QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 3: Deluge]

Rain, rain.

A clear memory: a painted skeleton, red and blue lines streaking its bones. The cervical vertebrae bound with straws to hold up its head. They dressed it in cloth-of-gold and laid it on a throne to rule the city as the waters rose up to patella, femur, coccyx. At the top of their ziggurat it watched as they piled golden jewelry on its robes. They pleaded to it, clung to it, but they had paid for water with blood. Endless rain, rising as high as the palace roof.

And when the water reached its skull-

“Awake, awake,” she hissed to herself. Unformed wings bubbled beneath the skin of her back. “Magpie- earthbreaker- abomination.”

She lay at the bottom of an overflowing storm drain, barely large enough to hold her. Her sides rasped against old concrete, corroded by years of rain. The rain, the rain- it chattered on the water’s surface, far above. She could hear only muddled echoes beyond. Distant booms and screams. The current tugged at her, gently, but with slow and relentless strength. The water skinned her layer by layer, leaving her raw and aching. Her blood washed down to the distant ocean past cigarette butts, drowned cats, nightclub pamphlets, scattered pearls.

Slipping away to this place- only meters below- had left her in agony. Each twitch of her muscles was electric fury, poisoned by alien venom. Her jailer. The spy. Pain lay beside her like an eager lover, caressing her skin with its wicked nails. It whispered in her ears and promised her endless kisses- or was that the invader? She snarled, the sound sluggishly rising from some distant memory. A dog. A man. She couldn’t remember. Her lungs ached as she tried to fill her gills with the floodwater, bitter with ashes.

It was unfathomable- fathoms, fathoms- that she would be laid low in water. Her mother, her daughter, her sister. A poison. This was not the first poison she had swallowed- Methods of putting an end to it, if you cannot afford its tithe- this was not the first bite she had suffered- Give him back to me! Give him back!- This would not be the first death she had died. Give me some warning. Give me some warning.

Ghost talker. A hunter-green memory. A thread for a needle, a needle for a wound. What tool of yours extracts a parasite?

Her eyes would dance when she was up to some mischief. I would advise her against it, of course, but who could stop her?

Its hateful presence burned her, defiled her. It had ruined her thoughts, desecrated her body. Poisoned her blood. This human-hive, this city, was hers to raze by rights. Who could stop her? Not the sun, not the winter-chemical-creature, not a thousand men with guns and witchcraft. But this, this- her own body. Her only companion, the memories of her mother, her mother’s mother, a dynasty of river-gods. Stagnant water.

We broke into a laboratory- do you know what that is?- and she said the funniest thing, I, I can’t remember what it was... Oh, Anila. Forgive me, forgive me….

A memory? Yes, I shall tell you my memories.

A wolf limping away from a trap, only bone below its knee, ragged and red. A ruined hand, serpent-struck, foul, necrotic. One too many children. One too many graves. Burning the harvest to keep the wheat from the enemy’s stomachs. Sacrifice.

A skeleton on a throne. They drowned it to stop the rain.

Take our offerings, they had said, weeping, plying it with gold and silver, with horse’s teeth and their children’s bones. Take them and the rain with them. The sacrifices piled higher and higher in the mud that had been their fields, their streets. They reached the base of the skeleton’s throne. The king had placed his crown on its brow. It smiled at them with red-stained teeth, its paint melting in the rain down its chin in red and blue rivers. They grasped at its bony hands. Please, please. The rain. The water is rising.

It hurt. Violent, vicious pain, her own teeth turned against her, working softly, softly, marking where the infection had spread and destroying what surrounded it. The great black tide turned in on itself, gently, baleen-teeth combing as one cards wool. The invader must not know. Cutting thread by thread, her muscle fibers fraying and filling her mouth with wild black blood. She muffled the cries in her throat: a wolf’s howl, a woman’s scream, shattering crystal, snapping twigs. Cutting out the poison. Her vessels thinned and snapped, each one a bright flower of agony.

Anila loved the rain. I had to stop her from going out in bare feet. She always wanted to dance in the puddles.

Vile, creeping creature, you shall not have me. You shall have no claim. You, rain, you, city, I have paid your sacrifice. I have paid with water for your blood.

Her favorite umbrella was blue, like me, a very close match. I wonder if she chose it on purpose? I was always reminding her to bring it. She rarely did. She- You- What are you doing?

The storm drain frothed with dark fluid, bubbling up over the rusted iron lip. The ancient street lamp above it, its glass bell long shattered, swung drunkenly from side to side as something slick and black lashed itself up the pole, half-molten mouths gaping in the rain. It sucked at the air, hauling up coil after coil of curdled muscles and nerves that splashed across the pavement. It was horribly rent, frayed like ruined lace, a network of sponge-like holes and disconnected fibers.

Don’t- don’t leave me. You can’t leave me too.

A cetacean head rose up out of the mass, engulfing the lamppost. It leaned out over the drain, rows of needling teeth forming in its heavy jaws. Damaged larynxes flexed and punctured lungs whistled; it hissed something in an incomprehensible slurry of consonants.

I don’t want to be alone.

The lamp creaked. The soft sound of tearing silk echoed through the streets, heard only by the cobblestones. What was left of the lamp’s bell fell to the ground, the sound of shattering glass masked by the rain. A slick black shape limped from the sidewalk to the shadow of a tenement half-collapsed into its neighbor, pooling below its ruins. It was half the size from when it had entered. It seemed to wait for a surge in the rain before slinking away, letting itself be pulled with the debris-choked current.

In the drain, electric-blue lights shone like drowned stars.

_________

Cade’s radio crackled and spat, threatening to give at out at any moment. He rubbed it with a calloused thumb, praying to whatever gods still looked down at Fort Saint Alban that it would give him another few hours. Enough to get just a little closer to the ugly heart of what he was just now realizing was a complete clusterfuck.

He’d spent the better part of the night working his rounds, trying to find anyone who knew a woman by the name of Robin Pearson. He’d pumped his remaining contacts for everything they were worth, promising everything he could offer and more things he couldn’t. Junkies, lowlifes, bouncers, call girls- anyone who might have seen someone unusual, or knew someone who had. He hadn’t been lucky. Scraps of rumors, nothing more, no matter how much he pretended he’d pay. The trouble with the sun cult uptown was making things too crooked to make sense of.

Cade sighed through his nostrils and rubbed his stubble. His contacts had done their best, to their credit. The metal crab was on the force now, they said, walking around with a goddamn badge. One or two had seen it in person, lumbering like an extinct gorilla on its hands. Some of its hands. No one knew where it came from. Some thought the cops had been using the last of their resources on building man-shaped tanks, but no one really seemed to think it was a man. It had stirred up some serious trouble downtown, come into contact with the madwoman leading the cult. She might not be human either, from the way things were sounding.

The radio barked, a garbled message spitting into the moody silence. Cade set it at the middle of the table, between the pile of dirty napkins and the empty salt shaker. He’d been coming to the Highwater Café for as long as he’d been doing PI work. Same as him, it’d seen better days; it wasn’t much more than somewhere to get out of the rain now. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the place serve food. Wearily, he fiddled with the receiver.

“Squadron six en route to Emerald District. Casualties reported. Squadron ten, report at nearest convenience, identify suspects of Corner Street bombing. Squadron eight- ah, damn, we don’t have an eight anymore, do we? Squadron nine, take over for eight. All patrols, be on the lookout for person of interest: young female, black hair, last seen in a green coat. Most recent location, unknown. May have a connection… cult activity. Known alias: Robin Pearson-”

Cade gripped the edge of the table, smudging the layer of ancient grease. The cops were out for the same perp. Things were moving quickly.

“Detective Silverheart!”

He bit his tongue to stop himself from shooting back Not anymore. “If you don’t have information, I ain’t interested in talking. I’m not taking any new cases.”

A man- no, a kid, gangly and underfed- slid to a stop in front of his table. An overgrown newsie, too old to work the paper corners but too skinny to get a foothold in the gangs. Cade recognized him from the streets around his neighborhood. He must have been so lost in thought he didn’t hear the café door.

“I got information, Detective,” the kid said eagerly. He wore the ragged remains of some uptown dandy’s Sunday best, scavenged from a trash heap. “Good stuff. That broad you were asking about- my buddy Robert’s shacked up with the Sunshiners and he heard someone talking. Word’s out this Robin broad must have pissed off a lot of people. The sun lady mentioned her, said some pretty nasty stuff.”

“I know all that,” Cade said. He gave the kid a long look. He’d had too many years of people trying to sell him info he already knew. “Unless you got anything else, I’d suggest you move on.”

“That’s not all of it.” The boy leaned in gleefully, dropping his voice to a confidential whisper. “There was another girl said she was gonna meet this Robin. She went to a house near the church upriver. People saw.”

“What church? Saint Eleanora’s?”

The kid shrugged, reluctant to admit to anything that might lower his finder’s fee.

Cade sank into his chair, thinking. Not a lot of activity in that part of town. It’d been a street full of hatmakers and perfumeries a decade ago. Wasn’t much of anything now.

“I heard you were paying big money for stuff like this. You pay up, I’ll tell where to go.”

“No, you’ll take me there yourself.” Cade stood up, tucking the radio in his pocket. It squealed and chattered, dissolving into incomprehensible static. As leads went, this was thin, but it was damn well better than nothing. “I’m not paying you to run off and sell the same story to the cops the second you leave. We’ll take the short way through Pure Street. And don’t forget your coat.”

___

“This- this is where it happened?”

Lieutenant Geurin nodded.

A wreckage of bodies was scattered across the square, gathered roughly into heaps. The soft tissues had been eaten first, the hollows of empty rib cages filling themselves now with rain. The toughest sections- the tendons of the wrists and ankles, the long bones- had been discarded, along with the metal fixtures of belts, rings, watches, guns. What was left of the skin was deathly pale, bloodless. Faces stared at him with vacant expressions, missing eyes and tongues.

“What could do this?” His partner, younger by a decade, was kneeling on the cobblestones. Geurin had just finished politely ignoring him vomit. “What…?”

“Don’t know.” Geurin wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He and the rookie were all that was left of squadron six. The others had been smoked by the cult. Reports said Ardoin’s heart had been ripped out, the rest of him burned. Even someone at his pay grade could tell the city was losing its last pretense of civility. “Looks like an animal.”

“An animal,” Debarr echoed hollowly. His drained face made him look even younger than his twenty years.

“Big one.” Guerin moved among the bodies. IDing them would be a nightmare. Some were little more than skeletons, feebly tangled in the remnants of coats and boots. Ordinary people caught out in the rain. Headquarters might never get around to finding the families. He flicked on his radio. “Six here. Reports were accurate. Emerald District, mass casualties. No survivors in sight. Bring the wagons-”

“Lieutenant,” Debarr said.

Deep in the mouth of an alleyway, one of the piles was moving. Geurin’s gun was drawn in an instant, pointed into the heart of the shadows. Something gurgled near the gutters- something huge and dark, glistening under the dull orange streetlights. A smooth, black back arched over the ruined remains of a body, nosing over the shredded wreck of something Geurin couldn’t call a man or a woman. Its hands and face were little more than pulp, red and white masses sinking into black water.

“You in there, come out,” Geurin ordered. He flicked the safety off his gun, the click echoing across the square. “Hands up. Take it slow.”

The water around the body paused- paused and then gathered together, impossibly pulling into an amorphous black head and gill-pocked neck. Teeth longer than his hands bristled along its lips. “Poison, Anila,” the water keened softly, its voice- its voice?- dancing on the edge of his hearing.

“Step away from the victim,” Geurin heard himself say, absurdly. His derringer was cold in his hand.

The head tilted, swiveling until its bottom jaw had become its upper. It didn’t seem to take notice of the rain, though drops were falling through the hollow spaces in its neck and pattering onto its catch. Rope-like muscles crawled over its skull, reforming around its new positioning.

“Nesting habits of the southern whippoorwill,” it chittered. “Feast, feast, and you- you- shall- not- have-”

He pulled the trigger. A burst of black spray erupted from the thing’s side and it bucked, snarling, screaming a furious song of clashing iron. It plunged down onto the corpse, sucking it into the dark recesses of its body with long, fingerlike cilia. Its surface rippled as hidden internal muscles contracted around the wreck, crushing its bones with a series of muffled cracks.

Geurin fumbled for his radio even as the thing lunged for poor Debarr, snaring an ankle with an oily black arm. The lieutant fled, boots pounding on the cobblestones as his partner’s desperate cries echoed in the empty streets, disappearing into the rush of the pounding rain. “Squadron six reporting- Emerald District lost- anyone heading this way, turn back! Get to higher ground! Turn back!”