The Vanity Case (Sondra Blake Book 1) Read online

  ‘You’re convinced this KonTash is behind the riots?’ Dickerson asked.

  ‘The more this idiot talks, the more I am.’

  ‘And I assume you heard there was another body found this morning?’

  ‘Outside Dillan Archer’s hotel. Yes, I heard. It’s not my case.’

  Dickerson gave a slow nod. ‘No… No, it’s not.’

  Sondra headed for the door. ‘It’s down to Special Agent Issacs to screw up.’

  Clarke looked relieved as Sondra returned to the interview room. ‘Detective Blake returning to interview,’ he said for the record.

  ‘And Detective Blake says,’ Sondra began and then she raised her voice and shouted out a stream of Orcish which cut off the rant from the orc.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ Clarke asked. ‘Because I could do with learning that.’

  ‘I suggested that his mother should have exposed him on a mountain at birth for having clearly inferior genitalia.’ She peered at the orc as she sat down. ‘I think he’s more shocked that I knew the phrase than anything. It’s a fairly common insult and he must have had it used on him before.’ The orc said something in Orcish, leering as he did so. ‘Impossible,’ Sondra replied in English. ‘There’s a well-known inverse relationship between the amount you boast about it and the size. Yours must be just about sufficient to grace a goblin from the way you talk. Now, speak English. The tape gets transcribed by a translator anyway.’

  ‘You’ve met KonTash, ValsaKa,’ Clarke said to the orc. ‘He’s not that old, but you seem to think he’s a really powerful magician. He was kicked out of–’

  ‘KonTash doesn’t get kicked out of anywhere or anything,’ ValsaKa said, his voice rising again. ‘TinshoKa was teaching him nothing and he walked. He’s more powerful than that old pulshiTe will ever be.’

  Clarke looked at Sondra. ‘A pulshiTe was a herd animal roughly equivalent to a goat. These days, the word is used as we would call someone an old goat.’

  ‘That’s not terribly insulting,’ Clarke commented.

  ‘Ah, well. Veneration of the shamans is kind of slapped into orcs from birth. That’s probably about as rebellious as ValsaKa can get about a menTaNin.’ Sondra’s attention turned back to the orc. ‘I’ve met menTaNin TinshoKa. He’s a good teacher and a strong leader. His magic is peKnava. KonTash is a pretender.’

  ‘He is a great shaman!’ ValsaKa shouted; shouting always sounded more impressive from a barrel-chested orc. ‘He channels the spirits of his ancestors!’

  Sondra’s eyes narrowed. ‘He said that? He said he was channelling his ancestral spirits?’

  ‘His ancestors are great and they mean to see the orcs great once again. Here we are slaves to–’

  ‘Shut up,’ Sondra snapped. ‘You aren’t slaves. Orcs have never been slaves.’

  ‘You’re human. You know nothing. You push us down with every breath you take.’

  ‘I’m black, asshole. I know more about “being put down by The Man” than any orc ever will, but that’s not the point. Orcs were never slaves. Your ancestral spirits have no concept of slavery, and most of a shaman’s training goes into avoiding things like channelling spirits. Did KonTash change suddenly? He was always one of the gang, right? But a few months ago, he suddenly started working more magic and spouting rhetoric about fighting for your rights?’

  ‘When his ancestors spoke to him. But his magic was great even before then.’

  ‘He got more violent. Callous. He stopped caring who was hurt, and he started hurting people. He pushed people to take greater risks to prove themselves.’

  Beside Sondra, Clarke had gone paler than usual. ‘Maybe he was great at magic, but now he was really great at magic. He didn’t need all the rituals the shamans used. KonTash just did things.’

  ValsaKa looked between the two of them and his expression shifted. He was looking less confident as the two cops listed KonTash’s changes in behaviour far too well. ‘He’s a great man,’ ValsaKa said, not sounding quite so certain. ‘Even you have heard of his power.’

  ‘No,’ Clarke said, ‘but I’ve heard all about the classic symptoms of demon possession. Damn. I should’ve got that sooner.’

  ‘This is why I get paid the big bucks,’ Sondra replied. ‘Well, mostly it’s because I’ve got several decades of experience on you.’

  ‘His ancestors–’ ValsaKa began.

  ‘Would be turning in their graves if their graves still existed,’ Sondra said. ‘He sold his soul for power, ValsaKa. He is a slave, and the thing that bought him is riding around in his body with only one purpose. It’s going to cause as much trouble as it can.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Here’s one. I bet KonTash has been encouraging any talented kids he can find to talk to their ancestral spirits, hasn’t he?’ The look on the orc’s face suggested KonTash had been recruiting. ‘He even helps. He summons the “spirits” for them. And then those kids start learning faster than you’d expect, right?’

  ‘Troops… Troops for our army.’

  ‘Kids on crack, ValsaKa. They’re giving their souls to demons a bit at a time. With KonTash’s encouragement, they’ll be puppets themselves in a few months. Or weeks. He can even grant power to orcs with no talent, can’t he? How many has he recruited with that promise?’

  ‘ValPaNa… My younger brother…’

  ‘It’s not too late for them, ValsaKa,’ Clarke said. ‘It may be too late for KonTash, but the others can be saved. Your brother can be treated before the demons have him. But we need to find them. We need to find KonTash.’

  ‘You can’t. He moves around all the time. He’s with a different gang each day. I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him since he took ValPaNa to the ceremony.’

  Sondra leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘Right. Of course.’ She turned to Clarke. ‘Get him locked up. If we let him go, someone will think he’s talked and he’ll be dead before sundown. Then go home and try to get some sleep.’

  ‘Sleep?’ Clarke asked, frowning.

  ‘I’ll talk to Dickerson. The only way we’re going to catch KonTash is to go out there tonight and track him by where the destruction is worst.’

  ~~~

  Sondra jerked awake, struggling to sit upright before clutching at her chest. Her heart was hammering, her hair was matted with sweat, and her breathing came in ragged gasps. Another nightmare.

  It had taken a spell, the Blessing of Hypnos, to put her to sleep after an hour of lying awake with the light coming through the curtains as her only company. Once asleep, she had been fine until the familiar dream began to play out in her head. It was never exactly the same, but there was the same theme: war.

  The nightmares did not come often, but they came, and they were always perplexing. When she had left the asylum, Sondra had always thought she would have nightmares about the place: being dragged back there and strapped to her bed to thrash uselessly and scream that she was sane. But those dreams had never come and instead she had nightmares of the war with the orcs. Battlefields, men in armour, orcs brandishing huge weapons, and wildly destructive spells filled her mind with a level of detail she found difficult to believe. Tonight was one of the worst ones, one she had been through before, more than once, and it had left her quaking every time.

  It always began with a siege. She was in a castle, high up on the side of a mountain. Below, the orcs were laying siege. Siege engines combined with magic as the orcs attempted to smash their way in. In her dream guise, Sondra was on the front lines. She threw spell after spell from the battlements, never knowing who she killed, if anyone. Then the world itself seemed to shudder and collapse in on itself. There was pain, so much pain, and a sound like the roaring of dragons. And then she would wake up feeling like the world had just ended.

  She had come to the conclusion that those dreams were about the Collapse itself. She was dreaming of being there when it happened. She had been, but this was from the point of view of someone on Lornaron, and that was impossib
le. In two ways, actually, since no human on that world had survived the event and there was no way Sondra herself could actually know what it had felt like. The pain faded quickly on waking, but the memory of it was still strong in her mind as she pulled aside her covers and started for the bathroom.

  Outside, night had fallen and the orcs would be out on the streets again. She needed a shower, and then she needed to be out there, looking for an orc with a demon at the helm. There was no time for dreams and she had another nightmare to walk into.

  ~~~

  ‘Get any sleep?’ Sondra asked. She was waiting with Clarke for something to show up in the reports coming back from the field. The command post vehicle was warmer than outside, and it had coffee, but if anyone had asked, they were there since it was the local hub for coordinating police efforts against the riot.

  ‘An hour or so,’ Clarke replied. He gave a shrug. ‘I’m an academic. Late nights cramming for tests is part of the lifestyle. I should be fine until tomorrow. Tomorrow could be bad.’

  ‘Luckily, the mob has to sleep sometime too.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s more of them than us. They could work shifts.’

  Sondra smirked. ‘First, so can the NYPD. They’ve pulled in auxiliaries to help with patrols in the other precincts. We’ve got the manpower. More or less. Second, that assumes a level of organisation I don’t think we’re seeing. If we’re right and there’s a demon pushing the buttons in the background, it’s doing so for the chaos. Micromanagement isn’t their style, so it’s up to the gangs themselves how they wreck things. Most of them will prefer the night. It’s colder, and they know they have an advantage there, and there’s the relative anonymity of darkness.’

  Clarke shuddered. ‘Can’t fault the logic. It’s certainly cold out there. You know they’re predicting snow tonight? Maybe that’ll calm things down a little.’

  ‘Doubt it. Orcs are comfortable well below freezing and they’ve got this moronic “mountain warrior” thing going. They thought Braveheart was the best movie anyone ever made about a human.’

  ‘Huh. Is that’s what’s up with–’

  ‘All the face paint, yeah. City orc habit. They picked it up from the movie, and watching World Cup soccer on TV.’ Sondra’s mind drifted back to her dreams. ‘They didn’t do that before they came here.’

  Clarke frowned. ‘Something wrong? You look a little…’

  ‘Just a dream.’

  ‘Ma’am.’ The call came from one of the communications workstations and Sondra ignored it; she was not the only woman in the long van.

  ‘I get… nightmares sometimes,’ Sondra went on. ‘If I’m looking like I haven’t slept well… Well, just ignore it.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘I think he means you,’ Clarke said, pointing toward the young officer at the comms desk.

  Sondra turned around and looked. ‘I am so not a ma’am. What’s up?’

  ‘Uh, there’s something going on in Marcus Garvey Park, Detective Blake,’ the officer replied. ‘Reports of smoke coming from nowhere and some sort of rally.’

  ‘That’s right on the edge of Orctown,’ Clarke commented.

  ‘And not far away,’ Sondra added, nodding. ‘How’s the cordon in that area?’

  ‘They’re moving reinforcements to the edge of the park now, m–, uh, Detective Blake.’ The comms officer’s cheeks went pink, which Sondra thought was kind of cute.

  ‘Check with command and make sure they have plenty of people with anti-magic gear. We’ll head out there now. And don’t worry.’ The van was two blocks south of the park on Madison Avenue, and the officer’s face said he was worried. ‘They won’t get past us.’

  ~~~

  Marcus Garvey Park was twenty acres of greenery and a lot of rock, which had endeared it to the orcs who lived nearby. At one point, they had suggested renaming it after an ancient orc warlord, but the city council had said one name change per century was quite enough. Still, it was FelGar Park to a lot of Orctown residents.

  Right now, as Sondra stood on the edge of the wall of black smoke circling the central region of the park, it was hosting a substantial gathering of orcs. You could not see them – the smoke was too thick – but you could hear them and there sounded like a lot of them.

  ‘We’re not sure we can hold them all if they decide to move out,’ the sergeant standing beside Sondra and Clarke said. He sounded nervous. ‘We’re not even sure how many are in there. Spotters saw at least five different gang colours or insignia moving in, but we didn’t get eyes on the place fast enough to make a good estimate on absolute numbers.’

  A roar welled up from beyond the smoke and Sondra frowned. ‘He’s in there. I’m sure of it. He’s getting them worked up for something. Even if they aren’t going to head out of Orctown, we don’t want them on the streets in that state. He’ll have some of them going berserk soon by the sound of it.’

  Clarke had taken some solace after his recent shooting since Sondra had been sure the wounded orc had gone berserk. It was not that common, but orcs could go into a battle rage akin to the old Norse legends. Generally, it was caused by injury, but sometimes it was just plain anger, and some of them could force themselves into it if they got worked up enough. Once they did, you just about had to kill them to stop them. ‘Can we disperse them?’ Clarke asked.

  ‘Crowd control with orcs is a pain in the ass,’ Sondra replied.

  ‘They’re resistant to CS,’ the sergeant said. ‘They’re tough enough to brazen it out, and they’ve got this second eyelid thing that helps keep their eyes clear. It’s almost like they’ve got built-in gas masks. We’ve got a couple of water cannons, but that’s not as useful against orcs as you’d think. They’ve got mass on their side and even soaking wet it’s not cold enough to slow them down.’

  Sondra nodded. ‘You’re from the twenty-eighth, sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I was on the street when we had the last riot here.’

  ‘Do I really look like a ma’am? Never mind. Clarke, I think I saw Morris and Hendricks here. See if you can find them and meet me at the edge of the park at Madison and East One Twenty-Second. I’ll put in a call to Parry and Ortega. They should be close. We’ll show the sergeant why Arcane is here for things like this.’

  ‘On it,’ Clarke said. He turned, heading for where he was sure he had last seen the two Arcane detectives.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Sondra went on, ‘I’m going to need you to get a sweeper team together ready to walk in and arrest people. A lot of people. There may be some resistance, but mostly it’ll be cuffing orcs who are lying on the ground. Can you do that?’

  The sergeant’s face shifted into a slow grin. ‘Like the hospital last time?’

  ‘Exactly like that, but bigger.’

  ~~~

  The shouting from within the smoke was getting louder as Clarke arrived at the junction Sondra had indicated with Morris and Hendricks behind him. Sondra was standing just outside the park itself, right beside the railings. Her hands were in the pockets of her black coat and she was watching the smoke wall in silence. Beside her, Ortega and Parry were in conversation about something; maybe about whatever it was that Sondra had got them together for.

  ‘Found them,’ Clarke said as he closed the distance. ‘That lot are getting loud.’

  ‘And if you understood Orcish, you’d be more worried than you are,’ Sondra replied, turning around.

  ‘Sondra,’ Morris said, nodding. ‘What do you need us for?’ Morris was the senior of the two with eight years in Arcane. He was a solid five-foot-ten of muscle hidden under a classic detective’s mackintosh. His brown hair was showing signs of turning grey, though Clarke knew he was only in his early thirties. He was not the smartest detective in the unit, but he had experience and a strong generalist’s knowledge of magic.

  ‘We’re going to drop a Blessing of Hypnos spell over the park.’

  Hendricks’s eyes widened. ‘The whole park?’ Hendricks was only a little older than Clarke
and the junior partner of the pair. She was about five-foot-seven and slim, with a pretty face and a bob of blonde hair. Right now, she also had a red nose: the cold was getting to her.

  ‘The whole park,’ Sondra replied. ‘You’ve formed a coven before, right?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. Never for something like this.’

  ‘Just keep your head and work through the ritual. Clarke, have you ever done this?’

  ‘Sure. In a lab.’

  ‘Exactly the same. Just try to ignore the horde of screaming orcs.’ Sondra turned to face the park. ‘Give me thirty seconds. Whatever you can pull together in that time, pass it on and I’ll make up the rest. We’re on a clock, people.’

  The others formed a rough and ready circle behind Sondra, joining hands. Clarke and Hendricks were at the ends of the loop, and they placed their hands on Sondra’s shoulders to form the connection. ‘Let’s do this,’ Sondra said and everyone bowed their heads, focusing their minds on gathering the power Sondra would need to put the park to sleep.

  It was only thirty seconds of effort, but they were pushing their manipulation skills to the limit. As the time to release the power to Sondra drew near, most of them were starting to sweat and the cold was freezing the liquid to their faces. Sondra had formed the pattern of the spell in her mind and begun to fill it with power, and now she reached out through the chain of her temporary coven, drawing the power from each in turn and funnelling it into her spell. She raised her arms, because it felt like the right thing to do, made sure the spell was fully formed and charged, and set it free. There was a pause, a moment when they were unsure what would happen, and then the voices beyond the smoke stopped.

  A second later there were shouts to replace the roar of the crowd, but they were a lot thinner than before. The smoke began to thin and, almost immediately, patrol officers in riot gear began marching in through the park gates to arrest anyone they could find.