Knight of the Demon Queen (19 page)

She touched a button at the bottom right of the screen. The voices and the brain-numbing music could be lowered but never completely eliminated. It helped that John hadn’t the least idea of what those people on the screen were saying, because if he had, he was certain he’d have been driven genuinely insane in hours. He wondered how many murders were committed or apartments were sacked simply because that endless yammering covered any hope of hearing an invader.

John paid her with a piece of the Demon Queen’s silver, and the way her eyes lit up—and Docket’s bulged with shock—he guessed that precious metals were as uncommon in the city as wood, leather, wool, or anything else that came from nature.

When she skittered away, clutching the coin as if it were a jewel, he was aware of the old man regarding him with uncertain wariness in the white glare of the single square of illuminated tile—ether lights, Docket called them—that filled the room. “You want to be careful, my friend,” the old man said gently. “Best not to let people know you have things like that, if you have any more of them. The deep-zone gangs have informants everywhere here, and they’re not to be trifled with.”

John had already encountered the gangs that came in by scutter boat from the flooded streets and empty ruins drowned fathoms deep. He understood, from things Docket had told him, that in addition to buying the more potent and unpredictable drugs like Blood Red and Lovehammer, they made stimulants of their own and as a result behaved with unpredictable violence if crossed.

“I’ll be careful,” he said.

There had to be someone, he thought as the old man left. He braced the only chair against the door. Someone knew the girl who’d been killed, or someone had seen something or knew something. Had the killing been entirely random the Demon Queen would not have shown it to him. He needed a place from which to watch and listen, to learn the signals that were a hunter’s livelihood and life.

That narrow strip where she’d been killed, the streets and alleys where the water lay ankle-deep and sometimes not even that, was the place to begin.

The girl had been well dressed. That pink shoe he’d found was new, and if silver was treasured, gold must be valued here like life itself. The girl had been driven into the alley, but she’d come from higher and drier ground beyond.

And somewhere in those wealthier zones, a man in dark spectacles sat in a green leather chair, fingering gold.

Amayon could probably find him in a night.

John leaned one shoulder against the wall and contemplated the frolicking images on the ad screen—the bouncing and looming pictures of boots or bottles or faces—and touched, beneath his shirt, the hot angry heart of the ink bottle. Dimly, as if from the end of an infinite
corridor, he thought he could hear the demon cursing him.

An incomprehensible place, he thought, but at least a place that was neither evil nor good—only dangerous and interesting and a hell of a tale to tell Jenny if he managed to get out of it alive. He prowled into the tiny plex cubicle and twisted and poked at the levers there and was rewarded—to his delighted astonishment— with a miniature waterfall of hot clean water such as he’d seen on the ad screens.

I’ll definitely have to figure out how this works before I go back
, he thought, stripping out of his sodden and filthy clothes and stepping in.
I wonder if we can rig one up at the Hold.

“Demons walk the streets of this city, my friends.” Bort TenEighty leaned impressively across the table littered with cups—plex table and plex cups, since the House of Two Fragrances wavered somewhere in that deadly neverland between a coffee house and a mere café—and stabbed a thick finger at the other members of the League of the White Black Bird. “I’ve seen them. Mark my words, it’s they who took poor old Docket.”

Measuring coffee beans into one machine that would grind them, dumping the resulting grit into another machine that would actually do the brewing, engulfed in an aromatic miasma of steam and heat and thumping music that almost but not quite drowned the ad screens that took up most of two walls, Aversin listened. Not a lot of people in the city—which he still sometimes thought of as the Hell of Walls—were able to filter through conflicting sounds to pick out those in a single timbre, like a voice, and in any case the Demon Queen’s spell of comprehension definitely helped. Nearly everyone drinking coffee in the brightly lit green-and-yellow room either had a personal sound environment system—PSE, for short—or had chipped their favorite recordings into the table players. Sometimes, John was amused and irritated to observe, both.

“You really think so?” SeventyeightFourFive asked. John had heard his name variously as
Poot
or
Garrypoot
or
Gargies
from the other members of the league, but SeventyeightFourFive came up on his cred when it was his turn to pay for the coffee. He was a thin young man with a long nose who always affected black clothing. The corneas of his eyes had a yellow tinge that Tisa Three—short for ThreeThirtyfive—who worked with John behind the counter, said was typical of cut-rate Priority Four plex eye jobs, whatever that meant.

“He’s a wizard,” Bort said. “Who else would have done such a thing?” His voice dropped, but he was so accustomed to dominating conversation—as he did every morning and evening with various members of the league at their regular corner table—that he could be clearly heard. “He said he’d seen them, too. Late in the night they creep along the verges of the wall or glow where they slip into the water: things like silvery lizards, shining in the dark. Double vanilla latte tall no-fat mocha cinnamon burned,” he added into the table mike.

“Get that, would you, Moondog?” Tisa asked. It was the League of the White Black Bird that had started calling John
Moondog
, after a character in a book: a professor of literature who went mad and believed himself to be a dragon slayer. The staff of the House of Two Fragrances had very quickly picked up the nickname.

John didn’t mind. He’d found employment mostly as a means of learning: Had he been in a strange city in his own world, he would have worked as potboy in a tavern, just to listen to what people said.
Not up to Jen’s trick of spreadin’ her awareness over the countryside and hearin’ voices on the wind, but we do what we can.

“The wet zone’s shifted in the past two years,” Clea
SeventysevenNine said. “Docket’s store is definitely inside it now.”

John’s attention sharpened. He knew now that the area where the girl had been killed was called the wet zone. The House of Two Fragrances, being in an older building, had actual windows, which looked out onto Economy Square, and the glare of the reflected neon outlined Clea’s long nose, her awkward chin, and the unkempt tail of gray hair that hung wet down her back. “There’s weird folks in there.” She was the oldest of the league, a tall rawboned woman who carried her weight in her belly like a man. Her dark eyes were kind and her voice soft. Among the excruciatingly fashionable women who patronized the H2F during this, the evening shift, she stood out in her homeliness, her dumpiness, and the mismatched brightness of her garb.

It was the same with all the members of the league, a loose congeries of friends and acquaintances who seemed to have taken the big corner table as their headquarters and meeting place at any hour of the day or night. The computers they often brought and plugged into the table outlet were good quality, according to Tisa Three. But they dressed like the poor, or like clerks and shop walkers and inputters, in loose baggy pants or anonymous tights, sloppy tunics or sweaters, plex ponchos bought from streetcorner bins and cracking already with a month’s use. They were among the very few who didn’t dye their hair either gaudy taffy-bright hues or jet black, and as far as John could ascertain, most of them eschewed the drugs that were nearly universal in the city. Tisa and the rest of the staff at the H2F complained about this, because most of the preblended coffees came mixed with White Light or Lovehammer or whatever the bliss of the day might be.

“And a lot of weird drugs,” Clea went on. “This might just be a case of some poor goon getting his dust cut with drain cleaner and taking it out on whoever crossed his path.”

“Nothing was missing.” Bort shook his head and stroked the savage auburn bush of his beard. “And nothing was disturbed, except for one book—Seventyfive-TwoOne’s
A Companion Beyond the Limits
. It had fallen on the floor behind the counter.”

“Woo, spooky.” Tisa squinnied to the machine beside John and mimed a sarcastic gesture of panic shock. “You listening to those guys?” She was a delicately pretty girl, thin with the manicured thinness fashionable among the rich and among those who wanted to look enough like the rich to be accepted by them. Her hair was dyed hyperfashionable snowy white—like the girls in the ad screens—and was dressed in tiny braids and lacquered loops held in place by gold clips with enameled blue butterflies. Under the transparent finish of one of the more expensive “masks”—as the skin ointments were called—her face was painted to enhance its natural pallor. She was, John guessed, seventeen or eighteen. He also guessed she prostituted herself part-time, as many girls—and boys, too—did along the wet zone’s fringes: not for money, but for clothes and jewelry, for gym or cinema subscriptions, for occasional rent or com-co bills, or for hits of high-priced drugs. She certainly hadn’t paid for that gold-and-blue hair clip herself, or the bracelets of real gold that circled her knobby wrists.

“Shouldn’t I?”

Tisa rolled her eyes. “Moondog,
honestly
, what manhole did you come out of?” She handed a gray-suited salaryman a triple-strength espresso and a muffin with a
brilliant smile—and a copy of a card printed with her com number—and turned back to John a moment later.

“Those guys are weird,” she explained patiently. She reached up and straightened the collar of the shabby, cinder-colored shirt he wore. “They’re crazy. You’ve got to be careful. They all think they’re
wizards
or something. I’ve
heard
them.”

“And that’s worse than doin’ your job and not thinkin’ anythin’ at all?” He nodded toward the clientele in the main body of the little bistro, most of whom were snatching a quick break after their regular work hours before returning to spend an extra two or three hours doing whatever they could to impress their superiors with their diligence, whether there was actual work to be performed or not. A couple of laborers lingered over coffee, heads adorned with holo-hats that played over and over fragments of advertisements—one of the more annoying ether-based miracles. There were students, too, from the art, ’ware, and tech schools, jacking their notebooks and PSE systems into the table relays, surrounding themselves in the noise of their choice to drown the clamor of those whose backs bent studiously twelve inches from their own.

“No,”
Tisa protested with the indignant promptness of one trained by years of advertising to believe that she was freer, different from, and better than others and therefore deserved to buy a more expensive mask or some Pixilon treatments to make her hair longer and shinier. “But I’ve been in that old guy’s crazy store.”

SixtysevenThree, the evening fetch-and-carry man, came through the door behind the counter, and Tisa and John slipped back through to take their break, climbing a narrow stair of high-impact plex to the storeroom above. The storeroom was situated just below the relay chamber
where crystals refracted, channeled, and focused the ether that powered the air circulation, lighting, water pumps, and computers for the entire building, and the concentrated vibration there gave John a headache if he stayed more than a few minutes. He suspected this was one reason why NinetysixThou, the manager of the H2F, had made it the employees’ break room.

There was a relay crystal in the room itself to power the coffee machines and table jacks. It was about three inches long and the thickness of Aversin’s little finger, unobtrusive in its gold-wired cage in the middle of the low ceiling. The gold cage was, of course, surrounded by a far more substantial lockbox of perforated metaplast, and there were two more metaplast ceiling boxes installed behind the stores of coffee and filters and drugs, ceiling boxes that John was pretty sure housed illegal relay crystals to pull energy for which NinetysixThou wasn’t paying Consolidated Power. On his first day of work, a week and a half ago, he’d climbed up on the table and examined the crystals as well as he could. They seemed to be identical and, he’d later learned, were manufactured as casually as potters in Alyn Village manufactured cups. His headache had increased when he’d come within a few feet of the lockbox.

With crystals by the dozen in every building and more relays of them glittering on their thin masts above every street, no wonder everyone in the city used Pink Sunshine and Let’s Get Happy and a dozen other substances to remain calm enough to function.

“That old guy, Docket ThreeFiftyfiveTen?” Her voice tilted inquiringly at the end of the sentence as if to ask if he was familiar with the shabby bibliophile, but in the next breath she went on as if assuming he was not. “I mean, if he’s a wizard and all that—if they’re
all
supposed
to be wizards—how come he’s running this crummy bookstore and living in one room in the back? How come TenEighty is like forty-five or something and all he does is input and teach a city rec class? That SeventysevenNine woman still lives with her mother! If they can do magic, how come they’re not rich?”

She perched on the corner of the table and dotted Sero-Yum on her tongue to kill her hunger, followed by a couple of dabs of Pink Sunshine—a gift from an admirer—to make it through the rest of the shift. “I know you don’t read, but that store he runs is full of
books
and stuff—really old paper books, I mean—about how to make magic and call elemental spirits. And those guys
believe
it! You see them sitting around comparing recipes for how to make gold out of breakfast flakes or how to talk to houseplants. They’re losers, Moondog.”