by A. L. Knorr
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she gasped. A handful of heartbeats later, we were both in the bathroom. Jackie curled around the toilet, evacuating her many helpings of shaiyah, while I held her hair back. Occasionally, I strained to look out and make sure Sark and Pietr were where we’d left them before Jackie’s violent retching brought me back.
When she had nothing left to give, Jackie slumped back against the wall, and I slid over to sit with my back to the doorframe. Pietr hadn’t moved, and Sark’s bleary stare had shuttered at some point, but I could still see them breathing. I filled a glass at the sink and gave it to Jackie, and she took it and sipped gingerly.
I suddenly felt painfully exhausted with my eyes burning and limbs feeling like lead. I rolled my head this way and that, stretching muscles I hadn’t realized I’d been clenching. As I did, I saw the room where Uncle Iry slept and wondered that he hadn’t been awoken by the ruckus. He must have been beyond exhaustion. While Jackie had been vomiting, I was pretty sure I’d heard the odd door open as one or the other neighbour finally poked their heads out, but we hadn’t left any evidence.
“I’ve got an idea,” Jackie croaked, but I raised a finger to my lips and then pointed to Uncle Iry’s door. She nodded and then gestured that we should go toward the kitchen. I rose and helped her stand, then stood in the portal to keep an eye on our unconscious patients.
“Okay,” Jackie began after her last swallow of water. “Pietr could wake up any second and so we need to get him to his flat—”
“I don’t feel right just dumping him there,” I said, but Jackie held up her hand, and I realized she wasn’t done and so quieted.
“Once he’s in there, we make an emergency call with his phone, say ‘I’ve been mugged, I’m hurt’, and then get out. The police will come and we are clear, at least on Pietr’s account.”
It wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t have a better plan. I looked back to our entryway where Sark’s blood was streaked across the rug, and then to Sark, who lay slumped on a patch of wooden floor, a spattering of blood around his head like a ghastly halo.
“And when the police start questioning the neighbours if they heard anything, what are we going to do with the wanted criminal on our floor?”
Jackie frowned and then moved to the pantry door. It had a series of deep shelves where we kept food and dishes. Quickly and quietly, she cleared the bottom shelf and lifted it from its moorings. She slid past me, grabbed Sark, and began to drag him toward the kitchen.
Sark snapped back to wakefulness as he slid into the kitchen, his good eye revealing a pupil so blown it looked black.
“What are you doing?” he hissed through mashed lips, as he began to struggle and then arched his body in pain at the movement. “What the f-”
Jackie let him flop to the kitchen floor, where he writhed in fresh pain, but it shut him up long enough for her to sink down in front of his face. His bulging eye watched her with open terror, but he kept his mouth clamped shut.
“Don’t make one more sound,” Jackie warned levelly. “If you want to live through the night, you better keep your mouth shut and do exactly what we tell you to. Understand?”
Sark’s eye narrowed to a venomous slit, but his head jerked up and down in acknowledgement. I didn’t know if Sark really believed she would kill him, but I don’t think he wanted to test the theory, and no one was more glad of that than me. Right then, I didn’t think I wanted to test her either.
“Ibby, you can probably move the rest of this stuff quicker than I can,” Jackie said, sweeping her hand to the cupboard. “I’ll move Pietr while you’re doing that.”
“You think you can move him by yourself?” I asked with a frown, as I remembered how heavy he was just to get out of the hallway.
Jackie shrugged and moved toward the living room. “He may have a few more bruises before we’re done, but I’ll get him there.”
Almost on cue, Pietr groaned, and I heard him moving on the couch.
Jackie moved quickly to his side, and I could hear her talking like she was lulling a baby back to sleep. She did this between grunts and heaves, and I heard her staggering steps going to the door, which she somehow managed to shut behind her.
I’d been listening so intently I’d almost forgotten about my job, and I turned back to the pantry. Sark still lay on the floor, glaring up at me with his inhumanly dark eye, but I elected to ignore him as he seethed in silence.
Reaching out with my mind, I drew the chords that made the song of the metallic pots and pans in the panty, and with little effort had them gliding out soundlessly to rest on the kitchen counter. I was glad that I still had the Rings on my fingers, their power providing me greater control.
I eyed the space and then looked at Sark. It would be a tight fit, but not so much that I needed to be worried about his breathing or anything. Assessing him like this made it clear how far he’d fallen, something which I noted with only a hint of satisfaction. Sark had been a lean man, maybe a hair or two shorter than Jackie, when he’d first torn into my life. Now, he had shrivelled from lean to scrawny, his frame having lost the sculpted curves of sinew. His hair was lank and uneven, as though it had been cut by someone with neither the tools nor the training to do the job properly. His roots showed that his hair had been dyed, badly, a much lighter shade months ago. It was hard to tell all the changes worked on his face due to the swelling and blood, but his jaw was covered in wiry scruff, and his good eye was sunken in a bony socket. On top of all of this, the bouquet emanating from him was not the soft, subtle smell of designer cologne, but the pungent miasma of sweat, blood, and mildew.
Seeing him like this made me feel a little better about not immediately recognizing him at the airport. He was a ragged shadow of the handsome, arrogant creature that had been responsible for so much pain and chaos last year.
I met Sark’s baleful stare and could read the hateful reaction to my scrutiny, but the threat from Jackie kept him quiet. I let my metallic sense run over him; first checking that he hadn’t used his own powers to weaken his bonds, and then just seeing what he had on him. A handful of coins were in his coat pocket, and in the band of his stained pants, I detected a folding knife with a two-inch blade. It was little effort to call the coins and the knife out of his clothes, though Sark hissed protest or pain, I wasn’t quite sure.
I looked at the knife first, opening it to look the blade over, noting the chips and curls along the cheap steel. This surprised me because with a little mental squeeze I could smooth out the metal and make a clean, sharp edge, and though Sark was weaker than me, he should be able to do the same. With his metallic powers, even this blade could be as dangerous as a handgun, but Sark didn’t seem interested in using it that way. Its disrepair suggested it was an abused tool of convenience, nothing more.
The coins were another story.
They would’ve been easy to dismiss except for the blood that had dried across them in dark, crumbling smears. The knife was his tool, but these were his weapons.
I stared down at Sark again. If he’d come to hurt us, why hadn’t these been part of his opening salvo?
I heard Jackie come back in and close the door as I squatted next to Sark, the coins and knife still floating in mid-air. He shifted away from me, then winced as he came down on his elbow. I noticed that the arm the elbow belonged to seemed twisted, uneven with his other arm. His lips peeled back from his stained teeth, a grimace of pain tightening his malformed face, but his eye stayed fixed on me.
“Ibby, what are you doing?”
I looked up at Jackie standing in the kitchen doorway, frowning.
“We still need to get the blood off the floor and rug before the cops show up,” she prompted when I didn’t respond. “And he needs to go in the pantry.”
I kept my eyes fixed on Sark and leaned close enough to make his eye widen in fright. I raised a finger and pointed to the coins above.
“You’ve killed people with those,” I said, a statement not a quest
ion. I paused, and he nodded his head slightly, maybe thinking the acknowledgement was what I was looking for.
“Why didn’t you use those on Jackie?” I asked, then turned my hand so my finger pointed at his face. “You can answer, but try to scream or doing anything else stupid, and I’ll choke you with those coins.”
Sark’s eye burned, but he nodded slowly again. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse whisper. “I didn’t come here to kill anybody.”
Jackie snorted and took a step into the kitchen. “Convenient when you just got your arse handed to you,” she spat, before turning to me. “Ibby, seriously, we need to clean this up. Shove his lying arse inside that closet and let’s get to work.”
I saw the strain on her face and wondered if it was fear of the police or Sark. I wanted to give her what she wanted, but things weren’t adding up, and I felt that information was more important right now. I turned back to Sark, but I could feel her glaring at me in angry disbelief as I went back to questioning our nemesis.
“If you didn’t come here to kill anybody, what did you come here for?”
Sark’s eye drifted over my shoulder to Jackie, and a fresh spike of rage and hate raced across his expression, but it was short-lived. His eye closed, and his whole body shuddered. When he opened his eye again, he was looking at me, and I was surprised at what I saw. He looked like he was about to cry. Desperation and fear swirled across his face, chasing each other. When he finally spoke, his voice was raw and thick.
“I need help.”
Chapter Five
“You came to the wrong door then,” Jackie declared before going into some very colourful and ungracious descriptions of Sark’s person and parentage.
I was too stunned to say anything, Sark remained adamant.
“I need your help,” he said looking at me. “Something has happened. They’re coming for me, and I need your help.”
I maybe thought that if I just kept staring at him, he was going to start making sense, and I’d know the truth. Jackie took a different tack.
“Well, if you want to sit here and let a crapsack fill your ear with shite, be my guest.” She threw her hands up in disgust. “I’m going to do my part to make sure we don’t get arrested tonight.”
Jackie stormed out of the kitchen and went to the hall closet to get cleaning products. I stayed where I was, looming over Sark, still trying to see the hidden agenda behind his words.
“You’ve got three minutes before I shove you in there,” I told him with a nod toward the pantry. “Make ’em count.”
Sark’s eye roved my face, then he cleared his throat to speak.
“Last year, you and that bitch put me on the run,” he snarled, unable to keep the animosity from his voice.
“Calling Jackie names cost you a minute, Sark,” I warned, my voice flat and low.
“Not Jackie,” Sark growled, agitated and shifting uncomfortably on the floor. “No, I’m talking about that thing that saved you in the alley. The one who used to work for me.”
“Daria?” But, I knew she had to be who he was talking about. “Way I heard it, she worked with you once upon a time, not for you.”
“Tomayto, tomahto,” Sark wheezed. “Point is her leaking all that information left me running from the bobbies and Winterthür as soon as I left Greenwich.”
“I’m feeling all kinds of moved for you,” I snorted in disgust, remembering all too well the horror and ruin he’d left me to wrestle with when he’d lost control of Kezsarak. “Tick-tock, chap, time’s almost up.”
I gave the copper bands a little nudge, and Sark slid closer to the pantry.
“She came to me,” Sark blurted, voice breathless and trembling. “The one you call Daria came when I was on the run and offered me a gift, a chance to get back onto Winterthür’s good side.”
I knew I shouldn’t react, shouldn’t give him anything to use to manipulate me, but I scowled. “Bollocks.”
Sark groaned, and his head lolled back on his knobby neck.
“She did, and what she gave me was … it was big. I couldn’t believe she had it, but once I knew what she’d given me, I couldn’t not take it to Winterthür. You understand? I had no choice.”
I still didn’t believe Daria would give anything to Sark that wouldn’t put him in the hospital, or possibly the morgue, but I wanted to keep him talking. He might reveal something useful.
“What was this big thing?” I did my best to sound bored.
Sark hesitated, and that same hysterical look came into his eye. I couldn’t deny that these expressions of terror were starting to win me over, though I knew Sark was a liar par excellence. He could be faking, but if he wasn’t, I ignore the fact that something that scared him this much should have my attention.
“It was a key,” he whispered, raising his head from the floor, his eye darting about suspiciously. “It was the key.”
I stared back at him dumbly. I wasn’t sure which bothered me more: my not knowing what he was talking about or his assumption that I knew what he was talking about. Neither boded well. “Key to what?”
Sark watched me for a second bewildered, and then with a little, disbelieving shake of his head: “The key to Heaven’s Barrow,” he hissed, as though the words might sting. “The key to Ninurta’s Tomb.”
That name I did know.
Ninurta was supposed to be the very first Inconquo and the slayer of Asag. Asag, father of a thousand gallu, had been some big bad demon warlord and baby-daddy, who threatened to wipe mankind from the face of the earth. According to Lowe, Ninurta, after cutting a deal with Kezsarak, one of Asag’s friendlier children, had used his metallic powers to kill Asag and then slaughter his army of offspring. Asag was the founder of the Inconquo as defenders against supernatural evil and a hero. When he killed Asag, he broke his deal with Kezsarak, and that betrayal was what created the world-ending monster I’d gone toe-to-toe with last year.
In my book, Ninurta kind of breaks even.
“Okay.” I shrugged. “An archeological treasure, but how does that put you here, begging for our help? Do you expect me to go all Indiana Jones and rant at Daria that those relics belong in a museum?”
As a matter of fact, I did want those artifacts in a museum, and I wanted to be the one to put them there. My job had vastly improved, but the discovery of a find like that is what––besides bringing Uncle Iry home––I’d been living my life for. Still, I was pretty sure that Sark hadn’t come here to help realize my life’s ambitions.
“You don’t understand.” He licked his lips with a swollen, discoloured tongue. “It’s not the relics, or the information, or even the technology they wanted. It was Ninurta; it was the First Inconquo that they wanted. His tissue, his remains, hell, even his dust.”
There was something odd about that list, but I couldn’t settle on it at the moment with the peculiar revelation of Winterthür’s interest in a corpse thousands of years old.
“What would they want with Ninurta’s remains?”
Sark shuddered at the question. “You’ve no idea the things they are capable of, the things they are so close to achieving!” The look in Sark’s eye had become frantic.
“What did they want his body for, Dillon?” I pressed.
Sark wasn’t looking at me anymore, but through me, his lips quivering as his teeth began to click together.
“Shutup!” he snapped, but the effort of the outburst reduced him to a whimper. “It doesn’t matter what they wanted; it only matters what they found. The only thing that matters in this whole miserable mudball is what was in that tomb?”
The madness in his voice, the way he said tomb with a sneer, and he began to giggle and gibber …
My skin prickled with gooseflesh.
Sark laughed then, a high, broken cackle that made my stomach twist and heart seize.
“Ninurta is alive!”
---
“So, he’s crazy then?” Jackie asked, her expression desperate for my agreement. “He’s either
lying, or he is stark raving mad, right?”
Sark had gone into the pantry quietly enough – though occasionally we heard a whimper. I’d helped Jackie clean up the blood on the floor, and we rolled up the rug and hid it in a closet. We moved a smaller area rug from our room to the doorway. It clashed horribly, but at least this way the worst thing we could be accused of was bad taste.
It had been unnerving listening to Sark’s muffled mewlings as we cleaned, but we gritted our teeth through it, and soon he’d fallen silent. I guessed he’d fallen asleep, but I didn’t much care so long as he was quiet.
Now Jackie and I were back where we’d started after dinner, sitting in the living room together. Exhausted, but skipping off to bed was impossible after everything that had just happened.
“Maybe he’s crazy,” I admitted cautiously, knowing that right now both of us would be prone to fraying tempers and hurt feelings. “But just because he’s crazy doesn’t mean he’s wrong, and I don’t think he’s lying.”
“I didn’t think he was lying either.” Jackie’s words were cold and bitter.
I looked in my friend’s eyes and saw equal parts of anger and shame.
“He can’t get to us now,” I soothed. “I wove the bonds with silverware. Given the power he’s shown, it will take him hours to untangle that mess.”
Jackie nodded, but she was only half paying attention.
“We’ll need to keep watch,” she muttered, looking over her shoulder at the pantry. “I’ll take the first round.”
Keeping watch was a good idea, but I wasn’t sure that Jackie going first was the best idea.
“I can go first,” I offered, but Jackie shook her head emphatically.
“I’m still keyed up from the fight,” she said without looking at me. “If I try to sleep now, I’m just going to lay there and think. I’ll go four hours, then wake you, and we can switch.”
“Okay,” I surrendered, not feeling good about it but not sure I had a better option.
