In spite of Rhyme’s goading of Spinnerette, the stolen 4B vehicle made a clean getaway before its cloak gave out. Within a few hours, the four villainous women were within the subterranean lair of their employer.
A pair of muscle-bound men offloaded Rhyme’s stretcher. The foot was lowered and the head jacked up, rendering her almost upright in her bonds, and they wheeled her through purple-lit passages to a private chamber draped in gauze. It was empty, but there was a conspicuous round depression in the center of the room. The two men left Rhyme positioned twelve feet away from the edge of it, then hurried from the room.
As the door whooshed closed behind them, the cover of the hole split in two and the halves retracted. From it, rose a throne-like seat with eight legs curling in around the seat, framing the figure lounged within… a shapely woman with long, lithe limbs, her body wrapped in a long sheet of silk that covered the bare essentials for modesty.
“Welcome to my parlor,” Webmistress said. She smiled, displaying a mouth with a pair of gleaming black metal fangs. “I pray you’ll forgive me the use of restraints.”
“Very wise of you,” Rhyme said, returning the smile with an equal measure of creepiness.
“It seemed prudent,” Webmistress said. “You’re known to be somewhat… variable… in temperament, particularly after waking up from a regeneration.”
“Oh, I meant the part of praying for my forgiveness,” Rhyme said. “Frequently, I find myself dealing with powerful people whose power has caused them to forget the basic fact of their own mortality. What would your wealth and influence avail you if I killed you where you stood?”
“Quite a lot, potentially, but let’s not find out,” Webmistress said. “As different as you are, you’ve been increasingly lucid for the last few years. You understand what your interests are, and you act to advance them accordingly. The fact that they’re not always comprehensible to anybody else doesn’t matter. You want something, and I can get it for you far more easily than you could. So, really, there is no reason for you to attack me.”
“If that’s so, why am I restrained?”
“Because I’m not dealing with Reason,” Webmistress said.
“Touché.”
“You are within my domain… my Web of Shadows. Within these corridors, I am in control. I am omnipotent and omniscient. I restrain you not as a matter of safety, but one of convenience. Were you to attack me, you’d find out very swiftly what my wealth and influence have availed me, in the way of countermeasures. Memento your own damn mori, dear… I’m not afraid. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly,” Rhyme said.
“Then with a touch of my hand, I release you,” Webmistress said, raising a slim plastic wand and flicking a switch on it.
Rhyme remained as she was.
Webmistress scowled and stabbed the switch with her other hand, then wiggled it back and forth.
“God damn it! Does nothing work in this place?” she said. She shook the remote, then banged it on the side of her throne, but it remained resolutely inert. The light in the room changed subtly, still purple but tinged more red. Composing her face, she looked to her guest. “Won’t you please excuse me for one moment.”
“Of course,” Rhyme said as Webmistress pressed a button and the throne swiveled around to face away from her.
“Spinnerette!” Webmistress barked. “Kill whoever’s in charge of batteries, and make his replacement eat the corpse.”
“…really?” Spinnerette’s voice said from a tinny speaker in the arm.
“Yes. No. I don’t care,” Webmistress said. “Just get me some freaking double-As in here.”
There was a brief pause.
“Did you hear me?” Webmistress said. The light continued to redden.
“Uh… we’re out of double-As,” Spinnerette said. “How about some triple-As?”
“Oh my God, do you even know how batteries work? Why do we have triple-As? Nothing uses triple-As.”
“That’s probably why we have so many of them left… if you really need some, I think I have some double-As in my room.”
“Ew, no, I don’t want your vibrator batteries, Janie, that’s gross,” Webmistress said, slamming a hand down on the arm of her chair. The room was a ghastly crimson now, like something out of Poe. “Never mind. God, just forget about it! Forget I even said anything.”
“Am I killing the battery guy or not?”
“Just have him order more,” Webmistress said. “I’ll deal with him later.” She swiveled back around to face Rhyme. Her calm pose was shattered now. She’d gone from the picture of decadent poise to one of agitation, her legs swinging back and forth. “Forgive the cliché, but good help is so hard to find,” she said, forcing a smile.
“I have to believe you could do better than Janie if you wanted to,” Rhyme said. “You know you are the first boss she’s had who hasn’t tried to kill her? So far, I mean.”
“Two is hardly a clear-cut pattern.”
“Two? Is that what she told you?” Rhyme said. “You should get somebody to vet your employees’ resumes.”
“If you know of anybody else who does evil human resources, be sure and let me know,” Webmistress said.
“Did you honestly just refer to yourself as evil, without irony?” Rhyme asked.
“Why not?” Webmistress asked with a fluid shrug. “It’s an arbitrary concept and one I don’t see the point of, but the word means what it means, and it would be hard to find a working definition of evil that doesn’t cover me. I’m motivated entirely by my own self-interest. I deal in drugs, weapons, and death.” She held up her hand, wiggling her fingers. “Have you seen my nails?”
“Point. You know, Janie told me the fact that none of them succeeded showed that none of them really meant it,” Rhyme said gleefully. “Isn’t that pathetic? Isn’t that just the saddest thing you’ve ever heard? Doesn’t that…”
The rest of Rhyme’s tirade against Spinnerette was cut off as the straitjacket she was wearing delivered a massive electrical shock.
“That one works,” Webmistress said with a smirk, some of her composure returning. “Believe it or not, I didn’t bring you hear to listen to your sophomoric rants against my second-in-command.”
The archvillainess took a calming breath. The light in the room cooled, turning blue.
“Interesting use of nanophosphors,” Rhyme said. “It brings whole new meaning to the term ‘mood lighting’.”
“Thank you,” Webmistress said. “I cannot tolerate the harshness of direct lighting. Aesthetically, I mean… though it doesn’t help that my omnispectral optical implants seem to be stuck in low-light mode.”
“Do you often have trouble with glitchy cybernetics?” Rhyme asked.
“Everything I own is on the cutting edge,” Webmistress said. “Which is the problem… it’s hell being an early adopter, you know.”
“Is that what you’re looking for from this head?” Rhyme asked. “A debugger? A troubleshooter? A dedicated cyberneticist who could iron out the kinks and integrate all the second-hand and jury-rigged systems you use?”
“They didn’t tell you who it is, did they?” Webmistress asked.
“No,” Rhyme said. “But dear Sandy mentioned that the cranium in question contains cybernetic parts. Cyborgs fall into two camps, generally: Humpty Dumpties who were put back together by technology, and the great big brains who make the technology work in the first place. What you’ve got is obviously the second variety. Why else would you revive a head, if not for the knowledge it contains?”
“Very astutely reasoned,” Webmistress said. “But I expect more than educated guesses and psychological parlor games from you. If you don’t produce results…”
“Here come the threats,” Rhyme said. “Do me a favor and wake me when they’re over, okay?”
“I don’t torture women,” Webmistress said. “And I’m not interested in boring myself trying to kill you. If you don’t come through for me, I’ll simply deliver you back to the authorities. On a related subject, Andrea has related your terms to me. The working conditions are easily met, but the payment is problematic.”
“It’s the only thing I want,” Rhyme said.
“I said I don’t torture women, and I meant it,” Webmistress said. “If I were going to flay Spinnerette alive, it wouldn’t be on your account.”
“Oh, don’t let Janie hear you talking like that, or you’ll give her false hope,” Rhyme said. “But in point of fact, I didn’t specify whether she needed to be dead or alive during the transaction.”
“Oh, well, it isn’t like I’ve never thought about it,” Webmistress said. “Especially when she eats. She does this clicky-teeth thing that just… well, it isn’t important.” The light spiked bright red, then dimmed back to a dim blue. “The point is, dear Rhyme, if you want my woman to go after your vase of stinky oil, then the attempt itself is your payment. There are no guarantees in this business.”
“Maybe you should get better help,” Rhyme said. “But you at least get points for getting my name right. That oil is the most important thing in the world right now… if anything should happen to it, I would be very upset, and would feel the need to register my disappointment with the responsible party in the strictest possible terms.”
“Do you want the oil, or do you want an excuse for trouble?”
“I rarely require an excuse for trouble,” Rhyme said. “But I believe you were going to release me?”
“I’d prefer to keep my distance,” Webmistress said. “And since the remote’s dead…”
“Have you tried jiggling the batteries around, or taking them out and switching them around?” Spinnerette asked from the armrest speaker. “If they’re only mostly dead…”
“God damn it, have you been on the line the whole time?” Webmistress asked.
“I was talking to the quartermaster about the batteries and when I hung up with him…”
“Never mind. Gah!” Webmistress said, stabbing the button on the arm console. She muttered to herself as she pried the cover off the remote with one long, shiny black nail, pulled the batteries out and switched their positions, then put the cover back on. A flick of the switch and Rhyme slid out of the restraints, landing lightly on her feet. “Well, that’s one thing she got right,” Webmistress said, tossing the remote over her shoulder.
“Broken clocks, yadda yadda yadda,” Rhyme said. She didn’t bother to massage her limbs… her circulatory system was more robust than the average person’s. “So, Webby, let’s talk nuts and bolts. What you’re talking about is nothing more or less than the resurrection of the dead. Simply animating a corpse is easy. You can do it with black magic, weird science… pretty much anything, there’s no wrong way to create a soulless abomination. But what you want is to restore consciousness to inert matter. That’s a different proposition altogether.”
“One you can do?”
“Under the circumstances? You have reason to be hopeful,” Rhyme said. “But it’s not going to be as easy as flipping a switch… even given an adequate supply of batteries. It’s going to be a delicate, painstaking operation. It’s going to take time. Weeks, if not months… if I thought Sandy could be taught, I’d show her how to do it and be on my merry little way, but I think it’s likely I’m going to be your guest here for a while.”
“There is no better scientist in the business than Cassandra Clevenger,” Webmistress said.
“Not on the side of ‘evil’, you mean,” Rhyme said. “Dr. Day could think her under the table, if only he were willing to work for villains outside the U.S. government… but even he wouldn’t be your best bet. No, this is straying too far outside the bounds of conventional science… it’s not just above the heads of Day and Clevenger, it’s off to the side.”
“But not so for you?”
“I’ve never undertaken to try it for myself, but I’m familiar with the principles… a man calling himself Vic Geneva used to patch people together for the mob,” she said. “My father was the one who shut him down, and his notes ended up in our library.”
“Do you have access to this library?”
“Large parts of it,” Rhyme said. “Though getting shot in the head all the dang time doesn’t help much there.”
“Then perhaps you should stop provoking people with guns,” Webmistress said. She rose to her feet for the first time since her arrival in the chamber. “I will have somebody show you to your suite, Rhyme… the items you requested are already there. I had an entire encyclopedia moved from the library, in case you got bored with the three volumes.”
“You have a library here?”
“A very good one. Would you like to use it? For security reasons I cannot allow you to access the internet or any external communications network…”
“I only need one book,” Rhyme said. “Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Original publication, 1818. The title seems to have bled out the back of my skull at some point… Somebody, the Modern Prometheus.”
“That’s a little vague, but I’ll see if I can find it,” Webmistress said dryly.
“Uh… she’s talking about Frankenstein, isn’t she?” Spinnerette asked.
“God, get off the freaking line!” Webmistress yelled. The room turned bright red, and she covered her eyes, screaming in pain. “Ow, my fucking eyes!”
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