Dragons & Dwarves

  Hephaestus opened the book and flipped though pages of arcane symbols until it opened on a full-page illustration. I wasn’t really surprised to see—sitting on a stony throne, before a background of fire—the Devil from the tarot card.

  “Shit . . .”

  Mazurich, or what was left of him, was right. What I was dealing with was Satan himself. Or, at least as close a manifestation as the Portal could conjure up. The reign of the Thesarch was based on a literal deal with the Devil.

  Or a Devil.

  Appearance aside, Hephaestus wasn’t describing Judeo-Christian metaphysics. He described a race of beings, few in number, older and more powerful than even the dragons. Beings that were so much of the mana they swam in that they often could forgo a physical form. The mana itself was a sense organ for them, making them near omniscient.

  Demons and angels . . .

  Their limited physicality, at first, made them little more than shadows in the conscious world. Creatures of dream and spirit, little known and little seen.

  Until one of their number discovered a vulnerability in the mortal mind, a vulnerability that allowed him to cohabit the brain and the senses of a man—to give himself form . . .

  And lust . . .

  And desire . . .

  “The vulnerability was two-way,” Hephaestus said. “Its spirit could infect the body of a man, but it, in turn, became infected with the basest material drives.”

  “This thing allied with the Thesarch?”

  “This thing was the Thesarch. It fed its human host with unimaginable powers, and in turn, human armies slaughtered immortals whose existence might drain the font of mana it now wanted solely to consume.”

  “Couldn’t someone stop it? Others of its kind . . .”

  “Were the first to die, consumed in rituals to extend the life of the first Thesarchs.”

  “But Valdis was killed . . .”

  “And it infested the neighbor most convenient to it.” Hephaestus shook his head. “Valdis was a host, nothing more. The latest in a long line.”

  “But the Thesarch was overthrown over ten years ago . . .”

  “Do you know how long that is to ones older than I?”

  Valdis, apparently, wasn’t the only one who was surprised by machine guns, rockets, and high explosives. Our demonic spirit saw in the National Guard hints of powers that had never been conceived within the boundaries of Ragnan. So, instead of taking the mantle of Valdis’ successor, it found someone anonymous to take it on its way to the other side of the Portal.

  Why settle for one world, when two were available? And one was so much more interesting.

  I shook my head.

  “As powerful as this thing is, it can’t live without mana, can it?”

  “It is almost mana personified. It is as if you asked: ‘Could matter exist without mass?’”

  “Then how can it expect to take over this planet? The portion with mana is geographically infinitesimal.”

  “It has patience, and servants.”

  “What do you . . . ?”

  I remembered my vision, the mountain of salt, the dwarves shoveling it while chained to the Devil’s throne.

  “They’re smuggling salt.”

  “Spreading mana,” Hephaestus said. “Every ritual that frees the mana trapped in those crystals, will leave some to sink into the earth. Every time, pulling the boundaries of the Portal outward.”

  I nodded, “He’s holding the dwarves by the short hairs. They’re living in what’s got to be the place where he has the most powerful influence.”

  “And he’s using them to spread that influence.”

  Patient bastard . . . “What do you think I can do?”

  “I’ve been watching for his reappearance.” Hephaestus folded his hands. “He is vulnerable on this side of the Portal while it is mana-poor. Until now, I was unsure that he was even here. Now I am.” Hephaestus caressed the spines on one of his shelves. “Originally, I intended to shut off the Portal itself.”

  I swallowed.

  “But the geology beneath your lake means that there may be enough mana to self-sustain now,” Hephaestus frowned. “So I must change tactics. If these plans are disrupted, along with the distribution of mana, he may not be able to recover. Merely publicizing what is happening, the dwarves’ smuggling ring, may be enough to cut him off from the mines, and weaken him enough to be defeated.”

  “You said you’d help with my daughter.”

  “Agree to this, and I can open a route to wherever she is. After which, you should both leave the area, go somewhere free of his influence.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you agree?”

  “There’s one problem, Hephaestus.”

  “What is that?”

  “That is exactly what he wants me to do.”

  I had managed to leave the dragon speechless.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I FOUND myself back at the Superior Viaduct and Reggie’s Town Car with little sign that anything had happened at all. It was four in the morning, and I only had my footprints going toward the end of the bridge and back to show that what I’d witnessed was more than hallucination.

  It actually helped my sense of reality that my footprints passed through a locked and warded gate.

  “What now?” I asked the chill night air.

  Hephaestus/Shafran might be a powerful ally, but I didn’t trust him entirely.

  Actually, I didn’t trust him at all. The dragon, like all dragons, was in it for himself. The fact that he so offhandedly mentioned shutting down the Portal was testament to that. That wasn’t just shutting down the economic engine for the whole region. That would be condemning hundreds of thousands of creatures—including his fellow dragons—to death.

  Someone about to throw away that many lives wasn’t really that interested in Sarah. No way I could trust him to come though on any sort of promise to rescue my daughter. As far as I knew, there was only one being who had that power.

  I let myself back into Reggie’s car and pulled away into the Flats.

  Before I quite realized where I was going, I found myself on I- 77 heading toward Columbus. I think I was moving faster than I was able to think. At least faster than I was able to rationalize. The one thing I did know was that I was the only person I could trust to have my daughter’s interests at heart. Not Hephaestus, not Blackstone and the Feds, and certainly not Old Scratch, the force behind what seemed to be going on.

  And what was it that seemed to be going on?

  Smuggling for one. The dwarves were mining salt out of their caves under Whiskey Island, salt that apparently was something akin to magic plutonium, a mana battery so rich in the energies coming out of the Portal, that it allowed the dwarves themselves to play against type and actually cast spells. A mineral potent enough that the Feds were worried about it being smuggled out of northeast Ohio.

  If the salt allowed spell-casting of any sort outside the direct influence of the Portal, no wonder Blackstone and company were so panicked. Federal policy number one regarding the Portal was containment. There wasn’t any nightmare scenario, from rampant counterfeiting to terrorism, that couldn’t be made worse by mixing magic into it. In theory, given the plans and enough mana, a mage with the proper incentive could reproduce a nuke.

  The idea that kind of power could spread elsewhere, not just do mestically, but overseas, would give a lot of people in Washington sleepless nights.

  That’s not even addressing the political problems if nonhumans decided to leave the state where they had legal recognition. A dwarf might pass without much notice, but a dragon?

  That was the first part of it . . .

  Then there was Mazurich, who orchestrated placing the dwarven clans in the place they were currently exploiting. Nothing about his history implied anything other than a working-class alliance that would have made sense just about anywhere with any immigrant population. Mazurich became a dwarven advocate . . .

  But somewher
e Old Scratch got involved. I wasn’t sure exactly when, but from Hephaestus’ history I saw two possibilities. Old Scratch must have been drawn to the area of the salt mines from the start. Coming through the Portal to this “mana-poor” world, the way the salt mines apparently became a mana battery would have drawn his attention as soon as he arrived.

  So he found the dwarves in residence, and somehow took over, infecting them as he had the rule of the Thesarch.

  Or there was an even more sinister possibility—

  If Old Scratch comes here very early, as Valdis is falling, or perhaps even before, he might be responsible for Mazurich’s deal for the dwarves. Perhaps his intent was to have a captive population, tied to the mines, the labor needed to refine and distribute the mana he wanted spread across this new planet.

  If Mazurich discovered this, that one of his greatest humanitarian achievements was at the behest of the Devil himself, the guilt may have driven him to kill himself.

  This piece fit everything that had happened to date, except possibly the most important part, from my point of view—

  Why did Old Scratch want me to run an exposé on the dwarven operation?

  From every indication, he wanted me to blow the whole story wide open. Hephaestus wasn’t the only one who was dumbfounded. I couldn’t see any angle that made sense. All I knew was that whatever was going on, Old Scratch was manipulating things so I would make the situation public.

  Then there was item number three . . .

  Magetech.

  It was part of the story, but beyond the financial conflict-of-interest story about Mazurich, I didn’t know how.

  It was becoming imperative that I know the whole story, because without it I was not going to know what was motivating Old Scratch. And I knew that, until I found out what the Devil wanted, I wasn’t going to have much hope of getting my daughter back.

  There were three sources I knew to go to for information on Magetech. The first, Magetech itself, had an evil effect on me the last time I visited. I had a feeling that it was a dangerous place, and the simple fact that it was saturated with mana meant that it was probably a hangout for Old Scratch himself. And, if I was avoiding concentrations of mana, directly approaching Dwarf Central at Whiskey Island was flat out, not to mention that—if I took Hephaestus at his word—it was Old Scratch’s base of operations.

  Last was a Dr. Pretorious, who had moved to Columbus, safely outside the influence of the Portal—also safely out of reach of Old Scratch.

  It was after dawn when I had reached the southern outskirts of the state capital, and pulled up to Pretorious’ house. Nothing much distinguished it. It was one large house in a development full of large houses. The only thing that might have marked it as odd was the fact that every window was shaded from the outside world. Even the vast windows marking the great room were shrouded.

  In addition, the driveway up to the three-car garage was covered by an unbroken layer of snow. I began to worry that the doctor wasn’t home.

  I got out of the car and trudged through the snow up to the front door. I didn’t see any sign of life. I rang the doorbell, and got no answer. I leaned on the button, listening to the electronic chimes inside the house.

  Nothing.

  I pounded on the door with little hope. “Dr. Pretorious? Dr. Pretorious?” My words came out in puffs of fog, and I began doubting that I had the correct house. I was going off of memory for the address. All my notes were in the hands of the FBI at the moment.

  For a few seconds I wondered if Blackstone had beat me here . . .

  “Dr. Pretorious!”

  I tried the door itself.

  Unlocked.

  I let myself in, not knowing what to expect.

  The smell hit me first, before my eyes adjusted. Food rotting, feces, ammonia . . . The heat was jacked so high that breathing the fetid air was like trying to suck air through a wet towel—a towel that’d been used to clean up the bathroom at a strip club. A cheap strip club.

  As my eyes adjusted, I began to see eyes, dozens of eyes. Pupils reflecting light back at me. I froze when I heard something growl. I hyperventilated, thinking of all the nasty goblins, gremlins, and little beasties that crawled around dark places. I had to tell myself that I was too far from the Portal for that sort of thing, but I still held my breath until I could make out the feline outlines that went with the demonic eyes.

  Cats. Just a shitload of cats.

  “Fuck,” I said, half relieved, half angry at myself. The word was enough to send about half the eyes scurrying deeper into the darkness.

  I closed the door behind me, and stepped carefully around debris on the floor as I felt around for a light switch. I found a panel of three on the wall, only one of which worked. A light came on over the master staircase.

  “Holy shit . . .”

  The house was only ten or fifteen years old, cost a few million . . . In three years, Dr. Pretorious had managed to completely destroy it. Cat shit was everywhere. Wallpaper was stained and peeled off of yellowing walls. The carpeting had been shredded, the fibers pulled up into random piles all over the floor and the stairs.

  The cats orbited me, staring, none closer than about fifteen feet. None of them seemed to be hurting for food, and the floor was scattered with empty cans and empty twenty-pound bags of cat food.

  Deeper in the house I heard a television turned to Fox News or CNN. I could hear some talking head discussing trade relations with China.

  I stepped carefully around the crap on the floor and headed toward the sound of the television. “Dr. Pretorious?”

  The cats followed me, mewing and occasionally hissing if I passed too close. One that had been concealed under an empty pizza box lying in my path suddenly appeared in front of me, back arched, spitting, then jumped me. I had to bring my foot up to deflect it back toward the ground.

  It shot away, and I escaped with a slightly unraveled sock.

  I flexed my bandaged hand. Just being in this atmosphere was probably going to give me an infection. It was bad enough here having exposed skin. An open wound . . .

  The den was actually worse. Lit only by the television, I saw a massive leather couch that looked as if it had had a losing argument with a rototiller. There had been built-in bookshelves, but most of the shelves had collapsed, spilling their contents on the floor, allowing the books to be shredded in a giant improv litter box.

  There was someone watching the television, seated in a wheelchair. He looked about two or three times as old as his portrait. Hair uncut, beard unshaven, skin pale, spotted, and deeply lined.

  “Dr. Pretorious?”

  The old man continued to stare at the news.

  “Dr. Pretorious?”

  “Is it time already?” he whispered. His voice was cracked and brittle, as if he hadn’t spoken in a long time.

  “My name is Kline Maxwell, I’m from the Cleveland Press . . .”

  “Is the seal broken? Have you seen a pale horse?”

  Shit, the guy’s lost it. He’s nuts.

  “I wanted to talk about Magetech.”

  He turned toward me, and his pupils were wide and cloudy with cataracts. I doubted he could see anything. “I don’t talk about that.”

  “You were a scientist, you helped found the company.”

  He shook his head violently. “I don’t talk about that.” He stared at the television again. He switched to another news channel where a Republican Senator from North Carolina was talking about an upcoming Supreme Court nomination.

  I looked at him, and the television, and asked, “What are you looking for?”

  “A sign. A sign he is coming.”

  “Is he part of Magetech?”

  He was quiet for a long time, before he said, “I didn’t know.” He turned toward me. “Tell them I didn’t know.”

  Filthy as the floor was, I knelt down so I could be on the same level as he was. “If I’m to tell them, I need to know your side of the story.”

  “I don?
??t talk about that.”

  “Because you’re afraid of him.”

  “He will come, for all of us.”

  “Let me know what you did.” I reached out and touched his shoulder. “You’ve been beyond his reach for three years.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “Then tell me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  IN fits and starts, it came out.

  Early on, Mazurich understood that someone needed to reconstruct the physical infrastructure of the city, or any political gains made by Mayor Rayburn and the statehouse would be hollow. Roads, buildings, sewers, those were all immediate, and led to the alliance between Mazurich and the dwarven immigrants.

  Beyond those first steps was the creation of Magetech.

  Shortly after the first city contracts were signed with the dwarven clans, and before they had found a homeland in the mines under Erie, Mazurich was approached by another immigrant from the Portal. Simon Lucas had been one of the growing numbers of human immigrants to come from Ragnan.

  While Mr. Lucas was new to our world, he had an excellent command of English and some compelling arguments. Cleveland was in danger of becoming simply an extension of Ragnan. Science and technology couldn’t be allowed to retreat in the face of the Portal. On the contrary, the disciplines developed in this world, in the absence of mana, could be used to create an understanding and manipulation of mana beyond anything imagined in Ragnan.

  Mr. Lucas persuaded Mazurich, especially as it became clear that, like the dwarven contracts to maintain the roads, it had been left to local companies to solve the problems in the technical infrastructure, the interference of magic in everything from the communications signal from cellular phones to digital cameras.

  Mr. Lucas helped arrange the settling of the dwarven clans under Whiskey Island, and in turn the dwarven clans, rich with funds from city construction contracts, invested their funds with Mazurich and the new Magetech start-up.

  Mazurich bought several technology companies that had been collapsing under the stress of the Portal. And he brought in Dr. Pretorious.