Black Blood

by John Meaney

“So question me.”

  “As if you've got anything to add beyond the obvious. Two—well, shall I call them resurrected persons?—opened fire on Mayor Dancy and then the crowd, and took out Hades knows how many of them, Commissioner Vilnar included. That about sum up what you might have said?”

  “Sir, I'm pretty sure I saw—”

  Behind Craigsen, Lieutenant Zelashni shook his head.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Craigsen. “And get out of my sight, before I throw you in the wagon with the other icicles.”

  “This was a professional hit.”

  “I want you off this crime scene right now. That's a direct order, Riordan.”

  Donal's voice went colder than a human's ever could.

  “Then I'll do it. Sir.”

  He turned and crossed the atrium floor, ignoring an attempted wave from Al Brodowski, and went out. The bonestone treads seemed to shiver beneath his feet as he descended to the gravel. A black ambulance was opening up, allowing the stretcher bearers to load sealed-up body bags formed of slick membrane.

  After a minute, Lieutenant Zelashni came down to stand beside Donal.

  “This is a nightmare.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You need to get out of here.” Zelashni put his hands in his pockets. “Let's take a walk.”

  “Escorting me off the premises?”

  “Fucking Hades, Riordan. Not everyone's like Craigsen.”

  “My apologies.” Donal glanced back up at the rearing skull of City Hall. “But it's his kind that are taking power, isn't it?”

  “So let's walk. Politics is a little outside my scope.”

  “Everything is politics. Vilnar told me that.”

  “I never figured you for a politician.”

  “I'm not.” Again Donal looked back. “I think the Old Man thought I might be able to handle it. Bit of a switch for me.”

  Zelashni set the pace, shoes crunching on the gravel roadway. They walked past the ambulance, where Mayor Dancy's sobbing son looked up at Donal, his mouth upturned into a trembling gesture of hatred. He was being comforted by several men in expensive suits. One, with a Unity Party pin in his lapel, was patting the younger Dancy's upper arm.

  “Tell me what you saw, Riordan.”

  “Call me Donal. And I saw a shadow on the ceiling, in the main hall.”

  “On the ceiling?”

  “A man in some kind of dark bodysuit, I think.”

  “Thanatos, Rior—Donal. Every night, I read adventure stories to my son. I think we did that one last week.”

  “You know SOCD are going to be here in strength. If you can get a diviner up there—”

  “On the ceiling. About, what, eighty or ninety feet high?”

  “There must be scaffolding or something. Unless they use wraiths to keep it clean, repaint it. Whatever.”

  “Huh.”

  The two men walked on, past stationary cruisers whose strobes flashed alternating pulses of harsh whiteness and deep-black anti-light, past uniformed officers alertly looking in all directions without knowing what to expect, while their colleagues helped rich-looking people in shock to climb into their cars. Some of the limousines were acting as ambulances, hurtling off at high speed, spraying gravel, escorted by motorcycle cops on black, polished-chitin Panther 7s whose slit-shaped headlights shone purple.

  “There were two dead cops on the third floor,” said Zelashni. “Letharque and Prigolin. You know them?”

  “Not really. Shit. They were the officers down?”

  “Yeah. Gilarney found 'em inside a display case. Limbs broken, tangled up.”

  “Ah, Thanatos. You got any idea how Gilarney is?”

  “The medics were waking her up, last time I looked. Don't expect any sense from her.”

  “Lethemist?”

  Donal had come across its use before, and knew that it not only wiped out short-term memory, it also caused intermittent, excruciating migraines for months to come. Although nonlethal, its use by law enforcement officers was banned.

  “That, or something like it. Knocked her out good, but at least she'll recover. Not like her guys.”

  “Damn it, Zelashni. If the two men—zombies—in the kitchen did all the killing, why would they have killed someone on the third floor? And hidden the bodies.”

  “Good question, and I know what Craigsen would say. Because their weapons must have been stashed, and maybe that display case was the hiding place.”

  “Shit.”

  To retrieve the weapons, the two zombies would have had to deal with the cops watching over the gallery where the cache was hidden. It was perfectly logical, and perfectly wrong.

  “Fuck,” muttered Zelashni.

  He was looking behind him, and Donal turned to see. Three D-wagons were opening their carapaces, revealing the long horizontal bars that prisoners could be manacled to. Each detention wagon had a complement of seven armed officers with hexlar jackets, helmets, and shotguns with hexplosive rounds.

  The kitchen staff, some twenty zombies, their wrists and ankles in chains, were shuffling toward the wagons.

  “The two zombies with weapons,” said Donal, “were ensorcelled. A couple of guys in dark suits went into the kitchens earlier…. Shit, I think they put the uniforms into trance as well. The officers guarding the door.”

  “I'll talk to the uniforms. You know their names?”

  Donal shook his head. “They're dead. I'm pretty sure that one of the zombies shot them first, before anybody else.”

  “That's what you might call convenient.”

  “For my flimsy story, you mean?”

  They stopped at the edge of the road. Beyond lay the dark trees. There was no sign of ectoplasma wraiths, but Donal knew better than to step off the graveled roadway.

  “I'll do what I can,” said Zelashni. “You understand?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I get that. Thanks.”

  Zelashni stared at him for a moment, then held out his hand.

  “My first name's Elleston.”

  “What's your son's name?”

  “Uh, Martin. Why?”

  “He's a lucky guy.”

  They shook hands.

  “Look after yourself, Donal.”

  “You, too, Elleston.”

  Zelashni turned and headed back toward City Hall. Donal waited a moment, then continued along the darkened roadway that led through the shadows of Möbius Park.

  He reached the North-East Gate, otherwise known as Deepwell Passing. Inside it was a lodge, where rarely glimpsed park-keepers lived and worked. Donal knocked on the door, and after a second it swung inward.

  A group of seven men, shoulder-to-shoulder, shuffled back.

  “Er … I'm Lieutenant Riordan.”

  “You knocked, not hurrying—”

  “—to get through. The—”

  “—gate, I mean. Everyone's—”

  “—in a hurry, but you don't—”

  “—get things done that—”

  “—way.”

  The voice looped around, from man to man, but it was the same voice. Donal was facing a septune gestalt. Their torsos—its torsos—were connected by thick, short muscular trunks.

  “You're a park-keeper, right?”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  After a moment, all seven said in unison: “I am indeed one park-keeper.”

  Donal thought about what to say next.

  “You know there's been a multiple homicide in City Hall. What I'd like to ask is for you to ring me if you find anything … odd. Afterward.”

  “What—”

  “—do—”

  “—you—”

  “—mean—”

  “—by—”

  “—odd—”

  “—Lieutenant?”

  Perhaps Zelashni believed only that Donal thought he had seen a shadow. Zelashni
might not be convinced of the reality of a professional kill going far beyond the crudeness of a mob hit.

  “There was an assassin involved. I'm the only one who thinks so.”

  For a moment, all seven men—all seven parts of the one being—lowered their/his head and closed their/his eyes, as if falling asleep standing up.

  Probably has to sleep that way.

  Then seven heads raised, seven pairs of eyes opened and focused on Donal.

  “Yes,” came from seven mouths, followed by: “I will—”

  “—ring—”

  “—you at—”

  “—Avenue—”

  “—of the—”

  “—Basilisks—”

  “—Lieutenant.”

  Donal looked from face to face, wishing he knew the correct form of address for a septune form, traditional gatekeepers whose unusual minds held fast against the influence of dream-ghouls and other denizens of the great stone walls.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  He turned and left, accompanied by a shuffling sound as the septune being moved to close the lodge door. Then it clicked shut, and Donal was left staring into the blackness of Möbius Park.

  Everything's gone to Hades.

  Behind him, the heavy gates of Deepwell Passing opened. Donal walked through, putting his left hand into his jacket pocket for no conscious reason.

  “Fuck!”

  Then he was on the sidewalk outside, and the massive gates were closed.

  I forgot. How could I?

  He withdrew his now-sticky fingers from his pocket.

  Ensorcellment. Has to be.

  But who was it that had caused Donal to forget he had Commissioner Vilnar's eyeball in his pocket? The commissioner's driver, Lamis? He was an interesting individual, but Donal hadn't seen him since getting out of the car.

  What other abilities had Vilnar possessed? What secrets had he kept?

  I'll find out.

  If this was the doing of the Black Circle, of Gelbthorne or Cortindo, then it wasn't Mayor Dancy's death that Donal was going to avenge. It was Arrhennius Vilnar's, in addition to Laura Steele's.

  “Whatever you started, Commissioner … I will finish it.”

  The Phantasm IV leaned over, Alexa tight against the fuel tank, as it arced onto an abandoned road, swerved past potholes, hurtled the length of the derelict street, and then began to slow. From the smashed skeletons of tenements on either side, white lizards were watching. A light quicksilver rain was beginning to fall; but the air was thick, and smelled of oil and salt.

  “Quietly now,” said Alexa.

  The bone motorcycle became almost silent, shifting to stealth. It avoided a clutter of fallen, rusted iron poles, and slowed further, to walking pace. Then it stopped at the edge of a great, rubble-strewn lot. Beyond was the darkness of Shatterway Sound, where a single long barge was moving in the black, thick waters.

  “Harald's in that building.”

  Alexa pointed to a shell with three walls standing, surrounded by a moat of concrete shards in which purple weeds were sprouting.

  “You see the open doorway?”

  The doors were long gone, taken by scavengers.

  “We go through fast,” said Alexa. “Very, very fast. You got it?”

  As the Phantasm growled, she felt the power through her inner thighs.

  “Good. Then we go.”

  The motorcycle leaped forward.

  “Faster.”

  It accelerated up an angled slab of concrete, roared into the air, hitting the next slab just right and hurtling across the rubble, straight for the empty doorway. Alexa crouched lower, getting ready.

  “Now.”

  As the Phantasm howled through the doorway, Alexa threw herself off to the right, smashing her shoulder against a pile of bricks, rolling, and then lying still, facedown, one knee beneath her. After a second, she pushed herself up.

  There was no sound.

  Alexa limped across the broken floor, to the side of the darkened pit where the building's floor had once stood. Careful of the crumbling edge, she leaned over.

  The Phantasm lay on its side, its bony carapace cracked across, its engine silent, and its headlight dead, totally unmoving.

  “Sorry,” said Alexa.

  Then she dragged herself out of the empty building, step by painful step, until she could slump down against the broken outer wall. She sat on hard rubble, uncaring. The darkness of Shatterway Sound was a reminder of childhood, and as her head tipped forward, she fell into dreams about the past.

  Dreams from which she did not intend to wake.

  There was a diner, where several men in rolled-up shirtsleeves were tucking into eggs and reptile rashers. Donal stopped, considered the state of his stomach—empty, yet without hunger—and went inside regardless. What he needed was a place where he could sit and think.

  “What'll it be, pal?” The guy behind the counter was old, his apron white.

  “Just coffee, black.” Donal looked around the place, noting that it was clean but not too busy. “And you can bag me a dozen doughnuts to go. You choose the flavors.”

  “Take a seat.”

  Donal slid into a booth at the rear, reached into his pocket, and withdrew the now-sticky eye of Commissioner Vilnar. He held it in his palm, looking into the still-clear cornea. Soon, the protein structures within the eye would begin to unravel, and it would grow milky gray, quite opaque. Not that it would ever process vision again, since there was no living brain for the severed optic nerve to connect with.

  “Ugh, what's that?”

  The old man had fetched Donal's coffee without his noticing.

  “It's a, er, novelty item. Kind of a joke, on the guys at work.”

  “Huh. Not too realistic. You didn't want cream?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “With the coffee.”

  “Oh. No, thanks.”

  The old man returned behind the counter. Donal continued to stare at the eye. Sister Mary-Anne at the orphanage had used the human eyeball's structure as the quintessential proof of evolution by natural selection: light-sensitive cells gave a simple jellyfishlike species an advantage, while mutations that placed those cells within a concave hollow saw better, and those that protected the proto-eye with clear membrane performed better again; and so on incrementally to achieve the imperfect but adequate stereoscopic vision of Homo sapiens sapiens.

  He put the eye back in his pocket.

  There's a reason for this.

  The coffee was growing cool. He took a sip.

  I just need help figuring out what it is.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  No one looked in his direction.

  Dr. Kyushen Jyu was still in the commissioner's office back at HQ, reading that damned manual, unaware of the disaster at City Hall. Maybe he could understand how a man might rip out his own eye, and not just give it to someone as he died, but also give that person temporary amnesia until he'd taken the eyeball from the scene.

  Donal wondered what the scene-of-crime diviners were going to make of the commissioner's mutilated head.

  Then he looked over at the counter, where the old man was carefully placing doughnuts inside a cardboard box. He was glad now that he'd have something to take to the task force room.

  “Those wormskin bags you use,” he said to the old man, pointing behind the counter. “They keep things fresh, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “You couldn't let me have a spare, could you?”

  “If you like.”

  The doughnuts might help because he needed a lot more than Kyushen's technical advice. It was Viktor and Harald and Xalia and Alexa who could help him nail the Black Circle bastards.

  Good.

  He had a starting point. Now he could get to work.

  Harald had spent over three hours going up and down between Robbery-Haunting and one of the deep levels, the −93rd floor, where little of the activity that took place was recognizably human. In R
-H, he'd finished typing up his report on the happy, healthy phone customers with altered personalities, gone over it with Kresham, then handed it in to Commander Bowman. In the deep level, he'd talked to several wraiths that Livitia—his wraith friend from the 77th Precinct—had persuaded to give him reports on Xalia's progress.

  But the wraiths who lived down here were a little … different. Most of the conversations went like this:

  The barriers have intensified.*

  “Is that a good sign?”

  *It indicates further rotation around the axes of this continuum.*

  “Meaning what?”

  *That Gertie is carrying out more work in other-dimensional space that you cannot understand.*

  “And is that good or bad?”

  *If you think in such binary terms, then yes.*

  And then the wraith would sink down through the floor or into the solid wall, leaving Harald to parse what meaning he could from his memory of the conversation.

  Finally, he decided to see if he could find Viktor, and ask him what the Hades he and Xalia had been working on. She was suffering, surely not from simple overexertion. Something had happened to her.

  Stepping out into the lobby, he nodded to Brian behind the desk.

  “How's it going?”

  “Great, but—”

  Thunderous automatic fire sounded from the far end of the range. Two Grausers, by the sound: almost certainly the Howler 50s that Viktor used. Harald wondered if anyone besides himself knew that the weapons had names: Betsie and Connie.

  “I'll talk to you later, Brian. Excuse me.”

  He headed along the half-lit corridor, to a gun lane with low lighting where the shredded remains of targets lay at a tall figure's feet. Big Viktor was standing with his back to the lane, his chin down and his hands empty.

  Harald knew better than to call out a greeting.

  Then Viktor snapped into motion, spinning as his hands disappeared under his leather coat, whipped up his Grausers, and opened stuttering blasts from both weapons. Then he rotated away as if avoiding return fire, ducked back, and let loose once more.

  Finally, the Grausers were holstered beneath his arms. He nodded to Harald.

  “You found out anything about Xalia? I couldn't.”

  “I talked to several wraiths.” Harald drew close, then stared down the range at the few tattered ribbons that hung at the far end. “Can't say I learned much.”