Procession of the Dead by Darren Shan

said.
    “They’ve wiped him out. They’ve taken Harry Gilmer and made it so he never existed. No records, nobody who’ll say anything about him. Nothing. They’ve swept every file, forced or bribed everyone who knew him into denying his very existence. That’s the cruelest thing there is, to take away everything a man ever was. It makes life seem so meaningless.”
    “Who did it?” I asked. “The Cardinal?”
    “I suppose. Nobody ever talks about it, so I can’t say for sure. But he’s the only one with that kind of power. The only one who can coerce people like Leonora into denying a man the courtesy of a memory.”
    “Y Tse,” she said calmly, “I swear I never knew this Harry Gilmer. We have discussed this before. He has an illness,” she said to me. “He invents people and makes accusations of this sort when nobody acknowledges them. Is that not so, Y Tse?”
    He shook his head sadly. “Maybe. There’s plenty who’d say I’m wrong in the head. But I can remember him as clearly as anyone. Him and the others. I’ve seen the list, too, that damned Ayua—” He stopped abruptly and stared at his fingers. “Take care, friend Capac,” he said bitterly. “Watch out for this city. Don’t let it do to you what it did to me. Don’t become another Inti Maimi.”
    I leaned across the table, determined to push the point now that he’d brought it up again. “Our names,” I said. “What’s the link? What were you going to say a few minutes ago?”
    He smiled. “The Cardinal hates guesswork. He’d shoot me here and now if he heard me guessing. But screw him. I stopped answering to him a long time ago. Here’s what I think. I was The Cardinal’s golden boy. He wanted me to take over when he passed on. There were a few of us—me, Ford, a couple of others—vying for pole position, but I was his favorite.
    “I let him down. I proved him wrong. But he doesn’t want to admit his mistake. I think he believes I was the right man, and if he could find someone like me—somebody with large dollops of the younger Inti Maimi—and train him, raise him up and make him the star
I
should have been… that’ll justify his decision. It will prove he was right, that the failure was mine, not a reflection on his choice.”
    He rose and stood beside his chair, adjusting his robes. Leonora was silent. “I think, friend Capac, that The Cardinal has chosen you to fill my shoes, to prove to everyone—including himself—that his judgment is sound. I think you’re being groomed to take over when he dies. This is the first step on a long, difficult road, but one which leads to gold, diamonds, all the riches you ever imagined. And more.
    “I think he’s planning to make you the next Cardinal.
    “Goodbye, Leonora. Goodbye, friend Capac. See you soon.”
    And he left, leaving me motionless in his wake, heart beating erratically, breath coming in jerks.
    The next Cardinal.
    He was mad, no doubt about it. His prediction was probably the product of a wild, deranged mind. But still…
the next Cardinal!
Even if he was wrong, his words provided me with more scope for fantastic imagining than I’d ever known. And upstairs in Shankar’s, surrounded by the echoing chatter and gabble of gangsters, veterans and young pretenders to the throne, I let myself dream.

paucar wami
    J ohnny Grace was an Irish Cuban who’d grown up in the harsh east of the city and headed a small but vicious gang, the Grace Brothers. They’d terrorized their home territory—no small feat—for three years and now Johnny had decided the time was right to expand west. He was looking for The Cardinal’s green light. Ford Tasso wanted me to meet with him.
    “Johnny’ll be a little pissed when he sees you,” he said. “He asked for me and he won’t like having to deal with an underling. He might make a scene.”
    “How big a scene?” I asked, worried. There wasn’t much that frightened me, but a pissed Johnny Grace was near the top of the short