safe – and no sooner does the Earth shine blue than he runs off to the pack and Bryce Mackenzie takes Robson.’
‘That’s not fair, Lucas…’
Lucas waves a dismissing hand.
‘I need you to go Twé. I need you to bring a consignment back to Boa Vista.’
‘What is it?’
‘Justice.’
* * *
Akosi the Poisoner’s rings catch Alexia hard on the back of the hand.
‘That hurt!’
‘Do you want to die bleeding from your eyes, your ears, your shit-hole?’
‘I was only looking,’ Alexia says, taken by surprise, shame-faced and angry that this old woman, more wrinkle than flesh, eyes like currants folded into bags of skin, caught her out.
‘Looking is not touching. Don’t touch!’
She removes the set of plastic needles from the printer.
‘You touched,’ Alexia says.
The old woman waves her hand dismissively.
‘Ach! I’ve been working with them so long I’m immune.’
Akosi the Poisoner lives behind a door in a tangled root mass of a strangler vine that ran away and rooted, thrived and occupied Silo 2 of Kojo Laing Agrarium after its ecosystem collapsed in the Third Great Purging and it was left to grow wild. Alexia climbed twining staircases up through the massive roots; back and forth, around and under, crossing and recrossing the light-pools of the central mirror arrays bouncing light down from the transparent cap. She was a devotee approaching a deep forest umbanda initiation. The Great Tree of Twé impressed on her the power and skill of the Asamoahs, but this two-hundred-metre cylinder of woven roots and trunks and branches was even more awe-inspiring, for magic dwelt here. Alexia imagined orixas muttering among the leaves.
And there was a door, opposite a sheer drop of eighty metres to the pool in which the Poisoner’s Tree bathed its roots. She knocked.
‘Who’s there?’ A scratch of a voice. The old woman knew well who was there.
Everything had been arranged through their familiars.
‘Alexia Maria de Céu Arena de Corta.’ Names and titles, honorifics and qualifications played well in Twé. ‘Mão de Ferro of the Eagle of the Moon.’
‘Come in come in, Iron Hand.’
The door creaked wide, opened by no hand. Of course. Alexia ventured through a chain of domed rooms, bubbles blown from the pith of the great fig. In the final room she found the Poisoner.
‘Part of the mystique, baa,’ Akosi the Poisoner said. She was an aged woman, long and thin as famine, draped in white like a Mãe de Santo. Necklaced, bangled and be-ringed. Her dark skin, mottled, was heavily wrinkled and creased, as if she had shrunk inside her own body, ‘I’m heavily branded. So, what business does the Iron Hand of the Eagle of the Moon have with the Mother of Poisons?’
Alexia told her and Akosi the Poisoner’s face creased into the configuration of a grin and with a wave of her stick opened up the rooms beyond the final room; the clean and pristine and white and sterile rooms with printers and chemical synthesisers and staff – staff! – where the work was done.
‘The tree isn’t just scenery, baa,’ Akosi the Poisoner said as the team made Alexia comfortable and served her tea which she could not bring herself to drink. ‘I’ve engineered it to grow the feedstock for over fifty different toxins. Try not to touch your eyes or your mouth or any holes at all. And wash your hands.’
It was a process involving much tea and boredom, brewing bespoke poisons.
Akosi the Poisoner sets the needles into a second printer and coats them with plastic.
‘Tagged to Robson Corta’s DNA. Only he can open them.’ She holds up the five plastic slivers in her fist. ‘The Five Deaths, Mão de Ferro. Who are they for?’
‘Just one person.’
Akosi the Poisoner hisses.
‘Who does Lucas Corta hate so much he must kill them five times over?’
‘I can’t tell you, Mãe de Santo.’
Akosi snaps her hand shut with a small cry.
‘Manners, baa, manners. The poisons must hear the name.’
Alexia takes a deep breath.
‘Bryce Mackenzie.’
Akosi the Poisoner gives a high, keening cry. She pushes the container into Alexia’s hands.
‘Have them, baa, have them with my blessing. No charge. For the Sisters of the Lords of Now. Take them and tell me when the Brute of Boa Vista is dead. One doubt, baa.’
‘What is it, Mãe?’
‘Have I made enough?’
* * *
The dark is soft and dense, broken by dozens of tiny, dim lights that shed enough illumination for Alexia to understand that she is inside a dome, a small one; four, five paces across. The air is old, stale and carries high notes of ozone and a spicy, smoky tang at once exotic and familiar to Alexia.
‘Reveillon!’ Alexia says. ‘It smells of New Year.’
‘Moondust,’ Wagner Corta says. ‘Most people say it smells like gunpowder. I don’t know what that is, but we say it.’
‘Fireworks,’ Alexia says. ‘Like the morning after the party, when everyone is creeping back home hung-over and you smell all the burned-out rockets.’
The barracks where Lucas had billeted Wagner was easily found, even as the heavy contractors were moving out and the landscapers and ecological engineers moving in.
‘Hey. Want to give me the wolf’s tour of this place?’
He almost smiled. He took her up through the ornamental grasses and saplings, the bamboo groves and waterfalls, past the rebuilt pavilions and the miradors to an incongruous elevator door in the wall of the world.
‘I kind of thought, the highlights?’
‘You wanted the wolf tour.’ He summoned the elevator.
At the top of that elevator is this dark, dusty dome, and Wagner saying, ‘Fireworks are not a thing we have.’
‘I would think so,’ Alexia says.
‘Dona Luna has a thousand deaths, but fire: that’s the worst,’ Wagner says. ‘Fire burns the breath in your lungs. There was a fire at an old Corta Hélio maintenance base. When the rescue team got there, they found everything covered in black soot. The fire had burned out, but not before it consumed every molecule of oxygen in the base. Asphyxiation, or burning. You choose.’
This is a man whose partner was murdered by Bryce Mackenzie’s blades, Alexia reminds herself. And the memory of Akosi the Poisoner, and what she brought back from Twé in a sealed titanium case, and what the deaths inside can do, will not slip her mind. And she knows no better remedy than humans being with humans for such hurts.
‘Dragons,’ Wagner says. ‘We have flying dragons. Tens – hundreds – of metres long. At New Year and Yam Festival we fly them up and down the quadras, in and out of the bridges. They’re filled with lights and music.’
‘Where is this place?’ Alexia asks.
‘Where the wolf was born,’ Wagner says. A noise. Light. Shutters retract with a clatter of folding vanes and Alexia stands on the surface, under a million stars.
‘This was Adriana’s retreat,’ Wagner says. ‘She liked looking back at Earth, looking at the lights. We light the lights. That was our talisman. Or did she just want to make sure old Brasil was still there? Can you see her?’ Wagner points, draws Alexia in with the gentlest of touches. She sights up his arm. Blue Earth stands in the western sky. It will pass through its phases from full to new but it will never move from that fixed point above the drab plain of Mare Fecunditatis. And there, low on the belly of the full Earth, scarred with dust storms and new deserts but still green, still blue: old Brasil. ‘Old Doctor Macaraeg said I was bi-polar. Fed me pills, patches, behaviour modification drugs. The whole time I tried to tell her it’s not a disease, it’s more than that, but even I didn’t know what it was until I learned about the wolves.’
‘They’re – bi-polar?’
Alexia sees Wagner wince in the Earth-light.
‘More than that. We’re a new neuro-ethnic identity.’ Now Alexia sees him smile apologetically. ‘Wolves. That’s what we are. But I knew then what I was – what I’d always been. I came up here. I stood where I’m standing now. I stood naked in the Earth-light and everything was illuminated. Everything made sense. I could feel it splitting me in two, tearing me apart into two people; the wolf and the shadow. Wagner Corta died that day. I was not one person, I was two.’
He stands, eyes closed, bathing in the light. He is trembling. Every muscle, every nerve is burning.
‘Is the light hurting you?’ Alexia says.
‘Hurting me? No, never. But yes – it hurts.’
‘Wagner. Listen to me. Analiese betrayed you.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Alexia has a guess but she will not say it here.
‘They stabbed a knife through her neck. Through her neck. Why did they do that?’
Wagner looks on the edge of collapse.
‘All I know is that she let Bryce’s blades walk in and take Robson. She betrayed you, Wagner.’
‘Bryce Mackenzie dies for this,’ Wagner hisses.
‘He will,’ Alexia says. ‘Oh he will. Lucas may be slow, he may be subtle, he may take the long way around, but he never misses.’
‘It should be mine,’ Wagner says.
‘Let Lucas take it,’ Alexia says. ‘You’re too close.’
Wagner turns on her. Alexia steps back: here is the wolf, jaws wide, fangs bared, alien light burning in its eyes. Wagner Corta is dead, he said. There is only the wolf and the shadow.
‘You don’t say that to me. This is for the Cortas.’
After the shock of the abrupt lycanthropy, Alexia meets Wagner’s darkness.
‘I am a Corta.’
The Earth-madness shatters.
‘Yes. Of course.’ Wagner’s hand moves, the shutters snap back into place. The blackness is blinding. The soft white lights emerge like stars over Barra. ‘We should go now.’
‘Are you all right?’
&
nbsp; ‘No. But I never am.’ Wagner summons the elevator. The door opens and floods the dark, dusty observatory with a cool blue glow. ‘I’m sorry, Alexia.’
‘The wolf.’
‘Yes. Too much light.’ Wagner closes the elevator door. ‘I love him, you know. Robson. Like he was my own. I would do anything for that kid.’
Alexia touches his hand. His skin is hot, she can feel the tremor of muscles fading.
‘You already have.’
* * *
‘Last of all, the death of the senses.’
Alexia places the final set of five plastic needles on Lucas’s desk behind the eye of Oxala. Red, green, blue, yellow, white. Black. The final darkness.
First death: the death of the bowels. The victim shall piss and shite themself as the linings of stomach, intestines, bladder slough off and liquefy.
The second death: the death of the blood. Blood shall spurt from eyes, ears, nose, every orifice of the human body.
The third death: the death of the soul. The mind shall be cast into a hell of hallucinations; endlessly replicating demons, fiery pits, falling through larger and larger universes.
The fourth death: the death of the self. The body shall reject its own organs, vessels and architecture through a massive immune system failure. Even the skin shall blister and slough off in bloody sheets.
The fifth death, the final death: the shutting off of the senses from the sights, sounds, smells of the other four deaths at their work. It is no mercy: the mind is trapped, sightless and soundless and helpless. The only sense that survives to the end is pain.
‘Good work,’ Lucas Corta says. He does not flinch, he makes no comment as Alexia lays out the toxins. He is still and cold and merciless as his poisons. That same deadly chill Alexia remembers when she felt his assassin fly stroke her neck in the suite in the Copa Palace Hotel. If he had had any doubt he would have killed her: cold, merciless, without lifting a hand. ‘Fine work.’
‘The Mother of Poisons waived her fee,’ Alexia says. ‘Because of…’
‘Bryce,’ Lucas says. ‘Why are you afraid to say it?’
The poison must hear the name of its victim. Else how will it know?