Dragons & Dwarves

  I was a journalist again, asking questions, taking notes. Ysbail, for her part, was like any partisan who’d suffered the loss of land, home, people. I don’t know if she’d appreciate the comparison, but the voice that came from her belonged to every dispossessed person I’d ever heard. Croat, Irish, Palestinian, American Indian—it only really varied in intensity, which was a function of memory, the severity of persecution, and of the individual personality.

  Ysbail’s personality was cool, but more passionate than any elf I had ever met. If she’d been a human, I would have assumed that she was still in shock over the events she described, that any moment, when the reality sank in, she would break down.

  Maybe that’s it, the entire species is still in shock.

  Before Ragnan existed, when humans were still grubbing in the mud, killing their food with well placed stones, this—Galweir—was the soul of civilization of this world. It was a city of philosophers, scholars, mages, artists, and poets. It existed in peace for uncounted millennia, unchanged. Even the anarchic dragons paid tribute to study from the hoard of knowledge Galweir represented.

  This place was so far removed from the lands of men that even the most learned among the elves thought that mankind would never become a threat.

  According to Ysbail, it was the elves’ inhuman pride that kept that belief alive long after it was apparent that mankind was growing too fast beyond anyone’s ability to contain it.

  The citizens of Galweir had been convinced of their own invulnerability even as their city was falling down around them. The men were ruthless in their slaughter. To the humans, death was an inevitability. To the elves, any death was a ghastly accident. Every elf who fell in battle was a festering wound cut into the body of their kind. Their choice became surrender or extinction.

  Those whose choice was surrender were the only ones left. The damage, however, was already done. The scars ran deep into the elvish psyche. Their nobles were executed, individuals who had defined the elves’ destiny for centuries. Their cities ruined, so soaked in the blood of their immortal dead that if any elf stayed there for any length of time the spirit of the place would drive them mad. Their people scattered so that the elvish community no longer existed, only singular individuals humbled by defeat and guilt-scarred by their own survival.

  According to Ysbail, not one elvish child had been born since the fall of Galweir, while half of these supposedly immortal creatures had since died.

  “There is no word in our language for ‘suicide.’” Her voice was thin and hollow in the wind. Dawn was leaking over the ruined dragon, the light reflecting off of the skull, picking out what might have been gems encrusting the massive sculpture.

  “Caledvwlch said that.”

  “A motto,” said Ysbail, “for those of us who want to survive. Many of us saw this,” she motioned to the ruins below, “as our end. To them, we are already dead and all that is left is the wait for the inevitable.”

  “You and Caledvwlch?” I asked.

  Ysbail shook her head. “My brother is not me. He sees salvation in holding on to the old ways in the face of everything. He sees the survival of our culture as the survival of ourselves. Even if he has to call a human Lord.”

  “He is your brother?”

  “In the ways that matter to my kind.”

  “You don’t think he’s right?”

  “Pretending this did not happen does not undo it. He sees himself—all those who do as he does—as preserving us.”

  “And you?”

  “I know better. Caledvwlch is simply looking for a way to die with some dignity.” Ysbail turned to face me. “I do not accept our end. I rebel against it. I will fight it as a wounded she cat defending her young. I do not care about our dignity.” She had grabbed my upper arm. The touch was light, but it shocked me, as did the sudden violence of her words. “I do not care to leave a dignified corpse.”

  She looked at me, and the expression on her face could have been that of a fanatic, or a visionary. The eyes, metallic and expressionless, could have hidden either.

  “What does this have to do with Aloeus’ death?”

  The hand left my arm as she turned to look at the broken dragon. “The elves were first. But the dragons suffered as well. Even though each dragon was a nation unto himself, by then, mankind had great experience in subduing nations. Aloeus gave us an alliance, a chance to bridge the gap between worlds. To find a sanctuary.”

  I shook my head. “My apologies for the state of that sanctuary.”

  “You misunderstand. Cleveland was never the destination. The term in your language that best fits our purpose there would be ‘re connaissance.’”

  “Recon . . .” My voice trailed off as switches began flipping in my brain.

  Fact one, the Portal was not a natural phenomenon, as the general public seemed to believe.

  Fact two, Aloeus created the Portal to give the elves a homeland. Cleveland, Ohio, while adequate, had the disadvantage of being populated by the mortal types who’d been giving these people the shaft.

  Fact three, ten years to these creatures was a very insignificant span of time.

  Fact four . . .

  “Mexico,” I whispered, looking at the mountains surrounding us. A plot of land the size of Cleveland with no commercial value, no easy access, little in the way of natural resources. A property completely worthless to Aloeus, Inc.

  Until you opened a Portal to it.

  “He was teaching us, Mr. Maxwell. Helping us. He had been since he opened the doorway into your world.”

  “Helping who?”

  “The few remaining elves who want to survive.” Ysbail looked away at the ruined dragon. Dawn was cutting the sky into ribbons of red and purple. “The land was ours. More than enough to rebuild our city. Enough to serve those who are left.”

  I suspected the answer, but I asked anyway. “You can move now, can’t you?” I waved back to the catacombs. “You don’t need the Portal.”

  Ysbail shook her head. “We learned enough from him to open a temporary doorway. It lasts hours at most . . . We cannot survive in a world devoid of magic, Mr. Maxwell. We need a permanent source.”

  Aloeus’ death, his murder, made too much sense now. There were dozens of interests involved in having the Portal as a monopoly. Everyone in the city, from Rayburn on down, had a stake in our Portal being the only game in town. Christ, what would happen to the tourist money if an entire nation of elves decided to open up shop south of the border? What would be the draw if there was the same thing available in a better climate, and without the remnants of the twenty-first century hanging around obscuring the magic. Disney was ready to drop billions to build that kind of environment out by Sandusky.

  To the person who, in O’Malley’s words, panicked the most, the natural progression led to an even worse possibility: The second Portal wouldn’t be the last.

  “No one wants competition for the Portal,” I said. One goose laying golden eggs is worth something, but more than that and the eggs start depressing the economy.

  “Centuries of work were wiped out with Aloeus’ death,” Ysbail said. “It might mean the end of our species.”

  “Centuries,” I whispered to myself. I thought of something Caledvwlch had said, “You are a fool if you believe it possible for us to be as inconstant as you.”

  I thought about that for a moment. I was walking in a world where allegiances shifted slowly, if at all. That was important, maybe the key to what was happening here.

  When Aloeus formed an alliance with Rayburn to keep control of the Portal local, helped engineer the attack that ended Valdis’ reign, and continued his influence on the administration—during all that time, he had been working with the elves.

  “You are ‘Faust,’ aren’t you?”

  “Your kind can be very loose with names. The same term can apply as much to many as to one.” She looked at me. “I am of the many, but I am not the one.”

  I decided to count that as
a confirmation. Nesmith was right. There was a mole in the administration, and someone had decided to do something violent about it. They were also correct, in a way, about “Faust” attacking the city and the administration. Their interests were certainly at odds with the long-term goals of most of the political and business community in Cleveland. From the look of things, though, the terrorism seemed pretty one-sided.

  “Tell me about what Aloeus was doing with you.”

  She obliged.

  The Portal was not intended solely as a doorway. It was to be an extension of their world into another, a foothold around which the elves could build their new capital. It required years of effort to produce the permanance of the Portal. It took, had been taking, ten times as long to teach those skills. The temporary Portal that Ysbail had led me through was just a small manifestation, a temporary doorway whose creation was made easier by the proximity of the other Portal.

  The difference between that, and creating a new, permanent Portal was the difference between driving down the interstate and building the interstate—and the car to drive on it. Ysbail’s little portal was simply pulling the energies from the permanent Portal and opening another space to walk through. It wasn’t even possible to do it outside the influence of the permanent Portal.

  And, unlike the Portal that Aloeus opened, the little portals could only be opened into places the mages—and apparently there were several needed to do it—themselves had seen. At least one member of the ritual had a sole duty to visualize the destination.

  The Portal that Aloeus created suffered no such restriction—of course it would have been useless if it had. Aloeus could cast a Portal to a world no one had ever seen. That gave them the ability to escape Ragnan, but made two Portals necessary for their mission. One for reconnaissance, the other once a suitable site had been found for permanent settlement.

  The decision to solicit the National Guard’s assistance was simply a tactical decision on Aloeus’ part, to remove Valdis and buy time on the Ragnan side of the Portal.

  Once the political situation on both planes had stabilized, they needed to find their final target on this world. A target they found with the help of Leo Baldassare.

  I asked about him.

  Ysbail told me, “He has been a friend to our cause since Aloeus arrived in this world.”

  “Hasn’t helped with the administration?”

  “We’ve both required privacy in our dealings.”

  “He knows about ‘Faust’?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew Baldassare kept things close to the vest, but this was surprising, even for him.

  “Where do I come into this?”

  Ysbail and her people knew that the Rayburn administration had Aloeus assassinated. There wasn’t a question in their minds. With their plans wrecked with the dragon’s death, their only real hope was to make the administration’s actions public in such a way that it couldn’t be covered up. Then, maybe, they could convince the government, the courts, the public—someone—to consider reparations.

  That kind of proof was problematic. Especially as the administration and the SPU seemed to be moving to place the blame for the assassination on “Faust.”

  They needed someone credible, someone human, someone with no obvious connections to the paranormal citizens involved. They needed that person to voice the crimes of the Rayburn administration.

  “You were chosen by the one ‘Faust,’ himself. He knows your works, and knows that if you call Mayor Rayburn a murderer, those who read your words will know it is truth.”

  “Baldassare,” I said. “You had him pressure the Press to put me on this story.”

  “To the other journalists, it was not a political story.”

  I shook my head.

  “We granted your guidance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The term in your language is bibliomancy,” she said.

  It took a moment to realize what she was talking about. “You’re the damn bard!”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I could not establish any immediate link to you, magically or otherwise, because you were so well watched. I could, however, create an independent floating enchantment that could warn you, guide you, long after my connection with the spell had been broken and could not be traced.”

  “You’re saying a spell called me?”

  “I cast the spell on the web of electronics that makes up the phone system in Cleveland. The spell moved from point to point, confounding any attempt to trace it.”

  “What’s with the quotes? Why not something useful, like ‘your life’s in danger.’”

  “An oracle does not work like that. It needs a matrix, a form, to cast its information from. It can be runes, dice, cards, bones . . . I chose a form that would be easiest for you to interpret, and easiest for you to receive through the medium I selected.”

  “You expected me to go up against Rayburn for you.”

  “We believed that you would willingly publicize his crimes.”

  I nodded. “There’s one problem with that plan, Ysbail.”

  “What?”

  “Rayburn didn’t have the dragon killed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  YSBAIL turned to say something, perhaps an objection, but she was interrupted by a presence. There was a sudden feeling of imminence in the air, a sensation that set the hair on the back of my neck on end. I turned away from the ruined vistas of Galweir and back toward the flagstone courtyard we had emerged from.

  The air rippled above the stone, and I could see a tiny speck floating there. As I watched it grew to a dot, then a ball, then a rapidly expanding sphere. This was the third Portal I had seen in my life, and the impact wasn’t diminished by the fact that I was expecting it.

  It certainly was a good way to cut any possible pursuit, just sidestep into the next dimension and wait for your comrades to rendezvous. I looked at Ysbail and asked, “How close are we to the original Portal, on this side?”

  “Thousands of miles.”

  I looked at the slowly stabilizing sphere. “But someone can only make these temporary things near the permanent Portal, right?”

  “The caster has to be within the permanent Portal’s influence.”

  “So what were you planning on doing if the ride home didn’t show up?”

  “We would have had a long journey in store for us.” She stepped forward. “Come, it only remains a few moments.”

  I took a step toward a curving image of a huge building in a wooded glen. With no sense of transition at all, I found myself stepping away from the shore of the Chagrin River. In front of us, rising out of the bluff overlooking the river was the massive Tudor pile of Leo Baldassare’s mansion.

  I got the weird feeling of coming full circle.

  The air was thick with the smell of incense, and a quartet of exhausted looking people sat on the grass between us and the mansion. The two elves, I expected. The humans, I didn’t. The man I hadn’t seen before was long-haired with a beard and gut worthy of a Hell’s Angel, with more cryptic tattoos.

  The other one was Mr. Friday, the man whom I’d taken to simply be Aloeus’ lawyer.

  “You’re a mage?” I asked.

  He looked up at me as if I still carried an invisible, disgusting odor, “You are surprised?”

  Ysbail walked up and looked over the quartet , examining each member as if checking for damage. Perhaps that’s what she was doing. Friday seemed the least fatigued by whatever happened here. Perhaps he just showed it less.

  The Hell’s Angel type got unsteadily to his feet. “You,” he said, pointing toward me. The look he gave me wasn’t that friendly.

  “Me?” I answered. So far, a stellar conversation.

  “You’re why they killed Bone.” The finger collapsed into a fist about the size of my face.

  I took a step back, and the guy stepped forward, about halving the distance between us.

  “I think you’re making a mistake,” I said.


  “You made the mistake. You tipped them off to Bone,” he told me. “When this is over, I’ll have your liver for lunch.”

  “Angor and Einion need to rest,” Ysbail interrupted us. “We need to go inside.” Ysbail helped the two elves up and started toward the mansion. Friday stood up and looked at me, then at the biker, and shook his head.

  The biker was still standing in my way, staring me down.

  I started, “I don’t think you understand—”

  “It’s simple. Bone was fine with the cops till you showed up. Then something tipped them on to him.” He slapped his open hand on top of his fist as if he was trying to drive a knife into someone’s chest. “Your fault, ain’t it?”

  To the guy facing me, the question was rhetorical. For me it was less so. Yet another datum added to my evolving portrait of Caleb Washington. He had, as O’Malley said, gotten very close to this Faustian network. From the looks of things, all the way inside.

  I suspected that this guy would not take well to the news that Mr. Bone Daddy was a cop, and had been one for years. The biker would probably be even less pleased with the info that Bone wasn’t killed because the cops caught up with him. He was killed because he knew who was behind the demise of Aloeus, and made the mistake of taking the information to O’Malley, rather than to his little underground group.

  The irony was, this guy might, in a sense, be right. Bone Daddy had been ventilated after interrogating me. I suspected that something he heard while questioning me set him on the path that got him killed.

  I even had a good idea what that was.

  When I didn’t answer the biker immediately, he turned and followed Ysbail and the others up toward the house. I followed in time to see Leo Baldassare holding the door open.

  He looked at me as we all walked into his wood-paneled sanctum, and his expression held no trace of irony. Not that I expected it. He’d always been one of those guys who knew exactly what he was doing, and left it to others to speculate about what that was.