Joseph stared. His expression did not change, nor did his eyes, but something did, and Harris imagined the huge, unfinished man swinging out an arm and casually batting Doc off the girder. Doc must have felt it too; he took a step back and balanced himself for trouble.
But Joseph crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. "Death follows you, Doc, and strikes down those who help you and love you while leaving you unharmed. But you're right. I owe you a debt. I will pay it. I hope you don't kill me in collecting it."
Doc was silent a long moment and Harris wished he could see his face. Then Doc said, "Did Duncan ever talk about the grim world?"
"Yes."
"Did he know devisements to take people there?"
"He went there. Not long before you caught up to him. He took gear and spent a day in that place. He left the gear there. When he returned, he said the grim world was ghastly. I think he loved it."
"What sort of gear?"
Joseph shrugged. "Crates. Boxes. He took gold to spend."
Doc fell silent. Harris broke in, "So did he have one of those conjurer's circles? Do you know where it went?"
"He did. In his conjuration laboratory. It went to the grim world, as I said."
"I meant, where in the grim—"
Doc said, "Wait. I don't remember a conjuration laboratory. Was this at Wickhollow?"
"Yes. It was well-hidden. You never asked about it. You just wanted help dealing with your dead friends."
Doc didn't answer for a moment. Then, his voice more quiet: "We'll go there tonight. You need to show me this laboratory."
"Meet me here at four bells. Leave me alone until then."
"Thank you." Doc turned to leave, and Harris began to grope his way back around the girder he clung to.
But Joseph spoke again. "Goodsir Greene."
Harris looked back. "Yes?"
"If you are not bound to this man, leave him. Else you will die with him."
Harris looked away from Joseph's glum features and didn't reply. He just crept back across the girders.
* * *
"What did he mean?"
"About what?" Doc drove back to the Monarch Building more slowly than he'd left it; there was a shadow of gloom over his features.
"About your friends."
Doc was slow in answering. "Joseph was made by a deviser named Duncan Blackletter."
"Made?"
"He is not a man. He is a thing of clay and powerful devisements. One with a beating heart and, I think, a soul fit for rebirth. But he was Blackletter's slave, and did many bad things for him. He had no will of his own where Blackletter was concerned."
Harris thought about Joseph's unfinished face. It didn't look like clay. But he didn't look exactly human, either. "Was this Blackletter guy . . . the one who gave you all that trouble a while back?"
Doc shot him a sharp glance, then nodded. His voice was weary. "Duncan was a very bad man. Full of charm and good cheer even as he was murdering people. He set nations against one another to advance his businesses or to obtain knowledge.
"The last thing he did was to make plans to enslave the king and queen of Novimagos. He managed to do great things for Novimagos, anonymously. He built up a debt they could not repay and used dark devisements to tap it so he could bind their will to his. That's what he was about when my associates and I caught up to him in his home in Wickhollow, twenty years ago."
"Twenty?" Harris had to reevaluate Doc's age. "You don't look it, but that makes you forty at least."
Doc managed a faint smile. "At least." Then the smile faded. "Duncan and I fought. The old way. Not with guns or swords but with strength of will and old, old ritual. I was able to redirect his will against him, and he was destroyed, consumed by fire. I nearly was.
"But I'd had to concentrate all my attention on him. While my associates fought his allies, Angus Powrie and Joseph among them. And died, one by one. Micah Cremm. Siobhan Damvert, Jean-Pierre's mother. Whiskers Okerry. All dead." Doc's voice was barely audible over the engine noise.
"I'm sorry."
"They were neither the first nor the last. Joseph is correct, Harris. Death wanders around in my shadow. My associates know it and stay with me anyway. But as soon as we can find your path back to the grim world, you will go, and be safe."
"Yeah." Safe to do what? Harris shook his head and tried to think of something else.
Just before dusk, as they rode in the vast red limousine Harris had seen last night, Alastair explained things to Harris.
"One bell" was midmorning. Two bells was exactly noon, straight up. Three was midafternoon; four near dusk; five was the shank of the evening; six was midnight; seven was the quiet time of the night—as quiet as a wide-awake city like Neckerdam ever got—and eight bells was around dawn. Each of the bells, so named for the ringing of the clock bells that marked their passing, was divided into twenty chimes; some clocks rang off the chimes as well. A chime was made up of five hundred beats, also called ticks.
Harris did some mental math and calculated each bell at about three hours, each chime at nine minutes, and each beat—what? a little over a second. As confusing a nonmetric system as he was used to back home.
So as the sun set far to the west of Neckerdam's stone and steel canyons, Jean-Pierre, driving, pulled up beside the Bergmanli Elevations building site and honked.
Joseph, clad in his work clothes and an enormous yellow shirt, emerged through the fence gate. He walked awkwardly, as though he were new to locomotion. He climbed into the car, settling alone into the rear-facing seat opposite Doc, Alastair, and Harris.
"You must be Joseph," the doctor said. "Alastair Kornbock. Grace on you."
The man with the unfinished face gave him a little nod.
"Care for something to eat? We'll have better pickings before we leave Neckerdam."
Joseph shook his head.
Alastair reached into the little red satchel he'd brought and dragged out a green glass flask; he waved it hopefully. "Uisge?"
Joseph shook his head.
Alastair sighed, uncapped the flask, and took a sip. "This is going to be a long drive."
He was right. A strained silence settled over the car. Jean-Pierre seemed strangely stiff during the drive; Noriko kept her attention on him, and Harris felt, in spite of the emotional detachment she projected, that she was concerned for him.
Doc spent his time disassembling the volt-meter the ersatz musician had carried. "Interesting design," he said quietly. "Old techniques, decades old, but very creative. I think I can improve on it, though." He seemed disturbed by the design of the device and spoke very little after that.
They took the Island Bridge to Long Island; it amused Harris to learn that it was called Long Island. Some things obviously translated quite well from the grim world to the fair one. The community on the far side of the bridge was Pataqqsit, and in the twilight it seemed to be half city, half green park.
On the far side of Pataqqsit, where traffic thinned so that the red limousine was often alone on the tree-lined road, Harris saw the first windmill. It was tall and more slender than the archaic sort of grain-grinding mills he'd seen in photographs.
Then they topped a hill and he could see what looked like an ocean of the things laid out below him; the road cut through an enormous field full of windmills. "Jesus," he said. "What's all this?"
"Wind farm," Alastair said. "Otherwise Neckerdam would have no way to power her lights, her underground trains and high-trains, or anything."
"What about coal? Oil?"
Alastair laughed. "While we're at it, why not lean out the window to empty our bowels instead of using the water closet?"
Doc didn't look up, but his tone was admonishing. "Alastair."
Harris frowned. "Then what do cars run on?"
"Alcohol, most of them." Alastair fondly patted his red medical bag, where he'd replaced the glass flask. "Oh, not the good stuff, of course. That's for fueling people."
Noriko turned back to
face them. "I once owned a two-wheeler that ran on gas I bought from chicken farms and sewer plants."
"Chicken—methane. Of course. This place is an environmentalist's dream." Harris turned away to watch the windmills pass by and wondered why their answers annoyed him.
Probably because their responses were so unquestioning. But that didn't make much sense. He'd seen no sign that the normal people of Neckerdam were fanatically devoted to the clean, organic, tedious causes some of his own friends back home were. So why didn't they use all the same things the grimworlders did?
A few miles further on, they reached a large stone sign reading "Wickhollow." At Doc's direction, Jean-Pierre drove through the quiet town with its curiously irregular brick homes and turned down a blacktop country road, then took a narrower dirt road that led far away from the lights of the town. Finally, where trees and thick underbrush gave way to a good-sized clearing, he pulled to one side and stopped the car.
In the light cast by the nearly full moon, Harris could see a large black rectangle in the center of the clearing. On the blackness was a lot of standing rubble, some of which looked like remnants of a chimney. He followed the others as they piled out of the car.
It must have once been a huge house, Harris realized. The black rectangle was an enormous array of foundation stones, now cracked, with weeds growing through them. The blackening looked like old fire damage. After the house had burned, someone had pulled down much of the remainder and scattered the pieces all over the lot.
Doc walked out onto the foundation, looking here and there, pausing for a long moment beside an unmarked section of stone, staring down at it with eyes out of memory. Then he shook himself and looked back at Joseph. "The conjuration laboratory?"
Joseph moved out on the foundation and moved around until he found what he wanted: an irregularly cracked section of stone, an oval roughly five feet long and four high, piled high with a mound of fallen rubble.
"Just below where Duncan died," Doc said, his tone low.
Joseph had to clear the rubble away before he could get at the foundation stone beneath, and this he did with terrifying ease, scooping up thigh-high piles of stones that must have weighed hundreds of pounds and hurling them off the foundation. Then he stepped aside and waited.
"How do you open it?" Doc asked.
"I do not," Joseph said. "It's a deviser's laboratory."
"Ah." Doc closed his eyes.
Harris saw his lips move as he murmured silent words. For long moments nothing happened; then there was a faint vibration in the ground.
A square portion of the foundation stone cantilevered upward, revealing a rectangular black space below. A dry, musty smell wafted out. Doc opened his eyes and nodded in apparent satisfaction.
Alastair brought an armful of long, clumsy-looking flashlights out from the car's trunk—boot? Harris remembered them calling it a boot, like the British—and passed them around. They all lit the ungainly devices and shined their beams down on the dull gray steps heading into the earth. Doc led the way down.
The conjuration laboratory of Duncan Blackletter turned out to be a large, simple chamber. Two facing walls were covered in bookshelves, many of them now collapsed with rot and age and the weight of the volumes they held. In one corner were a plush chair, rotting and bug-eaten, and a collapsed mass that must have once been an uncomfortable cot.
Most of the floor was decorated with what Harris now recognized as conjurer's circles: unbroken rings of paint or carefully laid-out stones, decorated along the rims with painted symbols that looked a little like Ms and Ws and Hs—two or three vertical lines connected at the top, middle or bottom by short horizontal lines. The writing style didn't look at all familiar.
Jean-Pierre cast his flashlight beam again at the standing shelves of books. He looked tense and grim. "With my luck, we'll be digging our way through that until I'm grayed with age."
Alastair peered into the younger man's dark hair. "Too late. Going gray already."
"I am not." Jean-Pierre, scowling, pulled down a lock of hair and put the flashlight beam on it.
Alastair moved to the bookcase. "Stop worrying. It's good to get older."
"You're lying to me."
"The blood cools. Women become . . . less important, somehow."
"I'll die first."
Harris saw Doc smile, just a little, before the man moved to join Alastair.
It wasn't as bad as they had feared. Duncan Blackletter had kept a very organized library, and Joseph remembered which volumes had served it as an index. They were rotted now, whole sections falling to pieces no matter how carefully they were opened, but the pages pertaining to special sendings of conjuration circles were intact. Within an hour they'd found the bookshelf where the appropriate reference works lay and busied themselves looking through the aged and damaged volumes.
Harris found that he wasn't much help. Most of the works were written in that alphabet he couldn't read. Jean-Pierre described it as the old alphabet of Cretanis: "Harder to learn than the modern Isperian alphabet, and mostly forgotten these days. They don't even teach it in school."
Noriko, Joseph, and Harris, unschooled in the antique letters, went back up into the fresh air and left the other three to do the academic research. Harris brushed some of the dust off a level slab of rock, then sat. Noriko announced that she would stand watch. She disappeared into the surrounding woods.
Joseph walked awkwardly among the ruins, never slowing, never stopping for a good look, never evidencing any emotion . . . but the giant's hands would occasionally tighten into fists.
After a while, curiosity got the better of Harris. "Hey. Joseph."
Joseph, poking around in the wreckage of the chimney, looked over.
"If it bothers you so much, why don't you take a walk? Get away from it for a while. I'll honk if we need to leave."
Joseph shook his head. "Too late for that. I am back. Back where I was born. Doc has summoned up the memories. A walk will not bury them again."
"Did you really—" The question was half-out before Harris realized what he was about to ask. He cut it off and frantically searched for another way to finish the question.
"Kill them?"
Harris winced. "Well . . . yeah."
"Yes, I did." Joseph moved up in front of Harris and leaned against the upright section of chimney. "I injured Doc and killed Whiskers Okerry. It was easy. I held him over my head and twisted him until his back broke. He lived for a while. Long enough to see Angus Powrie break Siobhan Damvert's neck."
The giant's tone was so calm that it took Harris a moment to grasp what he was hearing. Gooseflesh rose on his arms. "Jesus Christ, why?"
"I had to. Duncan told me to."
"And you did everything he told you to do?"
"Everything." Joseph reached up to rub his forehead. "The words are gone now. The ones once written here; Doc took them away. While they were on me, I did everything Duncan bade." His face hadn't changed, but there was something in his eyes, dark shadows of pain, that suggested Joseph hadn't mentioned the worst of the things Duncan Blackletter had made him do.
It was another moment before Harris realized the rest—the fact that Angus Powrie had murdered Jean-Pierre's mother. No wonder he had become so hyperactive when he learned that Powrie was back.
Harris didn't ask anything more; he let Joseph return to his lonely thoughts.
The limousine, black as a moonless night, glided to a stop behind the anonymous brown Dodge van. A round face appeared in the van's rear window, and its owner gave the limo a thumbs-up sign before disappearing.
Phipps shut the engine off and glanced back at his passenger. "He says she's still in the house." He picked up the object lying on the seat beside him—a device shaped like a volt-meter—and keyed it on. After a few moments he added, "He's right. Your signal and Adonis' nearly drown it out, but it's there."
The old man looked around until Phipps pointed to a specific house—two stories, brick, nicely appo
inted. "Ah. Lights still on, I see. Night owls. We'll wait until they're asleep."
"Yes, sir." Phipps pulled the stun-gun from his pocket and checked it to make sure it was still charged. Then, his revolver. Left-handed because of the damned injury to his other arm, he clumsily pressed the catch and swung the cylinder out to make sure it was still loaded with the .357 hollowpoints.
Chapter Nine
Doc, Alastair, and Jean-Pierre spilled up out of the underground lab as though they'd been driven out by a smoke bomb. Doc gave the foundation stone a push; it was an effort, but the stone fell into place with a boom. Then they headed for the car; Harris scrambled to catch up to them. "What's up?"
"We have it," Doc said. He clutched a sagging leather-bound volume to him as though it were precious treasure. He reached in through the driver's window and honked, then climbed into the back; the others resumed their seats, Noriko returning fast enough to beat Joseph into the car. In moments, Jean-Pierre had them rolling back along the road that had brought them.
"So what does that mean?" Harris persisted.
"A complete ritual set," Doc said. "The devisement to take you back to the grim world, Harris. We'll be departing from the conjurer's circle where you arrived."
"We? Who's going with me?"
"I am. You need to find Gaby, and I need to find Gabrielle, and we must find out if they are the same woman. Gaby is in danger, and so Gabrielle probably is, too. I want to waste as little time as possible. We need to get clothes and gear back at the Monarch Building, anything you think will not stand out too much in the grim world, and then return to Heinzlin Corners."
"So how does it work?"
Doc patted the leather volume. "The usual way. You assemble sacrificial goods, set up your ritual field, make your invocations and pleas, focus your mind and intent, and it happens. In theory. Each devisement is unique, of course, with variations for the types of the sacrificial items, the exact nature of the invocation and the godly aspect to whom it is addressed, the precise construction of the conjurer's circle—"
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