Streets of blood

1

The first gleam of blood-red light arced across the cabin just as the massive tires of the suborbital Ghost shuttle screamed on first contact with Runway 11 of the world’s busiest airport. The mage’s mind was elsewhere, and the rough impact jolted him back into the real world of Heathrow’s dazzling lights and concourses.

The call had come just when Serrin thought he’d almost gotten used to Seattle, even begun to feel slightly at home there, his suitcases slouched against the wall of a cheap hotel for more than the usual week or two. He’d been wary of the offer made by the suit with the impossibly even tone of voice, but the nuyen glowing on his credstick was no lie and money enough to bring him to London as requested.

Perhaps the corporation that wanted to hire him couldn’t find a registered British mage to do the job for them. That was plausible enough, considering the way the Lord Protector’s offices had nearly every British mage tied up good and safe in red tape. Every practitioner of magic had to pay a hefty fee and submit a DNA sample to be registered by the Lord Protector’s office. A foreigner trying to register could wait weeks, or even months, just for the processing of his or her application. Serrin had bypassed the usual difficulties and delays-and possible refusal of his application-because the powerful Renraku Corporation had owed him a few favors. Thanks to them Serrin’s carefully coded DNA sample was properly filed in one of the huge basement complexes of the Temple District. Gently, without admitting it, they had pointed him in the direction of the right people, which was the least they could do to make up for his leg turned to mincemeat while doing some work for them.

“We’d like you to sign this disclaimer of responsibility, however,” the jittery accountant had muttered, all the while avoiding his gaze. ‘‘It’ll, ah, tie up any loose ends. Just protocol." Maybe a leg turned to mincemeat was just protocol after all.

The magnetic seatbelt unclipped and Serrin got slowly to his feet, reaching up to open the overhead compartment. He pulled out his pigskin bag, then instinctively clutched it to his chest as if protecting some intimate part of himself. He edged forward along the aisle behind a snot-nosed child, who whined in protest as a blotchy-faced woman dragged him along toward Customs. For a split-second, the elf had a feeling of pure absurdity, a sensation of unreality, of being almost out of his own body. He grabbed at the papers inside his shabby jacket as if for support. With a shake of his head, he focused on the passport, the visa, the medical documents, the permits, and the licenses. Damn the British love of bureaucracy! Getting through Customs and Immigration in London was like having to read a long letter very slowly to a very deaf, half-senile great-aunt who, even in her rare moments of lucidity, willfully feigned a lack of comprehension.

Standing at the head of a stairway leading to British tarmac, Serrin shivered. It was one-fifteen in the morning, early November, the temperature hovering around zero Celsius and a dismal filmy drizzle of rain coating his skin with grime from the London skies. So much for the year 2054 and the city’s miracle weather-control dome!

He descended the steps slowly and a little painfully, his usual fine tremor become a veritable tremble. Coughing into a balled fist, he made his way gratefully to the warmth of the passenger coach waiting to deliver him unto British officialdom. I hate London, he thought, but at least you can get a decent malt whiskey here. Comforting himself with that prospect, he ducked his cropped gray head into the coach doorway and found himself sitting next to a pile of duty-free items and another sniveling child. The tall, gangling elf gave the boy a sinister look that made the youngster shrink back in alarm. Good, thought Serrin wearily, that should keep him quiet for a while.

At the moment Serrin was closing his eyes for a bit of rest, somewhere in London’s East End, blood was dripping down onto the floorboards of a nondescript apartment in the neighborhood known as Whitechapel. The knife had done its work and now was the time for greater precision.

In Chelsea, yet another part of the city, a nobleman was turning his gaze from the flickering computer screen to the elegantly fluted bottle resting in a monogrammed silver ice bucket. Geraint drew the bottle toward him, wrapped a linen cloth around the cork, and pulled it out so carefully that the hiss of escaping gas was barely audible. She hadn’t heard; she would be deeply asleep by now. Dom Ruisse ‘38 would have been wasted on the girl-one of Geraint’s rare lapses of taste.

He clipped the rubber seal over the bottle and depressed the silver hooks to keep the chilled champagne fresh. The wine tasted good, and he contemplated the pleasure of it as he idly swirled the bubbles in his glass. Then his gaze traveled, almost involuntarily, past the row of financial yearbooks and references by his work station to the mahogany box etched with images of dragons. He hesitated for only the briefest instant, then flipped the gold catch and drew out the black silk bundle containing his deck of cards. He cleared a space on the cool white surface of the table, pushed his glass to one side, then expertly shuffled the unwieldy deck several times. He sat for several long moments, mentally aligning himself with the Tarot. Feeling the rapport established, he lit a cigarette and left it to spiral blue smoke from the marbled ashtray.

With a sudden motion he reached out to cut the deck with a single, decisive sweep, then flicked over the top card.

The Magician.

Geraint was startled, not expecting this after so many years. The signal from a card of the Major Arcana was quite unequivocal: Serrin!

The Magician is here, he thought. The deck was telling him, and he felt it in his gut. He pursed his lips with his fingers, forgetting everything else around him, intent only on the extraordinary image of the snake-crowned juggler smiling at him. More than a century ago, the artist had given the Magician card the distinctly pointed ears of an elf; what had she and the designer of the Thoth Tarot known of the coming Sixth Age of the world? Had they foreseen the birth of elves and the other new races of metahumanity?

But these thoughts were taking him off-track. Show me why he comes here, Geraint silently asked the deck. With long, slender fingers he drew another card, which he placed face-up, across the first. He saw the unmistakable image as it turned, and shuddered in spite of himself.

The Nine of Swords. Cruelty. Blood dripped from the fractured blades in the image. The Welshman felt fear, fear for Serrin, fear for what was to come. Then, a third card slid from the deck, without his even touching it, as though his fear had called it forth to obscure the horror of the Nine.

A stone’s throw away, Francesca Young rebuffed an inept pass by her escort as she drew her tanned legs into the waiting limo. She wrinkled her nose just discernibly at the sight of a troll in the chauffeur’s seat, but he was polite and Forbes Security had obviously spent money on elocution lessons for their operatives. Mercifully, he restricted himself to a “Very good, m’lady" as he eased the powerful machine along Kensington High Street; Francesca was too out of sorts to put up with a driver who thought clients wanted meaningless chatter about London’s weather at two in the morning. As she stared out the window, the first sight that greeted her eyes was that of two young fools in tuxedos squaring off in the road while a pair of debs shrieked with delight from the windows of their limo. She felt tired and jaded, fed up with men who ordered salmon after hearing her mention she’d grown up on the Pacific seaboard of North America, then expected sexual favors for the price of a fairly routine meal.

Her mind returned to her work. All afternoon she’d been buzzing over her cyberdeck, a Fuchi 6, installing the smartframe that would operate as a semi-independent intelligence to execute programs that would protect her while she traveled about in the cyberspace of the Matrix. With the new Korean sleaze program, she’d be able to slip past intrusion countermeasures that until now she’d been too wary to confront. She forgot all about her annoying date and stretched out in the back seat. Men were far less sensuous than a hot program.

She was almost asleep when the limo delivered her to her doorstep; six minutes more and her head hit the pillow in her bedroom. In vain did the tortoiseshell cat grumble for his food. Daddy’s little rich girl slept, but that didn’t mean the cat would have long to wait. Not much time passed before Francesca was awake again, screaming in terror. It was the same nightmare and it always woke her at the same place, just as the last scalpel had been cleaned and was being put back in the case.

The Empress. Sitting demurely in her bower, holding flowers, and dressed in blue-green, the serene figure gazes out contentedly over the bounty of the earth. Her curves are sensuous and strong, and she is crowned by the sky above her throne.

Geraint almost slumped with relief. Francesca. Well, we certainly know each other, we three. The hint of a feeling slipped past his control, a momentary sadness, the recollection of a precious opportunity now lost, but the impression faded quickly.

His eyes were drawn against his will to a detail in the bottom left-hand corner of the card: seated below the throne of the woman, beyond her sight, was a pelican feeding her young. It was said that the bird nourished her offspring with her own blood, and, in truth, these fledglings were pecking at their mother’s breast. Geraint saw blood, blood in his mind’s eye and not on the card, and his body almost convulsed. The triangle of tufted hair at the nape of his neck rose and a cold chill ran down his spine. The champagne lay flat in the glass now, having become merely poor, thin wine. Show me help, he begged the cards, show me what I can reach to. Is there anyone there?

Rani was breathing a little heavily as she gave the five-rap signal on the reinforced door. Her brother Imran drew back the bolts, saw her face in what remained of the streetlights, and hurriedly pulled the chains from their pins. He drew her into his arms and half-dragged her inside, fumbling the bolts and heavy steel chains back into place to seal out the harsh night. He brushed back the hair from her forehead, examining her face carefully. Reassured that she was unharmed, he still wanted to know what had happened.

“It was nothing. Just a pair of dweebs in an alley in Shoreditch, up by Den’s chippie, the one who sells that crap cod, you know?" She was talking too fast, unsettled. “One came up behind me and I swivel-kicked him. I don’t think he’ll be having any kids in future. The other one didn’t back off right away, though. Bastard had a meathook with a honed edge. I think he wanted to get some practice barbering." She laughed a little too loudly and tears welled in her large brown eyes. ‘‘Doesn’t matter. Happens all the time.”

Imran hugged her tight again and shushed her, stroking the back of her head. Then he ushered her into the living room with its barred windows, peeling gilt wallpaper, and frayed carpets. She could see Sanjay with his thermometer and glass retorts in the kitchen beyond, the acrid smell of acetone and isopropyl biting through the air. She looked despondently at Imran, then flicked her eyes back toward kitchen, her face almost despairing.

"It’s for a bunch of rakkies in from Essex who think they’re going to have fun slumming in the Smoke," her brother sighed, trying to prevent a scene. “Who cares about white human trash? Sanjay won’t put any rat poison in it. Promise.” His lopsided grin asked for comprehension, but her head was in her hands now, her broad shoulders heaving a little as she fought back the sobs. Her brother knew better than to touch or approach her, giving Rani time to master these powerful emotions with her own strength. This wasn’t the moment for the usual reproaches about her being away from home; for once, the words died on his lips.

She inhaled deeply and brushed away the traces of tears from her face. “Maybe they wanted to kill me because I’m not white. Maybe they wanted to kill me because I’m an ork. I only did what I did because they came at me with blades and hammers. But I killed someone not twenty minutes ago, and I don’t feel good about that. And when I get home I find my brothers cooking up drugs to feed the habits of a bunch of trancers.” She sighed deeply and sank back into the chair, resigned and weary. “Sod it. I’m seventeen years old, and just now I think I’ve had enough of the world. Or at least the East End of bloody London.”

Feeling too hopeless to talk, Rani climbed the stairs to her room. She kicked off her heavy combat boots, pulled off her woolen socks, and looked at the upturned palms of her hands with their flexible immunoneutral pads below the skin. Not many of her kind could afford such a fusion of biology and tech. The twenty-first century had made it possible, but it couldn’t make it cheap. Imran had paid a lot to protect her.

That’s one advantage of being an Indian, she reminded herself; a smartgun link is harder to see on me than on a whiteskin. Makes me a lot harder to kill than most of my cousins. The ones still alive know that. The others found out too late. She pulled the padded jacket over her head and shoulders, making a mental note to repair the tear along the right shoulder in the morning. The edge of the meat hook had made a very precise cut, but a few minutes with the monofilament staplegun and the jacket would be as good as new. She tugged off her baggy ribbed pants and clambered into bed, and within minutes was asleep. Rani was too exhausted to be disturbed by the frequent sounds of shouts and gunfire that came up from the streets through her cracked window to her. Besides, she was used to it.

Strength.

The calm gaze of the woman holding the lion’s mouth open stared back at Geraint from the card. He didn’t know who she was, but he felt a mixture of calm and excitement after the horror and fear of the earlier images, a sense of reassurance and uncertainty at the same time. Well, powerful lady, I hope we meet sooner rather than later. After the soft-bodied creatures of the last few weeks, you should be interesting.

Geraint grinned, put the pack in its silk and in its box, and then poured a fresh glass of champagne. News was coming through fast from Tokyo and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong; something was popping in the pharmaceuticals markets, or so it looked. He reached for the plug and snapped it into the datajack behind his left ear, bringing the electronic chatter of the cyberdeck closer to his consciousness.

Geraint was in the Matrix now, and he felt predatory. At the same moment, his persona icon showed the place where his attention was directed in the Matrix. The icon had no objective reality among the optical chips, data-lines, and computer architecture they called the Matrix, but another operator in the same part of the system would perceive Geraint’s ‘‘persona” as a Celtic knight grasping a longsword, which represented a powerful attack program in cyberspace. Beside him, his sensor utilities took the image of a pack of Irish wolfhounds, eager and snuffling as they loped along beside him.

Let’s go check on the nightlife in Teesprawl, he thought with a smile. Something tells me Zeta-ImpChem might have some interesting data on this. Come on, boys. Time to make money.

It’s the middle of the twenty-first century, but the November fog is not so different from what it was in fin de siecle nineteenth-century London. The soup may not be quite as thick, but it boasts a more powerful cocktail of pathogens and chemical pollutants. The famous fog also still provides cover for those who want to slip unseen into the shadows, especially closer to the River Thames, where most of the street lights have been shot out.

At three-ten in the morning, the thermometer is still hovering around zero. Blood is beginning to seep through the floorboards of a room in Whitechapel and soon it will begin to show on the ceiling of the chamber below. That won’t worry the girl asleep downstairs; she’s a trancer. The drugs won’t wash out of her system until a police doctor arrives after the constables smash down her door later on. A young constable, the one who is first on the scene upstairs, will be vomiting uncontrollably in the street outside. The police photographer will be very, very glad he never takes more than coffee for breakfast.

So it begins.