CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My mouth was bone-dry by the time we finally came across something resembling a trail through the desert-like expanse of Suron. I was skeptical—anything less than a full-blown road in Heaven is notoriously prone to lead right off a cliff or into the lair of some strange and possibly violent animal, but we were running out of time. I put my concerns to Vivian, but she didn’t seem to grasp the potential danger of following it.
“It’s just a path,” she said. “It’s got to lead somewhere.”
I decided to strike off this decision and let her take responsibility for it when we found ourselves trying to make parachutes out of our jackets. If I was lucky I’d get the chance to say “I told you so” before we ceased to be in one piece.
So I had to admit I was a little peeved when the trail actually did lead to a full-sized road, stone-paved and everything. Vivian had the grace to not look too smug.
Decent roads were a fairly new addition to Heaven. Until they came into contact with humans, they didn’t have a single motorized vehicle. They still didn’t, technically, but within a few years of the first Vei to visit Earth bringing stories back to Heaven, strange new vehicles started appearing all over Heaven. The Vei refused to tell the human authorities where they’d got them, if they even knew themselves. Things had a way of just coming into existence in Heaven, so the Vei wouldn’t take any notice if one morning they woke up to find a brand-new car in their driveway.
Of course, they didn’t have driveways, and the cars weren’t really cars. For one thing, they had skin. Shiny skin, for sure, that looked almost like painted metal from a distance, but if you ran your hand along it you’d find it was warm, and soft, and moving in that special way that only animate things can pull off. We passed a couple on the way, their red muscles contracting and cranking the wheels as they trundled along. The look on Vivian’s face would’ve had me in hysterics on another day, but right then I was too sore and tired to muster so much as a chuckle.
The road turned into a hole in the ground, then a winding stairway, then it doubled back for a while. It would’ve been sure to take us in the wrong direction if this was a place where geography was fixed. As it was, it was exactly where we needed to go.
Time’s a hell of a thing to keep track of in Heaven, but after an hour or two we found the city I was looking for. Surei, the Vei called it. It acted as a sort of capital city of the Suron territory, and performed the neat trick of sitting on a huge plate of perfectly circular rock, floating in the middle of a giant hole in the earth.
Vivian gaped as it came into view. “Can’t anything just be normal here?”
“Here, this is normal.”
She paused, eyes sweeping the city. I could hear her brain smoking as it tried to work the place out.
I tapped my wrist. “I thought we were on a timer.”
She blinked a few times, shook her head, and started walking again without another word.
We followed the increasingly wide road toward the city. A ring of nothingness surrounded the floating city, like some sort of waterless moat, and several bridges stretched across the gap around the perimeter of the city. The bridge we crossed was actually disappointingly normal, resembling any number of suspension bridges from Earth cities. The city itself, though, that was something else entirely.
It was almost a parody of an Earth city. Skyscrapers littered the skyline, but instead of being built of concrete and steel, they were great bone skeletons, coated in muscle and sinew and skin. Several of them floated in the air, with only long stairways connecting them to the ground. The city looked to have grown straight out of the red stone, complete with criss-crossing streets and floating paths that disappeared up at impossible angles before dipping again and slipping out of sight behind buildings.
Vehicles of ever-stranger make trundled along past us as we crossed the bridge and made it into the city proper. All around us, Vei wandered the streets, going about their lives as if they weren’t living in something that looked like the love-child of Salvador Dali and H. R. Giger. There were a few humans as well; people seeking the novelty of the place, or maybe an escape from their pasts. Maybe even a few ex-military men, ones that’d been in the exploratory forces and had decided not to come back. The Bore couldn’t be directed to open a Tunnel near Surei, so it wasn’t much of a tourist destination. Most of the humans here would be here to stay.
Vivian exhaled forcefully, taking in the strange place with admirable stoicism. I’d seen more than one person badly shaken just from seeing the likes of Heaven’s cities. “What now, then?”
I stroked my mouth with my thumb. “Fancy a drink?”
“A drink? Now?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna shrivel up if I don’t get something soon. Besides, I know a place.”
“You know a place.” She imbued the words with enough skepticism to convince a TV psychic to give up the gig.
I led her through the crowded streets. We drew a stare or two, bloodied and bruised as we were, but a wide, manic smile from me was usually enough to send any nosy onlookers hurrying on their way.
We were a block from the alcohol den I had in mind when Vivian whispered, “Damn it,” and shoved me off the street and into an alcove beside a tree of twisted bone.
I struggled for a moment, but the look on her face stopped me. She glanced at something out of the corner of her eye, along a street running perpendicular to the one we’d been on. I followed her gaze, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, which was probably an exercise in futility.
A dozen humans were making their way down the footpath toward us, wearing getups they looked to have pinched from a bunch of heavy-metal rockers. They consisted mainly of spikes and chains and black leather, with a few brightly colored hairdos to really set the look off.
The crowd gave the humans as wide a berth as they could manage, which wasn’t easy since the men looked to be deliberately trying to bump into people and generally make a nuisance of themselves.
One Vei man didn’t take kindly to being shoved aside by one of the spiky men at the back of the group. The Vei snarled, and opened his mouth wide. The air seemed to warp around him and his top teeth, already sharp, shot down into fangs. The crowd around them started rubbernecking, slowing from their hurry to get away from the leather-clad men, and the tension in the air became palpable. Jesus. This wasn’t good.
The man who had shoved the Vei grinned, his face filled with enough piercings to overload a metal detector. With an almost casual sweep of his arm, he drew and flicked open a switchblade from the pocket of his jacket and sliced it across the Vei’s face.
The crowd went berserk, screaming and running as the Vei’s blood splattered the stone. The Vei staggered back, his fangs returned to normal, with an open gash running across his cheek and nose pulsing with blood.
The rest of the leather men had stopped to watch their friend. They jeered as the Vei backed away, the knife-wielding man advancing on him. Blood pounded in my ears.
I didn’t even know I was moving until Vivian’s hand grabbed my elbow. Her grip could’ve turned concrete to dust.
“Let go,” I demanded without taking her eyes off the Vei man.
She kept her voice low, neutral. “Those are Gravediggers.”
“I know who they are, damn it. Let me go.”
“Count them, Miles. How long would it take them to put you down?”
I took another look. There were a lot of them, sure, but I was a Tunneler. I wouldn’t fight them, but I’d be damned if I was going to wait until the Vei was a corpse before I acted. Otherwise, what the hell was all this for?
I wrenched my arm free of Vivian’s grip and jumped out of her reach before she could grab me again. “Wait,” she whispered.
The leather gangsters chose that moment to get bored with tormenting the Vei. The one with the knife grinned one more time, spat on the Vei, and returned to his friends. The Vei dropped to his knees in the street and clutched at his wound.
I allowed mysel
f a breath as Vivian took hold of me again and the group of Gravediggers continued on down the street that was now conspicuously empty.
“He could’ve been gutted,” I said. “The hell kind of cop are you?”
“The kind with a job to do. Miles, this is about more than just one person. We have to be smart.”
“We have to be cold, you mean.”
Her face was smooth, and I couldn’t pick up any anger in her voice. “If the Gravediggers are here, then it’s already begun. The tall one at the front, the one who wasn’t laughing, that’s Paul Guzman, their head man. If he’s here, I bet the other gangs won’t be far behind. And we still have no clue where to find Doctor Dee. We’re running out of time.”
I glared at her a few more moments, but my heart wasn’t in it. The wounded Vei was getting up with the help of some bystanders. Vivian was right, of course. That didn’t make it easier to swallow. Not by a long shot.
“Ah, to hell with it,” I said. “Let’s go make some enquiries.”
Not surprisingly, following the Gravediggers led us to the same part of the city I was headed for anyway. It was a nasty bloody neighborhood, famous—or infamous—for its connections to Earth gangs. I’d only been there once before, many years ago, and I’d left with a broken wrist and my face bright red and inflating like a blow-up doll. You should’ve seen the other guy, though.
We stayed far enough behind to avoid being spotted, but I don’t think the Gravediggers were much for the whole surveillance thing. They relied more on intimidation than subtlety to keep themselves safe, and it seemed to go all right for them.
The joint they led us to was a skin-covered, circular wine lounge, floating fifteen or so feet off the ground with a wide staircase of stone at the front. We watched from across the street as the Gravediggers climbed the stairs, still guffawing about the Vei they’d cut. The only one who wasn’t laughing and joking around with the others was Paul Guzman, the tallest one of the lot. He had a row of spikes across one jacket shoulder, and a couple of tattoos on his neck. He stared up at the wine lounge with something I guessed to be disdain.
They were violent, the Gravediggers, I knew that from experience. But they ran their drug racket with brutal efficiency, and a sense of brotherhood that far outclassed anything John Andrews’ gang could muster.
Everything I knew about the Gravediggers said this wasn’t normal. The wine lounge looked like a fairly classy establishment, something that I expected would rub the Gravediggers the wrong way.
“If Guzman’s here, it looks like Andrews isn’t going to be settling for meeting with small-fry gangsters,” I said.
Vivian nodded. “We have to get inside.”
“I seem to have forgotten my invite.”
She pointed to the staircase. “It’s not just gangsters going in. They’re meeting in a public place, or maybe they’ve got part of it sectioned off. We can just go in and look.”
She was right about the public place. The Vei going up and down the stairs didn’t have the gangster look about them. Still, as humans we’d stick out. I sighed. “Reconnaissance only?”
“Sure.”
I didn’t like the way she said that, but then again I hadn’t liked much of anything in the last couple of days, so I nodded. Hell if she wasn’t going to get us killed one way or the other. “All right. But let’s be quick about it.”
We went up the stairs and into the wine lounge, me doing my best Humphrey Bogart and Vivian doing her damnedest to make sure everyone knew she was a cop. Somehow, though, no one took any notice of us. The interior of the lounge had a curiously human aesthetic, all red curtains and large brown couches despite the Vei-styled exterior.
It was mostly Vei that sat or lay on the couches, blissed out on wine, although there were a couple of well-dressed humans scattered around. Alcohol had been something of a boom industry in Heaven since the Bores opened, turning a good portion of young Vei into raging alcoholics. It hadn’t caused quite the same level of societal destruction as Ink had to Bluegate, but it wasn’t all fairies and butterflies either.
I couldn’t see the Gravediggers, or any other gangsters. That soothed my nerves a little. A set of wooden double doors at the back of the room could’ve opened into a back room or a private area. I pointed them out to Vivian, and she nodded. “Could be it.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
She pursed her lips and glanced around. “Might as well wait here and see what happens. And I believe you promised me a drink.”
A smile played across her face, and I had to return it. She wasn’t so bad when she wasn’t being a cop. I gestured to the only empty couch, in the corner near the bathrooms. “I don’t think you’ll be carrying drinks with that hand. I’ll bring them over. What’ll you take?”
“What do they have?”
“Wine.”
She rolled her eyes and waved me away. “Fetch me something nice.”
I made my way up to the bar, where an old Vei man dressed in an old-fashioned human bartender’s outfit polished a glass.
“Two,” I said in Vei, holding up my fingers. “And give me some of that flatbread.”
He nodded politely and got out a couple of mugs. Apparently, this place wasn’t big on wine glasses. I wasn’t complaining, though; he filled the mug right to the top and charged me something approaching reasonable. He even took currency from Earth. I liked this guy.
I returned to the couch with the bread and glasses, handed her one, and gave a little bow. “The finest vintage they had.”
“Such a gentleman,” she said, shuffling over to give me room to sit down. She took a sip of the wine, and screwed up her face. “Oh God. It tastes like gasoline. Rancid gasoline.”
I followed suit, knocking back a large gulp, and smacked my lips. “It does have a certain exotic flavor to it.”
“Exotic my ass,” she muttered.
I took another sip of the wine, stoically ignoring the way it burned as it went down, then shoved a lump of flatbread into my mouth to quell my rumbling stomach while I studied the lounge’s patrons. I could definitely see the Gravediggers feeling out of place here. From our position we had a decent—though not great—view of both the entrance and the doors to the back room. We had nothing to do but wait.
“Just like an old-fashioned stake-out,” I said, mostly to myself.
Vivian used a bar napkin to wipe away the crusted blood from her hand. The injury had looked worse than it was. I took another napkin, gestured to her face with it, and she nodded. She closed her eyes and I cleaned off the blood from the cut across her cheek. “If this thing scars you’ll look like a Bond villain.”
“Shut up, Franco.”
Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a Vei coming out of the bathrooms next to us. I thought nothing of it for a moment, but as he walked past, something about him tugged at my memory. I lowered the napkin and turned to him, and he paused and looked at me as well. He was well-dressed in suit and tie, though he seemed to have left his fedora at home this time. The gangster had a face that a mother would smother, and it was quickly changing from shock to anger.
Ugly stared at me, letting the cigarette dangle from his lips. “Mr. Franco.” He went for the knife—my knife—at his belt.
I sure knew how to make friends.