Dragons & Dwarves (49 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves
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Dr. Kawata hung up.
“Salt?”
 
I got dressed, trying to remember my interview with Lucas. I couldn’t remember anything past dropping the water glass. However, the sense of unease around the Magetech complex still clung to me like the stale smoke around Columbia Jennings’ office. Every time I thought of Lucas, I felt something sour in the pit of my stomach.
There was something twisted about the guy—and my feelings about him made no objective logical sense whatsoever. Anyone looking at a transcript of my conversation with him wouldn’t see anything but a very cooperative and open interview subject. I knew, because I
had
that transcript. My notebook was covered with my handwriting. Notes I had no memory of jotting down
The guy had no problem answering every question I had, in detail.
“Maybe I was asking the wrong questions?”
The guy was way too open. He was telling me things about Mazurich’s history with Magetech that no sane executive should be stating on the record to a political reporter.
I apparently had a more detailed conversation with Mr. Lucas than I remembered.
However, the highlights were clear from the prelude I could recall. I had conflict of interest in spades, and dollar amounts with enough zeros to give Gregory Washington’s creative auditors an orgasm. The fact that Mazurich’s assets were news to me meant that they were never publicly disclosed.
I flipped through my notes and saw a road map of Mazurich’s secret finances, complete with quotes from Lucas that were marked as being on the record.
“What the hell?”
Lucas was giving me exactly what I should want.
For almost every line, I could think of at least two means of independent verification. With a few hours and a few phone calls, the right questions would have this story ironclad. I could easily reconfirm any quotes with Lucas before running the piece.
And I had a gut feeling that it was all completely accurate.
But that did nothing to dispel the sick sense of wrongness I felt about it all, and about Lucas in particular.
Stories aren’t just handed out like that. And it was almost as if Lucas was intentionally sacrificing Mazurich, the founding father of his company. At the same time, he was allowing a PR catastrophe for Magetech. If I ran with this, people would call for hearings and investigations and . . .
It didn’t make sense.
“
This is why he killed himself.
”
Could it be a smoke screen? Throw something big at the reporter so he doesn’t ask the really troublesome questions?
There was not a single thing in my notes about dwarves. Or zombies.
Or salt.
 
“Nina Johannessen,
Cleveland Press.
”
I sat down on my couch, phone in one hand, cold beer in the other. I pressed the bottle to my forehead and said, “Nina—”
“Kline? Are you okay? You haven’t been at the office.”
“I’ve been working.”
“Something’s wrong.”
I hesitated, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into something like unexpected blackouts with her. Instead, I changed the subject. “You told me you would look into some things for me?”
“Yes.” I heard rustling in the background. “I’ve actually tracked down rumors of dwarven magi. Nothing concrete, but from the sound of it there might actually be that unfocused charm or fetish we were speculating about.”
“What about zombies?”
“Have you heard any stories about a company named Magetech?”
I sat up, almost spilling my beer. “What?”
“Magetech, they have the patents on most Portal-adapted consumer electronics—”
“I know who they are.”
“Well, they’ve been trying to come up with fusions of magic and industrial technology for years.”
“What? Are you saying my zombie—?”
“I can’t find anything matching your description, but there’re stories about Magetech hiring dark magi, necromancers, real left-hand path people for some type of black projects lab.”
“The kind of people who might be reanimating corpses?”
“Your zombie was too decomposed and too active to be an efficient use of mana, unless the metallic components were some sort of superstructure. And the investment in time and energy to create that wouldn’t make sense, unless—”
“Someone was mass-producing it?” I shook my head. “Christ, there’re more of those out there?”
“It could be an R&D project, or I could be drawing the wrong conclusions.”
I shook my head. “No, it makes sense. If this thing was unique, why risk it on a simple B&E?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. I got an uneasy feeling. “Nina, what aren’t you telling me?”
“I don’t know what . . .”
“Please, I smell bullshit for a living. What is it? Did you have another vision?”
Silence. I thought of my dream. The undead rider rising out of the shards of the Magetech complex.
“Is that how you thought to look into Magetech in the first place?”
“You know?”
I looked at the bottle, sweating in my hand. It was shaking. I felt a sick dread growing in my gut.
“What did you see?” I asked, “What did you hear?”
“The Oracle is sometimes unclear—”
“
I saw it, damn it!
” I slammed the bottle on the table in front of me. “I saw Death ride off your tarot card right out of the Magetech complex. I heard my
daughter.
”
“I’m so sorry, Kline. I didn’t want to upset—”
“My
daughter,
Nina. Did you see her in your visions?”
A long painful pause. “Yes.”
“Don’t make me pull this out of you.”
Her voice was shaking. “It could all be symbolic—”
“Cut the crap and tell me.”
“I saw the Devil,” she said, near tears, “and your daughter was in his hand.”
CHAPTER TEN
 
N
INA is probably right, it is all symbolic.
 
Even so, I did call Margaret back to make sure that we were on the same page and that Sarah wasn’t coming anywhere near Cleveland for at least a month. I gave her some lame excuse, because I couldn’t bring myself to say what really concerned me. I told myself that I didn’t want to panic her, but it probably had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t admit that she might be right about this city.
What really worried me was the idea that people who tried to cheat the Oracle tended to end up doing exactly what the ephemeral bitch wanted—from Oedipus to Macbeth.
The fact that both those examples were fictional didn’t comfort me much. In my own life I had a brush with the Oracle that killed the soothsayer, and almost killed me.
All I could really think to do was keep my daughter as far out of the line of fire as possible, and do my job. If someone was about to threaten my daughter, my best course was to try and expose him, her, or it as fast as I could—and something was definitely up with Magetech.
I left my apartment, my hands still unsteady from my blackout and my talk with Nina.
I had one major contact that was wired into the supernatural goings-on in the city. And, while that might all be Nina’s job, I had pretty much reamed her over the phone and I needed a noncon frontational conversation. Now. So I tried calling Dr. Newman Shafran three times as I drove toward Case.
Case Western Reserve University was only about ten minutes’ drive from Shaker Square, and my condo, so I was parking my Volkswagen in the metallic shadow of the Peter B. Lewis Building by six. Dr. Shafran still wasn’t answering.
I couldn’t tell if my growing sense of urgency was some lingering dread from my lost time, or the aftereffects of grilling Nina. I sat behind the wheel and tried taking a few deep breaths.
I made my living with my head and my ability to think clearly. I didn’t like the feeling that someone might be messing with that. Combine my lost time with a supernatural threat against my daughter, and I had lost any real sense of objectivity.
When I got out of the Volkswagen, my destination didn’t help my state of mind.
In the entire history of Cleveland architecture, the Peter B. Lewis Building would be the structure voted most likely to induce migraines and epileptic fits. It was hard to believe that someone managed to have a psyche twisted enough to conceive the thing
before
the Portal opened. My best attempt to describe it would be if Salvador Dalí ate a Silver Surfer comic book, and threw up.
After the Portal opened, it seemed to attract and twist energies so that occasionally the curved metallic shapes would throw out rainbow auras or plasmatic arcs of energy.
It used to house the College of Business Administration, of all things. Nowadays it had been adapted to the study of things more in tune with its surreal outlines.
When I closed the door of my Volkswagen, the metal skin of the building draped me in a crimson blast of static that shaded my vision for more than half a minute. I saw spots in my eyes, one of which resembled a massive dragon descending from the dusk-colored sky.
I blinked a few times and it was gone.
Dr. Shafran wasn’t in his office, and I had to walk the non-Euclidean halls for about half an hour, asking random people where he might be. I was about to give up when someone directed me to one of the subterranean labs.
I walked down a shadowed hallway just in time to hear a small explosion and shattering glass. Having no idea what to expect, I ran down to an open doorway where brownish-green smoke was just beginning to roll across the ceiling.
“No. No.
No.
” I heard a familiar Eastern European accent as I rounded the corner. In front of me were ranks of lab tables with sinks and spigots for gas and oxygen. Two men flanked one of the tables in the middle of the lab; one easily seventy, the other in his early twenties.
On the surface of the table between them, a circle of runes was just fading from glowing yellow to a dull red. As the runes faded, a swirling mass of ugly, foul-smelling smoke rose upward from the table to spill against the ceiling. I heard exhaust fans working overtime to clear it.
In the middle of the fading circle was a pile of ash and broken glass.
“No.” One last time, and Dr. Shafran threw up his hands. The younger man, a grad student I suspected, just looked at the ruins on the table. “This is not your mother’s goulash recipe. Rituals are exact. The patterns must be maintained or the power you mass has no shape.” He slapped the table, making the glass bounce a little. It was an impressive show of force for someone who looked like a German watchmaker and talked like Bela Lugosi.
The student shook his head. “It was a brand-new spell . . .”
“You cannot just throw words on a page or paint on a canvas and call it art!” Dr. Shafran took off his bifocals and pointed them at the student. “You must know the patterns you are changing, or this is all useless.”
“But, sir,”
“Go, study what you just did here, and don’t talk to me until you can explain what it is you did wrong.”
Dr. Shafran stormed toward the door past me, then turned and said, “And clean this up.”
The student looked at me as if he had just noticed I was there. I looked at him, then at Dr. Shafran walking down the hall. I faced him, shrugged, and told him, “Sorry,” before I chased after Dr. Shafran.
“Doctor!” I called after him, running to catch up.
“What?” He sounded a little flustered. Then he turned and looked at me “I know you. Yes. Mr. Kline Maxwell.”
“Yes.”
“I got that grant request, thank you.”
“Huh?”
“Our last conversation, dragons it was. Being quoted in a national story does wonders for the credibility of a scientist in an unpopular discipline.” He waved me forward, toward the elevators. “Apologies for that display,” he said as he gestured back toward the lab, where I could hear the student coughing.

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