Dragons & Dwarves

  “What is your ‘role’? Do you guys have some sort of mission statement beyond ‘serve and protect’?”

  “You are looking for hidden agendas, Mr. Maxwell.”

  It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. “You—the SPU—were formed to be specialist cops, like Vice, or Homicide. Doesn’t look as if that’s the way things worked out.”

  “We are police officers.”

  “You’re doing covert black bag jobs for the administration. That night with Bone Daddy wasn’t your first midnight questioning of an unwilling subject.”

  “Perhaps.” The minivan slowed to a stop outside my building.

  They led me out of the van, and I hunched my shoulders, expecting an ambush out of the night. Three elves accompanied me inside, the driver staying with the car, as always.

  Once we were in the stairwell and I felt a little safer, I asked, “How close was Cutler to what was really happening?”

  Caledvwlch’s voice echoed hollowly, and somewhat ominously, in the stairwell, “Mr. Cutler asked the wrong questions.”

  I had a real bad feeling. What were the right questions? Why did Cutler have to die? Why did they want me dead? Coroner Nixon? Bone Daddy? Several things that had been nagging at me began surfacing as the elf led me up to my condo. Nixon wasn’t killed to hide the dragon’s murder. Nesmith and company already knew, they had just invented an accident in an attempt to play things down. The city was doing Faust’s job in that respect.

  Nixon was killed for some other reason.

  Faust had a mole in the administration . . . .

  I looked at Caledvwlch and asked, “How did Caleb Washington die?”

  He looked at me and said, “Mr. Maxwell, Caleb Washington held a fellow officer, a human officer, at gunpoint. We had no choice but to shoot him.”

  The air around me began to leach the heat off my skin. “Nesmith said—”

  “Ms. Nesmith does not know.”

  When I stared at him for a few moments, he repeated, “We had no choice,” as if I had missed the point.

  Before I could ask him anything more, he had the door open and we were walking into my condo to face the hunched form of Thomas O’Malley. The elves flanked me and stood, almost at attention until O’Malley nodded and gestured them at ease. Caledvwlch was silent, and it started to strike me that, like Baldassare, this person I’d been pumping would never tell me a thing unless he had a concrete reason to do so.

  As Commander O’Malley stood to greet us, I began to wonder exactly what that reason was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “WELL,” I said, “make yourself at home.” The bad feeling in my gut had just deepened several notches. What Caledvwlch had said in the stairwell didn’t sync with what Nesmith had said about Bone Daddy, unless O’Malley here was part of it.

  How much of this did Cutler have right?

  O’Malley shook his head. “I would have thought you’d be flattered at the attention.” He gave me a humorless grin. “You’re under ‘special police protection.’”

  “The elf squad isn’t special enough?”

  “We all follow Ms. Nesmith’s lead, don’t we boys?”

  “Sir,” replied Caledvwlch. He was echoed by his two henchmen, the first time I had heard their voices. The feeling in the room was unnerving. I couldn’t read the elves, beyond the fact that they had become even more reserved upon entering the room—as impossible as that seemed. O’Malley on the other hand, radiated unease like the heat from a compost heap. His posture was tense, and he eyed the elves more than he eyed me.

  I looked at the tableau in my living room, all back-lit by my wide-screen showing some nature documentary. The tension was taking its toll on me; I needed space to breathe, to think.

  After a few long moments I said, “Okay, folks, if you all don’t mind, I’m going to take a long-overdue shower.”

  I had just got my airport coveralls unzipped, an effort the way my hands still pained me, when Detective Caledvwlch opened the door.

  I stood there, the coveralls half dropped and hanging on my hips, staring at him in numb disbelief. “Come on.”

  Caledvwlch responded by settling his ungainly form on the john. He reminded me of a spider, the way his overlong legs bent past his lap. Even so, he managed to look gracefully imperturbable.

  “You are not seriously going to watch me take a shower?”

  “Mr. Maxwell, our duty is to protect you and neutralize your attackers.”

  “Yeah, right.” I waved an arm around the windowless bathroom. “You think someone will attack me in here? There’s no way in. You can sit by the door.”

  “A magical attack can ignore physical barriers.”

  I sighed, stood there a little longer, and finally dropped the overalls. If privacy was a little much to ask for, I was going to have to settle for getting myself clean.

  “Enjoy the show,” I said, and continued with my mission to feel like a human being again. I considered making a joke about dropping the soap, but a joke is wasted on an elf—and it was the kind of reference that would probably mystify him.

  While I cleaned myself, I asked through the shower curtain, “What’s the deal between you and O’Malley?” With the door shut and the water going, my question wouldn’t carry outside the bathroom.

  For a time, I thought Detective Caledvwlch’s comparative gre gariousness earlier had been a fluke. I didn’t hear anything for a minute or so, so I resumed scrubbing.

  It took so long for a reply that when it came, I did end up dropping the soap.

  “Mr. Maxwell, I fail to understand your question.”

  I snorted. It seemed an overly trite way of being coy, and I was about to say so, when it struck me that he might truly not understand. “There’s no love lost between you, is there? You might be cool to me on general principles, but around him it’s like you’re all sucking on dry ice.”

  “We owe fealty to him,” he said in a flat voice.

  “Don’t like your boss?”

  “From him to Ms. Nesmith, from her to Mayor Rayburn.” I actually had to turn down the shower, his voice had become so low. “But first, to him.”

  Okay, he’s got chain of command down pat. But his words began to ring an uneasy chord in my mind. In the twenty-first century United States, archaic feudal codes of honor were way out of place. But Caledvwlch wasn’t born, or in any real sense raised, in the twenty-first century United States. Would patterns of behavior, definitions of right and wrong, be so easily swayed by movement from an agrarian society of noble-born landowners and serfs to a post-industrial service economy?

  “. . . a society that doesn’t value human life, sees women as property, and sees violence as the first resort in a dispute. These men don’t know the rule of law . . .”

  Blackstone was speaking of the dregs when he said that. How such a world created for us a new breed of criminals and rapists. However, I began to realize that the effects might be manifest in ways more subtle—and more corrupting to the principles the Feds were supposed to be fighting for.

  I turned off the shower and pulled the curtain aside. Caledvwlch wasn’t looking at me, but I was thinking of the way he had said—right before we entered the condo—that he “had no choice.”

  I was beginning to see more than one way to interpret that phrase.

  “Who was Bone Daddy threatening?” I asked.

  “I cannot say,” Caledvwlch responded in the same flat voice, answering my question without answering it.

  “O’Malley?” I asked.

  “I cannot say.” He didn’t turn to look at me.

  My elven escort followed me as I shaved, bandaged the cuts on my hands that’d reopened in the shower, and when I went to the bedroom to get dressed. While I pulled on some clean clothes, Caledvwlch kept up his silent presence, not looking at me.

  He stood in the doorway, slightly bent because of his height. The silhouette of his head against the light of the hall was obviously nonhuman. His eyes had a slight
glow to them that I hadn’t noticed before, lifting them out of his shadowed face. His right hand touched his left shoulder, almost an expression of mourning.

  It wasn’t right. He seemed more out of place here now than he ever had. His cheap cop suit hung on him as oddly, and as disre spectfully, as a pair of dirty overalls hung on the statue of David. I’ve never used the word beautiful to describe another man, but in Caledvwlch’s case, the word fit—a lot better than the suit.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked him.

  He answered in his breathless island-flavored accent, a few notches lower on its inhuman register. “I am supposed to protect—”

  I shook my head and interrupted him. “Not here, my condo. Here, Cleveland. Why did you come through into this world? Why pass through the Portal?”

  He turned to face me and looked as if no one had ever bothered asking the question. “What interest is it of yours?”

  “You’re out of place here.”

  “Everyone is out of place here.” He turned away, looking down the hall, back toward O’Malley and the other elves.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Mortals have a great advantage,” Caledvwlch said. “That’s why Ragnan is the only empire of any consequence for the past thousand years. So fragile . . .”

  He trailed off, and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know where he was going with this.

  “Mr. Maxwell,” he turned to face me. “You might think that I might be more ‘in place’ were I to go home. You presume that a home still exists for me.” Caledvwlch shook his head. “We are a dying race. We started dying when mortal man took the first step into our world. Valdis simply consummated the inevitable with the destruction of our noble houses.”

  The aspect of mourning became concrete, the gravity of his past drew on his posture more than it did his words. “I and my fellows were raised for the honor of serving a noble lord. I have done so longer than any of the petty nations on your world have existed. Valdis took that last honor from us, with everything else.” He looked upward and for the first time I saw a trace of emotion. His right hand clenched on his shoulder, bunching the material of the suit so tightly that I thought it might tear.

  “They have the temerity to tell us that we’re free now. Free?” The hand relaxed. “How can I be free, Mr. Maxwell? My native language doesn’t even have a word for the concept.”

  His voice never wavered.

  I stepped up, feeling the need to say something. It was a misplaced urge, and I realized it as the words came out of my mouth. “It must be a difficult adjustment.”

  He looked at me as if I was a disease-laden insect that had just landed on his shoe. “Adjustment? You are a fool if you believe it possible for us to be as inconstant as you. Honor and duty are not malleable virtues to be reshaped at a whim. If what is right is only right as long as it suits you, there is no right.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “What did you mean, Mr. Maxwell, other than that we adopt your ‘freedom’? What purpose have I without honor? I have sworn myself, and that cannot be unsworn.” He turned away from me, and his voice was very low now, almost as if he was talking to himself. “Even should I want to abandon myself, do you think I can be so easily changed? We do not change. We are not mortal. We are supposed to be incorruptible, eternal. What we are is permanence. To change is to die.” Then, very quietly, “Not to change is to die.”

  Then he looked over his shoulder at me, as if he was waiting for me to follow him down the hallway. He said something that I found very disturbing.

  “There is no word in my language for suicide either.”

  He walked me out to the living room where O’Malley was sitting watching my big-screen TV. On the high-definition flat screen, a lioness was chasing after a wounded gazelle. The other elves were gone.

  “So where is everybody?” I asked him.

  “Sent them to cover the rest of the building,” O’Malley said. There was a tumbler of amber liquid in his hand. “You’re important, Maxwell.” He took a sip as the lioness ran the gazelle to ground and sank its teeth into the animal’s neck.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  I glanced over at Caledvwlch for a clue as to what was going on. The situation didn’t feel right to me. Caledvwlch was no help, he had become solidly impassive again.

  “You and the detective get to know each other?” O’Malley asked. “That’s good,” he added without pausing for an answer. “I know that Caledvwlch has a lot to get off his chest.” He looked over at the elf and shook his head. “Take it from a good Catholic, confession is good for the soul.”

  “What’s going on here, O’Malley?”

  O’Malley chuckled and shook his head. “Sit down, Maxwell. Detective, stand by the door.”

  I didn’t sit as Caledvwlch obediently stationed himself by the entrance to the condo. “This isn’t right, O’Malley. What’s going on here?”

  “Oh, God, what isn’t right about it?” He put the glass down roughly on my coffee table, and I was reminded of the image of Bone Daddy putting a bottle through the glass tabletop. “Sit yourself the fuck down, Maxwell.”

  I stepped in front of my lounge chair, but I didn’t sit. I looked at O’Malley on the couch and, for the first time, I noticed that he had his gun out, resting on the arm of the couch opposite me. “What are you doing here?”

  O’Malley stared at the screen where a trio of lionesses were tearing gobbets of flesh from the deceased gazelle. One white leg stuck straight upward, as if in some plea for mercy. “I wish I’d never heard of the damn Portal. I wish I’d stayed a damn beat cop. I wish I never had to deal with this crap.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t have to have this job, I volunteered. The Special Paranormal Unit. I thought it was so fucking interesting. Police work that no one else had ever done. Fucking idiot.”

  “O’Malley?”

  “I did not start out to run a goddamn Gestapo. And now it’s gone way past the point where I can go back.” He reached for the gun.

  I backed up. “O’Malley, this is not a good idea.”

  He moved slowly, picking up the remote and shutting off the television. “I didn’t want this,” he said as he stood up. He wasn’t even looking at me.

  “We can talk about this, O’Malley. Come to some sort of arrangement.”

  “Left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, Maxwell.” Many hands and no head. “It’s like trying to ride three horses, this job. Everyone’s got a piece of me. All panicked over this Faust.” He finally looked at me. His eyes were empty. “Some more panicked than others.”

  I raised my hands. “Let’s not—”

  “Do something rash? Irrevocable?” He shook his head and took out a silencer and began attaching it to the end of his gun. “Way too late for that Maxwell. It was too late when that goddamn dragon plowed into the Cuyahoga.”

  “Christ, O’Malley—” I looked back and saw Caledvwlch impassively guarding the door. Is that why he was so forthcoming? Because he knew I wasn’t going to live through this? “At least tell me why?”

  “Why? You know why. Didn’t Nesmith explain it to you?” He shook his head. “If that bitch knew—so many fucking idiots. You know the chain the mayor wears? Tells him who lies to him, who’s loyal to him—and the poor bastard thinks that means he knows what’s happening.”

  I swallowed and thought about Bone Daddy’s CD. “It wasn’t Faust, was it?”

  “Fuck, it was always Faust. Faust plans to destroy Rayburn and everything he’s ever built. We can’t let that happen, can we?” O’Malley shook his head. “We have to do anything to prevent that, don’t we?”

  “Aloeus . . .”

  “Was working with Faust,” O’Malley said. “Had to be stopped.”

  The whole sick situation was beginning to fall into place. The attack on Aloeus wasn’t an attack on the city. The murder of the dragon required a lot of mages in a concerted effort. When it c
ame down to resources, the city employed more mages than anyone else.

  “Bone Daddy knew, didn’t he?”

  “Such a fiasco. Right hand, left hand again. Nesmith didn’t know about the action to neutralize Aloeus. Didn’t come off of her desk—but then, of the three, she’s the least likely to do something that stupid. She also wasn’t one to take things at face value. She knew it wasn’t an accident despite what that poor little bastard Nixon was told to say.”

  I could smell his breath. There was enough scotch there to give someone a contact high. I looked down at the gun. “Why don’t you set that down. We can figure out a way out of this together—”

  I don’t think he even heard me. “She sees it as a movement by Faust, all hell’s going to break loose. Sends out Washington, our lone good cop. The one guy we actually got in close to Faust. Of course the shit starts flying—”

  I stepped forward, “Why don’t you give me the gun—”

  “Don’t you fucking move!” Scotch and spit flew from his lips as the shaking gun slammed barrel first into my chest. He shook his head and the eyes that looked down on me were those of a different person than the O’Malley I knew. “You think I want this? I’m a goddamn cop. You think for one moment, if Washington couldn’t talk his way out of it—Fuck!” He slammed the pistol across my face and my vision blacked out as blood stung my eye.

  “I recruited him. I handpicked him for this job. And he has to buy it because if it gets out how the dragon died it would be worse for Rayburn than if the beast had lived. Of course, since the stupid bastard sending the orders loves Rayburn . . .”

  I rolled over and blinked up at him. A blurred form held a shaking gun at my head. “No contest, Maxwell. I don’t even like you.”

  I braced for the shot.

  The phone rang.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  IT rang again. O’Malley looked over at the phone.