Outcast, p.17
Outcast, page 17
part #1 of The Grey Gates Series
“I ran into a demon and a dark magic shadow-hound,” Max said.
Leonda blinked, straightening up and taking the box of injectors from Max’s hands. “That doesn’t sound like a normal day,” she said, and glanced at Faddei. Leonda had never been out into the field, but she had a good sense of what the Marshals dealt with. She needed to, in order to do her job.
“I’d like to hear more about that,” Faddei said. He eyed Max up and down. “There’s coffee and some pastries in the staff room,” he said.
“Alright,” Max said. “Leonda, can Cas and Pol visit with you for a while?”
“As long as you like,” Leonda said at once, smiling. “I’m going to be here most of the night.”
“Thank you,” Max said, and walked with Faddei out of the building and two buildings further down. As she moved, she became aware of the various bruises around her body. It was going to be a few days before she fully healed. Assuming she was given the chance. The Marshals seemed to have been unusually busy the past few weeks, particularly after the breach of the Wild wards.
What Faddei described as the staff room was an all-purpose, large room which had a few comfortable seats, including some sofas which Marshals occasionally used to sleep on, and a haphazard collection of desks for the rare occasions that the Marshals actually got time to work on the reports that Faddei and Therese liked them to file. There was also a large set of shelves on one side of the room. None of the Marshals had an assigned desk, but they all had assigned shelves for their personal effects.
The room was empty of people, but filled with the smell of fresh brewed coffee.
Faddei waved Max to one of the comfortable chairs and went over to the coffee machine, bringing back two cups and a paper bag, which he handed to Max. She opened the bag, somehow not surprised to find one of her favourite pastries inside. Faddei was an observant boss, and had probably memorised the food and drink preferences of everyone in the Marshals’ service. It didn’t make up for the extra long hours, but it definitely helped. She set the pastry aside for the moment, curling her hands around the mug and letting the warmth seep into her. She sat back in the chair with some care, easing her back up against the cushions.
“A demon?” Faddei prompted. He was concerned, Max saw. As well he should be. The Marshals were equipped to deal with supernatural creatures of all shapes and sizes, but a demon was something else entirely.
Max stared into her coffee for a moment, wondering how much to tell him. How much would be safe? Faddei knew more about her and her background than anyone else in the service. She trusted him. Mostly.
“Whatever it is, I’ll listen,” he said softly. He had sat at an angle from her, so they weren’t face to face. She turned slightly and assessed him. He looked tired, too. He might not go into the field any longer, with the injuries he’d suffered, but he would have been working just as hard as everyone else. And had the added stress of the city politics to deal with.
Max set her coffee to one side and ran her hands through her hair, scrubbing her face.
“The demon said I could call him Queran,” she began, linking her hands together in her lap and staring at them instead of Faddei. “I’ve met him before. When I was a child. He used to whisper to me at night.”
“Sounds unpleasant,” Faddei said. His voice was calm.
The acceptance of what she was saying loosened some tight knot in Max’s chest she hadn’t been aware of carrying until then. She was being believed.
“I never actually saw him before today. And he disappeared when I moved into the Order. Until now. I think he was waiting for me today,” she said slowly, the truth of that settling on her shoulders. “But I don’t know why.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Faddei said, still with that infinite reserve of calm.
“Well. Anyway. Today he had made a spell circle with a brazier and a pot in the middle of it. When he left, the pot boiled over and a shadow-hound emerged. Not a real one. I mean, not a flesh-and-blood one. A dark magic one.”
“You destroyed it?” Faddei asked.
“Yes,” she said, not looking at him. She picked up her coffee, ducking her head towards it, hoping it would hide the tears gathered in her eyes. She had killed a shadow-hound. One that was trying to kill her, yes, but it still hurt.
“That must have been difficult,” Faddei commented. She glanced across and saw nothing but concern on this face. “Do we need to send clean up?”
“Ellie Randall was there. I told her to get one of the city magicians to clean the area,” Max said. “The circle was dead when I left it,” she added. It had fulfilled its purpose.
Her eyes were still stinging, a spark of anger warming her as she wondered if Queran had truly meant to kill her, and why. As she had told Faddei, she had not heard him whispering to her since she joined the Order. But the demon had remembered her. Had recognised her. And he had spent a lot of time tormenting her in her childhood. The anger was smothered by ice as she wondered just what she had done to deserve the attention of one of Arkus’ demons.
“I’ll check in with them later,” Faddei nodded. “You’ve no idea why the demon was there?” he asked. It was almost a statement, rather than a question. He wasn’t accusing her of anything, just seeking confirmation.
“No, no idea.” Max clamped her jaw shut, then let out some of the words bottled up in her mind. “I’ve no idea why he picked me when I was a child, or why he tried to kill me today.” Or even if that had been his intent, she added in her mind. A stronger magician, or one with more training in combating dark magic, probably would have been able to counter the spell before the shadow-hound had got loose.
“Make sure you have salt on you at all times,” Faddei said, perfectly serious. It was a standard ingredient for Marshals to carry. It wouldn’t stop a demon, but it should cancel out a lot of dark magic. “And let me know immediately if you sense him again. I know you won’t want to call on them, but demons are more the Order’s business than ours.”
“I know,” Max said, not looking at him. He knew her well enough to understand that inviting the Order into her life was the last thing she wanted. Even if it was the proper thing to do. She glared at the surface of her coffee, wondering what the chances were of never seeing Queran again.
“I will let the Order know we have a demon in the city,” Faddei said. “No more than that.”
“Thank you,” Max said around a lump in her throat. Faddei would protect her identity, as he would any one of the Marshals, she was sure, and that certainty made her eyes sting.
“The Marshals’ service is just as necessary to the smooth running of this city as the Order,” Faddei pointed out, in a mild tone that made Max smile. Every Marshal knew that, among all the other things that were true in the world, Faddei would fight for them.
“Oh, before I forget, the call out from last night, and the one today, was a hoax. Two idiots in costumes. Ellie has them in custody, but she thinks that they’ll be released soon. Their father is on the council,” Max said, hearing the bitterness in her voice.
“They had got the police and a Marshal out to investigate twice?” Faddei asked. He still sounded mild, but Max could hear the edge to his tone. If there was one thing guaranteed to set fire to his temper, it was someone wasting Marshal resources and time.
“Yes,” Max said. “Ellie is going to send me the details.” She hesitated, and glanced at her boss. “I thought you might like the information.”
Faddei’s mouth curved up in a small, hard smile. “I would, indeed. Send the information on when you get it. I’ll make sure it’s dealt with.”
Max nodded and finally managed a sip of her coffee, brows raising. “How much healing did you put in this?” she asked. For all his tough appearance, Faddei had a gift for gentle healing magic. The drink he had given her was laced with it.
“A little,” Faddei admitted. “You looked like you were about to fall over,” he added.
Even that one sip had made her feel better. She thanked him and drank most of the rest of the mug, then turned her attention to the pastry while Faddei asked her questions about her encounter with the demon. He didn’t ask too much about the hound, which she was silently grateful for. Queran was the real threat, after all.
By the time Faddei was done with his questions and Max had finished her drink and snack, she was feeling almost back to normal and somehow lighter. She had shared a childhood secret and had been believed, not dismissed.
Faddei had told her to take the rest of the day off, which had made her laugh as it was already into the evening. But as she put her mug into the dishwasher, she remembered that she had research to do. With her body almost healed, and fuelled with caffeine, it seemed a good time for that.
The Marshals’ library took up the entirety of one of the mid-sized buildings in the Marshals’ complex. In defiance of his warrior-like appearance, Faddei had made it a core principle of his leadership that the Marshals should have access to as much information as was available and that might be useful to them. So the very ordinary-looking concrete building housed floor-to-ceiling racks of books, folios, scrolls, and included maps of the city. Not content with amassing as much printed or written material as possible, the resources included shelves of outdated video tapes and more modern electronic storage, as well as network access to the city’s databases.
From what she knew of Faddei, Max suspected that this was much to fuel Faddei’s love of knowledge as to support the Marshals. Faddei loved learning, and wasn’t too particular about what it was. There were manuals on treating wounds in combat alongside texts describing the various orders of demons that might exist in the underworld and even a few works of fiction that featured supernatural creatures, or things from the world below.
Whatever the reason behind it, when she needed to do research, the Marshals’ library was the obvious place to start. If there was an answer to the questions she had about the city and the alignment of the bodies, Max was confident she would find it within the library. Or, at the very least, find clues to where she might look next.
Happy in the knowledge that Cas and Pol were being spoiled in Leonda’s presence, knowing that would please all of them, Max took her Marshal-provided laptop, a large notebook and pens and headed for the library.
There was no one else around when she went in and settled herself at one of the large tables, beginning to pull information from the shelves and racks around her.
Several hours later, Max straightened in her chair and stretched, hearing and feeling her joints crack. She had been sitting too long. She got up to stretch more fully, wrinkling her nose as she looked at the mess she had created.
The large desk was covered with books and print-outs. The notebook pages were covered with her scruffy handwriting. She had settled her ammunition belt, gun and one of her knives on the desk as well, tired of them poking into her as she studied. The laptop was somewhere underneath the mountain of papers, but as usual, she had preferred to write her notes out rather than type them.
Her head was spinning with newly acquired information from historic maps of the city to possible reasons for the alignment of the bodies to the information on summoning spells she had been able to find. All the information was too new to have settled into her mind, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Not yet. And there was a foul taste in her mouth from some of the things she had read about summoning spells and the sacrifices used to complete the spells. The knife cuts that the killer was using were far from the worst thing he could be doing to his victims, and Max wished she could erase some of the other options from her mind.
Seeking distraction, she looked around. The large room was dark and deserted, with only the reading lights around and above her desk on. In the shadows beyond her pool of light, she could sense the height and depth of the building. She took a moment to be grateful for Faddei’s thirst for knowledge, and his and Therese’s efficient gathering and cataloguing of information about the city, including as much of the history of the land as they could find. What Max hadn’t been able to find in the library, she’d been able to access through the laptop and the city’s current records of layout and ownership.
It hadn’t taken her long, looking through the city records, to come up with a possible explanation as to why the killer had chosen the places he had. But it had taken her a lot longer to accept that it might be a real reason.
Among the records in the library was an old set of maps that purported to trace the ley lines that ran across the city. The supposed lines of power that ran across the world, having some mystic significance that Max didn’t understand. Someone had mapped them onto the city. Or, rather, the city as it had been, when the Wild had been many miles away and the core of the city had been surrounded by farms and industry. Max had managed to overlay the current city map, and the murder sites, over the old map. Each of the sites was on an intersection of ley lines.
Modern magicians ridiculed the idea that there could be untapped power beneath the earth. But older magicians had taken it seriously, as demonstrated by the fact that they had gone to the trouble of mapping them, using methods that had seemed to Max to be more based in superstition than actual magic.
Whatever the truth, it seemed too much coincidence that the killer had somehow chosen sites which all matched up with the supposed intersections of ley lines in the city. At the crossroads of a side street. At the games court. Outside one of the Lady’s temples.
Even with the evidence in front of her eyes, Max still struggled to accept it. She remembered one of her early teachers laughing at the notion of ley lines. The Order had adopted similar teaching - ley lines were the magical equivalent of a witch’s pointy hat. Nothing more than fanciful day dreaming by people who didn’t understand magic.
And yet, each of the murder sites matched perfectly with a supposed intersection of ley lines, and she hadn’t come up with any other connection between the sites. So now she was left frowning into middle-distance, trying to work out if she needed to change a lifetime of thinking and consider the possibility of ley lines.
“Are you finished, Marshal?”
The voice came out of the darkness and Max jumped, reaching for her gun before her brain caught up with the words and she recognised the speaker. She left the gun alone and turned towards the voice.
“Librarian. You startled me,” she said.
“I am sorry,” the voice said, sounding sincere. A small, human-shaped figure detached itself from the shadows, coming into the pool of light. “I thought you knew I was here.”
“I should have remembered,” Max said, ducking away from the Librarian’s gaze. She should, indeed, have remembered. The Librarian was always present, in one way or another, even if it wasn’t seen. Max had no idea what, exactly, the creature was or what kind of bargain Faddei had made with it to keep it here, tending to the Marshal’s repository of knowledge. The Librarian might wear a human shape, but Max was sure its natural form was something much more deadly. Just now it was a pale cream colour from head to toe, its face a deeper shade of cream, as if it was wearing a sports bodysuit with only its face uncovered. And even then, describing it as a face was not strictly accurate. There were features, yes, but the Librarian’s face was more like a blank shop mannequin. “And yes, I think I am finished,” Max said, remembering the question.
“Then I will put everything away,” the Librarian said.
“A moment, please,” Max said, before the Librarian could move. On one of her first visits to the library, she had learned that the Librarian was very literal. If the creature said it was going to put everything away, it meant exactly what it had said, and Max would find her gun, ammunition and knife included in the library’s collection of oddities. And once something was part of the library, the Librarian did not give it up easily. “Let me collect my belongings first,” she told the Librarian.
“Of course, Marshal,” the Librarian said. It took a step back and waited, with apparently endless patience, while Max sorted through the mess on the table, gathering her possessions along with her notebook, pens, the print-outs she had made, and the laptop. That done, she took another look through everything to make sure she hadn’t accidentally left something behind.
“I have collected my belongings,” she told the Librarian. It was best to be clear and careful with the creature. “You may put away what is on the table surface.”
“Very good, Marshal.” The creature moved forward to the table and picked up the nearest book, barely glancing at the spine before heading into the shadows to shelve it again.
“Thank you, Librarian. Good night,” Max called.
“Good night to you, Marshal,” the Librarian said.
Chapter eighteen
Max headed back to the Marshals’ office to drop off her laptop, notebook and papers, finding a stack of slips of paper on her assigned shelf. Telephone messages, in Therese’s distinctive handwriting.
Max’s brows lifted as she flicked through the messages. It seemed that Ruutti wanted to speak with her.
Max pulled her phone out, finding over a dozen missed calls from the detective and the voicemail icon blinking, which suggested that the detective had left a verbal message, too. The magic around the library stopped all phone signals, so she had had a stretch of uninterrupted time to study.
With a sigh, she leaned against the wall and dialled the detective’s number. It was past midnight, but she thought that the detective would still be awake. Her call was answered on the second ring.
“Finally. I’ve been calling for hours. Why didn’t you answer?” Ruutti’s voice demanded.
“I’ve been busy,” Max answered. “What do you want?”
“There’s been another killing,” Ruutti said. Something in her voice caught Max’s attention. The detective was worried.
“Where?” Max asked.
Ruutti gave an address that made Max straighten away from the wall, grabbing the notebook and print-outs from her shelf. The address was closer to the heart of the city than the previous killings, which was bad enough. Worse, it was on the same street as one of the Lady’s temples, and Max could only imagine the attention that would be getting.
