The Year of the Knife Read online

  Praise for The Year of the Knife

  “An addictive blend of magic and murder noir.”

  —Gareth L. Powell, BSFA award-winning author of Ack-Ack Macaque

  “Penman writes with the wit and charm of a foul-mouthed Terry Pratchett. His Agent Sully is what Dirty Harry would be if he was a lesbian witch fighting demons alongside the cast of Yes, Minister. She can be my date to the Imperial Bureau of Investigation Ball anytime.”

  —Robyn Bennis, author of The Guns Above

  (5 stars) “I devoured this book . . . Sully has to be the biggest badass witch I have ever read about. I just loved her character. . . . I would love a sequel please Mr. Penman.”

  —Book Addict Live

  (5 stars) “The story grabs you from the first moment, and you can't put the book down till the very last pages.”

  —Ani's Book Blog

  (4 stars) “Penman has a knack for speculative fiction, especially involving magic, necromancy and, oddly enough, colonialism.”

  —TRL Reviews

  (4 stars) “I really enjoyed this book. . . . It starts from that stunning first line, grabs you and does not let you go. I could not put it down.”

  —Married Book Nerds

  (4 stars) “If you are into magic and all the supernatural stuff with demons, vampires, skin walkers and more, I highly recommend you pick this one up. . . . [You will] not be disappointed.”

  —Lin's Perspective Book Blog

  “I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Sully through to the end of this fantastic urban fantasy.”

  —BrizzleLass Books

  “It was a delightful read to discover layer after layer of mystery unfolding. I was really impressed with what happened and the reasoning behind all the murders.”

  —The Mystery Corner

  “Crazy demons, dark magic, and a mysterious conspiracy, oh my! The Year of the Knife is one crazy book, and you should probably read it with the lights on.”

  —I Love Books Club

  “All of the characters are completely engaging, and while The Year of the Knife has plenty of magical gore and gruesome mystery, it has quite a bit of humor as well. . . . [H]old on to your seat as the story unfolds into its dramatic climax. You don’t want to miss it!”

  —Ruthie Jones Reading by Moonlight

  “Full of magic and comical moments, The Year of the Knife is a fun and compelling read with a very surprise twist at the climatic ending.”

  —Happy Mom Blogger

  Also by G.D. Penman

  Call Your Steel | a stand-alone fantasy novel

  Apocrypha | collected short fiction

  other Sully stories

  Heart of Winter | novella

  “Equinox” | short story in Apocrypha

  THE YEAR OF THE KNIFE. Copyright © 2017 by G.D. PENMAN

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at [email protected].

  ISBN-13 978-0-9966262-8-6 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13 978-0-9966262-9-3 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916751

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in the United States of America by

  Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

  www.meerkatpress.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  People struggle to work out whether I am being sincere or sarcastic, so I will endeavor to keep this short and to the point:

  Thank you to my little family for enduring the long periods when I lived entirely inside my own head.

  Thank you to my parents for making the terrible mistake of bringing me into the world and the even worse mistake of enabling my reading habits. You have doomed us all.

  Thank you to Erin and Steven for being my literary guinea pigs, even when my stories were awful. Especially when they were awful.

  Thank you to the wonderful team at Meerkat Press for making this book into a reality and apologies to my editor Tricia; I have misplaced the long list of compliments that you requested so you will have to settle for my sincere thanks.

  Finally, a special thank you to the cats who strolled across my keyboard when I was getting a cup of tea, deleting whole sections of this book and forcing me to rewrite it from scratch weeks later when I finally noticed what had happened. I really appreciated that.

  July 4, 2015

  New Amsterdam was a city the way decapitation was a paper cut. Both could make a person bleed and both would hurt like hell, but only one made bystanders start screaming. It was a quarter past midnight and the streets of Nova Europa’s capitol still pulsed with life. Not so long ago, Sully would have been in the midst of that crowd, in one of the clubs that lined Park Slope with the scent of gin on her lips and her arm draped over some silly young wannabe starlet’s shoulders. She wasn’t in a nightclub tonight, though—she wasn’t even in the streets. She was hard at work among the vermin in the subway beneath the city.

  The tunnel was pitch black and the trains weren’t running there thanks to the New Amsterdam Police Department’s order to cut the power, an emergency measure to keep Sully safe. Although safe was a relative term given that she was tracking a serial murderer through total darkness. It was a dangerous job, but one that suited Sully perfectly—certainly better than her earlier stint in the navy or the retirement in academia everyone seemed to expect from her. The subway company had made a stink about the impact the outage would have on their business, but they’d been left no choice in the matter. Besides, it was the middle of the night—not rush hour—they would survive the loss of a few hours’ worth of fares.

  Sully kept her eyes down so that she wouldn’t give away her position; they glowed a dull red, the tell-tale sign that she had conjured vision enhancing magic—in this case a modified night vision spell that allowed her to see in the sunless tunnels. She needed the element of surprise; she was in the killer’s territory now. The heat signature of a set of footprints led her along the narrow subway walkways. They were getting brighter the farther in that she traveled. The NAPD officers on the scene had warned her that there was a homeless population in the tunnels, so it was possible that she was chasing one of them instead of her killer, but she doubted it. There was a certain cosmic geometry involved in magic, and once you knew how to interpret the angles, it only took simple calculations to work backward from effect to cause. Sully knew that whoever was casting the spells that had been killing citizens of New Amsterdam was doing it from down here.

  The footprints were glowing brightly now—she was close. All of the creeping around, the cat and mouse nonsense—it was making Sully tense. If alchemy classes had taught her professors anything it was that there were certain substances that reacted violently under pressure, and one of those substances was Sully. She’d started the night off angry, and it had only gotten worse after dealing with the solid wall of ignorance at the NAPD. The few cops who didn’t treat her like an idiot for being a woman treated her like an idiot for being Irish. It was enough to make anyone tetchy.

  Giving up any pretense of stealth, Sully shouted into the maintenance tunnel, “That trick with the trains was clever. Simple thaumaturgy, transferring the force from the train up to hit the people above. It takes a twisted kind of mind to come up with
something like that. I like it.”

  In the tunnel ahead, purple spellfire appeared, sputtering from someone’s fingertips, presumably the killer’s. Sully’s face split into a wicked grin and she dropped into a low stance. Her own magic flowed out smoothly. She twisted the flames of it with her fingers and traced jagged glowing sigils that hung where she left them, drifting in slow orbits around her hands. The scent of ozone started to fill the air, the smell of the gathering storm overpowering even the stink of tar on the train tracks. The dust, which hung heavy in the air due to the constant disturbance from the passage of trains in adjoining tunnels, started to take on shapes of its own. Geometric patterns formed in the clouds around the two of them as they prepared their spells.

  Sully was ready, but she held back for a moment. She wanted to see what she was up against. A sizzling green bolt burst out of the darkness toward her, some backwater hoodoo garbage that she wouldn’t have wasted the time of day on. She slapped it away with a half-formed shield and then returned fire: a sphere of ice that her opponent managed to dodge with a stumble. The spells were the only light in the tunnel, and she had to blink hard when her magic collided with a pillar and exploded in a shower of snowflakes and sparks.

  Another green dart was cast at her. She ducked under it with a wild laugh, not even wasting the effort to deflect it, and returned to her feet close enough to see the man in the glow of the sparks trailing from his hands.

  He was taller than her—but who wasn’t. He wore clean-cut clothes and appeared well-fed. Good, definitely not one of the homeless residents trying to defend their turf. She snapped her fingers and set off a series of small concussions in the air above him. He scrambled back from the din and clapped his hands to his ears in a vain attempt to protect his hearing.

  Laughing now, Sully let a long, razor-thin coil of flame trail from her hand, then snapped it up to catch the next bolt he flung. The captured spell swung around her in an arc, charring a long curve into the concrete walls of the tunnel. She flicked it back toward him and watched the man’s glassy eyes follow the blaze of light. The green bolt hit him in the chest and his clothes started to disintegrate instantly. He frantically tugged at his coat, trying to get it off before the spell spread to his skin, but it was too late. Bruises blossomed across his newly-bared chest, and blisters rose to the surface in a horrid yellowed mass before popping in a shower of bloody fluids. He screamed and the magic in his hands vanished. Only Sully’s fire kept the tunnel lit as she stood and watched him die by inches, the flame of her whip coiling and lashing around her like a snake caught by the tail.

  It was only after the man had collapsed onto the ground and was starting to decompose that Sully realized she was still laughing—although cackling might have been a better word. She stopped herself, feeling the build-up of adrenaline start to recede. She sat down on the side of the track and dug her cellphone out of her pocket, hoping for enough signal to call the office.

  Lots of women worked for the Imperial Bureau of Investigation these days, but Sully could never quite shake the feeling that, apart from her, most of them sat behind a desk and answered a telephone. She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line, so she used her formal drone. “Superior Agent Sullivan reporting.”

  “What is your status Agent Sullivan?”

  “Target is dead. Deceased. Extinct.”

  The conversation on the other end of the phone was muffled until she clearly recognized the nasal monotone of Deputy Director Col-cross. “Agent Sullivan, I need you to be in Winchester Village in Yonkers. Immediately.”

  Sully found herself straightening up despite herself. “What’s the situation, sir?”

  There was a sound that might have been the grinding of teeth on the other end of the line. “We may be dealing with a breach but it is unconfirmed. I wouldn’t ask you to be there if I didn’t think you were required. Please be as swift as possible, there are civilians within the containment area.”

  Sully had her little leather-bound notebook out of her inside pocket before the call had even disconnected. She scribbled out a formula and tried to be honest with herself about her own weight—it was crucial for the spell. As far as combat magic went, she was acknowledged as an expert by her peers, but traveling spells were not her area of expertise. For Sully, it was a brain grinding exercise in raw maths and she loathed it. Just when she was starting to think it would be quicker hiking back along the tunnel, the last piece of the spell clicked into place. She vanished in a soft thunderclap as the air rushed to fill the space behind her.

  * * *

  Aboveground, a taxi swerved to avoid the woman appearing out of thin air and nearly plowed into a streetlamp. The driver was out of the car and yelling before Sully had time to think. She tucked her notebook back in her jacket and yanked out her badge instead, shoving it in the cabdriver’s face until the torrent of Hindi slowed to a halt and he just stood there panting. She asked, “How fast can you get to Yonkers?”

  He looked at her like she’d just appeared out of thin air and demanded a ride; he then carefully said, “Half an hour if Throgg’s Neck is clear.”

  She weighed the information and then nodded. “All right, let’s go.”

  They moved slowly through the Brooklyn streets, only getting up to a decent speed once they had cut across to the road that ran alongside Black Bay. By the time they were over the bridge to the Bronx, Sully had more or less forgotten that the driver was there and was already on her third phone call. The first two had been to different branches of the NAPD, where no one seemed to be able to get their heads around the idea that their serial killer was dead and that Sully had more important things to do than convince them of this fact. The third had been back to her own office at the Imperial Bureau of Investigation to see if somebody who spoke the complicated language of jurisdiction could explain the situation to the NAPD.

  The IBI offices were on Staten Island in the midst of the shining towers of law firms, stock brokers and seers. It was the classiest looking place that Sully had ever worked, and she always felt as common as muck walking in wearing her street clothes. She probably should have been doing what everyone else in the building was doing, dumping half of her paycheck into tailors shops so she could blend in, but she was a lot more comfortable in her jeans. She blessed whichever bureaucrat had failed to make the dress code apply to her department.

  * * *

  The little gated community of Winchester Village was done up in the faux-Republican style that had been popular down south a few years back. The houses looked like big white blocks to Sully—white stucco walls and flat terracotta tiled roofs. Normally, they would have been dark at this time of night; the streetlights weren’t meant to reach all the way back past their pretty little gardens, but tonight, they flickered at the edges of Sully’s vision under the red and blue strobing lights of police cars.

  She paid the taxi driver with a bundle of greasy notes, and he hauled ass away so fast that she wondered if his green card was shaky, or if he knew the meaning behind the big glowing dome over the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. She jogged across to the barricade line where the local residents politely hovered. Sully may not have been tall enough to see over them but she had no qualms about elbowing her way through the crowd.

  She flashed her badge at the pale faced boy in uniform on the other side of the barricade and, when he didn’t respond fast enough, she hopped right over it and strode toward the group who looked like they were in charge. There were a pair of redcoats in the midst of a sea of blue and black uniforms of the NAPD, and it was the redcoats she focused on. The navy and the army recruited magicians for their power, the IBI recruited them for their intelligence, but the redcoats didn’t care if you could barely string a spell together. Redcoats were picked for their blind loyalty to the Empire. Their presence on the scene meant that the governor knew what was happening here—that the government was already involved. Sully groaned.

  Covered in cold sweat and sporting a bl
ank face, one of the redcoats had his hands in the air maintaining a barrier spell around the house, apparently with some difficulty. His superior officer was so entrenched in her jurisdictional pissing contest with the NAPD that she hadn’t noticed that he was burning out. Sully spun her around by the shoulder and snarled, “Relieve your deputy. He’s about to drop.”

  The silver haired redcoat glowered at Sully but caught sight of her slumping coworker at the same time. She gave Sully a dirty look as she stomped off and Sully took the woman’s place in the huddle of officers.

  The men fell silent and stared at Sully for a long moment until she rolled her eyes and flashed her credentials. “I’m with the IBI. Give me the situation.”

  The assembly muttered and spluttered a moment before all eyes settled on an older man with a walrus moustache and an attitude that screamed detective-sergeant.

  He huffed. “We have the situation under control.”

  Sully didn’t raise her voice at him; that would be unprofessional. Instead, she calmly said, “If things were under control, I wouldn’t be sent out here at”—she glanced at her watch—“half past one in the morning. Now give me a report or I’ll find somebody who can.”

  A sergeant can be many things—he can be rude, he can be stubborn, he can even be reckless—but one thing a sergeant cannot be is stupid. Behind the little eyes in the middle of his slab of a face, there were cogs spinning at high speed, and somewhere in that arcane mechanism, in the region of the brain related to having a career in the morning, a little alarm bell started ringing. He perked up and started reciting, “Our breach alarms went off a little after nine. We narrowed the search down with our magic detectors, I mean, ah, Schrödinger units until we got to this street. Then somebody called in the redcoats and we got things quarantined. They weren’t calling in the army until it was confirmed but they said that it looks like, ah”—he glanced around nervously—“one of the gentlemen downstairs may have come a-calling.”