Darren Shan - Hell's Horizon

It took laborious hours and countless dead ends, but eventually I found it. A photograph in Bill’s file that I’d previously passed over, an innocuous group shot taken at one of his fireworks displays several years earlier. He was pictured with a group of girls in pirate costumes, young actresses who’d performed a short play as part of the show. He had his arm around one of the fresh-faced beauties, a cute waif of a girl, recognizable on closer scrutiny as a younger version of the viperous Priscilla Perdue.

Tucking the photo away, I took a break, shoveled food down and showered. While drying myself, I wondered how I was going to locate Bill and if he was aware that I knew about him. I was sure he did and, after more thought, figured I knew where I’d be able to find him.

Returning to the upper floors of Party Central, I set about cross-referencing the players, connecting Priscilla to Jinks, Nic to Valerie, and so on, just for the hell of it. I’d barely made a start when my cell phone rang. It was Paucar Wami.

“Events are coming to a head,” he told me, sounding unusually agitated. “The secrets of the Ayuamarca file are about to be revealed, and you, lucky boy, are invited to the grand unveiling.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Cardinal is laying his cards on the table and I have a fly on the wall. It promises to be an invigorating experience.”

“I don’t have time for this,” I sighed, then said, “I know who set us up.”

I expected a gasp of surprise and a hundred questions, but all he said was, “Good for you. Now get your ass over here.”

“Don’t you want to know who it is?” I asked, taken aback.

“Tell me later. This is far more important.”

“Not to me.”

“Oh, but it is,” he disagreed. “I was told to invite you to the grand unraveling. Can you guess by whom?”

I only needed a second. “The villacs ?”

“Ten out of ten. Interested now?”

I didn’t want to get sidetracked at this stage of the game, but glancing down at the reams of paperwork, I suddenly lost the heart to dig any further. I asked Wami where he was and learned he was holed up in an empty office on the sixth floor of Party Central. I said I’d be with him presently, asked the secretaries to tidy away the files, checked to make sure I was leaving nothing of any importance behind and headed down for what would prove to be the most surreal few hours of my life.

The room stood next to a doorway by the stairs. Wami was within, perched on a bare desk, half a headset plugged into one ear. I started to speak, only to be shushed, directed to a chair and offered the second earpiece. Fitting it into my left ear I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation between The Cardinal and a man whose voice I didn’t recognize. I listened while he regaled The Cardinal with the story of a strange trip he’d taken and a woman who claimed he had died years before.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Wami. “Who is this?”

“Capac Raimi. He is an Ayuamarcan. He fled the city when The Cardinal put a death warrant out on him and retreated to the town he seems to have come from. I will tell you more later. For now, listen.”

And I did, as Raimi spun a grave-robbing yarn of sneaking into a cemetery late at night with his “wife” and digging up the coffin in which he had allegedly been laid to rest. Inside he found a corpse, which the woman identified as her late husband. The pair got into an argument, which ended with his caving her head in with a shovel and burying her along with the corpse.

“Nice fellow,” I muttered drily. “Any relation?”

“Shh!” Wami snapped, in no mood for levity.

It was The Cardinal’s turn next, and his tale made Raimi’s sound halfway believable. He started with his past, a fascinating history of a grubby street urchin who mutated into The Cardinal. Then he went off on a fantastical tangent and made far-fetched claims that would have landed any other man an instant spot in the nearest lunatic asylum.

According to him, he had the ability to make people, to actually create human beings. As a teenager he’d imagined the face of Leonora Shankar and thought how wonderful it would be if she were real. The next day he wandered into a puppet shop and met a couple of blind priests (I paid special attention to this part) who ran him through a bizarre ceremony that involved taking blood from his hands and daubing a puppet with it. The day after, Leonora Shankar turned up and took him under her wing.

He found he could keep eight or nine of his Ayuamarcans — the name he’d coined — on the go at the same time. His bent finger was a result of his fiddling with the laws of reality — every time he made somebody new, it bent a little more. To unmake someone, he pierced the heart of that person’s puppet (each had a look-alike puppet, which explained the marionettes of the fifteenth floor) and the blind priests summoned a magical fog — our famous green fog — that spread through the city and wiped out people’s memories of the dead.

Raimi didn’t believe him — he could smell bullshit and wasn’t afraid to say so. He asked where the blind priests were. The Cardinal told him they were in the basement of Party Central and the pair descended for a powwow. Something odd happened — I couldn’t tell for sure, but Raimi seemed to have some sort of vision — at the end of which the would-be successor stood as a convert, a firm believer in every crazy lie the madman had fed him.

The pair headed for the roof, where The Cardinal talked about “one-week pockets”—Ayuamarcans couldn’t survive more than a week away from the city. He said Paucar Wami was an exception to the rules, who could not only make it on his own in the big bad world, but was fertile to boot — the others were sterile.

“Hear that?” I remarked, nudging my father. “You’re one of a kind.”

He shushed me again. He was taking this seriously. I thought better of irritating him and tuned back into the weirdest conversation of the century.

The Cardinal spoke of his inability to create a worthy successor. He told Raimi — as he’d told me a couple of days before — that his empire meant everything to him, and he wanted it to survive. No human could safely steer his empire in the long run, so he’d set about making a leader of his own, capable of overcoming the sturdiest of obstacles, even death itself. He’d made Raimi resistant to physical damage — if injured, his body would heal quickly — and, if killed, he would be reincarnated and could continue where he’d left off. In a nutshell, he was immortal.

A lengthy silence followed, in which the only things to be heard were the howls of the wind and the beating of Capac Raimi’s understandably agitated heart.

“You don’t believe any of this, do you?” I asked.

“Every word,” Wami responded quietly.

“But it’s madness!”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but the mad can also be true. Fifty-five million people died during the six-year jamboree of World War II. Madness? Certainly. True?”

“Hardly the same thing,” I noted stiffly.

“Hitler tried to create a master race. The Cardinal set out to create a single superman. Which sounds more plausible?”

“Don’t throw immature intellectual arguments like that at me,” I retorted. “The Cardinal’s a grade-A loon. Anyone who believes that yarn of his is crazy too.”

Wami nodded. “Were I in any other’s shoes, I would be inclined to agree. But I have spent the better part of my life trying to unravel a mystery that defies the laws of logic. I have observed people come into existence and pop out of it as quickly as they appeared, all traces of their lives vanishing with their bodies, failing to register even in the memories of those who knew them. In the absence of any other explanation, I must accept The Cardinal’s.”