Vengeance (7 page)

A booming voice issued from within the shop, so the spellhound joined Jocasta. She looked excited: “There's all kinds of nonsense for separating fools from their money, but also some good stuff amongst the dross. O'Malley's definitely gone, though only very recently, judging by the warmth of the equipment. Listen to this.” She hit the message wall.

A voice, inhumanly loud, filled the room. “Assassins have been sent to kill you! Go now, while you still can!"

"Interesting, huh?” Jocasta hopped from foot to foot. “I checked the time. The first message was an hour after we left Duff's last night. The second was less than an hour later. Duff may have a spy in his camp."

—Perhaps not. O'Malley may have watched Duff's house as a precaution. If the house was watched, my role is obvious.—

"Okay,” Jocasta agreed. “How long has he been gone?"

—Less than twenty-four hours.—The spellhound sniffed around the shop, along every surface, in every gap, into every cranny, muscles straining as it fought to separate what was relevant from the irrelevant. The dust tickled its snout, and it sneezed.

It reached behind the counter, working purely on instinct. There was an explosion within its brain—there! The same set of smells as Duff's study! Its body was as taut as a wire, and fur stood erect along its spine. It raised its head in a moment of triumph, and from deep within it, a whine bubbled, erupting as a howl. It scrabbled, scattering rubbish, and emerged with something. It waved the casing of a spell in triumph.

"It could be the case for the copy we took from Kehmet, though I don't think so,” Jocasta mused. “O'Malley's probably created more than one new copy."

Using the man's scent in the shop as a conductor uses a baton, the spellhound drew a pattern with its paws. A shape began to form. The more the spellhound motioned, the more detailed the picture grew. It drew a sketch, a life-sized three-dimensional portrait of O'Malley. Red-bearded, dome-headed, slightly below average height; green-eyed with wide thick lips and a bulbous nose. He would never have been called handsome, Jocasta thought, but there was something about him. Even the simulacra showed a hint of the real man's undoubted charm. Judging by what emerged from the spellhound's efforts, working overalls were his usual garb, although there was an occasional glimpse of finer clothes, as if a curtain were drawn back then dropped again.

She never ceased to be delighted with the spellhound's talents. Whenever it ‘asked’ a witness about O'Malley, it would conjure up the portrait, and the more it learned of their quarry, the more substantial that portrait would become.

—He has had the spells out. Here, here and here.—It pointed and O'Malley simulacra held the box of Imrhaddyon.—Some spells have been taken by other people.—

She bit her lip:
Two trails to pursue
. “I want the other spells."

—It would make more sense to pursue O'Malley. He still has most of them.—

"Hmm,” she said doubtfully. “I still want those other spells. I need to think on this. Can you sketch the other people?"

Images began to form beside O'Malley's. The first and weakest of them was an old woman dressed in Atlantican costume. “Oh joy. Some of the spells are halfway around the world,” Jocasta said. “Duff won't be pleased. More expense."

—Lack of resolution means she's probably only visited once.—

The second image was of a young man dressed in a loincloth and face paints. “From the Meroë Matriarchy,” Jocasta said.

The image was no better than the first.—A single visit?—

The last image was a young man, tall and handsome, and Jocasta gasped at his almost unbearable beauty; he was too good-looking to be called merely handsome. He had curly brown hair and dark brown eyes. The mouth was wide and generous, and looked as though it might once have smiled a lot, although that wasn't his current expression. The strength of the image implied that he had visited often. She wondered with mounting excitement what on earth he could want here. “The frequency of his visits suggests he's local. Could he be sheltering O'Malley?” She had to know. “Bring him,” she said. “For the moment forget O'Malley. Bring him here, alive."

—I think you're making an error. Duff's instructions—

"If you want to work for Duff so badly, maybe I should sell you to him, and when he's finished with you he can boil you down into glue or experiment on you. In the meantime,” she took a deep breath and continued more calmly, “you work for me."

—As you wish.—

It left, leaving her alone in the quiet and dark.

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In the maze of canyons to the south of the City of Light, amongst the foothills of rubbish, was a collection of boxes. Here was where the detritus of civilisation came to rest. Some of that detritus walked on two legs and spoke. Slum, ghetto, shantytown, barrio: All just words, labels to describe different facets of the insect eye of poverty.

It was a landfill tip, except that what was rubbish to others—such as the rusted hulks of vehicles or carcasses of containers—was treasure to the canyon dwellers.

Flyblown and nauseatingly redolent of ordure, sweat and decay, the canyons hunkered beneath an unforgiving sky which only softened when the rains came, bringing in their wake flash floods that scoured the canyons.

Even the gulls and rats avoided the place, lest they end up as dish du jour. Only the insect kingdom fought with these lowest of the low, poorest of the poor, for the scarce pickings of the sites. To many outsiders, the detritus were little better than vermin themselves, not even human. To those outsiders they were incapable of pleasure and pain, love and hate. And therefore whatever was done to them, whatever they suffered, was of little or no consequence.

In the canyon maze, the detritus went about their daily business of survival. Disease was rife, malnutrition the norm rather than the exception. They had no time, even had they the inclination, to consider that they lived on the very margins of life and death. They were too busy scratching an existence from the stony soil of the canyons. So precious was fertile soil that they built terraces up the walls of the canyons, on which grew maize, substandard bread-trees and inferior meatplants (or fatplants, to quote one local wit). They were too busy surviving to pay much mind to their lot. Not that they were noble savages; they grumbled, bickered, stole, and adulterated as enthusiastically as any others.

A few lucky children, as potbellied and mucus-encrusted as their elders, were allowed to play amongst the rubbish mounds, but the majority worked as soon as they could walk and worked as hard as the adults—from before sunrise until it was so dark they couldn't see what they were doing.

The topography of their community ensured they were as self-contained as vacuum flasks. If the land had been anything other than steep-sided canyons, it would have been claimed by one of the local landowners. Sometimes the seal of their isolation was broken by a visit from individuals who would head straight for Za Kunter's Bar, the only structure resembling a commercial building in the canyon. Over glasses of weak warm beer or shots of potato vodka, they would have muted discussions to the plinking of Za's sitar and the wailing of the same five notes over and over again on the harmonica. Za knew only one tune, but it was one more than anyone else could play.

Visitors rarely left alone. And there would be one less child working the terraces beneath the unforgiving, perennially harsh blue sky. ‘Plenty more where those came from,’ those who ached for their loss consoled themselves. Their fertility was their only asset, as much a means to an end as the snatched pleasure that led to life itself.

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They were just an ordinary couple, a young man and his girl, who met at seven o'clock every night whether the weather was raining or clear, whether the night was moonlit or cloudy. It had always been that way as long as they had been emotionally involved. Last year they had met like this, the year before, even the year before that. He wished their evenings could last longer than ‘Hello’ at seven and a kiss goodnight at eleven, that it could last forever.
Maybe it can
, he thought. Maybe the waiting was finally over.

"It's ten-thirty, Gabriel,” his familiar said.

Sometimes it seemed they'd been waiting all their lives. Well, they had. They'd first met and fallen in love when she was four and he was five.

When they were younger, they'd played tag amongst the maze behind the shop, amongst the bags of obeahs and the boxes of jujus piled high in the storeroom. Apart from her father's workshop, nowhere was out of bounds, and O'Malley's Magic Emporium made a wonderful playground. They still played as they grew up, different games with different rules that became ever more intense.

They should have been married long ago. Last May, the May before; if they'd had their way, the first May he was a man, and she a woman.

His name was Gabriel, and he was an angel to her. To anyone else he was an ordinary guy, if better looking than most, with soft brown eyes that brought out the maternal nature in women.

Her name was Rosina, and she was one-and-a-half metres of red-haired, green-eyed beauty, which came from inside as well as out, for it was as much her temperament as her looks. Looks fade eventually, but character doesn't.

"It's eleven o'clock, Gabriel,” the familiar said. He remembered now. She was asleep. The suburban prince went to kiss his sleeping beauty goodnight.

He'd lived in San Clemente almost all his life, since before memory began. His father had died when he was still a child, leaving his mother with a headstrong son to raise and a scraping of money, enough to get by on but never enough for security.

His father had flown one of the delta wings used for conjuring up the rainfall that scattered rainseeds in the clouds and stopped San Clemente from reverting to the semidesert on the Quelforn side of the mountain. It was tricky work; the delta wings were temperamental, and occasionally one of the pilots would lose control. One morning his father tumbled out of the sky like a swift-spinning, falling leaf, and someone reported they'd heard him complaining the day before that one of the struts ‘wouldn't last much longer'. Though she hadn't asked for anything, the manufacturers must have been afraid Gabriel's mother would, and so they hurriedly, almost furtively, paid her a tiny compensation, ‘as a goodwill gesture.’ The witness disappeared quickly, and everyone was happy.

It had seemed a vast amount to her. Several thousand, after the advocate had taken his fee. Most advocates, he said, would have taken a straight fifty percent of it, so he was quite considerate. They had the house on the outskirts of town, which was now hers outright, and enough to get by on without ever being truly comfortable.

His mother had a persistent, niggling cough and a surfeit of minor illnesses. He heard Rosie's father mutter, “Creaking gates always hang on longest,” and, “The woman only does it for attention.” Rosie's ma shushed him, pointing at the boy. Rosie's pa flushed, and Gabriel wondered what he'd meant.

How different the O'Malleys were—loud and bright and vital. They'd moved to San Clemente from a big city, and Rosie and Gabriel met and fell in love. Uncle Dez, as he told Gabriel to call him, was short and rotund, with almost no hair on his head but a lot on his face, all of it a fiery red.

When his pa had died, Gabriel had been unaware of it. He'd been too young; it was too remote to take in. But when Rosie's ma suddenly died, the security of Gabriel and Rosie's world was abruptly breached. There was talk of ‘a rogue virus from an institute lab,’ but while they understood the words, they couldn't comprehend the meaning, could only see that Shalleen had been young and bright and pretty, suddenly old and frail, then dead, all within a few weeks. Now the world was dangerous, so Gabriel and Rosie drew even closer.

For a year Uncle Dez was so bitter that he was almost a stranger. But time healed, and he became his old self again. He grew, if anything, even friendlier toward Gabriel and his ma. Rosie cried for a time, before admitting that some of the other children had teased her. Said when her pa married his ma, they'd be brother and sister and couldn't be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.

As his voice deepened with the first signs of impending manhood, his own mother got really sick. When the wheezing worsened and she began to cough blood, she finally called for a healer. The healer shook his head and called a specialist, and she shook her head too and muttered about something called emphysema. It was too late, they said. Soon after, there was no danger of Gabe's mother marrying Uncle Dez or anyone else. Her last words were to beg Uncle Dez to look after Gabriel. She left the house in trust with Uncle Dez until Gabe came of age, and then the boy was on his own.

The first year after Ma's death was the worst of Gabe's short life, and only Rosie's nearness made life bearable. The rest of the family treated him kindly, and whatever lingering reservations Uncle Dez might have had about the boy were dispelled by the way he so very clearly made Rosie happy. So he swallowed any doubts he had and was kind to Gabriel. Even Jasper, Rosie's older brother, treated him as almost human.

The second year was easier. The third year, they made plans to marry as soon as possible. Jasper went to study at the Thaumaturigical Institute, but he promised he'd return for the wedding. Gabriel left school, got a nothing job as a dogs-body at the orchard, but that was okay. Rosie finished at the seminary and got a job at the dyeworks. He wasn't very happy about it. The chemicals were dangerous; they made her eyes red, and he knew she deserved better than such a mundane job, but she was happy, so he kept quiet.

In the evenings they always met outside her father's magic shop. By now they both knew most of it wasn't really magic, some of it just things for the foolish to gawp at. But there was enough magic there, and childhood memories always drew them back.

The corner of the shop away from the street had been their patch when they were younger and became their rendezvous when they became real boyfriend and girlfriend. Not the side with the desiccated parts of animals, and if rumour were true, even people. Nor the part where the pills and potions were piled high into unstable towers. It was the part lit by old lamps, not magical at all, O'Malley admitted, just a collection of antique lamps casting multicoloured beams of light. That corner was their place, where the lamps’ light, bouncing off mirrors at the back of the window, striking through the flasks and bottles, made little sunbursts of amber, gold, turquoise, and aquamarine reflecting off the jewelled surfaces in the window. That little niche by the end, that little square of pavement in front of the shop. Every night he stood there, when it was still not yet seven o'clock, oblivious of everything else around him, humming a tune.