“That’s why I look like this. I went to him first for supplies, but when we were making a deal last night, a group of dark mages torched his warehouse with us still inside. I got out, but Benny… sorry, I know you liked him.”
Jay didn’t cry again, but he stared at the stained carpet like he didn’t even see it. “I told him he should get out,” he said softly. “But he said it would be okay. That I should leave, because of the bounty, that it was getting too hot for me here. But he wouldn’t go himself.”
I put an arm around his bony, hunched shoulders. “I thought you’d have heard. The warehouse went up like a Roman candle.”
“No. I ran out of stock around midnight and dropped by a place, got some Chinese.” I hoped he meant takeout. He saw my expression before I could hide it. “Mu-shu pork!” he told me indignantly. “And then I came back here.”
“Well, I’m sorry I had to be the one to tell you.”
“I’m glad you did.” This was said with a note of unusual—for him—resolution. “I’m glad I didn’t leave sooner.” He hopped up from the bed and hefted the suitcase. “There’s something I need to do before I go. Something for Benny!”
I grabbed his arm. “That’s great and all, Jay, but you’re forgetting—I need some information.”
“Don’t worry,” he assured me, throwing his remaining possessions haphazardly in the already stuffed case. “I’m going to do more than tell you where you can find those bastards. I’m going to show you!”
That’s how I came, three hours later, to be leading a bunch of motley-looking trolls, demons and a few humans—mostly friends and ex-employees of Benny’s—toward a boarded-up bowling alley in a bad part of town. I really hoped this plan wasn’t as psychotic as it sounded, but for once at least it wasn’t mine. Jay had dragged me to see Benny’s secretary, a large female Bergtroll, or mountain troll, named Olga. She had a broad nose shaped like a squashed mushroom and an impressive golden beard, and her tiny eyes were still red from crying. After hearing our proposition, she had grabbed her battle-ax and her Rolodex and started organizing some payback. I’d spent several hours feeling pretty useless, waiting for the troops to assemble and some semblance of a plan to be formed, although Olga did show me to her bathroom, where I managed to get most of the blood off.
Once everyone assembled, the pace started to pick up, and so much swearing, weapons waving and mage bashing had been going on that I hadn’t actually heard the plan. I just intended to grab whatever I could while the troops took the mages apart, assuming vice versa didn’t prove to be true. In my own defense, I did try to talk them out of it, but the lynch-mob mentality had taken over and there wasn’t much I could do. Olga had merely crushed me to her enormous bosom and promised to see that no one hurt me. I grabbed a couple of knives and a .44 automatic out of Benny’s office equipment and silently returned the sentiment.
It was almost funny, as our crew of forty or so pissed-off amateurs and a few gimlet-eyed professionals surrounded the small buff building. “Stay behind me, small one,” Olga said, then eschewed subtlety to bash in the door with her ax.
The rest of the crew took their lead from her and made doors for themselves through windows, service hatches and, in the case of one particularly large mountain troll, a brick wall. I followed Olga in as soon as her considerable girth managed to squeeze through the door. It was a bit of a letdown to realize that the building was empty. Even worse, it had the feel of a place that had been so for a while. No electricity lit the overhead lights, a fine layer of dust coated everything and the only discernible odor was a faint reek from the rows of red and blue shoes behind a low counter.
I leaned against one of the concrete block walls and watched the mob take the place apart. “No one here,” Olga said, squinting about with her inadequate eyes. I doubted she could see very well despite the numerous holes that had been knocked in the place, letting in midday light, but her sense of smell was probably as good as mine and I didn’t smell anyone.
“Should we tell them?” I asked, lighting up.
“No, let them have fun.” She hopped up on the counter, which groaned slightly under her weight, and watched the destruction. “What you think?” she demanded when I didn’t comment.
I closed my eyes and mentally filtered out the smell of weed, mildewed pleather and sweaty troll. A faint but discernible trace of stale air wafted to me from somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes. “I was wondering what’s behind all the shoes.”
Olga hefted her ax and swung around to face the collection. She cleaved the center section clean in two. “That,” she said helpfully.
I regarded the set of stairs going down into bare earth with disapproval. I hate dark staircases, especially when I know I won’t like what I’ll find at the other end. I glanced at Olga. “It might be better if we don’t try to take everyone down. Don’t want anyone blocking the exit.”
She nodded and called a huge troll over. He had on a pair of jeans, which surprised me, since I hadn’t known they made them in that size, but no shoes. I caught myself staring at his knobby feet, which had the usual number of toes for a troll—three—and made myself stop. “Wait here,” she told him sternly. “Don’t let others pass. If we not back in half an hour, come down and kill everything.”
He grunted, which I had trouble deciphering, but Olga apparently understood. No one else appeared to have noticed us, which wasn’t surprising considering that the demons were setting the red pleather booths on fire and the trolls had started throwing bowling pins through the unlit beer signs. Their aim was pretty lousy, but there were a lot of pins, and the resounding crashes and tinkles of glass seemed to amuse them. Troll bowling.
I turned to Olga. “There’s no chance in hell anyone down there doesn’t know we’re coming. Let’s take a quick peek, but if I tell you to run back up the stairs, you do it, no arguments. Okay?”
“You funny little woman,” she said, and started down the stairs. I sighed and followed.
I have better-than-human eyesight in the dark, but even I couldn’t see much on those stairs. I don’t doubt that Olga was completely blind, but she never faltered. Trolls aren’t exactly graceful, but they have a low center of gravity for climbing around mountains and fjords, so I figured I was more likely to fall than she was. Luckily for me, four hundred pounds of troll stood between me and whatever was down there, something I found vaguely comforting.
When we finally ran out of stairs, we found ourselves in a tunnel carved out of the local sandstone. It looked like some of the deeper areas of MAGIC—those the vamps preferred to the upper levels belonging to the mages—except for the claustrophobically low ceiling. There was only the faint illumination from the stairway to guide us, and I couldn’t see a candle or lantern lying about, which was odd in a place even infrequently used.
Olga and I changed positions, after I explained that I might have more luck detecting the various nasty surprises a group of dark mages could have left for us, but she chafed at my pace. Drac had taken my key ring and its charms along with everything else, but I compensated somewhat by scattering clumps of dirt ahead of us to see if any obvious traps had been left. Nothing happened—not even a minor early-warning ward sizzled—which made me steadily more nervous as we progressed. It didn’t help that the farther we went from the stairs, the harder it was even for me to see anything.
Because of the almost nonexistent light, I found the rockfall by running into it. Olga plowed into me and I got a mouth full of sandstone dust before we sorted ourselves out. So this was why nothing had tried to stab, incinerate or crush us on the way in.
“Rockfall,” I said, spitting. “There must be another way in, on the other side.”
“Yes, but where?” Olga asked sensibly, pushing me to one side. “We go through here.” With sheer brute strength, she hacked her way into the blockage, clearing a path twice as wide as me through a six-foot-deep pile of rocks and dirt. Even at my best, it would have taken me thirty minutes or more of hard labor to make that hole; she managed it in about two. I made another mental note: avoid wrestling trolls.
When I stopped choking on clouds of dust, I found that I could see again. Olga’s patient expression was visible in the light of a nearby lantern tucked into a nook. It threw hard shadows on the walls, showing us a wide, innocent-looking stretch of corridor that I didn’t trust at all. The mages might have caused the fall to block off a vulnerable entrance, but any regularly used areas were going to be guarded by someone or something. And since these were dark mages, it would probably be something lethal.
“We’re going to have to be more careful from now on,” I told Olga, who gave me an impatient look. I noticed that she had her ax in hand, and nodded. We were on the same page.
It took us almost ten minutes of very cautious movement to get to the large cavern at the end of the hall. But maybe ten seconds after we entered, I got two big clues as to why nothing had grabbed us. A complex ward called the Shroud of Flame leapt up behind us, blocking the way back, and a wall of emotion hit me so hard that it literally knocked me off my feet.
The sensations were familiar, and highly unwelcome. So was the scene that accompanied them, superimposed over the real one like a movie shown on a see-through screen. I could still see the cavern, but most of my attention was caught by the images of my past that flickered and changed in front of me. It was like someone had accessed the part of my memory labeled “good riddance” and was doing a top-ten most-hated-events countdown. Only it seemed they were starting with number one.
A dark-haired child woke up in a nest of blankets next to a fire. It was summer, so there was no need to sleep inside one of the cramped wagons, which always smelled of body odor and garlic, in the surrounding circle. The only others up at this hour were two camp dogs worrying something near the edge of the clearing. The girl threw off her blankets and smoothed her clothes before going to see what it was. The food was usually hung from tree limbs to keep animals out of it, but sometimes a rope would break, and she knew she’d catch hell if the dogs were eating the smoked ham they had acquired at the last village. I wanted to scream at her to run and not look back, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. She couldn’t hear me, and even if she could, she was far too stubborn to listen. Then or now, I thought as my eyes followed her small form toward the two large dogs.
The shaggy gray creatures were part wolf—wild, half-feral things, kept around by more food than they could scavenge, and used to scare off interlopers. They were about as far from domesticated as they could get, but it had never occurred to her to consider them dangerous. Dogs of any kind don’t usually bite the hand that feeds them, but Dili, named after the fact that he had never been quite right in the head, was gnawing on something that looked a lot like a human arm. Baro, his huge mate, had something in her mouth, too, which a beam of early-morning sunlight showed clearly as the head of a middle-aged, bearded man.
The girl screamed then, at the sight of Tsinoro, leader of their
kumpania,
being breakfast for dogs. She screamed for quite a while before she realized that no one
was coming out of the brightly painted wagons littering the small clearing. Her cries would have raised the deaf, much less a company of people used to reacting quickly to any sign of trouble. She should have been able to sense immediately why no one had come—her sense of smell was good enough to discern the miasma of blood and feces that radiated out of the small wagons even without her entering them—but she wasn’t thinking clearly. Wasn’t, in fact, thinking at all, being in a panic to find someone, anyone, still breathing.
She ran to the nearest wagon, one of the largest since it belonged to Lyubitshka, the
chovexani
of the clan, who was respected for the power of her magic. But it quickly became obvious that it had not been strong enough to help her this time. The girl stared at the mutilated body of the most powerful person she knew, and began to shake. She was afraid, not only that whatever had killed the wise woman would come for her, as well, but also because Lyubitshka had yelled at her just the day before for tearing a hole in her favorite blouse when laundering it, and now there was no way to obtain forgiveness. Having someone so strong go into the spirit world angry with you was the worst thing her young mind could imagine. Lyubitshka would make a powerful muló, a vengeful spirit that returned to seek out those who had wronged it in life
.
After stumbling down the steps of Lyubitshka’s wagon and looking wildly around for the angry
muló,
the girl went a bit mad. She ran to throw open the doors of each wagon, but found only more corpses inside. After her increasingly panicked investigation proved that she and the dogs were the only living things left in the
kumpania,
she collapsed near the fire, exhausted, tearstained and shivering in shock. Even after her natural resilience kicked in
to calm her slightly, she didn’t bother to wash herself or even look for salvageable items to pack. She was not so young that she didn’t know the proper way to treat the dead, and there was no one else to do it.
I watched her dig a pit in the middle of the clearing, to which she dragged each body after wrapping it in a blanket to avoid handling it directly and risking
marimé,
or uncleanness. They should have been dressed in their best clothes, but there was so much blood, and some were not even whole anymore, that she didn’t know where to start making them presentable. She arranged the bodies in the hole, and piled on top of them their extra clothes, jewelry, tools and best dinnerware as custom required. There was no beeswax to use to close their nostrils and prevent an evil spirit from entering them, but considering how many wounds most of them had, she doubted the spirits would find animating these bodies very useful
.
As she piled earth on top of the heap of the dead, she sobbed for them, even those who had considered her unclean because of her parentage. They had been her family, or as much of one as she had ever known. And now they were gone. Sweat and dirt mixed with her tears, and her nose started to run, but she didn’t wipe it away. She wasn’t finished yet
.