Three doors away, Gerhardt unpacked loose pale trousers and wondered what had possessed him to ask the woman out to eat. He should have left her to her own devices.
The trouble was that he had expected an efficient and starched dragon after his brother’s description. Instead he was faced with gypsy eyes and a coarse bramble of undisciplined black hair. In spite of her air of control, he sensed she could not be entirely tame with hair like that. The drive across the desert had produced a queer intimacy of the kind that sometimes grows between strangers thrust into close company, but she had revealed nothing of her personal life. That was probably exactly why he had suggested dinner. He grinned ruefully at his whimsy.
Three doors away, Savid bowed deeply to the blonde girl who stood facing him.
‘Lady, I will go to see how the Searchers progress. I am certain there is no danger in this place, but it would be as well if you remain here.’
Signe inclined her head slightly. Even that was an effort. She had not imagined the dreadful draining of her meld with the Riftgate, the feeling of being devoured. It was taking all of her self-control not to scream and beg for mercy.
Please let them find it quickly, she thought, as the door closed behind her protector.
When Raven and Gerhardt came outside some hours later, they were both surprised at the warmth of the wind blowing in from the desert. After the chill of efficient air-conditioning, the heat made them both relax out of their intended formality.
The city skyline blazed around them, encrusted with diamond bright lights. Raven was reminded of her first fleeting glimpse of Las Vegas, and the momentary thrill she had felt at the fairy spires and pale shimmering towers her imagination had wrought. A mirage, and yet, just now stepping out of the hotel into the dazzling night, she felt she had entered that briefly imagined place.
‘You know, when I was a kid, I used to make up these magic spells,’ she said in a soft, low voice Gerhardt had to strain to hear. ‘I remember one night . . . just for a second, it seemed like everything trembled on the brink of changing. As if I’d got the spell almost right but I had spoken a moment too soon, or too late. Or I had got one word wrong.’ She fell silent, remembering how the magic had seemed to respond in some subliminal way to her.
Gerhardt thought of how that scrap of memory had transformed her face, infusing it with life and a wistful longing that reminded him of his own childhood. And yet, one had to grow up and get on with the world, didn’t one? One had to put away childish things and accept there was no magic in the world, and that honour and trust and love that lasted forever belonged in books, not in real life.
‘We will cut straight through the Treasure Island Casino, and go out the other side,’ he said. ‘The restaurant is just past it.’
As they were approaching, the side doors opened suddenly to disgorge a gesticulating crowd of Arabs. Gerhardt reached out and caught Raven’s hand, drawing her to one side.
‘Rude bastards,’ he said mildly.
Raven waited for him to let go of her hand, but he did not. She felt uncomfortable but did not want to seem foolish by overreacting to what had been no more than an instinctively protective gesture. Inside the foyer, she forgot her discomfort in amazement at finding herself in the jungle. The enormous foyer was filled with trees, ferns, sinuous vines and lush orchids drooping their heads and exuding a heavy languorous scent.
A small sign at the beginning of a golden marble path leading into the dense greenery offered arrows to Tiger Palace and Pool Bar, or Reception Desk.
Gerhardt considered the directions.
Taped jungle noises increased the impression that they really were in the jungle, and when they passed an immense waterfall backlit with green and blue lights, Raven thought that when make-believe and pretence were on such a scale they transcended themselves, and became a kind of magic. The only jarring notes were the people and the electronic siren call of poker machines. The path wound for some distance before bringing them to a clearing where, behind a thick wall of glass, two white tigers paced on the terrace of a lavish white marble palace. A bathing pool surrounded by pale pebbles was filled with iridescent blue water, and one of the tigers padded to the edge and immersed itself.
There was a crowd of watchers pressed up against the glass, and they sighed at the sight of the swimming tiger.
‘Just shows what money can do,’ one man said in a twanging midwestern accent.
Raven was appalled. It was awful to see the creatures, who were real and surely rare, caught up in this frozen false world, and yet, still, there was a sense of the incredible about the extravagance of the illusions bought by money. No wonder people gambled their lives away here.
Feeling vaguely suffocated, she made her way towards an exit door half concealed by a curtain of creepers. It led to a darkened pool area where the only light was a jewel-blue glow from dim submerged lights. The door closed, and the hum of talk and music was cut off as if a switch had been thrown. Hot wind rustled the foliage, and the sound of traffic beyond the wall sounded far away.
Gerhardt was abruptly aware that he was still holding Raven’s hand. Her fingers seemed hot and heavy in his. He felt a flicker of fear at the thought that he might have got himself into something that was going to be hard to get out of gracefully. But as if she sensed his discomfort, she slid her hand free, and pushed through the foliage to stare into the pool. A cloud of blue butterflies, disturbed by her movement, erupted, and for a moment she was enveloped in an azure spiral.
Gerhardt thought she looked like a pale goddess rising from a cloud of attendant butterflies.
She is much older than you, he told himself sternly, and in more than years. Look how little concerned she had been when you held her hand, he thought disapprovingly. Contrarily though, he now wished he was still holding it. There had been something exciting about being afraid.
He wondered what she would do if he kissed her. Maybe she would like him to kiss her. Maybe she would laugh and he would feel foolish.
Suddenly she stiffened. ‘Did you hear that?’
Without waiting for his response, she darted around the pool and into the foliage on the other side. He heard her cry out, and arrived at her side just in time to see two men grasping the arms of a man, while a third buried a knife in his chest. The wounded man crumpled at their feet and lay still.
Raven gave a frightened moan and one of the men moved towards them, but the man who had the knife grunted and made a chopping gesture with it. The three turned and ran into the trees.
Gerhardt’s heart battered at his chest in a mixture of fear and anger. He wondered wildly if he should try to follow the muggers or call for the security guards.
Raven had hurried to the injured man and was feeling for his pulse. ‘He’s alive . . . Oh!’
The prostrate man had grasped her arm. ‘Lady . . .’
‘You . . . you’ve been stabbed.’
‘Hear me,’ he interrupted. ‘Find Signe . . . warn her . . .’
The moon cleared a patch of cloud and they were startled to see that it was the grey-haired man who had brought the blonde girl into the hotel earlier that day. His eyes held Raven’s, pleading.
‘Help me . . .’
‘I’ll get a doctor,’ Gerhardt said.
‘No,’ the man rasped. ‘It is too late. The dagger was . . . poisoned. Please. Find Signe. Tell her the Searchers are dead. The Dakini killed them all . . .’
The man sucked in a laboured, rattling breath, then slumped, fingers sliding off Raven’s arm.
Gerhardt felt faint, but the urgency in the man’s voice had wakened a sense of apprehension in him. ‘We . . . must get the police . . .’
Raven visibly collected herself, but she could feel the dead man’s hands pressing her arm. ‘I don’t think we should go to the police first. If we do, we’ll have to go to the station and it might be hours before they believe we didn’t kill this man ourselves. I have a feeling that girl he was with is next in the line of fire. We have to help her.’
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Gerhardt gave way before the blaze of purpose in her eyes. ‘How will we find this girl? We do not even know her surname . . .’
‘The sixth floor. They got off at the sixth floor.’
There were three hundred and forty rooms on the sixth floor, and it took them half an hour to find the room, through the simple process of splitting up and knocking on doors, starting either end of the building and working their way towards one another. This took some time, but when they were separated by ten doors, to their amazement, one opened and the blonde girl they were seeking stepped out into the hall. Only she was not a girl. They had been mistaken about that. She was about twenty, and looked confused as she started towards the lift.
Raven reached out without thinking and caught her by the wrist.
‘I’m sorry, but you are Signe, aren’t you?’ she said.
The young woman merely blinked at her, then tried to walk on.
‘We found your friend,’ Gerhardt said. ‘The man with the ponytail and the grey suit. He was attacked . . .’
The woman moaned and her eyes widened. ‘I knew. I felt something was wrong. It must have been the Dakini . . .’
Gerhardt looked at Raven, registering this was the name the dead man had uttered. She shook her head minutely, ushering the shaken young woman to her room.
‘These Dakini – are they some sort of gang?’ Raven enquired gently.
‘Savid is dead?’ she asked, and when Gerhardt nodded, all the anguish and sorrow of a moment past were wiped from her expression. ‘His spirit swims in the river of time.’
‘I’d better call the police,’ Gerhardt said, and Raven nodded.
‘No.’ Signe’s voice was silk wrapped around a steel blade.
‘What do you mean? Your friend has been murdered.’
‘He was not my friend.’
‘He was killed and apparently these maniacs who did it have killed some other people too . . .’ Raven was indignant.
The blonde woman started to her feet and swayed, shock enlivening her pallid features yet again. ‘The . . . the Searchers are dead as well?’ She moaned like a wounded animal. A terrible twisted desperate sound.
‘No one will find you here,’ Gerhardt murmured, thinking she must be afraid for her own life.
But she laughed. A horrible raw sound. ‘No one will look for me. The Dakini know that without Savid and the Searchers, I am helpless. The rift is increasingly unstable, as is the nature of such flaws in the walls between worlds as they widen. Eventually it must collapse. The cost of holding it open is high and I have no strength left to search for the Valoria as well.’
Gerhardt and Raven looked into one another’s eyes, thinking the same thought.
‘We will get some help for you,’ he said gently.
The woman turned cold teak eyes on him. ‘If you would aid me, find the Valoria. It is a small stone which contains the power to subdue the invading Dakini hordes. We lived in peace and the barbaric Dakini also, until it slipped through a small rift into this dimension, and they reverted to their former selves.’
‘Dimension . . .’ Raven echoed carefully, because the poor creature obviously believed what she was saying.
‘Such cracks between worlds and even times are not uncommon. They occur naturally in all worlds. They are small to begin with, then they widen until the pressure collapses them, closing the gap. The rift into your world was minuscule, so my people have dwelt in exile and terror for two generations, waiting for it to widen enough that Searchers might retrieve the Valoria.’
‘But, if this thing fell through a . . . rift so long ago, it is probably buried under a building or even under the ground,’ Gerhardt said, thinking the man, Savid, must have been a psychiatric nurse.
‘Time here and in my world does not flow as one. But in any case the Valoria would not allow itself to be buried. Its power is shaped to repress violence, even to itself. That is how it controls the aggressions of the Dakini. It will not be hard to find for wherever it lies, it will affect magic. This entire place is infused with its power, although your people have disguised the true magic beneath false glamours. But the closer to the Valoria, the more real the magic will be, and as the rift widens, this effect will spread.’
‘Poor thing,’ Raven said, closing the bedroom door quietly.
Gerhardt sighed. ‘She is disturbed, but that bodyguard was killed. We had better talk to the hotel manager to see what is the best way to proceed.’
Descending in the lift, he collected himself for a confrontation with American hotel bureaucracy. When the doors opened, he was astonished to find the pristine hotel foyer filled with shouting men and women, all of whom appeared to be trying to check out.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked one of the liveried attendants.
‘Dunno. All these folks came running in and yelling about escaped wild beasts.’
Gerhardt thought of the white tigers in the glass and marble enclosure. Could they possibly have escaped? Another time the thought of that would have delighted him, though another part of his nature deplored the carelessness of such an incident. He shook his head, reminding himself that he had other things to concern him. The manager proved to be a great urbane slab of a woman in an expensive grey suit. Her toothy smile vanished as Gerhardt explained what had happened.
‘Is this some sort of joke?’
‘Of course not. We saw a man stabbed to death by a group of men in the pool area of the Treasure Island Casino. There is certainly nothing funny about that.’
The woman scowled. ‘All I know is I’ve heard more wild stories today than in my whole career. People telling me the sky is purple or that they saw a mermaid in the fountain. Guests complaining that other guests are trying to murder them, or that they saw mermaids in the lavatory. I have no idea what all this craziness means, but I don’t need the aggravation. If you really did see someone murdered in one of the other hotels, I suggest you see the police, sir.’
‘What a place . . .’ Gerhardt said, as Raven opened the door. Then he stopped because she was as white as a sheet.
‘She . . . you were gone for so long.’
He nodded. ‘I spoke to the manager, and then I went to the police, but this whole city seems to have gone mad today . . . These crazy Americans. What’s the matter?’
‘I . . . when you were gone so long, I went in to check on her. She . . . you’d better look yourself.’
Signe was sitting up on the bed, her back to the door. ‘Excuse me,’ Gerhardt said, beginning to back out. He had thought she must have killed herself from the way Raven looked.
Then she turned.
Gerhardt felt as if someone had hit him in the stomach. It was the same woman, but she was old. Ancient. Her cheeks were still high and pronounced but the flesh was sunken and ravaged, hair grey and lustreless. There was a brief flare of hope in her eyes, and then it was gone. Incredibly, she laughed. A dreadful, hopeless wrenching sound.
Gerhardt felt Raven’s hand on his shoulder. He felt as if his blood had iced up, leaving his limbs cold and stiffly unresponsive.
‘This is not possible,’ he said, when the door was shut again.
‘You think she made herself up to look that old?’ Raven snapped, taking refuge in anger. ‘She hasn’t moved out of that room – I’ve been here!’
‘But . . . what can it mean?’
She looked at him incredulously. ‘What do you think it means? It means she was telling the truth. She said that holding this rift open between her world and ours was costing her time.’
‘That is absurd.’
‘What other explanation is there for a woman who ages decades in a matter of hours?’
‘Some sort of stigmata . . . perhaps.’ He stopped.
Raven shook her head decisively. ‘I think she was telling the truth and if we don’t find this Valoria so she can go back where she belongs, she’ll turn into bones and dust right in front of our eyes. Look at her. She is alone and she needs our help.’ Again Rav
en seemed to feel the dead man’s fingers tightening on her arm. ‘I know it can’t be real, Gerhardt, but I am suspending my disbelief as of now. If I’m wrong, someone will have a good laugh at my expense.’ She was far calmer now than when he had arrived, as if she had come to some decision. ‘You said the city had gone mad?’
‘There are people downstairs demanding to check out of the hotel because there are supposed to be wild animals in the streets, and at the police station there was a woman trying to report fairies in her hotel swimming pool. I told them there was a dead man by the pool and they all but yawned and told me they had been getting reports of bodies all night long. Seven so far, and it was obviously a hoax because the bodies were not there when they investigated. I guess the other bodies were the ones Savid mentioned. The Dakini must be disposing of them. I gave up trying to explain because probably they have already shifted Savid’s body, and those police looked like they wanted to gaol me.’
‘Well, if the police won’t listen we’ll have to . . .’ Raven’s eyes blazed wide. ‘Of course. If the magic is manifesting itself in real ways around the Valoria, all we would have to do to find it is look for real magic rather than illusion.’
Gerhardt did not know what to say. It was incredible and yet in a mad sort of way, it fitted. But he was a physicist. He didn’t believe in parallel dimensions and magic. There must be some logical explanation for the way in which Signe had aged.
His eyes flickered to the bedroom door, and Raven shuddered. ‘Every minute we stand here talking, she’s dying. I have this horrid vision of going in and finding her lying there dead and withered. I have to try and find this thing. You can stay here if you want.’
‘We will go together,’ Gerhardt said.
• • •
It was a night of black velvet, soft and warm with the moon a mere sliver of silver. They stopped at the bottom of the steps to let a fat man with a beatific look on his face walk past. The woman following him looked puzzled and annoyed.
‘What do you mean you saw the grail, Ernest?’
Raven and Gerhardt exchanged a look and they turned in the direction from which the pair had come. At the front of Treasure Island Casino, Gerhardt stopped, remembering what the manager had said about the wild beasts. Maybe it was a sign that the magic was here. Even the name of the place seemed to offer a coy clue. After all, wouldn’t a treasure island have treasure?