Blind Shrike Read online

  The ranger finished her spiel and the tourists split into smaller groups to explore the island. Spyder and Shrike followed Primo up the hill toward the prison cellblocks. As they climbed the steep grade, Spyder became aware that many of the tourists, especially the fathers in family groups, lumbered under the weight of demonic parasites that were attached to their bodies. Some of the parents bore scars from the Black Clerks. Spyder met one man’s gaze—he still had his eyes—and the look the man gave Spyder was filled with such resigned despair that Spyder had to turn away. Out of the corner of his eye, Spyder watched the man herding his wife and children into the prison gift shop.

  Past the cellblocks, on the edge of the island looking back toward San Francisco, were rusted, steel double doors. They were chained loosely together and with a little effort, Primo was able to push himself through the opening. Shrike, smaller, slid easily through the gap. Spyder had to take his leather jacket off to get through and even then there was a lot of grunting and dragging himself inside by inches. But he finally made it.

  “I probably could have picked that lock,” he said once he was inside the tunnel.

  “Don’t worry. I have a key,” said Primo and walked away into the darkness.

  “Then why…?” Shrike elbowed Spyder to remind him not to speak. He followed them, giving up trying to understand his companions’ logic.

  “This is one of the old animal pens,” Primo told them eagerly. “The soldiers kept their horses here during the winter rains. You can still hear them whinnying if you put your ear to the wall during storms.”

  In the near, but never total, darkness, they climbed down ladders and through storm grates. They walked passages with floors of mud, passages lined with planks, cobblestone passages and some whose floors seemed to be some kind of soft, spongy metal that made Spyder want to run like a little kid. He was sure that there was no way all these passages were part of the prison complex. This was confirmed for Spyder as they moved through a rocky tunnel whose walls were lined with clay water pipes marked with inscriptions in Latin and Greek. Were they moving in time as well as space, Spyder wondered.

  They went through underground vaults and what looked like old sewer sluiceways. Occasionally, they would meet another group moving in the opposite direction. Some were dressed in rags, some looked like ordinary city dwellers, while others looked like escapees from some particularly mean and decrepit Renaissance Faire. The groups never acknowledged each other. Spyder got the impression that the passages weren’t the safest place to be.

  Up ahead, he noticed that Primo had slowed down and was nervously wringing his hands. At a watery intersection that reminded Spyder of the high gothic sewers where Orson Welles met his bloody fate at the end of The Third Man, Primo stopped. The little man turned in slow circles, peering into the distance. He stared hard at the walls, as if looking for a message.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Shrike.

  “Our transport isn’t here. A tuk-tuk was supposed to be waiting.”

  “Did Madame Cinders pay them in advance?”

  “Naturally.”

  “That was your mistake.”

  “No. She knows this family well. They are reliable. That’s why she employs only them to transport her guests.”

  “Maybe they broke down,” said Shrike. “If they were anywhere nearby, we could hear the damned racket from the tuk-tuk’s engine.”

  “We shouldn’t remain still too long. It’s dangerous. I suppose we should start walking.”

  “That would be my suggestion,” said Shrike. Spyder didn’t like the idea of being in the passages any longer that they had to. He looked back the way they had come and saw things moving in the darkness. Golden eyes glinted and slid along the floor. Spyder caught up to Shrike and made sure not to fall behind again.

  After what seemed like hours, they were moving through a passage lined with old red brick and dry rot-timbers. A cool breeze touched Spyder’s face. Sand had piled in miniature dunes where the timbers met the floor.

  “Oh dear,” said Primo leaning over a broken machine in the tunnel ahead. Twisted wheels lay on the bricks. Spyder could already smell the stink coming from the wreck. Melted rubber, gasoline and burned flesh.

  “I’m guessing this is the tuk-tuk we were waiting for?” said Shrike.

  “It would seem so,” replied Primo. “Hmm. I don’t believe this was a motor accident. There appears to be an arrow in the driver’s eye. I wonder who could have put that there?”

  “That would be us,” came a croaking voice from the roof of the passage.

  Four men (and the gender of the intruders was just a guess on Spyder’s part) dropped to the floor. The men weren’t holding anything, so Spyder wasn’t sure how they’d been holding on to the ceiling. But what seemed more important to him now was the men’s elongated faces and crocodilian skin. Each was dressed differently—one in a firefighter’s rubber overcoat, another in priestly vestments, the third wore shorts and an I LUV LA t-shirt and the fourth was wearing a high school letter jacket. Spyder didn’t want to think about where the lizard men might have acquired their clothes, but the rust-colored stains in the LA t-shirt gave him some idea.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Primo and he gave the lizards a bow. “I am Primo Kosinski and I am conducting these guests to the abode of Madame Cinders. The Madame has negotiated safe passage through the Blegeld Passage for herself and all her guests.”

  “She didn’t negotiate with us,” said the lizard priest in a gravelly, hissing voice.

  “That’s because the compact is universal. No one may ignore or prevent…,” Primo began. Shrike cut him off.

  “What will it cost us to get through?” she asked.

  “The pretty green. Piles of it. Do you have that?”

  “You know we don’t,” Shrike said.

  “Good,” hissed the lizard in the letter jacket. He took a step toward Shrike. Just as she was bringing her sword up, Spyder saw Primo ram his shoulder into the lizard’s mid-section, smashing him against the wall in an explosion of bone, blood and dry skin. Next, Primo rounded on the priest and back-fisted him, ripping off a good portion of the beast’s face. Spyder was pulling Shrike back from the carnage. As awful as it was, he couldn’t turn away. The first thing he noticed, aside from the fact that Primo had the last two lizards by the throat and was slowly choking the life from them, was that the little man’s clothes were not longer loose on him. In fact, they seemed a little tight. His skin had turned a bright crimson and long, thorned hooks protruded from every part of his body, ripping through the fabric of his suit. Primo growled with animal fury as he crushed the throats of the lizards until their heads hung at odd angles on limp flesh. Dropping the attackers’ bodies, Primo turned to Spyder and Shrike, asking, “Are you both all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Shrike said. “Thank you.”

  The little man, for he was already shrinking back to his original size, approached them, cleaning his hands on the T-shirt he ripped from the body of one dead lizard. “Forgive me, please,” he said. “You were under my protection and should never have had to even raise your weapon. You may ask Madame for my life, if you like.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Shrike. “You protected us and we’re grateful.”

  “I’m happy to be of service.”

  “You’re of the Gytrash race, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Members of my family have been guides for Madame Cinders and her friends for over a thousand years.”

  “Your family should be very proud of you, Primo.”

  “Thank you. I believe they are. At least, they sit well with me.”

  Spyder felt Shrike’s hand on his arm, quieting him until Primo had moved away to inspect the lizard men’s bodies. When he was out of ear shot, Shrike whispered quickly. “The Gytrash are nomads and escorts for travelers. They are a very practical race. They eat their dead for nourishment, but also as ritual. It’s their highest act of love and praise.”

  �
��We’re almost there,” said Primo. “Shall we continue?”

  “Let’s,” said Shrike. Spyder walked beside her trying to decide which member of his family, in a pinch, he could eat.

  SIXTEEN

  The Birth of Monsters

  When the world began, there were no such things as monsters. Demons were just fallen angels who, booted out of heaven and bored with Hell, wandered the Earth sticking little girls’ pigtails in inkwells and sinking the occasional continent.

  The word monster didn’t really exist until the Spheres separated and the humans and beasts in the first Sphere forgot about their brethren in the other Earth realms.

  In fact, most of what people call monsters are at least partly human. Many are the offspring of Romeo and Juliet encounters between mortals and races from the other Spheres. The first monster was the offspring of a man, Chrysaor, and Nyx, the snake queen. Their daughter, Lilith, was the first of the Lamia race. When she fell in love with another human, Umashi, and created the long-nosed Tengus. It wasn’t just humans coupling with the older races. Earth was a romantic free-fire zone before the Spheres split. Old races mated with the new ones, which created still newer races, new cultures, new myths and new possibilities. Later, when mortals only saw the other races of the Earth in their dreams, they called these long-forgotten siblings monsters.

  Of course, mortals weren’t always tops on the invitation list for parties, either. A number of animal races, especially the ones in the oceans and air, didn’t regard humans as truly sentient beings and considered mating with them to be the grossest kind of bestiality. This generally low opinion of humanity was widespread in the outer Spheres and didn’t change for thousands of years, until certain mortal stories trickled out to the hinterlands. Gilgamesh, for instance, was quite a hit with the swamp kings and lords of the air. Other stories of reluctant heroes and re-born champions, characters such as Prometheus and the trickster Painted Man, elevated humanity in the eyes of the other races because in all those stories the heroes die or give up some core part of their being for their people. That humans could grasp the idea of self-sacrifice was big news in the outer Spheres. Humanity was cut some sorely needed slack from races that previously regarded them as a kind of chatty land krill.

  Of course, while the creatures of the outer Spheres no longer thought of humans as vermin, they didn’t really want to live next door to one, either.

  SEVENTEEN

  Cannibal Orchids

  They emerged from the tunnel into what looked and felt like noon light. After the darkness and relative quiet of the subterranean passages, the city was—overwhelming.

  The first thing that hit Spyder was the heat, then the din of car horns and the heavy reek of exhaust fumes. They had emerged from a storage room in the back of a small open-air café where bearded men in long while garments sipped mint tea and smoked unfiltered Winstons.

  Spyder had a hard time focussing on individual objects in the dazzling light. Shrike looped her arm through his and they followed Primo through narrow, unfamiliar back streets that smelled equally of raw sewage and cumin. Shielding his eyes with his free hand, Spyder was able to focus better and realized that the reason he couldn’t read the signs on the shops was that they weren’t in English, or even Roman letters.

  “Where are we?” he asked, knowing it violated his promise not to speak, but not caring.

  “Alexandria,” said Primo. “The Medina. The old city.”

  “How far are we from Madame Cinder’s?” asked Shrike.

  “Very close. Just a few blocks, ma’am.”

  Spyder had always wanted to go to Egypt, though he’d always imagined going there by a more conventional means. Still, he told himself, he was there with a cute girl on his arm and a guide who knew his way around. For being utterly lost and nearly crazy from confusion and fear, it could have been worse.

  They turned a corner and were surrounded by the ruins of a burial and temple complex that looked as if it were left over from the time of the Pharaohs. Sandstone blocks the size of SUVs lay at odd angles amidst a litter of columns and statues of animal-headed gods. Silent children watched them from the tops of the shattered temples. Whole families were living in the necropolis, Spyder realized, though he couldn’t say if they were from his time, some antediluvian past or some weird future. The temple inhabitants wore stiff, bulky robes the colors of the stones they walked on. In their odd garments, they looked almost like living stones themselves. The men were butchering the carcass of some large buffalo-like animal and dragging bloody slabs of it off to their families.

  Just past the necropolis was an old walled fortress. Over the outer wall, Spyder could just see the top of a golden onion dome and a tall minaret. Primo picked up his pace, breaking into a stiff legged trot that made him look like an oversize wind-up toy. Even though it hadn’t been more than an hour or so since the fight in the tunnel, Spyder was having a hard time picturing Primo as a killer. Which might have been the little man’s greatest strength, he thought. He looked at Shrike. She was lean and exuded confidence, but if he hadn’t seen her in action with her sword he wouldn’t have imagined her strength, either.

  As Primo worked the stiff lock on the gates of the fortress, Spyder shielded his eyes from the sun. Frowning to himself, he remembered his first tattoo: barbed wire around his neck. It was a traditional prison tat. Spyder had told people that the tat was a memorial to his friend Gus who had died in the San Luis Obispo county jail in a fight with a member of a rival bike gang. And that was half true. It had genuinely broken Spyder up when Gus died during what should have been nothing more than a weekend in the drunk tank. But Spyder knew enough about tattoos to know how people would back off when they saw what they took to be a symbol of his having survived serious jail time. Thinking about it now, in the company of two genuine killers who looked anything but dangerous, Spyder saw much of his early ink less as a tribute to the art and more to his own neuroses. He wore his fear on his skin for everyone to see. Spyder had avoided thoughts like these his whole life and, as Primo wrestled the gates of the fortress open, they came down on him hard. Fear and covering up fear had probably been his primary motivator since childhood. Oddly, now that he had real monsters to deal with and not just the neurotic shadows that he’d dragged with him from childhood, none of it was as bad as he’d imagined it would be. Maybe because he wasn’t alone. Shrike’s arm was solid against him. If he wasn’t really brave, maybe he could watch her and learn to act bravely. A line he used more than once to sell tattoos to uncertain customers popped into his head, “Sometimes changing the outside is the first step to changing the inside.”

  Beyond the wall, the fortress was another world. Olive and orange trees lined the inside of the courtyard, providing shade and cooling the air to bearable levels. A fountain filled the air with the pleasant sound of running water and a tile walkway pointed the way into the main domed building. Primo ushered Shrike and Spyder inside to an opulent room of cushions and low, inlaid tables on a polished teak wood floor. Primo gestured for them to make themselves comfortable by a table piled high with fresh fruit and bottled water. When they were seated, Spyder put Shrike’s hand on the fruit and she eagerly took a fig from the pile. Spyder peeled an orange and said, “I could get used to this.”

  “It’s very nice,” replied Shrike. “It’s also for our benefit. Letting us know that she can take care of us.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “It’s very nice when you’re on good terms. It’s also a way of letting us know that her wealth and power can hurt us if things go badly.”

  “You’re getting a lot more from that fig than I’m getting from this orange.”

  “Keep quiet. There are people listening.”

  “Where?”

  Shrike inclined her head to a grating set into the wall. Spyder looked and saw numerous pairs of eyes staring at him through the wooden latticework. As soon as he focussed on them, the eyes were gone. He crawled over the cushions and looked
through. Beyond the wall was a large, formal room. Serving girls and white clad boys were cleaning the place and taking great pains not to look in Spyder’s direction.

  “She’ll see you now.” It was Primo, down at the far end of the chamber. Spyder gave Shrike his arm and they followed the little man down a long, cool passageway past dozens of rooms, out the back and into a sprawling Victorian greenhouse. The glass walls and roof were white with steam. Inside, it was like a sauna. Spyder was immediately drenched in sweat. Primo led them deep into a thick internal jungle filled with tropical plants whose thorns and poison sap tugged at their clothes.

  They entered a wet crystal-walled room filled with orchids of every imaginable size and color. Servants were gently tending the flowers with potions and fertilizers. Using a silver scoop, a young boy tossed ground meat into the soil. The orchids bent gracefully and used their fleshy blossoms to gather up the bloody scraps. Those that couldn’t reach the meat ripped the petals from nearby flowers. The place smelled like a cross between a department store perfume counter and a slaughterhouse.

  Spyder felt Shrike stiffen and when he looked, Madame Cinders was being rolled into the greenhouse in a wheelchair carved as gilded and elaborately decorated as any Louis XIV throne. Attached to the wheelchair was a kind of elaborate pump system tied to an intravenous tube that slid under the rich folds of Madame Cinders’ sky blue hajib. The woman’s face was entirely hidden by the headdress. There was only an oval-shaped grid across her eyes and through it, Spyder could see nothing but darkness.

  Primo walked into the center of the room and stood straight, striking an awkwardly formal pose. “This is the mistress of this house, the Last Daughter of the Moon, the protector and destroyer of Ail-Brasil, Madame Cinders. She will ask you a series of questions. You will answer these to the best of your ability. You are not permitted to question Madame Cinders at this time. If Madame decides to avail herself of your services, then questions may be asked in a less formal setting. Do you understand all these points?”