Robert Charrette - Arthur 03 - A Knight Among Knaves (35 page)

Maybe he ought to take his leave after all.

Dr. Spae disappeared back into her bedroom. He could hear her opening and closing doors and drawers. She kept talking as she dressed.

"The first thing we do is check out the scene of the crime."

"The railroad tunnel?" Quetzal might be gone, but a dragon lived in the otherworld version of that place. Dealing with a dragon was above and beyond the call.

"No," Dr. Spae replied. "The university. Specifically the building where Quetzal found the
telesmon."

"Doctor, it's been over a year. Surely anything of interest was taken away long ago by the police or some curious student."

"Maybe not. I checked with a friend on the police force. Tliey just conducted a cursory search of the building back (hen, and they did that only because the door was left open. They didn't find anything out of place, but then, even SIU wouldn't know what to look for."

"And you do?"

"I've got some ideas."

She told him about some of those ideas on the drive to Providence. From her arcane reconnaissance on the night l hey had confronted Quetzal, she knew which room Quetzal had visited when he was there. That room was an office, one of the benefits accruing to a certain endowed seat. The current holder of that seat didn't use the office, preferring a more modem, more spacious one in the main geology building on the north side of the campus. The place was essentially vacant, not even used by the graduate students who occupied every other office in the building.

"How do you know all this?" he asked.

"Research, John. As I've always told you, research pays off."

What she called research, John called obsession. He knew better than to argue with her.

They couldn't find a parking space near their destination,
so
they had to hike up the hill. As they approached, John remembered the last time they had come here. Even daylight couldn't dispel the dark and frightening memories.

"Dead and gone," he said—apparently aloud, because Dr. Spae asked him what he was talking about. "Quetzal."

"Dead, yes. I'm not so sure about the gone part."

The gates to the main campus were open. They walked in just like the throngs of students hustling along between classes.

"Try and look as if you belong here," Dr. Spae advised. "It's the best disguise."

Once upon a time, John
had
belonged on a campus. He remembered how to act. They walked along, student and teacher pretending to be student and teacher. The humor of it buoyed John up, until they entered the building. It was cold inside after the heat of the bright fall sun, dark and cheerless. Dr. Spae led him down a narrow staircase. It was even darker down there. The narrow corridor was made narrower still by piles of crates and large, oddly shaped geological specimens all covered in dusty sediments of neglect. Dr. Spae pointed to a door.

"That's the one."

"You sure we can get in?"

"The car isn't the only thing I borrowed from David." She held up a key card. "This should open the lock for us."

There was no maglock on the door, just an old-fashioned mechanical one.

"I guess this is worthless," Dr. Spae said, starting to put the card away.

John snatched it from her. "Maybe not."

He slipped the card between the door and the jamb, levering it up until it contacted the bolt. If the lock was the right kind...

Feeling the bolt start to slide, he smiled. He held the bolt back as he turned the knob. He'd done it—old Trashcan Harry would be proud. John swung the door open and returned the card to the doctor with a flourish.

"A man of hidden resources," Dr. Spae commented. "You sure you don't want a job?"

"I am your bondservant," he reminded her—adding, with a wicked grin, "for the moment."

"Okay, then. Moment by moment."

She preceded him into the office. The room was small, with barely enough space for a chunky old steel desk and its chair, a narrow table against one wall, and a set of bookshelves. Everything was as dust-covered as the neglected debris in the corridor outside.

"You sure somebody has been in here during the last century?" John asked.

"Look at the dust on the floor," Dr. Spae said.

There were furrows in the dust, and faint footprints, and some other scuffs. More than one somebody; there were footprints of several sizes. "Chair's been popular." The dust on the seat and back was nearly rubbed away.

Dr. Spae started to browse around. John leaned against the bookshelves and watched. Since she wanted to play the "binding deal with an elf" game, he'd go along, doing only what she asked him specifically to do, and because she hadn't told him what she was looking for, he couldn't know what to look for and so couldn't look and stir up the dust the way she was doing. Maybe there were some advantages to being an elf after all.

He got bored fast, and started staring at the wall opposite him. There was something about the wall, though. He couldn't quite figure out what, but something about it wasn't right. He tried looking at it in the sideways manner Loreneth had shown him for piercing glamours, but that only made him sure that the wall was not what it appeared to be— which, he had to admit, was a find in its own right.

"Doctor, take a look at the wall."

She looked, then looked down at the floor. "Look at the scrapes the desk's legs have made in the dust. It looks as if the desk was moved away from the wall, then back again."

Dr. Spae faced the wall, mumbling under her breath. Reaching out with both hands, she laid her palms against the wall and said,
"Occultus sese ostendunt."

A faint ochre glow outlined a door-shaped section of the wall. It didn't take them long to find the latch that opened the secret compartment. The false panel concealed a closet full of shelves. There was a lot of dusty stuff on the shelves.

"What have we here?" Dr. Spae said, poking at the objects on the shelves. Most of them seemed to be objects of painted wood, stone, or bone. A couple had feathers stuck to them and looked like preindustrial party favors. Most of the stuff seemed to be abstract carvings and dusty, dried-up leather bags. There were one or two other things and she handed him one of those. "See what's in that."

The object was wrapped in brittle, crumbly paper. The yellow stuff flaked away at his touch. The lower layers were less fragile, and they had printing on them. John got the object unwrapped, saw that it was another of the party favors, and put it down on the desk. The wrappings were far more interesting. He'd never held a real newspaper in his hands before.

"What is it, John?"

"The
Providence Journal Bulletin
for April 10, 1937. I don't think anyone has touched this thing since then."

"Forget the wrappings. Do you know what these things are, John?" She held up a knife and a wand that she'd taken from the biggest of the leather bags.

"Ritual tools."

"That's right. And these?" she asked, indicating the collection of odd objects.

"Objets d'art?"

"These are fetishes and power charms from a dozen different primitive cultures. Whoever held this office was interested in more than geology."

Fetishes and charms? Not one of the damned things held any power. "So he liked souvenirs."

"You don't hide souvenirs behind a false wall. These are magical artifacts."

"Maybe
you
don't hide such things, but this guy—who knows? He obviously wasn't running full-bore. There's not a one of those things that's got even a whiff of magic to it. They're all dead."

She looked at him as if he'd spoken a foreign language. She looked at the collection again, and after a bit, she nodded thoughtfully. "They
are
dead. Of course, they come from a time when the power wasn't there, but their forms and sym-bology are good. Or maybe it's just that they couldn't hold their power through the years." She studied them some more. "What's this?" She snatched something from the far back corner of one of the shelves. "Now
this,
this is not dead."

John looked at the thing. It was a shard of clay with some marks on it. The fragment had held power once, but the destruction of its physical integrity had sundered the bonds of magic as well. He could sense the drained and shattered dying spells upon it. "What is it?"

"Part of a binding, I think. The symbols look a little like something I saw once on what was purported to be a djinn's bottle."

"Solomon's seal?"

She shook her head, not the least bit impressed by John's display of scholarship. "Not Solomon's. Another sort. I've never seen an attribution given to it, though I've seen some of the symbols—this one for instance—on other occult objects."

The symbol she pointed out was a tiny six-pointed star with something inscribed in its center. John had to squint to make out what appeared to be a stylized eye.

"The guardian eye," Dr. Spae said. "At least that's what Rabbi Guildermann called it. I think that this may be part of the magic that hid the
telesmon
Quetzal took from here."

"But that fragment was back in a corner. Where's the rest of the seal? It's not like anybody was in here to clean up after Quetzal."

Dr. Spae got a strange look on her face, as though she were finding out the medicine she was taking had been flavored with something that actually tasted good. "Oh, no? Remember I told you that this office is part of an endowment? Well, it once belonged to the man who made the endowment. And you know what, that man is still carried on the university rolls as a professor emeritus."

"That would be the guy who wrapped up the fetish?" Dr. Spae's nod confirmed it. "But if this was his office and he wrapped up the fetish when he was using it, he'd have to be well over a hundred years old now."

"Yes, I should have seen it sooner. My friend said that the police hadn't found anything out of the ordinary here. Nothing about the false wall."

John saw where she was going. "And Quetzal wouldn't have had any reason to close it up again."

"He'd gotten what he wanted. What did he care about the rest of this stuff?"

"But someone else must have cared to hide this stuff away again."

"Someone who built the false wall," Dr. Spae said. "Someone with secrets to hide."

The light rain corning in off the bay made Benton more dependent on thermal images than he liked. He needed the amplification to navigate through the fields of the airport's corporate reservations, but the burning wreck spread across die runways polluted his vision every time he tried scanning in that direction. There was a lot of noise and activity out that way. Fire engines were still making their wailing arrivals as the conflagration threatened to spread to the air cargo terminal.

Not his business.

His business was the man in the topcoat standing by the jitney. Benton moved toward him. At the gate to the Metadynamics sector Benton nearly stepped on someone sprawled on (he concrete. He stopped to check out the body and found a withered husk of a man, dead. The corpse wore a Metadynamics security uniform, officer rank. There was no blood or other sign of violence that Benton could detect. He'd need a medical report to confirm it, but Benton suspected that he knew what had killed the man. He looked up at the topcoated man standing by the jitney, oblivious to the rain and watching the fire.

Why chase what's coming to visit you anyway, eh, Mr. Van Dieman? Is that why you called off the hunt for the
Wisteria
killer? Did you know it wouldn
't
kill you too, or did you
just
take a chance?

The man in the topcoat spoke without turning. His voice was soft and carried farther than it should have. The clarity of the man's words was better than Benton's ears should have provided.

"Ah, Mr. Benton, so good of you to come on such short notice. I trust you passed the police line with little trouble."

"Bypassed it."

"Yes, exactly. They can be so tiresome." Van Dieman waited until Benton got closer, within normal conversation range, before speaking again. "You know what happened here?"

Benton had been listening to the police and emergency bands on the way to the airport. He'd caught the media's take on the situation as well. "I know about the missile. First news reports are talking terrorist bombing."

"This incident has disrupted my plans," Van Dieman said peevishly.

A burning aircraft was spread over three of Logan's runways and the airport was shut down. The aircraft's crew of four and two other men were dead. Six people dead—seven, if you counted the MetaD security man—and Van Dieman was upset about having to postpone his travel. Typical.

"This was not some random act of violence," Van Dieman said. "I was the target."

"Evidence?" Or paranoia?

"My departure was unscheduled, yet there was a pair of assassins waiting aboard. No one outside of my company should have known about this trip." Van Dieman's voice turned hard. "I suspect a leak in my security forces."