The Broken Lands (7 page)

Bones was nodding. “This makes sense to me. Then what?”

“What you do with the information is up to you. I'm talking about an engine for searching for the people you need to find, nothing more.”

“And how quickly did you say this could work?”

Christophel smiled grimly. “That depends on how quickly you manage to get the right people talking.”

Bones smiled back, his oyster-shell eyes glinting. “Does it, now? Well, I'm sold. Walker?”

“What are they?” All of the spite had gone out of Walker's voice. Now he just sounded wary. “This engine, your spies? How is it done? What stolen conjury makes it work?”

“Aha!
Il m'accuse!
” Christophel stabbed a finger at Walker. “You've been waiting all afternoon to bring that up, haven't you, you malicious bastard?”

“Folks steal what they don't know how to build on their own,” Walker said evenly. “You and I have never gotten along, that's true, but all anger aside, what you're describing, these spies of yours . . . this sounds like exactly the sort of thing your kind aren't supposed to be able to do anymore.” He looked at Bones. “You don't know this man like I do. We need to be sure he can control what he calls.”

“My kind,” Christophel repeated, his voice deadly.

Bones put up a hand. “No offense intended, I'm sure. It's a fair point, I suppose. I can't say I particularly care, so long as the thing gets done, but it's a fair point.”

“Well. Since time is of the essence”—Christophel rose from his chair—“how about I just go ahead and show you?”

I
ONCE STUDIED
under a great practitioner of conjure,” Christophel told Walker and Bones. “It took ages to win her trust, ages more to win her respect. After that, it took a much shorter time to realize that what she could do was a mere shadow of what I sought, and shorter still for her to tell me that what I wanted to learn was mad, impossible, and probably evil. Which, I think you'll agree, was a bit suspect coming from a woman who had ways of killing with candles and coconuts, and charged thirty-five dollars for the service. Surely you can see why I had to kill her after that.”

Christophel had led Walker and Bones from the chapel of the former church through a door behind the altar, and now they followed him down a flight of flagstone stairs. Neither responded; they were too busy trying not to slip on the damp stone under their feet.

“I killed her because, given the way she felt about my intentions, she almost certainly would've tried to kill me if I didn't,” Christophel continued. “She would've seen it as a moral necessity.”

Walker gave a short laugh. “Don't tell me you were worried about some
human
conjuror doing you damage.”

Christophel shrugged. “The point is, I didn't kill her for her art. What you say was stolen was given freely. I learned every piece fair and square, just like every practitioner learns. In any case, what I do now isn't conjury. I may have built it on the foundation of what I learned from the woman I killed, but I speak to creatures the conjure doctors know nothing of, and I can do things they could barely imagine.”

He reached a door at the bottom of the stairs and turned a key already in the lock. “What I do is something completely new, completely my own. I call it
praxis.
”

He pushed open the door to reveal a room full of glass jars twinkling in the light of scores of lit candles: containers of powders, metal filings, fibrous bulbs and roots, glittering mounds of salt, snakeskins, the occasional liquid something. There were a few pieces of furniture holding it all up: a barrel, a rolltop desk, and a huge cabinet of the kind used to sort mail. This cabinet was full of little pigeonholes stuffed with dried roots, sheets of paper, envelopes, inkwells, jars of pins and tacks and nails, bowls of keys, bundles of freshly made candles in every conceivable color, tufts of feathers, bottles of alcohol and vinegar and patent perfumes, balls of string, assorted bits of crockery, jawbones. Potted plants and strings of onions and garlic hung from the rafters. The candles smelled faintly of animal fat, and their flickering flames trailed thick gray lines of smoke toward the ceiling.

In the center of it all was a table. It had been scrubbed smooth as marble, but there were still dark stains and burn marks visible on the surface.

Christophel took a narrow sheet of parchment and a fountain pen from the desk and stood in front of the table. He handed the pen to Walker. “Write everything you want my spies to listen for on this page and give it back to me.”

He pushed open the door to reveal a room full of glass jars twinkling in the light of scores of lit candles.
 

Jack Hellcoal. Pillars of the City. Cinefaction.
Walker frowned as he wrote, adding the phrase
by blood, by naming, and by fire,
and looked at Bones. “What else do you figure?”

“Looks good to me.”

Walker passed the page across the table. Christophel glanced over the list and nodded. “Very good.” He stared at it for a moment more, then set it aside. From the barrel next to the desk he pulled out a large roll of paper. “Next part takes tallow,” he said, unrolling the paper to reveal a map of Brooklyn, Long Island, and New York. “Lots of it. Bring candles and pour the melt over the map.”

Walker and Bones took burning tapers of all different colors from the sconces and candlesticks scattered around the room and held them so that the tallow dripped down. Christophel spread the mixture across the map with his palms, flattening it and securing it to the tabletop. Candle by candle, they coated the table.

At last, Christophel peeled the residue from his left palm. “Beeswax for Mass, tallow for this work.” He looked at Walker. “Where's that fancy smokes case you used to carry?” Walker put a hand protectively to his jacket pocket. The conjuror chuckled. “I don't want the case, Walker. What've you got inside it these days?”

“Kentucky cheroots. Why?”

“Let me have one.”

Walker produced his case, and handed Christophel one of the cheroots. He took the parchment with Walker's list of words and wrapped it around the little cigar. Then he lit and smoked them both almost completely down to ash in a single, impossibly long pull. He let the ash crumble into a saucer. After that, Christophel dropped the smoldering end into his still-coated right hand, peeled the tallow from his palm, and folded it around the remains of the cheroot. He placed the odd little parcel in the center of the table.

Inside the tallow envelope, the red butt of the cigar glowed for a moment, threatening to melt through its enclosure, then died.

“Hoodoo conjurors do much of their work through the of­fices of spirits,” Christophel said as he watched the embers go out. “When a spirit does a conjure doctor's bidding, it's because the doctor has a relationship with the spirit. He's asked for the spirit's good graces and, having received them, can bid that spirit to do good works or bad, so long as the bidding's done with complete faith. Mr. Bones, be so kind as to bring me that purple candle by your elbow.”

Christophel took another thin china saucer from one of the pigeonholes in the cabinet and two bottles from another. “But faith is a slippery thing. I never did like the idea of trusting in spirits that way. Mr. Walker, you should find a feathered monstrosity of a hat somewhere on the desk over there that I believe has a hatpin stuck through it. I need the hatpin.”

Walker retrieved the pin, and he and Bones looked on as Christophel uncorked the bottles and poured liquid from each onto the dish. The smells made them easy to identify: vinegar and bitters.

“Hatpin, please,” Christophel said to Walker, and rolled it in the vinegar-and-bitters mixture. “What I wanted was something I could control completely, something with a logic that would make its workings perfectly predictable. Candle, please.”

“Is there such a thing?” Bones asked, handing him the purple taper. “Seems rather a lot to ask of anyone or anything, that kind of obedience.”

Christophel ran the length of the pin through the candle flame, making it spark and sputter. “There's a trick to it, of course,” he replied. “The key that sets praxis apart from conjury. The thing, Walker, that enables
my
kind
to work this sort of art.”

He circled the table, drawing jagged boundaries in the tallow surface with the hatpin, boundaries that slowly resolved themselves into a rough outline of the map beneath. “The key is not to let the daemon know it's being asked.”

“The demon?” Bones demanded. “You're talking about messing with demons
?
Are you utterly mad?”

Christophel shook his head. “These are not the sort of thing you mean when you use the word.”

“I told you,” Walker said tightly to Bones. “I warned you.”

“Stop behaving like children,” Christophel snapped. He pointed the pin at Walker. “You're one of the last of the race of the High Walkers. He's a goddamn . . . what the hell
are
you, anyway, Bones? And I've been roaming this earth since before the walls of Pandemonium were built. We aren't humans, afraid of our shadows.”

The pin shook in Christophel's hand, but neither Walker nor Bones noticed. Something else was happening to the conjuror. Across his brow, beads of dampness, like sweat, had begun to form. Only it wasn't sweat. The beads were watery red.

“It's a fair question,” Bones said softly, staring at the red droplets on Christophel's skin.

“Do you know who I
am?
” Christophel snarled. A large drop slid down his face, leaving a crimson line between his eyes and down his nose. “
Messing
with daemons? I
command
daemons! And I have the right, because I figured out how. I answer to myself and no one else, no matter how anyone tries to bind my
kind
.”

“We know who you are, Basile,” Walker said quickly as another runnel of bloody sweat trickled from Christophel's temple to the corner of his mouth.

Christophel's tongue darted out, tasted the drop. Abruptly, he stilled. “Blast and damn,” he muttered, yanking a handkerchief from his pocket. He ran it over his face and neck, mopping the blood away. Then he turned to the desk and rifled through the drawers until he found a mirror and examined the slick of red still popping up across his skin.

“Damn, damn, damn.” He blotted his face again and examined the coppery stain around his collar. When he spoke next, his voice was tightly controlled. “Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen. I would rather not let this stain set.”

When Basile Christophel's footsteps on the stone stairs had faded from earshot, Walker turned to Bones and folded his arms. “And that, Bones, is why, behind his evil, evil back, we call him Doc Rawhead.”

“It isn't possible,” Bones mused. “I really thought you were overstating the matter.”

“Overstating which bit, exactly?” Walker asked casually. “The sweating blood bit, or the bit about calling up . . . whatever it is he's going to call up?”

“Either. Both.” Bones put the plum-colored candle back into its sconce and peered up the stairs after Christophel. “The other part, too. What he said about having been roaming since before Pandemonium, about having the right?”

“Are you asking what he meant, or whether or not he was lying about it?”

“I know what he
meant
. You never told me that part. Is it true?”

“I never told you because I only suspected it. Until now. He rather completely admitted to it.” Walker took a deep breath. “Yes. Despite how twisted it seems, yes. Basile Christophel's a jumper.”

Quick footsteps sounded on the stairs. Christophel appeared in the doorway wearing a crisp new shirt, a thin scarlet sheen just barely visible across his nose and cheekbones. He regarded Walker and Bones calmly. “So, you fellows want to finish this or not?”

 

The pin was redressed with vinegar and bitters, and Christophel ran it through the candle flame again. He scratched four letters into the surface of the tallow packet holding the cheroot ash at the center of the table:
INIT
.

The second he finished crossing the
T,
the little packet began to move. “Let the deal go down,” Christophel said as he poked the hatpin into the table so that it stood upright a few inches away.

“Now watch,” he whispered.

The letters took on a cold green glow, but they were only legible for a moment before the shifting of the multicolored tallow stretched them beyond recognition. The packet arched upward, curved into itself, uncurled, twitched, and writhed, and suddenly what had been a small, amorphous thing was now a hunched but recognizably human form. Its arms reached for the head of the hatpin, and leaning on it like a cane, the form slowly unbent itself.

It stood nearly two feet tall. The many colors of its skin had mixed into a fairly uniform, oily shade of gray, and it was now stretched so thin that it was almost transparent, like blown glass. Otherwise, it looked like something fashioned from clay by a child, human-shaped in the sense that it had two legs, two arms, and a head. The hands that gripped the hatpin were fingerless mittens. It didn't seem to have feet—the legs disappeared into the layer of fatty tallow coating the table, as if it was wading in shallow water that came up to its ankles.