by Conner, Jack
“Do any of the girls have free will—or at least awareness?” Layanna said.
“I don’t know much about the process, to be honest,” Coleel said. “There are many legends about it, but they often conflict. He controls them with his mind somehow, that’s all I know. And there’s not just girls here. There’s boys, too. And men. And pre-humans.”
Grunts, gasps and moans came from the rooms as they past them, and Avery tried to tune the sounds out. He wondered what the attraction would be in making love to a mindless automaton—or, worse, a person that had someone else looking through their eyes. Then again, that woman had smiled at her john—had the smile been genuine? Had it been given by the woman or whoever controlled her, presumably Virine? Surely one person couldn’t control very many glabren at the same time.
“How many are there—glabren?” he said. “Hundreds?”
“Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. They’re used all throughout the city. Even the Octunggen occupiers use them. For office functionaries and canon fodder, mainly.”
“And Virine exerts control over them all? Surely that’s impossible.”
“Oh, I doubt he tells each one what to do every moment of the day. He probably just winds them up and lets them perform their functions, like clockwork. But I don’t really know. To tell you the truth, I don’t want to know.”
They took a cross-passage to another hall, looking for a stairway up. Instead, the hall spilled out into a large open room, about half the size as the cavernous club room on the first floor. Here naked glabren paraded one at a time down a catwalk, their purple eyes staring blankly while their bodies swaggered and strutted. Most were human, a few infected, and one, to Avery’s shock, was a red-feathered Nisaar, one of the bird-people. Avery saw that its chest, belly and face weren’t red but a myriad of colors, blue, green and gold being the most prominent. Its eyes, however, were just as purple as the others on the catwalk. When one glabren had reached the pinnacle of the stage, it would pause, and those in the audience would lean forward or peer through glasses to get a better look. As Avery watched, a bidding war broke out over one particularly handsome-looking young man, whose body glistened with the oils it had been covered with.
“Selling the glabren to private bidders,” Coleel whispered. “Or at least selling the time left in their contracts.”
“Let’s keep moving,” Layanna said.
They found a stairwell and made their way to the third and final floor. At the top stood two glabren bouncers, both large men bearing semi-automatic rifles.
“Halt,” one said, as Avery and the others approached. Coleel put his head down, evidently not wanting to be recognized, and again Avery wondered if Virine could see through his puppets’ eyes; evidently Coleel wondered the same thing. “What do you want?” The glabren’s voice came as if from far away, slow and monotone. His blank purple eyes stared at nothing but seemed to see all.
“We have urgent business,” Avery said. “You’d best not detain us.”
“State your names. We will communicate them to the Master.”
So their minds do link directly to him. But not necessarily continuously.
“Certainly,” Layanna said, and stepped forward. As the least threatening-looking of the three (or so Avery told himself), she was able to get right up to the guards before they stopped her. She came to a halt before the guard on the left, then turned back to Coleel. He’d been trying not to look up, but at her cough he did so. She caught the merchant’s gaze and indicated the guard on the right. After a moment, he nodded. Avery, realizing what they were up to, was insulted Layanna had not asked for his help. Then again …
“Your identification,” the guard said.
“I have it right—” Layanna made as if to reach for something in a pocket, then grabbed onto the man’s rifle with both hands. He tried to tear it lose, but she clung to it with a strength born of desperation.
The other guard began to raise his own weapon. Losg Coleel barreled forward, his weight crushing the guard against the wall. He ripped the weapon free and struck the glabren over the head with its wooden butt, and the glabren collapsed, his purple eyes closing.
Meanwhile Layanna was losing the fight with the first glabren. Avery leapt forward and grabbed the rifle, too, shoving its lethal end away from Layanna’s face, which is where the guard had been trying to aim it. Coleel arrived, struck this guard too over the head and, when the man didn’t go down, struck him again. The guard fell, bleeding from the head, and Avery retrieved the gun. Weapons were still foreign to Layanna, it seemed. She was the weapon, and it apparently offended her to have to use a gun, as she had made no move to take it.
“Nice … work,” she told Coleel.
He nodded, sweat dripping from his broad brow. “I only hope … they didn’t send off a message …”
“Let’s get these two out of the way,” Avery said. “It’s lucky no shots went off. We might get out of this yet.” No one seemed to have seen the fight, and he couldn’t hear the sound of footsteps approaching.
They found a nearby room, checked to see if it was empty, then dragged the two guards inside. That done, the three moved off down the halls. The third level proved less busy than the second but by no means deserted. Hard-looking men and women came and went from various rooms, some clutching briefcases. A few were accompanied by bodyguards. Other bosses, Avery thought, either partners with Virine in this venture or some other. Some of the criminals gave Avery’s group a look of vague interest, but that was it, and he wasn’t surprised. There would be many strange comings and goings in the Ezzez underworld.
As the group moved through the corridors of green stone, he noticed that they were obliged to pass several long mirrors with elaborate, serpent-themed frames. Gooseflesh crept up his arms, but he wasn’t sure why, not then. Something about those mirrors looked familiar, though.
At last they reached a staircase leading up to what must be the roof, and Avery stared at the door above with barely contained eagerness. It would be all too good to get out of this place. He’d been feeling more and more claustrophobic as they marched their way up through the Snake’s Tongue, and he was almost desperate to be out. Looking about them to make sure no one was following, they started up the stairs. Coleel went first, with Layanna next, then Avery. Coleel reached out a hand toward the door knob, grasped it, took a breath, and turned it.
“Here goes,” he said, as though in prayer, and swung the door open.
Purple eyes glared down at him. Two rows of glabren huddled beyond the doorway, silhouetted against the stars, and yet Avery could still see the gleam of their eyes.
“Damn,” he said, feeling as though the floor had dropped out from below him. We came so close.
Footsteps behind him.
Avery spun. Two groups of glabren spilled from two different rooms to either side of the staircase. Avery began to lift his assault rifle. A hand seized his wrist. Another tore the gun away. Something struck him on the side of the head. He fell to one knee.
A cry from above. Glabren must have attacked Coleel, too. Avery jammed a hand into his pocket, going for the pistol, but strong arms lifted him up and dashed him against a wall. Pain filled him. Vaguely he was aware of other hands rooting through his clothes, removing the pistol, then—No! he tried to scream, but could not find the voice—the god-killing knife.
Layanna was shouting something, from worlds away it sounded like, but then Avery heard the strike of flesh and she fell silent.
Something hit him again. A bright flash of fire filled his synapses. Awareness faded. The world blurred, became a mist, then nothing.
Chapter 4
When reality drifted back into being, like a mirage on the horizon resolving into a citadel, Avery, Layanna and Coleel were being dragged down green stone halls, green alchemical lamps burning from recessed niches, with glabren leading the way moving in their stolid, dreamwalking way. Pain filled Avery, and he tasted blood in his mouth. He turned to see Layanna blinking, rega
ining consciousness, and beyond her Coleel, awake and bleeding from the nose and scalp, with his head down and eyes filled with despair. A horde of glabren hauled them bodily, and Avery could feel their rough hands all over him.
“The mirrors,” he heard himself say. “I should have known …”
“Mirrors?” Layanna asked, sounding dazed.
“The mirrors we passed. There were some just like that aboard Paradise.” He named the aerial brothel above the Twilight City, but he was aware that he was speaking just to speak, as an outlet for his fear, and his voice held a tinge of hysteria. “I asked Janx about them later, and he told me they were two-way mirrors so that voyeurs could watch the action from the other side.”
“The glabren were watching,” Layanna nodded, still sounding out of it. “Sentinels.”
“The receptionist warned us. ‘He has eyes everywhere’.”
“What does it matter?” Coleel snapped. “However it was done, it was done. We knew what we were getting into, and now it’s caught up with us. I only wish I was still in some cult or other. I don’t even have any gods to pray to.”
The glabren hauled them to the door at the end of the hall, a great edifice of stained brass inset with a bas-relief of a coiled serpent, with a window peeking out between the coils, and after being admitted dragged their catch into the room beyond, a large, dark chamber with a single light set on the floor—alchemical, of course: green, which reflected, just faintly, off the pitted, green stone walls glimmering with moisture. Somehow, though, the lamp seemed to throw back more shadow than light, and the shadows were tinted green. The dreamlike glow emanated from the very center of the room, to which Avery and the others were carried, then deposited in a heap. Their weapons were taken forward and set beside what Avery could see was some sort of throne—Virine truly did have a high opinion of himself.
It wasn’t just a throne. Oh, no. It was made of living humans, all glabren, Avery was sure, and arranged in tortuous positions so that one was a seat, another a footstool, two for the armrests, a large fat woman with big breasts for the back, and so on. The throne towered ten feet off the ground, and every foot was composed of human beings. Virine (and it must be he, surely) lounged back in his seat, drinking from a bejeweled goblet and with his head between the woman’s breasts. Her purple eyes gazed out on the room as if not seeing it. Virine himself boasted many tattoos, some glowing, some not, and his hair was arranged in long dreadlocks, none of which stirred, and he dressed himself in red-dyed furs. He was a fairly ordinary-seeming fellow for all that, other than being particularly seedy-looking, and several of his teeth had gone missing and replaced by the teeth of animals—sharp, Avery saw, and thick. One exuded something that might have been venom.
Glabren held Avery, Layanna and Coleel down while Virine appraised them. Coleel’s lambent flesh-art threw many colors across the floor, some even onto the throne itself, but the colors did not touch Virine.
“Well well,” he said, “look what we have here. I’ve wanted to see you in this position for a long time, Losgana, you bastard son of a milkless mother.” He spoke not in the local tongue but in Hurucan, a much more florid, colorful language. Avery understood it better than he could speak it.
“Fuck you.” Coleel tried to force himself to his feet. One of the glabren clubbed him on the back of his neck and he sank to his knees.
Virine grinned, showing off his stolen fangs. “Now now, that sort of talk won’t get you far here. But why are you here, Losgana? You’ve avoided my traps for too long to come blundering into my actual web now.”
“That’s not your concern.”
Virine leaned forward. “But isn’t it?” He let a beat go by, then drew back into the green-tinted shadows. “You see, prior to your arrival I received this.” He held up a photograph; Avery was too far away to see what it contained. “It’s of her.” Virine’s gaze flicked to Layanna.
Word travels fast, Avery thought.
“Do you know who delivered it?” Virine said, but Coleel didn’t answer. “Our delightful jackbooted occupiers. Apparently she’s an enemy of theirs and they’re hunting her. They’ve sent out word to many of the local businesses to deliver her. If they’re found harboring her, it will go ill for them. So, you see, Losgana, this poses a much more intriguing question than I would have wanted.”
“Just let us go,” Avery said, knowing he was mangling the pronunciation. “We can pay—”
One of the glabren struck him on the top of his head. Unable to help it, he cried out and fell silent. Layanna’s gaze fixed him, and she shook her head: Don’t do anything stupid.
“Why are they after you?” Virine said. The question, apparently, was directed at Layanna.
She answered slowly, and her voice, when it came, did some justice to Hurucan—better than Avery had done it, anyway. “It doesn’t matter. I’m an enemy of Octung. You say you don’t like them. Then help us.”
Virine laughed. “Like them? ‘Like’ has nothin’ to do with it, beautiful. And you are quite a looker, aren’t you? It’d be a shame to hand you over to the Lightning Crown, wouldn’t it? I could sell you for a pretty avilct and no mistake.”
“Do it and you’ll regret it,” Avery said, then flinched as one of the glabren kicked him in the ribs. He grunted and doubled over, wheezing. Blood ran down from his scalp and he could taste it at the corner of his lips.
“As I was saying,” Virine went on. “I don’t like Octung, but they are my clients. I’ve sold the contracts to many of my pretties to them. They need them more than ever now, don’t they, to keep the peace? Wouldn’t want to lose their business. Worse, wouldn’t want them to toss me into one of their black cells, would I? No, that wouldn’t do at all.” His gaze returned to Coleel. “Just how did you wind up with this lot, eh? I mean, I know you were in hiding, but surely you have some standards.”
Coleel shot a dark look at Avery. “I probably wouldn’t have joined up, to be honest, if certain facts had been made known to me.”
Virine laughed again. He seemed very pleased with himself. Then, with shocking suddenness, he sobered. “You will give me the locations where the ghost flower is harvested. And you will provide me with the seal you use on your contracts so the villagers will agree to deal with me.”
Coleel watched him. Streamers of bloody saliva dripped from the merchant’s lips. “I would rather die.”
Virine drummed his fingers on his living armrest. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “that skin of yours … if properly peeled … it would make a hell of a hanging. Maybe even a robe?”
A low growl coming from his throat, Coleel tried to rise again, and several glabren were lifted into the air. In the end, though, there were too many, and they forced him back to the floor. Gasping, he subsided.
“There is no scenario in which you can leave my presence without giving up your secrets,” Virine said. “So you’d better just get used to that fact, you garish spawn of a withered womb. There may be a scenario in which you can leave alive. I’m not sure. It depends on your manner and the level of respect you’re prepared to show. I—”
A woman approached the throne, coming from the rear of the chamber. Avery hadn’t even seen her. The room was so dark and all he could see was Virine’s obscene seat. There must be another door. She stepped up on a kneeling glabren and whispered in Virine’s ear.
“A fire?” he said, and she whispered again. “On both sides? Has the fire department been notified?”
“Phone lines are down again,” she said, not bothering to whisper.
Avery glanced at Layanna, who was frowning. Distantly, he thought he could hear commotion, the sound of people talking loudly, shouting, maybe screams.
“Send a runner, damn your diseased cunt,” Virine said.
“Already sent, sir.”
“Good.” Virine scowled, then, slowly, returned his attention to Layanna. “You should be delivered up to the Octunggen. And your friend, too, I suppose. He was wanted, as well. It’s a shame, gir
l. I would love to have seen you with purple eyes.”
Avery thought quickly. He was pinned down, but his arms were free. Hoping he wasn’t noticed, he rubbed his hands against his blood-spattered face, then massaged his arms, slicking them with blood.
Virine flicked a hand, as if unconsciously, and several of the glabren jerked Avery and Layanna to their feet, then pulled them toward the rear door. Avery could just barely see a vague light coming from there. In the distance he could hear the screams and the commotion louder now, even, yes, the crackle of flames.
He acted fast. With all of his strength, he threw himself to the side. The two glabren gripping his arms seized his biceps tighter, but they were well greased with his blood and the glabren couldn’t maintain their holds. Avery tossed himself at the pile of weapons on the floor near the throne, grabbed up one of the assault rifles and aimed it at Virine’s head.
The room had gone silent, save for Avery’s breaths and heartbeat. In the background, the roar of the flames was getting louder. Closer. He could smell the unmistakable reek of smoke.
Slowly, Virine rose to his feet.
Half of the glabren had raised their own weapons and were pointing them at Avery. None made to shoot, however. Virine couldn’t risk Avery squeezing the trigger in one last firing of the nerves.
Virine, for the first time really, looked at Avery. “Well,” he said, and his voice was droll. “You have the floor.”
Avery swallowed. He could feel his legs shaking. “Free my friends.”
Virine paused, then nodded. The glabren released Layanna and Coleel. The merchant, still breathing heavily, grabbed up a gun, then offered one to Layanna, who shook her head. Even now she wouldn’t arm herself. The trait was beginning to annoy Avery.
“What else?” Virine said.
Avery wanted to tell him to make the glabren lower their weapons, but he knew the underworld czar would refuse. It was Virine’s only hold on Avery.
“Have half of them lower their weapons to the floor, then step back,” Avery said.
