Serpent Mage

  “Do you believe the stories of what happened when the concerto was first performed?” Michael asked, deciding to adopt her point-blank style.

  “No,” she said.

  “Do you believe music has a power beyond notes on paper and sounds in the air?”

  She frowned. Her face was not accustomed to frowning, that much was obvious. “Yes,” she said, “but I’m not...gullible, I’m as much of a realist as a music-lover can be.”

  She had been a beautiful child, not so long ago, Michael thought. Her mother raised her after divorcing her father early, and her childhood was reasonably happy, and she developed rapidly both in body and mind. She was independent— He closed his eyes when her face was turned and abruptly cut off the probe. He was ashamed for having begun it. But what he had found made her even more enchanting.

  Kristine Pendeers was a genuinely good person, without a hint of guile.

  “The basement?” she prodded, catching him with a blank and inward-turned look on his face.

  He took a short breath and said, “This way.”

  In the service porch, Michael opened the door and switched on the light, then went to find the flashlight. When he returned, Kristine still stood at the top of the steps. She didn’t look happy. “I don’t like enclosed places,” she said.

  “We don’t have to go down there,” he said.

  “I’ll go. I just don’t like the dark and the smallness. But I can handle it.” She preceded him, and he shined the light between the stair railings to fill in their shadows and show her the stacks of papers and the armoire. She took a deep breath and turned in the cramped space between the boxes and cabinet. Michael remained on the stairs.

  “May I...?” she asked, touching the armoire’s left door. Michael nodded.

  She opened the door and examined the shelves within. “Wine bottles,” she said with a grin, tapping one lightly with her knee. “You haven’t read the letters yet, have you?”

  “Not yet. I found the manuscript in there and left the rest for later.”

  She nodded and lightly riffled a tied bundle of letters on the shelf. Then she lifted up on tiptoe and tilted the bundle outward a few inches to see the topmost letter.

  “Oh, my god,” she said softly.

  “What?” Michael descended a step, alarmed.

  “This top letter...it’s from Gustav Mahler. I only read a little German, but the signature... Can we open this and look at the rest of the bundle?”

  Michael drew a Swiss army knife from his pocket and handed it to her. She sliced the string carefully and returned his knife, then lifted the letters away one by one. “They’re all from Mahler... they’re not dated... but some have envelopes. These are worth a fortune, Michael!”

  “Who are they to?” he asked.

  “The first one says ‘Arno, lieber Freund’. And the next, ‘Lieber Arno’. They’re all to Waltiri.”

  “He was only a boy when Mahler was alive,” Michael said. Oh?

  “Maybe so, but they’re all addressed to him.” She handed him the stack. The letters at the bottom had been sent from Wien—Vienna; farther up the stack, from New York; and then the rest from München—Munich—and Vienna again. There must have been two dozen letters, some more than five pages long.

  “That’s a find,” Kristine said. “That’s a real find. If that doesn’t convince the department, I’ll just give up. Boxes and boxes of stuff... Who knows how many correspondents, all over the world?”

  “There’s a manuscript of a Stravinsky oratorio in the attic,” Michael said. “And letters from all sorts of people. Clark Gable.”

  Kristine’s face flushed with excitement. “Okay,” she said, raising and lowering her shoulders and arms like a fledgling bird. “Enough of this. This is too much all at once.” She giggled and held her hand to her lips. “Sorry. It’s just incredible. This house is crammed with treasure!”

  “I really don’t know why he put me in charge of it,” Michael said, ascending the steps. “I don’t know half what I should know. I only know of Mahler because Arno mentioned him to me.”

  “He chose you because he trusted you,” Kristine said. “That’s obvious. He knew you’d find all the right people and straighten everything out. When I hear what has happened to other estates, to the libraries and papers of people even more famous... Sold off, auctioned, broken apart, rejected by big universities for lack of space. God. It makes me want to cry. But this... It’s all here.” Suddenly, standing in the service porch, Kristine impulsively reached out and hugged Michael. “I have to go now. If you can get the manuscript of the concerto copied, perhaps I can pick it up this evening?”

  “I’ll try,” Michael said.

  “There’s a U-Copy place not too far from here...three or four blocks.”

  Michael nodded.

  “That policeman said he’d be back this afternoon.” Kristine regarded him from the corners of her eyes. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Is he going to keep you busy very long?”

  “No,” Michael decided.

  “Good. Then I’ll call about six. Maybe we can have dinner?”

  Michael’s insides warmed appreciably. “That’ll be fine.”

  He escorted her to the front door and watched her return to her car. Kristine’s walk, like all her movements, was lithe and graceful, with an unaffected insouciance in the push of her legs and the angle of her shoulders.

  Even after she drove away, Michael lingered by the door, reluctant to close it. He felt ridiculous, standing there with the morning well along, but now that she was gone, there didn’t seem to be anything very important to do.

  All of his training, all of his discipline, could not keep him from feeling empty and confused in her absence.

  “You’re a mess,” he whispered to himself and shut the door with a decisive clunk.

  Chapter Seven

  Michael carried the manuscript of the Infinity Concerto into the U-Copy and waited in line behind a broad, short woman in a dark wool coat. She fidgeted impatiently and patted her thinning black hair with a plump hand. Ahead of her, a middle-aged man with a bulbous nose copied a tax form dozens of times. When he finished, he smiled as if he had just solved the problems of the world, paid the clerk and walked out the door.

  The woman in the dark wool coat knew nothing about copy machines. The clerk, a raw-boned girl with an open and pleasant face, tried to explain the operation but met with an obstinate stare and finally did the job herself. She glanced at Michael and smiled wryly. “This’ll just take a sec,” she said. That commission completed, she took a quarter from the woman, who grumbled and shook her head as she left.

  “You know how to work the machine?” the clerk asked. She wore jeans and a man’s white work shirt.

  Michael nodded. “This might not be an easy job, though.”

  “What are you copying?”

  He removed the manuscript from the envelope. “It’s been soaked in something,” he lied, trying to avoid other explanations.

  “Hope it wasn’t toxic waste,” the clerk said, eyeing the manuscript distastefully. She sniffed. “Smells good, whatever it was.”

  She dialed the machine to a new setting. “This might work.” Michael removed the green-corroded paper clip from the music sheets.

  However its eye was constructed, the machine saw none of the glistening, oily distortion. Each page emerged from the machine plain black and white, with faint edges of gray.

  “Does fine, huh?” the clerk asked.

  “Great,” Michael said, surprised.

  “Did you get the glass dirty?” she asked casually after he had finished the last page.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “I’d like to know what it was soaked in, actually,” she said, winking at him. “Might appeal to my boyfriend.”

  Michael grinned, thanked her and carried both sets to the Saab. Simple enough, he thought. But how long would it take the notes on the duplicate t
o transform the photocopy’s fresh white paper?

  He locked both manuscript and duplicate in Waltiri’s library safe.

  From the basement, he removed the open bundle of Mahler letters, found a German-English dictionary, and sat on a patio chair in the back yard–warming nicely now in late morning sunshine–to make an attempt at translation. It was slow going. How much easier if there was a German-speaker nearby; he could tap the knowledge, in-speak and translate effortlessly.

  He closed his eyes and let his probe go out through the neighborhood. There was no way of knowing how far he could reach. Before last night, he had never probed beyond a few dozen meters.

  He seemed to be suspended in a dense leafy glade with neither leaves nor light. In this glade he found...

  An elderly man whose mind burned like banked coals, feverish with speculation on some topic Michael could not discern; the old man spoke only broken English and gutter Spanish.

  A young girl home from summer school, in bed with a cold. She also knew rudimentary Spanish and was reading Walter Farley books stacked six high beside her.

  A woman cleaning a large and elegantly furnished house, her mind filled with strikingly original jazz. Was she black, Michael wondered? There was no way of telling; her thoughts were of no particular color, and whatever voices he heard in people’s heads betrayed no accents. She did not speak German.

  Housewives, handymen, a late-middle-aged man with a mind like a musty bookstore typing on an old Royal, three young babies as selfish as three Scrooges, their thoughts incredibly sensual, nonverbal and as fresh as an ocean breeze...

  He went back to the man at the typewriter. An article on guns was emerging from the antique upright Royal, an evaluation of a new Israeli automatic rifle.

  This man spoke German fluently. He had

  Michael pulled away from the middle-aged man as if stung. He did not wish to tap the man’s language abilities if he had to face more of that sort of foulness.

  Where did he live—and how far away?

  He could not tell.

  The shock of the man’s frank evil had made Michael recoil drastically, throwing his probe out in a wide arc.

  And he saw—for a brief moment became...

  Eldridge Gorn, a horse trader. That was his euphemism for rounding up range horses and selling them to knackers. He had been in the trade for thirty years, starting in 1959, two years after he had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy.

  He had come back to Utah and been received by his Mormon family with chilly aloofness. Eldridge Gorn had not lived up to his father’s expectations. His father was a hard, unforgiving man, whom Gorn loved very deeply, and the rejection hurt.

  He moved to Colorado, married and been divorced within a year. He tried to take his life with a twelve-gauge shotgun in a small motel room in Calneva. The gun jammed, and he spent twenty-five minutes laughing and crying and trying to get the gun to work. It wouldn’t.

  It appeared to Gorn that someone, at least, wanted him alive.

  Shortly after, he went to work on a ranch in Nevada and learned the trade of rounding up wild horses and selling them to slaughter-houses. The money was marginal, and the last ten years—what with do-gooder animal groups and the ever-changing legal scene—had forced him to change his tactics, but he hung on. He knew he was a marginal man to start with, not worth much to anybody, the only sort of person who could seriously countenance turning range horses into dog food. He liked the work.

  He even liked the horses. Sometimes they outsmarted him, and he would laugh as he had when the shotgun had jammed, and wave his battered felt hat at them and whoop.

  Gorn sat on top of the cab of his pickup, a light afternoon breeze patting at his face and hair. Sage scrub to the horizon all around, a cinder cone of a centuries-old volcano off to the east, and nothing but silence and twenty or thirty head of wild horses about three miles away.

  Today he would just drive around them, count and look them over. Just possibly he could drive through the scrub and herd them into a small box canyon half a mile west of the cinder cone; but tomorrow would be better, when he had an assistant or two on horseback themselves.

  He lifted his nose and sniffed like a dog. He scowled and hawked and spat over the hood and sniffed again. There wasn’t any storm or even a cloud in the mild blue sky, but he smelled something very much like cold and winter. He prided himself on his nose—he could smell mustangs from five miles away in a good straight wind—and what he smelled bothered him.

  It didn’t belong. It was out of season, that smell.

  Winter. Snow and ice.

  Something glittered by the cinder cone, like the flash from a circle of mirrors. Gorn began to feel spooked. His crusty burned-red arms itched, and his small hairs stood on end. He pinched his nose between two fingers and blew into his clean white cotton handkerchief.

  The breeze became something out of a musty old refrigerator or freezer—not so much cold as having been kept still and confined for a long time.

  Horses ran from the direction of the cinder cone—twenty, thirty, maybe as many as fifty, galloping from a direction where they couldn’t possibly have been. What he smelled now was enough to send him into the cab of his truck, a scent fierce and electric and dangerous. He started the engine and watched the new herd through the windshield.

  They were all gray, hard to see against the sage but for a quality of iridescence more at home in an oyster shell than on a horse.

  And they were coming right for him, up the gentle scrub-covered slope, faster than any horses he had ever seen, gray blurs with long manes. Beautiful animals. If he could catch them (who could possibly own such beautiful horses and let them loose in this godforsaken country?) he could make a good deal more money by changing his tactics, avoiding the knackers and heading straight for the stock buyers in Vegas or Reno.

  A quarter mile from his truck, the herd split in two. His sharp eyes told him the animals were sinewy, tight-muscled, oddly out of proportion compared to the animals he had known all his life. They looked flayed, but their heads were exquisite, more delicately featured than Arabians, wild and energetic and maybe scared by something behind them. Still running at full gallop.

  Suddenly, the five or six horses in the lead lifted all their feet from the ground. They were barely fifty yards from his truck and Gorn clearly saw all four legs on each animal curl up and spread out like those ridiculous hunting paintings in rich men’s clubs.

  The lead horses grew long, leaned out, flew over the ground, not running, their hindquarters blurry and necks stretching until their heads seemed level with their shoulders.

  “God damn,” Gorn said under his breath.

  Like bright streaks of Navajo silver, all five lead horses merged with the sky and simply vanished.

  And then the five behind.

  In ranks, all of the pearl-colored herd took to the air near his truck and vanished.

  He did not see them come down again.

  Gorn sat behind the wheel with the engine running for a quarter hour before he halfheartedly returned his attention to the ordinary animals still down in the middle of the sage scrub.

  What he felt in his chest was something past all pain and feeling.

  Loss. Bereavement. An agonizing sensation of beauty and one important thing long since fled from his life. Gorn did not know what it was.

  But he knew he would spend the rest of that day, and perhaps the next, looking at the sky.

  Michael put the packet of letters aside and pressed the bridge of his nose between two fingers.

  His life was dividing in two, and the division was fuzzing rapidly. How long could he keep the parts separated—and how long could he observe and learn without acting?

&n
bsp; The sky spread clear and bland overhead, an extremely self-assured sky, unlike the Realm’s active and ever-changing blueness. Differences. Contrasts are the direct path to knowing.

  He was becoming more and more aware of human variety; in contrast, the Sidhe had seemed almost uniform, lacking the physical and mental differences and distortions peculiar to humankind.

  The Sidhe were like thoroughbreds; their lines had been molded across tens of millions of years, with who could tell what kind of strictures and impositions? Humans, however, had re-emerged from the condition of animals (were animals still), with all the riotous multiformity of nature.

  They would not mix comfortably.

  Michael returned the packet of letters to the armoire in the basement and fixed himself lunch, a cheese sandwich and an apple. Half an hour later, he returned to the back yard to practice hyloka. He squatted naked on the grass, skin glowing like a furnace.

  “Salamander,” he murmured, feeling the ecstasy of the unleashed heat subside. In such a condition, he realized, he could walk through a burning house unharmed; he would be hotter than the flames. He damped his discipline and got to his feet. Where he had been sitting, his legs and buttocks had left blackened prints in the grass. He was ravenously hungry again.

  He ate a second lunch, much the same as the first, and replayed The Man Who Would Be King on the VCR. Halfway through, he found he was merely staring blankly at the TV screen, his mind elsewhere—with the horse trader on the rangeland, with the elderly woman in the old forest... Mulling over the Tippett Hotel and Lieutenant Harvey, but most of all, thinking of Kristine.

  At four o’clock, the phone rang. Lieutenant Harvey was calling from downtown.

  “I’ve had to put our mutual interest here, the Tippett Hotel case, on the back burner for the moment,” he said. “But I’ll want to talk with you in detail later. If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can have a lawyer present. I’m not looking for a confession, just information, you understand?”

  “Yes,” Michael said, aware the detective was telling the truth; learning more about Harvey perhaps than the reverse.