Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  I am. You, on the other hand —

  Never mind me, what’s going to happen with reality? And what are you doing up here anyway? You’re supposed to be at the Spa.

  That’s a fascinating question, and I look forward to answering it in the near future, but for the moment we have work to do, said Fastitocalon, bone-dry.

  She sighed and wriggled out of his embrace, opening her eyes to find the rest of the group including the newcomers studying the ceiling, the mantelpiece, or in one case the line of upholstery tacks along the edge of a chair’s arm rather than looking at Greta and her oldest family friend. There were three people she’d never seen before: one middle-aged guy who looked a bit like Jeremy Irons, one young hippie type, and one who had both bright orange hair and an expression of profound unhappiness on his otherwise unremarkable face. After a moment she realized he had tiny carrot-orange horns half-hidden in the hair.

  “My apologies,” said Fastitocalon, “I believe most of you know one another by now, but allow me to introduce Crepusculus Dammerung and Gervase Brightside, remedial psychopomps, and the demon Irazek. Gentlemen, Dr. Greta Helsing.” He looked around the room. “Edmund, Sir Francis, a pleasure to see you again; you, I don’t believe I’ve met before,” he added, looking at Grisaille with an eyebrow raised. “My name is Fastitocalon; I represent Hell’s Office of Monitoring and Evaluation; and thank you, Monsieur St. Germain, for your hospitality.”

  You represent M&E? Greta had to demand. I thought that was – what’s his face, the other guy, the archdemon —

  Asmodeus, said Fastitocalon. Do hush, Greta, I will explain everything later, there’s something rather more important currently at stake.

  Not only did he look and sound better, he had apparently developed a more decisive management style in the past couple of months. Greta wasn’t entirely sure she liked it.

  “Can I offer you some coffee?” St. Germain asked somewhat uncertainly.

  Fastitocalon smiled, a brief flicker of expression. His face was narrow, lined, but deceptively ordinary: he could have passed for a middle-aged banker without a moment’s hesitation, despite the infernal heritage. “Not for me, thanks,” he said. “But don’t let me stop you. Let’s talk briefly about what’s just happened and what we need to do about it.”

  “I’d like some coffee,” said Grisaille. “If I have to go through this all over again. I’d like it even more if you put something heartening in it.”

  St. Germain sighed, and went into the kitchen. Fastitocalon eyed Grisaille – and then Ruthven, next to him – with one eyebrow raised.

  “His name’s Grisaille,” said Greta. “He’s probably all right. A defector. Used to work for Corvin, who’s in charge of all the general awfulness under this part of the city, but he’s all right, I think.”

  She watched the expression on Grisaille’s face change briefly; he sounded rather less flippant and more intent when he said, “I’ll help. I’ll do whatever I can, I’ll – help.”

  “Splendid,” said Fastitocalon drily. “Tell me everything you know.”

  There was a kind of anesthetic in being managed by other people, in giving up the responsibility for being in charge of what happened next, that Greta found intensely soothing. It felt a little like being allowed to put down something very heavy after carrying it for days on end; nevertheless she didn’t let herself do what she wanted to do, which was curl up in the corner of the couch and go back to sleep. Instead she listened to Grisaille providing his end of the story, which she could tell was somewhat edited to leave out the irrelevant gory bits regarding Corvin’s activities. Both the strangers with complicated names and St. Germain had stared at one another when he mentioned Corvin’s habit of nicking bones from the catacomb ossuaries to decorate his lair; presumably some tag-end of mystery had been tied up.

  She wondered what exactly had happened in Ingolstadt. He’d told her a little about his studies, his tiresome classmates of a hundred and ninety-something years ago, but not precisely why he had stopped; what he’d seen or done or experienced that had made him throw over years of work and disappear into history, to return at some point as a vampire with questionable taste in leadership.

  What he had to say covered mostly the parts of the story she already knew, and Fass and the two strangers filled in the other side of things. That the disturbance of the bones in the ossuary had been responsible for producing a manifestation sufficient to require Brightside and Dammerung’s professional attention, and that Lilith’s monster-summoning had had an unintended and highly dangerous effect on the planes of reality allowing such a manifestation to occur, had apparently been news to Grisaille as well. It did come as some relief to Greta that the strange timeslip experiences she’d had on the way out of the underworld were, in fact, not artifacts of her own neurology going haywire.

  “You could think of ’em as eddy currents,” said the younger of the two polysyllabic individuals. Greta noticed he was wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. “Like, moving objects through planes sets up a brief metatemporal energy flow in the surrounding area.”

  “That’s not exactly right,” said Fastitocalon. Greta couldn’t quite get over how much better he looked than he had the last time they’d met; he’d gained weight, his clothes flattering rather than emphasizing the thinness of the creature inside them, and he seemed to have finally managed to lose his chronic cough. She thought disconnectedly that she would really like an opportunity to chat with Hell’s medical director – whatever they had done to him, it was a serious clinical success – and turned her attention back to what he was actually saying. “It’s more like rolling out pastry too thin, so it wrinkles, and the places where the wrinkles touch can undergo a kind of temporal short circuit. The problem is the same: we, or rather I, need to throw a hell of a lot of energy into this bit of reality in order to first patch and then reinforce it. Orders of magnitude more than went into breaking it. And we have to do this before anything really nasty gets a chance to look in. Which brings me back to you,” he said, turning to Irazek and the other two. “I am going to need you to come with me to the Opera —”

  “To take advantage of the leylines?” Irazek interrupted, looking eager.

  “To, as you say, take advantage of the leylines.” Fastitocalon lifted a hand and swept it through the air as if washing an invisible window, and a map of the city made of blue light sprang into being in midair. Greta felt the static buzz of magic being done, and again thought, He’s so much stronger, he has the energy now to spare on doing pretty light shows. I so want to talk to Dr. Faust.

  Fastitocalon tapped the hovering map with a fingertip, and it expanded and began to turn slowly, streets and boulevards outlined in cyan light drifting through the air of St. Germain’s living room. “As Irazek has pointed out, there are points in Paris where existing lines of mirabilic force intersect with one another – any town that’s been around this long is going to have a few of them – and these loci represent coordinates where the effects of any given magical effort will be strongly amplified. The largest and most significant of these is the opera house.”

  They watched as the blue map lit up with yellow lines, crisscrossing the city; they were pulled into a kind of tangle surrounding the Opera, like iron filings drawn around a magnet. Fastitocalon made another little gesture and a point of throbbing red light appeared, waxing and waning, partially intersecting with the Opera building. “Is that the damaged part?” St. Germain asked.

  “Spot on,” said Fastitocalon. “My colleagues and I will take care of the metaphysical aspect of this situation, but the physical side is up to the rest of you. In order to focus my efforts, I’m going to need some of you to go down there into the actual location and put some very specific items in very specific places surrounding the damaged section, if the mirabilic geometry of this is going to be at all successful.”

  He reached into the inside pocket of his suit (Was that new? It looked new, even if it was cut just like his vintage 1950s pieces, double-bre
asted grey pinstripe) and brought out five thin rectangles of what looked like grey glass. They had an odd shimmer to them, a faint orange luster not unlike the one Fastitocalon’s eyes sometimes showed, and when he set them down on St. Germain’s coffee table, there were glints and flashes from inside the glass as if holograms were somehow sandwiched inside. “These won’t do you any damage to touch unless any of you are carrying a recent blessing of any kind, which I sincerely doubt. I’ll show you where they need to go.”

  “What are those?” Varney wanted to know.

  “Interplanar communication devices,” said Fastitocalon. “Our equivalent of the mobile phone. In this context, you can think of them as prisms, or possibly collimators in a linear accelerator to modulate and shape the beam.”

  “Wait,” said Grisaille. “You can collimate magic using hellphones?”

  “It’s a very long story, and one day I am going to make him tell it to me properly,” Ruthven told him. “I can explain what I do know about the science of magic later.”

  “Quite,” said Fastitocalon. “Action first, lectures afterward, once the world’s been stabilized. In order to manage it, you’ll have to take care of the vampires first, assuming they’re down there and will interfere with the operation —”

  “That will not be a problem,” said Varney silkily. “Believe me.”

  “There’s one down there who’s just a kid,” Greta said. “Can’t be more than nineteen, she’s – very new, and she doesn’t deserve this.” Body glitter, she thought. God help us, body glitter.

  “Nineteen?” Varney said, looking aghast. “They changed a child?”

  Across the room, Ruthven hissed through his teeth. The pupils of his eyes were ever so slightly red. Greta looked from him to Varney and back. “Which one of them —” he began.

  “Name of Yves,” said Grisaille evenly. “I can point him out to you. A few months back. I told him at the time it was a bloody stupid thing to do, not that it helps very much. The girl’s name is something intensely unmemorable —”

  “Emily,” said Greta. “Fass, tell me we can get her out of there.”

  He sighed. “Probably. That part is, I’m afraid, up to you and whatever methods you use to deal with the rest of them – I can’t repair reality and help you fight vampires at the same time. At least this lot probably hasn’t got poisoned knives and a possessed mercury-arc rectifier on their side.”

  “We’ll do our best,” said St. Germain. “I can’t promise anything, Dr. Helsing, but we’ll do our best.”

  “Yes,” she said, “we will. I’m coming with you. We did this part already. There’s five of those things Fass wants us to place; there’s five of us. End of discussion.”

  “Greta —” Fastitocalon began, and she glared at him, fiercely angry all over again – for the things that had been done to her, for the things that had been done to Emily, for the whole miserable stupid mess of it, for Lilith’s cassette tapes in the dark, for the monsters, for the ancient, decaying stuffed bunny, for everything. Some of it must have shown in her face, and rather more obviously he’d gotten a solid whack of it directly to the mindtouch, because he blinked hard and looked away.

  “Show us where you want these phone things put,” she said, picking one up. It was smooth glass, slightly warm to the touch, about the size of an iPhone 6. In other circumstances Greta would have loved the opportunity to play with it; right now she wanted very much to get this over with. “Is there an order in which we should place them, or does it not matter?”

  “You always did ask good questions,” said Fastitocalon, sighing, and canceled the blue-lit map of the city with a wave of his hand. In its place he called up a map of the undercity, the tunnels and mines and sewer pipes and utility conduits that made up the crowded space beneath the streets. Greta had wondered, down in Corvin’s lair, what kind of shape all the mine tunnels and the catacombs would be, seen from outside; now she thought again of those ant-nest sculptures cast in metal, dendritic networks of burrows intersecting with one another, intensely organic; there was no tidiness to it.

  Fastitocalon spread his fingers, and the scale increased, zooming in on a section of tunnels. Beside Ruthven, Grisaille sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the lair. There’s the passageway that intersects with the sewer —”

  “I went past that,” said Greta, vividly remembering. “I was afraid I’d have to get into the sewer to escape.”

  “Oh no,” he told her. “That’s just where we’d dump the bodies if we didn’t want to go all the way to the river.”

  “Convenient,” said Greta, slightly brittle. “The way out through Erik’s house —”

  “Is the back way in,” said Grisaille, and got up. “Can I?” he asked Fastitocalon, looking at the map.

  “Be my guest,” said the demon. Grisaille reached rather hesitantly into the glowing projection with a fingertip, as if expecting it to hurt, and then relaxed.

  “Here,” he said, tracing a pathway down from what Greta realized was the Opera itself – this map didn’t show surface detail – through a large rectangular chamber that had to be the cistern underneath the building, through a series of smaller chambers that were undoubtedly the house set inside the foundation wall, and then along a narrow winding tunnel Greta recognized.

  Where Grisaille’s fingertip had passed, there was a faint line of light, tracing the route. “Here’s the intercept with the storm relief sewer,” he said, “and past that – here is where Corvin and his people live. Or don’t live, if you want to get technical.”

  “That’s the way we’ll take, then,” said St. Germain. “The main entrance is where?”

  “Way over here,” said Grisaille, reaching to the north. “In the cellar of a Pigalle bar. There are several others, but the main way in is through the cellar. It’s convenient for their hunting grounds.”

  “Would it be better,” said Brightside, who had been watching this in silence, “to wait until they’re all out in said hunting grounds before you go down there and do this job?”

  “Not if part of the purpose of the journey is to do some extermination,” said Varney. “You can’t reason with this sort; the only argument they understand is a snapped neck, I’m afraid.”

  “I tried reasoning with them once already,” Ruthven said, pushing his hair back. “Didn’t seem to take. All right, Fass, where do you want your magic things to go?”

  CHAPTER 13

  G

  reta had thought, not so long ago, that she’d had more than a lifetime’s worth of crawling through dark holes underground during the whole Gladius Sancti affair, and here she was all over again, eyes wide in the relentless dark, walking toward a nest of vampires who had once already captured her and kept her in a cage.

  I never claimed to be sensible, she thought.

  At least she wasn’t expected to join in the active fighting if it came to that: her role in this particular mission was to place Fastitocalon’s five collimator plates, currently resting in her various pockets. They had decided to have her – the least-capable of physical violence – focused on that task, leaving it up to the others to make sure she could do that. If making sure involved gross bodily harm, then so be it. Greta could not bring herself to care about the ethics of the situation: she wanted it to be over.

  They had come in the way Greta had escaped, and been glad that the little boat was still waiting at the water stairs; the vampires could cross the underground lake simply by flying over it in bat form, but she and St. Germain were happy to take the surface route. It wasn’t deep but it was cold enough that neither of them had particularly wanted to wade, or swim, the distance to Erik’s house.

  Something had been there since Greta had come through, however many hours ago. What had been simply a tableau of slow decay, wet and slimy, was now a chaotic mess of broken furniture, rotting pieces of the chaise longue and armchair hurled every which way. The gas lamp from which a particularly tiny monster had hun
g, slothlike, had been torn from the wall and bent viciously in half. There was no evidence of the monsters themselves, and Greta had no idea if that meant they had escaped the destruction in here or that they were all dead; at least there were no tiny grey bodies among the debris. She hoped like hell that they’d somehow gotten wind of Corvin before he showed up to trash the place.

  “Got a temper, hasn’t he,” Ruthven had said softly as they picked their way through the wrecked living room and out into the tunnel proper. Grisaille said nothing at all.

  Being down here again was awful, but it was the kind of awful she almost welcomed: This time at least she wasn’t alone, and this time she didn’t have to rely on a whistler to guide her through the dark – and oh but she wanted to see this happen. Wanted that insufferable smile to be knocked off Corvin’s face once and for all. Wanted Paris to be safe from this particular group of monsters: she could think about the real world, about her responsibilities, on the other side of whatever lay ahead for all of them.

  They had just passed the junction with the sewer when she was overtaken by a sudden, intense, complete rush of sensation: the tunnel they were walking through was no longer pitch-dark except for the others’ eyeshine, but glimmering with the moving golden light of candle flames, and the silence and distant dripping of water were replaced with the clink of tools on stone and the undercurrent of human voices.