“Maybe there’s a rear exit,” Layanna said.
“There is,” Coleel said. He appeared stricken but resolved. He’d lost two men, but he was alive and was going to make good on their sacrifice. “This way.”
They pushed their way through the smoky room, past a stairwell and into a dark hall. At the end, a door led out onto an alley. Coleel shoved it open—then jerked back. Avery just barely saw around him several hunched forms clothed in tatters, cowls pulled low over their corpse-like faces. A radio static hiss emerged from their mouths, along with a fetid stench that Avery could smell five feet away.
Avery slipped around Coleel and slammed the door in their faces. It locked automatically. The door bucked as the figures on the other side threw their weight against it, then again. Avery and the others drew back, waiting for a third attempt, but none came. Avery checked his pistol: one bullet left.
“Who are they?” Coleel said, staring at the door. He was breathing heavily. “You said … priests of the Restoration?”
“That’s right,” Layanna said.
“I’ve heard of them. Some new cult. There’s always another one in this city. I myself have belonged to many. I always leave when it grows dull. But this … what did they do to Yoi and Greel?”
“I don’t know,” Avery said.
They stared at the door. Nothing happened.
“Do you think they’ve gone from the front?” Layanna said.
“I wouldn’t want to chance it,” Avery said. “We don’t know how many of them there are, but it seems more likely they simply divided their force into two groups, or more.” He gulped down a breath, some sense of sanity returning to him. “I propose we get a drink.”
They moved to the bar and took seats at a shadowy booth, where a man with glowing tattoos took their order. Avery caught Coleel examining the tattoos with professional interest.
“To Yoi and Greel,” Coleel said, raising his glass.
They all drank. Avery tried not to imagine Yoi and Greel rising from the dead and donning robes of their own. Have the priests just multiplied? With every murder, do their ranks swell?
Coleel swore. “I thought you were going to get me out of here, Doctor, not land me in deeper shit than I was.”
“I’m sorry. Things took an unexpected turn.” To Layanna, Avery said, “And you have no idea who or what this ‘Sleeper’ is?”
“None,” she said, then attempted a smile; it came out awkwardly. “Only that I’m supposed to wake it.”
Avery drained his beer, then ordered another. As he did, his eyes fell on one of the bouncers. The man stood in a niche along the wall. So did the others, Avery saw, at least those not about their various duties; some accepted money and handed out pills. Even some of the waitstaff appeared to be bouncers; Avery thought of them as bouncers because they all wore the same black pants and shirts and carried themselves with the same rigidity. It was as if they were all automatons, almost. Even their eyes …
Avery started. The whites of their eyes were purple.
Coleel saw his surprise. “Never seen a glabren, then?”
“Glabren?” Layanna said, turning to study the bouncers, too.
“It means ‘slave’ if you interpret it into Ghenisan one way, ‘mindless’ another. They belong to him.” Coleel glanced upward, toward the ceiling, and Avery guessed he meant someone on the floor above them.
“Your enemy?” Avery said.
Coleel nodded, sipped. “Maz Virine. A merchant in darker things than me.”
“Does he too hold a monopoly on some alchemical substance?”
“No. He acquires the substances by force. Then uses them for his own purposes. A few years ago he murdered the man who had the monopoly for glabrus, an herb, then took over the operation himself, killing anyone else who knew its secrets. Now he alone controls the substance, and he uses it, well …” His gaze flicked to the bouncers. “It can take over one’s mind, make you a slave to the will of another.”
“Damn,” said Avery, remembering that Janx had mentioned something about this. If this was what he’d been referring to, then this Maz Virine must be a local boogeyman, one that was all too real. “And that’s what these, well, bouncers are—enslaved?”
“If you like. It’s more complicated than that.”
Avery, though expecting the priests of the Restoration to burst in at any moment, said, “Go on. We’re stuck here for the moment. We might as well know what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
“Virine is an underworld figure. A boss. He controls a large and shady network. One of his rackets is loansharking. If you don’t pay up on time, he takes you and forces you to imbibe glabrus, then by some process only he knows compels you to obey him for whatever term of service he requires to pay off your debts. When you borrow money from him, you know that’s a possibility, and you even sign a contract to that extent. Believe it or not, it’s all quite legal. Mostly. What he does with the glabren, though … what they’re made to do …” Coleel visibly shuddered. “Some survive. Some don’t. Many that do are never the same afterward, in mind or body. Virine’s a part owner of this club, and he makes some of his glabren work here. They’re the lucky ones, believe me.”
“And you think this man is here? Upstairs?” Layanna said.
“I don’t know if he is or not, but I hope not. Like I said, he murders people like me to get control of the substances they have a monopoly on. He’s been wanting the ghost flower nectar for years. He’s tried to bribe me, threaten me, blackmail me, I’ve always held out. And I’ve had enough people around where I could afford to. I’m no small player myself, or I wasn’t. But now, to be in his establishment, at his power … If he finds out I’m here, it could go bad for us.”
“Great,” said Avery. He eyed the beer before him, what was left of it, then shoved it away. He needed to be clear. He would have liked to have bummed a cigarette off one of the people about him, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t alchemical—and it probably would have been.
Suddenly there was commotion by the front door. Avery and the others leapt up, expecting robed figures to be entering, but instead it was a group of new patrons. They were talking animatedly amongst themselves, and the news of what they were saying began to spread throughout the room. Avery listened, but most of the discussion was in the local language, which he didn’t speak. He turned to Coleel for explanation.
The glowing merchant, wearing a pained expression, sank back into his seat.
“Well?” Layanna said. “What is it?”
Coleel gulped down a large portion of his beer. “It’s the Octunggen. They’ve sent their minions into the Maze. They’re going door to door.”
“They must have spies here,” Layanna said. “They found out about my presence.”
“Just who are you people?” Coleel said.
Avery reached a decision. “The roof. We have to get to the roof. It worked before.”
