Managing Death (23 page)

‘No. Stirrers don’t operate this way. They’re not nearly as subtle.’

Solstice taps a blackened hub cap with one foot. ‘Do you call this subtle?’ He sighs. ‘Look, you’ve had a long night. Maybe you should go home. Rest up, get ready for all the questions I’m going to be asking you when I get my head around this.’

He thumps my back, and stares over at Alex. ‘And tell that hack cop we don’t need him here.’

‘He’s here as a friend.’

‘He’s a fucking nuisance, that’s what he is.’

I walk over to Alex. He’s glaring at Solstice.

‘What did the prick say?’

‘He’d like you to leave his crime scene.’

‘
His
crime scene?’

‘Alex, he has a point. Besides, the less he’s thinking about you the better. Have you found out anything new?’

‘Just how much I hate bureaucracies. Getting anything on these Closers is next to impossible. Look, the less I find the more worried it makes me,’ Alex says. ‘And then the harder I look. I’ll find something.’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘That’s what I like to hear.’

Oscar gets us home quickly. I can’t help thinking that, in a way, we’re lucky. If that bomb had gone off in the garage, Oscar, Travis and Lissa would all be dead. If it had gone off at the lookout there’s no telling how many casualties there would have been. And all because some ex-employee who predates my time with the company has a vendetta against me. Because I succeeded where he failed.

When we pull into the driveway, something else grabs my attention. This day just isn’t going to end!

‘Are you feeling that?’ I ask Lissa.

‘Yes, it’s not what it should be, but after today, I recognise it.’

We both look at the brace symbol above the front door. It should be glowing. It’s not.

‘What are you two talking about?’ Oscar says.

‘You’re going to have to stay in the car,’ I say to him. ‘This is something you can’t handle.’

Lissa and I slide out of the Hummer and hurry up the front steps and onto the verandah. I have the door open in a moment, and we slip inside my parents’ house. Now, I used to sneak in here a lot, when I was dating. I know every single creaking floorboard, every single shadowed alcove. Lissa follows my steps. We reach the living room with barely a sound above Lissa’s racing heart and the whisper of our breathing.

Here the sensation, the taste, is stronger. But not as strong as I’d expect.

I signal to Lissa and she nods, pulling out her knife.

I creep through the living room, then into the kitchen. Lissa is behind me, the only person I would ever trust with a knife in that position.

It’s sitting there, in one of the kitchen chairs.

‘Get out of here,’ I snarl.

The Stirrer smiles. Blood has settled along its cheekbones. Its eyes are dead: blank. It turns towards us clumsily. Every movement must be difficult for this creature. It can’t have inhabited the body for very long, no more than a couple of hours, maybe much less. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

‘Am I supposed to?’

The Stirrer nods towards Lissa. ‘I took over her … remains.’

How could I forget? When Morrigan murdered Lissa, this Stirrer used her body. It had even come to me and tried to make a deal.

‘You bitch!’ Lissa almost leaps over the table. I’m normally the one doing something stupid. I grab her arm, and it’s a strain to keep her here with me.

‘Not yet,’ I say.

The Stirrer’s grin is a challenge to us both. ‘You need to listen to me,’ it says. ‘Things are accelerating, but we are not as unified as you might think.’

‘Is that what you told Morrigan?’ Lissa demands.

I can feel the Stirrer now. Its absence. I can feel the things it is drawing away from the world; it’s like a cloud that has passed over the sun.

‘Morrigan was a mistake. It got out of our control.’

I notice the brace symbol tattooed on its thumb. This Stirrer shouldn’t exist. And it shouldn’t have passed through all the safeguards that I have set up throughout the house.

But here it is staring at me, in a body I do not recognise, for all its Pomp tattoos. Who did he work for? The relief I feel that it’s not one of my Pomps is followed quickly by guilt.

‘I found him outside your home.’ It lifts its head and I see the red line slashed across its throat. ‘I just took what was convenient. You really should clean up more frequently. My host has been dead for some time.’

‘What do you have to say?’ I ask, still holding Lissa back. She’s shaking with rage.

‘Not all of us are happy to see our god approaching. Some of us are scared. Some of us may be willing to change sides.’

‘What for?’

‘To see the sun again. To live among you, godless. After all, this place was ours long before it was yours. You who live owe us that much –’

‘That’s it!’ Lissa snarls, and shakes free of my hand. ‘We don’t trust Stirrers around here.’

She slides her knife over her palm and slams it against the Stirrer’s face. There’s a soft detonation, the air gathers something about itself, and takes the motion from the corpse. The body drops, all smug smiles and jerky movement taken from its limbs. I look down at it. There’s no hint that a Stirrer ever inhabited the body.

Then it smashes into me. The Stirrer’s soul. It’s as though I’ve curled myself around a ball of razor wire. I drop, and howl.

I close my hands around the scythe.

It feels so good, doesn’t it?

And it does.

Now let us kill.

Something shakes my shoulder, jolts me awake. My head rests on a cushion and Lissa is holding my hand, whispering soothing nonsense.

‘You had me worried there.’

‘It’ll take more than a stall to kill me, no matter how rough. Why’d you wake me from the first decent rest I’ve had in ages?’ I murmur.

‘You were screaming. And then you started to chuckle.’ Lissa doesn’t laugh. I blink at her. ‘When did that start happening?’

‘Just then. A stall has never hurt like that before.’

Lissa smiles grimly. ‘I’m glad you spared me from it.’

‘You’re welcome. The Stirrers are definitely getting stronger. And I don’t like what that suggests. But next time, maybe we should let the Stirrer speak.’

‘I don’t trust ’em,’ Lissa says. ‘Especially ones that take over my body and talk about what we owe it.’

‘I understand, but –’

‘No buts. That Stirrer was in our house. It should never have been here.’

Christ, I wish I could see things in such black and white ways. It can only mean that the Stirrer god is nearing. I have to sort this mess out with Rillman and fast; the sideshow is obscuring the main event.

Lissa frowns and crouches down by the corpse. One of its palms is marked in black ink with a bisected half circle.

‘Do you recognise that?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, it’s the same symbol our electrical friends in their safe house had on them.’

‘I think the Stirrers have found themselves something that counteracts the brace symbol.’

‘Something
that
simple? It’s hard to believe it has any efficacy,’ Lissa says.

‘The brace symbol is simple too. It has to be. Mr D told me that the universe rails against complexity, it likes to break the curlicues and the squiggles down.’

‘He’s a poet,’ Lissa says, with a wry grin. ‘Maybe he has something to say about all of this. Maybe you should go and find out.’

‘Are you going to be all right here?’

Lissa raises her bloody palm. ‘As long as this works I will.’

If you lose your trust in blood, what do you have left? Up until the last couple of days I would have found it impossible to believe anything could trip up the old ways of stalling. Yet here we are.

‘Be safe,’ we say simultaneously.

‘I was expecting you. I could feel it, don’t ask me how. Maybe we’re developing some sort of link. After all, you are the closest thing I have to a living relative,’ Mr D says, with two cups of steaming tea on a table by his chair. I don’t bother asking where the new furniture came from. The One Tree creaks around us. He’s just put down a copy of Fritz Leiber’s novel
Our Lady of Darkness.
He’s halfway through the book, I see. I slide a chair over to the table. There’s no point rushing Mr D. Even if I’m in a hurry, he isn’t.

On the uppermost branch above us is where my Negotiation took place. A Negotiation involving more pain than I’d ever thought possible. I keep finding new limits to that. My capacity to contain it has increased and the universe seems intent on filling it.

On the branches beneath us people clamber and climb, finding places where the tree is happy to absorb them and pass them on to the Deepest Dark. Every soul has a different spot, a different length of time to be spent in the Underworld. But Pomps, once they pass, don’t spend much time here. Maybe the One Tree is frightened that we’ll mess it up.

‘Sometimes I can feel the tree calling me,’ Mr D says. ‘It would dearly love to have my soul. I’ve been here for so long and the tree is something of a stickler for the natural order of things.’

‘You’re not tempted to go?’

He nods towards the Leiber novel, and the pile of paperbacks behind it replenished by visits to the markets below. ‘I’ve a lot of reading to catch up on. Besides, you need my help.’

It’s as good a reason as any I suppose. If only he was giving me more than the barest slivers of help. I bite my tongue, though.

‘What do you think of your little world?’ Mr D asks gesturing out at the Underworld.

‘It doesn’t feel like mine.’

‘I was surprised by that myself. You went into this with no expectations. I envied you that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There were no expectations to be disappointed. You’re the regional Death. This land bows to you, but it also has a very strong sense of what it wants to be. You can either fight it, and it will struggle, even as it bends to your will, or reach some sort of agreement. During my, er, tenure, I preferred the latter. I’d already had my fill of fighting. Nature will win out. I will, one day, let the tree take me.’

‘But nature doesn’t always win out. A Stirrer visited me today. Walked through my braces, and it had this on its wrist.’ I draw the symbol in the air.

Mr D slaps my hand. ‘You don’t want to be drawing that symbol here!’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing good, that’s for sure.’

‘I thought this was my region.’

‘It is, but regions are always imperilled, and that symbol’s a siege engine of a most terrible sort. I haven’t seen it since –’

‘Would the name Francis Rillman be tied up with it by any chance?’ I get out of my chair and round on Mr D. ‘What the fuck is it that you’re hiding from me?’

Mr D smiles. It’s an expression that I suspect he thinks is calming but it’s actually the most irritating thing I’ve seen all day, particularly as it is wrapped in his various faces. ‘I assure you, Steven, that I’m not trying to hide anything from you. I don’t work that way, and if anyone should know that it’s you.’ He sees his
approach isn’t exactly working and sighs. ‘Yes, Rillman is involved. He was one of the best Ankous I ever had. Better than Morrigan, and more trustworthy – or so I thought. Francis failed the Orpheus Manoeuvre, but before that he had started a Schism. And like Morrigan he made deals with the Stirrers, but unlike Morrigan he’d designed a new symbol. I can’t tell you what sort of genius that must take, but there hadn’t been a new symbol in pomping since the Renaissance.

‘He used his in a most peculiar way. He stole my powers – well, learnt to mimic them. But he wasn’t smart enough – or was perhaps too smart. He killed his beloved, Maddie. You see, she was a Pomp. I liked her, too. Steven, always know your staff. Know them as deeply as you can, watch their careers, and watch your back. She was against his Schism, she refused to become a Black Sheep, even tried to stop him. And when that happened everything fell apart for him. He tried to get her back and when I stopped him, well, he wasn’t happy. His Schism gambit had failed and he had lost his love. And theirs was a grand love, in spite of his ambitions. It sometimes works out that way. You know, I think he would have succeeded but for me. He certainly had Neti’s support.’

‘Aunt Neti?’

‘Yes, she could see the romance in it. But I think, too, she was pleased that he came to her, that he followed the traditions.’

‘She certainly thinks poorly of me.’

‘You’re an RM. It doesn’t matter what she thinks.’ He sips on his tea. ‘I really believe, now, that he may have been the inspiration for Morrigan’s Schism – only Morrigan was more thorough, and heartless. But that old bastard never got his hands on the new symbol. That, I kept hidden.’

‘You could have told me about it.’

Mr D nods. ‘Yes, I could have, de Selby, but I never expected to see it again.’

‘So after Rillman lost the love of his life?’

‘Not just once,’ Mr D says, ‘twice. He found her in Hell, as you found Lissa. Only I was waiting on the border. She returned to the One Tree.’

‘What did that do to him?’ I don’t really need to ask the question, and Mr D sees that, but he plays along.

‘He turned to the Stirrers, got in with them even more deeply. I guess he figured that they would know what he didn’t. How to get his wife back.’

‘Did they?’

‘No, their skills don’t work that way. The bastard has no sympathy from me – you don’t deal with the enemy. I actually banished him from my region, would you believe? Thought that would be enough, but then I didn’t expect another Schism so close to his. If he’s back in the region it’s only because I’m dead.’

‘Could I banish him?’

‘I don’t think so. You’re too new to your powers.
It’d probably kill you. No, you’re going to have to face him the old way.’

‘With knives and death?’

‘I was going to say with lawyers, law men, the full force of jurisprudence. But sure, knives and death … That could work, too.’ Mr D looks mildly annoyed now, which is a fair sign that he is mightily pissed off. He’s not even drinking his tea, but continues on.

‘Rillman opened the door for Morrigan, gave him ideas. And more, like I said, the little bastard stole some of my powers.’ He indicates his face. ‘This. Showy as it is, was mine. He stole that from me, made it somewhat less unique, less artistic.’ Mr D squints into his tea, then pushes it aside as though disgusted by what the tea leaves have told him. ‘I’ve got some beer up here if you would like.’