Immortal Twilight (12 page)

Kane looked at her with disdain. “Your knowledge never ceases to amaze—and bore—me, Baptiste.”

“It may be important,” she told him in response. “This whole...redoubt, perhaps we should call it...it’s stuffed with art treasures from a certain era. What’s more, I haven’t seen anything I’ve recognized. Like the sketches we found at the entryway and the giant mural in the tunnel back there, a lot of this stuff seems to have been inspired by a particular set of models, implying that they may have been created by the same hand.”

“You think an artist was stuck down here?” Grant asked, a little taken aback.

“I think art played a very great role in these people’s lives,” Brigid said thoughtfully. “If they were locked down here for a long time, that may in fact have been all they had to cling to.”

“Deranged playwrights,” Kane muttered, shaking his head. “What are they going to do? Baffle us with their witty ripostes?”

“One of them spoke of art,” Grant recalled, bringing the tone of levity back down. “When they attacked us, he said something about a dance.... ‘The dance of war and beauty.’ That’s what he called it.”

Warily, the three Cerberus warriors backed out of the storeroom and continued along the brightly tiled tunnel. There was no noise coming from the underground facility other than the faint hiss of the gas lamps, spaced wide apart along the tunnel’s length. The tunnel ended in a broad archway decorated with elaborate toolings in gold and bronze beyond which hung a heavy drape. Like the mural, the workmanship was exquisite, representations of what appeared to be Greek gods reaching down to touch man with fire.

“Prometheus bringing fire to mortals,” Brigid observed. “A parable for knowledge.”

Weapons raised, Kane pushed back the heavy drape and the three of them passed through into the next area of the underground complex. They found themselves in a small room with a balcony that left it open on three sides, with the drape hanging over the wall behind them. There were stylized columns to either side of the partitioned doorway, with decorative carvings akin to those they had found around the door. Four seats had been placed in the area, facing out toward the low balcony. Something was illuminated beyond the balcony, casting its ghostly light into this otherwise unlit space.

Warily, Grant padded forward, his Copperhead held out before him in readiness. Beyond the edge of the balcony stood a wooden theater stage with heavy curtains drawn back from its performance area. The balcony looked onto the stage where it lay ten feet below, providing a perfect view of any activity that happened there. Right now the stage contained just one thing—a figure, naked and kneeling in its center, uplit by the lights that rang along the foot of the platform. The figure was hugging itself, sobbing in great silent shudders of agony.

“What the hell?” Grant muttered as he peered over the balcony’s edge. He brought his blaster to bear on the mysterious figure and shouted a command. “Hands where I can see them—right now!”

Grant had a clear shot. It would be the work of just an instant to dispatch the stranger. On stage, the naked figure didn’t so much as react, though its shoulders continued to heave as though it was sobbing heavily. Grant recalled what had happened to Shizuka and to himself over in the Panamint factory, how quickly their attackers had moved. This time he wasn’t going to take any chances. He slid his finger against the trigger of the Copperhead assault rifle and prepared to fire.

Chapter 12

They walked the streets of Hope, gods among men.

Antonia, Hugh, Algernon and Cecily walked four abreast through the slums, where the lost sold their wares or their morals or their lives, whatever they still had that people would buy.

The streets were like rabbit warrens, human waste and death littering every corner and every nook. But there, amid all that devastation, all that horror that had become normalized, there walked four godlike beings dressed in the finest silks and velvets, lace collars and cuffs on the men’s shirts, lace trims on the women’s dresses that swept the ground like the wings of a swan taking flight.

The people of Hope stopped and watched—how could they not? The gaudy slut whores sneered in inverted snobbery at the way the two women presented themselves, calling them cheap, calling them the very things that the whores were. The men elicited comments, too, some unkind, some appreciative. But they made an impression on everyone, these beautiful, transient beings walking amid the scum and the wretched evil to which the people of Hope had become desensitized.

“Look at them,” Algie sneered, his golden locks bouncing with each step. “Poor, wretched creatures. They have been forgotten by their gods.”

From the end of the line, Cecily inclined her head, catching Hugh’s attention. “Is that true? Have their gods really abandoned them?”

“Gods?” Hugh repeated. “These people never had gods. Places like this—no god would step in a place so morbidly defiled.”

“Is the whole world like this now, do you think?” Antonia asked. Her dark hair had been propped beneath a hat whose crown appeared too small, its broad brim shading her eyes from the afternoon sun.

“So much has changed since we were...” Cecily stopped, seeing the warning in Hugh’s eye. “Since the last time we looked,” she corrected.

Hugh nodded once, accepting the blonde woman’s point in the spirit in which it was meant.

“But people surely cannot live like this,” Algernon insisted as he stepped over the rotting corpse of a dog. Flies buzzed around the corpse and bold rats scurried just a couple of feet out of the path of Algernon’s patent leather shoes. “Surely this cannot be.”

Hugh shook his head. “They can and they do,” he insisted.

“But it isn’t
moral,
” Antonia insisted. “Algie’s right.”

“We should do something,” Cecily chimed in, looking to the others for approval. “We should—oh, I don’t know—fix things.”

“Make the world a better place,” Algernon clarified, his blue eyes roving the street where beggars and cripples lay in the shadows of hastily constructed shacks, waiting out their days until death took them. They would suffer first, he could envisage, suffer more than they already had. It wounded him in a distant, removed kind of way.

Antonia took three quick steps ahead of the others and turned around to face them, stopping them in their tracks. “We were born for better than this,” she reminded them. “The empire was supposed to fall to our protection, the Dors who ran the world.”

“That dream was boring,” Algernon said, mocking her with an affected yawn.

“It got old very quickly,” Cecily agreed. “That’s why they chose to hide us away, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it was for safekeeping,” Antonia challenged, “the way one keeps one’s Sunday best hidden in the wardrobe, away from the light.”

As she finished, Algernon’s right arm snapped out and he pulled a street urchin from his feet. Ten years old, scrawny and malnourished, the urchin had a dirt-smeared face and he was just in the business of pocketing Algernon’s fob watch—pure gold with diamonds in the fidget.

“Hey, let me down,” the street thief shouted, calling Algernon and his friends a litany of vulgar names.

“You stole my ticker,” Algernon berated the child.

“Get off me,” the child replied, squirming in Algernon’s grip.

“I’ll tell you what,” Algernon said, clutching the lad in a strong one-handed grip. “You may keep my ticker if I can have yours. Fair?”

The boy’s face screwed up in consternation and he spat in Algernon’s face. “Go fuck yourself, big nose!”

Algie looked the boy up and down, a thin smile curving his lip. “Quite,” he dismissed, reaching forward with his free hand.

The boy watched as the dandy’s hand came very slowly toward him, and all around Algernon’s friends fell silent to watch. Fingers extended, Algernon pressed his fingertips against the lad’s chest. The boy squirmed and began to scream, struggling against Algernon’s strong grip. Then Algie’s fingers penetrated his chest in what appeared to be an effortless move, tearing through the dirt-stained shirt the youngster wore, bending his ribs as he reached inside their cage.

A moment later Algernon’s hand emerged from the boy’s chest, red and bloody, and it clutched his still-pumping heart. “A ticker for a ticker,” Algernon said as he let go of the boy’s collar. Already dead, the boy crashed to the ground, his heart beating its last in Algernon’s hand.

If anyone had seen this episode in the cruel back streets of Hope, they wisely chose to ignore it and go about their business, preferring not to get involved with immaculately dressed strangers who could pluck a child’s heart from his chest with no more effort than one might pluck an apple from a branch.

“So what are we to do?” Algernon said, tossing the warm heart in the air as if he were casually flipping a coin. “Fix all this? The Sunday best come out of the wardrobe?”

Cecily sighed as she spoke. “A place like this...it’s beyond redemption.”

“No,” Hugh told them. “A man must always strive to be better than the environment he inhabits. A place like this can be
adjusted.
”

“What do you propose, Hugh, old man?” Algernon asked, the cooling child’s heart forgotten in his hand.

“Art shall be the people’s salvation,” Hugh decided. “For no society can possibly flourish without great art. We shall encourage them, like the gods they are so sorely bereft from.”

Antonia unleashed a braying laugh that echoed off the close-packed quarters of the street. “We’ll be their gods,” she said between loud guffaws. “Oh, how rich. How absurdly delicious.”

Algernon turned his hand over and dropped the heart. “We are gods to them already. They are weak where we are strong. We have invention—they have
this.
”

“I like this idea of using art to spur them,” Cecily announced. “We could make sure art from the smells and the hells and the...cells that make up their fragile little lives.”

“A challenge, then,” Hugh proposed, leading them from one alleyway to the next, past a stall selling char-grilled rat in chunks. “We shall, each of us, generate a new piece of art. A piece of art so magnificent that it can alter the world and its people’s outlook. Art worthy of our new empire. Are we all agreed?”

Algernon applauded. “What is there to possibly disagree with?” he pointed out quite reasonably.

“Then we rise to bring mankind up from the swill of the gutter,” Hugh said, “to show it the error of its ways, to see once again the magnificent stars.”

Together, the four strangers made the pact, as the denizens of Hope fought and starved and rotted all around them.

Chapter 13

“Grant, wait,” Brigid said, her hand reaching across and dipping the muzzle of Grant’s blaster as he prepared to fire.

The dark-skinned ex-mag glanced at her angrily, eyes narrowed in rage. “What the fuck do you think you’re...?”

“We don’t know who this is,” Brigid said, keeping her voice calm.

“He’s one of them,” Grant insisted, pulling the Copperhead up against the pressure that Brigid had placed upon it. “I’m not taking any chances,
archivist.
” He spat the last as though it was an insult.

Kane had stepped up to the balcony now, as well, and he turned from the figure on stage to Grant, eyeing his partner with concern. “Baptiste is right,” he said.

“The hell she is.”

“Put the gun down—partner,” Kane urged.

“We won’t learn anything if he’s dead,” Brigid added.

Grant looked from Kane to Brigid, the need for revenge burning inside him. Logically he knew he was acting foolishly, that he needed to stay rational. Shizuka’s condition had gotten him freaked; the way those strangers had taken him and the most capable woman he had ever met out without even breathing hard was preying on his mind. Finally, he lowered the weapon, though his expression remained dark. “If he moves, does anything—I’m blasting and you can question whatever body parts remain,” he told the others.

Kane patted Grant firmly on the shoulder. “Seems fair.”

On stage, the mysterious figure had not moved.

“There has to be a way to get down there,” Brigid reasoned, leaning out over the balcony and searching for a staircase.

Kane brushed past her and placed a firm hand on the crossbar of the balcony itself, testing its strength. “Up and over,” he suggested.

Before Brigid could respond, Kane had done just that, vaulting over the side of the balcony and leaping the ten feet or so to the floor below.

Grant shrugged and followed, hefting one booted foot onto the balcony and using it to spring over the side, the Copperhead rifle held in one hand as he leaped.

Annoyed, Brigid followed the two men, edging herself over the side and dropping down with a little less gung-ho machismo on display.

Down on the stage, the naked figure remained hunched over himself, his legs pulled up and together, arms wrapped around his knees. He was definitely male, Kane noted. The musculature was that of a man—and a physically strong one at that. His head was hairless, though Kane could see he was still a young man.

“Hey, friend,” Kane called as he walked across the tiny auditorium between twin rows of seats, a dozen in all. He had his Sin Eater still resting in his grip, but he held it to his side, disguising it somewhat with his leg. “Sorry if my buddy scared you back then—he’s a little tense. You okay?”

The figure on stage didn’t move, and as Kane got closer he could hear the sobbing like a low, whimpering trill.

“Hey,” Kane said, climbing onto the raised stage. It was raised only a few feet off the ground, the step up just a little higher than a normal stair. “You okay? What’s up? Why are you crying?”

The figure said nothing; he didn’t even bother to look up at Kane. As he got closer, Kane saw something glinting on the figure’s wrist, a chain with a little metal tag set in it like the face of a wrist chron.

Kane leaned down, still holding the blaster in his hand as he brought himself to roughly the same level as the crying man. Behind him, Kane knew that Grant would be covering them both with the Copperhead, and he suspected Baptiste was doing much the same, covering the tiny auditorium in case anyone else materialized from a shadowy corner or from behind a drape. Kane reached out and touched the figure’s left arm, and the sobbing man flinched, ducking away from Kane’s touch as if it had burned him. He looked up at Kane, eyes wide with fear. One eye was pale blue while the other was brown like tanned leather.

“It’s okay,” Kane assured him, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m Kane. Care to tell me who you are?”

The figure continued to eye him warily, tears staining his cheeks, eyes wide and fearful.

Brigid was searching the auditorium in front of the stage. The seats looked well upholstered, although the stuffing seemed to have sunk with age, and they released the distinctive smell of dust when she patted one. There was just the one lone box overlooking the stage, a fine gold shield engraved in its paneling. Brigid recognized the shield—it was the House of Hanover, the same shield that she had seen on the map that had led them here.

Briskly, she located the only exit, an arched and curtained doorway that led to a narrow flight of tightly spiraled stairs, doubtless to best use the underground space efficiently. With a word to Grant, Brigid made her way into the stairwell, investigating where it led.

On stage, Kane continued to encourage the naked man to converse, but the stranger was having none of it. As a magistrate, Kane had handled difficult people, reticent prisoners and people in altered states of consciousness, and he knew the procedures for dealing with them. He recalled his training, continued to speak gently to the man, encouraging but not forcing him to speak.

This close, Kane could see the thing on the man’s hand contained a name tag, like something one might place around the collar of a pet. Beautifully decorated at its edges, the tag’s center contained a string of numbers along with the name Harold.

“Harold?” Kane asked. “Is that your name? What do they call you? Hal, maybe? You look like a Hal to me.”

The naked man said nothing. He just continued to stare at Kane with those strangely wounded, empty eyes.

* * *

B
RIGID
FOUND
THE
FIRST
of the bodies a quarter turn around the spiral stairwell, though she could smell it before that. Even so, she jumped when she saw the figure lying there, sprawled on the stairs, feet above his head, limbs protruding at awkward angles. It was a man, his skull crushed at the sides, forcing his terrified features into a compact narrow block as if he was staring through the gap between close-set buildings.

She held her blaster on him for a moment—nonsensically; aware that the man had to be dead. His skin was tinted blue from blood loss and there was a film over his staring eyes. She took a step over the body, trying not to look at the gaping wound that had colored his chest the hideous brown of dry blood, and peered farther up the staircase, her blaster thrust before her. She used a TP-9 semiautomatic, a bulky hand pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, creating a lopsided square in the user’s hand, hand and wrist making the final side and corner.

Slowly, gun unwavering before her, she continued to ascend the stairs.

* * *

B
ELOW
, G
RANT
WAS
EXAMINING
the auditorium where the stage was constructed. It was a small space, but the high ceiling gave a sense of grandeur and would help carry sound around the room. Besides the twin rows of velvet-backed seats, there were wall lamps that could be manually dimmed, and a curtained area at the side of the stage itself. Grant pushed back the curtain using the end of his blaster, nudging it aside. The metal curtain rings squeaked discordantly as they inched across the brass rail.

Behind the curtain, Grant saw a small, unlit room where costumes hung on racks, both male and female though all of them appeared to be of a similar size. The similarity of costumes indicated to Grant that the stage players were a tight cast, taking multiple roles and being recast with each new production.

A shelving unit near the back of the room contained clothbound manuscripts. Grant grabbed one at random and flicked through it, tilting its pages slightly to catch the light from the stage. The pages contained details of a play, stage direction and dialogue written out in hand. The penmanship was exquisite, great looping letters within which beautiful cameos and artworks had been drawn. It was something that could not be artificially reproduced.

* * *

O
N
STAGE
, K
ANE
CONTINUED
trying to reassure naked Harold. The man watched him with his duo-toned eyes, no sign of understanding behind them.

* * *

B
RIGID
FOUND
THE
SECOND
CORPSE
at the top of the winding staircase, sprawled against a wall with a hunk of his chest in ruins on the floor between his open legs. He was a stocky man and his eyes had been gouged out and his skin had been flayed, great rents of it torn from his face and hands. Brigid gagged when she saw this. The man had suffered at the hands of his torturer; of that there could be no question.

The walls here were a pale gray color, lit once more by the inconstant glow of gas lamps on elaborate wall brackets. There was an open doorway to the left and a line of closed doors on the right. Each door had been painted with representations of flowers, creeping plants winding down the height of the wood. Taking a closer look, Brigid saw pixies or fairies playing among the flowers, playing pipes and drums as they danced on the leaves.

Brigid glanced in the open doorway, acknowledging a large room that looked something like a gymnasium. The room was unlit and Brigid was determined to come back to it once she had confirmed what was behind the painted doors.

She peered behind each door in turn, confirming that no one was lurking there and that there were no more dead bodies. Behind the doors were rooms, each containing a large double bed and a desk with a lamp with a decorative shade. The beds and the lamps looked ancient, recalling Victorian England. There were trinkets in each room, mechanical jewelry boxes with clockwork dancers that would pop up when the lid was opened, books containing aged photographs and drawings, a great atlas showing the world as it was in 1895. Each room contained a partitioned area with a wardrobe-cum-dressing-room. Brigid took a moment to riffle through the clothes hanging on the rail of the first, discovering long dresses in the ornate Victorian style. Her heart sank, recalling the way that Grant had described his attackers in the Panamint factory.

The final room contained bathing facilities along with a toilet, scale marring the porcelain sheen, newly deposited feces and urine spattered against the floor.

After a quick sweep, Brigid left the side rooms and checked the end of the corridor, where the tunnel bent sharply to meet the one that she, Kane and Grant had used to reach the theater box. There was no one else here, just one last room to check.

She strode back down the corridor, boot heels echoing on the floor tiles, and made her way to the open doorway that waited to her right. TP-9 still in hand, Brigid used her free hand to activate her flashlight before stepping through the doorway. The beam of light played across a large, almost square room that contained various items of training equipment. The gear was old-fashioned—no, not old-fashioned, Brigid mentally corrected, simply old. There were leather punching bags, wooden vaulting horses, ropes and a marked-out sparring ring.

And there was something else, too. Brigid’s beam passed over a metal plate on the wall, and she moved the flashlight back to check it more carefully. Wide as a door, the brass plate stood taller than Brigid and it seemed at first glance to contain a face. On closer inspection she saw that the “face” was actually an effect created by two round control knobs and an oscillator scope that ran beneath them like a mouth. There were other dials and knobs on the wall plate, several level indicators held behind glass.

Brigid reached forward, turning the most prominent dial, a black knob that rotated with a clicking noise. As she did so, soft lights illuminated the doorlike metal slab from above and within the casing itself, and she heard the crackling recording of a man’s voice emanate from a single speaker at the midpoint of the plate.

“Welcome to the WarCreche, Dorian. Opponent selected. Sequence begins.”

* * *

T
WENTY
FEET
BELOW
B
RIGID
, Kane was still kneeling on the stage before the eerily silent figure he had found there.

“Can you talk?” Kane asked. “English? Um...
parlez-vous Français?
”

Nothing.

Dammit, he was running out of ideas. The guy continued to stare at Kane, his eyes flicking down to the automatic pistol that he held in his right hand. Maybe the gun was frightening him, Kane figured. He held his hand up before the man’s face, making a show of it, the barrel pointed away at the ceiling. Then, with a long-practiced flinch of trained wrist tendons, Kane commanded the Sin Eater back into its hidden holster.

“There,” he said. “I put it away. The blaster’s not going to hurt you.”

Without warning, the man reached forward and grabbed Kane by the neck with both hands, driving him down onto the stage with all his weight.