Vigil: Verity Fassbinder Book 1 (34 page)

Candles flickered here and there. The only enclosed space was a bathroom in one corner; the rest of the area was warehouse-spare,
with a bed resting on a raised platform to one side.

Thaïs’ sofa sat in front of a low coffee table, which was actually a chest of drawers of various sizes, filled with all the
sorcerous paraphernalia she might need. The eternal four-year-old in me wanted to sit on the dusty floor and go through every
compartment, just to see what was there; I imagined strewing everything around me until nothing remained hidden and I had
no idea where anything went. Luckily, grown-up me stayed in charge, which was probably for the best. Three other low and equally
over-stuffed sofas made up a square around it.

Thaïs squinted across the distance, then smiled. ‘Hello, little strangeling,’ she piped in a sweet voice.

Strangeling
seemed a bit rich considering the source, but I let it pass and approached with more confidence than I felt. Truth was, I
didn’t like being near any of the Norns without either witnesses or back-up. After so long managing to avoid having my palm
read, I was especially uneasy being alone with one of them in case something got blurted out, some stray strand of the future
I really didn’t want to hear. But Thaïs wasn’t an outdoors kind of girl, so everyone had to come to her. I didn’t want to
know what might be in the stars for me, but if there were any answers to be had, then Little Venice was the most likely place
to find them, for the Sisters always pooled their tidbits of gleaned knowledge. Thaïs might not go out, but intelligence came
to her as surely as the noise of a fridge opening transmitted itself to the ears of any cat within a half-mile radius. She
dipped into and out of the otherworldly streams as easily as a mermaid duck-diving in the ocean. I didn’t need the future,
but some hints about the past and the present wouldn’t go astray.

‘Hey, Thaïs. How’s life?’ I sank deeply into the sofa opposite her and was left with my knees almost at my shoulders. Trying
to stretch out, I kicked the table, then finally settled for loosely crossing my legs at the ankles.

‘Comfortable?’ she asked, one snowflake eyebrow raised.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Good.’ She collected the Tarot cards that had been laid out in a Grand Cross spread on the gold-fringed purple cloth covering
the table. It was a Rider Waite deck, but hand-drawn, not one of the mass-produced sets, with edges worn and soft, the colours
muted from years of handling, sweat and natural oils. Thaïs moved slowly, as if the longer she left them there, the more I’d
be tempted, but I remained still until she’d stacked them, making sure they were sitting
flush, then wrapped everything in a square of black silk. The bundle went into a plain brown cardboard box, and thence into
one of the niches on her side of the table.

‘And what brings you to my door, Verity Fassbinder? I’m surprised Aspasia let you in.’

‘Theodosia likes me.’

She sighed. ‘Theo’s an optimist. She still thinks you’ll sleep with her one day.’

‘Surely you can peer at some entrails and put her mind to rest on that score?’

‘She won’t listen. We’ve been at this so long we’ve forgotten who lies and who doesn’t.’ She smiled briefly.

Norns with Alzheimer’s?
I shook off the distracting concept. ‘Theo told you about the golem?’

‘And the sirens. And the baby. And Aspasia told me about the Winemaker – and everyone else told me how you dealt with her.
Very summarily.’

‘It’s not like she was an innocent, Thaïs. She was a murderer – and she was also Magda Nadasy.’

She looked as though she’d been slapped. Ah: the satisfaction of knowing something a Norn didn’t was rare and wonderful. Magda
had kept herself
very
secret indeed if not even Thaïs was aware she’d returned. I wondered if the Norns had tried to dig for details back when
Sally Crown had first offered wine made from children’s tears and come up against a brick wall.

I continued, ‘As I’ve explained to your Sisters, anything that risks exposing this community to the gaze of panicky Normals
– anything that exposes panicky Normals to the threat of flesh-hungry Weyrd – needs to be dealt with quickly.’

While most Weyrd acknowledged the requirement for policing
their interactions with Normals, and while they knew people like me and Bela and Ziggi were the thin line between them and
danger, they still resented it. Normals might have all the high technology of a geek’s wet dream at our fingertips, but essentially,
humanity reverted to its strike-out-at-anything-different mentality at a moment’s notice. That was knowledge all Weyrd shared.

‘So: we’ve got the golem – who is Nadasy’s grandson, by the way – attacking Normals, and any Council member he can get his
hands on. And there are the sirens, who are being murdered wholesale. There’s the exile, Ligeia, who may or may not be protecting
the siren’s child and, just to complicate things further, there is now an Archangel over Brisbane leading a posse of lesser
angels in a crusade of some description. Know anything about any of that?’

‘Sounds like you know a whole lot,’ she mused.

‘Nope,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve got bits of a broken mirror that I’m trying to put back together, and the edges are
very
sharp. The glass is smudged, and slippery to boot.’

‘Ooo-kaay.’

‘Nothing is fitting together properly, and the Arch particularly is bothering me.’

‘Me, too,’ she admitted. ‘Brisbane really isn’t the kind of city one of them visits, not without a good reason.’

‘Someone – and let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s an angel – is taking out sirens at a rate of knots. Last night,
the first Normal victim was claimed – you might have appreciated Mrs Tinkler’s taste in clothes,’ I added as an aside, ‘which
means it’s a real problem. Fixing it is now my problem, and if it’s my problem—’

‘It’s going to be everyone’s problem until you get answers. I know how you operate, Fassbinder.’ She paused, considering,
then said, ‘Bottom drawer on your side, far right.’

The bowl was a flat-bottomed shallow brass thing. Its rim was sharp and I cut a finger dragging it out; fat droplets of my
blood spattered into the base. Frowning, I rested it in the middle of the table.

Thaïs handed me a matching brass ewer, carved with snakes and branches, and pointed me towards the bathroom, which turned
out to be magnificent and pristine: white marble, fluffy towels, scented soaps, one wall mirrored, the others covered in a
lavishly tiled design of girls jumping over bulls. Even the loo looked majestic. I filled the jug, then washed my bleeding
digit and wrapped a piece of toilet tissue around it. When I returned, I noticed Thaïs hadn’t cleaned the vessel of the red
droplets. She impatiently took the water, noticed the direction of my glare and said, ‘You know nothing comes for free.’

‘I know. That’s why I brought these.’ I struggled to get the two large bars of Valrhona dark chocolate from my inside pocket,
where they’d been slowly melting. Thaïs eyed them greedily, then snatched the booty away.

Muttering, ‘Better than ichor,’ she filled the basin. I watched the fluid swirl and circle and settle, relieved the blood
was so diluted; that was the only reason I didn’t kick up more of a fuss. In that state it would be no use to anyone afterwards.
Thaïs sprinkled a handful of what I suspected was grave dust over the surface and it slowly dissolved and sank. When the liquid
had turned an impenetrable charcoal, we both leaned forward.

All I saw was a great big mish-mash of white wings, spinning garbage, the Winemaker’s press, large pale hands with neat nails
tearing at equally white feathers, and an empty cradle. Oh, and the stern of a long thin dark boat piloted by a figure in
a dead brown cloak. It meant nothing to me, other than flashes of the past, but I wasn’t a scryer, nor an interpreter.

Thaïs eyed me. ‘Anything you’re not telling me?’

I took a gamble and reached down to slide the knife from the sheath, carefully placing it on the table between us. Air hissed
out of her, not in an angry way, but more in a surprised loss of steam way. It was a relief to think someone might know exactly
what the thing was.

‘The Boatman gave it to me. Along with some cryptic wording about someone wanting to break the sky. I don’t know what I’m
supposed to do with it, but I found out purely by happy accident that the golem doesn’t like it.’

‘Naughty Boatman.’ She didn’t touch it; she reached out and wiggled her fingers in its direction, but didn’t make contact.
‘It’s the Dagger of Wilusa, which was a Bronze Age settlement sometimes mistaken for Troy. The dagger is older, but that’s
where it was found once, then lost again. It’s also known as the God-slayer. Some say it was what Zeus used to kill Kronos.
Abraham used it on his son – oh, yes, there was a sacrifice, no matter what the Biblical press release says. Others insist
it belonged to the Amazon queens of old. There are lots of stories, not many of them written down, certainly not in schoolbooks.
Whatever it is, it’s got some power in it.’

‘What am I supposed to do with it? Any ideas?’ She shook her head slowly, and I thought it was looking like my very expensive
chocolate investment was a bad one, but I waited. Maybe she was picking through what to tell me, which meant I might need
to shake information from her sooner or later. Preferably sooner.

Impatiently I said, ‘Look, anything you’ve got. Anything that might help me find the baby? Find the golem? Stop the angels?’

‘I don’t think the baby’s dead. I can tell you don’t trust the old siren and you’re probably right on a lot of issues, but
the little girl’s not as helpless as she may seem.’ She rubbed her chin and sighed.
‘Look, leave this with me. I need to do some reading. I’ll call if I find anything.’

‘That’s what Theo said and I didn’t hear from her.’

‘That’s because she likes you to have to come here and see her.’

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

‘And, Fassbinder, keep
that
close. It might be the only thing between you and pushing up daisies.’

‘This has not been reassuring.’

‘It seldom is. I
promise
I will contact you, little strangeling.’

‘I hate it when you call me that.’

‘I know.’ I rose, but her voice stopped me at the door. ‘The Archangel, he’s searching, that’s all I can tell you.’

‘I figure he’s searching for the baby.’

‘Better hope he doesn’t find her,’ she said, and would say no more.

*

It was one in the morning when the phone rang again. Though Lizzie, Tobit and David had gone to bed ages ago, I wasn’t asleep.
I’d just finished talking to Ziggi, whose mate on the Sovereign Islands had reported that Baker’s house was deserted. It had
been ransacked and its occupant-of-interest was gone. Ziggi could barely cover his relief that he didn’t have to drive down
there again.

On the first ring I thought it might have been him again, that he’d forgotten something, but the voice was coarse, sick-sounding.
‘Fassbinder?’

‘Yes. Rhonda, what’s up?’

‘St Stephen’s.’

‘Yes?’

‘You might find one of those angels you’re looking for.’ She gave a laugh bereft of humor, then clicked off before I could
ask who’d seen them and how she knew, or indeed mention that the location of
at least one angel was already known to me. Her phone went straight to voicemail and I left a terse message, then pulled on
my coat. I stuck an explanatory-but-hopefully unnecessary Post-it note on the fridge for anyone who might look for me and
snuck out of the house.

I took pity on Ziggi and got a ‘real’ cab. I wasn’t planning for it to become a habit, because I didn’t much like the Normal
drivers. Too talkative, too opinionated, too sleazy, too creepy. That night I got Barry, who loved cricket, football and beer,
and was passionate about the world, but hated everyone in it who wasn’t white. In the end, I had him drop me on the corner
of Elizabeth and George Streets because I couldn’t stand to listen to him a second longer. Music spewed forth from the nightclubs
and gambling dens of the Treasury Casino. I paced along the mostly empty streets towards the cathedral, which was currently
hidden by the high-rises. I kept my head down, the low level burr of minimal traffic the only sound as distance drained the
music away.

I walked on the opposite side of the road, but as I came alongside St Stephen’s, I ran into something: a large, invisible
something. If it hadn’t been for the steel grip clamping around my upper arm, I’d have bounced to the pavement. Being half-dragged
across the street, then up stone steps, was disconcerting, but I was smart enough not to struggle. Anyway, this was what I’d
been looking for, although probably with less of me being frog-marched. The precinct, bordered by Elizabeth, Edward and Charlotte
Streets, contained a small but neat cathedral with an even smaller chapel to the south, the old school-now-admin building
and another larger structure where more administrivia was conducted.

In between was a green space, empty for a while, and then much less so when five angels, in addition to the one holding me,
shimmered into view. No jeans and T-shirts for these – they all wore white
chitons, short enough to show off muscular legs that ended in lace-up booties, all very Greek, and about their torsos were
wrapped worked silver breastplates. Each cuirass boasted a bas-relief heart surrounded by flames, a little off-centre, right
where I assumed the angels’ own hearts were situated, and set in the middle of each was a different coloured precious stone.
All wore thick silver rings on their index fingers, and I stared at the one on the hand around my arm: the cut-out detail
showed a quadrate cross. They were, without exception, male, very tall, beautiful, and with red hair that shone like something
in a TV advert. The one sporting a ruby demanded, ‘Where is it?’

I couldn’t help myself. ‘Ginger Liberation Front Annual General Meeting?’

That earned me a good shaking from Sapphire. Ruby didn’t bother to answer, just glared as if he could make me shut up by thinking
about it. The air around us was thick with a sickly-sweet odour; too many angels in one area apparently makes the place smell
like a badly ventilated florist’s shop. I was beginning to feel a bit faint.