Dragons & Dwarves

  And she wasn’t lying about the NASDAQ.

  When she moved aside, I could see another pillar in the vast chamber, twin to the one holding the elevator. This sole architectural feature seemed to serve as a combination office and entertainment center for Theophane. Flat screen displays covered most of the available space. Some showed CNN, C-SPAN, and other news and public affairs channels. The screens were all muted, dialogue transcriptions running across the bottom of their screens. Central to all of them was an inset display positioned at what must have been a comfortable level for her, about four feet above my head. I could catch a few glimpses of a computer display showing windowed bar graphs and columns of figures. Across the top I could clearly see a stock ticker running.

  Theophane maneuvered an oversized mouse with a few well-placed claws. I don’t know why I found it incongruous.

  “So can you answer some of my questions?”

  She shook her head as she stared at the screen. The display was twice the size of my TV, but it seemed too small for her. “Your distraction cost me fifty thousand dollars.”

  She must have sensed me backing up, because her head turned my way just as I felt the warm muscular wall of her tail along the small of my back.

  “No matter, the entertainment value should be worth as much.” Her head lowered to be just slightly above my level, and I had the uneasy sensation of being surrounded. “What is it you want to know, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “I want to understand dragons.”

  Theophane’s head drew back and tilted slightly in my direction. There was a distinctly saurian cast to her face, especially with the heart-shaped bony ridge of her forehead facing me. The nose and mouth were very like a skin-covered beak with teeth. Her voice was eerie, coming from deep inside her throat, with little help from tongue and near-nonexistent lips. I might have suspected that the sounds weren’t even coming from her if not for the feel of moist breath on my forehead as she spoke.

  She raised one hand and drew her clawed fingers together at its point, the gesture disturbingly human. “An interesting synchronicity. I wish to understand humans. I feel we both may have embarked on an endless task.”

  Conversing with her was helping me recover from the initial impact. With that came the feeling that she was playing with me. I didn’t feel that levity—even the levity of a two-hundred-foot lizard—was appropriate. I took my notebook out of my pocket.

  “Theophane, I am investigating the death of one of your fellow dragons. I need to know why he died.”

  “Perhaps you do, Mr. Maxwell. Do I?”

  “Do you what?”

  “Need to know why?”

  “Aren’t you concerned at all about Aloeus’ death? He was one of your own.”

  “You are right to believe you do not understand dragons.” Theophane shook her head and withdrew it. When she moved, I was no longer surrounded, and I breathed a little easier. She moved away from the video pillar, toward a vast wall of windows that overlooked the eastern city.

  I walked up next to her, the view an antidote to the claustrophobia I’d been feeling. Below us, the arched glass roof of the Old Arcade flashed sunlight back up at us.

  “There is no reason the death of Aloeus should concern me more than the death of anyone else.” She shook her head. “We are not social animals. We do not form tribes, cities, or religions—any trappings of such things we undertake for the sake of others.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Of course you do. You have been trained from birth that another man must have authority over you, that other men define the codes you shall adhere to. You exist in a prison made of other human beings.”

  There was something very cold in the way she said that. My hand shook a little as I took notes. “You mean that dragons don’t?”

  There was another of her snorts that I took to be laughter. This one held less humor than her prior ones. “Consider me, Mr. Maxwell. You look at a creature supreme in physical prowess, in intellect, in mystical ability. Perhaps that sounds immodest, but modesty is a human virtue. To have a tribe, one must lead, and others must be willingly subjugate themselves.” She drew herself up and spread wings that reached from one end of the cavernous space to the other. “No dragon is a slave.”

  This was not what I was expecting, and it didn’t feel quite right to me. “You mean to say that there’s no social connection between dragons at all?”

  “We are not human beings.”

  A statement that any good newsman would recognize as a non-answer answer. She had sidestepped the question as adroitly as any politician. It prompted me to push slightly. “Aloeus’ death means nothing to you?”

  “We are sovereign creatures, each one’s fate is his own.”

  “Even if it wasn’t an accident?”

  She looked down at me, then turned her serpentine neck to look out at the eastern horizon. “There are no accidents,” she said. A clawed finger touched the ground near my feet. It was disconcerting, the black talon was almost the length of my forearm. “Ask me about dragons, Mr. Maxwell.”

  There was something in her voice, a burning emotion that I could feel in her words, but couldn’t identify. Rage or grief? I didn’t know, and its intensity frightened me. “Tell me why you came here, through the Portal.”

  “This is the background you need?”

  “You are a dragon. Everything I’ve heard says Aloeus was leading the way out, that nonhumans were being persecuted—”

  “A refugee?” Her neck twisted and brought her face withing a foot of my own. Apparently, while modesty might be a human virtue, pride was universal. “Is that what you believe?” Her voice lowered in pitch until her consonants caused my ribs to ache.

  “Why, then?”

  She swung an arm back toward her cavernous rooms. “This, little man. This.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “You require an explanation?” She drew back and shook her head at my ignorance. “Do you know why dragons love gold?”

  I was tempted to say, “greed.” But I decided that insults weren’t the best policy right now. “I know the popular image of dragons is that they hoard wealth.”

  “It is fact.” She turned from the wall of windows and moved toward the northern edge of the building, where more windows looked over the lake, and Browns Stadium. From here the constant atmospheric disturbance was even more impressive. A twisting pillar of dark clouds towering thousands of feet into an otherwise clear blue stratosphere. From this high up, I could see the motion, like a massive slow-motion tornado set slightly off center above the roofed-over stadium. “Many aspects of this world’s myth and legend bear enough truth to lead one to suspect that the Portal is not a unique phenomenon.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” I admitted. “No one can prove it. If a portal existed in the past, it was far enough back that no one can find any archaeological evidence for it.”

  “Perhaps not. But it gives my kind an explanation for why humankind suddenly appeared and ran rampant these past millennia.”

  “So why do dragons love gold?”

  “Power,” she told me. “As I said, we are supreme physically, mentally, in the realm your bizarre language refers to as the supernatural. So what is our weakness?”

  I thought for a minute, and came up with something that jibed with the stories I’d heard so far about the place they had left. “You’re loners. You aren’t organized. In a conflict you’ll best any one human, but humans band together—facing you with a city, and army, a nation.”

  “That is, exactly, our sole weakness.” She looked out over the water. I wondered if she had watched Aloeus’ body as it was towed out to sea. “Such a grave one that it may now overshadow our strengths. For millennia before our contact with elvish, and then human, ‘civilization’ it mattered not to us. The idea of ‘political’ power, ‘economic’ power—manipulating events through proxies, and symbols—were concepts long and hard in coming to us.” Theophane waved bac
k to the pillar, where her computer was showing a stock ticker. “Wealth is the easiest—and the most easily understandable—way to acquire that kind of power.”

  I scribbled a few notes as I asked her, “You’re saying that you only hoard wealth to be able to influence humans?”

  “Human society,” she corrected me. “An individual human being means little to us. But the possession of wealth allows us to influence a city, a government, a church.” She gave me a long, cryptic look. “A newspaper.”

  That took me back a beat. “Are you saying that you influenced—”

  “Don’t ask me things you can readily discover elsewhere. Do not waste my time.”

  I sucked in a breath. I did not want to push this interview. I definitely wanted to leave things at a point where I could come back if I needed to. I made an effort to return to the conversation’s previous tack. “Is that all you care for money, then? What about comforts—” I waved an arm to take in the retrofitted top floors of the BP Building. “This wasn’t cheap.”

  “I left a more spectacular aerie to come to this world. What is a diamond, Mr. Maxwell, except a pretty rock? What is money here, in this world, but paper and ink—or ephemeral records in someone’s computer?”

  I looked back at the stock ticker. “Is it difficult?”

  “What, exactly?”

  “It’s different here, isn’t it? Back on the other side of the Portal, from what I understand, was a medieval economy. Wealth was a ‘real’ physical thing. A pile of gold, gems—”

  Her head bobbed, a serpentine nod. “I understand what you mean. Though I don’t think you understand what I was saying. To us, a golden stone is just as symbolic as a piece of paper, or some accountant’s record. None has inherent value, just as words on a page do not have any inherent meaning. Values and meaning are assigned to them arbitrarily, and the association is only as strong as the number of people who agree on the assignment.”

  “So it wasn’t a difficult transition.”

  “Not conceptually.”

  “There were other difficulties?”

  “The matter of agreement applies to your bureaucracy as well as your economy. Fortunately, your bizarre layers of rule here have allowed the city of Cleveland, the county of Cuyahoga, and the state of Ohio to allow me that right. And with it the right to equal protection, the right to own property, and most importantly, the right to incorporate. The right to hold assets anywhere in the world. The right to litigate.”

  “Aloeus, Inc.,” I said. “I take it there is a Theophane, Inc.?”

  “Much more than that, Mr. Maxwell.” She looked over her shoulder, back at the pillar. “At that workstation, I have won more battles against your kind than had ever been fought on the other side of the Portal. With a single e-mail, I can send armies from a dozen corporations into motion in any country on this planet. That is power, Mr. Maxwell. That is why I came here.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I LEFT the BP Building feeling as if I had just walked through a combat zone. The adrenaline was slowly leaking out of my system, and I was filled with an appreciation of the fact that I was still alive. Intellectually, I knew that I hadn’t been in any physical danger. Theophane had as little need to show displeasure in a physical way as Baldassare did.

  My body was convinced otherwise.

  Egil Nixon was next on my list today. I was hoping that he was hiding out at home, since that was where I was headed. I really wanted to talk to him about what he had seen, and why Adrian Phillips was on that boat. I also wanted to see his eyes when he answered. Whatever he did say, my experience is that most people—outside the professions that require it—make rotten liars.

  Faust.

  The name rang in my head as I drove the Volkswagen through the working-class Slavic Village neighborhood that Egil Nixon called home. The place was in the midst of gentrification, and the houses were split evenly between places that had served as family homes for twenty years, and brand-new spit-shined renovations that went for twice the money to young couples or singles who had no family. No kids anyway.

  Nixon lived in one of the latter.

  Theophane’s response when I asked her if she knew anyone named “Faust,” her response was “Faust is no dragon.” That struck me as a nondenial, but I hadn’t been able to get her to elaborate. For all the stonewalling I was getting on the name, I was getting the sense that it was important, and related to Aloeus’ death.

  Nixon’s car was in the driveway. I was in luck.

  I pulled up in front of the building and walked up to the chain-link fence surrounding the front yard. The gate was hanging open. I pushed it open the rest of the way and walked up the path to the front door. I glanced at the car in the driveway, a late model BMW, black.

  The lawn was mowed with surgical precision, the path perfectly edged, the grass stopping in a perfect circle around the base of the tree that dominated the small front yard.

  The house itself was brick, the trim painted in a Victorian tricolor scheme of rose, gray, and hunter green. I mounted the steps to a brand-new front door that was mostly a beveled-glass oval. The porch was small, but neatly kept, the patio furniture arranged just so, as if awaiting a photo shoot.

  I pressed the doorbell and heard it chime inside the house.

  I couldn’t see anything through the window. A gauze curtain was drawn across it, and the house looked darkened beyond it.

  I pressed the button again, thinking I had struck out. Hell, if the city was hiding something, they could have easily bought the guy a ticket to Hawaii.

  I was just about to ring the chime again, when I heard a window shatter upstairs.

  “What the . . . ?” I backed from the doorway and looked up in time to see a figure leaping from the second floor, above the driveway. The black-clad figure moved as if in slow motion, tumbling through the air, to land in a crouch in front of the nose of the BMW.

  It was not Egil Nixon.

  He wore black leather, and his shaved head shone in the sunlight. I could see a flash of gold from several fingers. He wore a face that I wasn’t going to forget.

  The mage from last night.

  He looked almost as surprised to see me as I was him.

  “Hey—”

  He was a man in a hurry. The lights bipped on the BMW and the door opened for him as he dove toward the driver’s side. I ran for my Volkswagen as the black car was pulling out of the driveway. He turned left, which made me realize I’d never get my car around in time to follow him. So, instead of diving into my Volkswagen, I ran into the street to get a good view of the license plate.

  It wasn’t breaking and entering, because the front door was open. It also wasn’t obstructing justice, because I was calling 911 as I entered the house looking for Egil Nixon. The only thing I left out of my call was the fact that I’d met the intruder before.

  The house itself was pathologically neat. The sparse, modern furniture looked as if it had been laid out with a T-square and a level. That made the smell that much more ominous. A sour, ferric smell coming from upstairs.

  I tread lightly on the white Berber carpeting as I climbed the steps. The smell intensified as I went.

  I wasn’t completely surprised at what I found, but that didn’t make the sight any easier to take. Egil Nixon had suffered at the hands of the mage. Arcane inhuman writing scrawled the walls of his bedroom, spiraling up to where his body hung, suspended by spikes driven into the ceiling. His naked body had been slit from Adam’s apple to groin, and the flesh had been pulled back to allow various parts to dangle. The carpet was soaked with Nixon’s blood.

  I turned away, walking carefully not to disturb anything, and went outside to wait for the police to show up.

  Not a long wait. The first three cop cars were turning down the street as I came out. They pulled up, surrounding my Volkswagen, and when they turned off their sirens, I could hear more coming in the distance. One cop came up to the house and hustled me off the porch as another one started st
ringing up yellow police tape across the gate and the driveway.

  As the cop questioned me about what happened, half a dozen more police cars showed up as well as a forensic van with SPU markings. My cop got the details from me and stationed me by his police car as he went to give the details to a supervisor. Once he left, I had the chance to make a call to the office.

  “Cleveland Press. Columbia Jennings—”

  “It’s Maxwell. The shit’s hitting the fan here.”

  “Maxwell? What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know if the police are going to let me go in time to turn something in on time for tomorrow’s edition. Egil Nixon’s very dead.”

  “Wait,” I heard the rustle of papers on the desk, a mumbled obscenity, then the sound of fingers hitting the keyboard. “Okay, details.”

  “He was staked out on the ceiling, eviscerated, apparently in some sort of ritual. A man was seen leaving the scene—” I gave the mage’s description. “He’s driving a black BMW.” I gave the plate number. “There are cops all over the place here, I count at least ten squad cars. An SPU forensics team is going into the house right now. I haven’t gotten a comment from police yet—but I might because Thomas O’Malley is walking right toward—”

  O’Malley reached over and took my phone.

  “Hey, O’Malley, that’s private property!”

  He put the phone up to his ear and said, “He’ll call you back.” He flipped the thing shut and pointed the antenna toward me. “Do the words thin ice mean anything to you?”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “You just stumbled on a corpse, Maxwell? Egil Nixon’s corpse?”

  “I wanted to talk about a dragon, O’Malley.”

  “If you’ve been withholding evidence—”

  “I called once I saw a B&E.”

  “If I find out different, you’re in serious trouble.” He tossed me the phone. “You saw a suspect leave?”

  “Yes,” I repeated the description for the third time.