It reared, and I did the only thing I could. I dove into the woods.
It wasn’t quite the sanctuary it seemed.
I left the path, and the trees seemed to open up around me. Suddenly the stand of trees that seemed so closed in that a dwarf couldn’t pass through widened to the point where a man could fully stretch his arms between the massive trunks.
While that meant I could run, unimpeded; it also meant that a pissed-off griffin could follow me. The only thing that kept me alive was the fact that the trees were just close enough to prevent it from pouncing or taking flight, and its bird-clawed forelegs were more designed for tearing prey apart, not chasing it.
That meant that I could barely keep ahead of it while running flat out. My only hope was to find some cover before I hit a clearing, or the water.
I hit all three at the same time.
After running through the unnatural woods for ten minutes beyond the point where I should have reached the edge of the peninsula, I broke out of the edge, somewhere on the northern shore. I faced a clearing stacked high with mountainous piles of dismantled steel machinery. A scrap heap a few dozen orders of magnitude beyond the piles next to
The Dwarven Armorer.
I ran between stacks of girders too tight for my pursuer to follow. Behind I heard a screech and a rush of feathers. I could feel the griffin’s hot breath on my neck as I wove deeper into the rusty iron maze.
I saw its shadow fly across the slice of sky visible above me. I leaned against a slab of metal and hyperventilated. My lungs burned and my legs felt like rubber.
You’re a genius, Kline . . .
I closed my eyes and shook my head. At least I had my bearings again. I was standing in the last remnants of the Hulett ore unloaders—skyscraper-sized mechanical dinosaurs, four of which had dominated the pellet terminal for a good ninety years during the last century. They had been obsolete for a few decades when the Port Authority decided to dismantle the beasts—four of the six left in existence.
In the constant tension between redevelopment and preservation, redevelopment had won. Unfortunate, since political wrangling over this spit of shoreline, and the subsequent opening of the Portal, meant that the Port Authority never got to expand the docks here, losing even the existing facilities.
But the bones of this industrial fossil rested to the east of the old pellet terminal. So once I was clear of griffins, I could follow the shore and get back to the car. The shot of adrenaline from my confrontation was just what I needed to come to my senses and realize my limitations.
I waited a good twenty minutes until I was sure the griffin had given up on me. Then I tried to backtrack, which turned out to be less simple than it sounded.
I wove back through the maze of iron, toward what I thought was the edge, and I faced a dead end—a slab of iron an inch thick, dotted with rivets the size of my fist. I couldn’t even see around it.
I turned around and worked my way back, and realized I had no idea which way to go. I stood at the intersection of five paths that wove through the ocher piles of iron, my feet sinking into thick, red slushy mud. My footprints led down four of the paths, in both directions.
“Shit.”
My voice came out in a puff of fog.
I looked at the piles of scrap and saw figures spray-painted on the pieces. I had ignored them, at first. Just ID numbers, probably left over from when the Historical Society had plans to reconstruct one of these monsters on another site.
That was right, as far as the white numbers went.
However, someone had also sprayed red and orange paint on the girders, marking arcane glyphs that actually hurt my eyes when I stared at them.
That couldn’t be good.
I swallowed, and started to get the same creepy sensation I had gotten around Magetech. There, things seemed to hide beneath the reflections; here, it was as if something ugly hid under the pattern of rust flakes on the iron beams.
If I had my cell phone, I would have tried to call Dr. Shafran for advice. The little I knew about mazes like this, they usually forced you through the center in order to get out.
The problem was, like ancient Crete, there invariably was something nasty in the center.
However, I didn’t have much choice but to play along.
I followed the path that wasn’t graced by my footprints. I slogged between twisted iron walls that tried to claw their way into my brain. I forced my gaze down, focusing on the path ahead of me. Every heartbeat felt as if the walls would close in and squeeze the life from me, even though in my narrow focus, the path became wider.
Each intersection, I could see one path that did not yet have footprints. Each time I took that fork.
My socks were wet, and every step I had the nasty sense that something was reaching up through the mud and touching the soles of my feet.
“And I was worried about the woods . . .”
I slogged on, following the logic of the untraveled road. The weight of the metal around me became a heavier and heavier pressure on the back of my mind.
Until I came to a dead end.
“Fuck!”
I looked up, and the sky itself was gone. I was in a cavern built of iron scrap. I could see, but the ruddy light was sourceless and nothing cast a shadow. When I turned around, I saw no footprints in the mud behind me.
“Shit. Are you out there?” I shouted. The words hung in the air, echoless. “Someone show themselves!”
The light in the air appeared to pulse. I was breathing hard, the air burning my lungs as badly as it had after I’d run from the griffin. Vertigo gripped me, the dizzying sensation that the world around me was dropping into free fall.
“I want my daughter!”
The glyphs spray-painted on the metal walls around me began to glow. It became harder for me to breathe, the air as thick as the mud swallowing my ankles. I tried to shout again, but the words came out as a wheeze.
The sourceless light slowed its pulsing, dimming to invisibility, leaving only the glowing glyphs surrounding me. The sense of falling continued and I was tumbling in a void, my muscles locked, unable to breathe, only able to see the burning glyphs that were like hot brands stabbing into the back of my skull.
Voices spoke a guttural language other than English. Somehow I understood the unseen speakers.
“The journalist.”
“Yes.”
“He must not be here.”
“He is here.”
“Who does he serve?”
“Who do we serve?”
“He has cost us too much.”
“We have cost him too much.”
“Can he do what we cannot?”
“He will or he will not. Those who look cannot find him here.”
“He will return.”
“When it is done, and all is lost—or won.”
I sucked in a breath, shocking myself awake.
I was behind the wheel of the Lincoln. I was parked on some residential street somewhere. The sky was dark and it was just beginning to snow. I turned the key and the clock on the dash told me it was 10:30.
“What the hell?”
I had blacked out again. It was either another mana overdose, or it was some dwarven security system, or a little of both. I should probably count myself lucky coming through unscathed. I hoped to God I hadn’t endangered my daughter.
No, the demonic bastard wants me. He needs the leverage . . .
I gripped the steering wheel, trying to calm down. Then I realized where I was.
The dwarves were trying to give me a message.
I was parked in front of the late Council President Dominic Mazurich’s house. And on the passenger seat was a key on a St. Christopher key chain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
L
ET it never be said that I can’t take a hint.
Whatever was going on, I was getting the feeling that even if the dwarves weren’t exactly on my side, they weren’t on the side of my daughter’s kidnapper either. Whoever was hiding behind the tarot Devil was at odds with the dwarves themselves.
“What are you doing?”
“It must be fed!”
Perhaps it was Magetech itself. It wouldn’t be the first time a corporate entity took on its own life and started cannibalizing its workers and founders.
Whoever or whatever it was, the dwarves were afraid of even referring to it indirectly. And given what happened to Nina and Teaghue, they had good reason. But it was clear that they didn’t serve that master willingly.
So I made the assumption that I had been parked here to push me in the right direction.
I walked up the driveway to Mazurich’s side door and tried the doorknob. Locked.
I looked for any obvious wards. I didn’t see any, but if this was the house key, the St. Christopher medal was probably keyed to them. Even so, once I unlocked the door I stood and waited.
If any neighbor called the cops, or a warded alarm was tripped, I might get away with misdemeanor trespass if I was outside the house when they showed up. I gave them enough time to show up.
They didn’t.
I let myself into Mazurich’s house. I gagged a little. Death still clung to the air in here, as if an evil rot had sunk into the walls.
I stepped into the darkened house, unclear exactly what I was looking for. I left the lights off. The glass may not have attracted attention, but I wasn’t about to press my luck. I let my eyes adjust until the glare from the streetlights outside was enough for me to navigate by.
I left the kitchen and entered the living room. A sectional couch, coffee table, not much else. Family photos crowded the mantel. Nothing out of the ordinary.
My foot crunched glass.
I knelt down and picked up the remains of a picture frame, a partly torn photograph fell from it. I set down the frame and picked up the damaged picture.
It was a digital shot, the strange ghosting marked it as probably coming from one of the first post-Portal cameras. Given the date on the back, and the subject matter, probably a prototype.
The picture showed Mazurich, Dr. Pretorious, a cluster of dwarves recognizable from their portraits at Magetech HQ, and Mr. Simon Lucas. The tear in the photograph split Lucas in two, and there was a heel print in the center.
I suppose that once suicide was the obvious cause of death, the cops stopped bothering with evidence. And the Democratic party machine, which drove most everything in the county, might have discouraged any close examination of the council president’s connection to Magetech.
However, to be fair, I might just be a lot more comfortable with that kind of conspiracy.
I placed the photo on the mantel and headed upstairs.
Mazurich’s house made me uneasy. It wasn’t squeamishness as much as the look I was getting into Mazurich’s personal life. I knew how much money this man had collected from Magetech. Even if the money was sheltered and hidden, one would expect to see some of that in the man’s home. What someone chooses to spend money on is one of the keys to their character.
Mazurich hadn’t done much of anything. It was almost as if he hadn’t changed anything in the house since he separated from his wife. The impression came from the fact that every room seemed to have broken patterns. Pictures on the wall that formed lopsided, unbalanced designs. Matching end tables in a child’s bedroom, but with no bed between them. Throw rugs on the wall-to-wall carpet arranged around furniture that wasn’t there. Chairs facing blank walls . . .
I knew many, many people who put too much of themselves into their work. I counted myself among them. People whose residential address was little more than a place they went to go to bed. Their homes became shells. This felt worse.
Could a house be worse than soulless?
I wondered if I was suffering from the aftereffects of my ill-fated trip to Whiskey Island.
The master bedroom was the scene of the suicide. Here, the smell of death was the worst. Even though I could see that crime scene cleanup had been through here. The mattress was gone from the bed, leaving the naked box spring, and a large square of the wall-to-wall carpet had been cut away, baring the hardwood floor. In the streetlight glow from the window, there seemed to be a darker spot on the wood. Ink-black and shiny.
I stepped forward and the stain was gone. Some odd reflection, that’s all.
Why am I here? What am I looking for?
I saw the bullet hole. It went into the wall above the headboard. Around it, the wallpaper had been stripped baring the plaster. More attempted cleanup.