Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  Hands over my face. 'Jon, you're here to kill me for money. You're choosing to take my life for dollars in the bank. All we've been through together and it comes to this.'

  I just sit there, too tired to be afraid. 'Don't tell me what you are and aren't.'

  Look at him.

  'You're right. We were friends. And perhaps my employer chooses to delight in setting friend against friend.'

  'It's the sort of thing I reckon he'd like,' I say, 'Because of irony or some damn thing.'

  Quiet again. His hand touches the mask, running over it like he was feeling it for the first time.

  'I don't want to kill you. I just... Where I am now, everything is like smoke, and it's so hard to care about things. It's teaching me things, Lark. And some of those things are hard to understand unless you're alone.'

  I look up at him. Something's changed. Some condition has altered. His voice is less remote.

  'Then don't kill me. Don't let yourself be manipulated by some bastard. If you're really in some fucking murder-Samadhi, then stay pure. Don't wreck it all.'

  And that's it. I'm done. That's all I have to say.

  'I signed a contract.'

  'I'm sick of hearing about it! Show me you're a thug with a gun, no different to whacking guys for dollars, or show me you're a friend, or show me you're above it all and that fucking mask on your head is good for more than killing, but do it now. I have things to do.'

  His mind is made up shortly. I just grind out my smoke, light up another, determined to go out with a nicotine buzz if that's what it comes to.

  Slowly, he uncurls. Stands over me. He extends his hand like it's a vestigial memory of friendship. I take it, feeling the awful strength in there. 'Friends.'

  Then the mask is back.

  'But if you are marked a second time, I do not think I can ignore it. That would be a fated thing. And we are truly working as agents of fate, now.'

  Relief. Exhaustion. I'm too tired to hear more confessions from a mask.

  'Thanks Jon. I'm glad we didn't fight. But you can fuck off to out now.'

  He gathers his slaughter-decorations and is quickly done. He moves to the top of the stairs.

  'The Old Man, he'll commit atrocities upon you, if he finds you. I'd just murder you and it would hurt, but he's willing to mar your soul.'

  'So I hear.'

  'You hear. I don't think you understand.'

  'Could be.'

  He walks slowly down the stairs. The eyes flare down into wavelengths too low for human eyes.

  'You have to go after him. If you mix it up with him, you have to walk past his glamours and go for him. Throat him.'

  'Thank you, Jon. Thank the Hollow.'

  He stops.

  'That's not the Teaching Silence. That's me. I told you I remembered you.'

  He takes my doorknob and shifts it.

  'It was nice to see you again, Lark.'

  I'm in the dark. Smoking. I cough.

  Fifty-Four

  Primal magic on the street. G-men and women hunting us down. A sociopath who's hunted this city, spinning webs of sadism for a hundred years. A woman who locks me down every single goddamn time I try to show her she's made a mistake.

  Primal magic can warp the world. Hurt us all. The Old Man can hand me my skin and marlin-spike my soul. Blah blah. Threats.

  I'm Lark.

  Ten-year veteran.

  My master could never bring the old bastard to heel, but I can. I survived the Hollow. I've lived through Ludo and his fat fists filled with malice. I've been face-to-face with a sorcery that existed before our universe exploded into matter.

  Old Man. Ludo.

  I'm going to fucking have you.

  Ludo, you're a lead pipe and I'll take you out in ways you never imagined. Your stupid little amulet, I'll sneak past it like a murder-shadow and rend you up and down.

  And you, Old Man. You think one day we'll all live in the fire? Fuck it. You first, you prick.

  Throat him.

  Live in the fire?

  Live in the fire.

  I think I know what you want.

  Fifty-Five

  Blast furnace shower. Shave down to the skin. Mind so icy my thoughts freeze up, crystallise. No meditation, just focus. Throat him floodlights the winter in my head. Blue jeans black jacket grey hood. Good look. I make it work. Fingerless gloves. From under my desk, my true glory, the big black antique doctor's bag. You know the type. Shelves and that.

  Into the street and heading down to the depot with a plan to witness the sigil.

  Take the scent.

  Lockjaw pain just from glancing.

  Bettina said the city had bad dreams. Said something's wrong in the ground. Then she ran. Clever woman. Said it was like mercury in the ground. Sure. Pollution.

  There's a technique. Jon used to like watching me do it. The treadless path. Freefall hallucination. Lose my head in magic.

  The shaman walk.

  Soldiers at the depot. I wrap myself up in mystery thoughts. Shadow thoughts. I walked away from Jon the Hollow and I can walk my way through you. Then I protect myself. Hiding in plain sight, in the shadows amongst the cars and the gunmen, I ease down. I am aware, but make no choices. Simply wait. I allow myself to think of the Primal Working and then to obsess on it. I inoculate my thinking against it, letting it bite me with its potency and venoms.

  Then, my mind slow and guarded, I whisper all the words I've given so much time to. Words I've hand-crafted and lathed. Protection words. Phrases hobbled together from Latin and Greek heavy with the authority of antiquity. Alien words from Hindi and Urdu. Gutter threats. Apotropaic words.

  I call up prophylactic imagery. Eyes and pentagrams. Razor-wire wards. Sluice gates, ablative jinxes. All of it. This is it. Protected as it gets. Occult bomb suit, NBC, magic fucking armour.

  I walk through them all, the four or five soldiers who lurk who in the predawn light.

  Look at the Primal Sigil.

  Still-minded. Protected. I reel. It lands heavy. Hits my mind like a wrecking ball into a pool. Terrible pataphysics. Rabid ideas, hunting down good red sanity.

  But I'm ready. I look at it. Long strands of letters that writhe with potency. It feels like cancer of the sanity, but I'm not sane. Magician, at the height of power. Wrapped up in a freefall hallucination. I let it wash over me and

  (Teeth hurt. Gum bleed)

  I get the spoor

  (Every image of every humiliation rushes up the pit)

  the scent of

  (Bruises blossom. Serotonin surge. Want to stop and weep)

  the Scroll.

  (Cloning itself, metropolitan virus, consuming, transforming. )

  I walk away, tasting blood in my mouth.

  I have a language and the syllables to describe it. And that's what this Sigil is. A phrasing. A living story. Now I just need to find it. Place my thoughts into shaman territory and wander. Trust the magic will guide me to what I need to see, not what I want.

  Trying not to think about the leg and it's paining.

  Walking now, half there watching, half dreaming. Under the city's skin and drinking its blood, it's secrets spilling out. Whispering things to me.

  The sewer where they dumped the body of the holy fool, the homeless man. His body sat up and starting performing under dark miracles for rat and bat and alley cat. The swing set for the children that had a strangler's passions. The devil-thing, given to protecting the innocent by taking their hearts for safekeeping, taking the shape of an old man street-sweeping, who murdered with a smile. The funeral museum, the black building visited by the morbid or the hipster-cruel or the daring morbid, staffed by shadows and waxen hunters.

  The killer's nest, a plain-sight dumping ground that's the city's garbage barges, staffed by grateful necrophiles. The outreach clinic, staffed by cynics, bodies come and bodies go and necromancers pay tips. Water towers, whose gods are birds, humming with powers. Shop windows made crystal in the winter. Scrying pools of br
oken glass. Light reflects off them, gives up truth, until the spectrums splinter and the dried blood's just a bonus. The vending machines that howl. The digging machines that dig into kobold holds. Gambling machines summoning stochastic spirits. Computing machines, making dimensions from numbers. Espresso machines, pumping false-life into the deserve-to-be-dead. Streets sign sigils, road side runes, jailhouse jinxes, suburb spells, visible on my shaman trail.

  The tomb for the living, where prisoners of police and politics and poverty pound out summoning screams to spirits. The piano graveyard, down by Avenue X, the dog hunting zone by Avenue Y, where the beasts pray to their Feral King to restore their dignity, and the taxi ghost that prowls Avenue Z for redemption. The hookers who pray to whore god Lady P'an if they know her name or not, the postal workers who pray to do the work of Mercury and Apollo, with resentment, and the barmen who minister to the lonely with the zealousness of Christ. A traitor under torture, the city groans and shows it bones and I see every inch.

  I see it all. I walk it all. The magic is taking me places, letting me see the divine that burns in all objects, in every two-leg human monster, in each concrete stain on every jacket and every drop of blood on every shard of glass in every filthy gutter.

  Should I see wonder in this city, separate from the magic? Immigrants beaten and used condoms outside my door and cops beating children. Ask me why I wanted magic.

  And I am a sorcerer. The mediation between these worlds is my true work. Behind the atomising veil of my meditation, I see that I am righteous to set myself against the Old Man.

  But not fucking smart.

  Then I see the writing, the letters in the true tongue of fire. The Sigil, my feet more sure than my mind, has bought me the trail.

  I'm on track.

  I'm coming.

  I nearly drop meditation. Nearly lose all my wards and wards, which would leave me a fingerless man clutching shells.

  I want to laugh like a drain. But I can't.

  See, it's in the city. It's a memetic invasion, an idea that replicates through words. That breeds with each syllable. A phrase with an obsession for life. And I can read it. A warning. A claim. It says

  'Rejoice, for I am born anew.'

  And it says, 'This place is Archonic.'

  And I know what it is.

  And I know what it's doing.

  I get away from the tag, drop the wards, see it as normal people see it. A lurid graffiti tag that hookworm burrows into your eye and writhes.

  Fifty-Six

  Fucking hell. This really couldn't get worse. No exaggeration.

  Sitting in a bar, eating a hamburger. It sucks. Chlorine in my eyes, so tired. The beer sign in neon is pissing me off, and the guys playing pool are calling each other 'fag' too loudly. It's three in the morning, and this is my job now. There's no one left in the Library who can do this shit, and I don't trust anyone to do it anyway.

  See, it's an Archon.

  Way back, I said that magic works best on the human mind. The human imagination. Want a God or a spirit? Dream it up. There's no easier, no better or stronger place it exists than the inside of your skull. The best gods, the best magic, are you just expressing yourself and your desires.

  It's why I can't spit-roast bastards on the spot or magic myself up a bullet proof undershirt. At least, not without massive effort, massive time, massive resources. Like the Ultrascorpions. They can act in the real world, in a limited range, a limited way, only because it took me five years' work to make them real.

  And, honestly, if I wanted to kill someone, why not hoodoo them into suicide? What's even easier than that? Two in the head. Poison in their gin. Pillow case suffocation.

  But that's not the whole story. See, best I figure it, could be wrong here, don't quote, magic is pretty much a microcosm of a bigger set of rules. A physics our physics works in. Some people think magic lets you break physical laws. I think that sometimes, you get it to work according a higher principle, metaphysics in the purest term. Mully uses the term pataphysics, but I reckon that's as one of his private jokes. Still, good term.

  Easier one? Primal magic.

  The stuff that punches out our rules, our reality. The True Science. Fucking hell, people love giving it names. The Tongue of Fire. The Secret Flame. Blah blah. Just take my word for it, yeah?

  So there's a pataphysics. There's pataphysicians.

  Entities from outside our world. Our reality. Don't believe me? Talk to a scientist. Quantum fucking cosmologist. Whatever they're called. Ask 'em if the universe has an end. Bet they'll say no. But they're wrong. There's places a human mind simply cannot go. Places that scoff at our understanding of physical reality. And that's where they live. The End.

  We got a million names for 'em. Most common these days is Archons. Bit of a shout-out to our Gnostic forebears who knew a thing or two about magic. Creatures halfway between God and human. Half omnipotent, although I can't even figure that phrase out. But call 'em Aeons, call em Demon Princes, call em superbastards from beyond the speed of light. They exist in a world that's somehow more than ours. Bigger. Ice to our water. And when they get in here, it's fun time. Everything is so simple here and they are powerful in so many ways. Who wouldn't want to beat up the little kids?

  But they can't just beam down from the fucking mother ship. They need time. Materials. A good, still reality.

  That's what the tags are all about, the painted symbols. It's replicating some part of itself, using language as a medium. It's getting born, word by word, and getting bigger. Whoever sees the tags is, well, they're fucked. And it's warning off other Archons, too. It plans for a long stay. It plans to become the city. To become it.

  More questions unanswered. Why language? Why now? What's the Old Man want?

  Fifty-Seven

  The tags are easy to find now. I have them in my eye. I walk, senses open, knowing where they are the way you know you're hungry. Each time, they get more powerful. Hard to study, seeing as they're snapping at you. But I can do it now, although not easily. Every grapheme and diagraph and punctuation mark is a machine or a pathogen, looking to build or breed giants.

  Beautiful things in their way. Shark gorgeous, serpent sexy. The colours are bright and rich, and the Arabic-looking words are curved and sinuous, and I sort of want to touch them, trace them with my fingers... but I'm not looking to blow my mind out my skull.

  Come at last to a midtown apartment building. Which is weird. The tags have been in alleys, on rooftops and the rooftop things they keep air conditioning engines in. On the far end of the subway stations where the smokers try to sneak one. This is brave.

  Go to the doorman, ready to put the voodoo on him.

  No.

  He's fucking gone. Zombied out. Look in his eyes. He's there. He looks at me like a dog shown a drowning. He can see me. Just doesn't give a toss.

  'Please give me your keys.' Nothing.

  Reach into his pocket. Take. Door open.

  More tags in here.

  Silent. A bad place. Every echo too big. Rich people's atrium. Art on the marble walls and a couch that's worth more than all my furniture. Light up. First time in a while. Look around. Security office. Lucky.

  Locked. Try the keys.

  'Get the fuck out of here!' The door bashes against me. Woman's voice in terror.

  'I'm not one of them. I'm here to help you.' Keep it confident. Long pause. Then.

  'How do I know that?'

  Make a guess. 'I'm talking to you. Figure no one else in the building's done that for a day or so.'

  Again a pause. 'How can I trust you?'

  Look around. Camera. 'Check me out.' I wave. 'Don't reckon anyone's acted like a person around you for a while either, and here I am, acting like a kid for your goddamned amusement.'

  'You shouldn't smoke in here.'

  'I'll give you one if you let me in.'

  The door unlocks. 'Stand the fuck back or I will shoot you.' Just like in the movies. She's been practicing. Like she'
s got a gun. But I do what she says. Lift up my jacket to show I'm not strapped. She opens it. Middle-eastern woman. Hijab? Hadith? I don't recall. Headscarf.

  'Come on in if you're coming, spastic!' She waves me over.

  'Nice talk for a devout woman.'

  'I don't think I'm going to hell for swearing at a time like this!'

  Three video monitors. Pictures of a few people's kids, from playground to graduation. Coat on a rack. Fashion magazine. Qur'an. And fucking hell. A bucket full of piss. I cover my mouth, slide it out into the atrium with authority. The woman is embarrassed.

  'I've done the same in my time, but there's no need to keep it here now.'

  She yells at me to lock the door. 'This isn't a movie. They're not flocking at you, into brains or blood.'

  She locks it anyway.

  'Who the fuck are you?'

  'Obviously, I'm a guy who knows what's going on. So, listen. Here, take a smoke.' She does. I light her up. Put the pack on the desk, gesture to help herself.

  'They try to get in here?'

  'Told me to look at their sign. They tried to get in, but no one's coming through the security door. Even if you have the keys, we can lock this up.'

  'I can get you out. But it won't be easy.' Lie. 'And I will. If you help me.'

  'What?'

  'Do you store the security camera footage here?'

  'No. But we have access for about ninety days on the laptop.'

  'That's what I need to see. I'm not good with computers. If you can bring up, say, the last three days, I'll get you out of here.'

  She's thinking about it, her lips moving in curse words.

  'So it's a deal? You'll save me if I help you?'

  Say it like that, I realising I'm coming on way too strong. I throw myself into one of those stupid cheap chairs on wheels they make these guys work in. Take a deep drag.

  'No. It's not like that. I'm sorry. I know you've seen some things. I'll get you out but I need your help. This is going on in other parts of town tonight.'

  She curses again, in English and maybe Urdu. Looks at me carefully and decides.