Phelan changed back into a wolf as he died. In his wolf form, the wounds were not the same size, and now he gargled, choking and spitting blood, but he spoke. He said, “I see Le Maudit! He is here! A whip is in his hand!”
Whelan said, “The girl sits aloft and watches us die! I smell her!”
Phelan groaned, “Call to her! She can fetch a priest for us from the cathedral to shrive us ere we die!”
Whelan rolled heavily over onto Phelan, clamped his jaws on his neck, and with one last effort, Whelan jerked his head and tore out Phelan’s throat.
“Not so,” gargled Whelan, his jaws full of Phelan’s blood. “Damnation is better.”
With that, he breathed no more.
Ami slid down a wire to the alley, carefully slit Whelan’s throat with a kunai, and recovered her arrows. She took up the package of clothing. It fit into the pocket of her cape, which turned out to have had the same magical ability to fold objects into space without volume.
She stuffed two tracer devices down their throats as well. It seemed a methodical thing to do, but she turned the volume on those channels down to zero, so that this noise would not be confused with the feed from the other trackers.
Ami turned her head left and right, listening. The beeping from the tracking devices was audible. She was not willing to turn the ring to any darker shade than white. So it was on foot that she set out.
Chapter Eight: Hunters and Trappers
1. Catoblepas Shipping
When she could, she cut through back alleys and avoided well-lit streets. When she could not avoid it, she jogged briskly down the boulevard, a dark-garbed and sleek figure against a dark background, drawing the occasional stare from late-night drivers.
The truck went south, down Lexington Avenue, and then cut west through Hell’s Kitchen. The signal got dimmer as the truck got farther from her, but traffic came to a halt more often than she did, so the signal would get stronger again as she closed the distance. She lost the signal entirely when the truck entered the Lincoln Tunnel.
Ami saw no other way across the river. She turned the ring to make herself weightless and then turned it again so that a black mist thickened around her, and her shadow in the cone of passing streetlamps vanished. She felt the sensation of cruel eyes watching her, but she saw nothing nearby to make her afraid.
She discovered another strangeness about the ring: her weight slowly returned as the black mist covered her. It was as if the ring, with each turn, moved her deeper into the worlds of the mists, but made her weightless only when she was half in one world and half in the other. Her theory was that when she turned invisible, her visibility was not abolished, merely moved. Perhaps this was why she was still visible to herself. Invisible, she was in the same world where her weight was stored, so weight returned. Why that should be, she could not even speculate.
She turned the ring to pewter, used the wirepoon gun to mount atop a traffic light reaching across the tunnel entrance, found a place to perch, and turned the ring iron-gray. Then, she selected a likely looking eighteen-wheeled truck, jumped down, and used two kunai to cling to chains crisscrossing the roof of the load the truck was hauling.
In Weehawken, on the other side of the Hudson, the beeping in her ears resumed as soon as the truck she rode emerged from the tunnel and came into the night air again.
She noticed from the sign that to go from New York to New Jersey was no toll, but traffic the other way was charged fifteen dollars. It was ten times the amount of Elfines swiped can of cola. Ami scowled, wondering how a penniless girl could pay such a fee.
For that matter, was it legal to cling to a passing truck? Was that some sort of trespass, or a free rider problem, or something?
It occurred to her that not even the slightest twinge of regret followed her slaying of Whelan and Phelan. Instead she felt a quiet jubilation of a job well done, particularly since she had slain them from a high and safe vantage.
Indeed, ever since those two men first had entered her hospital room, when she had crouched in the dark like a frightened child, unarmed and half-naked in a flimsy gown, a trace of lingering terror had been as close to her as her own shadow. Now that shadow was gone from her soul.
Ami was troubled by the thought that she had no idea what she had been in her past life. An assassin? A murderess?
Well, in any case, she was a trespasser now. There must be some law against from roof to roof. She found she could travel swiftly by lowering her weight to zero, propelling herself by using the unfolding longbow as a pole-vaulter’s pole, and increasing her weight only enough to allow the glider wings to bite the air. She could sail hundreds of yards at the time using this method.
At one point she lost the signal entirely, and so she began a search pattern sweeping out an ever-larger east-to-west arc as she went south.
The effort was wearying. Time passed, and she was tired.
She found the signal again, and followed the steady electronic beeping in her ears. She entered a warehouse district near the wharves fronting the Hudson. Here were endless rows of dark, squat buildings and piled stacks of transport containers as uniform as children’s blocks.
The signal led to one warehouse two lanes over from the wharves.
Ami circled the building twice, moving from roof to roof of the surrounding warehouses, and studying the frowning black walls with binoculars, infrared, and night-vision.
The sign over the entrance read CATOBLEPAS DISCREET SHIPPING AND TRANSPORT.
The warehouse was a rectangle. Two sides abutted its neighbors. There was a large yard in the front with a crane and truck bay, opening up to an empty, unlit road. The yard had stacked shipping containers sitting to either side.
There was a narrow alley in the back running straight as a ruler between the line of warehouses, a strip of pale concrete darkened with grassy cracks and decades of litter.
The skylights were lit with dim, flickering, furtive, and yellowish reflections. It looked like firelight, perhaps from candles or coals, not light bulbs. A putrid smell, like the fume of a tannery, issued from vents on the roof. The roof was circled with strands of barbed wire.
Its lower windows were covered with metal plates. Its upper windows were a smoked, semi-opaque glass covered with grills. The red gleam of burning lights inside could be seen, but only as smeared shadows. These orange reflections moved. Ami could not see whether someone was moving inside or whether this was an illusion caused by fires leaping and flickering.
Infrared showed heat inside the warehouse—perhaps of living things, perhaps of fires. Warm air escaped from vents, and warmth radiated from the windows.
She was too wary to approach. The tracking devices were definitely in the warehouse.
Across the road to the east was a similar truck yard with stacked containers and a warehouse equally dark, whose sign read MR. VEGETABLE and was decorated with a grinning cartoon carrot dancing with an asparagus in lipstick. Ami crouched, motionless, peering over the top edge of the Mr. Vegetable sign, watched, and waited.
Time passed.
She heard the main doors of the Catoblepas warehouse trundle open. It was utterly black within. The night-vision lens brought only a gray and fuzzy image into her eyes since there was so little ambient light. Something large was moving out of the main doors and down over the concrete lip of the truck loading bay. The infrared showed the heat outline of the hippopotamic beast she had last seen swallowing dead wolves. It moved slowly, sluggishly, across the yard. It stepped to the southern side of the truck yard and squatted. The stacks of containers on the south of the yard now blocked her view of the huge creature. She could see only its tail and hindquarters. It seemed to be walking in a circle again and again, like a cat padding down grass to sleep, but with slow and ungainly movements.
A noise came from behind the containers. It was partly a choking gargle and partly a deep, wet, syrupy eructation, as if a vast throat were trying to clear some obstruction.
Ami looked carefully
in all directions. There was no motion, no noise, up or down the empty street. She debated whether to move or stay.
She saw that if she moved from behind the sign and jumped down to stand atop the piled shipping containers on the north side of the yard, she could have a clear view of the beast, but anyone looking out the windows in the warehouse would have a clear view of her.
She gritted her teeth, telling herself the risk was foolish, but also telling herself she had to find Elfine. Ami twisted the ring to summon the black mist.
The world turned dark in her vision, and the distances between objects seemed subtly off, as if the boxes and windows were no longer precisely at right angles at their corners, the dark telephone poles no longer quite upright, the lanes and alleys no longer quite straight.
Shadowless, now she leaped to the top of the stack of containers standing at the north side of the Mr. Vegetable truck yard. She struck the top container without noise, rolled, and came to her feet in a crouch.
The beast did not look up. She could now see the beast was choking and puking. Three dead wolves were lying on the concrete in a heap before him, their fur coated with spittle and half burnt away by digestive acids. Even as she watched, he vomited up a fourth wolf, larger than the others, from his distended throat.
Then, the beast crawled in a circle around the corpses, pausing every three steps to bang his lower jaw into the ground. There was something nightmarish about the awkward slowness of the motions, as if the monster were in pain or being pulled by invisible strings against its will.
Ami wondered what these strange doings meant.
2. The Captain
A dapper man dressed in an ostentatious Cossack uniform like something from the Napoleonic era now came swaggering out of the doors of the warehouse. He had more braids than a band leader or a doorman.
On his head was a shako of wolf’s fur; over one shoulder was a half-cape adorned with braid. Silver buttons were on his tunic and silver buckles on his boots. A pistol was holstered on one hip and a saber sheathed at the other.
His paused to light a cigarette, and in the glint of flame, Ami saw his face: handsome and lean, with a mustache like two crooked boomerangs and a tiny triangle clinging to his lower lip. One side of his mouth was slanting up, and the other slanted down, and his eyebrows crooked in parallel. He had captain’s stripes on his sleeves.
The great beast pulled itself with a painful motion to twist its head and turn its piggy eyes toward the Cossack. The man gestured nonchalantly to the great beast with his cigarette.
The great beast bowed to the man and continued its painful steps.
Then, stopping to pant and groan, the great beast hunkered down on its belly. It opened its great jaws wide and wider until its nostrils were pointed at the zenith. A light flickered in its throat. Small and pale balls of illumination, like the glints of marsh gas that deceive lost travelers in a swamp, issued from its mouth.
The spots of light circled, hovered, and hesitated, and then each one landed on one of the wolf corpses. The dead bodies trembled, and the half-burned fur rustled and shook. The dim orange firelight reflected in the upper windows of the warehouse grew bright, and the fumes from the vents now began to pour out a black and oily smoke, shot with angry red sparks.
The Cossack now knelt and took a fiddle and fiddlestick out of a black case, tucked the instrument under his chin, and began to play. It was a shrill, strange, haunting set of chords, drifting from note to note without seeming to form a tune. Yet at the same time, it sounded half-familiar.
Ami was not sure what she had been expecting, but a man in a cavalry uniform from a century ago playing the violin at the small hours in an empty warehouse yard was not it.
The strings seemed to sing of the artic winter, the shine of the northern lights on snow, and the delight of sneaking down from famished hills at midnight, where no game is, and finding a farmer’s croft, where soft and frightened sons of men await to be torn and eaten.
The corpses were twitching in time with the violin music, and the dapper Cossack was dancing in the empty truck yard. He stooped and kicked and kicked and stooped, an energetic jig, dancing with his knees bent in the Russian style. His saber jumped and banged against the ground. His eyes burned as brightly as the tip of his cigarette, and his grin was as bright and white as Elfine’s.
The corpses now began to twitch and jump, and their eyes opened.
The Cossack spun on his toe, twirling and playing furiously. Now, he began to laugh an insane, joyful laugh, and the smoke from his mouth made circles around his head.
Ami stood, her binoculars at her eyes, trying to see more clearly, wondering what was going on. Aloud, she muttered, “Who is that?”
A cold voice behind her said, “Thursday of the Supreme Council of Anarchists.”
3. The Stumble
The cold voice rang strangely, for she could hear it in her head, but not in her ears, as if the words were being carried to her eardrum through the bones in her jaw. But it was a voice she had heard before. “He is Lucien Cobweb, son of Lupus. It is he who set this trap for you.”
She turned. Behind her was a dark king whose crown was burning on his brow. His eyes were empty pits. The heraldry on his coat was a leafless tree.
He said, “I saw you clearly when you cloaked yourself to make your form unseen by men, at the tunnel, but I could not cross the running water and come to you then. Now you are here. Open your mouth, and I will enter you.”
Her first reaction was to untwist the ring from iron to pewter. But the dark figure was but an inch behind her, opening his eyes wide, and bending his face toward her face, as if he meant to touch her eyes with the darkness in his eye pits and force her to see what was inside them.
Her second reaction was to strike, but when she did, her fingers passed through nothing but icy air, her hands went numb, and her limbs shook with a terrible, primal fear.
When he stepped toward her and off the edge of the container stack, her feet also left the edge. He did not fall but stood in the air. She fell.
Down she went, but only at half speed and landed on her feet. The four dead wolves were now alive again, breathing, and growling, and their fur was rustling, creaking, and growing over their cracked and wounded skin. They were in a circle around her. She could not feel her fingers.
Thursday threw his bow and fiddle in the air, apparently uncaring of where they might land, and gave Ami a courteous salute. “Thursday, at your service, miss! Charmed, you surely are!”
Ami felt a moment of grateful relief. A talkative one! She jerked back her head to retract her mask.
The Cossack wolf-whistled when she showed her face. “Are you not a delectable little thing! I could simply eat you up!”
Because she could not use her fingers, she thrust her numb left hand into her mouth and with her teeth, twisted the ring from pewter to white.
“Simply gnaw your lovely pink flesh and suck dry your bone marrow!”
She looked up. The dark king standing in midair was no longer visible to her, and, she hoped, nor was she to him.
“Allow me to introduce the pack and the future rulers of this city. We will keep the humans to snack on. Don’t fret!”
A half-dozen wolves came from behind the roof vents. The exhaust had hidden their body heat from her infrared gaze. A dozen more wolves now slunk out of the main doors of the warehouse, and with them was the Cheyenne, carrying a compound bow and quiver, and four other bowmen with him. They were dark-eyed men with hard, sculpted facial features. They wore jeans and leather jackets and had feathers in their hair.
She was not sure if touching the dark king had permanently damaged her nerves. But she still had partial sensation in her hands, for the white ring felt warm and heavy on her finger.
A second and third group of wolves now came from out of the containers, which were unlocked, and formed a line across the street to the north of her and to the south.
There were six to one side of her, six to the
other, and four immediately circling her, plus six on the roof, eleven in the yard with the great beast, and the Cossack, Thursday, grinning, hands on hips, was standing on an oil barrel. A final wolf had carefully picked up the dropped fiddle in his teeth and was casting about, looking for the fiddlestick.
The Cossack kicked both feet in the air so that his rump came down on the oil drum with a bang. “Now! What shall we discuss?”
4. The Message
Her mask was up because she needed her peripheral vision to watch the wolves circling her. She did not turn her eyes toward the Cossack, who had no weapon in hand, and seemed not the most immediate threat.
He had one of the tracers she had left inside the corpse of a wolf. He was flicking it up in the air with his thumb as a man might flip a coin, tossing it and catching it, tossing and catching, over and over.
He said, “Let us discuss matters of life and death. What is life? It is clear enough that God created the world out of mere spite, to have creatures to torment. But torture is no fun if the victim lacks some false hope to prompt her to struggle and scream. You follow me?”
Ami bowed politely, not trusting herself to speak. Had she met this frightful, crazed, smiling man before? Did he know who she was? Any wrong word might betray something crucial.
He spread his arms in a theatrical gesture, eyes turned upward. “All souls yearn for goodness, yet life forces us to do evil. We are spirits trapped in the flesh of beasts, and the beast in us must triumph. So the sadism of Heaven commands!”
As she bowed, she casually put her arm behind her back with the same motion and reached for a throwing knife with her numb fingers. She groped, brushing the knife with the back of her knuckles.