Vengeance (4 page)

"Now talk,” Jocasta urged, as it tottered into the air, desperate to fulfil the purpose for which it had been bred, to watch and to report. “Paint me a picture of what happened.” She wasn't sure that it would obey her, but from what happened next, it was clearly set to respond to anyone's commands.

In the middle of the office, a grainy picture wobbled into life. Jocasta recognised Orstom Robert, a wiry runt who worked for Maltby. Robert was allegedly quick to take offence and slow to forgive those who caused it. His lips looked permanently pursed in disapproval.

Jocasta watched the life-sized imago lead Duff into a room, followed by Task, with Sinhalese bringing up the rear. It was hard to tell, so bad was the picture, but Duff looked furious and Robert terrified, his eyes bulging, while he moved as stiffly and awkwardly as a golem. “Duff has him under a geas,” Jocasta whispered, watching with horrified fascination as the hell-fuel tapers made grotesques of their shadows. “Open it!” Duff's blaring voice made Jocasta jump.

Robert threw open the doors to a room festooned with silk tapestries and a huge four-poster bed in the centre. A young girl, barely adolescent, cowered in it, while Maltby sat upright, blinking. Jocasta shuddered, repelled. His head was as bald as an egg, while his chest was carpeted with hair.

"What the...? Robert, have you—” His tirade was obliterated by Duff's roar, echoing round the room: “Where are they, you thieving little worm?” Duff strode toward the bed, shaking with rage, dark complexion now livid, a vein throbbing in his temple. For a moment, his eyes flickered with red.

Maltby shouted back, “What are you babbling about, you old fool? I've only just got to bed, and then you come crashing in here with your wits addled."

"It's not my wits I've lost, as you well know, you thieving little shit! It wasn't my wits you stole last night. Came sneaking around and thought you'd slither in, did you?” He pantomimed a snake. “And take my spells?"

"Oh, your spells,” Maltby shot back. “I should have guessed it was your little tricks behind all this."

"Where are they?” Duff advanced toward the bed.

"Spare me your tantrums. I haven't got your parlour tricks. I don't need them; your so-called magic might impress the foolish, but it takes more than some sleight of hand and stolen alien tricks to impress me."

Jocasta stared aghast. As everyone else did, she knew of the feud between the two, which had gone on for so long that neither seemed able to end it. But she hadn't realized the sheer, raw hatred beneath it. She watched Robert back away, edging past the zombie and almost out of the room, when Duff waved his left hand. Robert stopped, and despite his struggles, stood rooted to the spot. Blood began to trickle from his nose, then pour first from his ears, then his eyes, and with a pop! his left eyeball flew out. Then his head exploded.

Jocasta covered her mouth.

Duff turned back to face Maltby, who, shaking, still managed to step naked from the bed where the girl-child cowered. His head came no higher than Duff's chest, and his body, though stocky, looked small next to Duff's monolithic frame. “Very clever,” Maltby drawled. “A few motes to raise his blood pressure. Spectacular, but like everything else you do, a triumph of style over substance."

"I'll give you simple.” Duff towered over him, face twisted with fury. “I'll ask again. Where are they?"

"I'll give you an answer even you can understand. I don't know.” Maltby stood on tiptoe for a moment. “Now leave. I have better protection than Robert."

"Do you?” Duff waved his left hand. “Are you going to tell me, or do I have to torture it out of you?” Duff leaned forward, peering at him.

"Your little tricks won't work on me—ah!” The girl leapt at Maltby, her hands scrabbling at his eyes. Her nails dug in before he could get his hands up, and he screamed.

"No,” Duff said. “Magic won't work on you. But it'll work on her. She'll ask the questions far more persuasively than I could, won't you, my dear?"

Jocasta watched horrified as Robert's decapitated corpse climbed to its feet and lumbered toward the struggling pair.

Robert's corpse grabbed a vase and clubbed Maltby unconscious. Robert and the girl tore at the bedsheets with nails and teeth, and made them into impromptu ropes. Then they bound the groaning mage. Jocasta watched Duff sit in a chair, working Robert's corpse by movements of the fingers on his right hand. Then he wiggled the fingers on his left hand, and the girl rolled Maltby onto his side.

Duff motioned with his right hand, and Robert's hands locked around the girl's throat. Jocasta couldn't look away. The graininess and flickering of the picture only added in some strange way to its macabre quality. Only when the girl lay lifeless did Duff relinquish control of Robert's corpse.

"Typical of you,” Maltby managed to speak at last, spitting bile from the side of his mouth. “You use people as if they're pawns. But what now?"

Duff clearly dared not go too near Maltby. Jocasta guessed that the tattoos beneath Maltby's armpits were proximity-activated wards, some keyed to Duff personally.
Maltby probably had reflective charms,
she thought
, to reflect Duff's magic.
Her employer would have, after all, taken the same precautions himself.

"What now?” Maltby groaned.

"You'll tell me where my spells are,” Duff said.

Maltby sighed, shook his head. “I don't know."

"Where. Are.” Duff slapped the arm of his chair in time to each word. “The. Spells?"

"I really don't know,” Maltby insisted.

"Kick him,” Duff told Task. “We'll start gently, but make it harder, the more he resists."

Sinhalese only managed a few minutes before Maltby's increasingly desperate screams drove her from the room. Jocasta felt sick herself, but she had to watch this. She had to. There might be some vital clue at the end of it.

But by the time Sinhalese returned to Maltby's bedroom where his broken body lay like a discarded pile of rubbish on the floor, nothing had been gained from Maltby's torture. “He's dead then?” Sinhalese asked.

"Obviously,” Duff grunted and added, “Shame his bones dissolved. It would have been a fitting end for him if we'd put the villain's zombie to work for us."

"Did you find the spells?” Sinhalese asked.

"They're not here. Or if they are, he's taken their location to his grave.” Duff swore slowly, precisely, fluently. “The man was scum,” he added despairingly. “But he's snatched triumph from his own defeat.” His brow wrinkled. “Odd how stubborn he was. Even at the end, when only my charms kept him breathing, he insisted he didn't have my spells. I almost believed him innocent. Hah! What an actor!"

"So he's bested you then?” Sinhalese asked.

"No!” he shouted. “Never!"

Sinhalese tapped her lip with a finger. “Maybe he had them but got rid of them."

"Why?"

"What if you'd gone to the law?” she asked.

"Pah! I'd not waste my time with them!” he snorted.

"Yes,” she urged, “but what if you had? He could have called for a search and made you look like a fool. The more I think of it, the more it seems that he hid them somewhere. He couldn't lose: If you went to the law you couldn't prove anything. Even if you won, you'd look like a fool as the fiasco became public knowledge."

Duff smiled grimly. “What do you suggest?"

"We could try a spellhound,” Sinhalese suggested.

"That'll cost a fortune!"

"If you don't recover that box, your most potent spells are gone,” she said. “We're beggared anyway. At least this way we might get them back and stand a chance of catching those responsible."

"Whoever they are,” Duff snarled, “they'll pay with their lives.” At that point the picture dissolved, as if Jocasta were watching a clichéd drama. The spy toppled to the ground, its life ebbing away.

No longer able to control the urge to be sick, Jocasta ran into the back rooms. She splashed cooling water on her face and reluctantly returned to the front office. “Nothing on that tape,” she said. “All Maltby's ‘confessions’ led nowhere. I suspect that he would have told Duff anything at all to end the torture, especially if he thought that it was what Duff wanted to hear. But if he thought Duff would release him while Task went to look for the spells, he must have been as big a fool as Duff thought he was. After a while, torture takes on a momentum of its own, so Duff would probably never have let him go.” She frowned. “No clues there—just a warning of the kind of man we're involved with."

—But we knew that anyway, surely?—

"Yes,” she said, and her laugh was more a sob, as she shivered. “But there's knowing, and there's
really
knowing."

At home the next morning, as she applied her make-up, she glanced in the mirror at her tiny cubicle, and her shoulders drooped. “You'll have to work ‘til you're three or four hundred before you could afford to actually
buy
a place like this,” she muttered. If she solved this case, she could buy a tiny apartment, but if she failed—she tried not to think about failure.

She'd felt her age and more these last few weeks, but the night before had been her lowest ebb for many, many years. She'd scrimped and saved for most of her life, in a variety of dead-end jobs, before finding clerical work at an agency that was now her competitor. She thought,
Whatever happened to those lovers you used to dream about as a girl?
Romance had passed her by long ago. Men who attracted her had no interest in a workaholic spinster, and she was uninterested in those who did want her. The truth was she had had little time for romance, especially if it threatened to impede what passed for a career.

Pausing at the door she looked around. Her clothes seemed to have become alive, invading the normally immaculate sanctuary of the spellhound's area. This formed the top half of the side of the room, away from the oceanscape that was this week's offer on the window-wall. She still preferred her nest to Duff's mansion: A sofa bed and few cosy rugs and throws were more to her taste than his crystal statuettes and antique pix.

She couldn't even be bothered to tidy the towel that formed a bridge between the hot-air scrubber and the litter tray she shared with the beast. It could wait. Rigidly disciplined at work, Jocasta lived in chaos, leaving the housework to the spellhound, which left her feeling guilty. It had been designed to be more than her unofficial housemaid. She closed the door. The spellhound had left hours before, on the trail of another lead that would probably go nowhere. She walked down echoing corridors, the hum of voices unheard after years of screening out extraneous noise. Her room was in a hive-like building modelled on an antique brownstone on the outside, according to the building manager. She wondered if brownstone was really meant to be that particular shade of dung.

Her plummet down the levitation tube was so familiar she barely noticed her stomach lurch. The spell caught her gently on the ground floor. She emerged into sunlight blinking, her corneas dimming to compensate.

She walked coolly through the congested streets, smiling at the memory of planning her change of career, so ending years of tedium, proud that she'd taken nothing from her old employers except knowing what not to do. She allowed her shoulders to droop slightly, exaggerating the old-maid qualities her clients found reassuring. She'd learnt early that it helped if people underestimated her, but knew too that she sometimes carried it to extremes.

A nudge and an accompanying cry interrupted her reverie. A passerby had collided with her, incurring the shock of her privacy spell.

Her office faced a row of stalls, and she purchased a drink and sweetmeat for her breakfast, as she did every morning. She closed the door on the street. As the smell of food and herbs and spices from the street vendors and the nearby dining inn accompanied her, she activated the air scrubber. Nothing on the message wall came from anyone she wished to talk to, and she left the two messages from Duff unread. She deposited her faux-silk wrap in the inner office and sat cross-legged on the floor, breakfasting while she consulted her oracles.

She heard the crackle of a sending in the outer room. Peering through a crack in the doorway at Duff's image circling the room, looking for her, she shrank back, overcome by blind terror. Damn him! She was grateful she'd always gone to him or he'd have known about the inner office. She fought down a sneeze caused by the peppery smell of the sending.

She wondered now what she'd taken on. It was one thing to land a big job that would make her fortune, something else to take on a case that might lead to her death.

Giving up, the image pressed its hand to the message wall. “Jocasta, this is Duff. Please report to me on your progress,” it intoned and vanished, leaving its message with its two unanswered predecessors.

She breathed a sigh of relief and considered her next move. “Well,” she mused, “we have to give Duff something very, very soon."

That evening Sinhalese adjusted her dress one last time before dinner. Was it her imagination or the light from the mirror? No, she'd definitely lost weight over the last few weeks. Her eyes were bruised with lack of sleep and her mouth, always slightly downturned, had acquired a noticeable droop. When she slept, her dreams often turned into nightmares. Whatever she wore, it seemed to hang badly now. She shrugged.
It will have to do.

Meals in the Duff house were now eaten in silence. They breakfasted in their rooms, and Sinhalese lunched out. She found it difficult being around her father when he was in one of his moods, as he often was nowadays.

This lunchtime she had decided she would eat in and keep an illusion of normality, despite the way her father shredded his napkin and periodically scored the tabletop with a sharp knife. She had prattled about the new powder-blue dress she'd bought to match her eyes and didn't see him glower as she mentioned their friends she'd seen in town. She more than anyone should have understood the strained silence...

Until he roared, “If you don't shut your mouth, I'll shut it for you! I'm trying to keep us alive, and all you do is babble about your blasted dress!” He hurled a glass across the room, and her hands flew to her mouth, chewing at a knuckle. She flinched as he leapt to his feet, but he merely clumped from the room. “Women!” he roared, and she knew he referred not only to her but that Pantile bitch as well.