Iron and Blood (38 page)

Veles felt his temper rising. “Tell me what I want to know. I can give you an easy death—or a hard one.”

Jasinski straightened and for one terrifyingly coherent moment, his eyes were clear and his voice steady. “Go to Hell,” he said, and muttered a word of power. He was dead before the breath left his body.

“What just happened?” Thwaites demanded. “Did you bugger this up?”

Without a backward glance, Veles clapped his hands and Thwaites was hurled across the room, slamming into the wall. He landed hard on his back, dirtying his bespoke Savile Row suit. Thwaites lay still, cursing a blue streak, as Veles moved forward cautiously and felt for a pulse.

“Damn,” Veles muttered, although he had known Jasinski was dead before he tried. He laid a hand on the dead witch’s forehead and reached out with his magic. Trying to read a dead man’s mind was difficult, forbidden and dangerous.

Veles gasped, and tried to draw away. Jasinski’s brain was an unreadable puddle of goo, mangled as if by a shotgun shell. But the witch’s last spell drew Veles down, drowning him in the madness of a dead man’s decomposing brain.

Veles struggled against the spell, but Jasinski had used all of his cunning. The Polish witch was even stronger than Veles had suspected. Tendrils of power lashed out, worming their way into Veles’s defenses, burning skin and psyche, boring into his power. Veles cried out, sending a blast of magic to free himself as the dead witch’s power launched a last, brute-force attack, a spell prepared in advance to trigger with the witch’s last breath.

Jasinski had nothing to lose. The outlay of power to launch the spell had taken all his life force, his breath and body heat, the energy of his brain and heart. Everything was poured into a complex, deadly spell which forced Veles to call on his own magic to fight off the tendrils of power that burned him any time they slipped past his defenses, depleting his power.

He means to take me with him. He means to kill me.

Fighting Jasinski’s spell was like fending off an army of octopi. Welts rose all over Veles’ body as his life drained out of him with every painful blow of the tendrils. His skin was a mass of bloody sores. Blood ran from the open wounds and trickled down from his scalp. Distantly, he realized that Thwaites was screaming, but he had no time to deal with his panicked partner.

Worse, Veles knew the blood would draw the attention of the
gessyan
still in the depths of the Vesta Nine. He sensed that they were watching, and that if he failed to break free, they would surge up from the darkness to suck the marrow from his bones before tearing his spirit free of his wretched corpse.

Veles sent his will deep into the ground beneath his feet, drawing on the power of the earth. He willed that elemental force to geyser up through him, burning across sinew and veins, blasting from his palms into Jasinski’s body. The blast ripped the corpse apart, shattering its rib cage, flaying the skin from the face, crushing bone.

For an awful instant, Veles felt the tendrils of the dead man’s magic hold firm, until the power frayed and snapped with such force that Veles staggered back. He found himself in a defensive crouch, hands raised as if to fend off another attack, facing a savaged corpse tied with bloody bonds to a splintered chair.

Behind him, he heard he heard the slow, sarcastic applause of one man clapping. “Bravo!” Thwaites cried out. “Jolly good show. Encore!”

Were his power not utterly spent, Veles might have indulged himself in the luxury of blasting Thwaites with a bolt of energy, shutting the socialite up permanently.

“Shut the hell up and get rid of the body,” he gasped.

“Me? Get a guard!” Thwaites snapped.

Veles rounded on him, snarling like a cornered beast. “Get rid of the damn body or I will turn you inside out and let you lie, gasping, while your ruptured lungs heave for breath.”

Thwaites blanched. His lip rose in a sneer, but he grudgingly took one step and then another toward the bloody, mangled corpse. With a baleful glare toward Veles, Thwaites dragged the broken chair over to where Tumblety and Brunrichter left the unused ‘bits’ of their clockwork corpses. He pulled a straight razor from one pocket, snapped the blade open, and sliced down through Jasinski’s bonds, letting the body fall onto the rotting, maggot-infested heap.

“Happy?” he snarled.

“No. I’m not
happy
,” Veles replied venomously. “Jasinski is dead, and we don’t have the Russian stones or the Polish witch’s book. Desmet is meddling dangerously, and so is the Scottish detective. We have tourmaquartz left to mine, for buyers who are despots and arms dealers across two Continents. Men who will not look upon us kindly if we do not meet our obligations.” He took a menacing step toward Thwaites.

“You think what I did to Jasinski was bad? If we fail to deliver, that’s
nothing
compared to what our clients’witches will do to us. How many times can you be tortured to death, resuscitated and killed again?” he asked, slowly advancing on Thwaites, who had the good sense to back away.

“Get a grip on yourself!” Thwaites ordered. “We’ll deliver. The mining’s gone on despite Desmet and his nosy friends. You said yourself, the deposit’s almost completely exposed; that should make it easier to remove. Just another week or two, and we can cash in and leave this god-forsaken hole.”

A shudder went through Veles from head to toe. He took a deep breath and relaxed his balled fists, forcing his jaw to unclench. “It’s taken twice as long as it was supposed to. There’d better be no more problems.”

“Not once my men kill the newest DSI spy,” Thwaites replied. “We keep killing them, and they keep sending more. And we need to get rid of Jake Desmet and Rick Brand. That snoop Fletcher, too. They need to go—permanently.”

“You tried and failed to do that with the sabotage at Brand and Desmet,” Veles pointed out. “And your ham-handed attempt to kidnap Farber nearly destroyed the Tesla-Westinghouse building—and nearly killed him.” He fixed Thwaites with a lethal glare. “I want Farber alive.”

“It’s not my fault!” Thwaites snapped. “We were going to pull Farber out before the bombs went off, but Desmet and his friends got there first.” He gave Veles a self-satisfied look. “Although killing Farber would have still been better than letting Desmet have him.”

“And you failed to kidnap
or
kill him,” Veles pointed out. “Now he’s missing, and so are most of his designs. I told you sending that spy to be his assistant would backfire.”

“I still say it’s time to make sure Jake Desmet and Rick Brand stop sticking their noses into our business—and their private investigator, too. They need to die,” Thwaites argued.

Veles nodded. “Do it. It’s taking all my power to keep the
gessyan
still in the mine from breaking loose—or attacking the miners. It’s all coming down around us—and that will look like paradise compared with what our clients will do if we disappoint them. You’d better come through on this,” he said, eyes narrowing.

“Don’t have a fit,” Thwaites said. “I’ll take care of Desmet and his friends. We’ll step up the mining. Tumblety and Brunrichter have more of their mechanical marvels to help.”

“You’d better,” Veles replied. “If I have to face our backers with a failure, I am offering up your squirming, toady body first.”

“S
ORRY, ALL THE
beds are full tonight. No vacancy.” Dr. Zebulon Sheffield, New Pittsburgh coroner, chuckled at his own joke.

“I wasn’t really looking for a room,” Drostan Fletcher replied, patiently.

“Hey, did you hear this one? What’s black and white and red all over?” Sheffield asked without looking up from the corpse he was cutting into.

“A newspaper.”

“Nah. The bodies that came in here after the boiler explosion.” He glanced up from his work. “Get it?”

Drostan sighed. “I get it. What happened?” He leaned against the wall; Sheffield would tell his story at his own pace.

“One of the boilers blew over at the processing plant. Vicious things, boilers. Hate them. In this case, one boiler went and set off another one. Big, industrial boilers. God. Boiling to death is an awful way to go.”

Drostan didn’t have much to add to that, so he stayed silent and tried not to cringe at the sound of the bone saw cutting through the dead man’s ribs.

“Brought the guys in on the back of a truck,” Sheffield said, working as he talked. “Nothing anyone could do for them. Skin peeled right off. Made it tough to identify the bodies.”

“So why send them to you?”

Sheffield shrugged. “Too many for the locals and it’s Company policy. Need a ruling on the deaths. When they get worried it gets all ‘official’ like. But most of the time the locals handle it… and there’s talk that lately some of the bodies never make it out of the mines.”

“And your ruling is?”

“Accident.” An edge to Sheffield’s voice told Drostan that there was more to the story.

“Except maybe not so much?”

Sheffield was quiet for a while. “You’re not with the police?” he said finally.

“No.”

“The mines or mills?”

“Not them, either. Private client.”

Sheffield broke the rib cage open like he was cracking a lobster. Drostan looked away. “I don’t doubt the
how
,” Sheffield grunted. “But I’m a little iffy on the
why
.”

“How come?”

“You know how they say things come in threes?” Sheffield said, going about his work like a knacker rendering a horse. “Well, lately seems these kinds of things have been coming in thirties. Boilers blowing up. Dead miners. And yesterday, a couple of people from a house over in Pulawski Way—carbon monoxide. Not to mention the unpleasantness over in Allegheny and down the Mon.”

“How could those be connected?”

Sheffield shrugged. “No idea. That’s the problem. Maybe they aren’t. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not just coincidence.” He gave a harsh laugh. “Then again, no one pays much attention to me. That’s why I’m stuck down here in the basement with the stiffs.”

Drostan weighed his words carefully. Sheffield was a good man, beneath the cynicism his work demanded. He was also one of the few people in an official position willing to help Drostan along with bits of information making him a resource to be handled carefully. And on occasion, he was a damn fine drinking companion. Plenty of reasons Drostan did not want to muck things up.

“I heard that lately there were more miners dead than usual,” Drostan prompted.

“You ever hear that quote about life being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’?”

“Hobbes, isn’t it?”

Sheffield nodded. “Yeah. Well that goes double for the poor fellas down in those mines. Gah, what a way to live! Down in the dark, constantly afraid of the roof caving in, working all hunched over. If they don’t get crushed to death or fall down an elevator shaft, they get blown up by firedamp or suffocate from the blackdamp.” Under the harsh tone, Drostan could hear anger, maybe at death itself.

“So what’s different now?”

The coroner took long enough to reply that Drostan was not sure an answer was coming. “Look, if you tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it,” he said, looking up long enough to fix Drostan with an angry stare. “Or I’ll say I caught you sniffing ether and you were out of your head.”

“I’m not planning to tell anyone,” Drostan replied patiently.

“I think they’re cutting more corners than usual, down in the mines,” Sheffield finally said. “Greedy bastards. They want the last ounce of coal, so they take risks because, hell, it’s not them or their sons down there.

“They chip away at the pillars that hold up the roof, and then act surprised when there’s a cave-in, although any miner with a first-grade education could have seen it coming,” he ranted. “They skimp on the fans and ventilation shafts, so the poor sons of bitches die from bad air. Not that anyone cares.”

Drostan didn’t question it. Immigrant labor was cheap, even with the occasional strikes. And after the Homestead Strikes, the Oligarchy had made sure their Pinkertons and private armies kept all but the most incendiary personalities in check.

“It’s the way of the world,” Drostan said with a shrug. “Not much different back in Manchester, or Newcastle. Some men die young and some men grow rich.”

Sheffield grimaced. “Maybe. But there are... irregularities. And no one wants to hear about them. In fact, I’ve been officially ordered not to notice.”

Drostan raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Sheffield wasn’t the ambitious type. He had no political aspirations, no hunger to climb the social ladder. As far as Fletcher knew, the New Pittsburgh coroner had everything he wanted from life: a long-suffering wife, a tidy house in Bloomfield, and a large mutt that looked like a cross between a German shepherd and a wirehair pointer. The mutt, Benny, lay even now in the corner of the operatory, oblivious to their conversation. Sheffield had no clout and no reason to make waves. Which did not mean he had given up his conscience; he just kept it muted by common sense.

“The bodies that come in here don’t always match the tally,” Sheffield said. The late hour and the silence of the morgue made for a confessional atmosphere, helped along by the bucket of beer Drostan had brought before Sheffield had started on his ‘patient’. “The mines have to release something to satisfy the press and the family, and a senator or two if too many people die close together and word gets out. But the reports don’t have to include everything, if you know what I mean,” he added bitterly. “They ship some of the bodies here, and I get pulled in to make it all ‘legitimate’.”