The Broken Lands (8 page)

Inside the transparent head, a dull, uneven glow came to life: the stub of the cheroot. On the creature's forehead, the four letters Christophel had scratched into the packet were neat and legible again, black against the gray skin.

Walker opened his mouth, but Christophel raised a hand to silence him. In his other hand the conjuror held the saucer of ash. He watched the tallow creature intently.

After a moment, another detail appeared on its head: a wide mouth. It opened, and the thing began to speak. The sounds were indistinct mutterings at first.

Then it spoke a single audible word. “Root,” it mumbled. “Root.
Root
.” Each repetition of the word made the voice stronger, until at last its first sentence emerged. “I am the root,” it said experimentally.

The creature paused, turned its head and body in a circle—although it had no eyes, the motion was plainly that of
looking around
. The tallow around its ankles swirled in little eddies like moving water as it turned.

“Can it see—” Bones began. Christophel put a finger to his lips and shook his head.

“I am the root,” the tallow figure said again, more confi­dently.

Watching it closely, Christophel poured some of the ash from the saucer into his palm and curled his hand into a fist.

“I am the root,” the thing said once more. This time the words rang like a declamation. It raised the hatpin like a staff. Christophel took a deep breath and brought his fist with the ashes to his face.

“I am the root, the root of the tree,” it announced, “and thou shalt have no gods other than me!” And then it shouted something that sounded like
“Syn!”

The moment the creature finished its declamation, Christophel took a deep breath and blew the ashes in his fist across the table before the tallow-work figure. “Synack,” he whis­pered. The ashes settling across the table smoldered briefly, a little nebula of red cinder stars, and faded to gray again.

The figure replied with another syllable,
“Ack,”
turned to face the opposite corner of the table, and raised its arms again. Christophel moved around to that corner and poured more ash into his hand.

“I am the root, the root of the tree, and thou shalt have no gods other than me,” it called again.
“Syn!”

Christophel blew another puff of ash across the table. “Synack,” he repeated, and once again the dead ashes flared to life for a moment as they settled. The tallow creature replied again,
“Ack!”
and turned to the next corner.

At each corner the figure repeated its proclamation. Each time, Christophel responded with a puff of ash and the whispered word that brought the cinders to life. And when they had faded again, the creature spoke its reply.

When all the ash had been distributed, the creature stuck the point of the hatpin into the tabletop and spoke the word written on its forehead.
“Init.”

Immediately, a smattering of cinders across the table lit up like tiny gaslights, and one by one, lines of dull gold light radiated from them back to where the hatpin's point rested in the tallow. The pin glowed with the same shade of gold each time this happened. So did the smoldering cheroot in the tallow creature's head.

Christophel brushed off his hands. “It's begun. We can leave it to its work. Come.”

Back in the sanctuary, Walker folded his arms and fixed Christophel with a wary glare. “You said you were raising a demon, not some kind of . . . some kind of
god
.”

“Its name is Bios. And it isn't a god,” Christophel said dismissively. “It only thinks it is. It has to, or it wouldn't do the work we want it to do. The creature has to think the process it is undertaking is its own idea. That table is its domain, its universe. It doesn't know we exist.”

He poured himself a cup of lukewarm tea from the pot they had left behind and took a sip. “If there is some kind of god in the system, some mystical root in the tree,” he mused with a cold smile, “
I
am that root. I'm the one who brought Bios into being, who created in it the wish to seek out your pillars. But Bios doesn't need to know that. It
can't
. Particularly since, as you pointed out, according to the accepted wisdom of the world,
I
should not be commanding it to do
anything
.”

“So what is it doing, exactly?” Bones asked.

“It will create new daemons. We told it to search for conversations within the boundaries of the map on the table involving the words you wrote on that parchment. The first time someone speaks one of those words, Bios creates a lesser daemon to follow that person and report back whenever he or she says something else that your list defines as significant. Each of those lesser daemons is represented by a live cinder on the tabletop. With enough of them listening, Bios will be able to show us who your pillars are.”

“There were already cinders coming to life,” Walker said. “Does that mean Bios is already figuring it out?”

“Yes, but slowly,” Christophel warned. “You saw maybe thirty cinders, thirty people speaking words of meaning. That may sound like a lot, but you must remember there are somewhere near one million people in New York and nearly half that again in Brooklyn and the neighboring towns. To make anything more than a haphazard guess as to which of them we want, we need more people talking about you, and quickly.”

“Which means we need to get moving,” Bones said with a cold smile.

Christophel held up a hand. “There's one thing I want to know first,” he said. “I want an answer to the question Walker ignored earlier.”

Walker eyed him icily. “Why we're working with Jack.”

“Well, I was going to say working
for
him, but yes.”

“Why? You want to come aboard?”

The conjuror hitched up an eyebrow. “I'm satisfied with my situation, but I'll admit I'm curious.”

Walker and Bones looked at each other. Then Walker shrugged and gestured toward his companion. “Be my guest.”

“You have this,” Bones said to Christophel. “This sanctuary, this town. A place that's yours. A place where you belong.”

“
Belonging
might be stretching it a touch,” Christophel admitted.

“We have
nothing
,” Bones continued, an edge of bitterness tingeing his raspy voice. “No sanctuary, no home. And we belong nowhere. The humans are everywhere, like rats and roaches, only louder and messier and generally more unpleasant. We want to be able to stop roaming if we choose. We want a haven to come home to. And Jack . . . Jack has the means to build one for us.”

“He has the means to claim a place by raining destruction down on a human city,” Christophel corrected. “He has the means to invade, not to build anything new.”

Bones shrugged. “Humans breed, they migrate, they colonize, they take every inch for themselves. When there is no country left unclaimed because they have taken it all, then the only option left is to take something back. We believe Jack can do this. He's the only hope we've had for a very long time. This is why we have chosen to throw our lots in with his.”

“Well,” Christophel said after a moment, “it's a reason.”

“So glad you approve,” Walker said dryly.

The conjuror gave him a long look. “I didn't say I approved. But you have satisfied my curiosity, and for that, I thank you.”

“Fair enough,” Bones said. “Now, because time is short, we'll take our leave, Basile. Time to get this place talking.”

“This next bit should be more to your liking, Redgore,” Christophel observed nonchalantly, a little smile twitching around his mouth.

Walker's red-rimmed eyes glittered malevolently. “Oh, yes. I suspect that this much, at least, I'm going to enjoy.”

S
AVERIO
!”

It was uncanny how well Ilana Ponzi could mimic her mother's voice. Sam leaned around the punter sitting opposite him. Sure enough, there she was, waving as she made her way across Culver Plaza with a blue dinner pail swinging from her hand.

“That your girlfriend, kid?”

Sam grinned at the punter, who had already lost three dollars and looked to be good for at least another two. In fact, this mark might as well have been wearing his entire card-playing philosophy pinned to his vest. It was a huge relief, after the debacle with the card sharp from the day before, to discover he hadn't suddenly lost his ability to read another player's logic. “Nah,” he said airily. “I get my meals delivered. The girls line up for the privilege. But I suspect we've got time for another coup or two before she gets here, if you'd like to try and win back a few bits.”

No surprise, the guy lost; in fact, he lost another three dollars in the short time it took Ilana to reach them. But if he'd been in any mood to complain, it only lasted a minute.

“Oh, I didn't think to ask if I should bring anything for your friend,” Ilana said cheerfully. “How could I be so thoughtless?” She popped open the lid of the pail and beamed at the punter as she handed him a paper-wrapped sandwich. “Here you go!”

It was impossible, even for a punter who'd just lost a decent amount of cash, to be angry when Ilana Ponzi was doing her adorable routine. The mark accepted the sandwich with a rueful shake of his head and left his money behind.

“Thanks, pard,” Sam said as Ilana dropped onto the crate the mark had been using for a seat.

“See how good my timing's getting?” she demanded. “Admit it. I'd make a
perfect
partner. I'm simply too charming to get mad at.”

“You're a natural.”

“Wait.” Ilana slapped his fingers as he reached for the cards. “Here.” She handed him the pail and swept up the deck. “Watch. I've been practicing.” Sam leaned back, balancing on one edge of his own crate, and tried not to smile while Ilana demonstrated her card-shuffling prowess. “I've pretty much got this one down. What's that other one you showed me . . . Wait, Sam, keep looking . . .”

Several yards beyond Ilana's dark head, a slim figure was walking awkwardly across Culver Plaza. The face was hidden by a wide-brimmed black slouch hat, and although the person was dressed in brown trousers and a jacket and had both hands shoved into the pockets, Sam was immediately certain it was a girl. And it was pretty obvious he wasn't the only one who could tell. There was a pair of older boys, maybe eighteen or nineteen, trailing along behind her, muttering to themselves and nodding in her direction. Bad news.

“You're not looking,” Ilana protested, turning to see what had stolen Sam's attention.

Then something made the figure in the hat turn to face the boys at her heels. They burst into laughter. One of them must've said something fairly awful.

“Horrible boys,” Ilana said indignantly. “Why are all boys horrible?”

Sam put up his hands and opened his mouth to protest, but then as the girl turned her back on the hecklers and started stalking off, her plodding gait even more ungainly the faster she walked, one of the boys reached out and flipped the hat off her head. A long, black braid tumbled out as the hat went flying. It was the Chinese girl from the Broken Land Hotel.

“Sam,” Ilana yelped, hopping up and down and pointing at the horrible boys, and scattering cards all over the ground in the process.

“Wait here.” He shoved the lunch pail back into Ilana's hands. “Don't let anybody run off with my stuff and don't take any bets.
No
.
Bets
.”

He took off across the plaza, completely without a guess about what he could possibly do besides put himself squarely between the girl and the troublemakers. In fact, he was pretty certain that probably all that was going to come out of this was a black eye to match the bruise on his cheekbone. Sam could work some halfway decent miracles with a deck of cards, but he was still a fairly unassuming fifteen-year-old kid, and no pair of self-respecting roughneck rowdies were going to pause more than half a second before they pummeled him flat.

Then, when he was still a few yards away, something utterly unexpected happened, almost too quickly for Sam to catch.

The girl put one red-slippered foot down on the brim of her hat to keep it from escaping, a motion that looked almost balletic compared to her awkward walk, and that brought a fresh set of guffaws from the boys. By now Sam was close enough to see her face, which slid into a half-smile, shy and flirtatious.

The leering boys took the little smile as an invitation to sidle closer. The girl dipped forward, one hand behind her back, and reached long fingers into the collar of her shirt. Eyes goggling, they leaned closer still.

Then she threw the hand that had been inside her collar toward the boys, flinging a fine dust into the air between them, and swept the hand behind her back up after it. A blue flame appeared between her fingers. The flame met the dust and ignited, and a flurry of sizzling sparks popped in the air in front of the girl.

She scooped up her hat, turned toward Sam, and shoved it unceremoniously in his face as he reached her side, covering his eyes just as the sparks erupted with a muted
boom
into a ball of green fire.

The boys, who'd been leaning in way too close, probably trying to get a look down her shirt, flung their hands up over their eyes and howled in pain.

The girl took hold of Sam's arm and turned him away from the stinging vapor left by the explosion. “Thanks for trying,” she said with a thin smile as she tucked her braid back up into the hat.

“Sorry, I . . . I meant to . . . are you . . . are you all right?”

“Am
I
all right?” For a moment her thin smile widened and she actually looked amused. “Yes, thank you. I am.” She glanced over her shoulder at the two older boys stumbling toward the nearest saloon to wash out their eyes. “Best I get going, though, before they can see again.”