by Simon Hawke
"Make breakfast, Archimedes says, they'll be right out," Broom said irritably. "An hour is right out? You know what happens to eggs Benedict when they've been sitting for an hour? While the two of you are in there shtupping like a pair of high-school kids on prom night, my eggs are turning into hockey pucks. But what do you care? You're in there moaning and groaning with the water running . . . "
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry," Wyrdrune said. "We got a little carried away, all right?"
"Ten minutes is a little carried away. An hour is Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. Why don't the two of you get married, already, so you can do it once a week like normal people?"
"Broom . . . put a lid on it," snapped Kira.
The front door opened and Billy Slade came in, a cigarette drooping from his lips. He was dressed in military camo trousers tucked into the tops of his paratrooper boots, a torn purple T-shirt bearing the legend "Camp Crystal Lake," and a patchwork leather motorcycle jacket festooned with zippers, studs, and fringe. His dark hair was cropped close to the skull except in the center, where it rose up in a pompadourlike crest, descending down his back in a long ponytail. His coffee-colored skin gave testimony to his mixed ethnic origins and his sharp features were pretty almost to the point of being girlish. To offset this, he had cultivated a habitual sneer that gave him the look of a mean-tempered elf.
"Well, well, look what the wind blew in," said Broom. "What's the matter, there aren't any telephones in those dives you hang out in? It was too much trouble to call so I don't have to stay up all night and worry you've been mugged or run over by a bus? Your eyes are all red. You've been drinking again, haven't you? Come here and let me smell your breath."
"Stuff it, Stick," said Billy in a thick cockney accent. He dropped down into a chair. "What's for breakfast?"
"Hockey pucks with hollandaise sauce."
"What, again? Bloody 'ell, I'll just 'ave coffee."
"Coffee on an empty stomach, you'll give yourself an ulcer," Broom said. "I'll make you some nice poached eggs on toast. And you should have some milk, you're still a growing boy. If those disgusting cigarettes don't stunt your growth. Feh! How can you smoke those filthy things?"
"Sod off."
"You like how he talks? Are you listening to this? It's not enough he dresses like a bum with an Indian hairdo, he has to talk like some Limey rock star with P.M.S.?"
"Just make some breakfast, Broom, will you please?" said Wyrdrune wearily.
"And I'll 'ave coffee," Billy said. "Milk makes me puke."
"Where were you last night?" Wyrdrune said.
"Oh, Gor' blimey, not you, too?"
"In case you've forgotten, kiddo, you're only fifteen," Wyrdrune said. "You're not supposed to be out all night, hanging out in bars."
"I met a bird, if you must know."
"A bird?"
"He means a girl," said Kira with a smile.
"You spent the night with a girl?"
"Well, it's better'n a boy, in'it?"
"Very funny. Don't you think you're a little young for that sort of thing?"
"So what are you, me bleedin' mum?"
"I'm just concerned about you, that's all," Wyrdrune said. "Where was Merlin while all this was going on?"
"'E was out."
"What do you mean, he was out? How could he be out?"
"'E had too much to drink. The old sod can't 'old 'is liquor."
"Merlin got drunk?" Wyrdrune said with disbelief.
"Ohhh, my head," Billy said suddenly in a completely different voice. It was much deeper, with a different accent, and his facial expression abruptly changed to one of unadulterated misery. He slumped forward over the table and put his head in his hands. "Must you people shout so?"
Kira giggled. "Well, that's one way to get rid of your chaperone," she said. "Get drunk and then give him the hangover."
"What happened?" Merlin moaned.
Wyrdrune rolled his eyes. "It looks like you had a little too much to drink last night."
"Last night?" the mage said. "I don't remember."
"I'm not surprised," said Wyrdrune sourly. "How much do you recall?"
Merlin groaned. "I remember a rather tasty little concoction called a kamikaze, and I have a rather dim memory of dancing and then getting into a fight with someone . . . after that, it's all a blank."
"Drinking and fighting. You're supposed to be a responsible adult," said Wyrdrune sourly.
"I'm supposed to be dead," said Merlin. "I certainly feel like I'm dying. I had no idea an astral spirit could have a hangover."
"Broom!" shouted Wyrdrune. "Get some aspirin!"
"Please! Don't shout."
"You don't remember anything after you left the bar?"
"No," said Merlin. "But I do seem to have a sense of being insufferably pleased with myself. I only wish I could remember why. I swear, I will never, ever, drink those vile things again!"
"I was hoping you'd be a good influence on Billy," Wyrdrune said. "Instead, he's being a bad influence on you. A man your age, you oughtta be ashamed of yourself."
"Mea culpa," Merlin said, raising his hand weakly. "I will consider myself properly chastised. Now where's that aspirin?"
Broom came out of the kitchen with a glass of water and two aspirin tablets.
"Out a little late last night, were we?" it said archly.
"Out is the operative word," said Merlin. He gratefully accepted the pills. "I'm going to get even with that young delinquent for this, as soon as my head stops throbbing."
"Better make it soon," said Wyrdrune. "Mona called."
"Mona?" Merlin asked sharply. "When?"
"This morning. There's been a case of necromancy reported in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They've sent out an urgent request for a Bureau field agent."
"Santa Fe?" said Merlin. "One of my old students is teaching in Santa Fe. Paul Ramirez. He's also the Bureau agent there."
"Then the report must have come from him," said Wyrdrune. "Archimedes just printed out a copy of it." He picked up the printout and scanned it quickly. "Yes, that's right. Agent Paul Ramirez filed the report. How long has it been since you've seen him?"
"About twenty years or so," said Merlin. "He was a student of mine, and then one of my teaching assistants, long before you came to Cambridge, of course. He would be about fifty now, I think. He's dean of the College of Sorcerers there. A good man. An excellent teacher. Calm, steady, and reliable."
"And he's also the local Bureau agent? That could be a big help," said Wyrdrune. "It would be nice not to work at cross-purposes with the Bureau for a change."
"But if he's requested a field agent, that means he won't be in charge of the investigation," Kira pointed out.
"Yes, that could pose a problem," Wyrdrune said. "We'll have to find out who the Bureau's sending out there."
"That shouldn't be too difficult," said Kira. "We can have Archimedes ask Mona to access the Bureau's data banks."
"We'll get Archimedes on it right away," said Wyrdrune. "Meanwhile, it would be in our best interests to get out there before that field agent does and make contact with Ramirez. Our first problem will be to convince him that Billy and Merlin are the same person . . . sort of."
"I don't think that will be a problem," Merlin said. "Paul is a sensitive."
"What? You mean he's a telepath?" said Wyrdrune.
"Apparently, his mother had the gift as well," said Merlin, "though she never had any formal thaumaturgic training. Paul can't send, he can only receive, but he's a very powerful receptor. And that's what worries me. I once cautioned him about the responsibility of his gift and using it indiscriminately. However, this is exactly the sort of situation where he'll feel that the most responsible thing to do is use it to find the necromancer. And if the necromancer is a Dark One, Paul will be in a great deal of danger. A Dark One would instantly sense his probing. We must leave for Santa Fe as soon as possible."
"I'll let Makepeace know we're leaving town, in case anyt
hing comes up," said Wyrdrune.
"I'll start packing," Kira said.
The land had changed. The centuries had worked their wonders. Once a primitive, tribal settlement, the Dancing Ground of the Sun was now a city, throbbing with life. Life . . . and power.
It was still here. He could feel it, coursing through the soil. Some things never changed. There were places on earth where the natural energies accumulated, places of power, and Santa Fe was one of them. The humans felt it, on some vague, subliminal level, but they would never truly understand it. They perceived it but dimly, thinking it was something indefinable, part of the city's atmosphere and charm, believing it had something to do with the climate and the clean, natural beauty of the region, but it was more than that. Much more.
It was no accident that at various times in history, the place where Santa Fe now stood had inspired creativity. Rather, it was inevitable. There were places in the world where the suicide rate was greater than anywhere else. Places that somehow sapped the vitality of those who lived there. Places that possessed negative energy.
There was a balance to the forces of the world, which were spread out throughout the planet, but in certain spots, they became concentrated. Where there was negative energy, the people were depressed and often violent, subject to great stresses. Where the energy was positive, the people thrived in an environment that was relatively peaceful and crime-free, one that nourished them and subliminally encouraged their natural creative impulses. Santa Fe was such a place. As such, it might have seemed an unlikely haven for a necromancer, but Wulfgar understood that positive, free-flowing, creative energy made for greater power than the erratic, pulsing, negative, and violent energies that could be found in places like Tripoli, Tehran, Calcutta, or Beirut.
Wulfgar had come to feed. In Santa Fe, the life energy was pure and vibrant. He could still feel the life force of that young girl flowing into him, a sensation that was almost sexual in its intensity. It was rejuvenating, filling him with vitality and power. The others had made mistakes. They had gone to seek shelter in the larger, more crowded cities, where they had hoped their depredations would go unnoticed amid all the other violence. They had preyed on those they thought would not be missed and they had squandered their power on choosing human acolytes to serve them, wasting valuable energy to empower them and bend them to their will. Foolish. Pointless. It was like supping on roots and berries when they could have had a feast.
They had underestimated the sophistication of the humans. The humans had evolved considerably while the Dark Ones had slept. Their society and their methods of communication had become very much advanced. They were much more clever now and far more dangerous. They were almost as much of a threat as the runestones were. That was something that the others hadn't understood and they had paid the price for it.
He had felt it when the others died. Of all the Dark Ones, Wulfgar was the strongest. The others had always feared his power. He could still feel the presence of the ones who had survived after their escape, but there were fewer of them now. He sensed their life forces dimly. They were hiding like frightened little rabbits, carefully attempting to augment their weakened power in small doses . . . a homeless derelict slain here, the remains painstakingly disposed of; a wayward child stolen there, never to be found. The braver ones, those who had fallen to the power of the runestones, had flared briefly in his awareness, like glowing coals suddenly bursting into flame, then they were just as suddenly snuffed out. They had overreached themselves, had tried to do too much too quickly, and they had badly misjudged the power of the avatars.
Wulfgar did not know who they were, but he had glimpsed them briefly in the moment when he and the others had escaped. He had sensed their power, greatly augmented by their bonding with the runestones, the living gems that held the spirits of the Council of the White. He knew that they were strong. He would not have thought that humans could attain such power, even bonded with the runestones. Clearly, they had to be descended from the Old Ones. That meant some of the Old Ones had survived the war and perhaps were living still. If so, then they were weak, for he could not sense their presence. Perhaps they had lived so long among the humans, passing as mortals, that their powers had ebbed. Immortals could weaken over time if they did not replenish themselves, although they did not die, unless they were careless and allowed themselves to be killed. Wulfgar had no intention of being careless.
In the old days, before the dawn of human history, when he and his kind had ruled the earth, the humans had been little more than animals. Fragile, weak, and mortal, they were to the Old Ones what the apes were to the humans. They were brainless and inferior, ugly, foul-smelling brutes barely even suitable for slave labor. To the Old Ones, they were a sort of food, not flesh to be consumed, for nothing could be more detestable than that, but repositories of life energy that could be tapped to fuel their spells. They were constantly in heat and they multiplied like rabbits, so there was little danger of the resource being depleted. Yet, as time went on and they started to evolve, though Wulfgar had not noticed them becoming significantly more intelligent, the attitude that many of the Old Ones had toward them had changed.
They had never considered them as equals, far from it, for they still used them to empower their spells, but they began to think of them as if they were intelligent creatures. They began to speak of conservation, of insuring a renewable resource, and they began to talk of cruelty, as if human lives were as important as their own. Why banish them to utter darkness, they had argued, depriving them of life, when it was not really necessary? Why drain them completely of their life force when only a little could be used, enough that it would allow them to recover and be used again? Wulfgar had never heard such nonsense and had said so. The humans existed to be consumed for power. "They are the prey," he had argued, "and we are the predators. It is the natural order of things. If their population is not kept in check, they will soon multiply and overwhelm us." And that, in the end, was exactly what had happened.
The conservationists among the Old Ones had chosen to cloak their newly enlightened beliefs in a mantle of ridiculous purity—they had called it "white magic," that which drained, but did not kill. And those who, like Wulfgar, did not subscribe to their new notions had been branded as the Dark Ones, necromancers who practiced so-called "black magic," the sorcery of death, as all the Old Ones had once done. Only the pompously self-styled Council of the White had decreed that it was barbarous. They had ruled that necromancy would be outlawed in favor of white magic, which conserved the human resource. Those whom they had called the Dark Ones had not had a voice in their decision, as they were not members of the Council. They had simply been presented with the new "law" as a fait accompli. Wulfgar and the others had treated it with the contempt that it deserved and had refused to abide by it. It had led to war.
Humans now remembered that war only vaguely, as part of their myths and legends. They called it the Ragnarök, the Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods. Many of the Old Ones had died. Wulfgar and his faction had been defeated and captured, but the Council of the White had not seen fit to execute their prisoners. They had, after all, fought the war in the name of the sanctity of life—something that Wulfgar felt was the ultimate hypocrisy—and they had not been able to bring themselves to kill their captive enemies. Instead, the Dark Ones were imprisoned, entombed in a deep, subterranean pit in the Euphrates Valley and held there by the most powerful spell the Council could devise. The spell of the Living Triangle, the Warding Pentagram, and the Eternal Circle. To empower that spell, the members of the Council had nobly sacrificed themselves, fusing their life energies with three enchanted runestones—a ruby, a sapphire, and an emerald.
When the spell had been cast, only one member of the Council was left—Gorlois, the youngest. It was Gorlois who had placed the runestones into a small bronze box, which he then placed into a spellwarded, golden chest on a ledge above the deep shaft to which Wulfgar and his fellow necromancers had been cons
igned. The pit was the Eternal Circle, ringed by a mosaic of obsidian and gold, the tiles forming runes that were essential to the spell. The runestones were the Living Triangle, the three-in-one, enchanted gems containing the life essence of the Council of the White, the keys to lock the spell. And surrounding the pit was the huge Warding Pentagram, laid into the cavern floor in a mosaic of obsidian and gold.
Such incredibly elaborate preparations, Wulfgar had thought, before the spell had lulled him and the others in the pit into a deep torpor, would last for centuries. How much simpler, he thought, and ultimately how much kinder it would have been to kill us. But kindness was not what the Council had intended. No, despite their high-flown, noble pronouncements, what they had really wanted was revenge, a way to torment their enemies throughout all eternity. And eternity it might well have been, had Gorlois not proved susceptible to being contaminated by human weakness.
Since his escape, Wulfgar had sought to gain as much knowledge as he could of the humans in their brave new world and he had tried to discover if anything was remembered of his race. What he had found were memories that lived on in myths and legends. No one remembered the Old Ones anymore. But in their myths, the Greeks wrote of immortal gods on Mount Olympus. The Norsemen had a legend of mighty, immortal warrior gods who lived in a kingdom known as Asgard. The Indians of the American Southwest had their own mythology, involving sacred spirits known as the Kachina; the Arabs had their mystic Djinn. From the Balkans, tales came of supernatural beings who could assume the form of animals and stories of the "living dead," vampires who drained the living of the vital fluid of life. From those legends and what he had learned of human history, Wulfgar was able to guess what must have happened to many of the Old Ones who had survived the war.