Authors: S. Andrew Swann
Dragons & Dwarves (46 page)
I wondered if something like that would be enough to interest the FBI. Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. While there was a thriving industry of black market mages around town, the nature of the crime made it inherently local. The nature of the radiation through the Portal meant that those mages’ influence stopped outside the boundaries of northeast Ohio. The Feds tended to be more interested in things that might leave the state.
She shook her head. “No, it makes more sense if someone else cast the circle—maybe he met with someone besides his killer?”
“That’s as plausible as anything else I have . . .”
“Now you sound unsure.”
“If there was someone besides his killer around, why aren’t there two bodies?” I shook my head. “Not enough information. Can you tell me anything about zombie-boy?”
“That name seems an accurate description, flesh animated by some necromancer—but there are some oddities about it.”
“Only some?”
“The more decayed a body is, the more energy is required simply to have it move. Your zombie not only moves quickly, but shows more strength than I’d expect in even a freshly animated corpse. What you describe is certainly not fresh. And the wires and metal you describe are completely new to me.”
“Any idea what the wires might be for?”
“A framework? A matrix to focus additional power? Armor, perhaps.”
I wondered if she was intentionally referencing the Death trump.
She kept looking at her notes. “I can do some research on both of those. Find out if there are some magically plausible explanations I haven’t thought of.”
“Thanks.”
She reached out and touched my hand. “Please, be careful.”
“I always am,” I lied.
I hadn’t gotten out of the office before my extension rang. My mind was still churning with images of Death, the Devil, and the Tower when I answered.
A familiar voice told me, “My office, Maxwell. Now.”
My boss, Columbia Jennings, wasn’t the Devil, but she could give the witches from
Macbeth
a run for their money. She lorded it over the Metro editor’s desk from an office filled with a chain-smoking haze, and if anyone ever had the balls to tell her this was a nonsmoking building, I hadn’t heard of it.
Macbeth
a run for their money. She lorded it over the Metro editor’s desk from an office filled with a chain-smoking haze, and if anyone ever had the balls to tell her this was a nonsmoking building, I hadn’t heard of it.
When I walked into her office she looked at me and shook her head. “First off, don’t shut off your cell phone while you’re working. It makes me feel like you’re avoiding me.”
“What?” I pulled out my phone. “I didn’t—” I looked at it and the screen was dark. Apparently I had. “Damn it. This thing’s been acting up all day.”
“Fix it.”
I nodded.
“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“I had that feeling.”
“Shut the door.”
When I did, she asked me, “Now, do you mind telling me how a story on the Washington mayoral campaign became involved with the SPU, a ritual murder, and the trashing of a crime scene?”
I shrugged. “Things got a little sidetracked.”
“I gather.”
“The dwarf was trying to pass me some information before he was killed. I’m just trying to follow up on it.”
“Information about the Washington campaign?”
“Ah, no.”
“What, then?”
I hesitated a bit before I said, quietly, “Mazurich.”
“I didn’t quite hear that.”
“Mazurich, damn it. The dwarf claimed he knew the motive behind his suicide.”
Columbia rolled her eyes at me. “I didn’t figure you for chasing conspiracy theories.”
“The dwarf was killed. That’s a story in itself.”
“And you became a crime reporter . . . when?”
“Look, I just want—”
“Maxwell, don’t tell me what you want. You’re one of the best paid reporters on the staff, you have a hell of a lot of latitude, but you don’t get to make ad hoc decisions like that while you’re on the payroll. This isn’t some random op-ed piece. If the city public safety director starts calling me and asking what my reporter is doing,
I
should know why, at least.”
I
should know why, at least.”
“You’re ordering me off this?”
“Please, lay off the journalistic martyrdom. You know you have to run this by me.” She waved at a chair. “Now sit down, and convince me you should be doing this story.”
She was right, of course. And she kept me there for ninety minutes, more, I think, to punish me than because she needed any convincing.
I left smelling like an ashtray, but with full editorial sanction.
CHAPTER SEVEN
T
HE next day was almost painfully clear and cold, the sky a near cloudless, razor-sharp blue. All of which made the atmospheric display over the Portal that much more spectacular. I was passing by on the way to City Hall, and when I parked my car it was hard not to look up and stare like a tourist.
HE next day was almost painfully clear and cold, the sky a near cloudless, razor-sharp blue. All of which made the atmospheric display over the Portal that much more spectacular. I was passing by on the way to City Hall, and when I parked my car it was hard not to look up and stare like a tourist.
The Portal is pretty much what it sounds like, a hole between this universe and the next about fifty feet in diameter. And while it was hidden from Lakeside Avenue by the retrofitted fortress that used to be Browns Stadium, its effect on the environment was visible for miles.
More poured out of the thing than magic and dwarves—it also contributed a permanent standing weather front thanks to differentials in temperature, pressure, and humidity between here and there. Today it was particularly active, building roiling black clouds stacked up for miles, swirling with hail, sleet, and lighting, all lit by piercing winter sun. Ice crystals fractured rainbows in the sky while the occasional bolt of lighting traced across the clouds.
When you told newcomers that the whole display actually had nothing to do with magic, they tended not to believe you.
As influential as the damn thing is, comparatively few people had ever seen it outside of those who actually passed through the thing. No photographs or video of it existed; the interference inside the stadium was too great for any software engineers to filter out. Even regular electrical appliances, floodlights, power tools, and forklifts began acting weird when they got within a few dozen feet of the Portal.
Other than those who had a close encounter with the object itself, the best image anyone had was artistic representations of the thing. None of which did it justice. Even the best drawings I’d seen made the thing look like a giant chromed Christmas ornament, a sphere reflecting the image of another universe.
Nothing I’d seen caught the sense of depth the actual phenomenon had, the feeling of looking deep into a direction that didn’t actually exist.
I turned away from the storm and bought a copy of
USA Today
from one of the vending machines on the corner. Having been one of the people in the stands when the Portal was created, opening on the Pittsburgh thirty-five yard line, you’d think I’d be used to the damn thing by now.
USA Today
from one of the vending machines on the corner. Having been one of the people in the stands when the Portal was created, opening on the Pittsburgh thirty-five yard line, you’d think I’d be used to the damn thing by now.
I carried my paper and walked toward City Hall, serendipitously close to the epicenter of the last dozen years of city politics.
I took a station in the hall outside Council Chambers and opened the paper. The Supreme Court’s discussion on the Portal jurisdiction had long slipped off the front page of the national consciousness. The news was dominated by Congressional debates on Medicare and illegal immigration. The President was on a trip to North Africa. And the cover picture showed about three hundred protesters circling an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico with yellow rubber dinghies.
I tended to get so focused on local events that it was nice to remind myself there was a world outside of Cuyahoga County. It helped me gain some perspective.
I read the paper for about fifteen minutes. Then the Council meeting recessed, and the members began filing out of the chamber. I folded my paper and waited for the current council president, Brenda Carlson.
“Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.” I held out my hand when she came out to meet me. She smiled and shook it.
Carlson was just coming out of a marathon Council session, but she had the skill of not looking as drained as she must have felt. She had an easy smile, a red suit that appeared freshly pressed, and her hair was perfectly in place for any cameras that might be around.
By contrast, her late predecessor, Mazurich, used to come out of Council Chambers looking as if he had just been in a bar fight.
“Should I buy you a coffee?” she asked. “Or would that be a blatant attempt to influence the media?”
We left City Hall and found a booth in a coffee shop around the corner. I made a point of getting our coffee, despite her offer. I’m a purist and prefer my coffee unadulterated by sugar, cream, mocha, or whatever is Starbucks’ flavor of the day. When I came back with our caffeine, she said, “I read your profile on Greg Washington.”
“What did you think?”
“He’s going to beat Clifton.”
I chuckled. “Is that on the record?”
“It’s common knowledge. Besides, no one on Council gets a warm fuzzy feeling when they think of Gabe Clifton.”
“How about you?”
“Oh, I’ll work with whoever the people of this city decide to elect.” She smiled. “So is this what you wanted to talk about?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m here about Councilman Mazurich.” I sipped my coffee and looked at her, trying to gauge her reaction.
“Dom? What about?” I could hear the suspicion in her voice. It didn’t surprise me. I was the political attack dog on the
Press,
and I was pretty well known for unearthing ugly secrets.
Press,
and I was pretty well known for unearthing ugly secrets.
“A couple of things. Primarily, why would a dwarf concern himself with why Mazurich killed himself.”
“A dwarf?”
“A dwarf.”
“Who?”
“The name I have is Ossian Parthalán.”
“That sounds slightly familiar . . .”
I leaned back and set down my cup. “I was hoping you might help me with Mazurich’s history. You worked with him the first five years after the Portal opened. You must have seen a lot that was going on.”
“He was a good man.” She was quiet a long time, staring into her coffee. “You remember, back when the Portal opened. . . . The power failures, the blackouts, the federal blockade—”
Of course, anyone who lived through it would never forget. The first year no TV at all, radio so intermittent as to be almost useless. Computers and other electronics would eventually fail as digital garbage filled their memories. It would be two years before the engineers started producing consumer electronics that would work properly.
I was lucky enough to be one of the few to have benefited, at least professionally, during the chaos. But even if the collapse of local TV and radio caused the proliferation of news dailies that gave me my job, I was still rational enough not to be the least bit nostalgic about it.
“Yes?”
“You remember that most of the city government locked itself behind a National Guard barricade?”
That was when Mayor Rayburn made his famous stand against the federal government coming in and taking control of the Portal, the U.S. Army blockaded the city against the Ohio National Guard, and—if it weren’t for the intervention of Congress—the President might have ordered the first military assault on a U.S. city since the Civil War.
While it had been in the guise of protecting a natural resource, over the years it had come to light that Rayburn had been, in fact, negotiating unilateral trade arrangements on the other side of the Portal—and with the help of the governor and the Ohio National Guard, had helped orchestrate a regime change in the kingdom of Ragnan, the government on the other side.
The only thing that prevented a constitutional crisis at the time was badly written legislation on the part of Congress that effectively annexed the Portal and gave jurisdiction of all of its “contents” to the local government of the area the Portal sat in.
Only now, with a rewritten law and a new Supreme Court ruling had the Feds managed to finally gain control of the Portal, and the commerce through it.
“Yeah,” I remembered City Hall, Browns Stadium, all of Lakeside, packed with kids in fatigues carrying machine guns, all trying not to look at the storm swirling the sky above the stadium. The image was something out of the Iraqi insurgency. “I tried to get into City Hall a couple of times, not much luck.”
“Well, Dom actually went out into the city, he saw people, did what he could.”
She told me stories of what he did do. He not only saw the people in his ward, he visited the camps where refugees from the Portal were being held.
That’s where he first met the dwarves.
Without a common language, he couldn’t speak to them, but he managed to notice something that had been missed by most of the other humans commanding the influx from the Portal.
Mazurich saw that, even in the midst of escaping a genocidal war and finding themselves in the midst of a (super)natural disaster, the dwarves still worked. With little more than the possessions they carried through the Portal and the material lying about the refugee camp, they were able to craft amazing things—textiles, jewelry, statuary. Even with no common language, the dwarves had started their own economy, trading with other refugees and even with their human guards.
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