Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (12 page)

“Get a witness statement from Moss?” he asked.

“No opportunity,” she said. “She was taken to the hospital—smoke inhalation and a blow to the head; hopefully nothing worse.” Doctor Moss wasn’t a young woman, but hell, neither was Pierce, and she’d bounced back from a battering or two. Even if her current bounce felt more like a feeble totter right now. “I’ve asked the local uniforms to keep an eye on her,” she said. “I doubt the killer will make another attempt in the glare of the spotlight, but if he does, then hopefully we’ll nab him.”

From Dawson’s noncommittal grunt, he didn’t believe that outcome was any more likely than she did.

“So it’s the same thing,” he said. “We bring in an expert, they send someone after them.”

Pierce gritted her teeth, biting down on an unwise urge to snap at him. Asking an outside academic to take a look at some pictures was hardly the same as recklessly ordering an attempt at necromancy on top of an unidentified ritual, and he had to know it. She could deal with officers who made mistakes—Lord knew Ritual Crime ran on a haphazard process of trial and error even at the best of times—but ones who were too bloody stubborn to admit when they’d done something wrong were a much bigger problem.

“It’s not the same,” she said. “Vyner was much more directly involved—more so than he should have been. He should never have been allowed to attempt necromancy before we had any background on the intended purpose of the ritual.” She sighed. “But yes, it’s looking like these people are willing to go after anyone even peripherally involved in the investigation.” Had they simply followed Pierce to the university office—worrying enough—or had something Moss’s research dug up got them spooked?

She grimaced, aware she was going to have to concede further ground to Dawson’s conviction his bull-headed way was the right way. “And yes, it does look like this case is more urgent than it first seemed,” she admitted. “Moss managed to tell me that she thinks there are more sites like this out there. What we’ve found so far may be only the tip of the iceberg.”

As she hung up the phone and sagged for a moment, mustering the energy to drive herself home, she couldn’t help but grimly contemplate just how slim their chances were of finding the rest before things went to hell.

CHAPTER NINE

P
IERCE ARRIVED BACK
at work the next day with a gritty-eyed feeling of too little rest that even coffee wouldn’t shift. At least she’d beaten Dawson into work today, however; the only one in the office when she arrived was Constable Freeman.

“Morning, Guv!” she called out from behind her computer, bright eyed and enthusiastic enough to make Pierce feel even more ancient. She hoped the greeting she managed past her sip of coffee didn’t come out too much of a grumble.

“I’ll be over in Magical Analysis,” she said. “Let me know if anything important comes in.” Preferably before Dawson had any chance to get his sweaty mitts on it, but she probably shouldn’t say that sort of thing in front of impressionable young constables.

“Will do, Guv,” Freeman chirped, then bowed her head again to her computer. Pierce wondered if she was actually as absorbed as she looked, or just out to impress the new boss. With their overstretched resources, much of the RCU’s work came down to remote consultation, advising police departments around the country whether X bit of random graffiti looked like a legitimate occult ritual and how to handle artefacts seized at the scene of a crime. Pierce supposed even that might be fascinating to an RCU rookie used to far more mundane police matters, but after decades on the job, the shine of advising officers who didn’t know their ritual arse from their occult elbow had well and truly worn off.

Of course, that was why the good Lord had made constables, that DCIs might be free to get on with more interesting cases, at least when not buried under mountains of paperwork. Pierce had more than enough of that to be going on with, but hopefully Magical Analysis would have something on the skulls by now to spare her.

She popped her head into Cliff’s lab, still faintly whiffy after her first smoke-related incident this week. “Cliff! Got my skulls?” she asked him, once he’d untangled his headphones and pulled them from his ears.

“These fine fellows?” He indicated a table across the lab, where one of the skulls had been set up with ribbon-wrapped scroll and surrounding ring of stones in careful reproduction of the crime scene. On the next bench sat a second, but this one disassembled into parts, the stones lined up and the scroll untied and unfurled.

She couldn’t spot the third skull anywhere. “One of them gone walkabouts?” she asked.

“Jenny has the third one,” he said. “I do believe she was planning on attempting some divination with it first thing this morning, actually. She’s probably down in the ritual lab if you want to see what she’s made of it—I’m afraid we haven’t had much luck up here.”

“No?” Pierce wandered over to look at the unfurled parchment scroll. As she’d suspected, inked on it in careful brushstrokes was what looked like a spell, a nine-layer pyramid of runes surrounded by an intricate design. The unfamiliar alphabet made its purpose impenetrable.

Cliff moved over to join her, running a latex-gloved finger along the line of rune stones. “You’ll note that there are no common characters between this rune set and the set on the scroll,” he said. “Documents believe that
this
”—he indicated the scroll—“is some form of phonetic alphabet—see, you have several repeating characters, here, here, here, nineteen separate unique symbols in total—whereas
these
are most likely ideograms. Alchemical symbols, spirit names—planets, if they haven’t got the message about Pluto yet...” He spread his hands with an apologetic grimace of a smile. “Without the necessary text to decode them, we are, alas, completely in the dark.”

“And the runic alphabet?” she asked, without much hope.

“Also unfamiliar. Possibly a cypher of some sort, but with no knowledge of the underlying language...” He shrugged.

“Bit harder than doing the daily Codeword puzzle.” With a message in a language where they knew the rules of grammar and patterns of letters, they might get somewhere decoding it; with an unknown spell, the words could be literally anything. They didn’t even know how to read the pyramid—left to right, right to left, upwards, outwards from the middle? Unless they could match it to a source text, the spell was a dead end.

“What about the rest of it?” she said, gesturing towards the skull set up to match the original burial. “What does this arrangement say to you?”

Cliff pulled an awkward smile. “Mostly, I’m afraid, it says that more context is needed. Skulls, blood... they’re used for any number of ritual purposes. Something powerful, certainly. My instinct says a summoning, breaching the barrier with the spirit world. But I can’t give you any more than that without more details to go on.”

“Mm.” She nodded grimly, aware that she probably couldn’t have asked for much more, but still frustrated by the lack of information.

“Oh!” Cliff brightened beside her. “But I have managed to do some more tests with our friend the singing watch lantern from Tuesday.”

“Contained experiments, I hope,” Pierce said with a wince, remembering the smoke.

“Nothing so extreme as our first adventure, worry ye not,” he said. “Now that I have some idea of the strength of the reaction, I can calibrate my tests accordingly. I’ve been measuring the increase in the warning signal since yesterday morning.”

She turned to look at him. “It’s increasing?” That was never a good sign.

“Yes, and rapidly,” Cliff said. “Now, based on my measurements, and what I’ve been able to research in the literature about watch lanterns—and do please bear in mind that this is not an exact science—I believe that the warning signal indicates the approach of an event in roughly four days’ time. Probably some point on the twenty-second of December, though potentially it could fall as much as a day to either side.”

“An event,” she echoed.

“‘Something wicked this way comes,’” he said. “As to what, I’m afraid our metal friend is ill-equipped to tell us.”

“The twenty-second of December,” Pierce repeated. She pulled her notebook and pencil stub from her pocket to scribble that date down. “So, we can expect something unspecified, but probably bad, to happen on... this coming Monday?”

“That’s about the size of it, yes,” he said.

“Marvellous.” Typical—the one time they actually had advance warning of something going down, and they didn’t even know what they had advance warning
of
. “And do we know which direction to start looking in?” she asked. “You said watch lanterns could indicate that.”

“Ah.” His cheeks dimpled in a wry smile. “That would be the wrinkle that we fell afoul of on yesterday’s test. The smoke should, in theory, have issued forth from one of the lantern’s mouths to indicate the direction of the threat.”

“It didn’t do that,” she noted.

“No,” he said. “Because, you see, the danger is coming from all sides.”

O
N THAT CHEERFUL
note, Pierce left him to it, taking the stairs down to the station’s basement.

While the Enchanted Artefacts department merited their own lab space upstairs—though recent events might see that reconsidered—the rest of the RCU’s researchers had to make do with shared use of the ritual lab down in the basement. A small concrete box of a room not much different from the station’s holding cells, it had protective circles permanently marked out on the floor and ceiling to contain any magic worked down there. In theory.

Also in common with the cells—whoever had designed this station hadn’t stretched themselves or their budget far when it came to specialist facilities—the lab door had a sliding hatch for observation. Pierce checked through that rather than risk bursting in on a ritual in progress, and saw Jenny rooting through the storage cabinets at the far side of the room.

She knocked. “Is my head going to fall off if I come through this door?” she asked, raising her voice.

“If it does, it won’t be my fault,” Jenny called back, and waved at her through the observation window. “Hiya,” she said, as Pierce opened the door. “Just doing some tests on those skulls you sent us the other day.”

“Yeah, Cliff said.” She closed the door behind her, and regarded the skull currently standing on the central lab table in a sealed plastic bag. It looked much the same as the two she’d seen upstairs—adult, human, daubed with geometric patterns in what looked like blood... her expertise stopped there. Maybe with facial reconstruction they could figure out more, but good bloody luck getting any results back before the new year. If the superintendent would even authorise it for what might just be grave-robbery rather than murder.

Magical Analysis might be less certain and less useful in court, but when it worked, it was a hell of a lot faster than waiting for results back on traditional forensics. If only because Pierce had the staff here under her nose to prod into handling her priority cases first.

“Right,” she said, peering into the skull’s eye-sockets. “What can poor Yorick tell us, then?”

“Well, that remains to be seen,” Jenny said, staggering back to the table with a large wooden board about a metre square. As she set it down on the table, Pierce could see it was an elaborately painted thing like something out of a Victorian fairground, with rings of letters, numbers and symbols around a faint dip in the middle where it seemed some kind of centrepiece could be set. Jenny straightened it on the table and took a brief huff of relief.

“Obviously the skull’s been used as part of a ritual,” she continued. “That complicates things. There are divinations I could do if he was just an ordinary skull, but whether they’ll still work...” She made an ambivalent noise and spread her hands in a pantomime shrug.

“So what are you going to try?” Pierce asked.

Jenny went back to the cupboard and returned with a round wooden disk about the size of a serving platter, with an arrowhead pointer extending from one side. She slotted it into place on the baseboard, then rotated it round with a touch so that the arrowhead was aligned with the top of the painted design.

“Well, beginning with the ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ principle, I’m just going to do a basic divination for point of origin,” she said. “Now, that
might
just point straight back at the field that you took them from, which is admittedly not that much use to us. Or it might point back to the resting place of the skull prior to being used in the ritual.”