Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (7 page)

She let out a breath. “Mikki, I’d be lying if I said I knew 
how
 it was going to make a difference. But I have a feeling it’s going to matter. If it’s too much trouble, forget it.”

“Not at all,” Mikki said. “Three dozen, gilt, no cute designs. I’ll have a word with my source.” He cracked his knuckles and looked at his screen again, where the code continued to pour by.

“When will you be done with the findings on dil’Sorden?” Gelert said.

“At this rate,” Stella said, “no sooner than the day after tomorrow. We’ll call if anything surprising comes up.”

Lee and Gelert said their goodbyes and made their way downstairs again. “You having another of your famous hunches?” Gelert said, as they came down the last escalator.

“You always tell me to trust them…”

“So I do,” Gelert said as he padded out ahead of Lee, into the blazing sun. “So. Lunch first? Then we’ll go check out that nightclub.”

“Right,” Lee said. As they headed across the plaza, she kept losing the brilliance of the day in that image of the dark body-shape falling past her; and as she turned to look over her shoulder, the still, slim shadow stood there by the corner of the building, watched another Alfen go down with his life running out of him, and slowly, unmoved, pulled back out of sight.

The man with the gun we’ll track down soon enough
, Lee thought, not understanding her own anger, half-afraid to try. 
But
 you 
I am going to find with extreme prejudice…and after that, watch out.

*3*

Inside the nightclub it was dim, and dimmer still from the observer’s point of view. Here and there shapes were hunched over tables, pulled into themselves: but not many. A high wailing, like the keening for the dead, filled the air.

At a table near the front of the room, a shape sat by itself. A plate had been pushed off to one side, a crumpled paper napkin lying on it. A glass stood nearby, empty. The dark shape put some banknotes down on the table, some coins too, then got up slowly.

At the door he stood silent, hesitant, for a few moments. Then he pushed the door open. The orange light of the sodium-vapor streetlight outside threw his shadow against the wall near the door, sharp and distinct. He looked out the door, didn’t move for several breaths: then eased out into the evening.

Inside the dark room, no one followed him: no one noticed the door closing again. The keening of the jazz band went on, muted as the song came to a bridging passage.

Outside, to a tracker with keener ears, the music seemed as loud as it had inside, and a waft or confluence of scents from within the club drifted out past the dark shape. The tracker, though, perceived the shape itself also as a tangle of scents and aromas; deathlessness, strangely melded with fear, concern, unease, now moved away from the door, looking down Melrose. A metallic scent as it looked over its shoulder, saw nothing, felt in its pockets for the source of the metal smell—

The second set of scents, present from the beginning but not at the forefront, stronger and coarser than the first set, now slipped out of a doorway farther down the street and presented itself fully to the night.

The smell of gunpowder, blasting cap, barrel oil, pierced the dark air like a knife. The small grating sound of a footstep on the sidewalk alerted no one: but then sharp in the darkness, unmistakable, came the sound of the shotgun cocking. That sound lanced through the first tangle of scents like a missed heartbeat, made it turn, look behind, then break into a run, slide, go wide around the corner, vanish around it. The scents of gun and quiet enjoyment went after the smell of fear, fast, not afraid, anticipating. Then came the crash of the gun firing. And the second crash. Satisfaction, amusement, and the need to hurry, spread on the air. They faded away down Eighteenth Street, into darkness folding itself in on darkness, as scents of alarm, shock, surprise spread down the street after; and in the midst of them, in one spot, the smell of blood, of death, made itself all there was in that place—all there would be for a long time.

Then came the strange thing, the impossible thing: a scent that simply came from nowhere. The tracker always has a hint of every scent first—faint, then increasing until in full presence, then decreasing again to nothing. But this one drew itself as abruptly across the air as a trumpet note. Another scent of deathlessness stood at the corner, looking down Eighteenth Street at death. Its composure was not complete. Scorn lay on the air, and frustration. Yet it was pleased, for this was one more of several things that had needed to occur for some time. Soon the list would have been completed, and other things, even more final, could be brought about. Satisfaction filled the thinker, colder than that of the tangle of scents which had held the gun and pulled the trigger.

And abruptly as a trumpet note that does not fade, but simply ceases, the scent of satisfied deathlessness was gone.

Lee leaned back in her chair and let out a long breath. “That’s the third time I’ve run through it,” she said, turning her back on her commwall, “and I still don’t understand it.”

“You think I do?” Gelert said from his own office.

The wall between their offices was down. It was after seven in the evening. Mass had gone home for the day, and the two of them were going through the recordings of their “sniff” of the Vida Loca nightclub scene.

“Lee,” Gelert said, “I’m telling you that that perception is of someone simply 
vanishing
. Not going away, not walking off. Simply not being where they were anymore.”

“And they do that how?” Lee said, getting up and starting to pace. It was her third outbreak of pacing for the evening, most unusual for her. “These are 
Elves
 we’re talking about here, Gel, not the Tooth Fairy! They don’t just fizzle out into nothing, any more than you or I do. The DA sees that attached to a prosecution case, he’s going to throw it out. Or us, on the grounds that one or the other of us has taken leave of our senses.”

“Or both,” Gelert said. “You’re going to have to review your own perception of that angle, and you don’t like the idea much, do you?”

She didn’t bother answering, because he was right. “Lee, stop stonewalling,” Gelert said. “If we both see it, then—somehow—it happened. Whether we like it or not! It’s both our business to perceive the truth, and we’re both good at it. So stop assuming I’ve had some kind of brain failure. Assume that I smelled what I smelled. How do we explain it?”

“I can’t,” Lee said.

“So for the moment let’s concentrate on what we can explain, and leave the inexplicable to the DA: it’ll be his problem anyway, once discovery is over. Let’s take it all from the top.”

Lee leaned back, and Gelert brought up the image of Omren dil’Sorden that appeared in his ExTel personnel file. “So here he is,” Gelert said. “Born in the Alfen equivalent of Rio de Janeiro, birth date sometime in the 1970s if the computer is converting correctly between our dating systems. Standard educational history—taught at home until seven, fostered out to a relative on his mother’s side in exchange for her own son, educated at what passes for a public elementary school and then a fast-track private secondary—”

Lee turned to her own commwall. Gelert had already brought the precis up on it, and the “long” version of the data was flowing by in a larger window to one side. A name stopped her. “Laurin—” She blinked.

“Wait a minute. The 
Elf-King
 was on his school’s board of governors?”

“Don’t get excited. Apparently he’s on all of them. There’s some ceremonial connection—I think the Laurin is supposed to be ‘patron of learning’ for all Alfen children, directly or indirectly. Even private schools get a lot of funding from the central government, such as it is, in Aien Mhariseth—Geneva, as we would think of it. Except it’s not Geneva; it’s somewhere in the Dolomites instead. An imperfect congruence.”

Lee nodded, went on to the other data. “University afterward,” Gelert said, “at Mehisbon, which corresponds to our Chicago. Another government-funded school, this one like the Sorbonne: strong on physical sciences and art.”

“Interesting conjunction.”

“Not for Elves: they don’t see them as separate. Dil’Sorden took a joint degree in computer sciences and economics. Afterward he did some postgrad study in intra-universal economics at their version of Columbia, which strangely enough is a religious school in Alfheim.”

That made Lee blink. “What religion?”

“I wondered about that myself. It’s some local sect that worships a deity called Alma Mater—a variant on Herself, to judge by the name. The mainstream Alfen faiths consider this one kind of flaky, I take it, but their schools are highly thought of…Then dil’Sorden took an interim year—got a medium-access visa for Xaihon and planethopped in their space for a while, the usual ex-student stuff. When he got back, someone headhunted him for ExTel. And there he’s been ever since, working like crazy. Six promotions since he came.”

Lee shook her head. She touched her desktop and brought up once again the list of dil’Sorden’s projects at ExTel. “There’s a thought,” she said, as the characters flowed by under the surface of the desk. “Did he get promoted over someone’s head? Does someone hold a grudge?”

“Worth looking into.”

The project descriptions kept flowing by. Lee shook her head again. “I keep running into these references to fairy gold all through his proposals,” she said. “FG network lattices, FG core bindings…”

“Why wouldn’t you?” Gelert said. “Without a room-temperature superconductor, you’ve got no broadband comms, no high speed computers. No interstellar travel, no intersystem spacing, no gating facilities…”

That brought Lee’s head around. “Oh, come on now, there was gating before there was fairy gold. How did our version of MacIlwain break through to his first alternate universe, otherwise?”

“By accident. And supercooling. Lady of the Hunts, Lee, imagine what it must have been like. Liquid nitrogen everywhere: it’s a wonder the poor man didn’t wind up as an ice cube. But you can’t tune an accelerator ring predictably for interdimensional location without fairy gold for the inner winding on the dees. Without superconductor winding, there’s no telling which world out of seven you’d wind up in once you walked through a patent gate locus. Think how long it took poor MacIlwain to duplicate his results! That was the first thing Earth secured through Huictilopochtli when the two worlds came into phase again: the tuning technology, and enough fairy gold to make one gate that could be counted on, in phase or out. The Alfen even donated it.” Gelert grinned, a predator’s look. “So altruistic of them. They knew they were getting yet another universe’s worth of customers for their most expensive export…”

“I should do some more reading on this,” Lee said, mournful. She had been hoping to avoid it.

“You should.” Gelert grinned at her, shaking his ears until they flapped. “Instead of dancing around technology the way you dance around the tarantulas in my driveway. Sometimes I think your mother was frightened by a math textbook.”

“Sometimes I think 
your
 mother was a—”

“Now, now.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not, so don’t say you are. You’ve been bad-tempered for the last month or so, but you’ve had an excuse, and you’ll get over it. It’s not interfering with work, anyway, which is the important thing.”

They were quiet for a few moments. Lee looked up at her commwall again and watched the list of dil’Sorden’s next five years of planned projects go spilling by: work he would never now do. “You know what I keep coming back to?” Lee said.

“What?”

“Hagen,” she said. “Why he’s so antsy about this murder being ‘cleared up’—I assume he means solved—in such a hurry. Though I understand your explanation about the markets perfectly well.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Gelert said. “Lee, I know it sounds dumb…but the markets always do overreact, and ExTel in particular has been waiting for this particular set of circumstances for a long time. Hagen’s boss was offered any number of golden parachutes over the last few years, attached to fat offers from other companies, and he refused them. He was waiting for the antitrust case to end, waiting to be the president of the biggest multiuniversal comms corporation in town. Now 
this
 happens. Naturally it feels like a thorn in his paw, and he wants it out. We’re just the tool that’s nearest to hand.” He grinned at her. “Your fault for being so good on that job six months ago.”

“Thanks so much,” Lee muttered.

“So here’s dil’Sorden,” Gelert said. “By all accounts a team player, a nice guy, well liked by his fellow employees, good performance ratings. Up to his ears in profitable work, stock options—”

“Do we know that?”

“It’s a commonplace at his level of employment. We should probably ask Hagen for access to dil’Sorden’s workspace to confirm it.”

“You think he’d give us that?” Lee said.

“If he’s really so hot about wanting this case ‘solved,’ let’s dangle the suggestion in front of him tomorrow,” Gelert said. “The worst he can do is tell us to go chase our tails…Anyway, dil’Sorden’s not hurting. Nice apartment, nice car, all the perks. But when we see him for the first time ourselves—he’s down. Upset, would you have said?”

Lee closed her eyes and replayed her recording of her “sniff’ of the inside of the nightclub. “Yes,” she said. “Depressed. Extremely anxious about something he suspected was about to happen. Not the murder: something else, in the near but not immediate future.”

“I concur. He goes outside with his mind on that trouble ahead of him. Then turns around, sees the guy with the gun—”

“And thinks, ‘I never thought they’d go 
this
 far.’ ”

“I concur again. That’s certainly how I read it. But this is stuff that I don’t think a jury is going to be able to hear with you from your recording. It goes by awful fast in mine. If you can catch it more clearly when you run the site one last time—”

“All I can do is try,” Lee said. “Truth is out there. All we have to do is catch her.”

“If possible. These impressions are very general at the moment: they don’t lead anywhere specific.” Gelert lay back on his pad and stretched, long legs waving in all directions before he came upright again and lay there looking like an oversize statue of an albino Anubis. “So. A human lies in wait for dil’Sorden, shoots him, and escapes. An Elf watches, and leaves. And dil’Sorden was half expecting it. Why? What has he done wrong? Or done right, after which he can’t be allowed to live longer? What has he 
not
 done that he was supposed to do?”

They both sat with the thought for a while. “Too soon to know,” Lee said. “But this was no accident: no mugging that went wrong. It was him they meant to kill… And you’re right about his computer workspace. I’ll ask Hagen tomorrow morning, after I sniff the site again.”

“How many more runs on it do you think we have?”

“One each,” Lee said. “There won’t be much left to read afterward. But I’m going to milk my last run for all it’s worth.” Once again she saw it, that shadow by the corner, watching, satisfied, gone.

“You always were stubborn,” Gelert said, getting up and stretching again.

“It takes over where smart runs out,” Lee said, “and sometimes it’s worth more. Let’s go get some supper.”

*

Lee was in early the next morning, earlier even than Mass, which she knew was going to cause some teasing: but she didn’t care. She spoke to the alarm system, had it bring the lights and office services online, and went back to the coffee room to make herself a cup of something strong. The shadow by the corner building had kept her awake for a long time, and when she’d finally slept, she’d gotten no good out of it.