City of Corpses: The Dark Avenger's Sidekick Book Two (Moth & Cobweb 5)

by John C. Wright

  Only once, as they were walking, did an oddness occur. Malen climbed up from pot to lantern to an ornamental gargoyle in a keystone above the door of a highrise and caressed one of the Art-Deco faces carved there. The face grimaced and tried to bite Malen’s finger. Yumiko gently urged Malen to come down.

  Aside from that, Malen was unexpectedly well behaved. When they took a taxicab, for example, and the driver would not take Yumiko’s credit card, Yumiko was able to persuade Malen to undo her charm and restore the man’s braying donkey head to human shape.

  The red lady insisted on buying Yumiko a red parasol with an ivory hilt at Saks Fifth Avenue. Yumiko was glad for it and used the parasol to shoo crows and ravens away, which otherwise tried to alight on Malen.

  They were walking down an alleyway without enough room for both to walk abreast, and Yumiko was carrying hatboxes, parcels, and packages, not to mention her parasol. Yumiko spoke in a voice of alarm. “My lady! Back! Back the other way!”

  With glacial dignity, Malen turned. “What did you say, girl?”

  Yumiko said, “Some danger is near. I am not sure what.”

  “I am of the elder ones. I am of the Night. No danger threatens me. Put your burden down.”

  The dirty alley seemed an odd place to store parcels, but Yumiko placed them quickly on the stained macadam. She looked up in time to see Malen striding regally around the corner.

  Biting back a cry, Yumiko yanked up her kimono with both hands and sprinted after her.

  6. Stampede

  The sun was directly overhead when Yumiko came from the dim alley into the bright street, so she was dazzled for a moment. She heard a terrible noise. It was a noise which, once heard, can never be forgotten, like the roar of the sea, like the voice of a waterfall. It was the sound of a large crowd of men screaming and bellowing in rage and hatred.

  Yumiko blinked. For a moment, the street seemed empty. There were two or three deserted cars in the middle of the street and a line of police cruisers, lights flashing, parked in a line. Yumiko saw behind the police the shining highrise where she and Elfine had slept that first night.

  But the street was not empty. Before the line of police cruisers a group was listening to a speaker with a bullhorn. He stood beneath a banner and addressed the crowd through a bullhorn. A line of policemen in heavy gear stood to one side, in a narrow rank along the stairs of the hotel. The roar came from elsewhere.

  She spun. Malen was standing in the middle of the empty street gazing without curiosity in the opposite direction.

  From this direction around the corner suddenly came a mob. Those in the vanguard hid their faces behind balaclavas or bandanas. Some held signs taped to metal poles. Others flourished baseball bats or bludgeons or heavy bike locks. Some held bottles stuffed with burning rags, the flames pale and half-invisible in the bright sunlight. A figure in the forefront wore a black hood and waved a fire ax. The sound was like a physical thing, roaring. The sharp noises of glass smashing and the shrill bleating of car alarms added to the din.

  The rioters were charging the gathered crowd at full speed. The police line raised large, square shields. It was amazing how quickly the empty street was suddenly full of human figures, all running toward Yumiko and Malen.

  Malen neither moved nor flinched but looked with disdain at the flood of men about to sweep over her.

  Yumiko ran toward her. Whatever words of warning she shouted at Malen were lost in the uproar. The surging mob was immediately in the way. She saw fists, a blur of running legs. Some were boys as young as she, or younger, but taller, huge, strong, with arms that outreached hers. A girl fighting men was like a man fighting a troop of apes: a single firm blow would defeat her.

  She could not see over their heads. Yumiko dashed up over the hood and on top of one of the abandoned cars. Before she knew what she had done, Yumiko flung herself heedlessly through the air at the hooded man with the ax, who was swinging at Malen.

  Yumiko screamed like a falcon, a shrill, high scream. The man turned. She was smaller and slighter than he, but when she struck him in the face with her forward foot, her one hundred pounds of weight was behind the blow. The ax went spinning from his hands. He fell supine. If the foe cannot breathe, he cannot fight. She landed with her knee at his trachea. If he cannot see, he cannot fight. She drove her thumbs toward his eyes.

  But the voice of her master in her memory was not the only voice there. You shall serve the purposes of Heaven. Something more powerful than instinct turned her hand. Instead of gouging out his eyes, she struck his nose with her palm, breaking it. And for how long did he need to be blind? She spat in his eyes. He blinked and screeched.

  Because he was neither a werewolf nor an ape, merely a boy acting as savagely as one.

  At that same moment, instinct made her leap and roll aside. An obese man behind her, screaming obscenely and aiming a baseball bat at the back of her head, missed her and struck the supine man in the stomach, folding him in half.

  Yumiko plunged her hands into the seam of her obi, seized the first weapons to come to her fingers. One was a barblike throwing blade called a kunai. The other was a mini-grenade. Again, her instinct was overcome by something higher, and her fear was replaced by giddy amusement.

  She threw the mini-grenade instead of the knife into the obese man’s temple. He staggered, dazed, and inhaled the plumes of the erupting cloud, which smothered his next obscenity and hid his face.

  Yumiko realized that, even among the other dancers who had elfish blood mingled in their veins, she had better hand-eye coordination and sharper reflexes and tired more slowly than they. No Daylight man, mind mired in the Black Spell, could match even the grace and glamour of the Cobbler Club Girls. And an untrained, leaderless rabble of ruffians was even less a match. She laughed aloud.

  A young hooligan at the fat man’s elbow raised his boot to stomp Yumiko in the face. She braced the butt of the kunai on the pavement next to her ear. The blade was longer than the diameter of her skull, so the youth drove the knife through his boot sole into his foot rather than breaking her head. “Watch your step!” she warned as she kicked his other leg out from under him.

  From her prone position, Yumiko put her legs over her head, kicked, and threw herself upright. The mob was about to run over her. She stiffened her fingers into a knife hand and drove them into the ribs of the man directly in front her. “Pardon me!” she cried. When he doubled over, she used his back, and then used the head of the rioter behind him, to vault herself through the air again and to rebound from hood of the abandoned car onto the car roof, which trembled under her footstep.

  Now she was tall enough to see over the crowd. The skirts of her kimono were awry, her hair was wild and loose, her face was pink with battle-joy, and her red mouth was bright with laughter.

  Yumiko suddenly wondered what she was doing. What instinct had urged her to save the Malen from harm? If the humans tore one of their elfin tormentors to bits, that would be simple justice. Her eyes darted through the crowd. There was no sign of Malen.

  There was no sign of the police wading into the fray. The police line was retreating in an orderly fashion, not interfering with rioters. They clashed with the first crowd. There was a confusion of raised fists and clubs and curses, gangs of three and four pulling attackers to the street and stomping them down. It was awkward and ugly and none of the beauty of well executed blows was present.

  The next thing Yumiko fished out of her sash was her baton, which she unfolded into a staff. She whirled and spun the staff into the insanely screaming faces and blocked and bruised the hands and arms that reached for her from all directions. The weapon was like a ghostly disk of metal, so quickly did she spin it.

  Then, she realized she was wasting energy. The humans were slow and stiff in their movements, like lumbering creatures of clay. So she switched to a long-front stance, spread her grip, and began to move the staff in sharp, controlled strokes and thrusts, more precise and more painful while perhaps less
damaging.

  She was taken by surprise at how much more harm she committed on opponents who did not know how to take a blow or to fall. One eager boy climbing up the fender with a knife, when she dislocated his kneecap, plunged backward, arms wind-milling, and landed on his head, where he lay in a daze, swearing. No one in the crowd behind raised a hand to break his fall.

  Despite her Twilight speed and their Daylight slowness, numbers mattered, and she was hard pressed. She needed time and chance to draw her wirepoon pistol and teargas pellets to cover a retreat. Time and chance she did not have.

  She assumed Malen was more than capable of fending for herself. Indeed, Yumiko’s main fear was for what Malen would do to the throngs of men. She stole another glance behind her. The police still had not moved. The Black Spell, or something just as wicked, held their hands. They let the riot roar on.

  A moment of good fortune came when those standing farther off, seeing Yumiko atop the car, now began pulling rocks and bottles from their knapsacks and throwing them. Men who had climbed onto the hood were hit by rocks from behind. When they scattered and ducked, these men were easy to trip and topple back into the crowd.

  She narrowed her grip, spun the staff, and found it was easy to parry these unaerodynamic, inaccurate missiles and redirect them toward the upturned, masked faces of screaming rioters trying to climb the car. The bottles shattered with startling noise on the pavement rather than on her staff if she deflected them correctly, and her attackers would draw back, frightened.

  The rocks were painful but not deadly. Breaking a nose or bruising a throat was enough to take an amateur out of the fight. Even a black eye would discourage the more timid.

  The best thing thrown at her was a bottle filled with gasoline and sporting a lit rag from its neck. That one she tapped with her staff so that it shattered on the car trunk. The mob recoiled from the splash of flaming oil and glass splinters. “You can have this back; thank you!” she cried sweetly.

  The front rank pressed back into the oncoming second rank, creating a tangle, and now the flood of rioters suddenly had an eddy in it, a spot of blank pavement. It was her path of retreat.

  She waved her farewell, smiled, unfolded her staff to twice its length, and used the force of the expansion to pole-vault over their heads. From there, she landed on the canvas roof of a sidewalk stand selling newspapers and drinks, which the rioters were busily looting. From there, a utility pole was within reach. She began to scurry up the rungs.

  This was not unnoticed. Men were roaring and reaching for her. But only one man at a time could come up the rungs of the utility pole. She lined up her shot as carefully as a billiard player with a pool cue, whistled sharply, and when the man looked up, she shot the staff tip out to double length. Down he fell, taking the man below him along to the pavement.

  All around the pole a double circle of raging men raised clawed fingers, trying to grab her legs and pull her down. The mob seemed a single beast, a horror from Greek myths with a hundred hands.

  Suddenly, a strange, nightmarish sensation plucked at her soul. The hands reaching for her grew dark and darker. The brown of human skin turned into the brown of tree bark. Each man screamed in panic, horror, and pain, a terrible sound, as twigs emerged from ears and nostrils, and hair of head and beard turned green. Their toes emerged from their shoes and were driven into the concrete of the pavement.

  In a moment, there was a circle of trees around her.

  The greenery was spreading. Rioters farther away where twisting, cursing, calling out, and trying to run. Their steps were slow and slower, and their shoes burst asunder, as feet and toes became writhing roots of wood driving into the suddenly soft and yielding street surface.

  One young man, perhaps too young to shave, threw himself to his knees, clutching an ostentatious gold crucifix on a gold chain at his neck, and cried out a simple children’s mealtime prayer. God is great! God is good!

  The curse passed him by without touching him. He opened his terror-wet eyes, saw his arms and legs unaltered, jumped up and ran like a jackrabbit, leaping over the roots and slipping past the crooked, leafy grasp of his shrieking, cursing friends.

  In a moment, as swiftly as it had come, the roaring sea noise of the riot dwindled and vanished. The mob was routed. Yumiko looked toward the end of the street, wondering where Malen was. Surely this was her work. But now the crowns of the trees were tall, and she could see nothing but leaves in that direction.

  She jumped from the pole and swung on a tree branch and then to the ground. The branch broke under her hand, but she landed in a roll and came to her feet, unharmed. Human blood came from the broken ends, and a voice of woe cried out in pain from beneath the trunk. She threw the branch from her with a shiver of disgust.

  Yumiko saw scarlet fluttering between the trunks. She peered fearfully around the bole of a tree.

  Chapter Ten: The Hollow Hill

  1. The Ivory Chair

  Here was a clearing set with grass. A group of rioters, now unmasked, was down on hands and knees, chewing the grass contentedly, their expressions blank. Dame Malen Ruddgochren was sitting with her hair unbound, spilling through the air like a red cloud.

  She was seated on the selfsame chair of ivory Yumiko had last seen back in the royal suite of the Cobbler building. Yumiko now saw it was made of human bones. Malen had a femur in her hand, which she was carefully fitting into a slot between the radius and the ulna of an arm bone amid the struts of the chair arms. The other bones creaked slightly, and stiffened, to clamp the femur firmly in place. Now it was part of the design.

  Yumiko was horrified. “You are not supposed to kill them.”

  Malen did not look up. “Who speaks to me?”

  “I mean, ma’am. My lady. You are not supposed to kill them, ma’am.”

  “That is better. Mind your tongue, lest it haply turn into a poisonous adder. Why are you allowed to kill them, and I am not?”

  Malen now turned her head and stared at her. Her gray eyes reflected a silvery light from a source that was not present anywhere in the environs. Apparently, she meant it not as a rhetorical question, for she said, “Well?”

  Yumiko should have said something flattering, but the truth leaped angrily out of her lips. “I was trying to save you!”

  “You? Little un-bred half-breed? The mongrel bint means to save me? When I told you I was in no danger? Such presumption on your part. And look at your clothing! I shall do the Magician an evil turn because of this, for loaning me so insolent a draggletail! What shall it be? Ah! I will not tell him who you are.” She smiled and clapped her green hands together, delighted with herself. “A delicious revenge! And to compass it, I need do nothing.”

  Yumiko was startled, and perhaps some wisps of the drunken, dreamlike sensation that surrounded the red lady caught her off guard, for she blurted out, “You know who I am?”

  Malen threw back her head and laughed.

  2. Discovered

  Malen covered her smile with her fingers. “I should not laugh. Elfin mirth when overloud drives mortals mad as well as those whose blood is weak.

  “Know who you are? Pretty as a Moth, but with slanted eyes, dark locks, and ivory skin like a daughter of Amaterasu Omikami? Two weeks ago dead? Perfumed of the towers of starlight of Sarras before their downfall? Hah! I should have known you immediately, except that no one looks at half-breeds, or drudge girls, and everyone knows you are dead. But even then, I did not think on you until you betrayed yourself.”

  She lowered her fingers. “Girl, I just saw a crowd stoning you, and you took the stones in mid-air aside with a stick without looking and flung each one back in their faces. One pitched a bottle of Greek fire at your head, and you deflected it back to shatter at the feet of he who threw it. No mortal man of the Daylight world can do that, nor Moth, nor Cobweb, nor cunning Mustardseed from the Twilight, nor any of the wise Peaseblossom clan, save for one and one only.”

  Yumiko said, “If you please, ma’am, who?”<
br />
  She raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. The Peaseblossom was at the club last night. I would say he was in disguise, but is it called a disguise when one removes, rather than dons, a mask?”

  “Winged Vengeance was at the club?”

  “You pretend not to know your own master? How droll.”

  “But– Did you expose him to the Cobwebs?”

  “Cobwebs?” Her voice rang with disgust. “Bastard sons of harlots! Have you any idea what sort of filth it was to whom Cobweb mated his daughters to produce so many abnormalities and half-humans? Why should I care how many wolf-men of the Anarchists your crow-man kills? Lucien can do his own cleaning up!”

  “But– I heard– Is not Lucien Cobweb your beloved?”

  “Hardly, my dear girl! A child in pigtails who is weary of her spotless Sunday frills might sit in a puddle and make a mudpie, but not to eat for luncheon. Besides, if I need someone to fight my suitor at the elfin court, Hafgan, when he grows tiresome, who better? And more than that, Lucien is a card I can let drop from my sleeve if Erlkoenig attempts to arrange another political marriage for me. No one takes a bride who dallies with the hounds-keeper. How much less one who lies down with hounds?”

  “You are not with the Anarchists? Not against them? They mean to overthrow the elfs! Overthrow you!”

  “So let them.” Malen looked a trifle bored. “I know little of these tiresome affairs. I would not know of you at all, would never have even heard your insignificant name, had you not come into our lands to rob our Tower of Glass to lead an army against us.”

  “An army?”

  “You were there. King Brian’s men were upon your men like wasps.”

  “What men? I have no men. Ah. Do I?”

  Malen waved her hand in the air, as if to brush the question aside. “Men or monsters, what difference? Werewolves and clay statues, abominable snowmen, blood-drinking vampires, and other deformities and abortions. All of them led by shades of the dead who hold no terror for us, we who are the pure-bred children of Air and Old Night.”