Carl Sargent - Streets of blood

The first gleam of blood-red light arced across the cabin just as the massive tires of the suborbital Ghost shuttle screamed on first contact with Runway 11 of the world’s busiest airport. The mage’s mind was elsewhere, and the rough impact jolted him back into the real world of Heathrow’s dazzling lights and concourses.

The call had come just when Serrin thought he’d almost gotten used to Seattle, even begun to feel slightly at home there, his suitcases slouched against the wall of a cheap hotel for more than the usual week or two. He’d been wary of the offer made by the suit with the impossibly even tone of voice, but the nuyen glowing on his credstick was no lie and money enough to bring him to London as requested.

Perhaps the corporation that wanted to hire him couldn’t find a registered British mage to do the job for them. That was plausible enough, considering the way the Lord Protector’s offices had nearly every British mage tied up good and safe in red tape. Every practitioner of magic had to pay a hefty fee and submit a DNA sample to be registered by the Lord Protector’s office. A foreigner trying to register could wait weeks, or even months, just for the processing of his or her application. Serrin had bypassed the usual difficulties and delays-and possible refusal of his application-because the powerful Renraku Corporation had owed him a few favors. Thanks to them Serrin’s carefully coded DNA sample was properly filed in one of the huge basement complexes of the Temple District. Gently, without admitting it, they had pointed him in the direction of the right people, which was the least they could do to make up for his leg turned to mincemeat while doing some work for them.

“We’d like you to sign this disclaimer of responsibility, however,” the jittery accountant had muttered, all the while avoiding his gaze. ‘‘It’ll, ah, tie up any loose ends. Just protocol." Maybe a leg turned to mincemeat was just protocol after all.

The magnetic seatbelt unclipped and Serrin got slowly to his feet, reaching up to open the overhead compartment. He pulled out his pigskin bag, then instinctively clutched it to his chest as if protecting some intimate part of himself. He edged forward along the aisle behind a snot-nosed child, who whined in protest as a blotchy-faced woman dragged him along toward Customs. For a split-second, the elf had a feeling of pure absurdity, a sensation of unreality, of being almost out of his own body. He grabbed at the papers inside his shabby jacket as if for support. With a shake of his head, he focused on the passport, the visa, the medical documents, the permits, and the licenses. Damn the British love of bureaucracy! Getting through Customs and Immigration in London was like having to read a long letter very slowly to a very deaf, half-senile great-aunt who, even in her rare moments of lucidity, willfully feigned a lack of comprehension.

Standing at the head of a stairway leading to British tarmac, Serrin shivered. It was one-fifteen in the morning, early November, the temperature hovering around zero Celsius and a dismal filmy drizzle of rain coating his skin with grime from the London skies. So much for the year 2054 and the city’s miracle weather-control dome!

He descended the steps slowly and a little painfully, his usual fine tremor become a veritable tremble. Coughing into a balled fist, he made his way gratefully to the warmth of the passenger coach waiting to deliver him unto British officialdom. I hate London, he thought, but at least you can get a decent malt whiskey here. Comforting himself with that prospect, he ducked his cropped gray head into the coach doorway and found himself sitting next to a pile of duty-free items and another sniveling child. The tall, gangling elf gave the boy a sinister look that made the youngster shrink back in alarm. Good, thought Serrin wearily, that should keep him quiet for a while.

At the moment Serrin was closing his eyes for a bit of rest, somewhere in London’s East End, blood was dripping down onto the floorboards of a nondescript apartment in the neighborhood known as Whitechapel. The knife had done its work and now was the time for greater precision.

In Chelsea, yet another part of the city, a nobleman was turning his gaze from the flickering computer screen to the elegantly fluted bottle resting in a monogrammed silver ice bucket. Geraint drew the bottle toward him, wrapped a linen cloth around the cork, and pulled it out so carefully that the hiss of escaping gas was barely audible. She hadn’t heard; she would be deeply asleep by now. Dom Ruisse ‘38 would have been wasted on the girl-one of Geraint’s rare lapses of taste.

He clipped the rubber seal over the bottle and depressed the silver hooks to keep the chilled champagne fresh. The wine tasted good, and he contemplated the pleasure of it as he idly swirled the bubbles in his glass. Then his gaze traveled, almost involuntarily, past the row of financial yearbooks and references by his work station to the mahogany box etched with images of dragons. He hesitated for only the briefest instant, then flipped the gold catch and drew out the black silk bundle containing his deck of cards. He cleared a space on the cool white surface of the table, pushed his glass to one side, then expertly shuffled the unwieldy deck several times. He sat for several long moments, mentally aligning himself with the Tarot. Feeling the rapport established, he lit a cigarette and left it to spiral blue smoke from the marbled ashtray.

With a sudden motion he reached out to cut the deck with a single, decisive sweep, then flicked over the top card.

The Magician.

Geraint was startled, not expecting this after so many years. The signal from a card of the Major Arcana was quite unequivocal: Serrin!

The Magician is here, he thought. The deck was telling him, and he felt it in his gut. He pursed his lips with his fingers, forgetting everything else around him, intent only on the extraordinary image of the snake-crowned juggler smiling at him. More than a century ago, the artist had given the Magician card the distinctly pointed ears of an elf; what had she and the designer of the Thoth Tarot known of the coming Sixth Age of the world? Had they foreseen the birth of elves and the other new races of metahumanity?

But these thoughts were taking him off-track. Show me why he comes here, Geraint silently asked the deck. With long, slender fingers he drew another card, which he placed face-up, across the first. He saw the unmistakable image as it turned, and shuddered in spite of himself.

The Nine of Swords. Cruelty. Blood dripped from the fractured blades in the image. The Welshman felt fear, fear for Serrin, fear for what was to come. Then, a third card slid from the deck, without his even touching it, as though his fear had called it forth to obscure the horror of the Nine.

A stone’s throw away, Francesca Young rebuffed an inept pass by her escort as she drew her tanned legs into the waiting limo. She wrinkled her nose just discernibly at the sight of a troll in the chauffeur’s seat, but he was polite and Forbes Security had obviously spent money on elocution lessons for their operatives. Mercifully, he restricted himself to a “Very good, m’lady" as he eased the powerful machine along Kensington High Street; Francesca was too out of sorts to put up with a driver who thought clients wanted meaningless chatter about London’s weather at two in the morning. As she stared out the window, the first sight that greeted her eyes was that of two young fools in tuxedos squaring off in the road while a pair of debs shrieked with delight from the windows of their limo. She felt tired and jaded, fed up with men who ordered salmon after hearing her mention she’d grown up on the Pacific seaboard of North America, then expected sexual favors for the price of a fairly routine meal.