Dark Blood

by John Meaney

Genres: Science Fiction; Dystopian; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Police officer Donal Riordan, killed and brought back to life with the heart of his undead lover beating in his chest, is getting used to a bizarre and frightening new existence. As one of the undead the living citizens of Tristopolis distrust and fear him. But death has its advantages. He can sense the presence, the thoughts the feelings of his fellow zombies, he is tireless, he can see better, hear more acutely.

But none of this will necessarily save him as he begins to investigate who is behind a plot to ensorcel the entire population of Tristopolis. The plot goes right to the top and anyway who gets in the way will be killed again.

And all the time the members of the Unity party are stoking the fires of hatred towards the undead.

John Meaney's new series is a superb melding of the science fiction and horror genres and is perfectly timed for the resurgance of horror in the market.

Release date: October 15, 2015

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

One

Donal sat in the back of a police cruiser as it drove through the shadowed, broken streets of Lower Danklyn, past purplestone tenements that lay cracked and deserted. White lizards watched from the rubble. High overhead, a Tristopolis PD scanbat glided, observing.

I’ve seen men die before.

Not just men. His beautiful, lovely Laura, her head blown apart in a grey spray of brains and bone and zombie blood—

This one had better suffer.

But he could summon up no real joy. On some level of abstraction, Donal knew that Alderman Kinley Finross would take three hours to die. The bastard deserved every agonized second he was about to endure. Donal felt a sense of rightness – but only that.

There should be more.

Perhaps a living man, now, would feel his heart beat faster, his skin grow damp with perspiration, his stomach grow queasy.

More feeling.

In a living man, emotions would arise from masses of neurons in the bodily organs, and a flow of peptides almost as complex as the nerves themselves. But Donal was cold – would feel icy to another person, to a normal human touch – and his heart, Laura’s heart, beat at the same unvarying pace inside his chest.

Laura. Oh, my Laura.

It hadn’t been Finross who pulled the trigger. Senator Blanz had ripped Donal’s Magnus from his grip, and used it to destroy Laura Steele, Donal’s perfect lover, before swivelling to shoot Donal in the heart. After dying, Donal had awoken with his chest cavity split open, with para-medic mages working to install a beating black heart – Laura’s zombie heart – inside him.

‘Not long now.’ Bud Brodowski, his massive shoulders convex with muscle, turned the steering-wheel. ‘Has weasel-face got his self supporters?’

There was a bend in the road. A group of people stood beneath billowing, floating banners: Rending renders society cruel. They opposed the death penalty as a matter of principle. Donal wondered if they spared a thought for the near-invisible wraiths they were using to hold the banners overhead. Perhaps those boundwraiths had their own opinions on dealing with murderers.

‘Can we run over ‘em?’ Al Brodowski, hulking like his brother, was in the front passenger seat. ‘Just a couple, please, Lieutenant?’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ said Donal from the rear.

But he spoke on an inhalation, which gave his voice a strange resonance, as if he were Zurinese. He saw the shared glance between the Brodowskis.

Damn it. There’s too much to remember.

So much changed when you had to consciously control the lungs, when breathing was no longer necessary. When, arguably, you were no longer a person but a thing, an abomination created by thaumaturgical intervention instead of allowing extinction to—

To provide bones for the reactor piles? Would that have been better?

Further back, Unity Party supporters glowered at the police car. Officially, their party did not condone this demonstration, not when their man Finross had been complicit in the death of Maria daLivnova, a very human Diva.

To either side in darkness, amber eyes glowed, disappeared as the deathwolves turned their attention elsewhere, then shone again as they followed the progress of Donal’s car. They belonged to the prison pack, normally patrolling inside the grounds.

‘You think they’re expecting trouble?’ said Bud.

‘Nah.’ Al shook his head, but still pulled his shotgun from its dashboard clip. ‘Going to be a quiet day.’

‘Not for Finross,’ said Donal.

The prison gates looked like darkened pewter, two feet thick, on which the crossed axes of the Federal Prison Authority were embossed, overlaying a yin-yang whose dots were serpent’s eyes. The gates swung inwards, and the cruiser passed through.

Gravel sprayed as Al turned the wheel, following the arc of the driveway.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Shit.’

‘I hate this place,’ muttered Bud.

The gravel was formed of knucklebones, taken from prisoners across the centuries. Mostly, it came from corpses, but some came from the excision of living fingers: a punishment for infringing prison discipline.

Near the main steps, where white runes glowed upon the flagstones, was parked Mayor Dancy’s official limousine. The city’s Tree Frog insignia glistened on the black doors.

‘Probably his assistant,’ said Donal. ‘His Honour doesn’t like these things, according to the Gazette.’

‘Don’t blame him.’ Al drove past perhaps twenty parked cars. ‘Here we go.’

‘Got newspaper guys here.’ Bud replaced the shotgun in its clip. ‘Maybe they’ll interview you, Lieutenant. You being a hero and all.’

‘Huh.’ Donal held out his hand palm up, fingers extended. ‘You want to see my new heroic trick?’

Al halted the car, pulled up the handbrake, and switched the engine off. He and Bud turned in their seats.

‘Like this,’ added Donal.

Using neuromuscular control that he’d never possessed while living, Donal curled just his little finger tightly, while the others remained outstretched. Then, slowly, he curled the ring finger, then the forefinger, and finally the thumb. The middle finger remained outstretched.

Then he raised the middle finger horizontal to the vertical.

‘Pretty neat, Lieutenant.’

‘Ya gotta teach us that one.’

Donal slid out of the car, smiling. Then his shoes scrunched on knucklebones, and he looked up at the dark massive pile that was Wailing Towers, the city’s largest prison. His smile had gone. If zombies could shiver, he would have.

It won’t bring Laura back.

Still, Finross’s death would count for something.

Someone had redecorated. The viewing chamber held rows of plush, dark-red upholstered benches, instead of the hard bonewood furniture that Donal remembered from four previous visits. In Tristopolis, unlike other cities, the arresting officer always witnessed the execution. It granted cops a sense of perspective on their work.

As always, the benches were arranged in tiers, sloping down to an armoured hexiglass barrier, floor to ceiling. Beyond it lay the execution chamber. Inside, a stone bier waited, with dangling, empty chains and straps.

Donal stopped in the aisle, deciding where to sit. Several journalists and bureaucrats glanced at him. Some noticed the pale complexion. Others – Donal deduced, from the minutiae of widening eyes, a tiny rolling-forward of the shoulders – knew him for the lieutenant who had taken down Senator Blanz, dying in the process.

It’s not me they’re afraid of.

Choosing a near-empty row of seats high at the rear, Donal threaded his way past a down-at-heels journalist, then two men in grey suits. Each man wore a small black stud in his left lapel; inside the stud were superimposed a U and P, the symbol of the Unity Party. Neither man responded to a zombie detective lieutenant squeezing past them. Or perhaps they were fascinated – fearfully fascinated – by the waiting bier, the imminent reality of Finross’s death.

It’s the necrofusion piles that scare them. The thought of their own death.

Or perhaps they feared ending up like Donal, except that no Unity Party member would dream of taking out a life policy. As he sat down, he noticed both men flinch, just as he himself felt something cold from across the room.

Another one.

A black-coated doctor was entering with stethofork in hand. His skin was palest grey, almost white. He stopped, looked up at Donal, and nodded. His eyes were like chips of slate.

Donal nodded back.

Another of my kind.

The doctor paused at the front row, then ascended the aisle and made his way along the row below Donal’s. Drawing close, he stopped. His hand, when he held it out, was long-fingered. Donal expected his handshake to be cold.

But when two zombies shake hands, their bodies are at the same temperature.

‘I’m Thalveen,’ said the doctor. ‘Odom Thalveen.’

‘Donal Riordan. Good to meet you.’

A faint scent of formaldehyde wafted from Thalveen’s black coat.

‘I guess you’re here to make sure,’ added Donal, ‘that Finross lasts the course?’

The shock of rending would kill an unmedicated person within seconds. It took skilled medical care to ensure the vagus nerve and heart remained functioning. Anything less than two hours dying was considered ‘easy and unusual kindness’, prohibited by law.

‘I am here to prepare Finross. Also the hookwraiths.’ Thalveen’s hair was lanky, and he brushed it back with one long finger. ‘Why do people assume the wraiths enjoy their work? I try to minimize their suffering.’

‘While maximizing the prisoner’s, I hope.’

‘Why, Lieutenant—’ he gave a cold zombie smile, using Donal’s rank, signalling that he knew who Donal was— ‘that goes without saying.’

The grey-suited Unity Party men stiffened. Then they let out tense breaths, releasing their anger, and looked at each other.

Thalveen shook his head, saying loudly: ‘Too bad Senator Blanz isn’t here.’

Perhaps provoking the UP was unwise.

‘He wouldn’t see a thing,’ said Donal, not caring. ‘I know, because my hands were sticky when they resurrected me.’

‘What do you mean, Lieutenant?’

‘Isn’t it called aqua humerus, or something? I think it’s humorous.’

‘Aqueous humour,’ said Thalveen, ‘is a liquid inside the eye.’

‘Then that’s what I had on my fingers, when I took out Blanz’s eyeballs.’

Donal had raked with his hands like claws even as the shot took him in the heart. The memory endured, an undertone of terrible joy failing to offset the shock of seeing Laura’s head explode.

One of the UP guys had grown so pale he looked almost zombie-like. Donal considered pointing that out; but Thalveen was offering his hand again.

‘I have to take my place. It was good meeting you, Lieutenant.’

‘Likewise, Doctor.’ This time, it was no surprise that Thalveen’s hand felt thermally neutral. ‘I hope we meet again.’

‘We will.’

Donal watched him make his way down to the front row. Ordinary living humans – prison guards, bureaucrats and journalists – paid special attention to the black-coated doctor. Some frowned, some looked away, while others deliberately forced down their squeamishness and nodded to Thalveen as an equal. No one ignored his zombie nature.

So it’s always going to be like this.

Perhaps Donal would get used to it.

It was exactly nine minutes later – Donal somehow knew, without looking at his watch – that an old woman with cataract-milky eyes limped up the aisle. One of the grey-suited men rose, and went down to help. He led the woman to the seat he had been sitting in, sat her down, and took the place beside her. The other grey-suited man, on the other side of her, said something and patted her hand.

‘Holy Mother of the Seven Blades,’ she said. ‘It isn’t right. Not my Kinley.’

A zombie could feel icy cold, for Donal realized who the woman must be: Alderman Finross’s mother. A UP man was glaring at him, but Donal reacted in a way he could not have done when living. Consciously, he forced the guilt to recede towards an imaginary horizon, and into oblivion.

That was fine because Finross, ultimately, was the person responsible for his own execution.

Down below, Commissioner Vilnar was entering the chamber, along with Commander Bowman of Robbery-Haunting. Vilnar was blocky and shaven-headed, his suit expensive, his body overweight but muscular. He greeted one of the journalists, then the mayor’s assistant who was sitting in the front row as far from Dr Thalveen as possible.

Bowman, maybe forty years old with cropped, receding red hair, was an unknown factor to Donal. But he glanced in Donal’s direction and gave a minuscule nod, which was more recognition than Vilnar was granting him.

Politics? Or something else?

Commissioner Vilnar had attended Laura’s funeral, against political advice. Grant him that much. There had been few mourners at the graveside. Commander Laura Steele was a cop who had died in the line of duty, in the Capitol building at the heart of Fortinium – but she had been a zombie.

Vilnar must have known Donal was here. Still, he took his seat, and folded his bulky arms, without looking around.

Meanwhile, on the same row as Donal, Finross’s mother drew a prayer-chain from purse, and began to mutter the verses of a Septena. From his orphanage days, under the stern rule of the Sisters of Death, Donal remembered the prayers, and wondered if she was about to recite the entire forty-nine-verse sequence.

I’m not enjoying this.

Donal had made his guilt recede, but there was no joy to replace it. Conscious control of the emotions was a zombie’s hallmark, wasn’t it? So why couldn’t he stop feeling empty?

Finross’s mother faltered in her prayers.

Several seconds later, a door opened at the rear of the execution chamber, some fifty feet away and separated from the viewers by armoured hexiglass. Finross’s mother had sensed the door’s opening in advance. Donal wondered whether Kinley Finross’s abilities as a minor mage – unlicensed and illegally trained – were inherited.

Or perhaps it was ordinary maternal awareness, raised to new heights of perception in this awful place. She resumed her prayers in a tense, rapid mutter. Donal wanted to tell her shut up. He wanted to tell her that everything would be all right; but it wouldn’t be.

A gurney rolled into the execution chamber. On it, strapped naked in place, was Alderman Kinley Finross. He was gasping, hyperventilating, struggling against manticore-sinew cords that would never break. They left white marks on his soft, wobbling skin. As the gurney drew alongside the stone bier, Finross bucked, achieving nothing. Instead, the gurney seemed to shrug, and Finross rolled on to the bier. Then the gurney was backing away. Perhaps it rolled more easily now because of the lessened weight; perhaps it was glad to be leaving.

Several thin straps rose from the side of the bier, curled over Finross, descended, and tightened. As his movements were confined, his face bulged with pressure. He looked like someone about to have a coronary, but Thalveen would have made sure that such a premature ending could not happen. Not today.

Finross’s mother prayed faster.

He was helpless when you brought him into the world.

Donal wondered what kind of awful symmetry was here, when a mother could see her son’s ending in such a way. What childhood paths had led him to love power enough to ally himself with an illegal organization whose mages would eventually abandon him?

No. He’s not the victim.

Remembering Laura’s death was all it took to destroy that illusion. Finross deserved what was about to occur.

If only his mother weren’t here, and praying.

Several minutes later, the flamesprites that lit the viewing chamber seemed to soften, to lower their illumination to a glimmer, while the execution chamber brightened. It was bizarrely akin to a stage show’s beginning.

The hexiglass barrier did not transmit Finross’s scream. Donal wondered why the audience needed insulation from the sounds but not the sight of agony. As he thought that, one of the bureaucrats, a fleshy man with oiled hair, brought a pair of burgundy-coloured opera glasses to his eyes, leaning forward.

Maybe they should serve beer. Make a real occasion of it.

Or perhaps notarised truthsayers should question any person intending to witness a state execution, and turn them away if they revealed a propensity for enjoying the occasion.

‘— Mother of the Seven Blades deliver my enemies into my hands, and bring thy demon host upon their—’

As the old woman’s prayer lowered in volume once more, Donal could see what had changed. A network of tiny holes had punctured the soft, bare soles of Finross’s feet.

A fine fractal blossoming began.

It was a ghostly grey tree that formed, a spreading network of threads drawn from the skin by an ethereal hookwraith. Squinting, Donal could just make out the wraith’s attenuated form. Then a second hookwraith flowed over Finross’s fat white thighs, and bent to work on the soft inner flesh, not yet targeting the groin. Soon, fine threads sprouted here as well. Slender wraith talons drew Finross’s nerves through his punctured skin, and spread them in the air.

Looked at in a certain way, it was a form of art.

But Kinley Finross was not destined to be the first person to die here today. Perhaps Donal was the first to hear the old woman cough, and the wheezing that enveloped her lungs. The grey-suited men on either side of her realized she was ill. One of them took out a clean handkerchief for her to use; then it became obvious this was more than a coughing fit.

‘What are you doing?’ One of the men glared as Donal moved near. ‘Haven’t you caused enough harm?’

‘I’m trained in—’

But Donal stopped, because a black-coated figure was ascending in the fastest way possible: using his long legs to leap from bench to bench, up the tiers. In seconds Dr Thalveen was crouched over Finross’s mother.

One of the UP men reached down towards Thalveen’s lapel.

Donal moved faster, snapping a hold on the man’s wrist, exquisitely aware of the joint’s bony structure, of the angles of weakness.

‘Let go of her,’ the other man told Thalveen.

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘No, just—’

‘Then let me work.’

A guard was running up the steps with an indigo case in hand. Donal guessed it was Thalveen’s, retrieved from the chamber where he’d worked with Finross before the execution began, or the place where he’d prepared the hookwraiths for their task.

‘Are you going to behave?’ Donal said.

‘Let go of— Yes.’ The man looked at Donal’s hand gripping his wrist. ‘All right.’

‘Good.’

Donal let go, and turned just as a large, florid man wearing a purple cravat reached him, standing on the next tier down. An obsidian stud, inscribed with an overlaid U and P, pinned the cravat in place.

‘What are you doing with Mrs Finross?’

‘Trying to save her life.’

Thalveen had worked on the old woman’s acupressure points with his long fingers before the guard opened the medical bag for him. Now, Thalveen snapped open three bulbs containing fluids, and tipped one across Mrs Finross’s chest – the orange fluid seeped into her skin as if her body were a sponge – and tipped another against her mouth, allowing drops to fall on her tongue. Vapour from the third drifted towards her nostrils, and entered.

Then Thalveen reached inside the bag for a quicksilver scarab with flailing insectile legs. But even as he brought the scarab close to the old woman’s skin, she gave a bouncing kick against the floor. An awful hiss of escaping air was her final exhalation.

Donal had heard people die before. He recognized the sound.

‘I think you should stop now,’ said the florid man.

Thalveen sat back on his heels, struggling quicksilver scarab in hand.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t sense her coming back.’

The grey-suited men looked at each other. Thalveen replaced the scarab in its jar inside the case. Then he stoppered the vials and put them in with the jar, and clicked the indigo bag shut.

He looked up as two of the guard’s colleagues arrived with a stretcher.

‘We’ve called an ambulance, Doctor.’

‘Good.’

At that moment, a distant sound reached Donal even through the hexiglass: the empty howl of a man who had experienced the reality of a loved one’s death during the process of his own.

Donal could find no joy in it. Not even for Laura’s sake.

Outside, a black car rolled along the knucklebone-gravel drive, and stopped fifty yards from the steps that led into the main penitentiary pile of Wailing Towers. To the side of the car park was a long sidewalk where flamewraiths, in their minimized aspect, licked along the gaps between flagstones. On the steps and iron-bound doors, white runes glowed.

‘Someone’s late.’ Al Brodowski, massive arms folded, stood in front of the cruiser he’d driven here. ‘And I think they’re too late.’

‘Already?’ Bud Brodowski checked his watch. ‘But it’s been an hour, is all.’

‘Look.’

The white runes began to flicker red, then to strobe, alternating between white and red so fast they appeared pink.

‘Oh, yeah. That’s approaching death, all right.’

The black car stopped. From the licence plate, it was a rental. Al and Bud watched as the driver got out. He was narrow-bodied, dressed in a bluemole coat over a well-cut dark-blue suit. A black band of lizard skin encircled his blue fedora.

‘Sharp dresser.’

‘Ain’t he? You make him for a cop, all the same?’

‘Not from this city.’

The man reached inside the car, and drew out a grey box. Both Brodowskis found themselves resting one hand naturally on their guns. The thin man noticed them, grinned, and used his heel to slam the car door shut.

‘Disregarding the rental company’s property.’

‘Has to be a cop.’

‘What I said, ain’t it?’

The man’s pointed shoes scrunched on knucklebones as he neared the brothers. They could see the stubble on his long face, thicker over the upper lip. Perhaps he was growing a moustache.

‘Am I too late for the big finale?’ He nodded toward the runes, now shining a deeper colour, closer to solid red. ‘I got a tender stomach, so it’s just as well.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Al.

‘You got ID?’ asked Bud.

‘How I got through the gate.’ The thin man touched the breast of his coat. ‘Letter of authorization.’

‘That’s not exactly ID.’

‘I wasn’t exactly offering to show you ID.’

The brothers tensed. In the weight-lifting rooms at HQ, they were called the Barbarians. The sight of their swelling muscles and narrowing eyes had made more than one violent gang member grow weak and compliant. But the thin man merely shifted the weight of the grey box under one arm, and grinned again.

‘See, guys – I’m not here, right?’

‘Hey, Al. You think he looks kinda solid for an apparition?’

‘I dunno, Bud. He looks kinda brittle, y’know?’

‘Don’t test me.’ Then, with a grin: ‘OK, I give up. Just arrest me and throw me in Commissioner Vilnar’s car.’

‘Say what?’

But Al’s gaze had already flickered to a dark-green armoured limousine parked at the far end of the lot.

‘That one, is it? Thanks, men. That’s all I needed to know.’

Al and Bud stared at each other. They had the muscle to force the issue, but it was obvious that the stranger was no criminal. If he had been, he would never have passed through the outer gates.

But as the thin man walked on towards the commissioner’s car, the brothers smiled.

‘It’s not like he hung around long enough for us to warn him, is it?’

‘Nah. Shame, cos we’d have told him all about Lamis, we would.’

‘’Course we would. We aim to please, don’t we?’

‘Dunno about you, bro, but I usually aim for the centre of the body.’

‘There is that.’

In the distance, high in the dark-purple sky, a tiny shape with bat-wings banked into a turn, straightening up as its nose pointed toward Wailing Towers.

‘The ambulance is coming.’

‘Guess the show’s almost over.’

Two

Finross continued to die. His drawn-out nerves formed spreading branches, gauzy fractal trees that floated in the air. As the second hour began, his skin began to peel back in narrow, curling strips. The hook-wraiths teased grey, glistening fat away from red-soaked, striated muscle tissue. Shimmering liquid highlights played across the revealed interior of Finross’s body, as he continued to writhe and howl.

Someone – not the first – began to retch into a handkerchief, and rushed from the viewing chamber. Even the experienced journalists looked sweat-soaked and haggard, their complexions grey. Perhaps only Commissioner Vilnar, blocky and unmoving in his front-row seat, displayed no reaction to the ongoing suffering.

‘The taxpayers got their money’s worth,’ he’d said to a reporter on a former occasion, after a senior figure in Bugs Lander’s mob had paid the penalty for choking several competitors on their own intestines. The execution had lasted nearly five hours. ‘Nice to see the underworld giving something back.’

It had been a popular statement with the Gazette’s readership. The mayor’s office had taken note. And perhaps the prison officials too, because today’s hookwraiths were performing superbly, as the grey clouds of nerves around Finross’s form were joined by spreading blue and red. The wraiths teased out capillaries first, then arteries and veins, so that the whole circulatory system fanned out alongside the nerves, hanging in the air like a delicate sculpture that had taken weeks to construct.

Surpassing themselves.

Call it a masterful performance.

Outside, the lightest of quicksilver rains was starting to fall, faintly hissing on the knucklebone gravel. The thin man was approaching the dark-green armoured limousine parked at the end of the row of cars. Before he reached it, the driver’s door cracked open, and a tall figure climbed out. He was wearing a dark-grey chauffeur’s uniform with a peaked cap, and heavy wraparound dark-blue glasses, despite the fact he was outdoors.

From the far end of the car park came a murmured, ‘Lamis don’t never get out of the car, does he, bro?’

‘Not hardly. But there he is.’

Neither the thin man nor the tall chauffeur looked in the Brodowskis’ direction.

‘I’m Lamis.’ The chauffeur’s voice was sepulchral. ‘You’ve brought a sample.’

‘And now your boss owes my boss a favour.’

‘If you say so, Inspector.’

‘Uh-huh.’ The thin man checked that the Brodowskis were standing too far away to overhear. ‘So are you going to take the Death-damned thing or not?’

Lamis reached up and removed his shades just by an inch, until the thin man could see the darkness where Lamis’s eyes should have been. Inside that darkness was—

‘Shit. Impossible.’

‘But you haven’t.’ Lamis replaced his heavy dark-blue shades. ‘Excreted in your pants, I mean. Nor did you run from me, as most people would.’

‘Got a sprained ankle.’

‘And a strained humour, but good enough.’ Lamis took the grey case from him. ‘And my apologies. The resonance from this thing is . . . unsettling.’

‘Didn’t make me feel too happy carrying it, and I’m not even a mage or anything.’

‘You did a good job. You fly back home tonight?’

‘Unless the border’s closed, yeah. The old Transition Tempest has been wild lately. A lot of flights are delayed.’

‘Thank you again, Inspector.’

The quicksilver rain was growing heavier, and the thin man hunched his shoulders.

‘Any time,’ he said. ‘I love the weather here. Makes me feel welcome.’

But Lamis was staring at the red runes. If blood could glow, it would be that colour.

‘I get it,’ said the thin man. ‘End of the show. I’m gone from here.’

He turned and headed back towards his rental car, tipping his fedora to the Brodowskis as he passed. Then he got inside, started the engine, and backed out too fast from the parking space, spraying knucklebone gravel that knocked against the bodywork of three cars.

He drove towards the main exit without looking back.

The Brodowskis watched him depart, noting the scanwraiths passing through the car, checking everything even on departure. This was a prison, after all, filled with inmates desperate to escape.

‘Definitely a cop, bro.’

‘You got it.’

They turned away, checking Commissioner Vilnar’s limousine. The tall driver, Lamis, had climbed back inside. His curved dark glasses were in place as usual.

‘You saw it, right?’

‘What? When he nearly took off his shades?’

‘Yeah. Then.’

‘Uh . . . Nope. Didn’t see a thing.’

Inside the limo, Lamis’s features might have moved fractionally, precursor to a non-existent smile.

After a moment: ‘Me neither. Obviously.’

‘Yeah. Obviously.’

Overhead, the bat-winged ambulance was gliding in an elliptical trajectory, looking for a place to land. Then it did something surprising – curving its wings, it dropped straight towards the roof of the main penitentiary pile.

‘They’ll never make it.’

‘I dunno. That driver’s good.’

‘Pilot.’

‘Huh?’

‘They’re flying, ain’t they? So the guy’s a pilot.’

‘If you say so, bro.’

The black ambulance swivelled its afterburners downwards, and blue flames flared as it descended, braking. It lowered itself in the middle of a formation of five pointed towers, snapped its wings into its chassis at the last moment, and was gone from sight.

‘Didn’t hear a crash.’

‘Got down OK. Sweet.’

‘Who are you calling sweet?’

‘In your— Now who’s this?’

Another car was entering the ground of Wailing Towers. This one was long and darkest burgundy, almost black, its flared fins edged with obsidian. The windows and windshield were strips of polished darkness.

‘I recognize the fancy limo.’

‘So whose is—? Hades, bro.’

‘Yeah. Exactly. You think the lieutenant knows?’

‘Beats me. What do you reckon?’

‘Haven’t got a clue, bro.’

The limo pulled up alongside them. Then the driver’s door opened, and a huge bearded man with a vast belly manoeuvred his legs from beneath the steering wheel. Puffing, he got to his feet, grimaced at the sea of knucklebones, then grinned at the Brodowskis.

‘Hey, guys. Fancy seeing you here.’

‘André. How’s life?’ said Al.

‘See you got a job.’ Bud nodded towards the rear. ‘T