Dead Reign (2 page)

“You have no proof of these allegations.”

She shrugged. “You were in low security back then, because Dr. Husch had decided you weren’t a threat to others. You were allowed to walk the grounds at Blackwing, with supervision. You were allowed to have visitors. I know Upchurch visited you several times in the weeks before Somerset was resurrected—I checked the logs. I don’t know what you
talked
about, but I can guess. Somerset killed Sauvage. That guy was my
friend.
” Sauvage was her predecessor as chief sorcerer, and they’d gotten close back when she was a freelancer living by her wits and her steel-toed boots. “If I hadn’t stopped him, Felport would be a little piece of Hell on Earth now.”

“Somerset was a great leader. Strong. Sometimes ruthless, it’s true. I served him until he died, and then I served Sauvage, who was barely half the man Somerset was. He had no vision. But still, I worked for him loyally.”

“Until he had you locked up, right, Ayres? That must have pissed you off. Somerset wouldn’t have put you away—he didn’t care if the occasional ordinary got killed in the course of business. They were never part of his
vision.
”

Ayres took a deep breath. “As I said, you have no proof. Your accusations are baseless.”

Marla looked him over. He was old, yes, but far from broken. She’d hoped he would confess, but really, did it matter? “True. Upchurch was torn to bits by Somerset, and Dr. Matte couldn’t put his skull back together well enough to make him speak after death. So yeah, all I’ve got is suspicions. But they’re strong suspicions. If I had proof, you’d be dead by now. Dead for real.”

“I could have brought Upchurch’s shade back to answer questions,” Ayres said, a trifle smugly. “You see? You could use someone of my talents.”

Marla snorted. “I’ll pass. Get out of here, old man.”

He blinked at her. “What?”

“Beat it. Get lost. This is your one warning. If I catch you trying to practice your craft in my city again, I won’t have you committed—I’ll just strip you of your property and banish you.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong. I deserve—”

“You deserve whatever I want to offer.” Her voice was low and dangerous. “I don’t even need reasons. I’m in charge, and you’re out. If you want to retire and spend your days yelling at the kids on your lawn and playing Bingo, great, you’re welcome to stay, and I won’t say boo to you. But your time as a sorcerer is over. I won’t have you bringing any more dead monsters from the past to life.”

Ayres slumped his shoulders, and the light left his eyes. “I cannot change your mind?”

“Please. You’re lucky I gave you one screwup for free.”

“I will be on my way, then.” He started to gather his candles and powders.

“Leave that stuff. Consider it a donation to the city.”

Ayres didn’t even object, just nodded and walked away, leaning heavily on his stick as he went.

Marla opened her cell phone and called her consiglieri, Hamil. “Can you send a couple of guys with shovels down to the Browne Memorial Cemetery? I’ve got a coffin that needs burying. Or rather, reburying.”

“I don’t even want to know, do I?”

“Probably not.” Marla didn’t tell him about her suspicions regarding Ayres. She couldn’t prove anything, after all. “Nothing to worry about.”

“You’re still going to see the Chamberlain tomorrow about the Founders’ Ball?” Hamil said.

“Yeah, yeah, you’ve reminded me a thousand times.” Marla hung up.

She should get back to the car. Rondeau could get into all kinds of mischief by himself, and she shuddered to think what he might accomplish with the help of a small goat. But being in a cemetery made her melancholy, and she wanted to shake that off before she rejoined the company of others. Marla wasn’t far from the grave of her friend Ted, who’d died last winter, and she walked toward his modest marker. She also wasn’t far from the grave of her onetime lover Joshua Kindler, the man who’d killed Ted, and the last person to die at Marla’s hands. Marla wasn’t comfortable with killing people—from a purely pragmatic standpoint, murder incurred a deep karmic debt, and could eventually have dangerous consequences for a user of magic. As she looked down at Ted’s dark gravestone, set flush with the ground and inscribed with only his name and dates, she thought about other graves she’d filled. Three here in Felport. Two in San Francisco, though one was just an unmarked hole in Golden Gate Park. One back in her hometown in Indiana. Too many deaths. Most were situations where she’d had no other options, but some of them…some of them could have been different, if she’d been brave enough or smart enough or, though she hated to admit it, a little less sure of her own righteousness.

Marla shook off the weight of her regrets. She had things to do in the here-and-now, and the past was better left buried. On her way out of the cemetery, she paused by the casket Ayres had exhumed. A couple of Hamil’s apprentices would be along shortly to bury it. She patted the coffin’s lid. “Sorry we disturbed you,” she said. “Rest well.”

The next morning, Ayres sat seething on an iron bench on the esplanade, staring at the deep blue waters of the bay. Yes, he’d helped raise Somerset from the dead, though the Somerset that came to life was not the fearless visionary Ayres had expected, but a monster rendered insane by too many years of death. Ayres regretted his part in the affair, but Marla’s arrogance was insufferable. Ayres had been a prominent sorcerer in Felport when Marla’s
mother
was in diapers. He’d been born and raised in this city, steeped in the magical subculture from his earliest youth, when he’d first discovered the ability to speak to roadkill in the street and raise euthanized butterflies from the dead. Marla was an outsider who’d come to this city in her teens and stumbled into magic. Yes, she had a certain rough-edged charisma, and was said to be one of the most potent martial magicians the city had ever seen, but the ability to damage people physically didn’t qualify one for leadership. She wouldn’t even allow him to raise a servant. It was intolerable. He
needed
a servant—he was an old man, even by the long-lived standards of sorcerers, and he couldn’t very well scrub his own toilets and carry his own burdens or conduct his own reconnaissance. But what Marla didn’t know…

He rose and began walking, every step easing his stiffened joints. Once, he’d believed that stiffness was rigor mortis setting in, but he was
alive,
he knew, and the pains were only encroaching age. It would be a waste of time to try exhuming another corpse. Marla was surely having him watched. Fresh corpses were easiest to raise, but in truth he would prefer a nice mummy or bog-man, a corpse that had been preserved by the old methods. They flaked a bit, but didn’t fall to rot and wormy ruin as other corpses did. There was a mummy in the natural history museum, but he couldn’t spirit that away without being found out. He had to act in secret. Perhaps there were other options. He had some connections from the old days who might help. Somerset and Sauvage were not the only masters he’d served. He’d sometimes consulted with Hamil, but the man was Marla’s lapdog. Ayres needed someone he could get leverage over, who could be convinced to defy Marla….

He stopped. He smiled. He twirled his walking stick, feeling almost jaunty, and set off for one of the access points to the secret catacombs beneath Felport, the tunnels and caverns and vaults hidden to even the most seasoned of sewer workers, known only to sorcerers like himself. He went down a crumbling concrete stairway that led to the bay. The tide was out, revealing a strand of rocky beach. Ayres picked his way along carefully, the stink of low tide reminding him of his own rotting flesh—no, no, he was alive, still alive, he’d never died! After a while he reached the spot he remembered and slowly clambered up a few slick boulders, working his way carefully up to the face of the sea cliff. He used his stick to clear away hanging curtains of seaweed, revealing a mossy iron gate, which he pulled open, the hinges squealing and protesting from years of disuse, and he wondered if anyone else even remembered this passageway. Well, Viscarro would, of course—Viscarro was Felport’s subterranean sorcerer. He’d been here for as long as anyone could remember, carving his vaults beneath the street, drawing magic from the darkness, raising mushrooms with peculiar properties, hoarding gold and stranger treasures. He had a little bit of everything hidden away, it was said…and Ayres knew a secret about him. For sorcerers, secrets were power, and Ayres knew more than a few.

Ayres entered the stinking passageway, stepping around puddles of pooled filth. Soon the concrete walls turned to brick, and farther along to the black stone of natural caverns, walls furry with mold. Ayres finally reached a modern gate of steel bars, where a cadaverously pale attendant sat in an illuminated booth behind a Plexiglas barrier, his head resting against one wall as he dozed.

Ayres rapped on the Plexiglas sharply with his stick, and the attendant shot up. “Very shoddy,” Ayres said, leaning close and shouting through the cluster of holes punched in the glass to allow communication. “Does Viscarro know you sleep on duty?”

The boy—he was perhaps in his forties, and to Ayres, any man who wasn’t old enough to be dead of natural causes was a boy—sputtered, “I…no one has come to this gate in years!”

“I need to see Viscarro.”

The apprentice frowned. “Who may I say is calling?”

“Ayres, the necromancer.”

The boy scribbled something on a sheet of paper, tucked it into a glass-and-brass cylinder, and shoved the whole thing into a pneumatic tube, where it was whisked away to some deeper place in the vault. “It’ll be a few minutes,” he said, not quite apologetically. “I’d offer you something to drink, but, well…” He gestured at the bars that cut him off from Ayres.

“Viscarro’s hospitality is as fine as I remember.” Ayres leaned patiently on his stick.

A few moments later a cylinder dropped in the pneumatic tube. The boy unrolled the note inside, frowned, and said, “Viscarro sends his apologies, but he can’t see you right now. He suggests you come back next month, when the moon is new.”

This was not totally unexpected. “Tell him to see me now, or I’ll reveal his deepest secret in a way calculated to cause the greatest possible damage.”

“What secret is that?”

Ayres just stared at him. The boy sighed, scribbled a note, and sent it up the tube. After another interminable wait, a return note arrived. The attendant glanced at it and pressed a button, sounding a buzzer and making the metal gate swing open. Ayres passed through the opening and followed the apprentice to a solid-looking metal door. Beyond the door, Viscarro’s lair looked like something between a bank and a university archive—a series of rooms with low ceilings, crammed shelves, and endless rows of filing cabinets and desks, all lit with hideous fluorescent lights, with industrious men and women poring over heaps of papers. They walked past dozens of vault doors, all shining metal with enormous handles shaped like ship’s wheels and complex locking mechanisms that combined technology, magic, and sheer dense physicality. Viscarro was a hoarder, and he’d been under the city for a long time. Whenever a sorcerer in some faraway place died, Viscarro sent his agents to attend their estate auctions or—it was rumored—to simply steal their treasures. He’d raked in whole libraries and art collections over the years, and his horde of apprentices went through them diligently, sorting the genuinely valuable items from the frauds and trinkets and objects of merely sentimental value. Viscarro made a good living as an antiquities dealer, but his real wealth was here, in the vaults. In addition to countless charmed, enchanted, cursed, and haunted items, Viscarro was rumored to have half a dozen genuine magical artifacts—those strange items of intrinsic power, of mysterious and ancient origin, which sometimes seemed to have minds of their own.

Ayres had only ever seen one artifact up close, and that was the dagger of office that every chief sorcerer of Felport inherited in their turn. The stories said the dagger could cut through anything, and that if wielded by a hand other than that of its rightful owner, it would turn and kill the holder. Ayres wondered about that last part. It sounded like apocrypha meant to scare would-be thieves. Artifacts were items with
motives,
though, so who could say? Marla was said to possess another artifact, too, a strange purple-and-white cloak with powers of healing and devastation, though Ayres had never personally seen it, and she was reportedly reluctant to wear it anymore because of the damage it did to her psyche. Which just went that much further toward proving her unsuitableness to rule Felport. If Somerset had possessed an item of such power, he would have used it to expand his control of the city, make it into an empire. He’d been a ruler with
vision.
Viscarro was no better, though—if he got his hands on the cloak
or
the dagger, he’d just shut it away in some deep vault, thrilled by the mere fact of possession.

“The master is through there.” The apprentice gestured to an office door marked “Management.” Ayres went to the door, knocked once, then stepped into the dim office beyond. The room smelled of sweet spices. Viscarro sat behind a large antique desk, illuminated by the glow of a banker’s lamp. The skin of his bald head was so white and papery it made his apprentices look tan in comparison, and his ears seemed subtly wrong, too pointed, perhaps. He looked up from the papers on his desk, the monocle in his left eye catching the light and glinting, and offered Ayres a brief, toothy smile. “I should have you cut up into food for my worm farm. To come here and threaten me with nonsense about secrets?”

Though he hadn’t been offered a seat, Ayres sat down in the leather chair before Viscarro’s desk. “It’s good to see you, too, old friend. It’s been too many years. I understand you could not visit me during my time in the hospital—I know sunlight and fresh air do not agree with you—but you might have sent a letter.”

“We are not friends,” Viscarro said. “You were a tradesman. You
worked
for my friends.”

Ayres sniffed. “I was one of Somerset’s closest advisors.”