Dragons & Dwarves

  She didn’t say it in a reassuring manner.

  We climbed the stone steps, the sounds of banqueting and revelry getting louder. As we mounted the steps I asked, “Are these our other mages?”

  Boltof chuckled.

  Ysbail said, “The Folk are magic, they do not use spells as we do. They are capricious.”

  We walked in through the open arched doorway, and I looked around to catch sight of the Folk themselves. It didn’t happen. The moment we stepped through the arch, the sounds of revelry ceased; the odor of a banquet and of roses was gone on the wind. The silence of the woods descended again, and I looked through an entry hall that was empty of anyone.

  “They’re gone?”

  “No,” Ysbail said. “They remain, but they prefer to watch us rather than have us watch them.”

  I could feel them watching us. I think I’d been feeling it since we’d entered the woods. “Okay, where are we going to do this?”

  Ysbail looked up. “The turret.”

  I followed the others up a stone staircase that spiraled six stories up a tower that was three times as high as the original castle. The woodsmoke smell grew as we ascended. On the stone walls, ornate sconces held torches whose smoke curled straight up.

  There was an odd feeling of anticipation in the air, as if the cold stone walls waited expectantly. We followed the stairs to a rough wood trapdoor in the ceiling that let us out on the roof of the turret. Outside, it was about thirty feet square, a wood floor hanging between waist-high castellations. About every five feet along the walls, a torch burned, casting a flickering orange light on the rough-hewn roof.

  The wood had been covered with tracings in ash and salt, words in an alien language. The look was familiar to me from the glyphs on the casing of Cutler’s bullet.

  Three figures stood waiting for us. Two were elves whom I didn’t know. The last was a human in a hooded robe. I could catch glimpses of the jaw of a disfigured face in the firelight, almost enough to recognize.

  “No . . .” I whispered.

  But the cloaked figure nodded in disagreement. “I’m afraid so.” The man raised gloved, knobby hands and lowered the hood so I could see his face. He had once been handsome, and he still had a pair of innocent blue eyes that were as likely as not to send any girl this side of puberty into heat.

  The problem was, now, that tiny twins of those blue eyes blinked at me from dozens of lumpy growths on his face.

  “Morgan?”

  “Maxwell,” he said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “YOU?” I said.

  “Me,” Morgan said. “You look surprised.”

  I shook my head. That was an understatement. “You’re working with . . .” I waved at Ysbail, and at the elves.

  Morgan smiled, and the way it twisted the tumors on his face made me turn away. “Is the distaste in your voice because you don’t approve of the cause, or because you don’t approve of a journalist being involved in this subject matter?”

  “We do not have much time,” Ysbail said. “Everyone get in place for the ritual.”

  Boltof led me to the center of the markings. I turned to Morgan, who had replaced his cowl. “You’re a mage?”

  “You know a better person to cover my beat?”

  I kept shaking my head, trying to place this new bit of information in my world view. “You set me up,” I said finally.

  “I did toss your name in the ring. What? You thought you were Baldassare’s first choice?”

  No, maybe I wouldn’t have been. We knew each other too well.

  I looked around me, at the view past the torches. Beyond the immediate blackness of the trees, there was a glow from city streetlights. It was dim, though, as if I had stepped halfway out of the world.

  “You’re going to need to concentrate,” Morgan said. “We’ve pulled out all the stops for the spell itself, but you have to tell it where to go.”

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “Why am I part of this,” Morgan said, “or why did I come back?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “We really don’t have the time. Let’s just say the Morgan you knew was as much a fiction as Faust ever was, and if the possession infecting my body must progress to achieve our purpose, it’s a price I’m willing to accept.” His tone lowered. “Now, you need to imagine our destination. Make it clear in your mind.”

  I tried to do as he asked, closing my eyes and picturing the sanctum in the sublevels of City Hall’s parking garage. I tried to mine all of my memory’s resources for every small detail. The subliminal buzz of the single fluorescent fixture. The micron or so of concrete dust that marred the sheen of the table. The pebbled texture of the executive leather office chairs. The shape of the words carved into the concrete walls. The smell of confined air. The tang of exhaust fumes and oil. The feeling I felt through the soles of my feet when the access door slid shut.

  Around me, the soft tones of a spoken ritual began. The language wasn’t one designed for a human voice. The alien syllables wormed inside my ears as if they were burrowing for a warm place to lay their eggs.

  I was afraid of what was going to happen. For all my assurances to Baldassare, I didn’t know a damn thing about what I was doing. All I understood about the spell that was about to be cast was that I was going to be in a position of channeling all the energy massed by the ritual.

  And, in order to improve the success of the spell, there was going to be a lot of energy involved.

  I pushed the fear away with images of arcane symbols etched in concrete.

  The chanting continued, and it was a struggle to hang on to my memory of Rayburn’s bunker. The words that filled the air around me threatened to fill every empty space in my brain. God only knew what the result would be if I allowed that to happen, and let my mind lock onto sounds without any concepts or connotations to them. Would a portal open? If so, to where? Could a portal be opened onto an abstraction?

  I forced myself to think of the bunker. The feeling of the chair as I sat in it. The coolness of the still air. The smoothness of the table. The sound of dripping water.

  An ache began behind my eyes, and spread through my sinuses into my jaw. I felt blood pulsing beneath my scalp, and the hair on my arms and legs bristled against my clothes. The air around me was no longer still. It carried the scent of electricity and ozone.

  I screwed my eyes shut even tighter against the distractions. I didn’t move, my muscles frozen in place for fear of disrupting the tenuous mental image. I imagined increasingly fine details of the room. The small cobweb I had seen at one end of the fluorescent light, the black husk of a dead insect suspended in it. The way the grain in the table’s surface made a pattern somewhat like a human face near the end where Rayburn had taken his seat. The way the mechanism of the chair caught slightly when I had turned it to the right, and how the casters it rode on ground slightly with concrete dust caught in bearings designed for use on a quite different surface.

  Something was rushing through me. I felt a vibration that seemed to originate in the core of my body, the marrow of my bones. It was as if my flesh now hung on a superstructure constructed out of an overloaded water main. My teeth hurt. Every muscle in my body began to contract against the force, tearing itself into a tiny ball. I felt the sensation of millions of tiny insects running across my skin. The sense unidirectional, originating in the soles of my feet, shooting upward. The insect feet became pins, then razors, then claws tearing my flesh upward, pulling it toward the sky, the same direction the vibrating pressure inside me was going.

  There was a small crack in the veneer of the table, I remembered. Humidity, perhaps, had made the edge pull away from the rubber bumper that wrapped the edge of the tabletop. Above was the shine of mahogany grain under a light coating of dust, but for a small space, no wider than the base of my thumb, the veneer had separated allowing a view of the particleboard beneath. The top was dark, shiny, ordered—but the
true nature of the table, revealed by the flaw, was light, dull, and a chaos of wood splinters suspended in some sort of caked adhesive emulsion.

  I collapsed, my legs giving way beneath me.

  My hands had stuck to the arm of the chair, the skin peeling away from a surface that I realized was only vinyl that was textured to look like leather.

  My breath came in gasps. My body shook, a seizure that slammed my legs, my arms, my head into the wooden floor. I couldn’t feel the impact through everything else, but I heard the hollow thumps as my skull slammed into the wood.

  Rust spots on the white reflective underside of the fluorescent—

  Burning now, as if a torch had been taken to my trembling skin.

  The glint off of the golden inscription beginning with the Hebrew character aleph—

  The pulse of blood in my ears—

  The chunk of the elevator’s motor starting up—

  Fingernails cutting into my palms—

  The drip of water in the distance—

  Blood—

  Concrete—

  Burning—

  Flickering—

  Choking—

  Rayburn’s face . . .

  Suddenly, the pressure broke, so abruptly that I thought an artery had exploded, spilling all the pain and feeling, as well as what was left of my life, onto the ground. No more chanting, no more wind, no more hideous internal pressure. All that was left of my body was a burning ache and a terrible heavy fatigue.

  The floor was cold and hard beneath me. I slowly unclenched my fists and took a few deep breaths.

  The moment I tasted the cold, slightly stale air, I opened my eyes. Above me the world was twisted and distorted into a shrinking spherical reflection. I could look up into Ysbail’s eyes and the sphere shrank, seeming to withdraw via a direction I couldn’t perceive. Through the sphere came torchlight that illuminated the space where I found myself.

  Concrete walls embossed with arcane inscriptions. A meeting table surrounded by executive office chairs. A single suspended fluorescent light fixture that was, at the moment, unlit.

  Then the sphere was gone, and I lay on the concrete floor in total darkness.

  I could have blacked out. The effort of what I had just done had sapped every ounce of my strength. It had tapped resources that I didn’t know were there until I found them missing. The thought of not moving at all was tempting. I had done my bit, I only had to wait for Nesmith . . .

  Of course, it probably wouldn’t make much of an impression if she found me out cold on the floor, and it would probably blow my chance of talking to her without the possibility of Phillips overhearing or intervening. And that was why I was here.

  I sat up slowly. My flesh felt so weak that it seemed the sheer weight of my skeleton would tear my bones free to clatter on the ground under me. My brain spun with a sick vertigo when I sat up, my mind tumbling in a viscous black liquid with no sense of up or down. My gut spasmed as I tried to heave up the contents of an empty stomach.

  When the world stopped moving, somehow I was on my hands and knees. Spots darted in front of my eyes, as if I were squeezing them shut, but they were open—which I confirmed when I ran my hand over my face.

  Pushing myself upright was like fighting hundred-pound weights draped across my shoulders. My knees threatened to buckle as I stumbled toward the table. My hand found it by slamming into the edge with a knife-sharp blow that felt as if it—in my weakened condition—could snap my bone.

  Fortunately, my body’s structural integrity hadn’t been compromised by the spell, just my sense of it. I didn’t suffer a compound fracture, just a numbed and bruised hand.

  I leaned against the table and inched along until I bumped into one of the chairs.

  I didn’t want Nesmith to find me on the ground, but I lacked the strength to stand upright—even long enough to find the light switch. I slid into the chair feeling as if I only weighed fifty pounds, all held together with tissue paper.

  I rubbed my hand; at some point during the ritual the dressings had come off the old wounds. My palms were moist, probably with my own blood.

  I waited.

  My one fear was that I was so close to collapse that I might lose consciousness before Nesmith met with me. Her reaction would probably be to hospitalize me under police guard, which would give Phillips an opportunity to finish the job that O’Malley started.

  I couldn’t leave this room until Nesmith had heard everything. Until I had got her to set up a meeting with Rayburn. If we could do it quickly enough, it wouldn’t matter how secure it was, Phillips wouldn’t have time to react.

  Until then . . .

  It felt as if I’d been sitting, waiting, for hours. The darkness made time expand, stretching out into an infinity of fatigue before and ahead of me. I might have blacked out again, but I had no way of telling in the unchanging environment.

  Then an explosion of light washed the world with blinding whiteness. The light slammed into my eyes like a blow, grinding my retinas into the back of my skull. I blinked and turned away from the fluorescent that had come on.

  I turned the chair toward the direction the elevator had been. I couldn’t see the doors; my night vision had been assassinated by the light. But I could hear the whir of the elevator’s motor starting up.

  I could feel the pulse in my neck as I straightened in my seat. My fatigue was forgotten for the moment.

  It seemed another hour after the motor started before the doors slid open, spilling light into the darkened corner of the chamber. The light backlit three silhouettes, just as before. With one exception: these silhouettes were different.

  These silhouettes were also wrong.

  None of them was short enough to be Nesmith’s. Two were so tall and angular that they could only be elves.

  The round one in the center was the most wrong of the bunch. The trio stepped forward and Adrian Phillips walked into the circle of light thrown by the fluorescent. Behind him, the elevator doors slid slowly shut.

  “It’s almost a shame to have to kill you,” he said by way of greeting.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I WAS so drained that I couldn’t even muster up a decent response. Somehow, Phillips had caught wind of the plan and had beat Nesmith here. I should have been shocked, afraid, at least a little pissed off. There was only an empty hollow inside me where my emotions should have been. I squinted at Phillips’ sweaty, pudgy face , and all I could think of was at least it was over.

  “No comment?” he inquired. “That’s ironic, don’t you think?”

  “Nesmith?” I asked. I don’t even know why I said it. Reflex, I think. I was in some sort of psychic free fall, and I wasn’t really aware of the meaning of the word until after I spoke it.

  “I regret she wasn’t able to make it. Fortunately, I was able to intercept your contact with her.”

  Obviously.

  I looked at his escort. The elves were familiar to me. Caledvwlch looked a little more gaunt, and the one I knew only as Elf Three had his Glock out. What’s going through your mind, Caledvwlch?

  “Where is she?” I asked, closing my eyes.

  Phillips’ words washed over me, leaving little of themselves behind. “Mr. Maxwell, since you’ve obviously become an agent of Faust’s, or at least you’re under his influence, it is only prudent that the Safety Director send trained officers of the SPU to bring you to her.”

  I shook my head, smiling. “At your suggestion?”

  “You’re a smart man, Maxwell.” He shook his head and turned away.

  His turning away pulled me out of my stupor, at least to the point where I could feel my own anger. “Why are you here?” I sputtered. My jaw ached and the muscles felt slack on my face, slurring my words. “Let your boys do the dirty work.” I pushed myself upright, and the chair slid aside and upended.

  Phillips turned around.

  “You get off on it, don’t you?”

  “Maxwell—”

  “The idea yo
u can order someone killed gives you a raging hard-on, doesn’t it?”

  Phillips’ hand was white and pudgy, and came at the end of a flabby swing that had more inertia than muscle behind it. It still managed to cave in my nose and make me topple backward. I sprawled at the foot of Phillips’ bulk, his gray eyes glaring down on me.

  If he expected the blow to shut me up, he was disappointed. Somehow the shock of the impact seemed to shake the remains of the stupor from my brain. “That’s why you had to be on that boat. You had to see the dragon burn—”

  Phillips shook his head. “No.”

  “Bone Daddy—you look at the autopsy photos? You get a rush when you realize you did that?”

  His foot connected with the most sensitive part of my lower anatomy, and that did shut me up. It wasn’t pain so much as a burning numbness and a paralyzing clenching of the muscles that bent me double. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, or even if there was some kernel of strategy in it.

  I think I might have just stopped giving a shit.

  “You don’t know.” He leaned over and I could smell alcohol on his breath. “I was given the responsibility for this thing. A trust. To manage it, to support the mayor, to benefit the city. I could not let them do this thing. Could not!” I must have turned away, because a pudgy hand grabbed my jaw and forced my face toward his. My nose had swollen shut now, and I was forced to breathe through my mouth.

  “God forbid we have any competition,” I whispered between ragged breaths.

  “You naïve bastard. You think that was it? No, Aloeus brought the Portal here for one reason. If he had achieved his goal, it wouldn’t be competition, it would be the end. The end of economic recovery, the end of Mayor Rayburn’s administration.” His hand clamped on my jaw as he leaned forward. “It would be the end of the Portal. He had the power to shut it down, and once another existed, nothing would prevent him from doing so.”

  “You’re trying to justify murder,” I said.

  “Aloeus was a traitor to the city, a realm that he helped create.” Phillips shook his head and let my chin go. My head slammed back onto the concrete floor. “The mage was a traitor.” He stood back up, wiping his hands on his suit. “So are you.”