The Red King

by Jenn Stark

  “It’s not too late to do that now,” Nikki said reasonably. “You’re Justice of the Arcana Council. Who all would you need?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t know I’d need any of them at the beginning. We picked up a job, we went out on the job—”

  “We got mired down in a bog of crazy on said job. But it seems to me the Arcana Council would appreciate knowing the deets or at least revel in the chance to dish the dirt on this magicians’ senate, especially if there’s a new player who wants to elevate the profile of the magicians to Arcana level…or, arguably, turn them all into walking zombies, their magic burned out.”

  “Why in the world would that be an advantage?” I wondered aloud. “They’re killing their own people.”

  “Or they’re pruning the bushes in advance of the big flower show. What’s better, a dozen magicians with a few hangers-on who are little more than glitter tossers, or a highly motivated set of eight or nine sorcerers with a firmer grasp on their own powers and an up-close-and-personal performance enhancer?”

  “Win or die,” I muttered.

  “Pretty much.”

  We carried on like that around the gentle curve of the Grand Canal, the lights growing brighter and the houses more palatial as we neared Valetti’s residence.

  “First order of business, we need to get into the police files, find out what happened to Marrow and Greaves, specifically. I assume they died the same way Balestri did if they were at his house, but we need that nailed down. If it’s poison, source the poison. If it’s a technoceutical, source the manufacturer. We should be able to get that tracked if we can get a blood sample—assuming we can find the bodies.”

  “On it,” Nikki said. “There may have been trace evidence at the scene if they were able to get skin cells, hair, anything like that. It’ll take time, though.”

  “Except we’re the Arcana Council. It shouldn’t take time. Should it?”

  “Ah…is there a CSI: Supernatural division of the Council I wasn’t aware of?”

  “Maybe when Justice still walked the earth, but now? I think I would’ve run into it. From everything I’ve seen, the Council’s never been too big on getting involved with the Connected community.

  “Well, maybe it’s time for that to change.”

  “Maybe…” I looked again at the flowing waters of the Grand Canal, then stopped, my heart squeezing tight, as if it could take back its last several heartbeats. But it was too late for that. It was too late for a lot of things.

  Oh no.

  “And maybe it’ll need to change now,” I sighed. Nikki turned as well, her curse low and brutal in the evening breeze.

  Floating in the canal amidst several curved strips of wood were two bodies, their matching Union Jack capes flowing out around them. Twin coronas of purple light surrounded their heads. Purple, not silver, and the meaning of that illumination was finally clear to me.

  These men weren’t marked for Justice—they were owed it.

  “Hello, Marrow and Greaves,” Nikki said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  After we advised Simon of our discovery of the bodies, we moved down to the canal. Before we got there, someone else had sent up the alarm, saving us the trouble. Two gondoliers had hauled the magicians out of the water. They were draped across the boats, our vantage point allowing us to take several distance photos, which Nikki sent to Simon as well. There wasn’t any question in our minds, of course, as to who the magicians were—but if Simon could determine anything about how they died, that would be helpful.

  A crowd was already forming, the holdovers from the Carnevale celebration mostly, I suspected. Everyone in masks and feathers and hats and capes. It occurred to me I didn’t know whether or not Venice had any increase in crime during the festival. I couldn’t imagine the police were huge fans.

  After a brief deliberation, Nikki and I decided to take the higher road, literally, moving up to another tier of sidewalks overlooking the canal. From this vantage point, we were well out of the way when the cops showed up, a cluster of bustling techs plus a tall, dark, and brutal-looking man who had to be a detective. That man turned smartly when Valetti arrived, conspicuously without his festival garb.

  “I may know these men, I may know them,” Valetti shouted in authoritative tones. The combination of his assertiveness, patrician outrage, and ordinary garb got him to the front of the action quickly, and he greeted the detective like they were old friends. Interesting.

  Then Valetti leaned over the two bodies for a long moment before he seemed to visibly recoil. He straightened, turning shakily to the detective, his face white and drawn. Whatever conversation they had at that point, it was too low for us to hear.

  “I didn’t get the impression that Valetti was all that big a fan of Marrow and Greaves,” I commented. “But he seems pretty broken up.”

  “He wasn’t a fan of Balestri either,” Nikki pointed out. “I think death has a way of creating a cumulative effect. It’s tough not to feel one’s mortality when everyone around you is dropping like flies.”

  “Fair enough.”

  We made it back to the residence well ahead of Valetti, and his butler showed us to the same terrace we’d dined on that morning for breakfast and the previous evening. Notably, its forward view overlooked a section of the Grand Canal that was not set up with crime scene lights. Except for a faint halo of reflected light, you would’ve never known that anything had happened around the bend in the canal.

  Valetti arrived more than an hour later, and he entered the terrace with slow, heavy steps. When he saw us sitting there, however, he rushed forward.

  “You know, yes? I assume you know,” he said, breathing quickly. “You must know what we’ve found in the Grand Canal. I have never seen…this is simply horrible. I fear we’ve lost everything before we have even begun.”

  I tried to reassure him, but in truth, I didn’t know what to say.

  “You suspected they were dead,” I reminded him.

  “I did…” Valetti tried to pull himself together. “I did. But I thought with you and your associate here, perhaps—perhaps whoever was behind their killings would keep them hidden, out of the limelight, that you’d scared them off. You haven’t hidden the fact that you are here. Those who know who you are know the power that you represent. When Signore Stone let me know you were coming, I had hoped that would be enough.”

  I felt a flush of defensiveness rise through me, but the count did have a point. Unbidden, Balestri’s own accusation came back to me. “You were supposed to save me.”

  Valetti looked at me with wide, red-rimmed eyes. “If the threat of the Arcana Council is not enough to turn this demon back, what power on this earth can truly stop him?”

  “Hang on there, slow down,” I said. “This guy isn’t a real demon, or I’m pretty sure he isn’t, so that’s a plus. And as you say, you have the full weight of the Arcana Council now focused on this issue.”

  Valetti stopped, his bleary eyes struggling to focus and failing. “I do?”

  “You do. There are elements to this case that go beyond a simple search and recover mission. You’re part of an old and venerable organization, and your senate demands respect and careful handling. The Council will be there for you.” I didn’t want to lay the accolades on too thickly, but with Kreios showing up for the first senate meeting in a long time, I figured Valetti was primed for stroking. It was no secret that the Arcana Council was both admired and reviled by the magicians of Venice, the ancient rivalry between the senate and the Council made worse because the Council paid no attention to it.

  If anything, however, Valetti looked worse. “I have failed in my charge to protect my own. Never in the history of Carnevale have we experienced anything so dire. It’s a turning point for our organization, and one which none of us anticipated. We are not ready.”

  “It may not be as bad as all that,” Nikki assured him pragmatically. Nikki kept her drama strictly to her c
lothes. “We’ve got two dead guys, that’s it.”

  “Three,” I corrected. “And the assassins. And Valetti’s water taxi captain.”

  “Okay, multiple dead guys, all adults, no kids. We’ve got the supposed butcher of Venice running around, but so far as we know, no children have been sacrificed.” She tapped her lip. “Probably because once you get kids into the mix, the whole city would blow up. So it may not be the butcher at all is what I’m saying. It may be someone else.”

  “You don’t understand,” Valetti moaned.

  I looked at him sharply. He was right, we didn’t understand. Suddenly, the story of the gondolier from the Grand Canal came back to me, as well as the gunfire that’d followed it. The butcher of Venice hadn’t used guns to get his work done either.

  “Is there something about the butcher story we’re missing, Valetti?” I asked quietly. “Because with the arrival of the Devil of the Arcana Council, we’re going to need to know everything. You’re not going to want to hold back. And it might be easier for you to tell us what you know here and now rather than face uncomfortable questions from the Arcana Council.”

  I wasn’t kidding here, though I didn’t want to lean on Valetti too much. The Devil had a way of weaseling out the truth from people and using it on them at the worst possible time. If Valetti was at all a private man, he needed to stay away from Kreios.

  “Of course, I…” Valetti seemed to visibly shake himself. He touched a button on his phone, and a few moments later, his houseman appeared at the door to the terrace, carrying a tray that held a variety of crystal decanters and small glasses. He delivered the tray to the table, then poured Valetti three fingers of a dark brown spirit—scotch, I assumed. Because life’s most difficult moments demanded scotch.

  Valetti took a deep drink, then turned back to us. His voice, when it came, was hollow. “What we know is this. The butcher of Venice was working on a specific combination of spells when he turned to the darkest arts. As you may have gleaned from the prelate, he wasn’t seeking to augment the Connected powers of himself or anyone else. Rather, he was seeking to destroy them. To leave nothing but a husk behind of a formerly psychic soul.”

  This was getting uncomfortably close to what I’d seen in Balestri’s mind.

  “He was using Nul Magis,” I said, echoing the prelate’s words from earlier in the day, though the jury was still out on whether it was the butcher or some witch doctor behind the concoction. “Why?”

  Valetti spread his hands. “The reasons are lost to history, I’m afraid. It could have been to take down his enemies or to ensure his own primacy of place, but there are easier ways to do that. By all accounts, Biasio Cargnio was, first and foremost, a butcher. That he turned to the creation of bespelled recipes was one thing, that it got twisted into something so dire…we cannot even speculate as to why.”

  “I can speculate,” I said. “I specialize in speculation. But there’s something I don’t understand. Say the butcher fed his clients the special stew to get them to lose their psychic abilities. Did it work?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “For there to be a truly sinister twist here beyond the obvious horror of the sacrificed children, something had to happen to whoever ate those sausages tainted with the enchanted meat. Did anyone lose their woo?”

  “Well, as I said, he—”

  “And these recipes from his enchanted cookbook, have any of you tried them?”

  Valetti looked at me aghast. “You can’t seriously think that respectable magicians would try a concoction that required a human sacrifice.”

  “Oh, come on, not the whole human,” I pushed, watching him closely. “A hand. A kidney. With today’s technology, even the smallest slice of tissue from a Connected would be enough to work into a tincture, wouldn’t you say?”

  I tried to ignore the horrified expression on Valetti’s face. There was something here, I was sure of it.

  “So let’s say that a dozen of these books went out, and ten out of the twelve magicians were too delicate to do anything about it,” I continued. “But two tried out the recipe. Where would that leave us?”

  “I cannot see—”

  “It’d leave us with two potential perps,” Nikki said. “Both of them willing to try their concoction out on anyone, to see what happened.”

  “But if that’s the case, and the blend was truly dangerous, then we’d have more dead psychics in the canal or, at a minimum, some very unhappy newly minted Muggles. But from everything I’m seeing, that hasn’t been the case.” I fixed my attention on Valetti. “Have there been any other disappearances within the psychic community? Whether adult or children?”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea about children,” he said stiffly. “And I can assure you that the entire magician community is present and accounted for, less Signore Balestri and now Marrow and Greaves, of course.”

  “Of course,” I murmured. But something still wasn’t adding up. “There had to be a testing period of some sort, though. There simply had to be.”

  Though I wasn’t keen on Valetti knowing this specifically, I’d witnessed what’d happened to Balestri’s brain under the influence of the drug that had indirectly taken his life. By the time I’d gotten to him, his mind had been a hollow shell, all the areas that should’ve been lit up like a Christmas tree for a man of his psychic ability totally dormant. Particularly if he’d recently gotten an upgrade courtesy of the recent resurgence of magic on the planet, that was the exact opposite of what I should’ve seen.

  Which meant that had been some seriously potent stew someone had plunged into his bloodstream.

  But Valetti was shaking his head. “If you’re suggesting that we keep track of all members of the Connected community in Venice, you are sadly mistaken,” he said. “The senate, yes, of course. But as to the rest of them, psychic or not, we leave them to do what they will.”

  It was all I could do not to make a face. Back in Las Vegas, with far fewer years of history to back us up, the Connected community of the Strip had done a better job of looking after itself.

  Venice had a Strip too—anything that was directly on the lagoon or that abutted the Grand Canal. Did they have their own psychic community? They had to, surely. Signora Visione was a member, and even, potentially, the gondolier. Certainly the two tailors the prelate and Valetti had recommended to us.

  Something to check into, potentially, but I didn’t think Valetti would be of any use to us there.

  His next words confirmed my suspicions.

  “If someone was preying on the members of the Connected community, there would be no way of telling,” he sniffed. “This is Venice, a city with all the crimes, vices, and sad stories any other city has. Half the time, you’ll find that the Connected are most likely preying on each other.”

  “Fair enough.” I decided to take a different tack. “Have you noticed any changes within the magician community, then? You mentioned that some of your number had been affected by the recent energy spike. Has that caused any rifts within the group, any confusion?”

  “Not at all,” Valetti said firmly. “We are, at heart, an organization of academics. The events that led to the change in magical ability for many of the magicians, not merely in Venice, but worldwide, has been a subject of intense conversation and intellectual debate. But it wasn’t as if we stood around trying to see who could make the largest fireball.”

  “Would any of you consider yourself competitive? With each other?” Based on my reading in the Casino of Spirits last night, the answer to that was a resounding yes.

  Valetti merely shrugged. “I suppose if we ever attempted to conduct magic in a group setting, that would be an issue, but that’s simply not how we work. The art of magic is predominantly an isolated experience.”

  I thought of Armaeus in his fortress back in Vegas and had to concede the point. Valetti wasn’t wrong. All my questions kept spinning around, but instead of finding answers, they merely f
ound more questions, a Möbius strip of insanity. “And there aren’t—weren’t—any disagreements within the group? You said yourself that you weren’t exactly friendly with Balestri. Did he have any outright enemies?”

  “Signore Balestri was not powerful enough to have enemies,” Valetti began, but then he checked himself as if considering it for the first time. “Although I dare say, he certainly must’ve attracted some ill will for him and two of his associates to have met with foul play in his own home. Perhaps he’d run afoul of the dark practitioners. He was dabbling in the drug trade.”

  It was all I could do not to let Valetti know what I’d found or hadn’t found in Balestri’s brain, let alone share the fact that someone had tried to forcibly keep Nikki and me from attending the meet-up at Ca Daria tonight. But I didn’t want to scare the man any more than he was. He was already on his second hit of scotch. I detoured down a different conversational side street.

  “Well, whoever is doing this isn’t too confident in themselves or in the results of their little experiment.”

  “What do you mean?” Valetti sat back, looking confused.

  Nikki picked up the tale. “Think about it. We’ve got someone going around hitting people with drugs—and killing them on top of it. That’s not what the butcher’s recipe was supposed to do.”

  “Signore Balestri’s death was ruled a suicide,” Valetti said quickly. “And we have no way of knowing what the effects of the technoceutical in his system was, or if there even was any sort of toxin present. He could simply have killed himself.”

  “Excellent point.” I sat up. “What was the finding in the canal with Marrow and Greaves?”

  “It’s far too early to tell. The police were adamant that no firm determination could be given, however, as to cause of death.”

  “You saw them with your own eyes, Valetti. What did you see?”

  He held my gaze, the picture of misery, and didn’t speak for a long minute. When he did, his words were raw and agonized. “I saw nothing on them, no mark at all. But regardless what had been done to them before they died, they definitely weren’t intended to be found. At least not if the shattered wine barrels in which they’d been stowed were any indication.”