CHAPTER 50: CITY OF NO SECRETS

  GARLAND HEIGHTS—NOVEMBER 22th, 1992 | EVENING

  ?

  Leroy’s instructions had been clear over the pay-phone: show up at Forsythe Park just in front of City Hall, find the bench closest to the statue of the anchor, and arrive out of uniform. No badge, no gear, no reason for people to suspect that he was anything but an old friend. And yet, the moment Captain Holmes situated himself on the bench Leroy had laid claim to, Leroy couldn’t help but sigh.

  He wore a black tee shirt tucked into a pair of jeans, a Casio watch, and had a dull green windbreaker over the top of it. On his head was a plain black baseball cap, and the cherry on top was the stupid aviators that covered his face. In trying to be inconspicuous, he made himself look far more obvious.

  “Really? That’s what you wear when you’re off-duty, Holmes?” Leroy asked.

  “Yes,” he stated. “Well, sort of. I’m not in the habit of wearing sunglasses at night.”

  Leroy leaned back along the bench, letting his hands fall between his knees. “And you decided tonight would be the night you started. Good to know. Minister Rostavich fill you in?”

  Captain Holmes nodded. “He did. You should know he’s moved quickly. He’s already set up protective details with the Commonwealth Council, and somehow got Chief Montgrave to enforce a shelter-in-place policy until Thanksgiving.”

  “He tell you anything else?” Leroy asked.

  “You made some bad decisions and owe a man with bad intentions, and said bad man is involved with bad people at a company that’s even worse, and in spite of your otherwise lackadaisical approach to taking lives, you weren’t looking forward to taking mine. And now we’re here.”

  There was a lack of protest in his voice, which meant Minister Rostavich had conveniently neglected to include some of the finer details. If Captain Holmes had known the whole picture, the whole truth, he’d find reason to disagree with this whole arrangement. Leroy did want to spare Captain Holmes from being the victim of a favor owed to Marcus Velvet, sure, but both him and Minister Rostavich had a vested interest in taking him out. Two birds, one stone. He could be the hero and cover his bases all at once.

  “Sounds about right,” Leroy noted with a smirk.

  “Leroy. I appreciate you letting me in on this. In the same vein, I’m thankful you aren’t—.. well, going through with what Marcus wants you to do. Not that you’d get far anyways.”

  “You think I couldn’t storm Sterling Yard if I wanted to?” Leroy asked, only half-serious.

  “I think you’d try, and probably get pretty damn far, but the Special Response Unit would probably put you down before you made it to my office. And on the slim chance you did get through them, your odds of getting through me after the fact are even slimmer.”

  Leroy nodded his head from side to side. “Fair assessment, Holmes.”

  Captain Holmes lurched forward and clasped his fingers together, staring intently at the statue of the anchor at the center of Forsythe Park. Leroy followed his gaze, and inspected the aging copper—now a dusty green—with a half-lidded gaze. There were other metal fixtures that made it more than just an anchor: a crow situated on the top, with a rope coming out from its mouth, where said rope coiled around the lengths of the anchor. The same symbolism was at the center of the official seal of the Commonwealth of Brinehaven, plastered on the stamp of every document that Minister Rostavich had the pleasure of reviewing.

  “City of No Secrets,” Captain Holmes muttered, exhaling under his breath. “Sometimes I wonder if the founders of this God forsaken place chose that motto as an inside joke.”

  Leroy stared at the statue for a while longer. “Not the words I’d expect to hear from the Civic and Occult Authority’s resident golden boy. What’s got you rattled?”

  “Everything. I always had a gut feeling that the Brinehaven’s men of industry cut corners, but if you’d heard the statements I got from the Ackerman girl, and the alchemist, Janice, you’d—.. ah, forget it. You were there. You know. Using Brinehaven locals as test dummies, unsanctioned experiments on would-be migrants into the city. I can’t imagine this is the first time they’ve done something like this, and it makes me wonder just how many of their products were made using the same method.”

  “Most of them, I’d imagine,” Leroy noted.

  “And now this shit with Marcus Velvet. The Civic and Occult Authority has had a half-assed profile on him for years now, but we always suspected he was just some sort of narcotics dealer—mundy shit, you know. Cocaine, heroin, marijuana. Come to find out he’s got his hands in more pies than we’d ever know on our own.”

  Leroy cleared his throat. “Yup.”

  Captain Holmes exhaled. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bitch and moan to you, it’s just—... ah, fuck. Forget it. What’s the plan, Leroy? What do you need me to do?”

  “The day before Thanksgiving, we’re going to raid Spectre. Marcus’s club. By then, I’ll have a few things in place. First, an arbitration note from the Minister himself giving me the a-okay to kill Marcus. Second, he’ll be deputizing a few people as interim arbiters for the duration of said arbitration note.”

  “A team?” Captain Holmes asked.

  “A temporary one. Look, I’ll need you to speak with the Department of Risk Assessment and Restoration and get the floor plans for the club itself,” Leroy said.

  “Done. What else?”

  “Three days from now, head to St. Catherine’s Cathedral. There’s a few people there you’ll be picking up—people who I’ve already spoken to who’ve agreed to help us.”

  “The interim arbiters,” Captain Holmes noted.

  Leroy nodded. “Some of them, at least. On the 25th, we hash out the details. Finalize the raid. On the 26th, we strike.”

  ?

  Leroy returned to Lieberman Scrap and Stack with a plastic bag.

  Silvio’s uncle expected more money, but seemed content with taking a fortune cookie from the Chinese food he’d picked up on the way back to the junkyard, and asked how much longer they’d be there for. Leroy told him to expect them early in the morning tomorrow morning, and assured Anthony Lieberman that he’d have enough cash on hand to cover the expense for ‘renting’ the space. Normally, he’d haggle with the man like he’d haggle with Silvio, but Silvio was one thing, and his uncle was a worse thing.

  Several gunshots echoed out from the clearing in the center of the junkyard.

  Cameron was still at it: feet slightly spread, both hands gripping his Reign 18, shoulders relaxed, body alert. A glass bottle shattered in the distance. Then another. And another. He was quick to pivot, and quicker still when it came to leveling his aim and pulling the trigger.

  “Kessler!” Leroy shouted.

  His voice was drowned out by another gunshot. Leroy narrowed his eyes. Not one, three. Leroy took a few steps forward, ears still ringing, and examined where they’d pierced through. Two in the center, one in the top. A rusty car door wasn’t a human-sized dummy, but the ballistic pattern was easily recognizable.

  “The Mozambique drill,” Leroy muttered.

  Cameron glanced to his side and lowered his Reign 18. Guts, of course, lingered by his side, and the wisp of green-white energy turned its singular, unblinking eye towards Leroy. Leroy cleared his throat just as the gunfire died down, and placed the bag of food at Cameron’s side.

  “Hope you’re a fan of General Tso’s chicken and fried rice,” Leroy said.

  Cameron switched the safety of his Reign 18 on and tucked it into the front of his belt. “Don’t know what that is.”

  Leroy grimaced. “What? You’ve never had Chinese food?”

  “I have, just not General Tso’s,” Cameron explained, making his way towards a set of wooden palettes. “Where’d you run off to?”

  “Contrary to popular belief, I’m planning things out for a change,” Leroy said, pacing over to Leroy and withdrawing his own food, another serving of General Tso’s with fried rice. Plus two egg rolls, though he handed those over to Cameron without him asking for them.

  Cameron grabbed a plastic fork and began picking away at his food. “Right. So, what next?”

  “We eat, and then we go home,” Leroy muttered between bites.

  Cameron pointed his fork at Leroy. “You said you had more to show me, back at Esme’s. You told me you’d help me with my—”

  “Your abilities, I know. We’ll cover that tomorrow."

  Cameron outstretched an arm towards the junkyard, as if to present the results of his shooting drills. “I did well enough today, and I did better, in fact, when you weren’t breathing down my damn neck telling me what to do.”

  “Ah-huh. So you just, what, intuitively got better? That’s it?” Leroy said, shaking his head with a wry smile.

  “Yeah. That's exactly it. Why is that so hard to believe?”

  “Look. You did better than I thought you would, I’ll give you that. Suppose that’s the benefit of youth, among other things. Half of your brain is still empty, but that same half can soak up information a bit faster.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Camerons set his jaw. “Unbelievable.”

  Leroy continued on through his meal, and raised a brow. “What?”

  “It’s not me, it’s my age. It’s not me, it’s Guts, it’s not me, it’s my hexling abilities. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah. You always have some reason to explain why I happen to be good at something, or how I somehow manage to improve, without ever giving me the damn credit for it.”

  Leroy exhaled. “Whining isn’t a good look on you Kessler. The fuck has your panties in a twist? I just told you you did better than I thought. What more do you want me to say?”

  Agitation poured out from Cameron like water from a fire hydrant. It was perpetual, intense, and pointedly obvious. Something was bothering him, and for whatever reason, he was denying himself the chance to say what it was. What it really was. Cameron complained every now and again, but this was different. Leroy had called it whining, but there was a different word, a better one, that he’d been missing. He just couldn’t think of it.

  Cameron chewed away at his food.

  “What, you want my approval? A pat on the back? Here,” Leroy said, slapping Cameron’s back.

  Cameron lurched forward a bit, and glanced over his shoulder to glare at Leroy. “Asshole."

  ?

  They dropped by Allure Artificery on their way back to Leroy’s apartment in Cyprus Alley. Cameron had gone upstairs to check in on Tania and Janice, while Esme explained Leroy’s options to him. Her work goggles covered her freckled face, and her bandana was haphazardly tied around her dull, chestnut-orange hair as she examined the firearm.

  Leroy was hesitant to leave his LAR Grizzly so soon after acquiring it from Silvio, and dropping off a firearm when he might need it almost felt counter-intuitive. But he didn’t need a gun, he needed a focus. A tool that would work in tandem with what Yaerzul’s brand already allowed him to do. A tool meant for him and him alone.

  “Artificing a weapon is easy enough,” she explained. “But you’re giving me less than four days to complete a project that has many steps.”

  “That’s because you’re the best, Esme,” Leroy said, shooting her a smile from behind the counter.

  She seemed unimpressed and solely focused on the handgun. “You said you wanted something that would compliment your abilities. I have heard rumors, but forgive me if I do not know the specifics—which I very much need in order to give you what you want.”

  “I can make ice out of things,” Leroy said plainly. “Water. Piss. Booze. Mist. But I need a source, and the mist thing only works if there’s enough of it for me to pull out of the air. Can’t just walk into a room and do that.”

  “I see.” Esme continued to maneuver the gun.

  “I see?”

  “That narrows it down. Though, what you want it to do—its strength, or power, perhaps—is determined by two things. First, the conditions, and second, the components.”

  “Uh-huh, go on,” Leroy muttered.

  “Sorry. It is.. difficult to put in layman’s terms, but I will try. For your sake. Artificery is based on conditions and on components; as is the case with the Rings of Mutualism both you and Cameron wear. The condition, in that instance, is an effect that prevents one person—Cameron—from hurting another, which is you, and the inability to remove the rings. These are the runes themselves: symbol-based expressions of the condition carved into the object. The components, then, are the blood drawn from both of you, which ties you both to the runes themselves and to each other."

  Leroy rubbed his beard. Esme had a tendency to use a dozen words when one or two would do just fine.

  Esme placed the gun down. “It is a lot to take in for a person unfamiliar with artificery. Perhaps allow yourself a few minutes. Or several.”

  “So, the condition is the actual effect of the artificed object, the components are what is required for that effect to work. Sounds simple enough,” Leroy said half-jokingly.

  “Simpler still is expressing runes that personify pre-existing forms of the arcane. Creating a bracelet imbued with, say, kinetics, requires only the condition written through the runes and the raw power of a kineticist sealed into the runes—the raw power itself is the component. In that instance, however, the extent of what the condition could be is directly determined by how much power the kineticist decided to imbue.”

  Leroy slowly nodded. He’d known Esme for a while now, some three odd-years, and he’d known plenty of artificers before her, but he never bothered getting a proper understanding of what artificery was, or what it entailed beyond what he assumed to just be enchanting objects. For Esme, he imagined all of this came naturally, but to him, it sounded more like a science than a form of the arcane.

  “Right. So, in that case it's a matter of both the artificer’s ability to write runes and the individual strength of the kineticist. You’d be the craftsman, the kineticist would be the enchanter, for a lack of a better word. Am I following, or?” Leroy asked.

  Esme nodded. “Yes.”

  “So, back to my gun."

  “Yes,” Esme said. “Your gun. The component must be adequate for the power. That is to say, that the condition and the component must strike an equilibrium. They must be in balance. The general principle is that stronger conditions, as expressed through runes, require components of similar value.”

  Leroy rubbed his beard. “And what happens if they aren’t?”

  Esme swiveled back towards the far side of her reception desk, where an assortment of tomes, styluses of varied sizes, and what Leroy could now identify as stray components, all lingered between rough drafts, schematics, and a mug that stunk of day-old coffee. She grabbed a paper and a pen and held it in front of Leroy.

  “Allow me to demonstrate with an example. A customer walks in. His name is Bart.”

  Leroy held in a laugh. “Bart.”

  Esme began drawing with her pen, and created probably the worst rendition of a man as a stick figure he’d ever seen. “Bart decides he wants a necklace that lets him mimic the scream of a banshee. The Law of Congruity, which guides all artificery, states that the effects must be similar or approximate to the components.”

  Three C’s. Conditions, components, congruity. Leroy imagined that a wise-crack professor at the Brinehaven College of the Arts probably had that up on a chalkboard somewhere, and drilled it into the minds of aspiring artificers over and over again.

  “It needs to be appropriate,” Leroy noted. “Basically.”

  “Yes,” Esme answered. “To continue. If I write into the runes on the necklace that their intended effect is to produce a banshee scream, I need a component that the runes can attach to as a.. frame of reference, to enable such a thing to happen. The more congruent, the better the artificed object.”

  “The Rings of Mutalism. The reason they work is because the component is my blood and Kessler’s, and blood is directly linked to.. well. Life, death. The ability to harm. So the conditions and the component are what, just the right amount of congruent?”

  Esme smiled. “Very good. We’ll make an artificer out of you yet.”

  Leroy waved a dismissive hand. “Never was book-smart. Go on with what you were going to say.”

  Esme continued sketching onto the paper. She drew a necklace, and on one side of it, a cluster of lines that she aptly labeled hair, and then a tooth on the other side.

  “Sounds to me like you just about understand what I was getting at, Leroy, but since you insist, I will continue. Bart wants this necklace. I proceed with creating it, and the best component I can muster is a lock of hair from the corpse of the banshee. Is it congruent? Yes. But the grinded down teeth of the corpse, made into a powder, which is then poured into the metal of the necklace itself, would be far better. Better yet, the preserved vocal cords if they have not yet been entirely decomposed.”

  “Ah-huh. And if something isn’t as congruent, and Bart keeps using this necklace, then what?”

  “In artificery, it is called rejection. Bart could extract maybe a few uses, but the object would destroy itself before long. What separates a good artificer from a great one is not solely their ability to express the conditions through runes, but the combination of research and intuition that lead to a higher rate of congruency.”

  “Lucky me. I’ve always known you were the ladder,” Leroy said with a wry smile.

  It was a lot to digest. Yet, through Esme’s matter-of-fact tone, there were hints of girlish excitement, as if she’d been wanting to share all of this information with someone, and the only thing she’d been missing was the go-ahead from a fool with too much curiosity. As of that evening, Leroy was that fool.

  “You give everyone this Artificery 101 spiel when you’re taking work orders?” Leroy asked, half-joking.

  “Consider my lecture a tax for allowing Janice and Tania to stay here,” Esme said plainly.

  “The Civic and Occult Authority reimbursed you for that,” Leroy muttered.

  “But they did not pay me to have my loft used as an impromptu alchemical lab, or, to get the materials for Janice to do so,” Esme retorted. “There are some… smells I imagine will never leave even after she is finished brewing her potions. Smells I will have to live with for as long as I rent this space, Leroy.”

  “Alright, alright. However much you think that all was, you add it onto the bill for my gun. Yeah? Fair?”

  Esme lifted her goggles up from her face. Irritated and pink skin marks bordered her brown eyes, and she inhaled sharply. “Typically, with working orders, my clients request conditions. What is it that you want your gun to do, exactly?”

  Leroy tipped his hat to her. “The chef knows best. Surprise me, Esme. I’m curious to see what you come up with. But I need something functional. Reliable. Keep it simple, clean, and practical.”

  “A condition of sufficient power that requires only one component, then,” Esme noted aloud. “I will take the liberty of naming your gun once it is finished, too.”

  “By all means,” Leroy said with a wry smile.

  He cleared his throat and made for the far end of Esme’s shop, towards the normally off-limits back room and leaned up against the door. “Kessler! We’re leaving!”

  Esme stood up behind her reception desk and began finnicking with the various odds and ends propped up against the wall, shifting through metal boxes containing what Leroy imagined to be components that she’d collected over the years. Leroy made towards the door and waited for Cameron to finish up upstairs, and stared at Esme’s back as a question burned in his throat.

  “Esme.”

  “Leroy,” she said, but it sounded more like a statement.

  “Last question for you, before I bolt. Curators. How do they figure into all of this artificed object stuff? Conditions, components. So on and so forth.”

  “They don’t. Not really,” she muttered. “The objects they wield demand that their souls be sealed into them once they die. I suppose if I were to break it down through artificery, the condition would be the effect of the object and the component would be their soul. Hence, why most, if not all, curators wield objects stronger than anything I could make. Though sacrificing one’s soul for a leg up hardly seems worth it.”

  “Depends on who you ask,” Leroy said decidedly. “Some people might argue otherwise."

  “I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure meeting many curators who would agree,” Esme retorted. “And I know quite a few, none of which seem particularly thrilled to be sealed into whatever strange purgatory waits for them in the object they bound their soul to.”

  “Yeah, well,” began Leroy, who ran his hand over his neck and felt the grooves of Yaerzul’s brand. “Can’t imagine it’s any worse than where I’m going.”

  LEROY WATERS

  CAMERON KESSLER

  GUTS

  CAPTAIN HOLMES

  ESME O'DOHERTY

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