“Glad to hear it.”
“Only took a decade . . .” Kawata held up the bag and looked at it. “Addressed to you?”
“Someone sent me a present.”
Kawata nodded. “You know, all I’m competent to do is a chemical analysis. If you want anything more thorough—handwriting, fingerprinting . . .”
“I have a good idea who sent it.”
“Okay.”
“But you should probably treat it like crime scene evidence, just in case.”
He lowered the envelope. “Is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
When I got back to the office, I tried to research what I could about Ossian Parthalán. Mazurich aside, Ossian Parthalán’s life and death already counted as a minor news story even if he was just a dwarven conspiracy buff blowing smoke out his ass.
I sat at my desk, running searches through my computer through periodical databases at the
Press,
at the local library, and at two subscription services, as well as the basic Internet search engines.
The pickings were slim. In two hours of searching, I only had three solid hits, and only one of them directly concerned the dwarf in question.
The direct hit was a minor story from about three years ago about a legal battle between my Mr. Parthalán and State Farm insurance. It seems that Ossian Parthalán made a trade out of auto bodywork. He worked out of a small garage on the near West Side called
Thor’s Hammer.
State Farm wasn’t compensating my dwarf for work he did because, apparently, he did too good a job. State Farm thought the claims were fraudulent. Their adjusters were convinced that, based on the damage done to the cars involved, they wouldn’t be salvageable.
Mr. Parthalán won that case.
The first indirect hit was from almost ten years ago. It was someone’s attempt to do a story about dwarven politics. My caveat about reporters on the outside looking in applied here in spades. The article was mostly a description of some sort of dwarven council meeting that was held in the Tower City Hilton, the mechanics of which the reporter obviously wasn’t privy to. The whole story amounted to little more than saying: “the dwarves here have a clan-based system that has something to do with blood relation, and after a lot of raucous infighting, one of these clans is dominant.”
The picture accompanying the story showed a half dozen dwarves yelling and pointing at each other around a circular meeting table. By the caption, third from the left was my guy, Ossian Parthalán.
So my guy was active in dwarven politics at one point. I wondered at what point that interest carried over into Cleveland City Council.
The second indirect hit was from one of my Internet searches, and at first look the Web page seemed to have nothing to do with my dwarf at all:
The Dwarven Armorer:
Highest quality arms and armor. Serving the Midrealm for ten years. If your marshal doesn’t pass it, we’ll take it back!
Specializing in:
• Functional Historic Reproductions
Gauntlets to Gorgets and everything in between. Reasonable prices, financing, Master Card and Visa accepted. Prop. Sir Thorndyke of Dover (mundanely Teaghue Parthalán)
It was located at another West Side address. I would have passed it off as simply a coincidence of names, but the address was only a block or two from the
Thor’s Hammer
body shop, and—when you think about it—there is some similarity between making plate mail and doing auto bodywork.
At least there seems to be, to a reporter looking for leads and who knows nothing about either.
There is some truth to the argument that once you cross the Cuyahoga River you are entering a different city. When Kipling wrote, “West is West and East is East,” he could have very well been talking about my hometown. A lot of people simplify the thing by pointing out the racial fault lines. It’s easy to do, since Cleveland is—even post-Portal—one of the most segregated communities north of the Mason-Dixon line. But the differences go a lot deeper than that.
The histories of the two halves of Cleveland over the past hundred years have been radically different. The East Side had the race riots in the ’60s, while the West Side had its working class communities plowed under and split in half by interstate construction. Almost every museum was built east of the river, every factory built on the west. The East Side has Case Western and University Circle. The West Side has the airport. Hispanic people drift west. Middle Eastern people drift east. Rayburn was a solidly West Side mayor, and Gregory Washington was firmly East Side.
On the East Side we’ve got elves.
The West Side got the dwarves.
I was thinking of the Portal’s contribution to the yin-yang nature of this city as I left the Shoreway and started looking for
The Dwarven Armorer.
It was hard to miss.
If the heraldic banners flapping in front of the doorway didn’t give it away, the suit of plate mail standing in front of the shop was a dead giveaway. I found a parking spot across the street and looked at the building. It wasn’t a regular storefront. The building was a low red-brick structure with large garage doors set in the side. A small lot on one end was surrounded by chain-link. The snow-covered lot was piled high with scrap metal of every description—old plumbing, wheel rims, twisted rebar still dangling fragments of concrete, and the occasional engine block.
We were obviously zoned for light industrial here, and I wondered what the building used to produce. I suspected that it was a machine shop of one sort or another, which probably closed up when this town’s last steel mill shut down for good, about twenty years ago.
I got out and walked to the door and its metallic guardsman.
I was impressed. I’ve seen the medieval armor displayed at the art museum here, the best collection in this half of the world, and you could place this guy’s work right up there with it. All it lacked was the patina of age.
Teaghue Parthalán also did something a bit unusual. Every suit of armor I’d ever seen had been in a static upright display. This one was mounted on some sort of articulated skeleton that allowed it to be posed in the midst of delivering a blow to an unseen attacker. It helped show off the mail underneath and the way the joints moved.
Apparently, you had a much wider range of motion in one of those things than you’d expect.
I slipped under the broadsword and pushed through the door into the shop.
If the showroom was any indication, business was pretty good. There were glass-fronted display cabinets on every wall, and a couple taking up floor space in the center of the showroom. While there were a couple of full suits on display, most of the space was devoted to individual pieces. Helmets, gauntlets, shields, swords, breastplates, and innumerable other metal parts whose names escaped me.
I was busy studying an intricately engraved broadsword with an eight hundred dollar price tag when Mr. Parthalán emerged from one of the rooms in back. He announced himself in a gruff voice, “Is your interest display or function, good sir?”
I tapped on the glass in front of the broadsword. “What would you consider this?”
“Display, my lord.” He chuckled. “That pretty little number is meant for a wall, or for fancy dress.”
“I see.”
He seemed to measure me up. “What is it you’re looking for?”
“A story.” I turned around and held out my hand. “My name’s Kline Maxwell,
Cleveland Press.
”
He cocked an eyebrow and took my hand. It felt as if I were shaking hands with a cinder block. “Ahh, you didn’t look like any Cleftlander I know.”
“Cleftlander?”
“Barony of the Cleftlands, the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Are you familiar with it?”
“Somewhat. I had a friend in college who would go out every Wednesday with a bunch of people who’d beat each other with sticks. I didn’t think it was this sophisticated, though.”
“Well, it’s a little more than that. The S.C.A. recreates all aspects of the Middle Ages: arts, sciences, as well as combat. It happens to be that armory is my own particular specialty.”
“If I recall, my friend’s armor was mostly blue plastic and duct tape.”
The dwarf laughed. “I doubt any marshal would pass that nowadays, even before the Portal opened. There are strict safety rules.”
I shook my head. “So how did someone from the other side of the Portal become involved in the S.C.A.?”
Teaghue shrugged. “Many of us had to change specialties, I preferred to find out what market existed for what I had always done.”
“You seem to have done well.”
“Why would anyone engage in labor to do poorly?”
“Your workmanship is incredible, but I was referring to your business.”
“As was I, good sir.”
I looked down at him and saw him smiling. He obviously enjoyed talking about what he did, a trait that will endear you to any journalist. I tried to see any familial resemblance to the late Ossian, but I wasn’t familiar enough with dwarven appearance in general. The kinky brown hair and beard, flat nose, and brown face were similar, but were also similar to just about every dwarf I had ever seen.
“A story, you say?” he asked. “On the S.C.A., my lord?”
“No. I am looking for background on a person named Ossian Parthalán.”
I paused for a moment. I had no idea if Teaghue was a close relation to the dead Ossian or not.
“Go on.” No overt reaction to Ossian’s name, but I had the feeling that he knew Ossian. The way his humor seemed to fade, I suspected that he knew Ossian’s fate.
“I cover city politics,” I told him. “And I am looking for connections between him and the late Councilman Mazurich.”
“Sad end, that,” Teaghue said. He could have been referring to Ossian or Mazurich. “The councilman was a friend to me and mine. There was a feast when he died.” He looked up at me. “You don’t do poetry, do you?”
“No.”
“Pity, a soul like Mazurich should have an epic written to him.”
“Ossian thought highly of him, then?”
“Ossian Parthalán is not of any clan of mine and I shall not speak for him.”
“But the councilman is well thought of in the dwarven community?”
“It was his work that found us homes, and labor worth pursuing. Without him, those of us that came from the Portal would be as rootless as the elves.” Teaghue glanced away as if he was seeing something else. “Without him there would be no halls under Erie.”
The “halls” he spoke of were the remnants of another industry collapse caused by the Portal’s opening. The salt mines under Lake Erie, particularly those around the spit of land called Whiskey Island closest to the Portal, suffered some severe issues with “mana” that resulted in about a dozen deaths before the operation was shut down.
The dwarves ended up resident in those mines, apparently immune to the magical influence that tended to drive anyone else mad. I’d personally never paid much attention to the details of how that happened. At the time there was a federal blockade of the city, an economic meltdown, and a thousand other crises.
“He participated in the dwarven settlement in the mines?”
“He initiated it.” Teaghue looked up at me with a suspicious expression. “You ask about dwarves and you do not know this?”
“Just trying to get your perspective,” I lied. The fact was, I tried to avoid inhuman interest stuff that simply existed to announce, “See, it’s magic here! See? We’re special.” It’s a strange bias to have in this city, I admit, but I’ve always been more interested in the political ramifications of the Portal than its material manifestations. Usually, considering my seniority at the
Press,
and my particular beat, it wasn’t an issue.
Usually.
Still it does tend to be a bit of a blind spot.
“I see,” Teaghue said. I could feel the guy closing up.
“Can you tell me anything about Ossian’s relationship with the councilman?”
“Ossian is nothing to me or mine. For the Councilman, he was a good man, ill-used.”
“How so?”
“That is my perspective, Mr. Maxwell. Should you ever be interested in the purchase of quality arms or armor, feel free to return. Right now I have work to attend to.”
Teaghue ended my interview by walking into the back of the shop, leaving me alone in the showroom.
A good man, ill-used.
I couldn’t help but think,
Used by whom?
CHAPTER FIVE