by Jack Conner
“I’m ready.”
“We may need to sit down.”
He grabbed his drink (he had made his point) and returned to the bed. Throwing on a towel, she reclined against the headboard and sipped her whiskey. “Long ago,” she said, “there was a race of gods, or god-like beings, called the Ygrith.”
“Yes yes, I know. The R’loth and many higher beings, some worshipped as gods themselves like the R’loth, worshipped them.”
“Well, a group of the Ygrith established a retreat—a monastery, you might say—on this planet, where they could contemplate the greater mysteries and commune with the fantastic beings that they worshipped. Even the Ygrith revered higher deities. Certain members of the Outer Lords. Well—”
Someone knocked on the door.
For a moment Avery wanted to scream at whoever it was to leave them alone. He didn’t care if it was Risiglon (who had been given the adjoining room) or Asclan or Lord Onxcor himself. He just wanted Sheridan to get on with the story.
A voice called out, “Doctor Avery?”
Avery suppressed his shock. It was for him.
Irritated but confused, he threw on some clothes and answered the door, blinking out at the speckle-furred man that stood there.
“Are you Doctor Avery with the party from the Temple?”
“I am,” Avery said, hearing Sheridan come up behind him. She took his arm, and he marveled at the gesture. It was such a feminine one, her standing behind him, holding onto his arm as he addressed someone on the threshold. “What is this about?”
“There’s been a murder, sir,” the man said. “Actually, several of them. Lord Onxcor sends for you to inspect the bodies.”
* * *
“Godsdamn it all,” Avery muttered, as he stalked down the ice hall after the speckled man. “Why did it have to be now?”
“More importantly, what does it mean?” said Sheridan, and her voice held an ominous quality that he didn’t care for. Rather, it felt all too apt, and he didn’t like to think about what a murder meant here, now.
“It’s probably just the usual,” said Risiglon. As their translator and cultural advisor, he had come with them, though he’d been rather annoyed to have been taken away from the prostitute who had been leant to him for the evening. Even now he looked flushed and agitated. “Some fight among the roughs,” he added.
“Maybe,” Avery said. “But I doubt Lord Onxcor would call me out to inspect the wounds of men killed so obviously. Why did he call me?” he asked their guide. “Surely he has his own doctors?”
“Not medically trained, no,” the man replied.
Avery frowned. To Sheridan, he said in Ghenisan, “Maybe he thinks we might be responsible for the deaths. If so, this is our host’s way of seeing how we react—whether guilty or not.”
“I doubt he’s that cunning.”
Their guide led them down a high stairwell. Carved of ice, its risers had been laid over (as with many of the walkways) by textured plastic, and handrails had been embedded in the wall to the right. The stairwell glowed a neon blue, and it reflected off their faces in dream-like fashion. The whole place was like a dream—though not, perhaps, a good one. They came to a landing, and their guide led them down one hall and another until the corridors opened out, becoming wide and common. Here various late-night guests of the block-dome went about their business, coming and going to casinos, drug dens and the like. And they were guests, Avery sensed, or at least not employees of the warlord’s administration. Most went without the heavy furs Avery wore, and he marveled at how accustomed to the cold they were.
Xagriv, their speckled guide, led them into an area of the block-dome Avery hadn’t seen before, but it didn’t surprise the doctor—or at least its content didn’t. The style, of course, was completely fantastic, like everything else here. Xagriv showed them into a brothel carved of glowing lime-green ice, scintillating with various highlights and inset with panels of glass and what looked like sheets of solid gold. Girls lounged on furred couches in the lobby, naked legs thrust out from under fur coats, and when a potential customer turned an eye on one, she parted the furs to reveal her equally naked body beneath. Some were quite human-looking, some were very much other. Avery suspected the more humane girls came from elsewhere and were the more in demand because of their foreignness. Then again, those with particularly striking mutations would likely get top dollar, too.
Girls and johns perched at the bar along one wall, which glowed yellow, and the attractive bartenders that served behind it were tattooed in glowing ink. Avery could have told them how their tattoos came to glow, and that theirs might well be the last generation that could boast such art, as the ghost-flower was no more—at least to his knowledge.
The madam met them near a rear hall. Covered in sleek gray fur and bedecked in glittering jewelry, she stood tall and severe, smoking a clove cigarette and looking hung-over, to judge by her bloodshot eyes and the black bags under them. Avery wondered when she had woken up. Perhaps she’d had to be woken up for this.
“Took you long enough,” she snapped at Xagriv, then turned to Avery and Risiglon. “Which one of you is the doctor?” She must have known the doctor was male, or perhaps in her culture women simply did not go to medical school.
She had spoken in Xlacan, and it was a moment before Risiglon translated. Avery asked if she spoke Ysstran, and when she replied that she did he informed her that he was the man she was looking for.
“I’m Lady Gaxia,” she said. “Follow me.”
They like their titles, don’t they? Avery thought. Xagriv hung by them as they went, but he seemed to fade into the background, blending with the shadows at Avery’s back, and the doctor realized he didn’t like having the speckled fellow about. Gods knew what his normal duties were.
“Lucky we had a real doctor in the house,” Lady Gaxia said. “Oh, we have a man here who peers into the girls’ nooks and crannies, but that’s all he’s good for, and he’s barely good for that. Then there are the pharmacists that assist in the labs, but they wouldn’t know a tit from a zit.”
“There’s not a block doctor?” Avery said.
“There were several ... before the fighting.”
“Oh.”
She showed them up a flight of stairs, around a bend in a hall, then to a doorway. Two large men stood outside it, and though they scowled at the appearance of Avery and the others, they only nodded to their madam and stood aside as she brought her charges into the room beyond. Avery steeled himself, then entered.
It was as bad as he’d imagined. Blood dripped down the walls, still fresh but already freezing. Some of it steamed slightly from ruby pools surrounding the bodies—or the chunks of bodies—that littered the room. Avery saw what had to be half a dozen corpses, about half male and half female, all in various states of nudity, amidst the splintered wreckage of two large beds and various satellite furniture. The shattered glass from bottles taken from the bar lay among the bodies, embedding several of them.
Avery sucked in a breath, placed a scented cloth over his mouth to ward against the stink (he had come prepared), and staggered over to an unbloodied wall, where he doubled over and caught his breath.
Sheridan lit one of her thin black cigars. Risiglon, after a moment of gaping, lurched from the room, and Avery shortly heard the sounds of retching.
“Well?” Lady Gaxia said. “What do you make of this, Doctor?” She studied Avery, gasping and surely yellow. “You should know there might be a reward in this if you can help us catch the killer.”
“I’ll ... do what I can.”
With renewed effort, not because of the reward but because he needed to know—all of their lives might be at stake—he began examining the scene. What was left of the men, though they were mainly in pieces, showed them to have been rough and scarred, almost certainly the barbaric criminals of Lord Onxcor. They had been tortured horribly before being allowed to die. Avery saw crushed fingers, testicles, gouged out eyeballs and the broken shaft
of a chair leg sticking up one’s rectum. The women, by contrast, had been killed quickly and with little pain. Avery turned to catch Lady Gaxia looking at the girls, sadness in her face. Tears had gathered at the corner of one eye, but when she saw him watching her, she sniffed and turned away. She was not nearly so hard as she pretended, and Avery wondered how long she had known the girls. Years, possibly. It could even be that she was related to one or more of them. He knew it often went like that in tribal areas.
He bent over one of the corpses, sniffing. Could that be ... ?
“What killed them?”
This was Sheridan, coming up beside him, perhaps to lend him strength, or perhaps, more likely, to spur him on.
“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a ... smell.”
“I noticed it, too. Ammonia?”
“Yes.” He hesitated. In a lower voice, he said, “It also hung around the spot where the two soldiers vanished.”
Her lips thinned around her cigar. “Keeping secrets, are we, Doctor?”
He didn’t answer.
“Whatever killed them did this, then,” she said. “And you can’t see what sort of instrument did it? They’re torn apart.”
He examined the wounds again. The men and women had been wrenched apart as if fashioned of dough. “The wounds were made by stress,” he said, indicating a ragged edge of bone and flesh that had once been a man’s arm. “Something grabbed this arm from top and bottom and pulled ... hard. So hard it tore the arm in two. No simple instrument did this, and there are no marks that any machine was here. No. Some living thing did. Possibly some ... limb.”
A shadow passed across her face. In Ghenisan, she said, “You suspect something like Uthua?” She wouldn’t say the word Collossum for fear of it being overheard.
Once more he looked at the bodies. Going around the room, he counted limbs, torsos and heads. “There’s nothing missing,” he said. “If it had been one of them, and these being infected men and women, the being would have fed. There wouldn’t be whole bodies left.” Approaching Lady Gaxia, he said in Ysstran, “Lady, how many men were in here? How may girls? Are there any missing?”
Looking back to him, her eyes dry, she said, “They’re all here, Doctor. All six of them. None are missing.”
“These men were tortured. They must have made an awful sound.”
“Yes. Screams were heard, but only briefly. People ran to the scene even as the sounds were still going on, but when they got here the room was empty.” She wiped at one eye. “Except for the dead.”
“This torture must have lasted longer than a few moments, Lady.”
She only shook her head.
“It could have been done in relative silence,” Sheridan said. She had hunkered down over one of the male bodies, or at least one of the upper torso and head combinations. Pointing to a red mark around the mouth, she said, “I think something gagged them. The women were killed at first, then whatever limb or tool ripped the men apart clamped over their mouths while they were tortured. It could have been done quietly—no more loudly, anyway, than what they’d been doing. Assuming the walls block that out ...”
Avery nodded. “What were they tortured for?” To Lady Gaxia, he said, “Who were these men?”
She rolled a mink-wrapped shoulder. “Men of Lord Onxcor. He was rewarding them. I think they were there when the god was captured.”
“What else?”
“That’s all I know.”
“But ... whoever did this ... they had to have come and gone down the same hall we did. It’s the only way in or out, and it looked reasonably trafficked. Surely they would have been seen, especially if, as you say, people were already on the way here.”
Gaxia met his eyes, and there was no deceit there, only weariness and grief. “None of my people saw anything, Doctor. Otherwise we wouldn’t have summoned you. I’m only glad that when I brought the matter to Lord Onxcor’s attention he remembered you were a doctor and thought of calling you.”
Avery returned her gaze. Are you hiding something, Lady? He could think of more than one reason why a madam would want certain johns killed. Perhaps they’d been abusing her girls, or knew the location to a lucrative stash of loot, or ... well, it could be anything. And yet he believed her. Turning to Sheridan, he asked her a silent question, and she gave a small, eloquent shrug. She didn’t necessarily trust the madam, but neither did she mistrust her. It was enough.
“Still,” Avery insisted, “the killers must have been seen. Unless ...” Smiling to show he was kidding, his gaze strayed to Xagriv, brooding in a corner and looking like he was part of the wall, even though he was a spotted seal-man with a stooped posture in an ugly jacket. Avery hadn’t even been aware of him entering until a moment earlier. “Unless they were invisible.”
Xagriv met his gaze dully. He was just a functionary doing his job. But what job had these dead men been doing? They had been tortured for some information, and Avery could only assume it had something to do with Uthua.
To Gaxia, he said, “Please, Lady, can you have these bodies taken to the house doctor’s office—or perhaps one of these drug labs. Somewhere where I can look more at them later and in better detail?”
“I’ll send them to the pharmacy,” the madam said. “The central lab.” Quickly she gave him directions.
Avery turned to Xagriv. “I need to see Lord Onxcor.”
Xagriv nodded. “My lord said if you had some idea who or what might have done this to come to him immediately.” He bid farewell to Madam Gaxia and led Avery and Sheridan out. Risiglon was wiping his chin and looking pale. He cleared his throat and fell in with them as they made their way back through the halls.
Xagriv led them up a long flight of stairs to what passed for a penthouse at the very top of the dome. Onxcor’s rooms displayed the same mix of sumptuousness and barbarism that Avery might have expected, and more than one beautiful woman lounged on a silken couch wearing almost nothing or played a stringed instrument near a roaring fire, set apart from the ice by thick concrete. A magnificently-fashioned chandelier made from differently-colored glowing ice stalactites hung from the living room, where a terrace commanded a magnificent view over the likewise glowing spires and domes of the city.
They found the warlord himself, surprisingly, in his study reading a book. The study was a large affair with ice stalactites overhead and fine rugs underneath. Leather-bound books lined the walls in elaborate bookcases, and Avery was astounded. The books weren’t pornography or current bestsellers but were classics and masterpieces from the ages, some in Ghenisan, some in other languages he recognized. Avery realized that privately Onxcor might be much different than the public face he put on. Just how barbaric does a Xlacan warlord have to appear to maintain control, anyway?
The tusked chief glanced up. “Did you find out what did it? Who did it?”
“No,” Avery said, as the door shut behind him. There was no brazier or heater in the room, and he shivered at the confined cold. Blue veins of ice—the room was not colored—ran between the bookshelves. At any moment he feared one of the ice fangs overhead might snap off and impale him. One was dripping water onto his right shoulder. Idly he wondered how many drips it would take to infect someone—quite a lot, he suspected. Sheridan should be safe, especially popping her daily pollution pill.
“What then?” Onxcor demanded. He lowered the book but did not put it away.
“No tool killed those people,” Avery said, “or at least no normal tool.” He paused. “There is a possibility they were made by a weapon called the blurwhip, created from the tentacle of a large, slightly extradimensional jellyfish.”
“Yes, I had heard they were newly in demand. Whalers’ve been spreading tales that they can fight Octung’s gods. They got that from pirates, I believe. I’ve recently sent for some—the whips, not the pirates.”
“Well, they stink of ammonia and could make wounds like the ones the dead people in that room had. If I were you, I would consider searching t
he rooms of your guests—the other bidders, I mean—for them.” Avery did not seriously believe any of them possessed such weapons, but he firmly believed that one of the other bidders for Uthua was responsible for the murders, and this was the only pretext he could think of on short notice to have them investigated.
“Only my guests?” Onxcor said mildly.
“Yes.”
“Only the people who want to give me a great deal of money. Only your enemies in this little bidding war. It would be wise of you to have them harassed and offended, wouldn’t it? Trying to get them to quit and go home?”
Avery swallowed. Onxcor’s tone was mild, but his dark eyes held a dangerous heat. With one hand, he was idly fingering a tusk—the one missing its tip. Its jagged end gleamed sharply in the light of the subtly-glowing white walls.
“That’s not it at all,” Avery said. “Look at the bodies yourself if you don’t believe me.” When Onxcor didn’t reply, he added, “I’m having them moved to the, ah, main pharmacy so I can better examine them. Maybe I’ll know more later. To that end it would be invaluable to have my medical kit. Can you have it released from the locker rooms?”
“I’ll send word.”
“Thank you. Until then, my tentative conclusion is that blurwhips are responsible.”
Onxcor’s finger tapped his tusk, making a hollow sound. “How could any of the bidders have access to these weapons, even if they were the instrument of death? You were all searched on entering.”
“I don’t know. I’m only reading the evidence.”
Onxcor gingerly laid down the book he’d been perusing. He took the time to slip a bookmark inside it, then glanced back up at Avery. “Is there anything else, doctor?”
Avery glanced to Sheridan, then to the warlord. “Those men were tortured for a reason, Lord Onxcor. What could they have known that would have brought that on?”
Onxcor’s eyes blinked slowly, lizard-like. “Nothing I can think of.” His voice had changed, like thin ice about to break. “Is there anything ... else?”
