City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World) (15 page)

Her voice was calm as she cut straight to the pertinent questions. “Where are you? Are you in danger?”
 

“On the street right in front of the theater. Probably.”

“Vivian’s on her way. If you have to move, call me back.” The line went dead.
 

I stayed crouched next to Iris. All around, the street was quiet, but I couldn’t trust that we were alone. From now on, I was going to start packing a flashlight.

Belatedly, I remembered Copper’s gun, buried in my bag. In easier reach was one of the pistols dropped by our attackers. They hadn’t stopped to collect their things before they fled. I fumbled the closest one into a comfortable grip and pointed it forward, out into the darkness. I could only hope I looked like I knew what I was doing.
 

Was Syed still out there, lurking in the shadows? Had he sent that thing inside him back out into the night? Would I see it coming? Every strip of darkness was suspicious. In the corner of my eye, every shadow seemed to be moving.
 

Every breath of warm air that blew across my face made me startle. Just the breeze—probably. The sounds of distant traffic that had been too faint to notice during the fight now pounded against my ears—did it cover breathing, the low scrape of stealthy footsteps?
 

I didn’t know how long I sat there, struggling to stay calm against the certainty that any moment some deeper darkness would fall over my eyes and that would be the end. Every second stretched and warped into an eternity. If the heat death of the universe arrived before Vivian, I would not have been surprised.

The world didn’t end and my brain wasn’t eaten. Screeching tires and engine noise, followed by a wash of headlights announced my salvation. Vivian drove up in a cloud of dust and sand and I’d never been happier to see anyone.

Vivian pulled around next to Iris and me. In the glare of light, I could see the mess we made. So much blood. Was all of it Iris’s? How much could a body lose? She was still breathing, but other than that, I had no idea what shape she was in.
 

Vivian came out of the car, gun drawn. “Are you hurt?” she asked, looking all around.

“Not me, but Iris needs help.”

“In the car. Now. Amelia’s calling a doctor.”

Between the two of us, we got Iris into the back seat without slinging her around too much. I got in with her, rested her head on my lap, and took hold of her shoulders. We left the bodies of our attackers lying in the alley.
 

“Hold on, Iris.” She probably couldn’t hear me, but I didn’t know what else to do as Vivian wound us through the Miroc streets.
 

But not downtown. Vivian sped up a ramp onto an elevated road that led to a side of Miroc I’d never visited. That I’d never been invited to. “Where are we going?”

Vivian kept her eyes on the road. “Amelia’s place.”
 

We passed withered husks of parks and half-empty shopping centers. Boarded-up cafes and broken-down ball courts. But for all that, the signs of decay were less here than in the rest of the city, and as we moved into the residential area, they all but disappeared.

Our road dropped back down to ground level and we approached a tall iron gate across the road. Vivian pulled a card out of a driver-side compartment and showed it to the man who sat in a booth outside the gate. He scanned it with his wireless, nodded, and the gates swung open. As we drove through, I saw the armed men milling about on the inside.

Not much further, Vivian drove onto a driveway that serpentined through a long-dead lawn. At the end was a compact but elegant two-story house with several other cars in the circle drive in front of the door and what looked like every single light on.

Good. I wasn’t eager to stand around in the dark right now.
 

Half a dozen men came out of the house, all armed. Three spread around the car, watching out into the night. The other three opened the back door and carefully removed Iris. They carried her inside. Vivian and I followed.

Amelia waited just inside the door. I’d never seen her outside the office before, and she looked strange in a robe that had been thrown on over pajamas. Where another woman might have been diminished, receiving visitors in her nightclothes, Amelia was as cool and in-charge as ever. “Ash.” She looked me up and down, her eyes catching on the blood smeared on my clothes. “Are you all right?”

That was a more complicated question than she knew. “I’m not shot.”

“Good. There’s a bathroom down the hall. Go clean up. I’ll have someone dig up something fresh for you to wear.”

I tried not to gawk on my way to the bathroom. Amelia was my boss, and I’d never looked beyond that to wonder who she was or where she came from. But this house—I knew P&B did well, but did it generate the sort of money to afford this house and all this security?

I passed a lavish sitting room, complete with crystal chandelier and hand-woven silk rugs I suspected were real, not the cheap knock-offs they hawked downtown to tourists. The dining room had an ornate table of real wood—expensive to import, here in the desert—and shelves full of silver and porcelain behind the glass doors of the cabinet. And it wasn’t just the big things. Little touches, all over—a vase that matched the curtains, or an arrangement of silk flowers on the table—it all bespoke the kind of artistry and taste that could only be achieved with money.

Just who was it I worked for?

Even the bathroom was well appointed, with crystal knobs on the faucets and a gilded mirror over the sink. A delicate ceramic vase stood empty on the counter—how long had it been since it had held flowers?

I stripped out of my bloody clothes and ran a small amount of water into the sink, trying not to abuse Amelia’s hospitality. I did claim one of the soft, embroidered washcloths from the rack that may or may not have been decorative. It felt good to scrub away the dirt. The cool water against my skin, the quiet isolation—for a few minutes, I could forget the strange horrors of the last few hours.

But only for those few minutes. “Ash!” Vivian pounded on the door, then opened it wide enough to shove fresh clothes through the gap. “Hurry up. Amelia wants to know what happened.”

Sadly, I’d been there, and I wanted to know the exact same thing.

#

Vivian waited for me outside the bathroom. I followed her to a more casual sitting room, where a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of tea had been set out. “Amelia thought you might be hungry.”

Now I was staring at food, I was famished. “Where is she?”

“Said she had to talk to the security guys.” Vivian went straight over and grabbed herself a sandwich from the pile.
 

I followed suit. The first bite was cold and delicious—a blend of meat and cheese, some flavors I didn’t recognize, but I wasn’t going to complain. “Those guys—do they work for P&B?”

Vivian shook her head. She talked around a mouthful of food. “Never seen them before. Don’t know where they came from, but Amelia seems to trust them all right.”

I finished one sandwich and had started on the next when Amelia joined us. “Iris will be fine,” she announced, taking one of the thick, cushy chairs. “I just spoke with the doctor. He was able to remove the bullets, and with the foreign matter out of her body, her own instincts will take care of the rest.”

“How soon before she’s up?” Vivian asked. Without being asked, she poured a glass of tea and took it to Amelia.

Who nodded her thanks. “She’ll be recovered in a day or two, I would imagine.”

“Remarkable,” Vivian said.

“That she is. Thank you, Vivian. You’ve been a great help tonight, but I shouldn’t need you any further.”

Vivian closed the glass-paned doors as she left, giving Amelia and me privacy. “What happened,” Amelia asked, concern softening her voice. “Did something go wrong with the magic?”

“That’s…complicated.” I recounted, as best I could, what I’d seen in the pattern. I described the shadow-creature that had eaten Eddis with as much detail as I could, but Amelia’s blank look told me she didn’t have any better idea than I did what the thing might be.
 

“So this thing, this creature, has been living in the Jansynian’s skin. That’s how the project got sabotaged. I’m sure of it. But then it gets more complicated.”

Her eyebrows drew together. “What else did you see?”

“Not there, not with the magic. Although—I have to say—something wasn’t exactly right with that either.” I flailed for the right words. “Like the pattern was fighting me. Or something was fighting the pattern. I don’t know that it matters, but I don’t know that it doesn’t.”

She nodded, sipped her tea. “But there was more?”

I recounted my call to Seana as close to word-for-word as I could manage, along with my own thoughts on the timing of Eddis’s death. His second death. “I knew I needed to explain to Seana—to warn her. I still do. But when we came out, we got jumped by a street gang. Thieves. They freaked out when they saw I was a priest. That’s how Iris got hurt.” Amelia’s lips tightened and I hurried on. “I don’t know what we would have done, except that we got rescued.”

“By whom?”

There was nothing to do but say it. “It was one of the Favored Children.”

“The Favored Children are all dead,” Amelia responded automatically.

“That’s what I thought, too, but—” I stopped. Was Syed even alive?
 

Once again, I tried to remember every little detail to describe the encounter to Amelia. I hoped she’d notice some connection, some clue I had missed, but all she came up with was the same question I’d asked myself. “If this thing—Syed—made Iris forget it was there, why couldn’t it do the same to you?”

“I don’t know.”

Amelia stood up and went to the window, looking out over landscaping that had lost its war with the desert. Floodlights still lit the grounds. My opinion—they could stay on all night. Amelia leaned her forearm against the window, tapped her fingers against the glass. “This is getting esoteric. Outside my realm of expertise.” She thought a moment longer. “What do you know about the Silent One?”

Time for another sandwich. Not that imparting the sum total of my knowledge was going to take long. “He’s the god of secrets. No one knows much of anything about him. I can tell you he’s one of the few gods who never created children to follow him. Syed was his Favored Son, but Syed’s human.” Or so I’d been taught.
 

“There are stories, sure. Fairy tales to frighten kids. But there’re stories about all the gods. The only facts I know are that the Silent One had his temple in Tala like the rest of the Thirteen, where Syed has been his Favored Son for as long as people kept records. He didn’t have any other followers or any other temples. As far as we knew, he just minded his own business.”

Amelia said aloud the thought that had been lurking in the back of my mind. “That would make him unique among the gods.”

The god of secrets. “So that’s all of what I know. As to what I believe….”

I hadn’t seen more than a glimpse of Eddis in the vision, after the shadow creature had taken him. How much could I trust of that one brief impression? “The shadow came from Syed. I’m almost positive. It belonged with him, seemed more part of him than it did with Eddis.”

“Which would bring us to the question of, what does he want with Desavris?”

“Maybe exactly what he’s gotten. Maybe he wanted to destroy the weather project.”

Amelia turned to look at me. “Then I have to wonder, does he know about Spark?”

Something tugged at the back of my mind. A memory? A suspicion? I couldn’t grab it. “I think it’s too dangerous to assume otherwise.”

“I agree.” Amelia set her glass down on the windowsill. “This technology—we can’t let him destroy it. It’s a matter of survival. I think it’s time to bring in more help.”

“There’s more help?” I asked.

“For this, I think yes. But it will take some time for me to get the right message through to the right people. I don’t want to draw attention. In the meanwhile, you need to check in with Director Seana. Warn her she could still be in danger.”

That was one way to put it. “I’ll do that right now.”

After everything else I’d done tonight, tossing off the pattern to make sure my handset was still secure seemed a trivial thing. I dialed Seana.
 

She answered immediately. “Ash! Where are you?”

I looked over at Amelia, who nodded. “I’m at my boss’s house. There’s been—I got attacked. But I’m heading your way now.“

“I’m sending someone to get you. Stay there.” The line went dead.

I slid the handset into my pocket, along with Seana’s data stick. I fished the Desavris security tab out of my bag and stuck it just below my collar bone, where it wouldn’t be obvious but was still easy to access. The rest of the bag—including my growing collection of guns—I left on Amelia’s floor. “What should I do after I’ve talked to Seana?”

“Take your time with her. She’s another ally it wouldn’t hurt to cultivate. Find out how far behind they are with their rain machine with Eddis removed from the picture. Get back here when you’re done. Hopefully by then, I’ll have progress of my own to report.”

“Good luck.” I was pretty sure we all were going to need it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Dinner for Two

This time, the Jansynian security folks were much more polite. They held the hovercar door for me and, after a cursory scan at the security checkpoint, even invited me to enjoy my visit.

Riding up the lift, looking out into the Web, I didn’t see anyone I knew. I wasn’t surprised, as close as we were coming on towards morning. All reasonable people were asleep. I certainly wished I were.

Even the Desavris halls were empty of everyone but me and my escort. Which surprised me. With Eddis’s sudden death, I expected more chaos—security people rushing about, or medical or something. But I’d never understood how Jansynians worked.
 

Again, I was escorted to Seana’s office. She was at her desk. She looked up as I entered the room. Despite all that had happened, she showed none of the signs of agitation that had been there in our last meeting. Seana in a crisis was Seana at her best. She skipped over a greeting and went straight to, “Tell me what you know.”