Swift and the Black Dog Read online

  “That was never a promise,” Jack said. “Never.”

  “Words between wizards are binding, no matter how drunk you may have been. Now don’t waste my time whining. I need you to harden up and make the fucker pay for what he’s done—and not just to me.” She paused, staring hard into Jack’s eyes.

  “He did this to Beadle?”

  Jack could hear a security buzzer sounding in the hall outside and far more distantly the stomp of boots hitting the marble floor. Men with machine guns were marching to kill him. A sound so familiar that it felt like a memory, like he’d already done this over a hundred times before.

  But Beadle’s death felt fresh, a deep wound, open and aching. He’d known that it had been murder. But he’d blamed other Ministers, other devious bastards. He hadn’t ever thought Peter could have been on the dealing end of it. He’d given Beadle up to Peter and then he’d slunk back down to his Bone Ledge beginnings because he couldn’t bear the sight of them fondling and fucking in front of him.

  Rachael reached out and dug her thin fingers into Jack’s wrist.

  “He wants to devour our Ways, mine and Amelia’s. But I’m not giving up what’s ours, not to that shit.” Rachael fell silent a moment as an obvious shudder of pain rippled through her. Her dark eyes went glassy but her stare didn’t waver. She pinned Jack with her anger and agony. “He’ll be after you next. You have to swear to me that you’ll dig up the ivory gun—”

  “It’s been in the ground ten years. It’ll be rotted through—”

  “Swear it to me, Jack,” Rachael ground out.

  He could feel her trying to claw at his arm. Once she could have turned his bones to dust, but now her grip was like a child’s, clinging to him.

  “I swear.” Jack relented. Even if he’d find nothing but pebbles, it was the least he could do for her, when he hadn’t been there to stop this from happening in the first place.

  “You’ll make him pay, you understand.” A tear tracked from the corner of her eye and dribbled down the side of her face.

  “Yeah, he’ll pay.” He couldn’t stop himself from reaching out to her then and wiping the tear away.

  “Don’t turn soppy on me, Jack.” Rachael scowled at him. “Not now.”

  “Never.” Jack drew his hand back.

  “Let’s have this done with then. You said that if I ever took the Tyrant’s coin you’d strike me dead, now I’m calling you on it. I kept some old-throne pennies for just this occasion.” She opened her right hand and Jack saw the three copper coins stamped with the Tyrant’s crown. “Now do it, Swift!”

  “I won’t.”

  But it didn’t matter. She had taken his drunk teasing and made it binding.

  The glory of light and fire came down from the turbulent heavens and surged into Jack as if it had missed him madly every minute of the last ten years. It gushed through his bone and muscle, awakening every nerve in his body. Oh, it felt good as an orgasm; all that light came bursting from him, bathing the room in thunder and fire, spilling across the floor, scorching the walls.

  Then it was done and all that remained of Rachael was ash and three drops of molten copper.

  A new, red burn-scar steamed across the back of Jack’s hand and up to his elbow. Sirens wailed through the sanatorium like they were screaming in horror. By the time armed guards opened fire through the door, Jack was already out the shattered window. When they tracked him to the terrace edge he jumped.

  In a recent color film, the antiseptic young actor portraying Jack had swooped gracefully in front of a backdrop of painted clouds like gravity had no hold on him. The same film cast him and Rachael as reformatory runaways and best friends. They’d got a good half of it all wrong, of course.

  Jack couldn’t fly for shit.

  Flight compromised trajectory and destination. It implied directed motion full of intent and, like the path of any passing bird, it could be predicted. Anyone with a rifle and a sight could shoot a man in flight.

  What Jack did was plummet while savage winds kicked and threw him through frigid banks of clouds. His course jerked and forked like the lightning crashing around him. His erratic battering was chaos, thunder and cloud cover. Not even a trained sniper could peg him once the wind took him. He tumbled erratically, rising, falling, twisting like a candy wrapper caught in the storm’s fury.

  At last he dropped through a rotted roof into an abandoned swimming pool full of rainwater, lotus flowers and inner tubes.

  He floated on his back, dazed and aching like he’d gone ten rounds boxing a cyclone. It’d been years since he’d taken a jump that rough. His nose was bleeding, but not broken. He couldn’t hear anything over the ringing of his own ears.

  Above him, reflected light from the pool danced and broke across a high ceiling that once had been painted like an uninterrupted blue sky. Now gaping holes exposed the dark storm clouds that Jack had called down. Warm water lapped around Jack’s body. The inner tube buoying his head felt like velvet and smelled like moss. A fine rain began to fall and Jack simply closed his eyes. He let it come, wetting his cracked lips, streaking his face. He thought he should be crying, but he couldn’t. For now the rain was enough.

  Chapter Three

  He only knew that he’d slept after he woke and then nearly drowned. He fought up to his feet and realized that he’d drifted into the shallow end of the pool. Algae green water lapped around his waist as he waded to a set of granite steps and slogged his way out of the pool.

  Thick moss lined the murky water’s edge. Past that, yellow dandelion flowers sprouted up between broken floor tiles, and hillocks of wild morning glory vines spilled over moldering beach chairs and twined up long-forgotten parasols.

  He must have fallen to an old ledge on the far eastern slope. The Hanford Terrace, Jack guessed from the ornate abandon. Once a resort for favored subjects, the ledge had been evacuated at the end of the Tyrant’s reign after Amelia had immolated half the Fireguard and herself, igniting the Tyrant’s fuel reserves. Only a ragged overhang remained of the ledge above Hanford. For days after the initial explosion smoldering limbs and burning petrol had rained down on the hotels and spas.

  No one returned to Hanford Terrace, even after David’s colleagues in the Ministry of Health declared the ledge habitable. People were probably right to stay away. Even now bitter, faint traces of Amelia’s killing magic still lingered in the air and drifted up from charred bones lying underfoot.

  Jack shoved his way through a weed-tangled door and stumbled out onto the cracked remains of an open balcony. A red sunset colored the dissipating storm clouds and gold ministry planes swarmed in the heights. Lower down, walls of black security choppers hovered over the ledges, raking the streets with searchlights. Alert stations pumped out a recording of the High Minister Campbell’s calm voice, thanking the population for their participation in this Ministry of Security drill. As far as Jack could see, the streets were empty, and only the lights of the lowest ledge bars still illuminated their decrepit landing pads.

  Just like old times.

  Only he was alone now and he’d lost his taste for the fight. He felt old and already beaten by the last decade.

  Jack crouched down in the long shadows of rusted iron railings. Miles below, the river rolled by. One deep plunge and he could float out to sea along with the rest of the republic’s garbage. Him and the sewage and a thousand unwanted flyers demanding rights for queers and dykes. They could all be washed away and forgotten.

  Even beaten, Jack hated that idea. He leaned his face against the rough metal and tried to think, not remember, not regret, but think.

  He wasn’t a boy burning with arrogance anymore, but he couldn’t let Peter get away with murdering Beadle or spiking Rachael, either. Fuck the Ministries and their bigotry, it was Peter who had done him one worse. Anger smoldered in Jack’s chest and he let it grow, let it warm him deep in his bones.

  It was time to dig up the ivory gun like he’d promised Rachael and fire the five names
of death into Peter’s chest. But first, Jack realized, he was going to need a shave and a change of clothes. And money, a good deal of money. The abandoned wealth of the Hanford Terrace seemed to open to him like Amelia’s last smile.

  Chapter Four

  Five miles east and five thousand feet higher than Hanford Terrace, Mayer Ledge still rose nowhere near the frigid elevation of the Ministry Palaces but hints of winter swept down on sharp winds. The glory of the Tyrant’s botanical gardens still stood in a circus of ornate greenhouses. Palms, ferns and huge canopy trees clouded the glass windowpanes with their humid exhalations.

  Jack inhaled cinnamon and the musk of hot compost, and he remembered the taste of Beadle’s breath in his mouth, the smell of his sweat on his skin. For a moment he wondered if that smiling guard at the sanatorium had survived Rachael’s hunger. He wanted to believe that the man had. The fact that it mattered worried Jack a little. Now was no time to start caring about anyone, much less indulging in fantasies of a future where he got through all this alive.

  Jack turned his thoughts from the guard’s knowing glance and inviting smile. Above him a bird with a brilliant blue tail took flight from its perch, shrieking at a cluster of schoolgirls and their flashing box cameras.

  Jack bowed his head, letting his black vintage hat take the brunt of photos. He walked past the girls in their yellow uniforms as if he were wandering, awestruck as any of the well-groomed tourists who’d ridden the funiculars up from their dull middle-ledge lawns to gawk at wilderness under glass.

  And it was lovely—even constrained by cement beds and gardening wire. So many pungent blossoms, thrusting stamens and sensual, clinging vines spilled through the space that even the air felt lush and wanton in Jack’s lungs. Flowers, at least, had the freedom to fuck how they pleased.

  Jack imagined saying as much to the prim couple who stood scowling at their botanical map.

  “There are supposed to be ghost orchids in this bed,” the dowdy little woman complained.

  “What do they look like?” The man peered between the simple map in his hand and the chaotic display of verdant foliage and dangling orange mangoes rising over him.

  “I don’t know. That’s what I came here to find out…” The woman pulled off one of her gray gloves and stuffed it into her pocket. “Maybe that white flower over there…”

  “They’re behind you,” Jack said. “The pale flowers floating over the lagoon.”

  “Oh.” The woman blushed a little as she met Jack’s gaze and he watched her for any sign of recognition. Despite the high rotation of security announcements flashing his grizzled image in the golden glow of the Perpetua Sanatorium, the woman didn’t seem to recognize him. A shave, a haircut, a change of clothes, a pair of expensive shoes, he was no longer the filthy rag-man wanted by the Ministry of Security for questioning. Now he appeared to be someone a little better than these two, someone to stare at.

  “You’re staring,” Jack told the woman.

  She flushed and spun around to the lagoon display.

  “There!” The woman exclaimed a little too loudly to the man accompanying her. “Oh there they are!” The man shot Jack a petulant glare and then joined the woman. Both of them carefully ignored Jack, which suited his purposes perfectly.

  He slipped off the path and stepped into the dark tangle of ferns and foliage surrounding the mango trees. The soft carpet of soil and loam gave beneath his feet, silencing his quick strides into the shadowy heart of the old exhibit. He ducked and bowed as he moved beneath the cascading leaves of the mango trees, careful to keep skin contact to a minimum. Clever little chemicals lurked in the leaves and sap of the trees; they could leave welts as nasty as poison sumac.

  Jack had known fuck-all about flowers and trees before he’d met Amelia but she’d been born to the high, decadent ledges, where all the debutantes kept perfumed greenhouses and wore silk gloves even while gardening. She’d known the name of every deadly fruit, root, leaf and seed by the time her aunt caught her kissing a maid and tossed her down to the Canigard Reformatory. There, she’d fallen in with him and Rachael.

  Before they’d broken out of the place, Jack had shown Amelia where to bite to crack a man’s trachea. Amelia had told him of all the poisons lurking in yew leaves, foxgloves and apple seeds. But it had been Rachael who’d shaped her Way and who’d awakened the fire and lightning brooding within his and Amelia’s seething spirits.

  Not that the magic could be easily shared or taught—that was the mistake straights always made about magic, thinking that it ought to be orderly, uniform and as easy to master as grammar. But magic arose from deep within the dark and churning realm of the subconscious mind. And every wizard had to find a personal Way to understand, accept, and embody the magic. Ways were like dreams, often holding meaning and power to only the dreamer.

  But Rachael and Amelia had dreamed together: fire and shadow. For Jack, magic had been something far up in the clouds and he’d found his Way to it on the rising smoke of his illicit cigarettes. Week after week, he’d been caned black and blue for smoking but he hadn’t been willing to stop.

  Feeling sorry for him, Amelia had tried to teach him how she embodied her power—scattering flower seeds and then releasing the life within them in bursts of flames—but Jack hadn’t possessed the temperament to snatch up another wizard’s Way, not even when it was offered up to him so freely. He’d only managed to draw a few swirling flowers in the clouds. Those at least had made Rachael and Amelia laugh.

  His memories of those months felt strange now, and fragile. He couldn’t really picture Amelia’s or Rachael’s young faces anymore. Instead slurred, vague approximations lay over visages of corpses, their deaths distorting his recollections like dry rot creeping deep beneath woodwork.

  Jack slunk past the trees and stepped over clusters of orchids until he reached the far wall and the nondescript door hidden behind a flowering coffee shrub. He tickled the cheap lock and it opened easily to him. Through the door, he stepped into a dank concrete maintenance corridor. Dozens of water pipes gurgled over the whine of banks of dehumidifiers. The air reeked of fertilizers and fungicides. Jack stalked along the narrow space silently taking in all the unlovely necessities that supported the illusion of vibrant nature at liberty.

  As a boy he’d sneered at the thought of the common slobs who toiled in these corridors, but now he felt something near respect for the unseen and uncelebrated souls who held all this wonder together through constant mundane labor.

  He’d never had it in him to be one of them, but that, he now realized, probably signified his own deficits more than theirs.

  He found the disused exit easily enough and stepped out into the biting cold of a small, neglected courtyard. Stunted weeds grew in patches and heaps of decomposing compost formed a line of dark hills at the far end of the yard. Just ahead of Jack the broken granite base of a statue stood carpeted in lichen and frost. Not far from there a dark-haired man wrapped in a heavy black coat hunched on the single stone bench, arms crossed over his chest, hands jammed beneath his armpits. He looked up, nose red from the cold and eyes narrowed against the wind.

  So he’d survived.

  A warm rush of relief flooded Jack’s chest. Then recognizing the stupidity of his happiness at the sight of the other man, Jack grew disconcerted.

  The young guard sniffed and stood. The barrel of his machine gun scraped the corner of the stone bench as he rose.

  “Jack Swift,” the young guard called and he strode closer. His machine gun swung from its shoulder strap taking on the easy cadence of his steps. A few feet short of Jack, the young man stopped. “I thought you’d come here.”

  “Did you?” Jack didn’t see any one else in the courtyard and the frost plating the heaps of compost appeared undisturbed. Still, royal assassins had survived the old days and those bitches could hide themselves in the crack of a man’s ass. “And why’s that?”

  “To retrieve the ivory gun that Jon Beadle crafted for Amelia Cu
rrie.” The guard flashed the gap of a broken tooth in an otherwise perfect smile.

  Jack studied the guard’s wind-chapped face. Still too young to wear the lines of kindness or cruelty that betrayed an innate character, he looked handsome in the bland manner of all the broad shouldered, dark-eyed boys Peter preferred for the honor guard.

  A breeze lashed the guard’s hair and Jack wondered if he knew how much it made him resemble Beadle and the way he’d grinned into every rising storm.

  “You think the gun is here somewhere?” Jack asked, hoping that somehow it could have been a lucky guess.

  “Not now,” the guard replied. “But I dug it out of the mud right there.”

  He pointed to the base of the statue that had once commemorated the Tyrant’s favorite bitch: the black mastiff that whelped so many of his most relentless soldiers until Peter had slipped into her kennel and gutted her. Strange to think now that it hadn’t disturbed any of them, seeing Peter’s bloody grin as he bragged over the ease of hacking apart a chained animal.

  “Nine years ago, during the Damcrack Floods, a bunch of us Bone Ledge kids were evacuated up here to the heights,” the guard went on, his gaze still resting on the lichen-crusted granite.

  Jack nodded. He recalled the floods vaguely. He’d been drinking hard then and had ridden out the deluge in a drag bar, toasting Beadle’s short life.

  “The rain must have brought it up…. I was so excited and then I thought that it couldn’t actually be the original ivory gun…. But it felt real to me. I hung on to it, for luck as much as anything else. Never could convince myself completely one way or the other that it was the real thing. But I hoped…. And now here you are.”

  Again Jack nodded. He and Rachael had buried the ivory gun deep and beneath murderous incantations. No way had a little rain brought it floating up through the earth and mud.

  “So you took it?” Jack asked. He glanced as causally as he could at the surrounding walls, watching for the glint of a gun sight or the flicker of a killing curse. He found nothing. The courtyard seemed as abandoned as the cold evening when he and Rachael had come here to hide the gun and make what peace they could with the furious spirit of the Tyrant’s bitch.