Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman (25 page)

The tobacco burnt down, the chant done, I got slowly to my feet and began the walk back to the CA Tower, turning the whole experience over in my mind. The killer had said something. Something like “Be pleased...” I thought at first he was talking to me—to her, that is—but it was soft, breathy... like he was praying or something. Unless Suzi’s shade had been caught in a loop, he was saying it over and over. “Lady,” that’s what it was. “Oh, Lady, be pleased. Oh, be pleased...” And then something else I couldn’t make out.

“
Be pleased, oh be pleased.” It sounded like a prayer, yeah, an entreaty. Did this invocation happen at every killing, or just at this one? Just this one, I thought. It’s a freak, a fluke, a variation on the pattern, and he’s pleading with his Lady, be she goddess, human, or whatever, to continue to favor him, overlook this self-indulgence. “Be pleased.” No, not just overlook it, allow it, but take it as an offering, a sacrifice. It’s not part of the pattern, but it’s still something he’s doing for her.

It is the moon, I thought. He broke the lunar pattern. He’s getting worked up inside. He’s getting close to the end of the pattern, and he’s doing it for her, his Lady, his Goddess, and there’s something else... What compels the abject worshiper? The worshiped, or its opposite. God—in this case Goddess—or something foul and degraded, a sacrilege. Mascarpone was a Marilynist. Was Marilyn the Beast’s “Lady”? Or did he find the Marilynists offensive? There are several goddesses associated with the dark moon. None of them, at least in their more popular forms, would have found the Marilynists offensive. The lunar goddesses tended to be harlots as well as virgins, particularly in the dark phases. Tiamat, Ummu-Hubur, Hebat, Hecate... The killings could be offerings to any of them.

But all that, I realized, was speculation, balanced precariously on one point: my intuition that this killing was a fluke, that the Beast’s prayer wasn’t the rite that accompanied every killing, but something special. It was a good theory, but still only a theory. Best not to get too attached to it.

I thought back over the earlier parts of the vision, before she was caught by the Beast. The knife pressed into her hand, the hand on the elbow. I had forgotten, the harlot had seen Auden earlier in the evening. And we had only Auden’s report of what had happened; there were no other witnesses. Auden was a friend of the fishing captain. Could it be Auden? Could he have had some falling out with Hawthorne? When he met Mascarpone earlier, was he scouting his next victim?

But, no... Auden was with us when Czernoff had been killed. I doubted there were two shapeshifting killers in the city. Was Auden dirty? A human ally to the killer? It didn’t seem likely. And if the investigator had been the Beast’s inside man, why the charade with the janitor? Auden could have simply let him in. If I couldn’t entirely rule out him as a possible Beast ally, I wasn’t about to put that at the top of my list of likelihoods.

Back at our rooms in the CA Tower, I found Rok still up, sitting on the couch with a file folder open on his lap. Something in black and white was showing on the big-screen DV, but the sound was off.

“
Nice sneak-out,” he said over his shoulder.

“
Thanks.” Water was sounding good. As I filled a glass at the sink, it occurred to me that a couple of aspirin couldn’t hurt, either. I grabbed the bottle from the counter, shook out a couple and swallowed them, washed them down with the water, then refilled the glass and took it back to the main room. I looked at the guy on the DV. It was Jimmy Stewart. He was ranting silently about something.

“
You go to the tram overpass?” Rok asked.

“
Yeah.”

“
She there?”

“
Yeah, sort of.”

“
Any help?”

I thought about what I had experienced under the tramway. “Maybe,” I said. “Hard to tell yet.” Eventually I’d need to fill Rok and Morgan in on what I’d gathered from the harlot’s shade, but I didn’t have the energy just then.

“
You knew that the fisherman, Hawthorne, fought in the Takeover?” Rok asked. I nodded. “First mate claims the Cap’n once admitted to him—deep, dark secret shared late one drunken night—that he was actually the guy who shot Wendell Crichton.”

“
You believe him?”

“
I think he believed it. I believe his captain probably told him that story. Whether it was true or not, who knows? Anybody can make a claim like that.”

I sat down beside him on the couch. “Man,” I said, “you got all the finest, most expensive for-pay DV available to you on this nice big screen, all at the expense of Micah Roth and Bay City. Why you watchin’ this low-rent, free channel shit?” The free channels ran a lot of pre-Crash stuff—no copyrights or royalties involved.

Rok raised one finger, but kept his eyes on the file. “You’d better be fucking joking.”

I laughed. It made my head hurt. I’d have to try and remember not to laugh often. That probably wouldn’t be too difficult. “Course I’m joking,” I said. “Jimmy Stewart’s The Man. What’s this,
Wonderful Life
?”

“
Mr. Smith
. Get a clue, will ya?”

I took a slug from the water. Rok looked up at the screen. “You ever wonder what it was like, to live back then?” he asked.

“
Wasn’t like that,” I said, nodding toward the screen. “These things are the fantasy those people had of themselves. Hey, how close is the average DV show today to the reality we experience?”

“
Yeah,” he said. “But it’s true, they did have one central government controlled practically the whole continent. That must have been really strange.”

“
Not if you grew up with it.”

“
I suppose not.”

On screen Stewart was now dumping bags of mail out onto his little desk. For a while there was only the faint hum from the muted speakers. Then Rok said, “You think it’s all about Roth, don’t you?”

I looked at the thought again carefully. It felt right. “Yeah.”

“
You think Roth lied about Crichton’s pregnant wife?”

“
Nah, I don’t think he lied. But I don’t assume he’s right.”

Morgan appeared from the other room, her portable balanced open on her forearm. “They’re ritualistic revenge killings, that’s gotta be obvious,” she said.

“
Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“
You didn’t.” She sat down at the table. “Check this out.” She gestured at the screen. “Do you mind?”

Rok shook his head. “Go ahead,” he said.

Morgan punched some keys on her portable and Jimmy Stewart vanished from the screen, replaced by the image of Morgan’s desktop, several old articles open in different windows.

“
After the Takeover, the trials focused on Crichton and his top guys,” she said. “But you look at the media reports from before the Takeover, they make it sound like Helena Crichton was the real brains of the outfit, the power behind the throne. Kinda like Crichton was the gun, his wife was the hand that pointed it.”

I didn’t bother trying to read the articles, but took Morgan’s word for it. The photos accompanying the write-ups showed Crichton with his wife, a handsome woman with hard eyes.

“
They found a body though, didn’t they?” asked Rok.

“
If anybody could come through a civil war in one piece, I’d be betting on someone like Helena Crichton. Bitch on wheels, totally as ruthless and power-hungry as her husband. More so, probably. It was a war zone. There easily could have been more than one pregnant woman killed in the fighting. I can’t find anything on how they identified that body.”

“
If she did escape,” I said, “and gave birth to Crichton’s kid, that kid would be...”

“
Hitting his Saturn return about now,” Morgan finished. It wasn’t exactly what I was going to say; I hadn’t thought of the astrological implications, but it was close enough. He—or she, I reminded myself—would be almost thirty.

Rok snorted. “Guess that means the New Republic of Bay City is hitting its Saturn return, too,” he said. “Makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it?”

Saturn takes just under thirty years to complete one circuit of the zodiac. Astrologers see the Saturn return as the beginning of true adulthood, the ending of the age of innocence, loss of illusions, the time when the Universe forces you to face a bunch of very hard realities.

“
Yeah,” I said, “I guess it does at that. How old was Helena Crichton then? During the Takeover?”

“
About forty or so, I think,” Morgan said.

“
Isn’t that a little old for a pregnancy?”

“
It’s pushing it, yeah. Didn’t Roth say they’d had trouble getting pregnant?”

“
Yeah, he did.” I nodded, looking at the screen, where Morgan’s cursor was skipping around, flipping through the windows that showed different articles and photos.

“
Wait a minute,” I said. “What was that? Go back...”

She did. There was a photo of Crichton and another man standing in front of a building that looked like a resort hotel.

“
What’s that?” I asked. “That symbol?”

There was a sigil on the doors of the building. It looked like two stylized commas bracketing a lower case “i,” the shaft of the “i” pointed instead of squared off at the bottom.

“
Crichton’s corporate logo. I think it’s supposed to be C-I-D, for ‘Crichton Industrial Development.’”

“
Imagine that logo upside-down,” I said. “Doesn’t it look a little like the mark the Beast has been leaving?”

Rok was starting to twist his head sideways when Morgan clicked on something and inverted the picture. We all looked at it in silence for a moment. “I dunno,” Rok said finally. “It’s a stretch.”

“
Yeah,” said Morgan. “I guess I can see it, but it is a stretch.”

“
Maybe I’m just too desperate to make a connection,” I admitted. They were right. The logo would not only have to be inverted, but distorted as well, to match the Beast’s mark. I stared at the screen some more.

“
Okay,” said Rok. “Let’s say, for the moment, Helena Crichton did escape, and gave birth. Would a woman like that stay here and plot revenge? I’d think she’d be more likely to go somewhere else, start over again. No power to be had for someone like her in the New Republic. Maybe she went to Santa Brita or Bendmond. They were more like the old Bay City in those days. Hell, San Angelus was still practically feudal.”

“
Maybe she did,” said Morgan. “I’m assuming some-one like that doesn’t lose their taste for power, and that if Helena Crichton survived, she’d be rebuilding her own little empire somewhere. I’ve got at least three good possibilities, women who fit her profile, who appeared in other cities around the right time period. And she doesn’t need to be here, in Bay City, right now. Maybe it’s just her son who came back.”

“
Could be,” I said.

The entire roof of the featherweight dune crawler was one huge solar collector. The batteries were fully charged when I signed for it. I turned out of the guard garage and headed down Fourth Street, south toward the river. Once I was over the Fourth Street Bridge, moving southwest out of the city, the buildings got shorter and smaller, going from plascrete and granite to brick and adobe and even some old wood frame buildings. After a while they petered out altogether, and I was speeding through the peninsula south of the Bay. Now I could see glimpses of ocean between the oncoming hills.

I could probably have consulted Wolf again in the CA Tower, but this seemed more respectful. There was an old sacred circle overlooking the sea at the top of the hill they called “Chaco Head.” The circle of stones wasn’t that ancient—it had been raised sometime just before the Great Crash—but legend said it had been a sacred site for centuries before that.

The sun was setting as I parked the jeep a few yards from the circle. The stones were larger than I’d expected. Most stone circles you see these days, the uprights come to your waist or chest at most, but these stones were a good seven or eight feet tall. Away to the southeast I could see the cracked remains of one of the great domes that once made survival possible. Back then bees could only survive in that artificial environment, which meant only plants growing under the domes would get pollinated. Almost any new growth plant in the world today was a descendent of something that was grown in one of those domes. Their adoption had saved the human race from extinction through starvation.

I took off my boots. Bringing my knapsack, I walked to the center of the circle. Took out a little brazier and some sage, and set the sage to burning. I raised the brazier to each of the four directions. Performed the Evening Salute.

Then I lay down and closed my eyes. Slowed and deepened my breathing. In my mind’s ear I heard the beat of a drum, the shaman’s drum. It might have been helpful to have an actual drum there, but I’d done this so many times I didn’t really need it. In only moments I saw the door, and stepped through it.