Bone Song (16 page)

“How goes it?” Mina asked the two young men.

“Well, ma'am,” said one, pale-faced with a dead expression. “We're just filing the results of yesterday's intake. Nineteen incomers.”

“Excellent,” said the other, a froglike grin distorting his bony face. “Picked up a resonant trace from a young girl who was flamewraithed. Thought they'd destroy her bones, but we”—he glanced at his companion—“managed to drag out the perceptions we needed.”

“Good enough to make a match?” asked Mina, meaning a visual ID of the killer.

“Done already, ma'am,” said the serious one.

But something in his voice told Mina that it was the enthusiastic guy who'd done the real work, not the plodder who was sharing the credit. These were two people she needed to keep an eye on.

“All right,” Mina said. “I'm going to make an inspection of storage. No need for you to help,” she added, seeing the enthusiastic Bone Listener starting to rise. “I like to wander 'round the place alone.”

His answering grin was immediate, and Mina realized that he did exactly the same thing: allowing the low vibrations of the bones' trapped memories to play at the edges of his awareness as he walked around the morgue labs and repositories. It was a way of getting a feel for the atmosphere of the place, of noting anything unusual in advance, of being prepared when the postmortem began.

“You're Lexar, right?” said Mina.

“Uh—yes, ma'am.”

“Keep up the good work.” Part of Mina laughed at herself for using the trite phrase. “I mean it.”

“Thank you.”

When Mina stepped through into the interior tunnel, she remembered that the other young man was called Brixhan and realized that he had scowled as she left. Did he think that Mina wouldn't notice?

Thanatos save her from such subordinates . . . but it was unwise to make enemies, even junior ones. Especially when you were planning to break the laws you were supposed to help enforce.

Mina entered the metallic space they called the Honeycomb. Heptagonal steel cells contained the bodies of the dead awaiting analysis. The ends of those cells were sealed with a mistlike wavering of the air: a side effect of the stasis hex that filled each cell.

Stasis prevented degradation of the interference patterns laid down in bones, the same interference patterns that the most experienced of forensic Bone Listeners might deconstruct and reconstruct as they relived the final moments of the dead person's life.

Most often the interference patterns merely confirmed a medical diagnosis, at least within the normal parameters of a physician's ability. Down here, the Bone Listeners knew better than most how much guesswork filled medical science.

By definition, Mina and her colleagues only met the patients who had died.

The metal floors were gently sloping and suffered sudden reversing turns, so that they zigzagged deep down into the subterranean volume of the Honeycomb. Five levels down, Mina came to the section she wanted. She slowed down, checking the numbers on the labels that bore the deceased's details.

Here were some of the long-term stasis cells, where bodies were preserved for years or even decades, usually waiting for some judicial process to complete, so that a body's ownership could be established. There was one corpse, known affectionately as Fat Fredo, who had been in stasis for over 120 years while generations of lawyers argued with their counterparts in distant Zurinam.

Fredo had been some kind of junior diplomat killed in a bar brawl, but there were complications due to the Tristopolitan mayor's daughter, who had been the cause of the fray, and allegations that Fredo had used his position to illegally influence certain business deals. The battery of entwined legal cases dragged on with a life of their own, with the original participants long gone.

Then Mina found the cell she was looking for. The name was written in an ornate script that most Tristopolitans could no longer decipher.

It read:
Malfax Cortindo.

Mina stared at the shimmering stasis field, thinking about what she was going to do. Most forensic Bone Listeners needed the fully resonant chambers that were the autopsy rooms in order to work.

But Mina was aware of her own capabilities, straightforwardly and without a sense of ego. With the right tools—a scalpel and a bone cutter, perhaps a platinum divining scope—she could analyze Cortindo's skull right here.

The question was whether the powers that be were going to insist on holding the corpse in stasis indefinitely—in which case Mina would be safe, because no one ever looked in on the bodies once the stasis field was plugged. Not until it was time for the autopsy.

But if the postmortem decision was made soon, then the interference would be obvious. So would the trail of blame.

“Shit.”

Mina's colleagues would have been surprised to hear her now. She was renowned for her equanimity in difficult circumstances and her insistence on clean language, even when there were only corpses to hear.

Mina placed a hand against the steel rim of the heptagonal cell, as though gaining strength from the metal. Then she pulled away and headed back up the long sloping floor, climbing toward the autopsy rooms, where she kept her own personal set of tools and devices.

Cats moved across the rooftops, searching, comfortable in the darkness, lithe and agile, enjoying their own abilities as they slipped through the night. They hunted tiny silvermoths that flickered in the air. As they spread out across the city, they were alert for any sign of the people that Laura Steele was tracking.

Sometimes the cats met others of their kind and spread the word in a manner undetectable to humans (though Laura might have sensed a little of the phenomenon, had she been present).

That was why one of their number, a scrawny little silver tabby called Spike by the humans who sometimes fed him, was perched on a damp brick wall near the docks, watching a big man in a leather jacket working on the ensorcelled rear door of a mostly deserted building.

Mostly
deserted, but not entirely. Spike's feline senses revealed the rifle and the hidden sniper deep inside as sour tastes or bitter scents in the air. And he sensed a compressed violence barely kept in check by the need for discipline, along with the fear of punishment from someone more evil than the sniper himself.

Lights flared across the door, dissipated, and were gone, leaving no defenses behind. The leather-clad man, Viktor, drew the Grauser from beneath his left armpit, leaving his left hand free to push open the door. He held the weapon close to his chest, where no assailant could grab it.

As Viktor entered the building and was lost from sight, Spike hunched on the wall, a tiny ball of fur, and commenced a tiny buzzing purr.

Donal rolled awake off the bed, stumbled, then hauled himself vertical and stretched hard, vertebrae and tendons popping. Barefoot, he walked around the bedroom, looking for signs that Laura was there, knowing she was gone.

He padded out to the kitchen, which he still hadn't stocked, detecting no sounds in the apartment anywhere save the soft, ongoing sibilant hiss of the internal systems that kept Darksan Tower operational. He called out Laura's name, got nothing back except a micro-echo of his own voice.

Definitely gone.

Perhaps she had scarcely been here, for Donal remembered only that Laura had stood outside the bedroom as he fell onto the bed and into sleep. Perhaps she had left right away and gone back to HQ, having made Donal get the rest he needed.

“Shitfuckbugger,” Donal muttered. “Laura, for Thanatos's sake.”

Picking up his discarded suit jacket from the floor, Donal searched through the pockets until he found a scrap of notepaper he'd stuffed there earlier. It was a list of phone numbers, some of them home numbers, which he could use to contact members of the team at odd hours.

Donal squinted at the steel-handed clock on the wall: it was eleven minutes past two in the morning, but at times like this, normal standards failed to apply.

He took a guess, set the rotary wheels on the bedside phone to Alexa's number, and waited for the ring.

The tone sounded twice, and then there was a click and Alexa's voice said:
“Hello?”

“Hey, it's Donal. I'm glad you're up.”

“Right.”
Alexa sounded hoarse.
“You going in to HQ now?”

“I would, but”—Donal looked at the tangled bedsheets where he'd slept alone—“I have a feeling no one's going to be there, not even Laura.”

“Why? Aren't you two—
” Alexa coughed.
“Sorry. Forget that. None of my business.”

“Maybe.” Donal's laugh came out easily, surprising him. “I
am
at her place. It's just that she isn't. I think she just wanted me to crash.”

“And then what? She went out on the streets?”

“Yeah, I guess. Where would she go?”

“Hang on a minute.”

Donal listened to coughing on the other end of the line, then some muted sounds followed by a faucet running, filling a glass. After a few moments Alexa came back, her voice clearer.

“Two possibilities,”
she told Donal.
“One, she went to Harald's location to join the surveillance team. Second . . .”

“What?”

“Something else. She followed up some lead of her own. She's...Well. She's like that.”

“Thanatos.”

“Yeah, precisely. You okay?”

“Not really. See you near the Illurian embassy?”

“Yeah. See you there.”

Donal put the phone down, found his Magnus, and checked it over, ejecting the magazine and snapping it back in before reholstering.

Time to go to work.

V
iktor moved farther into darkness.

There was a stairwell, and he tested the narrow treads carefully. They were old and prone to creaking, but the edges seemed solid enough. Viktor began his ascent, feet parallel to the treads, using cross steps to climb. He moved carefully, slowing when he reached the first landing. Were there trip wires?

None. Not that he could detect.

With his left hand Viktor drew out his picklocks and continued to climb, knowing that the keys would fluoresce at any hint of a hex field. But there were other, equally dangerous traps. As the gloom intensified, he slowed the pace once more.

The sniper was four more stories up. At this proximity, if Viktor tripped something and the trap itself wasn't fatal, the sniper's response would be. He would come out of hiding and fire down into the stairwell, and that would be it.

Slowly . . .

But there were tricks you could play with time. While part of Viktor's mind remained in the moment and alert to the smallest stimuli, other layers altered their time perception, slowing down to a leisurely pace, to a kind of moving meditation.

Viktor moved upward, farther and farther into the danger zone. Finally he was on the fourth landing, and everything clicked into place inside his skull. The night burned with a dark and silver life.

Where the stray moonlight was coming from was impossible to tell. It was enough to cause the hairs to rise on the back of Viktor's neck as he saw the sliver—
Thanatos and Hades
—like a single thread spun by a nocturnal spider. It stretched across the floor and touched, just touched, the material of his trouser leg.

Trip wire.

Another millimeter and he would have tripped the thing.

Viktor retreated three paces.

Beyond the wire was a shut door, which would open inward. As always, there were two choices: to creep in slow or charge in fast, hoping that momentum would take him beyond whatever trap waited inside. A third choice was to kick in the door and then retreat, ready for what would follow—but the man inside was a sniper, and the last thing Viktor wanted was the sound of a firefight.

On the other side of the street lay several acres of yard and buildings owned by Sally the Claw. While many of the people there were office workers, there would be a couple of dozen foot soldiers at least, all of them ready to shoot.

Viktor's keys remained dull, so there were no hex shields to contend with. Perhaps the elaborate hex alarm down below had seemed enough for the sniper.

With no time left for deliberation, Viktor moved. His foot crashed into the door just below the handle, smashing the lock apart. The door flew inward. Viktor leaped, clearing over ten feet as the prone sniper jerked himself upward.

Down below on the street, the gates to the complex had swung open, and a glimmer of bright yellow indicated an unlikely sight, which Viktor would later think had distracted the sniper for those few extra milliseconds.

But Viktor's own momentum saved him the necessity of processing what he saw. He swung his leg forward powerfully and kicked the sniper in the ass: a move that might have looked comical but crushed the man's coccyx and caused him to arch back, voice frozen. In that moment Viktor descended.

He knee-dropped onto the sniper's spine, hammered the Grauser butt into the back of his neck, then slipped his left forearm under the sniper's chin. Viktor pressed down with his right elbow and applied a sleeper hold, hard.

The man was probably unconscious before the strangle went on, but this would make sure—though it added the risk that he might never wake up. After thirty seconds, Viktor released the hold. He stood up.

The sniper remained prone, unmoving.

As part of checking the environment, Viktor allowed himself to sink quickly, deeply, into a trance, checking for ensorcellment. If the various parts of his mind were no longer in synch with one another, then it might indicate that some form of hex was distorting the neural patterns in his brain, causing hallucination.

Nothing.

That meant several things: not just the lack of hidden, subtle booby traps in this place, but also that the vision Viktor had glimpsed earlier was real.

Just why the gates outside had swung open to let out two dwarves riding a canary-yellow tandem bicycle was unclear—but that was exactly what Viktor remembered seeing. Either that, or twin children wearing false beards.

The sniper began to groan and shake.

Good.

Meanwhile, Spike the alley kitten was already on his way, moving among shadows. He darted across a wall surmounted with fragments of broken bottles. They were fastened in place to discourage human intruders; Spike circumnavigated the sharp-edged shards with ease.

Then he was scrambling up a long-dead tree and slipping along one dry branch that led to a rooftop. High above, a noxeagle glided below moon-tinged clouds, but Spike was aware of the danger. In seconds he was hidden beneath a rusted water tank, waiting for the flying hunter to pass.

Yellowish eyes regarded him from across the roof. It was a parafox, not a deathwolf, but the look in its eyes was nothing like friendly. But even as Spike began to realize the danger he was in, two pairs of eyes suddenly glowed scarlet, followed by a third pair, and a fourth.

The parafox blinked at the appearance of more cats, these rangy and muscular. With one flash of his bushy tail, the parafox turned and slipped away. After a moment, one of the cats, old and gray and torn-eared, made his way across to the water tank where Spike crouched.

The other cats maintained their watch. They were far from familiar territory.

Ducking low, the tomcat peered in at Spike. Spike stared back, and the two cats—the old warrior male and the determined youngster—locked on to each other. Information passed along the entangled channel of feline communication that slips through the deepest geometry of space–time.

Spike began to purr.

Then the older tomcat turned and moved away, accelerating across the rooftop. It took a few seconds for the other cats to realize what had happened, then they, too, were on the move, into the night, heading for their rendezvous with Laura Steele.

There was a spare medical robe in her locker. Mina drew it out and pulled it on over her ordinary clothes. The robe was clean and smelled good. She ran her finger across her instrument case, then rejected it. The damned thing was too heavy to cart several stories down.

Mina had a smaller, zipped traveling case of instruments, which had been given to her by Aldinov, her boyfriend back in graduate school. Aldinov had lost interest in direct proportion to Mina's success and prospects outshining his. Aldinov had been rich—or rather his parents had been—and a useful-but-expensive present like the portable instruments had been a clever idea.

After their affair's bitter ending, Mina had almost thrown away the instruments rather than continue with a reminder of her stupidity. In the end, though, she kept the case and settled on using it only when carrying a full kit was impractical.

Mina slipped the small instrument case into the pocket of her robe. She stared at herself in the small mirror fixed inside her locker door, then swung the door shut. She exited and found herself in Autopsy Room 3, where concave steel benches with built-in drains and antiseptic nozzles were empty and shining.

No stains marked the tiled floor, no scents hung in the air that could penetrate the eternal mist of disinfectant pervading this cold place. Perhaps a hint of steam marked the exhalation of Mina's breath.

Mina crossed the autopsy room and pushed her way through the triple sets of doors. She did not look back as the steel floor began its downward slope toward the Honeycomb, where Malfax Cortindo's corpse waited.

Something rumbled deep beneath her feet. Mina stopped.

“What the Thanatos—”

Mina held herself still, expecting something more. There was nothing. It had felt like a distant train, but no tunnels ran beneath this place. If it was a freak trick of geology and happenstance, then that was all right, but Mina decided she would report this.

All the more reason for doing what she had to do quickly, quietly, and privately.

Her pulse began to beat visibly beneath her thin skin. She took out the instrument case and unzipped it as she walked, drawing out a long, slender scalpel.

She neared the heptagonal cell containing Cortindo, then stopped to look up and down the steel corridor, sensing nothing save the clammy sweat coating her narrow body. Another tremor passed through the floor. This time she was certain.

Whatever was happening, there was danger, and she was its target.

“Fuck you.”

All the decades of medical training, of playing politics with the high and mighty—and immersing herself in the most painful Bone-Listener disciplines—fell away now, leaving only her native toughness.

“Just . . . fuck you.”

Mina hammered her fist into the crystalline ward set at the edge of the cell and watched as the hex shield flared, then began to fade. Inside that dying glare, the unmoving form resolved itself into a dead body, no different from any of the thousands that had passed through here before.

Except this time someone wanted the body back.

Someone who was capable of breaking into this place—but this was
her
place. Mina sliced savagely into the inanimate head of Malfax Cortindo, the scalpel coming away sticky with semiliquid blood.

There was no time to retrieve the other instruments, but that was all right, as Mina hooked her fingers into the flap of scalp and ripped back. She threw herself inside the cell as far as her shoulders, desperate as an explosion banged through the corridor outside. Metal ripped open amid showering dust and noise.

I hear you.

The corpse's exposed skull tasted raw and salty as Mina placed her tongue against it.

Cortindo, I hear you now.

Then Mina pulled her head back. Splaying her fingertips against the bone, she began her quest for one particular song amid the inchoate patterns laid down inside his—Hands clasped Mina's ankles.

“No!”

Strong hands, hauling her away from Cortindo.

“No—”

She shivered as the contact was broken. . . .

“Please, don't—”

. . . and they pulled her into the cold, dusty air. The two small figures who stared at her were ordinary thick-boned men, less than four feet tall but strong. Mina knew in the instant she saw their stone gazes that the rules she had broken, and the rules she had lived by, were of no consequence, not any longer. This was the day her own life ended.

One of the dwarves raised an ax that shimmered with coherent hex waves, its edge capable of slicing through the hardest stone or metal. Biological matter was no kind of challenge. The dwarf drew back his lips; you couldn't call the expression a smile.

Concentrate. Replay.

Mina squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the disciplines.

Remembering the pain.

Concen—

The universe blacked out.

Was finished.

The Robbery-Haunting team was professional. By the time Donal and Alexa arrived, the R–H guys were well settled in place.

They had formed two concentric circles of observation posts around the Illurian embassy. Harald, his gentle eyes beginning to show his exhaustion, took Donal and Alexa on the tour, walking the quiet streets.

“And the limo,” Harald said, as they crossed one of the narrow avenues that led into the heptagon. “R-H impounded it from a counterfeit ring.”

Alexa grinned. Donal checked the vehicle from the edge of his vision, not turning his head, just in case their suspect or someone working with him was mounting a surveillance of his own.

In an area like this, where the grand old houses were owned by diplomats and embassies and occasionally a rich old Tristopolitan family, the normal kind of surveillance vehicle would have stood out: a baker's van, for instance. But the dark-windowed limousine was perfect.

“Who's inside?” Donal asked.

“Guy I know vaguely,” said Harald, “called Ralfinko, and an older guy, a sergeant, who looks like he knows what's what.”

“All right.”

Alexa touched Harald on the arm. “You need to get some rest.”

“No.”

“Er . . . I know you and I have only just met,” said Donal, “but I think she's right, pal.”

“Balls.” Harald spoke softly as always. “All right. My old sergeant used to say, it's only your comrades who can tell you when you're screwing up.”

They were standing under a streetlamp. Harald dug inside his pocket and pulled out a small food box. He flipped back the lid and held out the open box. “Hungry?”

“Um. . . no thanks,” muttered Donal. Inside the box were layered flower petals, orange and darkest purple predominating. “I don't know how you eat that stuff.”

“It's all he ever eats,” said Alexa. “Mr. Gentle, we like to call him.”

“Right.” Donal looked at Harald, who nibbled at one of the petals. “Which sergeant was this that you mentioned?”