by Carl Sargent
"Nasrah, you want to earn a few bucks?" she asked brightly. He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
"You trying to sell me something again, Kristen?" "No, all I want is for you to read to me." He gave her a slightly sideways glance, drew a pair of battered glasses from a pocket, and barely had them perched on his nose before she almost pushed the magazine straight into his chest.
"Here. Start here. Tell me about him."
The wine shop was open late.
Serrin remembered that his Welsh nobleman friend, Geraint, had told him that if ever in Germany, he should try to find eiswein, the extraordinary yellow wine made from grapes rotted on the vine after the first frost had crystallized their liquid into a supremely concentrated fermentation. He took the bottle back to his hotel room, which suddenly filled with the scent of fruits and flowers the moment he uncorked it. Serrin poured himself a glass, then raised the cold wine to his lips and tasted the delicious sweetness as the nectar slid down his throat as smoothly as water dripping from an icicle. He was astonished; nothing he'd ever known had tasted like this. One glass would never be enough.
He woke with a start just after midnight, knocking the empty bottle away as he stretched his arms and yawned wide enough to almost crack his jaw. Hungry now, and sure he would need some exercise before being able to sleep again, he used his night key to let himself out onto the street, passing by the church, making his way through the scattered university buildings toward the bars, where he would still be able to find food at this hour.
The tiny alleyways around the university were deserted, barely lit. Suddenly, panic gripped him as his spell lock screamed with its knowledge. Looking around wildly, the elf was sure only a threat to his life could set off such a warning. He threw up a barrier spell just as the
first heavy dart struck the wall behind him with a brutal crunching sound.
A red spot had also appeared on his chest, an IR rangefinder, and Serrin risked an instant of astral perception to find its source. High on the roofs above he glimpsed a second figure, shadowy and silent, melting out of the shadows to his left. He slipped out of astral in double-quick time and decided to try to take out one of the fraggers with some heavy hitting. No sense in doing things by halves.
As he cast the spell, hellfire lit up the roofs above and a curtain of flame roared around the gunman, ruining his second shot. The man screamed and toppled, his burning body hitting the cobbled streets with a ghastly thud. The rifle that fell from his hands clattered along the street, and a cascade of ammunition also rattled down the rooftops and onto the street. Serrin heard voices in the distance and someone shouting, "Polizei! Bitte, polizei!" The second man was a meter away from him. Serrin could see hand razors snaking from his fingers, discolored blades glittering even in the faint light around him. Jerking himself backward, he found himself suddenly backed up against a wall.
The man grinned. He was almost anonymous in his long, shapeless coat, and Serrin guessed there must be cybereyes under his shades. There was a grim appropriateness about his hunting hat, but another feature clawed at something in Serrin's memory: a triangular scar stamped into his chin. He knew he'd seen it somewhere before, but had no time to wonder where.
The razor claws ripped the mage's arm just as Serrin hit his assailant with a mana bolt, pushing hard with the force of it at the man's psyche and being. His attacker grunted and doubled over as if someone had just kicked him in the guts, but Serrin knew the force he'd put into the spell should have done a lot more than that. He leapt past the man and ran like the wind for the Haupstrasse. Just as he as about to round the corner, the sound of running feet coming at him from the front made the elf halt and back into a shadowed dotirway to cast an invisibility spell. Despite the danger and the adrenaline pumping
through his veins, Serrin felt weak and drowsy, a sign that he was burning up far too much magical energy. Half a dozen drunken students teemed past him, advancing on where Serrin had just left his assailant.
Waiting frantically for them to pass, he noticed something small and metallic gleaming faintly on the ground. He picked it up, thinking he'd dropped it. Then came the wail of sirens from the west of the town, and Serrin had to wait for them to pass before tottering unsteadily back to his hotel. His arm stung like crazy, although there was little blood on his jacket. The wound was barely a scratch. Spirits, he thought, the bastard poisoned me!
He barely made it back to his room, he couldn't call BuMoNa, because he hadn't bought any health care coverage upon arriving. Neither did he want to call the German police, who were sure to wonder about poisoned wounds and blazing bodies in the streets of peaceful Heidelberg. The elf cut a strip of cloth from a spare shirt and bound his left arm with a tourniquet so tight the arm was white within seconds. Then he stuffed everything he could into his suitcase and called a cab. He knew this was crazy, that he was taking an absurd chance with his life, but with the venom making him unable to think straight, his actions were born out of sweating, pallorous fear.
"Hauptbahnhof, danke," Serrin managed to say to the taxi driver, waving enough nuyen in the man's face to buy himself salvation from the sirens, or so he hoped. He got lucky; the ork just grunted, and the car began to slip quietly along the riverside, left through the Bismarck Platz and west into Bergheimerstrasse, leaving the flash of blue lights behind.
Arriving at the train station, Serrin stumbled out of the cab, hoping the driver would take him for just another drunken tourist. Dragging one foot after another, he approached the big board showing the train schedules, and studied it briefly before slotting his credstick into the automatic ticket dispenser. His brain raced: Get the Essen express, change at Mainz for Frankfurt or go through to Bonn. Buy a ticket for Essen in case the police track me. Get off halfway there. The machine must have exhausted
its misanthropy for the day because it finally coughed up his ticket without any of the usual harassment.
Serrin just barely managed to get into the first class car before finally passing out. The wound burned like fire and his throat was dry as dust. Horribly, he felt his muscles stiffening, his breath ragged and gasping. Spirits, he thought, I'm having a seizure. They stuck me with some fragging paralyzing neurotoxic or something. He tried to get to the door of the car and shout for help, realizing too late that death wasn't the smartest way of avoiding the German police, but his leaden limbs refused to obey his brain and he slumped helplessly into the corner seat. His eyes rolled backward in his head and he collapsed.
Serrin was awakened by the conductor as the express pulled out of Koblenz. His arm throbbed and his mouth felt like a parakeet had been living in it, but his heartbeat seemed normal and the only other lingering symptom of the attack was a tight, knotted stiffness in the muscles of his arms and legs. While fumbling in his pockets for the ticket, Serrin's hand rattled something metal and he hurriedly coughed to cover up the sound. Once the conductor finished looking at the ticket as if it were something he'd been unlucky enough to step in, the elf waited for the man to move on up the aisle before pulling the metal object from his pocket. It was a cartridge, the kind used for medical injections. Empty now.
Trank shot, Serrin thought. Odd that I don't remember picking it up, but it explains why I only feel as stiff as hell. Those claws must have been full of tranquilizer too. That means they wanted me alive.
Though the thought should have been reassuring, Serrin found it even more terrifying than someone wanting him dead.
He stared wretchedly at the oncoming glare of the glittering Rhine-Ruhr megaplex and wondered who the hell could be after him. His head swam with images from dozens of Z-grade movies of killers on trains, but his spell lock wasn't giving him any warnings of immediate danger. He tried to figure out what someone might now expect him to do, to second-guess anyone trying to track him. With a start, he remembered the scarred man from JFK and realized that the hit must have been ordered while he was still in New York; from there they'd followed him to Heidelberg. That had taken some doing,
surely; tracing him to Frankfurt would have been easy, but on to the university city?
It has to be a magician, he thought. Someone who could trace me astrally. A magician who wants me alive. The thought hit him like an ice-cold shower.
He got off the train at Bonn and took a taxi directly to the airport. Pushing coins desperately into one of the battery of concourse telecoms, he cursed the broken slot that should have taken a credstick for the call. The number he called was in the heart of London.
"Yeah?" The screen showed the face of a sleepy blonde rubbing her face and peering back at her caller's gaunt visage. She didn't like the look of him at all.
"Is Geraint there?" he pleaded.
"Hey, whoever you are, term, it's five in the morning and "
"It's urgent. Tell him it's Serrin."
"He's not here," she said smugly. "He's in Hong Kong on business. He'll be back in two days. Can I take a message?"
"I'll call back," the elf said curtly and hit the Disconnect. London was close, and a friend who was a member of the House of Lords might be protection worth having. But for the moment he was still alone and twitching in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar airport thousands of miles and an ocean away from home. His hands were shaking even worse than usual. No one seemed to pay him the least attention, however. Looking around, Serrin saw the standard fare of all airports at five in the morning: the beginnings of the business commuter traffic headed for Brussels or Strasbourg; jilted lovers red-eyed and morose; sleepless and angry people denied their flights by some incompetent engineer or air-traffic controller; drunks and chipheads laid out on benches airport security hadn't yet gotten around to cleaning up. Dimly, Serrin remembered some phrase from an English poet: Isn't life a terrible thing, thank God? But God, if he exists, couldn't have created airports, the elf thought glumly. Drek, I should just get on the next plane back to UCAS, to anywhere they can take me. So what if what somebody's probably expecting me to do? What other choice have I got?
He approached the British Airways desk, getting ready for his standard "first plane home" spiel. He was getting good at it by now. But even as the thought came, Serrin felt the beginnings of a smile tugging at his lips. Seattle! Home of sorts.
He pushed his suitcase onto the conveyor at a gesture from the girl yawning behind the desk.
"Mr. Shamandar," she said suddenly, while routinely checking his documents. "There's a message for you. It was delivered a couple of hours ago I nearly forgot."
He took the envelope, then made a hash of trying to open it neatly with his shaking hands, almost tearing the single sheet of white paper as he pulled it out.
Mr. Shamandar, it read, you would find it profitable to investigate the identity of the instigator of your meeting with a certain party this evening. Especially if you studied others in the same position.
It was written in Sperethiel, the elven tongue. Which gave his guts another quick loop-the-loop. "Who gave you this?" he demanded gruffly. "I'm sorry but I don't know," the girl replied, stifling another yawn with her elegantly manicured hands. "I wasn't on the desk at the time. You'd have to ask Frieda, but she won't be back on duty until tomorrow night and your plane is boarding in fifteen minutes."
As he trudged to the departure gate, trembling hands groping for his ID, Serrin felt like a pawn in the midst of some dangerous cat-and-mouse game. In itself that wasn't so unusual. He'd already been scragged royally by life enough times before, but this had a certain starkness to it that he was beginning not to like at all.
Slot, he thought, I'm just getting old, that's all. The elf ran his fingers through his short graying hair and wondered what kind of protection he could buy once he got back to Seattle.
Squinting at the magnificent bloody sunset and the black clouds whipping in from the Atlantic, Kristen stretched her legs and pulled the wrap tighter about her
shoulders against the rapidly cooling air. She was happy with life right now: dollars in her pocket and dagga and drink in her bag, a smile spreading over her face at the thought of dancing at Indra's all night. This couldn't last, of course, it never did; but her luck tended to come in runs and maybe the mugged tourist's bag was the start of such a run.
She meandered down Main as the dull glow of the streetlights grew into a glare, past the plastic and chrome tourist traps of Vesperdene and into the warren of streets between Main and High. The first few big drops of rain sloshed against the sidewalk, promising Cape Town's usual evening drenching. All day Table Mountain had been wearing a shroud of hazy clouds that must have concealed the fifty-kilometer view it offered from its peak on a clear day. Hissing at the rain, she ducked into one of the malls, a whirring blur of neon, trid, video, and colorful humanity.
To her dismay, she walked straight into some lekker-boys laughing their way out of a bar. Cheaply dressed and absurdly proud of their garish clothing, they were as vain as peacocks and unpredictable as hell. The slag who seemed to be at the head of the pack looked at her disapprovingly while preening the lapels of his jacket. The others formed a circle around her before she could react.
"Don't like kaffirs dirtying up my threads," he snarled. Kristen winced at the insult, once spat at blacks by whites and now directed at mixed-race people, usually in one of history's little ironies by blacks.
"I'm sorry. Didn't mean it. Didn't see where I was going. Let me help." She clumsily reached out a hand to wipe at his jacket, but he gripped her wrist painfully and stared deep into her eyes. Kristen had the horrible certainty that this bugger was high on something not very pleasant, then she heard a metallic click behind her. She didn't need to turn around to know it was a knife.
"I ain't got nothing'," she whined, then suddenly remembered the money she was carrying. Even worse than the physical danger was the prospect of losing her treasure so soon after finding it. "Only some dagga. I give it to you, you leave me alone."
The man sneered. "She give us dagga, boys!" A faint swell of derision rose around her. The grip on her wrist tightened and the ganger twisted it a little. Kristen had to bite her lip to keep from yelping in pain.
"Maybe we want something else," he leered, dragging her close and opening his mouth in a broken-toothed smile. His free hand was rising to grab at her breast just as a much larger one seized his shoulder. The world-weary face of a black troll loomed above him.
"We don't want no trouble here, boys," the troll boomed in a deep voice. "Police were round last week and we don't want to see them back again so soon, do we? Run along and play somewhere else, you skollies." The lekkerboy turned and with a cool gaze took in the stun baton in the troll's other hand. Slowly he released Kristen, then made an obscene gesture as he led the rest of the gang off into the night rain, shoving aside anyone in their way.
"Thanks, chummer," Kristen managed to say, shaking worse than she should have. She got in and out of a dozen scrapes like this every week. Maybe that dagga was a little stronger than she'd thought or maybe it wasn't strong enough. "Hey, Muzerala, is that you?"
"You betcha ass," the troll said, not given to much in the way of polite conversation.
"I thought you were working at Indra's. Thought I'd see you there tonight," she replied. "Hell, I need a drink." "I guess you can come in," the troll told her, gesturing to the little bar whose entrance he'd been guarding. Then he shrugged and said, "I had a little disagreement with Indra. She owes me something like three hundred rand in back pay and wouldn't pay up. So I did a little damage cost her that much and more. Won't be seeing me around there for a while."
Kristen parked herself on a bar stool and ordered a beer. With a chaser. The barman looked dubious until Muzerela gave him a nod. "She just had a mess-up with some skollies. Needs a drink," he said. Scowling, the barman rudely pushed a glass across the bar. She didn't waste any precious dollars on him, paying instead with
what was almost the last of her rands. She needed to find Nasser and cut a deal on the bucks.
"Any chance of work?" she said r
ather pathetically to the troll. The bar was almost empty, which just might make the humiliation of rejection not quite so painful. A place like this wouldn't hire a mixed-race girl any more than it would normally serve one. Still, the troll just might have something, somewhere. But all she got was the offer she should have expected.
"Your face wouldn't fit," the troll said. "Nothing personal. My brother could always find you work, though." "Huh. Thanks but no thanks. I'm not down to that yet," she said, gulping down the beer fast. If the bar owner appeared, it might not be healthy for Muzerela that he'd let her in, especially since he hadn't been working here long. Kristen finished her drink too quickly and headed for the rest room.
Three minutes later she was back on the streets. She'd smoked the joint even faster than usual, and it hadn't been a good idea. She had to get to Indra's, dance away the effects, find Nasser on his late-night rounds and change her money. Then pull a fade fast before word got around and someone decided to slice her up for the money.
Looking up at the street sign, Kristen didn't have to read it to know that the street was named High. She was just chuckling at the appropriateness of it when the face of the American elf drifted into her mind. She was still disturbed by seeing it on the tabloid, and she longed to be able to read the words and try to figure out who he was and why he could seem so significant to her. It was then she saw the two men in the shadow beyond the streetlight, collars raised against the rain that had driven most people off the street. Something told her she wasn't going to be walking any further along High.
By the time the suborbital landed in Seattle, it was late afternoon. Serrin awakened from his doze and stared out the window at the haze shimmering all the way from the runway to the terminal. Great, he thought, limping his way toward customs, that's all I need. Sweltering heat.
By the time he picked up his bags, he'd decided to get a room at the Warwick. Last he'd heard, that luxury hotel had begun to specialize in unobtrusive security for corporate clients who expected a little more than the norm. The rates would be exorbitant, of course, but he was too