The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  But though they crossed cultures and millennia, they did share a common theme.

  Power. Everything Dawson’s employer had demanded he research was an object purported to possess unnatural power.

  That was the thread that wove all of it together, the secret of his master’s obsession. Regardless of culture or era, material or origin, he sought artifacts purported to hold extraordinary—even supernatural—power.

  The Cauldron of Ceridwen that raised dead warriors back to life again. The bones of an obscure saint believed to cure insanity. The Ring of Solomon that gave its possessor dominion over the nations of the djinn.

  That roughly shaped clay in a forgotten tomb in Ostrask that some believed to be the remains of a golem.

  Ostrask.

  To Dawson, it had been a mere curiosity. The people of the village had believed differently. Of course, Dawson doubted any of them knew the story of Rabbi Eleazar and how he shaped a servant from the raw earth, infusing it with life and inhuman strength that it might protect his people from persecution. They didn’t care what the books said, or neglected to say. Their more primitive minds recognized that the thing was an abomination, and they sought to destroy it before it could destroy them.

  Damned superstition, Dawson had thought at the time. But then, to him, the artifact, which only barely resembled a human form, like something a child would make out of sand, was a mere curiosity. A fascinating example of a long-dead piece of Hebrew folklore. That the people of Ostrask saw it as a threat had seemed to him a mere inconvenience. That is, until they arrived at the excavation site carrying picks, axes, and torches, vowing that they would not leave until they had destroyed the rabbi’s creation.

  The scene was seared into his memory. The villagers, perhaps thirty of them—a group that represented nearly every able-bodied male—gathered at the border of their camp, torchlight accentuating the terror in their expressions. Jacobs standing before them, seemingly unperturbed, as though the mob were an everyday occurrence barely worth his attention.

  The leader had demanded they turn over the golem. He said if they did not, then they would force their way into the camp and take it. Either way, the thing would be destroyed.

  Jacobs had not answered. He had merely watched with perfect calm as the men before him worked themselves up into a holy outrage.

  Who is Jacobs? Dawson had often wondered. A half-caste of some sort, that was his best guess, but of what background he could not begin to say. He had heard the man speak Romanian like a native. His Arabic and Greek were likewise flawless, and Dawson was certain he understood everything the men of this expedition said to one another in their various dialects of Spanish and Creole.

  Dawson did not know his first name. He had no idea where he lived. His accent revealed nothing. He could not possibly be educated, yet Dawson had learned not to underestimate either his intelligence or his knowledge. Where he had come from was as obscure to Dawson as the name and nature of their employer, a mystery he was not altogether certain he wanted to solve.

  As the men of Ostrask prepared to attack what they saw as a piece of the devil’s work, the cold night air was broken by the sound of sobs and cries. Around the ridge that separated the camp from the village came the rest of the population of Ostrask—the wives and children of the men who threatened the excavation. They were herded by the roughest of the men Jacobs had hired, who pushed them on with the barrels of their rifles.

  How Dawson remembered the sight. The women, lovely and terrified with their dark hair loose about their faces, some in their nightclothes with infants clutched to their breasts. The children clinging to their skirts, eyes wide with fear.

  The shouting of the men had died away, the echoes fading off the surrounding mountainsides. By the time the huddled group arrived at the camp, all was silent except for the crackling of their torches.

  They would have left, even then. Dawson had seen it in their eyes, how the fury they had worked themselves into was snuffed out like a candle by the sight of their loved ones, barefoot and vulnerable before those harsh-faced mercenaries. All Jacobs would have had to do was say the word, and they would have been gone.

  But he did not order them home. He lifted the revolver at his side, pointed it into the group, and fired.

  He had barely glanced in their direction, but his aim was flawless. Three of the women went down, as well as a boy who could not have been more than twelve. Then he shifted and, without so much as a moment of hesitation, put a bullet through the forehead of the ringleader of the mob, the man who, a few moments before, had been exhorting them to action.

  He had fallen to the ground with a sound like a dropped sack of wheat. Dawson had heard it clearly, because there had been no other sound in that desolate place. No screams. No outrage. Even the children seemed to have sensed that to cry out was to risk making themselves the next target.

  On the ground, beside the fallen body of its mother, an infant began to wail. Beside it stood an old woman, twisted with age like a piece of driftwood.

  “Dybbuk,” she said, pointing at Jacobs. She spit on the ground.

  Then, as though all of them had simultaneously sensed some kind of subconscious dismissal, they fled, men and women both. They had run down the mountainside as though hell itself pursued them. When Dawson had passed through the village the next day, as they carried off the artifact carefully packed into a wooden crate, the place was empty save a few lean, half-starved dogs. They had gone, all of them, deserted the place they had called home for who knew how many generations.

  Dybbuk, the old woman had called him. Devil. Well, men could certainly be devils when they chose, and that night Dawson had seen just how easily Jacobs could put his humanity aside.

  And for what? A misshapen lump of clay. A curiosity. Or so he had thought at the time, sickened with the violence he had seen, and with something more—the knowledge of his own reaction.

  He had stood by and done nothing. Said nothing as those people had died. He had remained silent throughout an atrocity, consumed by a fear for his own skin.

  It had become something of a habit lately, ever since Edinburgh.

  Dawson had deserved the gallows.

  He remembered that night in Saint Andrews. He had been dizzy as he walked up the stairs to his elegant town house. How had he gotten so drunk? He had gone from a faculty event to a tavern near the university, a disreputable place favored by some of the younger professors. There, he had topped off the brandy he had been sipping at the meeting with two, maybe three glasses of whiskey. It hadn’t seemed like too much, but he knew, as his feet stumbled on the steps, that he must be drunk.

  He had played the scene out so many times in his mind. He must have been silent coming in, though how that was possible when he was swaying on his feet, Dawson couldn’t say. But when he climbed the stairs to the upper floor, the man still lay in the arms of his wife, just as the stranger in the tavern had warned him.

  I know you don’t know me from Cain, Professor, but as one honest fellow to another…

  The dark form had fled, climbing nimbly out the open window. Anne had lain there, mumbling some sleepy, incomprehensible endearment, as though wondering where her lover had gone.

  The rage had come in so quickly. One moment he was feeling vaguely ill. In the next, fury filled him, hot and violent. It had been a sort of madness. There was no decision, no rational choice. He had leaped on her like a beast, clamping his hands around her throat.

  Dawson had loved her once. She had been lovely, privileged, the daughter of a wealthy factory owner. That she returned his affections had come as a surprise, one he hardly believed.

  He wasn’t sure what killed it. Perhaps her childlessness. Perhaps it was merely ennui, or the patient accumulation of slights and resentments. But while Dawson knew the decline of his marriage brought feelings of disappointment, boredom, and occasional frustration, it had never really angered him. Anger required passion, and his passion for Anne had burned out years befo
re.

  He could remember how the soft flesh of her neck had given way under his fingers. Her eyes looked up at him, thick as though with sleep, her expression one of confusion, then fear, then desperation as she clawed at his arms, mouth gaping like that of a fish pulled up onto the riverbank.

  Then she had slipped away. The hands went limp, the eyes vacant, and as the hot fury faded into ash, Dawson looked down and realized what he had done.

  Why? Why had he done it? Where had that snarling ferocity come from? Did it really take so little as a bit of drunkenness and an unfaithful wife to turn him into things out of a nightmare?

  He should have hanged for it. His guilt was as real and solid as the stones he walked upon. But when offered the chance to live, he had snatched at it as greedily as any beggar. He was still snatching at it now, as he stood before the false doorway in this impossible chamber.

  The Smoking Mirror was real.

  He had been sent here to retrieve it for a man whose name he did not know, a man who plucked murderers from their just punishment, who did not scruple to hire monsters to achieve his ends. A man whose obsession with powers only gods should possess inspired him to every extravagance, from fixing courtrooms to slaughtering children.

  Somewhere in this ruin lay an object that could reveal the technology of the future—and perhaps more. The myth of the Smoking Mirror was of a window into all of time and space. The past, the present, and the future, laid out like sweets on a table.

  Every shred of Dawson’s remaining decency screamed against letting such a device fall into the hands of a man like his employer. He could not begin to imagine the use to which it would be put, but anything wanted so badly by such a man could not be meant for good.

  It didn’t matter.

  He would go through with it. Dawson knew what the cost of failure would be. That was, of course, why Jacobs had been sent here with him. If Dawson wavered in his duty, Jacobs would see things done.

  And Dawson would die.

  His life was all he had left. Everything else had died in that room in Saint Andrews, or later, in the filth of an Edinburgh jail, when he had sold out the last fragments of his humanity for a few more years of breath.

  He could have spoken up in Ostrask. He might have tried to stop that loss of innocent life. He had remained silent, afraid to draw one of Jacobs’s bullets. And if he could go back to that moment—he would do the same thing again, without a moment’s hesitation.

  Dawson would find the mirror and deliver it to the ruthless bastard who owned him, regardless of the consequences. He had bought his life dearly, and he meant to keep it, whatever the cost.

  Ellie crouched in the darkness at the edge of the camp, making a careful assessment of the scene in front of her. She could hear cries in the distance, the sound of Jacobs’s men searching for her. They had fanned out, probing the farther reaches of the ruins. She could see their torches flickering in the distance like will-o’-the-wisps over the moor. No one thought to look for her here, back at the very heart of the camp, which meant getting where she wanted to go would take far less luck than she’d anticipated.

  Ellie crept around the perimeter. Using the crates and stacked supplies for cover, she worked her way toward Dawson’s tent.

  She looked up. A flicker of lightning illuminated a massive spread of thick, dark clouds.

  Beside her, the mules shifted in their paddock, braying nervously. They could sense the tension in the atmosphere, the uneasy stillness before the storm.

  Ellie waited, tense and silent, as a pair of drovers approached, talking in low voices, then moved by. With a silent prayer to whatever gods might be listening, she dashed across the remaining open space and slipped into the tent.

  Moving quickly and quietly, she made her way to the field desk, which sat to the side by a pile of trunks.

  She took Adam’s knife out of her pocket and held it to the lock of the drawer. She paused, listening carefully for any indication of men passing by outside. Hearing only silence, she hefted a paperweight from the desk and hammered the blade into the lock. It gave, splintering the frame.

  She didn’t care whether anyone noticed now. By the time they did, she planned to be long gone.

  Ellie moved to yank the drawer open, then stopped at the sound of voices outside the tent. She quickly shifted the books on top of the desk to disguise the damage, then ducked behind the pile of trunks just as Jacobs entered the room.

  She peered at him through a slight gap in her hiding place. One of his men followed him.

  “And when they find her, do you want her returned to camp?” he asked.

  “When they find her, I want her shot,” Jacobs replied.

  It was so matter-of-fact, so utterly without drama, that Ellie nearly missed the import of Jacobs’s words.

  “But the professor—”

  “Only cares about her companion’s cooperation. There are other ways to secure that.”

  Ellie pressed herself back as Jacobs approached her hiding place, but he merely lifted a sack of gear from beside the desk.

  “This is what Velegas was looking for. See that he gets it.”

  “Yes, jefe.”

  The man left, but Ellie caught back her sigh of relief as Jacobs stopped in the doorway.

  He turned like a predator suddenly scenting a rabbit, dark eyes surveying the room coldly. They stopped at the desk. Ellie pulled herself back from the small gap, trying to shrink into the trunks themselves.

  He stepped forward, and she tightened her grip on the bent knife in her hand. Her hands were sweating, the hilt slipping under her fingers. She felt frantically aware of how useless the weapon would be. But what else was there?

  If she could reach the drawer of the desk…

  But any movement, even the slightest rustle of her clothing, would draw him like a bloodhound.

  If he took another step, moved any closer, then she would have no choice. She just hoped to hell she could move quickly enough.

  Another voice called from outside. Jacobs hesitated.

  Then, abruptly, he turned and answered, pushing through the flap and leaving her.

  She let out a shaking breath, slumping against the trunks. The tone of his voice when he had spoken of killing her had been so easy, as though he were speaking of eliminating a stray cat. And what he’d said about Adam…

  The professor only cares about her companion’s cooperation. There are other ways to secure that.

  The game that had kept them alive for the past few days had apparently changed.

  She slipped from her hiding place and returned to the desk, pushing back the books and yanking open the drawer. She shoved the papers aside but felt nothing but the rough wood of the drawer itself, no solid weight of heavy steel.

  She pulled the drawer out entirely and dumped the contents onto the floor, but there could be no doubt. The revolver she had seen before was gone.

  Adam fought against a rising sense of irritation. Dawson’s fixation with the door was getting on his nerves. He had been studying the mural for what felt like the better part of an hour, refusing to acknowledge that there were simply no signs that the painting was anything more than decorative.

  The exhaustion and constant tension of knowing that his time was running out certainly weren’t helping matters. But he couldn’t afford to snap at the man, no matter how justified it might be. He had to stay on Dawson’s good side, at least for a few more hours.

  “This isn’t the sort of problem we can solve tonight. Why don’t we go down, finish setting up camp? We can come back and try again in the morning.”

  Dawson didn’t answer. He was staring at the mural, the dust accentuating the dark circles under his eyes.

  “If it isn’t here, it could be anywhere in the city,” he muttered.

  “So we keep looking. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Dawson was afraid, Adam realized. But of whom? Jacobs? Or whomever it was who had put this whole business into motion, the mysterious em
ployer with a lust for a mythical mirror?

  Dawson opened his eyes, studying the panel again. A new light seemed to come into them.

  “What if they walled it up?” he mused aloud.

  The notion energized him. He hurried to his bag of gear and pulled out a hammer and chisel, then lifted them to the painted wall.

  Shock delayed Adam’s movement as he realized that Dawson was about to knock a hole through a piece of history.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “It could just be facing, or maybe a layer of fill plastered over. Before we search anywhere else, we should make certain it isn’t here,” Dawson retorted stubbornly.

  He moved forward. Adam blocked him.

  “This mural is priceless.”

  “Can’t you feel it? The rains are coming,” Dawson snapped. “We’ll be forced to leave before the trail is impassable, and by the time we return this place will have been looted. You really think they’ll be scrupulous about a few paintings?”

  Dawson’s reasoning made him pause, but only for a moment. The city had protected its secrets for centuries. It could keep them for another few months. And that was only if there was no other way to secure the room.

  He’d seen too many monuments destroyed by men bent on finding treasure. He’d be damned if he’d stand by and watch this miraculously preserved place fall to the same fate.

  He crossed his arms.

  “You’re not doing this.”

  Dawson reddened.

  “This is what you agreed to.”

  “I don’t recall actually agreeing to anything,” Adam drawled in reply.

  So much for cooperation, he thought distantly. The game was officially blown.

  And all for a damned mural.