Unholy Magic

The hall buzzed with people around her. Other Debunkers, Elders coming from their weekly meeting, Goodys carrying files. Thursday was the busiest day for the Liaisers, those who communicated directly with the dead. The benches along one pale wall were thick with people waiting their turn to be escorted down to the Liaising Rooms, to wait while their assigned Liaiser rode the long train deep into the ground to visit with the pale, emotionless shades of their loved ones or distant ancestors.

Chess suppressed a shudder. That train, and the City itself, were the reasons why she’d chosen Debunking rather than Liaising; she’d shown talent for the latter but couldn’t stomach it. Some days the only thing that kept her alive was fear of the City, and she still hadn’t quite gotten over the night she’d been trapped in the dark on the train platform.

Elder Griffin wasn’t in his office yet. Chess settled herself on the dark, shiny wooden chair next to his door and tried to still her jiggling feet. Maybe that third line had been too much.

“Good morrow, Cesaria. Thank you for coming in. Are you well? No ill effects, I trust?”

She bounced up from her seat and bobbed a quick curtsy. “Very well, sir. Good morrow.”

He turned the ornate iron key in the lock of his office door and ushered her in, closing the door behind them. “Sit down, my dear.”

She did, waiting in the cushioned armchair across from his massive stone desk. She’d always loved this room, loved how peaceful it felt. But then, she’d always liked Elder Griffin as well, and knew the feeling was mutual, so perhaps it wasn’t just the décor that made the room feel like a sanctuary.

He sat down at his desk, the tall window framing him. Pale sheers turned the harsh winter sunlight into a hazy glow that illuminated his hair like a halo and touched every inch of the room. Ivory walls, soft gray stone, leather, dark wood. An antique globe in one corner had always fascinated her; she could have spent hours studying all those lines and shapes where the old country boundaries used to be.

And books everywhere, lining the walls, stacked under glass-topped tables with their spines out. The shelves bowed beneath their weight, and where there were not books there were bowls of herbs, rows of consecrated skulls and bones to be used for spells. On the wall behind her was a flat television tuned to the news service with the volume down and the captioning on; when she left, she knew, he would put the sound back up to keep him company while he worked. It was touches like those that made her comfortable with him, made so many others comfortable with him as well.

Today, though, he didn’t look comfortable himself. Without the makeup that made his face a pure mask on Holy Days, she could see shadows under his eyes, and his brow furrowed as he used another key to unlock his desk and extract a file.

“This came in two days ago,” he said, placing the file on the desk with exaggerated care, as if by placing it in the exact center he could emphasize its importance. “The Grand Elder and I have had several discussions about it. Yea, we have found ourselves concerned about it, and decided in this case to circumvent the normal process and give the case to you.”

“I thank you, sir,” she said, leaning forward in the chair, “but I’m a little confused. Why me?”

“Your…your handling of the Morton case, my dear. You proved to all of us then that you were capable of discretion, as well as being a fine investigator. This is a sensitive case. Are you familiar with Roger Pyle?”

Had there been a drop of moisture in Chess’s mouth, she would have spat it out. As it was, she tried to swallow and managed only to produce a dry clicking sound. “The actor?”

Elder Griffin nodded. “I believe he is, of some sort.”

“He’s haunted?”

“He is reporting a haunting, yes. Apparently he has just moved into a new house and has been having some problems.” He pushed the file forward so Chess could take it. “It’s all here.”

Papers and photos slid out from between the pale covers of the file when she opened it. “He took pictures?”

“He has a lot of documentation.”

She didn’t respond. They both knew how easily documentation could be faked, especially documentation like this. Pictures of hazy gray shapes, of walls covered with shiny streaks that looked like ectoplasm but could have been anything. The deed and blueprints to the house, and a clipping from an old BT newspaper. Chess scanned it.

She looked up. “The previous dwelling was a murder scene?”

“That seems to be the case, yes.”

What was it with murder this week? Hearing about murders, seeing dead bodies, now the possibility of tangling with the ghosts of murder victims—hardly her ideal way to spend a few days.

Elder Griffin shifted in his seat. “It was the decision of the Elders that given your…experience with malevolent entities, your handling of Ereshdiran…”

“I’m the go-to girl for murderous ghosts?”

His eyebrows rose. She couldn’t tell whether he was amused or displeased. “We felt you were the logical one for the case, yes. If you find yourself uncomfortable, we can assign another Debunker, of course, but I don’t have to tell you what a case like this could do for you.”

She waited for him to continue. She’d take the case, she already knew that. When the Elders made a decision it was best to abide by it.

And she couldn’t help it. The thought of handling something like this, a career-making case, appealed. Agnew Doyle was still coasting along on the success of his Gray Towers Debunking, and probably would for years.

Doyle. There was a name she thought of as little as possible. He stayed well out of her way these days. As well he might—after Terrible beat the hell out of him for hitting her, Lex had taken his shot, too.

Time was the only concern. Helping both Bump and Lex would put enough on her plate as it was. She didn’t have a choice there, and she was beginning to feel certain she didn’t have a choice here, either.

“The bonus offering on this case is a tidy one,” he said finally. “Forty thousand dollars.”

Her car was on its last legs. Her couch sagged. Her jeans were developing holes in the knees. Even with the money she saved getting her pills free from Lex it was hard to make ends meet, hard to afford the pipes and the pills she bought from Bump to keep up appearances and the beer and cigarettes and CDs and…Forty grand bought a lot of time in dreamland.

She nodded. “I’ll take it.”

Chapter Five (#ulink_3a958140-e34a-5f56-b613-f60c6233b56c)

The dead do not offer forgiveness. They do not feel. They do not advance or grow. They remain frozen as they were, save for the replacement of love with hate.

—The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 329

Normally she would have gone up to the library to research Pyle’s address and put in a request for his financial records and employment history, but in this case there was no need. The newspaper clipping and blueprints gave her what she needed to figure out the address, and the financials were already there.

Besides, Roger Pyle was famous. So famous even Chess knew who he was. He’d parlayed a clever stand-up act into a TV series, and rumor had it he was about to make the move to the big screen. She’d never watched his show, a spoof of a BT religious order, but she didn’t need the pictures in the file to know what he looked like, that was for sure.

Nor did she need the financial records to know how wealthy he was. Pyle couldn’t be faking a haunting for the money. Even if there were numerous entities in his new house, the most he could hope for would be, what, maybe a couple of hundred thousand? A drop in the bucket for someone like him.

Still, there were other reasons to fake a haunting, and forty grand was a lot of money for her. She needed it, and she needed to prove he was lying.

But first…The image of those empty eye sockets haunted her, the image and the knowledge that this would happen again if she didn’t do something about it. Whether it was a ghost or something else, she didn’t know, but the Church’s extensive library was as good a place as any to start finding out.

Goody Glass squatted behind the desk like a troll on a heath, right down to the malevolent facial expression. With an effort, Chess kept from returning the disdain. Goody Glass had never liked her, not from the first week of training when she’d caught Chess eating crackers—crackers stolen from the kitchens—in the stacks.

A minor crime, but it wasn’t the crime itself for which the Goody held a grudge. It was the way that discovery had led to a deeper, uglier one: that Chess had stolen the food because she wasn’t used to being fed on a regular schedule, that she had no ancestry, no family. A fairly common situation since Haunted Week, but not for Church employees.

The Goody’s thick eyebrows rose over her beady eyes. “Art thou working on a case, Miss Putnam?”

“I am, Goody.” Chess waved the file.

She got no reply, but she didn’t expect one. Instead, the door to her left clicked and she entered the Restricted Room, charmed as always by the displays of religious artifacts from the past, all sitting beneath the bright lights as if waiting, hoping, that one day they might be useful again, be something more than relics.

She knew it shouldn’t, but the benevolent smile of the fat golden Buddha in the corner made her feel safer. She smiled in return and set her file and her bag on one of the long, empty wooden tables.

Beneath the glittering gold cross on the far wall—another symbol of religions past—the Church kept shelves full of magical reference books. Chess knelt in front of them, scanning the titles. Eyes…eyes.

She’d used eyes before in magic, of course, but only as ingredients in other spells. Salamander eyes were sometimes used in poultices to heal energy deficiencies. Raven eyes could be dried and powdered and used in protection spells. But she’d never heard of human eyes being used for anything of the sort, much less being used in sex magic, and she had a feeling the eyes were more than simply spell ingredients anyway.

Finally she grabbed a couple of books and sat down with them. The first was a slim volume on sight magic; she had hopes for it, but it related more to psychic visions and spells for out-of-body investigating. That sort of thing was done by the Black Squad, Church government employees, as opposed to regular Church employees like Chess. They handled crimes mundane and magical, the breaking of legal codes as well as moral, whereas Chess dealt pretty much exclusively with the crime of fake hauntings—“conspiracy to commit spectral fraud,” was the official term—and with banishing the ghosts if they did exist.