Unholy Magic

Chapter Eight

There were lots of better ways to spend the free hours after Holy Day services, but Chess wasn’t in a position to enjoy any of them. A pity, that. She had a few keshes freshly rolled at home, a blanket without too many holes in it, and a disc copy of ten episodes of Roger Pyle’s television show—not her usual thing, but she figured it could be a decent afternoon. And a decent afternoon was worth a lot these days.

Instead she was walking down the long corridor connecting the main Church building to the outbuildings, ready to go farther still into the spirit prisons. According to the Log Books, Charles Remington resided in Prison Ten; Chess intended to see if he was still there.

She wasn’t sure if she preferred him to be or not.

Her footsteps echoed around her in the tunnel-like hallway, making it sound as if she wasn’t alone. As if there was an army following her into the sterile misery of Prison Ten. She resisted the urge to turn around and check. This hall was for Church employees only. She’d had to press her index finger to the ID pad and use her key to get in; the door locked automatically behind her and she hadn’t heard the buzz of it opening again. Pale gray light filtered through the smoked glass skylights, pale blue joined it from the special bulbs lining the jointure of wall and ceiling. Of all the places in Triumph City she could possibly be at that moment, this was undoubtedly the safest.

The hair on the back of her neck didn’t quite believe it, but her brain did, and that was all that mattered. And bad as the spirit prisons were—and they were bad—at least they weren’t quite as awful as the City itself.

Most people wouldn’t take that view, but then, most of them didn’t see the eternal silent peace of the City as a terrifying, isolating vacuum, either.

She pressed her finger into the pad by the door, used her right hand to turn the key. The door buzzed and opened, and Chess entered the prison anteroom.

Goody Chambers, the prison Goody, sat behind her desk, her black bonnet neatly tied beneath her pointed, whiskery chin. Sometimes Chess wondered exactly how old the woman was; she hadn’t visibly aged a day in the nine years Chess had been with the Church, as if she’d become a septuagenarian in early middle age and stayed there.

“Good morrow.” The Goody reached for her pen, poised it over her log. “Have you a message, or are you here to see a prisoner?”

“A prisoner.”

“Name and date of death?”

Chess told her.

“Sign here, please.”

While Chess scrawled her name the Goody took a pale blue velvet robe from a hook. “You’ll need to put this on. You visited the prison during training? Very well. You may leave your clothing and effects in the dressing room there. I’ll call the elevator for you.”

Chess’s fingers shook as she unlaced her boots. She did not want to do this. She glanced over her shoulder, checked the closed door for holes and saw none. Good. A chance to shove a couple of pills down her throat, hope they calmed her nerves a little before she got on the elevator. Showing any sort of emotion—especially fear—to the dead was a huge mistake. To show it to imprisoned spirits, trapped in iron cages, subjected to punishments, was like slicing open a vein and waving it around in front of a starving tiger. Not a good idea.

She pushed the image from her mind and focused on the black chalk she pulled from her bag, focused on putting power into the sigils she drew on her forehead and right cheek, on choosing which of her unfinished tattoos to activate by completing. Most of her tattoos were done, but a few were too powerful to keep active all the time.

By the time she was done marking, her entire body felt warm and tingling with power. The pills hadn’t kicked in yet, but it didn’t matter; she knew they would, and she knew she could do this. This was her job. This was the one thing in the world she was good at, and she refused to be afraid.

The robe smelled faintly of incense and smoke, comforting smells because they reminded her of Church and of … well, she didn’t know why smoke would be comforting, but it was just the same. It made her feel safe, as if the thin napped fabric was armor. Which in a way it was.

Goody Chambers handed her a file folder—Remington’s file—and a bag of graveyard dirt. “It’s only generic, but it will help if there’s a problem.”

“Thanks.” Chess had some melidia as well, which she tucked into one of the robe’s pockets. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do.

“You have fifteen minutes,” the Goody informed her as she held the elevator door open. “After that we sound the alarm.”

Chess nodded. “Thanks.”

“Good luck. Facts are Truth.”

“Facts are Truth,” Chess replied, and the elevator door slammed shut, leaving her alone to descend deep below the surface of the earth, to the realm of the criminal dead.

Silence prevailed in the City of Eternity, expectant, pained silence like the hush before the guillotine blade falls. Occasionally metal clanked against metal, echoing in the empty space.

Prison Ten was not the City, though, and the first indication of that difference was the blast of heat from the roaring fires, the sizzle of ectoplasm on hot coals. Chess was grateful for the thin robe; her regular clothes would have been soaked with sweat in minutes. Ghosts hated heat and disliked fire. Chess wasn’t particularly fond of them either, but if the ghosts down here could take their punishment, so could she. Especially since after she’d checked whether Remington was in here, she could leave.

The iron walkway rattled under her feet as she made her way into the prison, a cavern so large she couldn’t see where it ended. Across the red-hot expanse, bottomless and spiked with flames, all she saw were ghosts, hanging from the ceiling in iron cages through which mild electrical currents ran, forcing them into solid form and making escape impossible—or more impossible, given that every object in the room had been charmed and bolstered with magic.

And they watched her, the dead, with their empty eyes and wide-open mouths. Her skin itched like heavy withdrawals, crawled and tingled so hard she imagined they could all see her vibrating on the walkway. Power thrummed through her body like a line of speed times ten as her tattoos reacted to their energy and her muscles to their hate.

Sparks flew into the air on her left; gears in need of oil screeched high in the smoky, too-thin air. It took her a second to realize what was happening, to remember what to do, but she made it in time, ducking below the hot iron railing before the first metal cage passed over it. Every hour or two the ghosts were moved to a new torture station. Some got a respite. Chess knew better than anyone how that could be the worst form of torture, that brief peace. Even a ghost knew it wouldn’t last, had to wait as the minutes ticked by too fast, knowing the pain was coming again.

Through the slats in the railing she watched the cages glide over her head. Ectoplasm dripped like sweat onto the walkway and oozed through the diamond-shaped holes.

She stood up again, kept walking, careful to keep her gaze straight ahead. How long had she been down there? Five minutes, seven? The last thing she wanted was for an alarm to sound.

The walkway turned and twisted, angling between the fires. To her left iron spikes drove themselves through the cages, through the ghosts. To her right two cages swung back and forth through high bluish flames. Minor punishments. The serious stuff was farther in, farther than Chess would go even to find Charles Remington. If he was there to be found.

Sweat dripped into her eyes. She wiped it away, turned another corner. Each cage had a plaque bearing the spirit’s name; Remington should be in this sector.

He was.

His cage hung upside down over a vat of boiling water, dipping down, hanging for long minutes, then coming back up. Luckily she caught him on an upswing, got a good enough glimpse to know he was indeed Charles Remington.

Or not so luckily. Much as it pleased her to see him getting the punishment he deserved—those mortuary photographs, those empty eye sockets, would stay with her for a long time—this opened up a whole new set of problems.

Remington was in prison, his spirit bound in iron and tortured. In prison, and therefore not on the streets of Triumph City killing prostitutes.

So if it wasn’t Remington … who was it?

This time of day the library contained only a few people; the library Goody—Goody Martin today—and a couple of students at the far end, huddled together at a table in the Basics section. Chess had felt their gaze on her a few times already, ignored it. None of their business who she was, what she was doing, or why her hair still stood in sweaty spikes off her forehead.

This was pointless. A ghost was killing hookers, a ghost she had no idea how to track or find short of catching it in the act, and there was no way she would ask any of the girls to act as bait. Not just out of altruism, either; who knew what Bump or Lex would do if she got one of their girls killed?

The Lamaru could be responsible, no question there. But she didn’t think it was them, not this time. They always identified themselves. They were far bolder than this. And frankly she just couldn’t see any possible way the deaths of a few hookers could connect to the Lamaru’s incessant drive to overthrow the Church.

Chess shook her head and dug out her camera. The symbol branded onto Daisy’s skin had to tell her something. Anything.

It didn’t. The image sat on the digital screen as silent as Daisy. She’d never seen those symbols before, she was certain of it.

Okay, so they weren’t runes. What then?

She grabbed a pen and her notebook and opened to a fresh sheet. Copying sigils could be dangerous. Most of them only needed to be created in order to be activated, and since she had no idea what this one meant or what it would do, she wasn’t about to copy it straight out. Instead she tried separating the elements, piecing them together one at a time.

It probably wouldn’t help. Even if she could see what each individual part was, she’d have no idea what it meant. But it was something, and she needed to do something.

That bit there, if she followed the line around, could be an A … that part could be a rune, maybe Higam? Higam was protective, though, and she couldn’t imagine why someone would brand a protective rune onto the breast of a woman they were about to ritually murder.

Damn! If only she had some way to tell which layer was which, what elements overlapped, she could make so much more progress with the fucking thing. As it was, she—

“Good morrow, Cesaria. Do I find you well?”

Her guilty fingers flexed, trying to crush the paper, but she caught herself before they tore it completely from her notebook. No better way to convince someone that something unethical was happening than to destroy evidence in front of them.

Elder Griffin probably wouldn’t suspect anything no matter what, but still. “Very well, sir. And you?”

He nodded. Without his hat, his pale hair rose in waves from his high forehead and caught the light from the fluorescents overhead.

He sat down opposite her, folding his nimble hands on the tabletop in front of him. “How goes your case?”

“Okay, I guess. I’ll know more tonight when I go back.”

“Most interesting, that one,” he said. “I admit I have my own doubts.”

“Doubts?”

“Roger Pyle has such a reputation for honesty and good works. His anti-drug charity alone … Well, you saw the information in his file.”

Anti-drug charity? Shit, she hadn’t even bothered to look it up. Yet. She would have, she hadn’t forgotten, but she’d never heard of the Daylight Fund before. Anti-drug anything wasn’t exactly on her radar.

She nodded, keeping a smile plastered across her face. “Of course. He is a very nice man, actually.”

He’d also been high as shit when she met him, no question. Hypocrite.

“Do you think you’ll have an answer quickly?”

Another nod, an emphatic one. “Absolutely.”

“Excellent. I do enjoy his show. I hope very much he proves to be innocent of any wrongdoing.”

“Surely you don’t want him to be haunted?”

He gave a little laugh, one of the few she’d ever gotten from him. “Of course not. But I understand he has some rather … unscrupulous companions. Well, one can hardly help it, I imagine, in that sort of industry. I don’t wish ill on anyone, Cesaria, but I would be quite disappointed to hear that someone who brings joy to so many people is a liar and a criminal, one who denies the Truth for his own gain.”

His black-ringed eyes glittered faintly as he shook his head. “I apologize, Cesaria. I find myself in a rather philosophical mood today.”

“Anything I can help you with, sir?” The minute the words left her mouth she realized how much she meant them. It wasn’t simply that she’d always liked him; it was the desire to deal with problems that had a possible solution. Or at least problems that belonged to someone else, for a change.

But he shook his head. “Thank you, no. ’Twill pass. What are you working on?”

“What?” Her hand covered the paper as much as it could. Not enough, though. Some of the squiggles and half-runes she’d drawn peeped out from around the edges of her palm. “Oh, nothing. Just playing, you know.”

“May I see?”

Shit. How could she say no without looking suspicious?

She couldn’t. So she handed the notebook over, while her cheeks started to ache from artificial cheer.

“Creating a new sigil?” He glanced up to see her nod. “Interesting. What’s it for? Protection, I assume, since you have Higam there. But what are these for?”

“Actually, I’m trying to recreate a sigil.” Seized by madness or inspiration, or a mixture of both, she grabbed the camera and turned it around. The photo had been taken close up, so close Daisy’s dead face did not appear. Hell, her neck didn’t even appear. Nothing indicated that the sigil she showed Elder Griffin was burned into a corpse.

If she hadn’t been watching him so carefully, she might not have noticed the delicate lift of his eyebrows, the blink, before his forehead smoothed. Had he seen that before?

“I saw it the other day,” she said, before he could ask. Technically it wasn’t a lie. “Thought it looked interesting.”

“On whom? Where did you see it?”

“Um, in Cross Town.” Now that was a lie. “Just some woman in a restaurant. Why?”

“Yes …” He didn’t look at her, though.

“Elder Griffin? What is it?”

“What? Oh, nothing. It merely reminded me of … well. It looks a bit like something I saw once years ago, while I was training. Did you know I was one of the first here to enter the program? Before Haunted Week proved our Truth to the world.”

She nodded. Ordinarily she’d enjoy hearing his stories of the world BT and the early days of the Church, but today more important issues pressed on her mind. “What was the sigil you saw years ago, sir? If I may ask.”

He shook his head. “No, on second thought I don’t believe they are so alike after all.”

“But—”

The camera clicked back onto the table. “I’m sorry, dear. ’Tis far later than I realized. I should go.”

“Please, I just—” Fuck! “I just want to know what it’s for, I was hoping … well, you know how pleased I am to be working with other departments, and I thought maybe if I could really expand my esoteric knowledge, I could do it more often, is all. Couldn’t you please just tell me what the one you saw does? Or if you know any of the elements?”

She widened her eyes, let her mouth pucker slightly. Not enough to look like she was trying to seduce him, but enough to catch his sympathy. She hoped. Every muscle in her body tensed. Please … please …

He bowed his head, lifted it again. “I really know nothing about it. But we have better sigils, as you know. Ones that protect much more consistently. Some of those we learned in my youth were not as sa—not as foolproof as what we now use. I appreciate your desire to advance yourself, but I fear moving down such a twisted path will not do you the good you seek.”

“I just want to know what it does, is all, I don’t plan to use it.”

He sighed, watched her for a minute while her still dry eyes started feeling sticky with the need to blink.

Finally he spoke. “I’m sorry, dear. I cannot, not today. Perhaps another time. Good morrow, now. Facts are Truth.”

“Facts are Truth,” she echoed, but she didn’t hear the words leave her mouth. Didn’t hear the tapping of his buckled shoes on the floor as he exited the Restricted Room and reached the main library.

When he was in training, he’d said. Either he’d spoken without thinking, or he’d been giving her a hint. Either way, it took her only a few minutes to find the old training manuals, in the far corner beneath the smiling golden Buddha.

The Buddha and the other outdated religious relics lining the walls were one of the reasons she enjoyed doing work in the Restricted Room so much. Of course the Archive building contained even more: Christian Bibles hundreds of years old, printed on paper so fine she could almost see through it, an entire room full of Nativities, a Buddhist temple reconstructed beneath the high ceiling. Korans and prayer rugs, statues of Hindu gods and goddesses with gold leaf still clinging to their stone arms like a luxurious rash.

None of it meant anything anymore, but the images still fascinated her. Once they’d given humanity solace. Now they sat in a museum, viewable only by those who applied and were approved for a pass. How quickly importance deserted people and things, how quickly the revered became the forgotten.

She shuddered and grabbed the dusty books, flipping to the back to check the index, then scanning the pages to see if she could find the sigil. Mustiness rose from the pages, filling her nose, making her eyes burn. She swiped at them with the back of her hand and kept looking.

Nothing in the first three books. She was just about ready to give up when she found it.

Not the sigil she was looking for, not exactly. It appeared to be missing several lines; one entire letter or rune? No way of knowing, really. It could be one, could be three, thanks to the overlapping nature of sigil lines. Still this was better than nothing, like a sketch had been done of Daisy’s before it was finished.

She’d been right. It was protective … but not for the dead. The sigil was designed for Church employees, to hold their souls in their bodies in case of severe injury.

The Chester Airport case had hinged in part on a dead man whose soul had been trapped in his body, held by magic and used to power a dark spirit. For a second Chess’s blood ran cold. Fuck, there couldn’t be another—

No. No, Daisy had been dead. The other hookers Terrible and Lex had mentioned were dead.

So why had their souls been fixed to their bodies, when their bodies had then been emptied and discarded? What were the other runes in the sigil and what did they do?

She sighed and snapped a picture of the book, zooming in to get the printing at the bottom. In the Church’s early days every employee had been required to mark this sigil somewhere on their person before doing battle with spirits. Seemed like a pretty good idea to Chess; she wondered why that had changed and the sigil had fallen out of use, even out of teaching.

In her classes, starting at age fifteen and continuing until she graduated at twenty-one, they’d been taught hundreds of protective sigils, mainly to study and use as a basis for designing their own. Each Church employee was supposed to create and develop their own individual system, their own way of interacting with the herbs, symbols, and energies of magic. Grade points were taken off for simply copying the Church’s designs.

So it was entirely possible that this sigil, which had apparently been designed sometime in the mid-twentieth century, had been used as the basis for the one she’d found on Daisy … entirely possible, given Elder Griffin’s discomfort, that the variation used on Daisy had been used before. With results so disturbing that they’d removed the sigil from Church training entirely.

She closed the books and checked the ornate carved-wood clock. Its eldritch ivory face told her it was almost three. Time to go. She planned to head to the Pyle house that night and wanted to take a nap.

Besides, unless Elder Griffin changed his mind and came back to tell her everything he knew, her chances of finding out more about the sigil were nonexistent. There might be something about it in the files, but considering there were thousands of them, she didn’t much want to look. Better to compare the two pictures and see if she could separate the differing elements.

Most of the employees had left already. Chess descended the wide marble staircase in the main hall in silence, nearly the only living thing in that vast space of dark wood and stone.

The Reckonings had ended for the day, too, although one man still hunched over the stocks with his wrists and neck trapped. An overnighter, she guessed. Thievery, perhaps, or … yes. Red gloves—now spattered with bits of food, as were his bowed head and pale stockings—indicated he was an adulterer. An unlucky one, too, if his spouse pressed the point this far.

She passed him, gave his Church guard a short nod. Icy wind cut through the fabric of her coat as she trudged through the dead grass and over the cement to her car, sitting alone along the wall at the far end of the lot.

Her keys were in her pocket, the metal still warm from being indoors. She slipped the car key into the lock, opened the door, and froze as energy raced from the door handle up her arm. Black energy, thick and hot, making heat blossom in her chest and between her legs. Her heart did a flip in her chest; not just sex, but fear. The darkness in that power, the pure voracious evil lurking beneath the boiling surface …

Two eyes sat on the driver’s seat.

Eyes, sitting placidly on the gray fabric. Looking at her. They were looking at her. They knew who she was. Knew she was involved.

And whoever they were, they weren’t pleased.