The fat man chuckled. “Don’t pretend at such moral posturing, Janx ol’ boy. Yes, I know who you are, all right. You’re not a non-entity like this fellow.” He indicated Avery. “Anyway, you’re hardly better than I am, or at least you were. I don’t know anymore. But if you’ve reformed then I pity you, and laugh at you.” Gaescruhd sighed and finally changed position, scooting his butt back to push against the bench. He reached for some clothes nearby—Janx tensed—but pulled out only a cigar and a lighter. Sparking up, he said, “I had been saving this for after. Oh well.”
“I suppose you’re to thank for the slaves the priesthood abuses,” Avery said.
Gaescruhd rolled hairy, shapeless shoulders. “I’m to thank for many things.” He studied them, his gaze lingering on Janx’s knife. “And me without my muscle. Figures. Just when I need them most. But they wouldn’t accept the Sacrament, and only believers are allowed here.”
Avery noticed what he hadn’t before, that the fingers of the mobster’s left hand had fused together, and his nose had shrunk. From the redness, it appeared to be a fairly recent mutation.
“You a believer now?” Janx said. “Bullshit.”
“I believe in power,” Gaescruhd said. “The Collossum has it. By spreading his will, I have it too. Didn’t figure on getting fished, but times do change, and I know where the wind blows. Or the sea spray, perhaps.”
“You were once the go-between between Jessryl Sheridan and the Collossum,” Avery said. “Are you still?”
The fat man inhaled a plume of smoke, swirled it around his mouth, and blew it in Avery’s general direction. “Information is a commodity.”
“What do you have to trade?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something. Chances are I can help you get it. But in return ...”
“You want your freedom.”
Gaescruhd nodded. To Avery’s relief, the man’s tumescence was finally fading. Avery and Janx shared a look.
“This scum deserves to die,” Janx said. “You don’t know. You don’t live in his world, Doc. You don’t know what he’s done. I do. He needs to die.”
“I’m sure he does,” Avery said, “but we need information. Agreed?”
Janx spat again. “I’m just here to back you up.”
Regarding Gaescruhd, Avery said, “Tells us what we want to know and your life is spared.”
“Very well,” Gaescruhd said. With some amusement, he added, “Shall we shake?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. What we want to know is where the relic taken from Atosh is. If you are still Sheridan’s go-between, you might be the one she passed it to. You might have been the one to deliver it to the Collossum.”
“So I did.”
“Wait a minute,” Janx said. “If Sheridan’s here, does that mean she accepted the Sacrament, too? She a fisher now?” To Avery, he said, “No offense.”
“She is not,” Gaescruhd said. “Visitors are encouraged to accept it, but it is optional. Only we who live here must be complete converts.”
“The relic,” Avery said. “Where is it?”
Gaescruhd gestured with his cigar. “That way. In his laboratory.”
“Whose?”
“Who else, you fool?”
“Why in a lab?”
“Ask him. Now, I have fulfilled my end of the agreement.” The mobster stood to go, gathering his clothes, and began moving to the door the boy had taken. “It has been a pleas—”
The last word ended on a wet note, as Janx tackled him to the floor, burying the fat man under his immense weight, and began plunging his knife into Gaescruhd’s broad, hairy back, again and again. Red dripped from his blade, and Gaescruhd thrashed like a stuck pig. Janx stabbed, even as Avery blanched and nearly vomited. He wanted to call out for Janx to stop, but it was too late. When at last Janx stopped stabbing, the big man rose shakily and ripped his robes off; they’d been spattered with blood. He wiped his knife on them and replaced it in its sheath.
Blood spread out from Gaescruhd’s corpse, and Janx stepped away from it, not hurriedly. He showed no disgust, only weariness.
“Why?” Avery asked him. “We had a deal.”
Grimly, Janx said, “I lied.”
Avery held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. Fighting down the impulse to rebuke Janx, and fighting another urge to retch, Avery stepped around Gaescruhd’s corpse and pushed through the door the mobster had been traveling toward, as it was in the same direction Gaescruhd had indicated the laboratory was. Janx followed.
“We’ll have to hurry,” Avery said. “His body could be found at any time.”
“If he’d lived, he woulda just raised the alarm.”
“We could have bound him. Gagged him.”
Janx didn’t reply, but Avery could almost feel his rage, not quite spent yet, even with the man’s death. He had truly hated Gaescruhd.
Avery led on, taking one room and then another. Some rooms had multiple doors, and always he took the direction Gaescruhd had indicated, judging his relationship to the room of worship by the fading-then-swelling sounds of singing. This place was a maze, a warren of arbitrarily enlarged, truncated and divided rooms, with doorways installed brutally into walls that hadn’t originally been meant for them and bare pipes snaking along the ceiling. Searching for the lab, Avery followed the pipes and, when he saw them, wires. Soon the rough wood walls around him became metal, and somewhat cleaner. He and Janx stepped through into what was obviously a laboratory, with benches and tables laden with equipment, much of it esoteric.
A man stood over a microscope, but he snapped up at Avery and Janx’s arrival.
“Who—?”
Janx grabbed him by the shirtfront and hauled him up off the ground. His legs kicked spastically. Avery feared at first that the man might be the Collossum, but, since he didn’t immediately kill Janx, Avery decided not.
