Mountain of Black Glass (55 page)

Again a cloud of shrieking darkness descended, wreathing the combatants in a chaos of velvet wings and claws, but Orlando, laboring for breath against the horny bar of the creature's arm, had already nearly lost the light. One of the winged serpents dropped out of the bat-swarm and coiled around his head, an almost certainly final indignity. Gasping, operating on pure vindictive reflex, he took a hand from the tortoise-man's neck, then snatched the serpent and shoved it into his enemy's shattered eye.

The tortoise-man abruptly loosed its grip, staggering back in slow, arm-waving distress as the serpent's tail whipped and lashed, the rest of its body already chewing halfway into the skull. As the tortoise-man dropped its club and tumbled to the floor, Orlando grabbed his sword in his good hand, steadying it with the hand now tingling with returning feeling, and put all his weight behind the blade to shove the point into the creature's throat.

The tortoise-man did not die quickly, but it died.

Orlando was on his knees sucking for air, feeling certain he would never, ever get enough of it into his burning lungs, when he heard Fredericks screaming his name from the front of the temple. He dragged himself to his feet and waded toward the shattered door. Bloody madness and dying innocents were all around him, but he was in a desperate hurry and lifted his sword only to slap away winged serpents or knock grasping hands and claws from his ankles. Still it took him long minutes to drag his exhausted body across the temple, a journey through the worst corner of hell.

The terrible dance of combat at the front door had slowed but not ended. The goddess in the pantherskin lay in a crumpled heap against one of the walls, an arm and both legs twisted at hideous angles, her spear broken across her, but the sphinx was dragging one foreleg and was covered with cuts and gouges that leaked sand instead of blood. The god Reshpu had his antlers dug into one of Saf's sides; small lightnings crackled there, blackening the tawny skin. Bull-headed Mont, ribboned with bloody wounds and with both eyes swollen shut, clung with his great arms to the sphinx's throat.

As Orlando cleared the worst of the slaughter, stepping out into the clear space where the besieged sphinx had crushed anything that had come too close, he saw something that made him forget the temple guardian's heroic struggle in an instant.

Framed between the twisted bronze hinges which were all that remained of the great doors stood Tefy and Mewat. The bloated cobra-man held a small, struggling figure; his vulture-headed companion was examining it as though for purchase.

“Orlando!” Fredericks' shriek was cut off by a flick from Mewat's blunt, scaly finger. Orlando's friend sagged in the cobra man's grip, knocked senseless. Fear washed out over Orlando like winter wind.

Tefy looked up, beak curling in a dreadful smile.

“Citizens,”
he purred. The word might have described some particularly tasty treat. “Look at this, my beautiful brother—not just one Citizen, but two! Just when all nice little visitors should have gone home, we find them still roaming in our network, up far past their bedtimes. We wonder why, don't we?” Tefy reached out a long finger to stroke Fredericks' slack face; the claw scratched the skin, drawing blood. “Oh, yes,” Tefy said happily as he licked the talon with his purple-black tongue, “we have so many questions!”

Two Gates the silent House of Sleep adorn;
Of polish'd Iv'ry this, that of transparent Horn:
True Visions thro' transparent Horn arise;
Thro' polish'd Iv'ry pass deluding Lies.

—Virgil's
Aeneid,
translated by John Dryden

H
ER wallscreen held a six-meter-square collage of files. Her living room was littered with an afternoon's and evening's worth of snacks and empties and notes. In a tiny apartment the clutter piled up quickly. Calliope surveyed the mess and made a logical Friday night decision.

It wasn't like she was getting anything useful done—that hey-it's-the-weekend feeling had settled into the back of her mind over an hour earlier like a bored, lazy relative who tired everyone out just by being there. And it wasn't as though she'd been devoting a lot of attention to her private life lately either.

A memory of the sullen waitress at Bondi Baby suddenly woke a desire in her for pie and coffee. Or just coffee. Or perhaps just a seat at the edge of the holographic ocean and a chance to flirt with Little Miss Tattoo. She looked at the wallscreen whose printed words suddenly seemed as impenetrable as top-secret military code and flicked her fingers to shut it off. Calliope stared out the window at the stately curve of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, an arc of lights like a pictorial representation of a Bach fugue. Sometimes she found the view itself to be enough to ease her craving for contact with the real world, but not tonight. She was definitely going out. No one could work all the time.

The apartment elevator was incredibly slow. The trip down from the 41st floor to the parking garage seemed to take months. When she reached the bottom and stepped out, a whoop of laughter and a murmur of other voices came echoing to her. A troop of homeless people had paused in their migrations to have what sounded like a party outside the garage gates. Calliope was not looking forward to trying to get the car out without letting any of them in. This was a depressingly common experience, since the neighborhood itself was fairly poor. In fact, as Calliope's friends had pointed out to her several times, other than the view, there weren't a lot of nice things to say about her apartment. A police detective did not earn a huge salary, and if said detective was determined to look out at the bridge and the harbor, she either had to accept an apartment in a pretty seedy part of town, or an apartment so small you couldn't swing a cat in it (Calliope fortunately had no urge to own a cat for any purpose at all), or—if she was sending part of her paycheck every month to her widowed mother in Wollongong—both.

After much sawing back and forth, she had just backed the car out of the incredibly narrow parking space when she realized she had left her wallet and pad upstairs. There wasn't enough room in the garage to leave the car out without blocking anyone else who might want to pass, and she certainly wasn't going to leave it on the street while those people were having their Homeless Festival or whatever it was. Swearing in a way that would have left her old-fashioned father pale and shaking had he heard it, she laboriously injected the car back into the original parking slot and trudged across the garage to the elevator, her brief, winged moment already a bit bedraggled.

Both wallet and pad were sitting on the small
tansu
stack near the door. As she leaned in to snatch them up, she saw the “urgent message” light blinking on the wallscreen. She was tempted just to leave it and go, but her mother had been ill and one of the neighbors had been going over to check on her in the afternoon. Surely she would have called hours ago if there had been anything wrong . . . ?

Calliope cursed and stepped back in, cueing the message. It was only her semi-friend Fenella inviting her to a drinks party next week. Calliope stopped the message halfway through—she knew how it would go—and cursed herself for giving the woman her priority code in a moment of weakness the year before, when Fenella had been trying to set her up on a date with an out-of-town friend. Fenella was a politician's daughter and liked to be at the hub of power, even if it was just running a dyke arts salon: every invitation was to an “event,” although Calliope had discovered that “event” just meant a party with photographers where the guests didn't know each other. She headed back down.

Somewhere around the twentieth floor she realized she had left her car keys on the table where the wallet and pad had been.

By the time she made it back up the elevator, any last bit of interest in going out had been crushed, a casualty of the invisible (but clearly omnipresent and all-powerful) God of Work. After a brief period of glowering at the apartment, since it had been a major player in the conspiracy against her Friday night, she waved a bowl of pseudoberry crumble, spooned the last of the ice cream on top of it, and—with extremely bad grace—brought the Merapanui files back up on the wallscreen.

If the final compilation of files on John Wulgaru had been printed out on paper, they would barely have filled fifty pages—a pathetically and even suspiciously small amount of information considering the boy had spent most of his life in one institution or another. Over half that material had come from Doctor Danney's fragmented case notes, and a good proportion of those notes were useless for Calliope's purposes, little more than scores and dry observations of various behavioral tests.

A search of various record banks had turned up a few other pages here and there, including a solitary death notice found in one of the backwaters of the police system, now appended to his few remaining sheets from the criminal justice files (John Wulgaru, aka etc., had been hit by a car while crossing a street in the Redfern district, and thus his case was to be marked closed.) But all in all there was very little, as though someone with a crude but fairly thorough grasp of government information systems had done their best to remove any record of his existence and had mostly succeeded.

The death notice caught her attention, and although the date given for the fatal accident was depressing—if it were true, John Wulgaru had died more than half a year before the Merapanui murder, which would certainly qualify as an alibi—there was something else about the notice that nagged at her like a loose tooth, but although she shuffled back and forth through the various documents until the flasher for the evening news appeared on the wallscreen, she could not put a finger on it. She clicked off the flasher, deciding she would download the news later. As she had surveyed the death notice, which mentioned that Wulgaru had no surviving relatives, a new thought had suddenly arisen and she was afraid she might lose it.

Calliope had a hearty dislike of the term “intuition,” which she thought was usually what people called good detective work if it was done by someone the rest of the department didn't like much, especially female cops. What the hell
was
intuition anyway? Guesswork, really, and a surprising amount of police work had always been just that. You had to get the facts first, but often what put them together was that eye for subtle yet familiar patterns that all good law enforcement people developed after a while.

But Calliope had to admit at least to herself that she sometimes went a step farther, getting hunches on things based on perceptions so ephemeral that she couldn't even explain them to Stan. That was one of the reasons she was so much more hands-on about detective work than he was: she needed to touch things, smell things if she could. And she was having such a moment just now.