To the person who, in O’Malley’s words, panicked the most, the natural progression led to an even worse possibility: The second Portal wouldn’t be the last.
“No one wants competition for the Portal,” I said. One goose laying golden eggs is worth something, but more than that and the eggs start depressing the economy.
“Centuries of work were wiped out with Aloeus’ death,” Ysbail said. “It might mean the end of our species.”
“
Centuries,
” I whispered to myself. I thought of something Caledvwlch had said,
“You are a fool if you believe it possible for us to be as inconstant as you.”
I thought about that for a moment. I was walking in a world where allegiances shifted slowly, if at all. That was important, maybe the key to what was happening here.
When Aloeus formed an alliance with Rayburn to keep control of the Portal local, helped engineer the attack that ended Valdis’ reign, and continued his influence on the administration—during all that time, he had been working with the elves.
“You are ‘Faust,’ aren’t you?”
“Your kind can be very loose with names. The same term can apply as much to many as to one.” She looked at me. “I am of the many, but I am not the one.”
I decided to count that as a confirmation. Nesmith was right. There was a mole in the administration, and someone had decided to do something violent about it. They were also correct, in a way, about “Faust” attacking the city and the administration. Their interests were certainly at odds with the long-term goals of most of the political and business community in Cleveland. From the look of things, though, the terrorism seemed pretty one-sided.
“Tell me about what Aloeus was doing with you.”
She obliged.
The Portal was not intended solely as a doorway. It was to be an extension of their world into another, a foothold around which the elves could build their new capital. It required years of effort to produce the permanance of the Portal. It took, had been taking, ten times as long to teach those skills. The temporary Portal that Ysbail had led me through was just a small manifestation, a temporary doorway whose creation was made easier by the proximity of the other Portal.
The difference between that, and creating a new, permanent Portal was the difference between driving down the interstate and
building
the interstate—
and
the car to drive on it. Ysbail’s little portal was simply pulling the energies from the permanent Portal and opening another space to walk through. It wasn’t even possible to do it outside the influence of the permanent Portal.
And, unlike the Portal that Aloeus opened, the little portals could only be opened into places the mages—and apparently there were several needed to do it—themselves had seen. At least one member of the ritual had a sole duty to visualize the destination.
The Portal that Aloeus created suffered no such restriction—of course it would have been useless if it had. Aloeus could cast a Portal to a world no one had ever seen. That gave them the ability to escape Ragnan, but made two Portals necessary for their mission. One for reconnaissance, the other once a suitable site had been found for permanent settlement.
The decision to solicit the National Guard’s assistance was simply a tactical decision on Aloeus’ part, to remove Valdis and buy time on the Ragnan side of the Portal.
Once the political situation on both planes had stabilized, they needed to find their final target on this world. A target they found with the help of Leo Baldassare.
I asked about him.
Ysbail told me, “He has been a friend to our cause since Aloeus arrived in this world.”
“Hasn’t helped with the administration?”
“We’ve both required privacy in our dealings.”
“He knows about ‘Faust’?”
“Yes.”
I knew Baldassare kept things close to the vest, but this was surprising, even for him.
“Where do I come into this?”
Ysbail and her people
knew
that the Rayburn administration had Aloeus assassinated. There wasn’t a question in their minds. With their plans wrecked with the dragon’s death, their only real hope was to make the administration’s actions public in such a way that it couldn’t be covered up. Then, maybe, they could convince the government, the courts, the public—someone—to consider reparations.
That kind of proof was problematic. Especially as the administration and the SPU seemed to be moving to place the blame for the assassination on “Faust.”
They needed someone credible, someone
human
, someone with no obvious connections to the paranormal citizens involved. They needed that person to voice the crimes of the Rayburn administration.
“You were chosen by the one ‘Faust,’ himself. He knows your works, and knows that if you call Mayor Rayburn a murderer, those who read your words will know it is truth.”
“Baldassare,” I said. “You had him pressure the
Press
to put me on this story.”
“To the other journalists, it was not a political story.”
I shook my head.
“We granted your guidance.”
“What do you mean?”
“The term in your language is bibliomancy,” she said.
It took a moment to realize what she was talking about. “You’re the damn bard!”
“Not exactly,” she said. “I could not establish any immediate link to you, magically or otherwise, because you were so well watched. I could, however, create an independent floating enchantment that could warn you, guide you, long after my connection with the spell had been broken and could not be traced.”
“You’re saying a
spell
called me?”
“I cast the spell on the web of electronics that makes up the phone system in Cleveland. The spell moved from point to point, confounding any attempt to trace it.”
“What’s with the quotes? Why not something useful, like ‘your life’s in danger.’”
“An oracle does not work like that. It needs a matrix, a form, to cast its information from. It can be runes, dice, cards, bones . . . I chose a form that would be easiest for you to interpret, and easiest for you to receive through the medium I selected.”
“You expected me to go up against Rayburn for you.”
“We believed that you would willingly publicize his crimes.”
I nodded. “There’s one problem with that plan, Ysbail.”
“What?”
“Rayburn didn’t have the dragon killed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Y
SBAIL turned to say something, perhaps an objection, but she was interrupted by a presence. There was a sudden feeling of imminence in the air, a sensation that set the hair on the back of my neck on end. I turned away from the ruined vistas of Galweir and back toward the flagstone courtyard we had emerged from.
The air rippled above the stone, and I could see a tiny speck floating there. As I watched it grew to a dot, then a ball, then a rapidly expanding sphere. This was the third Portal I had seen in my life, and the impact wasn’t diminished by the fact that I was expecting it.
It certainly was a good way to cut any possible pursuit, just sidestep into the next dimension and wait for your comrades to rendezvous. I looked at Ysbail and asked, “How close are we to the original Portal, on this side?”
“Thousands of miles.”
I looked at the slowly stabilizing sphere. “But someone can only
make
these temporary things near the permanent Portal, right?”
“The caster has to be within the permanent Portal’s influence.”
“So what were you planning on doing if the ride home didn’t show up?”
“We would have had a long journey in store for us.” She stepped forward. “Come, it only remains a few moments.”
I took a step toward a curving image of a huge building in a wooded glen. With no sense of transition at all, I found myself stepping away from the shore of the Chagrin River. In front of us, rising out of the bluff overlooking the river was the massive Tudor pile of Leo Baldassare’s mansion.
I got the weird feeling of coming full circle.
The air was thick with the smell of incense, and a quartet of exhausted looking people sat on the grass between us and the mansion. The two elves, I expected. The humans, I didn’t. The man I hadn’t seen before was long-haired with a beard and gut worthy of a Hell’s Angel, with more cryptic tattoos.
The other one was Mr. Friday, the man whom I’d taken to simply be Aloeus’ lawyer.
“You’re a mage?” I asked.
He looked up at me as if I still carried an invisible, disgusting odor, “You are surprised?”
Ysbail walked up and looked over the quartet , examining each member as if checking for damage. Perhaps that’s what she was doing. Friday seemed the least fatigued by whatever happened here. Perhaps he just showed it less.
The Hell’s Angel type got unsteadily to his feet. “You,” he said, pointing toward me. The look he gave me wasn’t that friendly.
“Me?” I answered. So far, a stellar conversation.
“You’re why they killed Bone.” The finger collapsed into a fist about the size of my face.
I took a step back, and the guy stepped forward, about halving the distance between us.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” I said.
“You made the mistake. You tipped them off to Bone,” he told me. “When this is over, I’ll have your liver for lunch.”
“Angor and Einion need to rest,” Ysbail interrupted us. “We need to go inside.” Ysbail helped the two elves up and started toward the mansion. Friday stood up and looked at me, then at the biker, and shook his head.
The biker was still standing in my way, staring me down.
I started, “I don’t think you understand—”
“It’s simple. Bone was fine with the cops till you showed up. Then something tipped them on to him.” He slapped his open hand on top of his fist as if he was trying to drive a knife into someone’s chest. “Your fault, ain’t it?”
To the guy facing me, the question was rhetorical. For me it was less so. Yet another datum added to my evolving portrait of Caleb Washington. He had, as O’Malley said, gotten very close to this Faustian network. From the looks of things, all the way inside.
I suspected that this guy would not take well to the news that Mr. Bone Daddy was a cop, and had been one for years. The biker would probably be even less pleased with the info that Bone wasn’t killed because the cops caught up with him. He was killed because he knew who was behind the demise of Aloeus, and made the mistake of taking the information to O’Malley, rather than to his little underground group.
The irony was, this guy might, in a sense, be right. Bone Daddy had been ventilated after interrogating me. I suspected that something he heard while questioning me set him on the path that got him killed.
I even had a good idea what that was.
When I didn’t answer the biker immediately, he turned and followed Ysbail and the others up toward the house. I followed in time to see Leo Baldassare holding the door open.
He looked at me as we all walked into his wood-paneled sanctum, and his expression held no trace of irony. Not that I expected it. He’d always been one of those guys who knew exactly what he was doing, and left it to others to speculate about what that was.
“Kline,” he said by way of greeting.
“Mr. Baldassare.”
We had gathered in the massive library. There were more than enough overstuffed chairs, and the two-story ceiling gave enough headroom even for the elves. The bookshelves covered three walls, ten feet up to a balcony that held more shelves all the way to the ceiling. A massive semicircular arc of windows faced the river and the clearing we had walked from.
Everyone sat, with the exception of Baldassare and myself. I stood next to a long, wide desk that seemed designed explicitly for holding large volumes flat. Quite a few were open on it. I saw a few non-English titles, a book with mostly Hebrew text amidst circles and linear diagrams, and something that was authored by Alister Crowley.
“I suppose you have some questions,” Baldassare said as he closed the door.
“You know me,” I said. “I always do.”
“You know I support Rayburn, always have. But you probably know by now that the administration has some strange ideas about my friends here.”
I nodded, walking down the long desk, flipping a few pages here and there at random. I stopped at one ancient-looking tome as thick as my arm and about three feet tall. The writing was hand-lettered in a text I couldn’t recognize from any human alphabet.
“A fifth column,” I said. “ Elements of an invasion that may or may not come. A threat to the city government on several levels. At the least, a justification for deeper federal involvement. At worst, agents of unregulated and possibly competing access to Ragnan.” I closed the book. The cover was black leather from some animal I didn’t recognize. “I’m wondering what’s your angle, involved in this.”