January 10, 2011

The Throne of Saturn was Morana's most visible business, but the organization she had inherited from Marius stretched much further. Gira Pharmaceuticals occupied most of one rather large business complex in the Temple District, and the company was starting to bleed profits. She'd arrived there early along with one of the Mr. Greys (who was promptly dispatched to the accounting department) and a leather briefcase. Her sky-high heels had tapped into the Director's office, and the door had shut firmly in her wake.

Now it was half-past noon, and she walked back out of the office with a small smile on her lips and her dark-chocolate eyes practically glowing with blissful satisfaction. There was absolutely no reason that torture had to be messy. Really, physical pain just wasted the fear. The Director did not walk her to the door - or anywhere else - as he was sitting behind his desk with shaking hands and the pale, pale skin and sweaty immobility of sheer terror. It was delicious.

The Director's secretary was pleased to usher her out of the front portion of the office, and she smiled warmly at the woman. "Thank you, darling. I believe that Mr. Aiken will want some coffee and perhaps a light snack in just a little while. Something with chocolate."

"Reece," Keeya whispered, and spread her fingers into the air over the edge of the Temple to Mammon whose roof they currently occupied. "I can feel her wards. She's here." Winter sunlight flickered where she should have been, as Tahli concentrated and bent the light around them.

All three of them were mages, a tight-knit group that always hired out together. Keeya and Tahli were brother and sister; Reece, two years younger, was occasionally a lover of one or the other. This was not the first corporate run they'd done, but it was by far the highest-risk out of all of them. Blissed-out thugs dying in backalley pools of their own hemorrhaged brain-parts; whores losing their contracts to some conglomerate who then farmed them out for nightly gangbangs until they died; weapons flooding the local markets of half a dozen Nexus points, just at the right instants to take advantage of an upswing in local violence. This suka's web was spun wide, wide. But the payoff meant retirement. It was worth it.

"Can you commune?" Reece asked Keeya in an almost subsonic rumble, and bent his long thin body double to lay a hand on her shoulder. The heat that bled off his touch was efficiently shunted outward to radiate into the winter sky by Tahli, who clung like a spider to the corner of the roof parapet six feet away. "Or are they too far out there?"

"They're far, far strannyi," Keeya whispered. "But not so far that they don't love me, I think." A flicker of clouds might have been Tahli's fierce smile in response.

The secretary nodded in response to Morana's orders and shot a curious look at the Director?s closed door. Morana smiled again, imagining the woman?s reaction when she saw the man?s condition. Her heels tick-tapped on the hallway tile, and she let her briefcase swing loosely in her hand. That iteration of Mr. Grey would be occupied in the accounting department for at least another week. She paused at the signboard near one hall-turning, narrowed her eyes a moment in thought. John?s lab was right down there, and it was almost lunchtime. Perhaps? no.

Not lunch. She would call him later and ask him over for dinner. She?d even cook for him. After a moment she smiled again and turned away from the hall toward the front entrance. The security guard near the door held it open for her, and she smiled warmly at him. The tough-beaten guard blushed, fiercely, and tried to hide his sudden physical reaction. She left the building on a wave of throaty laughter.

Keeya found the place in the wards she was seeking, tipped her head back, and began to sing to it in a whisper of sound. The sound became color, and color became numbers and letters, all of it in a language too foul for her to have imagined or comprehended on her own. She persuaded the wards with her vision and her magic, turning numbers and letters--the words of the ward-spell--into colors and sounds that she received in response, and tuned the difference between what she sang and what she heard until the two exactly matched and she had her result.

"Go," Keeya whispered, and Reece lifted the rifle to his shoulder and started shooting.

There was - it was that same odd touch against her wards she'd felt the night of the assassins, and this time she didn't have the distraction of a snooping Hound to confuse the issue. Morana felt her wards twist and blend with another presence. Her eyes went wide and she Stepped - not far, because until she had her wards back she couldn't go far - but back into the lobby of the building. Her territory and within her sight: within the confines of the stolen wards.

Glass shattered, the security guard grunted with surprise and shock, and the receptionist behind the large curved desk in the lobby shrieked and ducked down, slamming her hand against the alarm button. Morana snarled an incantation that mixed Abyssal and Avestan, and cut her hands out in a gesture that reached toward the source of that interference in her wards.

Abruptly the figures became visible as Tahli was knocked backward by the sudden surge of twisted force from the spell to lie stunned, insensate on the rooftop. A freakishly tall, thin man appeared with a rifle nearly as big as he was with his eye to the scope. Next to him was a much smaller woman with sharply pointed ears who watched Morana for a moment with cold and unforgiving eyes before following suit with a much smaller version of the high-powered sniper rifle.

The rifle was a semi-automatic; the bullets chewed their way through the parking lot, blasted through the glass toward her. The glass crazed into a million fragments before it shattered inward.

The large, curving reception desk was an excellent place to be - Morana Stepped again and covered the distance to the slim shelter of the wood just as a bullet skimmed through her former position. The desk wouldn't do much more than slow the shells from those high-powered rifles, but at least it blocked the line of sight. Outrage flared hot in her skull. How dare they! The security guard had dropped to the floor and was talking urgently into a hand-held radio, calling for backup. The pistol on his belt didn't have the reach to hit the assassins now visible on the rooftop.

Morana's voice shuddered out, low and guttural, while the receptionist cowered with her hands over her head. Morana called hellish energy and twisted it into the semi-mundane reality of Rhydin. The Temple roof.... shivered. Harsh red and eye-bleeding violet sparks crawled over the gold-leafed surface from the tip of the lightning rod down, moving faster with each word that ripped from her throat as she steered the power down from the Abyss with the metal on the roof as a conductor.

The tall thin half-orc turned his head, looked over his shoulder briefly at the snap-crackle-pop of hellish energies conducted over the metal. He rumbled something, directions or a curse. Then he scooped the elfish woman up as if she weighed nothing and leaped to the parking lot below. The unconscious male was left behind without a second thought to smoke and cook against the edges of the dome.

Yum. Seared assassin. When the sparks caught up to the unconscious body there was a flare of white-heat, and if the man hadn't been dead before he surely was now. Morana twisted to look up over the edge of the desk for the other two while the receptionist sobbed and four more security guards finally pounded into the lobby. These four were much, much better armed and armored than should have been normal for a pharmaceutical company. Malloy had done a good job. I?ll have to remember to give him another bonus.

"Shit," Reece pronounced like the Voice of God when he saw the arriving guards, and shoved both himself and Keeya flat on the parking lot. The next series of shots were low, the sprays aiming for kneecaps, ankles, legs. A group of temple-goers who'd been frozen in huddled terror on the edges of the parking lot, not knowing where the shots were coming from, collectively shrieked and ran in all directions, confusing the scene.

An ethical company might have had orders to hold fire in all the confusion. Morana believed in effectiveness far more than she believed in ethics. Standing orders were that company personnel and facilities had priority over bystanders. One of the newly arrived security guards went down screaming with a bullet through his knee, another staggered and fell breathless at the impact on his body armor, and the remaining two took cover. Professional and combat-experienced, they lowered their rifles to firing positions and opened aimed fire in return. Three-round bursts spat toward the flat-laying assassins.

Morana dropped back down behind the desk and started another chant, a hissing thing that writhed against the distortion of her wards and started claiming them back with acid etches of pain for the thief to boot. You want to take my wards? I?ll shove them down your throat ? Morana had to reclaim her wards: the assassin didn?t have any idea what she kept contained. If the woman were to simply cut off the wards instead of stealing them? She?d set Sarva free ? she?d release everything ? . Cold fear cut through her rage.

Reece had no armor; Tahli's distortion and illusion were to have provided cover for them, and the plan depended on Morana's dropping quickly. They had no provisions for a sustained firefight. His head exploded on the third burst from the security guards, showering Keeya in globs and spray. The woman was beyond caring at that point, twisting and shrieking in pain as she clutched at her own head before she went mercifully limp.

And just that fast, it was over. Two of the worshipers lay sprawled on the pavement as well: one twitching, one unmoving. The others were gone.

Now for the cleanup work. It would take quite a bit for this mess. Morana sighed and reached over to put a hand on the weeping receptionist's shoulder. "Call Malloy. Tell him I need him here, now." She stood to survey the damage. The day had started out so well, too.

Oh, hello, certain featureless hallway. Fancy meeting you here.

John rolled off the elevator and realized he had no idea where he was supposed to go. Morana wouldn't give the girl to Sarva...that would only make the daeva stronger. But he'd never been through any of the other doors in the hall.

Sarva's door was about halfway down the hall on the left side from the elevator. Two doors past that on the right, another of those featureless doors in the featureless hallway had been cracked open about three inches. No sound at all came from the room; the only noise in the hall was the low hum of the air conditioning system.

He was saved from having to go up and down the hallway knocking on doors and interrupting God knew how many various unholy rituals by the sight of the cracked-open door. A moment later, he'd nudged it open and was rolling through it.

"Close the door behind you, John." The request - command - was given absently, without turning to look around. Morana stood with her back to the door, studying the unconscious woman bound to what looked like a perfectly ordinary surgical table fitted with restraint straps. The unconscious woman who was, as far as she could tell, the very same woman whose head John had neatly bitten off just over a week before. Morana hadn't bothered to change from her business suit, but she had let down her hair from the falling knot.

He did so, closing the door with a barely-heard click. That left axle squeaked as he rolled around to the other side of the table. His surprise showed in his face as he recognized the woman's gray hair, features, pointed ears. Even the clothing--tan fitted pants with a dozen pockets, a fitted gray knit shirt--was the same. After studying her, he looked up at the demon.

As soon as the door closed, wards flared to life in the room and around the unconscious woman. "It's not just surface appearance. Nor, as far as I can tell, is she a construct. She was accompanied by the same two men as before." That was an oblique and more complete answer to his question in the parking lot. The hell happened was another assassination attempt. Morana's voice was cool, her expression calm, and her eyes were pits of hell; the sparks of blue that woke in John's presence had no chance of survival for more than an instant. "She was able to take my wards from me and make them hers."

He went ahead and made the admission to himself that Morana with tousled hair in a business suit, looking down at her would-be assassin with a clinical expression on her face was goddamned hot. Emphasis on the goddamned. Okay, that was out of the way. He returned to thinking. "Not a demon?"

"No. I can't find anything to explain this in her makeup." She stepped forward, reached out to run her fingers down the elven woman's cheek. "You mentioned a man who turned up in the morgue, repeatedly, who tested as perfectly human. She appears to be perfectly elfish." Her eyes flicked over to John and the corner of her mouth turned up a little. It was not a pleasant or reassuring smile. "Time to wake her up."

"Yeah, but there were changes in those copies over time. Added scars. The guy ended up doing some jail time, and that was the last I heard about it." He flicked another glance up at her, then at the woman. The elf twitched once. Her breathing changed, and then abruptly smoothed out again.

"Do open your eyes, darling." Morana walked around behind the table and touched the strap that held the woman's head immobilized. "We've some very simple questions to ask you." She made no promises, nor any threats, as her heels hit silent on the padded, sealed floor. A bronze-painted fingernail slid down the woman?s other cheek leaving a cold tracery in its wake.

Another twitch, and the eyes gradually revealed were yellow as a cat's. The woman cut those eyes sharply to one side, catching John in her peripheral vision, then up to Morana. Suspicion, paranoia, fear--they were all there before they winked out and left the even features an unemotional mask. She did not speak.

Abyssal words hissed out just barely on this side of audible, caught and twisted at the woman's throat, and snapped down through her spine. Once that was taken care of, Morana smiled again. "Now, darling. We'll start with the simple. What is your name? Your twin's name or your third companion's?" Oh yes, the testing on the first round of bodies had revealed the relationship.

Keeya hissed back at her and the sound filled up the room like a cup filling with water, too loud for such a small woman. The sound sawed against the eardrums and raised hackles.

The sound the woman produced - that raised Morana?s eyebrows. The twist of her fingers cut at vocal cords with a harsh immobilizing slice. Morana frowned across at John while the wards in the room writhed back into place. "Tell me, John. How would you question someone you can't allow to speak?"

As the woman visibly tested her bonds, John recovered from his wincing and frowned. "Have her write or type responses, if she's literate. Or you could set it up--" he wiggled his fingers at Morana, out of Keeya's range of vision "--so that the only things that come out of her mouth are the answers you're looking for." A shrug. "You could offer her a job." That wasn't going to go over well for either one of the females in the room, he suspected.

"You still have that telepath on staff?" He asked a moment later, casually. "Or was the brain damage count too high?" He had no idea whether she had a telepath at all.

"I believe she's," Morana tapped down on the woman's shoulder, twisted a quick pattern to cut off all nervous sensation to the elf's arm, "already employed. And quite persistent, at that." Her eyes lit up with surprise, pleasure, appreciation as she flicked a glance over at John. "Oh, there's a brilliant idea. He's been dying for something to do, and in this case - all things considered - I believe I'm willing to take the risk." There was no telepath on staff, but Morana knew lies and how to use them. She was Deception.

Unfortunately, Morana still had the faint limp as she prowled around the table again and halted next to where John sat. This time the guttural snarl of Abyssal caught the woman's throat and released it within very strict constrictions. "Believe me, darling, this will be much better for you if you answer our questions."

Keeya's sulfurous gaze shifted back and forth. She kept her face impassive, but her pupils bloomed as she realized she couldn't feel her fingers, as they spoke of employment and damage. She knew she was going to die. She expected to die. But she couldn't help being afraid of pain.

"Suka," she said after almost a minute of deliberation.

Morana saw the bloom of pupils, the twitch of fingers in the hand that still had feeling, and her smile curled up slowly. She turned then and walked across the room, almost entirely out of the woman's field of view. With the padding her steps were silent. "Yes. Your name, darling." There was a cabinet on the wall, steel doors held shut with a keypad lock. She punched in the combination, let it swing open.

"Bes," she said next, the word straining against her throat, and, "Keeya."

Inside the cabinet was horror. Surgical tools, razor sharp and well maintained. Needles. Vials of saltwater, injections of some of her street products and some of the legal ones. One slim clear container seemed to hold black smoke that curled back and into itself over and over in hypnotic patterns. Morana studied the contents of the cabinet thoughtfully. "There, darling. You see? That wasn't so very unpleasant. And your former companions? What were their names?"

She sighed, a near-silent rasp like a presaged death rattle, at the edge-of-vision sight of the cabinet and its blurry contents. "Tahli," she said. "Reece."

"Thank you, Keeya." The use of the woman's name was a verbal caress as Morana finally selected one of the prepared hypodermic needles already loaded with a milky-white substance. "I understand that you were hired to kill me. Tell me, darling, who hired you?" The longer she stood on those heels, the worse her limp grew. She kicked off the shoes before she padded back to the table, perched on the edge of it on the side of the arm with feeling. Her fingers slid over the knit grey shirt again, and removed sensation from the second arm.

The strap across her head pulled tight as Keeya strained against it. "I was not hired," she said in a thickly accented voice: heavy on the final consonants, all vowels softened.

John watched in silence, his jaw tight, his gloved fingers curled around the arms of his chair.

"The more fool you, then, to try to kill me without any pay for your troubles." She could feel the Void dancing in her soul, drowning out the flickers of whatever had been stirring in John?s presence. She could see the questioning was troubling her Hound. Unfortunate, but she wasn?t finished with the woman yet. "What questions do you have for darling Keeya, John?"

"If you weren't paid to do this, then...why?" His voice was tight.

"I was born," the woman said, eyes rolling back toward Morana and that syringe.

Her lips pursed as she tapped the hypo absently against her palm. "Do elaborate on that, darling." Still holding the needle in the hand farther from the woman, she braced her other palm on the table and twisted, leaned down until her face was barely an inch from the elf's ear. The faint hiss of Abyssal breathed into a caress over skin to send pleasure and arousal through the woman's body - with the distinct exception of the elf's still nerveless arms. "Tell me what I want to know."

"Baphomet made me," Keeya whimpered, and squirmed against the bindings. "Sophia directed me."

Morana sat up straight, then, with both eyebrows arched way up. "Now that, darling, is an impressive claim. We've killed you once already. Will you return again if we kill you again?" Her fingers traced along the woman's cheek, left another surge of pleasure behind. The ecstatic caress was a reward for the information provided already, as was the tingling return of sensation to her left hand.

"I will not," she panted. "I am only one."

John was still listening, eyes distant behind his lenses, one hand over his mouth. Morana rather thought it looked as if he might be sick, or as if he was trying to pretend he wasn?t present. "But darling. How many of you are there?" She took the syringe and used the tip of the needle to caress the woman's cheek where before she'd used her fingertips. At the same time, a foul, guttural whisper took away the woman's sight but also gave back sudden life to all the nerves in her arms. "Do you remember the first death?"

Keeya?s eyes filled with confusion, and then closed. Tears leaked out from beneath her lashes. "No. I am alive." Not for much longer. All the nerves in her arms suddenly prickled into agonizing life; she strained against her bonds again and went limp.

"Why did you try to kill me, Keeya?" The question snapped out quick and hard, in sharp contrast to the soothing tone Morana had used before. Her fingers pushed up the arm of that knit grey shirt, tapped the needle of the syringe against the inside of the woman's bare elbow. "How did you take my wards?" Her eyes shot from the elven woman over to John and her voice turned very ugly as a sudden thought occurred to her. "Am I your only target?"

"Suka," the woman said again, her voice as blurry as her gaze. "Bes. You murder the holy. You defile the righteous. Your crimes are manifold and manifest." After this passionate speech she fell silent again. She blinked more tears out of her eyes, followed Morana's gaze to John, and added, "Baphomet sees. Sophia knows."

Hellfire and Void filled her eyes, filled her soul, on the wake of decision. If they were targeting John as well as her, they would be punished. "You didn't answer my other question, Keeya." Her voice was soft again, soothing, while the needle slid into the woman's vein and the plunger depressed, withdrew empty of the milky-white substance that had filled the syringe. She had been planning to use a quarter of the syringe in questioning. "How did you take my wards?"

Keeya?s expression had been, in that instant where she looked at John, as calculating as Morana's before it smoothed out again. Then her face constricted, as did her voice, as the plunger depressed. Her skin at the injection site turned as gray as her hair. The color bled outward along her skin as she spoke. "Your language tastes like der'mo. It sounds like poison in my ears, it is black and red..." The gray raced up her arm.

John shook his head and rounded the table at the sight of it, shoving the wheels to get into place. Morana dropped the empty needle onto the table next to the dying woman, slid from her perch on the edge to stand on bare feet, hipshot with her weight free of her left leg. "Somehow, darling, I get the feeling I'll see you again." Her voice was cool again, very detached, while her eyes flamed.

He ran his fingers over the syringe, caught the elf?s wrist to time her pulse in that arm and realized he couldn't feel it, though she was still alive, red-faced and straining against her bonds.

While John played doctor to the woman, Morana re-crossed the room to the cabinet hanging open on the wall and shut it back up. She'd dismissed the elf as soon as she'd made the injection, and now her mind ticked over the scant information the woman had provided.

"What did you use?" Came his voice behind her after the last gasp ended. He sounded frustrated, and he'd returned to running his fingers over the injection site. The clinical side of him pointed out that he was not using good lab procedure in using his bare hands. The rest of him told his training to fuck off.

"Fairy Dust. In elves it acts as a simultaneous stimulant and anesthetic. Overdose has some rather predictable results." Such as a paralyzing death while the brain remained fully aware. Her voice was cool as she turned back, paused to pick up her shoes. "Tell me, darling, what were your impressions?" There was a measure of calculation in the question while she studied him. How was he going to react to this relatively mild interrogation session? Would he turn on her now?

"Does it normally cause soft tissue to calcify?"

Her shoes hit the floor again as she crossed the rest of the distance with long limping strides. "What."

He wanted the body. He suspected that would put him working under Malloy. Not his favorite place to be. He turned his head, focused that knife's-edge stare at her, and then indicated the arm. "Your people need to take a good hard look at her enzymatic processes, is my guess." Rubbing his thumb and fingers together, he shook his head. "Baphomet was a medieval demon. Sophia is Greek for 'wisdom.' That's all I know."

"Baphomet was a pagan deity before he was a medieval demon. Sophia is also sometimes worshipped as a goddess of wisdom and knowledge. I'll turn the body over to Malloy's forensics team." Malloy and his people made really quite absurd amounts of money and they were very good about not asking the wrong questions, or not caring about the answers when she gave them. She brushed her fingers over the calcified skin, frowned, and said softly, "She overstepped the limits of wisdom." Keeya should never have threatened John.

His jaw set. He looked up at Morana again, searching her face. He didn't seem to realize that he still had a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the table.

Her fingers went from the woman's skin to John's white knuckles. The contact burned against her skin. Her eyes were still Void-black, but the summer-sky blue shimmered right over the surface of that emptiness. The corners of her mouth quirked up with faint amusement. He was fighting himself so hard. "Say what you want to say, John. Ask what you want to ask."

"I didn't know." That seemed to be the extent of it.

Another lift of her eyebrows asked for elaboration while she let her hand fall away and turned to reclaim the oft-discarded shoes. "Didn't know what, darling?" After all, there were so many things he didn't know.

He had thought she'd been lying. His attention returned to the woman's face, now slack. He shook his head. "Never mind."