The Red King

by Jenn Stark

  He’d lost his magic.

  “Signore Balestri, no!” The slender man in the dark suit managed to duck beneath Nikki’s outstretched arms keeping everyone away. He dropped down beside me and started speaking in a rush of Italian. He was a doctor, Signore Balestri’s doctor, this was an overdose, and apparently not a surprise. This was something he understood and knew how to handle, and there was absolutely no need for alarm.

  Beneath us, the feathered man had rolled over on his side and started throwing up, lending credence to the whole overdose concept. He was breathing more easily now, his heart pumping at a normal pace, his adrenaline level receding. His brain was even firing normally. But that was the problem. It was firing normally. The element of this man that had made him a psychic was no longer there.

  As if in response to my assessment, the man groaned, saying something in a low tone to his doctor, who stiffened at the request, alarm spreading through him.

  “Signore—” the doctor began again, his face tight with alarm.

  “Not on my watch, buddy.”

  I flipped the man over again, scowling down at him as he looked up at me through the mask, his eyes finally discernible through the holes cut into the gleaming white surface. Balestri knew already, he knew what he’d lost. But I wasn’t going to let him administer the fatal dose of whatever toxin he’d requested from his doctor. I had enough deaths piling up at my door.

  “You were supposed to save me,” Balestri said again in garbled Italian, his voice morose.

  “Who did this to you?” I asked. “Who’d you let get close to you, close enough that they could stick you with a needle behind your left ear?”

  But the man was shaking his head as if I had missed something terribly important. His next words confirmed it. “You don’t, cannot understand,” he muttered, his words half-coherent syllables, half groans. “He has agents—everywhere. The very breeze whispers his commands.”

  “That’s beautiful, but let’s try this again. Who was close enough to you to stick you with a needle? Because unless it was delivered by blow dart, there’s no other way you could’ve been hit with this toxin.”

  “Toxin,” said Balestri. He coughed up phlegm and spit to the side, patently disappointed that it wasn’t blood. He was going to survive all right. The shock of the drug in his system might have killed him if I hadn’t been here, but that hadn’t been its primary goal. In fact…

  “What do you mean I was supposed to come?” I demanded. “What did you see about me? How long have you been taking Black Elixir?”

  That brought his head around.

  “I don’t need a potion to predict the future,” Balestri retorted, as if I’d delivered an unforgivable insult. By now his physician was helping him to a seated position, and one of the bouncers was bracing his back with a broad arm. “I’ve been doing that since childhood.”

  His eyes widened even as he spoke the words, and I watched as realization hit him again, his face going positively gray.

  “Stay with me, buddy. We’ll figure it out. So, okay, you saw me all on your own. Good for you. Why? What’d you see exactly?”

  “That you were coming for me,” he said morosely, a self-mocking smile creasing his face. “That you would see me and judge me worthy.”

  “Not my department,” I started, but the man wasn’t listening anymore.

  “I moved up my timetable because I knew your arrival would throw everything into a panic. I needed to get the last market test completed, then prepare for Carnevale—but there was too much to do. I knew you’d been drawn here, and I knew why. Valetti and the others’ old-woman concerns about the return of the butcher. Foolishness.” He shook his head. “Still, you were supposed to protect me. To keep me in the game.”

  “The game.”

  “The senate has reached a point of power never before achieved.” A burst of animation infused Balestri for a moment, and he stared at me with mirror-bright eyes. “All the magicians in the world of any merit have gathered here, will gather here, and the competition for a guiding role of the senate will be the stuff of legends. I deserve to be one of those guides.”

  I eyed him in disbelief. “This is about serving as a committee chair?”

  Balestri sagged. “But you didn’t come in time,” he said dully. “He came first.”

  My head was starting to pound. “You predicted I was coming. So you busted tail to get your last bit of drug data before closing up shop and partying, but you weren’t fast enough. One of your other enemies got you first.”

  “Firrrst…” the feather man was overcome with another paroxysm of trembling, and the doctor shooed me away, opening his bag.

  “He’s going to be okay,” I said, because I couldn’t help myself. I’d be damned if some doctor thought that his injection of goop was going to do anything to save his patient beyond what I had already done.

  “He’s not going to be okay,” the doctor said in tight Italian. “You have restored the body, you may have even restored the brain, but you have not restored the mind. And what are we without our minds?”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but the man rushed on. “He needs to be stabilized, you need to go, and then he needs to go deep inside himself and see what there is to be seen. After he does, with some luck, he will do everything he can to restore himself. That I can handle.” He shook his head, looking at the feathered man with something that was almost like affection as he slumped in the bouncer’s arms.

  “Wait, you know what this drug is? How it works?” Because I didn’t. I couldn’t stop what I didn’t understand.

  “I don’t, no,” the physician sighed, then bent down to rummage in his bag. “But I also cannot allow Signore Balestri to take his own life out of despair for what he has lost, until he has at least explored the possibilities of finding it again.”

  Nikki clasped my shoulder. “Somebody will report this, dollface. I don’t think we should be here when that happens.”

  The sound of the distant sirens finally broke across the quiet night. But I couldn’t help staring at the doctor. I took a gamble.

  “How much do you know about the Red King?”

  “The Red…” The man frowned in what seemed to be genuine confusion, then he shook his head again. “If that’s some new drug on the market, I’ve not encountered it yet, and to my knowledge, Signore Balestri was not under its influence. He prided himself on being a producer, not a taker of technoceuticals.”

  “What a champ,” Nikki said drily.

  “Not true,” I objected. “He was under the influence of more than just a healthy self-image, even before this new toxin was injected into his system.”

  “You mean wine, you mean cocaine, of course. I suspect when I check, I’ll also find the fentanyl patch supply has dropped since last time I was here as well.”

  “But you said he didn’t take drugs.”

  “He didn’t take technoceutical drugs. He was—is—pure-blooded. A magician of the highest order, who has never fallen prey to the siren song of any augmentation he hadn’t earned through his own strength and study, even though his natural power was not nearly as strong as he wished it to be. There are very few true magicians in the world that can claim to be truly pure-blooded, and Fabrizio Balestri is one of them. He is also an honorable man.”

  The doctor straightened, turning to me. In his hand was a small red leather-bound journal, wrapped tight with black leather cords.

  My eyes popped wide. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Signore Balestri received this two weeks ago, but he knew his history. He was no fool. And as for the drugs he made…” The doctor shoved the book at me. I took it. “No one died. He did not deal in Black Elixir or anything like it. He was an alchemist, and devoted to the cause of augmenting Connecteds safely.”

  “And making money from it,” I pointed out.

  “There is no crime in that,” the doctor said severely. “He was pure-blooded. Magic to hi
m was life. Everyone knew it, and they were all coming here, to Carnevale, where he would finally make his stand.”

  “Well, not anymore,” I said grimly, looking down at Balestri’s crumpled form. “So what’s next for him?”

  “Next you will leave, and Signore Balestri will heal. And then I suspect he will break his vow of pure-bloodedness and rely on the augmentation drugs so favored by the weakest of his kind. His pride will take a hit, but better that than living even a day without the powers and psychic abilities that have defined his whole life. Unless, of course, you could restore him?”

  I considered that. I honestly didn’t know if I could, given the destruction I’d seen along his neural circuits. And the man still was a drug dealer. Then again, if he could be of greater help to me later… “You know his crimes?”

  The doctor’s face shut down, and he glanced away. “We all have our crimes. Yours is that you came too late to be of any use to us, Signorina Justice.”

  Yet someone else who knew who I was. “I’ll add that to my performance review.”

  “Dollface,” Nikki said again more urgently.

  “Yeah, yeah.” I stood up and stepped back from the doctor and his patient, pulling off my feathered cape. By now, the sound of sirens had chased away most of Balestri’s employees, and the ones that remained didn’t look too happy. I moved with Nikki across the courtyard to a shadowy alcove, and she removed her cape as well. We dumped them by the wall. Both of us still wore masks, as did most of the people left in the courtyard. It was an odd sensation of feeling completely hidden and protected while still being exposed in a crowd. Maybe that was why the masks had become so popular.

  “You got a fix on Valetti’s balcony?” Nikki asked. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to head back down the alley. Somebody will definitely be watching at this point.”

  “Agreed.” I’d no sooner placed my hand on her arm when a sudden commotion behind us drew our attention once again. A half-choked scream broke off as Balestri lurched to his feet again, wheeling around toward me. He had a gun in his hand.

  “Gun!” Nikki shouted, shifting in front of me to block the bullet. Never mind the fact that I was the one who could heal myself.

  When Balestri saw me, however, he stilled, his mouth gaping open beneath his mask. He tried to speak, but his mouth seemed to have difficulty forming the words.

  And then it didn’t.

  “The Red King will be the strongest in all of Venice!” Balestri intoned in a terrible voice that was nowhere near his own. Beneath his half-mask, his face seemed to morph as well, as if a hive of bees swarmed beneath the skin, and his lips parted in a terrible grimace as he groaned his next words. He looked for all the world like a man possessed, but how? “And as it goes in Venice, so goes the world. If you seek the path of the Red King, follow the bodies of the greatest magicians in the city—until you reach the one who is greater than them all. I look forward to your hunt.”

  He put the gun into his mouth, and fired.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I cannot apologize enough.” Valetti’s hand shook as he set his teacup into its saucer. “Police were knocking on doors until the sun was practically risen again. I am so sorry for the disturbance, I assure you this is one of the quietest neighborhoods in Venice. Disruptions such as this simply do not happen in this area. The families are old and well respected. The police, some of them, do not respect the old ways the way they should.”

  There was an odd note of privilege in Valetti’s voice that I hadn’t heard before, layered with a genteel outrage, as if the normal course of business for the police was simply something not to be borne by this neighborhood in particular. I eyed him over my espresso, my third of the still-early morning. “How well did you know Signore Balestri?”

  “Not well, not well at all,” Valetti dismissed with a casual wave. “I knew him in the way of neighbors. We were friendly, of course. He was a part of the neighborhood, and we respected each other’s position in the city.”

  “He was Connected,” I said bluntly. “A magician.”

  “Ah, well, we all in Venice are Connected to some degree or another, don’t you think?” Valetti’s smile had turned a bit condescending. Interesting. “As to being a magician, well… Signore Balestri liked to style himself in the mode of a pure-blooded magician, yes. However, he was more, how would you say, grandfathered into the role. His family was one that had long held a position of power in the senate, and that accorded him some measure of respect.”

  “How many people make up this senate thing?” Nikki asked.

  Another hand wave. “We have a long and glorious history of which we are perhaps a bit too proud. But I’m afraid the reputation of Fabrizio Balestri did no favors to his family legacy. He was known as a debaucher who would use what little Connected ability he had to manipulate the unwitting into purchasing a string of designer technoceuticals he’d manufactured in boutique supply.” He glanced up, catching my confused expression. “It’s become quite fashionable in Europe, and arguably in Venice for quite a bit longer. We do tend to set the trends rather than follow them.”

  “Of course,” I murmured, but Valetti either didn’t catch my sarcasm or didn’t understand it. He continued on.

  “Obviously, setting oneself up as a drug kingpin requires a great deal of work and organization. So even those of us who have the means and the capability of recognizing true magical compounds when we see them, and who could then synthesize them into distributable form, it is too much, you see? Yet it is tempting to step into this scene at least in part, if only to provide a glimpse of what’s possible to those who cannot achieve psychic greatness on their own.”

  “This city is filled with humanitarians,” Nikki muttered.

  “So, Balestri was one of these boutique suppliers,” I said, turning the phrase around in my mind. I had to admit, I liked it. “You make just enough product for a very limited distribution. Your advertisement is word of mouth, and your clientele is very exclusive.” It wasn’t so different from Leonardo and Rocky Mountain Ricky when I thought about it. They were the end of a very long supply chain, but in their own little neck of the woods, they could run their business however they saw fit. And catering to a group of vetted, proven regulars, was a better business model no matter what the product.

  “Indeed,” Valetti said. “You can see the appeal, and Signore Balestri proved not to be able to resist it. I cannot fault the man for that. If it weren’t for his other flaws, it would have been a benign indiscretion. Nothing more. But he insisted on going further, pushing the boundaries of taste and decorum.” He sighed with false regret. “It’s perhaps no wonder that he drew the attention of some senior dark practitioner, no doubt irritated that he was moving in on his turf, as they say.”

  I exchanged a quick glance with Nikki. “Wait a minute. You think this death is a one-off? You don’t think it has anything to do with threats that are facing the magicians in the city?”

  “Signore Balestri? Oh, I can’t even imagine. And if so, then allow me to be the first to say how terribly sorry I am for bringing you all this distance, and how even sorrier I am that I called in a favor from Signore Stone to make it happen. Because if the threat that I believe is stalking Venice’s canals and byways is truly so indiscriminate as to strike down Fabrizio Balestri, then it is not only the elite who have the issue. In fact, it is not the elite at all. We have nothing to worry about.”

  I eyed my espresso with dismay. Valetti was making less sense as the morning went on, not more.

  Fortunately, Nikki was still tracking him. “You’re saying that if this was the work of the butcher of Venice, he suddenly isn’t as scary a perpetrator, because he’s not targeting the top-level magicians anymore.”

  “He could as easily strike a common prostitute next and it would no longer be a surprise. Not that that wouldn’t be a horrible turn of events, of course,” Valetti said hurriedly. “I merely mean that the method to disp
atch such a criminal suddenly would move from a pair of tweezers to a hammer.”

  One thing about Valetti, he certainly had a distinctive turn of phrase. I debated asking him about the Red King, but hesitated. There was something more to Balestri than Valetti was letting on—the man had been a high-level Connected, even if all those systems had gone dark within him by the time I’d reached him. And he had a recipe book. Why was Valetti downplaying him so much?

  Valetti looked up as a new man entered the room, a staffer who held out his phone with a gloved hand. “The prelate, Count Valetti,” he said quietly. “He is quite ready for you, at your convenience. He wishes you to call him directly.”

  “Excellent.” Valetti beamed as he rose. He turned to us. “I’m pleased to share we will have all your questions answered in short order this morning and be able to put your mind to rest regarding Signore Balestri’s unfortunate death as being any part of our larger question. The prelate is in a unique position to assist in our efforts. We’ll go to see him now. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll make this call and then meet you in the foyer?”

  Without waiting for us to respond, Valetti tapped on his phone and held the unit up to his ear, quickly striding away. The phone call connected, and a murmured wave of melodic Italian drifted behind him on the lilac-scented breeze.

  “There are so many things wrong with what we just heard, I’m having trouble keeping up,” Nikki observed.

  “I’m right there with you.”

  We stood as well, keeping our voices low as Valetti’s staff came in to clear away the breakfast dishes. We were already dressed for the day, so we headed immediately down to the foyer. It was a small but elegantly appointed room, and we were more or less alone except for the doorman, who, not too surprisingly, hovered near the door.

  Nikki sidled closer to me. Today, she wore a feminine Italian business suit in deep black, the jacket cinched at the waist. On her feet were four-inch pink leather platform heels, or, as Nikki liked to refer to them, walking shoes. “I asked Council HQ to give me the lowdown on this prelate guy. Simon was all over it.”