Death of a Necromancer

Draft: March 2003
Note: While this story does not seem like fanfic -- because it's so wildly, dubiously AU -- it is fanfic, inasmuch as it is based on Tokyo Babylon, and in the writing of it. None of the original CLAMP characters appear though, except by allusion.

Prologue.

"A long time ago, there existed a secret sect of hereditary stranglers who brought horror and death to the streets and shadows of India for three centuries. They killed with bare feet and fatal scarves. Hired assasination was, for them, a religious duty. They were devoted to the goddess whose idol is black, and whom they worshipped under the names of Durga, Parvati, and Kali Ma."

Aludia tilted an empty hourglass up over her head, as if to the light of unlit candles on the chandelier that plunged down from the vaulted ceiling and swung on level with the big dormer windows. She studied the hourglass intently for a moment, then let it fall on the floor without so much as a sigh, where it shattered into tiny glass and exhumed sand. A slight wind blew in from the open windows. The air was heavy and slightly sour, an essence of perspiration, dust, excess sun, and coming rain, and the hothouse flowers that bloomed on the miniature patterned tables.

Hikaru slid a glance towards his companions. Ikuhara sat on a chair a few feet away from him, arms folded across his chest, feet crossed on the floor, eyes half-closed and sleepy. In contrast, Takehisa was leaning forward on the divan, staring at Aludia. He had never even blinked the past hour, thought Hikaru. His mouth hung open and he looked on the verge of passing out. Takehisa had one of those sweet cherubic faces that never seemed to grow old. Even while gaping at Aludia like a fish, his skin just as pale and sickly translucent, he was still beautiful and looked no older than sixteen, even though Hikaru knew he was nearly thirty. Pale skin, delicate bones, large dreamy eyes, slender hands clasped on his lap now, and trembling, clawing as if for air.

Aludia sat directly front of Hikaru. They had entered the room to find her sitting on an old painter's stool. A large canvas was propped in front of her. She was holding an ink brush. Hikaru could not see what she was painting and he knew better than to ask. He could not see Aludia herself. Fine black silk edged with lace covered her head and draped her body like an exotic widow's shroud.

Something stung Hikaru's eyes then. He blinked rapidly while he reached for a silk cloth inside his sleeve. Tears lingered on his eyelashes like knife-edged dew drops.

"These adepts swore to be valiant, submissive, and secretive," said Aludia. "They spoke a language made up of signs and ciphers that could be understood anywhere. Their fraternity consisted of four orders: the Seducers, who lured travelers with songs and fantastic tales; the Executioners, who strangled them; the Hospitalers, who dug the graves; the Purifiers, who stripped the corpses."

Hikaru wiped his eyes harder. When he looked at the cloth, he saw through his swimming vision that it was stained with little drops of blood.

"Is that it?" he said.

"You're bleeding," said Ikuhara, yawning.

Takehisa started and turned towards Hikaru slowly, his thin perfectly shaped mouth now working, convulsing. "Are you all right, sir?" He blinked and shook his head and drew a heavy embossed revolver from the pocket of his crisp linen jacket. "Are you all right?"

Ikuhara shifted on his seat, mumbling irritably. He didn't look so sleepy anymore but he didn't look so interested either. He shot Hikaru a bored, disgusted glance.

Hikaru couldn't look at Aludia. His eyes were streaming too much, and the sun was on his face. He put up a hand to wipe them and smeared his fingers with blood.

Takehisa had stood up. He was waving the revolver expansively and he was talking. Fast and low at first, as he had begun, then louder and louder until the air was rent by his shrill cries. Hikaru wondered if Ikuhara could be bothered to lunge for the gun because in the state he was in, he certainly couldn't.

Then Takehisa pointed the revolver at him. Hikaru froze. Ikuhara grunted.

"I can't see," Hikaru muttered. "Ikuhara, do something, you bastard."

Takehisa's fingers tightened on the trigger. Hikaru's own blood-stained hand worked frantically on the space in front of him. He heard Ikuhara say something that sounded like: "Damn kid."

"He's thirty, for god's sake," he snapped.

Takehisa fired the gun. Hikaru flinched.

The explosion came, but he didn't see it too. He felt himself being flung aside and he hit the floor hard, rolling around and around like a dice out of control. The broken hourglass crunched under his spine. When he finally stopped, at Ikuhara's feet, he could only lay there for a moment, panting and cursing as loudly as he could, then he wiped his eyes again and staggered upright to peer at Takehisa. Ikuhara stood beside him and handed him another piece of cloth.

"Told you to wear your glasses," said Ikuhara.

"Will you be quiet," said Hikaru. He held the cloth up to his right eye, which was bleeding more than the left.

Takehisa stood in the same place, still with the wide-eyed stare, still with the clasped hands. But the gun was gone.

Hikaru's neck prickled and he looked over his shoulder. Through his blood-shot gaze, green eyes, bright like emeralds, yet glittering with a cold dead light, stared back at him.

Then they were gone.

"Amaru!" Hikaru yelled. "Wait!"

Takehisa shrieked hoarsely as long fingers coiled around his neck and flung him to a nearby wall. Amaru stalked towards him. The sun shone bright on his dark hair.

"Where did you get it?" he said in a smooth, modulated voice, but there was murderous intent behind his words. He grabbed Takehisa's neck again. His victim twisted and squirmed, trying to look at his tormentor. Amaru let go for a brief moment, his lips curling into a terrible smile, and sunlight seemed to explode into the room, hot and angry, like branding iron liquefied. "Where. Did. You. Get. It?"

Takehisa screamed and screamed.

Blindly, Hikaru lunged forward to grab him, but Ikuhara had taken hold of his arm and was dragging him out of the door. He struggled; Ikuhara only tightened his grasp.

He heard Aludia say, disinterestedly: "They would travel for leagues and leagues to the precise and remote spot indicated by auspicious signs, and there the massacre would occur. There was a famous strangler -- Buhram of Allahabad -- who in forty years on the job killed more than nine hundred people."

Hikaru let out a long, resigned sigh. Ikuhara ushered him out onto the hallway. The door shut behind them.

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They stepped out on the empty sidewalk at the precise instant that the Chief Inspector's carriage pulled up in front of them. Hikaru turned round rapidly, covering his eyes, while Ikuhara took a step back and waved the swirling dust and grit away patiently. The Chief hopped onto the street amidst the confusion like an overweight primordial fairy. His carriage teetered behind him, harnessed to a team of horses that always seemed to be frothing at the mouth, their eyes glazed, hooves thumping unsteadily as if ready to buckle and collapse on the street, every single time Ikuhara saw them since he could no longer remember. The two junior bureaucrats who accompanied the Chief wherever he went and who now jumped down after him looked on the verge of fainting, too. Ikuhara was about to make a comment about labor legislation, but the Chief glared at him, brows lowered, posture menacing to the extreme. His aides avoided Ikuhara's eyes, as if by doing so they could pretend they were not visible to anyone. As well they might.

"What the hell is going on now?" he demanded. "You're damn lucky the messenger found me in my office. If I had just read your note, I would have burned it on the spot. Well?" he barked. "What is it?"

Ikuhara knew that he knew but he answered dutifully anyway, "We think we found the suspect, sir, but he wouldn't admit to anything when we talked to him, so Inspector Hikaru and I decided to take him to, well..."

"You were the one who insisted," snapped Hikaru, looking over his shoulder. "Don't drag me into this. I was all for bringing him to the Inspectorate."

"But you were the one who asked Amaru for help in the first place," Ikuhara pointed out.

The Chief stared at Hikaru. His aides blinked. "And what happened to you?"

Hikaru shrugged. He seemed to have regained his vision somewhat. His eyes, while still mottled with blood, looked straight at the Chief. "The suspect," he said curtly. "I think. He's certainly powerful enough, if the things he did were any to go by."

Ikuhara gave him a meaningful look.

"Don't say it, Ikuhara," said Hikaru.

"And where's your suspect now?" the Chief asked though he knew the answer to that, too.

Ikuhara gestured at the house behind him.

The Chief looked ready to tear his hair out. "Why did you leave him in there, you fools? Didn't I tell you to--"

"Don't worry," said Ikuhara. "He'll live. I hope."

"It's not that, idiot!" the Chief shouted.

The door, which Ikuhara had left open, flew clear off its hinges and landed on the street with a loud crash. Amaru stepped out. He was dragging something along with him. Something that moved, and moaned.

Hikaru dabbed at his eyes again. The Chief stared.

Amaru didn't look surprised at the sight of the Inspectors. He didn't even seem to notice them. He dropped his burden unceremoniously on the ground. It took Ikuhara a moment to recognize Takehisa.

"Well?" said Amaru. Ikuhara knew he was not talking to him, or to Hikaru, or to the Chief.

The man on the ground looked up. Ikuhara peered down at him then drew back. He exchanged silent glances with Hikaru and the Chief, who nodded curtly.

"I'll tell you everything," Takehisa whispered, blood dripping from the side of his mouth. He was smiling up at Amaru adoringly. "I'll tell you."

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The aides, looking even paler and more shaken than their charge, drove back to the Inspectorate, where they would take Takehisa's statement and charge him formally. Amaru had disappeared while the Chief gave his orders without so much as a by-your-leave, but then that was already to be expected.

"That's it," the Chief muttered and strode into the house, up the narrow winding stairs, and into the drawing room, followed closely by a distracted-looking Ikuhara and a wary Hikaru.

They found Amaru lounging on the divan where Takehisa had sat, reading a book. The sun was no longer so bright; the Chief could discern the outlines of the stained decorations on the windows. A pentagram, a prayer wheel, a particularly malicious and abstruse series of spells, the ingredient for a poison injected through the thorn of a rose.

Aludia was still painting. The only part of her body he could see was her thin white hands, weaving back and forth.

The Chief flung himself on Hikaru's chair and glared at them both. "Look, Amaru," he spat.

"Sumeragi," said Amaru coldly.

"You have never deserved that name less," retorted the Chief in disgust. "What the hell were you trying to pull, killing that boy?"

"Hikaru said he was thirty," answered Aludia, putting down her palette on the table beside her and adjusting the canvas.

"I don't care how old he was!" yelled the Chief. "You had no business murdering him!"

"He is not dead," said Amaru without looking away from his book.

"Quiet!" The Chief realized he was nearly out of his chair, his veins were popping out of his neck, and that he was breathing far too heavily. Ikuhara and Hara kept glancing at him. He loosened his grip on the arms of his chair and slowly sat back, mentally reciting a poem to himself to regain control, if not composure.

"The distinction is irrelevant," he finally said after about ten minutes, when he thought he could speak normally. "Amaru, you will look at me. Or I will have you arrested and shipped off to nurse baby frogs in the South. And should you try to use your twisted magic there, you would automatically transform into a man-eating snake-headed goblin. Would that make you happy, Amaru-kun? SUMERAGI?"

From the way Amaru was staring at him now, green eyes brilliant with solid and hateful menace, obviously not.

The Chief braced himself for the return volley. He didn't really think Amaru would attack him. Perhaps incinerate his hair, but not dismember him completely or anything like that. Still, the Chief sat a little straighter; out of the corner of his eye, he could see Hikaru and Ikuhara reach into their robes for their ofuda. Just let Amaru try to jerk his --

"You're right," said Amaru calmly.

Ikuhara coughed.

What did the damn kid expect him to do with all this excess adrenaline? Maybe he was hoping to burn a hole in his veins.

Aludia sighed. Her breath stirred her veil.

"What?" said the Chief.

Amaru sat up on the divan, swinging his legs down to the floor, which he didn't quite reach. One bare foot dangled as he smiled. The Chief wondered what he was up to. Interrogating Amaru and Aludia, the Chief realized, had ruined him for every other blood sport.

"I shouldn't have been too hard on Takehisa-san," said Amaru.

The Chief glowered at him.

"It would have been kinder," another narrow smile, "to have shot him with the gun your department so thoughtfully supplied us, instead of--? What did I do again, Aludia?"

"Burned him, I think," said Aludia. "His crotch. And you broke most of his bones."

The Chief shot up from his chair despite himself. "The hell you did!"

"You didn't notice?" asked Aludia calmly. She picked up her brush.

Ikuhara coughed again. Hikaru rolled his eyes.

The smile had gone very cold. "Just in case you have forgotten, he killed a hundred people. More, if you would check his statement after your clerks are through with him. And he stole from a dead man. Not just a dead man, but the son of the court onmyouji."

"We're not sure he killed the boy," interjected Hikaru.

"No, of course, not," said Aludia. "But he found his body."

"What did he take?" demanded the Chief.

"I'll give it to you eventually," answered Amaru. "Hikaru and Ikuhara have already talked to us about this."

The Chief closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Ikuhara gave him a slightly apologetic shrug, while Hikaru glared stoically ahead of him.

"All right," the Chief answered wearily. "You win. Just as long as you do not add Human Sacrifice to your list of misdemeanors."

He heard Aludia laugh. Amaru's mouth twisted.

Hikaru gave him a look that said: With all due respect, sir, that disclaimer no longer applies. It never has for a long, long time.

He heaved himself up from his chair. It would be dusk soon, though the light was still strong. Afternoons were longer during summer. "We're going," he said curtly.

"So soon?" said Aludia. "Won't you have tea first?"

"Um--"

"No, Ikuhara," said Hikaru, glaring at him.

Ikuhara raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

The Chief looked around him for a moment, noting that Amaru, probably during that interval when he was barking orders at his frightened aides, had already cleared a table and had laid out the chess pieces. So it was to be chess tonight.

"You'll hear from me soon," he said.

Aludia inclined her head. Then she glanced at Amaru, who shrugged and lay back down on the divan. The room darkened abruptly, as if curtains had been pulled together, though there were none. The windows remained unshuttered. As he left the room, the Chief glanced over his shoulder, and saw that Aludia was removing her veil. He paused to watch. Ikuhara nearly bumped into his back, and muttered an apology, but Hikaru, too, was staring.

She smiled at them through her white, white face, her narrow eyes that stared and glowed like a predator seeing in the dark, blacker than her eyes, but her hair was blackest yet, it fell to her knees, and it was as if she hadn't removed her veil after all.

"By the way, Inspector Hikaru," she said, "wouldn't you like to see my painting? I knew you wanted to look but I wasn't finished and I was too preoccupied talking to Takehisa-san."

Slowly, she turned the canvas.

"I was thinking about Yuki-onna. The Snow Queen," she said, smiling. Her teeth, too, were very white, as white as incongruous snow, whiter than her skin. "But somehow I found myself painting the Holy Virgin. What do you think?"

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"Are you sure they're not vampires?" said Ikuhara later as they rode a hired carriage back to the Inspectorate. It had taken them half an hour to find one. No one lived in the street where Amaru and Aludia did. "Because I was reading this text and I could have sworn I saw a copy of it in Amaru's library--"

Hikaru snorted. "No. Not vampires. Worse. They're mad."

The Chief was quiet. He had not spoken since they left the house.

"Well, Chief?" Ikuhara nudged him. "You don't think they've started to transfigure themselves into weird foreign monsters, do you?"

"No," he finally said in a tired voice. It had been a long day. "They're just children, Ikuhara."

"Children?" said Ikuhara blankly.

"You're joking, right? Aren't you, Chief? It was a joke?" said Hikaru after a protracted silence. Ikuhara was choking. Hikaru gave him a distracted thwack on the head.

But what else were they?

Whatever it was, they had already decided, and there was really nothing he could do. The Chief crossed his arms and stared out of the window. The carriage rocked and swayed as the horses stumbled on something in the street. Perhaps a dead man, thought the Chief. The suddenly rising moon careened crazily in his vision. He remembered Aludia's painting: the Virgin, as she called her, with eyes of glass-encrusted orbs, like a violated doll, or a shattered hourglass, clasping a young boy's body to her breast, holding his heart. Crying his blood.

Children, he thought again.

End Prologue

Note: The 'story' Aludia was telling is based on the book "The Confessions of a Thug," by Meadows Taylor (1839). Sick sick girl.