by Leod D. Fitz
Percy swallowed.
“You’re going to be in charge of the viewing tonight. Make sure everything runs smoothly. I’m going to head out a little after it starts.”
“Sure… sure.” Percy stood glumly in my office for a moment, obviously wanting to say something and obviously frightened to do so.
I sighed. “What?”
“You… you are going to come back tomorrow, right? You’re not… you know, just going to disappear, are you? Because if you are, that’s cool! I totally get that. But… I’d like to know ahead of time?”
I rubbed my face with my palm for a few seconds. I considered telling Percy how much my business had come to mean to me. I considered telling him that I wasn’t about to abandon my mother and brother because of a couple of two bit hoods.
But Percy wouldn’t really understand that. So, I stuck with the language he did understand.
“What do you think Aldred would do to us if we ended our contract with him without notice?”
Percy shuddered. “Good point.”
Chapter 11
“Oh god. You wouldn't believe the day I've had, Walter.”
Simon started talking about the same time he opened the door to the stairwell, long before a human could have heard him. I paused in my work and glanced over at Trish. She was cleaning some of my equipment. Normally I just lick it all clean, but I hadn’t had time to really sit down and think about what jobs I could assign to her yet, so for the time being I was picking things at random and telling her to clean them. Besides, if she was really interested in learning to work with the bodies, it made sense to make her learn the less pleasant parts of the job first.
“One of my responsibilities as a journeyman is to assist practitioners who come to the university for help. About fifty percent of the work is trying to help people figure out how they fucked up some simple spell. The other half is mostly just telling people where to find uncommon spell ingredients, or figuring out the provenance of a spell, or how to shut down a curse somebody put on them….”
Trish blinked suddenly and looked up, her eyes narrowed. “Do you hear that?”
I nodded towards the door. She turned to face it.
“But of course, whenever I'm on duty, that’s when the nutballs show up. Every time, man. I swear to god, it's like somebody puts the bat signal on the roof and calls in all the weirdos.
The door opened and my brother walked in, still talking. “Today I got this crazy witch. Swear to god, she wanted... oh. Hello.” Simon glanced between me and the girl. “Uh, sorry, is there some sort of inspection today?”
I snorted. “Relax. She's just a hunter.”
“A hunter!” My brother tensed, his eyes moving to the girl, who was staring at him open mouthed. “What the fuck are you doing bothering Walter, bitch?”
“Wha—I’m not—“
“Jesus, did I not just tell you to relax? She's fine. In fact… I kind of hired her.”
“Oh.” Simon eased up. “Finally fired Percy, huh? 'Bout time.”
“No. No, Percy still works here. Well, he doesn't work here, but he shows up and cashes a paycheck… You know what I mean. Anyway, Simon, this is Trish, Trish, my brother, Simon.”
“Brother!” She looked between is in utter bewilderment. “There's no way he's a shiteater!” she froze in place, her face going pale. “Uh, I mean... uh....”
“Adopted brother,” I clarified, keeping most of the irritation out of my voice. Well, I kept some of the irritation out of my voice. I think.
“Oh. Sorry, I just--” she stopped talking for several long seconds, probably trying to think of something appropriate to say. When she came up blank, she snapped her mouth shut.
Simon and I both stared at her for several seconds while she stared back, her face slowly turning redder and redder.
When I felt she'd suffered enough, I turned back to my brother. “Anyway, something about a crazy bitch?”
“Witch. A crazy witch. She wants to have a kid, right? Like, her own kid, but she hates everyone, total misanthrope. I'm not talking about, 'oh god, I can't stand to have sex,' I'm talking about 'oh my god, the thought of spending time with anyone who isn't me makes me nauseous.' Anyhow, she gets it into her head that what she really wants is basically a clone of herself.”
“Well, it’s narcissistic as hell, but it doesn’t sound like she’s that much crazier than your average asshole.”
Simon waved the question away. “Oh I don't give a shit about that. The thing is, she decides to do it magically and starts cobbling together this spell, right? Only the base she's using is a mixture of a Polynesian fertility ritual, and a Chinese curse intended to prevent a woman from having any sons.”
“Oh.” I waited for a few seconds, but apparently the story was over. “And that's crazy because it's like trying to use a standard set of tools to work on a car with metric nuts and bolts?”
Simon made a face. “No, that’s not… uh, how do I put this? If she’d just combined a Chinese spell with a Polynesian spell that would be accurate. But she was trying to combine a subtly powerful blessing with a bloodline curse. And neither spell was really associated with what she was trying to pull off, except loosely. And to be honest, she’d done a shoddy-as-shit job of mixing them together. Uh, a better metaphor would be... she was trying to attach a weed-wacker to an old Cadillac with duct tape so she could dig a tunnel into a mountainside.”
“Oh.” I nodded knowingly. “Crazy witch.”
“Anyhow, the big news is that I've finished my first time through that thing you gave me.” He glanced towards Trish. “Do you want to go to your office to go over it?”
“Is there anything in there that she'd be better off not knowing?”
“Not really. You trust her?”
“She's lending me the sword I'm going to use against them.”
Simon stared at Trish for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Okay, whatever. Basically, this Orrin fellow has a major ass compulsion on him. They all do. Somehow Orrin is resisting his, in so much as he isn’t going after the keys, but he’s unable to keep himself from looking for them and tracking them once he finds them.”
“He knows where all of them are?”
“Not all.” Simon flipped through the notebook. “Apparently, there are forty-three locks. He has a line on fifteen of them.”
“But his brothers don’t know about them?”
Simon shook his head. “They all have their skills, but it seems that Orrin is the researcher of the group. The rest know how to work people pretty well, but he’s the one who can spend the day in a musty old room full of files and find a needle in a haystack.”
“As it happens, he’s not terrible at beating the shit out of people, either.”
Simon raised an eyebrow.
“We ran into each other last night. He… sort of helped me out of a jam.”
“Interesting.”
I nodded. “Is one of the keys he knows about the one that his brothers think I have? Key number four?”
My brother pulled a small pad out of his back pocket and flipped through it for a second. “Uh, yeah. Yeah that’s one of them.”
“Fantastic, all we have to do is let his brothers see that page and they’re off my back!”
Simon made an uncomfortable grimace. “That might not be a great idea.”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Orrin may not be sharing all of his research with his brothers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing all right on their own. Those forty-three locks I was talking about? That’s forty-three of the original two hundred and fifty.”
I grimaced. “Why doesn’t anyone just melt down the key?”
“Actually, I know that! It wasn’t in the journal, but the girl who works the archives looked up some shit for me. It turns out, destroying the keys is a no go. In order to make chains and locks that the prisoner couldn’t break, the smith had to use this insanely powerful, super complicated spell. But the magic theory that t
he spell came from doesn’t allow for locks that can never open and chains that never come off. Basically, there’s a balance built into the whole thing. The locks, chains, and keys are all metaphysically connected. Even if somebody knew a way to destroy one of the keys, the corresponding lock and chain would be destroyed along with it. Anyhow, the point is, anything that was originally such a badass that they locked it up with two hundred and fifty chains, and which can make people into chimera WHILE it’s chained, is something I don’t want getting out.”
“Well, I don’t want it getting out either,” I countered, “but I don’t really want to die just to keep one key safe.”
My brother looked frustrated. “Okay, there has to be something else we can do.”
“I thought you were going to kill them,” Trish interjected. “I mean, that’s the point of the searing blades, right?”
I sighed. “The point of the searing blades is to give me a chance to kill them if things end up coming to violence. But given how my last three fights went, I would much rather avoid a fourth encounter.”
“Oh.” She turned back to her work.
I grunted in annoyance. “There’s got to be some way to get them off my back.”
Simon rubbed his chin. “I think better with a little whiskey in me. There’s a little mage’s pub near campus, you know the place?”
I nodded and turned to Trish. “You need a ride home?”
Tricia shook her head. “My boyfriend is going to pick me up.”
I blinked. “Boyfriend?”
“Um, yeah.” She turned red again, turning away from me a look of shame on her face.
“So, where did you meet your new boyfriend?” I asked, suspiciously.
She hesitated. “He’s one of the foster kids at the home.”
I let out a relieved breath. If Percy had managed to worm his way into her life, I would have had to kill him, and my day was busy enough already.
I was about to turn and leave when a nagging suspicion caught my attention. “I thought you weren’t getting along with the other kids at the house. Is he new?”
Again, she hesitated. “No. He… uh, he’s the guy I told you about. The one I slept with that one time.”
“The one who humiliated you in school and tricked you into having sex with him?!”
She hunched her shoulders up and refused to turn her head towards me. “Yeah.”
“You—You don’t—why would you—“ I clamped my mouth shut, closed my eyes and forced myself to count to ten. “Patricia, I do not have time for this right now, but we will talk about it later.”
“Okay.” Her reply was so soft I almost missed it.
Turning around I found my brother trying to hide an amused smile.
“Let Percy know when you leave.”
“Sure, sure.”
I stored the body I’d been working on in the refrigerator and my brother and I headed upstairs.
“I’ve never known you to get involved in other people’s lives, Walter.”
I shook my head. “That’s because I’ve never met anyone with decision making skills as bad as hers.”
Simon chuckled. “Well, she may not be bright, but at least she’s cute.”
“Oh god, you’re not going to fuck her, are you?”
Simon was silent for a moment. “I haven’t decided yet.”
A few hours later I dropped my brother off at his place and headed to a nearby cemetery to relax among the tombstones.
Elysium Mortuary has buried people at pretty much every cemetery in the area at one time or another. I like to visit them from time to time. It’s odd, I know, but I feel a certain intimacy with the bodies I’ve prepared for burial. After all, I’ve seen them naked, I’ve spoken with their loved ones, I’ve painted their faces and broken their bones. Hell, I’ve tasted their flesh.
I smelled the chimera before I saw him.
“Hello, Orrin.”
“Walter.”
We walked a little way in silence before I stopped at a grave.
Orrin looked at the name. “Michael Groves. You knew him?”
“No. I just buried him. Eighty-four years old. Thin as a rail. Died of prostate cancer.”
“You memorize the details of all of your clients?”
“Of course not.” I nodded towards the headstone. “I remember his son. Michael was the second relative that he knew of to die of prostate cancer. Poor man was terrified it would get him next. We met three times, and all three times we ended up talking about his prostate.”
Orrin chuckled.
“As it happened, he had it. I could smell it on him. Poor guy. I hope he went to a doctor before it was too late.”
“You didn’t stay with the dryads.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got a life. Shit going on.”
“I’m trying to save that life.”
“Hey, that’s funny, so am I.”
Orrin sighed.
“Look, man, I know that you know that I don’t have the fourth key.”
“Your brother got through the whole notebook, huh?”
I repressed a wince. I knew things he didn’t want me to know, but he knew things I didn’t want him to know. We hadn’t exactly exchanged threats, but we didn’t exactly have to.
“Yeah, he did.”
“So he told you how few keys are left.”
I nodded.
“I can’t let my brothers get their hands on anymore of the keys.”
I licked my lips, nervously. “So what you’re telling me is that, in terms of an ideal solution, we both want the same thing. We both want your brothers to leave without killing me, and without finding out where any of the keys are. But if we find ourselves having to choose which of those is more important, we’re going to be very much at odds.”
Orrin was quiet for a moment. “That more or less sums it up, yes.”
I smiled. “Is that why you wanted me to stay with the Dryads? So that if it looked like your brothers were going to end up taking me, they could make sure I wasn’t alive to tell them that they were looking in the wrong direction?”
“That was one possible outcome, yes.”
I shook my head. “The key that Aldred has, it has nothing to do with the keys your brothers are looking for, does it?”
Orrin shook his head. “The Province Master received an honor which, loosely translated, means ‘the key to the kingdom.’ It’s a rather annoying ceremonial position which will require him to attend meetings he’d rather avoid and perform symbolic duties.”
“Gregor set it up,” I murmured. “Somehow he set it up.”
Orrin shrugged. “I didn’t look into who. I don’t particularly care. This isn’t the first time somebody has arranged to mislead my brothers for personal gain. As a rule, such arrangements don’t work out for anybody involved, but they do create an opportunity for me. Last time I was able to bury a lead that might have resulted in them finding one of the keys. While I did, a dozen innocent people died.”
He kept his voice level as he spoke, but I could detect the pain behind it.
“And this time?”
“This time, I hope to kill one of my brothers.”
“Just one? Not going to make a play for all of them?”
Orrin offered me a sad smile. “I’ve been fighting them for over a thousand years and I’ve only managed to kill two. If I can take one down, I’ll consider it a major victory.”
“So tell me, Mr. ‘I’m-here-to-save-you,’ if you’re not willing to give your brothers a real lead, what’s the scenario where I come out of this alive? I mean, it isn’t like they’re going to just give up, are they?”
“Believe it or not, sometimes they figure out for themselves that they’re on the wrong trail.”
“How often do they figure it out before they’ve brutally murdered everyone involved?”
“Not often.”
I gave Orrin a look.
“Most of the time they kill the person who is supposed to have the key. Most o
f the time, the best I can do is minimize the collateral damage. And maybe drag things out a little bit. This time, the fact that they’re after you, someone nearly as strong as them, nearly as fast as them, and who regenerates even more quickly than they do… and because there is a large grove of dryads nearby willing to support me, I am hoping that I will be able to hit them harder than usual.”
“How bad is this thing that they’re trying to set free?”
Orrin shivered. “I’ve never met anything as terrible as The Creature.”
Given the length of his life, that was probably saying something.
Still, I’m not the type to sacrifice myself for the greater good. Definitely not when the greatest good in question was just putting off the release of a monster that the world had apparently survived once already.
“So, if your brothers are so big and scary and have thousands of years of experience, why have I seen so little of them the last few days? I would have expected them to be nipping at my heels every time I stuck my head out of a hole. Hell, why haven’t they attacked me in my hole?”
“Because they’re big and scary and have thousands of years of experience.” Orrin managed a wry smile.
I held my tongue and waited patiently.
“You’ve got to understand, when we were first… recruited into the cause, there were more of us. Over a dozen legionnaires, actually. And we were not The Creature’s only pets. It had a small army back then. There were soldiers like us, and monsters which would obey our command. Some of the keys had been passed down, generation after generation, moved from one continent to another, buried. We put off finding those, focusing our attention on the warriors who had been given a key and were still alive. Immortals. And powerful ones at that. We took heavy losses on many of our campaigns. For a while we were receiving regular reinforcements, but over time those diminished. Eventually it became too much and Andres decided that those of us under his command should go out into the world, start hunting down the keys that had gone missing, lest they disappear forever.”
