Dragons & Dwarves

  I left smelling like an ashtray, but with full editorial sanction.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE next day was almost painfully clear and cold, the sky a near cloudless, razor-sharp blue. All of which made the atmospheric display over the Portal that much more spectacular. I was passing by on the way to City Hall, and when I parked my car it was hard not to look up and stare like a tourist.

  The Portal is pretty much what it sounds like, a hole between this universe and the next about fifty feet in diameter. And while it was hidden from Lakeside Avenue by the retrofitted fortress that used to be Browns Stadium, its effect on the environment was visible for miles.

  More poured out of the thing than magic and dwarves—it also contributed a permanent standing weather front thanks to differentials in temperature, pressure, and humidity between here and there. Today it was particularly active, building roiling black clouds stacked up for miles, swirling with hail, sleet, and lighting, all lit by piercing winter sun. Ice crystals fractured rainbows in the sky while the occasional bolt of lighting traced across the clouds.

  When you told newcomers that the whole display actually had nothing to do with magic, they tended not to believe you.

  As influential as the damn thing is, comparatively few people had ever seen it outside of those who actually passed through the thing. No photographs or video of it existed; the interference inside the stadium was too great for any software engineers to filter out. Even regular electrical appliances, floodlights, power tools, and forklifts began acting weird when they got within a few dozen feet of the Portal.

  Other than those who had a close encounter with the object itself, the best image anyone had was artistic representations of the thing. None of which did it justice. Even the best drawings I’d seen made the thing look like a giant chromed Christmas ornament, a sphere reflecting the image of another universe.

  Nothing I’d seen caught the sense of depth the actual phenomenon had, the feeling of looking deep into a direction that didn’t actually exist.

  I turned away from the storm and bought a copy of USA Today from one of the vending machines on the corner. Having been one of the people in the stands when the Portal was created, opening on the Pittsburgh thirty-five yard line, you’d think I’d be used to the damn thing by now.

  I carried my paper and walked toward City Hall, serendipitously close to the epicenter of the last dozen years of city politics.

  I took a station in the hall outside Council Chambers and opened the paper. The Supreme Court’s discussion on the Portal jurisdiction had long slipped off the front page of the national consciousness. The news was dominated by Congressional debates on Medicare and illegal immigration. The President was on a trip to North Africa. And the cover picture showed about three hundred protesters circling an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico with yellow rubber dinghies.

  I tended to get so focused on local events that it was nice to remind myself there was a world outside of Cuyahoga County. It helped me gain some perspective.

  I read the paper for about fifteen minutes. Then the Council meeting recessed, and the members began filing out of the chamber. I folded my paper and waited for the current council president, Brenda Carlson.

  “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.” I held out my hand when she came out to meet me. She smiled and shook it.

  Carlson was just coming out of a marathon Council session, but she had the skill of not looking as drained as she must have felt. She had an easy smile, a red suit that appeared freshly pressed, and her hair was perfectly in place for any cameras that might be around.

  By contrast, her late predecessor, Mazurich, used to come out of Council Chambers looking as if he had just been in a bar fight.

  “Should I buy you a coffee?” she asked. “Or would that be a blatant attempt to influence the media?”

  We left City Hall and found a booth in a coffee shop around the corner. I made a point of getting our coffee, despite her offer. I’m a purist and prefer my coffee unadulterated by sugar, cream, mocha, or whatever is Starbucks’ flavor of the day. When I came back with our caffeine, she said, “I read your profile on Greg Washington.”

  “What did you think?”

  “He’s going to beat Clifton.”

  I chuckled. “Is that on the record?”

  “It’s common knowledge. Besides, no one on Council gets a warm fuzzy feeling when they think of Gabe Clifton.”

  “How about you?”

  “Oh, I’ll work with whoever the people of this city decide to elect.” She smiled. “So is this what you wanted to talk about?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’m here about Councilman Mazurich.” I sipped my coffee and looked at her, trying to gauge her reaction.

  “Dom? What about?” I could hear the suspicion in her voice. It didn’t surprise me. I was the political attack dog on the Press, and I was pretty well known for unearthing ugly secrets.

  “A couple of things. Primarily, why would a dwarf concern himself with why Mazurich killed himself.”

  “A dwarf?”

  “A dwarf.”

  “Who?”

  “The name I have is Ossian Parthalán.”

  “That sounds slightly familiar . . .”

  I leaned back and set down my cup. “I was hoping you might help me with Mazurich’s history. You worked with him the first five years after the Portal opened. You must have seen a lot that was going on.”

  “He was a good man.” She was quiet a long time, staring into her coffee. “You remember, back when the Portal opened. . . . The power failures, the blackouts, the federal blockade—”

  Of course, anyone who lived through it would never forget. The first year no TV at all, radio so intermittent as to be almost useless. Computers and other electronics would eventually fail as digital garbage filled their memories. It would be two years before the engineers started producing consumer electronics that would work properly.

  I was lucky enough to be one of the few to have benefited, at least professionally, during the chaos. But even if the collapse of local TV and radio caused the proliferation of news dailies that gave me my job, I was still rational enough not to be the least bit nostalgic about it.

  “Yes?”

  “You remember that most of the city government locked itself behind a National Guard barricade?”

  That was when Mayor Rayburn made his famous stand against the federal government coming in and taking control of the Portal, the U.S. Army blockaded the city against the Ohio National Guard, and—if it weren’t for the intervention of Congress—the President might have ordered the first military assault on a U.S. city since the Civil War.

  While it had been in the guise of protecting a natural resource, over the years it had come to light that Rayburn had been, in fact, negotiating unilateral trade arrangements on the other side of the Portal—and with the help of the governor and the Ohio National Guard, had helped orchestrate a regime change in the kingdom of Ragnan, the government on the other side.

  The only thing that prevented a constitutional crisis at the time was badly written legislation on the part of Congress that effectively annexed the Portal and gave jurisdiction of all of its “contents” to the local government of the area the Portal sat in.

  Only now, with a rewritten law and a new Supreme Court ruling had the Feds managed to finally gain control of the Portal, and the commerce through it.

  “Yeah,” I remembered City Hall, Browns Stadium, all of Lakeside, packed with kids in fatigues carrying machine guns, all trying not to look at the storm swirling the sky above the stadium. The image was something out of the Iraqi insurgency. “I tried to get into City Hall a couple of times, not much luck.”

  “Well, Dom actually went out into the city, he saw people, did what he could.”

  She told me stories of what he did do. He not only saw the people in his ward, he visited the camps where refugees from the Portal were being held.

  That’s where he first m
et the dwarves.

  Without a common language, he couldn’t speak to them, but he managed to notice something that had been missed by most of the other humans commanding the influx from the Portal.

  Mazurich saw that, even in the midst of escaping a genocidal war and finding themselves in the midst of a (super)natural disaster, the dwarves still worked. With little more than the possessions they carried through the Portal and the material lying about the refugee camp, they were able to craft amazing things—textiles, jewelry, statuary. Even with no common language, the dwarves had started their own economy, trading with other refugees and even with their human guards.

  Seeing what the dwarves did, and seeing the major problem of the day as the breakdown of infrastructure in the city combined with the panicked departure of much of the available skilled labor, Mazurich became Rayburn’s ally in getting the nonhuman population legal recognition. Rayburn had high-level geopolitical motivations, mostly concerned with preventing a federal takeover of the city. Mazurich was much more practical. He saw the potential to integrate these new people into the city and get things working again. The dwarves were quick studies and picked up English—and shovels and jackham mers—all within a few short weeks.

  Mazurich talked with the leaders of all the clans, always in an effort to try and meld the existing dwarven society into our own. It wasn’t an easy task. Dwarves weren’t solitary, and the clans tended to act as a unit—including in the acquisition of living space. Finding facilities to house several thousand dwarves in one place wasn’t easy, especially for a race that preferred living underground.

  Mazurich managed to pull it off, though. He managed to get the Port Authority and the county to buy up all of the remaining private property on a spit of land called Whiskey Island and designate it a relocation area for the dwarven population.

  He managed to get his hands on the prime lakefront property and longtime political football by the simple expedient of political blackmail. There was still a federal blockade, and while the Feds were letting people out, no one was getting back in. In the space of a few months, Mazurich’s dwarven contractors were pretty much the only game in town. Sewer, water, power, roads, name it and Mazurich’s dwarven allies were maintaining it.

  Keeping the dwarves happy became high on everyone’s priority list.

  And whatever the history, and whoever’s ox was getting gored, Whiskey Island was a perfect solution for the dwarves. Not only was it spitting distance down the coast from the Portal, it was home to acres and acres of subterranean salt mines under the lake. Pretty much a perfect environment for the dwarves.

  “I seem to remember some nasty stories coming out of the salt mines, before the dwarves moved in.”

  She frowned at me. “Are you trying to imply something?”

  Actually, I wasn’t. “I just remember some news stories from back then.”

  “Alarmist bullshit. It was the same stuff that was happening everywhere at the time—a salt mine just happens to be a dangerous place to panic.”

  “Uh-huh.” I sipped my coffee, wondering exactly what she wasn’t telling me. “What about recently? How were things with him and the dwarves?”

  She smiled. “They loved him, he was practically one of their clan.”

  Mazurich managed to be human advocate and power broker to his new nonhuman constituency. His dwarves managed to form a bloc that was a political counterweight to Rayburn. They weren’t particularly glamorous, but they ran the city, and because of them, Mazurich managed to keep the City Council tightly under his control. When you got down to the nitty-gritty, it mattered where your ward was on the priority list to get potholes fixed.

  In return, Mazurich’s own ward benefited greatly from dwarven labor. The technology park that lived over the remains of the old steel industry grew threefold, built by low-bidding dwarves. Dozens of new businesses set up shop, dwarven-owned and operated, ranging from one-dwarf operations like Thor’s Hammer, to multimillion dollar R&D outfits like Magetech.

  “Magetech? That’s a dwarven operation?”

  “Right in the heart of the Kucinich Technology Park. In fact, now I know why that name’s familiar . . .”

  “What name?” I was still absorbing the idea that Magetech had anything to do with dwarves. I had heard of it, of course. It was a magnet for venture capital. The next Internet boom and all that. The idea that it might be the first to viably apply magic to any modern technological process was like crack for investors. If anything, I would have expected a dragon or two to be involved.

  But dwarves?

  “Parthalán. That clan name. Their clan leader happens to hold the CEO position there, and a bunch of others sit on the board.”

  “No kidding . . .”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SURPRISINGLY, one phone call got me a meeting with the Chief Operations Officer of Magetech. It was unexpected enough that I had to reorder my whole day to fit in the sudden appointment. When I called to reschedule with members of Mazurich’s staff, most of them sounded relieved.

  Magetech was housed in a cluster of office buildings sheathed in mirrored glass. Even before I reached the parking lot, I could tell there was something unusual going on here. If you looked at the right angle, you could see something else in the mirror, something dark that traced glyphs and symbols that barely registered in the conscious mind.

  The wards, if that’s what they were, seemed only to register on my peripheral vision, and when I tried to look at them directly, my eyes hurt and I felt something between paranoia and dread.

  I had to blink a couple of times to get the feeling to pass.

  One of the annoying things about the world post-Portal was the fact you couldn’t readily dismiss sensations like that. The sense that this was not a good place might actually have a concrete source outside my own subconscious.

  Of course, dismissed or not, there was little I could do about the feeling anyway.

  I pulled up and into the visitor parking area, feeling the uncharacteristic hope that this was a wild goose chase. As I stepped out of the car, I pulled my jacket close against the chill in the air. I walked up to the building, under a logo hovering in midair, and into a cavernous neo-industrial lobby: a few cubic acres of glass, exposed steel, and ductwork. Everything had been polished, so that even the rivets in the exposed girders gleamed.

  Display cases lined the polished granite floor between the lobby doors and the reception desk. Floating in rune-carved Lexan cubes were artifacts of Magetech’s R&D efforts. The objects were all pretty mundane and wouldn’t have made much of an impression on someone who wasn’t a Cleveland native; PDAs, cell phones, laptop computers, televisions, radios, digital cameras . . . so what?

  The “so what” was the Portal. The mana flowing out from the world next door caused interference, severe interference, in every type of recording and communication media known to man. Magetech was jump-started by being the first to patent ways to correct for the problem. Because of that, Magetech got a piece of nearly every electronic device sold in Northeast Ohio.

  I walked up to the reception desk. It was staffed by a woman who looked like a cross between a librarian and one of the nastier guards at a women’s prison. She looked at me over the top of her glasses.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Kline Maxwell, Cleveland Press. I have an appointment with Simon Lucas.”

  “The Cleveland Press, I don’t know—”

  “It’s okay, Nora,” came a voice from behind me. “I approved it.”

  I turned and faced the Chief Operations Officer of Magetech. He was taller than I expected, and balder. There wasn’t a lick of hair on his naked skull, and he was almost elven in his height and the way he moved. He held out a long-fingered hand and I shook it.

  “Mr. Lucas?” I asked.

  He nodded and looked toward the receptionist. “I apologize, Nora. Last minute addition.”

  Nora let out with an intimidating “Hrumph.”

  “Come with me,
Mr. Maxwell.”

  Lucas led me past the reception desk, past a few corridors, and to a bank of elevators. “Nice setup you have here.”

  “These are just the corporate offices,” Lucas said as he pressed the up button. “The heart of the operation is in Solon.”

  “Oh, I thought you had labs here?”

  “Not for years,” Lucas laughed.

  The elevator slid open for us and we both stepped inside.

  The interior of the elevator was all chrome and mirrors, and I again got the headache-inducing sense of seeing something out of the corner of my eye. As if something was written underneath the reflections, something old, arcane, and evil . . .

  “Are you all right?” Lucas asked.

  I realized I was rubbing my temple and I lowered my hand. “I’m fine. But I am correct? This is where operations started for you?”

  “Oh, yes. On the location of an old blast furnace.”

  To my relief, the doors slid open. It was all I could do to avoid racing Lucas for the exit. Outside the elevator, there was a plush lobby where a glass wall opposite us looked out over the shorter buildings of Magetech corporate headquarters. Beyond that sat the rest of the Kucinich Technology Park, backed up by the Cleveland skyline.

  The sky was clear enough that I could even see the cylindrical clouds marking the static weather front above the Portal itself.

  “This way,” Lucas said.

  I followed him down a corridor dotted with portraits, most dwarven. I took out my notebook and jotted down names as I followed Lucas. No titles were provided, but I suspected I was looking at the founding members of Magetech.

  Two of the portraits were of humans. The first, little surprise, was of Councilman Mazurich with tie uncharacteristically straight. The second was a man I wasn’t familiar with at all. I suspected that meant that he wasn’t a politician. The name on the engraved plaque was “Dr. Eric Pretorious.”