Poison City (6 page)

I wear a mask because I sometimes forget what it feels like to be human. The mask is the me that existed before everything happened. It’s a construct built up from memories and remembered responses.

I take a few deep breaths, trying to remember what I used to be like, dredging up the memories. The cockiness. The bad jokes. The sarcastic comments. Not exactly the best traits to aspire to, but they’re the ones everyone expects.

It feels . . . nice, like welcoming an old friend.

I uncurl my aching fingers from around the wheel and climb out the car, jogging up the stairs to ground level. I could have just taken the elevator into the main building, but I’m hoping to talk to Armitage before I see anyone else to tell her what happened yesterday.

I emerge into daylight and skirt around the closest building, a towering, brutal grey silo with a radius of about two hundred feet. That’s the Division’s main building, where we have our offices.

I approach the first of six smaller silos that surround it, stopping before a smooth section of concrete.

I knock. A section of the wall fades to darkness and I step through, the concrete reforming behind me. Just before it does, the dusty sunlight illuminates a set of stairs leading down. Way, way down.

Energy-saving globes flicker to weak life as I descend, their anaemic glow lighting the way forward. I head down and find Eshu waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

Eshu is one of the Division’s convict gods. He’s a trickster deity, the Orisha of advice and communications. Which is why he’s been put in charge of our comms and internet servers and . . . well, pretty much everything electronic really.

He looks like a seventeen-year-old street kid. Faded Levis. Converse high-tops and a George Romero T-shirt.

‘Hey, London,’ he says in greeting. ‘Why do you never use the front door?’

‘Uh . . . Don’t know. Guess I’m just a backdoor kinda guy.’ I wince as I re-run the sentence through my mind, but Eshu says nothing, just turns and walks away. No sense of humor, these gods.

‘Armitage around?’ I ask, following Eshu into his base of operations. (And his prison cell.)

The place never fails to impress me. It’s as if a set designer from
Blade Runner
and
The Matrix
got together and created the ultimate SF computer room. There are monitors everywhere, drilled into the walls, bolted to the end of extendable swing arms, even piled one atop each other to form huge, multi-part screens.

Some are showing live CCTV feeds from all over the world. Others are playing movies, TV shows, music videos. Still others have 24-hour news channels on an endless loop while others are showing porn and cartoons. Thick black cables loop through the air and sprawl across the floor like burned snakes. There’s a cot bed in the corner and boxes of instant noodles, the only thing Eshu eats.

I never actually found out what Eshu did to warrant his prison time here. It must have been pretty bad, though. I hear his sentence is a cool two centuries.

‘She came in an hour ago,’ he says. ‘Said to tell you that if you came crawling in the back way like the yellow-bellied coward she knows you really are, you’re to sit tight and wait on her call. She’s dealing with Ranson.’

Ranson. Christ, I hate that guy. A politician. An officious pencil-pusher. He’s our Divisional Commissioner and reports directly to the National Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee. And yes, he’s as annoying as all those titles sound. Petty in the extreme. I could go my whole life without laying eyes on him again.

Only problem is, he’s in charge of Delphic Division and seems to be doing his best to get us shut down. Or at least crippling our funding. He won’t even acknowledge that shinecraft is real, for Christ’s sake. How messed up is that?

I cross the room and duck through a heavy-duty blast door, emerging into a dimly lit tunnel. I duck through an identical door at the far end of the passage and I’m standing in the Hub, a round room with tunnels radiating off to the other sections of the Division, like spokes in a wheel.

There’s a round metal plate beneath my feet. An LED light embedded in the plate flashes blue. Apparently this is where they keep our namesake, the Delphic Oracle, locked away and kept out of sight. I say apparently, because none of us really know if she’s down there. We’ve never seen her.

I follow a tunnel into the heart of Delphic Division, the massive silo that I passed on my way to Eshu’s door.

The inside of the silo is open all the way to the top. A massive post-modern office structure that wouldn’t look out of place in London’s financial district. The silo has been sectioned off into twenty floors, all holding offices, conference rooms, prisons, kitchens, sleeping quarters etc. A balcony circles each floor, a set of stairs leading between levels.

The entire bottom floor is taken up by our open-plan office, desks and partitions and white boards, the stuff you’d see in any police station. Except our white boards are covered with pictures ripped from fantasy books, D&D paintings of orisha, photographs of supernaturals, anything that helps us visualize work on our open cases.

The place is already bustling with activity. There are about thirty operatives in Delphic Division, and we all have a little space to call our own. I weave through the narrow lanes between the desks, nodding at people who insist on greeting me even though it’s first thing on a Monday morning and that kind of thing should be forbidden. No talking till ten would by my rule if I was in charge.

I flop down into my ancient chair. It creaks and sinks down a few inches, the pneumatic gas long since dissipated. I pump the lever and it rises reluctantly upward.

A pile of coloured files has been placed neatly in the exact centre of my desk. My case load for the week. I stare at it resentfully, then prod it with a pencil. I grab a bottle of aspirin from my desk drawer and swallow a few dry. I can feel it already. It’s going to be a long day.

Parker is sitting at her desk opposite mine, glowering at nothing in particular.

‘Morning, sunshine.’

She grunts noncommittally.

Parker is our resident resurrectionist. Anything to do with dead bodies, zombies, death magic, hoodoo, voodoo, astral planes, whatever, she’s your woman. We were recruited at the same time, so we learned about the hidden history of the world alongside each other. She’s five-six and has a thin, muscular frame. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tattoos all across her arms and back. She may be small, but I pity anyone who mistakes that thin frame for weakness. She’s got a punch that can fell an African Rhino and has a pair of knuckle dusters hidden away that spring to hand at a moment’s notice.

She also has the most extensive T-shirt collection known to mankind. I’ve known her four years and I’m sure she hasn’t worn the same T-shirt more than once. Today, she’s wearing a faded Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tour shirt.

She doesn’t seem to be in a talkative mood. She’s like that until she gets a few cups of coffee in her system. She lives on the stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without a cup of thick tar close at hand.

I leave her to carry on with her system reboot and open up the first file on my desk.

It’s a complaint from someone in the SAPS, a request to investigate the National Police Commissioner’s in-house sangoma. The complaint alleges that the sangoma is actually a charlatan, and is using fear of the occult to influence the commissioner. Boring. Should never have come to us. That kind of thing is usually dealt with by ORCU.

The next file is a case being built around a bishop who mutilated children on the advice of a traditional healer. Apparently, the healer told him that mixing herbs and human tissue would boost his dwindling church numbers.

I toss it back to the desk. I hate these cases. No
real
connection to Night and Day. Just desperation and ignorance.

The next file is more interesting. An investigation into why more and more fairy circles are appearing in Namibia. Armitage’s notes say she thinks it might be due to the migration of our own abatwa faeries. But that doesn’t explain why they would be leaving their homes here in Natal. Faeries the world over are notoriously territorial, tied to the land itself. For them to leave meant something had to be driving them. We’d have to look into that.

The next folder is a series of suggestions to add secret amendments to the Human Tissues Act. These amendments are to give Delphic Division more power to carry out sentences against the country’s vampires. Armitage wants me to read over her suggestions and add notes.

I groan. I hate that kind of stuff. Parker is much better at it than me. Maybe I can trade one of her cases for it.

I tuck the file to the bottom and move on to the next.

A report about Swaziland’s ban on witches flying their broomsticks below 150 metres. I chuckle. That’s not real. Witches didn’t really fly broomsticks. Boil down the fat of children and coat themselves in it to fly, sure. But broomsticks? Nah.

Beneath the report is Armitage’s untidy scrawl.
‘How the hell are the poor buggers going to play Quidditch now?’

Armitage is the one who recruited me into Delphic in the first place. I suppose I’m DS to her DCI, although we don’t really have those ranks out here.

She came over from London on a case for the Ministry, the UK’s version of Delphic Division. But she decided she liked the weather here better, so just sort of stuck around.

I asked her once if she didn’t miss England and she squinted at me through wreathes of cigarette smoke, sipped her whisky and said, ‘I won’t lie to you, pet, I do, I do. And you know how I get over it? I get in the shower and stand under the cold water for ten minutes straight to remind me
exactly
what I’m missing. After that, I’m golden.’

She can be a miserable old sod, but we have a laugh together. The stories of some of our cases . . .

’Course that was before Ranson was appointed Divisional Commissioner, sent here from his last job as the Minister for Arts and Culture. (Yeah, South Africa, where skills mean nothing in government and it’s who you know that counts. Or rather, who you knew during the struggle days.) Sure, it’s probably the same all over the world, but at least in other countries the ministers seem to have some basic idea of what their job entails. Here, people just get passed around departments every year or so, make a lot of noise to look like they’re actually doing something, inevitably running the department into the ground in the process, and then are moved to a new post leaving us to pick up the pieces.

And Ranson is the worst of the worst. Apparently, his remit is to slash our budgets by fifty per cent. No idea why. It’s not as if we’re not needed. Get rid of us, and the whole country would be swallowed up by supernatural crime in a month. The talk around the water cooler is that whoever he’s reporting to in the National Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee is skimming whatever percentage Ranson manages to cut for him or herself, splitting the money with Ranson.

It’s the only explanation that makes any sense. The Supernatural Divisions around the world are allocated budgets according to an international treaty agreed upon at a tip-top secret meeting that takes place in a different country every year. So it’s not as if the government can just decide to cut us off.

I asked Armitage about it when Ranson started firing ‘non-essential’ personnel, and she said she was already looking into it. Haven’t heard anything since, though.

I pull my thoughts away from politics before I get really worked up and focus on the folders on my desk. It’s always the last file in my weekly workload that I look forward to the most. A list of odd happenings in the supernatural world. Bits and pieces that don’t make up full cases, but give a general spread of events and happenings.

The first item relates to the fact that a lot of supernaturals from overseas were making their way to our lovely shores. Faeries from Ireland, djinn from North Africa, banshees from Scotland, goblins from Germany. Loogaroo from Haiti. Even the Fir Bolg were venturing beyond the shores of Ireland. And they
never
leave. Weird. Was it holiday season in Nightside? We’d have to keep an eye on that.

Next up is a note that Anansi is courting Mother Durban in the hopes of entering into some sort of marriage. I wince. That’s bad news. Anansi is the infamous spider god. A trickster. He’s one of the most powerful orisha in the country, and he’s used that power to create a criminal syndicate that spans the length and breadth of the country. He’s a gangster, a crook and a murderer, the Godfather of the supernaturals.

And the fact he’s courting Mother Durban can only mean he’s trying to extend his power.

See, every city has a soul. The memories, the histories, the lives of the inhabitants, they all seep into the background aether, creating an orisha that is the personification of the city itself, an extremely powerful goddess that we know next to nothing about.

What I
do
know is that if Anansi is after her, then we need to look into it.

I put the report aside for later. Next up is a mention that there is a truce in place between the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts in London.

I have to re-read the sentence twice. A truce? How did
that
happen? The Seelie and the Unseelie have been at war for
centuries
, using London as their battleground. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. They just fight because that’s what they’ve always done. Gods alone know how they managed to broker a truce.