by John Meaney
Good.
So he carried her around to the rear, his perfect diva, half-squatted again to twist the handle—careful, don't drop her—and stood back as the trunk lid rose up. Then, with perfect care and a tender smile, he rolled the diva's wonderful body into the trunk.
And slammed the lid down.
Donal went to the gatehouse, where he found two more slumped men. Three sets of car keys hung from hooks, and he took them all. Then he wrenched down the series of brass levers that would cause the outer gates to open.
Crossing back to the car, he tried the keys, and the second set fit. The huge steel gates were groaning back as Donal walked over to a drain in the ground and dropped the two remaining sets of keys through the grille. There were two viscous splashes in darkness.
He climbed into the car, pushed the skull-embossed lever into first, and drove forward through the huge gates while they were still opening, then turned onto the empty road where derelict buildings stared at him.
Overhead, the sky pulsed dark purple as he drove.
It took two hours to clear the central Tristopolitan districts, using backstreets and odd alleyways where possible, staying off the main grid. Donal kept under the speed limit, drove courteously . . .
So beautiful.
. . . and tried to keep his attention on his driving, despite the flawless wonder in the trunk of his car. It was difficult, and he wanted to stop and allow the stupefied trance to swallow him. He needed to go back to touch his beauty . . . but not yet. Not yet.
Beautiful.
And not just beautiful, but his; wasn't that the point?
Once past the city limits, Donal turned the car toward Black Iron Forest, where few people ventured and fewer lived. Perhaps that was why the orphanage had never sold the cabin for their own gain, or perhaps it was Sister Mary-Anne Styx who had arranged things to Donal's advantage.
Although Donal's parents had died when he was a week old, his grandfather, dour and solitary, had survived for thirteen more years. Unwilling to raise a grandchild, he nevertheless acknowledged Donal. When Jack Riordan died a year before Donal's “graduation” from the orphanage—before they kicked him out on his fourteenth birthday—Donal received title to the cabin, plus the small amount of savings that had allowed him to continue in school and work toward the military entrance exams.
As far as Donal knew, none of his department colleagues was aware of the place. He had never mentioned it, rarely visited, and for sure had never brought anyone here.
Not until now.
The long car growled along ever-darkening roads, the trees becoming odd-patterned shadows against night, twisting perspective. There was a long period when Donal drove without any conscious thought, lost in beautiful dreams—oh, my diva—and when he came back into the moment, he was entering the Dispersed Vale.
They—he and the dead diva—were deep inside Black Iron Forest now. Someone would have discovered the mess back at the Downtown Complex. Scene-of-crime diviners might already be at work.
The time when he could have given it up and returned to police HQ was hours past.
It's all right, my love.
It was better when the path was clear, all choice removed.
The time on the skull clock—the hands fashioned in the form of slender bones: one femur, one radius—passed twenty-five o'clock. It was the early hours of the morning.
He continued to drive.
Eldritch howls and half-perceived shadows with amber eyes moved in the darkness. Donal branched off the already-narrow forest road onto the Tartrous Trail, dropping his speed. Grit seemed to have gathered in his eyes.
By four A.M., he was in familiar surroundings. Donal drove the car quietly down to a clearing and stopped.
And waited.
He switched the engine off.
Lost in trance for a time, Donal eventually came to. He inhaled, then forced himself to move, pushing the car door open and stepping out onto dark mud. The sky was a featureless purple. Looking downslope, he could see the lake.
It was a massive shadow that would never grow lighter. The lake had no name, and its waters were permanently black, perpetually still. Donal had never seen it any other way.
He walked to a wide silvery tree that stood on a hillock, dragging a key out of his pocket. Donal inserted the key into a knothole in the bark. There was a hesitation, then a cracking sound.
The slope's mulch slid back to reveal the cabin's steel windows and the carved blackwood door.
Grandfather Jack's legacy.
Donal opened up the front door, then went back to the car and hauled the dear diva from the trunk. Gently he carried her to the cabin, their cabin, and laid her down on the long dining table.
He snapped the flint switches on two oil lamps. Their yellowish light danced and flickered before growing strong and steady.
Perfect . . .
No. There was work to be done.
Forcing himself not to look at the perfection spread out upon the table, Donal looked around the low-ceilinged room, avoiding the overhead beams, searching for something heavy.
He stopped when he came across an old Zurinese stone skull, some beloved totem of his miserable old grandfather Jack, who had never come to visit his grandson, never mind take him away from the prison that was . . .
Irrelevant now.
So beautiful.
Stone skull in hand, Donal made his way downslope to the car. He pushed down the trunk lid and climbed into the driver's seat, the skull in his lap as he drove in first gear, bypassing a large tree root. Then he stopped but left the engine running.
Directly below, the nameless lake was thick and dark as ever.
Donal slid out from the driver's seat, jammed the stone skull down on the accelerator, let go of the clutch pedal, and leaped back. The car bumped its way down toward the waiting lake.
It's going to stall.
For a second Donal thought he had failed, but then the car was over the edge into the lake with a heavy plop, no more. Black water surrounded the car's roof, pulling it under, and then it was gone.
One long curved wave moved across the viscous surface like a satisfied smile, then attenuated into nothingness. Lake and forest had returned to dark normalcy.
After a moment, Donal turned and made his way back to the cabin. To the object of his dreams.
For the next three days and nights there was no sleep—no true sleep—for Donal. He slid in and out of strange half-waking dreams, where the diva sang arias that were purely his, amid impossible white sands by a quicksilver sea born of the memory of that other artist, Jamix Holandson, whose dead bone Donal had touched.
But it was the diva who remained with him, laid out on the long table beneath the low ceiling, her flesh pure and radiant ivory.
So beautiful.
Donal washed the wounds and scraped dried blood from perfect skin—a spatula from the kitchen served for that. He cut away the bloodied portions of her dress—oh, Thanatos, such perfection—and wrapped a white bedsheet around her body.
Afterward, he pulled the only armchair close, turned it away from the table, and used it to kneel upon, his forearms across the chair's back. He contemplated the drying perfection of his desire.
Soon she would be ready for the flensing.
Do you hear the bones?
Not every moment was spent in contemplation. For the beautiful dark act to take place, it was necessary that the diva—and Donal—remain undisturbed. So he was able to drag himself into the kitchen, drinking cold canned soup as he dug through the old toolbox and equipment chest.
In a forest such as this, Grandfather Jack had needed to prepare for dangerous times. There were thirteen old iron life-wards: narrow, heavy objects the length of his forearm, ending in a rough spike so they could be jammed into the ground.
Designed primarily to ward off packs of deathwolves, the devices would repel all living organisms above the level of plants.
The life-wards were heavy as Donal lugged t
hem outside. When he pushed them into the hard soil and leaned on them, the life-wards' spikes slid easily into place. It took an hour—as far as he could tell; time seemed to be moving strangely—to set them all in place, in a rough ring around the cabin.
As the last ward entered the soil, a great shimmering hemisphere descended, shielding the entire cabin from invasion.
Safe.
Donal went back in to contemplate the diva.
After a long, rapt period, Donal shook himself into awareness. He was kneeling on the reversed armchair. When he pushed himself to standing, his sinews ached with unaccustomed use.
He wiped his hand across his face, feeling rough stubble. Then he moved toward the bathroom, and each step was hot agony.
Finishing, he drank brackish water from the faucet. Then he walked, still in pain but with more mobility, to the kitchen. He opened another can of soup, took three cold sips from it, and put it down.
There was something important he had to do.
What is it?
The toolbox.
From it, Donal drew the rusted scythe that Grandfather Jack once used to cut back the tall, dark grasses. He found the stone sharpening block, poured seven drops of moth oil upon it, and began the long, careful process of sharpening the scythe.
Soon the flesh would begin to soften with a hint of liquefaction.
Beautiful. So . . .
Then, only then, Donal could begin the slicing and cleansing process, which would culminate when he polished those dear bones, one by one, with every ounce of skill he possessed.
Donal worked until he could stand it no more: the presence of perfection in the next room while he scraped blade against stone in here.
He went back into the lounge and resumed his kneeling position upon the armchair, contemplating the diva laid out upon his table.
So perfect . . .
And that was the position he was in, kneeling and frozen in rapt awe, when the front door blew apart in splinters and the windows exploded inward.
No . . .
Dark-clad troopers in hexlar armor stormed inside, dropping to crouch, some rolling and coming up with weapons trained on Donal.
You cannot . . .
Donal's hand moved toward his shoulder holster.
. . . have her!
He clasped the butt of his Magnus, drawing it out.
And in that moment a woman clad in a pale-gray skirt suit stepped through the splintered remnants of the doorway. She raised a heavy dart gun, aimed at Donal's heart.
The world was moving so slowly.
“Too late.”
She fired.
The ceiling spun past and he was flat on the floor, limbs rigid, ribs paralyzed, scarcely breathing. Darkness circled and shifted around the edges of his vision.
“How. . .” It was so hard to speak. “Wards . . .”
“That was your mistake. They're life-wards.”
The woman leaned over him and brushed back her white-blond hair with one gloved hand. Donal's lips moved to ask the next question, but only a gasp came out.
“The ward shield keeps out”—she smiled—“only living beings.”
Donal's eyes shifted toward the troopers.
“Oh, they're alive, all right.” The woman tapped Donal's forehead with one finger. “It's me you didn't count on.”
Darkness was closing in.
“—take the diva and—” was all he could hear of the troopers' voices.
A hush surrounded Donal, blanketing him.
No. She's mine.
Even the air was thicker, viscous. It was difficult to drag the stuff into his lungs.
Do you hear the . . .
Silence.
A shadow fist closed around the world and snuffed it out.
Delirium followed chaotic dream followed a thrashing in his bed, limbs screaming with pain as Donal—or the near-mindless thing that had been Donal—fought against the restraints and howled. Then he would lapse into comatose darkness.
Afterward, liquid fire would spread along each fine nerve, igniting it with agony, as the cycle of torture began again.
For nine long days and nights, nurses with vertically slitted eyes watched over Donal, their skins shifting through hues of violet as Donal's writhing body threw back refracted energy from the thaumaturgic field. They were immune to the field's effects: Night Sisters with delicate fangs and elegant limbs, revealing hints of their feline aspect.
They watched and cared for him.
On the tenth night, something burst inside Donal, something in his mind . . . and he gave a great agonized gasp and fell back, slipping into peaceful sleep. Above him, the ten-foot-long shield casting the healing field glowed strongly and then began to fade. The thaumaturgic field shifted hue and became a pale-blue volume that smelled of ozone and lilacs.
Two of the Night Sisters looked at each other, the vertical slits of their eyes growing more circular as the light faded once more.
“He'll be fine, don't you think?”
“Yes. You did a good job, Sister Felice.”
“Thank you. Shall I phone the commander, or do you—”
“I'll let you make the call.”
The younger Night Sister, the one known as Sister Felice, walked along the central aisle of the shadowed ward. The room was in darkness save for one of the beds, which glimmered with a sapphire glow: radiant energy from an ensorcelled victim trapped deep within the paralyzing influence of a deathmoth's bite.
Other sleeping forms were just lumps beneath the bedclothes, unmoving, while tiny monitor sprites hovered over each pillow, ready to flare with brightness should any vital signs drop below the parameters that the Night Sisters had set.
In the nursing station, Sister Felice picked up the phone. With one long retractable fingernail, she rotated all ten combination wheels to a memorized sequence. She listened for the ring. Though it was the middle of the night, someone picked up the phone immediately at the other end.
“Hello?”
“Is this Commander Laura Steele?”
“Yes.”
“You wanted to know when a patient called Lieutenant Riordan underwent a phase shift in his condition?”
“What's happened?”
“It's an improvement, not a decline. Although, not having died in the first three days, he had a good chance of—”
“He's going to live?”
“Yes, that's—”
A burr sounded.
Sister Felice held out the receiver.
“You're welcome.” Her voice was a predator's whisper.
She put the receiver down.
On the seventeenth day—after Donal had woken for an hour at a time, three times in twenty-five hours—Sister Felice hauled him from the bed, onto a wheelchair whose frame was formed of interlocking silver heptagrams.
“For luck,” she murmured, as Donal ran his fingertips along the soft metal. “And for healing.”
“Where . . .” His voice was a croak. “Going . . . where?”
“Rehabituation.” Sister Felice pushed the chair into motion. “Don't believe what they say about mystical therapists.”
She let go of the chair's handles and walked in front, heading through open double doors and into an empty corridor. The wheelchair trundled after her, bearing Donal's pain-racked form.
“What do they . . . say?”
“Oh”—Sister Felice looked back over her shoulder at him—“that they're evil and sadistic and delight in torturing you until you scream.”
They continued on until they came to a floating hand-shape sign hanging in midair in a five-way intersection of corridors.
“Rehab,” said Sister Felice loudly.
The hand swung left.
“Everything moves around in this place.” She shook her head, then headed into the indicated corridor. “Come along.”
The wheelchair followed.
“The . . . therapists.” Donal's voice was tight, but he had to ask. “Don't . . . torture patients?
”
“Oh, they torture you, all right.” Sister Felice slowed before a set of black opaque doors labeled RD. “It's just they don't enjoy doing it.”
Then she grinned, showing needle-fine white fangs.
“Only kidding.”
The doors swung open of their own accord, and Sister Felice stepped aside as Donal's wheelchair rolled forward and took him into Rehab.
A soft feminine chuckle sounded as the doors closed behind him.
“Ah, so you're our latest vic—patient.” The androgyne in white tunic and trousers had wide shoulders and ten-inch-long fingers. A smile stretched its long features. “That's our little joke. Don't you worry.”
“Thanatos.” Donal was not up to this.
“All right, my name's Jan, and the first thing we have to do is restore some basic thought and movement patterns. You with me?”
“Uh, if you say s—”
A strangled gargling sound came from one corner of the Rehabituation Department. Donal was confused by the strange geometric shapes of apparatus designed for Hades-knew-what functions, but then he saw the patient trapped inside.
Gross distortions rippled across the man's body. His right hand flared to maybe four feet in length, and he moaned in pain.
Then, just for a second, his whole form pancaked outward to ten or twelve feet in diameter, amoebalike, before retracting into a normal human shape. The man bent forward on his couch, retching. Another androgynous therapist held a cardboard bowl beneath the man's mouth.
“That's Andy”—Jan used one frighteningly long finger to indicate the patient—“and the therapist is Alyx.”
“Very good,” Alyx was murmuring to the wretched Andy.
“Are you trying to tear him apart?” Donal felt an urge to get off his wheelchair and run, but when he commanded his muscles to move, only hot pain resulted. “You're killing him.”
“No. Relax.” Jan ran its long fingers, ending in soft padded tips, down Donal's face. “Andy's been infected with an attenuation field. We're teaching him to hold himself together.”
“Oh.” Donal's eyelids fluttered.
Again Andy's hands ballooned, the right more than the left, and his face grew larger and larger.
“See the natural precursor to complete expansion?” Jan gestured, and Donal's wheelchair rolled closer to Andy's couch. “That's how your nervous system views the world, in terms of touch. The hand and face are more sensitive than—”
