Nocturnal (episode n. 1) (6 page)

«You're going to pay for this Manda. Dearly.»

He jumped down the chair and left his office, telling his men he was going without even stopping by.

He quickly reached the deposit and barked «Two-seater, and fast» to the agent in charge, who stood staring for a second, with an astonished look on his face.

Shim Stonehand was a detective, had all permits needed to ask for a vehicle at any time. Of course this wasn't what troubled the keeper. The point was that, as far as anyone could remember, Shim had never, for any reason, asked for one.

A scowl from the detective shook the agent from his torpor and urged him to give the dwarf a small light-blue roll, looking like a rolled-up gym mat. Shim took it, murmuring something unintelligible, then left and went to the roof.

There he unrolled the mat, which lazily fell to the floor, and sit on it, struggling to find a position he deemed fit. Finally, he knelt, bent forward and put the palms of his hands on the mat as well.

«There, go old trap!» Nothing happened.

He sighed again. He knew that was not how it worked, but that would have been more satisfying.

Without saying a word, he focused on the latex rectangle under him, which suddenly seemed to stiffen and then started floating at a few centimeters from the rooftop.

Shim swallowed hard, then directed the carpet towards the sky.

Even though he knew there was no way he could fall, he felt the need of something to grip.

He sincerely hoped that all that was going to help preventing Amanda from getting herself killed. So he could kill her himself later for forcing him to fly to her rescue. He had always thought that if gods had wanted dwarfs to fly, they would have been born with wings.

The address Shim had given her wasn't very far from Kate's, even though it was in the opposite direction than her home. However she was sure that Shim wasn't really expecting her to keep a promise he had forced her to make in such a way. Or did he? No, he knew her too well to believe such a thing.

Once she was there, she found herself in front of a building which had seen better times. It didn't look like someone could really live in there. Did Shim gave her false information?

She walked anyway into the narrow path, leading to an abandoned-looking courtyard and towards the front of a short and stocky building, which scraped walls looked like they could crumble down at any moment. No, Shim didn't lie to her. If he had wanted to send her looking for nothing, he would have made sure not to chose such a bad place.

The doorway of the building seemed to be a slab of rust kept together by good will. In spite of this, it was closed.

Amanda tried to open it and it shrieked like a badly slaughtered beast. Then it gave way all at once, turning around a few degrees in a rain of brittle red chips. Amanda pushed once again, to no avail. It seemed it wasn't going to move any more. She had to crawl between the door and the frame, trying to press herself as much as she could to the latter. Her pullover got stuck several times, getting unthreaded and rust-covered in places. After that, it was going straight to the garbage can.

Finally she succeeded and was able to see that the inside of the building wasn't any better than the outside. An almost nauseating smell of mold owned the small atrium. A mix of water and plaster fell at regular times from the ceiling, and the walls where patched with an odd white hairy thing creating weird patterns.

On one side there was the shaft of a lift. The crystal which made it work was in place. Unlit. She didn't even try to make it work, the last thing she needed was trying to go upstairs and finding out too late that there was power enough only to go halfway, seeing the disc disappear from under her feet and going back to the bottom floor in the fastest and less healthy of ways.

So she accepted the fact that she had to use stairs, and soon she was at the door of the flat she was trying to reach.

No one answered when she knocked. No kind of noise was coming from inside. She hadn't gotten there just to give up at the first sign of trouble, though. She knocked again and again with no better result, then she bent to examine the lock. She wasn't a professional at lock picking, but she knew some things to be used in case of need, and she didn't really think that such an old and decadent place could have worthy locks. Actually, she didn't even have to try anything: as soon as she leaned on the door for a closer look, it clicked with a metallic noise and opened, almost making her fall face first inside.

«Mr. Marsten?» she heard herself calling, not sure why. If that man was hiding somewhere with all but good intentions, for sure he wasn't going to mellow up just because she was calling him, neither he was going to wait if he was trying to slope off.

The inside of the flat was barely better than all the rest. Maybe a little cleaner, for sure a little tidier. The smell wasn't any better though. A mixture of less-than-pleasant fragrances impregnated it. It was the smell of a house that didn't intake fresh air very often, but not just that. There was a nauseating sweet smell, that only partly covered not less disgusting stinks, and a background aroma that she could only identify as "smell of sex".

The main room was a small dinette, containing a table with a single chair, some suspended cupboards and a small stove. A closet was almost completely opened, at its feet a small heap of rotten food, piled as if someone had forcibly pushed it out. The crystal of the closet hadn't been reloaded in a while, obviously, and it had expelled its contents. If there had been more things inside, there would have been food all over the room. Then again, someone who kept a lot of food in store was usually not so careless with reloading.

Amanda went through the room more carefully than she really needed to. No one could have been hiding in there, unless he was extremely small or invisible, in which case no amount of care could help her anyway.

She opened the door dividing that room from the rest of the house, and entered a small, smelling bedroom. Her attention was inevitably drawn by the owner of the house, lying naked on something that, with a good dose of optimism, could have been called a bed. Even at that distance she could see his lost gaze, which left her no doubt about the fact that he wasn't really sleeping.

There was Kate's dead magician.

She quickly looked around. The room was almost empty. Two doors on opposite sides lead to a little bathroom and a wardrobe respectively. They were both ajar and it was quite unlikely that someone was hiding inside, unless they were right behind one of the doors themselves. In that case, anyway, they wouldn't have been able to get out without closing the door and then opening it again, which would have left her plenty of time to react as needed. Her mind simply refused the idea that someone could be hidden under the bed.

She approached the corpse quietly and touched his neck with two fingers to make sure he was actually dead. The contact wasn't pleasant. His skin was saggy and vaguely wet, and even though it hadn't yet started to decay, it didn't seem like it would take much longer.

The expression on his face was that mixture of tiredness and pleasure typical of someone who has just experienced a very fulfilling sexual encounter, at least from his point of view.

There weren't any wounds or signs on the body, nothing that could explain his death. She carefully searched it for byte marks, though she didn't think she would find any. Even as he was, he looked too rosy to be the victim of a vampire.

Kate had mentioned an out-of-control summoning, but what could kill a man like that?

There was a picture trying to take shape in her head, too misty to give her an answer. Still an answer had to exist, and it shouldn't be too far.

A magician would never part from his tools, and unless that particular magician had another place in which he performed his spells – and seeing the place he lived in, that was at least unlikely – she should have found them in the flat.

She went to the wardrobe. No one jumped out from behind the door, which pleased her.

Inside there were a few clothes and a ceremonial tunic, easily the best-kept item in the whole house. A shelf housed some books, a few jars and a box like the ones normally used to keep plied shirts. She was already reaching out to take the tomes when she realized what she was doing and stopped still. No worthy magician would ever leave his spellbooks without any kind of protection, and the fact that she didn't see any was just another reason to be sure there were. She had to call Shim and ask him to go there with an expert. Provided there was still time for that.

She opened her bag, thrust one hand inside, and just then the window of the room exploded, hurling glass shards all around. Amanda screamed, jumped backward and knocked her head against the back wall of the wardrobe, fortunately shielded by the clothes inside.

She couldn't imagine what could have been of her if she hadn't been in there. Then again, she thought looking at the body on the bed – turned into a weird kind of hedgehog by the shards sticking out of his flesh – she could imagine it all too well.

She risked to look out, barely poking out from her relatively safe place. A twisted metal sheet had appeared just below the windowsill, after coming in through the glass. She couldn't understand what it was, but she had no trouble understanding how he had gotten there. For that, she only had to listen to the icy howling of the wind coming through the window. She'd never heard anything like that, and it seemed to get louder and stronger by the minute.

She thought she felt a slight vibration under her feet. Was it possible that the building couldn't stand the wind blasts? Maybe not... or more likely yes, considering its conditions. Anyway, she really had no intention to stay there and find it out by herself.

CHAPTER 7

She ran down the stairs as if her life was at stake, which might actually be the case as far as she knew.

Once in the atrium, she found out that the wind had succeeded where she had failed, and now the rusted door was wide open and almost unhinged. Chilly blasts swept away the dust, howling like hungry wolves.

Amanda launched herself toward the doorway, only to be pushed back by the wind. She had to grasp the frame of the door not to fall down, and pull herself out with the strength of her arms, but once there the situation got no better. She found herself pushed against the wall, breathless, and for an endless instant she thought she was going to suffocate, until she was able to turn her head and finally breathe again.

Obviously she wasn't going anywhere like that. She thought that maybe it would have been better to go back in, and at least make use of the feeble protection of those unstable walls. She was about to do that when a crash from within drew her attention, as a large chunk of plaster fell down from the roof, filling the atrium of a whitish cloud, quickly dissolved by the wind.

What was better? Being carried away by the wind or buried alive in an abandoned building? Hard choice.

The small but strong arm that caught her from under an armpit, lifting her bodily, startled her. Her scream got lost in the wind at first, then could clearly be heard when she was suddenly flung into a little quiet oasis.

«Stop shouting or I push you back down», a very familiar voice grunted. Amanda turned to see Shim scowling at her. In spite of the constant whistle of the wind all around, his voice had reached her clearly, thanks to the invisible bubble which surrounded the carpet, shielding them from the awful weather.

«I thought you hated flying», she said, confused, surprised, but most of all happy to see him there.

«I hope you will still remember when I tell you what I think of this bravado of yours», he replied. «Now we have to go away from here quickly.»

He was right. Flying carpets where enchanted so that they protected their passengers against bad weather conditions, but they weren't designed to fly in an hurricane, and soon the protection would fade out, considering the hard challenge it was facing.

«Were are we going?» she asked.

«Central!» he replied quickly before concentrating again on piloting.

They raised, even though all but steadily. The carpet was violently flung around, and even though its magic kept them on board, it looked like they could be thrown away at any moment, so much that Amanda flattened herself as much as possible on it, as if this could somehow protect her from what was happening. Around them, the hurricane unleashed its fury. She didn't think she'd ever seen something like that in her life.

Rain had started pouring, and now the wind was pushing towards them compact bodies of water which looked almost like waves. The carpet seemed to be floating in water rather than flying, like an odd surfboard facing higher waves than it had been designed for.

The sky was black, engulfed by clouds crowding together like people trying to conquer the front line in the audience of a concert, though the show they wanted to see was quite different.

A violent blast almost made the carpet topple over, and left Amanda wondering what would happen if it did. She didn't think the magic would be of any help against gravity in that case, and probably they would crash on the street below, or maybe be flung away by the wind alone.

Shim looked calm and self-assured. In truth he was just entirely focused on what he was doing, all of his efforts taken by the task of keeping the carpet steady and preventing the contents of his stomach to come back the way it had gone in. He would have cut a very poor figure if he had retched, but most of all he wasn't sure he could be able to pilot and vomit at the same time, and it was this thought which helped him the most to keep his last lunch down.

«There!»

Amanda's scream drew his attention on a dark shape moving towards them. He pulled up the carpet abruptly, just in time to avoid a door which must have been stripped away from some house and was now floating freely, waiting to crash against something or someone. He heard a muffled thump as it hit the rear edge of the carpet, which steered unexpectedly and almost made him lose control. The air was getting wet even in there, and some raindrops were already pushing their way through the barrier, a clear sign that it was about to stop existing at all.