River of Blue Fire (20 page)

As he backed away, the huge bug bent itself in a semicircle, following him with its front end even as the rest of its body held in place. Unlike the mostly anthropomorphic creatures of the Middle Country, it gave off no suggestion of feeling or thought at all. It was simply a hunter, a killing machine, and he had walked too near its hiding place at sundown.

Orlando reached down and grabbed the barge pole he had dropped, a rigid stem of grass twice his own length. He doubted it was strong enough to pierce the centipede's armor plating, but it might help to keep the creature at bay until he could think of something else to do. The only problem, he quickly discovered, was that he could not support the pole and hold his sword, too. He let the stem droop as the centipede began another sidewinding charge, and shoved the blade through his belt.

He managed to raise the pole just enough to jab it at the centipede's head. It lodged so hard against the creature's mouth parts that if Orlando had not dug the butt-end into the earth behind him, he would have slid right up the stem into the poison fangs. It bent, but did not snap. The centipede, arrested by something it could not see, rose clawing toward the sky until its first three pairs of legs were off the ground. The reed straightened and popped free. Released, the beast thumped heavily back to the ground, hissing even louder.

Orlando dragged the stem backward, looking for a new position to defend. The far end of the reed had been chewed to pulpy splinters. The centipede lockstepped toward him again, more cautiously this time, but showing no signs of going away to look for a more compliant meal. Orlando cursed weakly.

“I see the others!” Fredericks was shouting. “They're coming back!”

Orlando shook his head, trying to get his breath back. Unless their companions had kept some big secrets, he couldn't imagine any of them making much difference. This was pure monster-killer work, and Orlando was one of the best. Or was it Thargor who was one of the best . . . ?

Jeez, listen to me
, he thought blurrily, dragging the pole up into a protective posture again. Sharp things clashed in the shadows of the centipede's mouth.
Can't tell the difference between one kind of not-real and another
. . . .

He jabbed at its head, but this time he could not get the reed seated against the ground. The bug shoved forward and the long stem slid to one side off the dirty-brown carapace, catching between two of the driving legs like a stick in bicycle spokes. Orlando hung onto the pole as it jerked and flung him through the air to one side; he landed hard enough to squeeze the breath from his body. The great multilegged shape swiveled into a tight turn, rippled forward a half-dozen steps, then reared over him, legs hooking inward like two hands' worth of giant, snatching fingers. Orlando scrabbled backward, but it was a hopeless attempt at escape.

The centipede lifted and stretched farther, its killing parts locked in place above him like some horrible industrial punch-press. Fredericks' distant voice was now a meaningless shrill, fast disappearing in a rising wash of pure sound, a great storm, a slow explosion, but all somewhere far away and meaningless as Orlando struggled to lift the heavy stem one last time. In this moment of slow time, Death was upon him. The universe had nearly stopped, waiting for that ultimate second to tick over.

Then the second crashed upon him with blackness and wind. A cold thunder blasted down from above, a vertical hurricane that blew him flat and filled the air with stinging, blinding dust. Orlando screamed into dirt, knowing that any moment he would feel poison spines hammer down into his body. Something struck his head, throwing stars into his eyes, too.

The wind lessened. The darkness grew a little less. Fredericks was still shrieking.

Orlando opened his eyes. He squinted against the swirling dust, astonished to discover himself still alive in this world. Stones as big around as his thigh rolled past him as an impossibly vast black shape, like a negative angel, rose into the sky overhead. Something slender and frenetic and comparatively tiny writhed in its talons.

Talons
. It was a bird, a bird as big as a passenger jet, as a shuttle rocket—bigger! The explosive force of its wings, which had pinned him at the base of an invisible column of air, suddenly shifted as the bird tilted and vaulted away, the centipede still struggling helplessly in its claws, on its way to feed a nest full of fledglings.

“Orlando! Orlando, hey!” Fredericks was keening softly, far away, unimportant compared to the awesome sight of a certain, inescapable death being sucked away into the evening sky. “
Gardiner
!”

He looked up to the bluffs above the beach, where Sweet William and T4b had dropped their bundles of reeds to stare in astonishment after the swift-rising bird. He turned to Fredericks, and the boat, but they were gone.

A heart-stopping instant later he saw that they were only displaced, that the new leaf-boat they had so laboriously built in one place was now quite a way distant. It took a moment for his dazed mind to put together the information and realize that the leaf was on the river, blown into the water by the bird's flapping wings, and was drifting slowly out toward the strong current. Fredericks, alone on board, was leaping up and down, waving his arms and shouting, but already his voice was growing too faint to understand.

Befuddled, Orlando looked up to the bluffs. The two figures there had finally seen Frederick's situation, and were making their way down the mossy bank as swiftly as they could, but they were a minute's run away at least, and Fredericks was only a score of seconds from the current that would sweep him away forever.

Orlando picked up the barge pole like a javelin and dashed along the beach. He sprinted toward a headland, hoping he might be able to extend the long stem to Fredericks, but when he got there, it was clear that even with three such poles he would not be able to reach his friend. The leaf caught for a moment in an eddy, buffeted between the faster current and the small backwater below the headland. Orlando looked at his friend, then back at T4b and Sweet William, still distant and small as they ran toward him across the strand. He turned and scrambled down the headland, got a running start, and flung himself off into the backwater.

It was a near thing, even in reasonably warm water. Orlando had almost run out of strength, and was wondering what had happened to his legs (which he could no longer feel) when Fredericks reached down and plucked the floating barge pole from the water. Orlando was just deciding that traveling to a virtual universe to drown seemed a long way around for a person with a terminal illness, when the centipede-chewed end of the pole slapped down next to him, nearly braining him.

“Grab it!” Fredericks shouted.

He did, then his friend helped him struggle over the edge of the leaf onto the mat they had spent much of the afternoon weaving. Orlando had strength only to huddle down out of the evening wind, shivering, as water drizzled off him and the river swept them away from the beach and their two astounded companions.

“I
t's yours, Skouros,” the captain said. “It's
Merapanui
. On your system even as we speak.”

“Thanks. You're a mate.” Calliope Skouros did not say it like she meant it, and to avoid any accusations of subtlety, she curled her lip as well. “That case has been history so long that it smells.”

“You wanted one, you got one.” The sergeant made a wiping-her-hands gesture. “Don't blame me for your own ambition. Make a last pass, call the witnesses. . . .”

“If any of them are still alive.”

“. . . Call the witnesses and see if anyone's remembered anything new. Then dump it back in the ‘Unsolved' list if you want. Whatever.” She leaned forward, narrowing her eyes. Skouros wondered if the sergeant's cornea-reshaping had been less than she'd hoped for. “And, speaking on behalf of the entire police force of Greater Sydney, don't say we never give you anything.”

Detective Skouros stood up. “Thank you for this rubber bone, O glorious mistress. I wag my tail in your general direction.”

“Get out of my office, will you?”

“It's ours and it's impacted,” she announced. The pressure vents on her chair hissed as she dropped her muscular body onto the seat.

“Meaning?” Stan peered at her over the top of his old-fashioned framed lenses. Everything about Stan Chan was old-fashioned, even his name. Calliope still could not understand what parents in their right minds would name a child “Stanley” in the twenty-first century.

“Impacted. Suctioning. Locked up. It's a rotten case.”

“This must be that Merapanui thing.”

“None other. They've finally kicked it loose from the Real Killer investigation, but it's not like they were doing anything with it over there. It's already five years old, and I don't think they did anything but look it over, run the parameters through their model, then throw it out again.”

Her partner steepled his fingers. “Well, did you solve it already, or can I have a look at it, too?”

“Sarcasm does not become you, Stan Chan.” She kicked the wall-screen on, then brought up a set of branching box files. The case file popped to the top of the activity log, and she spread it out on the screen. “Merapanui, Polly. Fifteen years old. Living in Kogarah when she was killed, but originally from up north. A Tiwi, I think.”

He thought for a moment. “Melville Island—those people?”

“Yep. Homeless since she ran away from a foster home at thirteen. Not much of an arrest record, other than vagrancy-related. A few times for shoplifting, two offensive conducts. Locked up a couple of days once for soliciting, but the case notes suggest she might actually have been innocent of that.”

Stan raised an eyebrow.

“I know, astonishing to contemplate.” Calliope brought up a picture. The girl in the stained shirt who stared back had a round face that seemed too large on her thin neck, frightened wide eyes, and dark, curly hair pulled to one side in a simple knot. “When she was booked.”

“She seems pretty light-skinned for a Tiwi.”

“I don't think there
are
any full-blooded Tiwi any more. There's damn few of us full-blooded Greeks.”

“I thought your grandfather was Irish.”

“We made him honorary.”

Stan leaned back and brought his fingertips together again. “So why did it get pulled out of the dormant file by the Real Killer crew?”

Calliope flicked her fingers and brought up the scene photos. They were not pretty. “Just be glad we can't afford full wrap-around,” Calliope said. “Apparently the type and number of wounds—a big hunter's knife like a Zeissing, they think—were similar in some respects to Mr. Real's work. But it predates the first known Real murder by three years.”

“Any other reasons they gave up on it?”

“No similarities besides the wound patterns. All the Real victims have been whites of European descent, middle-class or upper-middle. They've all been killed in public places, where there was at least theoretical electronic security of some sort, but the security's always failed in some way. Put that damn eyebrow down—of
course
it's weird, but it's not our case. This one is.”

“Speaking of, why did you ask for this Merapanui thing in the first place? I mean, if it isn't a prostitute getting offed by a client, it's a crime of passion, a one-shot. If we want casual murders, we got streets full of them every day.”

“Yeah?” Calliope raised a finger and flicked forward to another set of crime scene snaps, these from an angle that showed all of the victim's face.

“What's wrong with her eyes?” Stan asked at last, rather quietly.

“Couldn't say, but those aren't them. Those are stones. The killer put them in the sockets.”

Stan Chan took the squeezers from her and enlarged the image. He stared at it for a dozen silent seconds. “Okay, so it's not your usual assault-whoops-homicide,” he said. “But what we still have here is a five-year-old murder which had a brief moment of erroneous fame when it seemed like the perp might be an important killer who's been splashed all over the newsnets. However, what it really is, Skouros, is some other cop's leftovers.”

“Succinct, and yet gloriously descriptive. I like your style, big boy. You looking for a partner?”

Stan frowned. “I suppose it beats cleaning up after cake dealers and chargeheads.”

“No it doesn't. It's a shit case. But it's ours.”

“My joy, Skouros, is unbounded.”

It was never an easy choice on office days between taking the light rail or driving the underpowered e-car the department leased for her, but though urban traffic insured that driving was slower, it was also quieter.

The auto-reader was picking its way through the case notes, making bizarre phonetic hash out of some of the Aboriginal and Asian names of the witnesses—not that there were many witnesses to anything. The murder had happened near a honeycomb beneath one of the main sections of the Great Western Highway, but if the squat had been occupied before the murder, it was empty by the time the body was discovered. The people who lived in such places knew that there was little benefit in being noticed by the police.

As the details washed over her again, Calliope tried to push all the preconceptions from her mind and just listen to the data. It was almost impossible, of course, especially with all the distractions that came from the tangled traffic streams humping along in fits and starts beneath the bright orange sunset.

First off, she was already thinking of the killer as “he.” But did it have to be a man? Even in her comparatively brief career, Calliope had worked homicide in Sydney long enough to know that women, too, could end another's life, sometimes with surprising violence. But this bizarre, iron-nerved, obsessive play with the body—surely only a man would be capable of such a thing. Or was she sliding into prejudice?