The Relic Guild (37 page)

‘We could really use his help right now, couldn’t we?’

The unfamiliar hue of guilt now swirling in Samuel’s body perturbed Van Bam. He said nothing as his old friend looked up at the sky and continued.

‘When I joined the Relic Guild – before your arrival – Denton took me on my first trip to an Aelfirian House. The Aelfheim Archipelago – do you know of it?’

‘I … yes, though I never got the chance to visit it myself.’

‘They have a sub-House there called Sunflower. It’s a farming community.’

Van Bam nodded. ‘So I have been told.’

‘They keep livestock, you know – all kinds of different animals, running free and wild. There are greenhouses too, as big as the Nightshade, growing all manner of plants and food that we never see in Labrys Town anymore.’

Van Bam furrowed his brow. ‘Samuel, perhaps you could tell me where this is leading?’

The old bounty hunter’s voice became wistful. ‘Over the years, I suppose I fell in love with the idea of returning to Sunflower. I still dream of it, sometimes – of being a farmer, keeping livestock, harvesting crops, walking among the trees in a forest.’ He closed his eyes. ‘
Forests
, Van Bam! Can you remember those?’

Van Bam felt a sad sense of realisation. ‘Am I to understand that the avatar offered you escape from the Labyrinth?’

Samuel’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the guardrail tightly. ‘The bounty was passage. Passage to any House of the Aelfir I chose. All I had to do was kill Clara and I’d be free. It didn’t even occur to me to refuse.’

Inside Van Bam’s head, he could feel Gideon relishing the moment.

‘Samuel, you are not a naive man,’ the Resident said, scorn entering his voice. ‘Did you honestly believe the avatar could give you this reward? Such a bounty was a lie, a means to ensure your involvement—’

‘I know that now,’ Samuel snapped, and he glared. ‘But for the first time in years I remembered what real hope felt like. It made me desperate.’

‘I can sympathise, Samuel, but—’

‘How long do you think I have left, Van Bam?’ Although the anger remained in Samuel, his voice had softened somewhat. ‘I’m old and tired, long forgotten by the people I served. I don’t want to spend what time I have left slowly rotting away in a place where the sun barely shines. Do you?’

‘We do not choose our life,’ Van Bam retorted. ‘There is only circumstance and duty. You know this, old friend.’

‘Really?’ Samuel swept an arm across the sky. ‘Do you honestly believe the Timewatcher cares about what we do anymore? That the Thaumaturgists are still out there watching over us?’

‘Yes, somewhere!’ Van Bam said hotly. ‘You and I are the last of a fading generation, Samuel. We have experienced every good and bad the worlds outside our realm have to offer. But …’

He felt suddenly weary, as if the weight of his own years was pressing down on him. The weariness also crept into his voice. ‘Think of Clara,’ he said. ‘That girl will never get the chance to see what we have seen.’

‘Don’t talk to me about Clara!’ Samuel replied cruelly. ‘Whatever information Marney has hidden in her head, you’d better get Hamir to extract it quickly, Van Bam. Clara won’t remain a friend when she changes into the wolf. She has no training, no control over her magic. The chances are I’ll have to put a bullet through her head. Forget Clara.’

‘No.’ Van Bam’s tone was resolute, protective, and this seemed to amuse Gideon more than anything. ‘Clara will have to become the wolf again, Samuel, you are right on that. But I will never believe she is a danger to us. Her emergence as a magicker is surely a sign that not everything has been forgotten in the Labyrinth.’

‘Believe what you like,’ Samuel said miserably. ‘It makes no difference now, anyway.’

Van Bam accepted then that coming to the rooftop had been a mistake. There was no point in continuing this conversation.

‘Clara and I have a job to do,’ he said. ‘We will be gone for a short time.’

Samuel did not respond. Van Bam turned away and walked to the hatchway in the roof. As he prepared to descend the ladder, Samuel’s voice drifted back to him.

‘Would you stop me?’ he said as he continued to stare down onto the street. ‘If Moor hadn’t returned, if the bounty contract had been sound, would you stop me leaving the Labyrinth?’

Van Bam paused for a heartbeat. Without replying, he began climbing down into the apartment below, and Gideon’s chuckles rattled in his head.

Oh, Samuel
, the former Resident whispered.
I think
you have your answer.

Chapter Fifteen

New Regime

It was generally believed that Hamir’s emotions were so deadened that even an empath could not read him; that behind the inveterate shell of his genial manner he kept his true self hidden in a place where the machinations of a necromancer were preserved in dark dreams. Hamir felt in no way obligated to confirm or negate this supposition; though to claim he could feel no emotions whatsoever was not an entirely fair accusation. He was capable of feeling surprise, for example, if only on a mild level. And at that moment Hamir the necromancer most definitely felt mild surprise.

Surrounded by the purple, magical mists swirling within the glass confinement chamber, Hamir stared down at his patient. Charlie Hemlock lay naked upon a gurney. The skin of his chest had been sliced open, peeled back and clamped; his ribcage had been snapped and pulled away to expose the dark, gaping hole of his chest cavity. Hamir’s brow was furrowed and his lips pursed as he gazed into the hole. The interior of the human body was well known to the necromancer, and things appeared generally as they should. However, Charlie Hemlock’s heart was missing. In its place was a small terracotta jar, around the same size and shape as those used for storing preserves.

‘Interesting,’ Hamir muttered.

He turned his attention to the small metal trolley-table beside him. Upon the table lay bloodied surgical tools and pieces of ribcage. Hamir selected a long and sharp scalpel, and then turned to Hemlock again.

The terracotta jar appeared to be in symbiosis with his body, connected almost as a heart should have been. There were veins and arteries attached to it; and, although blackened and seemingly diseased, they obviously aided the transportation of blood somehow. In a rare moment of indecision, Hamir wondered if he could cut the jar free without disturbing the wax seal around its lid.

That slight sense of surprise deepened somewhat when Hamir noticed Charlie Hemlock’s eyes were open and staring at him. He took a step back as Hemlock pushed his hands into his own chest cavity and began tugging at the terracotta heart. Before Hamir could react, he had pulled the jar free with a wet, slurping sound, and begun clawing at the seal.

Hamir’s indecision vanished. He dropped the scalpel, turned, quickly stepped from the containment chamber into the isolation room beyond, and closed the door firmly behind him.

With thick, reinforced glass now separating him from his patient, Hamir watched as Charlie Hemlock made short work of the wax seal and removed the lid. The sound of a scream was muffled by the glass, and then a sandstorm rushed from the jar and filled the chamber.

It swirled and whipped violently, rattling against the glass like wind-blown rain. Not only did the storm strip the flesh from Hemlock’s bones and absorb his blood, it also began devouring the purple mist that the Nightshade itself had created as defence against hostile magic.

‘Curious,’ Hamir remarked.

As the sandstorm continued to rage, the first cracks appeared in the containment chamber. With tight creaking and sharp snaps, they spread through the glass like jagged streaks of slow lightning. Hamir retreated further. He left the isolation room for the safety of the corridor outside. He sealed the door and activated the dark observation window on the wall. He was just in time to witness the containment chamber shattering into a thousand shards.

The sandstorm had coalesced to form a woman. Naked and pale-skinned, she stood with her back to Hamir, gently swaying on her feet, clearly orienting herself after the stresses of reanimation. After a moment, she inspected the fleshless skeleton of Charlie Hemlock on the gurney. She raised a fist, and then smashed it down to reduce the skull to dust. Picking through the remains, she plucked something out, and only then did she turn to face the necromancer through the window. She smiled at him triumphantly.

Hamir recognised her immediately: she was the Genii Hagi Tabet.

‘Ingenious,’ he whispered.

The Genii’s hair grew in stubbly tufts. Her eyes had the vacant, distant lack of focus that Hamir had so often seen in the insane. She stepped closer to the observation window, untroubled by the broken glass that cut at her bare feet. She held between a thumb and forefinger a small egg-shaped object with a leathery shell of green-streaked brown. She smiled for Hamir one more time before pushing the egg into her mouth. Opening her arms wide, as though proud to expose her withered nakedness to the necromancer, she strained as she swallowed the egg whole.

Hagi Tabet’s scream was silent in the corridor as she fell to her hands and knees.

The tips of tentacles broke through her pallid skin. A cross between vines and snakes, they slithered out of her back, twenty of them at least, coiling and writhing, whipping at the air. Hamir couldn’t be sure if Tabet was in agony or rapture as she continued to scream silently. Her head was thrown back, her mouth opened wide, like a beast barking at the sky as her blood puddled on the floor beneath her.

The tentacles continued to grow as not even the confines of the isolation room could halt their progress. Splitting maze-patterned stone, they pierced the walls, the floor and ceiling, and burrowed deep into the Nightshade itself. The Genii was lifted from the floor, raised by the tentacles until she was suspended at the centre of the room like a spider sitting in its leathery web. Her head hung slack. Blood ran down her legs and dripped from the ends of her toes.

Around Hamir, the atmosphere shifted. The light darkened subtly. A static charge filled the air.

The Nightshade had changed..

‘Troubling,’ he mused.

Pausing for only a moment, the necromancer turned from the observation window and strode off down the corridor towards his laboratory.

The afternoon sun hung high, burning bright yellow through the vaguest wisps of white clouds, and seeming to banish every shadow on the streets. Voices buzzed beneath its heat as denizens milled through the central district. Trams rumbled by on their clean, silver tracks, and the thaumaturgic energy that drove them snapped along power lines with purple sparks. The air was laced with the smell of food cooking and freshly made coffee from eateries and street-side vendors. The scent of hot stone was dry and dusty.

Life in Labrys Town continued exactly as it always had; yet as Clara walked beside Van Bam through the heat of the afternoon she felt detached, distant from the people all around her.

The denizens seemed so normal, going about their mundane tasks, their day-to-day routines. Over the course of a single day, Clara’s perception of the world had altered. There was nothing routine in what she saw. She pitied these people for the secrets that were being kept from them, yet envied them for their blissful ignorance. Old and young, not one of these denizens was aware of the shadow that had fallen across their town. Clara barely understood it herself.

She stopped outside the Central District Bank to watch a young boy shining shoes beside a food vendor’s cart. He relished his work, labouring hard to earn his money, his expression entirely too serious for one so young. Clara had a sudden, horrifying vision of this innocent child as a slavering monster like those she had witnessed at the asylum.

With icy needles pricking her spine, she looked again at the denizens around her. Suddenly dizzied by their comings and goings, she was assailed by a burst of panic. Each of these denizens represented nothing more than fresh blood to the Genii. A single bite could start a virus that would destroy Labrys Town’s entire population. And there were two of them now—

‘Clara?’

She looked at Van Bam with a start – only it wasn’t really him she saw.

The Resident had used his illusionist magic to disguise them both, and they now appeared as a middle-aged man and woman. There were no metal plates covering Van Bam’s eyes; they were normal looking and soft hazel. His skin was no longer deep brown but an olive colour. His
usually strong facial features
were gaunt, drawn, and his smooth shaven head was now
covered in short black hair etched with grey. The green
glass cane appeared as a plain wooden walking stick.

‘You
seem distracted,’ he said.

Clara looked back at the shoeshine
boy, who smiled hopefully. ‘Shine your shoes, missus?’ he called.

Clara shook her head, her panic now a dull sadness.

‘
I’m fine,’ she told Van Bam. ‘Let’s go.’

They continued on down the main street, just an ordinary
couple out walking among fellow denizens on a day like
any other in Labrys Town.

Van Bam still hadn’t
told her where they were going, or what they were
about to do; and Clara hadn’t asked. She was
content for the time being simply to follow and not
think.

She had caught her own image a few times,
reflected in shop windows. It had been like looking at
a vision of the future. She recognised herself – she still
had the same gawky features and awkward body and limbs –
but her hair was longer, devoid of red dye, and
her face was older and plumper, sagging slightly. Under Van
Bam’s illusion, she might have been taken for her
own mother.

At the end of the main street they
came to a long and high wall with a single
wide archway cut into it. On either side stood almost
identical statues – over ten feet tall and carved from the
same dark stone as the wall. Finely sculptured thick robes
flowed from their broad masculine frames. Their heads were spherical,
like the receptor helmets of the street patrols, and for
faces each bore a single ovular eye, etched in white.
The statues differed only in the symbols in their stone
hands. Where one held an anvil, the other held a
set of scales. Van Bam led Clara past the statues
and through the archway, where they entered the great plaza
known as Watchers’ Gallery.

As in the streets, a high
number of denizens were present, and Clara let the sounds
of their lives wash over her. Some sat on the
edge of the Gallery at tables outside an eatery, drinking
and eating and laughing; others sat on benches beside colourful
flowerbeds, chatting. Some stood clutching papers and dossiers, discussing and
arguing over business with colleagues, their expressions serious. So wrapped
up in their routines,
so content with what they had, these denizens were interested only in what the day had brought them.

The high wall enclosed Watchers’ Gallery in a circle. There were two ways in or out: one was the way Clara and Van Bam had come; the other was on the opposite side of the plaza, and that way led to the street that marked the beginning of Resident Approach, which ran in a straight line all the way to the Nightshade. Most of the buildings belonged to the various houses of the merchant guilds – though there was the usual presence of a Chapel of the Timewatcher, and a tavern called The Merchant’s Ore, where the central district’s businessmen and women met for a drink at the end of a hard day – but one building stood out from the others, and Clara viewed it with an ominous feeling.

The building stood at the plaza’s centre. It was surrounded by a ring of grass, which was dissected into quarters by four narrow paths. Like the Nightshade, the building was an impressive size and a perfect cube in shape – though still much smaller than the Resident’s home – and, unlike the Nightshade, its severity was mitigated by windows. Large wooden doors provided an entrance though which an unending stream of people entered and exited. This building was the heart of the law; it was the police headquarters, and its location not only marked the centre of Watchers’ Gallery, but also the exact centre of Labrys Town.

With a worried frown, Clara followed Van Bam towards the police building.

She had been to Watchers’ Gallery on a few occasions in the past, with her friend Willow, to see how the business class of Labrys Town lived. She had found the attitudes of the merchant guild types over-opinionated and judgemental. Now, Clara felt hemmed in, as if – even with her altered appearance – her every step was being scrutinised by the people around her, bound by their ignorance as they were.

She stuck close to Van Bam as he stopped at the beginning of a path that led across to the entrance of the police headquarters. He didn’t speak as he faced the building.

Most people exiting or entering ignored the pathways and took short cuts directly over the grass, but a group of five denizens that emerged from the wooden doors headed directly towards the magickers. Clara stepped aside to let them pass, and then shied from two patrolmen who appeared from behind her and headed down the path to their place of work. But Van Bam stood his ground, unfazed by the slight objections of those who had to walk around him.

‘What are we doing here?’ she whispered.

‘Secrets, Clara,’ Van Bam replied. ‘The Labyrinth has many of them. Come.’

He set off down the path and Clara followed him into the building, where they were met by a wall of sound.

The reception area was a hive of activity. A cluster of denizens had gathered around the reception desk, arguing and shouting and pushing one another. More denizens sat in chairs, clearly agitated, frustrated at being made to wait so long to be seen. A group of three men and two women were jabbing fingers angrily at each other. Even though Clara had never set foot in the police headquarters before, it was evident the level of activity was unusually high. Something was wrong.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked Van Bam. ‘Everybody’s so angry.’