Lisa Smedman - The Lucifer desk

The kid rummaged in the pocket of her jacket. She pulled out a tiny bronze disk. But when Carla reached br it, the kid yanked her hand back. “I want you to promise me something, first,” she said.

“What?”

“That you’ll do the story on my friends,” the girl continued. About how the cops killed them.”

“Sure, kid,” Carla promised smoothly. “Just as soon as the Mitsuhama story airs. That’s the important thing right now. Getting those goons off your back”

The kid studied Carla for a long moment, then grudgingly agreed. “O.K.,” she said, dropping the data-chip into Carla’s hand.

“Now!” Carla said, “tell us everything that happened the night you found the dead man.”

When they reached the station, Carla immediately popped the datachip into a deck. Masaki fretted about encryption devices and self-wipe programs, but as it turned out, the chip wasn’t even encoded with a password.

As the two reporters hunched over the display, Pita could tell from their perplexed expressions that they didn’t understand what they were seeing. The screen was filled with a series of weird diagrams and symbols and long blocks of text. Whatever was on the chip apparently had something to do with magic because she heard Carla and Masaki muttering stuff about “hermetic circles,” “astral space,” and “multi-something conjuring.” They at last concluded that it must be a spell formula of some sort.

By the time they gave up on trying to figure it out themselves, it was morning. Rather than going home to sleep, the two decided to visit a mage friend of Carla’s. Pita, despite the fact that exhaustion threatened to overwhelm her at any moment, decided to tag along. She was already coming to realize that the reporters were more interested in the datachip than in her. But they’d saved her ass once, and she felt safer with them than in an office full of strangers. Besides, she was curious about the chip.

Their destination was an odd little shop on Denny Way, tucked into the middle of a block of buildings that looked as if they’d been built in the previous century. There was no sign out front, no indication of what type of store it might be. The large window in the front was entirely covered with intricate designs, done in gold leaf. Pita wondered if they were magical wards of some sort.

As Carla knocked. Pita peered in through the glass. The interior of the shop was dark, but she could see that it was filled with untidy stacks of hardcopy texts bound in boxy coverings. These were books-the old-Fashioned, difficult-to-use data storage units that had been so popular in the last century. Pita couldn’t see he attraction of them, and wondered how a place like this could make any money. She’d take a Pocketpad graphic novel over one of these dusty antiques any day.

The door opened suddenly, and the brass bell above it tinkled. Carla stepped inside, then motioned Masaki and Pita to follow. As Pita closed the door behind them, a small white cat leaped down from one of the stacks of books and wove itself. purring, around her ankles. She reached down to scratch its head, looking around the shop. There was no sign of the proprietor.

“Hello. Welcome to Inner Secrets Thaumaturgical Textbooks. Aziz Fader at your service.”

The voice came from somewhere just ahead. Pita jerked back as a human shape suddenly appeared a step or two in front of her. One minute there had been nothing but empty air in front of her; the next, some guy was standing there. It gave her the weirds to think he’d been there all along, watching her invisibly. Masaki was equally startled, but Carla just smiled. “Hello, Aziz. Long time no scan.”

The shopkeeper was a tall man with jet-black hair combed straight back from his high forehead. He was human, but thin enough to be an elf. His nose had a slight hook to it, and his eyes were so dark it was hard to tell where the iris ended and the pupil began. He wore a flowing, one-piece garment with an ankle-length hem and wide sleeves, and held his hands in front of him, fingers laced together.

His eyes were locked on Carla. They took in every centimeter of the reporter, from her neatly braided hair and high cheekbones, to her tailored suit, to her stylish, expensive leather pumps. “I like the new face,” he commented, one eyebrow arched. He barely glanced at Masaki, with his rumpled shirt and uncombed graying hair, or at Pita, who still wore her torn jeans and cheap synthleather jacket.

Masaki cleared his throat. “We’ve come to-”

“I know why you’re here, Carla,” Aziz said, still addressing the female reporter “I did a minor mind probe before I let you in. A little protective measure. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Carla said smoothly. “Let’s get right to it then, shall we?”

Carla handed him the chip.

The shopkeeper waved them to a large wooden desk in the back of the store. A telecom unit sat on one corner. The rest of its surface was covered with a jumble of books, loose papers, and datachips. Aziz pushed these aside, revealing an ancient data display with a fold-up screen and a battered-looking keyboard. It didn’t even have a pickup for voice recognition, let alone a jack for a datacord. The shopkeeper must have a jones for old-fashioned stuff.

Aziz seated himself at the desk and powered up the datadeck. Carla and Masaki pulled up chairs on either side of him, and Pita, left without a seat, perched on a stack of books.

“Get down from there!” Aziz barked. “Those are valuable!”

Pita leaped to her feet, but the mage had already turned his attention to the flickering screen in front of him. He scrolled through the text, muttering to himself. Pita flipped him the finger behind his back.

“It’s a conjuring spell, all right, but not one I’m familiar with,” Aziz said. Definitely hermetic, and definitely related to the summoning of a spirit. But the diagram for the hermetic circle isn’t like any I’ve seen before. Usually it encloses a square pattern representing the four elemental energies. This one omits the square entirely, and instead places a pentagram at the middle of the circle. The first four symbols at each of the lower points I recognize-they’re the standard glyphs for the elements of fire, water, air, and earth. But I’m not familiar with this fifth one, here at the top of the pentagram. It’s almost reminiscent of a yang symbol Hmm…”

Pita was bored by the shopkeeper’s ramblings. If she stood here any longer she’d fall asleep on her feet. She ambled over to pat the cat. It was wedged into a space between books and shelf, licking its paw and affecting complete boredom and disdain. As Pita reached up and stroked it under the chin, the cat broke into a rumbling purr. Now that it was at a level where she could see its face, Pita noticed the animal’s unusual eyes. One was a vivid yellow, the other a soft sky blue.

The cat shifted, rolling over so that Pita could scratch its belly. It used its rear paws to push itself along the books, and as it did so one was dislodged. Pita instinctively picked it up, intending to put it back into place. But then she looked around at the shelves on which books were stacked every which way, wedged into any available space. She was tempted to just drop the thing back on the floor, but the picture on the cover, done in brilliant primary colors and outlined in gold, caught her eye. It showed a beautiful woman reclining on the ground with her arms straight out in front of her, palms flat against the sandy soil, staring forward intently. Just above and behind her, framing her body with its own, was the shadowy outline of a cat whose eyes were twin dots of gold. To either side of the woman were strange sculptures of a creature with a cat’s body and a human head. The statues looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment Pita remembered where she’d seen them before-In one of her history vids. They’d had a weird name: finks, or spinks, or something like that.