Dead of Veridon (3 page)

"It's what you paid for, Mr. Burn. Reliable passage to the Fehn, away from the docks. It's what you paid me to do."

"Reliable, covert passage, Mr. Hamilton." I looked over at the crew, suddenly busy with the crate we'd brought along. "And no trouble getting back."

The captain cleared his throat and spat out into the fog. "No trouble, Mr. Burn. You're not a man I want crossing me."

"Hear that?" Wilson asked, nudging me. "You've got that reputation to look after. Dangerous man."

"Yes, well." There were plenty others who might pay to have me crossed. There was good money in that kind of business. I watched the crew dismantle the box and remove the bulky iron man. Its chest creaked open, spilling hoses and dials onto the deck. "Not the best reputation to have."

The old man grunted, then closed his window. Wilson and I went over to the iron man. It was fat and bulbous, the head as wide as the shoulders and made of smooth, thick glass. The crew stepped back nervously, their eyes drifting between me and the cumbersome metal form. I took off my coat.

"You sure about this thing?" I asked.

Wilson nodded happily. Knelt next to the iron suit and started unstrapping the arms and adjusting dials.

"Absolutely. Safe as falling in love with a whore." He punched me in the arm, glint in his eyes. "Just as expensive, too."

"Fine. Let's have this done," I said, refusing to rise to his jab, then stepped into the iron man's embrace. It closed around me. There was a creaking sound as the thing sealed up, and suddenly the air was forge-hot. The crew gathered behind Wilson's strangely hunched shoulders, looking at me through the thick glass. I waved a heavy arm and they cleared away. Wilson led me to the rail and gave me a little push over the edge. The Reine took me without a sound.

It was like that for a while. Dark and darker, cold and colder. I fell through the water in absolute silence, my breathing swallowed by the tubes and metal of the iron man. I stared at my own face in the glass, reflected by some dim light from the machine's quiet engines.

My eyes looked dead, my hair a rambling mess across my head, my face pale and tired. I had aged ten years in the last two. Business had been bad. Ever since I'd held a pistol to the head of Veridon's top criminal and ended our complicated friendship, things had been bad for me. My contacts stopped talking to me. My regular clients stopped calling by my office. I was reduced to taking jobs from people I didn't trust, jobs I didn't want to do, working with people like Gray, getting myself into situations I wasn't sure I could get out of. Jobs like this one. Situations like this one.

A dead face bumped against the glass, his skin saggy and white, his eyes smooth pale marbles. I startled, banging my head against the suit. He put his hands against the glass, running them down the edge until he found a grip. He watched me with empty eyes. Other hands came out of the darkness and held my back, slipped around my arms. My first instinct was to struggle. I had to fight down the panic and let those riverbloated arms take me. They led me down. There were lights, a wide ring of them fading into the darkness. A door, flat and round, against a wall of barnacled iron. It irised open and we went inside. My guides drifted back out into the cold currents and I was alone in a small chamber. I drifted against the floor. A heavy thud and the water seemed to vibrate around me, then slowly drained away. The suit was heavy on my shoulders, and I struggled free of it. The air here was cold and sterile.

I let the iron man fall away and rummaged in the small leather satchel I had brought with me. My fingers were numb and I realized how cold I was. I fumbled the frictionlamp a couple times, then got it spun up. I stood. The room was full of bodies, standing close to me, closer than I would have believed. Dozens of them. It took me a second to realize that I was in a room of glass windows, looking out at the murky waters of the river Reine. On this side of the glass was my tiny, dry room, and out there, waving slightly in the currents of the river, hordes and hordes of the Fehn.

The Fehn... well. The Fehn freak me out. I had done business with them before, even counted a friend among them. Wright Morgan, though I hadn't seen him in a while. Perhaps he had passed from the ranks of the individual Fehn and joined the shambling choir of those who had lost their personalities and minds to the group consciousness of the Fehn hive. I suppressed a shudder as I surveyed my audience, their eyes loose in their heads, mouths open to the cold water of the river.

"Are we so foul?" a voice asked from behind me. I turned to see one of the Fehn rising from a ladderway in the floor. His clothes were mostly dry, and his eyes still held the spark of sentience. He crossed the floor and held out his hands in supplication. "Is our presence so awful, Jacob Burn?"

"Well," I said, glancing at the crowded windows around us. "It can be a little unnerving. For a man in my position."

"Mm." He drew a steel cylinder from his belt and unscrewed it, then took a long drink. Water splashed around his mouth and ran down his cheek. "A man in your position. As in, a man trapped in a small room, underwater, surrounded by the dead of Veridon."

"Yes, well. Something like that."

He nodded and drank again, then crossed to the nearest window and looked out at the tableau of slack faces and loose limbs waving like grass in the breeze.

"Do you know any of them, Jacob? Are any of your friends here? A man like you must have lost a fair number of friends to our beloved river?"

And that was the trick, the thing that made the Fehn so unsettling. They were our dead. Anyone who died in the river, drowned or dumped from some harbor back alley, any body that slipped beneath the Reine's dark waters became their property. Their citizenry. The Fehn were a symbiotic race, their mother-form hidden away in the depths of the river, but they infected the bodies of the drowned. For a while those bodies maintained their personalities, their minds, as with my friend Morgan. Sometimes they were able to last for months, or years... maybe decades. I never knew Morgan's age, but had the feeling he had been around for even longer than that. Something about the symbiote kept the bodies fresh. But eventually their minds would go, and they would become one of the numberless, mindless creatures even now floating outside this window.

"None of these, no. Most of my friends die on land."

"Fortunate," he said, turning to me. He drank a long pull of water. "For you, at least. Less fortunate for us."

"Yeah, well." I bent to the iron man and unfolded the package. "I'm kind of on a schedule here."

"Really? A busy man, are you?"

"Sure," I said.

"I've heard different. I've heard that times haven't been too good to Jacob Burn." He leaned idly against the glass of the window. Behind him the silent choir raised their hands and stroked the glass, as if to touch his shoulder. "Ever since you pissed off your man Valentine, and the Council, and the Church... I've heard that business is a little light."

I stood up, holding the dull metal box I had been hired to deliver. "I get by. I'm working now, aren't I?"

"Sure. But this is a shitty job, Jacob. It doesn't pay well, and no one wants to do it. Times must be bad, for a man of your stature to serve as delivery boy for the river."

Something about the way he said it, something in his voice or his face. Something sinister.

"Do I know you?" I asked. The river had blunted his features, but I didn't think the guy looked familiar.

"Not really. Not anymore. I was one of your father's servants, a while ago." He raised one bloated hand and held it out. "Anthony Flowers."

"The Beggar's Feast barge," I said, pointedly ignoring the proffered hand. "You and your family drowned, along with most of the kitchen staff. I'm so sorry."

"We've gotten over it." He grimaced and lowered his hand, clenched it into a fist a couple of times, then tossed his head towards the window. "My kids, my wife, they're out there somewhere. I don't see them anymore. Don't really go looking."

"Yeah."

"Anyway. I hope we didn't ruin your Beggar's."

I shook my head and held out the package. "I was only a child."

"Yeah. So were they." He took the box and set it on a modest table built into the floor. "So what were you hired to bring us?"

"Not my business," I said.

"You're not curious?"

"Not in the business of being curious, Mr. Flowers. Is there anything else you need from me?"

He looked me over, then sighed and picked up the box. "I guess not. Get on your way, then. The room will flood once you have your clever suit on."

I nodded and turned back to the suit. He went down the ladderway, then a door closed and I was alone with the quiet walls of the dead. Without looking up, I clambered back into my suit and made ready for my return to the surface. I hoped the captain and his whispering crew were still around. That they hadn't jumped Wilson and thrown him over, then left me alone in the middle of the Reine. Never wanted to die in the river, and now I wanted it even less.

Chapter Two

Black Blood from the River

"D
O YOU MIND
if I ask you something, sir?"

I looked away from the steamer's tiny window and turned to the captain. He was looking dead ahead, as if I weren't even there. I nodded.

"Go ahead."

"You were one of Valentine's boys?"

"Yeah."

"But not any longer?"

"Not any longer, no." I looked back out the window. The river was rolling in deep, heavy swells. The fog had cleared out some, but there wasn't much traffic out yet. I could see the climbing towers of Veridon above the gauzy bank of mists. I knew where this question was going.

"Most folks I hear about, they work for Valentine, they don't stop working for him." He glanced over at me, then back to the prow of his boat. "Not without getting killed."

"Not killed yet, am I?"

"No, sir. That's why I'm asking. You're not working for him still?"

"I'm not."

"Because if you were, you see, it'd do good if you could say a word for us. For our service here. Always good to do an honor for someone like Valentine. Or one of his boys."

"Well, next time I see him, I'll be sure to give the good word. Right after he finishes shooting at me, or whatever it is he's set his mind to doing."

"Ah, well." The old man nodded. "I was just thinking. If you were still working for him."

"Yeah." I opened the tiny door that led out to the lookout rail. "Well, I'm not."

Outside was better. Outside didn't smell like canned grease and desperation. Outside was cool and wet, the thin lines of fog streaming over the deck. Wilson was strolling across the deck, both hands shoved in the pockets of his coat. He looked nervous. The crew was nowhere to be seen. I let my eyes wander over the water, wondering at the life of the Fehn, at the fate of Wright Morgan and all the other people who ended up in the cold, dark river. I rested my elbows against the rail of the captain's little tower. Good thing I was braced, too. I barely heard the call of "Overboard" before the ship shuddered to the right and cut power. I nearly fell, if not for the rail. Wilson had fallen, but was already bouncing up and scurrying to the edge of the boat.

"Overboard, ahoy!" someone yelled to my right. I ran over to that side of the ship and looked down. There was a cluster of crewmen by the ship's rail, looking down into the water.

"Where is he?" the captain roared from his window behind me. The crew looked up at the two of us.

"One, sir, just off the rail. Don't know who it is."

"One of ours? Someone see him fall?"

"No, sir. Kelly spotted him. No other ships out here."

"Could be a floater, from the city," I said to the captain. I spotted the subject of the excitement, shirtless and bobbing with the gentle swell of the river. He didn't look alive. He was floating closer to the boat with each second. "He doesn't look too good."

"Could be just a body," one of the crew agreed. There was business, and a long hook was produced. They were poking at the shiny white flesh of the guy's back, and not getting much response.