They shambled, chill-racked and yellow-faced, eyes playing about as if in addled wonder, and one saw John. She grinned, an awful rictus, and licked her lips and hoisted her skirt with one hand, gesturing with the other index finger, eyebrows raised. John was so transfixed he stopped urinating and stood there shock-still until finally the Zom shrugged and went on with the other miserables. His heart restarted again some time after and he put himself back in his pants.
Zoms were accepted as a necessity for their brute labor, he told himself, but still his breath came short, his chest grew tight and fluttery. Instinctively he reached up into the mellow, soft air and whispered his ritual words.
A long moment of nothing. Then he felt the reassuring grasp of an unseen hand clasping his own, shaking it firmly in reassurance. It was a callused workingman’s hand, world-worn. He had felt it in moments of vexation since he was a young boy, since the day his father had left in blood and fire and his world had ended.
It had started that night. Somehow he had known that the spirit realm would understand that flame and hot fury, and so had simply reached up into the prickly spark-filled air of the burning house and had felt the firm fist that, sensing him, opened into a welcoming palm.
Years later, in another crisis, he had looked up to see what grasped him, and the hand was invisible, though he could feel it. But the air waxed gossamer-rich with crystalline motes—a manifestation, certainly. More sure than demons or mana.
The spirit hand gave him strength. Made freshly bold, he walked down a street of wavering oil lamps and searched out the Zom raiser.
The man was tall, in a stovepipe-thin charcoal suit. He sat in a spacious room, working at an ancient stone desk, scribbling on parchment. Along the walls were deep alcoves sunk into shadow.
“I’m looking for a, my father. I thought maybe—”
“Yes yes,” the man said. “An old story. Go ahead, look.”
This abruptness startled John so that it was some moments before he fully realized what he saw.
Grimy oil lamps cast dim yellow radiance across long rows of slanted boards, all bearing adult corpses. They were not shrouded, but wore work clothes, some mud-caked. John walked down the rows and peered into bloodless, rigid faces. In the alcoves were babes laid out in white shrouds.
All had the necessary ribbed ironwork cage about them. Pale revitalizing fluids coursed through tubes into their nostrils, pumped by separate hearts—bulbous, scarlet muscles attached at the ribs, pulsing. The fluids did their sluggish work down through the body, sending torpid waves washing from the sighing chest through the thick guts and into the trembling legs. Their charge expended, the fluids emerged a deep green from the rumps, and spilled into narrow troughs cut into the hardwood floor.
Amid echoing drips and splashes he returned to the stone desk, an island of luminosity in the cool, clammy silence. “He’s not here.”
“Not surprising. We move them on fast.” The man’s deep-sunken eyes gave nothing away.
“You raised anybody looks like me?”
“Got a name for him?”
John gave it. The sound of his father’s name spoken full was itself enough to put John’s teeth to grinding. The man studied a leather-bound ledger and said, “No, not in the records. Say, though, I recall something …”
John seized the Zom raiser by the shoulders. “What?”
“Leggo. Leggo, I say.” He shied back and when John’s hands left him he straightened himself the way a chicken shakes its feathers into order. “You damn fools come barging in here, you’re always—”
“Tell me.”
Something in John’s voice made the man cease and study him for a long moment. “I was trying to recollect. You’re all wrong, lookin’ on the slabs for him. That name, it’s in the trade somehow.”
“Zom business?”
“Believe so. A supplier, if I ’member right.”
John felt his throat tighten with memories. His father had worked now and then, always at jobs he picked up easily and let go of just the same. And always work that strayed to the shadowy side. “That would be right.”
“He comes in here with a squad or so, every week or so.”
“From where?”
“Gets them in the countryside, he says.”
“That would fit.”
The man picked up his quill pen and used it to turn the pages in a small volume of notes. John saw that he had only one arm. “Yeah, here. Zom master, license and all. You can see what he’s rounded up lately, if you like,” the man said without looking up.
“I can? How?”
“He’s got a place where he holds them till he’s got a goodly number. Then he brings them here for kindling up to strength.”
“Where?”
“Last I heard, ’bout seven blocks over.”
“Which way?”
“Annunciation and Poydras. Big long shed, tin roof.”
John made his way through the rain-slicked streets, getting lost twice in his hurried confusion and slipping on something slimy he did not want to look at. He got to the low building as a figure came out the other end of it and something made him step back into the street and watch the man hurry away. He went inside and there was nobody there except five Zoms who lay on ready-racks, chilled down and with brass amulets covering their faces. A gathering sense of betrayal caught in his mouth and John trotted down the empty aisles where Zoms would labor in the day, the slanting grey light making every object ghostly and threatening.
He knew before he reached the end of it that the Zom raiser had played him for a fool all along, had maybe even recognized him somehow. While John was finding his way here the man had somehow sent word and now his father had slipped away.
He was not smarter, John reminded himself, but he was younger. He ran hard for some minutes through shrouded streets and caught a glimpse of the same figure—running hard now, too, coat fluttering behind—as he came up into the open produce market.
The stalls yawned empty and the man ahead darted among them, knowing better where he was going and gaining distance. John settled in to run him down but then they burst out onto Galvez Street and up it onto the ample docks. The man was going flat out. He ran down stone steps to the riverside and leaped into a launch moored there. It was an oddly shaped craft and the man worked frantically to start it.
John could hear the engines sputter and then rumble as he put on a desperate surge, but the launch erupted away from the dock before he could reach the stairs.
It sped off upriver, growling, and John saw with a souring taste in his mouth what the vessel carried amidships, giving it the strange shape: induction coils.
The man did not look back.
Three deep, mellow bell notes floated off across the sublime skin of the river and some moments later came wafting back, steepened into treble and shortened in duration.
“Means we’re getting close to the arc,” Mr. Preston said.
John narrowed his eyes, searching the gloom before them. “Can’t see a thing.”
“The bell notes get scrunched up by the time-wind, then bounced back to us. Better guide than seeing the arcs, sometimes. They twist the light, give you spaghetti pictures.”
John would have preferred to watch the treacherous standing curves of frothy water, for he had seen one smash a flatboat to splinters on his trip down. A deep hush brooded upon the river. He felt a haunting sense of isolation, remoteness from the bustle of Cairo, though they were only hours beating upstream from it.
To starboard he could make out solid walls of dusky forest softening into somber grey. Mr. Preston sounded the bells again and the steepened echoes came, quicker and sharper this time.