Dragons & Dwarves

  “Give me back my daughter.”

  “Do your job well, and she will be safely returned.”

  What the hell kind of blackmail was this? What kind of ransom? I didn’t understand. Still, “Give me my daughter first.”

  The Devil chuckled and grabbed me by the shirt. “Show some good faith, and I might.”

  The world turned red and bloody again. I looked into the Devil’s face and his eyes began to glow at me. “You also know the cost of defying me . . .”

  The Devil’s eyes became bright white, too bright to look at. My eyes watered and I shook my head.

  “Mr. Maxwell?”

  Someone was holding me down and I tried to push him off as the light went away.

  “What the—” I looked around and the Devil was gone. Agents Levi and Francis were there, and the man holding me down and shining the light in my eye was a paramedic.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Maxwell?” Levi asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I looked up at the medic, “What happened?”

  “You had a seizure,” said the medic. “For about fifteen minutes you were completely unresponsive.”

  I sat up. “I’m fine now,” I said despite the fact that I suddenly felt dizzy.

  “I think we need to take you to the clinic for observation.”

  “Is that necessary?” I looked over at Francis and Levi and their expressions told me all I needed to know. Whatever they had seen was severe, and the growing pain in my back told me I’d been doing more than lying around.

  Levi looked over at Francis, “I’ll go with him. You stay here in case there’s some attempt at contact.”

  Attempt at contact? Boy, did you guys miss it.

  They took me to the Cleveland Clinic where I spent a good part of the afternoon suffering through a series of uncomfortable and unnecessary tests. After which they deposited me in a private room, with Agent Levi stationed outside.

  Great . . .

  I needed to get out from under the FBI’s thumb if I was going to have a chance to follow up on my phantom e-mail. I needed to think of something.

  The problem was, all I had was a hospital gown and one of those stupid little bracelets. I don’t know where my clothes had gone, and I didn’t even have my cell phone. It took me a while to come up with even a stupid plan.

  Fortunately, the clinic provided me with a phone.

  “You’re shitting me,” Reggie said.

  “Can you do it?”

  “You’re making me an accomplice.”

  “That isn’t an answer.”

  “Damn it, you going to give me something for my byline out of this?”

  “How ’bout my notes on Mazurich’s secret slush fund. You can go to town.”

  “Christ, you are desperate. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  It was fairly simple as escape plans went. Which meant that there were probably way too many things that could go wrong. Fortunately, I didn’t have too long to dwell on it. By the time I had gotten the window to my room open, and brushed the snow off of the sill, I could hear Reggie’s voice outside.

  “I want to see Maxwell. I brought him a change of clothes.”

  “You’ll have to leave that with me,” said Agent Levi.

  “Come on, how long has he been wearing the same stuff—”

  I ran back to the bathroom, which was right next to the entry-way. I wedged myself in the shadows, trying to be invisible, as Reggie walked into my room.

  “Hey, Maxwell!” Reggie walked into the room and repeated, “Hey!”

  With the bathroom and the front door open, I could just see Levi, sitting by the doorway. A paper grocery bag sat next to the chair. I had to smile when I saw that Reggie had scrawled “Kline Maxwell” on it in permanent marker.

  “Hey,” Reggie said, “where is he?”

  Levi got up and walked into the room. “What?”

  I watched him from behind as he looked at Reggie, then the bed, then at the open window. While his back was turned, I dashed out, grabbing the grocery bag.

  “What the hell,” I heard Levi say as I took the first turn I came to.

  I tried not to run as I looked for a place to slip out of view. There were orderlies, nurses, and doctors, but everyone was in the middle of doing something, and no one yet seemed to have the spare time to notice me. Before any of them did, I saw another bathroom in the hallway, and I slipped inside.

  Just like Reggie had said, the bag held a change of clothes. The fact that they were Reggie’s clothes didn’t really matter to me at the moment. The sleeves were short and the waist was loose, but at least the sneakers fit. Ratty as they were, he had even had the sense to bring a winter jacket, stocking cap, and gloves—all bearing the logo of the long-absent Browns football franchise.

  I waited until the hallway was quiet, then I slipped back outside.

  I took a very circuitous route to the parking garage, and found Reggie waiting for me in an idling Lincoln Town Car. He threw the door open for me and said, “You owe me.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  He drove off, back toward downtown.

  “There’s one more thing,” I said.

  “Of course there is.”

  “I’d like to borrow your car.”

  Reggie gave me a withering stare for a moment. Then he said, “Of course, why not?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SANITY would dictate that I lay low until midnight and my anonymous meeting. I managed to do that for nearly an hour. Then I broke down and started driving along the west side of the Cuyahoga. I wasn’t clear on everything that was going on, but I was clear on where it was centered.

  Whiskey Island.

  What I would do when I got there was an open question. However, it was clear that Magetech’s strings were being pulled from there. And if my demonic visitor was to be believed, my daughter was kept somewhere out there, in the mines.

  As I turned away from Edgewater Park, on to Whiskey Island Drive, I was able to see the Cleveland skyline beyond the wooded confines of the dwarven peninsula. Whiskey Island was flanked to the right by the skyscrapers a mile away on Public Square, and on the left by the dark twisting clouds above the Portal.

  Whiskey Island stabbed right between the two features as if it were a conscious metaphor for the division between the two worlds.

  After passing through the Shoreway underpass, I paralleled the long-disused Conrail tracks that used to serve the port and the salt mines. I passed chain-link fences that were sagged and rusty, a few bore warning signs that I had never seen before. Big red letters “Fe” covered half the sign. Text in English warned “High Iron Hazard.”

  The English words were accompanied by a script that I believed was elvish.

  Lots of things had occupied Whiskey Island at one time or another; nineteenth-century Irish immigrants, a defunct Coast Guard station, volleyball courts, a marina, the salt mines, of course . . .

  And the Port Authority once ran an iron ore pellet terminal here. Decades of use probably saturated this area. I would not want to be an elf right now.

  I shook my head. It was as if fate itself conspired to isolate the dwarven enclave.

  The road got worse, the asphalt deteriorating the farther west I went toward the tip of the peninsula. It finally degenerated into a gravel track ending at a gateless chain-link fence. At one point I could have driven all the way to the largest marina on the Great Lakes—but that didn’t exist anymore.

  I got out of the Lincoln and looked around. I hadn’t expected the way to be completely clear; I was at the back door, so to speak. All the traffic and new construction was concentrated on the southern edge and the western tip of the peninsula. The road I was on, like the train tracks, was mostly abandoned.

  However, if my memory of my research was accurate, the salt mines were on the opposite side of the tracks from the old pellet terminal. At one point, they might have been visible from where I stood, but high concentrations of mana had some interesting effe
cts on vegetation.

  Past the chain-link, and the train tracks, stood a grove of trees whose twisted and gnarled trunks could have clung to the land here for a millennium. Could have, but didn’t. This was one of a few areas where dark old-growth forests seemed to have erupted overnight, post-Portal. Somehow the twisted patterns of mana allowed centuries-old roots to climb over fifty-year-old train tracks. In one place a trunk as wide as the Lincoln grew through the open doors of a derailed boxcar.

  The woods hid the southern sky, the naked winter branches as dense as any canopy. The only sound: my feet crunching gravel and the ominous creak as wind from the lake shifted the branches around me.

  While the road was fenced off, the chain-link was in bad repair and showed no obvious wards. A man-sized gap was in the fence opposite the Conrail tracks, and led to a dirt trail that headed off where the road used to go.

  “Okay, Kline, does this make sense?”

  Yesterday I had chased a dwarf to his death. I had good reason to believe they held my daughter. Chances were they wouldn’t be pleased to see me.

  But Teaghue said that “he” had her. I didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure out what demonic manifestation the late Teaghue Parthalán was referring to. Both in his last words and in the circle his fellows constructed for my benefit on the Detroit-Superior Bridge.

  Add to that the image from my nightmares; the dwarves chained to the demonic throne, mining the massive mountain of salt . . .

  “What are you doing?”

  “It must be fed!”

  However badly things went with Teaghue, I had a gut feeling that I might find some ally among the dwarves. Or at least some source of information.

  That’s how my rationalizations went as I slipped through the fence. Despite that, the fact was cold logic should have dictated that this was as dumb a move as chasing Teaghue had been.

  A few steps past the fence, and the trees had me surrounded. I had to keep checking to make sure the path was still visible behind me. Enchanted woods had a habit of closing up behind people.

  This one didn’t seem to mind leaving me an escape route, though after a hundred feet, the path twisted around enough to make me lose sight of the fence and Reggie’s car.

  I stopped a moment.

  This was one of the places in the area that no one had managed to map accurately since the opening of the Portal. All I had was some general geography. I was on a peninsula about a mile long, ranging from a third to a half mile wide. The western end, where it met shore, and where I had come from, had been the industrialized part, the east end had never really been developed and only had an abandoned Coast Guard station.

  I was pretty sure that I was roughly in the geographic center, which would put me due north of the salt mines and the dwarven settlements.

  However, the thick woods around me encouraged me to stay on the path, which kept going east—as far as I could tell.

  I kept an eye to the right, looking for a clearing, or any passable way toward the mines. However, to all appearances, the plant kingdom had been completely triumphant. The Conrail tracks were totally overtaken. I saw railroad ties, and the rails themselves, embedded in large trunks ten, twenty, thirty feet up. Roots embraced and seemed to consume large fragments of concrete and asphalt. Corrugated steel poked out of snow-covered earth, only visible because the undergrowth had shed its leaves for the winter.

  I knew the area I was in was way too small to really become lost, but even in a space less than a mile square, I knew it wasn’t safe to brave these kinds of woods. They tended to be larger on the inside than they were on the outside.

  The light started to fail. Looking up, I saw the dappled white fragments of sky turn grayer. Another storm front moving in from the lake.

  As if in response to my thought, thick white flakes began to drift down through the twisted branches above me.

  “Fuck,” I whispered, and my breath fogged around me.

  In response I heard something rustle.

  I froze.

  The woods stayed silent around me. I couldn’t tell if the sound I’d heard came from behind me or ahead of me.

  I took a step.

  Something crunched the gravel on the path behind me. It wasn’t my foot.

  I started moving. I tried to be quiet, but I could hear my shadow picking up the pace to match me. My heart raced, and the trees themselves seemed to feed into the sense of panic. I wanted to run, but I tried to reason with myself, the point was to talk to someone, right?

  I wasn’t Indiana Jones or James Bond; there wasn’t any way I was going to free my daughter by stealth or force. The only thing I could do was to convince someone to hand her over. I had to talk to someone.

  Now was as good a time as any . . .

  I turned around and stood my ground, facing the last turn in the path behind me.

  My stalker stopped moving before he came into view. If I listened now, I could hear his breathing heavy and deep. I could just see a wisp of his breath emerging from behind a tree.

  I sucked in a breath, calmed myself, and put on my best journalistic game face. “Come on out, I just want to talk to someone.”

  I heard weight shifting on the gravel path. It sounded bigger than a dwarf. More like several.

  I took a step forward. “Kline Maxwell, Cleveland Press. But, I think you know that, don’t you?”

  Something rustled again, a noise that took me a moment to identify.

  “Come out and talk . . .”

  Wings.

  It came out, but it wasn’t a dwarf, or even several dwarves. It leaped into the path in front of me, springing on feline haunches that were sized more for a Clydesdale, and stared me down with the head of a raptor that should have been extinct for a few hundred thousand years.

  The griffin let out a screech that could probably knock lesser avian dead out of the sky.

  Unlike a lot of critters that came out of the Portal, this was not something you could reason with. It was a wild animal. Most had a healthy fear of humanoids. However, this one was too hungry, too pissed, or just too nasty to be fazed by me.

  It reared, and I did the only thing I could. I dove into the woods.

  It wasn’t quite the sanctuary it seemed.

  I left the path, and the trees seemed to open up around me. Suddenly the stand of trees that seemed so closed in that a dwarf couldn’t pass through widened to the point where a man could fully stretch his arms between the massive trunks.

  While that meant I could run, unimpeded; it also meant that a pissed-off griffin could follow me. The only thing that kept me alive was the fact that the trees were just close enough to prevent it from pouncing or taking flight, and its bird-clawed forelegs were more designed for tearing prey apart, not chasing it.

  That meant that I could barely keep ahead of it while running flat out. My only hope was to find some cover before I hit a clearing, or the water.

  I hit all three at the same time.

  After running through the unnatural woods for ten minutes beyond the point where I should have reached the edge of the peninsula, I broke out of the edge, somewhere on the northern shore. I faced a clearing stacked high with mountainous piles of dismantled steel machinery. A scrap heap a few dozen orders of magnitude beyond the piles next to The Dwarven Armorer.

  I ran between stacks of girders too tight for my pursuer to follow. Behind I heard a screech and a rush of feathers. I could feel the griffin’s hot breath on my neck as I wove deeper into the rusty iron maze.

  I saw its shadow fly across the slice of sky visible above me. I leaned against a slab of metal and hyperventilated. My lungs burned and my legs felt like rubber.

  You’re a genius, Kline . . .

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. At least I had my bearings again. I was standing in the last remnants of the Hulett ore unloaders—skyscraper-sized mechanical dinosaurs, four of which had dominated the pellet terminal for a good ninety years during the last century. They had been obsolete
for a few decades when the Port Authority decided to dismantle the beasts—four of the six left in existence.

  In the constant tension between redevelopment and preservation, redevelopment had won. Unfortunate, since political wrangling over this spit of shoreline, and the subsequent opening of the Portal, meant that the Port Authority never got to expand the docks here, losing even the existing facilities.

  But the bones of this industrial fossil rested to the east of the old pellet terminal. So once I was clear of griffins, I could follow the shore and get back to the car. The shot of adrenaline from my confrontation was just what I needed to come to my senses and realize my limitations.

  I waited a good twenty minutes until I was sure the griffin had given up on me. Then I tried to backtrack, which turned out to be less simple than it sounded.

  I wove back through the maze of iron, toward what I thought was the edge, and I faced a dead end—a slab of iron an inch thick, dotted with rivets the size of my fist. I couldn’t even see around it.

  I turned around and worked my way back, and realized I had no idea which way to go. I stood at the intersection of five paths that wove through the ocher piles of iron, my feet sinking into thick, red slushy mud. My footprints led down four of the paths, in both directions.

  “Shit.” My voice came out in a puff of fog.

  I looked at the piles of scrap and saw figures spray-painted on the pieces. I had ignored them, at first. Just ID numbers, probably left over from when the Historical Society had plans to reconstruct one of these monsters on another site.

  That was right, as far as the white numbers went.

  However, someone had also sprayed red and orange paint on the girders, marking arcane glyphs that actually hurt my eyes when I stared at them.

  That couldn’t be good.

  I swallowed, and started to get the same creepy sensation I had gotten around Magetech. There, things seemed to hide beneath the reflections; here, it was as if something ugly hid under the pattern of rust flakes on the iron beams.