Authors: Tim Akers
"Is there some reason you're showing this to me?" I asked, wiping my face. "Other than the obvious fact that it will give me some pretty brilliant nightmares, I'm not sure what this has to do with my little problem."
"This is one of the lesser ones. Whatever it was didn't take in this man. Not that it really mattered to him. But his wife, who was in here making dinner, might be grateful." She looked around the room with distaste, as though more offended by the décor than the corpse of packed sand on the floor. "Might be. She had a chance to escape before the others found her."
"So what happened to the others?"
Angela motioned and I followed, into one of the other numbered doors. She was right. The woman whose husband had turned to beetle-riddled sand at her feet was probably happy. At least she was able to get out of the building. How she would sleep, who knows. But she was alive.
This apartment held two kinds of bodies. The kind of bodies I was used to fell into the first group. People who had been killed in horrible ways, mostly through blunt force trauma, though several looked as if they had been torn open. As though they had been attacked by something with powerful jaws and blunt teeth. Old men, children, more than one woman with a bloody kitchen utensil in her hands. Defense wounds, and then other wounds that had been delivered after death.
The second kind of body was of a type that I was beginning to become familiar with. Smooth white skin, pearly and bright. Wounds that bled clumpy, black blood that dried into flakes of cog and gear. The cog-dead. These had been killed by gunshot and blade. I saw no weapons among the casualties. Badge, probably, responding to a horrified call.
"So the Fehn got in here, too," I said, looking around the apartment. "I take it there's a basement dock of some nature?"
"There is not. The foundation of this house is solid stone. Not even a basement. The original owner preferred to live in open spaces. The original floorplan even included a number of open gardens on the top floors. All closed off now, of course." Angela stepped delicately over a body, the formal engine again showing more maneuverability than I thought possible. She was very familiar with its controls, of course, since it was hard to tell where Angela ended and the engine began. "In fact, there is no evidence that these creatures came from the river at all."
"How did they get in here, then?"
Angela swept out of the apartment, pausing to spin in place and fix me with her empty eyes.
"These are the residents, Jacob. Something changed them into this."
She was gone before I could respond, but that was okay. I didn't have much to say. Had a lot to think about, though.
I gave the rooms one more look, the butchered family and the cog-dead, together on the floor. All one family. I shivered and left, catching up with Angela in the hall.
"I assumed that because it was the Fehn this happened to first, that it had something to do with them already being dead. That it was just another host in their body, something that drove out the Fehn's symbiotes and took over."
"We made the same assumption, when it first started to happen."
"First started to happen? Angela," I hissed and pulled ineffectively at her metal dress. She obliged me by stopping and turning around. "First? How long has this been going on?"
"We're not sure. Weeks. Maybe more than a month. This is the fourth attack that we're aware of, including the events on the docks this morning."
"All of them like this?"
"None of them like this." She glanced over her shoulder at the open door that led to the garage, then lowered her voice. "None of them alike at all. Which is why it took us so long to connect the events. The only similarity is a cleverness of mind, and ruthlessness of intent."
"Ruthlessness I see," I said. I gestured to the boots of the sandy man at the other end of the hallway. "But what's so clever about this?"
She pressed her lips into a thin line.
"Upstairs," she said.
I
EXPECTED SOMETHING
much worse. When Angela Tomb makes that kind of face, the expression that she pulled before she opened the door at the top of the stairs and escorted me into the second floor of the building, you expect something pretty horrible. So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in a garden. Not the most natural garden, seeing as how it was confined to the second floor of a rent house in one of the poorer districts of Veridon, but still. It was a nice garden.
The whole floor was more open than the lower level. There was some evidence of plaster walls that once separated the space into apartments and hallways, but they were cracked and crumbling, serving as low benches for the plantlife. Creepers spread across the walls and ceiling like drapery, and the warm, green fuzz of moss made most of the furniture that remained into soft, indistinct shapes. The broad faces of sunflowers bobbed gently in one corner of the first room. There were many plants, in reds and greens, velvet black petals shivering on stalks, yellow flowers like eyes blinking at us between wide leaves. Some were tropical, some arboreal, and some looked completely alien, as though they had been drawn from the mind of a madman. The air was heavy with life, tight and close in the claustrophobic chambers of the building.
It seemed that some greater architecture still defined the floor, but all of the temporary stuff that had been thrown together by the present owners had dissolved into this tiny horticultural explosion. Plants like this couldn't last long in this sort of environment. I could see no pots, no soil. The roots seemed to bury themselves into the wood of the floor, or cling to the plaster of the walls, as if they could suck life out of these dead things. There was no light here, either, other than the muted glow of the frictionlamp that Angela had taken from one of the guards on our way upstairs.
"Well, I must say," I took a careful step into the room and sighed. "This is not what I was expecting. The way you set your jaw, I thought I was going to step into a room full of bodies."
"No," Angela said quietly. "There are no bodies on this floor. Nothing but what you see."
"All of the rooms are like this?" I asked.
"Those that we've seen. There are no pathways, and some of the plants are difficult to get around."
"Then cut through them. Something may be hidden in the farther chambers," I turned to the stairs. "I'm sure there's some sort of blade in the stables, isn't there? A shearing knife or something."
"Jacob, listen to me." Angela nodded to the room. "There are no bodies. Nobody died up here. Not yet."
I paused at the head of the stairs and looked back. The flowers blinked at me, their heads bobbing silently in the flat glow of the frictionlamp.
"These are the tenants?" I whispered.
"The tenants, their friends, and a couple officers of the Badge who were first on the scene. You can see why we've been reluctant to explore more fully."
"Are they still... can they..."
"Are they alive?" Angela said firmly. "Can they hear us? We assume so, on both accounts. Since our encounters with the Guaran, the Council has decided to err on the side of caution."
I nodded, then stepped carefully out of the room and onto the stairs.
"Is there anything for us to see up here, Angela?"
"Nothing else," she said. "I just wanted to be clear on what we're dealing with. The sort of things this person is willing to do to achieve his - or her - goal."
"Goal?" I asked.
"Well," Angela gave the room of bobbing flowers one last, sad look, then closed the door and followed me down the stairs. "We assume he has a goal. We assume he's not just a madman."
"He just turned a house of innocent people into flowers, Ange. That's one hell of an assumption."
T
HE SOLITUDE OF
the bizarre garden upstairs was broken by an argument, coming from the still-open door to the garage. Several voices going back and forth in tense whispers as we came downstairs. When the considerable bulk of Angela's engine reached the hallway, the voices cut off and a woman stepped into view. Quite a woman.
She had a lot of very dark hair that fell in broad curls over her shoulders and across her face. She had the tall, broad frame of a woman who could become heavy if given to a life of sloth, but everything about her spoke of a life lived out of doors. Her skin was dark with the sun, her face dusted in freckles, her arms strong and long. She was wearing a riding dress and shoulder shrug, the coat coming to the middle of her torso. The colors were muted, greens and blacks and browns that would have looked common if they had not been so finely cut, so expertly tailored. She put her hands on her hips and stood in the middle of the hallway, blocking our path.
"Lady Tomb. I see that you've taken your liberty with our property again," she said. Her words were precise and clear, the anger in them packaged in courtly politeness. Clearly she and Angela were cut from similar cloth, if perhaps by different tailors, for different reasons.
"Veronica. I am here on Council business, and as such have free access to any property that might pertain to our current investigations. If you insist..."
"I insist, Angela. I insist that you notify the Bright estate whenever you intend to conduct Council business on our property. I insist that you have a family escort during your investigation; if not a member of the Brights, then someone we can agree is trustworthy and will not merely serve the interests of the Founders. I insist..."
"Enough, girl," Angela snapped. "I will not stand here and suffer your insinuations. This is a matter for the Council, and for the committee duly appointed to handle this situation. If you have a problem with that, you can bring it up in the chamber. Until then, I ask you to step aside."
"The committee duly appointed, eh?" The girl named Veronica sneered, a look that sat strangely on her face. "Are you referring to the committee that you created from your friends, the committee that operated without the full knowledge of the Council for months, that did not come to the light of day until" - she hurled her arms around the hallway, indicating the whole house - "until this attack made it necessary for you to share with the industrial families. That committee?"
"It was unclear if it was a matter for the full Council until..."
"Enough. We have filed an order of dissolution for the committee. The votes are with us. You are going to turn over your findings" - she stabbed at Angela with her finger - "with documentation to support your claims. This has been a witch-hunt, conducted in the shadows by you and your friends. And when I read those documents, Angela, I expect to find a report detailing your reason for being here today."
"She was just showing me around," I mumbled. Veronica turned to look at me, as though I had just popped out of the wall.
"Another one of your lackeys, I assume? Does this one know how to properly search a house without killing the witnesses?"
"Veronica Bright, I'd like to introduce you to Jacob Burn." Angela nodded between us, presenting me with a flick of her hand. "Jacob, Veronica."
Veronica stared at me with open tension. I wondered if my father had done something to offend her, or if she'd merely heard the stories of my exciting and disaster-laden youth.
"Another one of your Founders. Of course. Is this the one being groomed to fill Alexander's seat?"
"My father is more than capable of holding his seat in the Council, ma'am. And when the time comes, I doubt he'll be passing that honor on to me."
She gaped at me like a fish, then rounded on Angela.
"He sounds perfect, Lady Tomb. Where did you dig him up? Somewhere downriver? He has that perfect scent of blind ignorance and entitled arrogance I've come to expect from the Founders. Will you sign his birthright yourself, or is Alexander still capable of that?"
"Veronica, please. Jacob is the legitimate heir of Alexander Burn, and more than capable of sitting the Council." She shot me a look that promised violence. Well. Violence she would get. "What the elder Burn intended cannot be disregarded, of course, but there are considerations that must be weighed. In fact..."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," I said, stepping angrily between the women. "I think I can say pretty clearly that my father has no intention of naming me heir to anything other than his contempt. He was pretty clear about that, the last time we spoke."
"And tell me, Jacob - it's Jacob, right? I do remember that Alexander had a wayward child by that name, though honestly when he had you struck from the histories I was a little surprised." Veronica Bright smiled smugly. "When was the last time you spoke to your father?"
"He and I are not on what you'd call speaking terms."
"Hm, yes," she said, then nodded to Angela. "He is quite well done, Tomb. It's a pity Alexander won't be able to appreciate your work." She turned to me and gave a little bow. "A pleasure meeting you, young Burn. I'm sure we'll be speaking again."
She left, going into the garage where she resumed her argument. Within seconds the garage door rattled open and her voice receded. When it was quiet again, I turned to Angela.
"Lovely girl. What did she mean about my father not appreciating your work?"