The edges of the bloodstain started burning, jets of flame reached around from the edge of the circle and followed the now black stain. When the flames reached Phillips, they raced around the edges of the corpse like a chalk outline from hell.
The green energy was slower; it flowed out from the break in the circle, covering the black stain in a net of crackling light. It reached Phillips’ head as the flames fully encircled him.
The green followed the blood; it crawled up the side of his head, the flesh charring and releasing smoldering jets of flame underneath its touch. It spilled into the head wound.
When it reached the interior of Phillips’ skull, something fundamental changed in the room. The random electrical sounds were replaced by the sound of a great wind. The filaments that reached into Phillips grew, merged, became a thick, pulsing, green conduit. It began racing by, whipping up and down like a garden hose out of control—though the motion was reversed, the energy flowing
into
the stationary hole in Phillips’ skull, the source whipping around the surface of the invisible dome around us, sucking power into itself.
The body jerked.
Caledvwlch and the other elf had got on the ground themselves, staying out of the way of the whipping tendrils of energy that fed into Phillips. The circle seemed no protection now; power arced from outside, splitting into several sources, all feeding into Phillips’ skull.
The body shook, the back arching and the limbs flailing in a seizure. The skin was turning black.
Phillips may have been dead, but he screamed. The sound of the prolonged cry drowned out everything. An agonized keening that went on long after living breath would have expired.
His back snapped back, and suddenly, impossibly, Phillips was on his knees. His arms flung forward and up, as if to embrace the energy spilling into his skull. His head bent and twisted side to side almost too fast to follow. Fire ate his clothes as smoke rose from the exposed parts of his carbonized skin.
Every scrap of the green energy fed itself into the corpse until all light in the room died. For a few moments the darkness was complete. The room was silent except for a quiet sighing. In a few moments, I could see a ruddy light, a crackling glow that seemed to form an outline where Phillips’ body knelt.
I distinctly heard the words, “
Oh, my God.
”
It was Phillips’ voice.
Then came the explosion.
An eruption of red light, fire, and smoke tore from the remains of Phillips’ body. The light shot upward, tearing a hole in the ceiling as a cloud of tar-black smoke unrolled in its wake. I was still on the ground, but the force of the blast pushed me back about four or five feet, spraying me with burning embers whose nature I really didn’t want to think about.
I lay there, stunned and coughing, as sensations from the real, normal world began leaking in. Above me I could hear the sound of dozens of car alarms. I could also hear the spray of water from the sprinkler system. Somewhere a klaxon sounded a fire alarm, and as I looked up, through watering eyes, I could see the mercury-white glow of emergency lights shining from the ceiling—more exactly, from where the ceiling had been.
“Mr. Maxwell?”
I looked up and saw Caledvwlch standing there, looking unmoved despite the fact that his cheap cop suit was charred, stained, and spattered with blood.
“Yeah?”
“Perhaps we should talk.”
It was like emerging from Dante’s Inferno. The elves had to help me up out of the hole; the elevators were out of service. They escorted me through the levels of the parking garage, the lower two levels awash with water, courtesy of the sprinkler system. Another two floors up, and we passed fire crews going in the other direction. Another floor, and a trio of uniformed cops met us, but Caledvwlch flashed his badge and we continued on our way.
“Phillips was a traitor to his liege,” Caledvwlch told me on the way up.
“No argument here,” I said. My voice was hoarse and ragged, and all I wanted to do was to lie down. My eyes burned, and my body felt as if it had aged about thirty years. My clothes smelled of smoke and ozone, and my shoes were covered in blood, causing the soles to stick to the concrete as I walked.
“Our oath was to O’Malley,” Caledvwlch continued. “Perhaps that was an error. But we served until he died.”
I nodded. “So why—” I shook my head. “I have no objection about what you did. But why intervene for me, and not for Bone Daddy? I presume the situations were similar.”
“No,” Caledvwlch said. “O’Malley had our fealty. Our duty was to follow him. Anything he required, we had to give. That is the nature of the duty.” He looked down on me and said flatly, “Were he alive, and ordered me, you would not still be living.”
“Then I guess I’m glad he died.”
“As am I,” Caledvwlch said. “
“Hey? Isn’t that a little traitorous on your part?”
“A traitor is defined by acts, not thoughts. My duty required me to obey O’Malley, not to love him.” Caledvwlch looked across at Elf Three, who nodded solemnly. “The killing of the mage was an evil, criminal act, that we were powerless to prevent. Our fealty takes precedence over any other oaths.”
“Including an oath to uphold the law,” I said. “You went through the standard cop initiation, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But our honor places men before abstracts.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but, as they kept telling us in civics class, this is a nation of laws, not men.”
“That may be so,” Caledvwlch said. “But I have told you, we are not so easily changed.”
“So what happened to you guys after O’Malley died?”
“Mr. Phillips did not understand—”
“Obviously.”
“—he assumed that since we belonged to O’Malley, and O’Malley belonged to him, that we became his.”
We walked up the ramp to the sounds of sirens and red-and-blue flashing lights. The sky was still black above us. I noticed that a few streetlights were out, and that a patch of lawn on the park to the north of Lakeside, next to City Hall, had turned black and ashlike. In the distance, the permanent clouds swirled over the Portal, and it might have been my imagination, but I thought the clouds had a greenish inner glow to them.
“You obviously didn’t.”
“Our fealty is an inviolate bond that cannot be severed, and certainly cannot be traded. We must give such loyalty, it cannot be taken. Mr. Phillips’ attitude, that we were employees who owed him the same duty that we owed O’Malley, was an insult. The only man who holds such a claim to us now is the man who allowed us our pledge in the first place.”
“Mayor Rayburn?”
“The ruler of our adopted land.”
I shook my head and looked up at the sky. No stars, too many lights. “Why did you wait until Phillips had a gun on me?”
Caledvwlch was quiet, and I looked down and saw a contemplative look on his face. His pastel skin was alternately rose and aqua under the flashes from the emergency vehicles. “Dare I say that we have learned some things here of law and politics? Assassination is not a viable way to remove your liege’s enemies. The act poses more threat than the individual could. But if such a man dies in the commission of a criminal act—deadly force is appropriate in a case where police or civilian life is in immediate danger. No matter who the man is.” He looked over at me and might have smiled. “As you said, this is a land of laws, not of men.”
A couple of paramedics came over. “Sir, I think we should look at you.”
“No, I’m all right.” I shook my head—a little too fast, it made me dizzy.
“No, you are not,” said Elf Number Three. It wasn’t until that point that I realized that he had been supporting me during the walk out of the parking garage. He made his point by ever so slightly lowering his arm from my shoulders. My knees felt my full weight and began to buckle.
The paramedics saw me start to collapse and got on either side of me. Caledvwlch and the nameless elf let them take me. By the time they got me to a gurney, my mind had already spun away, eager to be free of the effort of controlling my body and keeping myself awake.
My last thought was that Caledvwlch might not have the wrong idea about how to deal with this new world we shared.
EPILOGUE
I
T was five weeks after I got out of the hospital before I returned to Hunting Valley. It took me that along to get the various facets of my life back in some semblance of order. This not only meant giving depositions to the cops, to the Feds, and writing my own stories for the
Press
—suitably mauled by three layers of editorial oversight—it involved insurance claims on my condo, replacing my entertainment center, and dealing with building management to get a contractor to fix the damage. It also included a week of vacation and a long needed flight to San Francisco, where I got to take my daughter to a concert.
It was mid-September now, fall was starting to nip at the air, and the story of Phillips’ little conspiracy had begun fading. The elves did Rayburn a favor in more ways than one by killing him. Not only was Phillips gone—a good thing in and of itself—but the lack of a warm body meant no trial, and less prolonged coverage. It also gave the administration a convenient scapegoat on whom to hang every query the Feds were on to. Phillips was in charge of the Portal, and any unpleasantness associated with the Portal, from prisoner dumping to disappearing homeless people could be blamed on his criminal mismanagement of the department.
Hearings were being held, but with everyone’s cards on the table, it was hard for the Council to stick anything on Rayburn. Everything had Phillips’ prints on it, and it was evidence of Rayburn’s political mastery that he had co-opted the elvish cause. Somehow he had got on the other side of the issue, and there were talks about constructing a reservation out in Lake Erie.
The Feds had lost the rhetorical war once Ysbail held a press conference at City Hall.
Of course, Phillips’ position in the administration was still vacant. The Council had to go through all its hearings on the Port Authority before Rayburn could fill the job. The word was that there weren’t a hell of a lot of people willing to step anywhere near Phillips’ bloody shoes.
However, any good newsman has his sources, and one of my better placed sources gave me a short list of Phillips’ possible replacements. At the top of the list of possible candidates was a familiar name.
One of many reasons I decided to pay my old acquaintance a visit once my own life was in order.
It was funny, how the approach to his estate seemed a little less intimidating than it had before. The mansion seemed a little smaller, the Tudor architecture less grand.
I suppose it was the memory of Galweir. Baldassare’s realm suffered by comparison.
He was sitting on the patio again, the barbecue off. He stood up as I climbed out of my Volkswagen. His calculated smile and easy manner seemed more obviously artificial to me now. Looking at him, I knew he wasn’t the one who had changed.
“Kline, good to see you.”
I nodded, but I didn’t take his hand. “I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “I saw you were on the short list to replace Phillips.”
“I shouldn’t comment on that.” His smile said that he thought otherwise. “I don’t even know if I’ll take the job.”
“Oh, you’ll take it.”
The smile lost a little of itself. For all his political savvy, I don’t think he understood, until that moment, why I had come here. The fact that the smile stayed at all meant he was still too cocksure to care. “Okay, shall we drop the pretense? Why are you here?”
I smiled myself, and shook my head. Baldassare was the only person here engaging in pretense. “I have a story and I wanted to give you a chance to comment.”
He looked me up and down, measuring me again. Perhaps he was trying to figure out what it was I wanted.
“You’ve followed the stories about Aloeus?” I asked.
“Where are you going with this?”
“The public has just about sainted him. A martyr for nonhuman civil rights. With the elves stumping for Rayburn, the Feds are backpedaling so fast that you’d think
they
killed the dragon.”
“Dave’s always been adept at seizing political capital.”
“All of which has made your own political capital rise.”
Baldassare shrugged, “I didn’t become involved with the elves for political gain—”
I shook my head. “No. That is
exactly
why you became involved.”
“There’s no call for—”
“Aloeus was no saint leading his people to the promised land, no matter how we’d like to read it that way, or how the pundits would like to spin it that way. Aloeus was a
dragon.
Altruism is a human virtue, a virtue of a society.”
Baldassare shook his head. “His actions speak otherwise.”
“To whom? My experience with Phillips has taught me that you cannot ascribe human motives and values to an alien creature. But I’m sure you understood Aloeus’ motives perfectly.”