Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  His aide, I thought to myself. Elise the vamp-skank, he means.

  Lucy was gazing at him, starry eyed. “Oh wow,” she said. “You can call out to your people? Is that a vampire thing? You can summon them with your mind?”

  He looked at her wearily and held out his hand. “Actually, I was going to ask to borrow your phone.”

  “Fine,” I said as he punched in numbers. “You look after number one.” I was aware of all eyes on me, and to be honest, I was still mortified about what had happened, or almost happened, in the coffin. Impulsive, yes, but let’s be frank, I had thought I was going to die anyway. Give me a break.

  Or maybe I was only really mortified that I got caught. That was probably more honest, but I was getting better at being less honest, even to myself.

  “Call the bride of Dracula, I’m sure she’ll help you lick your wounds.”

  He gave me a curious look, as though trying to figure out what I was thinking. I could still feel him in my blood, an echo of him. He himself looked oddly satisfied, as though enjoying some private joke at my expense. “You won’t need to take any…medicine for a while, Doctor,” he said to me. “One less thing to worry about.”

  Yes, and at what price, I wondered. I filed it away as a problem for future-Phoebe.

  Kane stood beside me and I could still feel the animosity rolling off the huge man. It was probably for the best to keep the two of them apart. I had no idea what history they had between them, but I had zero patience to deal with it right now.

  “As for the rest of us,” I said, trying to form some kind of a plan. “Sofia, would you please take Lucy to Blue Lab? With the city like this, I don’t want her home alone. The lab is far more secure, and I’d feel safer if she had an escort.”

  Sofia looked surprised that I trusted her with Lucy’s safety. She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t protest. I was surprised myself, I suppose, but the woman had been in my rescue party after all. You had to trust someone at some point. She nodded.

  “I don’t want to go back to the lab,” Lucy protested. “I want to help.”

  “Griff will be there,” I said. “Tell him what we discovered, or rather what Professor Knight discovered about Bacon’s manuscript. That it was coding for GO genetics and a whole lot of alchemy. Whatever disease that corpse is carrying is bad news, and we need to know more. And please, Lucy, try to get hold of Oscar Scott for me. Even if you have to call and demand to speak with his father. He was with us in the museum. He’s a pain in the arse but he means well. I’m kind of worried something bad might have happened to him…again,” I finished lamely.

  “Since when did you start calling the shots around here, Harkness?” Cloves said. “Last time I checked, I was in charge. Oscar Scott should just plain avoid you. You’re like a bad luck charm for him. You and I are going to find Director Coldwater. I want to know what she knows, and fast.” She flicked a thumb at Kane. “Fido, you can come too. We might need your…” Her face soured and she struggled with the word, “…help. I need your nose to track her. If she’s involved in this, and if she knows where those students are…God, she could be anywhere in the city.”

  As we walked, the world’s least likely troupe of individuals following Cloves toward the service elevator, I thought about what Professor Knight had written in his notebook:

  ‘I cannot go to the authorities. I have seen her come and go and consort at the old site, they are tied into this, Cabal are tainted, but I don’t know how much, or how many.’

  I stopped in my tracks. Cloves turned and looked at me questioningly. The wind was whipping through my hair. “I know where to go,” I said quietly, as realisation dawned on me. “If I were an evil villain, scheming away in a walled city, I know where I’d have my lair.” My gaze travelled out over the wall, not inwards at the city, but out past the wall, south and into the dark night. At the countryside beyond, black and hidden in the deepening night.

  I was looking out into the wild and dangerous realm of the Pale, the cursed, post-apocalyptic land where none now dared to tread. There probably used to be lights out there, beyond Oxford, before the wars. Streetlamps, roads, villages, distant towns. The glow of a motorway.

  Not anymore. There was nothing but darkness, shadowy hills and eerily deserted countryside. It was their world now out there. It belonged to the Pale. As dark and wild and godless as it must have been in prehistoric times.

  Seven, maybe eight miles away, southward beyond the city, a tiny light burned in the darkness. One solitary patch of pale light just visible in the night. “The old site,” I said softly. “The old, failing power plant, out at the Harcourt Arboretum.”

  “That’s impossible,” Cloves said, following my gaze. “That station is fully automated, Harkness. No one works there. It’s all drones. The place is fortified of course, against the Pale, but nothing like the wall we have here in the city. The place is unmanned and has been for years. No one would be stupid enough to actually work out there.” She adjusted her gloves. “And besides, leaving aside the fact that you would have to cross miles of no-man’s land of the gibbering angry boogeymen just to get there, rest assured, nothing and no one, can get in and out of any one of the four gates of our city without a whole load of signing, counter signing, and fanfare. Trust me, not even Coldwater could come and go as she pleases without people noticing.”

  “If it’s unmanned, then why the lights?” I asked her, still staring out across the countryside. “Drones and robots don’t need them. All they would do would attract the Pale.” I looked over to Kane, who was glowering into the night, staring raptly at the distant lights which showed in the dark hills. I could see the intensity of his expression. He was wondering if his daughter was there.

  “You and I,” I said to him. “We’re going on a trip. Outside the city.”

  The elevator rattled to the top of the wall with a shudder and stopped, Sofia opened the grille door for us. Allesandro was peering between the Tribal leader and me grimly. “Your Cabal woman is right,” Kane said darkly. “All four of the great gates are guarded. There is no way out of the city. Not for us.”

  I shook my head. He was wrong. “There’s one way.”

  32.

  An hour later, back at ground level and deep in the city, Kane, Cloves and I stood alone in a dark, smelly alleyway. We were on Williamson Way in Southern Iffley, very close to the wall. Nondescript buildings rose up on all sides around us in the night.

  “I can’t believe I agreed to drive you here, Harkness,” Cloves said, hugging her arms against the cold night. “For fuck’s sake, we’re bordering on the southern industrial zones here. What on earth could be out here that you find so interesting? It’s nowhere near the southern gate.”

  Cloves’ acid-yellow Ferrari sat at the mouth of the alleyway, incongruously parked and sticking out like a sore thumb against the deserted industrial backdrop. Cloves herself looked equally out of place here in the grimy streets. At least she had left the large floppy hat in the car.

  “We’re not leaving by the gate,” I told her. Cloves had flashlights, one of which she now passed to me. They had been in the glove compartment. I don’t know why I had been surprised by this. Veronica Cloves is nothing if not prepared. I expect she also has thumbscrews and a sawn-off in there too. Regardless, I was glad. There was precious little street lighting this far south in the city. Not many people came here after dark. It was all drones. Being this close to the wall, and the horrors outside it, made people nervous. I shone a beam of light around the floor, revealing overflowing dumpsters and heaped bin bags. “It was somewhere around here…” I muttered to myself.

  “I should call this in,” Cloves said, decisively. “That’s what I should do. If we have evidence, or a reasonable suspicion that a high level member of the Cabal council is involved with these murders and abductions, I have a responsibility to…”

  “You can’t call it in,” I told her. “It’s like dear old paranoid Professor Knight said in his diary, we don’t kno
w whom we can trust in this.” I shone the flashlight on her face briefly. She squinted back at me, her pursed lips tightly downturned while I regarded her. “I barely trust you to be honest.”

  She glared at me unhappily.

  “And we don’t have proof, not yet,” I added. “If Coldwater has dirty hands, and it’s a big if, then we need to know what they’re smeared with before we go whistle-blowing to the council, don’t we?”

  “And if we don’t find anything?” Cloves asked. “If Coldwater’s clean, and we’re on some wild goose-chase in the middle of the night while elsewhere our city is verging on anarchy? Just how well do you think that’s going to reflect on us, on me, specifically? When I have to explain to the council that while Tribals and humans were frantically killing one another in city-wide riots, I was busy aiding and abetting the unauthorised…and highly illegal…trafficking of people out of New Oxford?” She shot a look at Kane, hulking in the darkness beside us. “And I use the term ‘people’ loosely.”

  “You don’t have to come,” I said. I was trying my best to ignore her, still searching the alleyway with my torch.

  “Like hell,” she retorted. “You think I’m letting you out of my sight again? Every time I do, something explodes, someone dies, or something disappears. Be thankful that I haven’t had you incarcerated.” She paused, as though the possibility of this had only just occurred to her “…yet.”

  “Doctor, I do not see what we are looking for here,” Kane cut across Cloves. “Time may be short.”

  “Found it,” I said, suppressing a whoop. I shone my flashlight onto the floor, specifically onto a manhole cover.

  “The sewers?” Kane questioned, looking down the path of my beam and then up at me through confused eyebrows.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Cloves said. She stared at me. “The sewers don’t extend beyond the city. It’s a closed system, Harkness. Are you stupid? You don’t think that when the wall went up we considered the sewers might be a possible entry point for the Pale?”

  “It’s not the sewers we’re after,” I said, as Kane, ignoring Cloves’ protests, bent down and lifted the circular grate with a heavy scrape, revealing a pitch black, circular hole. “It’s what’s beneath them we’re interested in. The Labyrinth.”

  “If you think I’m ruining a perfectly good pair of Jimmy Choos to slop around in the effluence of New Oxford on a hunch of yours…” Cloves looked horrified.

  “Look,” I said. “Think of it this way. If Coldwater goes down, if she’s a traitor to Cabal, then wouldn’t that open up a seat on the council?”

  She looked at me shrewdly. “Limitless political power,” she said. “You really think that’s all I care about, Harkness, clawing my way up the ladder?”

  I nodded, shrugging. Call a spade a spade, I thought.

  She considered me for a moment. “Genuine…vintage, pre-war…Jimmy…Choos,” she said quietly.

  “Have it your way,” I said. I shone my flashlight down into the darkness and turned to Kane. “This is where Allesandro and I came out, after your Tribals tried to kill us. This leads down to the sewers, and then below that, there’s a service tunnel and steps which go down a whole lot further, right into the Labyrinth.”

  “What is this labyrinth?” the Tribal asked, looking from me to my supervisor, who was still suffering an inner war of style versus ambition.

  “It’s a warren,” Cloves explained. “After the wars, when we built the walls, when we started using the Bonewalkers to fill up our city with everything we could salvage from outside, a network of tunnels was built.” She peered up over the buildings, the silhouetted factories that surrounded us. Rearing above everything, a false horizon of glossy obsidian, the wall reared, filling the sky as always. “When you live in an enclosed space,” she went on, “…the only ways to build, to expand, are up or down. Think of all the vampire clubs. They’re subterranean. Even Blue Lab is buried below street level. Cabal HQ at the Liver contains thirteen underground levels too. The buildings of New Oxford you see on a day to day basis are just the tip of an iceberg. There’s much more below.”

  I was betting she was right. There was probably more down there than even she knew.

  I stepped onto the ladder, and taking a last look at the night sky, began to lower myself into darkness, the flashlight slung over my shoulder like a quiver of arrows. It felt as though the manhole cover should have had ‘all hope abandon, ye who enter here’ carved into its rim.

  “Are you coming?” I asked them.

  *

  I’d never have imagine I’d return to the Labyrinth so soon, or indeed willingly, but at least this time around with the two flashlights, we had better illumination. It was easy to find the steps down if you knew where to look and we were soon through the sewers and descending further. Down down to goblin town, I muttered to myself in my head. The darkness and silence around us was close and oppressive, and although the night up at street level had been chilly, it was even colder down here. The damp, permeating chill you only seem to get deep underground. In the bowels of the earth.

  The corridor we finally reached at the base of the stairs was dry at least. Kane was behind me, sniffing the air as we made our way along it. He didn’t need a flashlight. The corridor was so narrow he almost filled it. Cloves’ heels clicked on the steps behind him as we walked. Her flashlight sweeping from side to side. She had tagged along, of course. Power was worth a lot to this woman, even more than shoes.

  “They call this a labyrinth for a reason you know,” she said, her voice echoing off the walls and along the long dark corridor. “I’ve never been down here at the service levels before, but I’ve seen part of the schematics back at HQ. If we get lost, we could wonder down here forever and never retrace our steps.”

  “I thought of that,” I said, a little proudly, “I know what we’re looking for, I think, and I called Griff on the drive over. He has the resources back at Blue Lab, and the skills for what I’ve asked him to do. We should have what we need. Check your datapad.”

  Cloves and Kane crowded around me in the darkness, and she fished out her small, mobile datapad. A green light blinked in the corner.

  “I don’t have one of these, not on my salary, so I asked him to mail it over to you,” I explained.

  Cloves flicked the screen and opened the message. I was impressed she could get a signal this far below street level, but then the DataStream was strong tech. As we watched, complicated blueprint schematics rolled across the screen.

  “You…hacked…the plans for the Labyrinth?” She sounded faintly impressed, blinking up at me. “This is private Scott Enterprises’ file data. How in the hell did you get hold of them?”

  “Griff is good with computers,” I said, proud he had come through with my hurried request. I could barely work my answerphone myself. “He could hack most things. This should show us where we need to go.”

  Cloves gave me a curious look, and I wondered whether Griff was now in trouble, or whether Cloves was recalculating his worth to Cabal. Either way, I’d put him in her headlights, which I regretted. We were out of options though; I hadn’t had a choice. I took the datapad from her, working out where we currently stood. After a few moments, I shone my flashlight down one of five branching corridors splitting off from the dusty intersection at which we now stood. “It’s this way, come on.”

  I’m not a huge student of the classics, but I know a little, and any hero worth his salt back in olden times seemed to have passed into the underworld on some quest or another. Odysseus, Orpheus, Perseus, the Winchesters. Dante had written a lot about the descent into hell. Escher had had a thing for labyrinths and mazes. They seemed to crop up a lot, and from what I could gather with my hedgerow knowledge of these things, is that the journey to understanding, to enlightenment, necessitated a long and confusing journey through a dark and twisting road. We wandered for what felt close to an hour in the Labyrinth, in blackness and silence, up and down dusty cobwebbed corridors,
some curving, some straight and narrow. In places there were steps, concrete or metal, occasionally a spiral of rusted stairs, just to mix things up a little and to make sure we completely lost out bearings. The only light was our two thin beams, cutting jittering shadows across the bricks. We halted at every juncture, every twist or horseshoe, to consult Cloves’ datapad, which hopefully, if Griff had plotted the route I’d asked him to, would take us through our darkness to some kind of enlightenment in a hurry.

  Kane was silent, sniffing the air as we walked. I wanted to ask if he smelled anything, if his daughter had come, or been brought this way, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Cloves was equally quiet. Having finally given up her bitching about shoes and potential court marshals. She could sense it. We were on to something, and it could spell big things for her if it went our way. She peered down at the datapad constantly, its soft glow lighting her sharp features as we followed onwards through the silent, forgotten underworld.

  Eventually, our journey bore fruit. The thin passageway we were currently travelling along suddenly ended, spitting us out into the largest space we’d seen so far, a high and wide tunnel, stretching in either direction into the blackness. Kane stretched gratefully, able to stand fully upright for the first time. The corridor was immense, tall enough for an old freighter truck to roll through. Bare concrete made up the walls, floor, and ceiling and, blessing and salvation, embedded strip lighting provided illumination in soft punctuation.

  I led Cloves and Kane onward, flicking off my flashlight. There was no need for it here. Cloves’ shoes clicked and echoed as we wandered into the centre of the large passage. “Where the hell have you brought us, Harkness?” she said softly. “This is motion-sensor lighting. Is this an access tunnel? The kind used for shipping goods in the old days. Why bother, when they could just go overland?”

  “This tunnel leads out of the city,” I said triumphantly. If this map is correct, and it better be, I thought. “Straight to the Harcourt Arboretum. It’s the only active one which still leads out of New Oxford.”