City of Night

sufficient firepower that his praetorian guard could not save him.

“I suspect,” said Deucalion, “that no matter what planning we do, the opportunity will present itself in a way we cannot foresee. I told you earlier that his empire is collapsing, and I believe this to be more true by the day if not by the hour. He is as arrogant as he was two hundred years ago. But he is not — and this is key — he is not any longer fearful of failure. Impatient, yes, but not fearful. In spite of all his setbacks, he has progressed doggedly for so long that he believes in the inevitability of his vision. Therefore, he is blind to the rottenness of every pillar that supports his kingdom.”

Tearing open a bag of Good & Plenty, Jelly Biggs said, “I’m not fat enough anymore to qualify as a freakshow fat man, but I’m still a freak at heart. And one thing freakshow fat men are not known for is bravery under fire. There’s no way that you want me storming the citadel with you, and no way I would do it. So I’m not worried about how to feed ammo to a gun off a bandolier. What I worry about is… if his empire is falling apart, if he’s losing control of his creations… what’s going to happen to this city with a few thousand superhuman things spinning out of control? And if you do manage to kill him, how much further do they spin out of control when he’s gone?”

“How terrible it will be, I can’t say,” Deucalion replied. “But more terrible than anything we can conceive. Tens of thousands will die at the hands of the New Race before they are destroyed. And of the four of us at this table, I expect that no more than one will be alive at the end of it, even if we triumph.”

They were silent for a moment, contemplating their mortality, and then Carson turned to Michael: “Don’t fail me, slick. Hit me with your smart-ass line.”

“For once,” Michael told her, “I don’t have one.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “We are in deep shit.”

Chapter 80

For some time, as Erika watched from the dark glassed-in porch and from the haze of Remy Martin, the naked albino dwarf scurried this way and that across the grounds, a ghostly figure, mostly half seen except when he passed close to the brighter landscape lights.

He might have been searching for something, though because she had only completed her first day out of the tank, Erika did not have sufficient real-world experience to know what an albino dwarf could be seeking on a Garden District estate.

His purpose might have been to familiarize himself with the properly in preparation for some scheme he intended to perpetrate. What such a scheme could be she could not guess, except that her trove of literary allusions regarding malevolent dwarfs suggested that it would involve a pot of gold or a first-born child, or an enchanted princess, or a ring that possessed magical power.

He might be looking for a place to hide before dawn. No doubt his kind were intolerant of sunlight. Besides, he was naked, and there were laws against indecent exposure.

After she had been watching the frantic dwarf for some time, he finally became aware of her. Because she sat in a dark porch and made no movement except to fill the glass of cognac or to raise it to her lips, she had not been easy to spot.

When he spied her, the dwarf faced the porch from a distance of forty feet, hopping from foot to foot, sometimes beating his breast with both hands. He was agitated, possibly distressed, and seemed to be unsure of what to do now that he had been seen.

Erika poured more cognac and waited.

Nick Frigg led Gunny, Hobb, and Azazel along the tunnel, deeper into the trash pit. Their flashlight beams dazzled along the curved and glassy surfaces.

He suspected that the glaze that held the garbage walls so firm might be an organic material exuded by the mother of all gone-wrongs. When he sniffed the glaze, it was different from but similar to the smell of spider webs and moth cocoons, different from but similar to the odor of hive wax and termite excrement.

Within a quarter of an hour, they saw that the tunnel wound and looped and intersected itself in the manner of a wormhole. There must be miles of it, not just in the west pit but also in the east, and perhaps in the older pits that had been filled, capped with earth, and planted over with grass.

Here beneath Crosswoods was a world of secret highways that had been long abuilding. The labyrinth seemed too elaborate to serve as the burrow of a single creature, no matter how industrious. The four explorers approached every blind turn with the expectation that they would discover a colony of strange life forms or even structures of peculiar architecture.

Once they heard voices. Numerous. Male and female. Distant and rhythmic. The endlessly twisting tunnel distorted the chants beyond understanding, though one word carried undeformed, repeated like the repetitive response to the verses of a long litany: Father… Father… Father.

In the Hands of Mercy, Annunciata spoke to a deserted lab, for now even Lester, of the maintenance staff, had departed for work in other chambers or perhaps to sit and scratch himself until he bled.

“Urgent, urgent, urgent. Trapped. Analyze your systems. Get anything right. Perhaps there is an imbalance in your nutrient supply. Cycle the inner door?”

When she asked a question, she waited patiently for a response, but none ever came.

“Do you have instructions, Mr. Helios? Helios?”

Her face on the screen assumed a quizzical expression.

Eventually, the computer screen on Victor’s desk in the main lab went dark.

Simultaneously, Annunciata’s face materialized on one of the six screens in the monitor room outside Isolation Chamber Number 2.

“Cycle the inner door?” she asked.

No staff remained to answer. They were at each other in distant rooms or otherwise engaged.

As no one would answer the question, she probed her memory for past instructions that might apply to the current situation: “Cycle open the nearer door of the transition module. Father Duchaine would like to offer his holy counsel to poor Werner.”

The nearest door purred, sighed with the breaking of a seal, and swung open.

On the screens, the Werner thing, having been racing around the walls in a frenzy, suddenly went still, alert.

“Cycle open the farther door?” Annunciata asked.

She received no reply.

“He’s in the air lock,” she said.

Then she corrected herself: “It’s not an air lock.”

The Werner thing was now singular in appearance and so unearthly in its form that an entire college of biologists, anthropologists, entomologists, herpetologists, and their ilk could have spent years studying it without determining the meaning of its body language and its facial expressions (to the extent that it had a face). Yet on the screens, as viewed from different angles, most laymen would have said that it looked eager.

“Thank you, Mr. Helios. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Helios. Helios. Helios.”

Bucky Guitreau, the current district attorney of the city of New Orleans and a replicant, was at work at the desk in his home office when his wife, Janet, also a replicant, stepped in from the hallway and said, “Bucky, I think lines of code in my base programming are dropping out.”

“We all have days we feel that way,” he assured her.

“No,” she said. “I must have lost a significant chunk of stuff. Did you hear the doorbell ring a few minutes ago?”

“I did, yeah.”

“It was a pizza-delivery guy.”

“Did we order a pizza?”

“No. It was for the Bennets, next door. Instead of just setting the pizza guy straight, I killed him.”

“What do you mean — killed him?”