by Voss Foster
"Coffee for four." Dorma walked in with a proper silver serving tray balanced on one hand. She set it down on the desk in the corner, then lowered herself onto the end of the bed. "I hope you're able to get some good information."
"Tenak's been very helpful so far." King nodded and took the coffee cup from behind her. I maybe should have tackled it out of her hand, but she could probably bench press me, so…she could caffeinate herself right up into outer space if she wanted to. It didn't seem to be affecting her work yet. "Is there anything about this you can tell us?"
She shook her head. "Oh, no, I can't give you anything. I was asleep. I didn't know anything had happened until I woke up. Just lucky I'm an early riser."
I had a few questions for her no matter what she had to say about her usefulness. "Can I ask you some questions about home in Al-Sekar?"
She launched straight in without me asking questions at all, so I guess that was a yes. "I worked in the palace just like my daughter and her husband. A lot of us dust elementals work for the royal house of Al-Sekar. Our magic has specific uses. Not many, however, which means specific occupations."
"What exactly is it that dust elementals do for the royal family?" Nobody had mentioned that, and I had to think that was…not a coincidence.
"Covert operations." She sighed. "Dust elementals, with training, can hide in plain sight. We make excellent spies, among other shady sorts of maneuvers as required by the royal family."
"Covert operations?" King snorted, her face settling into a scowl as she turned her attention to Tekar. "We asked if there was anyone who could want to hurt your family, and it didn't occur to you that spying, subterfuge, and…what, assassination attempts? That those could possibly be motives?"
And there was all the coffee, finally hitting King all at once I guess. Sounding nice and insane, too, but I had to check things out. Dot the Ts and cross the Is. I eyed Dorma up and down. "Assassinations aren't really on the table here, are they?"
She sighed. "They aren't the norm. So far as I'm aware, neither of his parents were ever involved in anything like that. And frankly, I'm too good at it. I was never caught."
Holy shit. Okay. All right. We were in the house of a magical assassin, asking questions that might be annoying. Great.
She shook her head. "We need to talk to the royal family of Al-Sekar."
Tekar's eyes widened. "You're going to speak with them?"
King shrugged. "We don't have any choice. This is the second time they've come up, and apparently there might be a connection through some of the crap they've been pulling." She rose and nodded. "If either of you remember anything else vital that somehow slipped your mind, I recommend you call rather than getting on the bad side of the only people actually trying to help you." She dug out a business card and handed it to Dorma. "Thanks for the coffee."
She walked out. She was pissed, and apparently terrible at hiding it. Sounded about right for King. I stood and nodded to Dorma. "Thank you for the coffee, and answering the questions. We might be back if we end up needing more information."
Dorma nodded, but neither of them said anything. I guess an angry FBI agent would do that. I walked out and met King on the steps. Time to finally confront the bear. "No more coffee. You're already too wired."
"Yeah, I know." She snorted. "Doesn't make what they did any less idiotic. Just makes my response not as dainty and feminine as I normally would have been."
"There's a lot of words I'd use to describe you. Dainty isn't exactly one of them." I redialed Zar and waited for her to pick up. "Yeah. We need to go somewhere else." I checked the list that King pulled out. "We're going to 2121 Fourth Avenue in Watervliet, New York."
"And that's it?"
"Well, you'll still have to get us back to the office after that, but then that's all I have on the schedule for you." She was always kind of tired, but not so…apathetic. "Everything okay with you, Zar?"
A pause. "Kids."
"Yeah. Kids." It was pretty much going to be the answer for why everyone was acting like a crazy person until this case was over. "We're right out front of the last house, so whenever you're ready."
Chapter Seven
I did go back to DC first, to try and see if Kimmy's searching had turned up anything of relevance. Maybe a giant web page that said 'Buy Kidnapped Elemental Children Below.' That would have been amazingly helpful, but unfortunately there wasn't anything even a quarter as useful on her screen. But she did have two more screens up and running through information than she did before, so that was…not hopeful, exactly, but it was forward progress.
Maybe.
Back in Vermont, I finally noticed how late it had gotten. And once I saw that the street lamps were on, I got very, very tired. No wonder King was slamming back coffee. She needed it just to stay functional. I was apparently elevated only by…lack of a watch and complete ignorance. This was a hell of a long day.
It was late enough that we didn't bother meeting back at the cop shop, opting for the no-tell motel we were staying at for this case. We all could have gone home and used remote transport to get back, of course, but…well, everyone pretty much felt more comfortable sticking close by. Plus the motel made a slightly more comfortable base of operations than the police department. Not in any tangible sense—wear worn carpet from the seventies and sheets and blankets that had seen better days…and weeks and months and years—but back at the station, I was just never quite sure who was on which side. Where there was one rat, there was normally a whole nest.
Gutt took up one of the two beds all by himself, even sitting. I was next to Swift on the other bed, and Bancroft, finally back from his ice elemental friends, sat in the ratty swiveling chair at the desk. Everyone looked about seventy-eight percent dead, and the other twenty-two percent was a mix of rage and crippling depression.
"So Al-Sekar?" Swift nodded slowly, thumbnail between his teeth. "The one in Maryland comes from a line of royal assassins?"
"Not assassins, per se." Gutt shifted a little in place. "Most civilized societies have some form of surreptitious organization or another. The CIA, the KGB, MI6 in the UK. I'm obviously unaware of much of the finer goings-on in these groups, even in the Kingdoms. That is their point. But assassination is simply the more dramatic, exciting side of what they do."
Swift leaned in a bit, crossing one leg over the other. "What about the equivalent in Droshheim? Anything you can tell us about that?"
"Well at my size, I was never even an option for their covert operations. They were far more likely to choose an elemental, an elf, a sorcerer. And a lot of the most prized and lauded among them, at least in the public eye, were gnomes. Their smaller stature and non-threatening appearance made them very fit for service in that line of work."
Swift nodded, obviously a little frustrated. "But what did they do?"
"Droshheim had few direct enemies that I was ever aware of. Even with remote transport, it could be made largely impregnable if necessary, which made attacking futile." He sighed. "There were a few major covert operations while I was there. No assassinations, but magical espionage. Stealing new spells in progress, that sort of thing."
That got my eyebrow up. "People steal spells?"
"Spell research is just as well protected as any other research done by some country here in the Mundane. Everyone wants to be the first one to crack proper, complete necromancy, or break exchange laws on some of the more dangerous magic." He smiled slightly, looking just a touch wistful. "When I was young, I even thought I might want to be a researcher, but the requirements are fairly insane compared to any other line of work." He sighed. "That's a meaningless tangent, of course."
"Al-Sekar is not a terribly friendly place." Bancroft's normally quiet voice was all but a whisper when he finally chimed in. "I've never heard that there's any particular danger in going there, but the royal family is exceptionally long-lived, and like most of the older generation, they weren't even in favor of contacting us here after the prison break spi
lled over our borders."
Great. So a kingdom that didn't much care for the Mundane at all was our next potential lead. Couldn't see any problems with that. "Is it going to be dangerous for us to go in there?"
"Not if I go with whoever chooses to attend." Gutt sat taller and prouder…or if not prouder, at least in a way that showed off his incredible physical presence. I wouldn't have been caught fucking with him, no matter who he had in tow along with him. And sometimes my job was to attack big motherfuckers like Gutt to get to the people they were protecting.
"However," said Gutt, "that's not guarantee to how useful a meeting with them will be. We can certainly get to them. That's assured us in the treaty. But that doesn't mean they'll be happy about it."
"I don't give a crap if they're happy about it, just as long as they give accurate answers," said Swift. "Will they do that?"
Bancroft said nothing. Gutt said nothing. So there sat those odds.
Swift sighed. "Have to go anyway. Dash, you and Gutt can take the trip tomorrow morning."
"Don't you think you might want to go? You've probably got the better experience sussing out lies from these big, powerful people."
"I wouldn't send you if I wasn't confident that the two of you could handle this. And I need to be here in case something breaks in this case. Unless you think Abigail would get along better with Chief Ballinger."
King dealing with diplomacy, bigoted humans, and in general having to be around a bunch of police officers who really didn't know what they were doing. Yeah, that would go well. "Okay. How should I dress for this place? Cold? Hot? Scuba?"
"Hot." Gutt frowned. "Very hot, very dry. Al-Sekar is largely a desert, broken up by the occasional scrubby wasteland. It's highly unpleasant when you're used to Droshheim."
"I mean, DC doesn't exactly stay cool in the summer."
"I'll take DC over Al-Sekar. Besides, that's why I got a house on the water. Lovely and cool." He sighed and laid out on his bed. "If we're going tomorrow, I need sleep."
"We all need sleep." Swift nodded and laid out, too. "Bancroft, we can make room for you here if need be."
"Ixta and Aletra are expecting me back. They're still not entirely comfortable being alone, but they also don't want anyone they don't know in the house. So I'm there to cower and wet myself if an attacker comes in." He sighed. "But they are friends."
I slipped off my shoes and laid on the bed next to Swift. Yay for FBI budgetary concerns. That's what happened when you weren't in the favor of the FBI director, I suppose. The couple of times we had to stay somewhere else when I worked counterterrorism, I wasn't sharing a bed with Agent Carlson, that's for damn sure. I looked up at Bancroft after I got settled in a bit. "How are they doing with everything?"
He shook his head. "Aletra's doing a little better. She doesn't cry as much. Ixta is about the same. But both of them are happy that someone is actually taking this a little bit seriously. Even if it is too little, too late."
Gut punch right there. Straight in the fucking kidneys. If we'd somehow paid more attention, or put it together, or demanded that local police departments stay on top of this shit, or, or, or…
"We're going to get this all sorted out and stop these people." Swift didn't move, just spoke softly there on the bed. "Ixta and Aletra and all the other parents can have a front row seat when these bastards get locked back up in a new, higher security prison."
Gutt grunted his assent. "I'd happily be the one to seal them in, if the powers that be would allow it. And I'm fully capable of making certain they don't break free again."
The murdering, kidnapping bastards locked up in a magical otherworld with no chance of escape? Sounded pretty damn nice to me. Not as good as your kid not being dead, probably, but damn nice.
Bancroft rose and moved to the door. "They do appreciate it. Really. Burlington PD was so dismissive…I can't believe they had someone like that working there."
"They're everywhere, Bancroft." Swift sighed and nestled into his pillow. "They're everywhere."
Bancroft left and I laid out next to Swift. "Now no funny business. I'm only willing to do so much to keep my job."
Swift snorted. "Even if I were into thirty-something white guys, I'm too tired to consider any of that. Now turn off the damn light and prepare yourself for your super fun desert visit."
"Right. Super fun." I reached over and clicked the light off, fumbled the top sheet over myself—with clothes on, it was too fucking hot to use the actual blanket—and…well, I was still tired. Closed my eyes and I was out.
Showered, shaved, and with my jacket left behind in the motel room, Gutt and I stood in the motel parking lot. Swift had left for the cop shop early.
"So, this place really isn't dangerous?"
Gutt shook his head. "I've never heard of anyone having outsize issues with the people of Al-Sekar. Just the royal family. Truculent and distant, particularly to humans. But if they try anything, I can probably out-cast at least one guard."
"Well as long as they only have one guard, we're golden."
He chuckled and waved his hand through the air, opening up the shimmering portal. "Go left, you know the drill."
Gutt stepped through and I followed. I was expecting the Sahara. Endless expanses of cream-colored sand in huge swirls, sunlight so bright it burned straight through your clothing and made your pits immediately explode with sweat, maybe some ramshackle tents and shit. On the very outside edge of expectation, sandstone and mud-brick buildings. Maybe it was a little culturally insensitive…or a lot culturally insensitive. After all, Dubai and Abu Dhabi were both smack in the middle of the desert and looked nothing like that.
But this place wasn't a lifeless desert, or a scene out of Aladdin, or even a postcard from Dubai. The sand was a silvery color, gleaming and sparkling with some sort of internal light like so much else did in the Hidden Kingdoms. The sun was certainly bright, and certainly hot, but not oppressive. At least not yet. Maybe my opinion on that would change after a few hours baking away.
But the buildings wouldn't change. Sweeping monoliths of glass in all different shades, some mirrored, some frosted, some completely transparent so you could see all the goings-on inside. And like Dubai, some of these buildings stretched up impossibly high, which had to be magic. It had to be. Glass couldn't survive its own weight at thirty stories high.
"This is not what I was expecting."
Gutt nodded. "Al-Sekar is a sight, to be certain. Even compared to the other Kingdoms." He started down the street. "The royal palace is in the center of town. We're on one of the southern spokes." He started down the street. "They don't appreciate visitors popping in too close to the palace proper."
I got myself out of my stupor and followed behind. I didn't bother trying to say anything, just spent my energy taking in everything around me. We passed by an honest-to-god outdoor marketplace, but everything was made of the most beautiful glass. It looked like regular, Mundane carnival glass—purples and emeralds and cobalts all mixing together, throwing colored light across the glowing sand—but so impossibly massive…damn. Elementals and sorcerers and elves and even what definitely had to be a giant—the whole "being fifteen feet tall" thing gave that away—hawked all variety of wares. From fragrant, steaming plates of street food to little trinkets to bundles of fluorescent-bright fabric that sparkled and shimmered under the white sun.
Deeper into the city, the buildings grew more and more lavish and extravagant, defied physics even more than just a regular old glass skyscraper. A forty-foot tower had fountains installed all around the outside edges, raining cool, clean water down to the ground. Children splashed and drank as it fell. Another one a couple feet away simply couldn't have stood without magic to reinforce it. A spindly bottom with free-floating stairs spiraling up into the bulbous main structure.
And as if Al-Sekar felt the need to punctuate its own grandeur, came around a corner and saw what had to be the royal palace. All roads seemed to feed into this massive, multicolored
glass structure. Turrets jutted and swirled into the sky for a good sixty feet on the four corners, but even the main body of the building was a solid twenty-five, thirty feet tall. Fountains festooned the grounds around it, spewing not just water, but all sorts of other bright, colorful liquids I couldn't identify. Flowers so vibrant they almost hurt to look at spilled out from around the palace, unkempt and wild and beautiful because of it.
Oh, and the whole thing floated about ten feet in the air. That was a thing that was happening right there. It bobbed very gently, as though it was on an invisible, placid ocean, but otherwise showed no movement. Exterior structures orbited around it like planets around the sun, everything tethered together by brilliant, shining bridges of silver and gold. And one large bridge came out from the front doors, touching the road where two guards stood, crossbows in hand.
"What the actual hell is this place?"
I caught Gutt smiling. I guess even if you hated everything about Al-Sekar, this was something else. Something you probably couldn't even see every day in the rest of the Hidden Kingdoms. "The royal palace of Al-Sekar. Were you expecting anything less than complete shock and awe?"
"No, but I wasn't expecting it to float, either. I understand you're not from the Mundane, but our buildings are normally pretty firmly attached to the ground. And also not made of glass."
"It's attached to the ground." He leveled a stout finger at the base of the bridge, where it attached to the road in front of us. "Right there."
"Yes, that's exactly the same thing as a concrete foundation. How could I be so blind?"
"I'll give you a pass this time." He walked up to the guards and nodded to both of them in turn. They were both clad in armor that hid their faces, but I had to imagine they were both baked and now dead. It wasn't unconscionably hot, but it also wasn't "let's wear metal plate armor all day" weather.
The guard on the left surprisingly moved, nodding back to Gutt. "Do you have business with the royal family?"