CrossTown

by Loren W. Cooper

  I wouldn’t have many associates left. I probably wouldn’t enjoy the company of the few that remained.

  Consider Anthony Vayne. I didn’t meet Vayne’s tough standards. But then I doubted that Vayne met Vayne’s standards. I’d always had considerable respect for him because of his ability to befriend even a cheerful pagan like myself. It said something about Vayne that earned him my respect.

  I have always had enough difficulty trying to live my own life well. I didn’t have the time or inclination to try to live the lives of others for them by forcing them to conform to my own standards. My advice for anyone burning with the desire to show the world the right path is first to find it, then to walk it. Let anyone who desires to seek the same destination find their own path. Truly, isn’t anyone without a little danger, without experiences and perspectives beyond our own, just a little bit less interesting to be around? How much can we learn from someone who already shares our point of view?

  I slept there that night, on one of the low couches, resting up for my next step. I slept well and dreamlessly. I had a plan. I intended to carry it through. I needed to sow as much confusion in the enemy ranks as possible. I expected a certain bounty hunter named Jack Duncan to help me to carry it out.

  CHAPTER XIX

  JACK DUNCAN lived out on the fringes of TechTown in a small orbital habitat that circled over a blasted and slowly recovering planet. The owners and builders of that orbital habitat had apparently gone the way of all flesh by the time Duncan had found it and taken it for his own. On the world below the habitat only bugs and plants and fish throve in the wake of that particular apocalypse.

  An orbital habitat is one of the most Road-secure locations I’ve seen, an alternative much fancied by the more paranoid technocrats and those without much trust in the Ways. It takes a great deal of effort and skill to reach an orbital location by WanderWay. I’m not saying it can’t be done; given the virtually infinite variation of the Roads, one can find a place where the rules are different enough to bend oneself into existence in such a location, but it wouldn’t be fun. That’s a large part of what Duncan had always relied on for security. I won’t say that Duncan was paranoid, given his profession, but then I won’t say he wasn’t, either.

  It so happened that I had been to Duncan’s place once before, when he had hired me to remove a curse that had been laid on him by a Shaman (as I understood it, the Shaman had been a brother of someone that Duncan had taken for bounty, so the curse had been nasty and driven by all the fuels of a blood feud). I remembered enough details that I knew that I could make it there through a translation zone without too much difficulty.

  I had no intention of doing so, however.

  One thing about traveling by WanderWay is that if someone else is good enough, they can place triggers to announce visitors. Dropping in on Duncan that way would have been like hiring a crier to run before me to spread word of my impending arrival. I didn’t plan on being so direct. Besides, I didn’t have the need.

  Jack Duncan, like everyone, had passions. Some were undoubtedly cleaner than others. I knew Duncan tolerably well, had worked with him on a couple of occasions, and so I knew of at least one passion of which I could take advantage. I knew a place on that world of his he frequented regularly, and I knew the Ways and seasons of that place and how they played into his passion. I had no doubts of finding him there. But before I did seek him out, I needed a safe place for the heart of stone.

  I walked the Ways to a land off the beaten path, where willows wept silently into a dark and winding river. I waited there on the banks of the river, watching the trees move and whisper despite the absence of wind. As long as I harmed nothing and made no threatening moves, the trees would tolerate me. At least, they would tolerate me until their master arrived. If he decided to remove his protection from me, it would be an entirely different matter.

  He came upon me almost before I saw him, moving like a ripple of wind through grass. He came to stand before me, regarding me with patient hazel eyes. “Zethus. It’s been a while. What do you want from me?”

  I grinned in spite of myself. “You know me too well. I have brought you gifts.” I pulled the seeds I had gathered from Dulchen Fen out of the pocket of my coat and poured them into his cupped hands.

  Pleasure suffused his features, bringing an almost human glow of warmth to his pale cheeks. He had never worn the human form well, though I would not be the one to tell him so. “I have not heard the voices of the trees of Dulchen Fen for some time. Thank you. I ask again, what do you want?”

  His tone had gentled. He treasured the gift, as I had known he would. He didn’t travel any more than his charges did. “I need you to keep something for me until I return for it.”

  I gave the environment suit and the heart of stone into the keeping of the shepherd of the trees. He took them from me in silence, his eyes warm and deeply alien. I knew he would keep the heart safe. More importantly, he would return it to me when I came again.

  I had paid in advance, so I left that place feeling as secure as I could be. I didn’t trust anyone much with the heart, but it would offer no temptation to the shepherd of the trees. He didn’t have much use for the quarrels between fauna, including the human kind. If it didn’t impact his world, he didn’t care.

  I kept the driller worm spores. I planned to stash them outside Jack’s immediate area, but in a place close enough to lay my hand upon them should the need arise. I didn’t want to take them close to Jack, since he was a technophile and would be most unhappy if I ruined several years’ earnings in machines.

  I felt ambivalent about the heart of stone. I needed to confirm what I had learned from Chimereon. I needed to discover whether or not Corvinus the Raven had been killed for prying into the ancient Rites of the Nephilim, and who had killed him. Titania had certainly implicated herself, but had she acted alone? Had she truly been at the heart of Corvinus’s death? And was she the only player involved? What of the last of the Nephilim, if any still lived?

  At the same time, I had no desire to follow my late master’s path too far. The Rites sounded dangerous. People died trying to become Nephilim. I counted that as a bit more risk than I wanted to take for a reward I really didn’t understand, despite the temptation of immortality that lingered in what I had learned from Chimereon.

  I didn’t wonder if that tidbit about immortality had been deliberate. Everything Chimereon did was deliberate. I simply didn’t know what her exact motive might have been for dangling the bait in front of me.

  Shelving those considerations for later, I took a direct route, fast and short and hard, running through wild and deserted Ways. Duncan’s choice of abode, fortunately, made deserted routes easy to take. Outside the area where I expected to find him, I tucked away my bags of driller worms beneath a small, twisted tree with long reddish leaves. No other large plants grew in proximity to that lone monument to arboreal hardiness, so I figured that I should have no problem locating it again in the rolling grasslands.

  Duncan had set out monitors, which I had expected, so he didn’t even turn to face me as I walked down the long slope of a river wide enough to have been the Nile, thin blue grasses sliding along my legs as I approached the shore and the fisherman standing there.

  His wrist flicked the fly pole in a steady rhythm that did not change even when he spoke. “Zethus. Foolish of you to come to me with a price on your head.”

  “Nah.” I halted beside him. “Our friendship is too good and too old for me to worry.” I grinned as he shot me a skeptical look. “Besides, you’re on vacation.”

  “There is that,” he said wryly. “So what’s your proposition?”

  “You know me too well.”

  He laughed.

  I watched one wave curl into the next. “The bounty has been offered by the Whitesnakes.”

  His mouth twisted. “I know. One of the reasons I haven’t been chasing it.”

  “Some have.” I bent, picked up a rock, and weighed it in my
hand.

  He shot me an evil look. “Don’t even think about it. Scare away one fish and I might not care about the Whitesnakes.”

  I hid a smile. “Fine, fine. The money does have possibilities, though.”

  He favored me with a sidelong glance. “What now?”

  “How would you like to have the benefit of that money?”

  “You don’t look depressed enough for suicide,” he said mildly. “So you must have something else in mind. What is it?”

  “You have cloning tanks still, right? For organs and the like?”

  He nodded slowly. “I see where you’re going, but I don’t think …”

  “It’ll be dead. Eventually. And I can give it enough of a psychic imprint to pass all but the most dedicated scans,” I told him.

  “Maybe so,” he said. “But you have to realize that a bounty hunter lives by his reputation. I take in something like that for the cash, you crop up later, and my rep’s blown. No one will ever trust me again.”

  I winked at him. “That’s the beautiful part. I remember you talking about the competition in less than favorable terms in the past. You’ve never turned down an opportunity to make life difficult for someone else.”

  A slow smile blossomed on his face, vanished as the pole jumped in his hand. His reflexes responded for him, setting the hook, and then the fight began. After about fifteen minutes of what I’m sure Duncan would later report to other fishermen as an epic battle, he brought a long, sleek fish up to shore, carefully drew it out of the water and held it up for clear visibility to his monitors, cleared the hook from its mouth, and released it back into the river.

  I shook my head as I watched it dart out into the rolling current. “I will never understand a man wasting his time and effort catching a fish that he’s only going to release immediately.”

  He gave me a jaundiced look as he collapsed his rod. “You’d rather I tortured it for a while before I let it go?”

  I shook my head, chuckling. “No, but it seems that you’d at least eat the thing.”

  He shuddered. “Oh, no. I hate fish. Besides, the fish in these waters have learned to live with poisons that would kill me quickly and painfully.”

  “But you love to catch ’em.”

  “It relaxes me. I can’t say that about much else.” He picked up the rod and began walking back up the slope. “The ship’s this way.”

  I followed, watching the blur of his monitors as they rose whining from their hiding places in the grass and fell into escort formation around the two of us. The monitors’ chameleon cloaking technology made them virtually invisible when they weren’t moving, and made an observer a little queasy when they were. “Are they armed?”

  He looked back at me. “The monitors? You know I never talk about methods. Besides, would you believe me if I told you?”

  I laughed. “Probably not.”

  “There you are.”

  His ship had the same chameleon cloak as his monitors. Essentially a long, sleek, aerodynamic dart, Duncan’s ship floated just above the tall grass, a hatch in the side of the ship opening as the ship itself ghosted into view. Duncan, the monitors, and I boarded without preamble. The monitors stored themselves in vacant niches while Duncan and I strapped ourselves into the cockpit. Apparently an ex-military craft, the ship hadn’t been designed with the comfort of the crew in mind, but it responded to Duncan’s commands like a living thing, leaping up and into the dusty, golden sky.

  I watched the ground drop away and swallowed heavily. Duncan glanced over at me and grinned. “Still not a flyer, eh?”

  “Maybe I just don’t like giving someone else that much control over my fate.”

  “You could always become a pilot.”

  “I’d rather walk.”

  “Like I said.”

  Darkness grew around us as the craft drew itself up, beyond the reaches of the atmosphere. Though I’ve been in space a few times, I will never tire of the exquisite clarity of the light of the sun, moon, and stars, just as I will never grow accustomed to the endless nausea of free fall. Fortunately, the moments of true weightlessness were brief as the ship followed an intersecting course with Duncan’s habitat.

  Duncan reached into a pouch set low on his seat, took out a couple of chocolate bars, and waved one in my general direction. I shook my head feebly and concentrated on controlling my rebellious stomach. Duncan made no attempt to conceal his amusement as he peeled the wrapper back on one and ate it, the son of a bitch.

  Fortunately, Duncan’s station had been built by a relatively conservative bunch who knew the value of simulated gravity. The station had been constructed as a topless and bottomless cylinder. A hollow shaft ran through the center, connected to the interior wall by several rigid tubes. The interior of the shaft, the tubes, and the sealed, hollow wall of the cylinder provided pressurized passageways and living space. The entire structure spun around the central shaft, providing a comfortable illusion of gravity in the living quarters located within the cylinder’s walls.

  The ship docked at one end of the central shaft, matching the rotation of the station until the station stilled to rocklike solidity and the Earth, sun, and stars spun around us. None of that helped calm my stomach one bit. We disembarked through a narrow tube that led through the central shaft, pulling ourselves along by means of regular handholds set in the walls of the station. Duncan took his slow, easy time, so I pulled myself on past him, virtually diving down the first available shaft that led out to the interior wall of the cylinder, flipping in mid-flight and putting my hands on the side rails of the long ladder that stretched up the shaft. As the pull of gravity increased, settling my nervous stomach, I tightened my hands, slowed myself to a stop, and proceeded downward at a more leisurely pace into the steadily increasing pull of the station’s centripetal force.

  Duncan was waiting for me at the bottom, undoubtedly having taken advantage of an elevator. I didn’t care. My mood had improved as my stomach settled. I looked at the velvet blue of the walls and grinned. “You’ve been sprucing the place up.”

  “I finally managed to figure out the controls on the wall displays. It’s more comfortable like this.”

  “The effect you’re looking for is something like night-blindness?”

  “I like it dark,” he said defensively.

  “I noticed.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  I sat down and drew out the details for him. He corrected and added a few things. I went along with that, since he knew the habits of our prospective dupe better than I did, though I had at least heard of him. The man whose reputation Duncan had decided to destroy had not spent his time endearing himself to anyone. He called himself Edward Harvest, and he preferred to take bounties that did not specify the condition of the target after capture. Edward Harvest apparently found it easier to deal with dead bodies than live ones.

  Edward Harvest was not a nice man.

  His predisposition for killing, however, made him perfect as our patsy. He also had no talent for sorcery or psi or any of the other esoteric trades that might have made the deception more difficult. He used a variety of weapons, most of them high tech. As a result, he crossed paths once in a while with Duncan. Duncan didn’t like the competition, and Duncan didn’t like Harvest. Because of those dislikes, Duncan did like the plan, and that was the important part.

  We began that night. I donated a few drops of blood to one of Duncan’s more advanced machines and we settled down to wait. I took the opportunity to eat and catch up on some needed rest. Even at its most accelerated state, the machine would take three days to complete its task. With my cells, it would be able to grow and age a clone to what we needed. I’d have to take it from there.

  I would have challenged Duncan to some chess to pass the time, but poker was his game of choice, and he chose not to play with sorcerers or any other of the more esoterically skilled, which I thought a bit narrow-minded of him. So I used the time to rest and to go through the Legion, pay
ing attention to every minuscule detail of my waiting host. I didn’t want to take any chances on losing control of that situation again. The White Wolf, Blade, Bright Angel, and the White Rose all passed inspection. I could detect no trace of taint on any member of the Legion. I did note that my forces, though less numerous, had gained in strength, undoubtedly due to the power gained from the Gold.

  I made the White Wolf’s role as a Captain of my Legion official. I had doubts that it would do anything but increase his arrogance, but he deserved it.

  In the shadows of Duncan’s station and in the boredom of waiting, I noticed that I had begun to see with far more clarity than the conditions should have allowed. What should have been the dim outlines of walls had sharp contours, and in the pools of darkness where the light faded, I could see more clearly than in the direct light. Once I became aware of this clarity in the darkness, I thought of the Fae Hound I had taken into my shadow. Its power had been linked to the darkness. I had absorbed its power with its memories. That power had become mine. I should not have been surprised as it began to manifest itself. I decided to take a more active approach to exploring my new abilities.

  I worked with the darkness. I found that in the corners of deepest shadow in the station, I did not need line of sight to be aware of what passed there. I grappled with this new strength, stretching senses through darkness, until I came to see shadow as a gateway and took my first cautious steps through the station from room to darkened room without using the hallways in between. The power of the Shadow Hound had opened a new kind of Way.

  Duncan had plenty of shadows for the dweller to move through, so I used my new power to explore his abode. No other living soul occupied the station. Duncan had put away considerable stores. He had also converted several storerooms to holding cells. More of the station seemed to be active than I remembered from my previous visit. In other words, I found nothing surprising. Still, the empty shell of the Shadow Dweller’s power responded easily to my will. With practice it could become a useful tool.