Dragons & Dwarves

  “Thank you,” he said without looking at me. Now that he wasn’t speaking publicly, his accent had grown thicker. His brows furrowed a moment, and he turned to face me. “The voice is familiar. We have spoken?”

  I nodded and held out my hand. “Kline Maxwell, Cleveland Press, we spoke yesterday.”

  Dr. Shafran smiled broadly, put down the case, and grabbed my arm with both of his.. “Yes. The newspaperman. You do me a great service.”

  “You did me a service, Doctor.”

  “Nonsense,” he gave my arm a vigorous shake and let it go. “It is you who helps my work.” He waved at the auditorium. “Mine is not a popular study.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Believe me.” He picked up his case. “No one wants to hear what I have to say. The scientific community,” he shook his head sadly. “Too many people dismissed what was happening here as rampant fantasy before it was documented. I’m afraid that the whole generation will have to die off before one can get an impartial jury to judge a scientific paper on the subject. And the public . . .”

  “I saw the woman.”

  “I am doing serious work here, and what kind of questions do I get? Spirits, angels, demons, God and the devil. Do they not hear what it is I am saying?” He patted me on the shoulder. “We must leave before they lock us in this place.”

  He led me out of the auditorium and back through the halls of exhibits. “You do me a great service by quoting me accurately. Perhaps I can use the attention in a grant request.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions for me?”

  “Certainly.”

  We took a seat outside the entrance, under the dragon’s looming effigy.

  “What concerns you tonight, Mr. Maxwell?”

  I looked up at the abdomen of the dragon above us. We were lucky that Aloeus had hit in the Flats. The kind of damage that might have happened elsewhere was frightening.

  “I wanted to know if it is possible that what happened to the dragon might not have been an accident.”

  “How exactly do you mean? Certainly the dragon could have ended his own life in such a way, intentionally aiming to an area of fatally low power.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.”

  “You are asking if someone else could have created the conditions that killed him.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is possible.”

  “How?”

  Dr. Shafran took off his bifocals and waved them at the air around us. “The power is a fluid. When any magical effect occurs, that power is drained for a bit, somewhere. Like siphoning water from a river. If a spell was cast, involving a massive amount of energy, a momentary void could be created.”

  “How massive?”

  The doctor shrugged. “I do not have enough information to quantify that. Enough to spread the burden, the energy flows through the mage, like an electric circuit. Too few and the synapses would fry.”

  “A guess?”

  “Perhaps a dozen.”

  Christ, I didn’t think there were that many competent black-market mages in the city. “So, to engineer that, you need the collusion of at least twelve mages?”

  Dr. Shafran shook his head. “No, you only need one specific mage.”

  “But you said—”

  “The mechanics are like this, Mr. Maxwell. In a proper multiper- son ritual, there is only one mage directing the spell. All the other participants are gathering and channeling the power to create the effect envisioned by the central figure. If more than one person is actively casting, they must be focusing on different elements. Each person’s influence is different, and if you have more than one person concentrating on the same thing, the effect is to dilute the effectiveness of whatever you’re trying to do, not multiply it.”

  “But if a dozen people cast something, aren’t they all going to know what it is? At least after the fact? If you’re expecting some massive effect and something else happens”—

  “You do not understand me. The void, the power being sucked away from the river, that is a side effect. It is quite possible for a mage to cast some great effect and be completely ignorant of the specific geographic location the energy to cast the spell came from. For most rituals the source of the energy is local and arbitrary, but all that’s required is one mage in the ritual to direct where the power is coming from. If a mage had wanted to kill a dragon in this fashion, he need only participate in a large enough ritual, and direct the channel from where the power came from. It would be possible to do so with none of the other participants being aware.”

  “So it could have been murder.”

  “Yes, it could have been. But it was not.”

  I had been staring at the dragon above us and thinking of Aloeus’ last moments. Dr. Shafran’s assertion brought me back to earth. I turned and looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

  “A cursory examination of the body would have revealed it,” he said. “Anyone remotely familiar with the process would have been able to tell the difference.”

  “What? It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head. “Only insofar that the cause of death is the same. But the differences would be as stark as the difference between death by asphyxiation and death by explosive decompression. The natural phenomenon is a gradient, the body would die at different rates in different areas, the process would be nonuniform. An artificial drain would cause a sudden, stark, absence of power. The parts of the body inside the effect would all be affected equally. Any part outside the effect would be completely unscathed.” He looked at me. “Such a line of division, such a uniform degradation of the flesh, that would be as obvious as a bullet wound or a slash from a knife. The police would not dismiss such a thing as an accident.”

  No, but perhaps Coroner Nixon had.

  If Dr. Nixon had falsified the manner of death, that gave someone an excellent motive to finish him off. Since Aloeus was now so much ash, there’d be no one left to contradict the “official” examination. I was more certain than ever that Aloeus’ death was murder.

  I decided to not bother Dr. Shafran with my conclusions. I thanked him for his time and stood up. “One last thing.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Have you ever heard of anyone named Faust?”

  “No—”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not recently.”

  I stopped in mid stride and turned back around. “What?”

  “A long time ago, back in the months after the Portal opened.” He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment.

  “Yes?”

  “Just a rumor I heard somewhere. When people were talking about elves and such taking over.”

  “What rumor, exactly?”

  “Faust was the person who was going to lead the elvish takeover. A dozen different descriptions. All probably someone’s paranoid fantasy. The elves have not taken over.”

  “Thank you.”

  One of many rumors to have spawned after the Portal opened. The doctor was right. It was probably someone’s paranoid fantasy. Except for the fact that Bone Daddy and the SPU elves had been asking about him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I GOT home late, and the message light was blinking on my home phone. No Shakespeare this time, just the voice of my ex-wife saying, “Call me.” I set a Styrofoam box of tandori chicken on the coffee table and dialed her number, hoping that Sarah would answer the phone.

  No such luck.

  “Where have you been? It has to be nine-thirty out there.”

  “Ten-thirty,” I corrected her, rolling my head to hear my neck pop.

  “You talked to Sarah—”

  “She called me,” I said. Unlike the call from my daughter, the tone my ex-wife was using made me grateful for the distance between us.

  “What did she tell you?”

  I shook my head. “She told me you beat her with chains and fed her broken glass. What do you think she told me? She
esh.”

  There was a long pause before she said, “Do you think I’m being unreasonable?”

  I closed my eyes and put my head in my hand. “Margaret, I told her that I wasn’t going to pressure you on her behalf. I’m going to tell you the same thing.”

  “Kline, please—”

  “I’m not there. I won’t second-guess your parenting skills. I don’t doubt you’re a good mother, or that our daughter gave you ample justification, but I’m not getting involved in a fight between you two. Period.”

  “You’re her father—”

  “Thank you for clearing that up.”

  “You’re supposed to back me up on things like this.”

  “That wasn’t on the divorce paper I signed.” I was sorry the moment I said it. I felt the words leave my lips and realized that she had managed to snare me in the old trap of following her up the emotional escalator.

  “Goddamn it, Kline! Since she called you, she won’t talk to me.”

  I sighed and took a deep breath to center myself. “Margaret, she called me to bitch about being grounded. She’s a very pissed young woman.”

  “You’re taking her side?” Her voice was escalating. Any moment now, dogs all over San Francisco would start howling in response.

  “You know better than that. And my opinion has no bearing on how angry she is. Whether or not you’re justified, has no bearing on how angry she is. She probably deserves everything she’s getting. Do you think for a moment that makes her feel better?”

  “You don’t understand. You don’t have to deal with this.”

  “That’s exactly why I should keep my substantial nose out of the whole mess. Just step back and think of how much well-meaning destruction I could wreak if I tried that kind of long-distance parenting. You really want to debate curfews with me over the phone every week?”

  “She was really upset, wasn’t she?” Her voice had calmed down.

  “It didn’t seem unwarranted.”

  There was along sigh. “Sometimes I think it would be easier if you were closer.”

  “You’re the one who moved.”

  “I couldn’t have our child in that environment.”

  “It’s a lot better now—”

  “Kline—”

  “Houses in the city are worth something now, the school system is finally—”

  “Kline, don’t.”

  I stopped.

  “You know better than that,” she said. “Sarah’s lived here most of her life now. She has friends—”

  “Uh-huh. Now why don’t you tell me about this Chris guy . . .”

  Despite the successful deescalation of things with Margaret, my subconscious was uneasy enough to prod me with nightmares.

  I am confronted with a specter of Aloeus’ corpse, torn and broken worse than I had seen on the river. The body is being consumed by the unnatural rot that afflicted the corpses of slain magical beasts. It stares at me with a blind milky eye the size of a hubcap and whispers in an uneven voice that sounds like a tape recorder going bad, “Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unusual . . .”

  The voice merged with the sound of my phone demanding attention. I rolled off my couch, pissed at the second rude awakening to happen to me in the past forty-eight hours.

  I grabbed the handset and growled “What?”

  Even though it had been a dream, I was still surprised to answer the phone and hear the voice of Kirk Cutler and not my harassing Shakespeare buff.

  “Maxwell, what happened to you? Why aren’t you answering your cell phone?”

  “Jesus Christ, Cutler. It’s three-thirty in the morning.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for two hours.”

  “Did you hear me? It’s three-thirty. A.M.!”

  “I’ve been leaving messages all over—”

  “Cutler, I go off duty when I come home. I turn my cell phone off. That means that I’m not even going to ask you why you’re worked up, because whatever it is can wait until eight.”

  “Don’t you listen to the radio? The news tonight—”

  “I’m hanging up, Cutler.”

  I was reaching to hang up the phone, and just as I was about to set it in the cradle, I heard, very distinctly, the word, “Dead.”

  A feeling of dread filled my stomach as I raised the handset back to my ear. I began to wonder what would get Cutler so worked up, and why he might call me of all people. We had consummated our quid pro quo and, if anything, I needed him for my story more than he needed me for his. “What was that?” I asked the receiver, something in me wishing the connection had already died.

  “I said that Bone Daddy is dead. Deceased. It was all over the late newscasts.”

  My words felt dry, tasting of copper. “I don’t turn on the news at home.”

  “You missed a shitload. That BMW you spotted turned up at an intersection in Hough. A squad of SPU elves called in the plates. Mix in a liberal dose of ‘allegedly’ and ‘according to police,’ and you have a fucking massacre that looks like the end of Bonnie and Clyde.”

  I was standing, completely awake now. “Back up a minute, Cutler. You’re saying the cops shot him.”

  “No, Maxwell. I’m saying they slaughtered the guy. At least a hundred shots fired, none from Bone. Which is kind of funny if you ask me, since the homeboy was packing.”

  I was pacing now, looking for where I’d tossed my clothes when I went to bed. “From the top, Cutler. What happened?”

  “I don’t know what happened. I know what the police say happened.”

  “Out with it.”

  “The story goes: Bone’s sitting at a light. A squad of unidentified SPU elves—whose identity I think we both can guess—run his plate, then call in that they are making the stop. Bone does not do the sane thing and pull over. Instead, he pulls an Uzi out from under the driver’s seat and draws down on the elf cops—cops, I might add, who’ve had no problem letting him walk from all manner of felonies before this.”

  “He shot at the police?”

  “No, apparently he was a little too slow. Though he did have the foresight to load up the Uzi with 9mm elf-stopper rounds.”

  I shook my head. The thing about the SPU being mostly elves and such, is bullets don’t do a hell of a lot. A lead slug will knock them down, but they’re a hell of a lot more resilient than your average cop. A head shot with a normal bullet won’t take them out of the picture. But then, there are so-called “elf-stopper” rounds, fully steel-jacketed hollow points that fragment enough iron content to drop your average elf.

  Unfortunately for Bone Daddy, the human body was quite vulnerable to standard lead bullets.

  “The Uzi was a plant,” I said.

  “A regular rhodo-fucking-dendron.”

  “Why would they kill him?”

  “Why you think I’m calling all over the place for you, Einstein? The dragon shit blew this open, and the hell if I’m going to lose a story because of one of you op-ed prima donnas. You and I gotta talk.”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  “Bring your notebook, I got another CD to show you.”

  I met up with Cutler at an all-night diner in Cleveland Heights at about four-fifteen. Cutler was getting a refill on his coffee when I walked in. I was carrying my computer, like he’d asked me.

  He waved me over to the booth and waved the waitress away—rather rudely, since I didn’t get a chance to order anything myself. He ground a cigarette out in the ashtray next to him and said, “Come on, let’s boot this thing up.”

  I put the notebook on the table between us. Before I opened it, I asked him. “What is it?”

  He reached down and put a clear crystal case down in front of us. The platter inside had the blue tint of a recordable CD. “You ain’t going to believe this one.”

  “Try me.”

  “I hear Bone Daddy bites it. You aren’t the only one I’m trying to get hold of. I’m running down everyone I know who knew Bone and who m
ight talk to me. Everyone. The fucking case of my fucking life is bleeding away, Maxwell. I gotta get something.”

  “And you got this?”

  “An old girlfriend—not even his current, this is, like, three bitches ago, but I’m running out of people who’ll talk, right?—I knock on he door. She doesn’t know that the cops capped her ex’s ass.”

  I can picture Cutler at this woman’s door. He wasn’t exactly the soul of subtlety or discretion. This must have been only hours after the shooting, Bone wasn’t even cold yet.

  “So she loses it when you tell her,” I said.

  “Hell, no.” Cutler taps the CD case. “She gives me this. Says that our wizard gave it to her three years ago, saying to give it to the man who tells her he’d been killed.”

  “What is it? A will?”

  “I don’t know,” Cutler said. “It’s encrypted.”

  I picked up the case and looked at the CD inside. I shook my head. “I hope you didn’t call me here for my prowess as a code breaker.” When it came down to it, there was enough hard encryption on the Internet that chances were that the CD was essentially useless, unbreakable without a passphrase.

  Cutler shook his head. “No, but let me tell you this. Bone Daddy said to this chick, ‘Pass this on to the man who tells you I’ve been killed.’ He didn’t say, ‘when I die.’ he said ‘killed.‘”

  I shrugged. “Not a tough call in his line of work.”

  “Kline, this guy was an eye, a fortune-teller. He knew he was going to end badly. And, three years ago, he knew that someone was going to bring the news to this babe he was shacked up with.”

  “Fat lot of good it does anyone if the CD’s encrypted.”

  “She told me that he knew that the guy who was supposed to see this thing would know the password.”

  I shrugged. “So if this guy is—was—such a seer, why don’t you know it?”

  “I don’t think it is meant for me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve tried passwords six ways from Sunday. Like I said, he’s good. He’d know what passphrase to use to let it fall into the right person’s lap. Not me. You.”