Stiletto

by Daniel O'Malley

  “We should have a conversation,” said the Bishop. The blond man’s face twisted in frustration.

  “Damn it! So close. Well, there’s always next time.” He shrugged, and Odette saw his eyes unfocus as he went limp in the Bishop’s hand. The knife dropped to the floor.

  “Well, that’s disappointing,” remarked the Bishop.

  32

  Before we begin, should Pawn Clements really be present?” asked Sir Henry. Felicity flushed and looked down at her feet. In the wood-paneled conference room, she was the only one standing. At one end of the table was the entire Court of the Checquy. She had been a trifle amused to note that they’d arrayed themselves in the positions of pieces on the chessboard, with the Lord and Lady flanked by the Bishops, who were flanked by the Chevs, who were flanked by the Rooks. Apparently, Rook Thomas was the Lady’s Rook. Felicity herself was standing against the wall behind Rook Thomas.

  At the other end of the table were four representatives of the Broederschap. Odette looked very small between Marcel and Ernst. Marie, her hair a rich mahogany, was sitting on the other side of Ernst. The distance between the two parties was not great, but it seemed very significant at that moment.

  “I requested that Pawn Clements join us,” said Rook Thomas. “I have absolute confidence in her discretion, and I believe that she can provide some important information.”

  “Very well, then,” said Sir Henry. “Let us proceed.” As one, the Court looked across to the members of the Broederschap. “Graaf van Suchtlen, earlier this evening, an attack occurred. Bishop Alrich observed that it was very specifically targeted at a member of this Court. The leader of the attackers, who has apparently lapsed into a state of catatonia, seemed to know Miss Leliefeld. A Checquy driver with no history of any unnatural abilities suffers a convulsion and vents a chemical weapon out of his skin—a weapon that appears to affect everyone except Miss Leliefeld. And the body parts of the attackers that our people managed to gather up, well, they show evidence of . . . alterations.” His face, which had been serious before, now looked distinctly stern—almost merciless. “This all combines to form a very troubling scenario. We require an explanation. A true and complete explanation. Otherwise, this is going to go to a very, very ugly place.”

  The graaf’s face was expressionless, but he made a movement with his shoulder, like someone shifting to stretch a sore muscle. Everyone tensed, except for Lady Farrier, who rolled her eyes. The atmosphere in the room was icy, and all the occupants of the room, as if by agreement, had their hands flat on the table in front of them. All of them, that is, except Felicity, who had her hands clenched at her sides, and Marcel, who was making notes on some writing paper and seemed quite unaware of any tension.

  Felicity wondered anxiously if she was going to be witness to the first executive-level battle since the last time the Americans came for dinner.

  “Very well,” said the graaf finally. Just saying that seemed to have robbed him of his strength, because there was a pause sufficiently long that Marcel even looked up from his notes.

  “Ernst,” said Rook Thomas reprovingly.

  “I apologize. This is difficult. I am ashamed.” Odette looked up at him, startled. “I had hoped that we could resolve this trouble without ever revealing it to the Checquy, but we have failed.” He sighed. “For the past several months, we have been the subject of attacks, horrible attacks upon our facilities and our people. There have been deaths, mutilations, and sabotage.”

  “Why on earth didn’t you tell us about this?” asked Chevalier Eckhart. “We could have come to your assistance, even in Europe. Who are these attackers? Do you know?”

  “Oh yes,” said Ernst, and his voice shook with rage. “We know who they are. Among ourselves, we refer to them as the Antagonists, but in truth they are us. They are a splinter faction of the Broederschap.”

  “Oh, bloody hell!” exclaimed Rook Thomas in disgust. Everyone stared at her in surprise. The Rook seemed enraged, and she looked up at the ceiling with her mouth twisted. “What is wrong with you people?” It was not immediately apparent to whom she was speaking. She shook her head and, with a visible effort, calmed herself down. “Go on,” she said coldly.

  “It is the most shameful part, knowing that it is our own family members and colleagues who are responsible for this,” said Ernst hesitantly.

  “And dare we ask why they are doing this?” asked Lady Farrier. “What is the cause of this schism?”

  “You, of course,” said Ernst.

  “Of course,” said Farrier flatly.

  “When I announced that the Broederschap would be joining forces with the Checquy, there were some protestations.”

  “Did you tell them about the pension plan?” asked Chevalier Whibley. “It’s index-linked.” He realized everyone was looking at him. “My apologies.”

  “He didn’t tell them anything,” said Odette darkly. “Just that it would be happening.” Grootvader Ernst shot her a look, but she was staring down at her hands and didn’t notice.

  “And it will be happening,” said Grootvader Ernst.

  “Grootvader Ernst is accustomed to people doing what he tells them to,” said Odette.

  “Yes.” He nodded. There was a long pause, but no more information was forthcoming. Apparently, he felt that everything had been said that needed to be said. People did what he told them to. He had told them to join the Checquy, and so they would. Odette diplomatically closed her eyes before she rolled them. Then she opened them again.

  “There was quite a bit of shock when the announcement was made,” she said. “We were informed that one of the heads of the Broederschap had been killed.” She didn’t add that he had been killed by the Checquy, but everyone was thinking it. “Then we were told that Grootvader Ernst had made peace with the Gruwels—I’m sorry, with your organization. Then we were told that we would be merging with this organization. All of this information was communicated over the course of five minutes.”

  “Oh, I said it nicer than that!” snapped Ernst.

  “Not much nicer!” snapped back Odette. “We’ve lived in secret for centuries, Grootvader, petrified that the Checquy would track us down and finish the job they’d started in 1677. And then suddenly you expect us to move in with them! Of course people were going to react.”

  “I expected a reaction, but not this madness.” The two of them stared at each other, and Felicity was caught by their resemblance. They might be separated by multiple generations, but there was no doubt that they were related.

  “And who are these rebels, these Antagonists?” asked Chevalier Eckhart. “What resources do they have to command?”

  “There are five of them,” said Marcel, who’d returned to his notes. “Only five now. But they are dangerous.”

  “It was surprising, at least to me,” said Ernst. “I had anticipated trouble from the older members of the Broederschap, those most set in their ways. There are still a few who have been with us since the very beginning, who remember the Isle of Wight and the Checquy. If anyone could be expected to hold on to their hatred, I thought it would be them. But it was not that way at all. Rather, it was the younger people, the apprentices, who would not countenance peace.”

  “I knew there were people missing from the files you gave us!” exclaimed Rook Thomas triumphantly. “There was a gap in the demographics, from age nineteen to twenty-six.”

  “Wait, so the five are your friends?” Felicity burst out incredulously. “The ones from the photos? Your boyfriend?” Everyone stared at Felicity, but her eyes were on Odette, who looked back for a moment and then nodded slightly. “You told me they died!” Felicity said accusingly to Marcel. He glanced up from his notes and gave a little shrug.

  “They were angry,” said Odette brokenly. “So angry.”

  Paranoia formed a crucial component of every Grafter’s makeup. Like twenty-twenty vision or a tolerance for gluten, if you weren’t born with it, it was implanted in you at an early age. And the cause of th
is paranoia was the Checquy.

  When the Broederschap troops marched onto the Isle of Wight in 1677, they had anticipated that there would be no real challenges. The closest they had ever come to an inexplicable phenomenon was a regenerative pig they’d stumbled across, and even that was dead after they had tried to see just how regenerative it was.

  As a result, when the operatives of His Majesty’s Supernatural Secret Service exhibited abilities on the battlefield that made absolutely no sense at all, the Broederschap was shaken to its core. During the campaign, the Grafters captured prisoners and snatched corpses. They frantically dissected them, and what they found (or failed to find) defied even the Broederschap’s understanding of science and, indeed, of logic.

  The small portion of the Grafters who escaped the purge never felt truly safe. Always in the backs of their minds (and at the beginning of the agenda for every meeting they ever held) was the knowledge that the Checquy was out there, lurking, on their strange gray island.

  And so the Grafters kept very much to themselves. If they amassed too much power or wealth or gained any prominence at all, they might catch the eye of the Checquy or some equivalent body. Rather than placing all their eggs in one basket, the Broederschap established chapter houses throughout Europe: in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Marseille, Hamburg—large cities where they would be lost amidst the population. After a century or two, they also built chapter houses in Belgium and returned circumspectly to their homeland.

  Security was always paramount. But despite their scattered distribution across Europe, the Grafters were not isolated from one another. Like many scientists and academics, they thrived on constant collaboration, and information and research results were shared as a matter of course. Younger members acted as couriers, traveling to visit relations and colleagues and carrying materials and heavily encrypted documents within their bodies.

  With the advent of telephony and then, much later, the Internet, the Grafters developed ways to take advantage of these new technologies without putting themselves at risk. Certain trusted flunkies were packed full of complex communications equipment and acted as the ultimate secretaries. However, lacking flunkies, the younger members of the brotherhood were obliged to improvise, and one of Odette’s friends had come up with designs that allowed animals to fill the flunky roles.

  And so Odette had been sitting in her studio in Roeselare, Belgium, listening to the voices of her closest friends come out of the mouths of five members of the lizard family and a tortoise.

  “This is insane,” said Saskia’s voice. “Graaf Ernst has lost his mind if he is honestly thinking there could be peace between us and the Gruwels! He is betraying us, betraying the generations that have worked and died to give us what we have today!”

  It was startling to hear such rage in Saskia’s normally gentle voice, and it didn’t help that it was coming from the passionless face of a tortoise. Saskia, who lived by the seaside in Marseille and could breathe underwater and created beautiful perfumed butterflies with wings like flowers. Saskia, who had taken Odette shopping in Paris for her first gown and taught her to dance.

  “What he is proposing—” began an iguana with the voice of her uncle Dieter, but it was cut off by a bright green chameleon.

  “He is not proposing anything,” declared Pim. Odette could picture him striding around in his studio down the street from hers, as he always did when he was caught up in something. Pim was passionate, innovative, a genius among the Grafters, and Odette loved him with all her heart and all her heat. He had sculpted her spurs for her, and he would kiss her closed eyes and tell her how much he adored her. “He simply told us: ‘We will be joining ourselves to the Checquy. Peacefully.’ Just like that!”

  “As if there could ever be peace with those abominations!” spat Mariette from her home in Brussels. At twenty-one, the only member of the group younger than Odette, Mariette spent as much time studying history as she did the craft of the Broederschap. She had interviewed Graaf Ernst and Graaf Gerd on many occasions and had talked for long hours with the few Grafters who had been alive since the very beginning of the Broederschap. Odette had had a hand in crafting her eyes. “They tried to rob us of our future! The Checquy would have obliterated our people, our families, everything we were if they’d had their way!”

  “Well, after our armies tried to invade their country,” pointed out Simon languidly. His lizard, a frill-necked variety, had something of Simon’s look about it. It might have been the amused expression or the fact that it kept flaring its ruff to get attention. Simon was Odette’s cousin, and he never hesitated to push the bounds of either biological science or other people’s sensibilities. He had been known to turn up at Broederschap events looking completely inhuman.

  “That is not the point!” said Mariette. “After you have won a war, you do not kill every person on the other side! You do not order them to destroy their culture and slaughter their own people.”

  “Even if they hadn’t forced us into hiding,” said Claudia’s chameleon, “their very nature makes them dangerous.” Living in Brussels, Claudia was the one who had designed their reptilian communications network, and she’d secretly gained access to some of the secure records the brotherhood had on its enemies. “I’ve scrutinized the notes of our handwerksmannen, and there is simply no explanation for what the Checquy are. Their DNA is perfectly normal.”

  “How can they be so certain?” asked Odette curiously. Even for the Grafters, genetics could be tricky, with unexpected surprises lurking in the coils of code.

  “They have twice grown clones of three Checquy operatives,” said Claudia, and the reptiles all fell silent. Given a few cells from a living thing, the Grafters could produce an exact genetic duplicate of the original. The prospect of their creating a Checquy-thing in the lab was a disquieting thought.

  “Was it done under speed-growth conditions?” asked Pim thoughtfully. The Grafters had the means to rapidly accelerate the aging process, bringing a subject to a particular point in its life span and then allowing it to resume normal metabolism. It was useful because one could see the results of a new process without having to wait years for it to come to fruition. Plus, it saved on lab time and maintenance costs.

  “The first batch were speed-grown, yes,” said Claudia. “And none of them displayed any sign of the originals’ powers. One was a copy of a Checquy man who had patagia and was covered in yellow fur. The clone was a perfectly normal man with brown hair.”

  “But speed-growth isn’t perfect,” observed Mariette. She was right. Speed-grown organisms, whether or not they were clones, had various built-in problems. The growing process cut their life spans to a fraction of what they would normally be. At a random point, they would suddenly suffer rapid cellular breakdown, aging in moments, their flesh rotting on the bone.

  “Yeah, you know that, and I know that, and, oh, wait, everyone in the Broederschap knows that as well,” said Claudia tartly. Even her lizard was rolling its eyes, as only a chameleon could do. Mariette’s lizard kept its mouth firmly closed.

  “Don’t be a snot, Claudia,” said the tortoise with Saskia’s voice. Odette rested her cup of tea on the tortoise’s shell and closed her eyes. It sounded as if Claudia and Mariette were ready to break out into one of their trademark arguments.

  “Fine,” said the chameleon sniffily. “Anyway, yes, they then did a normal-growth cloning. They spent twenty years raising the clones to adulthood. Same results. No powers, no duplication of unnatural appearances.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Mariette hesitantly.

  “That they’re abominations,” said Claudia flatly. “Whatever they are, they don’t belong in nature. They’re not bound by the rules of science.”

  “Demons,” said Simon, and there was no trace of his usual amused tone.

  “I had thought the Broederschap was working against them,” said the Saskia-tortoise, sounding lost. Odette reached out and, ridiculously, patted the tortoise to comfort it.

>   “We were,” said Dieter. Although he was her uncle, he was only two years older than Odette, and more like a big brother. His laboratory was five minutes’ walk away from hers and Pim’s, and they had collaborated on several projects together. Also, his father, Marcel, was highly ranked in the Broederschap and a close confidant of Graaf Ernst’s. “Papa said that everything was proceeding well.”

  “And now this!” exclaimed Saskia. “They want us to ally with them, to join ourselves with these atrocities who drove us underground. I simply cannot believe it.”

  “Believe it,” said Claudia grimly. “Because it’s happening.”

  “’Dette, you’ve been pretty quiet this whole time,” said Pim. “What do you think?” Odette opened her eyes. All the lizards and the tortoise were looking at her expectantly. It was almost worse than having her friends staring at her in person. At least, she would never have used the actual Saskia to hold her teacup. She hastily plucked it up.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she confessed. “I mean, the Checquy is . . .” She trailed off helplessly.

  The idea of the Checquy gave me nightmares all through my childhood, she thought. But that was when they were the monsters under the bed and in the closet. Now I know that they’re monsters in suits, in offices. If they’re a part of a government, if they take orders from a government, then perhaps they can be reasoned with. But she didn’t say that. She didn’t dare.

  “There are some things one cannot do,” said Pim. “Things the graaf cannot ask us to do. And I cannot ally myself with these monsters, who have done so much harm to my people.” There was a murmur of agreement among the reptiles. Miserable, Odette kept silent.

  “We need to meet,” said Dieter. “To discuss this further, face-to-face.” Odette looked up hopefully. If there was to be more discussion, then there was the possibility of coming to a sensible conclusion. Dieter will convince them to be reasonable, she thought.