Chapter 9
The payphone headset cooled my pointed ear.
Ringing.
The rising sun reflected on the gas station’s OPEN 24 HOURS sign, bathed me in pinkish light. I glanced back at my Stallion, charcoal paint desert stained, gothic grill hissing heat, the goblin’s ears visible in the window, both of them now sagging against the seat. He had fallen into an impenetrable sleep, his conya lolling as we drove. It was such a deep slumber that I could blare music and call his name loud as I wanted, and he would just carry on like he was drugged. Maybe he was.
More ringing. Come on. Wake the hell up.
“Hello...” Vinny's voice croaked over the phone, still half asleep.
“It's me. You still wanna meet our masseuse lady?”
“Teek?”
“Talk to Diamond for me. There’s something I need. Soon as possible. Today if he can.”
“Uh what?”
“A biomancy centrifuge machine.”
“... How's he supposed to get that?”
“He's an artificer.”
“He makes jewelry.”
“Close enough. Come on, he's a Gold Jaw. He should be able to get it. One way or the other.”
“Right. Wh—” He yawned. “What did you say it was? A bio what?”
Irritation simmered under my voice. “A biomance centrifuge machine.”
“Aren't those things expensive?”
My thumb rifled the charred edges of gold bills in my jacket pocket. “Don’t worry about it. Just get it.”
My joints ached as I maneuvered the byzantine metal stairs that caged my apartment complex’s tall slum courtyard, the goblin slung over my shoulder, my jacket draped over him. My nose wrinkled in confusion. Where was that urine smell coming from? Ugh. Of course. Where else? The little cagg had pissed his pants while he slept, turning their motley fabric a darker shade down one leg.
Setting him down in my ironcast tub, I twisted the knob on the faucet and the ancient pipes trembled and groaned before sneezing out hissing warmth.
The gobbo’s naked legs rippled in the bath.
Calcified droplets stained my bathroom mirror where I pulled up my shirt enough to see my gashed red flesh. Back in the desert, I’d used some skin putty from my alchemy kit to stop the bleeding, but it was flaking now. My bruised face, my split lip, my twisted ankle, a broken rib I think, it all made me wince. I rummaged in the cabinet under my sink for a bottle of saline.
The tree cig’s charring end winked in sync with my breath as I sat on one end of the couch, Skreecher lying on the other, mummy like. His face was wearing a mask again, but this time it was made of gauze and medical tape. He’d slept right through the bath and me dressing the wound. I'd slipped a pair of my shorts on him, which for his size were more like baggy pirate pants, thrown a blanket over him. I probably could have thrown the damn gobbo into a wood chipper and he would have stayed asleep. But I had to break his rest. I didn't want him waking up with me gone and doing who knows what to my apartment in his complete disorientation.
“Hey.” I shook him and his conya bobbed on the sofa’s cushioned arm like a bandaged bowling ball. “Hey. Come on wake up.” Nothing. “Hey! HEY!” Still nothing. I got up to look for something that would wake him, perhaps some smelling salts, when suddenly a dog barked down the street.
“Eeeeeghhh!” Skreecher twitched, jumped awake. He sat up in bed, his conya searching in confusion, bony shoulders trembling. “Nooooo!” He felt the gauze mask on his face.
“Don’t!” I stepped to him. “Don't take it off!”
“But it's mask!!! You a troll!”
“No! I'm not!” My hands seized his skinny wrists, like holding dog legs, surprisingly strong. “And that's not a mask. That's a bandage. It's alright. You're fine.” His eyes roamed the couch, the curtains, the frayed pattern rug under my coffee table, up to the TV (an RVA model the size of a picnic cooler, rounded corners, black and white image, a lopsided antenna).
“You have TV?”
“Yeah.” A contained laugh came out only as a sharp breath that shook my chest. I let go. “I have food in the fridge too.” I nodded toward the kitchen as I stood. “Have some. I have to head out.”
“Boss leaving?”
“Yeah.” As I stood a post shower buoyancy filled me like cold fog. My jacket made faint flapping noises as I took it from its hook and slipped it on. “I'll be right back. While I'm gone... don't make a mess. And whatever you do, do not answer the phone, do not answer the door. Those are boss’s orders.”
Green light rippled over cold concrete walls. An old malno, snake spotted flesh, limbs like half empty waterskins, floated inside the dream chamber. Spreading its cables and tubes and chassis all over the floor and wall it was anchored to, the artifact coffin seemed almost like a strange metal plant growing below ground, a giant mechanical tuber humming softly into the basement’s shadows all around us.
Across the room, under an ornate ceiling lamp’s severe light, we sat for business, Lady Pearl and I. She sat opposite me at the octagonal table, a long ivory length of leg protruding from under the black silkiness of her dress at a crossed angle. Hector was a few feet away, looming like a gargoyle. I tossed a charred wad of gold bills onto the tabletop.
“3,200 gold. That's all I could collect.” I winced at the rakes across my stomach, still burning.
“That's a fraction of his debt.” Her arched brows knit together. “What happened?”
“He got heavy—which for him is saying a lot.”
“When you hand me my 12 grand you can get back to your bard career.”
“I didn't mean nothin—”
“—How do I know you're not crossing me?”
“Pearl, I'm not playing games here. Does this look like I’m spinning yarns?” I pointed to the bandages on my face. “I mean if I was skimming from the top I sure as hell would take less. That or I wouldn't be showing my face at all.”
“You are a gambler, are you not?”
“That, that’s irrelevant.” Resentment mixed with lusty admiration—was she digging up dirt on me? “Look the whole reason I came to you in the first place is cuz I wanna use that chamber. I didn't come here trying to mine gold. I'll never turn coin away but right now it's a means to an end and that end is the chamber. I wouldn't ruin that just to stack.”
“Trust. That was always up in the air with you... and now... there better be an...”
“If you recall,” I held a finger up, “um the deal was that if I didn't bring all the coin I would bring something more valuable.”
“And?”
“And I did.” My hand slipped out of my pocket and slipped to the coffee table. As my bruised fingers pulled back, the messy wad of cash looked like some kind of nest under the troll tooth that now lay at the wad’s center.
Pearl delicately picked up the chunky, stained tooth between her manicured fingers. “Something... more valuable?”
“Your reputation.”
“Grivonne. He is...” A lock of stygian hair slid onto her cheek in the tilt of her gaze, a gaze I held cold. “I see.” She collected herself, smirked a rueful understanding. “Well then... hm for that... the chamber is yours. For one night.”
I leaned forward in gentlemal fashion. “You know, I gotta say, all these cuts and bruises, that smile of yours is worth it.”
“Please. You've been smoking too much tree.”
I chuckled, rose from my chair, caught sight of Hector’s irritated glare.
“Teek,” Pearl’s clear voice turned me back to her; if my gaze was cold, hers was freezing. “Why did you kill him? Truly.”
“He... he said something not worth repeating.”
“We know each other only a day. But still, you should know that answer is unacceptable.”
A hot hissing in my throat. “He called you... that old squid hooah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So I says to him, I says: you can call her a squid, you can even call her a hooah, but you can never ever call her old. Then I shot him and burned his circus down.”
She picked up a few of the charred bills. Their wrinkled, blackened edges trembling, she stared between them and me. Then her teeth flashed and her laugh rippled the air. I couldn't help but echo it, my chest thrumming. Her smile lingered. “Come tomorrow. I will have it ready for you.”
“It’s a date...” I said, but my bard tone vanished as I stared at the chamber’s artificed metal, its eerie glow, my very bones aching suddenly as I felt the oncoming rush of cold reality, time’s precipice, duality inescapable.
Her tentacle chair writhed as it carried her around the black octagonal wood. Then she rose and stepped on her own dame legs, closer to me, so close that her sultry voice tickled the back of my neck.
“You do realize Teek... that you cannot wear anything into that chamber?”
“...What a thing to say. For a lady no less.” I recovered my postured nonchalance. “What an invitation.” I smirked and a bat of her lashes pressed through my jape.
“That means that you cannot hide behind that lead vest any longer.”
“I know.” I stared at the chamber, felt Pearl’s cold breath on my neck, Hector’s dour presence, but spoke to neither. I spoke instead... to the last decade and change, each year a thousand members of an audience, all hungry ghosts, starved, jeering, all lunatic braying and hooting and hair pulling through soundproof iron walls, sentient rats begging for scraps from concrete cracks on street corners, as the song says. “I’m done hiding.”