Descent into Darkness
The sun had set, yet low clouds, red like smoldering coals, brooded over Godtown and cast the city in hues of black and crimson. Two Elysian runeships, their armored underbellies aglow with esoteric symbols, cut through the air above the crumbling tenements and makeshift huts of a sprawling zopadpatti, one of the many slums that stretched across Southside like flaking scabs across a healing wound. In the rubbish-strewn streets below, children looked up from their cricket games, men from their hash pipes, and women from the wells where they gathered water; all saw the ships, and they raised their fists and cursed.
In the foremost ship, Nurse Juliet, immaculately dressed in white, sat across from the door gunner and quietly clutched a teddy bear. She gazed out over the slum and fretted, wondering why nobody closed the door. Looking down from the sky on the tents and corrugated steel rooftops made her nervous: If she accidentally dropped the bear, it would ruin the whole night.
Even so, she was grateful for the breeze. The monsoon was late this year, so Godtown cooked under the sun from morning to evening until it was almost too hot to breathe. At night, every surface radiated back the heat it had collected over the sweltering day. But up here above the city’s miasma, the air was cool and fresh, carrying none of the odors that filled the city streets—petrol fumes, monkey droppings, open sewers.
Doctor Darcangelo, wedged next to the gunner, stared at Juliet through the long, black strands of his oiled hair. His nimble, narrow fingers toyed with the fedora in his lap, and a sickly smile formed on his face, making the hollows under his cheekbones more prominent.
He was paler than usual. Juliet wondered if he’d eaten today.
“You didn’t have to come, you know,” he murmured.
She felt a twinge of irritation. “Just once, doctor, I wanted to see—”
“There’s nothing to see.”
She chewed her lower lip as she tried to read his expression. “Then why do it?”
“Someone has to.”
“The soldiers—”
“They don’t understand like I do.”
She glanced into his dark eyes but then looked away again and stared out the door, out over the city lit and shadowed by the light reflecting from the roiling cloudbank overhead.
Needing no engine, the runeship was silent. The wind whistled past the door, and the grumbles of automobiles and trishaws rose from below. In the blood-tainted twilight, Juliet could make out the marble shikaras and minarets of innumerable temples and mosques interspersed with crumbling tenements and ramshackle jhuggi-jhompris. It was such an ugly city, yet here and there, it held instances of the greatest beauty.
For reasons she couldn’t explain, Juliet did want to see. These trips made the doctor suffer—and she felt a strange desire to suffer with him.
“She’ll really like that bear, though,” Darcangelo said. He smiled again.
She managed to smile back.
***
Covetous of the magical Tuaoi Stones that grew in abundance in the mountains to the city’s west, the globe-spanning Elysian Empire had, thirteen years ago, invaded Godtown—but couldn’t control it. Nobody controlled Godtown for long.
After taking the Vindhya Range and a slice of the city’s west end, the invading army had halted, forgoing endless house-to-house fighting as well as the inevitably bloody battle with the temple fortress in the harbor. For thirteen years now, the Elysians had owned the mountains and their Tuaoi Stone mines but had also dealt with an endless parade of criminals, malcontents, and guerillas. Possessed as it was of the world’s most potent Runetech, the Elysian military performed well in large-scale wars of conquest, but it was unwieldy in urban combat, and when it came to police actions or counterterrorism, it was like a chainsaw cutting butter: It did little more than make a mess.
Thus, when raiding a condemned tenement to strike at a child-trafficking ring, the Elysians landed two heavy runeships on the roof, launched flash grenades through the windows, and smashed through every door with an entire company of men armed with carbines, 12-gauge shotguns, and grenade launchers.
The tenement was full of impoverished squatters whom the soldiers rounded up, cuffed—sometimes in both senses of the word—and herded into a dingy courtyard. There, Captain Swaggart, with outsized jowls and a craggy face set in a permanent frown, clasped his hands behind his back and, shoulders stiff, marched past rows of the crouching, sullen, and uncommunicative natives.
They stared at him, eyes blank. They had the faces of men accustomed to being whipped like dogs.
Only one dared to speak, a fellow with a dark and heavily lined face; back home, Swaggart would have judged him to be in his sixties, but here, a man with a face like that could be as young as thirty. The man uttered several rapid words in the vernacular.
When he had first arrived in Godtown, Swaggart had received an official translator—a toothless, bhang-addicted native whose vernacular was almost as bad as his English and whom Swaggart had immediately tossed on his ear. So far, however, the captain thought he had done all right without anyone to parse the local tongue for him. He listened for a minute to the squatter’s tirade and understood almost none of it, but somewhere amidst the jabber, he caught the words bahen chod, which translated to “sister fucker.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Swaggart raised a boot and laid the man out with a kick to the temple. It didn’t pay to tolerate insolence.
The native sprawled on the ground, groaning. His fellows didn’t flinch but merely stared at the pebbles near their feet, faces slack.
Dr. Darcangelo, a foppish pediatrician immaculately dressed in a black suit and matching trench coat, pushed past Swaggart’s shoulder and dropped his heavy medical bag to the ground. He pulled off his kid gloves and snapped on a latex pair in their place. With his young nurse hovering anxiously at his shoulder, he set about treating the cut on the native’s head.
Swaggart bit his lip as he watched the working of Darcangelo’s spiderlike fingers. Those fingers—too white, too long, and too bony—made his skin crawl. Indeed, Swaggart found everything about the doctor disconcerting: He could never bear Darcangelo’s gaze for long on account of the doctor’s liquid eyes rimmed with delicate lashes, his sallow and clammy skin, and his lips, which were too full to be a man’s, and too red.
Once Darcangelo had shone a light in the wounded native’s eyes to make sure he didn’t have a concussion, Nurse Juliet rounded on Swaggart. “Why would you do that?” she cried, clutching a teddy bear to her chest. “That poor man didn’t—”
Swaggart raised a hand to stop her. “Nurse, you and the doctor are here only because the general, for reasons of his own, allows it. If you insist on tagging along after my men, you are under my command. Is that clear?”
She squeezed the bear and thrust out her jaw. But she didn’t answer.
As he helped the injured man sit up, Darcangelo asked several questions in fluent vernacular. The man answered rapidly but at length while waving his grimy hands.
Darcangelo nodded and stood. He carefully brushed his hands down his coat and adjusted his fedora.
“I don’t have all night, doctor,” Swaggart said.
Darcangelo languidly fiddled with his emerald stickpin as he replied, “This gentleman informs me of a secret panel in a cupboard on the top floor; it leads to an entire wing of the building that had been closed off. The fellows you want are in there—well, were in there. I’ve no doubt they’ve escaped by now.”
Swaggart gestured to three of his men. “Stevens, Heatfreak, take the kit. Martins, you’re on point. Let’s go.”
***
Darcangelo turned his hat in his hands and struggled to quell his impatience while the soldiers broke through the false wall. He wondered if things would have been easier and neater if he had come alone; alas, the military had received the tip before he did, so the military had acted first.
Three times, his right hand—as if it had a mind of its own—lifted from his hat and reached toward his ear. Each time, he caught himself in the gesture and forced it back down.
Martins tossed in a flash-bang grenade. After a loud thump, he dived in.
Heatfreak went next. A man probably still in his late teens, whose rounded cheeks had not yet lost the fleshiness of childhood, Heatfreak had caught Darcangelo’s eye earlier in the evening. He had a maniacal glint in his baby-blue eyes. His moniker—almost certainly a sportive nickname—undoubtedly recalled something unpleasant; as Heatfreak smashed through the door, Darcangelo wondered what a man with such a nickname might be capable of in a moment of desperation.
In less than a minute, Heatfreak and Martins, having fired no shots, declared the room clear. Once all had rushed in except the rear guard, Darcangelo donned his hat, shifted his medical bag to his left hand, and ducked through the small entryway. He helped Juliet in after him.
It was a broad room and low. The few electric torches had blue tissues hanging over them to dampen their beams. The feeble light filled the room with fantastic, sinister shadows that stretched up the walls and gave the impression of enormous beasts crouching in the corners, waiting to pounce. Insect carcasses littered the dirty enamel floor, and wires hung from holes in the ceiling. In the center of the room stood an extraction chair with its standard apparatus—including a skull-bit. A grimy, yellowing plastic tube ran from the device to a nearby table where a Mason jar stood half-full of pale, shimmering fluid. Darcangelo wrinkled his nose. Beside him, Juliet put a hand over her mouth and looked sick.
The chair, an expected find, did not long occupy Darcangelo’s attention. Of greater interest were the men, both human and marjara, who sprawled on the floor in painful-looking contortions, as if they had frozen amid seizures. Several bullet holes graced the walls.
Fingering his carbine, Stevens whistled. “Somebody already got here and took ’em out. Another mob, maybe?”
Darcangelo chuckled through pursed lips, bent over a marjara, and set down his medical bag. “No, take a closer look. These men aren’t dead.”
With his long and nimble fingers, Darcangelo probed the marjara’s neck. Like most marjaras, this one had a decidedly feline muzzle with pronounced canines protruding from his upper lip. His fur was yellow and covered with tightly clustered black spots, indicating that he was of the Vaishya Varna, though Darcangelo didn’t know the fur patterns well enough to identify his particular caste. This marjara was enormous, probably seven feet tall when erect, and sheathed in thick, lean muscle. When Darcangelo touched his furry neck, the marjara opened his eyes and looked up at him with an unmistakable expression of distaste.
“His pulse is strong,” Darcangelo said as he straightened. “He’s simply been immobilized by a Sastravidya nerve strike. Be aware that he can hear everything we say.”
Looking around, he added, “At first glance, captain, I’d say all these men appear to be either temporarily paralyzed or unconscious.”
Swaggart scowled. “Then who—?”
“I don’t know for certain, but my first guess would be the Ragamuffin. This is her style.”
Swaggart cursed under his breath.
Darcangelo walked to the extraction chair and peered at the skull-bit; poised on its tip was a clump of burnt hair clotted with blood. Then he turned to the jar on the table and opened it.
Juliet, eyes wide with horror, pinched her nose. “Doctor, do you really want to—?”
The tangy stench stung his nostrils and poured straight into his brain, making his head pound.
“Heaven Seed, and it’s fresh,” he said with a cough as he clamped the lid back into place. “Half an hour at the most.”
Swaggart’s craggy face brightened. “So the Ragamuffin could still be here?”
“And the victim could still be alive, though this is a large extraction—large enough to kill some hybrids outright. If she’s here, we need to find her right away.”
With a series of terse orders, Swaggart assigned fireteams to search. “Get me the Ragamuffin,” he said. “If she’s in the building, I want her—alive.”
“And the victim?” Darcangelo asked.
With an impatient growl, Swaggart added, “If you find the victim, radio for Darcangelo. Don’t move her until he gets there.”
Darcangelo cleared his throat, straightened his tie, and put a hand on Swaggart’s shoulder. Swaggart winced.
“Captain,” Darcangelo murmured, “I thought the military had an unofficial policy against interference with the Ragamuffin’s vigilante activities.”
“That’s not my policy,” Swaggart answered through clenched teeth as he brushed the doctor’s hand away. “I don’t give special privileges to criminals—any criminals.”
He tapped a finger on Darcangelo’s chest. “As for you, doctor, I want you to stay right here. Got it? No wandering around.”
“Right here,” Darcangelo repeated, offering Swaggart a thin smile. “I’m happy with that, captain. I wouldn’t want to get my suit dirty.”
Swaggart’s lip curled. He turned away and took his own team through a low doorway. Only a few soldiers remained behind to place plastic ties around the wrists of the incapacitated men strewn about the floor.
Darcangelo put a thin finger to his lips before taking Juliet’s arm and pulling her swiftly and silently into the shadows.
