by Steven Brust
“Interesting.”
“Yes.”
“It occurred to Mr. Longfellow that maybe the attacker is using artifacts, that he has no sorcery of his own. Each artifact, of course, can be used only once, so it would explain that. I asked Artifacts and Enchantments to look into it. I got this last night. And, in passing, I must commend the department for fast and excellent work.”
He carefully removed the memo from his inside coat pocket, unfolded it, and presented it to Morgan with something of an air of ceremony.
Morgan read it, then nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I see. What do you suggest as our next step?”
“We need to determine what else was in the cache, and, if possible, recover it.”
“Do you have a suggestion as to how to do that?”
“Mr. Longfellow hypothesizes that there are two individuals—one supplies the devices; the other uses them. If we can capture the second alive, he may be able to lead us to the first.”
“And to capture the second?”
“Figure out his pattern, determine his next target, beat him to it.”
“And to do that, Mr. Becker?”
“There are resources we need.”
Her mouth twitched a little. “Resources. You mean money.”
“Among other things. Mr. Longfellow was able to find a link between the first two victims by going to an outside source. If the—”
“Outside source, Mr. Becker? Is there a security risk?”
“I trust Mr. Longfellow implicitly.”
Morgan nodded. “Very well, then I will, too, for now. Continue.”
“The source will continue to be useful, but only if paid. I am therefore requesting that you instruct Budget and Oversight to release this and future payments.”
“I see,” said Morgan. “Is the amount substantial?”
“Roughly four thousand, five hundred at the current exchange rate.”
“All right. I’ll see to it.”
“Thank you, Ms. Morgan.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Only one more thing. Ms. Morgan, I don’t know where this is going. There is a great deal I don’t understand. Therefore, I don’t know what we may require. But it is very possible there will be unexpected demands on the resources of the Foundation, and not a great deal of time in which to gather them.”
“Are you asking for carte blanche?”
“No, Ms. Morgan. Not at this time. I am merely informing you of the possibility, so you can consider the matter.”
Camellia drummed her fingertips on the desk. “We do not like the idea of the existence of magic being generally known. It would put us all at risk. That said, the Foundation has other tasks, performs other services, not just yours.”
“I understand that, Ms. Morgan.”
She nodded. “I will consider it. I appreciate the heads-up.”
“Very well, Ms. Morgan.”
“There is something else, Mr. Becker.”
Becker had half stood up; he sat down again and waited.
“Do you know Vasily Vasilyev?”
“I do not.”
“Russian, of course. Part of I and E, Black Sea area. Used to be Ukraine, but he’s Jewish, so he got out after the coup. He’s the sorcerer for a good team. He’s a tracer.”
“I’m sorry, a tracer?”
“A fluke talent. Give him a good feel for the actions of an artifact, he can tell you where the artifact is, and sometimes, where it was before.”
“I see. Yes. That might be worthwhile. It is unlikely to lead us directly to either the shooter, or whoever is behind him—people who commit crimes with artifacts tend not to hang on to them once they’ve been used. But getting our hands on one could be useful. We might even get a fingerprint.”
“Yes. I’ll email you his contact information, and ask him to cooperate with you.”
“Will I need a translator?”
“His English is good.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course.”
Becker stood and gave a nod, turned, and walked away. Morgan gave a barely audible sigh and relaxed a little.
* * *
From what Donovan could tell on Skype, Vasily Ilyanovich Vasilyev seemed to be in his midthirties, with shaggy, curly hair that could have been blond or light brown and a wide forehead that made him look smart. His first words were, “You must be Mr. Longfellow, yes? Mr. Becker said I should expect your call. Very happy to speak with you.” He made the “v” sound with just the least hint that it wanted to be a “w” and the “s’s” were pretty hissy, and “Becker” was kind of close to “baker,” but other than that, Donovan detected little in the way of accent.
“Thank you for speaking with me, Mr. Vasilyev. Mr. Becker told me of your talent. Can you explain a little more how it works?”
“Please,” he said. “Call me Vasily, if we are to work together.”
“Vasily. I’m Donovan, then.”
“Of course. To answer your question, it is very simple: If I am in an area where an enchanted artifact was used, I can sometimes tell whence it came.”
“Tell how? I mean, how does the location manifest to you? Do you point to a spot on a map?”
“A direction, and a sense of distance. Sometimes a close sense of distance. Once I came within half a kilometer from over a hundred kilometers away.”
“But you need to start from where it was used. I mean, you need to be there yourself.”
“Yes, naturally.”
“How long do you have after it’s been used?”
“Well, of course, it will depend, yes? On the nearest grid line or point, on the exact spell. In general, it will last as long as if the spell had been cast as you would say normally, by sorcerer casting it, or sometimes a little longer. Can you tell what this is about?”
“A whole cache of artifacts was found in Turkey, sent to the British Museum, and vanished en route.”
“What sort of artifacts?”
“We’re pretty sure one was a time-stop.”
“Bo—my god. That is, that is remarkable.”
“Yes.”
“When was it used?”
“A week ago.”
“A week ago, I could not detect it.”
“There was also one used to give someone a disease. That one is less than forty-eight hours old.”
“Oh? That is possible, then, though I would not wish to guarantee anything.”
“Yeah, I don’t expect guarantees. But it sounds like it’s worth a try. Hey, Vasily: You ever wanted to visit Chicago?”
* * *
Here’s a question that doesn’t come up often in either basic training or advanced, or in training for any specialty offered by the Armed Forces of the United States: How do you find a sorcerer? It isn’t like they advertise. In fact, it seems like they go to a lot of trouble to make sure no one knows they exist. From what he’d picked up, Matt had the distinct impression that, in fact, keeping magic secret was the thing both organizations cared about the most. Don had as much as said that no one cared what was done with magic as long as no one did anything that risked detection by the public—by civilians, as they said. Matt didn’t care for how that word tasted. Was that why he was getting involved in this? Just to avoid being a civilian?
Red on the ledger. Shit.
Matt sat on a bench outside the library and lit a cigarette—his first since he’d left the service. He wasn’t sure why he was smoking again, but there it was.
One in a hundred thousand. That meant that, in the continental United States, there were between three thousand and thirty-five hundred, minus however many were off at whatever training base the two places had. Big country to find one of three thousand people in. Maybe they had a message board.
Actually, not that funny—they probably did. But finding it would be at least as hard as any other way of searching.
If I were a sorcerer, what would I do? That’s easy. Get rich. How?
Well, the first a
nd most obvious answer would be: conjure up big wads of cash. Would that work? If he understood more of this, he’d know; but then, if he understood more of this, he wouldn’t need to go find someone to ask.
Well, let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that between the paper, the art, sequencing serial numbers, and all that, it was impossible, or so difficult it wasn’t worth the trouble. And then, of course, there was the danger of detection; not using magic to break laws seemed important to these guys.
So take that off the table. Limit it to things that you could legally do without magic, but that magic would make easier, or better.
Easier. Maybe that was the key. Of those three thousand or so people, there had to be some who weren’t crazy obsessed with making as much cash as they could, but were just satisfied with getting by while they played video games and watched reruns of Seinfeld. If so, then what he was looking for wasn’t someone with a huge income, but with an income out of proportion to the work he put in.
Yeah, that would make kind of a tough Google search, though.
He put his cigarette out and went back into the library. A quick check of the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed something like eight hundred different occupations. He could eliminate the vast majority of them at once—whatever this mythical sorcerer was doing, he or she was self-employed. Something not requiring work with anyone else who could see the sausage being made. Something taking some degree of skill or training or knowledge, probably, where he could get a reputation for good, fast, cheap work and keep customers coming back, while actually doing a whole lot less than it seemed.
Several hours later he had a list, a plan, a headache, an appetite, and a mad desire for sleep. He’d come back tomorrow and get started. It shouldn’t take more than a few days to go through the ads in the fifty biggest cities.
Ads. Shit. The son of a bitch might not advertise at all—he might want to keep a lower profile than that, just finding customers through word of mouth. If so, there’d be no way to find him.
Somewhere out there, Matt was sure, was someone who could sit down at a computer, type in a few keywords, and have the answer come spitting out in five minutes. This computer whiz would pick a suitable business, and look for a drop-off in commercial businesses over, say, the last few years. He’d set it up, and run it in fifty cities at once. Well, no, probably not—probably no way to do that. But, shit, there had to be something. There had to be traces somehow. And there had to be someone who could figure out how to find what he needed.
It was good to have friends, and friends of friends. And friends of friends who’d do favors without asking questions.
Matt pulled out his cell and punched in a number.
Twenty minutes later, someone he’d never met, or even heard of twenty minutes before, said, “Well, you know, if he’s fixing cars he’s got to dispose of a lot of oil, right? And maybe batteries, too? A lot of places keep track of that. Give me a couple hours, I’ll get back to you.”
It was good to have friends.
9
A DAY IN THE PARK
Susan answered at once. Donovan explained why they were going back to Chicago, to the scene of the last attack, and Susan said that she had no problem going, but wanted five minutes for a shower. He couldn’t reach Marci on Skype, but she answered her cell fast enough. She was twenty minutes from her apartment and the slipwalk, out with her boyfriend, but would drop everything and go.
“Sorry,” Donovan said.
“It’s all right. He knows this kind of thing is liable to happen. I’ll see you there.”
He opened the closet, filled his pockets, and shut it. He started to leave the apartment, caught himself, and went back into the kitchen to put the milk away.
* * *
Some people thought Susan worked out so much because she was dedicated. Others thought her “goal oriented,” which might mean the same thing—she wasn’t sure. Occasionally an idiot would hit on her by explaining that she was “sublimating,” as if she were likely to respond, Gosh, you’re right; I never realized that. Fuck me right now.
She had occasionally tried to explain that it wasn’t like that at all, it was more like addiction. Or maybe “habituation” was closer. All she knew was that if she didn’t work out for a day her body felt funny. If she went two days, she had trouble sleeping.
That, and there was something pleasantly hypnotic about the process. Swimming was her favorite, but the pool was five miles away, which too often seemed like a pain. So she ran, did weights, stretched, hit the bag, and, above all, practiced kata. She loved her kata like a junkie loved the prick of the needle: the feeling of every muscle behaving, doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It was a high. She didn’t dance, but she understood dancers.
She was in the middle of stretching when her computer notified her of a Skype call. She stopped, spoke with Donovan, and jumped into the shower.
Clean—or at least not stinky—she threw on her Portland Community College sweatshirt, a pair of brown capris, and her knee-high red and white stripey socks with Ariel on them. That’s right. You’ve just gotten your ass kicked by a girl wearing Little Mermaid socks. She put on her flat-heeled doeskin boots, closed the apartment, and ran up the stairs to the top floor of her building, then down the hall to apartment 409.
No one lived in apartment 409—it was a storage unit shared by everyone who lived there, according to an agreement with Mr. Sloan, the landlord. But it did have a bathroom.
She reached into the shower and turned the hot up all the way, then down to half, then off, then one quarter on, then off; then she pulled on the divertor that would have started the shower if water were running.
A section of wall opposite the shower fixtures lowered. She stepped through it to a stairway leading up. She stated the same Chicago address as before, and started walking.
* * *
Peggy had a feeling.
Peggy did not base her conclusions on feelings, or instincts, or intuition. She didn’t get feelings; she got answers. But now she had a feeling. I’m not done. There’s more here. I’m sure there is.
It was the dig in Turkey, where some British archaeologists had uncovered and shipped to England (after paying the proper bribes, of course) three large crates of carefully packed thirteenth-century artifacts, one of which had gone missing. There was the inevitable broken pottery, and even a brownish-red jug that was whole save for a chipped handle. There was an anvil, and a piece of what was probably the tongs to go with it. There were curious copper disks with tiny holes to string them together that some were arguing were children’s toys, some thought had religious significance, and others believed were coins. There were tools, buttons (there are always buttons), utensils. And there were a few semi-precious stones—agate, diaspore—that had been shaped and polished.
Bits and pieces of many things had come together to point that out: Turkish folklore, newspaper accounts, shipping manifests, papers in archaeology journals, records copied (read: stolen) from the Mystici. In the end, she had found what the Ranch had been looking for, and everyone was happy; Julia had shown her a memo from Ms. Morgan complimenting the department. That was winning. Once you’ve won, you can stop, right? Right?
She pushed aside her current research—the kind she liked most, where she wasn’t looking for anything, just looking—and brought up her notes labeled “Agri Cache.” She read them over, each line a conclusion, each conclusion bringing back memories of how she’d reached it.
She couldn’t have made a mistake. It was all there, all the pieces, fitting together—
Fitting together so perfectly.
She’d had many reactions over the years to success, failure, or discovery, but this was the first time she had ever felt herself flushing.
She opened the Foundation directory, found a number, punched it into her phone.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Becker,” she said, forgetting how scary and creepy he was.
“Yes, who is—”
>
“Peggy Hanson from the Burrow. We have a problem.”
* * *
Donovan offered Vasilyev his hand and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.”
“And you, Donovan.” The Russian’s handshake was a little too strong, almost painful, but his smile seemed pleasant.
“I thought,” said Donovan, “that the plan was to let me and my team show up first, so we could secure the area.”
The Russian shrugged. “I hate waiting.”
Donovan felt his lips twitch. “Yeah, I hear you. The others should be along.”
“All right,” he said. “Tell me, is it as hard as they say, being black in America?”
Donovan laughed, couldn’t help it. “I love Europeans. You guys are the best.”
Vasilyev frowned. “I do not understand. I didn’t mean to give offense.”
“No, no. It’s cool. But no American would ever, ah, anyway, I don’t know. I don’t know what they say. I mean, it’s a thing. The more money you have, the less of a thing it is. I’m not saying I want to trade places with a homeless white guy. But it’s still a thing.”
“I’m sorry. Can you explain?”
Donovan thought about it. “Okay, I got this thing I call the Face. It’s automatic now; I just do it when I go out, don’t even think about it. I make my eyes just the least fraction wide, and I do a kind of Mona Lisa smile. And I’m never the first one to make eye contact, but I always nod and smile if someone else does.”
Vasilyev shook his head. “Why—”
“It’s so I look harmless. So no one gets scared and decides to shoot me.”
The Russian’s brows came together. “Someone would shoot you otherwise?”
“Probably not. It’s more like—oh, here’s Hippie Chick. Good timing; I was getting to the hard part.” He made the introductions, then introduced Marci as she appeared. Then he said, “Well, it’s across the street there. Let’s see if you can get what we need.”
“Eh, oh,” said Vasilyev. “I got it already.”
“You—”
“Yes, yes. Before you got here. Trivial.”
“What if you’d been shot?”