The Corpse Thieves Page 6

  And they still held, though Konrad could sense their strain. It was beginning to hurt them, and he could not expect them to bear it much longer.

  Master, Ootapi gasped. We weaken.

  Konrad was not surprised to see a sword flicker into being in Radinka Nartovich’s hand. It was not a fully solid weapon, but it could pass for metal if not closely inspected. Such a blade could wreak damage enough, wielded by a determined lamaeni.

  Well, that explained the disappearing weapons.

  ‘Time to go,’ Konrad barked. Tasha was already running for the door. He followed, backing his way to the stairs with his eyes upon the still recumbent form of Radinka Nartovich until he reached the door. Then he turned, and fled.

  Once he and Tasha were safely away, he sent a parting order to his serpents. Release her. Or him.

  With which words he hastened on, intent upon putting the Darks behind him as swiftly as possible. The two serpents soon caught up, ragged and spent, and Eetapi’s voice chimed dolefully in his mind.

  I do not like lamaeni.

  ‘I am not fond of them either,’ he agreed. He eyed Tasha, who kept pace with his longer stride with remarkable ease. Her fear was gone, though she had yet to fully recover her composure. ‘Present company excepted, possibly.’

  Possibly. Tasha had not given him reason to distrust her, but it struck him as a mighty coincidence that a lamaeni should appear in his life just at a time when others were creating the kind of havoc he had to deal with. ‘Tasha. You knew something of this beforehand, did you not?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then how did you happen to appear just at this time?’

  ‘No one sent me,’ Tasha said reluctantly. ‘You caused a lot of havoc at the Circus. Some of it good, some of it bad. Things got… uncomfortable for me there, and I thought it was time to move on.’

  ‘So you came looking for me.’

  ‘Yes. The way you handled Myrrolena, and Alad… it was masterful.’

  ‘I did have help,’ Konrad murmured, feeling absurdly flattered anyway. The Malykt had actually handled Myrrolena, the former Ringmistress.

  ‘Whatever. You’re interesting, and if anybody can keep them off me, it’s you.’

  ‘But you informed on me to the police.’

  Tasha shrugged. ‘Just helping you out.’

  ‘You have a funny way of helping.’

  ‘As long as it works.’

  Konrad found that hard to answer, for as much as he did not like having decisions taken out of his hands, Tasha’s interference had indeed helped. Instead of engaging further with this thorny topic, he said: ‘Do lamaeni often go dangerously maverick like this?’

  ‘I never heard of it before.’

  They were some distance from the Darks, by now. The shabbiness and filth had given way to well-swept streets and sparkling shop-fronts, and Konrad slowed his pace. ‘So we have a couple of dispossessed lamaeni wandering around house-hunting, so to speak,’ he said to Tasha. ‘Who are they? How did they come to lose their bodies? And why is it that our knife-wielder is still looking? That one has killed three that we know of, and availed themselves of none of the corpses.’

  ‘It seems odd to me. I mean, I never heard of anyone shacking up in a random corpse, either. It shouldn’t be possible. If it was, we would do it all the time. It makes no sense.’

  Interesting point. The prevalence of victims who had not got up again and wandered off suggested that Tasha was right — whoever had killed them had not been able to repurpose their slain corpses.

  But Konrad was not disposed to doubt his theory. He felt certain that Radinka Nartovich was Radinka Nartovich no more, and he had Tasha’s testimony in support of the idea that whoever occupied that body now was lamaeni. And she ought to know.

  Little spy.

  ‘She spoke as if she knows you,’ Konrad observed. ‘And hates you.’

  Tasha gave a crooked little smile. ‘It is possible. There ain’t all that many lamaeni about, all told.’

  ‘Any idea who we might be dealing with?’

  ‘I’ll look into it.’

  Tasha might prove very useful indeed, at least for this case. ‘I wonder why they thought it would work,’ he mused. ‘If it’s never been heard of before.’

  ‘And why did it work with Radinka, and not the others?’

  Also a good question. ‘Suppose there was something different about her.’

  ‘There was.’

  Konrad did not immediately realise that it was not Tasha who had spoken those two words, for the voice was light and female and not dissimilar to hers.

  ‘We got company,’ said Tasha, with unseemly cheer considering that the street was empty save for their two selves.

  Serpents?

  Dead lady incoming, Eetapi confirmed.

  Minus body, Ootapi clarified.

  In a flash, Konrad reached for his spirit vision and let it take over his regular sight. The colour bled out of his world, and the shops and houses around him and turned to stark, hazy black and white.

  A ghost hovered directly behind Tasha. The figure was vaguely female, though too indistinct for Konrad to discern much detail.

  ‘Radinka?’ he guessed.

  ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Any chance you’ll help me to get my body back?’

  ‘Why haven’t you…’ Konrad began, but then the pieces came together. ‘More lamaeni.’

  He got the impression that Radinka smiled, a little. ‘We are not all bad, I assure you.’

  A strange vision passed through his mind, of the unknown lamaeni walking off with Radinka’s body as though he had stolen her coat. Bizarre, bizarre. ‘Why don’t you tell us what happened?’

  Radinka gave a gusty, ethereal sigh. ‘I was in the Blue Rose Coffee House, talking with Kaz. Kazimir that is, Kazimir Sokol. I felt someone else come in, someone like me, in spirit form. Then Kaz went nuts, came at me with a sword and tried to cut off my head. I dodged that, but I think it was just a distraction, because he got me with slash to the belly and a psychic punch the likes of which I have never felt before. Knocked me clean out. When I came to I was like this, and my body was walking itself out the door. I’ve been following myself around ever since, looking for a chance to evict the bastard, but I can’t match whatever it was he did to me.’

  ‘Because you aren’t possessing,’ said Tasha.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘We ain’t exactly at our best in spirit-shape, right? If we were, why strive to maintain a link to our physical selves at all? It’s exhausting and inconvenient. But a spirit without a body is only half. When those two things work in concert, everything we do is stronger. So, our mystery man probably couldn’t chuck you out by himself either. That’s why he grabbed Sokol, and used him to weaken and distract you until he could hustle you out. Mortals are pretty feeble really, not that hard to overpower for a little while. It’s not the same as the link between a spirit and its own body — or a lamaeni vessel. But it’s a lot better than nothing.’

  Konrad looked sharply at Tasha, impressed. The girl had a quick mind.

  ‘So I need to possess some hapless bystander, stick holes in my body until it weakens, and then try to batter my way back into my own head.’ Radinka said all this in a flat tone, deeply unimpressed at the prospect. ‘You do know what’s happened to poor Kaz, I suppose?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Konrad said absently. ‘I will make sure he is fully exonerated.’

  ‘Great, but I’m still not doing it.’

  ‘We will work it out,’ said Tasha.

  ‘The other one,’ said Konrad. ‘We’ll call him Knife. Or her, whatever. Sword figured out that a lamaeni target works, but Knife apparently hasn’t.’

  ‘Wrong.’

  Konrad eyed Tasha in irritation. ‘What do you mean, wrong?’

  ‘Knife knows that he needs to find a lamaeni host. He must do. No one would be stupid enough to imagine that any old corpse would work.’

  ‘But he’s been possessing living, m
ortal people.’

  ‘Yes… and vacating them again soon afterwards. I can’t really explain to you what it’s like to be squashed into someone else’s living body, alongside someone else’s living soul. It isn’t what they need, or want.’

  ‘So kill the living soul, keep the body. Come to think of it, I’ve no idea why he didn’t do that to begin with. Why not just keep Sokol’s corpse, instead of bothering with Radinka?’

  ‘Because then it’s a corpse. It’s dead, not undead. Lamaeni are something else.’

  ‘You mean… all the people Knife killed were lamaeni.’

  ‘Have to have been. He just wasn’t strong enough, or quick enough, to take control the way Sword did.’

  ‘So why weren’t they home? Those two victims of Arina’s looked stone dead to me.’

  ‘Knife probably managed to dislodge them, but he either failed to anchor himself in the bodies afterwards, or they fought him off in spirit-form.’

  ‘And then they declined to reclaim their own bodies afterwards.’

  ‘Gravely wounded. Would you want to get straight back into a body with sixteen stab wounds?’

  ‘Fair point.’

  ‘It takes a lot of extra energy to heal a body that’s separated from its spirit. They’ll do it, given time and access to enough nice, lively people.’

  ‘Bad planning on Knife’s part. If they couldn’t reclaim their own bodies for a while, surely he couldn’t seize them either.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what went wrong. Knife broke his prospective hosts too successfully. I don’t get the impression he’s thinking too clearly here.’

  Konrad thought with dismay of the rib he had taken from Kovalev’s corpse. In his own defence, the man had looked more than dead enough at the time. ‘I wonder if any of them have got up and started wandering around, yet. That should entertain Nuritov.’

  Tasha grinned. ‘Better find out. It might be interesting to talk to them.’

  Radinka interjected. ‘Do you have any idea how cold it is with no body?’

  ‘I cannot say I have ever mislaid mine,’ Konrad replied.

  ‘Think yourself lucky. I really want mine back.’

  ‘Stick with us,’ Tasha said cheerfully. ‘We’ll find a way.’

  Konrad wondered when he and Tasha had become us, and moreover when the two of them had become so formidable a team that she could make promises with such unassailable confidence. ‘We will try,’ he corrected.

  ‘How feeble.’

  ‘How realistic.’

  Tasha snickered. ‘What aspect of your life is ever realistic?’

  The wretched girl had a point, but Konrad was disinclined to admit it. ‘Let’s go see Nuritov,’ he suggested. ‘He might release Sokol and Dubin already. And we can find out whether any of our supposed murder victims have woken up yet.’

  ‘Solid plan,’ said Tasha.

  Konrad looked at Radinka. ‘Coming along?’

  Radinka drifted in his general direction, shrugging wispily. ‘I seem to have an opening in my schedule.’

  So Konrad made his way back to police headquarters, accompanied by two lamaeni — one corporeally equipped, one rather less so — and two dead animal spirits, his inside coat pocket heavy with a rib bone its original owner probably wanted back. Realistic? Not so much.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Nuritov,’ said Konrad, upon finding himself restored to the inspector’s presence. ‘Have you happened to find any of your corpses unusually ambulatory?’

  Nuritov had barely glanced up as Konrad came into his office, absorbed by some stultifying-looking stack of documents upon his desk. At these words, his head came up and he blinked at Konrad with myopic confusion. ‘Ambulatory?’

  ‘I realise the circumstance would be somewhat out of the ordinary.’

  Nuritov’s gaze travelled to Tasha, who responded with a casual wave. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ he murmured, taking the question with admirable composure. ‘Ought they to be?’

  ‘That depends on where they have been stashed, and how far away from living organisms that might be.’

  ‘Oh.’ Nuritov blinked.

  It took a few minutes for Konrad to relay all that had occurred, and to explain Tasha’s presence. He concluded by introducing Radinka, which was difficult considering her presently incurable ethereality and Nuritov’s lack of spirit vision.

  ‘Inspector,’ she said, apparently out of thin air. ‘A pleasure.’

  Nuritov’s composure, though impressive, was not fully up to the demands of the case. ‘I see,’ he said faintly, and fell silent, his eyes very wide.

  Konrad judged it best not to draw his attention to the two serpents, who were presently engaged in inspecting the contents of his desk. ‘I probably ought to offer Kovalev the return of his rib,’ he remarked. ‘If he is accessible?’

  ‘And if you should happen to have a few colleagues handy that you don’t much like?’ Tasha put in. ‘He will be needing food.’

  Nuritov blanched at that, and repeated in a still fainter voice, ‘Food?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Konrad said, with a scowl for Tasha. ‘Lamaeni do not eat people, they just absorb animating energy. It does little harm.’

  ‘Little harm.’ Nuritov appeared to be recovering his equanimity, and fixed Konrad with a stern look. ‘How much is little?’

  ‘They might feel weary for a day or two.’

  ‘Oh!’ Nuritov brightened at once. ‘Bykov, then, and Loronin.’

  Konrad wondered about Nuritov’s sudden cheer — at least, until Bykov and Loronin arrived. The former proved to be a young recruit, the kind that walked with a swagger and could not stop recounting his own merits in a manner designed to appear humble. Loronin was cursed with a pedantic air and a patronising manner, even when addressing Nuritov, his superior.

  ‘Excellent,’ Konrad approved.

  Nuritov grinned. ‘Gentlemen, there is some slight irregularity with some aspects of my current case, and we are bidden for the morgue.’

  ‘The morgue?’ repeated Loronin, recoiling. ‘But why?’

  ‘Will it be dangerous, sir?’ said Bykov.

  ‘Could be,’ Nuritov said gravely, ignoring Loronin’s question. ‘That’s why I need men with me that I can trust.’

  Bykov swelled, and gave a crisp nod. ‘I’m with you, sir!’

  ‘Excellent,’ murmured Nuritov.

  ‘Dangerous?’ repeated Loronin. ‘It’s a morgue. How can it be dangerous?’

  ‘Most things stay dead when they have been killed,’ Konrad offered. He uttered the word most with a slight emphasis.

  Loronin turned paler, and tried to cover his obvious discomfort with some bluster about the enduring mythological concept of undeath and its essential unreliability in fact, a monologue which nobody much attended to.

  Konrad enjoyed the short journey to The Malykt’s Temple very much. He derived enormous satisfaction from observing the preparations of Bykov to meet any conceivable danger with staggering force, in the fullest confidence of the inevitability of his victory. He was similarly entertained by Loronin’s attempts to demonstrate a knowledge he did not possess, and by his own adeptness in ignoring the other man’s endeavours to discover just who Konrad was and why a top-hatted member of the gentry was disposed to assist with a police investigation.

  Radinka amused herself by walking directly beside Loronin and periodically touching his hand, a gesture he could not feel but could, on some level, sense, for he jumped each time and began to stutter. The serpents improved upon this game by occasionally kidnapping Loronin’s hat and whisking it away up the street, only to return it into his waiting hands moments later. And Tasha got on everybody’s nerves by whistling popular tunes decidedly off-key, accompanied by an infuriating grin and an aggravatingly insouciant manner.

  Konrad felt he had rarely enjoyed an outing more.

  By the time they arrived at the morgue, Loronin was half out of his wits with fright; Bykov was ready to take on a small army by hims
elf, should it prove necessary; Radinka had progressed to shadowing Nuritov, watching his every movement with a speculative, vaguely predatory interest; Tasha had abandoned whistling in favour of singing slightly bawdy circus tunes; and the serpents had decided they liked Loronin’s hat and were going to keep it, in spite of his obvious dismay. Konrad began to feel a little pity for Loronin, for his worst crime was only foolishness after all. But when the silly man insisted upon preceding Konrad into The Malykt’s Temple, with insufferable pomposity and a look of clear disdain, Konrad’s pity melted away.

  The morgue was, as ever, cold and empty. Very empty.

  ‘Well,’ said Nuritov, extracting his pipe from his pocket and absently lighting it. ‘They were here.’

  ‘Who were here, sir?’ said Bykov.

  ‘The corpses.’

  ‘Body snatching,’ said Loronin, with a sad shake of his head. ‘Lamentable. The Malykt’s Order should be able to manage better security.’

  This slur upon his Order did not endear the man to Konrad.

  ‘Maybe they’re still here!’ hissed Bykov, and readied himself for imminent combat.

  ‘Thank goodness,’ whispered a soft voice, which clearly belonged to no one of their party.

  Loronin jumped, and instantly began haranguing Bykov for playing pranks, and outlining the duty he owed to his elders.

  Konrad drifted around the corner. Just out of sight of Loronin, a group of three pasty-looking people huddled in a miserable, shivering cluster. They were all blood-stained, and visibly weak upon their feet. But they smiled, their eyes closed in deep appreciation for something or other.

  Three lamaeni, feeding.

  ‘Afternoon tea,’ said Konrad. ‘Delivered to your door.’

  Kovalev opened his eyes, and lifted an eyebrow at Konrad. ‘Ah. The bone thief.’

  Konrad bowed. ‘I do apologise. No doubt you can divine the reason for my disgraceful conduct.’

  ‘Mm.’ Kovalev looked Konrad over, expressionless. ‘I would like it back.’