Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  Dr. Faust had apparently had a word with Fastitocalon, as he’d promised; as soon as Ruthven’s breakfast things had been cleared away (coffee and spiced blood, he still didn’t know where they were getting the blood and still didn’t want to know), an orderly had arrived with his clothes and the news that somebody would be waiting at reception to escort him to Fass’s office. As he’d expected, somebody turned out to be Irazek, who gave Ruthven a slightly anxious smile.

  “Lord Ruthven,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again. I’m so sorry you’ve not been well—are you sure you feel up to this?”

  “Entirely sure,” said Ruthven. “Drop the ‘lord’ and lead on. I hear you’re working in a bakery these days?”

  Irazek had grown his hair out a bit; it almost completely hid the little carroty-orange horns, exactly the same color as the hair itself. He had been quite helpful in the end, during the Paris business, but he was definitely better off outside the ranks of Monitoring and Evaluation.

  “Yes,” he said, “Naberius’s, on Plutus Boulevard, it’s quite well known. Er. I’m sorry we don’t—carry anything that would fit your, um, dietary requirements—”

  Ruthven laughed. “Never mind. I am sure you make the best pastries in Dis. Is there some sort of map of the city I could have a look at? I barely have any idea of where anything is.”

  They were crossing the vast crystal-and-white plaza that separated the waterfront from the eight glass towers, each tapering to a point. The towers had astonished Ruthven when he’d first seen them from the Spa balcony: they looked like snaking rays of the sun, like stylized flames, twisting as they rose in a close arrangement, the tallest of them seeming to touch the distant vault of the sky. He knew he’d been in one of them—Erebus General took up most of Tower Three—but it was still a shock to see the whole complex from the outside.

  “External Affairs has all kinds of maps,” said Irazek, “I’ll find you one. M&E is in Tower Six; it’s this way.”

  He led Ruthven past the cluster of bars and restaurants that surrounded the base of the towers; one or two of them were open, serving breakfast to newspaper-reading demons at little tables outside. It made Ruthven think of Rome, and that sent a spike of longing through him: he missed Grisaille so much it hurt, a depth of feeling he hadn’t had for anyone in hundreds of years. If ever. He closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Lo—Mr. Ruthven?” said Irazek, and Ruthven shook himself out of it, reached for a smile.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m all right. Momentary aberration. Tower Six, you said?”

  “This way,” Irazek said, not looking all that convinced.

  Tower Six was the tallest—Samael’s penthouse apartment and boardroom took up the top several floors—but the rest of them were plenty tall enough. Looking up at them, following the helical twist of their structures, vast columns spiraling into the sky, made Ruthven briefly dizzy.

  Inside, the reception area was sleek black and silver, glass and chrome, and the demon at the desk looked up from a scarlet computer and gave them a practiced smile. Ruthven noticed they had not only very pointy teeth but also pupils shaped like hourglasses, and was only faintly discomfited.

  “Um,” said Irazek, “hi, this is Lord Ruthven, Director Fastitocalon is expecting him?”

  “Of course,” said the demon. “You’ll need a visitor badge, my lord, or the portal wards won’t let you into sensitive areas; please wear it at all times.” They handed Ruthven what might have looked like an ordinary ID badge, clip and all, except for the fact that it was matte black and completely blank.

  “Thank you,” Ruthven said, and clipped it to his lapel. The receptionist turned and gestured at a bank of elevators behind them.

  “Elevator six,” they said, “you’ll want the thirtieth floor.”

  “I should be getting back,” said Irazek, “um, give Director Fastitocalon my best regards?”

  “I will,” Ruthven promised. He could clearly remember his own surprise this spring at Fastitocalon’s apparent restoration to well-being and administrative competence; during the course of their previous acquaintance he’d been plagued with chronic ill-health and exiled to Earth, but a prolonged sojourn at the Lake Avernus Spa had seemingly fixed him. Ruthven thought it had probably come as something of a surprise to the rest of the M&E staff as well.

  The elevator buttons appeared to be made out of jewels; everything else was rather upsettingly ordinary. On the thirtieth floor he stepped out to find himself in a reception area that could have been in any large and expensive office building in any large and expensive city on Earth. Glass doors separated the space from what looked like a corporate cube farm, full of people busily working away on computers, hurrying back and forth, and Ruthven thought things were getting faintly surreal. He wanted someone to saunter past carrying a pitchfork, or laugh diabolically and flap their leathery wings; all these people seemed to be interested in was the mounds of paper on every desk.

  He introduced himself; the receptionist paged Fastitocalon, and he had to wait only a few minutes before the latter appeared, threading his way between the cubes. He looked somewhat less pristine than he had at the Spa, shirtsleeves rolled up and tie loosened, but he gave Ruthven a weary smile. “Hello—sorry for the lack of fanfare, we’re all working flat-out, I’m afraid.”

  “I can see that,” said Ruthven. “Tell me quickly what’s happening and what I can do to help?”

  “Step into my office,” said Fastitocalon, pushing the glass doors open. “And mind the Bosch-ear demonlets; we’ve got an infestation at the moment.”

  “Bosch-ear demonlets,” Ruthven repeated slowly.

  “Exactly what they sound like. They’re ears on legs. It’s a little startling if you’re not expecting one.” He was leading Ruthven along the corridor between groups of cubes, pausing every now and then to look at someone’s work and tell them to adjust something. Ruthven realized that the stacks of paper weren’t just printouts: they were graphs, sheet after sheet of a red-ink trace on blue ruled paper, and he knew where he’d seen that particular type of graph before.

  “These are the essograph traces that never got properly analyzed,” Ruthven said. “The data you were talking about. How much of it is there?”

  “A very great deal,” said Fastitocalon, quellingly, and nodded to an open door with DIRECTOR stenciled on it. “You see why I’m in something of a rush. We need to know what’s in those readings before we can have any real idea of what might be happening, and why—before anything else goes dramatically wrong. London was bad enough; Paris was worse. I’ve still not quite got my strength back after repairing that particular thin stretch of reality, and that was with quite a lot of help.”

  Ruthven could clearly remember how violent the burst of energy had been when Fastitocalon had tack-welded shut the damaged section of space-time. He was about to follow him when something ran over his foot; he yelped and looked down to find not a mouse but…

  Okay, that was an ear on legs.

  “I’m sorry,” Fastitocalon was saying, “the bloody things are everywhere—”

  “No,” he said, raising a hand. “Actually it helps. The—the weirdness. It’s a little reassuring.”

  Fastitocalon looked at him, eyebrow raised. “Feel free to adopt as many as you like. Do you want coffee?”

  Ruthven bet it was absolutely awful coffee, from an urn, with powdered creamer, and somehow with that thought, the absurdity of the situation slipped over from upsetting into something like exhilaration. When in Rome, or when in Hell…

  “I’d love some,” he said, and smiled.

  “I’m no good at this,” said Greta Helsing, passing a hand over her face. They were back in the conference room, with its flying-saucer phone squatting in the center of the table. The telltale light was dark.

  Varney and Tefnakhte looked at one another—she could feel the glance, and resented it enormously—and Varney began to say something about how yes of course she was when the phone rang. Gre
ta leaned over and pushed its little button.

  “Grisaille?” she said.

  “C’est moi. Has anything earth-shattering occurred on your end?”

  “Not so far. There was one brief episode of the fainting, but only one. What happened with the woman?” She’d looked up Leonora Van Dorne on the Internet after Grisaille’s previous call, and hoped like hell that American aristocracy was vulnerable to vampire thrall.

  “Funny you should ask. We trundled on over to her adorable little enormous fuckoff mansion with our metaphorical hats in hand and practically the first thing out of the Van Dorne’s rosy lips was, I know you’re thieves.”

  “Fuck,” said Greta, but he cut her off.

  “It gets better. So the kid and I look at one another in some considerable dismay and I get ready to drop a ton of thrall on her and leg it, when she comes out with, ‘And there’s something I want you to steal for me.’ My dears, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

  “Lots of stone feathers in her collection,” said Cranswell’s voice, and Greta could picture Grisaille’s eyeroll. “So it turns out that Van Dorne wants the stela thing, too,” Cranswell went on. “It’s the only one in the world, so she has to have it, apparently. I mean, I’m not surprised, she goes around wearing irreplaceable Middle Kingdom jewelry like it’s mass-produced Tiffany; she has a kind of cavalier relationship with the whole ‘this thing should be in a museum as opposed to in my living room’ concept.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “What could we say?” Grisaille told her, and now she could picture his who, me? expression. “I believe the general thrust was something along the lines of, ‘Yes of course, ma’am, it’d be our pleasure to assist you in this matter, there’s just the little problem of how to winkle the thing out of its current setting without causing alarm and consternation on the part of the museum authorities,’ and get this, she was all, ‘Nonsense, don’t worry about that, I’ll make some phone calls and the item will be taken off display for safekeeping because as a prominent collector and personal friend of several auction house directors I’ve received credible threats that someone will try to steal it.’”

  “Good heavens,” said Varney. “I don’t think I can remember ever encountering a more brazen bit of effrontery.”

  “It rather took the breath away. So we, as in Cranswell and I, will make our way unto the museum’s loading dock tonight in the guise and seeming of armored-van personnel, complete with armored van accessory, and if we have even the slightest bit of luck, we’ll have the thing out of there and into our custody in no time at all. It will undoubtedly disappoint the Van Dorne when we fail to arrive at her prearranged location, poor lamb, but the case can be made that this experience serves as a lesson on morality.”

  “I get to drive the van,” said Cranswell.

  “Yes, you get to drive the van. The rest of it’s all details with which I won’t burden the home team. As soon as we get the magical MacGuffin safely away, I’ll ring up the New York demon types and ask for a lift back here, and that, I believe, will be all she wrote. Do I have the green light?”

  Varney and Tefnakhte looked at Greta. After a moment she sighed, pushed her hair back. “I don’t know why everyone seems to think I’m the one in charge here; we’re all equally making this up as we go along.”

  “Because you are,” said Tefnakhte mildly. “Interim Medical Director Helsing.”

  “That’s facile and you know it. Oh, hell. Yes, Grisaille, you have the green light, but be bloody careful, all right? Both of you. Get out of there if it starts to go wrong, your safety is much more important than a carved bit of stone, even if it is a very significant carved bit of stone.”

  “To hear is to obey,” said Grisaille. When he was under stress, he got a lot more facetious, Greta had observed. “I’ll text before we go into action. It’ll be about ten o’clock our time, I’m afraid, so you might not want to stay up waiting.”

  “You think any of us are going to be able to sleep?” said Greta, bone-dry. “You just concern yourself with getting in and out safely.”

  “I will,” he said, and she could hear how tired he was underneath it. “Ta-ta, darlings.”

  The light on the phone went out. Greta stayed where she was, staring at it, for a few moments before leaning back in her chair and letting out a deep breath.

  “Well,” she said. “This is certainly the most eventful week I’ve had in, oh, must be getting on for seven whole months now.”

  “Do you think he can pull it off?” Tefnakhte said. “And I’m sorry, it’s the pattern identification habit, but doesn’t it seem awfully strange that we and the woman should both want to steal the stela at the same time?”

  “Of the strange things that are currently happening,” said Greta, “that’s pretty low on my list. We can worry about the Van Dorne and what to do with priceless stolen artifacts after we solve the actual problem at hand.”

  Varney and Tefnakhte looked at one another again. “What?” Greta demanded.

  “You,” said Varney with a smile in his voice. “Being actually rather good at this.”

  “I’m not, it’s just what has to be done, that’s all. And right now what has to be done is more coffee, and possibly even a shower, and food, and then I have to get back to my actual job, which does not seem to have stopped being necessary.”

  It was inconvenient, Grisaille thought, that of the vampire traits he’d ended up with, turning into mist was not an option. He could do the bat thing, but he was no good on eagles, mist, or big black dogs with glowing scarlet eyes, which were the other traditional options. Mist would have made the infiltration part of tonight’s festivities a lot easier.

  As it was, he’d still found his way in bat shape through the ventilation system, which was designed to keep objects the size of human beings out but posed little difficulty for Desmodus rotundus. Cranswell was outside in the armored van and matching uniform which Ms. Van Dorne had arranged for them—Grisaille had been not at all surprised that the Van Dorne could get hold of specialty rolling stock on very little notice, since she probably spent a lot of time trundling priceless artifacts back and forth from auctions, or possibly other people’s houses, late at night—parked in the loading dock, waiting. From where Grisaille stood in the vast glass-walled atrium of the Sackler Wing, he couldn’t quite see the van, because part of a two-thousand-year-old temple was in the way.

  Despite his worry over Ruthven and his general desire to get this over with, Grisaille couldn’t help a certain excitement. It had been ages since he’d had a chance to steal things; in fact, the last item he’d personally lifted from a museum was a large ruby ring originally belonging to a fourteenth-century bishop, and the only regret he had regarding that particular incident was the fact that he’d stolen it for someone who had turned out not to deserve it in the slightest. This time, even though it was ridiculously fraught, he was at least stealing something for a relatively good reason.

  He was fairly sure he’d be able to carry the stela himself if necessary, but it was far preferable to have the museum’s own movers put it in the truck for him, for several reasons. Van Dorne had called him earlier to confirm the specific time when the thing would be taken off display—thus confirming that she had, in fact, arranged for it to be moved—and he’d been slightly impressed by her determination. It really was going to be a pity when she figured out they weren’t going to show up.

  Grisaille still couldn’t work out what it was about her that bothered him so much, apart from the sheer bloody-minded greed; that was practically vampiric, anyway. It was something about the way she smelled that wasn’t quite human, or wasn’t just human; he wondered if she was part-something, like Greta’s half-rusalka nurse. Her eyes were peculiar.

  He was running through the potential species that might have intermarried with old-money New York families when a faint change in the air gave him the cue he’d been waiting for. A few moments later he could hear footsteps, and sm
ell slightly anxious human wearing deodorant that clashed with their perfume: the curator, here to oversee the process of moving the stela. She’d arrived before the movers. Excellent.

  Grisaille took a handful of change from his pocket and tossed it into the reflecting pool with a splash that sounded very loud in the silent museum; and retreated into the darker shadows of the temple proper. He had his being inconspicuous effect turned up all the way, and the security cameras would be able to pick up only a faint dark blur; the motion sensors blithely ignored his presence.

  The faint gasp, and a moment later the sharper hint of surprise and fear in the air, told him everything he needed to know. This part Grisaille was going to enjoy, even if he was undoubtedly going to end the evening with a vicious headache; it was worth it.

  What the cameras saw: a minute later, a youngish woman creeping through the doorway from the study gallery, eyes wide in the dark, and holding her ID badge up to the nearest camera. The motion sensors went off, but in the security control center the guards on duty recognized Susan Blake, who’d just come to talk to them about the planned move, and who was supposed to be in the Egyptian section tonight.

  Later, those guards would be asked some serious questions about why they hadn’t kept closely watching that particular channel.

  Susan Blake looked around, trying to find any sign of whatever had splashed in the pool—that hadn’t been her imagination, she’d heard it—and caught her breath in a sharp gasp when something rustled inside the darkness of the temple itself.

  God but this place was fucking spooky after dark—she knew better than to let herself start thinking about the blank-eyed gaze of thousands of carved smiling faces, and what she’d do if those sculptured staring heads suddenly turned to look at her as she passed by, but there was something in there and she had to find out what it was; that was her job.

  She took a step closer, and then another step, peering into the deeper darkness, and froze in blank stomach-dropping terror when two round points of red light suddenly looked back at her. Quite close up.