Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

  “Ray! It’s been so long. Remember me?”

  “I remember you, Wally. Why don’t we get together? We can talk about old times.”

  “Heh. I’m sure you’d like that, Ray, but I haven’t forgotten that you tried to kill me. I mean, some stuff is hard to remember, but not that.”

  He sounded different, almost dreamy. Wally had never been the sharpest guy, but he’d never sounded like this. “I’m a different person now,” I said.

  “I’ll bet. Listen, Ray, I do want to meet with you. Right now. Walk west about three blocks. There’s a little diner that serves a nice breakfast. My treat.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. “Do you think I’m stupid, Wally?”

  “Not at all, buddy. I know you still want to kill me. But I haven’t forgotten what you did for me over the years. I still owe you. So we’ll meet in a public place, and you’ll give me a chance to talk for, say, sixty seconds before you try to kill me again. Okay? After that, we’ll see what happens. The place is called the Sugar Shaker.

  Okay?”

  “Okay.” I closed the phone and started walking west. The fire engines drove by me as I went, and I saw bystanders and lookie-loos helping tenants unload their apartments or stand guard over their stuff.

  At the corner I dropped Wally’s cell into a trash can. It was painful to throw away resources, but it was Wally’s. I didn’t want any gifts from him.

  I had three blocks to figure out what he wanted, but I couldn’t put it together. In junior high, a couple of guys from the baseball team had picked on Wally until I told them to lay off. It wasn’t that I liked him, but I hated to see the misery they were making.

  Then I’d played with a handgun, and my life changed forever. I never went back to school and didn’t hear from Wally again until just before I got out of Chino. He wrote to me, offering me a joe job at his copy shop. I tried to remember how it felt to be grateful to him, but it was too long ago. Too much had happened since.

  So I wasn’t sure what Wally owed me. An apology for what happened to Jon? For the predators he’d unleashed? As far as I was concerned, all Wally King owed me was his spell book and his miserable fucking life.

  The Sugar Shaker turned out to be a storefront café with a counter along the back wall and ten round tables.

  I took hold of my ghost knife before I walked through the door. The spell was quiet—just a sheet of laminated paper that I could sense—as it had always been. But if it still wanted someone to cut, Wally would do just fine.

  A man sitting by the wall near the newspaper rack waved to me, and it took me a moment to recognize him. It was Wally, and he looked bad. His sallow skin sagged off his body. His skull seemed slightly misshapen, and his body was a formless mass. He’d always been fat, but now he looked lumpy, as though he was riddled with tumors. He wore green sweats that needed to be thrown into a hamper, but he’d spent a long time brushing and blow-drying his hair.

  There were a dozen other people inside, talking, eating breakfast, or just reading. My adrenaline was still running, and I was jumpy and pissed off. Annalise, if she were here, would have smashed in Wally’s skull and burned him down to cinders without a second thought, and she would have written off anyone killed in the crossfire as an acceptable loss. I wasn’t ready to do that. While Wally needed killing—oh, how he needed killing, no one knew that better than I did—this wasn’t the place.

  Unless it had to become the place.

  Wally held up his pale, flabby hands. “Sixty seconds, right?”

  “You don’t deserve sixty seconds.”

  “But they do.” He gestured toward the crowd around him.

  “You look terrible.”

  “But I feel fantastic.” He rubbed at a piece of peeling skin on the end of his ear. “Ray, I know what you want to do—it’s written all over your face and I can see it in your glow—but I’m a different person, too. If you make your move here, all these people are going to suffer.”

  I stared at him, picturing him with a split skull. Could I do it quickly enough? My ghost knife felt alive in my pocket. I remembered how it had felt when it tried to control me, and the killing urge dimmed just a little.

  “Can’t we just talk?” Wally asked. “Have a seat.”

  I sat and placed my hands on the table. “My friend died today because of you.”

  “Which one?” I nearly snatched a knife off the table and stabbed him in the eye, but he kept talking, oblivious. “Was it the cute one with the big butt? I knew we were getting close to her time. She gave you my message, right? I mean, you’re here.”

  “Why, Wally? What are you trying to get out of this?”

  He sighed. “I’m not much for schemes, Ray. I think you know that. Some guys can come up with complicated plans to get what they want, but I’m not like that. I need things to be simple.”

  A waitress stepped up to the table. She was a tall Asian woman with a broad forehead and long, straight black hair. She did her best not to look at Wally and didn’t seem all that impressed by my soaking wet clothes. “Can I take your orders?”

  “I thought this table was in the other waitress’s section,” Wally said. He sounded a little whiny about it.

  “Nope, I’m your waitress,” she answered in a tone that suggested she wasn’t happy about it and didn’t want to argue.

  Wally sighed again. “I’d like three hard-boiled eggs, a side of bacon, and a side of sausage. And water. Ray? It’s on me.”

  “Black coffee,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t drink a drop of it. I didn’t want to accept anything from him.

  The waitress hurried away. “I thought this table was in the other waitress’s section,” he told me, as though I hadn’t heard him the first time he said it. His lips were rubbery and his teeth were gray. “I’m not into Asian chicks. I know some guys are crazy for them, but I like curly hair.”

  I closed my eyes. I was not going to sit here and talk about women with him. “You need things to be simple,” I prompted.

  “Right. I needed invisible people for my thing, and I wanted to do it in a way to get your attention.”

  “What ‘thing’ are you talking about?”

  “I’m trying to get my hands on a puzzle.… Actually, never mind about the thing,” he said. “I blew that, anyway. This is about you now. You remember what I told you last time, right before you tried to kill me? Well, nothing has changed. Bad shit is coming, Ray. Really, really bad shit.”

  “But why is this about me?”

  “I owe you, for all the good things you did for me growing up.”

  “That doesn’t make us friends.”

  “Oh, no. I’m well aware of that. Still, you did good things for me when no one else would, not even the actual friends I had at the time. Besides, I like knowing you. It’s like being pals with Stalin’s deadliest assassin or something.”

  Even I knew who Stalin was. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The Twenty Palace Society, natch. They used to be really scary, you know, back in the day. I’ve spoken to some of the people who were around back when. Everyone was terrified of them, and hid like field mice. But they lost their spell books—the original spell books—and can’t produce primaries anymore. They’ve been in decline ever since.”

  I knew all this. Zahn had bragged, and Annalise confirmed, that the society had once had and had lost two of the three “original” spell books. According to Annalise, they were the source of all magic in the world, and they weren’t really books with spells written in them.

  Why they were still called spell books was beyond me. I learned the names of two of them—the Book of Grooves and the Book of Oceans—during the disaster in Washaway. I had no idea where they were, and as far as I could tell, no one else did, either.

  Annalise said that anyone who read them had visions. The visions turned them into a “primary”—the most powerful kind of sorcerer—and they recorded their visions by writing them out as spells in an actual book. Tho
se secondhand spells were what everyone thought of as spell books, and they were traditionally named after the primary and the source: Smith Book of Oceans or Jones Book of Grooves.

  I’d seen one of those secondary books. Well, in truth I’d stolen it. I’d cast my ghost knife out of it and nearly died in the attempt. Annalise had taken it back, but I had a copy hidden away. In fact, it was so well hidden that I hadn’t gone near it since.

  When a second person laid hands on the Jones Book of Whatever, that person became a “secondary.” The third person became a “tertiary.” Every time a book of spells passed from one hand to the next, the spells became weaker, because each new person was further and further from the original vision. It didn’t take many generations for them to become useless.

  That’s why sorcerers guarded their spell books so carefully, because sharing them made them decay. Unfortunately, the spells that held on to their potency the longest were summoning spells.

  I knew the society was losing power as their sorcerers died and their spell books were handed down, but it didn’t really matter to me. That was long-term thinking. I was in this game for the short-term fight. I was here for this enemy, and this danger. Someone else would have to worry about the next few centuries.

  Wally watched my face, waiting. For a moment, I thought he might try to sell me something.

  I said: “You’re not telling me anything new.”

  “You’re the first real threat they’ve been able to put into the field in decades.”

  I looked away. Annalise, my boss, was ten times more dangerous than I was. She could tear my head off with one hand, and she wasn’t the most powerful member of the society by any means. I was a guppy in a shark tank. “That’s bullshit and bullshit won’t work on me.”

  He laughed. “You would think so, dude, but I’m one hundred percent serious. You killed Ansel Zahn, man!” The rail-thin old woman at the next table looked up from her book at that, but Wally was oblivious. “You killed the last of the Hammers. You took out a whole swarm of cousins, too. And those were just the top-of-the-marquee names. Do you understand how badass that is?”

  I glanced at the woman beside us. She watched us warily and looked about to bolt from her seat. “He’s talking about videogames,” I said. She sighed and returned to her book.

  Wally grinned at me with his gray smile. “And then there are all the regular folks. I didn’t know you had it in you. I tried to get my hands on the police report—”

  “Shut up.”

  “No, really! I wanted to find out how many bystanders you killed in Washa—”

  “Shut up.” I wanted to hit him so bad I could barely breathe, but I didn’t know what would happen to the people around me. They would be just like the people I’d killed in Washaway, innocent victims—only this time it wouldn’t be self-defense, it would be sloppiness.

  Luckily, Wally wasn’t interested in pushing me. “Okay, dude. Be cool. I’m just saying it’s like I went to grade school with the Seahawks’ quarterback. People are talking about you.”

  That, I didn’t like. “Tell me about the ‘thing’ Melly was supposed to help you with.”

  “Why else would you want an invisible person? I wanted to steal something that’s moderately well guarded.”

  “A puzzle,” I prompted. He smiled and shrugged. “But you couldn’t get it.” His gaze became a little distracted, as if I was boring him. Either he didn’t want to talk about it or there wasn’t anything to say. “You’re TheLastKing,’ right? That was you last Christmas in Washaway, right?”

  He focused on me. I had his attention again. “I was never in Washaway.”

  “But you were the one feeding information to …” The faces of dead people came back to my memory, and I stopped talking. I couldn’t say the names of those dead men out loud.

  Wally held up his hand, his thumb and index finger almost touching. “Teeny, teeny bits of information, but it was enough to get them running out there with their checkbooks and shotguns. They didn’t matter, though. Not really. They were in the way.”

  “Wally, tell me about the thing you’re planning. What part did Caramella have in it?”

  He laughed. “Forget about the thing. I wish I could. Anyway, she already did her part.”

  “You …” I’d almost said killed her, but the woman with the book was still too close. “The drape already took her, and it almost got me, too.”

  “That’s the risk we face when we call these things,” Wally said, absentmindedly touching a lump on his chin. “But wait, what did you call it?”

  I shrugged, feeling vaguely embarrassed. “I had to call them something, so I’ve been thinking of them as drapes.”

  “Hah! In the book, they’re called Wings of Air and Hunger, but I like your name better. Less ridiculous.”

  The word book pushed one of my buttons. “Wally, I want you to turn over your spell book and all copies—”

  “Ray! I can’t believe you’d try that shit with me.”

  “Excuse me,” the waitress said. She set a plate in front of Wally and a cup in front of me. “You can’t use that language in here. If you do it again, you’ll have to leave.”

  Wally beamed up at her with his sickly face. It was a nasty smile. “I hear you.”

  She left. Wally picked up a hard-boiled egg and popped it into his mouth—he didn’t even peel the shell off first—then gulped it down like a snake. “Ray,” he said, as he cut his sausage patties in quarters and stacked them. “Don’t try that ‘turn over your books’ crap with me, okay? It’s insulting. First of all, I’m not one of the power-crazy jagoffs you’re used to dealing with. I’m trying to do some good here.”

  “Tell that to Caramella.”

  “And her boyfriend, too, probably.” He looked at his watch. “Should have happened for him first. And the rest of them soon enough. But I’m sorry about that. Seriously. I know that drapes are painful, and I’m not looking to cause a lot of pain.”

  I laughed at him. He shrugged and looked sheepish. I said: “They’re bringing more of their kind.”

  Wally stabbed the stack of sausages with his fork, stuck them into his mouth, and swallowed them all without chewing. I wondered how his throat could squeeze them all down. “Good thing I brought you and your buddies down to take care of it, then.”

  “I’m going to take care of you, too.”

  The lumps on Wally’s face suddenly shifted position, as though something under his skin was moving around. His body hunched up, bulking around his neck and shoulders.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Hold on, let me deal with something.” He closed his eyes and took deep breaths as though fighting the urge to puke. After a few seconds, he smiled again. “My passengers didn’t like that you said that. Don’t, okay? It’d be embarrassing to call you here under a white flag and break the truce myself.”

  “Christ, Wally. You have predators inside you.”

  “Oh, yeah, Ray. You’d be surprised by how many. I’m a different thing than you’re used to facing. Man, the whole world looks different to me now. Literally. Did you know that some outsiders don’t use light to see? Now I’m sharing that gift, too, and it’s wild.”

  “You’re carrying predators for their abilities? Are you fucked in the head? What could be worth that?”

  “Oh, well, they let me fly like Superman, and I can hork Chubby Hubby ice cream through my nostrils. Right? Dude. Come on. You expect me to just tell you? We’re not exactly pals—for now, anyway—so I’m not going to tell you everything I can, you know, do. That would be showing my hand.”

  “Showing your … Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look like you’re dying right in front of me.”

  “Looks bad, feels good; that’s what I say.”

  “Christ. You’re so fucking stupid.”

  “Hey now,” Wally said. He didn’t seem offended at all. “I have power, Ray. Not Ansel Zahn levels, but I don’t have to take the risks his type takes, either. All I had to do was put a prot
ective spell on myself—a permanent one—and summon a couple something-somethings into myself. I keep them fed, and they share their little tricks with me.”

  My hand twitched as I resisted the urge to grab my ghost knife and start cutting. It could destroy the mark that protected Wally from his predators—wherever it was—turning them loose on him.

  Except that was absolutely forbidden. No one in the Twenty Palace Society was allowed to feed a predator, ever. When I killed Wally, I was going to have to do it some other way.

  He kept talking, oblivious. “Ray, I’m sure you could find a way to kill me if you really tried, but it would not be easy. Then, if you survived, you’d have my little buddies to deal with. But you shouldn’t try. You want to know why?” He gestured toward his face and neck. “Because I’m making sacrifices to do some good here.”

  “You’re trying to kill everybody.”

  “Everybody dies anyway, Ray. I’ve seen it. If things keep going the way they are, what happened to Caramella will look like passing peacefully in your sleep. And you know what? Drapes and cousins and sapphire dogs—that shit is really painful and scary for people. But I’m not about that. Just because I plan to euthanize the world doesn’t mean I want to be a dick about it. My plan is supposed to make things easier. Make it, you know, quick and painless.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” I said.

  “Too late. I already decided. Ray, do you want to know why the outsiders are so anxious to get here, to our world? Do you know why they’re desperate to escape the Deeps?”

  “What outsiders are you talking about?”

  Wally touched a lump on his face. “The society calls them predators, which is correct but doesn’t really describe everything they are, and calls their home the Empty Spaces, which is a pretty stupid name for a place that’s so full of weirdness. Ray, do you know why they want to get here so badly?”

  I didn’t like being instructed by Wally, but no one else ever wanted to explain things to me. Certainly not Annalise. “Tell me.”

  “Because there’s no death there. I’m serious. The Deeps are teeming with outsiders, but they can’t feed on each other because they can’t kill and eat each other, because nothing there can die. So they’re stuck out there, desperate and starving. You think what happened to your friend was bad? She probably had a couple days of pain before she died. Maybe less. The outsiders hurt for decades—centuries, maybe—waiting for a chance to feed again.”