California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Daniel watched all this from a white service van across the canal. He put down his binoculars.

  “Onward,” he said.

  He and Cassandra, Moth, and Emma, whom they’d collected upon arrival, exited the van, all dressed in Department of Water and Power coveralls, complete with official DWP tool bags. They caught up to Ballpeen-Jo at Rodeo and Brighton, and headed north, past the De Beers diamond store, past the Sergé shop, where the mannequins in the window wore nothing but thousand-tusk scarves, and up to a chain-link fence and gate. A green canvas curtain blocked view of everything behind the fence.

  Daniel tried to give Jo a look that said, “You’re doing great, you’re an incredible actress, I’m proud of you, and I know you’re going to get us through the next step of the job.”

  Ballpeen-Jo barely flicked a glance at him. She was in character.

  She banged on the gate with her cleaver-club. A chain rattled on the other side, a key turned, and the gate opened on a pink-faced young man in Ministry security blues. One hand rested on his holster. The other held an emery board.

  “Hey, sarge,” he said, pocketing the emery board. His nails gleamed.

  “DeSoto,” Ballpeen-Jo growled. “Open up and get out of my way.”

  DeSoto didn’t take Ballpeen-Jo’s manner personally. He swung the gate open and stepped aside. Ballpeen-Jo moved past him with the rest of the crew in tow.

  The fence enclosed the site of Cross and Carsson’s. Customers from the richest enclaves once came here for refined La Brea magic, and for potions and elixirs imported from all over the world. Now, the shop was a fifty-foot-deep crater. Twenty years ago, the owners fell into some kind of tax dispute with the city, and the Hierarch brought down the shop with an earthquake. Nobody knew exactly how he’d done it. Possibly he’d used namazu, the gargantuan catfish. Maybe Jinshin-Mushi beetle. More likely, Daniel thought, he’d simply declared the area a disaster zone and ordered his police to shut down the neighborhood while a crew bulldozed the shop. You could get away with that sort of thing when you controlled all the newspapers and radio and TV stations. Daniel supposed the power to control what people believed was its own kind of magic.

  “These guys are DWP inspectors,” Ballpeen-Jo barked at Officer DeSoto. “They need to do some work here.”

  Emma had a clipboard with official-looking paperwork, and she made a point of not bothering to show it to DeSoto.

  Daniel was satisfied with how nervous DeSoto had grown. There were many powers in Los Angeles—the Council, the Ministry, LAPD—but none held a jurisdiction as nebulous as the Department of Water and Power. They fell under William Mulholland, and if the Hierarch was the kingdom’s number one, then the ancient water mage was number two. Maybe even one-A. Four DWP workers and one corrupt police sergeant versus one cop? Daniel liked the odds.

  “Take a hike, DeSoto.”

  “I’m not supposed to leave my post, sarge.”

  He wasn’t weak. He was fed a diet of ground cerberus wolf and could see without light. He was as fast as a greyhound. He could pulverize a brick in his left hand. And he wasn’t surrendering.

  “Do him,” Daniel said.

  Cassandra squeezed the trigger of her gun, and a narcotic dart struck DeSoto’s neck. He raised his hand, as if to pontificate on some important point, and then collapsed in the dirt. Moth collected him and stuffed him inside the portable toilet, where he would finish out his shift.

  Daniel let himself breathe.

  “Good job, Ballpeen,” he said.

  “Enh,” Jo said, always her own harshest critic. “He wasn’t very intimidated.”

  “What about me?” Emma asked, securing a loose wisp of hair back in her bun. “How was I?”

  “You haven’t made a fatal mistake yet,” Daniel allowed.

  They picked their way down the sloping wall of the crater, careful not to slip in the loose dirt. At the bottom, Daniel kicked away a layer of earth and revealed a piece of what Officer DeSoto was there to guard: a solid slab of concrete roughly the area of a two-boat dockhouse.

  The crew donned goggles and filter masks. From his DWP toolkit, Daniel removed a carved-bone vial.

  “Stand farther back, guys,” he said, voice muffled by his mask. “Seriously, you don’t want to be in the splash zone.”

  He unstoppered the vial and let its contents dribble onto the slab, then leaped back to stand with his crew. Tendrils of seps vapor curled in the air. The surface of the concrete sizzled like hot grease, and a web of cracks formed, accompanied by the sounds of breaking molars. The concrete flaked away and fell like snow down a manhole-sized gap.

  “Cowabunga,” said Cassandra, impressed.

  Daniel grinned. He liked impressing her.

  “‘All my being,’” Emma whispered, “‘like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw into a dew with poison, is dissolved, sinking through its foundations.’

  “That’s from a poem,” she said with some despair to the crew’s stupefied expressions.

  “Yeah, Shelley,” Moth said. “It’s just we usually don’t do poetry during jobs.”

  When the concrete stopped bubbling and the cracking sounds dwindled, Daniel tiptoed to the edge of the void and aimed his flashlight into the darkness. The beam revealed a shattered floor of white and black checkerboard marble, about twenty feet below.

  At Daniel’s go-ahead signal, Moth dropped one end of a chain ladder into the hole and hooked the other end over the edge of the pit. Daniel climbed down.

  He did a flashlight sweep of the vault when his toes touched the floor. It was a dusty space, not much larger than his tiny apartment. A round vault door dominated one wall. Cross and Carsson’s used to receive deliveries directly to this vault from the Ossuary’s distribution annex. It had been a very secure system, safe from aboveground armored boat robberies. But everything of value was stripped from the shop when the Hierarch shut it down. Only the vault door remained.

  Daniel flashed the light three times up the hole to signal the others to come down.

  In the Golden City, standing before the vault door. Step one of the Ossuary Job, done.

  Cassandra commenced step two.

  With a flashlight and jeweler’s loupe, she examined the towering slab of Colombian dragon scale like a mother counting her newborn’s fingers and toes. A labyrinth of hair-thin grooves was etched into the vault door’s surface.

  She turned to Daniel. “Sphinx riddle?”

  Daniel put his nose up to the door. He smelled the scent of whispering sand, blown by hot desert wind. “Yeah.”

  They both took a step back and sighed.

  “What’s the problem?” Moth asked, stretching out his calves. “I thought we stole the seps venom so we could burn through shit like this.”

  That was the idea. But the grooves were impregnated with sphinx oil, and sphinx was the substance of riddle. Fail to solve the riddle, and the dragon scale might explode and impale the crew with thousands of shards, or topple over and crush them like bugs, or vaporize into a cloud of poison.

  “Sphinx makes it more complicated,” Daniel said. “It’s kind of an impenetrable wall, plus a death trap.”

  “That Emma completely failed to warn us about,” added Jo. “I thought she was supposed to be our inside man.” Jo had shifted back to her own face and body and was shedding her cop’s uniform, down to a black T-shirt and pants. The look on her face was deceptively dangerous, like someone attending to a few last-minute matters before committing a murder.

  “You know I’ve never been on this side of the door,” Emma said to Daniel. “I’ll be of more use to you once we’re in.” She gave a winsome smile and crossed her heart. “I promise.”

  “Wouldn’t be a good heist without some surprise hurdles,” Daniel said to Jo. “And if it turns out you’re lying, Emma, I’ll electrocute you until your eyes melt.”

  Emma took this in with silent equanimity.

  Cassandra continued to study the grooves.

  “What do you think?�
�� Daniel asked. He didn’t like to rush her, but if she couldn’t get through the door, the job was off, and the sooner they knew that, the sooner they could get out of here and limit their losses.

  Cassandra smiled in the dark. “Rich people’s things are so adorable. I’m going to need my ears.”

  She tilted her head to the side, and Daniel brushed a few stray strands of hair away from her ear and leaned in close. He smelled her clean-sweat scent and became very conscious of his own breathing, and of his heartbeat. He’d kind of forgotten about this part of working with Cassandra. He was supposed to be the leader of professionals and Cassandra was the most professional among them, and they didn’t sleep together anymore, and, anyway, she probably didn’t like him literally breathing down her neck.

  He squeezed three drops of fachen oil in her ear, then the other.

  “I need everyone to shut up now,” she said.

  Ear pressed to the scale, Cassandra ran a glass key over the grooves, using it like a phonograph needle to coax out the sphinx’s voice. She followed the grooves along their intricate routes, backing up, pausing, starting again, and Daniel didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until Cassandra finally held the key aloft like a sword, as if she’d just slain a dragon.

  Whispers rose in the vault, at first a soft chorus of sighs, of things coming awake after long sleep, and they grew louder and more distinct. The voices resolved into language, seducing and taunting with their riddle.

  Some kind of Afro-Asiatic tongue, but not one Daniel understood. Fortunately, Cassandra did.

  “‘Who is the great one that glides over earth?’” she said, translating. “‘Who swallows both waters and wood? The wind he fears, but creatures he does not, and he seeks to kill the sun.’”

  She uttered a word in the sphinx’s language, and the voices drained away like water.

  “The answer was fog?” Emma asked.

  “How did you know?” said Cassandra, surprised. She inserted foam plugs in her ears to muffle uncomfortable noise until the eardrops wore off.

  “I’m not just a pretty face, dear.”

  The next part of the job, burning through the dragon scale with the stolen snake venom, would be fairly mechanical. This was the kind of magic Daniel liked. No guards to get past with shape-shifting and social engineering, no traps set with pseudo-sentient oils. Just osteomancy and small explosives. As he set venom charges around the door, the familiar pleasure of being somewhere he was not supposed to be and doing things he was not supposed to do returned. He was still having fun.

  THIRTEEN

  Gabriel cooled his heels in Fenmont Szu’s fifty-fifth-floor reception hall and tried to calm himself with math.

  In a glass case, four hundred tri-faced cerberus wolf skulls rested on shelves, silhouetted in orange backlight. An osteomancer could cook night vision out of a skull, or speed, or acute smell, or predatory instinct, and skulls like these were responsible for the lethality of Los Angeles’s Strategic Magic Assault Command squad. Each skull was as valuable as a Fabergé egg. To maintain maximum effectiveness, a SMAC team member required half a gram of cooked skull a day. Take the magic yield of each skull, multiply by the number of skulls in the Hierarch’s stores, divide by the number of cops on the SMAC team … So that was about thirty-seven days of operation.

  Once the skull supply was used up, Fenmont Szu would still have a few options. He could import skull from his Mexican and Asian trade partners. He could convince the Hierarch to go to war with Northern California in hopes of claiming their stocks as his spoils. Or, he could cannibalize his SMAC team veterans, leeching cerberus wolf residue from their bones and feeding it to younger men and women. Gabriel suspected this tactic was already in play.

  “Are you sure I can’t get you anything, Inspector Argent?”

  The receptionist glared at Gabriel from behind the mahogany plateau of his desk. He was a man of about fifty with a nose sharp enough to use as a letter opener. Behind him, guarding Fenmont Szu’s inner sanctum, stood six guards with manticore lances.

  “Thank you,” Gabriel said. “I’m fine.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to walk your hound? The courtyard is rather spacious…”

  “Do you need air, Max?”

  Seated beside him on a leather couch, Max flipped through a Sunset magazine. On the cover, a glass and stone Palm Springs palace stood against painfully blue sky and sharp rocks.

  “There’s air in here. It’s what I’m breathing.”

  “Thank you, we’re fine.”

  A full half hour later, someone finally emerged from the room guarded by the manticore lances. Max’s head snapped up from his magazine. His nostrils twitched. To him, Fenmont Szu must absolutely reek of magic.

  Back at Griffith Observatory, standing on the balcony to honor the Hierarch, Fenmont Szu had seemed a demonic presence. Closer up, he was more human, but still intimidating, with a tan face as hard and smooth as driftwood. His black business suit drank light.

  Szu regarded Max with cold curiosity and then turned a smile on Gabriel.

  “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector Argent.”

  “I’m grateful you could see me at all. And I apologize for not going through customary channels, but my business is urgent.”

  “Why don’t you come with me?”

  Gabriel gathered the few file folders he’d brought with him. “Max, will you be all right here for a while?”

  Max flipped a page. “I know how to stay.”

  Gabriel followed Szu into the dark regions beyond the reception hall. A wood-paneled hallway was lined with oil paintings of Los Angeles’s early glamour mages: Loew, Mayer, Selznick, Chaplin. The portraits were the equivalent of mounted heads in a hunting lodge. He wondered who’d fed on Chaplin.

  Szu installed Daniel in a library-sitting room, cool and dark despite a broad sweep of windows. Outside, beyond the neighboring office towers, the snowcapped San Gabriel mountains looked like a matte painting on this rare clear day. Gabriel had been named for those mountains. His parents had loved hiking in the pines and staying in the lodges. He had a very dim memory of a spacious log cabin with a crackling fire, and a white-gloved butler carving a roast at the table. The lodges were gone now, the mountains declared off-limits for reasons unknown, and Gabriel’s mother had been killed, butchered, processed, and her osteomantic essence reallocated.

  “How can I help you today, inspector?”

  “Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother a Council member with something like this, but my boss—”

  “Minister Watanabe. He reports to my brother on the Council, the Alejandro.”

  “Yes. I haven’t been getting very far with Minister Watanabe lately. I’m in his doghouse.”

  “I’m familiar with Watanabe,” said Szu. “He’s not the sort of man who would work for me. So I understand that you might, on occasion, need to maneuver around him for important matters. Is this an important matter, inspector?” Szu’s teeth showed the rich brown of La Brea magic.

  “I’m tracking a fugitive.” He showed Szu the sketch of Daniel Blackland.

  Szu reached out and examined it.

  “Should I know this person?” he asked after a time.

  “No, sir, but you would have known his mother, Messalina Sigilo. And his father, Sebastian Blackland.”

  Szu’s lips parted. “Their son—”

  “Daniel. Daniel Blackland.”

  “—is dead. Shot, when his mother defected to the northern kingdom.”

  “No,” said Gabriel.

  “There was a body. It was recovered from the North and examined.”

  “Here, in Los Angeles? By qualified experts? Or just by field agents?”

  Szu considered the sketch. “Tell me what you know.”

  Gabriel told him everything, starting with his chance encounter with the handler and nervous hound in the kennels, and his search with Max of Farmers Market, and of the sint holo, and the theft of the seps serpent from Wilson Bryant’s house.<
br />
  “Neither Farmers Market nor Wilson Bryant’s house are your jurisdiction, are they?”

  “No, sir.”

  Szu looked pleased, as if he’d tasted something agreeable.

  “You don’t have a reputation as a particularly ambitious man, Inspector Argent.”

  Gabriel bristled. He knew what happened to the ambitious. Some rose to great heights, like Fenmont Szu, who’d attained his position by challenging other osteomancers, killing them, and eating their remains. Other fates awaited the ambitious but less successful. They could end up ground to powder and smoked in the Hierarch’s pipe.

  “Sint holo for stealth,” Gabriel said. “Seps venom to burn through barriers. And the son of a potent osteomancer who’s been clever enough to operate for a decade without us even knowing he’s alive. Put it all together, and it adds up to a serious security threat.”

  Szu surveyed Gabriel’s face with a long, cool stare.

  “A security threat to what, precisely?”

  “To the Hierarch, sir. I believe he intends to assassinate the Hierarch.”

  Szu regarded the sketch of Daniel Blackland, turning his head sideways as if trying to understand a piece of modern art.

  “That’s a broad leap.”

  Gabriel swallowed. This is where things would get sticky.

  “It’s what I would do if I were him, Councilor Szu.”

  This got no reaction from Szu, which was somehow worse than the one Gabriel was expecting.

  Gabriel threw himsef into the void. “As I’m sure you know, my mother was an osteomancer. And she was taken in the Third Correction. It was hard. She was my mother, Councilor Szu. If she’d imparted powers to me, if she’d trained me to be an osteomancer … fed me like an osteomancer … I’d be a different man today. I’d be Daniel Blackland.”

  “And you would…?”

  “I’d want to eat the Hierarch’s skull, sir.”

  “I see. Yes, of course.”

  “If I could just have access to some resources … some uniforms who don’t answer to Minister Watanabe, some hounds…”

  Szu stood. “Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. I will confer with my brothers and sisters on the Council to see how best to proceed, but don’t worry, your involvement is inescapable.”