Streets of blood

6

Geraint pushed his way through the bead curtain, past the main shop area, and sat down opposite the tiny elf. Skita, the long-haired black and white cat, strolled over, his splendid tail held proudly aloft, and parked himself on Geraint’s lap. The Welshman smiled, curling his fingertips around the cat’s ears and under his chin, the animal responding by closing his eyes and purring in pleasure. Serena returned his smile, sitting with her hands folded in her lap, the spell focus on the table between them.

As always, she had crafted it so lovingly that it was a thing of real beauty. She had chosen crystal, roseate quartz, and set it within a silver dragon’s claw. It also had a small clasp that would let him wear it on a silver chain or as a brooch. Serena always attended to such fine points whether in her work or in her appearance. Today she wore a flowing silk blouse and cotton skirt in tones of dark blue and ivory, the lines classically elegant. She also wore her azure spinel earrings. The deep blue of the stones matched her beautiful eyes, and flashed with tiny points of magical golden light. Serena’s head was tilted slightly to the left as she looked at him, and he wondered if she was using her magical skills to probe his mind.

“You’re looking tired, my lord." She used the formal term, without any mockery, when reproaching him. “There’s gray under your eyes. You’ve been spending all your time in the world of false power. You will have to let go of that or you will suffer."

She handed him a glass of sparkling iced liquid, cloudy apple juice settling in pure spring water, wonderfully cold and refreshing. He took a deep draught and relaxed back against the pile of cushions. Skita moved slightly, too, stretching out his front legs, licking the side of one paw to wash his ears. The animal seemed to especially enjoy cleaning himself when Geraint was wearing a dark suit, all the better a carpet to deposit white belly hairs. The cat purred with a deeper tone, but then seemed to think better of rolling over to have his belly rubbed. Skita preferred to hold on to his dignity until he was fully relaxed.

"It’s just that time of year, Serena. Lots of corps are finalizing the third-quarter turnovers and announcements, and it’s been busy in the House. But then you’d know that." More than a few elven nobles counted Serena as a good friend, and it was probably their influence that allowed her to operate beyond the rigid legal constraints of the Lord Protector’s Office. She didn’t always need to fill out the quadruplicate paperwork or obtain the full array of permits most registered talismongers needed in Britain’s highly regulated society.

Serena waved away his words with a tiny, bird-like shake of her head. “You can always find a rationalization, Geraint. There is always the pressure of work, if you choose that. But I see you are not at ease. There is a blockage in your aura. Your left side”-she touched her left temple with her index finger-"has been flaring. You won’t accept it, or you don’t want to face it, and you tell yourself that you are too busy, perhaps. You have a block there, and your energies do not flow properly. You’re creating tension within yourself, and you have been trying to calm it with poisons.”

Her expression was almost stem, almost like one his mother had mastered to perfection. If he’d been allowed, he would have lit a cigarette to calm his irritation and to give his restless fingers something to do now that Skita was clearly not to be disturbed in the acme of his relaxation. Serena would not allow tobacco to even enter her premises, let alone be smoked here.

“Serena, I came for business. It’s fortunate that I asked for the mask when I did, for there’s an important business meeting this weekend and I’m sure there’ll be the usual gaggle of corporate mages and opportunistic freelancers trying to probe a mind or two here and there.”

The comment doubled as a warning to her not to probe his any further. Geraint reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew the credstick with the monogrammed silver top. It was a little joke between them, an ostentation that went beyond the bounds of his normal vanity, but one that pleased and amused her. He held it out to her, opening the palm of his free hand to receive the quartz focus in exchange. She took the stick and pushed the focus toward him, but would not relinquish the line of query.

"And they will know, as I do, that you are an adept. You would be a better one if you had not defiled your spirit.” Serena disapproved strongly of the little cyberware Geraint had implanted: his datajack, the headware memory, the cannula implant just above the first vertebra for swift administration of psychoactives. Poisons, she called them, and she would not budge on that interpretation. “It is not a common gift, yours, to see the future.”

This, at least, gave him the opportunity to attempt to divert the direction the conversation was going. “It’s not true precognition, my mother would say. Predicting the future is only extrapolating the present. It is merely clairvoyance and some intuitive guesswork that works out from time to time.” He took an almost perverse pleasure in denigrating his talent, a carefully imposed “merely” making it seem more domesticated, less an intrusion into a well-ordered life.

“Call it what you will, Geraint. It isn’t something you can stop, or control, or subdue. If you will not accept it, then it will break through in ways that will haunt and disturb you.” She was silent for a moment, then turned to put the credstick away. "Well, that’s done,” she said. "Will you have your cards read?"

“No. Thank you.” The first word was too swift, the second following a pause just too long. His response had been almost panicky, and they both knew it. Geraint hid his embarrassment by lifting up a complaining Skita and depositing the cat on the warm cushion he was vacating, then brushing the cat’s fur off his lap with exaggerated motions. As he was leaving, Serena had a final word for him, as always.

“Then, they have been speaking to you themselves. Listen, Geraint. Listen! If you do not, they will force you to hear. Take care.”

For some inexplicable reason, Geraint managed to knock a small trinket off the counter on the way out of the shop, diluting the impact of her words somehow. He hurriedly picked up the bracelet and replaced it in its wicker container on the polished glass counter. Serena stood with arms crossed, watching him half-seriously, half-amused.

"Acquaintance of yours was in the other day,” she said.

“Hmm? One of the elven nobles? Haven’t been seeing-”

“No, an elf from across the waters. Serrin Shamandar. I would not tell you what he was seeking, of course, but it was an interesting little coincidence." They both knew that neither of them believed in coincidence. Geraint shrugged, smiled away her raised eyebrows, and then headed into the flow of the faceless on Frith Street.

His bags were already packed as he held the focus within his hands. It would take a couple of hours for the bonding, to draw the magic of the thing into himself. He had handled and meditated upon the crystal and metal during its making, of course, and now he needed just a little time with the finished item. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, and within four hours he would be back in Cambridge, five or ten minutes from his old college, shaking hands with the rich, the fat, and the titled. He laughed, his good spirits returning, and sat down with the focus.

Within minutes, he was oblivious to the world, and he did not even register Francesca’s call on the telecom. Besides, she was only calling to wish him a prosperous weekend.

Serrin frowned as he parked the hired bike in the hotel’s underground garage. It didn’t help his mood to have baleful sodium-molybdenum lighting winking at him from the walls, with their flaking white-painted arrows pointing toward the elevator.

The morning had been tedious, as usual. Down in Grantchester, a couple of miles to the south, his watchers at the Renraku labs had chattered their reports to him. The barrier created by the hermetic mages inside was as thick as a troll samurai’s skin, but that was to be expected. The Corp’s watchers were observing his without undue concern. The little buggers probably leg it as soon as I’ve gone, doing whatever they do to amuse themselves, he thought.

It had been the usual routine: concentrating on his magical masking and camouflage, perceiving astrally from a safe distance, prowling around the seamless magical barriers, testing gently for any unusual responses or activities. But nothing unusual ever turned up. No combat mages returning the astral surveillance, no body-armored goons roaring forth in APVs. But then, this was England, nothing like what Serrin was used to back home.

Just for the hell of it, he decided to break the speed limit on the flat, straight road back to the heart of the sprawl. Roaring along the riverbank, he seriously startled some students poling flat-bottomed punts along the River Cam, but none actually fell into the stinking water. Serrin had read in his guidebook that ingesting a mouthful of the river water gave you a flat 10 percent chance of death by chemistry, while sometimes a puntful of students got swallowed by one of the paranimals that wandered downstream from the Stinkfens to the east. But the students still went on punting, as if the simple tradition of it all could defy the realities of a ravaged earth. People just went on: punting on rivers of filth, buying demitech that’d kill them more times than it’d work, going to butchers to get questionable cyberware implanted in street clinics, believing in another green guru with a smile on his face and a corporate credstick stuck up his ass.

Serrin had not been feeling his best that afternoon, but getting away with speeding had lifted his spirits some. Wandering into the hotel foyer, distinctly more grimy and unappealing than most of the clientele, he grinned in spite of himself. Maybe it was time for some late lunch and a decent bit of protein.

Striding toward the maitre d’ in the restaurant overlooking Parker’s Piece, the one patch of parkland left in Cambridge’s central zone, Serrin saw the first of the suits and goons arriving for the weekend seminar. Credsticks were flashing at the reception desk, and the troll chauffeurs looked stereotyped to perfection in their light gray uniforms and visors. Every bulge was in the right place, from the biceps to the licensed pistols secreted at hip and armpit.

Heading up the stairs toward the Churchill Suite were a pair of elves, their spell fetishes in plain view. Security was going to be obvious and strict. Serrin could understand why his employers had asked him to do a little tailing out of town if he was supposed to be checking out a couple of the participants here. From a purely logical point of view, he’d never doubt that this was the real purpose of his expensive jaunt at his anonymous employer’s expense. But that unknown something that hovered beyond logic wouldn’t let him rest with that.

He picked at his food, gripped by restlessness. He hated having a definite job to do and then having to wait around to do it. He amused himself with crazy ideas of bluffing his way into one of the laboratories by claiming to be a corporate exec or some university science whiz, or of rustling up a fake ID and doing something outrageous purely for the hell of it. Not that he ever did such things, but fantasizing about it passed the time.

He was staring gloomily down the hallway, dawdling over the remains of a creme brulee that had resolutely failed to ignite his appetite, when he saw the hint of a face vanish into the elevator. His heart missed a beat, damn nearly missed a second, and he had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up right there in the middle of the restaurant.

Mustering as much nonchalance as he could in his shaken state, Serrin strolled to the reception desk. Having dressed for lunch, and looking more respectable than usual, he thought he just might get away with it. Besides, he was booked for the whole weekend, so he really was the part, whether he looked it or not.

“Excuse me. The gentleman who just arrived,” he breezed to the receptionist, “he’s an old friend of mine. Which is his suite?" He took a chance that Kuranita wouldn’t have taken an ordinary room. The receptionist might be fooled by that little touch, and thus give it away.

She was cooler than that, and she didn’t. “I’m sorry, sir. We cannot provide room numbers of guests without their express permission.”

“Of course, I understand. I’ll catch up with him later." He smiled politely, but he’d seen all he needed to. The ID was still flickering on the vidscreen. James Kuruyama, Communication Management Associates, Chiltern Suite. So it was a false ID, although the company seemed to be plausible enough. Serrin dimly recalled CMA as a subsidiary of the great megacorporation that actually employed Kuranita these days.

But what the hell was Paul Kuranita, Deputy Head of Active Security for Fuchi Switzerland, doing here under this alias?

Back in his room, Serrin had a lot to think about as he took his fetishes and focuses from their silk wraps. Next he unfolded the outer casing of his attache case, drew out the components of the Ingram, and began to assemble them, screwing and clipping the gun together. When he had finished, he hefted its weight in his left hand for a few moments before slamming a clip of ammunition home with a pleasing click.

In all the years since his parents had been murdered, the missile striking down the Renraku chopper with unerring accuracy, Serrin had never been able to get more than a lead on a single name.

Paul Kuranita.

The man had been untouchable, a brilliant freelance samurai whose movements were untraceable, until the troll in Jo’burg had left him so badly burned that all the reconstructive surgery and spare parts his millions could buy had not been able to put him back together. For six years, Kuranita had worked his way up the ladder of the Fuchi organization. Deputy Head of Active Security for Switzerland sounded like a joke, unless one knew that the Head was hopelessly senile and no more than a figurehead. The joke was even less amusing because of how powerful the Swiss division was in coordinating all of Fuchi’s European activities.

Serrin had never been a hundred percent sure of Kuranita’s complicity in his parents’ deaths. The evidence was only circumstantial, but then it could never be more than that with someone like Kuranita. Now, however, fortune had brought the assassin to Serrin, and he wasn’t going to pass up his chance.

He began to plan carefully. Immediate magical surveillance would be a mistake, of course, but perhaps some nuyen thrown to the garage attendant for information on Kuranita’s limo would be good for starters.

By the time the mage had made his plans, the world beyond his room had fallen dark. Passing through the lobby and down the emergency stairs to the garage, he did not see the nobleman gawking almost stupidly at him from the reception desk.

Geraint had no time to chase after the elf, as he was immediately stopped in his tracks by a relieved Earl of Smethwick. The earl was delighted to see him again and would really love to introduce Geraint to some distinctly tipsy young woman from OzNet who was digging up bits for a trid feature on the seminar. The pressure of Smethwick’s hand gripping his forearm unerringly conveyed the message, "Get this gopping bimbo off my tail and I’ll owe you a massive favor, friend,” with pressing urgency.

With just the hint of a sigh, Geraint decided to do Smethwick a good turn and turned to the woman, a blowsy type who clearly favored applying her make-up with a troweL Geraint’s first few applications of insincere Celtic charm seemed to be received with an almost devotional eagerness by the tridjock. She’d probably been given the cold shoulder by almost everyone else here that evening, and there was something almost touching about her relief at finding someone willing to talk to her. Hell, maybe her job was on the line; she was obviously only a junior. At least I can buy her dinner, Geraint thought, and make sure I don’t let anything slip.

He took her arm in his and headed for the flambee.

“It is not really predictable. I don’t think this is such a well-planned step.”

“Look, he can’t get close to the man. There’s no chance of anything serious happening here. The important thing is to put that name into his head. He’s spent days doing sweet FA, and now he’s got something to sink his teeth into. He won’t get to Kuranita, but he’ll start investigating. He’ll meet the Welshman and the two of them will begin asking some questions. It will be some time before they can find out what was going down all those years ago, but when they get to the answer the timing will be more or less right. After all, that’s a step we can control.

“Sure, there’s a whiff of the wild card about it, but you know Caicraft’s Cumulated Inexactness Theorem. A sufficient number of wild cards come down to a highly probable hand of cards at the end of the day."

The thin man scratched at his yellowed teeth, picking the last remains of shrimp from between his incisors. He looked, for several moments, as if he were weighing the delicate balance of the matter with every gram of intellect he could bring to bear. Finally, he sat back and tapped a cigarette on the mahogany arm of his chair.

"Charles, that’s utter bollocks!" They both burst out Laughing, then broke into contented grins. "Okay, let’s check the conditioning. I think he’s pretty much done by now. Let’s arrange the logistics."

Wheels turn.

Annie Chapman has less than three days to live.

So it continues.