I thought about that. Even if I did not have an obligation to my late master, I knew I had no choice anymore. I had to resolve this problem with the Fae and the Whitesnakes if I meant to go on living in CrossTown. At the same time, I suspected that there must be some connection between Corvinus’s murder and my present troubles.
“NightTown isn’t enough for you.” She caught and held my gaze. “Staying here with me isn’t enough.”
I looked her in the eye for a long moment of silence. “No,” I said at last.
Until we had talked, I had not fully realized where I intended to go or when. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. But then I felt it, an itching need to investigate the causes of Corvinus’s death while the event was still fresh. I wanted to find out who killed him, and why, not only for him but for myself. Emerantha had been right in one respect—if Corvinus had been killed for his research, then the killer probably figured, like Emerantha, that I had knowledge of it too. If someone had set me up deliberately for the vendetta and the trap in Faerie, then my bet would be that the same person would prove to be involved in Corvinus’s murder.
And if that were the case, maybe the murderer was not so much interested in stealing Corvinus’s research as suppressing it. That ugly thought gave me considerable pause: with the number of things the Raven had been investigating, almost anyone could have decided that he had begun to dig in forbidden areas. Knowing the nature of his project might inform me as to the nature of his killer or killers. If I could track my troubles back to the root cause of Corvinus’s death, I had a chance of dealing with my own problems and getting my life back on track. As long as Fetch could legally hunt me for defaulting on a contract, as long as the Whitesnake bounty hung over my head, and as long as unknown forces thought of me as a threat because of what they believed I knew about Corvinus’s research, I was a fugitive in CrossTown. Hell, I would be a fugitive anywhere I traveled along the myriad Ways, if they were motivated enough. I couldn’t dodge all those bullets forever.
I considered my possible courses of action. I could investigate Corvinus’s activities and check out his abode and the workshop there, as well as his study in the caves above DeepTown. I could also track the money the Whitesnakes had posted—fifty golden hours sounded like quite a bit for the ragged lot of cultists I remembered. It also seemed odd that all of it would have been put on my head. They had other sacrificial knives to grind—why not thirty on me and twenty on Anthony Vayne? Even ten golden hours gets a fair amount of attention in the CrossTown market. That focus on me reinforced my suspicion that more lay behind the Whitesnake bounty than simple revenge.
Tracking the money wouldn’t be easy. The Bank of Hours wouldn’t tell me squat if confidentiality were involved, unless I could pay the disclosure price, which I doubted. My best bet there would be getting my hands on a Whitesnake in the know, like one of their priests. I knew where one Whitesnake priest had lived, but I had retired him myself (permanently), so that didn’t help.
I wished I could have found an analogue of Corvinus, or talked to a past self who could tell me what I needed to know, or journeyed to a timeline wherein I could warn him against his impending death. But subjective time is a constant in Cross-Town. In addition, the more we travel the possible Ways, the more the probability waves of our alternate selves collapse into our subjective past and present. I might have been able to find an analogue of Corvinus down some strange Way, but as a powerful user of the Ways, Corvinus would have absorbed all of his closest analogues into his personal probability.
Analogues of initiates of the Ways were so rare as to be virtually nonexistent. If I did find an analogue, the experiences would be divergent enough that any information I obtained would be unreliable. Each subjective past is fixed. Even trying to scry into a place as tangled as Corvinus’s home would be beyond all the experts I knew and trusted. Certainly it was beyond me, though I might have some luck picking up traces once inside. Although, given what Pale had told me about how the killer had left no traces for CrossTerPol to find, I had my doubts.
“You’re going to approach this thing the way you always do, aren’t you?” Eliza sounded amused and a little melancholy.
“And how’s that?” I asked.
“Head on.” She smiled. “You could stay here with me a little longer. I think you’re afraid that if you stayed long enough, you wouldn’t want to leave.”
That had more than a little truth in it, so I kissed her and said nothing. We sat together in silence for a while, listening to the wind in the trees and watching the shadows dance.
To break the mood, I changed the subject. “Who was your uninvited guest at the party?”
She cocked her head, and then laughed. “Emory? My half brother. He managed to get himself turned a few years back, freeing himself of his master.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think that happened often.”
“It doesn’t. Most masters are more careful than that. Still, it was careless to turn Emory in the first place.”
“He’s dangerous?”
“To himself and everyone else. I don’t expect him to last long.”
I grinned. “And what does a masterless vampire do?”
She chuckled. “Whatever he wants, as long as it doesn’t involve sunbathing.” She gave me a quizzical look. “Do you think he’s involved in your present problems?”
I shook my head. “Just a stray thought. Should I?”
Eliza shrugged. “Not to my knowledge. But then, I don’t always know what he’s up to these days. Word has it he’s hired himself out to nobility. I wouldn’t have expected that. Put it this way: if he finds out that you have a bounty on your head, it wouldn’t surprise me to find him trying for it.”
“He’s not concerned about your reaction?”
“That aspect of it would amuse him.”
“I knew I didn’t like him for a reason.”
Eliza plucked fastidiously at my ragged shirt. “You need to burn these before you go. I can give you new ones. There’s a stream not far from here, for your bath. You need one.”
I gave her an impudent look. “You didn’t seem to mind before.”
She arched an eyebrow delicately. “That was before. And you had the excuse of fatigue.”
Truthfully, I needed a bath. “Lead on.”
We left the remains of the picnic under the broken trees. Eliza led me to a narrow stream running between smooth rocks and down to a clear pool hemmed in by dark, crooked trees whose roots curled snugly under a thick blanket of moss. Long-stemmed roses with midnight petals ringed the pool, nodding gently in time to the unseen rhythm of a gentle breeze only they could feel, every movement wafting a delicate, musky scent into the air. Fresh clothes and thick towels lay folded at the base of one the trees, nestled in the midst of roses.
“You’re nothing if not prepared,” I commented as I stripped.
She laughed. “Teila was happy enough to bring the clothes and towels down.”
The water had the cold, clear bite of purity. I thought about a great many things as we bathed, and when I rose from the water I had considered my course of action. I needed to deal with the Whitesnake bounty. Until I did that, every move I made would provide some joker with the opportunity for making some fast cash. I needed a plan, and I had the beginnings of one smoldering in the back of my mind. But first I needed information, both on the Whitesnakes and on the details surrounding Corvinus’s recent demise. So I needed to hit the crime scene while the evidence was still fresh. I needed to see if Corvinus had left anything for me there. I doubted it. I expected that he would have left any valuable information at the more secure workshop “down by the sea,” but I couldn’t afford to pass this opportunity by.
I picked up the clothing Eliza had prepared for me, and found three small chains nestled in the folds of cloth. The links of the chains had been fashioned alternately out of a bright metal and a dull metal. I held them up. “Iron and silver?”
She nodded gravely. “
You never know.”
I fastened the chains around my throat and wrists. They would slow certain NightTown predators with particular vulnerabilities. “Thanks for thinking of me.”
I drew on loose trousers, a long-sleeved and high collared shirt, and low boots. All fit well. Everything had been cut from fine cloth, and fit as if it had been designed for me. All of the clothes quite possibly had, Eliza being the way she was.
I turned my attention back to strategy. All of my planning, of course, ignored Fetch. He motivated me to move, in the final analysis. Even at Eliza’s place, if Jack found me, he would take me. I couldn’t present anyone with a stationary target. I had to stay away from any and all of my places and regular contacts. I needed to shift from the defensive to the offensive.
“It’s dangerous,” Eliza told me quietly. She stood behind me, her hands tracing the line of my spine.
I had almost become accustomed to the way she could read me. “So is staying here. So’s life.”
“And that’s what you love about it.”
“There’s a measure of truth to that. I’m going to keep this thing out of your backyard. I think that my best chance is to keep moving.”
She turned me and carefully smoothed my collar as it lay against my neck, covering the chains at my throat. “Don’t get caught.”
“Not if I can help it.”
With Shaper’s help, I pulled the guise of age back over myself. The wind stalked gently through the trees as I set my feet on the path out of there, my mind open to all the possibility I could reach.
CHAPTER XIII
I TRAVELED on crooked paths, wary and alert for traces of the hunters. I intended to make my way to Corvinus’s place, then on to set other wheels in motion. I needed information and I needed to confound the bounty on my head. I knew a bounty hunter I had worked with on a couple of occasions, and perhaps I could use him to stymie the Whitesnakes’ efforts to see my imitation of John the Baptist a la Salome.
But first, I bent the Ways of NightTown toward the high-rent district of CrossTown’s native users of power—a place known as the Folded Quarter. The Folded Quarter housed more Shapers of the Ways than any other area of CrossTown. The Ways there turned in on themselves, Worms Ouroboros of infinite possibility. Powerful users of the Ways could go almost anywhere from the Folded Quarter and reel themselves back in even more easily, given appropriate markers. Most dwellings built there took advantage of the peculiar nature of the place to increase their lebensraum; closet tesseracts were a dime a dozen. More flagrant uses of the Ways could be seen in that place by paying a fee and taking a walk through one of the works of the Folded Quarter’s most expensive architects, a man by the name of Escher.
Corvinus had designed his own home. It looked conventional enough on the outside. A large, walled palazzo—a concession to the Italian origins of Corvinus’s family—built in a circular design that curled around the central white spire of a fifty-foot tower like a sleeping dragon wrapped around the trunk of an ancient tree, Corvinus’s home lay on the conservative side of the Folded Quarter’s dwellings. The reality of the place, as with so many of Corvinus’s works, turned out to be something considerably more interesting than it appeared at first glance.
I could feel the light presence of CrossTerPol interdicts on most of the obvious approaches to Corvinus’s estate. I had expected that. It was a crime scene, after all. There would be wards inside, as well. But I had planned this approach with exactly those safeguards in mind. I intended to observe, not interfere enough to set off any alarms. So I turned down the branch of a Way that tended to deny its existence to all but the most persistent observers.
As I had expected, no CrossTerPol traces lay across that Way. I had not expected, however, to see that Corvinus’s security remained in place. I entered the backdoor Way, only to stop in a featureless gray room. A closed door set in the wall across from me barred my path. A bulky, inhuman silhouette stood in front of the door, like an ivory statue.
My eyes widened in surprise. “Shaw. I thought you would be gone.”
Eyes like icy pits opened to regard me. “Not yet, Zethus. The bonds weaken slowly. Corvinus’s strength fades with his death, but has not yet broken.”
He raised one hand in warning as I stepped forward. “You may not pass.”
“What?” I asked sharply. “I never had a problem before.”
“Corvinus tightened security,” Shaw told me flatly. “I had to check with him before allowing anyone to pass. He no longer replies. I can allow no one to pass.”
I bit back curses. Shaw had always been overtly hostile to his binding, and as such, had never been trusted with any flexibility in interpretation of his orders. I would have to destroy him or loose his bindings to pass. On the other hand, I could use this opportunity to my advantage. “Did you see the murder?”
“I look outward, not in.”
“Did you sense anything?”
His eyes darkened. “I felt the ones who entered. I felt the Master die. I felt the one who came after.”
I leaned forward, suddenly interested. “Tell me more.”
The pits of his eyes caught and held my gaze. “You don’t command me,” he said flatly.
“I don’t. Yet. I could.”
“Could you?” Without moving, his aspect became threatening.
I said nothing as the Legion stirred within me. He sensed the Captains rising to look him over with hungry interest, though, for a touch of sickly green painted his white flesh. I thought about my digestion problems. I didn’t need to add another threat to the already volatile mix, but he didn’t need to know that.
“I offer a bargain.”
His eyes narrowed. “What bargain?”
I pulled out my pack of cigarettes. “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll try to break the bonds that hold you.”
“And if I refuse?” He asked the question with deceptive calm.
I lit up. “Then I bind you, and take the information anyway.”
“If you were strong enough, you wouldn’t have to bargain.”
I grinned. “Don’t think to test me. I may change my mind. Do you really doubt my strength?”
He paused to consider, then sighed. “No. Not really. But I don’t have much to tell.”
While I spoke to him, Bright Angel and Bane rose to monitor Shaw. If he lied, I would know. Digestion problems or not, I would have the information out of him if I had to consume him to get it.
He flinched as my Captains’ attention fell upon him, but he spoke steadily. “Something smashed Corvinus’s defenses. Something powerful, something old, something wild. Then someone came through while the walls were down. A visitor with the stench of NightTown on him. Felt different than the power that took down Corvinus’s barrier, but I didn’t get a clear feel for anything other than the power. Then that old, wild power took Corvinus’s personal defenses down, and the NightTown visitor killed him. The old, wild power sheltered the killer from Corvinus’s death curse. After they had gone, something else came in. Something so subtle I wouldn’t even have noticed it except that it cleansed the place of all traces, psychic and otherwise. Even most of the last bindings Corvinus had in place vanished under that touch. I wish it had reached me here. Once all the traces and psychic resonances had been eliminated, it left. Everything seemed normal in the house, except that Corvinus was dead.”
I thought about that. The NightTown connection I had heard from Pale, but I hadn’t believed it as anything other than a ruse. But with Shaw’s story, I didn’t have that certainty any longer. “Anything more specific? About the power that protected the assassin, or the one that came after?”
“Nothing more on the last. I only knew it indirectly, by what it did. The escort had so much power, so much wild strength. It kept Corvinus’s power locked up while the assassin killed him.”
My attention sharpened. “Wild? Anything more specific about the nature of the power?”
Shaw shook his head.
Ba
ne and Bright Angel spoke to me together. “Truth. Or so he believes.”
I frowned, considered the bindings holding him, then frayed them away to nothing with the sharp edge of my will. Shaw’s bonds fell without too much difficulty since Corvinus no longer held them in place. Over time, they would have decayed away. Shaw would have been able to escape then without any outside aid.
Shaw rose and twisted as the bindings weakened, then he snapped them in a sudden surge of rippling power. He studied me for a moment in silence. I smoked and returned his gaze. I felt the Ways respond to his will, and he vanished.
“Think he told us everything?” The White Wolf asked.
“Probably not.” I stood there for a moment, thinking. “Titania, possibly? Wild power is a good description of the feel of her workings.”
“Perhaps,” the White Wolf growled dubiously. “But she seems bound by place. And what of the NightTown connection?”
My lips tightened. “We still don’t know enough. It could have been Fetch. He isn’t bound by place. And stop playing devil’s advocate.”
“You know someone better suited to the part?”
Bright Angel chuckled. “A touch. A definite touch.”
I ignored them both, drew a last hit from the cigarette into my lungs, pinched out the ember between thumb and forefinger, dropped the stub into a pocket of my coat, opened the door and stepped through into Corvinus’s uptown workshop. The room stretched around me in an octagon, like the tower that housed it. Gray catwalks connected the black metal stairways that stretched into the workshop’s upper reaches. Floating globes of pale light provided illumination. Corvinus had varied the shade and intensity of the illumination as needed. I expected to see tall cabinets of dark wood holding everything from vials of hydrofluoric acid to neatly baled cockatrice tongues. I anticipated long tables standing around the walls, every bit of a considerable and eclectic set of equipment neatly in place.
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