Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

Pete picked up the plain cloth volume on a display stand and opened the front cover. Plain black print declared, with frightening practicality, Malleus Maelificarum. Even though the book itself was utter nonsense and Cotton Mather was a sexually repressed twat of the first order, the thin paper and running ink, and the many notations in the margins on effectiveness and practical results, made Pete drop the thing again and swipe her hands on her trouser legs. She banged on the counter bell instead. “Oi! Anyone home?”

  Lawrence stayed as close to the door as he could without being outside on the pavement, hands shoved in his pocket, boot tapping. Pete tossed a paperback pulp at him, cover depicting a heaving-bosomed blonde tied to a cross, menaced by faceless figures in crimson robes. The Demon’s Bride. “Will you cut that out? You look like we’re in here trying to cop.”

  “Aren’t we?” Lawrence muttered. “In one fashion or another?”

  “Oh, for the sake of all the saints.” Pete chimed the desk bell again. “Hello.”

  The door to the back room of the shop rattled, and a figure wrapped in tweed that had to be as old as some of the books in the shop appeared. He blinked at Pete through round spectacles, greasy silver hair falling in his face. “Ah. Here you are.”

  “Here we are,” Pete agreed. “Waiting.”

  The man extended a hand, silver rings to the knuckle on each finger, but Pete didn’t bite. The Black wasn’t the place for friendly handshakes. You never knew what you might be touching in addition to skin. “Tyrell,” he said, dropping the hand back. His eyes flicked over Lawrence. “You’re the man?”

  “Hell no, I ain’t your man,” Lawrence snorted. “She’s the one who wanted this. Far as I’m concerned, you can crawl right back into that hole you oozed out of.”

  Tyrell blinked, and then smiled at Pete, slow and crooked as if a rock had rolled back from the entrance to a cave. “How lovely,” he said. “A damsel in need of rescue.”

  “Let’s keep the bullshit down to a dull roar, shall we?” Pete suggested. Tyrell’s tongue flicked out and back in, and he grimaced as if the air tasted bad.

  “Whatever you say, my dear,” he said at last. Lawrence was staring a hole in her over Tyrell’s head, but Pete kept herself reserved and stony. She was willing to be polite, but she wasn’t willing to play the courting games so many creatures of the Black demanded. She’d always been crap at being obsequious, and she wasn’t going to lick Tyrell’s boots just so he could maybe, possibly but probably not give her a scrap or two of new insight into Gerard Carver’s death markings.

  “That is what I say,” she agreed. Drawing out the folder Nasiri had given her, she fanned the photographs on the counter, dislodging dust that was likely older than she was. “You know anything about this?”

  Tyrell coughed and waved at the air in front of his face. “Not here,” he said. “Are you stupid as well as unpleasant?”

  “Oh, I assure you,” Pete said, shoving the photos a bit closer, “we haven’t even scratched the surface of just how unpleasant I can be.”

  “Pete,” Lawrence said, and gave her a hard squeeze on the arm. “We know how it works,” he assured Tyrell. “But we wanna be sure you ain’t wastin’ our time.”

  “I dare say there isn’t much you could do to me if I was,” Tyrell said, with the peculiar glee of small children who enjoy stamping on fluffy things. “You, after all, are the ones who need something and I am the one who has it.”

  “I don’t need it that badly,” Pete assured him. “I’m not a prissy white witch you can run in circles. If you can’t help me, then piss off and let me find someone who can.”

  “Oh, my dear,” Tyrell said. “You think you frighten me, with your rough edges and your empty threats? I am an Antiquarian. To collect for the lost library, I’ve bargained with things far worse than a kitchen witch and the whore of a dead mage.”

  Pete felt all the joints in her hands and arms tense, and she forced them to relax one at a time. She wasn’t going to give Tyrell the reaction he was fishing for. Wasn’t going to shout and cry simply because he’d called her a name. That was the game, and she wasn’t playing any more. Jack might have risen to every invitation to smack someone in the gob, but she was better than that. And if not entirely, at least better than some cackling creature who looked like a goblin had mated with a Jim Henson puppet.

  Tyrell wilted a bit under her glare. “Far be it from me to judge,” he said, clapping his hands together. “The terms are blood, spellcraft, or trade. Judging by your general air of poverty and the fact that you aren’t a sorcerer, I suppose it’ll be trade.” He traced the marks across Carver’s torso, finger leaving an oily streak on the photograph. “I’ll search the archives and you’ll give me a little something to store in them in return, yes?”

  “Pete,” Lawrence said at once. “Don’t do it. Don’t give anything you got to an Antiquarian.”

  “Witch, kindly shut the fuck up before I disengage your jaw from your skull,” Tyrell said, eyes gleaming. “The young lady and I are engaged in bartering.”

  “All right, all right,” Pete said. “No need to open your trousers, boys.” She tapped the photo with her fingertip. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Tyrell. You better be worth it.”

  “I think you’ll find I’m worth my weight in gold,” he said, drawing the photo away from her and folding it into quarters. “Now, shall we take a look through the archive and see if we can’t find a match to your dead bloke?”

  “Get on with it,” Pete agreed. Tyrell came from behind the counter and wound through the stacks toward a narrow back hallway. Lawrence began to follow him, but he shook his head.

  “You’re too pure and bright to deal with the likes of me. The lady and I are in a bargain, not you.”

  Lawrence flicked him off. “Where she goes, I’m goin’.”

  Tyrell bared his teeth. “Then you’re not going far, are you, boyo?”

  “It’s all right,” Pete said, to head off Tyrell getting a boot through his teeth. Lawrence growled in the back of his throat.

  “You don’t know how far from all right this is.”

  “Lawrence.” Pete felt a headache spring to life behind her eyes and tried to massage it away. “I know this isn’t what you’d do, but you do trust me, yeah?”

  His jaw ticked, but he nodded. Pete leaned in, so Tyrell wouldn’t be privy. “Then trust I know what I’m doing. This isn’t my first shady old man in a dingy shop.”

  “Jack ever heard about this, he’d wring my fuckin’ neck.” Lawrence sighed. “Anything happens, I’m in there.”

  “At the very least, avenge my death,” Pete told him. She joined Tyrell and let him lead her into the back room. It wasn’t much, just a slant-roofed space that had once been a coal shed, filled to the rafters with paper mountains even more vertiginous than Jack’s. Pete’s boot clanked on something, and she saw a metal door, more of a hatch really, set into the floor.

  “Tea?” Tyrell cleared papers away from a kettle encrusted with green minerals sitting on a burner that gave off a blue spark when he flicked the switch.

  “No,” Pete said. Tyrell grunted as he rooted in the drawers of a narrow apothecary.

  “Suit yourself. Tea makes it go down easier.”

  “What?” Pete said, drawing back as far as she could without starting an avalanche of ancient books and papers onto her head. Smothered in circulars from before Churchill was in office was not the way she’d imagined kicking off.

  Tyrell held up a small brown bottle. “You’re not a sensitive, am I right? You want a look at the archives, you take this.”

  “Like Hell I’m drinking something out of a bottle some skeevy old man brandishes at me,” Pete said.

  Tyrell coughed, or perhaps he was trying to laugh and not making much of a go. “My dear, you’re so generous.” He showed his teeth again. “Calling me a man.”

  He busied himself finding a pair of cups and an ancient tin half-eaten by rust, measuring the tea into the strainer by hand. Pete felt her
gaze slipping to the front of the shop. She’d lost sight of Lawrence, even though she could hear him rustling around and the sounds of the street outside. Not far at all, but she had the distinct feeling that if she made a break for the door, Tyrell would spring like a great insect and wrap his skinny limbs around her.

  He wore his human skin poorly, as far as things disguising themselves as men went. It sagged around his face, and his hair was matted and greasy, as if he’d climbed inside a homeless man and hadn’t bothered to clean up. His eyes burned too bright, and whatever his real shape looked like hadn’t quite mastered blinking. Tyrell displaced just a little too much air for his size, the thing living under his skin larger than his concentration camp limbs and cavernous face.

  “What should I call you instead?” Pete said.

  “Whatever’s your pleasure.” Tyrell brushed his fingers against hers when he handed her the teacup and added a drop from his bottle.

  “Don’t do that,” Pete warned. She sniffed the tea. It was gave off musty steam and smelled rather like the inside of a pensioner’s purse, but not like poison.

  “I’ll do what I like,” Tyrell said, downing his own cup, sans potion. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me, desperately, and I don’t think you’re really in a position to boss me about.” He clinked his empty porcelain against Pete’s. “So drink up, Alice, and quit pretending you’re not quivering with anticipation.”

  “Fuck off,” Pete said, and tossed the tea back in one long swallow. Tyrell banged his cup down.

  “That’s the spirit. Give me a hand with this.” He wrenched at the wheel of the hatch in the floor and hauled the rusted, creaking thing free. Pete peered over the edge and saw a pitted metal ladder leading down into night.

  “After you,” Tyrell said. Pete didn’t argue. He had her number—she didn’t have another bright idea if the Antiquarian wouldn’t help her. As she descended her center of gravity shifted, as if she’d passed through a sheet of running water. By the time her feet hit brick, she was seeing everything with a bleeding edge and hearing sounds down a long, convex tunnel.

  “Dammit,” she said. Her own voice came across like a wax record, warped and tinny. “What did you give me, Tyrell?”

  “Opened your eyes,” he said. When Pete looked at him from the corner of her vision, something much thinner and taller was in his place, and when she looked full on, he was the same grotty old man she’d cross the street to avoid.

  “I asked for help, not … not this,” Pete said. She reached out, grabbed at chipped concrete. “Where the Hell are we?”

  “Down the rabbit hole,” Tyrell said, and passed a hand across her neck with a chuckle. Pete felt claws, long multi-jointed fingers that could search through pages, or bones, with equal alacrity. An elongated jaw, yellow teeth made for slurping and grinding living flesh. Robes made from dirty grave winding cloth that concealed a body with more legs than two, with eyes that stared from between Tyrell’s rib bones, and soft insides that pulsed wetly behind an exoskeleton. Vast, unblinking hunger, but not for Pete. Tyrell wanted something much more, was trying to touch not her skin but the talent underneath, searching and seeking like a needle hunting a vein.

  Pete became aware that she’d fallen over when she tasted blood from a cut cheek and felt the cool of brick against her face.

  “See anything you like?” Tyrell crouched, and looked at her with his head twisted halfway round.

  “What are you?” Pete mumbled, feeling her face. Wet on her fingers, but her nerve ends were blunted. Her face was completely numb. She remembered the few times she’d tried acid in school, how her dirty laundry in the hamper had turned into a crowd of black, flapping things and the paint had begun to bleed and reform on the walls of her room into scenes from MG’s tarot cards. That had been dreadful, and this was ten times worse.

  “I told you,” Tyrell said. “I’m an Antiquarian.” He scuttled down the curved corridor ahead. Bare bulbs in cages hissed and spat above his head, and he stopped at a second metal door. “Coming?” he said, casting a look over his shoulder.

  All right, Petunia, Pete said. Get your arse up. You’ve had worse.

  She couldn’t remember when, but she got herself on her feet, and tried to ignore the ship’s-deck feeling of a bad trip rocking under her feet. “Where are we?” she said.

  Tyrell pointed to a faded seal on the metal door. Pete saw it was from the War Office, decades out of date. It also kept moving, skating from one side of the door to the other. “Bomb shelter,” he said. “Thin here. Lots of fear, lots of people all shut up together, feeding off one another.” He spun the hatch. “A bit of the lost Black, for the lost library.”

  “I can cross into the Black,” Pete insisted, knowing she sounded as if she’d drunk an entire pub’s worth of lager.

  Tyrell extended his hand to pull her through the door. “Not like this.”

  Pete ignored the gesture. Even wasted out of her skull, she knew better than to willingly touch Tyrell. She stepped through the hatch, and the bottom fell out of her stomach. The Black closed over her head, intractable as freezing water. Her head felt as if she’d left her skull floating a meter away, her brain flopping uselessly. The connection, to the currents and tides, was gone here. The Black was a bubble, trapped under glass, and Pete quivered under the psychic feedback.

  “I do enjoy this place,” Tyrell said. “The world rushes to and fro, and the Black creeps into every crevice like tar, but here…” He inhaled, nostrils flaring white. “Here, it bends to the Antiquarians.”

  Pete pressed a hand over her mouth, hoping the pressure would keep her together. Sweat chilled all over her bare skin.

  “If you’re going to vomit,” Tyrell told her, “kindly do it in the corner and not near me.”

  “This isn’t right…” Pete managed. All around her, the Black was screaming, rent open and bleeding magic into the void. She’d gotten sick the first time Jack had brought her over, but nothing like this. Something larger and more powerful than any single mage had torn a rip in the fabric of the Black here, and it was clinging to her mind, sinking in a million tiny needles that made all of her senses scream. For the Antiquarians to do such a thing, they were far worse than Lawrence had imagined. And she was here with them alone. Brilliant.

  “Breathe,” Tyrell said, taking the folded photo from his vest with a clipped motion. “If I can stand it, so can you.”

  Pete forced herself to focus on anything except her irregular heartbeat and the roar of the Black all around. The feeling wasn’t any worse than when they’d run suicide drills during her police training, back and forth in the rain and muck, until a cadet either passed out or chucked up their guts. “Hurry,” she mumbled at Tyrell, loathing the fact he’d made her beg. “Please.”

  Tyrell pressed the photo to his lips, mumbled something Pete couldn’t understand, and then dropped it to the floor.

  Blue flame crept in everywhere, over the walls, across the floor, through Tyrell’s hair, caressing his face and hands. Pete watched it raise the hairs on her arm, but she didn’t scream. It wasn’t really fire; it was power, bleeding out of the Black and into the physical realm. Jack could do the same trick.

  Tyrell panted slightly, and while the witchfire crept over every surface, Pete felt more than saw something vast and fathomless open before her. This sliver of the Black bumped against another, connected, slippery as soap bubbles. “The archives say they know nothing,” Tyrell said presently. “I’m sorry, my dear.”

  “Piss off,” Pete said. She could feel a bit of herself again, enough to know that she’d be miserable with bruises by the next day. If she even made it out here without her brain turning into cauliflower. “Try again.”

  “I’m sorry.” Tyrell crumpled the photo between his fists. “The archives have spoken. If they don’t know, it’s not there to know.”

  Pete pulled herself to her knees, and then, using the wall, stood up. She felt her knees wobbling, but she locked them and favored Tyrell
with a glare. “People don’t just do this for a laugh. There’s a reason he’s dead.”

  “Humans want to ascribe reason to everything,” Tyrell said. “It’s a failing of the breed.” He made for the door. “Our bargain is void, of course. I’m sorry that I, as an Antiquarian, could not be of service.” His awful caved-in mummy’s face composed itself into an expression that actually seemed contrite, but Pete pointed a finger at him.

  “I’m desperate. You’re right. But I’m also not an idiot.” Her arm was too heavy to do anything but hang, so she let it. “You know something.”

  Tyrell tugged at the door. “That’s odd.”

  “Tell me,” Pete said. “Whatever it is. I can take it.”

  “No, Miss Caldecott,” Tyrell snapped. “You can’t. Because you’re human, and like a human you will try to rush in and change things, push and shove them into your image of what the world should be.” He gave the door a kick. “Bastard thing. Enchantments are as dodgy as a knockoff watch.”

  Pete inserted herself between Tyrell and the door, even though a fresh wave of dizziness crested and crashed over her. “Tell me,” she snarled. “I have even less patience than the average human, Tyrell.”

  Tyrell worried his hands, nails clacking. “It’s not a death spell, all right? It’s not a spell at all. The carvings are Babylonian and a sort of necromancy, yes, but not in the narrow way you think. Not simply calling or repelling the dead. This thing that was done to this flesh—it has no order and no sense. It’s as if someone who didn’t speak the language wrote a book in Chinese, yeah? Nothing can come of it.”

  “Clearly somebody thought different,” Pete said. The carvings had power. What she’d felt in the museum wasn’t simply psychic soot, deposited by the normal passage of the Black.

  “Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t care. Antiquarians do not concern themselves in the affairs of the Black,” Tyrell said. “Far more pressing is the fact that I cannot open the door.”

  Pete stared dumbly at him for a moment. “What?” It was certainly her day for asking obvious questions.