by Conner, Jack
The killer swiveled. A flash of fire signaled another gunshot, an instant before the crack reached Tavlin’s ears. Even as the assassin spun, Tavlin flung himself to the roof. The bullet whizzed overhead.
Then Tavlin was up and moving again, the killer disappearing and then reappearing between chimneys and peaks and walls. Tavlin followed. The assassin made his way into the industrial sector. Here the roofs were further apart, and the man scaled down the walls and alit on the streets. Tavlin clambered down a fire escape and followed. He could smell the stink of the sewers now; they were on the edge of the city, close to the shore, where the influence of the scented alchemical lamps was weakest.
The assassin emerged from the cover of the buildings and ran along the docks, down Eyersly Blvd., which bordered the shore and encircled much of the city. Warehouses and factories still lined one side. As soon as Tavlin went after him, the killer turned and fired again. Tavlin reeled back. When he judged the killer too far away to fire accurately, he reemerged.
A tentacle rose from the black water and curled toward his leg. The huge suckered limb attempted to lasso his ankle. He leapt it, barely. What the hell?
Another tentacle rose, then another. Huge fleshy bodies strained against encrusted bars that just breached the lake’s surface. Someone was transporting illegally-caught giant squid from the Atomic Sea, probably for use as either circus fodder or expensive menu items.
Tavlin swore and ran on. At last he saw the killer stop at a gate in a fence surrounding a particular factory, show some I.D., then be admitted through. The man spoke with a figure at the gate, pointing back.
The figure withdrew a pistol and started for Tavlin.
Shit, thought Tavlin, and stopped. Panting, sweating, joints aching, he watched the dark shape approach. As the light of a passing streetlamp revealed it, Tavlin saw glistening black flesh, huge black eyes and a thrusting snout. It was one of the Suulm, a salamander-like race that lived in underground caverns, typically dwelling near black lakes. They were creatures that loved the water and disdained man and man’s technology, thus it surprised Tavlin to see one near the foul sewer water, carrying a pistol and clearly cooperating with men.
Tavlin ducked behind a corner just as the Suulmite lifted its gun and fired at him. The bullet struck chips from the wall.
Tavlin waited for the creature to approach, then popped out and threw his knife at its head. It had to adjust the angle of its gun to deflect the oncoming blade. The gun fired anyway, but the bullet passed harmlessly over Tavlin’s head and struck a warehouse wall.
Tavlin rushed the wet, dripping Suulmite, and slammed hard into it. He grabbed its wrists in his hands, forced them up and kneed it in the crotch. The Suulm apparently were not so sensitive in this area, and the creature opened its large snout and snapped vicious teeth at Tavlin’s throat. He wrenched himself away, taking the gun with him.
He aimed at the Suulmite’s chest. Before he could fire, a strong black hand swatted the gun away and sent it hurling end over end down the docks. It landed atop one of the squid cages and nearly fell through. The Suulmite’s other hand made a fist and crashed into Tavlin’s jaw. He staggered backward, keeping his feet with an inelegant flap of his arms to balance himself as starbursts flickered in his vision.
Enough. Tavlin edged around the Suulmite, making for the gun.
The Suulmite wasn’t about to let him get to it first. The creature leapt to all fours and waddle-ran toward it, tail wagging for balance behind it. The Suulmite moved on all fours faster than Tavlin could run, but Tavlin had a head start. Still, they reached the gun almost at the same time. Tavlin just barely scooped it up and fired—not at the Suulmite, who was low and moving, but at the thick padlock just before him.
Freed, something massive and misshapen erupted from the cage in an orgy of tentacles, huge eyes and snapping beaks. Tavlin ran, screaming, but his screams were not as loud as the surprised Suulmite, who was immediately caught up in a dripping limb. Tavlin did not look back to see the Suulmite’s fate, but the salamander creature’s screams lasted longer than Tavlin would have supposed, then ended abruptly.
Dear gods, I just killed a man. Or whatever a Suulmite is.
Feeling sick, Tavlin reached a space where the docks stretched out over the lake, and many boats of various sizes bobbed on the calm waters, heaving up and down very slowly to the small swells that rippled across the lake, mostly caused by the movements of the town itself. He sucked in deep breaths and grabbed his knees for support. Sweat stung his eyes. His legs shook. If his hands had been steady enough, he would have stuffed and lit his pipe. Behind him, he could hear the thrashing of the squid-thing, the breaking of wood, the groan of metal and the shouts of townspeople rushing toward it in order to contain the thing, but the noises were far away now. He was safe for the moment.
What had the Suulmite been guarding? What was in that factory, and who owned it, and why did they need whatever the killer had been bringing to them?—if he had been bringing anything. Tavlin thought he’d seen a pouch on the man’s belt, but he couldn’t be certain. Still, he had to assume the man had been about the same business he’d been about earlier that night when he’d killed the five people at the Hall of the Wide-Mouth. If, of course, it had been the same man. Perhaps Tavlin should double back, try to sneak into the factory ...
He shook it off. They would be on high alert now.
“Shit,” he said, partly just to hear his own voice. It didn’t sound as steady as he’d like.
As he was standing there collecting his thoughts, a white mist rolled in off the water. At first he barely noticed it, but when it moved closer his eyes were drawn to it. It flowed across the lake, a contained cloud of whiteness, coming straight toward him. At first it was just a dark, amorphous shape at the edge of the city lights, then the roils of darkness became roils of whiteness, and the cloud streamed toward Tavlin as if driven by phantom winds. It was coming straight for him, and only him, there could be no mistake.
The hairs lifted on the back of his neck. His knees turned to jelly. A pit formed in his stomach, and he felt cold. If he’d been able to reason logically he would have run, but an odd paralysis had come over him.
The cloud rushed toward him.
I’m safe here on the docks, he thought. Whatever it was, it must be limited to moving on the water. Surely.
It reached the docks and sped across them, a churning cloud whose summits rose higher than Tavlin was tall. It bore down on him.
Before he could shake off his terror to run, the cloud slowed, and the tendrils of vapor sloughed away from its central mass, revealing a beautiful young woman. She was all of white, not like porcelain, and not quite ghost-like, but somewhere in the middle. He could see the suggestion of shadows through her, but she was not quite translucent. She glowed, very faintly, a pulsing whiteness, and when the light pulsed bright her limbs glowed like glass. Flowing blonde or blonde-seeming hair fell to her delicate shoulders, and it was almost like vapor as it swirled there.
She came straight toward Tavlin. She stopped when she was near, and he gasped as he stared up at her, buoyed as she was on her cloud. He could not see her feet. Vapor swirled all around her.
She was beautiful. She possessed an otherworldly splendor, an inhuman exquisiteness, that he had never before been able to imagine. Her nose was small and straight, her lips full and round, but not overly so, her brow fine and high, her cheekbones chiseled as if from ivory. But her eyes ...
Luminous, startling, possessed of an indefinable color, they pierced him. He felt their presence as if her gaze was a physical weight, settling on his shoulders, driving the breath from his lungs.
He stumbled back. He felt as if he were about to pass out.
She flowed toward him. One of her slender arms rose up to his face, and he realized for the first time that she was utterly naked. Clothed only by the clouds, and this only barely, she stood before him nude, phantasmagorical, otherworldly. If she had been human, he would have placed her in her late te
ens, but there was no telling. She was slender and supple, delicate and graceful.
Her bone-white hand reached toward his face, and as if in a dream he let it approach. She smiled softly at him, and he was struck again by her luminous eyes. They transfixed him. Speared him.
Her fingers brushed his cheek, and they were soft and warm but light, oh so light, almost as if they didn’t exist at all.
“Tavlin ...” Her voice was like a sigh.
“Lady ...” He wanted to kiss those perfect lips.
Her hand seized his throat and squeezed. Pain like fire filled him. Her beautiful, angelic face twisted into an expression of wrath, and her eyes burned. “Why did you take it?”
“Wh-wh—” He gasped around her hand but couldn’t speak.
“Why did you take it?”
She shook him like a rag doll.
He tore himself away, and for a long time he knew nothing save the vague patter of his feet. Dimly he realized he was running, but to where, or from what, he did not know. Often he looked over his shoulder, as if making sure something wasn’t following him, but he wasn’t sure why.
In the morning he awoke in an alley. His head throbbed and he was covered in grime. He remembered everything. He couldn’t stop the shaking in his hands and legs.
Chapter 3
He returned to the Twirling Skirt. Entering through a rear entrance, he cleaned himself off in his room, used the lavatory and descended to have breakfast with the ladies of the establishment. He was still trembling. Never could he remember being so out of sorts—but he was also hungry. Ravenous. His stomach growled loud enough to hear from several feet away. The women of the Skirt smiled at him, but the smiles were sad.
The food smelled heavenly, eggs and biscuits, tainted seafood of various sorts, mutated mollusk, diseased zappers, fried flail, plus orange juice, toast and jam of questionable freshness. Tavlin filled his plate (eschewing anything that came from the water or had contact with same), sat down at one of the crowded wooden tables whose scars were hidden under frayed but pretty checkered tablecloths, and commenced eating. His trembling began to subside, but slowly.
Young women (and a few men) filled the room, trickling in a few at a time. The women assigned cooking duty would cook all morning, so there was no hurry. Many of the prostitutes rubbed red-rimmed eyes, and all looked sad and scared. Groups huddled and spoke of Madam Elana and of what had happened last night. Several made tear-filled speeches. Tavlin began to feel bad about listening in—he was an outsider here, after all—and rose to leave.
As he reached the doorway, someone squeezed his arm. He turned to see Henrietta. She was clad in a flimsy shift, though the illusion of sensuality was somewhat ruined by the curlers in her hair and the thick, fluffy orange leg warmers that crawled halfway up her thigh. She too looked as if she had been crying, and she flung herself against him and sobbed into his chest.
He patted her back. “There, there.”
“You were so brave.” She lifted her face to look into his eyes.
“I—what—”
“Going after her killer last night—oh, that was so amazing! Did you get him? Did you kill him?”
Other girls glanced up, and many clamored to know what the result of last night’s activities had been. They seemed a bit too bloodthirsty for Tavlin’s liking.
He gently disengaged himself from Henrietta. “I didn’t get him.”
There came a disappointed ahhh.
“But I think I know where he went.”
Their eyes lit up.
“What are you going to do now?” asked one, and others echoed the sentiment. Tavlin knew that Muscud did have its own mayor, and the mayor employed a single police officer, but both were eminently corruptible and unreliable. If you wanted something done in Muscud, you pretty much had to do it yourself—or, apparently, get Tavlin to do it for you. Despite that, he felt his chest swell as the women’s eyes seized on him like graphite shards to a magnet.
“I’m ... going after him,” he said. The words were easy to say, at any rate.
Henrietta smiled, somewhat insanely. “Good.”
“Tell me, did Elana ... was anything missing last night?”
The women looked at each other. Then one of the older ones, with threads of white in her red hair, said, “Yes. Her favorite necklace. Why?”
“Was it ... was there anything odd about the necklace?”
More strange looks. The redhead said, “Yes. The stones set within it were taken from old ruins, or so Elana always said, and I believe it. Ruins from one of the pre-human races—the Iuss’ha, I think. The stones ... sort of glimmered. Like a fire was somewhere way down inside them, and they weren’t clear exactly. You couldn’t see into their depths. They were sort of ... smoky. But they were the most beautiful stones I ever saw, like honey-burgundy, a color I’ve never seen before. Never seen their like, either.”
Tavlin nodded. It’s what he had expected. “I mean to make sure you see them again.”
These were more bold words, of course, and as he stepped out onto the street several minutes later he began to regret them.
*
The air smelled of musk, rust, stone, an underlying, hardly-noticeable foulness, the scents of various restaurants and streetside vendors—fried rat, squid, egg wraps, grilled slugmine, bagels—and a thousand strange secretions.
It was too early to visit the Wide-Mouth. Deciding he could do with some coffee, Tavlin made for a place he used to frequent and dry-swallowed his daily pollution pill on the way. All non-infected coast dwellers carried a supply on them just in case; skipping even a single day was risking infection. The pills were lifesavers and, coupled with the air processors up top, they allowed humans to live along the coasts of the Atomic Sea. They still weren’t enough to protect someone from contaminated food, water, or swapping bodily fluids from someone already infected, however.
As he made his way through the streets and over the canals, he remembered strolling these same avenues before. Many of those instances had been with Sophia. They had been through here countless times together. They had likely explored every square inch of Muscud, from the Razor Quarter to the Shingles, from Dockside East to Dockside West, from the depths of the Innysmere to the heights of the Spire, even a brief foray into the Ualissi Quarter. He remembered casting pennies with Sophia off the Waythern Bridge; there were said to be spirits in the Way Canal that granted wishes. Sophia had believed it. Together they would often picnic in the Syssl, a rooftop garden with an unparalleled view of the city, or grab a hot dog along Liechsmarg Canal; she knew the vendor there and was always assured of the hot dog’s safeness. Of course, that was only for Tavlin’s benefit, as she had been infected long ago, before they met.
Her mutations were subtle, one webbed hand, some scaly skin, gills. He remembered he used to trace the left side of her torso, from her ribs up over her breast, to her collarbone. The whole expanse was covered in glittering silver scales, and when she moved it flashed brilliantly. It was oddly beautiful, and the smooth, cool, raspy feel of it had sent tingles down his whole hand. Sometimes she would shudder at the caress, at the twist of a blue nipple, and when she did her gills would flutter briefly, and her gorgeous hazel eyes would widen, and her toes flex.
Those days were over now. After Jameson ...
Tavlin switched the thought off. Better to think of other things, things that he could make some difference in. There was no changing the past.
He found his coffee bar, Gezzyr’s, perched on an old stone bridge above a canal, and he reclined on the terrace smoking his alchemically-laced tobacco, drinking coffee, and trying to come up with a plan. Below him boats came and went, the early morning traffic of Muscud. The fog that had crept throughout the city during the night at the lessening of activity now broke up and faded away as boats whipped it aside, but that fog made him remember …
The girl in the cloud.
Did that really happen?
She had been like a ghost, he thought. But
ghosts didn’t exist. Did they?
Horns blew through the still-hazy air, and mutants called to each other, or honked the horns of their motorcycles. Somewhere music played so loudly that it echoed off the stone ceiling that was Muscud’s sky high, high above, stirring the flails that nested there in their dripping stalactite mounds.
Tavlin smoked on. Thinking.
When he was done, he moved swiftly toward the industrial sector. Though his skin crawled as he neared the factory he’d seen the assassin vanish into, he forced himself closer. It seemed just as busy today as yesterday, only he saw no Suulmites at the moment, only mutants. Then again, the Suulm were nocturnal creatures, in as much as they recognized the time of day. Tavlin found the address without getting too near, then ducked down an alley, climbed a building and squatted on its roof for some time, studying the comings and goings of the factory. It was a hive of activity, with much traffic in and out, some of it from beneath the docks.
The industrial sector was raised above the level of much of the town, and boats made pick-ups and drop-offs under the docks from trapdoors in the factories above. Tavlin could not see what it was the boats picked up or dropped off, of course, which was likely intentional. No smoke issued from the factory’s smokestacks. He wondered what they might be making.
After a few hours of spying, he climbed down. He drew on his pipe as he made his way back through town, thinking as he went. At last he found his way to the library, a listing building of wood, brick and stone several hundred years old, scarred by smoke and covered in grime. Several flails sucked on the walls in the alley he passed, making squelching noises, and he saw orphan mutants preparing traps for them.
The library was ancient, and as Tavlin entered the small, two-story building he had to wrinkle his nose at the smell of must and decay. The librarians of Muscud were virtual literary pirates, and they had been stealing, looting and tricking their way into books for as long as the library had stood, erected by Tithanus Marl, said to be a disenfranchised royal back in the Imperial Age—which had just ended fifty-odd years ago with the Revolution—and he had intended on bringing the sophistication of the mutants up to a more refined level. Tavlin thought the cause righteous but doomed. Nevertheless modern librarians carried on the tradition, stealing and reappropriating books whenever possible. They would even send raiding parties into the world above to bring back tomes.
