The Dormant (The Sublime Electricity Book #4)

by Pavel Kornev

  "You could wait forever. I’ll never be able."

  "As you once said yourself: forever is a very long time. I believe in you, Leo. Swear it or get lost."

  I took out my pocket watch, glanced at it and hid it back.

  "If I promise to imbue you with power, you will help me free Liliana and cover me in a conversation with Moran?"

  "I could even tear off his head," the succubus said with an unpleasant smile.

  "No one's head needs to be torn off!"

  "Why not? It's been a long time since I felt such an upwelling of power!"

  "Well, will you help me or not?"

  "Free Liliana. Cover you. I'll do it."

  "Alright!" I exhaled hoarsely. "In exchange, I swear to imbue you with power as soon as I get the chance."

  The instant I pronounced these words, I was overcome with an unpleasant pressure. It was as if the oath had taken on a certain materiality and now hung like another load on my soul, which was already ruined by one deal with this underworld native.

  "Excellent!" Elizabeth-Maria said, melting into a bloodthirsty smile. "What do you need done?"

  "Let's go to the Greek Quarter," I ordered.

  "Is that where the meeting was scheduled?"

  "Yes, not far from the cabaret where you met Albert."

  The succubus nodded thoughtfully and then gave an abrupt soft laugh.

  "What is it?" I asked, getting on guard.

  "Surprising!" Elizabeth-Maria shook her head. "They say that tragedy tends to repeat itself as a farce, but for us it's the other way around. First the farce, then the tragedy."

  "No need for tragedies!" I shot out, although I understood the succubus's point perfectly. My former boss Inspector White had once kidnapped her from me, hoping to obtain my assent to a madly dangerous if not to say entirely insane affair.

  And is it not the most extreme absurdity to kidnap a succubus?

  But now, everything was exactly the opposite. My life and that of Liliana were riding on this horse, and that was already no farce at all, but the most authentic drama.

  I couldn't hold back and exhaled quietly to myself:

  "Tragedy, bugger..."

  3

  I EASILY CAME TO AN AGREEMENT with the nephew of the owner of the Charming Bacchante cabaret, where Albert Brandt had once rented an apartment. I'm sure that, even if I hadn't slipped the boy five francs for his trouble, he would have sat at the wheel as soon as we got out of view, and just stayed there until we got back.

  Complications arose where I was not expecting them. Parking the carriage on the quiet embankment of a narrow little canal, Elizabeth-Maria threw open the baggage trunk and removed my grandfather's saber.

  "What the devil are you doing?!" I objected. "How are you going to walk down the street? Everyone is watching you already, the last thing we need is for some beat cops to ask questions!"

  "You want me to help you or not?" her cold reply followed.

  "I’d prefer to avoid firefights with the police!"

  The succubus sighed loudly but didn't argue and put the saber back.

  "It'll be your fault if something goes wrong."

  "I'm sure you'll manage!" I parried and led Elizabeth-Maria down the narrow alleys of the Greek Quarter to the place I'd be meeting the senior inspector.

  On any other day, all the neighborhood lades would run to see the emancipated bimbo in pants and a leather jacket but, today, it was as if the neighborhood had died out. Most of the shops were not working. Their blinds were closed, and their doors were locked. There were no matrons hurrying to the market with small children, or old men sitting on chairs up against the building walls. And the few city dwellers who did meet the eye usually quickened their pace and walked to the other side of the street when they saw us.

  Fear had come to New Babylon. I could sense it just as clearly as mint leaves thrown into a pitcher of lemonade.

  "Are you not going to wear your glasses?" Elizabeth-Maria asked suddenly. "People will give you a wide berth!"

  "Drop it!" I waved it off.

  Then the succubus pulled out her powder box, opened it and let me look in the little circular mirror. I glanced at my own reflection and whistled quizzically. The former transparency of my eyes had been replaced with a clear glow, as if there was a light bulb of twenty or forty candlepower inside my head.

  But how could such a thing have happened? Could Liliana's fear have been the catalyst that restored my electroshock-weakened talent to life?

  Not busting my brains over it, I quickly took my dark glasses from my pocket, one of their lenses marred by a long crack, and clipped them onto my nose.

  "Is that better?"

  "You look so..." Elizabeth-Maria frowned, but immediately waved her hand. "Anyhow, it'll do!"

  By then, the Greek Quarter was behind us, and boarded-up windows or broken doors became more of a rarity. There were plenty of frameworks of once sturdy and well-maintained manors, while a wrecking ball crane loomed in the distance over the rooftops. Some sly wheeler-dealer must have decided to buy part of the abandoned neighborhood and build apartments. There were even temporary poles here with aerial telephone lines. So, the building where I had once found the muse tormenting Albert had seemingly changed a bit recently.

  I stopped at the nearest intersection, and Elizabeth-Maria climbed swiftly over the leaning fence, heading through the yard to scope it out.

  She soon came back and got my attention from behind the fence.

  "Yes?" I called back.

  "Two on the first floor. Smoking," the succubus said. "Maybe there's someone in the basement, but I'm, not sure. This building is... strange. I practically couldn't feel anything."

  I looked at my watch, it was two thirty. I decided not to draw out time, unclipped my pistol holster and asked:

  "Can you cover me?"

  "Give me five minutes. I'll get from the next building into the attic. From there, I can go down into the building."

  "Just don't make any noise. Don't do anything until I call you."

  "I hope you don't get your throat cut at the entrance," Elizabeth-Maria chuckled and hid from view.

  I waited for the scheduled time and walked over to the abandoned manor in the middle of the road no longer trying to hide. It felt like a lump of ice had frozen in my stomach, and all I could do was encourage myself with the thought I had the succubus at my back. Elizabeth-Maria had a blood interest my well-being, she would tear through them all with her bare hands just to get the power I promised her. And still this was strange. Very strange.

  But I walked forward. There was just nothing left to do.

  Dumb as it may have been, I needed to rescue Liliana in the worst way, no matter what. I was obliged to take care of my girlfriend! Otherwise...

  I didn't even want to think about what might happen otherwise.

  Horror was pounding inside me, but it didn't drive me into a stupor, instead nudging me in the back and whispering into my ear: "Kill, kill, kill!" Few recognize that fear doesn't always force a person to retreat. Not even close. Often, fear pushes a person to such foolish actions that afterward, standing in the middle of a blood-soaked room with a knife in hand, they themselves don’t understand how they managed to fly off the handle and land themselves in such a bind.

  I had no doubt that this would end in blood. If Bastian Moran wanted to get me to confess, he would have forced me to come to the Newton-Markt. But now, he had scheduled a meeting at the end of the world. And clearly not for no reason...

  As I walked through the wide-open gate into the courtyard of the abandoned manor, my nerves stretched to the limit. Touch them and they wouldn't even ring, your finger would get a bleeding cut.

  And so, when a trim boy came out of the house in a low-key gray suit and felt hat, my hand just about tore my Steyr-Han from the holster all on its own.

  I cannot say what helped me avoid doing anything dumb: the senior inspector's underling's surprising calm for such a serious situation, or the
four-barreled lupara in the hands of his partner, a strong man of middling age.

  "Weapon!" the young boy pointed at the dried-out wooden table, most likely pulled out here for that express purpose.

  I tried to use my reborn talent to catch the echoes of any fears, but I didn't have any success. Moran's subordinates were entirely calm, as if they were on duty, and that fact surprised me greatly because it didn’t fit with my interpretation. But my surprise didn't stop me from setting out first my Steyr-Han then the Cerberus on the table.

  "Turn around!" the boy demanded after that. "Hands to the side and legs at shoulder width."

  I obeyed, and was carefully patted down from ankle to collar, which is where neck knives are usually hidden. The young man acted so calculatedly that he never once covered his senior partner's line of lupara fire.

  "What's in your pockets?" he asked after feeling my jacket sleeves. "Everything on the table!"

  I unloaded the pen knife, wallet, extra Cerberus cassettes and loaded Steyr-Han clips.

  "Leave it!" the boy ordered.

  "Are you serious?"

  The boy let my rhetorical question go in one ear and out the other, then pointed to the door.

  "Go inside. You're expected in the basement."

  I tilted my head to the side in incomprehension.

  "And what about the honor guard?"

  "Go inside and get down into the basement," he repeated.

  With a bewildered snort, I got up on the porch waiting for the older man with the lupara to come after me, but he just stepped aside and let me in.

  Totally alone, to the creak of the dried-out boards, I walked to the stairs to the basement. Over the year and a half since I'd last visited this manor, it had become totally abandoned. The floor was covered by a crust of dirt, the dirty wallpaper was peeling off the walls and hanging down in ratty strips. It seemed as if the building had been striving to evict the otherworldly infection that had made this place its lair, but the poison had penetrated too deeply. Instead of purifying, it had self-destructed.

  Standing on the upper step of the basement staircase, I looked down and shivered nervously. I didn't want to go down. Ever since I was a child, I couldn't bear basements. Every time I entered one, it seemed like I would never come back up. And now, my expectation of death was stronger than ever.

  "Come down, Leopold! Come down!" I suddenly heard Bastian Moran's voice. "Enough milling about and creaking boards! I have a very busy schedule today!"

  Rage helped me overcome my doubts, and I went decisively down the rotten boards of the rickety staircase. The altar of the creature that had fancied itself an Ancient Greek muse was no longer in the basement. Instead, there were two stools. Bastian Moran was sitting on one of them with his legs crossed. The second was unoccupied.

  "Where is Liliana?" I immediately asked the senior inspector.

  "Take a seat," he pointed at the free stool with his pistol.

  "If anything happens to her..."

  "Shut up and sit down!" Bastian Moran raised his voice. After I obeyed, he continued: "Now, I want to tell you that nothing bad will happen to your sweetheart. She will simply be interrogated and brought back home. But as for what will become of you, Leopold, that depends exclusively on whether or not we can find a common tongue."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Enough playing the fool!" the senior inspector came unhinged. "Devil knows what is afoot in the city, and I'm wasting my time on you! Either start talking or get buried!"

  People need hope, even if it contradicts common sense. Skilled manipulators can get a person stuck on it like a fish hook. And police investigators were some of the most skilled operators around; I knew that perfectly, but still decided to grab onto the straw he'd extended.

  "What do you need?" I asked the senior inspector directly.

  "Whores, Aztecs and some kind of conspiracy–what were you on about yesterday? What do you know about the ritual murders?"

  I glanced at the man with unhidden surprise.

  "Are you serious? You want to talk about that?"

  "You're wasting my time!" Bastian Moran said in an icy tone. "Your company does not provide me with any joy, so just answer my question! The sooner we finish this, the better!"

  There was no reason to draw out time, so I told the senior inspector a condensed version of everything I'd discovered about the Aztec plot from Thomas Smith. Near the end, after brief hesitation, I shared my own conclusions on the matter. Something in Moran's behavior led me to believe pains had not been taken to tell him the details of the conspiracy.

  "You believe that Duke Logrin is behind this upwelling of the infernal?" the senior inspector asked thoughtfully after he heard my story. "What makes you so sure?"

  "Is fecit, qui prodest[1]," I replied, showing off my knowledge of Latin.

  "Balderdash!" Bastian Moran shot out. "Putting the Empire on the edge of collapse is not in the regent’s interest! He could have gotten rid of the Crown Princess in hundreds of less destructive ways!"

  "He tried," I told him. "But he failed. And it might well be that, this time, his New World allies didn't tell him all the details. That doesn't matter! What does matter is that the Duke brought the Aztecs to Riverfort. I was there! I saw it!"

  "What were you doing there, Leopold?"

  "Carrying out an order from her Highness... or people from her circle."

  Moran stood to his feet, looked thoughtfully at the pistol in his hand and asked:

  "That Pinkerton agent, why didn't he come to me?"

  "He called and set up a meeting. That same evening, he was nearly cut down. That can hardly have been a simple coincidence!"

  The senior inspector frowned and led his gaze away, but immediately overcame himself and, as if justifying, said:

  "When Department Three was tasked with finding the Reaper, Duke Logrin came to me with an unofficial request to keep him up to date on the investigation and immediately inform him of any progress. It didn't seem suspicious to me. The series of murders caused a large societal resonance, while the position of the regent in the Imperial council left better to be desired. Any minor issue could be critical to him. It never occurred to me he may have been somehow connected with these murders!"

  Moran spoke as if by the book, but I was in no rush to take his words for the genuine article.

  "On our last meeting, you made a very different claim."

  "Are you referring to my thoughts on her Highness?" the senior inspector snorted. "I said it yesterday and I'll say it again: the death of the Crown Princess would only be to the Empire's benefit. I am sincerely convinced that someone else should be elevated to the throne. Someone... more human."

  "So, everything comes together for you in the best conceivable way, isn't that so?"

  "First of all, her Highness is still alive and, no more than an hour ago, emerged from her coma," Bastian Moran blindsided me with the unexpected announcement.

  "How do you know?"

  "The palace defenders are still holding out. The Imperial Guard is in telephone contact with us."

  "I see," I drew out my words in thought. "And second?"

  "And second, I want a change of dynasty, not the collapse of the government!" the senior inspector practically shouted in response. "He should have waited for the Crown Princess to die of natural causes or set up a palace coup. What is happening now..." Moran looked at me in concentration. "This is the end of the Empire. Don't you understand that?"

  "I'm not sure I follow..."

  Bastian Moran snorted scornfully.

  "The unity of the Empire was based on two things," he said in a mentoring tone. "The metropole provides the provinces defense against infernal creatures and guarantees the inviolability of their borders. But what talk can there be of defense with such devilry afoot in the capital? The Imperial Palace is under siege, but we cannot do anything!"

  I nodded. What had happened was a clear demonstration of the weakness of the central authorities. If the situ
ation was not resolved very soon, there would be no avoiding unrest.

  "And it isn't all fine with the borders either," Moran sighed and went gloomy, loosening his neckerchief. "Alexandria and Teheran have concluded a military alliance and made a joint ultimatum saying that we must completely withdraw our armed forces from the Island of Arabia and cede Gibraltar to Great Egypt and Constantinople to Persia. The closing of the Persian and Red Gulfs would block the short path to India, while the loss of the Bosporus and the Pillars of Hercules would be an unmitigated catastrophe!"

  "What, is that the first such ultimatum?"

  "It is the first ultimatum the cabinet of ministers is seriously considering! The regent doesn't want war, he insists on negotiation. He believes a compromise is possible!"

  "I see Duke Logrin is no longer your hero," I chuckled, not understanding the purpose of this whole conversation.

  "Duke Logrin is doing everything so improperly, that whether I like it or not, doubts in his true motives are stealing up on me!" the senior inspector shot out. "This goes beyond criminal negligence. It looks like intentional sabotage!"

  "And what do you want from me?"

  "From you?" Bastian Moran snorted and suddenly returned the pistol to its holster. "Nothing. I've found out everything I wanted to know."

  "And Liliana?" I jumped up from the stool.

  "She'll be brought here in a quarter hour," the senior inspector promised. "I'll call off the search order. And I suggest you leave Atlantis at once, while you still have the chance."

  Bastian Moran started walking over to the stairs, but I called out to him:

  "Wait! What are you planning to do?"

  "Me?" the senior inspector asked in surprise. "I'm planning to do what I do best. Ask questions, nothing more."

  "You're not afraid to share von Nalz’s fate?"

  "The fate of the Empire is at stake. If the government falls, civilization will be thrown back half a century. And that's in the best case!"

  I hesitated, but still decided to believe the senior inspector and asked:

  "And if the Crown Princess manages to get out of the palace?"

  "No more than half a dozen people even know that her Highness is alive. There will be no rescue operation."