The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1)

by Daniel O'Malley

“Do not question me! I possess the knowledge of the ages!” he gargled. “Big deal,” said Myfanwy with a snort. “You know, fifteen minutes before I met you I had drinks with a vampire. The man has been dead since the eighteenth century, and he still manages to be quite well mannered.”

She took a sip of reclaimed coffee and winced. Diplomacy isn’t working. Good manners aren’t working. Hell, even sanity isn’t working, she thought. I’m just going to have to talk plainly with this thing. She took a deep breath.

The heart wasn’t much of a lead. They ran it through every scanning device known to man and got that anorexic girl who claims to be psychometric to try a reading, but even she got nothing. So the heart is now down in one of the locked fridges, and I am without a clue as to why it was sent to me. If I were in a better mood and had a shit sense of humor, I’d suggest that it was a valentine, but I shall restrain myself and instead talk about our latest acquisition—and how I got stuck with a hasty cover-up operation.

A duck intelligent enough to communicate with people might (I thought) be intelligent enough to lie about telling the future. But I was in a unique position to test its skills because I already knew what my future held.

“Duck, will I be attacked by operatives of the Checquy?” I asked. Its neck straightened abruptly, and it pecked the Y button on the keyboard. Its answer displayed on the monitor. Since my fate had already been predicted by, among others, a schoolboy, a homeless man, and a thirty-seven-hundred-year-old oracle, this wasn’t the greatest revelation in the world, but I was impressed with the duck’s rapid response.

“I’ll fix your hair,” he said, pulling a comb out of his inner coat pocket and holding it up. “Oh,” I said. He unbent and stood behind me, carefully rearranging my hair. “You’re good,” I said, eyes downcast. He smelled delicious. I remembered for a moment my crush on his brother, and felt my cheeks flush. “I have a female body,” he said briskly. “All right, you look fine.” Actually, though I hated to admit it, I looked quite good. “Thanks. And here, your tie is crooked.” I straightened it self-consciously, and smoothed his collar. It was while we were in this pose, with me up on tiptoes, him looking at me, and both of us flushed with running, that the doors opened. Ingrid was there. Anthony was there. Gestalt’s executive assistant and his bodyguard—a slim Chinese chick with lots of facial piercings—were there. Everyone was staring.

It was clear that Henderson didn’t know exactly what kind of organization the Checquy was. He seemed to be laboring under the (not entirely inaccurate) assumption that we were involved in military intelligence and had stumbled onto a relic of unsurpassed mystical value. He told us patronizingly that no matter what we might believe, there was more in the world than what we saw on the street. That mysterious forces were all around us, and our mundane assumptions vastly underestimated the supernatural power that existed in the world.

“Should we kill him?” wondered Eckhart. “That might be best,” mused Farrier. “Bishop Alrich?” “I just had dinner,” Alrich murmured. “We were just thinking about killing him, not draining him,” said Eckhart. “And then perhaps we could try reading his entrails?” proposed Grantchester.

Caroline Grantchester, thirty-nine years old, was wearing a cocktail dress the color of champagne, and she was beautiful, with dark hair, the bluest eyes in the world, and a figure that proved beyond all doubt that the baby was adopted. Well, that and the letterpress announcement we’d all gotten in the mail that the Grantchesters were adopting a baby.

It was inevitable, really, that the party was going to be awkward. At least for Gestalt, Gubbins, and myself—the three members of the Court who had been raised at the Estate. Wattleman predated it. Farrier, Grantchester, and Eckhart had come into their powers late in life. And Alrich, well, he’d been doing this dance for more than a century. They all knew what it was like to be a person rather than a tool. But those of us who had been brought up to be assets first, warriors second, and people if there was ever some spare time scrambled to make normal conversation.

Normal people were free to go about their daily lives, with their petty trials and tribulations, secure in the knowledge that the supernatural wouldn’t bother them. Christ, they didn’t even have to believe in the supernatural. That was for us to concern ourselves with.

No, we’re not a family. But we are supposed to be a team. We may not like one another, but we should respect and be loyal to one another. When you go to the Estate, that’s the only thing they promise you. That within the Checquy, you can trust those around you. Looking around at my comrades, I felt more betrayed than ever. I’d always known that gatherings like these were a pleasant fiction, but tonight’s pleasantries were an outright lie. As we smiled at one another and chatted about the weather, one of my colleagues was planning to destroy me.

Anyone else might have lost themselves entirely, but she was Myfanwy Thomas, and she had been born abruptly into herself. She knew everything she had experienced in her brief life, and she could separate her own sensations from what was being foisted onto her. Her thoughts floated on top, and she wrenched herself out of the morass.

Myfanwy looked down and saw that she was standing barefoot on a little islet of muscle mass. All around her, there was a broad pool of caustic fluid that was wrinkling the leather of the bodyguard’s boots. Clumps of skin and bones were scattered about the room, along with a few bleached corpses. She nodded and he scooped her up like a baby, cradling her. He walked hurriedly, and after they emerged from the building and went down the steps, someone else took her while the bodyguard shucked off his boots. A trickle of fluid was coming down the stairs, but the image that stayed in Myfanwy’s mind was the tiny little island that had kept her free of the acid, perfectly placed under her feet.

Am I going to do this? Am I really going to confront them with this? This person can destroy my life. She thought of Gallows Keep and the terrors that waited there for a person the Checquy could not trust. Of the penalties that would be inflicted on an infiltrator. And then she thought of all the letters she had read. She recalled the despair and the hope and the effort that Thomas had put into them. Into her. This person can destroy my life. But they already destroyed Thomas’s, and by God, they’ll pay for that.

“It turns out that Gestalt has a fifth body—a smaller body—and that body was in the company of your wife, with her unforgettable blue eyes. So I did a little research and found that Eliza Gestalt took long service leave some time ago—and returned just before you adopted your baby. And there are other things. I know that she has a scar across her stomach and that she has been withdrawn of late. In short, I think your adopted child is Gestalt’s baby. I think your child is Gestalt.

“You terrify the Grafters. A woman who can control living matter. Their great advantage—the weapons with which they can smite the Checquy—are all biological. They wouldn’t be able to shoot their guns if you decided that you didn’t want them to. Any enhancements their agents possess could tear themselves out at your command. You, my dear, are their worst nightmare. And also their greatest possibility. You’re our uranium. If we can reverse-engineer you, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.”

Myfanwy stared at him. Of course this happened, she thought wearily. After the longest day and night in recorded history, of course there’s a naked man in my office. And he’s a Grafter. Well, at least this one’s got his skin on, if nothing else.

“How did you infiltrate us?” “Oh, well, it is easy enough to turn your Retainers,” he said, a little thrown by her lack of response. “They get sick of being treated like they’re second best. No matter how good they are, they will always be normal, and they can never rise beyond a certain rank. Your Pawns strut around with their special abilities, gliding down the hallways and typing with their tentacles. And those poor Retainers watch them enviously, knowing they will never be respected.

So it was with an open mind, and a couple of extremely large fellows from my estates as backup, that I accompanied my cousin to his residence, where a handful of grubby men were engaged in some extremely complicated experiments in a barn. They were too socially awkward and uninterested in me to be recruiting agents of the devil. Rather than making any sort of overtures for my soul, they spent several hours explaining to me exactly what their work consisted of. Their earnest descriptions gave me a headache, but their optimism about providing me with a new leg was tremendously exciting.

We’ll bind them with contracts and oaths and promises of full disclosure. You keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and the Grafters are both.

It’s so easy to despair. I know that I have no choice in what’s coming, and for me it’s not a matter of faith or fatalism. It’s simply knowledge. I guess you could say this means there’s no free will, but in writing these letters, I like to think that I’m making my own choices. And besides, free will has never been something I had too much of in this life. I’m grateful for whatever I can get.

Gestalt came to me when I was helping a friend move, and I thought rather wistfully that this would be much less of a pain in the butt if I had a few extra bodies. And voilà! I was so thrilled with the idea that I had to put down a television set so I could scribble down the concept.