Dead of Veridon (7 page)

The sound was awful, a hollow thumping like rotten logs crashing together, over and over, and then a crackling like kindling being crushed. They screamed in triumph, lifted the limp form above their heads and swept down the alley into the street. They were still yelling when I got to my feet. The proper gentleman was still there, on one knee, glaring at me. His lip was bloodied.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked. "Standing with a bug, defending one of those... one of those monsters? What's wrong with you?"

I dusted off my pants and retrieved my pistol. Realized it was damp all the way through. Never would have fired, even if it had come to that. Wilson was already stalking down the alley, away from the scene of the murder. I flipped the pistol in my hand, then put it through the gentleman's teeth. He crumpled.

"Gentlemen need to stand, sometimes," I said. "Gentlemen don't need mobs."

I put away the revolver and ran to catch up with Wilson. We walked past the tiny shed that the mob had shattered. There was blood on the wood, pooling between the cobbles, making a sluggish stream to the drain. Neither of us stopped.

T
HERE WAS NO
need to talk about where we were going, or where we had been. We walked in silence, Wilson's hands thrust into the damp pockets of his coat, his thin face turned down. The fog cleared, the clouds parted, and the sun came out. It did nothing for our mood, or for the scent of madness that settled over the city. The air smelled like smoke, but not woodsmoke. Unnatural things were burning, somewhere.

The streets weren't safe. The citizens of Veridon had taken protection into their own hands, each street watching out for itself, enforcing their own idea of who should be safe. We stuck to the houses. No one was inside, not in the Lower City. Several of the houses we walked through showed signs of struggle. One house, there was something banging around in the parlor. The door was nailed shut, a couch leaned against the frame. There were bodies, too. Fehn and regular folks, some of our pearl-white friends who used to be Fehn, as well.

"They're running," Wilson whispered, as we looked down at the bloated remains of a Fehn. There was none of the tar-black blood we had seen during our fight out on the river. "Something's happened, and they're trying to get out of the river as quickly as possible."

"Coming up in people's homes, or at the docks. Throw in a couple reports of these cog-dead, and suddenly every Fehn is a monster." I rubbed my eyes and looked around the house. It had been looted at least once. The city's thieves saw what was happening, and they weren't wasting any time. "This is going to be a hell of a thing to get past."

Wilson grunted and went to the back door. A quick hop across the alley and he picked the lock of another house. We walked on.

The closer we got to our destination, the more Badge we saw. The gray-coated officers held important intersections or patrolled in tight, heavily armed groups. There were plenty of them around the canals, too. We avoided the lot of them, going extra wide around the barricades and staying away from the water. Tough to do in Veridon, and it was taking us forever to make our way across the city. By the time we got where we were headed it was well past noon. People were settling down, repopulating their homes, leaving the streets to the Badge. There was a lot of hammering, as basements were secured or sealed off completely.

Finally, we stepped out of our last looted building and skulked across the street. The house stood opposite, black and broken as when I'd first seen it. The house on Marlowe street, where I'd first met Mr. Ezekiel Crane.

"Wish we'd had time to stop for a dry pistol," I said. I took my revolver out and shook it. Even the wood grip felt soggy.

"What you get for depending on powder, son," Wilson said, drawing the wicked steel blades from his vest. He shrugged off his coat and dropped it to the street, extending his six bonewhite spider arms like a bird shaking out its wings. "You'll just have to be more traditionally brutal."

"Suppose so." A quick look up and down the street showed no witnesses. "Ready?"

"Ready enough," Wilson answered, then rushed the front door in a clattering flutter of arms and legs and razor's edge. The door splintered on impact. I ran after him, yelling and brandishing the damp revolver like a club.

The tiny foyer was empty. The bookcases were splintered, their contents reduced to pulp. The oil lamp was gone. And something had dug ruts into the walls around each of the doors, like a beast trying to dig its way out. Wilson paused long enough to give me a nervous look, then rushed down the hallway Gray and I had taken to meet Mr. Crane. Still low, still narrow, like a tunnel burrowed in a tree. The walls were scorched, and the oil lamp from the foyer lay smashed on the floor in the middle of the room. Its glass hood crunched under our boots as we ran, faster and faster, into the final room.

Empty. It showed all the signs of a thorough looting, the kind of job professionals do if they're looking for something, or trying to hide something. A little random vandalism thrown in to make it look like a casual job.

The fireplace was still warm, the last embers smoldering under a curtain of ash. The furniture was overturned but undamaged, and the massive table was clean of paperwork, though the forest of candles remained. As soon as I saw the papers were gone, I went to the fireplace and poked through it with the barrel of my revolver.

"Awfully confident that powder's ruined, aren't you?" Wilson asked, wincing. I muttered something noncommittal and continued my search. Got nothing for it but a barrel full of ash. Banged it out against my thigh, then grimaced down at the mess it made on my pants. Wilson was giggling at me.

"What's this look like to you?" I asked him, ignoring his joviality.

"What it is. A professional job. Someone wanted us to think it was theft." He tipped one of the delicate chairs up and sat. "But it's not. Thief would have slit these cushions. Thief would have taken the chairs, maybe even the table." He peered at me with his insect-curious eyes, his hundred teeth glittering in the light from the window. "Thief would not have taken all the papers. Papers are not money."

"No, they're not." I sat on the table and swung my legs. "And the stuff in the hallway. Theater?"

He nodded. "Theater. Those doors did not lock. There was no need for something to try to claw its way in. If the doors were barricaded, we would see evidence of the barricade. And the lamp was dropped in the one place it probably wouldn't spread to the rest of the house."

"If someone, and I'm assuming it's Crane we're talking about, if Crane wanted to cover his tracks, why not just burn the place?"

Wilson watched me for a dozen heartbeats, though I don't think he was really seeing me. Finally, he stood up and walked to the table. With those long, articulate fingers of his, he plucked something from among the candles and presented it to me. Crane's glasses, carefully folded shut and hidden.

"Because he expected someone to come by. Because he wanted us to search the house."

I grimaced. I didn't like that. Didn't like being led, being part of someone else's game. Didn't like someone else playing me. I took the glasses from Wilson. They were light, the rims incredibly delicate. The lenses were very thin. I held them up to my face. No distortion. They were false glasses, just for show. Just for theater. I dropped them to the floor and put my boot on them.

"Then I guess we search," I said.

Chapter Four

A Mask, Black,

Words in Iron Across its Face

M
Y FIRST VISIT
to this house left me nervous. I came out with the impression of a house full of dark rooms, rooms that may be full of silent people or completely empty. It was a house of strange noises and unsettling quiet. That had changed, but not in a good way. Walking through the house now, I felt like I was sitting in a room with a dead man. No sound, and all the more maddening for the quiet.

There wasn't much to the first floor. The doors off the hallway were empty. There wasn't even dust to disturb. Crane was the tidy sort of criminal. Other than the staged items in the foyer, the hallway and the fireplace room, there was not one scrap of personal detritus. The whole first floor could have been deserted when we held our meeting with Crane. I began to think the whole thing was a set up, until we found the stairs and went up. Things were different upstairs.

It didn't seem like the same house. Everything was painted white, walls to ceiling; even the floor had been drenched in a thick, tacky coat of white paint. The stairs came up in a central room that was ringed by eight doors. Six of them had heavy padlocks that were hanging open. The two without were on opposite sides of the room. One corner of the room was littered with children's toys. Wilson crossed quickly to the toys and poked through them with absolute attention.

"They're all broken," he said with clinical detachment. "Some in quite ingenious ways. Do you think Crane had a child up here?"

"No. I think he kept those for himself, Wilson." I crept to the nearest door without a padlock and put my ear against it. Quiet. "How the hell do I know?"

"Don't you want to do the locked rooms first?" he asked.

"Those are obviously empty. Hopefully. They're hopefully empty." I shrugged and nodded to the door I was standing next to. "Come on."

Wilson put down his toys and stood behind me. The door opened easily. Inside was a bedroom, or something like a bedroom. A room with a bed, at least. A bed, a dresser, and two traveling cases, like you would take on a cruise. Their lids were bound in brass, and the wood showed a great deal of wear. The bed was iron, with a thin mattress and the barest of covers. It was the cheapest piece of furniture we'd seen in the house yet. Where the rest of the house had been compulsively tidy, the covers on the bed were twisted and stained, like they held a madman and his nightmares, night after night. There were no pillows. The dressers were empty.

"That leaves these," Wilson said, and bent to pick up the traveling cases. He scrabbled at the first for a while, fishing around in the tumbler, his face slack with concentration. Longest I'd ever seen him take on a lock.

"Having trouble there, master thief?"

"Yup."

"You want me to handle it?"

"Handle it?" His voice was barely a whisper, barely more than the inhalation of breath. "Shut up. I'll get it."

"Because it looks like you're having trouble there. With the lock."

He let the pick clatter to the floor and sighed.

"Jacob, you're just about the biggest-," he said, turning to look up at me. His eyes locked beyond my shoulder and his body stilled. "Ah."

"Ah?" I asked, then turned quickly. I couldn't see anything. "Ah, what?"

He stood and went to the bed, standing on the sweat-stained mattress to reach the ceiling. Something was nailed to the boards there, just above the theoretical sleeper's head. Wilson pried it free and peered at it.

"Ah," he said.

"What is it?" What I could see was that it was black, about the size of two hands together. He handed it to me.

A mask, black. There were words in iron etched across the face. Other than the eye holes, there were no other features.

"What the hell is this?" I asked.

Wilson came down from the bed and sat wearily on the chest he had failed to pick. I knew the look on his face. It was his scholar look.

"That is what we were meant to find." He drew a pair of reading glasses from one of the innumerable pockets in his vest, rubbed some river water off them, then returned them to the pocket. "We can look in the other rooms if you'd like, but that's going to be it."

"Doesn't answer my question, Wilson." I held out the mask. The words meant nothing to me. Even the letters looked funny. "What is it?"

"I'm not sure. But the lettering is Celestean. It roughly translates into 'Cull.' Or 'Purge,' I suppose. Yes, purge is probably a better translation." He ran his tongue across his hundred teeth, deep in thought. "The image imposed is of a tree stump, burned down to the roots."

"You read Celestean?"

"Tricky question. It's not really a language." He stood and took the mask, holding it at arm's length. "The Celesteans seemed to communicate in unformed ideas. Images. The pictograms we use to program foetal metal cogwork are a derivation of their form. The idea is to let the words interact with the unconscious part of your brain. They impose meaning directly into your..." he searched for the word. "Soul, I guess. Directly into your heart."