City of Corpses
The Second Book of The Dark Avenger’s Sidekick
A Tale of Moth and Cobweb
John C. Wright
Copyright
City of Corpses
The Dark Avenger's Sidekick, Book 2
John C. Wright
Castalia House
Kouvola, Finland
www.castaliahouse.com
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental
Copyright © 2017 by John C. Wright
All rights reserved
Editor: Vox Day
Cover: Scott Vigil
Version: 002
Contents
Chapter One: The Cobbler’s Club
Chapter Two: Night Life
Chapter Three: Envoys to Anarchy
Chapter Four: Truth and Half-Truth
Chapter Five: Nocturnal Venture
Chapter Six: The Voice of Darkness
Chapter Seven: The Red Knight
Chapter Eight: Hob in a Bottle
Chapter Nine: The Red Lady
Chapter Ten: The Hollow Hill
Chapter Eleven: The City in the Summer Stars
Now the midnight hour draws on:
Human form no fiend may keep
Or ever that mystic hour is told.
Lower, lower, lower it bends.
Midnight is come—is come and gone!
Down on all fours see it plunge and leap!
A human yell in a wolf’s howl ends!
What gaunt, gray thing gallops on o’er the world?
—Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934)
Chapter One: The Cobbler’s Club
1. Maiden of Arrows
She did not know her mother’s name.
Yumiko Ume Moth showed none of the desperation and sorrow smothering her soul on her face. Without expression, without food, without sleep, without hope, the Japanese girl walked the sidewalks of the gray metropolis, her dark eyes hot with hidden turmoil. Dawn could be glimpsed as a narrow strip of gray overhead, where the sky was trapped between frowning walls of surrounding buildings.
Even at this early hour, the sidewalks were filled with hard-faced crowds. The streets were snarled with creeping cars with glaring lights and honking horns.
It should have thrilled her to have found her own name again. Instead, she felt only gloom. There was no one with whom to share the dazzling news. Her cousin Elfine had been kidnapped by a knight on horseback in the middle of modern Manhattan. Yumiko had failed to protect her.
Knowing her father’s name was cold comfort. Shodotekiken Moth was his name, which meant: Impetuous Danger Moth. It was a strange name. She had no face to match it, no memory.
Knowing her own name was even colder comfort. Yumiko. It meant Maiden of Arrows. She had heard it spoken, not seen it written, and different kanji characters might have carried different meanings: Beautiful Girl, or Brave Child, or Born-of-the-Evening. But the first meaning was hers. Ume meant plum blossom. This was the flower of fidelity and perseverance, for it bloomed in midwinter. This also was hers.
What was not hers was the rest of her. Her home, her past, her life, all were still lost in the mist.
And her mother was lost. She could recall no face, no touch of hand, no sound of voice. That, more than anything, drained her of hope.
Yumiko had stopped at a phone booth, surprised to find one unvandalized, and looked in the phone book. There were no Moths listed in the New York City white pages, and the yellow pages listed only exterminators.
She knew of no one who would help her.
And her mother’s death? She remembered nothing of that, only an echo of pain. Pain called for retaliation. She must find and kill her mother’s killers. It was a duty.
On she walked. Yumiko passed the Chrysler Building. Central Park was to her left, an occasional green glimpse between gray walls. The sidewalks grew more crowded and the street traffic more raucous. The strip of sky grew bright above, but the claustrophobic streets were cold with early spring chill.
Soon, she saw the Chrysler Building again. She was going in circles. She had no aim, no destination. Her thoughts also went in circles.
To whom she could turn? It depressed her that the human world was enchanted, trapped in the Black Spell, mesmerized and mind-controlled by some sort of vast conspiracy of nonhuman, ancient, cruel, and magical beings: the mazoku, which the Westerners called elfs.
Was her amnesia caused by the same spell? Was there any way to break it?
Winged Vengeance had also sworn to kill the enemy. It should have solved all her needs to find again the master whose disciple she was. Instead, each word spoken atop the Empire State Building after midnight had been like another arrowshaft into her heart. Her mother was dead. Her beloved was missing. She herself could no longer be trusted since she had been captured by the Anarchists.
This strange group had declared war against both Man and Elf and sought to topple all nations, break all laws, and shatter all crowns. They were a cabal of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and warlocks, for they broke also the laws of nature. The Supreme Council of their seven leaders were named after the days of the week. From a ghost she had learned the name of the one called Thursday, whose werewolf packs were poised to strike at New York City. He boasted that he would conquer the metropolis and keep men alive only as herds of cattle on which his wolves would feed. His name was Lucien Cobweb.
Remembering his laughter, recalling the sensation of being trampled beneath him, his hot jaws one inch from her throat, made a rush of fear and hatred, like a dark cloud, boil through her brain.
Had he been the one, himself, who slew her mother? It did not matter. He was one of the seven who had done it: the Anarchists.
Winged Vengeance said Yumiko’s former life had ended when she had fallen into Anarchist hands. Therefore she must be an impostor, a hypnotized puppet, or possessed by a ghost. Winged Vengeance called her his enemy. It was an added insult when Yumiko discovered that her master truly did not believe her competent or capable of escaping from the Anarchists.
The truth was too strange for belief. An unexplained miracle had saved her from death. In a dream or vision, a bright lady had given her words to say and washed away all her oaths, all need for vendetta.
Winged Vengeance did not believe it. Yumiko was not sure she believed it herself. And so he had cursed her, denounced her, and wished her to commit suicide.
And then he departed on dark wings into the night, leaving her hollow and lost, with no tears to shed.
He did not even tell her the name of the young man she loved.
Perhaps suicide would be best. She was no coward, to cling to life when fate said otherwise! Submission to fate, and detachment from all desires, was the path to serenity. Joy was not meant for her.
Had she indeed failed to fulfill her oath, whatever it might be, to Winged Vengeance?
Yumiko found herself standing on a small arched bridge of dark brown stone in Central Park. Trees with naked branches stood bright about her, shivering in the cold March wind. She could not see how deep the stream ran. Perhaps not deep enough for a drowning.
It seemed that suicide was the reasonable and expected answer: to cast away this failed life, one of an infinite number, and to make amends in a next. Her next life would be fresh and clean of stain, a
nd the memory of this one would be blotted out…
A noise made her stop and look up. Unlike the city noises, it was music, haunting, echoing, like a voice calling over the rooftops.
It was the chime of the churchbells in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, ringing the hour of morning prayer. The golden metal notes seemed to mock her thoughts, to remind her that there were not an infinite number of worthless lives given to man, but only one, and that one infinitely precious. The golden voice promised something higher and better than simple submission to fate.
It was hypnotic, intoxicating. A strange emotion touched her. It was a terrible emotion. She did not know if it was fear or if it was joy.
She turned north, walking away from the park, and back into the streets.
Perhaps she had tried to cast her life away, and this had been prevented, or forbidden. Who or what was the bright lady she had seen in a dream? What was the strange message she was burdened to carry?
She recalled the words well enough.
Therefore tell the Twilight people, who are neither wholly of the Daylight World nor of the Night World, that when eternal day breaks, Twilight is no more. Then will all their deeds be laid bare and judged.
What was the task she was meant to do?
Let not the soul of thy beloved be drawn into darkness.
Whatever it meant, it meant some injustice had been done, and there was none but she must right it. Someone was relying on her. Someone she loved.
With a start, she looked up. Somehow, she had wandered into the Upper East Side, past 72nd Street, to Lexington Avenue. Here, once again, was a looming sign: THE COBBLER’S CLUB. Not far away was the empty backlot where she had watched the werewolves Whelan and Phelan die. Her tracking devices that had been planted on the corpses yesterday showed that the bodies had been moved to this location. This was also the place where she had first met Elfine, who was also being attacked by the Redcaps.
As suddenly as that, all despair, all thought of suicide, all doubt quite vanished. Her feet were wiser than her head, and had brought her here. This was the only thread left to follow. Before her was her mission. She may have forgotten it, but still it was hers.
2. Gainful Employment
The second time she walked past, she saw a help wanted sign in one corner of a dark and highly decorated window. Yumiko raised her eyebrows. She knocked.
A dark-haired man in a dark jacket and tie with dark sunglasses opened the door. He looked Yumiko up and down. “We’re closed. We don’t open until four.”
He spoke with the slightly wobbly precision of a fellow with a few drinks inside him, and trying not to show it.
Yumiko recognized him from the fight in the alley. He was a Twilighter who had been helping the werewolves. Apparently he did not recognize her.
She said, “You have a help wanted sign in your window.”
She could not see his eyes, but his lips thinned into a sarcastic moue. “For a waitress, not a paralegal. We’re looking for girls with a certain, you know, appeal to men. You ain’t it, sweetcakes. Sorry.”
And he closed the door.
Yumiko thought of herself as a modest girl, but this curt dismissal offended a feminine pride she had not realized she had. No appeal to men, eh? Her eyes narrowed in determination. She looked left and right and then trotted down the street to the alley where she had first seen Elfine. If expensive clothing barred her way, she would see what it took to open it.
Yumiko unbraided her hair and shook it down her back. She wished she had Elfine here to brush it magically into the shampoo-commercial shine she had earlier. Yumiko then took off the blouse, skirt, and jacket, and stood in a black lacy garment that might have been a bustier or might have been a leotard. She left on her stockings, but donned her long black boots, rolled down to the knee. She stowed everything in her cloak, which she turned into a sash, but instead of tying it obi style around her waist, she tied it pirate-girl-style around her hips, to add a touch of emphasis.
Swaying her hips, her heels tapping on the pavement, she went back to the door and knocked. She assumed the sultry expression she had seen on advertisements for lipstick or lingerie: chin up, lips parted, eyes half-lidded.
A different fellow answered the door, a thin and acne-scarred teen boy in a black leather hat and black jacket smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He gawped at her in surprise, and the cigarette nearly fell out of his lips.
“I am here for the waitress job,” she said, flinging her hair back off her shoulder with a toss of her head.
The youth beckoned her in without a word.
Inside it seemed dim as night after the glare of the sunny, early-morning street. There was a podium for the maître-d’ to her right, a hat-check closet to the left, and before her were stairs leading down to a lounge. In the lounge were small tables crowded around a Plexiglas dance floor beneath a battery of mirrored balls, colored spotlights, and laser emitters. At the far end was a bar of white marble beneath mirrored shelves holding bottles of every shape and hue. The tables on the floor were currently empty except for three customers lingering from the previous night. The air smelled of sweat, alcohol, and opium.
The youth called, “Mr. Licho!” and this summoned the man in the dark glasses once more. He was carrying a steaming pot from which the rich aroma of freshly-brewed coffee arose.
“What is it, Blud?”
Blud, the youth, merely gestured toward the half-clad girl.
This time, he stopped and drew his dark glasses off his nose to inspect her. She now saw why he wore dark glasses: each eye had two pupils instead of one, lending a freakshow ugliness to his naked stare. He did not once raise his gaze all the way to her face, and may not have even known she was the girl he had previously dismissed.
He said to her, “You’re in. Go up to the second floor, take a right, knock on the first door. Boggy is our captain of waitress staff. If she’s drunk, just pour this pot over her head.”
He passed the handle of the steaming pot to her. She turned to go up the indicated stairs, feeling the man’s stare on her as she climbed.
She was blushing by the time she reached the first landing.
There was a mirror on the wall of the corridor at the top of the second landing. The girl who looked out at her was the same she had seen last night in the lady’s room of the coffee shop, but a few hours older and wiser. “Whatever you were in your past life, you are not someone who lied to police or seduced enemies with her feminine appeal.” She shook her head. As far as a woman’s weapon went, this was a blade with no grip, one that cut the swordsman when it struck. She felt shamed and small. “I am not Mata Hari.”
The girl in the mirror inspected her. “You might get used to it in time.”
“That is what I fear.” At the moment, she was the type of girl who would not cheat a tollbooth. That was a type of purity she did not necessarily want to let slip from her hand. It might shatter, with no way to put it back. “And what would my boyfriend think? I don’t even know who he is or what he is like.”
The eyes in the mirror narrowed. “Now is not the time for qualms. You are Mata Hari at the moment if you want to sneak into an enemy stronghold and poke around.”
Yumiko shook her head, put the pot down, undid her sash, took out the blouse and skirt, and put them on. More demurely dressed, she picked up the coffee pot.
Across the hall from the mirror, the first door had a card thumbtacked to it: Boginki Cobweb.
Inside was a desk crowded with papers, flowerpots, and ashtrays. To the left was a sofa on which boxes of bottled vodka were resting. Three walls were crowded with shelves on which a large number of dun orchids and thin cactuses were drooping and dying. The floor beneath the shelves was littered with brown leaves and dropped needles. The final wall was crowded with framed autographed pictures of celebrities, always posed with the same portly man in a top hat and tuxedo. A four-bladed wooden fan in the ceiling was turning slowly, but the office was still hot and airless.
B
ehind the desk was a thin, hatchet-faced matron wearing a rather old-fashioned gown of a dark material, buttoned up to the collar. Her hair was gray and worn in a bun, but her eyes were as bright as the eyes of an eagle.
She looked up. “Well?”
Yumiko said, “Mr. Licho sent me up with the coffee.”
The gray woman nodded and took a small white cup off the shelf that had a fern growing in it. She dumped the plant and soil into the neighboring flowerpot, wiped the cup with her fingers, and beckoned. She thumped the cup down on the litter-coated table. “Give it here. Big night last night.”
Yumiko approached, wiped the cup with her sash, poured, put the coffee pot down carefully, turned the white cup, and presented it to the woman with both hands.
Boggy took the cup, with a scowl. “Who are you again?”
“I am the new girl. Mr. Licho sent me up here.”
Boggy said, “Back up. Turn around. Let’s take a look at you. How high can you kick?”
Yumiko thought it was a strange question. “How high would you like me to kick?”
“Just show me as high as you can.”
Yumiko looked up and pointed at the ceiling fan. “There?”
Boggy looked surprised, then skeptical, then sarcastic. “Um. Sure.”
Yumiko flipped into the air and tapped her boot heel on the ceiling between the turning fan blades, landed, spun, and did it again with the other foot, tapping the ceiling on the other side of the fan.
Boggy said, “Well, well. We are limber, aren’t we? Did you bring a letter?”
“A what?”
“A résumé. A list of where you worked before.”
Yumiko said, “I am new in the field.”
Boggy scowled. “And Licho just up and hired you? Without checking you out?”
“Well, no, I had taken off my blouse…”