by T. A. Pratt
Jason rose to his feet. “I should retrace my steps, back to the hotel—I'm in town for a convention. Do you think, if you guys happen to find it… ?”
One of the pool players laughed. “A ring with diamonds all over it, you said? Just come back later and check the lost-and-found.”
Jason sighed. “Okay, I see how it is. Look, you could pawn the ring for a few hundred bucks, probably, but it means more to me—more importantly, to my wife—than that. So if you find it, call me, all right?” He produced a business card and handed it to one of the pool players. “Here's my cell number. I'll give you a reward.” He paused. “A thousand dollars. That's more than you'd get at any pawnshop.”
Now the men looked interested. “You got a grand on you?”
Jason backed away, holding up his hands. “No, no, I'd have to go to the bank, but if you find the ring…”
The men shrugged and circled one of the pool tables. “Sure, mister. If we see your ring we'll give you a call.”
“Thank you.” Jason sounded miserable, and he kept touching his ring finger, seemingly unconsciously. Rondeau was impressed. “I'd better walk back the way I came.”
The men ignored him, and Jason bowed his head and went out of the bar, staring at the floor all the while.
“Poor bastard,” one of the pool players said, and the others nodded in solemn agreement.
After a couple of minutes, Rondeau came out of the bathroom, whistling and holding up the gold-and-diamond (or diamondlike anyway) ring to what little light there was in the bar. He went past the pool players, careful not to even look in their direction—Jason had been firm on that point—and one of the men said, “Hey, what's that? A ring?”
“Yup.” Rondeau slipped it into his pocket. “Just found it in the john, saw it glittering back behind the toilet when I took a piss, you believe that? My lucky day.”
The players exchanged glances. The one Jason had given his card to said, “Let me see it.”
“No way. Finders keepers.”
“I think it's my ring.” The guy stepped around the table, holding the cue with casual menace.
Rondeau snorted, trying to remember his lines. It was mostly improv, but there were some salient points he was supposed to hit. “Oh, yeah? If it's yours, then what's the inscription?”
“Fine. It's not mine. But what do you say you give it to me anyway?” He took a step forward.
Jason had said it might go this way, but Rondeau had assured him not to worry about it. He took his butterfly knife from his inner jacket pocket and flipped it open and closed a few times with well-practiced ease. “What say I don't?”
The guy laughed. “All right, fair's fair. How about I buy it off you?”
“Why you got such a hard-on for this ring?”
“It's got diamonds on it, right?” He paused. “I saw, when you were holding it. I like stuff like that.”
Rondeau shrugged. “I don't know, it doesn't fit my finger, but I figure I can pawn it….”
“Pawnshop might want to see some proof of ownership,” the guy said. “Me, I'm a no-questions-asked kind of man.” He took a large wad of small bills from his pocket—his stake for hustling—and began counting. “What would you say to a hundred?”
Rondeau snorted. “I'd say ‘That's funny’ Then I'd say something you'd probably find offensive.”
The guy sighed. “You're gonna make me haggle? Fine. Two hundred.”
“Make it three, and settle my bar bill for me, and you've got a deal.”
“Hey Pete!” the guy yelled, and the bartender looked up. “What's this guy been drinking?”
“Cheap gin, and lots of it.”
“All right.” The guy counted out the money “Let's see the ring.”
Rondeau fished it from his pocket, gave it an ostentatious little shine against his sleeve, then exchanged it for the cash. He counted the money quickly, then grinned. “Nice doing business with you. That's the most profitable piss I've ever taken. Afternoon, gentlemen.”
Rondeau managed to stay calm as he walked out of the bar, but by the time he got to the sidewalk he could barely contain himself—he wanted to skip and cackle. He felt like he'd just fucked a fetish model and then gone hang gliding. He'd engaged in plenty of petty larceny over the years, at least when he was a kid, but he'd never really conned anyone, and it was a thrill.
Two blocks away from the bar, Jason sauntered along as promised to meet Rondeau on the corner. He held a cheap disposable cell phone to his ear, and said, “You found it? That's wonderful! Stay there, I'll be back as soon as I can. I just need to go to the bank to pick up the reward money for you.” He hung up, then tossed the phone underhand into a garbage can. “How'd we make out?”
Rondeau wordlessly handed over the folded wad of bills. Jason flipped through them with professional precision, separated half the bills, and tucked them into Rondeau's breast pocket.
“Fun, huh?” Jason said. “And we're only out a twenty-five-dollar piece of costume jewelry and a disposable cell. Not a bad take for ten minutes of effort.”
“I can't believe that worked!” Rondeau shook his head. He'd seen magic on a regular basis for years, but Jason was a different kind of sorcerer.
“Conning a con man is supposed to be the greatest challenge, but sometimes it's not that hard. Guys like that think they can't be taken, and overconfidence is one of my favorite qualities in a mark. Hey, listen. You were pretty good in there. I've got a little something in the works, and I could use another guy on my team. You interested? It's more involved than that business was, but it won't interfere with your job working for my sister. Hell, you could learn a few things to help her make money in the future, right?”
Rondeau considered. Jason thought Marla was a crime boss—which she was, kind of, though not mostly—and thus reasonably assumed Rondeau was some kind of criminal, too, which he was, he supposed, but only technically. He'd had fun running that little scam in the bar, but he wasn't that drunk. “I'd have to check with Marla. She can get touchy about moonlighting.”
He figured Jason would drop the subject then. Instead, Jason said, “Oh, absolutely. I'll come with you to talk to her about it. What do you say we go grab some burgers to soak up all that liquor, then pay Marlita a visit?”
Rondeau just nodded, already walking along with Jason, giving in to the momentum of events. The Masons were maelstroms, and if you got too close, they'd suck you in. But, Rondeau reflected, it was usually a hell of a ride, and going with the current had seldom steered him wrong. At the very least it would take his mind off Lorelei, and in a healthier way than booze did. He couldn't stand the hangovers anyway.
Viscarro scuttled jaggedly along like a dead leaf blowing down a sidewalk, and soon B lost track of the turns they'd taken through twisting low-ceilinged corridors. Marla was gone, off to tend other business, and B was a little afraid Viscarro was going to turn ghoul and eat him or something, though he was trying to keep an open mind. This had been a rather overwhelming morning. How was he supposed to concentrate on learning magic from a dead man when Marla had dropped this bomb about him becoming her successor? Ever since he'd discovered magic was real, he'd been trying to figure out his place in that world—but he'd never imagined himself at the top of it, even on a local basis. If he wasn't up for the job, he probably shouldn't waste Marla's time.
Maybe by the time she needs me to take over, I'll be ready. Maybe she'll make me be ready.
“I'm taking you to the limbo room.” Viscarro's voice was dry, maybe amused—even with his vaunted perceptiveness, B found it hard to be sure.
“That's where you keep your unbaptized stuff?” B said, and immediately regretted it. This didn't seem like a place for jokes.
“You'll see.” They rounded a corner curved like a fishhook, which dead-ended into a shining steel vault door guarded by a wheezingly asthmatic man clutching a rusty halberd in ink-stained hands. “Open the door,” Viscarro said, and the guard spun dials and twisted knobs, then shoved hard
on a lever, putting the whole weight of his body into it. The door, which was at least two feet thick in cross-section, swung open with silent ease. B wondered if the exquisite balance could be credited to magic or to engineering.
Harsh white lights on the vault's ceiling illuminated when the door opened, revealing shelves of jumbled crap and a long low table with a couple of rolling stools beneath it and a giant magnifying glass on a swing arm fixed to the tabletop.
“This is the land of uncataloged acquisitions. Hence, limbo. I'm going to teach you to establish provenance.” Viscarro rubbed his hands together in anticipatory glee.
Then followed the most excruciatingly dull three hours of B's life. Viscarro reverently took objects from the shelves and made B examine them, pointing out salient details. The stone pot with the leering monkey face might look pre-Columbian, Viscarro explained, but the dirt in the crevices suggested it was fake—genuine artifacts from that era tended to be cleaner, preserved in sealed chambers and thus not especially dirty This tapestry appeared handmade in the 12th century, but this color of dye was unavailable in Italy at that time, so it was clearly from a later era. This painting might seem a genuine Van Gogh, but careful attention to the aggregate directionality of the brushstrokes revealed it was more likely a forgery. And so on and on and on and on. The guard sat in the corner, furiously marking down Viscarro's pronouncements in a ledger the size of an extra-large pizza box.
B finally croaked, “Could I get some water?”
Viscarro paused in his discourse on noteworthy potter's marks, which was itself merely a long digression from his original point about identifying anachronistic tool marks on purportedly ancient arts and crafts. “Ah, yes, bodily functions.” He sent the guard away for refreshments, and, now derailed, squinted at B through his monocle. “I suppose you'd like to get to the magic, hmm?”
“Magic? There's magic? Magic would be nice.”
Viscarro tapped his creepily long fingernails on the table. Nosferatu, B thought again, but beyond the fact of the guy being dead he wasn't picking up any especially treacherous vibes.
“I make my apprentices study conventional methods for years before I teach them more direct routes of appraisal, but if I don't show you something beyond the limits of ordinary human knowledge and intellect, Marla will just bring you back. Neither of us want that. She's so damned impatient.”
“People who aren't going to live forever sometimes feel the need to rush,” B said. The guard set a glass of water before him. B gulped it, even though it seemed to have been drawn from a dying well, complete with specks of yellow sediment settling at the bottom.
“Aren't you impudent? That makes you a good fit for Marla, at least. All right, then.” Viscarro went to a shelf and took down a dented gauntlet from a suit of plate mail. “This item, then. It appears genuine, and so it's worth further investigation. Like most of the items here, it was acquired in a bulk estate sale. I buy via the dragnet method, sweeping up loads of offal in hopes of finding a few gems amid the shit. If I didn't have my large staff—and all the time in the world—it would be a disheartening enterprise, but as I have the proper resources, it suits me perfectly”
“So you fish for treasure. Fair enough. What do you do with all the rejects?” B gestured at the jumbled pile of frauds and commonplaces heaped at the far end of the table.
“The good forgeries I sell at auction, with fake letters of provenance. I am a highly respected expert in many branches of antiquity, you know, and my word is trusted. Those things that are merely ordinary go to… what is it?”
“eBay,” the guard said.
“Yes.” Viscarro sounded deeply satisfied. “The eBay has proven most lucrative.”
“Okay. So this gauntlet. How do you tell…whatever it is you're trying to find out about it? Besides using your encyclopedic knowledge regarding stuff dead soldiers wore on their hands?”
“Objects have memories. The art of accessing those memories is known as psychometry An object possessed by an individual or kept in one place for a long time carries associations, images, and aftertastes of that contact. I'm told you are psychic, so you should have the necessary perceptiveness. I will merely teach you how to prepare your mind.”
Viscarro described meditation exercises and incantations used to focus attention, lecturing with the same tedious thoroughness he'd used when discussing ancient printmaking techniques or the hallmarks of early glass-blowing. B did his best to soak it in, finally saying, “So all this works like magical Ritalin?”
Viscarro looked at his guard, who shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?”
“The living are so tiresome.” Viscarro sighed, and went on to explain how objects sometimes projected information on slightly out-of-phase wavelengths, so even a sensitive psychic might smell an image, hear a taste, or feel an odor. Viscarro went over some methods for recalibrating one's sensitivities, and finally, when B was ready to bang his head against the table until he blacked out just to make the talking stop, Viscarro laid his hands on the gauntlet, inhaled deeply, and said, “A heavy cavalry knight. Well, of course. Of a good family, but landless, ashamed of his wastrel father, desperate for glory and reward…” He opened his peculiarly colorless eyes. “The associations are strong here. The owner was wearing this when he died, and that tends to make a deep impression. You try Tell me how he died.”
B cleared his mind, muttered the right words, felt all his senses turn themselves up to eleven, and laid hands on the gauntlet.
The shimmering gray-white ghost of a bearded middle-aged man in a battered suit of armor appeared, his insubstantial body cut off at the waist by the table. Viscarro scuttled backward, stool toppling. The man said something—it sounded like French, only not quite—and touched the caved-in side of his skull. He held up the shattered remains of his helm, made a disgusted noise, and tossed the broken armor aside, where it vanished in mid-fall.
B let go of the gauntlet, and the ghost promptly vanished. “Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Maybe a war hammer?”
“Show-off.” Viscarro scrambled up from the floor and brushed off his clothes. “But it appears you've gotten the hang of it. I'm sure Marla will be pleased with your progress, and release me from my obligation. I'll be glad to see the back of you.” He paused. “But while you're here, would you mind looking at this old brass oil lamp? It's defied the analysis of my best technicians.” B laughed. “You want my help? What's in it for me?” “An infinitesimal reduction in the amount of ill will I bear you,” Viscarro said magnanimously
“Works for me.” Who wanted to be on a not-exactly-Nosferatu's bad side?
Nicolette's messenger stopped beneath a tree, sucked down the last drops from his water bottle, and surveyed the forest before him with a sinking heart. What a shitty gig. He ran errands for sorcerers for a living, but he would've turned down this job… if he'd been allowed. He owed Nicolette too much to say no to any request, no matter how unreasonable, so here he was, deep in eastern Oregon's Malheur National Forest. One-point-seven million acres of the place, and he had nothing to guide him but a 'chanted compass festooned with dried mushrooms he'd had a local alley witch whip up for him. “Local” meaning “in Seattle”—Nicolette was so firmly a creature of the East Coast that she thought Washington State and Oregon were basically the same place, so why couldn't he run this little errand for her? Of course, it was a ten-or eleven-hour drive in his van—this place was practically in Idaho—plus the time it took him to find a charm capable of tracking his quarry, plus hours spent literally wandering in the wilderness. The chaos witch had given him a bout of good luck a few years back when he'd needed it most, but on the whole she'd been more bad news than not. He was exhausted, down to running on fumes and magically augmented adrenaline. It wasn't even noon yet.
This forest was a pretty place, no doubt—he smelled sage and juniper and pine, he'd passed two gorgeous lakes, and there was enough mountain scenery for a hundred bottled-water commercials—but tracking down a s
orcerer who was, by all accounts, insane and anti-social didn't put him in the mood to appreciate nature. Es pe cially since he'd recently passed a trailhead sign for a spot called Murderer's Creek. He wished he didn't believe in omens. Even the name of the forest, “Malheur,” what was that, corrupted French for “Bad Hour”? That was just great.
The compass began to shudder in his hands, the seed-pods and dried shrooms swinging away from gravity's pull and pointing up a hill, so he kept clumping through the forest. He reached a dense stand of trees, their trunks ringed with fat clusters of yellow-brown mushrooms. The profusion of fungus sparked a vague memory. Hadn't he read something about this park, about some kind of mushrooms? How they were all linked underground, actually one giant organism, maybe the biggest single living thing on the planet, stretching beneath the earth for miles and miles?
“The Mycelium said you would come,” rasped a voice from the thick underbrush among the trees.
The messenger stiffened. “Are you…” He consulted the scrap of paper in his pocket. “Bull-yard?”
“Bulliard. The name I took for myself. In honor of the great botanist Jean Baptiste François Pierre Bulliard, who wrote the Dictionnaire Elémentaire de Botanique. Do you know it?”
“Can't say that I do.”
“A great work for identifying mushrooms. It is important, being able to identify mushrooms. For instance, many cannot tell the straw mushroom from the death cap, and in those cases, tragedy may result. Do you know the death cap? Amanita phalloides. My brothers. We killed Charles VI. We killed Emperor Claudius. We attack the liver and kidneys. We have no antidote.” The underbrush rustled.
“Listen, I'm here with a message. From an, ah, anonymous benefactor.”
“The Mycelium said. The Mycelium said I should listen.” The voice had moved—it was off to the left now, and seemed to be coming from a place relatively clear of underbrush, where there was nothing but those honey-colored mushrooms. Was Bulliard invisible? Or was he—somehow this was more horrible—was he underground?