City of Ghosts

Chapter Ten

She was right about that one, at least mostly. Lauren called her cell phone just as Terrible dumped her off on the steps of her building and peeled away: Chess should meet her at Church instead because she had too much to do to drive in to Downside. They were apparently going to check out Erik Vanhelm’s place anyway, and the Church lay between Chess’s apartment and Cross Town. Great. So instead of having time to relax a little, she had just enough time for a quick salt-scrub shower to wash off the remnants of sick magic clinging to her.

Too bad salt scrub couldn’t do anything about the other stuff. The memory of his hand on the back of her neck, of the moment when he’d spoken to her as she huddled in the corner with twisting evil eating her insides, so gently. How it had felt safe. The way he always used to make her feel. And how fucking stupid she’d been. Fresh pain throbbed through her veins; it dulled a little when she sent four Cepts in after it, but did not disappear.

Her stomach still felt heavy and too warm when she parked outside the Church and plodded up to the tall front doors. For once they gave her no peace. Nor did the inside, the soaring entryway with high carvings on the walls and tender blue light glowing from the ceiling.

The building bustled and hummed with people; Church employees, Debunkers like her who nodded or said hello as they passed her on their way to the enormous library upstairs, or Liaisers, quiet with the secrets of the dead, on their way to the elevator and from there to the City below the earth.

Where she would have to go, she remembered with a shudder. In four days they would all go, to perform the Dedication ceremony for the executioner and Elder Murray.

In four days she would have to stand with her fellow employees, all of whom would smile and talk about how peaceful it was, how beautiful, and how pleased they were that the Elder and the executioner had found their eternal bliss, and she would have to smile and pretend she felt the same way. Pretend the City didn’t terrify her, didn’t look to her like the literal interpretation of the emptiness and misery she carried with her every day. Pretend she didn’t want to scream and tear the skin off her body with her fingers for just being there.

Pretend she was just like the rest of them. The way she did every day. Normal. Happy. Clean.

“Hey, Chessie. Are you okay?” Dana Wright came down the stairs, her slim arms loaded with books. “You look kind of upset about something.”

“Huh? Oh, I’m fine, I just … I was just thinking about Elder Murray.”

“Oh.” Dana bit her lip. “I know, it’s so sad, isn’t it?”

“I—”

“I mean, I know it isn’t, I know he’s going to be so happy now.” Dana glanced around them, eyeing the little crowd of Goodys at the far end of the hall. Her next words were spoken in their direction. “I’m just being selfish. I know this is a good thing for him.”

The Goodys didn’t seem to be paying attention, but you never could tell. The acoustics in the hall were funny sometimes. Chess figured a total change of subject was the best idea. “What are you working on?”

“Trying to determine who Madame Lupita was Hosting and how it got into her. It’s really something the Squad is handling, but since I was in the room … Here. I have the list of people who came to visit her before her execution.” Dana shuffled the load in her arms, came up with a thin sheet of paper clasped between two of her fingers, draping over her hand. “Do you recognize any of the names? Just because you were the one who actually went in, we thought you might.”

Chess plucked the paper off Dana’s hand and scanned it. “I didn’t really get any names, I mean, not the kind they’d sign officially. But …”

“But what? Chessie?”

Her voice dragged Chess back to reality, away from the name glaring up at her in spiky copperplate. “What? Oh, sorry. I kind of drifted for a second. Hey, can I make a copy of this? Some of the names might come back to me, you know?”

“Sure. They told me to show it to you, so I can’t imagine they’d have a problem with it.”

Lining the wall to her right were low, long, dark wooden benches. On Thursdays they’d be full of people, family members of the dead come to consult with the Liaisers. Family members with full pockets; talking to the dead didn’t come cheap.

Nothing did with the Church. Most people didn’t have to pay more than tithing taxes, but for special services … Liaising, weddings, childhood indoctrinations and blessings … It all had a price.

Chess didn’t begrudge the price, oh, no. That was what paid her meager salary. More to the point it was where her bonuses came from. That thirty grand in her bank account represented the toil and sweat of a thousand or so taxpayers, and she appreciated it. She’d appreciate it even more later, when she got to take some of it to the pipe room and suck back some forgetfulness.

But that was later. This was now, and she knelt before the bench and rested her notepad on it to copy the list.

All of the names, all eleven of them. Best to copy them all. Best not to make Dana suspicious by simply copying ARTHUR MAGUINNESS on her pad, along with the address he’d given at Ninetieth and Mercer. In Downside.

The address might have been real, but the name wasn’t. She searched every database she could think of in the Church mainframe, where birth and death records were kept since the end of Haunted Week and the Church’s installation as the ruling body. Granted, even with the Church’s control it was possible for people to slip through the cracks, but the lack of any information on Maguinness still disturbed her.

He was clearly old enough to have been born BT. He would have had a birth certificate, filled out and filed in whatever state he’d been born and entered into the database; an entire full-time staff had done nothing but copy that information in. And if that accent of his indicated he’d been born elsewhere in the world? There still should have been a certificate to be entered.

So his name couldn’t have actually been Maguinness, because out of the hundred and forty Maguinnesses she found in the system, none of them could possibly have been the one she was interested in. Shit!

But how had he gotten in to visit Lupita without a real name? Visitors had to produce some kind of identification; their identities were checked. Hell, they were fingerprinted. It wasn’t unusual for blood to be drawn and checked against the DNA database for some prisoners. Lupita probably didn’t qualify for that kind of security, but still …

She made a note to check with the prison and see if any of the guards remembered Maguinness. Not all the guards were witches; some were people with lesser skill. More than the average person, but not enough to qualify them for employment in any of the upper levels. It was entirely possible that Maguinness could somehow have bespelled one of them.

But Lupita had been convicted of a magical crime; wouldn’t her guards have been witches?

She sighed and wrote that down as well. This really wasn’t what she should have been focusing on. Maguinness was a side project, a bit of mild curiosity. She was supposed to be investigating the Lamaru, figuring out who they’d killed and why.

Speaking of which …

The file they’d given her the night before still sat in her bag, bound with a rubber band; a quick stop in Elder Griffin’s office had given her a few additional pages. Hard to get used to, that was. Debunkers didn’t keep their files, having to hand everything over to Goody Tremmell to be stored in the enormous cabinets in her little office. But the Squad kept their own reports, and for this case Chess got to do the same.

She pushed the plastic-covered fetish parts aside and pulled out the manila folder and the new pages, then paused. The Church library wasn’t full, but it wasn’t empty either; a couple of Debunkers-in-training studied at one of the tables at the far end, casting glances at her every few minutes or so; various other Church employees, including two junior Inquisitors, wandered between the shelves.

Goody Glass let her into the Restricted Room. Much better. There she could be alone, without worrying someone might see the file over her shoulder.

Hmm. Okay. The new reports confirmed an identity, and what a nice fucking bingo that was. At last, proof of Lamaru involvement beyond a stupid symbol any idiot could have carved; the dead body in the lot by the docks had once been Garret Denby, whose records had a nice big Lamaru stamp on them in red. Ding ding ding.

Or at least, it would have been a ding ding ding if that hadn’t opened up a whole new can of confusion. She’d been brought into this thing to investigate Lamaru crimes, not Lamaru deaths.

Not that they weren’t fully capable of killing their own. Even if their reputation hadn’t preceded them, Chess would never forget the fear in Randy Duncan’s voice when she’d realized he was the Church employee working with the Lamaru several months back. Couldn’t forget the sheer terror on his face at the prospect of failing the Lamaru and what they would do to him.

So had Garret been killed because he was trying to leave the Lamaru, or because he’d failed them? Either was entirely possible. They were in that respect like any terrorist organization; there was no retiring, and failure meant death.

Which meant checking out his place would be well worth it, at least after Lauren finally got tired of playing Precious Daughter and decided to do some actual work.

But didn’t it seem odd that he’d been left in a pile of useless parts in one lot, while another pile of parts was left in another lot with Lamaru marks on them?

Speaking of those other parts … No ID on the bodies Ratchet had reported to Bump; those were the reports she’d glanced at earlier in Terrible’s car. Whoever had been killed, they hadn’t been in any of the DNA databases, and there were no fingerprints … no fingers to print. Ugh. She made a note to double-check the lack of DNA results; not all the parts had been tested before she was brought into the case, so ID might still be possible. Only a few of the parts were DNA matches with one another, which meant she was looking at images of three dead bodies, or rather, various parts from three bodies.

No organs. No heads. No fingers. Hell, not even feet. In other words, the parts found in the lot were leftovers, items of no or very little magical value. She supposed that could account for the lack of malevolent energy around them, at least in part.

She skipped the chart of each DNA string—the Black Squad might be able to understand it, but she couldn’t—and headed for the summaries.

“… genetic anomaly in parts two, six, and seven does not match anomaly in three and four. Three and four do not match one, five, eight, and nine. All contain communal genetic markers.”

Okay, so … what? She looked again, checked the pictures. That was no help so she read the second summary, wondering if perhaps she was either a little too high or just stupid.

Or maybe the case was simply more fucked-up than she’d thought. If she understood correctly—she’d have to double-check with Lauren but she thought she was right—each of the three dead people had possessed genetic anomalies; had been chromosomally imperfect. Not in a recorded and common way, but in ways that at least the two Seekers who’d done the analysis had never heard of or seen before. And the people whose parts they were had been related to each other in some way.

Were the Lamaru doing experiments with people? Altering their—No, she didn’t think it was possible to alter the DNA of living people. But in utero, before fertilization … That in itself was a major crime.

But not one she’d put past the Lamaru. She wouldn’t put anything past the Lamaru.

Shit, though. How long had they been planning this? Those body parts did not belong to infants or small children; their size alone indicated that couldn’t be the case.

The entire report was full of thick scientific analytical language she didn’t really understand; Debunkers didn’t generally get involved in investigations of that sort. Why hadn’t Lauren told her about this the night before? Sure, she’d probably imagined Chess would read it for herself, but wouldn’t this be the sort of thing she might mention upfront? “By the way, it seems the Lamaru are breeding genetically imperfect humans and killing them?” Wouldn’t that have made sense to mention?

Probably a test of some kind. What a pain in the ass. If Lauren was going to play games with her, this whole thing was going to be—Well, hell, it could take as long as it wanted, right? Chess was getting a grand a week. She could use the money.

Still, she’d ask about it. Being kept in the dark didn’t make her happy; having her work double-checked by means of some sneaky let’s-see-if-she-mentions-this made her even less so.

One last thing to check, as long as she was in the Restricted Room anyway. Most of the books concerned advanced spells and research materials, things the Church didn’t want just any training witches to be able to get their hands on. Among them were a few volumes on human-ghost spells, Hostings, and Bindings. Might be some information in there about how Maguinness—if it had been Maguinness—had smuggled a ghost in to Lupita, how she’d managed to keep it hidden while in custody. She thought she’d seen something in one of them a few years before, in one of her first solo Debunking cases when the family had been trying to claim that a ghost had possessed their daughter.

A little shiver ran up her spine when she thought again about her last Debunking case, about the sigil on Terrible’s chest. The sigil had turned a promising Church student named Kemp into a sick, ghost-possessed toy for any clever spirit who had a use for him. And one certainly had; Kemp had played battery and human slave to a murdered prostitute who wanted to stay in business forever. And Kemp had liked it enough to attempt to kill those who wanted to stop him.

Later. She’d worry about that later; it wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it anyway, when Terrible wouldn’t talk to her. What was she supposed to do, wrestle his enormous frame to the ground and make him? Take him down to the City and let him loose to see if any ghosts invaded his body? Sure. He’d be eager to do either of those things with her, to do anything at all with her.

She scanned the index of the oldest of the books she’d grabbed. Yes, this was the one. Okay. She grabbed her pen and copied:

It is possible in some cases to bond with a spirit so completely that it becomes part of the living body itself. This is achieved through the use of black magics so dark I hesitate to describe them here. See Baldarel.

Baldarel? What was … ah. Another book. Uses of Spirits, by August Baldarel. She pulled the slim volume—little more than a pamphlet, really—off the shelf and started to open it.

“Cesaria! There you are, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Lauren stood in the doorway, with her arms folded and a frown twisting her mouth.

Chess ignored it. “I’ve been doing some research about the case, the—”

“Never mind that. They’re about to separate Vanhelm’s Bindmate and Banish it. Let’s go.”

She turned and stalked away without looking back. Gee, working with her was almost as fun as working with Terrible these days. Didn’t they both make Chess feel all warm inside.

But she reshelved the book, grabbed her bag, and followed. Lauren had already reached the top of the main staircase; Chess refused to run, but did manage to catch up halfway down the steps.

“Why didn’t you—”

The shrieking of the alarm cut into her words, into her thoughts, like a white-hot iron blade. What the fuck? The alarm—the prison.

Lauren’s wide eyes told her she was thinking the same thing: The Banishment was taking place there.

They both started running.

Few prisoners were kept in the Church building prison itself; only those awaiting trial or execution, or those who were particularly magically dangerous. On Friday nights the small Reckoning cells filled up, citizens who’d confessed their crimes and wanted to be punished, or those who’d had complaints filed against them. Minor crimes or moral crimes only, though; petty theft, adultery, information crimes like insider trading or hacking below a certain damage level.

But a situation that required the alarms to sound was serious. All-hands-on-deck serious, and as Lauren and Chess reached the back hall they met more Church employees, all with the same white faces and steely eyes.

They were too late, though. Too late to save the guards lying on the cold tile with crimson pools of blood forming around them. Too late to save Gary Anderson, a fellow Debunker, slumped against the wall behind a still-smoking firedish, his unmarked face and bloody lips and the odd bluish cast of his skin giving mute testimony as to how he’d died: His soul had been torn from his living body. Murder by psychopomp.