Dragons & Dwarves

  “Mr. Maxwell—”

  “You want Blackstone to take it over. You want all of this in the hands of DARPA and the DoD. Who else would exploit it quicker, farther, and with no regard to cost. They’ll spread the mana for you faster than the dwarves ever could.”

  “—I don’t think we need to continue.”

  “But I want my daughter back,” I said as Lucas stood up, “and I have something you want.”

  Lucas stopped and turned toward me. “What?”

  “Information.” I sipped my club soda and waited. My heart was racing. Deals with the Devil were a little out of my league.

  He looked me up and down. “Shall we accept for a moment, your premise?” He slid back into the booth. “Hypothetically, shall we decide I am the fiend you believe me to be? That I have access to your missing daughter? Fine, Mr. Maxwell. But I might point out that such a fiend would easily be able to detect falsehood.”

  I’m counting on it, Old Scratch . . .

  “Might I assume that, for all of Magetech’s advancements, it has not been able to uncover the central mystery of the Portal itself? How it formed, how to form something like it?”

  “Make that assumption.”

  Thank you, Mr. Lucas, but that is pretty self-evident. You had to use the Portal to come here, and if you could create them at will, nothing would stop you from opening new ones wherever you wanted, and spilling Ragnan’s mana all over the planet.

  “So the dragons kept at least one secret from you.”

  Lucas didn’t look happy. “You have this knowledge?” he snorted at me.

  “I know where it is.” I swallowed. I was reaching the most dangerous point of the conversation. Even now, I was second-guessing myself, but I made a point of remembering my vision. Death, the Devil, and the Tower crumbling to earth. I was meant to do this.

  “Where?”

  “It is in the possession of a dragon named Hephaestus.”

  “Hephaestus?” It wasn’t just a look anymore. I could feel Lucas’ emotion, in waves of force coming off of him that rivaled what I felt when I touched the zombie. I had to concentrate to avoid losing focus and falling into some new nightmare visions. “Where did you hear this name?”

  I had expected a reaction, but this was more than I had hoped for. “You know him, then?”

  “He has chosen to be my adversary, and for that I will suck the power from his marrow.” He reached over the table and grabbed me. The power came off him in searing waves. It tore into me, timed with my pulse, carrying with it images of fields strewn with skulls, pyres the size of small cities, dragons falling out of the sky, and the endless march forward of the Thesarch’s army.

  “You are Valdis,” I whispered.

  “Show me to my adversary.”

  “My daughter,” I croaked. “Bring me my daughter and I will show you to his doorstep and lead you inside.”

  He let me go. And slowly the power drained back into its human shell. “Beside this prize, anything else you might give me is less than nothing. Give me this and you shall have your daughter.”

  I nodded. “Forgive me if I don’t trust you. I want my daughter first.”

  “You try my patience.”

  “But you know I’m telling you the truth. Give me my daughter back, and I will give you what you want.”

  Lucas nodded. “I see that you believe this to be true. So I will do as you ask.”

  “Bring her to the Superior Viaduct tonight at five minutes to midnight.”

  “Remember, though, she will be hostage to your continued intention. I expect you both to accompany me to Hephaestus.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  Lucas left me at the booth, and I had to sit and calm down for several minutes. I desperately wanted a drink, or five, but a clouded head was the last thing I needed. I was about to betray someone, something, incredibly powerful, and the last thing I needed now was to tip my hand.

  When I felt calm enough, I walked back to the rear of the bar and called Dr. Shafran.

  “Yes,” he answered his line this time.

  “It’s Maxwell. We do need to meet again. Tonight at midnight.”

  I spoke with him another ten minutes, hoping I was doing the right thing.

  Sarah, I’m going to get you back, baby.

  Whatever I have to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Show me to my adversary.”

  I begin to object, I don’t know who the adversary is. But then the mists clear, and I see a Tower hovering over the city, greater than any skyscraper.

  “There!” I point.

  A booming, inhuman laugh resounded. “Your service will be rewarded.”

  The Devil rises from his throne, and walks toward the Tower. Moments later, after losing sight of the Devil, the Tower begins to crumble.

  The image of the crumbling tower haunted me as I sat in my rented Solara, waiting for Lucas and my daughter. I was plagued with the recurring thought that I didn’t know what I was doing. Desperation was driving me to risks I never would have contemplated before.

  I was playing with my daughter’s life, and I didn’t know if I could go through with it. All I had to validate my decision was a hallucinatory vision, one that may have been open to interpretation.

  As people have said to me before, the Oracle is a bitch.

  Outside the car, the snow was getting worse. A blizzard moving down from Chicago, combining with lake effect, cut down visibility to about twenty yards. Occasionally, the wind would pick up and it would drop to nil.

  Ahead of me, the twin cones of my headlights aimed toward the bridge, fixing on the gate. Caught in the beams, the snow moved sideways.

  The clock on my dash read 11:49.

  “Show, damn you . . .”

  Slowly, a twin pair of headlamps became visible in my rearview mirror. They approached and came to a stop behind the Solara. I couldn’t even make out the outlines of the vehicle.

  Bracing myself, I stepped out of the car, and walked back toward my guest. The wind bit into my exposed skin, the flying ice like an army of tiny pikemen charging my skin as if it was a fleshy Bastille.

  As I walked around behind the Solara, I started to see the vehicle that had driven up behind me. A Volkswagen Beetle.

  My Volkswagen Beetle.

  “Sarah!”

  I ran to the car, sliding in the treacherous footing. I almost fell face first into the side door as I clawed through a layer of ice to find the door handle. I pulled the door open, wrenching my bandaged hand, and showering myself with fragments of snow and ice.

  I stood by the open door, dumbfounded, staring into the idling car.

  It was empty.

  The clock on the dash of my Volkswagen read “11:54.” As I watched, it flipped to “11:55.”

  “Mr. Maxwell?” came a voice from behind me.

  I spun around to see Simon Lucas standing in the halo of my Volkswagen’s headlights. The snow swirled around him, but didn’t seem to touch him.

  I backed away from my car, slamming the door. “Where’s my daughter?”

  “She’s safe, Mr. Maxwell, I assure you.”

  “You were supposed to bring her.”

  He smiled at me with a stare that burned into every organ in my body. “I decided I should provide you with an incentive to avoid any second thoughts.”

  “No.” This couldn’t be falling apart on me now. “That wasn’t the deal.” I ran at Lucas, a move that beat me grabbing the zombie for dumbest move of all time.

  “You do not dictate terms to me.”

  I didn’t see him move, but there’s a good chance he didn’t. One moment I was running toward him. The next I was bouncing off the windshield of the Volkswagen. The windshield spider-webbed below me as my right elbow smashed through. Briefly all I was aware of was the pain streaking up my arm. It was so intense that somehow I missed the moments where I rolled off the hood onto the snow-covered street.

  I blinked, and I was on my
knees. Spitting snow as I held myself up with my left arm. My right arm, clutched to my chest, was shooting pain so bad that I still couldn’t focus on where I was, or what I was supposed to be doing.

  I blinked, and the snow seemed to be slowing its fall.

  “Do not presume. No servant is too valuable for me to destroy.” I heard footsteps walk around in front of me. A pair of shiny leather shoes stepped into my field of vision. They were unmolested by snow or salt. As were the legs of the sharply creased trousers above them. “On your feet, Mr. Maxwell.”

  I pushed myself unsteadily up, one-handed. The pain in my right arm became more concentrated and localized, and I realized that something had dislocated or broken in my elbow. “Fuck.”

  “You pathetic little man. You think that is the limit of pain?” Lucas walked around me, not seeming to be completely in the world. “With a thought I could place you in torment for a thousand years, focus your existence on a single eternal moment of agony.”

  It was easy to see why this guy, as the Thesarch or as Simon Lucas, could command so many people. How the hell could you fight something like this?

  “You offered me something I desire. You live now, your daughter lives now, only to provide this to me. Tell me.”

  I glanced through the window of the Volkswagen. Snow had just started blowing in through the broken windshield. The clock on the dash read “11:57.”

  “You want to find Hephaestus, and his hoard of knowledge, you only need to wait.”

  “I have no taste for riddles.”

  “The Portal to his lair will open at midnight.” I looked up at the snow, which had near frozen in the air.

  “Portal?”

  “How do you think he hides from you so well?”

  I received an inordinate amount of gratification from the surprise on Lucas’ face. It had been a strategic omission on my part, partly because I had been trying not to give much away when I thought I had some chance of Lucas bringing my daughter.

  The other part is I didn’t want Old Scratch here to have too much time to prepare. The bastard might hold sway over every crevice that held mana, but if he wanted to pass through a Portal, everything I had learned told me that he had to do it in person.

  And as I expected, his first impulse was not for a face-to-face.

  The Simon Lucas who faced me, untouched by snow, was not Old Scratch. Lucas nodded at me, folded his arms across his chest, and shimmered briefly.

  Then he was gone.

  “Lucas!”

  The unmoving snow was silent around me. I leaned back against the Volkswagen and unzipped my coat enough so I could slip my right arm in for some support. As time slowed around me, and the endless minutes crept along, I got a sick feeling that I might have lost my daughter, that I had done something to make Lucas doubt me . . .

  But at “11:59” according to the Volkswagen’s dash, a shadow fell out of the sky. Something huge and bat-winged passed over me, and thudded on the roof of the Volkswagen, shaking it back on its shocks. I stumbled away from the car, turning, half expecting to see Hephaestus before me.

  My new guest wasn’t quite that big.

  “Your service is rewarded,” it said from on top of the Volkswagen. It was twice as tall as a man, even seated on its haunches. It had the head of a goat—but a goat that was a carnivore. Fangs curled over its black lips, and its chin was streaked with blood. Its skin was reddish purple and bristled with black hair that became denser as it grew down from a near naked chest, to become a shaggy pelt down its hooved legs. “Few mortals are privileged to meet my flesh.”

  I backed up as the Devil extended a leg to step off of the car.

  “I thought you didn’t have a physical body.”

  “I desire one, so I have one.” It drew its claws across the side of my car. They effortlessly pierced the skin and tore through the quarter-panel. “Should I be confined to the proxy senses of my servants? What is my power if I cannot taste the blood of my sacrifices with my own tongue?”

  It looked down on me with eyes that were now completely inhuman.

  “Better to sup on Hephaestus’ soul.”

  Around us, the snow had frozen in midair and the mist from my breath hung unmoving between us.

  Inside the Volkswagen, the clock flipped over to “12:00.”

  The bell tolled one, and the gate opened in front of the Solara.

  “Now, show me to my adversary.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THIS time, the way was harder, and time seemed to progress even slower. The snow had drifted up to my knees in places and my legs burned with the cold. My breath fogged, and I could feel it freeze on my cheeks.

  And with every step, I felt the presence behind me. A massive weight I could sense, as if it was about to envelop me. A heat that offered no warmth, the sound of a heavy breath that smelled of carrion, the sound of muscle and skin moving. But when I looked behind me, I saw nothing. Some enchantment hid the demon from my sight.

  I only looked behind me once. He corrected me by drawing one of his claws across my back, one of the same ones that had cut through the skin of my Volkswagen. My clothes were nothing to it, and it cut, burning, through to my shoulder blade. The wound wasn’t disabling, but it hurt like hell, and the wind found another stinging patch of skin to attack.

  As the blood froze on my shoulder, I heard a whisper in my ear.

  “Do not turn again. Do not show you are followed.”

  I didn’t even nod. I just trudged forward.

  “Good.”

  It may have been my imagination, but I could feel the desire from this thing behind me. This close, I couldn’t escape the sense of a black sucking need that seemed to overwhelm even the waves of power that surrounded the thing. It was as if I was leading the personification of lust, in just about every depraved connotation that word had. The kind of lust that made child molesters and serial killers seem civilized.

  I knew this thing behind me had come from the Portal, and was just another in a long line of immortal entities to take up residence in my city. I knew that its physical presence was a self-creation, almost certainly modeled on the belief and customs it found here. It probably found that—like the ritual-imbued position of the Thesarch helped amplify the power of mana—taking a predefined demonic role was a shortcut to even more power . . .

  I knew all this.

  But when my feet found the first of the stairs, I knew in my heart that what followed me was the Devil himself. I was walking a path to certain damnation and I didn’t know how to stop.

  Even though the passage to the base of Hephaestus’ tower took an eternity, we came upon the great ebony doors too soon for me.

  The tower struck twelve.

  The doors remained shut.

  I could feel the fury rising behind me. The power of it passed me in waves, and I could almost see it wash against the doors. I thought I could see a tint of blood-red ripple across the black-green script.

  It happened again, and it wasn’t my imagination.

  Waves of glinting red washed across the script in pulsing waves, emanating from the base, where the doors met. Behind me, I heard a laugh. “The great Hephaestus hides behind his walls like a child.”

  Visible now, he stepped past me, to face the giant onyx doors. On them, the script now glowed a pulsing red. With wings outstretched, the demon was almost as large as the doors themselves.

  “I’ve come for you, dragon. And I will not be denied.”

  The script glowed a solid red, as if the door’s core had become molten. Something urged me to back down a few steps.

  “Your wards do not deter me,” it said as it reached out and touched the door. The demon’s touch unleashed a holocaust. Balls of flame erupted from the door, and instead of blowing outward, wrapped themselves around the demon, shrouding him in a fire burning red, then yellow, then white. The air filled with the smell of roasting flesh as the demon’s skin began to blister and peel.

  The demon laughed. r />
  It kept laughing as more fire erupted from the door, sheets of flame and energy pouring into the spot where the demon stood. The flames were so hot that I could smell my own hair burning, and my eyes watered to look at it.

  I backed down a few more steps.

  Still it laughed.

  The demon’s flesh roasted away, leaving a carbonized skeleton that soon disappeared under the heat of the rippling fire. Still the flames enveloped the demon, erupting from the doors faster and faster.

  Still the laugh.

  The door slowed, sputtering, the script fading from white-hot to a dull red. Before it stood a pillar of fire in the shape of a demon. The flaming image stretched its arms, and from the flames came a voice.

  “So like a dragon, to focus on the body.”

  I don’t think it spoke English anymore. I don’t think it “spoke” in any real sense.

  The flaming arms embraced the door. I heard something sizzle and pop, and long cracks crawled across the glowing script of the doors, the cracks glowing hotter and emitting steam. The doors groaned and screamed as if they were living things.

  I took cover flat against the stairs before the doors imploded in a shower of gravel, smoke, and red-hot ash. For a moment the entrance to the tower was wrapped in an impenetrable cloud. As it settled, the fire was gone, replaced by a demon form made of crackling red-hot onyx. Enchanted alien script still glowed on the surface of the stone, but the words somehow had become disturbing, obscene.

  It flexed a new onyx claw.

  “I think I like this better.”

  It stepped though the smoking hole that had been the grand entrance. I took the stairs upward, slowly, until I could see the great entrance hall. The onyx demon walked into the chamber spreading its arms and wings, facing upward.

  “Show yourself, dragon!”

  “DEFILER!” The nonword screeched through the tower, tearing directly into my brain. The force of it caused the great pillars to crack. Then, arcs of green twisting energy burst from the pillars, converging on the demon. The whipping tendrils buzzed and hissed with power so dense I needed to lean inward just to stay upright. My singed hair danced with static.