Dragons & Dwarves

  “Unfortunately for O’Malley and Phillips, the snowball was already rolling downhill. Cutler was checking on Bone Daddy’s movements before his death, and had got too close.

  “I suspect that the real reason that Cutler got the CD was because the SPU handed it to him, right after putting that bullet around his neck. Something about that CD made the SPU think it was meant for me, and since it was from Bone, Phillips wanted it cracked. It could hold damaging information. After I opened the CD, they could finish me off in a righteous shooting once Cutler’s chest blew open.

  “I think it might have been less luck that saved me then, than the fact that Caledvwlch was already disillusioned with his liege at this point. The elf had worked with Bone for a long time; being ordered by O’Malley to kill him was enough to shake the foundations of his belief system. Not enough to ignore orders at that point, but enough, maybe, to miss.

  “By this point Phillips was panicking about what Bone Daddy might have known and when. When the Feds nabbed me for questioning, it had to be the worst of all possible worlds. He had gone to the mat to ‘protect’ Rayburn. Letting the Feds pick my brain could be a disaster. He set up ‘Faust’s’ attack on the safe house, and when that didn’t finish things off for me, he had O’Malley pick me up when Blackstone tried to take me out of the city.”

  “Then why didn’t the bastard take your sorry ass out right there?” quipped the biker.

  “He seized me from a Federal Agent in a public place. They might have been becoming more reckless, but not that reckless.” It must have been nerve-racking for Phillips during that triumvirate meeting. He probably had a near stroke when I asked about the Coast Guard cutter. Lucky for him that Rayburn was willfully blind.

  “O’Malley was setting my death up as another one of ‘Faust’s’ victims. He probably had his evidence all lined up.” I shook my head and chuckled. “It’s ironic really; you gave Phillips the best evidence he could want, with O’Malley’s corpse.”

  “That was unavoidable,” Ysbail said with the barest tinge of regret.

  “I’m not complaining,” I told her. “That gargoyle probably saved my life.”

  “Fat lot of good it’s done us,” said the biker. “They got O’Malley’s death to dump at our feet, along with Aloeus and that reporter. And fuck if they ain’t right this time. We did kill O’Malley. For what? So we can listen to exactly how we’ve been screwed?”

  “He’s gong to help us,” Ysbail said flatly.

  “Yeah, right. How?”

  Baldassare looked uncustomarily grave. I suppose he had a lot invested in the success of this enterprise. “Lady Ysbail, I am afraid I do have to agree. While he has given a laudable analysis of the situation,” he nodded in my direction, “I fail to see exactly how he is supposed to help.”

  “What you going to do? Write about it?” I got a sneer from the biker that was acid. It was an expression I knew. Two of the most lauded virtues in the old school of my profession were objectivity and detachment. We do not become part of the story. The point is not to right wrongs, but to illuminate them.

  It wasn’t Ysbail who spoke, it was Friday. “Caleb Mosha Washington was why we saved him.”

  “Bone didn’t know this guy from Adam.”

  “His gift knew,” Friday said. “It knew when he saw this man.”

  “There ain’t no fucking savior. Not for the elves, not for us. He’s a goddamn reporter, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It is him,” Ysbail said quietly.

  Baldassare shook his head. “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  This had gotten cryptic enough for me. “What conclusions?”

  “Don’t worry, you ain’t him.”

  “Show him the message,” Friday said.

  “While we’re at it why don’t we just tell him our life’s story?” The biker looked back across at me. “That’s what all this is to you, an effing story.”

  Of course.

  I didn’t say it, though.

  Baldassare walked out of the library, leaving me alone with five rogue mages. I didn’t realize until then how reassuring his presence was, the one player in this drama who I knew, who I thought I understood.

  Ysbail sat, caressing the brow of one of the elves, the one who had defended her from the biker. The biker walked up to her and lowered his voice. His bearing suddenly had a trace of deference to it. “Lady, look I ain’t subtle, and I ain’t polite, and I sure as hell don’t pretend to know all this shit. But, damn it, what the hell is the point of all of this? We’ve been keeping ourselves under wraps, and for damn good reason. We’re just supposed to spill everything to this guy? What’s he got at stake?”

  “He is Caleb’s man,” Ysbail replied.

  “Uh-huh? And what if he isn’t? You’re just going to let him splatter our secrets, our names, on the front page of his rag?”

  “If he isn’t, what reason have we left to hide?”

  Baldassare returned with a notebook computer in tow. I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. He set it on top of the desk next to the large incomprehensible tome. He flipped it open, the blue LCD screen glowing ominously.

  He struck a couple of keys and the CD player whirred.

  “He left this with a lawyer,” Baldassare said. “It was delivered the day after he was shot.”

  The blue background switched to black, which suddenly changed to an extreme close-up of a blinking eye. The eye backed away until we saw a shirtless Bone Daddy standing in a living room that was all too familiar to me. I noticed that the coffee table and all the broken glass was gone. He also looked a little less strung out. The arcane tattoos rippled across his back as he walked away from the camera and sat down on the couch.

  “Greetings from the great beyond.” He even smiled somewhat as he said it, but his voice was flat and carried little in the way of emotion. He probably blew most of it on making the previous movie. At the very least, he had blown most of his inebriation. “I thought a lot about not making this tape. You should know that I am severely pissed off. That comes from divining that a good friend of mine is going to betray me. The fact that one of you all might be the one to off me sort of chilled my enthusiasm for trying to help you bastards out.”

  He leaned forward toward the camera. “Of course I kept trying to find out who the bad guy is, but you all know the Oracle. Can’t let me know that, it might keep me from getting killed. So I did find out a few things you can’t do anything about either.” He held up his index finger. “Your great plans for a homeland are pretty much doomed. Sorry, I would have told you, if it could have done any good. Sometime in the week they bury me the whole thing is going to fall apart. Death, destruction, evil deeds, betrayal, the whole en chilada.” Second finger. “A man of great temporal power holds your existence—I mean all of you—in his hands. He can destroy you or not, at his whim. This man is connected with the man who killed me, and may be responsible for my death. He is male, human, and is—big surprise here—involved in the political leadership of this city.” Third finger. “There is another man, someone of great honesty who is threatened by the same forces. He is the one person I see who can get your butts out of the fire. Again, don’t ask me who he is, I just know that he’s got the best chance of sticking it to the shits who killed me off.”

  He lowered his hand and stared in the camera. I felt as if he was looking directly at me. “Call him Will.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MY instincts wanted me to leave, told me I was too close to this little band of revolutionaries. Looking at the biker and Ysbail after Bone Daddy’s last self eulogization, I knew that it wasn’t altruism that prompted them to pull me out of a life threat ening situation.

  However, at this point, my options were limited. I faced the same Hobson’s choice that I had been given in front of Rayburn’s triumvirate, though no one here explicitly stated so. I could go along, or I could go out alone to face a threat that had shown no reluctance about violently dispatching people with too much info
rmation. Phillips could have every mage in the city’s employ hunting me down. My only reprieve right now was the fact that Baldassare’s estate was very seriously warded against magical intrusions.

  I needed Phillips stopped as badly as anyone did.

  But as badly as anything, I needed to rest. I felt as if I hadn’t slept in weeks.

  Baldasarre led me to a bedroom bigger than the living room in my condo, and I collapsed on a mahogany four-poster king-size bed. My body screamed for sleep, but my mind kept spinning along out of sheer momentum.

  I lay on Baldassare’s sheets and tried to think of how Bone Daddy’s Oracle thought I was supposed to save the idea of an elvish homeland.

  Call him Will.

  “Bastard,” I answered my mental image of Bone.

  With that one phrase he tied me inextricably to his little prophecy. Even if I’d kept quiet about the CD that had been sent to me, word of it had made its way ahead of me. Apparently a familiar gargoyle had salvaged my hard drive from the dumpster I’d stashed it in. And there was enough decrypted data on it for Ysbail and company to scry the passphrase, and Bone’s home movie.

  The Oracle’s second message to me: Your path has been chosen for you by forces you’ve known and have not seen . . .

  That fit well. I had known a lot of players here—in Baldassare’s case, years—without “seeing” the whole. And, according to Ysbail, it was Baldassare who pressured the Press to put me on the dragon story.

  . . . they fear your allegiance because the masters you serve are not theirs . . .

  Again that made sense. Probably more so than it did with the Feds. In the elves’ case I had no doubt that they had a literal “master,” possibly in Ysbail.

  . . . The alliance they offer will not be an easy one.

  I closed my eyes and whispered, “You pegged that one, brother.”

  It wasn’t just that these people were unashamed partisans, and I was a supposedly objective journalist. I had done enough op-ed pieces to know that unbiased reporting was generally an oxymoron, and reporters have been getting involved in their own stories ever since Councilmen started throwing chairs at people.

  No, what really worried me was the fact that I was standing with the losing side. Not just my opinion, mind you. These folks believed that they were on a death watch and it was only a matter of time before the darkness closed in on them. I had seen the fatalism in everyone’s eyes—except, of course, within Baldassare’s carefully crafted expression.

  It was hard not to picture everyone here suffering the same fate as Aloeus. However careful they had been, it was only a matter of time. Despite Phillips’ botched manipulation of the SPU, there were certainly more conventional investigations going on over Aloeus’ death . . .

  . . . and Bone’s.

  . . . and Cutler’s.

  . . . and O’Malley’s.

  All of it, given the nature of the quarry, would be tainted by SPU involvement. All of it, with the SPU’s help, subject to manipulation by Phillips.

  If I had the luxury of time, an explosive exposé would be just what the doctor ordered. As nice as that thought was, there was no way this was something I could just phone in to Columbia. You can’t go around accusing major public figures of murder in print without sources and documentation lined up from here to Lakeside Avenue. To get this into print without a criminal investigation would require more evidence than it would to convene a grand jury. I’m sure, as clumsy as Phillips had been, the evidence was out there. I just didn’t have the weeks to collect and itemize it.

  I kept coming at the problem from every angle, and kept getting the same simple, and the same ludicrous, answer:

  Despite Baldassare’s reservations, my—and by extension, the Faustians’—only hope lay in getting me a face-to-face with Mayor Rayburn.

  The mayor might be adept at fooling himself, or cultivating blind spots where his cronies were concerned, but I doubted that he’d be as willfully blind when someone introduced the possibility that one of those cronies was going off half-cocked without his authorization. It was Rayburn’s nature, there’d be no possible way he could tolerate that kind of challenge to his authority—no matter how loyal Phillips might be.

  Easy.

  I could picture the headlines the next day. “Newsman slain in foiled assassination attempt.”

  Rayburn never went anywhere unguarded. There were always cops, SPU officers, and mages shadowing the mayor to protect him. Any or all of them would be under Phillips’ thumb. Worse, even to set up a meeting alone, assuming Rayburn would be willing, there was no way he’d be able to avoid telling his security team. That would, in turn, let Phillips in on the meeting. God only knows what he’d do then.

  The only place that I’d ever seen Rayburn without an extended entourage was in the secret meeting room they had set up under Lakeside.

  Eventually, I slept.

  The sun had come and gone, its light fading from the windows when I opened my eyes. I sat up and looked across to see Ysbail standing in the corner next to the windows, watching me with her metallic eyes.

  “How long have you been there?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “What if Bone Daddy is wrong?”

  “Is he?”

  I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and swung my feet off the bed. I had not had a restful sleep. My racing thoughts and the heat of the day had kept me awake. But I did now have the embryonic glim merings of a solution to our shared dilemma.

  I told her about it.

  “It has to be me,” I said “Baldassare has the contacts, but he doesn’t believe. Or, if he does, the best he could say to Rayburn was, ‘This is what Maxwell said.’ It would be easy to dismiss secondhand, especially after he admits his relationship to you.”

  Ysbail nodded.

  “You all suffer that credibility problem. Even if Rayburn knows you’re telling the literal truth. He can always tell himself that your beliefs are skewed. That’s even if you could manage to meet with him, and I’m sure Phillips is watching that line of attack.”

  “Perhaps it is as you say. But what good is it for us for Rayburn to know that Phillips is corrupt? We have lost our Portal.”

  “You’ve lost a Portal,” I corrected her. “Once Rayburn discovers what Phillips has done, is doing, he’ll be driven to distance himself from the guy. He’ll have to establish that the policies that Phillips was trying to advance are not the administration’s.” I looked up. “I think you’ll be able to deal with him, if only to give him political cover from Phillips’ covert activities.”

  “You sound very certain.”

  “I’m not certain of anything. This role was forced on me, I didn’t volunteer.”

  “Perhaps,” Ysbail said. “But we have learned to respect Caleb Washington’s gift.”

  “Uh-huh.” I shook my head, telling myself that—if I survived—there was going to be one hell of a story out of this. “As far as getting me and Rayburn in the same room before Phillips gets to do anything about it . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “You need to tell me, exactly, what is involved in casting that mini-portal of yours.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding, Maxwell,” Baldassare told me after I’d explained to them all the details of my plan to, in Bone Daddy’s words, pull our butts out of the fire.

  “At least he’s got some balls,” said the biker, whose name I’d learned was Boltof. He was, unlike Bone and Friday, an immigrant from Ragnan.

  Of course, Boltof couldn’t let a compliment leave his mouth without hunting it down and killing it. He added, “Unless he’s really a spy and this is all a setup.”

  “He is not a spy,” Ysbail insisted.

  “Besides,” added Friday, “there would be easier ways to inform the administration who we are. The phone comes to mind.”

  “Yeah?” Boltof shook his head. “He’s smart enough to know that I
’d slice him open if he pulled something like that.”

  “We all know,” Baldassare said. “Can we all dispense with the posturing?” He turned to me. “Had Ysbail explained the implications of what you’re suggesting?”

  I nodded. “To open a temporary portal somewhere, you need someone who has been there—”

  “Someone to visualize the destination,” Ysbail corrected me.

  “In this case it is the same thing. I’m the only person we have who’s been there,” I finished.

  “You did see what it did to the elves?” Baldassare said.

  I nodded. “Ysbail explained it. The spell needs someone to act as a lens, to focus the spell.”

  “Someones,” Baldassare corrected. “This is no simple task. The energies involved are immense.”

  Friday rubbed his hands. “Mr. Baldassare does have a valid point.” He said it as if he found it distasteful to allow the man that much. “The last Portal was the first we attempted with as few as two. Angor and Einion nearly collapsed focusing the energy.”

  “Exactly,” Baldassare said. “And they were mages, and benefited from an inhumanly tough constitution. A human, especially an untrained one, would have died in their place.”

  Boltof chuckled, “Hey, if he wants to—”

  “I told you, I discussed this with Lady Ysbail,” I said. “There’s a risk, but it isn’t a suicidal one.”

  “You think you’d be better at this than Angor or Einion?” Baldassare asked.

  “No,” Ysbail answered for me, and everyone turned to face her. “He realizes he is a novice. You all are forgetting the significant difference between creating a Portal to Galweir and what Mr. Maxwell proposes.”

  It only took a moment for Boltof and Friday to get it. Friday nodded, as if it suddenly all made sense, and Boltof just gave a caustic grin. Baldassare frowned and asked, “Will someone enlighten me?”

  “In going from point A to point B, there are two things that stress the person guiding the destination,” I told him. “The distance from the source, and that person’s affinity for the target. While Angor and Einion might be adepts, and have an unmatchable affinity for Galweir, the distance from Galweir to the Portal on the Ragnan side was several thousand miles.” I looked into Baldassare’s eyes and tried to gauge his reaction. All I saw was a calculated concern. “My destination lies less than half a mile from the Portal, and lies in a place—at least beneath a place—that I have unquestionable affinity for. My inexperience might cost me, but the other elements we have going for us should make up for it.”