Dragons & Dwarves

  If I had my cell phone, I would have tried to call Dr. Shafran for advice. The little I knew about mazes like this, they usually forced you through the center in order to get out.

  The problem was, like ancient Crete, there invariably was something nasty in the center.

  However, I didn’t have much choice but to play along.

  I followed the path that wasn’t graced by my footprints. I slogged between twisted iron walls that tried to claw their way into my brain. I forced my gaze down, focusing on the path ahead of me. Every heartbeat felt as if the walls would close in and squeeze the life from me, even though in my narrow focus, the path became wider.

  Each intersection, I could see one path that did not yet have footprints. Each time I took that fork.

  My socks were wet, and every step I had the nasty sense that something was reaching up through the mud and touching the soles of my feet.

  “And I was worried about the woods . . .”

  I slogged on, following the logic of the untraveled road. The weight of the metal around me became a heavier and heavier pressure on the back of my mind.

  Until I came to a dead end.

  “Fuck!”

  I looked up, and the sky itself was gone. I was in a cavern built of iron scrap. I could see, but the ruddy light was sourceless and nothing cast a shadow. When I turned around, I saw no footprints in the mud behind me.

  “Shit. Are you out there?” I shouted. The words hung in the air, echoless. “Someone show themselves!”

  The light in the air appeared to pulse. I was breathing hard, the air burning my lungs as badly as it had after I’d run from the griffin. Vertigo gripped me, the dizzying sensation that the world around me was dropping into free fall.

  “I want my daughter!”

  The glyphs spray-painted on the metal walls around me began to glow. It became harder for me to breathe, the air as thick as the mud swallowing my ankles. I tried to shout again, but the words came out as a wheeze.

  The sourceless light slowed its pulsing, dimming to invisibility, leaving only the glowing glyphs surrounding me. The sense of falling continued and I was tumbling in a void, my muscles locked, unable to breathe, only able to see the burning glyphs that were like hot brands stabbing into the back of my skull.

  Voices spoke a guttural language other than English. Somehow I understood the unseen speakers.

  “The journalist.”

  “Yes.”

  “He must not be here.”

  “He is here.”

  “Who does he serve?”

  “Who do we serve?”

  “He has cost us too much.”

  “We have cost him too much.”

  “Can he do what we cannot?”

  “He will or he will not. Those who look cannot find him here.”

  “He will return.”

  “When it is done, and all is lost—or won.”

  I sucked in a breath, shocking myself awake.

  I was behind the wheel of the Lincoln. I was parked on some residential street somewhere. The sky was dark and it was just beginning to snow. I turned the key and the clock on the dash told me it was 10:30.

  “What the hell?”

  I had blacked out again. It was either another mana overdose, or it was some dwarven security system, or a little of both. I should probably count myself lucky coming through unscathed. I hoped to God I hadn’t endangered my daughter.

  No, the demonic bastard wants me. He needs the leverage . . .

  I gripped the steering wheel, trying to calm down. Then I realized where I was.

  The dwarves were trying to give me a message.

  I was parked in front of the late Council President Dominic Mazurich’s house. And on the passenger seat was a key on a St. Christopher key chain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  LET it never be said that I can’t take a hint.

  Whatever was going on, I was getting the feeling that even if the dwarves weren’t exactly on my side, they weren’t on the side of my daughter’s kidnapper either. Whoever was hiding behind the tarot Devil was at odds with the dwarves themselves.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It must be fed!”

  Perhaps it was Magetech itself. It wouldn’t be the first time a corporate entity took on its own life and started cannibalizing its workers and founders.

  Whoever or whatever it was, the dwarves were afraid of even referring to it indirectly. And given what happened to Nina and Teaghue, they had good reason. But it was clear that they didn’t serve that master willingly.

  So I made the assumption that I had been parked here to push me in the right direction.

  I walked up the driveway to Mazurich’s side door and tried the doorknob. Locked.

  I looked for any obvious wards. I didn’t see any, but if this was the house key, the St. Christopher medal was probably keyed to them. Even so, once I unlocked the door I stood and waited.

  If any neighbor called the cops, or a warded alarm was tripped, I might get away with misdemeanor trespass if I was outside the house when they showed up. I gave them enough time to show up.

  They didn’t.

  I let myself into Mazurich’s house. I gagged a little. Death still clung to the air in here, as if an evil rot had sunk into the walls.

  I stepped into the darkened house, unclear exactly what I was looking for. I left the lights off. The glass may not have attracted attention, but I wasn’t about to press my luck. I let my eyes adjust until the glare from the streetlights outside was enough for me to navigate by.

  I left the kitchen and entered the living room. A sectional couch, coffee table, not much else. Family photos crowded the mantel. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  My foot crunched glass.

  I knelt down and picked up the remains of a picture frame, a partly torn photograph fell from it. I set down the frame and picked up the damaged picture.

  It was a digital shot, the strange ghosting marked it as probably coming from one of the first post-Portal cameras. Given the date on the back, and the subject matter, probably a prototype.

  The picture showed Mazurich, Dr. Pretorious, a cluster of dwarves recognizable from their portraits at Magetech HQ, and Mr. Simon Lucas. The tear in the photograph split Lucas in two, and there was a heel print in the center.

  I suppose that once suicide was the obvious cause of death, the cops stopped bothering with evidence. And the Democratic party machine, which drove most everything in the county, might have discouraged any close examination of the council president’s connection to Magetech.

  However, to be fair, I might just be a lot more comfortable with that kind of conspiracy.

  I placed the photo on the mantel and headed upstairs.

  Mazurich’s house made me uneasy. It wasn’t squeamishness as much as the look I was getting into Mazurich’s personal life. I knew how much money this man had collected from Magetech. Even if the money was sheltered and hidden, one would expect to see some of that in the man’s home. What someone chooses to spend money on is one of the keys to their character.

  Mazurich hadn’t done much of anything. It was almost as if he hadn’t changed anything in the house since he separated from his wife. The impression came from the fact that every room seemed to have broken patterns. Pictures on the wall that formed lopsided, unbalanced designs. Matching end tables in a child’s bedroom, but with no bed between them. Throw rugs on the wall-to-wall carpet arranged around furniture that wasn’t there. Chairs facing blank walls . . .

  I knew many, many people who put too much of themselves into their work. I counted myself among them. People whose residential address was little more than a place they went to go to bed. Their homes became shells. This felt worse.

  Could a house be worse than soulless?

  I wondered if I was suffering from the aftereffects of my ill-fated trip to Whiskey Island.

  The master bedroom was the scene of the suicide. Here, the smell of death was the worst. Even thou
gh I could see that crime scene cleanup had been through here. The mattress was gone from the bed, leaving the naked box spring, and a large square of the wall-to-wall carpet had been cut away, baring the hardwood floor. In the streetlight glow from the window, there seemed to be a darker spot on the wood. Ink-black and shiny.

  I stepped forward and the stain was gone. Some odd reflection, that’s all.

  Why am I here? What am I looking for?

  I saw the bullet hole. It went into the wall above the headboard. Around it, the wallpaper had been stripped baring the plaster. More attempted cleanup.

  I stepped forward and suddenly saw the wall spotted with gore, tufts of hair, shiny bits of—

  I stumbled back and the vision disappeared.

  “Okay, that wasn’t the light.”

  I walked backward from the bed frame, toward the door. My heart raced.

  The mana from the Portal used the environment around itself as an organizing principle. The patterns could be chemical, like the crystalline structure of the salt under Lake Erie; or ritual and cultural, like the New Age occultism that Nina had practiced. It could be geographic, such as in the mystical woods that had enveloped the North Chagrin Reservation; it could be architectural, like innumerable churches, or the maze the dwarves had made of the Huletts’ remains.

  Patterns could also be emotional, and psychological.

  Such as this house, the mind of Mazurich, and the way he had killed himself.

  The door slammed shut behind me.

  “Shit.” I whipped around and grabbed the knob and tried to pull it open. It was shut fast by something more powerful than the latch.

  Something laughed behind me.

  I turned around, back flattened against the door.

  “Only the damned follow me here.” Mazurich’s voice was little more than a whisper. He sat above the bed, hovering above the box spring where the missing mattress must have been. Blood flowed from his mouth, turning his chin and the front of his shirt a glossy black. His skull was shaped wrong, and when he moved, I could see that it was because of a massive crater in the back of his head.

  He turned his face toward me and stared into my eyes. I couldn’t look away. I knew the face. I had interviewed him innumerable times. I also knew he was dead, and the specter before me couldn’t be him . . .

  Just an image conjured up by the Portal.

  “W-why did you kill yourself?” I tried to keep my composure. It wasn’t easy.

  Mazurich laughed again. When he lifted his head, I could see through his mouth to the wall behind him.

  “You know, Maxwell. You’ll join me in hell soon enough.”

  I shook my head, no.

  “You will do His bidding, even if you fight Him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He has an infinity of names: the morning star, the bringer of light, the father of lies.”

  “He has my daughter.”

  Mazurich laughed.

  “You are already lost.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “You will give your soul for what He will promise you.”

  I screwed my eyes shut and clenched my fists. I tried to anchor myself against the fear. “What the hell are you?”

  “What you will become.”

  “No,” I shook my head. “You’re the mana-animated guilt of a poor bastard that couldn’t accept the decisions he made.”

  “You cannot fight Him.”

  “No,” I whispered. “You couldn’t.”

  A chill wind blew through the room, making my bones ache. For a moment I could actually feel my heart stop.

  I opened my eyes, blinking, and the phantom was gone. No specter, no blood, and even the smell of death seemed to have receded.

  The morning star,

  The bringer of light,

  The father of lies,

  Lucifer,

  The Devil.

  Mazurich was a good Catholic, and if that’s really what Mazurich thought, I could understand how he might end up killing himself. I was shaken myself as I backed out of the bedroom.

  What if the authors of that evangelical pamphlet had a point?

  When I got back to the car, it was after eleven and I had another meeting to go to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE Superior Viaduct has an interesting history. It was one of the first rail connections between east and west across the Cuyahoga River, and one of the first moving bridges marking it as a precursor of dozens of drawbridges that would rise, fall, and swing across the river.

  Nineteenth century trolleys crossed an arched stone approach toward a swinging iron trestle that would carry them west. The operation lasted only a quarter century or so, surviving at least one fairly significant disaster where a trolley plunged into the river, eventually to be replaced by higher, more modern structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  The iron trestle of the bridge was shortly sold for scrap. But the arched vault of the eastern approach has remained for close to a century, a bridge to nowhere. Like the Huletts, it is one of many odd artifacts in the city that are subject to periodic debates that swing between development, restoration, and apathy.

  With the viaduct, there was a brief development debate, but since the Portal opened the pendulum had swung solidly toward apathy. However, as far as meeting places went, it was probably the most public abandoned structure you could find—a raised open-air deck cutting through the heart of the eastern shore of the Flats.

  While the East Flats were a little less hard core than the West—a fetish club like the Nazgûl wouldn’t fit in with the restaurants and comedy clubs that clustered on this side of the river—the area was still choked solidly with people at quarter to midnight.

  It reminded me why I haven’t gone clubbing for over twenty-five years. I don’t know what was worse, the five-mile-per-hour traffic, or the twenty-something pedestrians who believed that side-walks were only a suggestion.

  Fortunately, I still reached my destination ten minutes early. I parked Reggie’s Lincoln by the barriers at the eastern end of the viaduct. I stepped out of the car and was just far enough away from the chaos and noise around me to hear my feet crunch in the snow.

  The night was clear and cold, the only cloud was the fog from my own breath. The deck of the viaduct arced away from me, over the Flats, to dead-end at the river. Blocking my path, on the other side of the traffic barrier, was a tall chain-link fence. It had a gate, but it was padlocked.

  I stood at the gate and looked at the deck. It was covered by a layer of snow, silver and unmolested under the glow of the full moon.

  It looked like I’d got here first.

  I wasn’t about to break in. I could see a frightening array of wards scribed on the top rail of the fence. I didn’t know what any of them might do, but I wasn’t about to find out the hard way. I wasn’t going to help Sarah by inflicting random curses on myself.

  I stood by the gate and waited for my anonymous e-mailer to show himself.

  I waited.

  I checked my watch five times, each time sure that I’d been stood up, or that the phantom e-mail had really meant only last midnight.

  However, every time, my watch told me that even less time had passed. It didn’t feel possible. The ten minutes to midnight seemed to stretch to twenty. Everything seemed to crawl around me. Even the fog of my breath seemed hesitant.

  By the fifth time I suspected there was something more going on than my impatience. My watch read 11:58:49, and I was convinced that I’d been standing here for way more than eight minutes.

  I looked at the seconds and waited for the 49 to change to 50. And waited. In my head I counted to ten before the LCD winked over to 50. I counted fifteen to reach 51.

  I looked up from my watch and realized that it wasn’t just a wayward timepiece. The noise from the Flats was wrong, octaves lower than it should be, I couldn’t pick out anything recognizable as a human voice, and everything was muffled and nearly subliminal.
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  Down the street where there were people, I could see movement, but barely. I looked down and kicked the snow at my feet, and saw it hang in the air for a short eternity before arcing slowly back to merge with the slush at my feet.

  I looked back at my watch.

  11:59:03.

  I counted a full twenty seconds before the number flipped to 04.

  Almost at the same time, the air around me rang with the sound of a gigantic bell. The sound was undistorted, and felt so close that I could picture myself right next to Quasimodo as he pulled the rope.

  In front of me, of its own accord, the gate in the fence opened.

  I looked around and all I could see of the world had stopped. The people at the end of the street showed no visible movement. By them, a glowing cigarette butt hung in midair where a leather-clad biker had thrown it toward the gutter. The Harley he rode was caught in mid-spray passing the college kids, the slush frozen in the air, halfway toward them.

  There was another resonating bell sound, the gong vibrating the fillings in my back teeth.

  My watch still read 11:59:03.

  Something told me it was slow.

  I expected it to be awkward to move, but whatever enchantment gripped me must have compensated for little things like air resistance, acceleration, and gravity. Whoever this was, he wasn’t minor league.

  I passed through the gate and walked across the snow-covered deck of the Superior Viaduct as the bell tolled again. Three down, nine to go.

  Whatever distorted my sense of time began operating on my sense of space as well. The world around the deck of the viaduct began to twist, the moon coming impossibly close, and the neighboring Cleveland skyline receding into the far distance. The Flats below sank into a deep abyss while the river widened to rival the lake, swallowing the western shore.

  The bell tolled four. And the air, cold and razor clear until now, began to spontaneously form mist, wrapping itself around me as I walked. The air became heavy, humid, and slightly warm.