Dragons & Dwarves

  “So is anyone who threatens your private fiefdom—”

  He shook his head. “This is Mayor Rayburn’s city, not mine.”

  “He knows what you’re dong?”

  “The mayor’s constrained by politics. It would prevent him from acting in his own, or the city’s best interest.” Phillips shook his head. “No, Maxwell, I do not like the necessities of the past few days. My responsibilities forced them on me and I would not be worthy of that trust if I did not act.”

  “A power trip, and you get to pretend to be noble at the same time,” I spat. “You’re living a fascist wet dream.”

  “Enough. Despite your accusations, I’m not here to relish the violence. I’m simply present to make certain that,” he looked at the elves, “this time, the job isn’t botched.”

  “Your whole world view is botched.” I said, even though Phillips didn’t seem to be listening anymore. “You think that killing me will accomplish anything? You’ve gone so far over the top that you’ll never be able to keep it quiet.”

  “If you would finish the job here,” Phillips turned to the elf with the Glock.

  This was not how I’d planned things. For all my romantic notions about the press, I never saw dying for my profession as a particularly glamorous way to go. Several thoughts ran through my mind. First was a nice little daydream about me overpowering the elf with the gun, a slight possibility when I was in perfect shape. Then I thought about the consequences of killing someone in this inner sanctum. Bone Daddy had been concerned about it disrupting his magical environment. Would this place’s more permanent nature make it more or less disruptive? I also idly wondered who Bea would get to replace me on my beat. It’d be ironic if Morgan could land the job.

  My musings lasted long enough for me to realize that the fatal bullet wasn’t immediately forthcoming.

  Caledvwlch held his hand on top of the other elf’s Glock. “I am afraid we cannot, Mr. Phillips.”

  Okay, what’s happening here?

  “What do you mean? You took an oath to serve this city. That’s supposed to mean something to you.”

  His posture and tone didn’t change, but somehow I could tell that Caledvwlch didn’t like the implication. “Do not fault our honor, sir. We serve the mayor and the city. We follow the commands of our liege.”

  Phillips waved toward me. “Your ‘liege,’ O’Malley, one of the most faithful cops in this city, is dead because of him—”

  “There is no honor in killing an unarmed man.”

  I chuckled and Phillips whipped around to face me.

  “I guess you get to do it yourself—”

  Phillips grabbed the Glock from Elf Three, and aimed it toward me with a shaking hand. I tensed as he squeezed the trigger, even though nothing much happened. He didn’t know enough to switch off the safety. He grimaced in frustration, and I was halfway between pissing my pants and busting up in laughter.

  “Sir,” Caledvwlch said quietly.

  “Goddamn gun.”

  “Sir.”

  “How’re you supposed to—”

  “Sir!” The act of raising his voice erased every other sound from Caledvwlch’s presence. It was a sound of such clear crystalline fury that it felt as if the concrete walls should crack just from hearing it. Caledvwlch held his own weapon on Phillips. His arm was arrow straight, and his hand was not shaking.

  Phillips turned to face him, shock and anger rolling across his face like waves over a breakwater. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Put the gun down.”

  The sound of Caledvwlch’s voice dried my mouth and made me push away from Phillips, the focus of it. Phillips sounded truly amazed. “He’s the enemy. You know that. You serve—”

  “We serve the Honorable Mayor David Theodore Rayburn. Our honor, our service, our duty became his when his servant, our liege, was taken from this life.”

  Phillips nodded.

  I got it, what Caledvwlch was saying. Phillips didn’t

  “You see, then,” Phillips said. “He’s a threat to the mayor. To the city. He has to be stopped.” He turned toward me and steadied his own gun.

  “Put the gun down, Mr. Phillips.”

  Phillips shook his head. “We’re serving the mayor here. You can’t interfere.” He found the safety at last, and cocked the weapon.

  The gunshot was like a cannon going off in the enclosed space.

  I could smell it, an acrid burning, as a hole erupted in Phillips’ forehead. Phillips collapsed as if his body had turned into a sack of so much wet cement. He fell across my legs as blood sprayed from the hole in his skull.

  “Shit,” I pushed away from the corpse, pulling my legs back and trying to get clear of the spreading pool of blood. For a moment, everything was still except the blood. Even the gun smoke seemed to hang suspended in the air, frozen as if in anticipation.

  The hair on my arms began standing on end.

  Magic is a fluid thing, I’ve been told. It has eddies and currents. It follows the curve of reality, finding gravity in points of complexity, order, and ritual. It can concentrate in places, objects, even people. While we manufacture our own rituals to manipulate it, ultimately it is its own master.

  I could feel the potential filling the air, like a static charge, like the hum of an overcharged transformer. There was even a smell to it, a slightly sour, tinny odor. The elves were stepping back from the body.

  Phillips had fallen inside the central circle. The perimeter was etched in gold, embedded in the concrete. The blood spread across the concrete until it touched the circle.

  The warning from Bone Daddy crossed my mind, “The mojo’s been building here a couple hours. You break the pattern, boy, and it’ll be like someone shoved a stick of dynamite up your ass.”

  There was an arc when the blood touched the circle. The sound was somewhere between an electrical sizzle and a relay being thrown. A blue-green light began to radiate from the metal of the circle, sweeping around it in pulsing waves from where Phillips’ blood touched it. The greenish light spread to the glyphs etched in the floor, in the wall, and from details I had never seen before in the ceiling.

  The fluorescent light exploded in a cloud of sparks and dropped, sputtering, onto the meeting table. By that time there was enough of the glow to see.

  I tried to push myself up, but Caledvwlch shook his head, “No.” He may have said something, but the room was filled with the sound of electrical sizzling. Arcs leaped from the circle to the inscriptions, and back. Tendrils of blue-green energy erupted from the concrete walls, like lightning, but smooth, curved, and slow. The energy had a terrible feeling of potential. Just looking at the glowing snakes gave me an impression of energies an order of magnitude above what had passed through me when we cast the spell that had brought me here.

  Caledvwlch was warning me to stay in the circle. Inside the glowing ring, free of the display that tore the air apart outside. We seemed to be in a bubble that didn’t quite reach the ceiling. Arcs and tendrils slid over an invisible dome around us, sometimes making slow-motion splashes against it.

  Closer to me, Phillips’ blood was sizzling. The pool of blood had turned black and was charring. Where the blood had touched the circle, the gold wasn’t glowing. I could see green filaments of energy, slipping across that dead-black break, like probing roots.

  The edges of the bloodstain started burning, jets of flame reached around from the edge of the circle and followed the now black stain. When the flames reached Phillips, they raced around the edges of the corpse like a chalk outline from hell.

  The green energy was slower; it flowed out from the break in the circle, covering the black stain in a net of crackling light. It reached Phillips’ head as the flames fully encircled him.

  The green followed the blood; it crawled up the side of his head, the flesh charring and releasing smoldering jets of flame underneath its touch. It spilled into the head wound.

  When it reached the interior of Phillips’ skull
, something fundamental changed in the room. The random electrical sounds were replaced by the sound of a great wind. The filaments that reached into Phillips grew, merged, became a thick, pulsing, green conduit. It began racing by, whipping up and down like a garden hose out of control—though the motion was reversed, the energy flowing into the stationary hole in Phillips’ skull, the source whipping around the surface of the invisible dome around us, sucking power into itself.

  The body jerked.

  Caledvwlch and the other elf had got on the ground themselves, staying out of the way of the whipping tendrils of energy that fed into Phillips. The circle seemed no protection now; power arced from outside, splitting into several sources, all feeding into Phillips’ skull.

  The body shook, the back arching and the limbs flailing in a seizure. The skin was turning black.

  Phillips may have been dead, but he screamed. The sound of the prolonged cry drowned out everything. An agonized keening that went on long after living breath would have expired.

  His back snapped back, and suddenly, impossibly, Phillips was on his knees. His arms flung forward and up, as if to embrace the energy spilling into his skull. His head bent and twisted side to side almost too fast to follow. Fire ate his clothes as smoke rose from the exposed parts of his carbonized skin.

  Every scrap of the green energy fed itself into the corpse until all light in the room died. For a few moments the darkness was complete. The room was silent except for a quiet sighing. In a few moments, I could see a ruddy light, a crackling glow that seemed to form an outline where Phillips’ body knelt.

  I distinctly heard the words, “Oh, my God.”

  It was Phillips’ voice.

  Then came the explosion.

  An eruption of red light, fire, and smoke tore from the remains of Phillips’ body. The light shot upward, tearing a hole in the ceiling as a cloud of tar-black smoke unrolled in its wake. I was still on the ground, but the force of the blast pushed me back about four or five feet, spraying me with burning embers whose nature I really didn’t want to think about.

  I lay there, stunned and coughing, as sensations from the real, normal world began leaking in. Above me I could hear the sound of dozens of car alarms. I could also hear the spray of water from the sprinkler system. Somewhere a klaxon sounded a fire alarm, and as I looked up, through watering eyes, I could see the mercury-white glow of emergency lights shining from the ceiling—more exactly, from where the ceiling had been.

  “Mr. Maxwell?”

  I looked up and saw Caledvwlch standing there, looking unmoved despite the fact that his cheap cop suit was charred, stained, and spattered with blood.

  “Yeah?”

  “Perhaps we should talk.”

  It was like emerging from Dante’s Inferno. The elves had to help me up out of the hole; the elevators were out of service. They escorted me through the levels of the parking garage, the lower two levels awash with water, courtesy of the sprinkler system. Another two floors up, and we passed fire crews going in the other direction. Another floor, and a trio of uniformed cops met us, but Caledvwlch flashed his badge and we continued on our way.

  “Phillips was a traitor to his liege,” Caledvwlch told me on the way up.

  “No argument here,” I said. My voice was hoarse and ragged, and all I wanted to do was to lie down. My eyes burned, and my body felt as if it had aged about thirty years. My clothes smelled of smoke and ozone, and my shoes were covered in blood, causing the soles to stick to the concrete as I walked.

  “Our oath was to O’Malley,” Caledvwlch continued. “Perhaps that was an error. But we served until he died.”

  I nodded. “So why—” I shook my head. “I have no objection about what you did. But why intervene for me, and not for Bone Daddy? I presume the situations were similar.”

  “No,” Caledvwlch said. “O’Malley had our fealty. Our duty was to follow him. Anything he required, we had to give. That is the nature of the duty.” He looked down on me and said flatly, “Were he alive, and ordered me, you would not still be living.”

  “Then I guess I’m glad he died.”

  “As am I,” Caledvwlch said. “

  “Hey? Isn’t that a little traitorous on your part?”

  “A traitor is defined by acts, not thoughts. My duty required me to obey O’Malley, not to love him.” Caledvwlch looked across at Elf Three, who nodded solemnly. “The killing of the mage was an evil, criminal act, that we were powerless to prevent. Our fealty takes precedence over any other oaths.”

  “Including an oath to uphold the law,” I said. “You went through the standard cop initiation, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. But our honor places men before abstracts.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but, as they kept telling us in civics class, this is a nation of laws, not men.”

  “That may be so,” Caledvwlch said. “But I have told you, we are not so easily changed.”

  “So what happened to you guys after O’Malley died?”

  “Mr. Phillips did not understand—”

  “Obviously.”

  “—he assumed that since we belonged to O’Malley, and O’Malley belonged to him, that we became his.”

  We walked up the ramp to the sounds of sirens and red-and-blue flashing lights. The sky was still black above us. I noticed that a few streetlights were out, and that a patch of lawn on the park to the north of Lakeside, next to City Hall, had turned black and ashlike. In the distance, the permanent clouds swirled over the Portal, and it might have been my imagination, but I thought the clouds had a greenish inner glow to them.

  “You obviously didn’t.”

  “Our fealty is an inviolate bond that cannot be severed, and certainly cannot be traded. We must give such loyalty, it cannot be taken. Mr. Phillips’ attitude, that we were employees who owed him the same duty that we owed O’Malley, was an insult. The only man who holds such a claim to us now is the man who allowed us our pledge in the first place.”

  “Mayor Rayburn?”

  “The ruler of our adopted land.”

  I shook my head and looked up at the sky. No stars, too many lights. “Why did you wait until Phillips had a gun on me?”

  Caledvwlch was quiet, and I looked down and saw a contemplative look on his face. His pastel skin was alternately rose and aqua under the flashes from the emergency vehicles. “Dare I say that we have learned some things here of law and politics? Assassination is not a viable way to remove your liege’s enemies. The act poses more threat than the individual could. But if such a man dies in the commission of a criminal act—deadly force is appropriate in a case where police or civilian life is in immediate danger. No matter who the man is.” He looked over at me and might have smiled. “As you said, this is a land of laws, not of men.”

  A couple of paramedics came over. “Sir, I think we should look at you.”

  “No, I’m all right.” I shook my head—a little too fast, it made me dizzy.

  “No, you are not,” said Elf Number Three. It wasn’t until that point that I realized that he had been supporting me during the walk out of the parking garage. He made his point by ever so slightly lowering his arm from my shoulders. My knees felt my full weight and began to buckle.

  The paramedics saw me start to collapse and got on either side of me. Caledvwlch and the nameless elf let them take me. By the time they got me to a gurney, my mind had already spun away, eager to be free of the effort of controlling my body and keeping myself awake.

  My last thought was that Caledvwlch might not have the wrong idea about how to deal with this new world we shared.

  EPILOGUE

  IT was five weeks after I got out of the hospital before I returned to Hunting Valley. It took me that along to get the various facets of my life back in some semblance of order. This not only meant giving depositions to the cops, to the Feds, and writing my own stories for the Press—suitably mauled by three layers of editorial oversight—it involved insurance claims on my condo, replacing m
y entertainment center, and dealing with building management to get a contractor to fix the damage. It also included a week of vacation and a long needed flight to San Francisco, where I got to take my daughter to a concert.

  It was mid-September now, fall was starting to nip at the air, and the story of Phillips’ little conspiracy had begun fading. The elves did Rayburn a favor in more ways than one by killing him. Not only was Phillips gone—a good thing in and of itself—but the lack of a warm body meant no trial, and less prolonged coverage. It also gave the administration a convenient scapegoat on whom to hang every query the Feds were on to. Phillips was in charge of the Portal, and any unpleasantness associated with the Portal, from prisoner dumping to disappearing homeless people could be blamed on his criminal mismanagement of the department.

  Hearings were being held, but with everyone’s cards on the table, it was hard for the Council to stick anything on Rayburn. Everything had Phillips’ prints on it, and it was evidence of Rayburn’s political mastery that he had co-opted the elvish cause. Somehow he had got on the other side of the issue, and there were talks about constructing a reservation out in Lake Erie.

  The Feds had lost the rhetorical war once Ysbail held a press conference at City Hall.

  Of course, Phillips’ position in the administration was still vacant. The Council had to go through all its hearings on the Port Authority before Rayburn could fill the job. The word was that there weren’t a hell of a lot of people willing to step anywhere near Phillips’ bloody shoes.

  However, any good newsman has his sources, and one of my better placed sources gave me a short list of Phillips’ possible replacements. At the top of the list of possible candidates was a familiar name.

  One of many reasons I decided to pay my old acquaintance a visit once my own life was in order.

  It was funny, how the approach to his estate seemed a little less intimidating than it had before. The mansion seemed a little smaller, the Tudor architecture less grand.