California Bones (7 page)

“It’s his damn war,” the glamour mage blurted without preamble. “He can’t take his eyes off San Francisco long enough to see that without people like me, he’ll have a war right here in his own city.”

Gabriel weighed how to respond to this openly seditious statement, made within the walls of the Hierarch’s own house. Of course he would not in any way voice agreement with Disney, but neither did he want to provoke the old mage’s ire. It was said the Mouse had its own enemies list.

“I’m certain he has nothing but the utmost respect for the contributions of your art, sir.”

Disney made a sour face. “Art? I never called it an art. Entertainment is a business, and it’s one of the most important businesses a man can devote his life to. I have lived a very, very long life, Mr. Argent. I was around when the Ministry was just a squabbling cabal of cutthroats, and the citizens of this kingdom were no better. Southern California was not a happy place back then. I helped make it a happy place for business. And now the Hierarch is taking a grand crap on my happiness.”

“Maybe we should lower our voices, sir.”

But Disney gnat-waved Gabriel’s caution away. “We’re down to two hundred pounds of eocorn. One hundred forty pounds of parandrus. I haven’t seen an ounce of sint holo in years. My theaters and park serve a critical function, and if I don’t have enough bone to run my operations, everyone will discover just how critical.”

“Sir—”

“Yes, I’m talking about unrest. Protests. Riots. That’s what happens when people aren’t happy. The idiots will burn their own neighborhoods. You get the reports, the ones that don’t end up in the
Times
. You know the insurgents are making gains. This kind of thing catches and it’ll be a conflagration. You have to soothe them, don’t you know. Rock them like babies. Any idea how much magic that takes in a kingdom the size of Southern California? I could show you spreadsheets.”

“I’m sure if you spoke to the Hierarch … You’re old friends. I’m sure he’ll listen…”

The glamour mage’s trim mustache twitched in irritation. “Oh, he’s far too busy for me. I can’t get into his chambers. I’m not one of the Six. You must convince him for me. You must convince him to grant me audience.”

Gabriel almost laughed. “I’m flattered you think I have that kind of influence.”

“Mr. Argent, I despise insincerity. You are the Hierarch’s nephew.”

“Grandnephew. The Hierarch has a lot of grandnephews. He’s sired a pretty large brood.” Gabriel wondered if Disney was putting each and every one of his cousins through a meeting like this. Maybe Apple was next on the list.

“The Hierarch was fond of your mother,” Disney said, as if that were the capstone to some well-constructed argument.

Being related to the Hierarch just meant you were a little closer to his dinner table.

Gabriel did his best to murmur and nod politely at the right times as Disney subjected him to another half hour of complaints.

In truth, Disney’s grievances and warnings were legitimate. Southern California’s easily accessible natural supply, the resources the Hierarch used to establish his rule, had been mined decades ago. The stuff remaining was scant and difficult to obtain. There were still imports from Mexico and Central and South America and the Far East, but those had slowed in the last several years. Gabriel wasn’t privy to the reason why, but he understood how fragile those trade relationships were. From his knowledge of smuggling operations in the north, he knew San Francisco must have some osteomancy left—historically, the north’s supply came from the Siberian steppes, where entire mammoths and griffins could be found preserved in the permafrost—but nothing could change the simple fact that there wasn’t enough bone to go around.

Disney rose from his chair. He leaned on his walking stick, gripping it with both hands and driving it into the Hierarch’s carpet. “I hope you’ve been listening, Mr. Argent. And not just to my petition. Ask around. Talk to Mulholland. Talk to Weinstein. Go see Baron Doheny. Go see Baron Chandler. The powers that run this kingdom have huddled in the Hierarch’s shadow for a long time, but they won’t do so forever.”

Gabriel could not let a declaration like that stand unanswered.

“The Hierarch runs the kingdom, sir.”

The mage smiled, revealing a ghost of the comforting presence he still managed to project when he hosted his TV programs.

“Even the most powerful engine needs fuel,” he said. “And this time, the osteomancers won’t sit idle while the Hierarch grinds our bones for it.”

Gabriel stayed behind once the mage had left the room, giving Disney time to get some distance. Then he rubbed his temples and rejoined the party. A fog had come in off the sea, a ghostly electric haze lit orange-yellow by thousands of canal lights.

Apple and her red dress came out of the mist in a rush to besiege Gabriel. She clutched his arms and leaned in conspiratorially. Gabriel assumed she wanted the skinny on his meeting with Disney.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, but she shook her head.

“You almost missed it. He’s about to show.”

She towed him around to the front of the observatory, where a great clot of party guests stood, gazing up at a balcony. The music had stopped, and all conversation fell to whispers. The moan of a barge horn came from somewhere down the mountain, but all other sound from the outside world was swallowed in the thick, wet air. French windows behind the balcony opened, and there was a collective gasp as Fenmont Szu stepped around a silk screen and stood at the balustrade. Tall and thin in a blood-red suit so luxurious it made Apple’s dress look like a valentine card, he directed a withering smile at the gathering. Five others came around the screen to join him. The Alejandro. Mother Cauldron. Madeleine Sing. Sister Tooth. Mr. Butch. These were the Council of Six, the Hierarch’s adjudicators, enforcers, ministers of fear and discipline. Powerful osteomancers, all. Seeing them together at a celebratory gathering such as this, attended by a crowd whose competence lay in spreading gossip, sent a clear signal: The people of Los Angeles had been acting as though they’d forgotten what fear was. It was time to remember.

Fenmont Szu said some words in praise of the Hierarch’s long-ago victory of independence, and then he announced the Hierarch. The silk screen at Szu’s back flared with red light, as though a fire had been lit behind it. And then, like a Balinese shadow puppet, a silhouette appeared, an almost skeletal figure. Servants removed the screen, and there stood a thing. It was hard to make out, exactly. Maybe it was the red light. Maybe it was the fog. Maybe it was because the Hierarch’s magic distorted perception. Even if he was sick and ancient, even if he was no longer human, even if he was mostly constructed of dead things, the Hierarch was still terrifying.

He raised one arm in salute, the light died, and he was gone, and the Six returned inside the house.

The partygoers clapped dutifully and returned to conversation and crudités in a nervous chill.

“Well, that was anticlimatic,” said Apple, snatching a drink off a passing tray.

“That wasn’t a climax,” Gabriel said. “That was a beginning.”

SIX

This time when Daniel went to see Otis, nobody put a hand on him. The muscle-slabs who’d bagged him at Farmers Market cut off their conversation about last night’s Angels-Padres game and tried to find something to do with their bandaged hands.

“No hard feelings, guys,” Daniel said. And he meant it. He didn’t regret kraken-burning them, but they’d only been following Otis’s instructions.

They nodded as though they understood.

Daniel found Otis at his desk, working numbers with an abacus.

“How’d your meeting with Emma Walker go?” Otis said, not looking up.

“Why does she know about my mother?”

Otis took off his glasses, deliberately folded the temples, and set them on his desk. “What are you talking about?”

“I slipped her lamassu and ate her memories. They were of me. Of when my mom went North with the thing that looked like me. Who is she, and what’s she got to do with me?”

Otis clucked his tongue. “You used lamassu. That’s tricky stuff. You probably tried to drink up her memories but ended up regurgitating some of your own. Brain magic is complex, Daniel. Memories get mixed up. Maybe you somehow picked up some of your mom’s.”

“All of a sudden you’re an expert in osteomancy.”

“I’ve been around it all my adult life,” Otis said, jollier than ever. “I’ve dealt it by the ton.”

“Otis…”

“Listen. Truth. This is what I know about Emmaline Walker. Born in London, came to California by way of Hong Kong, very quickly put her talents to use at the Ministry. For the last twenty years, she’s worked in the catacombs on special projects. She came to me eight months ago and asked me how to get into the Ossuary’s primary vaults. She provided intel, and drawings, and she has an intimate knowledge of the layout and protocols of the catacombs, and if you’re going to infiltrate the Ossuary, she’s the one who can get you in there.”

“You trust her?”

“Trust?” He rocked his hand in a fifty-fifty gesture. “I know she’s useful.”

That meant something to Daniel. He knew Otis didn’t invest in jobs he couldn’t profit from. Nor in people.

“What’s her score?”

“From the Ossuary? She won’t say. And I worked her really hard on that. It’s not treasure. It’s something more personal. The good news is that she doesn’t want a cut of the basilisk fangs, so more profit for us.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Look, it’s not the fangs, it’s not the sword. There’s no job without her, so I’m giving her just that much privacy.” Otis moved a bead on his abacus. “My advice, Daniel? Use Emma. But don’t trust her. Build your crew around that idea. Take Cassandra. You know she’ll have your back. And take whoever else you want. Your father gave you osteomancy, and I gave you thiefcraft. But those aren’t your most powerful weapons.”

“And what are those?”

Otis didn’t hesitate to answer. “Your friends. Whoever has the skills, whoever
you
trust. Get Jo. Get Moth.”

“You don’t like Jo and Moth.”

“I don’t have to like them. It’s your call. And you know why?”

Daniel waited.

“It’s because I trust you, Daniel.”

“Oh, shove it, Otis.”

Otis put his glasses back on and returned to his abacus, and Daniel made for the door.

“The thing,” he said, before leaving. “The boy. The one my mother took North. You really don’t know what it was?”

“What did I tell you, Daniel?”

“You told me it got shot along with my mom when she was trying to cross.”

“And it looked like you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And it made the Hierarch think you were dead, right?”

Daniel didn’t say anything.

“Then it doesn’t matter what it was,” Otis said. “It worked just as your mom and dad intended.”

SEVEN

Daniel asked around for the whereabouts of his friend Josephine, and the answer led him to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Or, more precisely, to Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s brass star in front of a yogurt shop on Hollywood Boulevard.

Daniel edged near a group of pedestrians clustered around a man barking a sales pitch. Under a fedora that looked like it had been well chewed by a bullmastiff, his sun-speckled face showed evidence of many naps on park benches.

“I can see you’re pooped by the way you droop and stoop! By the lack of pep in your every step! Well, what if I told you this: an opportunity you just can’t miss? A simple stone, a piece of bone, that you could have for your very own, that will give you something greater than wealth? A Peruvian carbuncle, to restore your health!”

After suffering the pitch man’s rhyme, Daniel wanted a carbuncle to restore his sanity.

Peruvian carbuncles were toadlike creatures whose heads grew deep red gemstones. The skull stones possessed osteomantic healing properties, and amulets made out of them were the thing among the Golden City crowd.

Beside the pitch man, on a square of black velvet draped over a folding TV tray, was a copper bracelet set with some small red stones. He held it aloft and crowed, “Who wants to feel better right now?”

A couple of hands went up. The salesman picked a drab-looking woman out of the crowd. Her sweater was the color of grass in need of fertilizer.

“You, miss! Forgive me for saying, but you look like you could use a little magic.”

The woman was jowly and turkey-necked, with bags under her eyes. When the pitch man stepped forward to take her arm, she made a show of demurring, but she relented without too much struggle.

“Now, I’m too much of a gentleman to ask your age, miss—”

“I’m thirty-seven,” she said, with a self-conscious giggle. Actually, Daniel knew she was only twenty-two.

The hawker patted her arm. “And what do you do for a living?”

“Well, I’m unemployed right now, but I’m a nurse.”

“Always sacrificing your back and your arches and your sleep to take care of others. Well, maybe it’s time to take care of yourself. What do you say?”

I bet she’ll say “yes,” thought Daniel.

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose … Okay.”

In a manner that was equal parts doctor and suitor, the pitch man took her slender wrist and clasped the skull-stone bracelet around it.

“From the high mountain peaks to the lush rain forests of Peru, the indigenous men and women of that pure country keep magic close to the skin.”

While he barked, the woman’s posture subtly changed. Her shoulders straightened. Her paunch vanished.

“They bask in the radiance of native osteomancy, to heal their ailments, to thrive with the vitality of the ancients.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “How do you feel, miss?”

“My skin is tingling.” She ran her hands over her neck and kneaded her cheeks and rubbed her eyes. “It’s wonderful.”

“Now, some of your skull-stones, I am very sad to say, are little more than paint and epoxy. Don’t be fooled, people. Don’t part with your hard-earned wages and give your hope to charlatans and thieves. Demand evidence! Demand proof! And that’s what I’m giving you right now. What do you say, miss? Are you a believer?”