Neon Stonehenge - Ch. 7 (all readers) (Patreon)

Chapter Seven – “What We’re Calling ‘Penancewear’”

            I wish that anytime I took a case that all the rest of the daily shit that goes on in day-to-day living would simply drop by the wayside and I could just focus on whatever it was I was working on exclusively. Sadly, life, as always, had different plans in mind for me, and nobody ever lets me just concentrate when there’s rough shit on my plate I’m trying to work through.

            This is all to point out that when my cell phone rang and Bad Penny’s name popped up on my caller ID, I should’ve been expecting some kind of chaos to have dropped in my life before this, but BP’s just the sort of usual nonsense that comes with everyday work weeks.

            I get a call from BP about once or twice a season, so often so that she has me on retainer, but I offered her that retainer rate with one very specific caveat in place. If the problem is of BP’s own making, I charge her an additional day’s work, quite often in addition to hazard pay. That’s slowed the amount of calls she makes to me every year, but certainly hasn’t stopped them any. And I end up collecting on those surcharges about half the time my phone rang with her name on it.

            Penny Crowley (yes, unfortunately, of that lineage) was one of San Francisco’s best known necromancers, a particular stripe of magic I was never keen to get entangled with, but she certainly had her uses, and I’d been known to knock a season or so off her retainer any time I had to enlist her skills, but the relationship was far more in her favor than it was mine. You’d think it hard for someone who spends most of their professional time talking to the dead to accumulate seriously threatening enemies, but BP was simply that good (or that bad, depending on how you looked at it) at selecting her clients.

I’d told her time and time again that the slightest amount of research would’ve probably cut down her problem intake by half, but she insisted that it would also slow her income by sizably more, and that wasn’t something she could afford to do, mainly because BP also had a gambling addiction and was known to run up the ledgers of any bookie daring enough to take her bets.

            (When bookies came to collect on BP, I’d buy her more time, but I’d never once allowed her to skip out on a marker. Debts that were owed would be paid, one way or another, otherwise how could I expect her to pay her debts to me? To date, she’d always made good on her ledgers…eventually. I wasn’t particularly keen to find out how.)

            “Penny, I hope whatever you’re calling about is serious, because this isn’t exactly a great time,” I said into my cellphone, praying like hell it was just a butt dial.

            “Dale, dear boy, I never call for anything less than the most vital of crises,” she says to me, her voice that of a schoolmarm disliking the line of questioning from one of her pupils. “Besides, you’ll at least find this one interesting. I think I’m being followed by a pirate.”

            “Oh come on, Pen,” I grumbled. “Who am I, Benjamin Hornigold? It’s 2012. How the hell are you being followed by a pirate?”

            “I don’t think it’s a living pirate, Sexton,” she hissed at me. “I think it’s a ghast, a ghostly pirate tied to some gig I did a few years ago.”

            “A few years ago?” I said to her. “Why the hell would it be after you now then?”

            “I don’t know! I can’t think of anything I’ve done that would’ve incurred a pirate’s wrath! But I’m being followed by something undead in a conquistador’s outfit!”

            “Is it a conquistador or is it a pirate, Penny? They’re two entirely different things.”

            “I don’t know the difference, Sexton, but in either case, I’ve got you on retainer to keep me safe from these sorts of things.”

            “Fine, fine,” I grumbled. “Where are you?”

            “Downtown, just about a block away from The Punch Line.”

            “The hell are you doing out in the financial district this time of night?”

            “I was on a consult! Completely unrelated! Now get your ass over here!”

            “Alright, alright, I’m about twenty minutes out.”

            “Twenty minutes?” she shrieked at me.

            “I’m over at Ocean Beach, Penny,” I told her as I started walking in from the sand, kicking loose bits of grit from between my toes. “Besides, you don’t sound like you’re under immediate threat.”

            “Isn’t the park closed this late at night?”

            “Who’s lecturing who now?” I asked her, stepping over to the public footwash station, running my feet under the water to get them clean before sitting down and pulling on my socks and boots. “You’ve got to have more than this for me to go on. A ghostly pirate or conquistador that might be related to a case you worked on years ago? Sounds so flimsy you couldn’t put a sticker on it.”

            “Just come and cover my ass, Gunslinger! That’s what I pay you for!”

            She hung up on me before I could gift her with one of my witty repartees, which meant Penny was genuinely quite nervous about what was going on, and that I needed to find her relatively quickly. I’d taken the Kawasaki over to the beach, so at least that was in my favor, although I was starting to reconsider the validity to my sister’s idea that I should have a griffon on call in case I needed to move across the city even faster than this.

            I hopped on my bike and started tearing through the streets of San Francisco like a screaming demon cutting through the foggy night air. One of the reasons I loved San Francisco was the fog, which the Bay Area had affectionately named Karl a few years back. It provided the perfect cover for people like me to move about at night without prying eyes causing all sorts of problems. People can think they saw all sorts of things happening within the visual obscurity of the fog, but nobody really knows for certain. Also, late at night San Francisco is something of a ghost town, with literally nobody in it.

            See, San Francisco’s a commuter town, so when the sun goes down, the population of the city plummets like you wouldn’t believe. That means it’s much easier to get away without being spotted, because the buildings you see all around you are mostly empty, or at least they are in stark contrast to how they are during the day.

            Because of this, my bike can go a lot faster than it’s supposed to, although it does have a tendency to leave a single flaming tire streak in its wake when I deploy the hellfire thrusts. I don’t mind. It makes me look much more badass than I really am. It’s another trick I picked up from my father. The appearance of being threatening is just as important as actually being threatening. It wasn’t enough just to be capable in a position like ours – you had to remind people of what you could do (and would do) every now and then. You had to make sure people were scared of you when you wanted them to be.

            I cut across the city, leaping off one hill when I crested it, leaving an arc of fire behind me as I ripped through the night fog, sending denizens of the night scattered like terrified cockroaches. Nobody wanted to get in my way. They all knew better.

            When I get into the Financial District, the whole place is deader than any graveyard or a policeman’s birthday party. The ground floors of the buildings were lit up, but everything’s closed, and all of the buildings are actually empty, nary a soul to disturb me in my work. There’s something eerie about a highly lit area with nobody around.

            I say ‘nobody,’ but that clearly wasn’t the case because I could see a handful of shadows sprinting away in different directions. Now, I knew most of these weren’t problems, but it still could’ve been any of these people who were in the pursuit of my client.

            I keep a tracking spell on all my regular clients, but they aren’t long range, so I just need to get close enough and I can figure out where the hell they’re hiding. This particular spot had a couple of second floor pedestrian bridges around with walkways beneath them and that meant they were premiere hiding spots for Penny, who always seemed to think elevation ensured security. There was a gossamer trail of silver faerie dust, the kind I use to indicate my clients’ location.

            For a few seconds, I let my eyes sweep the area, making sure there wasn’t anything I was missing, then I used a LiftFoot spell to let me quickly climb through the air, stepping on invisible platforms that sparked beneath my feet as I moved to stand on the bridge.

            The area looked empty.

            I knew all too well that it wasn’t.

            My hand passed through the air and the veil Penny had thrown up in a hurry stripped away like so much useless magic, revealing her form bundled up in a tiny ball, looking up at me with an intense sense of relief on her face. “Jesus, Gunslinger!” Penny said to me. “It fucking took you long enough!”

            Penny Crowley had never had the best sense of fashion, looking more like a Victorian era schoolmarm than someone who lived in modern San Francisco. She appeared to be in her sixties, but I knew far better than anyone how appearances could be utterly deceiving. Her hair was mostly grey with black streaks in it, her makeup overdone and excessive by any stretch of the imagination. Her outfit was layers upon layers, and I was more than a little certain that there were petticoats in some of them. She had rings on all her fingers and enough necklaces hanging around her neck to weigh down a small horse. She reeked of bad taste in magic and even worse judgment.

            “Penny, shut the hell up a minute,” I said to her, glancing around her, my hand reaching to pull one of the SoulEnders from its holster, feeling its familiar weight in my hand once more.

            The act of drawing one of the SoulEnders had gotten to be an action I was far more comfortable than I was comfortable with. It wasn’t a weapon anymore; it was an extension of me. I knew how to use the weapon to do any number of things, many of which weren’t even the primary function of a weapon.

            Because the SoulEnders were far more than simple weapons.

Almost no one understood that.

With a flick of my wrist, the gun in my hand started eating up loose magics. There was a swirl towards the end of the barrel. The SoulEnders fed anytime they were used, but this feeding ability could be used to strip away all concealment magics in an area. I hadn’t been entirely sure I’d find any, but there, just down against one of the lampposts, I saw a figure starting to take shape. Across the street, against the side of the building, there was another concealment being torn asunder, but it wasn’t large enough to conceal a figure, so I assigned it second priority in my mind.

As the veil was ripped free, I saw that Penny wasn’t entirely out of her mind, but it also wasn’t at all what she’d told me it was.

It wasn’t a pirate or a conquistador; it was a goddamn jester.

“Byron, is that you?” I said, pointing the SoulEnder at the scrawny figure in the jester’s costume.

“Yeah! Don’t shoot, Dale! It’s me! It’s me, Byron!” the elf shouted my way, his hands raised to indicate his surrender. “It’s just your old pal Byron Oldbarley! Just here doing my job, that’s all!”

“Byron, get the hell up here and explain yourself, will you?”

“Dale, I—”

“Byron, don’t fuck with me tonight, okay?” I sighed, keeping the SoulEnder pointed his direction. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I’m working, Dale!” The jester leaped up from the street onto the pedestrian foot bridge and I could get a good look at him. It was clearly a jester’s costume and not, as Penny had claimed, some kind of pirate. There were curls on the feet that ended in bells, and the hat had another four sets of bells hanging off it. The colors were garish, even for San Francisco, large patches of different shades, greens and purples mostly. “What do you think of the outfit?”

“I think you look like a goddamn idiot, Byron,” I told him. “But okay, I’ll bite. What’s with the jester’s costume?”

“It’s a jester’s costume?” Penny asked me.

“Quiet, Penny,” I told her.

“It’s an enchanted bit of what we’re calling ‘penancewear,’” Byron said to me, beaming with pride. “The idea is that it’s meant to evoke the spirits of your ancestors, in order to get the person I’m following to be more likely to pay their debts.”

“How do they know it’s tied to a debt they owe?” I asked him.

“I show up and tell the debtor that they’re going to be followed by their ancestors until they pay their debts, Dale,” Byron laughed. “Of course I do. Otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t make a lot of sense, would it?”

“And Penny Crowley is indebted to…?”

“Bill Travolta. Same as always.”

I glanced over at Penny, who was making her way to her feet indignantly. “You made no such claims to me, sir!” she yelled at Byron, gesticulating wildly at him with one finger. “And certainly no such mention was made of… of… THAT!”

Byron sighed, shaking his head as he reached to his belt, grabbing what looked like a piece of doll furniture. He set it down on the ground, waved his hand over it, and the furniture grew from doll size to human size, before the elf moved to open the third of four drawers, looking through the files before settling on the one he was looking for. He pulled a stack of papers out, setting it atop of the row of files, opening a folder before unfurling a scroll about as long as my arm. “This is your signature on a document informing you that you were to be ‘disturbed magically’ until you have settled your debt, in full, with Lord Bill Travolta, head proprietor of Travolta’s Trials & Tribulations. You can quite clearly see it here at the bottom, Lady Crowley,” Byron said, tapping the bottom of the scroll with one of his long fingers.

It was my turn to sigh and shake my head. “Penny, what did I tell you about calling me to come scare off creditors for you?”

“This one didn’t seem like a creditor, Sexton!” she yelled. “It looked… it looked…” She glanced over at Byron, who was impossible to take seriously in that outfit at close quarters. “He looked much scarier than that!”

“Any last words from the defense?” I asked Byron, at this point more amused by the whole thing than bothered by it.

“She was warned in advance, she signed her acknowledgement of said warning, and the outfit is supposed to create a sense of general discomfort,” Byron laughed.  “She’s late on payments that she agreed to make. By the terms of the accord, we aren’t allowed to actually hurt her, but we are well within our rights to make her life as uncomfortable as possible. That’s the way the accreditor’s clause has read since your father agreed to it decades ago, and I’m clearly operating within the agreed upon boundaries, causing the client discomfort without in any way giving her any real threat.”

“What’s with the jester’s outfit?”

Byron shrugged a little bit. “It was the last one Catalina had in stock, so I figured, everyone’s only going to see the haunting ancestors anyway, so what do I care what I look like when I’ve got it on?”

“Didn’t foresee conversations with authorities, despite the fact that you’re in the debt collection gig?”

“It’s within the permits!” Byron said a touch defensively. “When you’re delinquent on payment, we’re not supposed to make your life easier! We’re supposed to annoy you to the point where you just want to pay to make it stop! My appearance is not on trial here.”

“I mean, as ridiculous as he looks, the elf makes a fair point,” I said with a chuckle. “You’re in debt, Penny, and you did agree to endure this sort of behavior until you paid up. You also had every right to ask Byron to identify himself.”

“I did!” Penny shouted at me.

“She did not,” Byron said. “Or if she did, it wasn’t in English. I’ve got all my encounters recorded on GoPro if that’s needed.” He tapped the little square camera he had clipped to his chest. Byron, like most of the magical credit enforcers in California, was meticulous in making sure his ass was covered. “She was shouting a lot of Latin my way, but it’s all Greek to me.”

“That joke wasn’t funny the first dozen or so times you made it, Byron.” I nodded quietly. “That’s in line with the accords, though. If you weren’t demanding he identify himself in English, that’s on you, not on him.”

“But Dale—”

“Don’t ‘but Dale’ me, Penny,” I told her. “This has to do with a debt you owe. You know what that means. This isn’t within the terms of the contract regarding your protection, and as such, you’ll be getting an invoice for incidental services invoked. If you don’t want to be bothered like this, either pay your debts on time or stop making such stupid fucking bets in the first place!”

“But the Super Bowl—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Penny,” I said, shaking my head. “Next time, I’m going to start stacking fees, so you’d better get your shit together, for your own sake, otherwise I’m going to end up taking that nice house of yours in lieu of my fees. I’ve always wanted a house near the Palace of Fine Arts.”

Penny glared at me, but knew enough not to talk back, especially when she’d put me in a foul mood. She nodded, accepting her fate. The last thing she wanted was me to zero out her options and null her contract, leaving her unprotected. “I’ll… I’ll be better. Sorry, Gunslinger.”

I tucked the SoulEnder back into the holster and moved over to the rail, hopping over the side of it and falling down gentle to the ground below, my natural featherfall spell baked into my boots making sure I descended gracefully, leaving Penny and Byron to work out the last of their differences.

Despite the fact that I’d been focusing on Byron’s pursuit of Penny, he wasn’t the only thing I’d stumbled across tonight. Against the building across the street, there’d been another concealment spell I’d stripped away, and I needed to go see what sort of magical debris I’d stumbled across.

The space that had been concealed by the spell wasn’t large, no more than a foot and a half on each side, and in that space, I saw something I certainly hadn’t anticipated running into. A Bhatt Box.

Nobody really knows the origins of the Bhatt Boxes. They’re named after Patel Bhatt, the first one to discover any of them, almost a thousand years ago in Anhilwara, India. There are probably a thousand of them scattered around the world, although that count could be off by an order of magnitude in either direction. Nobody knows what they’re for or what they do, exactly, but they make a lot of very smart magicians very, very nervous, because they run on the magical equivalent of a nuclear reaction, a Hand of Glory.

If you aren’t familiar with a Hand of Glory, let me enlighten you. First, you need to hang a man. The most powerful Hand of Glories are from dead murderers who have been hung, but it really only needs to be a criminal of some kind. After you’ve hung the criminal, you have to lop off one of his hands, usually the left, unless it was a murderer, in which case you want ‘the hand that did the deed,’ which can be harder to deduce than you might first think. You also want to drain some of the fat from the body, because you’re going to make a candle with it later. Then you dry and pickle the hand. At the end of all of this, depending on how well you’ve followed the rituals involved, you’ve created a magical battery with a power somewhere between ten sticks of dynamite and a thermonuclear warhead.

They’re stable, they’re strong and they aren’t volatile, all of which are things in their favor, in terms of using them to power long-term, freestanding magical projects, as long as they aren’t damaged or disturbed too much, either of which can result in all sorts of problems.

The Bhatt Boxes are ornately carved wooden boxes, bound in heavy iron and silver, that are left beneath heavy enchantments, scattered around the world, almost always in major cities. We think they’re gathering information of some kind. Maybe they’re designed to do long-form or long-scale calculations or research, but as far as we can tell, they don’t emit any signals, they don’t ever report back to anything. Also, while we’ve never been able to successfully open one without damaging the contents, we can’t seem to find any data storage inside of them either. And they don’t seem to affect the area around them.

We don’t know who put them where they are. We don’t know how many of them there are. We don’t know where almost all of them are. We don’t know how long they’ve been there. We don’t know who built them. We don’t know if they’ve ever been moved. We can’t tell if they’re ancient spellwork or something relatively modern. The first one we know of was discovered in the year 1127 in the city of Anhilwara, India, and it looked a little old at the time, but we’re almost certain there were dozens, if not hundreds, already in play long before that. In fact, the only thing we do know is that when they’re removed, usually another one shows up somewhere else in the same city. But even that’s not fully confirmed, since the concealments on the Bhatt Boxes are top notch, and generally only get removed by the sort of industrial grade magic destroyers as the SoulEnders and things on their general power scale.

So what the hell are they?

Fuck if I know, but I also know that destroying them can be incredibly bad luck, so I didn’t have any desire to do that, and I don’t even believe in luck.

I made a note of the exact location of the Bhatt Box, because the location of it was valuable intel, and then I pulled my cellphone out to call Disappearing Dwayne, tapping his name on my contacts list and preparing to get an earful.

“Well, if it isn’t my old friend Dale Sexton,” Dwayne’s voice said on the other end of the line. “How long has it been? Two, three years?”

‘Not long enough,’ I thought to myself as I sighed.

“I don’t usually need your services, Dwayne, so it’s best if our paths don’t cross too often,” I told him. “Besides, you’re usually in the line of work that involves hiding people and things from me, and I figure it’s best if I don’t have to come and lean on you too often. That way if I’m truly stumped, I can come and admit defeat while threatening you enough to still get what I need.”

“I can’t tell if I ought to be flattered or insulted,” Dwayne said to me.

“You can be both. I won’t mind.”

“Why are you calling me then, Sexton?”

“How’d you like for me to actually owe you a favor?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Are you serious?”

“I’m as surprised by this offer as you are, Dwayne, but I need your services, and when it comes to what you do, you’re one of the best in this part of the world.”

There was a slight sniff, and I think Dwayne might’ve been shedding a single tear of pride on the other end of the line. “That might be one of the damn nicest things anyone’s ever said to me, Gunslinger. A’right, what do you need done?”

“I need a stationary concealment spell of the highest caliber. I’ve stumbled onto a Bhatt Box, and I have no desire to move or disturb it,” I tell him. “I’d rather just make a note in my book as to its location, have you cover it back up in the best concealment magics you’re capable of, and then just hopefully never have to think about the damn thing ever again.”

“Bhatt Box, huh?” he said. “Haven’t had to disappear one of those before, but I know the sorts of magics they use to cover them.”

“’They?’” I ask, curiously.

“The royal ‘they,’ Gunslinger,” he chuckled. “Relax. I don’t know anything more about them than you do, probably less, truth be told, and I’d rather keep it that way. They spook me.”

“Yeah, well, don’t go spreading this around town, but you’re not the only one,” I admitted. “They unnerve me as well.”

“The mighty Druid Gunslinger shivering in his boots at a little tiny box? Who’d have thought?”

“Yeah, well, the one time one of those things was destroyed, it ate an entire colony, so maybe don’t make fun of me and my cautions, huh?”

“Wait, really? When was this?”

“1588. What’s now North Carolina.”

“… Roanoke?”

“Before there was a Druid Gunslinger, there was a Druid Swordbearer, and the bearer of the time came across one of these damn Bhatt Boxes and attempted to use SoulCleaver on it. It worked, but when the magical blast had dissipated, all 100+ colonists had vanished into thin air, and the Swordbearer was left entirely alone. Never did figure out what the hell happened, but you can imagine I’m not eager to repeat that kind of effect in downtown San Francisco, especially down in the financial district.”

“Yeah, I get that,” he replied. “Sure, I can come down there and bury it up for you, make sure it isn’t going to call down anything neither of us wants to stumble onto it. My work studio isn’t more than a couple of blocks away from the financial district, and I have no real desire to be a blip disappeared in the night. Can you hang out by it for twenty minutes or so, just so it’s not exposed to any Tom, Dick and Harry who wanders by?”

“It’s the middle of the night, Dwayne,” I told him. “I highly doubt anyone’s going to come by and poke their head into the financial district.”

“And you’re there… why exactly?”

I sighed. Not because I didn’t have an answer, but because he was right. I hated that. “Yeah, okay, I can wait here.”

“Cool. Text me the street crossing and I’ll see you in a few.”

After he hung up, I texted him the cross streets before I took a picture of the Bhatt Box up close, then several more to document its exact location, and then sent all the pictures to my sister, Charlotte.

-How the hell did you stumble across that?- she texted me.

-Trying to peel away a concealment for a paranoid client. I’ve got Disappearing Dwayne coming over to hide it back up. Unless you want to take it off my hands.-

-Fuck no.- she shot back. -But I’ll get it added to the atlas. And hopefully we never speak of it again.-

It would be quite some time before we spoke of it again, but it certainly wasn’t the last time this particular Bhatt Box would ruin my night.