City of Corpses

by John C. Wright

  And the deadly, terrifying eyes slid past. The apparition was blind to her. The Ring of Mists could obscure the sight of more than mere ghosts.

  A shiver of relief passed through Yumiko so overwhelming that she almost fainted.

  But she did not faint. Instead, heedless of noise—for nothing could be heard against the sound of dogs screaming and alarms wailing—Yumiko ran toward the utility room, cartwheeling over a dog cage in her way, landing, rolling, and coming to her feet inside the room between the washers and driers. She saw her nightgown, picked it up, and stuffed it into her cape pocket. A flick of the wrist slapped the wirepoon gun into her palm. She shot the grapnel up into the laundry chute.

  A spool motor in the gun spun in a whispering hum of noise. The wire tightened. She felt a jerk on the parachute harness built into her suit to which the wire was attached. A yank pulled her up out of the utility room as smoothly as a marionette being whisked offstage by the puppeteer.

  3. Alarums and Excursions

  She passed one hatch above the next as she rose from floor to floor. She squirmed through the last hatch into an upper-floor laundry room. Uniforms of busboys and cleaning maids were hanging in the darkened room. The alarm from below was muffled, almost inaudible. She cracked the door.

  Outside was a carpeted hall, two floors below her dorm. She could see two standing mirrors in the hall, each one near a stairwell. Was it her imagination, or was there a hint of frost in one of the mirrors that looked almost like the thin, mouthless face staring out? Did a chilling draft sigh from that side of the hall?

  At the same time, she heard a man’s footsteps in the stairwell and a dog’s claws clattering. “…some backup. Roust everyone out of the sack. This could be the big one. The one we’ve been prepped for. Put four men on the roof as spotters…” It occurred to Yumiko to wonder whether other hotels and nightclubs in America kept a full-time squad of bouncers and security guards who slept on-site, not to mention a K-9 corps.

  Yumiko toyed with the ring on her finger; her eyes narrowed. If both ghosts and men were hunting her, the ring could not hide her from both at once. Either one might be posted behind any one-way mirror. How could she get upstairs without being detected? If the noise woke even one of her nine roommates as Yumiko crept back into the room, and into the bed… and then there was that haunted pumpkin… There was too much commotion.

  Too much commotion? Or not enough?

  She saw a fire alarm on the wall across the hall. A flick of the wrist, and she shot her grapnel precisely into the alarm to hook the switch. She yanked on the wire. Alarms now started whooping on every floor. Wilcolac’s men could not keep everyone locked in the building, not without exposing his secrets to his innocent guests.

  She released the grapnel and retracted it with a metallic hiss into her pistol, just as two men, Kudlac and Blud, and two dogs, Batterfang and Rach, stepped out of the stairwell. Doors were beginning to open in the hall. A chubby middle-aged guest followed by a svelte young redhead with sleepy eyes stumbled into the hall. Then came a man with wild eyes, still in his nightshirt, but clutching a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Then a tall woman carrying a lantern. Then an old hag with an eyepatch, carrying a besom, wearing yellow robes and sporting a tall, conical hat. All began uttering querulous questions. More doors opened. Kudlac called out in a loud voice that all must remain calm and move to the exits.

  Yumiko made sure her mask was in place and that the seal was airtight so that no scent of her skin could escape for any dog to smell. She waited for the door opposite the laundry room to open, and the guest there, a young man with unkempt hair and a foot-long single eyebrow, carrying a bindlestaff, emerged. She stepped casually into the hall, gave a cheerful wave of the hand to Kudlac and Blud, and stepped around the young guest. In the doorframe she struck a pose, standing on one foot, the other leg bent, one hand on hip, the other raised on high, beckoning to Kudlac with her fingers.

  Kudlac drew a knife, and the guests crowding hall uttered cries and shouts of confusion as he began shoving his way quickly through the guests, shouting apologies.

  Blud was wrestling with the two dogs, yanking on their neck chains, not daring to release them.

  She blew Kudlac a kiss from the snout of her grinning mask, and, with a pirouette, danced into the empty guest room. As she had correctly recalled, this was a room with a balcony. She stepped over, flipped the latch, and opened the French doors. She waited another moment, perched on the balcony rail in a saucy pose with her legs crossed, until Kudlac struggled free of the press, came to the door, and saw her. She tossed her hands overhead gaily and fell backward into empty air, kicking her legs up as she went. Kudlac gave an involuntary cry of alarm.

  Yumiko fired her wirepoon as she fell, snagging the upper crosspiece of a telephone pole to one side. Momentum carried her through three-fourths of a great circle while Kudlac rushed out onto the balcony, staring and gasping. At the top of the arc, she released the grapnel and somersaulted through the air to land neatly on the next roof over. There came a hoarse shout from above. Men were hurrying out of the roof door atop the Cobbler’s Club, and one of them had spotted her.

  She braced the pistol with both hands and shot her wirepoon across Lexington Avenue. The grapnel caught a fire escape across the street. She twisted the ring on her finger and let the wire’s retraction throw her now-weightless body across the avenue like a stone from a slingshot. Streetlights and headlamps passed beneath her like a bright, murmuring river. As she flew, she unlimbered her baton. The wall next to the fire escape rushed toward her like an avalanche. She snapped the baton to its full length and used it like a pole-vaulter’s pole to stave off the approaching wall. Her flight path was deflected just enough that she did not ram into the corner of the building, but slid through the air past it, to soar down the narrow alley.

  She snapped open her cape, and it stiffened into gliding wings. She banked and swooped around the far side of the building, going out of sight of any observer on the Cobbler’s Club roof across the avenue. Then, she twisted the ring to increase her weight, cupped her wings to kill her speed, and caught a passing telephone pole in her hand. She followed a path like a barberpole spiral to the ground and landed lightly.

  Then, she removed her mask and cape and weapon harness and changed the color of her suit from black to white. A girl in a pale leathery catsuit was not actually out of place among the late-night crowd of the Manhattan streets. She stepped out onto the avenue and hailed a cab. She had it drive her around the block while she changed into her nightgown, and the driver twice almost wrecked his cab trying to stare at her in the rear-view mirror. Yumiko was so pleased to have money to buy things that she gave the driver a larger tip than he deserved. “I am so sorry to have confounded you,” she said with a bow.

  “Don’t worry, lady. It’s New York.”

  She then scampered lightly over the fence leading to the back alley leading to the loading dock and strolled over to where the other Peach Cobbler Girls, also in their nightgowns, were gathered. The guests from the hotel were also milling in the same area. Wilcolac was not in evidence, but Boggy Cobweb was there. For once her hair was not rolled up in a severe bun, but hung to her shoulders, the hue of smog. She was calling to the guests to remain calm and cajoling them with promises and reassurances. Yumiko was nonchalantly standing with the other girls when Joan the Wad turned around and called a roll call to make sure everyone had made it out of the building safely. A minute later the fire marshal and a fire truck arrived.

  And when all the hullabaloo was over, Yumiko strolled back inside with the others, pausing to pet Batterfang and praise him. The husky wagged his tail and barked happily at her. She gave Blud a shy look, dropped her eyes, and hurried past him. She glanced over her shoulder to see his eyes still glued to her. Then, she went skipping upstairs with the other girls, who were chattering or giggling or complaining as the mood took them. Closing her eyes, safe in the warm bed, a sense of profound pleasure, such as a magic
ian must feel when his sleight of hand fools all eyes, tickled her warmly.

  Chapter Seven: The Red Knight

  1. Hectic Evening

  Yumiko was far less buoyant the next day.

  Elfine was still missing. Her beloved, the boy named Tom, was still missing or dead. Her mother was still dead and unavenged.

  As she stood naked in the bathroom, doing her hair and make-up before donning her Cobbler Girl outfit, and staring with unsmiling eyes at a mirror which might have been one-way glass, she fretted about the hundred little clues she had left behind on her spree. Her cover had become too fragile. A single conversation with Blud, or any of her roommates, about who had been wandering about at night could expose her, or a hidden camera, or a haunted pumpkin, or some magical watchman whose existence she could not even begin to guess.

  But she still held to a thin thread of hope. The two cages marked by her tracers would eventually be shipped, one to the City of Corpses and the other to LIs, whatever that was. She had read the invoices and knew when the next shipment was due to arrive: this Wednesday. Three more days after that, it would go out. It should not be that hard to discover when a fleet of trucks was parked out back.

  So she expected a hand to fall on her shoulder that day, or the next, and it did not. Perhaps this was because things became hectic then.

  At first she thought this was become the shipment was due tomorrow. But she realized something else was in the air.

  Some of the regular staff were absent, running errands, and no one seemed to have time to tell Yumiko what was happening. The managers were ordering everything put in order and double-checked. The janitors were doing a thorough cleaning. Wilcolac Cobweb emerged from his office and was going over the stock, talking with the bartenders, the chef, and the kitchen staff. VIP tables were set up on the lounge floor, separated from the rest by a cordon of velvet ropes.

  Yumiko, wary of attracting attention, was unwilling to show any curiosity, but that night, when they were working tables before the first show, Iele the Romanian rolled her eyes at Yumiko and tossed her head with a snort. Clearly, the girl wanted to gossip: Yumiko stepped with her into the short corridor connecting the kitchen to the lounge.

  2. Very Important Elf

  Iele was fishing half a dozen twenty-dollar bills out of her cleavage, smoothing them, and tucking them into her cummerbund. “I have a live wire. Heavy tipper. Look over there. You can see him. The one built like an Olympic athlete. Or an Olympic god.”

  Yumiko opened the swinging doors a crack and peered where Iele pointed.

  Wilcolac was standing at the table side, smiling a genial if subservient smile. With him was the chief chef, who was describing the main course for the evening to the guests. There were several people at the VIP table circled by a velvet rope, but only one man with the broad shoulders and muscular build of a boxer or wrestler, certainly not of any peaceful sport.

  Yumiko understood why Iele was breathless: the man was handsome to an unearthly degree. His face was square and strong, his cheekbones high, his gray eyes piercing, his nose long and straight. His mouth was a thin slash that rarely flexed, and lines like calipers embraced it. His chin jutted like the toe of a boot. A grim dignity surrounded him like a dark aura.

  He wore hues of sable and jet, trimmed with scarlet and gold. His shirt was silk with voluminous sleeves. A collar of lace reached from shoulder to shoulder in two broad triangles. He wore dark pantaloons like a matador. His gloves and his boots were burgundy. A chain of silver set with rubies, the copper buckle of his baldric, and a larger ruby set in the pommel of his broadsword provided a touch of brightness to his dark garb. There were gold spurs on his bootheels.

  Strangely, the reflections of light caught in the shining threads of his black silk, or in the shining copper and gleaming rubies adorning him, seemed not to come from the room in which he sat. It was as if the light of stars brighter and greater than the stars in the skies of earth shone on him and shed their reflections here.

  What was the most eerie about him was the grace of his posture and gestures. Every slight movement of his hand, or the tilt of his head, was fluid, strong, and precise as a dance, and this made the other men around him look as if theirs were the movements of children, clumsy and unpracticed.

  The back of his neck to a line above his ears was shaved in a tonsure.

  Yumiko stared in fascination. Was this the same man who had kidnapped Elfine?

  The look of interest in Iele’s half-closed eyes was smokier than usual. “He desires me. The fire in him, I must quench, yes? If he asks me to drink with him, you have to watch my tables, no? We’ll split the tips for any of my tables you cover.”

  “Why me?”

  “Xana would not split fair. She’s crooked. You’re straight.”

  Yumiko said, “Why is his hair that way?”

  “For his helmet.”

  Yumiko said, “He is a knight?”

  Iele gave her a curious look and a half smile. “Ah! You know of such things? I thought you were one of us. Not a sleepwalker. Yes?”

  Yumiko pointed at her necktie where the microphone was hidden, “I know there are things we don’t talk about. But I know about the wolves and the shadows of the dead. I know about the Moths and the Cobwebs. Not a sleepwalker, no.”

  “Good! It is hard to talk, not knowing who is Nighttide or Dusk, and who is Day.”

  Sleepwalker was evidently Twilight slang for those under the mesmeric influence of the Black Spell.

  Yumiko asked again, “So, is he a knight?”

  “He is. A puissant knight and dire. They bring him in to face the foe no one can face. They say he has magic, the dark art. Very costly were the gifts to bring him. Much gold.”

  Both girls peered out the door again at the mysterious figure. There were four other men at the table and a redheaded woman in a pointed, conical hat with a veil over her face.

  The men with him were also fabulous and strange, but like stars around a central sun, the striking grace and beauty of the man in black and scarlet made the others seem to recede. A youth too young to shave, dressed in a uniform of black and red, stood at his elbow, and was armed with a longsword. He poured wine from a carafe, sipped it, and passed the cup to the elfin knight. Yumiko recognized what he was, but could not recall what the sidekick of a knight was called.

  Seated at his left was a dark-skinned, squat fellow in a leather cap. He had unusually muscular limbs and unusually bright eyes and only grinned with half his mouth.

  The second was a tall, beardless, handsome figure in scarlet, with the distant eye and stiff posture of a soldier. He had long, curling locks of fiery red that fell past his shoulder, a sneering lip, and six fingers on each hand.

  The third had an impassive, angular face, and strange, unwinking eyes like the eyes of a lizard. On his head was a fez. Trickles of smoke rose continually from both nostrils. When he opened his mouth, he seemed to carry something like a glowing coal in his throat, whose red fire was reflected from his palate and teeth. In his hand was a cigarette in a long holder which he never brought to his mouth. He wore a jacket of sparkling sequins, as bright as the patterns on the back of a poisonous snake, which Yumiko only on second glance realized was a field of priceless diamond drops, many-colored ametrine, gems of beryl, opal, topaz, and tourmaline.

  The woman sat at the knight’s right hand. Her red hair fell from her shoulders, across her chair back, to pool on the floor behind her, so long were the tresses. She wore a red silk dress which hid none of her perfect proportions. Her necklace, belt, and slippers were adorned with emeralds. When she put aside her veil to drink from her cup, the face beneath was one of stirring beauty, large of eye and full of lip, a nose tip-tilted, and a fine, small chin. Her skin was as free of freckle or blemish as polished ivory. So pale of skin she was, she seemed, in the subdued lighting of the lounge, almost to glow.

  Her gestures, like his, were like music made visible, infinitely graceful and smooth, and, also like him
, the light in her eyes, and gems at her ears, throat, and fingers caught reflections of stars not present.

  “He has a date.”

  Iele said, “I overhear. That is not his woman. It is his sister. She is the Captain’s mistress, but unfaithful to him. It is her joy to have jealous princes fight for her possession. Bloodshed follows her. She is called the war-red war-queen. Lady Malen Ruddgochren.” Iele pronounced it Rith-gock-rain. “She is older than time. She is to be feared.”

  Yumiko was not concerned with the woman. “And his name? What is he?”

  “Garlot. Sir Garlot of Listenoise, called the Red Knight. He is of the court of the underground world, you know? The Erlkoenig, who brings the winter cold and darkness of long nights, is his liege. Garlot is of the Night World and eats nectar and drinks soma, and so even the strongest of the Twilight World cannot stand against him. Ah! But Little Willy’s boss does not like it. There is much hate.”

  “I did not know Mr. Wilcolac had a boss.”

  “As in the Old World, Little Willy is a client. He has a protector. A patron. The Captain owns the club. Willy only runs it.”

  “Has he been around here? His patron?”

  “Not for two weeks. Something came up,” Iele shook her head. “We call him the Captain. He is a fiddle player and a very bad man. Not fun bad, crazy bad. Joan says he is one of the fifty sons of Lupus Loupgarou, who broke Lent seven years running.”

  “Does he have a name? This patron?”

  “Captain Cobweb, of course. Ah! Got to run! Can you cover me?” And, with a wave of her hand, Iele was off.

  Watching Iele’s retreating back, Yumiko realized the distraction of Sir Garlot offered a rare chance for some misdirection and deception of her own. It would be dangerous, coming so close after her last exploit. Suspicions surely were closing ever tighter about her like some invisible net. But she dared not let it slip away.