Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman (41 page)

It’s because he doesn’t wear his strength on his sleeve, she thought. He was gentle, polite and friendly, but firm about most things. Like the instructors at the guard academy tried to teach their guards to be. Most of them pretended to be that way, and many fooled the civilians; but this guy was the real thing. His strength was a tool to be used when needed, and left at rest when not, like senseis would teach you your limbs and mind should be. When she twisted the plastic tray, the ice cubes slipped out in one mass, a few separating as they struck the counter. She collected the loose ones, dropped them into two glasses, and filled the glasses with water with only a single glance at the fridge, where the beer was.

Yes, she thought, she’d asked for a breather, and here it was. A man who could not only match her on the mats (probably), but who could talk about things other than methods of hurting people and sports statistics. Railwalkers knew all sorts of ancient lore, and were given the equivalent of a college education.

43. WOLF

When Nita walked back to the living area with the two glasses of water I was still looking over her bookcase.

“
You’ve got a full set of Malvern,” I said. “And the Master Sayings. Annotated.”

“
My Dad thought it belonged in any law enforcement agent’s library.” She handed me the glass and sat on the couch. “Have you studied his period at all?”

“
The ‘Master’ of the Sayings? A little.”

“
Victorian was an odd period. Strange that a man of such insight and wisdom came from a society so screwed up. The Victorians were very uptight about sex.”

I walked to the couch and crouched beside her. “Are you feeling uptight about sex at the moment?” I asked.

“
Strangely, yes.” She looked me in the eyes, and I realized her brown eyes had green rings around the pupils. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”

44. WOLF

“
Come to Hartshall for an evening before you leave.” Roth’s voice faded in and out, static spiking from time to time. He must be on a portable unit. “The place is cleaned up. We’ll gather upstairs, light a fire in the fireplace, raise a glass to the dead.”

“
Gotta admit,” I said, “I don’t feel much like partying just now.”

“
I know your man just died. We all have to honor and mourn our dead, and that’s something it’s good to do together. Besides, it’s probably the last chance we’ll get to relax and talk about things other than the Beast. And it’s important we do that before you leave. Besides, we’ve got a ceremony to do, don’t we? Closure on your gift of aid to the city?”

“
I’m not sure we’re ready—”

“
I’ll see you at seven,” he said, and he hung up.

I was a little surprised to find that Morgan had agreed to go too. “What do you want me to say?” She shrugged where she lay on the couch in our suite, staring at the ceiling, fiddling with Rok’s cigar case. “The Rothster is very fucking insistent. Plus he asked for Ceremony. We’re sort of obligated, aren’t we?”

Yeah, we were. Roth was the one who summoned our help. It was right we do the closure thing on that. Except I wasn’t sure we were really near anything like closure. I’d been about to point that out to Roth when he’d cut me off. I pointed it out to Morgan now.

“
Fuck it,” she said. “If Roth is satisfied, then fine. Let’s give him his ceremony and get the hell out of this place.”

This wasn’t like Morgan. Usually once she got her teeth into a mystery she was tenacious as a zone badger until she had all the answers. I watched the light flash off the silver edges of the cigar case as she turned it in her hands.

“
I thought we were agreed there was more to this than one bloodthirsty shapeshifter,” I said. “What about where the Beast came from, why he was after Roth? What about Helena Crichton?”

She sighed. “Helena Crichton,” she said. She didn’t look at me, kept her eyes on the cigar case. “She’d be, what, at least seventy by now? If she was behind all this, without her pet beast, she’s nothing but an angry old woman. Sometimes you need to let the past bury the past. We did what we said we’d do. We stopped the Beast.
You
stopped the Beast. We’ve done enough. We’ve lost enough.” She opened the case, looked at the little cigars inside.

“
An angry old woman could have other servants, partners, co-conspirators,” I said. “We have an obligation to make sure the city is safe.”

Morgan snapped the case shut and stood. “Fine. You’re the Brick. It’s your call.”

I watched her stalk away and vanish into the room she’d shared with Rok. I shook my head. I could understand grief smothering Morgan’s intellectual curiosity about the mystery of the Beast’s origins, and his master or mistress, if he’d had one. But whatever her mental state, I’d never known Morgan to not take her obligations as a Railwalker seriously. Granted, I’d never seen her grieving for a dead husband, either. The loss of Rok was like a large stone weighing down the center of my being, the loss of Windsteel close beside it. Rok had been my friend, my Bear, and my partner, but not my lover or husband. Maybe I really just didn’t understand what she was going through.

I grabbed up my tunic and headed for the door. Whatever was going on with Morgan, eventually either she’d open up and talk to me, or I’d figure it out myself. Or not. In any case, I wanted a look at the Beast’s body.

I don’t know why I’d expected the guard morgue and forensic lab to be in the basement. I’d watched too many mystery DVs, maybe. Turned out it was on the ninth floor of the tower. Once you were inside, though, it might as well have been in the basement, since it had no windows.

The man in the white coat was heavyset, with a mop of curly brown hair and bright, intelligent eyes behind square glasses. “Railwalker Wolf,” he said. “Doctor Bill Barnet. Call me Bill. Fascinating specimen you sent us. Thank you so much.”

“
I didn’t send you a specimen,” I said. “I killed a living being. The guard brought his remains to you.”

His face fell. “Of course, of course,” he said. “We must respect the dead, even our fallen enemies.” He brightened again. “But this particular fallen enemy really is quite amazing.” He led me to the table on which the Beast’s body was stretched out. “These armor-like growths are keratin based...”

“
Can you tell me where he came from, anything about who he was?”

“
Oh... well.” He blinked. “He was human. At least, he’s got human DNA. Of woman born, as the saying goes. Unless, of course, he was ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripped...’”

“
MacDuff was still a human,” I said.

“
Right. As is this guy. Apparently. I can tell you a lot about his peculiarities, but unfortunately, I can’t tell you much about
why
he’s so peculiar.”

“
He was a shapeshifter,” I said.

“
We haven’t got a lot of data about shapeshifters, and we don’t understand them very well. Keene dissected a few back in ’03, ’05 or so. Didn’t find out much. We still can’t tell you why they are able to shift their molecular structure.”

“
It’s magick. It won’t show up under your microscope.”

“
No such thing, Railwalker. Oh, I know, the phenomena are real. But it’s not magic in the sense you mean it. The ‘unnatural’ is by definition impossible. It’s all natural. We just don’t understand it yet.”

I was looking at the Beast’s body. On his forehead was what the guard had come to call the “beast mark.” It was drawn on the skin in some sort of paint or makeup, which had partially rubbed off, and yet...

I looked closer. I reached out and rubbed at it with my thumb. The doctor held out a rubber glove and said, “Umm...” I ignored him.

There was something underneath that painted mark, something hard-edged just under the skin. I rubbed some more.

“
Doc, take a look at this,” I said. He looked, then took a scalpel and ran it around the edge of the area. It didn’t bleed much. He drew something out of the wound with a pair of forceps.

It was a piece of metal, the size of a large coin, but wafer thin. A cutout of the Crichton Industrial Development logo. It was inverted, and so still looked to me like the prototype of the “beast mark.”

“
Now I suppose we have to wonder if this guy really was born,” said Barnet, “or if he was hatched in a lab. I didn’t see any tattooed bar code.”

“
No,” I said, “he was born. This was inserted later in life. It was part of an initiation, like a tattoo. The metal was so thin it didn’t really show, so he reinforced it with war paint.” I wasn’t sure how I knew that, but I was certain of it.

Roth was right. Hartshall had been cleaned up thoroughly, and the only obvious suggestions of the violence that had gone on here two nights ago were a window paneled over with plywood and the faint scent of blood beneath the sharp odor of cleaning fluid. I hadn’t really appreciated the upstairs private dining room when I’d been here before, and it had been untouched by the fight that went on downstairs. Paneled in light wood, the room had a stone fireplace at one end and a gathering of mission style couch and chairs. The dining table was in the same style, and seated six.

And there were just five of us... Roth, Sarah Weldt, Morgan, myself, and Weldt’s daughter, Rochelle, with one empty place at the table. Roth was also right about the food: The venison chili was amazing.

The meal finished with coffee and tobacco. We performed a brief, heartfelt Ritual of the Given and Received, and then shared a cup and bowl with the dead. Formalities concluded, the atmosphere relaxed and we took our cups and bowls to the fireside.

The girl, Rochelle, had not gotten to act the Javamama, but she did refill my coffee cup for me now with formal ritual intent. It was obvious Roth and Weldt had worked out their differences after their divorce, and it had been the girl’s choice to keep the Roth name. She was very serious at twelve, with long, dark hair and large, luminous eyes.

“
Rochelle is training with Hannah Caine,” Roth said, as his daughter refilled my cup.

“
It’s not as if I want to be a harlot when I grow up,” she said, and I saw Roth and Weldt exchange a glance. “But they do have the best social graces. And I’m sure those will be useful, whatever I become.”

Roth laughed and hugged the girl. “Gets that calculating mind from her mother,” he said.

“
I thought you didn’t get along with the Guild-madam,” said Morgan. There was something in her voice when she said that. She’d actually varied the flat monotone she’d spoken in since Rok’s death. I knew that tone. It said she knew this wasn’t good news, but she wasn’t willing to say so yet.

“
There’s lots of things we don’t see eye to eye on, politically,” said Roth. “But certainly we respect each other. And she is an old mistress of her craft. Who better to teach Rochelle her social skills?”

Roth broke out his expensive scotch. Weldt and Morgan both chose to stick with their wine, and Rochelle had a small glass of lightly spiked punch. When the drinks had been distributed, Roth asked Morgan if she’d tell a tale. Any Railwalker can spin a story, of course, and we all know the traditional Brick tales. But the Profs are usually the ones who have a passion for it, who carry the lore and know all the old and obscure stories, the history tales and such that aren’t part of the central canon. Roth would know this, and I wondered if it was a guess or just a good bet on his part Morgan would be one of those with a real passion for it. At Morgan’s expression, I thought perhaps Roth had been too clever for his own good; it was early days to be trying to draw a grieving widow back to herself, especially one who was sharp enough to know exactly what the city boss was doing. She started to shake her head, then stopped herself. If Roth made the request formal, she’d be honor obligated to agree to it, and there was no way Morgan was going to allow herself to be forced into something she didn’t want to do.

So she hauled out her frame drum, settled herself by the fire, and began to play. She set a rhythm, played with it for a few moments. Then she began to speak, first nearly singing the words, and then settling down into the prose of the tale of Huck and Heather, and the troubles of Farr City:

Two cities in mountainous countryside,

They come to a place where they both decide

They’d be better off if they was allied,

Sister cities, as you might say, side by side.

Farr City’s Blues tells the tale of two rival cities who forge an alliance over a marriage, but like in Romeo and Juliet, along come Tybalt and Mercutio—in this case a young buck named Rant and some unnamed guy from the other city. They start a fight, and next thing you know it’s war again, blood running in the streets.

They nearly recover from this, both sides wanting and needing peace. But the heroine, Jess, is put in a position where no matter what she does she betrays someone. Many of the protagonists die, victims of someone’s idea of honor. It’s a sad tale, traditionally told in alternating sections of prose recitation and almost-song like punctuated rhyme.