Heaven's Bones (14 page)

He turned and crouched as the door opened, the faint light from the alley shining into the dark room, illuminating a cloud of dust motes. A bulky figure stood there. Tibor blinked and recognized him: the bone man, with white orbs for eyes. He looked blindly inside and bared his teeth, straight and separate like pegs lined up in his gums. The Vistana touched the handle of his weapon but didn't draw it.

“He was waiting for you,” said the bone man in a voice that was surprisingly hollow, as if all his bulk was a shell. “He never lost faith.”

The bone man entered the room and Tibor edged around him, keeping a respectful distance, but the larger man simply walked in and stood beside the body. The room smelled increasingly of vinegar, and something under it, bitter and acrid. Everything Tibor had learned told him to get out, now.

Yet at the door he paused. “The others,” he said. “His students, who weren't able to take the final step. What happened to them?”

The bone man didn't turn around. “When they didn't kill him, he killed them, of course. It ripped him apart. There wasn't a single one of you he didn't love, not one. You should remember that, if you live.”

As Tibor turned away he thought he heard a horrible lapping sound.

In the pens, one of the horses nickered, another answering. Tibor rose from his crouch in one fluid motion, a blade in each hand—the stiletto in the left, and in his right a short curved knife of curious make, with a wicked crook at its tip.

As he stood, a circle of glyphs ignited on the ground around him, glowing in the short grass with a sickly pale green light. The bloody red edge of the sun was just vanishing beneath the horizon, and its ruddy illumination fell before Tibor like a path, a red path toward the horses in their pen; a path toward power, and knowledge, and the key to all those other worlds.

He stepped over a glyph and it vanished, opening the circle.

Arms spread so that his blades glinted crimson at his hips, he walked toward the horses.

Artemis stared at Inspector Crutchly. He felt the heat of his face flushing.

“With all due respect, sir, have you gone mad?”

Crutchly went red in his turn.

“Watch yourself, Donovan. The Superintendent's determined this is an isolated case. We don't have the resources to chase down every fancy-man who's lost his temper with a whore.”

“Did you read my report, sir?” Artemis sputtered. “That was no beating. In fact, it was anything but—her face was untouched.”

Crutchly waved a dismissive hand. “However he did it—we have bigger fish to fry. Rabble-rousers in the public parks, for one—and pickpockets on the Strand for another. The Superintendent would like to know why a decent woman can't seem to go shopping without having her purse lifted.”

“There'll be more, sir, if my guess is right,” said Artemis. “More killings in Whitechapel before the year is out—killings like that one. Someone who does that is hungry, and he doesn't know what he's hungry for, so he'll do it again and again until his hunger is satisfied—which, often as not, is never.
Please
, sir.”

He stepped toward the Inspector. “Did you see the body? I know you read the report—but did you
see
her?”

Crutchly shook his head, putting his hand on the detective's shoulder.

“No, I didn't. And it wouldn't do any good if I had. Look, Donovan, I would feel the same way in your position. But this is a fight you can't win. The Superintendent doesn't feel it's of significance, and I have no choice in the matter.”

“It's not right, sir.” Artemis growled.

Crutchly paused. “I know.”

The Inspector gave his shoulder a final squeeze and turned away. Artemis considered probing his supervisor's thoughts, and finding there a nugget of information he could hold over his head. It was surprising, sometimes, the petty and not-so-petty crimes men rolled over and contemplated and
remembered
in the place just below conscious thought, in the muddy river of the mind that even they were not aware of. Sometimes Artemis was able to look into that murky stream and find information he could use to coerce cooperation out of a suspect or informant—although to do so made him feel sick, as if he'd seen acts best kept behind closed doors.

Be careful
, he could hear his mother say.
Sometimes it's a gift, and sometimes it's a curse, and sometimes the greatest gift is to be headblind and ignorant of the secrets beneath. Folk, and good folk too, won't thank you for knowing too much
.

But Crutchly was a good enough man, and like as not it was true he had no choice. Artemis would accomplish nothing by probing his secrets.

Crutchly sat at his desk where a great pile of paper awaited him—reports to be approved, orders to be carried out. Artemis did not envy him his work.

As he walked out the door of the Inspector's office, Crutchly's voice caught him midstride.

“Of course, what you do on your own time, Detective …”

Artemis glanced back. The other man didn't look up from his work.

“Understood, sir,” Artemis said.

The next day was a Saturday, drizzly and gloomy, the day Cherise Daughtery was buried, the funeral paid for with the money her killer had left behind. Artemis knew on sight some of the women that ringed the small grave, and stood well back so they would not be made uncomfortable. Bowler in hand, he watched the sexton and his boy lower the coffin unsteadily into the earth and the minister—an overworked assistant, not the man who presided, full of righteous grace, on Sundays—intone from the Book of Common Prayer.

As they reached the end the rain began in earnest, drumming on the lid of the coffin and making a thick slurry of the dirt thrown up from the grave. The service concluded hastily and the minister hurried inside to his office and a hot cup of tea while the women dispersed, the cheap feathers in their hats a sad tangle from the wet. The sexton and his boy seized their shovels and quickly filled the hole, the clumps of mud thumping loudly on the casket, then softer as the grave grew shallow.

There was a little depression still over the grave when they shouldered their shovels and left, likely as not seeking something hot as well. Artemis stayed for a while, the rain wetting the shoulders of his greatcoat, looking at the little dip in the graveyard that was all the evidence left of that girl named Cherise Daughtery who once lived in London.

Kartakass

Jaelle was about to step into the circle of dancers when she heard the horses scream.

She jerked back as if the dancing-circle, beaten down into the grass of the clearing, had been made of hot coals.

Jaelle glanced around at the dancers. No one else seemed to have heard it. Was it her imagination? Or a sound from a future that hadn't happened yet?

Another scream, full of unearthly pain, that bent her double, hands over her ears.

She looked around frantically. Still the dancers kept their circle, their steps unnaturally even and precise, their expressions frozen. She stepped through the circle to the center, watching each of her clans-folk as they passed—Gris, whose burly shoulders and arms belied his gentleness with the horses; Mikal, who was the cleverest at negotiating terms with the lord's men, was invaluable to her uncle, and who she knew there was talk about hand-fasting to her and binding to the tribe. Both men went through the steps as if they were enchanted.

This was the only dance where the Vadoma men and women were allowed to dance together, for when the horses went to their masters the taboos were broken for a night, and youth and maiden could move together and touch hands. Jaelle looked Mari, her little cousin, in the face, and saw no recognition there. Her Aunt Sonja had joined the circle under the amused glance of her husband Serge, but even her face was frozen like a mask.

The drummers and the sitar player kept up a monotonous rhythm, as if the dance had trapped them in position and made them move their hands and fingers whether they willed it or not. Lord Harkon's emissaries stood apart with her uncle, alien yet welcome here, watching the dance, their smiles of tolerant condescension frozen on their faces.

Her guts twisted as another scream penetrated the glen, and this time she saw a flicker pass across the dancers' faces, a momentary awareness, a misstep in their compulsive dance. The music faltered and the emissaries looked around and frowned.

But then whatever force compelled them took hold and was renewed, and the drums maintained their beat, and the dancers stayed in time.

A strange feeling passed through Jaelle's limbs, and her mind felt cloudy. The drums and the sitar pounded in her head, numbing all thought, and she felt the urge to step into the dance, to lose herself in the rhythm of the circle. Mari passed in front of her and Jaelle
moved to take her place beside her, her arms lifting of their own accord into the proper position.

Dance
, a voice intoned in her head.
Take your place until I come for you, sister
.

Tibor's voice.

There was a horrible satisfaction in that voice, like a beast glutting itself with fresh meat.

No!

She pulled away from that hypnotic voice and burst out of the circle, running toward the pens where the horses were kept. Away from the fire her eyes swiftly grew accustomed to the dark, and the light of the moon that was just peeping over the hills was enough to guide her.

Another scream and she staggered, regained her footing, and ran.

Tibor! Don't do it, brother!
she called, although she knew it was too late.

She reached the pen just as Tibor plunged his knives into the eyes of the last horse, the last of the twelve. Several lay motionless, some were horribly still. A few staggered about blindly, maddened by pain and the smell of blood, falling over the dead beasts.

One reared, its hooves striking blindly over Tibor's head; it fell on its side and churned the dirt, screaming in its last extremity. Jaelle wondered why they hadn't broken free at the first, for the wooden pen was no barrier for a herd of panicked horses. Then she realized that they had been ensorcelled too, under the same spell Tibor had managed to cast across the camp that imprisoned the Vadoma in their dance.

He turned to her, smiling, still holding the knives, bloodied to the elbows, his garments blackened and wet. She backed away from the pen as he walked toward her. He kicked away the loose boards of the barrier, lifting his gory arms as if to embrace her. Behind him a few dying horses still milled, and their confusion and pain stabbed through her body.

She saw blood on his mouth.

Why?

She spoke only inside her head, but knew he heard her.

He paused, still smiling.

“Because I could, and because I needed to,” he said. “Each level reaches to the next.”

“I don't understand,” she managed, her voice choked with tears.

“Twelve perfect horses,” he replied. “The life of the man who made me. Great power has a price. Opening the passage to other worlds, controlling other worlds, has its price.”

The last horse fell to its knees, whinnied in exhaustion, and collapsed to the ground. A night-fog was rising from the bloodied ground of the slaughter and from the grass around it, mercifully blurring the horror from sight.

“I can walk between the barriers now,” said Tibor. “Watch.”

He closed his eyes, arms still extended, and she saw him flicker and fade, almost vanishing entirely. He reappeared, becoming solid, and opened his eyes, his expression beatific as a child's. Like his face when she saved him from falling into the river, she thought suddenly, holding a cluster of mussels triumphantly, both of them laughing with the joy of being alive.

He stepped toward her again. “Come with me, Jaelle. We'll rule where we will, and you'll be my queen. I'll give you anything. Come with me.”