Chapter III: The Fall
Posted: Mon May 02, 2016 7:12 am
One Week Later
The last dregs of summer's heat were now well and truly gone. The Summer Fae's mantles appeared muted, a coating of frost uniformly covered every patch of greenery across town, and the sun seemed to be struggling to provide a last few golden rays in the fast-shrinking midday hours. Not that the city cared, Halloween was inching ever closer. Parties were on several minds, the yearly preparations, rituals and protective measures were being put into place, while the more holistic practitioners were carrying out the various dozen potential observances of autumn, Walpurgisnacht or Samhain you could think of. As mercantile as this time of year could be - especially if you were a candy distributor looking for sale outlets - it still was a set of a few weeks that was charged with heavy arcane significance.
These were the Dying Days, in which Nature laid down its head and closed its eyes - not to die, but to sleep and prepare for spring. Deep in the earth, well underneath the frozen crust, the city's Nexus was slowing down. The cost of spells had almost imperceptibly risen, reaching for power took slightly more effort; but this was a normal occurrence most practitioners compensated for without even thinking about it. As the mantle shifted, however, and the interim Winter Lord claimed the city, every performer in the Dark Arts across the county could feel their own font of power grow more steady, more reliable. As a warlock, Tom Magnus didn't need to look too far to notice it. He couldn't have picked a better time to bring some of his old friends home...
A little work from Preston and Arthur had bought him a temporary Russian name - Dimitry Volkov - and a slew of entirely fake commendations in East Berlin's former secret police. Having invented a fake Russian transplant for himself, and one that had allegedly lived in Berlin's Communist half, Magnus had quickly conscripted Mary as a liaison for the local branch of the Brotherhood, the cipher of the Russian mob that persisted in being unaffiliated with the Commission. A fake name, doctored plans for fake brothels being built out of real construction sites across Sandhill and a Bluetooth earpiece for Jameson had been all that had been needed for initial negotiations to really take off. Shen Long's Pervy Midget act had been surprisingly convincing and had required some profuse apologies post-encounter, but he'd been the shoo-in the warthog had required.
Now, all that was left was for Jameson to receive a single container's bill of lading and a hastily-assembled receipt; for Tom to actually prove he could pull off a decent Russian accent, and for Preston to move a few decimal points between America and some podunk banking outlet in Kazakhstan, and they'd have a few cryogenically frozen bodies available for whatever ritual Tom intended to perform...
For the occasion, the warlock had gone for a more textured shirt with a higher collar, along with one of the Clank's little rubies - a tiny red dot that normally served as a cravat pin. A few borrowed rings and a cane, and he'd effectively gone beyond looking merely professional, instead now looking like someone who seriously wanted to leave an impression. The idea was for this to clash with Melmoth's pin, in the hopes that exuberance and forced banality would collide in a bit of a head-scrambling number. If the Bratva's goons were too busy scratching their heads to realize they'd been had, Volkov-Magnus would have all the time in the world to disappear.
Of course, if that failed, Hellfire was always on the menu.
For now, however, he took a look at Aislinn from his reflection in the mirror, having spent a few minutes deliberately preening himself while working on a black Russian cigarette. Permeating his clothes with the right scents seemed like a good idea, in case anthros showed up. He'd also been gargling vodka - and not drinking it - since right after breakfast.
"Do I look like you'd want to punch me in the face?" he asked her. "I'm supposed to be moderately irritating - I hope I won't push too hard against the pin," he said, tapping the object.
He licked his lips. "Let me rephrase, considering... Do I look like enough of an asshole from the Caucasus? And don't tell me No, you're a warthog, because globalization mixed the proverbial cards decades ago. Now we've got polar bears living off the coast of Fiji and lions manning hardware stores in Alaska."
* * *
Today marked Three, Jenkins and Meris' second tour of Hell, Aislinn having already followed along for the first. As before, they'd sailed away on the Flying Dutchman for a few knots, had gone through the mildly nauseating sensation of corporeally shifting into the Shadowlands, and now waited as some of Sam's deck hands lowered rope ladders into the water. Maybe it was the Lexicons supporting them, but Three and Jenkins had both gotten fairly good at dislocating their spirits from their bodies. Drake had simply sat down at the main mast's base and closed his eyes, willing himself forward without moving - and now stood up and away from his own body. The ship's nature made it so they wouldn't float like Aislinn initially had, Aidan's lifeline manifesting as a literal length of lambent rigging that was tied to his waist as well as his body's. The connection being strong, Three's shade almost appeared as corporeal as his body, with translucence creeping in halfway across his thighs.
"Does it ever not get freaky?" he asked Meris, his voice feeling slightly distant, as if he were speaking through a light haze of radio interference. As Tom had explained to Aislinn, he appeared much as his physical body suggested, but a few of his own scars appeared deeper than they physically were - wartime trauma still clinging to him and his self-image.
* * *
As it turned out, Archie's assignment for the twins had been a relatively pleasant one.
Every workday started about the same as usual, but Holden had advised them to stop bringing their lunches to work. Instead, they'd gone to the Harp & Blackthorn Inn and its Faeside counterpart every single day since the spy's disclosed assignment, and had sipped beer and gone through Jimmy Winters' Irish Pup-meets-Bistro noontime menu. Archie didn't seem too focused on anything in particular, sometimes even selecting one of the stools at the bar to partake in the British tradition of blaming Manchester United for the evils of the world. They played pool and snooker, tried their hand at board darts and even managed to arrange for a few rounds of petanque with some of Winters' barflies - but it'd be a few days before the nature of the assignment would become clear.
They were waiting for someone, someone Archie obviously hoped for them to meet without relying too much on his own connections to the proprietor. It wasn't exactly working out, but they'd still gather plenty of data, judging by the frequency at which Holden mumbled for them to remember a specific face or to commit someone's drinking habits to memory.
A lot of cops came to drink at Jimmy Winters' bar, and most of them, he was at least on good terms with. Some of them, however, he clearly wasn't.
It wasn't any big secret that Hope had three kinds of cops on its payroll. You had the Straight Arrows, those who'd rather drive a Gruff's sword through their chest than accept a bribe. Plenty of these came in, and all of them seemed to ignore all the clues that pointed to Winters' relationship with the Commission. You had Those Who Knew, who worked with the unofficial system, but who still took their job seriously. A lot of Winters' Irish-American friends fell in that category. Good sorts, all of them; even if they'd sometimes overlook procedure if common sense appeared favorable.
Then, you had the Bad Apples. Cops people feared, and elements everyone between Alderan, Lowell and MacLoch were trying to either contain or excise entirely, the same way you'd cut off a diseased limb to preserve the remainder of the healthy body. These tended to go off like overheated grease on Jimmy's stove - flaring bright and ruining a piece of meat or some other project before being scrubbed away and forgotten. Quint had been something of this, long ago, and now he was dead. Worse than dead, if you believed Tom. Gone.
Unfortunately, not everyone had the grace of being laughably incompetent. Some people knew entirely what they were doing - and disturbingly so.
If you wanted to get the whereabouts and recent projects of one of Hope's most corrupt officials, you had to go where the least corrupt congregated.
The last dregs of summer's heat were now well and truly gone. The Summer Fae's mantles appeared muted, a coating of frost uniformly covered every patch of greenery across town, and the sun seemed to be struggling to provide a last few golden rays in the fast-shrinking midday hours. Not that the city cared, Halloween was inching ever closer. Parties were on several minds, the yearly preparations, rituals and protective measures were being put into place, while the more holistic practitioners were carrying out the various dozen potential observances of autumn, Walpurgisnacht or Samhain you could think of. As mercantile as this time of year could be - especially if you were a candy distributor looking for sale outlets - it still was a set of a few weeks that was charged with heavy arcane significance.
These were the Dying Days, in which Nature laid down its head and closed its eyes - not to die, but to sleep and prepare for spring. Deep in the earth, well underneath the frozen crust, the city's Nexus was slowing down. The cost of spells had almost imperceptibly risen, reaching for power took slightly more effort; but this was a normal occurrence most practitioners compensated for without even thinking about it. As the mantle shifted, however, and the interim Winter Lord claimed the city, every performer in the Dark Arts across the county could feel their own font of power grow more steady, more reliable. As a warlock, Tom Magnus didn't need to look too far to notice it. He couldn't have picked a better time to bring some of his old friends home...
A little work from Preston and Arthur had bought him a temporary Russian name - Dimitry Volkov - and a slew of entirely fake commendations in East Berlin's former secret police. Having invented a fake Russian transplant for himself, and one that had allegedly lived in Berlin's Communist half, Magnus had quickly conscripted Mary as a liaison for the local branch of the Brotherhood, the cipher of the Russian mob that persisted in being unaffiliated with the Commission. A fake name, doctored plans for fake brothels being built out of real construction sites across Sandhill and a Bluetooth earpiece for Jameson had been all that had been needed for initial negotiations to really take off. Shen Long's Pervy Midget act had been surprisingly convincing and had required some profuse apologies post-encounter, but he'd been the shoo-in the warthog had required.
Now, all that was left was for Jameson to receive a single container's bill of lading and a hastily-assembled receipt; for Tom to actually prove he could pull off a decent Russian accent, and for Preston to move a few decimal points between America and some podunk banking outlet in Kazakhstan, and they'd have a few cryogenically frozen bodies available for whatever ritual Tom intended to perform...
For the occasion, the warlock had gone for a more textured shirt with a higher collar, along with one of the Clank's little rubies - a tiny red dot that normally served as a cravat pin. A few borrowed rings and a cane, and he'd effectively gone beyond looking merely professional, instead now looking like someone who seriously wanted to leave an impression. The idea was for this to clash with Melmoth's pin, in the hopes that exuberance and forced banality would collide in a bit of a head-scrambling number. If the Bratva's goons were too busy scratching their heads to realize they'd been had, Volkov-Magnus would have all the time in the world to disappear.
Of course, if that failed, Hellfire was always on the menu.
For now, however, he took a look at Aislinn from his reflection in the mirror, having spent a few minutes deliberately preening himself while working on a black Russian cigarette. Permeating his clothes with the right scents seemed like a good idea, in case anthros showed up. He'd also been gargling vodka - and not drinking it - since right after breakfast.
"Do I look like you'd want to punch me in the face?" he asked her. "I'm supposed to be moderately irritating - I hope I won't push too hard against the pin," he said, tapping the object.
He licked his lips. "Let me rephrase, considering... Do I look like enough of an asshole from the Caucasus? And don't tell me No, you're a warthog, because globalization mixed the proverbial cards decades ago. Now we've got polar bears living off the coast of Fiji and lions manning hardware stores in Alaska."
* * *
Today marked Three, Jenkins and Meris' second tour of Hell, Aislinn having already followed along for the first. As before, they'd sailed away on the Flying Dutchman for a few knots, had gone through the mildly nauseating sensation of corporeally shifting into the Shadowlands, and now waited as some of Sam's deck hands lowered rope ladders into the water. Maybe it was the Lexicons supporting them, but Three and Jenkins had both gotten fairly good at dislocating their spirits from their bodies. Drake had simply sat down at the main mast's base and closed his eyes, willing himself forward without moving - and now stood up and away from his own body. The ship's nature made it so they wouldn't float like Aislinn initially had, Aidan's lifeline manifesting as a literal length of lambent rigging that was tied to his waist as well as his body's. The connection being strong, Three's shade almost appeared as corporeal as his body, with translucence creeping in halfway across his thighs.
"Does it ever not get freaky?" he asked Meris, his voice feeling slightly distant, as if he were speaking through a light haze of radio interference. As Tom had explained to Aislinn, he appeared much as his physical body suggested, but a few of his own scars appeared deeper than they physically were - wartime trauma still clinging to him and his self-image.
* * *
As it turned out, Archie's assignment for the twins had been a relatively pleasant one.
Every workday started about the same as usual, but Holden had advised them to stop bringing their lunches to work. Instead, they'd gone to the Harp & Blackthorn Inn and its Faeside counterpart every single day since the spy's disclosed assignment, and had sipped beer and gone through Jimmy Winters' Irish Pup-meets-Bistro noontime menu. Archie didn't seem too focused on anything in particular, sometimes even selecting one of the stools at the bar to partake in the British tradition of blaming Manchester United for the evils of the world. They played pool and snooker, tried their hand at board darts and even managed to arrange for a few rounds of petanque with some of Winters' barflies - but it'd be a few days before the nature of the assignment would become clear.
They were waiting for someone, someone Archie obviously hoped for them to meet without relying too much on his own connections to the proprietor. It wasn't exactly working out, but they'd still gather plenty of data, judging by the frequency at which Holden mumbled for them to remember a specific face or to commit someone's drinking habits to memory.
A lot of cops came to drink at Jimmy Winters' bar, and most of them, he was at least on good terms with. Some of them, however, he clearly wasn't.
It wasn't any big secret that Hope had three kinds of cops on its payroll. You had the Straight Arrows, those who'd rather drive a Gruff's sword through their chest than accept a bribe. Plenty of these came in, and all of them seemed to ignore all the clues that pointed to Winters' relationship with the Commission. You had Those Who Knew, who worked with the unofficial system, but who still took their job seriously. A lot of Winters' Irish-American friends fell in that category. Good sorts, all of them; even if they'd sometimes overlook procedure if common sense appeared favorable.
Then, you had the Bad Apples. Cops people feared, and elements everyone between Alderan, Lowell and MacLoch were trying to either contain or excise entirely, the same way you'd cut off a diseased limb to preserve the remainder of the healthy body. These tended to go off like overheated grease on Jimmy's stove - flaring bright and ruining a piece of meat or some other project before being scrubbed away and forgotten. Quint had been something of this, long ago, and now he was dead. Worse than dead, if you believed Tom. Gone.
Unfortunately, not everyone had the grace of being laughably incompetent. Some people knew entirely what they were doing - and disturbingly so.
If you wanted to get the whereabouts and recent projects of one of Hope's most corrupt officials, you had to go where the least corrupt congregated.