Emerantha told me the place had been torn apart, but I hadn’t believed it in my gut until I saw for myself.
I hardly recognized my old master’s workshop. A whirlwind had ravaged the lab, leaving nothing untouched. Equipment had been smashed, furniture torn to pieces, papers scattered to the winds. The sharp chemical smell of spilled reagents fought the pitchy scent of freshly broken wood. I had to step carefully to avoid losing my balance amidst the debris. Despite my care, the crunch of broken glass, the rustle of paper, and the gritty protest of shattered ceramic accompanied every step. I could have spent days cataloguing the destruction, but I wouldn’t have been able to discern whether anything had been taken.
Not that it mattered. Corvinus had never kept anything important in his public lab anyway.
The house itself did not react to my presence. Everything around me felt quiescent, as if waiting for the Master to return. Except that the Master would never return. Did sorcerers leave ghosts? Often. Unless killed by another sorcerer.
I shivered. The house didn’t understand that the Master would never return. As I stood there, it seemed to me that I could almost hear his voice in the distance, speaking to someone in another room, ready to be furious as a thundercloud when he discovered the wreckage. It felt as if I stood just beyond the place where the echoes of his presence fell away into nothingness.
I didn’t spend much time there. I had planned only a cursory examination on the workshop in the main house. Only the haunting echoes of the voice of the newly dead held me, caught in the moment like a fly in amber. Corvinus had another workshop in DeepTown for higher security projects. I’d hit that one next and check it out thoroughly. I valued the residence more as the scene of the crime.
I eased my way up the main curving stairway of rose marble, where I carefully pushed back the heavy brass door. It swung open soundlessly into a cave lit by dancing apparitions of beautiful men and women. The walls glittered with the sheen of polished jewels. Thick coils of pure gold ran out of the cave walls and down over the floor in ropy loops thicker than my waist.
I chuckled and stepped through the door, feeling the twist of a guided Way. Instead of stepping into the cave, I found myself standing on a balcony made of smooth, green stone. I leaned over the rail of the balcony and looked down to see amber clouds curling like surf around the length of the jade tower. I pulled back, smiling, to watch the diaphanous sweep of a Death Angel’s wings as it spiraled indifferently down to circle the tower. Above, the crowded sky blazed with the clear, cold light of countless stars—a jeweled curtain holding more colors than I could name with a light that danced as it refracted through the Death Angel’s translucent body.
I stepped back through the archway before the Death Angel became tempted by my presence and set my feet on the jade steps that wound down and around inside the tower. I passed a window with every complete turn, glancing through them at scenes at once foreign and familiar. Here lay endless possibility, the recreation and entertainment of one of CrossTown’s finest WayShapers. Glancing through any window, one might see veils of swirling golden sands parting to reveal a city of sweeping ivory towers, or perhaps the view might look out from a half circle of stone built in the shelter of an undercut cliff of dark red rock, tall and beautiful people with bronze skin farming and living and loving and conducting their business in the bright golden light bathing the river below. Then another turning of the stair and the view could open through cut crystal into soft darkness holding the rage of a seething red giant sun like a ruby in velvet, and then another turning, and another, down through a long gallery of infinite views.
I reached carefully, touched the Way of the stairs lightly, and stepped off the last stair and into the deep blue luminescence of bright sunlight filtered through a few feet of seawater. Deep red wood framed walls of thick, clear glass. The light and life of the ocean came pouring into the room through these ports. Rainbow schools of fish swirled like clouds whipped before a quick gust of wind, then flickered and vanished as bright torpedo shapes flashed into view and out again. Thick cushions lay piled around the room, placed strategically near long, low tables filled with everything from handheld computers to paper notebooks, inks and quills, heavy telescopes and delicate telesonde equipment.
I turned round and round about, to a doorway hidden behind the slope of the jade steps. I walked through the doorway, felt the gentle twist of a Way moving beneath me without my guidance, and then I looked out into the long sweeping curve of Corvinus’s main entry hall, where he had displayed a motley collection of artifacts and curios picked up from diverse places during the course of his long and checkered career. Most of those curios held little intrinsic value, but he’d had a story for each, a memory tied to place by some oddly carved stick or twisted lump of clay.
I walked around the long arc of the corridor, my footfalls as soundless as I could make them on the polished marble floor. I kept my senses open, knowing that Corvinus’s simple entry corridor had been fashioned from a Way that bled subtly beyond the confines of his home. And while I could feel the distant traces of the CrossTerPol monitors across many of those Ways, none seemed to stretch inside the house.
Despite the temptation to make the trip short, I refrained from using the entry Way, figuring that it would be more closely monitored than any other. Instead, I walked as would any burglar, slipping quietly between pedestals and display cases, watching for sentries. When I found one, I nearly tripped over the damned thing.
They had shaped it to look like one of the pedestals, supporting a bust of a stern-faced dignitary whose nameplate read Daniel Webster. I didn’t recognize the name, but I knew that the bust and pedestal didn’t belong. Corvinus hadn’t been one for half measures, especially in statuary.
A bit of discreet examination revealed that the monitor had been set along this Way as a supplementary passive detector of possibility manipulation. I only hoped that it hadn’t picked up my entrance into the workshop or my impatience in Corvinus’s Gallery of Worlds. I continued down the corridor, more cautious than before, encountering no one. I knew that I had come close to my goal when the smell came to my nostrils.
Someone had set preservation effects over the entire scene. CrossTerPol must have discovered the killing not long after it had happened. Maybe Corvinus had prepared automatic notifications, and an alarm had managed to get through to someone. While I had considerable insight into Corvinus’s security layout, even I hadn’t known everything he’d held in reserve.
At any rate, the rich copper scent of blood didn’t hold the slightest trace of decay. When I came around the curve of the corridor, I saw the scene and bit back bile. Blood splashed everywhere, pooling on the floor, the walls, even splattering the high ceiling. Bits of flesh, bone, and muscle had been scattered like chaff. The largest trace of Corvinus I saw was a bloody chunk no greater in size than a closed fist. Someone had been more thorough than I would have thought necessary.
Someone had enjoyed the killing.
The scene of the crime covered a larger area than I expected. There was so much blood … I opened my sorcerous senses, but I found only the power that held the area aloof from the process of decay. CrossTerPol would be going over everything forensically. If anything of the killer remained, they would find it. I had no doubt of that. I also doubted that they would find anything.
When I say that I felt no other traces of power aside from the preservation effects, I mean that all signs of Corvinus, who had worked in that place year upon uncounted year, had been scrubbed clean. I had never seen that done. I would not have imagined that it could have been done. But in that place someone had swiftly cleaned all traces of power from the scene. Anyone with that kind of skill and finesse wouldn’t have left any physical traces behind, either.
My senses open, I felt the entry Way twitch subtly under me. I looked up to see bulky figures in official dark uniforms trot into view. I fled out into the wild Ways. Shrill whistles cut the air behind me. The slap of flat fee
t echoed on the stones of the hallway.
I took the wildest Ways I could find, rocketing through a whirling sky of kaleidoscope light on a RoadWay that writhed under my feet like a snake in its death throes. I lost them in a maze of living rock, where doors opened and closed like yawning mouths, jagged stalactite teeth could come crashing down on an unwary traveler at any instant, and howling winds pushing a violet froth of hallucinogenic spores cut through the opening and closing Ways like the breath of a mad god. I pulled my sleeve over mouth and nose, and ran, breathing as shallowly as I could manage.
The pursuit fell away behind me. By the time I walked out of a cave mouth and onto a beach of white sand, my lungs burned and the lights of the glass towers above me throbbed and pulsed in time to my heartbeat. The sun left visual echoes of itself as it passed across the sky at the pace of a boat leisurely rowed.
I waited for the sun to slow, and for the echoes to fade, and for the lights to steady, as the effect of the spores faded. Fortunately, no disgruntled CrossTerPol patrolmen showed up to continue the pursuit. Traveling the Ways while in an altered state of consciousness could be dangerous for everyone involved, but I couldn’t afford to be caught, questioned, held, and made into a stationary target. It was not so much that I didn’t trust CrossTerPol, it was more that I didn’t trust anyone much at that point. I understood their desire to keep the crime scene clean, but I wasn’t going to let a few bureaucratic regulations stand between me and any information I needed to get to the bottom of this.
Evidently, I had missed a CrossTerPol monitor, or the one I had found had been more sensitive than I realized. But I had discovered at least some of what I had gone there to find, and that was enough. More than one individual had worked to kill Corvinus. One had come from NightTown, the other commanded some of the most considerable power I had yet seen, probably of a sorcerous nature. What did that tell me?
It told me that I didn’t have enough of the facts yet.
CHAPTER XIV
I KNEW of only one individual who had more than a snowball’s chance in an Evangelical Christian hell to glean any information at all about the origins of the Whitesnake’s gold. And that seemed to be the next step. Although “individual” wasn’t entirely accurate. The Wraith seemed to be both more and less than an individual.
The Wraith, being an old friend of Corvinus’s, might also have information on Corvinus’s latest project. That would be the good news. The bad news consisted of the simple fact that the Wraith happened to be a good friend of my late master’s, not a good friend of mine—which meant I’d have to be as persuasive as I could manage without strong arm tactics.
Unfortunately, my powers of persuasion have always been at their best when I have the other guy by a sensitive portion of his anatomy.
The Way from the sea towers ran (with a little encouragement from me) back through the edge of NightTown to a long spiral stairway formed of black marble that disappeared into the earth. I nodded to the tall figure that stood before the stair, the moonlight gleaming off his tufted ears and shining off the silver blade he held casually in his left hand.
He showed me his teeth. He had too many of them, all too long, all meant for meat. “Have you permission to pass this way?”
I looked up at the height of him. “Do I need it?”
“Probably not.” He cocked his head. “Nice disguise.”
“Thanks,” I said modestly. “Can’t say it fooled you, though.”
He chuckled. “You didn’t really expect it to, now did you?”
“Not while you’re on sentry duty. Trying to keep the undesirables out, or the game in?”
“Little of both, little of both.” He looked off toward the horizon, red eyes distant. “I hear they’ve put a bounty on your head.”
I nodded.
“Shame about that. I might be tempted myself, if it weren’t for our friendship.”
I kept a straight face. “And the Tindalans.”
“Aye, there’s always that,” he said thoughtfully. “There’s always that.”
He stood aside from the head of the stairway. “You know, one way to get around that problem might be to partner with someone who doesn’t know about your pet swarm of private vengeance.”
I grinned up at him. “Maybe that would keep you clear. Then again, maybe not. I understand that Tindalans track by intent and are a hungry bunch. As far as they’re concerned, the more prey the merrier.”
He grunted in reply, apparently losing interest in the conversation, so I walked on past him and down the stairs. The black marble, veined through with threads of crimson, silver, and white, throbbed under my boots with the pulse of the living earth. The stairway dropped down into velvet darkness, lit at every full turning of the spiral by a globe radiating a cold, white light.
A distant scream, cut off abruptly, floated down from above, but that was nothing new for that place. I held to a steady, unflagging pace, passing down through geologic layer after geologic layer of earth—wending my way back through forgotten ages. The white skeletons of ancient animals lay embedded in the rock, occasionally close enough to be visible to pedestrians like myself. They offered mute testimony to the variety of life, and in their broken bones, jagged teeth, curving claws, and sharp spines could be seen the signs of past violence, ancient Darwinian arms races, and a silent plea for remembrance.
A solitary cloaked figure passed me on the stair, winding tirelessly up into the darkness, holding the small bundle of a babe in its arms, but other than that I made my journey alone. Despite the numbers of travelers in and through areas of Cross-Town, the less commonly traveled Ways can be quite deserted, due to the effort and danger involved in anything less than a skilled manipulation of those tricky paths. So the lack of traffic didn’t surprise me. But the steady noise of clicking claws behind me did.
Bright Angel brought it to my attention. The sound had been stealthy enough that I had not noticed it consciously, but as Bright Angel played back the unconscious, lower level hind-brain recordings of my perceptions for the last few minutes, it became obvious that this light noise of distant pursuit had been teasing me for some time. It could have been another pedestrian, but the distant rasp of claws on slick marble seemed to be keeping pace behind me, speeding up as I increased my pace, and slowing as I slowed. I became suspicious.
I had a Hound on my trail.
Below, at the foot of the stairs, white sands covered the length of a beach that stretched beside the dark waters of the river. That place had always been used as a boat landing, but would provide no cover. I suspected that my Hound had this beach and the lack of cover to be found there in mind.
Rather than fear, a dark hostility grew in my heart. I didn’t particularly like being hunted. I much preferred to hunt, instead. I kept my pace steady and extended my otherworldly senses behind me. I found only a diffuse darkness, an absence of discrete detail, and I nodded to myself grimly. It was cloaked against probing. A denizen of NightTown with natural (or unnatural, depending on your perspective) defenses against sorcery had decided to try for the Whitesnakes’ bounty.
Simple hunger could also have been its motive, but by that time I had abandoned any trust in coincidence.
A NightTown Hound could be bad. Ordinarily I might have sweated getting to a WanderWay quickly enough to escape, but the river that waited below provided one of the most powerful and wild Ways in CrossTown, and I had reached the point where escape did not interest me as much as discouraging some of the opposition. I maintained my pace. The clicking slowly became louder. Knowing that most of the NightTown predators had unhealthily wide sadistic streaks, I stopped as if listening, and the steps shuffled clumsily and audibly to a stop half a heartbeat after I did.
Yep. It was definitely looking for a fear reaction. Which meant that it didn’t know me very well.
I began descending the stairs once again, pushing the pace this time, making my steps a little quicker, a little more hurried, a little more evidently nervous. The clickin
g of claws resumed, a little softer than before, a little further behind than before, but moving a little quicker as well, closing the distance between us. I could almost hear the thing above me salivating. I had Shaper relax the disguise slowly. I figured that I might need all of my strength for what lay ahead.
I kept the pace brisk, risking a glance down to see how far the beach might be, and turning what I hoped looked like a worried expression upward. I saw nothing below but darkness, though I caught what might have been the first whisper of the voice of the waters. Above, a deeper darkness could be seen against the shadows of the stair. As I watched, the shadow slowly and insolently pulled back out of view.
Eyes narrowing, rage growing, I resumed my descent at an even brisker pace. Above, my stalker made no effort to conceal the ticking, rasping noise of its pursuit. At the same time, the sound of the river began to rise around me. I smiled. At my urging, Bright Angel focused my rage and anticipation in a sudden burst of adrenaline and I bounded down the stairs in a rush.
I hit the sands and saw no boats, but that didn’t particularly bother me—once I’d found out about the hunter, I’d had no real intention of taking a boat. I had a wilder ride in mind for my new friend.
I ran out along the strand, stopped by the rushing flow of the river, formed a quick contact to the Way in the waters, and turned to see the thing that hunted me descending the stairs. It moved in a cloud of visible darkness, which made its form difficult to discern, but as I watched it rose from all fours (or sixes, I couldn’t say for sure) and the shadows spread around it like countless pairs of wings. Blood red eyes gleamed at me out of the shadow surrounding it, and the rasping sound, like one claw moving against another, formed rough words. “Man most mortal …”
“I’m working on that mortal part, actually.”
I had the impression that it cocked its head. “I am of the Wild Hunt, Blood and Bone. Does your life mean so little to you that you will not beg for it?”
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