Dragons & Dwarves

  You want me to get that? I thought, but I managed not to say it.

  It kept ringing, the electronic beeping cutting through the silence like a knife. I could tell that O’Malley wanted the person just to hang up, but the caller wasn’t cooperating. Five, six, ten rings.

  I did say, “Might be Nesmith.”

  My vision had cleared enough to see O’Malley’s mouth harden into a bloodless line. “Get that, Detective.”

  Caledvwlch walked away from the door and picked up the phone. It was hard to read his expression. “Hello?” After another moment he repeated, “Hello?” After a half minute he hung up.

  “Who was it?” O’Malley asked.

  “‘The play’s the thing,’” Caledvwlch quoted, “‘Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’”

  “What?” O’Malley wore a puzzled expression.

  I was in a sprawl facing O’Malley, and the windows to the street. Streetlights shone against the curtains, and while I watched, a shadow passed between the window and the light. I took my Shakespearean caller as a cue to dive for cover.

  I rolled behind the lounge chair as the window exploded inward. The hairs stood up on my arms as the wards on the condo let go, trying to stun the intruder. Unfortunately for O’Malley, the wards only carried enough punch to KO something the size of a human being.

  O’Malley turned around to face the window, bracing his arm. The gun fired, the silencer making the shots sound like a sledgehammer slamming into a bag of wet cement.

  The intruder stood on the remains of my coffee table. The thing stood as tall as Caledvwlch, even in its perpetual hunch. The black leathery batwings folded behind it added a foot to its height. Its arms were long enough for the knuckles to scrape the floor, its legs thick and half the length. The face was twisted and skull-like, all toothy jaws and deep black orbits for eyes.

  My shadow.

  O’Malley emptied his automatic. To his credit, even caught completely off guard, I saw about half the shots find a tight grouping on the gargoyle’s chest. Fat lot of good it did O’Malley. The holes the bullets punched in the thing’s flesh didn’t even bleed, they only released a little steam.

  The gargoyle’s response was slightly more effective.

  A long arm, ending with a hand full of foot-long talons, swatted O’Malley like a windshield wiper taking out a horsefly. Just as effective, and a lot more messy. O’Malley’s body sailed into the entertainment center, shattering the wide screen and knocking it off the wall. His head didn’t quite make it that far.

  I did the sensible thing. I ran.

  I had forgotten about Caledvwlch. I only made it halfway to the door when the elf clotheslined me. Flat on the ground, I coughed and opened my eyes to see Caledvwlch pointing a Glock down at me. “Are you nuts?” I coughed. “That thing—”

  Something was wrong here, because the gargoyle should have decapitated both of us by now. I looked back, and it hadn’t moved from its station in the middle of my living room. It opened its mouth, and spoke “Place the gun on the ground, brother.” It was like the voice of the dragon, deep enough that I felt it vibrate behind my sternum.

  “Do not approach, or your prize will die.”

  The creature spread its arms. “You do not trust me?”

  “You killed my liege.” Caledvwlch pulled back the slide on the Glock.

  The creature laughed, and the sound made me sick to my stomach. It didn’t help that Caledvwlch looked ready to shoot me to spite this thing.“You would call a mortal liege?”

  “I have honor. I have duty.”

  “You debase yourself. Do you imagine your ‘liege’ saw your noble fealty as more than a tool to control you?”

  Caledvwlch shook his head. “This is not what was agreed—”

  “Consider it a favor,” the thing said, gesturing toward the pile of meat that had been O’Malley.

  “Go,” Caledvwlch said, “the others will be here soon.”

  “Not without him.”

  Caledvwlch shook his head. “Not after what you’ve done. I cannot accept this.”

  “Who are you serving now, brother? O’Malley’s ghost? You know the evil they’ve done.”

  “I cannot trust you with him.”

  The Glock moved away, and I sat up a bit. “Don’t I get a voice in this?”

  “You keep him in city custody, it is only a matter of time. You believe I would harm him after what we’ve gone through already?”

  Caledvwlch wavered. For myself, neither option seemed all that appealing. The standoff seemed primed to endure indefinitely, then a pounding started at the front door. When no one answered immediately, the sound changed to someone slamming into the other side, trying to break the dead bolt.

  Caledvwlch looked at the door, than at the remains of O’Malley. He lowered his Glock and shook his head. “This cannot be allowed to continue.” He stepped away from above me. “You wanted to know, Mr. Maxwell. So you shall. Go with the creature.”

  “Is this a good idea?” I asked as I got to my feet.

  Caledvwlch raised the Glock again. “Go,” he said.

  I heard the doorframe crack. So much for caution. I ran over to the gargoyle. It didn’t give me much choice. Once I was within reach, those long arms took me into an ice-cold embrace, holding me to the unyielding flesh of its chest.

  The thing held me in an iron grip, and I had a few brief moments to contemplate the idiotic things people are capable of doing when a gun is put to their heads. I felt movement, but I couldn’t see past the thing’s shoulder. I managed to turn my head just as the whole world went topsy-turvy on me. I saw a brief flash of ceiling behind me as the gargoyle sprang backward. Then a starless expanse of sky twisted around us as my inner ear decided that it was time for me to throw up.

  We fell like a stone; a dive that nothing should’ve been able to recover from.

  Fortunately for both of us, the gargoyle was a magical entity and the laws of aerodynamics need not apply. It unfolded its wings beneath its plummeting body and managed to pull out of the dive a few feet above the sidewalk. We narrowly missed the power lines for the nearby rapid transit tracks as we shot upward.

  By now the sense of vertigo from all the movement was making my head hurt. I managed one passing look at the flood-lit quad of Shaker Square—from about three hundred feet up and at a sixty-degree angle—and screwed my eyes shut.

  The thing moved so fast that it was hard for me to breathe. The wind whipping by us tried to snatch the breath from my mouth.

  Okay, someone remind me why this was preferable to being shot . . .

  I could feel the remains of this afternoon’s McFood backing up on me. I think the only thing that kept me from actually throwing up was the thought that it might encourage this thing to drop me. I risked a few glances as we flew, looking downward. We seemed to be heading northeast, though that was only a guess based on sighting the downtown skyline, and not from anything below or the sense of direction that I had abandoned during that dive out my condo window.

  Thank God no one is shooting at us.

  My one glad thought was quickly followed by the mental image of Aloeus. We were, apparently, escaping from the folks responsible for that. If they decided to reprise that with my gargoyle . . .

  I spent the rest of the flight imagining myself plummeting to the ground embraced by three or four tons of inanimate stone—or whatever this thing was made of.

  It felt as if we were airborne for an eternity, though it was actually only a few minutes before the gargoyle began its descent. I risked a look downward and, for a few moments, I thought we were falling, upside down, into the sky.

  Below us was black, inky darkness. It was even darker than the sky, when I realized the sky was still above us. The blackness was bordered by broad avenues and streetlights, but the interior was a vast unlit space. We had already descended too far for me to see the extent of it.

  The gargoyle set down on a dark lawn in the midst of the darkness. It let me
go as soon as it landed. My legs weren’t ready to support me, and my inner ear wasn’t quite sure of the direction of up. I tumbled down at the gargoyle’s feet. I had to sink my fingers into the grass to convince my body that I’d stopped moving.

  I agreed with my body; down was good.

  I lay there for a few long moments, waiting for the flight-induced vertigo to recede enough for me to open my eyes without setting my head spinning.

  When I felt well enough, I pushed myself off of the ground. My legs were a little wobbly, but they supported me. I blinked a few times before I realized that I was face-to-face with an angel. A few more times before I was convinced that the angel in question was made of granite and perched atop a rectangular monument whose front read “Drummond” and whose side bore a carved shield with the text of the 23rd Psalm engraved in it.

  It was dark, but I could see ranks of headstones surrounding me.

  At least I knew where we were. Lakeview Cemetery was the only near east side necropolis that covered this much real estate. I turned around to face the gargoyle. It stood, impassive and unmoving.

  “So?” I asked it. “We’re here?”

  No response.

  “Now what?”

  Nothing.

  “Damn it, I know you can talk—” I shook my head. “Did you fly me all the way over here to abandon me in a graveyard?”

  “No,” came a feminine voice from behind me. “And it cannot talk without someone to animate it.”

  I spun around again, staggering a bit because I did so too quickly. “Who?”

  “We’ve met before, Mr. Maxwell,” she said as she walked out of the shadowed woods beyond the graves. She wore a dark hood that made her form nearly invisible in the shadows. I only caught sight of her because of the sense of movement toward me. She lowered her hood as she approached me, and her pale face stood out against the darkness, her eyes glowing slightly as Caledvwlch’s had.

  “Ysbail,” I said.

  She gestured in a half bow, half curtsy.

  I placed my hand on my head and closed my eyes. “This is a long way from Hunting Valley.”

  “One of many places of power.”

  “What the hell’s going on here? Why did your pet—pet thing over there—grab me?”

  “You would prefer being killed like their mage?” She walked up next to me and stared at the gargoyle. She spoke several lines quietly in her native tongue, and the misshapen thing jumped straight upward, unfolded its wings, and disappeared into the starless sky.

  “You’ve had that thing following me since this started.”

  “Imperfectly,” she said. “And initially it was watching Commander O’Malley.”

  “Why?”

  “Accompany me, Mr. Maxwell, and I will explain.” She started walking away, and the fear that she might leave me here was more than I needed to convince me to follow.

  I walked after her, through sparse woodlands, toward a mausoleum set back into a hillside, facing partly away from us. “You were singled out the moment Aloeus fell from the sky. Set upon the twisted path that led you here.” We walked around to the front of the mausoleum, where green bronze doors were held shut by a rusty chain. Ysbail made a hand gesture and the chains rattled to the ground.

  “Uh-huh,” I said as the doors to the tomb opened of their own accord. “Who did the singling out?”

  The doors stood open before us and, inside the tomb I could see only an inky blackness. Ysbail walked up the steps and said, “Come with me.”

  She walked through without looking back. Her form disappeared into the darkness and I hesitated until the doors began closing again. I slipped through before they had shut completely. I felt a sudden drop in temperature as a cool wind beat at my face. I felt for the walls, so I’d have some sense of direction, but my hands didn’t find any.

  I walked into light, as if a curtain was drawn aside.

  For a few moments I was blinded. I blinked a few times, and the first thing I noticed was the unfinished stone floor.

  I looked up to see Ysbail standing against a curving stone wall. The wall was unfinished stone, like the floor, and inscriptions in some alien language were carved into the rock. Light came from a Coleman lantern that hung incongruously from a bronze sconce set into the wall.

  I looked around and saw no trace of the mausoleum we had entered.

  However, hanging in the air behind us was a sphere of inky blackness that seemed to hold a reflection of some space that wasn’t here. As I watched, the sphere shrank, as if it was deflating or fading into the distance. In a moment, it was gone.

  I turned around to face Ysbail.

  “Welcome to Ragnan,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I SHOOK my head. “No. Don’t play games with me. Where are we?”

  “The catacombs beneath the city of Galweir. I assure you that I am not playing any game.”

  I looked back to where the sphere had disappeared. “Was that what I think it was?”

  “A Portal? Yes, though a short-lived one.”

  “That’s not supposed to be possible.”

  “Many from your world wish that were so.” She picked up the lantern, and the shadows shifted around us. “Come,” she said, leaving me with little choice. She led me through twisting corridors of stone, all inscribed, most with niches in place to receive the dead. The air here was cool and dry, and—now that the mini-Portal was gone—still.

  I looked at the skulls piled into some of the niches, and it didn’t seem so far-fetched that we had left the shores of Lake Erie.

  “Why are we here?”

  “Because the people who threaten your life are not here.” Ysbail said it as if she was explaining things to a child. She followed a narrow staircase upward.

  “What’s my life to you?”

  “We used you. Invested what was left of our cause in you.” Her voice changed tone slightly. I didn’t know if it was the elvish equivalent of compassion, or irony, when she said, “We bear some responsibility for your safety.”

  “Used me?” I said. “Everyone and their brother have been using me.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. I could swear she gave me the ghost of a smile. She pushed open a large oaken door and led me out into our partner universe. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting.

  What I saw was decidedly surreal.

  The sky was just purple with dawn, which allowed me to see the mountain first. It towered over us, a rocky mound covered by trees until, about halfway up, someone had decided to turn the mountain into art. The bluff on which we stood, and looked upward from, turned into a muscular leg. The ridge where it led toward its sister mountains, became a tail leading into a serpentine torso. One wing still rose on the far side, but on our side, the stone dragon’s remains were buried chest-high in rubble, on top of which lay a carved head the size of a five-story building.

  I looked around and saw our surroundings were in similar disrepair. We stood on flagstones that could have once been inside. Stone walls on either side of us were draped in vines and moss and only seemed to go halfway up. Behind us I saw the shell of a ruined tower, collapsed so all that was left of the upper levels was a semicircular wall whose concave side faced us.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Our capital,” Ysbail said. “The home of the elves.”

  I looked at her, and I could see the same aspect of mourning that I had seen in Caledvwlch. I looked back toward the catacombs we had walked through. “You’re supposed to be immortal.”

  For the first time in my life, I heard an elf laugh. It was a quiet sound, and somewhat sad. “Your word, Mr. Maxwell. Not ours. We do not age, but all but the most prideful of us know death is no stranger to us. To one as short-lived as you, we must seem forever unchanging, eternal. Our greatest sin was believing that was so.” She cast an arm back toward the catacombs. “Our ancestors, and their ancestors. Generations before memory.”

  “What happened here?”

&n
bsp; “You did.”

  “What?”

  “Mankind. Mortals more familiar with death, and much more willing to face it. They could not abide us, so they destroyed us. Our people are so scattered now that in a few of our generations we will cease to exist.” She reached out and took my arm. Her fingers were long, pale, and cold. “Come see.”

  She took me to the edge of the flagstone courtyard, which was once a great hall, and stopped at the edge, where the floor fell away. We stood at the top of a hill that sloped downward about a mile. There was a road coming from what must have been the front of this place, snaking down the hillside to a city.

  The road had once been lined with statues, but the sculpture lay in dismembered piles along the gutters. Large segments of the road had fallen away into gullies that now dug into the hillside. The buildings, whatever remained standing in the town, were roofless. Most had only two or three walls left. Plants covered the stone, giving everything a weathered, softened appearance.

  I expected to smell death here. Perhaps my psyche needed that kind of tangible sensation to bring home the gravity of what I was looking upon. The world, of course, didn’t cooperate. The smell here was the smell of a meadow at dawn, dewy grass and wildflow- ers. The mortal wound inflicted here happened too long ago to leave such a sign. The ruins here were centuries old.

  Still, I asked, “Valdis?”

  “No,” Ysbail said. “He was only the most recent.”

  “How long has it been like this?”

  “An instant—” she turned away from the dead village. “I remember when these halls smelled of incense and lavender and proud men argued about the most enduring values of aesthetics.”

  “Why haven’t you rebuilt?”

  “Here? No. The magic here is alive with the atrocities still. To remain here overlong would be death. To build here would be to desecrate a tomb.” She shook her head. “Elsewhere? Until now, it has been all that we could do to survive in the face of the human realm here.”

  “Until now?”

  She nodded. “To begin again—that has been what has made such bitter enemies, Mr. Maxwell. The great beast, Mankind, cannot forgive us for refusing to die, or be forgotten.” She turned to face me, and I could almost see tears on her cheeks, though her voice didn’t change timbre. “Your world as much as mine.”