Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

So embarrassed.

  I'm not getting drunk, despite a hero's effort. Three quarters of a bottle of scotch and I'm barely feeling it. Just feeling chemical ill. Just feeling so goddamned embarrassed. Wet wheezing from too much tobacco. Nicotine rolling in my lungs. My taps are dripping. Garbage trucks are starting up and the rubbish day stink wafts into my house. Close the windows.

  Overconfident. Stupid. Shamed.

  But.

  Ludo is no magician. He wasn't ready for the possibility Bettina was anything other than my muscle. Other than human. He took a gun, relied on it. Had a man on the embankment, sniper. Had the thought-eater and the glasses, too, so there's no doubt he knows, or is told, what the artefacts he's peddling do. He's a player, but he's no magician. He's just muscle.

  Which means there's someone I don't know yet behind all this shit.

  But, here's the thing. Ludo ripped a chunk of hair out of me. He'll have my scent. If someone could work up those Tools for him, tracking me will be child's play.

  I can hide. Draw up some concealment spells now and hope whoever is divining me isn't that good.

  Or, on my own ground, my sanctum, we can go again.

  I'm afraid of Ludo. He'll hurt me if he gets me. Bad. And no mistake, he'll come. He has to. A man like that doesn't let a witness go.

  But then again, this is my place and I know his weapons, his tactics, his limitations. I won't say I'm eager for it, but if I want to be me. Remain me. Thrown down on my turf, motherfucker! I have to take some pride back.

  Let's go again.

  Twenty-Six

  Want to know the coolest thing about being a magician?

  You get your own gods.

  You realise that pantheons are just as up for grabs as anything else. And if you can worship Attis or Jupiter or a Yama King or Jehova or Ereshkigal, what's to stop you from worshipping anything you like?

  Why not make your own god, then?

  The fat one from The Doors in the ludicrous leather pants. I've seen him take on a totem's attributes. Why not be protected by Goya's witches or breakfast cereal mascots, who you loved? Why not offer up prayers to Batman. Who'll save you in the night if not Batman? You can seek to emulate the compassion of Christ, the creativity of Shiva, or avoid the gaze of a horny, punishing Zeus, all you like because those are all gods are. Ideas, wrapped in stories, made perceptible to us by hymn and myth, and we can use those ideas. Why not give up a prayer to the Statue of Liberty, or a beloved pet, lost in childhood, that symbolises everything you ever loved?

  All praises to Batman.

  And when you have a god, you have slumming angels and local saints. You have demons and devas and all manner of totems. Locate what you want from a god, what ideals that god represents and what lessons it teaches, and your human head will find patterns that link together pantheons and theologies.

  I have a god. I call it the Omegamantis.

  I imagine it, in space somewhere, black as oil and lacquered to frictionlessness. Chrome talons sharpened to infinitesimal width, dangerous enough to take the electron off an atom. Praying mantises have the keenest vision, pound for pound, on earth, and that's what I think of when I think of the Omegamantis. That's one of his holy attributes, if you like. Lurking in the hearts of collapsars and black holes, watching, paying antehuman attention to the universe. Hunting for patterns. Its body a liquid stillness, but its attentions dangerous and ceaseless.

  A conceit, but in my private moments, I like to think of my work this way. Hunting knowledge, books my snare and spear. Recognising patterns, referencing information. Building up maps of magic. I made the Mantis to reflect my private obsessions, my private conceits.

  And Omegeamantis has saints.

  The Ultrascorpions.

  Midnight green, dressed in robes of white, human scorpions, tails lifting above their head, twitching and venomous. All the anger in me, all the poison, incarnate. The talk in clicks and clacks, subvocals, infrasonics. Strange pheromones like opium, like airborne formic acid, perfume the room.

  Tulpas. Servitors. Eregores. Imaginary friends gone feral and potent.

  My thoughts. The Ultrascorpions are my angry thoughts, my wounded thoughts, my protective thoughts elevated and refined through the prism of rites.

  I am preparing to meet the face of my god.

  I scrub long and hard, rinse the cigarettes and whisky from my mouth. I shave, very carefully.

  My ceremonial robe is a long, black hooded terry-towelling cloth I drew all over with silver, marking spells and glyphs. Comfortable. Hooded and spooky. Black silk pyjama pants. I put it on carefully like a vestment.

  Dressed, I go up into the Sanctum. I have one last smoke. Know why so many magicians smoke? Stillness is bad for spirits and possessing entities. The less molecular motion, the better they can enter the real world. The mathematics of smoke are complex, churning out numbers. Sage, incense, whatever, helps chop up the grid. So I keep the Sanctum smoke-free. Need it to be a place where I can control everything.

  It's an attic. Hot in winter, cool in summer. Painted black, it's stuffy and claustrophobic.

  Or, it's the heart of my magical practice. The place where I perform my most important ritual workings, where I commune with my gods.

  All my favourites, up on the altar. Odin, from a strange Scandinavian wood carver I know. Toth, commissioned for me by Mully on his last trip abroad. Gwydion, once a Silver Surfer toy.

  Painted on the ground is a circle, carefully aligned with the compass points. There's a sword I got from a disposal store, an old cavalry sabre. A tankard. My wand, which I got on my first and last trip into the Black Forest, five foot of carefully lathed oak. A chunk of polished onyx, the size of a child's skull. Bit of classic symbolism never hurts. Omegamantis takes pride of place, made from mechano and clothes hangers and boot black and shellac.

  Runes, occult and religious symbols. Phrases in Latin and Greek I've memorised. Pow Wow Dutch and low German Scarlet taught me that I've forgotten the meaning of, all the more potent for all that. Spray painted or written on the walls.

  Took me years to get it this cool. The lab. The Sanctum. My place of business.

  I light up all the candles and kneel in the centre of the circle, on a cushion. My leg is aching.

  A Polaroid of me and the Hollow, drinking at Violin's. Yes. Take it out from the box I got under the bed. I reread over the letters Scarlet sent me when I was away for the Cull. The really sexy ones. Take it out. The photo of her in the bikini.

  I slide the box out of the circle and begin. Deep trance. Chanting. A lot of people put it all on breathing, pneuma and that, and they're probably right, but I've spent so long doing this stuff, I don't have to put in that time. Everything goes 2D and colourless, and the relief goes supersharp. Leg stops hurting. Can't feel my pulse beat. Take the Zippo from my pocket, light it. Burn up the pictures. Burn up the letter.

  A sacrifice.

  Think insect thoughts. My mind goes one-channel chitin. Predatory stalker thoughts. Ride the smoke from a saucy letter up, into the Outer Dark where my God lurks.

  Omegamantis.

  Spindly city of wires and satellites, where a rusted ball of iron serves as a sun, scoured by its own ruined cities. Clockwork spiders spin telephone wire webs. Crane towers and brass locks. Spindle citadels and deep silver alleys. And there, on a moon made of celluloid, there it is. My mind rises up to the lunar wanderer where my god makes it home today.

  Am I there? Really there? Yeah. There's no debate. This is a thing I'm experiencing. Am I on another planet? Another dimension? Or just hallucinating? It doesn't matter. I'm experiencing something real, and that's enough.

  The Mantis' attentions are on me. It lifts me up to it, weightless and without motive power. I bow to this creature I choose to pray to. This is a power. Did I invent it? Discover it? Refine it? Is it something that already exists that I cloak with my own fictions?

  I don't know.

  Regardless, this is one of my great sources of strength and
only a fool disrespects that. It transforms me and my skull is suddenly triangular, my hands recreated as long pincers and I feel like a re-written sentence. My form is made more pleasing.

  'You have destroyed what you valued: gifted to me.'

  'Yes, Mantis.'

  It's voice is exactly the low-pitch you'd expect a cosmic predator's to be.

  'And you seek?'

  'The service of the Ultrascorpions.'

  'Will you be pitiless?'

  It's never asked me about what I want to do with them before. Is it a trick? I don't care. This is one of the few times in a man's life where honesty is useful.

  'I will be pitiless.'

  'Then they will serve.'

  I am returned, hurtling away from that place, watching it dissolve, the after image of the red Mantis eyes regarding me in alien contemplation. Slowly, surely, I come back to the Sanctum. My hands, my face, alien, merely human.

  There they are, four of them, in the corner of my eye. Still, still as ice, aside from their tails, which sway over their backs. The clack their mandibles and their eyes, six each, set in thick black exoskeletal faces, watching.

  I light the Zippo. Hold my hand over the flame. The hair burns. Pain. I do that four times, four times extending out my paw, shooting it towards the Ultrascorpions. My offering and salutation.

  'We have come to do a hurting.'

  I hear behind the click click clack of the mandibles.

  'Of course you have.'

  Twenty-Seven

  Now they are real. Present in a virtual world, I suppose is the trendy magicians' vocab guidelines. But I've given them the ability to manifest in this world. To take bodies. Ideas poured into the world and cloaked in matter, the matter a kind of flesh.

  But until then, they're like ghosts, separated from our world as through murky glass.

  I get up, jeans, t-shirt. Hoodie. I look to my wards. Bettina stumbles into my room, naked and smeared. I turn my back while she raids my cupboards.

  'Shit. You shouldn't be awake.' It's not a statement about her recuperation. She's got fucking great big bullet holes in her, but they're already closing up. Her face is gaunt as a wolf's.

  'What's here? Like, there's something in the house. I know.'

  'Allies. Ludo is coming.'

  She's too tired to panic. 'I can't help. I have to eat.'

  'Tonight, go out to a potter's field. Security will be no joke for a woman who can jump ten foot with a run-up. Dig. Eat. But that's not until tonight. I'll give you a coat, now. Shirt. You'll just look sick if you go by day.'

  'You could force me to stay.'

  Nod. I could. Never would.

  I think of Ludo. Think of the pain in my leg. Never? At least not today, with the Ultrascorpions, disembodied and potent, whirling around like a rabid dog's thoughts and just as invisible. But even as a suicide bomb, she's powerless. Won't say I'm not tempted, though. I want it, she's bound to do as I say and that includes a certain, second death.

  'When they come, just... stay in the attic. Don't touch anything.'

  'I'm hungry.'

  I shrug. 'Pigeons on the roof. Rats in the alley.'

  She goes up onto the roof. Over the shoulder. 'This time. Use that mad guy's knife.'

  We kind of laugh but ain't nothing funny. Gone.

  I call Scarlet, looking for back-up. She's not answering. Doubt they'd have muscle to spare. Could Lionel put together a posse? Not in time.

  I watch television and zone out and nap. I wake up listening to Bettina shower. Four thirty.

  It's six thirty in the morning. I hear them picking the locks.

  Twenty-Eight

  The knife is good for cutting, I suppose. The Hollow was never a man to leave a blade unsharpened, even before the mask. But that's not its purpose. Break it into symbols. A knife isn't a sword that is a device honed to murder. It's a tool and a killing thing. It slices. It carves through the unnecessary.

  My brain goes floodlit as I take the thing.

  Jon used to use this when he knew it was bodywork. I can see why.

  I'm thinking of battle plans and more. What needs to be protected. Hearth stuff. Home stuff. Every kitchen, the heart of every home, is bladed. So much meaning in the knife.

  Ludo comes out second, up the stairs and into the living room where I'm sitting, communing, joined to my house and feeling its shock at the intruders. The knife hardwires me in. My wards are lambent, pressing against Ludo's protections. I'm connected to the place in ways I've never felt before. Nervous system trodden by badman's feet.

  The Sudafrique brought four men. The wards I've worked so hard on over the years finally awaken like krakens. One man falls apart in his head, thoughts falling to tatters like an old rag doll. He's behind Ludo. I feel my protectors hone in on him. The though-eater pendant shakes. The knife tells me. It's fucking serious voodoo, that amulet.

  The one guy behind Ludo is dead meat now.

  The Ultrascorpion knows its work. It doesn't even need to manifest. It flows into his mind, rewires dendrites and neural pathways with a sadist child's glee. The man screams, tries to punch his way into his brain with his knuckles. Ludo doesn't look back. He's intense.

  Three men find me, standing there, tapping a knife against my thigh.

  'I'll have you, you greymeat cunt.'

  Two guys, fanning Ludo, draw guns, ready to off me. This is my house and I'm not afraid of guns here.

  I whisper a spell to one of the guns. A ghost leaps into his spine and he falls to the ground. His very lymph curdles at the cancer hex I whisper. It's not real. I can't invoke metastizing magic. But for a while, his mind is convinced that's what's happening.

  Ludo draws on me now. Same gun he had by the water.

  His mate clicks off the safety of his own pistol.

  And three more scorpions strike with the dignitas of assassins.

  Wait, I recognise the man thumbing this weapon. Hip hop magician. What's his name? He was just about my last job for the Library. He's the prick who traced me. Has to be, he's the only magician. The Ultrascorpion takes him and he falls, fucked up. It slides into him, slicing his thoughts apart like meat. He's good, but he's not prepared for my sinister friends.

  Finally, they manifest. Ludo draws his gun and fires. One of my eregores falls back, unprepared for pain, but taking five rounds to the chest won't kill it. Ludo is professional. The gun isn't empty when he shifts it to me. But the knife tells me he's panicking. This isn't his ground.

  Ludo is ready to cap me when another Ultrascorpion manifests behind him. Made from real stuff, created from old skin cells and whatever else they need, the venom is real venom, unambiguous. The barb is cruel and one takes him in the hand. One other scorpion stakes his foot. He's splayed out, ready for dissections.

  He screams. It hurts him. I'm happy.

  I light a cigarette. He's pinned like a butterfly and I check his pockets. Another gun. Balisong. Speed, which I pocket.

  It's hard to act in the real world when you're a spirit. I dismiss the Ultrascorpion with thanks. Ludo drops like puppet. Gored.

  And I'm back. Trance gone.

  Two men on my floor, one taken and stilled by spells, one lost to the hallucinogens of scorpion poison.

  I don't know how to take the bullets out of his ridiculous gun, so I just put it on a bookcase. The other I hand over to the Ultrascorpion, knowing they'll appreciate a murderous gift.

  Hip hop? I can't remember his name, but he's on an epilepsy trip. He won't be back for a while. I stare at Ludo and my leg aches. I can feel the bunched muscles and the bruises.

  Ludo swipes at me but the knife has me hooked in to him. I know his moves. I stand back, slap his head with the flat of the blade. It doesn't hurt him and, if it did, he wouldn't care, but he's got a veinful of metaphysic poison. His punches are nothing now.

  'You thought I was nothing.' Don't even realise I'm speaking aloud until I hear it. The eregores shiver with torture-anticipation.

  I think abou
t kicking him. He'd laugh it off and I'd look stupid. No need for this.

  'Now why don't we talk about what the fuck you're up to.'

  Bettina stalks into the room. Walks past us like nothing is up. Drags one of the thugs, the one I hexed, up the stairs. Stops in the kitchen, shaking hands finding a knife. He's so insane that he's not paying much attention to his demise. Up the roof she drags him. I don't think about the rest.

  Inch-wide wounds and filled with other-dimensional poison, give Ludo this. He grins despite them.

  'You want to know what I'm doing?'

  That smile's like a punch. Fingers his wound. His suit is totally ruined.

  I trace runes in the air with the blade. Flaming in my head. Here, in this place, even the uninitiated can feel their strength and malison. He'll tell the truth or suffer.

  'I'm about the Old Man's business.'

  The Old Man.

  I can't hide my surprise.

  Inside my head is static. Chafe. Siren warnings. The Old Man. The Old Man. Ludo grins like a bastard. The Old Man. If he even knows that name, he's hooked in deeps as ticks. The Old Man.

  I take the knife. He can't lie to the knife. He's not lying, I can taste that. Put the blade away, not time for threats. 'Take your men and go.' The scorpions slide their stings from his body but keep them close.

  I'm scared, not stupid. I pat down Hip-hop and notice he's got a baggie filled with my hair. I take that back. Ludo picks himself up, bleeding over my wood floor. As he goes, he collects his wounded. Drags them out to a car which he'll drive with a thigh bored through. One tough motherfucker.

  But I can't hear it. I'm sitting down, freaking.

  The Old Man. The worst of the them all. And I've crossed him.

  Twenty-Nine

  Call up onto the roof. 'I'll be back in a bit.' Ignore the wet greedy chomping.

  She'll be a while. Am I worried about the guy she's about to carve up? Am I fuck. Ludo would have tortured me to death while that prick watched. Or helped.

  I'm on the adrenaline rush. Scarlet. Where are you? Map of the city, the long spar of it, running north to south, surrounded by a bay. Trance state. Fear jab. Fail to make it.