Dragons & Dwarves

  Five.

  I slowed my walk, because I knew that the viaduct dead-ended before the river, and I couldn’t remember if the raw edge was fenced off or not. I didn’t want to step off the end by accident. It felt as if I had easily traversed the length of it already.

  Six.

  Much longer than I expected, I couldn’t trust my sense of distance anymore. If I was where I thought I was, I’d be midway across the river by now.

  Seven.

  I couldn’t see my feet, or much of anything other than gray mist and a fuzzy glowing orb in the gray that showed where the moon must be. I could feel that I had left the snow cover. My feet fell on naked concrete. Or stone.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” The mist soaked up my words without the slightest echo, almost to the point where I thought I didn’t actually hear them myself.

  Eight.

  The path I was on tilted upward and became uneven. I almost stumbled until I realized that I had come to a stairway. My heart was racing, my body was half convinced that any moment I would find the edge and take a fatal tumble into the river.

  I had to tell myself that there were less grandiose ways to kill me off.

  “Yeah, unless this is another hallucination.”

  Nine.

  Pushing away unpleasant thoughts of bad trips and hostile illusions, I climbed the stairs. The mist began thinning almost immediately. After a few steps, I could see the moon clearly again.

  Ten.

  I stepped upward, out of the mist, and saw the moon eclipsed by something I had never seen on the Cleveland skyline. A cylindrical tower bisecting the swollen moon, with a height rivaling some of the tallest buildings downtown. The stairs I climbed, still shrouded in mists, weren’t straight, but spiraled up the side of the tower, whose base seemed to have a foundation in the mists themselves.

  Even though I had never actually seen it, the tower was familiar.

  “Show me to my adversary.”

  Eleven.

  I finally stepped completely out of the mist; setting my feet on the first visible stone stair climbing up the edge of the tower. As I did, the mists themselves fell away.

  I gasped.

  There was no sign of the stair I had climbed to arrive here, or of any structure below the last two steps I had trod. The stair and the tower were anchored in nothing, suspended midair above the Cuyahoga River, about seven or eight hundred feet above the Superior Viaduct. The Cleveland skyline spilled out below me.

  “The FAA has to love this thing.”

  I climbed up another quarter turn around the side of the tower and came face-to-face with a pair of ebony doors thirty feet wide and almost fifty high. An alien script wrapped every inch of their surfaces, glowing a blackish green in the moonlight. The hairs rose on the back of my neck, and the power here was thick enough for me to smell it in the air. It was like breathing hot static and adrenaline.

  Twelve.

  The bells came from inside the tower, and at the stroke of twelve, the huge doors swung out in front of me. They moved slowly, which was good because I needed to step out of the way to avoid being pushed off by them. Sidestepping the opening doors gave me a good look at how massive they actually were—the things were thicker than I was, and I needed to lose weight. Four-and-a-half feet thick at the base. The doors to this place took up more cubic feet than my entire condo.

  I stood there at the entrance to the phantom tower as the doors completed their transit. Beyond was a massive hall that seemed to take up half the volume of the entire tower. Cylindrical walls shot away on either side, cased in marble, and hung with rich tapestries. Massive Gothic pillars formed concentric circles a third of the way in, reaching up to support vaults to a vast domed ceiling whose ribs at this distance seemed spider thin—though they probably rivaled the doors for sheer mass.

  Thick rugs covered a flagstone floor arranged in a complex pattern that might have had some mystical significance. Iron sconces held torches illuminating the center space, and heavy chains suspended a vast iron chandelier—another object bigger than my whole condo—over the center of the room.

  Sitting on the floor in the center of this vast room was the largest dragon I had ever seen.

  The doors shut behind me before I fully realized I had walked inside.

  “Welcome to my home, Mr. Maxwell. I am called Hephaestus.”

  Hephaestus was gargantuan, even for a species known for its size. A wall of reddish flesh, scaled and ribbed, towered over me even from a hundred feet away. His chest was almost as broad as the entry behind me. His forelegs, folded in front of him in a near catlike pose, were thicker and longer than my entire body and ended in clawed hands that could probably bat my Volkswagen around like a wad of tinfoil. Massive wings draped behind him, obscuring half of the huge chamber from me, and, perched on a towering serpentine neck was a triangular saurian skull that was the size of an Escalade.

  His coloring ranged from a pinkish coral near the center of his chest, to a crimson so dark it was close to black along his spine and wings. He stretched his forelegs, and I could feel the movement in the stones beneath my feet.

  “Come to me, I would talk to you.”

  I had only ever had one extended conversation with a dragon before. They tended to be solitary creatures, interacting with maybe one or two human proxies. They also were attracted to power, in its various forms, whether it be raw physical strength—which Hephaestus obviously had in spades—or the more intangible aspects such as wealth and knowledge.

  Since they interacted with human society here, most concentrated on the purest distillation of power that we could provide—money. If you dug into the list of all the billionaires resident in Northeast Ohio, I would bet that once you dug behind all the shell companies and legal fictions, six of the top ten would have wings, claws, and little whips of sulfur smoke trailing from their nostrils.

  “Unique home you have here,”

  “Thank you,” Hephaestus said. His booming voice had all the subtlety of a chainsaw being thrown into a wood chipper, but I could catch an inflection of pride. “Not many have had the honor of an audience here.”

  “It is impressive,” I said, stopping about twenty feet away, which seemed a safe radius from any idle gestures. Also, with Hephaestus’ head so far above me, it was about as close as I could get without tilting my head at an angle too unnatural for conversation. “And well hidden.”

  The floor shook as Hephaestus let loose with a rumbling bellows sound that, if I hadn’t heard a dragon laugh before, would have scared the shit out of me.

  Even so, I still backed up a step.

  “Amusing choice of words, Mr. Maxwell. Hide? Indeed!” He lowered his head, circled his neck around me, and rested his chin on a clawed forefoot. I turned around to keep eye contact just as my gut began to realize that I was suddenly completely encircled by a wall made of dragon.

  An instinctive step back and I was leaning against the curve of Hephaestus’ muscular neck. I could feel his pulse in the small of my back, like a coal miner trying to pickax himself out of a hopeless cave-in. “I do not hide, Mr. Maxwell. I merely make my home where men do not care to look.”

  “Forgive my ignorance, but I’ve looked at this patch of sky every day for the last few decades, and I haven’t seen this tower of yours. It’s rather large to miss.”

  “Suffice it to say that, until tonight, you have been looking beside this spot, not at it. Most men have not trained their eyes to look in this direction.”

  “I seemed to walk it okay.”

  “When led, Mr. Maxwell. You could not see where you were going, could you?”

  Despite the fact that Hephaestus spoke with a sonorous tone that vibrated my sternum and made Barry White sound like a castrati, I could swear that there was something almost impish in it. As if he took great pleasure in showing off his sky castle.

  “No, I couldn’t.” I looked around. “Is this something like the Portal. Have I walked into some other reality???
? I calculated my question carefully. The Portal had been a construct of another dragon, one named Aloeus. That was a fact that wasn’t general knowledge, mainly because I wasn’t able to get the details into print without having the story pulled by the forces that be. And while I had yet to write my book on how I found out that particular tidbit of information, I was pretty sure that Aloeus’ handiwork was known among most of the nonhuman community. I also knew that if the elves could be defined by their reticence, dragons were almost as surely defined by their pride.

  As I expected, bringing up Aloeus’ handiwork encouraged Hephaestus to elaborate on his own. “So close to understanding that you impress me. Like, but yet unlike. The Portal is simple, a hole in the wall, nothing more. No grace, no finesse. This, the creation of Hephaestus, is much more than that. A pocket of space that did not exist before my thoughts of it. A place that was not, but now is.”

  My host was gracious enough to allow the implications of that to sink in. Could someone—something—create a whole universe from scratch? “How big is this place?”

  “As large as suits my fancy at the moment.”

  “You didn’t come through the Portal, did you?”

  Again, the booming laughter came. The pressure made my skull ache as Hephaestus’ neck vibrated behind me. It confirmed a suspicion that had been brewing ever since I walked in and saw him. There are not that many dragons in northeast Ohio. They might be secretive, but they also tend to stand out in public. A single appearance is enough to register deeply in the public psyche, especially for someone whose job is to cover the local news—“fuzzy gnome” or not.

  The fact that Hephaestus was a new face to me, made me suspect that he did not come here through normal channels. At least that was more probable than the Feds suddenly loosening up the flow of nonhumans through the Portal.

  “Astute you are, Mr. Maxwell.”

  I looked up at the tower above me; at the torchlight; the candles in the chandelier; at the tapestries I could see beyond the dragon’s bulk, all of which could probably be titled “The Death of St. George” in one form or another; and it impressed me that exactly none of the twenty-first century seemed to have touched this place—

  Other than myself.

  “Jesus Christ, did you just move this place?”

  “You are indeed worthy of my attention.” Hephaestus lowered his clawed hand so his head hovered before me. “Though it would be more accurate to say that I altered its orientation relative to various planes of existence, rotated its axis somewhat closer to that of your world.”

  I stood there in silence for a few long minutes. I rubbed my face and realized that I hadn’t showered or shaved in the past two days. My hand was shaking, and with the initial shock of meeting the dragon here wearing off, reality—such as it was—began to sink in.

  “Why did you bring me here? Your message said you could help me. I need to find my daughter.”

  “Indeed, the predictable mortal concern for progeny.”

  His breath was hot, wet, and smelled of brimstone. His face was barely three feet from me—closer than I’d ever want to be.

  “Can you help me?”

  “In return for your help.”

  “What do you want?”

  Hephaestus uncoiled from around me and sat upright. On his haunches, wings unfolded, his neck coiled almost to the chandelier. If it was possible, it was even more intimidating having his SUV- sized head sixty feet above me than when we were face-to-face.

  “Mr. Maxwell, we have a common enemy.”

  Of course, I asked the obvious question. “Who is it?”

  “I will not speak one of his names here, suffice it to say he has many of them.” Hephaestus waved a clawed hand, and a line of torches lit along a stairway that spiraled along the inner wall of the chamber, behind the ranks of pillars. I hadn’t noticed it before, and because it was a human scale, much too small for Hephaestus, I wondered if it actually had been there before.

  I turned back around, and Hephaestus was gone.

  “What the—?”

  A human voice, a familiar human voice, came from behind me. “Perhaps more the correct question might be what is it?”

  I turned around and faced one of the last people I expected to see. “You?”

  “Me,” responded Dr. Newman Shafran, and the thick accent couldn’t quite hide Hephaestus’ glee at my surprise.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “COME, come,” Dr. Shafran took off a pair of thick round bifocals and used them to gesture toward the staircase leading up the wall. “To answer the question foremost in your mind, I am the Dr. Shafran you have known, and he is I.” He looked at me with a glint in his eye, “as we are both the dragon Hephaestus.”

  That helped answer why Quint couldn’t find a phone number for Dr. Shafran. The good Dr. Shafran might well cease to exist when he left the Case campus . . .

  For once I had trouble coming up with a coherent question. “How, why . . . ?”

  Hephaestus chuckled. “Please, let me take you to my library.”

  I followed him up the spiral staircase.

  “To answer your concern, this mortal shell is propelled by my spirit which, along with the rest of my body has, in the terms I used earlier, rotated on its axis to be behind myself.” He turned and smiled at me.

  “Is there a real Dr. Shafran?”

  “Oh, why be needlessly complex? Dr. Shafran is as real as you. Allow a scholar his alias.”

  We circled around the vast chamber once, and we were barely a quarter up the side of the wall. “Why do it?”

  “What shocks you more, Mr. Maxwell? That I show such duplicity, or that I demean myself as much as to wear a man’s shoes?”

  I didn’t know how to answer the question. The last thing I wanted to do was say anything that could come across as insulting. If anything, Hephaestus had managed to convince me that he possessed powers way beyond anything I had ever seen. I tried purposeful misdirection again. “I have seen remote-control golems before, gargoyles and undead—yours is the most real—”

  Dr. Shafran touched me and the physical contact was enough to stop me talking. “Because it is real, Mr. Maxwell. This is my flesh.” He let me go. “A gobbet of it, anyway.”

  We continued up the stairs as he talked. “Why should I reduce myself so? Because I can. To disguise the person of one’s flesh so is beyond the means of any of my peers and it pleases me to do what others cannot. And it gives me an eye with which to view the men of your world. It allows me to watch, and to see . . .”

  “See what?”

  “The aforementioned enemy.”

  We continued to trudge up the stairs, and I began to see what looked to be an opening to the upper portion of the tower.

  “What about my daughter?”

  “Patience. You will see that our desires are one.”

  He led me upward and eventually we walked into a room that was as vast as the entry hall, the walls lined with shelves that held an endless supply of books ranging from simple scrolls to giant metal-clad volumes as tall as I was. The room smelled of incense, dust, and old paper. From the expression on Hephaestus’ face I could tell that I was looking at a hoard as great as any pile of gold.

  He walked over to a long table where a book was already open. He looked down at it and said, “Do you know much of the history of your sister land across the Portal?”

  The Cliff Notes version of what I knew went something like this:

  There’s a realm of magic, elves, dwarves, fairies, and dragons. In the midst of this land enters mankind—i.e., my own kind, only scruffier. They found a land called Ragnan that slowly gobbles up everything around it. Among other things, the fact that men weren’t immortal gave them a tactical advantage—they didn’t care nearly so much about dying.

  Ragnan becomes an authoritarian regime—human only—led by a god-king called the Thesarch, who seemed to have more authority than your average Pharaoh. He was helped in part by the fact that he was at th
e apex of the mana pyramid and could muster spells that could waste entire cities.

  The last Thesarch was named Valdis, and he seemed particularly nasty and long-lived. Many of the nonhuman societies surrounding Ragnan crumble before Valdis and his enchanted human armies.

  Then, a dragon named Aloeus throws a monkey wrench into the works by blowing open the Portal, opening the way between here and there. Out pours a tidal wave of magic and refugees, and— among other political maneuverings—Aloeus manages to broker a deal that has the Ohio National Guard send a unit of armor and air cavalry through the Portal.

  Valdis had a blind spot, not seeing the unenchanted, thoroughly mundane troops as a threat. Apparently, no one had shown him that things could be blown up very well without any mana at all. So, thanks to Aloeus, Mayor Rayburn, and the governor of the great state of Ohio, a coup ended the reign of the Thesarch, and started a rat’s nest of political ramifications on our side of the Portal that was still working itself out.

  So far, so good, from Hephaestus’ point of view.

  But there was more to it.

  There always was.

  “The explosion of the nation of men across the continents took generations in mortal eyes,” Hephaestus opened a large atlas, showing alien lands in scripts I couldn’t read. However, as he turned the pages, it was clear what was happening as the maps became dominated by a single color. “But for most immortals—dragons, elves—the pace of change came too fast to react. I watched many die.”

  “What about dwarves?”

  “Mortal as well, but they lacked man’s ability to master mana, and fell too often before it.”

  “I know of Ragnan’s conquests—”

  “Do you know of her ally?”

  “Ally?”

  Hephaestus walked over to a dark grimoire, bound in black leather that seemed to show remnants of facial features in the grain. He drew it off the shelf and placed it on the table between us.

  “Not all immortals fought the Thesarch’s rise.”