Mad Maudlin

by Mercedes Lackey

  In the morning he'd hit the street and start looking—but not, he thought, as Eric Banyon, suave young Bard-about-Town. That would be a good way to get himself mugged, and scare off the very people he needed to get close to as well. No, he needed to fit in, and that meant looking homeless and down-at-heel himself.

  * * *

  In the morning he was up early, too keyed up to sleep. A quick cup of tea—skip the shave; he needed the unshaven look for his plans—and he was on his way.

  His first stop was a secondhand clothing store down on Canal Street. Not one of the trendy "vintage" places, but an actual secondhand store. There he picked up a pair of frayed khakis, an old Air Force sweater, a trench coat, and a watch cap, all items absent from the current fashionable Eric Banyon wardrobe. Paying for his purchases, he wandered about looking for the other item on his shopping list. There ought to be one in this area. . . .

  Aha. There it was.

  He walked in through the door of the pawnshop, blinking at the sudden transition from light to darkness.

  All around him were the leftovers of other people's lives: everything that somebody might be induced to loan money on, or buy outright. Some of them were pretty strange—cuckoo clocks and mangy animal heads, for example. Others were the usual stock-in-trade of places like this: rings, watches, jewelry. Musical instruments.

  "Can I help you?" the proprietor asked.

  "I'm looking for a flute," Eric said.

  He'd been a homeless street musician before. He figured it made pretty good sense to go back to being one now. But he'd need a flute for that, and it would be way out of character to go around with the $8,000 Miyazawa Boston Classic that he'd bought to replace the flute that Aerune had melted. It didn't raise an eyebrow at Juilliard, where parents routinely took out a second mortgage to give their kids the most expensive instruments money could buy—not that money was a problem for Eric, with Underhill bankrolling him—but out on the street his regular flute would look far too new and expensive to go with his cover story.

  "We have several to choose from. Over there." The proprietor pointed casually and returned to his reading.

  Eric walked over and regarded the selection. There were six of them, all displayed in open cases, all looking rather battered and certainly well-used. All of about the caliber you'd expect to find being used by a high-school marching band, really. Any of them would be suitable. It hardly mattered which he chose, but Eric still hesitated, gazing at the array of tarnished silver as though sight alone could tell him something of their history and quality.

  Was it his imagination, or did one of them look just a little more wistful than the others, just a little more ashamed to be here . . . ? Like the dog in the back of the cage at the pound, knowing that no one would ever take him home, but longing just as fervently for a home as the pup that was performing a complete gymnastic routine at the front of the cage.

  "That one," he said, pointing at the flute nestled against the rusty-brown velvet. "I'll take that one."

  * * *

  Returning home with his bundles, he dutifully left a message on Oriana's answering machine, letting her know that he needed to talk to her, and went to inspect his new purchase. He'd probably been a fool to buy a pawnshop flute at random, but after all, it was really little more than a prop, and he had a kit here to make minor repairs. Only minor repairs; anything else would need an expert—but he could change broken springs and replace worn-out pads.

  Though he was anxious to start looking for his brother, common sense told him it was still too early to begin. Though he and Ria hadn't been able to find Magnus last night by scrying, Eric still thought he stood a good chance of locating his brother—his brother!—by magic, if he could only get close enough. The question was, where was he? Manhattan was a big place. He'd been shielded last night. Those shields were probably around wherever he slept, and Eric knew from Hosea that street children were mostly creatures of the night. Wherever Magnus was, he was probably still asleep. Eric would have the best chance of finding him once he was up and on the move, and that wouldn't be for a couple of hours yet at the earliest.

  That left Eric plenty of time to get ready for his masquerade. He turned his attention to the flute, not expecting very much.

  But when he assembled it and blew into it experimentally, the tone was surprisingly good. The silver warmed beneath his hands, as if grateful for the attention, and Eric tried a practice run. That showed him a few stuck keys, and he got out his tool kit.

  He'd just gotten everything working properly when the phone rang.

  "Eric?"

  "Dr. Dunaway." He hadn't expected a call-back this quickly.

  "So formal," she said chidingly. "Now." Giving him no more leeway.

  "Oriana, I did something really stupid," Eric said, and launched into an explanation of Tuesday. By now, after having explained it already to both Greystone and Ria, he was able to get through it fairly quickly and lucidly.

  "I see," she said when he'd finished. "I think you already know that we should talk about this. Unfortunately, my schedule is very full today. Can you possibly come in tomorrow morning, before my regular hours? Or would you rather wait for our regular session?"

  Eric sighed. Before regular hours meant eight a.m., and he'd never been a morning person at the best of times. On the other hand, he really thought he needed to talk this out with somebody who knew the whole story. "I'll be there," he said, with resignation.

  "Good," Oriana said warmly. "I'll see you then."

  Eric hung up the phone, feeling as if he'd attached another lifeline, somehow. He looked down at the flute, and then at the bundle of shabby clothes—his new uniform.

  He carefully disassembled the flute again, and took the coil of Magnus' hair out of his wallet. Pulling a single strand free, he coiled it carefully around the mouthpiece of the flute where the join to the body was and fitted the pieces back together. Now the flute was bound to Magnus. As he played, it would search for him, and find him.

  And then. . . .

  What then?

  Worry about that when you get there, he told himself, pulling off his shirt.

  * * *

  With his new flute, his busker's license (no sense being a damned fool about things), and a few dollars in his pocket, unshaven, disheveled, and dressed in somebody else's discards, Eric Banyon reentered the world he'd left (though he hadn't quite realized it at the time) the moment he'd met an elf named Korendil at a RenFaire a few years before.

  It was a place where you begged for money while trying not to attract attention. A place where you weren't sure where your next meal was coming from. A place where you weren't sure where you were going to sleep that night—or any night. All right; granted that he had been good enough and personable enough even when he'd been a lush, that he'd usually had an apartment of his own and was able to keep the lights on and food in the fridge—but he acknowledged now what he had resolutely ignored then, that he had been hovering on the edge of that other world, and it would have taken just a little more booze and grass to push him into it. He wandered slowly downtown and eastward, knowing, both from personal experience and from hearing Hosea's tales of his work in the shelters, that he was heading for the part of town where runaways often gathered.

  He did not move purposefully, but drifted, stopping every once in a while to play, leaving the flute case open at his feet. The day was bright and cold, and he realized that he'd forgotten gloves—well, he wouldn't tomorrow. And a little warmth was easy enough to summon, even if he did feel a pang of guilt while doing it.

  No one stopped to reward his playing with money, but that was hardly the point. He was hunting, not busking.

  He found a few hints of his brother's presence, but the magic told him they were old, many days old. And the harder he tried to trace them, to get a sense of Magnus' movements, the fainter they became, though Eric tried every hunter's trick he knew. It was as if there was a veil over his magic, and the harder he pushed, the thick
er the veil got.

  And slowly, a new fear was added to all the others.

  If he's got this much grasp of magic . . . to be able to cover his trail this well . . . to know to cover his trail this well . . . who taught him?

  If Magnus had allies, who were they? And more to the point, what did they want with him?

  * * *

  In a small office in a nondescript building in Washington, a man regarded a desk full of reports. They were unsatisfying.

  Parker Wheatley was not a happy man.

  Everything should have been going his way—this was the perfect time to alert those in power to the existence of a heretofore-unsuspected menace right within their own borders. But at the time he most needed his Otherworld ally, Aerune mac Audelaine wasn't returning his calls.

  Served him right for trusting an elf in the first place.

  Fortunately Wheatley'd had the great good sense to stockpile a number of Aerune's little toys when Aerune had still been willing to dispense them—the green fabric that rendered humans invisible to Spookies and impervious to their powers; the parasympathetic energy detectors that looked like wristwatches and could detect "magical" energy at a distance; the sheets of transparent material that screened out Spookie illusions. Other items, like the zip guns that threw the slugs of Cold Iron so distasteful to elves, were easy enough to build here.

  But he did mourn the loss of the larger items, like the flying car. That had disappeared in Las Vegas, along with a number of fine field operatives, just after they'd lost contact with Aerune. They'd never been able to duplicate it. It was irreplaceable. As were the agents, of course, but the agents hadn't cost several million black-project dollars squirreled away from the Department of Defense to create.

  Well, there was no use crying over spilled Spookies, Wheatley told himself with a flash of cynical humor. They could make do with what they had for quite some time, even without Aerune's help. And if they could actually manage the Holy Grail of the Paranormal Defense Initiative, a live capture . . .

  Then they could either parlay that into a truly satisfactory budget—for a change—

  Or perhaps their new elf would be more cooperative and forthcoming than Aerune had been. He wasn't averse to another interspecies partnership, Parker Wheatley told himself. Only this time he'd be sure to make sure that everyone involved was straight on where the real power in the arrangement lay.

  He was actually more inclined toward seeking out a new Elven partner at the moment than toward pinning his hopes on displaying a live capture. Despite the early reports last year from Vegas that there seemed to be a whole nest of Spookies running around loose out there, subsequent searches had uncovered nothing, Vegas elves had proved as elusive as Vegas Mafia, and time was running out. The climate on the Hill these days was conservative. Everybody was pulling in his horns, pushing for interagency cooperation and the elimination of deadwood and redundancy . . . and without results, the PDI was headed for the chopping block.

  Wheatley was an experienced game player. He could read the writing on the wall as well as anyone. And he knew that Aerune had seduced him into overcomitting himself to the PDI over the last several years. It would be very hard to back out now, to distance himself from the program and try to blend in elsewhere.

  No. He needed results. And if Aerune wasn't going to answer whatever Spookies used for phones, that meant Parker Wheatley had to find someone who would.

  His intercom buzzed.

  "Yes, Gail?"

  "Mr. Nichol just called. Your appointment is here."

  "Good. Let him know I'll be down in just a minute."

  "Very good, sir."

  Wheatley smiled. Gail was a good girl. A fast hand with a burn bag, and absolutely loyal. He got to his feet, reaching for his suit jacket.

  * * *

  Marley Bell was scared. Not just getting-your-tax-return-audited scared. Nobody who ran a small business was a stranger to audits. But might-be-going-to-die scared.

  Everything had been fine this morning. He'd gone down to Bell Books to open up, thinking this was just another ordinary day in his life. Bell Books was an occult book store—not a fluffy New Age shop selling candles, glitter, and unicorns, but a real bookstore, selling new and used occult books, some of them extremely rare. Most of his business was mail order, and many years he was lucky to break even; without the trust fund, he'd have had to pack it in years ago. But he was a member of a fine old Baltimore family, with fine old Baltimore money to match. The bookstore had been in the family for three generations, though it had been Marley who had changed the focus to match his own interests and studies. Scholars flew in from Europe just to consult the books on his shelves!

  He wondered if he'd ever see any of his beloved books again.

  He'd just gotten the shutters up and the front door open—thinking about a nice mug of coffee from the French press he kept in the back of the store—when this big government car had pulled up in front of the shop. The store wouldn't be open till ten, and it was only a little after eight, but he always came in early to check his e-mail and fill orders.

  There'd been three of them, all dressed alike. One stayed behind the wheel, while the other two got out of the car: one out of the front seat, one out of the back. They'd been wearing green trench coats, the color so offbeat, bordering on bizarre, that he hadn't taken them seriously for a moment.

  That had quickly changed.

  "I'm sorry, we're still closed," he'd said, turning in the doorway to face them.

  "Yes, you are," one of them said.

  They'd walked right up to him, crowding him. One of them had taken the key ring right out of his hand, while the other one had taken his arm and started pulling him toward the car. He'd been too shocked to protest for a moment, until he'd heard the sound of the first one behind him, relocking the door of his shop.

  He'd tried to struggle then, but it was too late. He wasn't quite sure what the two of them did—everything got a little hazy—but when he could think clearly again, he had a ferocious headache, and he was sitting in the back seat of the car between the two men in the green coats, and the car was heading in the direction of D.C. Neither of them had spoken to him again.

  And now he was alone in here.

  "Here" was a small room with a table—bolted to the floor—one chair, and no windows. It looked like the holding cells you saw on television in police shows. He'd been brought in through an underground garage, up an elevator, along a deserted corridor. He'd seen no one.

  Why? He'd done nothing wrong, broken no laws. He didn't use drugs, didn't cheat on his taxes . . . he didn't even jaywalk, in the name of all that was holy. He was an only child, never married, his parents were dead, he had no close relatives, he didn't date anyone of any sex. All of his close personal relationships—such as they were—were conducted by mail and over the Internet, and all of them referred exclusively to either the Art or rare books.

  Why was he here?

  After a while, nervous tension gave way to a kind of numb despair, a growing horrified realization that, no matter how innocent he was, no matter that the men who had kidnapped him seemed to belong to his own government, anything at all might happen to him. And no one would know.

  Finally there were sounds of a key in the lock, and the door swung inward. Marley sprang to his feet with a cry, knocking the chair in which he'd been sitting over backward with a crash.

  Two men entered.

  One was one of the men who'd kidnapped him, wearing a business suit the exact same color of lurid green as his trench coat. The other, Marley was relieved to see, looked normal. He was wearing a plain, charcoal-grey three-piece suit with a burgundy tie, and his thick silver hair was swept straight back from a widow's peak. He looked like an expensively groomed Washington insider and, paradoxically, that reassured Marley. Career politicos had plenty to lose. They would not throw it away on foolish mistakes.

  Mistakes. That's what this is, a mistake. They'll tell me this is a mistake, and I
can go home . . . .

  "Good afternoon. My name is Wheatley. Mr. Nichol you already know. And you are Marley Tucker Bell. Bell . . . Bell . . . you wouldn't happen to be a relation to Miller Stevenson Bell, by any chance?"

  Marley felt a disappointment too deep for words as his last hope of this being a mistake was crushed. They—whoever they were—had picked him, chosen him by name. But the dictates of good manners were strong. "He was my great-uncle, sir."

  "Ah." Wheatley smiled. "I thought you had the look of the family. He was a fine politician, still fondly remembered, and by all accounts, an excellent preacher. How sad he'd be to discover that his great-nephew had grown up to be a black magician."

  Shock does make you light-headed, Marley decided with a faint sense of discovery. He reached down, picked up the chair, righted it, and sat down on it. His hands trembled, and he knew he looked as frightened as he felt.

  "Perhaps you would be so good as to allow me to call my lawyer," he said, summoning up the last of his defiance.

  And a psychiatrist for yourself, he thought, but did not say. He'd long since grown beyond responding to such petty schoolyard taunts. So Wheatley knew he was a student of the Art Magical. That was disturbing—hell, it was terrifying. But studying magic wasn't illegal. And he was no Black Magician. He harmed no one and nothing in his practice of the Art.

  "Oh, come now, Mr. Bell," Wheatley said. "You've done nothing wrong. Why would you need a lawyer? We simply require your help. And you're going to provide it."

  Marley stared at him in baffled horror, unable for a moment to think coherently. This was the stuff of nightmares, of bad movies. All it lacked was the Nazi uniforms to make it complete.

  "What do you want?" he said at last.

  He drew the tiniest of comforts from knowing that his paper files were sanitized, his computer was secure . . . they'd get his mailing list, but very little more than that; and if he didn't log in to his system within 72 hours, it would format itself and that would be lost as well. And his important files and correspondence were triply password-protected and encrypted, on a system designed by a Brother of the Art. Bless Ray for that; there was no one better, and even Ray didn't know the passwords and encryption he'd chosen.