Dragons & Dwarves

  But that did nothing to dispel the sick sense of wrongness I felt about it all, and about Lucas in particular.

  Stories aren’t just handed out like that. And it was almost as if Lucas was intentionally sacrificing Mazurich, the founding father of his company. At the same time, he was allowing a PR catastrophe for Magetech. If I ran with this, people would call for hearings and investigations and . . .

  It didn’t make sense.

  “This is why he killed himself.”

  Could it be a smoke screen? Throw something big at the reporter so he doesn’t ask the really troublesome questions?

  There was not a single thing in my notes about dwarves. Or zombies.

  Or salt.

  “Nina Johannessen, Cleveland Press.”

  I sat down on my couch, phone in one hand, cold beer in the other. I pressed the bottle to my forehead and said, “Nina—”

  “Kline? Are you okay? You haven’t been at the office.”

  “I’ve been working.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  I hesitated, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into something like unexpected blackouts with her. Instead, I changed the subject. “You told me you would look into some things for me?”

  “Yes.” I heard rustling in the background. “I’ve actually tracked down rumors of dwarven magi. Nothing concrete, but from the sound of it there might actually be that unfocused charm or fetish we were speculating about.”

  “What about zombies?”

  “Have you heard any stories about a company named Magetech?”

  I sat up, almost spilling my beer. “What?”

  “Magetech, they have the patents on most Portal-adapted consumer electronics—”

  “I know who they are.”

  “Well, they’ve been trying to come up with fusions of magic and industrial technology for years.”

  “What? Are you saying my zombie—?”

  “I can’t find anything matching your description, but there’re stories about Magetech hiring dark magi, necromancers, real left-hand path people for some type of black projects lab.”

  “The kind of people who might be reanimating corpses?”

  “Your zombie was too decomposed and too active to be an efficient use of mana, unless the metallic components were some sort of superstructure. And the investment in time and energy to create that wouldn’t make sense, unless—”

  “Someone was mass-producing it?” I shook my head. “Christ, there’re more of those out there?”

  “It could be an R&D project, or I could be drawing the wrong conclusions.”

  I shook my head. “No, it makes sense. If this thing was unique, why risk it on a simple B&E?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. I got an uneasy feeling. “Nina, what aren’t you telling me?”

  “I don’t know what . . .”

  “Please, I smell bullshit for a living. What is it? Did you have another vision?”

  Silence. I thought of my dream. The undead rider rising out of the shards of the Magetech complex.

  “Is that how you thought to look into Magetech in the first place?”

  “You know?”

  I looked at the bottle, sweating in my hand. It was shaking. I felt a sick dread growing in my gut.

  “What did you see?” I asked, “What did you hear?”

  “The Oracle is sometimes unclear—”

  “I saw it, damn it!” I slammed the bottle on the table in front of me. “I saw Death ride off your tarot card right out of the Magetech complex. I heard my daughter.”

  “I’m so sorry, Kline. I didn’t want to upset—”

  “My daughter, Nina. Did you see her in your visions?”

  A long painful pause. “Yes.”

  “Don’t make me pull this out of you.”

  Her voice was shaking. “It could all be symbolic—”

  “Cut the crap and tell me.”

  “I saw the Devil,” she said, near tears, “and your daughter was in his hand.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  NINA is probably right, it is all symbolic.

  Even so, I did call Margaret back to make sure that we were on the same page and that Sarah wasn’t coming anywhere near Cleveland for at least a month. I gave her some lame excuse, because I couldn’t bring myself to say what really concerned me. I told myself that I didn’t want to panic her, but it probably had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t admit that she might be right about this city.

  What really worried me was the idea that people who tried to cheat the Oracle tended to end up doing exactly what the ephemeral bitch wanted—from Oedipus to Macbeth.

  The fact that both those examples were fictional didn’t comfort me much. In my own life I had a brush with the Oracle that killed the soothsayer, and almost killed me.

  All I could really think to do was keep my daughter as far out of the line of fire as possible, and do my job. If someone was about to threaten my daughter, my best course was to try and expose him, her, or it as fast as I could—and something was definitely up with Magetech.

  I left my apartment, my hands still unsteady from my blackout and my talk with Nina.

  I had one major contact that was wired into the supernatural goings-on in the city. And, while that might all be Nina’s job, I had pretty much reamed her over the phone and I needed a noncon frontational conversation. Now. So I tried calling Dr. Newman Shafran three times as I drove toward Case.

  Case Western Reserve University was only about ten minutes’ drive from Shaker Square, and my condo, so I was parking my Volkswagen in the metallic shadow of the Peter B. Lewis Building by six. Dr. Shafran still wasn’t answering.

  I couldn’t tell if my growing sense of urgency was some lingering dread from my lost time, or the aftereffects of grilling Nina. I sat behind the wheel and tried taking a few deep breaths.

  I made my living with my head and my ability to think clearly. I didn’t like the feeling that someone might be messing with that. Combine my lost time with a supernatural threat against my daughter, and I had lost any real sense of objectivity.

  When I got out of the Volkswagen, my destination didn’t help my state of mind.

  In the entire history of Cleveland architecture, the Peter B. Lewis Building would be the structure voted most likely to induce migraines and epileptic fits. It was hard to believe that someone managed to have a psyche twisted enough to conceive the thing before the Portal opened. My best attempt to describe it would be if Salvador Dalí ate a Silver Surfer comic book, and threw up.

  After the Portal opened, it seemed to attract and twist energies so that occasionally the curved metallic shapes would throw out rainbow auras or plasmatic arcs of energy.

  It used to house the College of Business Administration, of all things. Nowadays it had been adapted to the study of things more in tune with its surreal outlines.

  When I closed the door of my Volkswagen, the metal skin of the building draped me in a crimson blast of static that shaded my vision for more than half a minute. I saw spots in my eyes, one of which resembled a massive dragon descending from the dusk-colored sky.

  I blinked a few times and it was gone.

  Dr. Shafran wasn’t in his office, and I had to walk the non-Euclidean halls for about half an hour, asking random people where he might be. I was about to give up when someone directed me to one of the subterranean labs.

  I walked down a shadowed hallway just in time to hear a small explosion and shattering glass. Having no idea what to expect, I ran down to an open doorway where brownish-green smoke was just beginning to roll across the ceiling.

  “No. No. No.” I heard a familiar Eastern European accent as I rounded the corner. In front of me were ranks of lab tables with sinks and spigots for gas and oxygen. Two men flanked one of the tables in the middle of the lab; one easily seventy, the other in his early twenties.

  On the surface of the table between them, a circle of runes was just fading from glowing yellow t
o a dull red. As the runes faded, a swirling mass of ugly, foul-smelling smoke rose upward from the table to spill against the ceiling. I heard exhaust fans working overtime to clear it.

  In the middle of the fading circle was a pile of ash and broken glass.

  “No.” One last time, and Dr. Shafran threw up his hands. The younger man, a grad student I suspected, just looked at the ruins on the table. “This is not your mother’s goulash recipe. Rituals are exact. The patterns must be maintained or the power you mass has no shape.” He slapped the table, making the glass bounce a little. It was an impressive show of force for someone who looked like a German watchmaker and talked like Bela Lugosi.

  The student shook his head. “It was a brand-new spell . . .”

  “You cannot just throw words on a page or paint on a canvas and call it art!” Dr. Shafran took off his bifocals and pointed them at the student. “You must know the patterns you are changing, or this is all useless.”

  “But, sir,”

  “Go, study what you just did here, and don’t talk to me until you can explain what it is you did wrong.”

  Dr. Shafran stormed toward the door past me, then turned and said, “And clean this up.”

  The student looked at me as if he had just noticed I was there. I looked at him, then at Dr. Shafran walking down the hall. I faced him, shrugged, and told him, “Sorry,” before I chased after Dr. Shafran.

  “Doctor!” I called after him, running to catch up.

  “What?” He sounded a little flustered. Then he turned and looked at me “I know you. Yes. Mr. Kline Maxwell.”

  “Yes.”

  “I got that grant request, thank you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Our last conversation, dragons it was. Being quoted in a national story does wonders for the credibility of a scientist in an unpopular discipline.” He waved me forward, toward the elevators. “Apologies for that display,” he said as he gestured back toward the lab, where I could hear the student coughing.

  “That’s okay—”

  “Somehow I cannot get through to the students that the presence of ‘magic’ does not invalidate the scientific method. Ten years of students, and how many have a solid science background? Three! A waiting list I have, and all astrologers, pagans, devotees of the Golden Dawn. From all over the country. And can I even get a basic physics prerequisite written into the course descriptions? Pheh.” The elevator arrived and he turned toward me. “That is not what you want to discuss, is it, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “No.”

  “Come, then. Share a cup of coffee and let us discuss the subjects of future news articles and research papers.”

  He took me to a refreshingly rectilinear cafeteria with a set of tables and vending machines. It was an odd hour, and we were the only ones there.

  I made an effort to back myself up and act like a journalist. I sipped machine black coffee as I gave Dr. Shafran background on my dead dwarf, and where he had led me to date.

  Dr. Shafran steepled his fingers and nodded in the right places and prodded me with the occasional monosyllable.

  I paid particular attention to the oddities about my visit to Magetech, and the rumors Nina had passed on to me. The moment I mentioned Magetech, he seemed more interested.

  “Really? I was offered a position there, a long time ago.”

  “You?”

  “My expertise, you see. I was uncomfortable, however, with their—” I noticed a pause, as if he was deciding how much to tell me. “Their nondisclosure arrangements. It is hard enough to publish as it is, to conform to some corporate bylaw as well would be intolerable. At the university I study as I see fit and publish as I see fit.” There was a pride in his voice that sounded almost familiar. “But I’m acquainted with the man you mentioned that they did employ.”

  “Dr. Pretorious?”

  “Yes, a great mind. It’s a blow to my own vanity to admit that he was the first to begin the scientific quantification of the phenomenon we call the Portal, at this university in fact. You might say I inherited his position. He joined that private enterprise at the beginning, and I understand the decision has been quite kind to him—in the material sense.”

  Knowing the figures I had jotted down for Mazurich, that had to be an understatement. And Pretorious had the added benefit of not having to keep things under wraps to protect a public position.

  “So do you know anything about what he worked on for Magetech?”

  Dr. Shafran shook his head. “Like me, he is—or he was—a scientist, a theoretician. The information the public sees coming out of Magetech is in the form of patents and end-user products. From that, you can see their engineering but not their research—and that is what would possess him. And anyone in my position will tell you that the time from pure research to practical applications is measured in decades.”

  “Could they be developing something like my zombie?”

  “They could be developing anything, especially if they are employing black market mages. That begs the question, why would they?”

  “Can you think of a reason?”

  “There seems to be little chance of seeing a legal market for such an abomination, and I don’t think the black market here is either wide enough or deep enough to support that sort of development.”

  “But someone did develop it.”

  “Which means that one of us is operating on a faulty assumption.”

  I looked into my coffee.

  “Now,” Dr. Shafran said, “your mention of dwarves is interesting.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, as you’ve been told, dwarves, in a sense, are antithetical to mana. Where mana pools into areas of ritual and pattern, both physical and cultural, the presence of dwarves tends to push it away. I’ve had no opportunity to study the effect closely. Dwarves seem too wary to volunteer for any experiments.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “My guess is that there’s some inherent biological or mental an tipattern that affects the collection of mana. It makes them unique as far as intelligent nonhumans go. They don’t need mana to exist.”

  “You mean they can leave the influence of the Portal?”

  Dr. Shafran nodded. “They like to remain close to their clan, but I have heard of dwarves traveling as far afield as California.”

  “Now why would a dwarf go to California?”

  “Disneyland?” Dr. Shafran smiled.

  “About Magetech—” I looked down into my coffee again. I was uncomfortable leaving the realm of journalism for the personal. I barely knew Dr. Shafran. I didn’t know if that made it easier or harder to tell him about my blackout.

  “I’ve never blacked out like that before. Could someone have cast something on me?” I asked him after describing my interview with Lucas.

  “Certainly someone could have, but you describe unease before you even entered the building.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Dr. Shafran leaned back. “The mechanisms by which human beings perceive mana are not fully understood. Just as a camera or a telephone without filtering software can pick up signals from the mana force itself, so does your brain. But while the brain of a living creature is an infinitely better filter than any microchip, signals can and do sneak through. I suspect that you passed close to an intense source of mana you’re particularly sensitive to.”

  “Why would it make me black out?”

  “That may be a medical or a psychological question. But I might suggest there is some slight evidence that such static is not wholly random, and is responsible for what some New Age victims refer to as the Oracle.”

  Please, tell me he didn’t just say that . . .

  I rubbed my forehead. As much as I wanted Dr. Shafran to be pulling my leg, he didn’t look like it.

  “You’re saying that I had some prophetic vision?”

  “I am saying that you might have seen something you were not physically or mentally capable of absorbing at the time. I won’t say much
more than that, since far more people claim to see the future than I can credit.”

  I tried to grasp a little rational reassurance. “I would think fortune-telling and soothsaying is outside your scientific purview. Mana or not.”

  “Such things are unproven and untested in the lab. We have, however, conducted very interesting experiments that demonstrate that these energies can violate our commonsense notions of causality, just as they mangle our not-so-commonsense notions of physics, matter, and energy.”

  Well, that isn’t very reassuring.

  I stood up, shaking my head. I wasn’t absolutely sure I had learned much . . .

  “Are you all right, son?”

  “This whole thing is making me uneasy.”

  “Is there anything else you would like to ask?”

  I paused, and realized there was.

  “What about salt?”

  “Salt?”

  “Salt. The dwarf sent me a sample of salt. What could be the significance of that?”

  Dr. Shafran reached over and grabbed a saltshaker and sprinkled the white crystals on the table. “When you speak of salt, you speak of possibly the most potent mineral symbol in human culture. Physically, it is crystalline, and it is a longtime symbol of purity taking part in rituals millennia before the Portal existed. Its crystal structure, and the cultural significance surrounding it, makes it a perfect matrix to absorb the mana flow out of the Portal.”

  “What would that make the salt mines under Lake Erie?”

  “Possibly the most potent concentration of mana on either side of the Portal.”

  It started making sense. So much mana in one place, no matter how dull someone was, the sheer force of all of that would leak through their mental filters. God help anyone who was sensitive or naturally adept. Of course, the mines became a disaster when the Portal opened.

  “If dwarves are immune to the effects, they might be the only ones who could go down there.”

  Dr. Shafran nodded.

  Christ, what happened when you refined the stuff?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THAT disturbing sense of urgency kept me moving after I had talked to Dr. Shafran. My world felt out of joint, and I had the feeling that things were laughing at me from behind the reflection in my rearview mirror.