Wicked Gentlemen (11 page)

"Rimmon." Brown paused after he had written my name in on the form. "I assume that's your lineage name."

"I suppose." I forced myself to turn my attention back to Brown.

"Now let me see..." Brown thumped the back of his pen lightly against his chin. For a moment he looked as if he was reading from some text at the center of his empty desk. "Clothed in the darkness he came beside Sariel, his body white as the lightning, his voice a terrible thunder, and he was called Rimmon, and he too knelt before the cross..."

I just looked at Brown.

"Book of Prodigals," he said. "It's a hobby of mine, keeping genealogies of all those fallen princes. It's very telling, you know."

"Is it?" I wasn't really sure of what else to say. If I had had a genuine legal problem, I might have been annoyed by this digression. As it was, I thought it might be better than filling out the form. I let Brown go on.

"Yes, indeed. You may think that genealogy has little importance in this modern age, but many Prodigals still carry traits of their ancestors in one form or another." Brown looked me over for a moment. "You, for example, I would guess are one of those rarities, a flyer. You have a strong affinity for the air, either moving through it or smelling and tasting it." Brown made several marks on the form. "I'd also guess that you're pretty solitary, even among your own."

"All that from just a name?" I asked, neither acknowledging nor refuting the description.

"From just the name," Brown assured me with a look of pride. "Of course, there are well over a hundred names and attributes to keep straight in your head. I know most of the higher demons, but it's Albert who has all of them memorized perfectly."

"Mr. Scott-Beck?"

"Yes. The man has the memory of a mastodon." Brown turned back to the form. "Family?" he asked just as I had again begun to draw in curious tastes of the air in the office.

"No," I replied.

"None?" Brown seemed unable to credit this. "Certainly you have parents?"

"Both dead."

"Oh. Was it the Inquisition?" Brown asked with an unnatural gentleness in his voice. I could imagine him practicing that tone at night while flipping through the evening paper.

"No," I replied, though it was half a lie. "My father was killed after a mine collapse." The explanation had been my mother's way of lifting the criminal nature out of my father's execution for sabotaging the Wellton mining company. "My mother drowned during the sewer floods twelve years ago."

"And you have no one else?" Brown pressed.

"May I ask why you need to know?" I didn't mean to sound irritated, but the elusive smell in the room and the memory of my mother's bloated dead body had twisted into a single presence. Repulsion and sorrow for a moment made me wish to just get up and leave the room. I held my breath against the smell in the air and the feeling passed.

"We need someone to contact in case you're summoned to court and we can't find you," Brown explained.

"I see." I frowned. "I can't think of anyone. You'd just have to leave a word at my residence."

"And where is that?" Brown skipped down several spaces on the form.

"For now, the Good Commons Boarding House, in Hells Beow." I watched Brown carefully as I gave my answer.

"Good Commons." He smiled just slightly at the corners of his mouth as he wrote the name. "Yes, I believe I know where that is." He didn't pause long enough to take a breath before asking, "So, do you already have a criminal record?"

"Yes."

"Then let's have a look, shall we?" He stood up and went to his shelves. I watched as he slowly paced past the first two shelves and then whipped one of the thick, black record books out.

"It would be under Sykes, would it?" Brown asked.

"Yes." Though I could see what he was obviously doing, I couldn't quite believe it. I glanced again at the shelves and shelves of record books that filled the room.

"Here it is." Brown sat back down behind his desk with the big book open. "Hmm, flying and resisting questioning." Brown looked curiously at the page and read on a little. "All that trouble just to keep your friend from getting a trespass fine." Brown looked up at me. "It took them quite a while to get his name out of you, didn't it?".

"You have a copy of my legal record?"

"Yes. Albert and the Brighton abbot are old school friends, so the abbot has been kind enough to let our firm keep copies of the records involving Prodigals." Brown flipped the page and then turned it back. "You don't have much of a record. It looks like you've managed to keep a step ahead of the law for the most part."

"For the most part, yes," I replied.

I knew in the back of my mind that there had to be records of my birth and education, even my arrests and time under the prayer engines, but I had imagined that all those things had been filed far away in some dark basement. I hated the idea that my life could be fingered through by a stranger at his leisure.

"You are quite the specimen, aren't you, Mr. Sykes?" Brown turned the book so I could see it. He taped his thick finger on a small tracing of a photograph. It took me a moment to recognize my own body stretched out on the table. I stared down at my own furious gaze without interest. My memories of that time were sharper than any smudgy drawing could ever be.

As quickly as I could, I read through the dozens of comments and tracings of my effects at the time of my arrest. I wanted to know what Brown or anyone else with access could know about me. The page was clotted with trivialities: my shoe size, fingernail lengths, a tracing of my business card, and a long string of initials where one officer or another had checked the record out. W.J. H. appeared a dozen or more times.

It only took a moment for me to realize where Harper had come across my business card. He would have known all of this about me before he even walked through my door. It shouldn't have surprised me.

Brown turned the book back to himself and read over it for a few more moments.

"His uncooperative nature and refusal to testify have put us in a position to assume guilt...Still no statement...Questioning with silver-water...Ah, and ophorium." Brown made a little clicking sound with his tongue. "Just to keep your friend from getting a fifty-coin fine? I'm not sure I would believe that myself. Were you holding out on something else?"

I stared at Brown flatly.

"I suppose if you wouldn't talk, then you won't just tell me now." Brown seemed amused. "You know, Mr. Sykes, if our firm is to represent you, it's in your best interest to tell us the full extent of anything you've done."

"I'll keep that in mind." I managed to get the words out civilly. The deep desire to slash Brown's face had seized me the moment he began reading from my record. Those months had been my ruin and he read over them as if they were prices on a menu. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself.

The scent and taste of acidic sickness, something between excrement and bile doused in heavy rose perfume, washed into my lungs. I coughed and Brown pushed the record book to the side of his desk.

"It's getting late," he said.

"Should I be going?" I started to stand but Brown held up his hand for me to stop.

"No, I'm sure Albert will want to speak with you." He smiled at me as if we were friends. "No, I was thinking that I ought to get a little something in me. I'll send Tim out for some supper. A little snack for you too." Brown stood and started for the door. "It'll be my treat. You just wait here. I won't be long." He stepped out and closed the door.

I waited a moment, then checked the door. Brown had locked me in.

Chapter Eleven

Blue glass

Just the fact that I had been locked in made me immediately want to escape. I walked to the window. It was painted shut, but the glass was thin enough to break through.

I stopped myself. Crashing through the second story window would be an act of desperate panic, a last resort. I wasn't sure that the situation merited that.

There were reasons other than murder that Lewis Brown would want to keep a Prodigal from roaming freely through the building. Brown could have just wanted to keep me from bumbling in on another interview. It was equally likely that he kept the door locked out of habit.

My instincts urged escape. I could easily knock out the glass with Brown's chair and be out. But my instincts weren't paying me to be here in the first place.

I looked down at the street and wished I could see Harper. The second story only provided me with a view of roofs and the tops of a dozen or more hats. Below me people made their ways back home. Offices and shops were closing. It would be night soon. The darkness drifting in over the sky calmed me.

I decided to investigate Brown's office and the disturbing smell that hung in it. I took a deep breath and spread my arms out. As I blew the air out of my lungs, I slowly drifted up. I continued to rise until my head lightly bumped into the ceiling.

The air near the ceiling was rank. I nearly gagged, and when I opened my eyes, they stung. The tops of Brown's shelves were filled with rows of blue glass jars. Some were large apothecary jars; others were smaller, perfume bottles. All of them were filled with dark thick liquids.

I drifted closer to the jars. The smell was nauseating. I squeezed my nostrils closed with one hand and read the pieces of paper that were attached to the rows of blue bottles. One big container read, Strength Beyond Numbers: Abaddon. Another was marked, Power to Churn the Waters: Rahab. I frowned and scanned across the multitude of labels: Beauty, Wealth, Control of Fire, and even the Lordship Over Insects was cited, and a name written beneath that. Many of the bottles were nearly empty. But the one nearest me was completely full.

I picked up the small bottle, hardly larger than an ink vial. It was sealed with a waxed lid. Its paper label was crisp and white, still untouched by time. It said, Prophecy: Roffcale.

Holding the vial in my palm, I sank back down to the floor. I broke the wax seal and almost choked on the smell that seeped up. It was the same pungent scent that had pervaded the cell where Peter Roffcale had been murdered. Rosewater poured through the soured smell of his blood, urine, and shit.

Magic potions made from the bodies of Prodigals. Wasn't that what Sariel had said?

The door opened behind me, and I shoved the vial into my jacket pocket. I quickly turned to face the man who had entered the room. He was much taller than Brown, but just as muscular. His hair and beard were white, but he seemed youthfully fit in spite of that. His skin was tanned and flushed with a healthy glow. He smiled at me as if I were his favorite nephew.

"I'm truly sorry about the delay in meeting you, Mr. Sykes." The big man held out his hand. "I'm Albert Scott-Beck."

Out of habit I took his hand. He smiled even more brightly and didn't release my fingers from his tight warm grip.

"May I ask you a question, Mr. Sykes?" He was close enough that I could smell the blood and rose perfume on his breath. His fingers felt like steel shackles encasing my hand.

I remembered that the blue glass jar marked Strength Beyond Numbers had been nearly empty. I wondered how much of it Scott-Beck had running through his veins.

"Who sent you in here?" he asked.

His hand crushed brutally around mine. I slashed my free hand up and drove my long nails into the flesh of his throat. His skin was like horse hide. My claws barely cut into it.

In an instant, Scott-Beck stepped aside and twisted my hand violently. Cracking pain burst through my arm as a bone in my wrist snapped. He twisted my hand farther and I stumbled on my feet, dropping to one knee.

He kicked me hard in the chest. My ribs cracked inward. My lungs crushed in as the air was forced out of them.

"Who sent you, Mr. Sykes?" He was still smiling as if this had just been a friendly tussle.

"You're going to kill me whether I say or not, aren't you?" My voice was barely audible.

"Of course." Scott-Beck squeezed his fingers around my broken wrist. "But it's up to you, how I do it."

"Please, don't." I closed my eyes as if that would hold out the pain. "The man who hired me..." I carefully dropped the fingers of my free hand down into my coat pocket. "He didn't tell me his name, but he wore an anatomist's pin. He was blonde and young." I closed my hand around the vial.

"An anatomist?" For a moment Scott-Beck's attention shifted from me to the man who hired me.

I lunged forward, smashing the vial into Scott-Beck's groin. The delicate glass shattered and Scott-Beck howled in agony. I jerked my hand free of him and scrambled for the window.

A brutal weight slammed into my back and crushed me face down to the hard wood floor. I hadn't seen Brown come in after Scott-Beck, but I recognized the smell of him on top of me. I tried to twist out from under him, but his weight on top of me was immovable. He seized a fistful of my hair, jerking my head up. The tendons of my neck strained as he pulled my head back so that I was looking up at him.

"It seems that you still don't know how to answer a question properly, Mr. Sykes." Brown's face was flushed deep red. His expression was one of pleasure, almost arousal. He slammed the side of my face down into the floor. A deep explosion of pain and dizziness rocked through my skull. He pulled my head back up and slammed it down again. I fought against him. Brown threw his weight against my straining neck and my head cracked into the floor again.