the smuggler’s bible

Phoebe decides in like fourth grade that her spirit animal will be (and, in fact, always has been) the chupacabra. It makes school difficult. Later, though, when it counts, it's still waiting for her, a soft growl rising from the darkness to teach her the old wisdom.

"Jesus Christ," the guard says, "where'd she go? I swear to god she was right—"

Strength and speed. Phoebe snatches the radio out of the air as the body falls.

Hauntings, in some cases, are like a Claymore mine rigged to a tripwire. It's a quiet piece of junk in the corner you don't even notice. That is, until you step in the wrong spot.

Iseult reaches into her jacket and produces a pair of Sixte's cufflinks. She shakes them like a pair of dice and drops them on the table. The kitchen door crashes open as a cleaver, spinning like a sawblade, flies out and buries itself in the back of a chair. The head waiter whimpers.

"Watch it," Iseult says. "These things don't always blow all at once."

Access to the executive corridors is gated (shrewdly, Eiko thinks) by analog methods. Digital credentials are well and good but carry very little water when you aren't one of the twenty-odd people the man with the gun is expecting to see.

Chrysoprase thinks they should chop the guard in his carotid and drag him into a closet somewhere. Chalcedony agrees in principle, but suggests waiting until shift change to get two at once. While they shoot rock paper scissors to decide, Eiko steps back between two waxy-looking artificial plants and opens her terminal.

"There," she says. "We have an appointment."

He fires his pistols and discards them, whipping them overhand at the beast as it stumbles in the charge, scrabbling across litter-strewn cobbles with foreclaws spitting the white-blue flash of iron against stone.

Behind, a hoarse roar. Thornquist turns on one heel, dark cloak snapping as a burly form dashes past. He dodges by an inch the pendulum arc of a simple railman's spiking maul. The beast checks its momentum, convicting both. The pause is certain proof of confederacy.

Rasp of leather. A makeshift grenado appears, heavy and harvest-ripe. The whole world draws in breath. Thornquist reaches for a match.

They come to rest in a cupboard away from the main avenues of the palace. Cedarwood shelves are piled with linen, clean and cool like the banished winter. Gisela tears strips from a curtain and wraps her arm, cinching the knots with her teeth. Mottled patches of red soak through.

"Your wound has reopened."

Gisela leans back against the wall, eyes closed. "Listen, the kids have to get home. Even if something keeps me here."

The nineclaw watches patiently with bright lamp eyes.

"I messed up. A long time ago," Gisela says. "I don't think I can do it again."

ALCHEMY LABORATORY

Beakers, flasks and stoppered jars line creaky shelves. There's equipment on the workbench beside a book. It smells crazy in here.

Exits TRAPDOOR.

>look book

Okay, reading rainbow. The book is lying open to a recipe for invisibility potion.

>look equipment

There's a small brazier and an, uhm, alembic.

>look alembic

I mean, I think that's what it is. I'm pretty sure. There's some mixture residue left inside.

>drink mixture

Listen, that could be anything.

>drink mixture

You vanish completely. Hmm, really more of a disappearing potion. Oh well, that's wizards for you.

You have died. Restart? (y/n)

"This is the spot."

"The very same. You are sensitive in these matters."

It was a cheat. Iseult feels nothing about the broad, dark table (positioned specifically so the occupants might easily be observed indulging themselves at baffling expense) except a dismal, proletarian instinct about the sort of person who would reserve it. In fact, there's a slim crucifix wedged in among the tapered candles.

"The gentleman has dined here for years," the head waiter says proudly. "And often with very charming company."

"His wife?"

"Aha," the man says slyly. "Yes, I suppose it was known to happen on occasion."

The mayor is furious. Basile founders in the sea of her wrath, cringing appropriately, all the time with a seasoned eye trained on the horizon, alert for any break in the weather.

"And he was a volunteer for god's sake."

Sensing a subtle note of conclusion, he promptly attempts a sortie. "Courageous, of course, but obviously lacking substantially in deftness and expertise. Thus, the poor fellow is ultimately culapable for his own grisly demise."

"While you, amazingly, suffered no misfortune."

"Madame, be reasonable," Basile says. "I departed with all swiftness while he was being devoured. The situation was extremely dangerous."

They are ushered smoothly upward through several escalating strata of accomodation. The home station of a major concern is regulated by cynical ambition arrested just at the edge of excess by mutual advantage. Here, the surface tension rests in delicate equilibrium. Their forged identification causes not a single spreading ripple.

Chrysoprase and Chalcedony begin immediately to dismantle their quarters in search of surveillance devices.

"Why would they bother," Eiko says, "unless they already suspect something?"

"They're convinced. The graspers are spying on each other." Chalcedony, grinning, produces a tiny sliver of circuitry from beneath a chair. "We're just background noise."

You chop the other guy basically in half, then let him go because you're a gentleman. That's it. Trial over. Obviously somebody else poisoned Patrise.

Everyone is laughing and seems happy to see you. Even her. Even though she freaked out and banished you in the first place. The queen is happy crying. Probably everying has been reevaluated in light of the murder accusation.

She was there once, remember, when you needed her, bringing the sword you thought you'd lost. God, there's always a sword. It seems like such a little thing, now. But you promised. Don't forget. You promised.

Lone tries the password he found taped behind the monitor. It's so easy he's worried it might be a trap, like a bomb to catch hackers. But the security terminal unlocks and starts dumping files onto the screen.

What he really needs is a code for the keypad in the lab. Instead it's somebody's diary. Lone taps return a few times, then escape.

fever in subject—

Skip.

containment failure—

Skip.

every (repeat EVERY) internal organ—

Boring. Lone logs off. Easier to crack some lockers and rummage through shirt pockets. Yeah, sort of irreverent, but, hell, that's where people leave things.

The world is gone, ruined like a cup of sorbet rolled through the gutter. The essence, after a fashion, remains, but subtracted of all pleasant qualities. Also, looking sort of squashed.

Principium Hiemies waits, watching the glow fade in the final, deepest fissures. There's no atmosphere. Once it gets cold, it will stay that way. He could crack it like an egg, but the husk serves as a monument. You need those (a few at least) to keep you honest about your record.

Ah, cruel, bright magma hardens. The work is etching tombstones, the cemetery nothing but a trophy case.

The thing about goddesses is they're fucking crazy for disguises. Anything at all in the world conceivably could be the magic-drenched Super Sentai transformation of divinity incognito. Well, it could be anything. Some stuff is sort of more likely. Flowers are a good bet.

Dryope barely clocks the blood dripping from the stems of the purple verbenas she picked before the retaliatory curse catches her in a flying backbreaker windmill chokeslam.

"How the hell," she says, herself rapidly morphing into a gnarled lotus, "could I possibly have known?"

You couldn't. You never can. So just watch your shit, all right?

Loup Roger calls in every favor. He hangs on doggedly, leaning on any shred of advantage, ancient, modern or invented, until it splits, then tells lies, hissing like a striped adder, to wring anything worth having out of old contacts. He spent his career gathering the scraps. Time, now, to light a few matches.

"This is it," they say. "Finished and quit of you henceforth."

Quite possibly. But imagine Roger's position. The long, steep slide ahead. Oh, yes, you'd be snatching madly at gnarled scrub and root on your way past, too.

Why give up? Why? Just because you're beat?

Thornquist steps carefully, gliding like silk, preferring vantages submerged in darkness. He is alert, always, to his footing. Ankles have been turned on sillier things than an a cracked sherry flask.

The beast is ahead, and not far, hunting and itself hunted, just out of sight. A further complication: Thornquist has become aware of a third dancer in the waltz, clumsier than his partners, tripping along in the rear. Perhaps, he dares hope, the beast's master.

So they go, tense as the strangler's wire, eyes straining for the faintest glimmer of advantage. One shallow spark. A diamond on black velvet.

The money moves in unpredictable ways. It swirls from place to place, from investment to account via complex financial instruments. Save the headache. Meet it wherever it's going. Better yet, open your wallet and catch the winning lottery ticket fluttering in on the midnight breeze. Hope you know where to stand.

No. Lose sight of it for a second and it's gone forever. You have to make a deposit. Stick it out, ride the dollar the entire winding distance.

Mister Mothman dials his client. "Let's talk expenses," he says, cool and delicate. "The figure I quoted originally was somewhat deficient."

Her new client complains of nerves exhausted by near-death. Falls. Fires. Swerving traffic. Every time, Sixte sees it coming in his dreams.

Iseult's skeptical of the premonitory angle. The human brain doesn't need a haunting to foster disquietude. Plus, the manifestations have been private. Except the first. At dinner, in front of god, the waiters and everybody, a butcher's knife floated out of the kitchen and embedded itself in Sixte's table. He blames his wife—lovely, mocking and dead these three months.

Iseult peels out, headed for the restaurant. When you're not sure, she thinks, go where the ghosts are.