I never had guests, so I had converted the living room and dining area of my apartment into a combined gym and workroom, with weights, a treadmill, a computer desk, and a workbench for various tools. I dumped my bags by the door, unpacked, and changed into workout clothes.
Then I busied myself with exercise for the next two hours. I did weights – deadlifts, bench presses, and squats. I ran eight and a half miles on my treadmill, stopping only when I was drenched with sweat and starting to see little black spots.
Excessive exercise can be dangerous, but I needed a release, and it was better than drugs or booze. Or seducing some random stranger.
After, I showered off and collapsed into my bed. It was nice to sleep in a proper bed again. My old Caravanserai van is many things, but comfortable isn’t one of them.
I fell asleep at once. If I had any dreams, I didn’t remember them.
When I woke up, I was stiff, sore, and had a headache.
I also had the beginnings of a plan.
A mob of dignitaries would descend upon Madison for Rimethur’s arrival, both Elven nobles and human politicians and businessmen. Dignitaries meant there would be security, bodyguards, and Homeland Security officers. It also meant there would be a reception, which in turn required catering, music, janitorial services, and all the other things that went into a big party.
I could infiltrate any one of those things.
Elves thought themselves superior to humans, but they shared one big blind spot with rich humans. They often failed to see the hired help (or slaves, for some of the Elven nobles) as real people, just as sort of part of the backdrop. Elves and rich humans expected the hired hands to pour drinks and serve shrimp puffs. They did not expect the help to do something audacious, like steal an amulet from a frost giant ambassador. It was a psychological flaw I had exploited before.
Maybe I could exploit it again.
I put on a bathrobe, made a pot of coffee, sat at my computer desk, and got to work.
In my line of work, using the Internet is dangerous. The Inquisition, the High Queen’s secret police, keeps track of Internet traffic and cell phone calls. Most people don’t even notice. They check their messages, browse the official news sites, watch videos, use social media, and view the Punishment Day clips of convicted criminals. But criticize an Elven noble on social media or in an email, and a Homeland Security SWAT team might kick down your door, and you’ll find yourself in a Punishment Day clip getting fined and flogged for the crime of elfophobia. Plot against the High Queen or the Elven nobles over the Internet, and you would find the Inquisition coming for you.
So I was careful. There were ways to avoid the Inquisition’s electronic eye. Encryption, rerouting the connection through a dozen different countries’ Internet pipelines, hardware scramblers, and a few other illegalities. I used them all, and I routed my connection through a burner phone I fished out of my closet. My connection speed slowed to a crawl, and I would have to destroy the phone when I was done, but it let me browse more or less anonymously.
So long was I was careful.
I visited the website of Duke Carothrace of Madison. Of course, the Duke had likely had never seen his own website. He had minions to do that sort of thing for him. Still, the minions had done a good job with the website. There was lots of stuff about the Duke’s role as the benevolent protector of humanity against the dangers of the Shadowlands, blah blah blah. There was a gallery of pictures of the Duke’s men-at-arms who had died fighting in the Shadowlands campaigns.
Quite a lot of pictures, actually.
I found the news page. The Duke and his guests would greet Rimethur and his attendants in the square before the Wisconsin State Capitol. They would then proceed to Battle Hall across the street, a convention hall built to commemorate an Archon attack on Madison a hundred years ago. The page displayed a long list of businesses providing food and drink and other services for the reception.
I got out a notebook and started writing, taking down addresses and phone numbers. Easier to destroy a notebook than a phone if I needed to cover my tracks. I found the office of the Duke’s event coordinator, a woman named Alexandra Ross. The picture above her contact information showed a smiling, blond woman of about thirty with blue eyes and teeth so white they were the result of either expensive dental work or photo retouching.
I wrote down her phone number and office address, and then scrolled back through the businesses providing goods and services for the reception. I needed something important, preferably not something too expensive, but something the reception needed. Something that the perfectly coiffed event coordinator I had seen on the Duke’s web site would refuse to do without…
There.
A company called Gail’s Greenhouse Arrangements would provide the centerpieces for the tables at the reception. I went to their website, wrote down the details, and started packing my bags, my plan coming together in my mind.
I was a little annoyed that I had already dropped off my van. I was going to need the stupid thing again.
Once I was ready, I took my motorcycle back to the storage unit, loaded up the Caravanserai, and headed west along Interstate 94. From what I had read, the ancient pre-Conquest Presidents had built the Interstates to provide landing strips for aircraft in case of nuclear war with the Russians, and the High Queen had maintained the Interstates to allow her men-at-arms to travel quickly in response to any incursion from the Shadowlands. I saw a convoy of a dozen troop trucks, all of them bearing the colors of the Duke of Madison, each truck loaded with men-at-arms in steel and carbon weave armor, swords on their belts, spears in their hands, and crossbows and automatic rifles over their shoulders. I made sure not to pass the convoy. Homeland Security patrolled the Interstates much more diligently than the back roads, and I didn’t want to get pulled over. I had all sorts of things in the van that I didn’t want to explain.
Like that medallion adorned with the symbol of the Dark Ones, for instance.
I had kept it in the van because I didn’t know what else to do with the damned thing. There had been no way I would tell Morvilind about it. The one time I had mentioned the Dark Ones to him, he had inflicted crippling agony on me and threatened to kill me if I ever brought up the subject again. I didn’t know what interest he had in the Dark Ones, the creatures from the Void beyond the Shadowlands, but he had sent me to steal an artifact associated with them last month.
So what did the anthrophages want with me?
More importantly, how had they found me? Los Angeles was a long way from Milwaukee. I had the peculiar sense that the anthrophages had been smelling me, that they followed my scent, but that was ridiculous. It was a fifteen hundred mile drive across the country from LA to Milwaukee, over deserts and mountains and plains and the Mississippi River. Nothing could follow a scent like that. It had to be some kind of magic.
I didn’t know how they had tracked me, and more importantly, I didn’t know why. The anthrophage I had killed carried that medallion with the sign of the Dark Ones, and I was willing to bet the creature I had run over with the van had carried one as well, though God knew I wasn’t about to go back and look. Yet no one knew what I had done at Paul McCade’s mansion. Corvus and I had left no witnesses behind. Briefly I wondered if Corvus himself had sent the anthrophages after me, but that made no sense. He was a Shadow Hunter, and the Shadow Hunters were the enemies of the Dark Ones. McCade himself had said so before he tried to kill us.
I didn’t know why the anthrophages had come after me, and I didn’t know how they had found me.
I really, really didn’t like not knowing.
I couldn’t worry about it now. I had nine days before Jarl Rimethur arrived, and I had that long to figure out how I was going to steal his Ringbyrne Amulet without getting killed in the process. Assuming I survived the experience, I could worry about the Dark Ones then.
I’m really good at compartmentalizing. Maybe that’s why I get into so much trouble. I always worried that all the l
ittle compartments of my life that didn’t know about each other would blunder together in a horrible mess that would get me killed.
But not today. Today, I had nine days left to figure out how to steal a magical artifact.
And to do that, I was going to buy a whole lot of wedding centerpieces.
It took me two hours to drive from Milwaukee to Gail’s Greenhouse Arrangements on the west side of Madison. About a hundred thousand people live in Madison, with another hundred thousand scattered around the city proper. From what I understood, Madison had been destroyed during the Conquest, rebuilt, and then destroyed again during an Archon attack a century past. It had been rebuilt again, but that had done nothing for the road system, and it took me forever to get through the surface streets to Gail’s Greenhouse Arrangements.
Gail’s Greenhouse Arrangements did indeed have a greenhouse. It had six of them, in fact, arranged in a neat row, with a gravel parking lot and a metal trailer that served as an office. I circled the block, noting the location of the buildings, and then parked at a gas station a few blocks away. Unmarked vans draw unwelcome attention when you park them on a residential street, but at the gas station it was just one more battered service vehicle.
I bought a cup of aggressively mediocre coffee from a bored clerk inside the gas station. The TVs behind the counter repeated news about Rimethur’s upcoming visit, emphasizing the honor Madison would receive from the assemblage of so many Elven nobles. I wanted to roll my eyes, but I didn’t. The surly clerk looked like exactly the sort of man who would call Homeland Security to report elfophobia, and there were portraits of the High Queen and Duke Carothrace on the wall below the TV.
Coffee in hand, I retreated to my van and sat in the back. I plugged a burner phone into my laptop, fired up an illegal program, and called Gail’s Greenhouse Arrangements. The program on my laptop spoofed the phone number, making it seem as if I had called from Alexandra Ross’s office at Duke Carothrace’s headquarters.
“This is Alexandra Ross’s office calling,” I said in the prim, cool voice of a professional assistant. “I regret to inform you that we have to cancel our order of the centerpieces.”
That got a reaction, let me tell you.
The phone call went on for another fifteen minutes. I wound up talking to Gail herself, who protested her loyalty to the Duke, the high quality of her centerpieces, and the amount of work that had already gone into the order. I made various soothing noises and eventually got her calmed down, and then ended the call and left the gas station as fast as I dared. I figured I had maybe twenty minutes before she called Alexandra Ross herself to complain, and I needed to be in place by then.
I came to a stop in the gravel parking lot. I took a quick moment to change from jeans and a T-shirt to a nice blue sundress and a pair of high-heeled sandals. I made sure I concealed any incriminating equipment, left the van, and went into the metal trailer.
The interior looked like a combination of a craft studio, a gift shop, and an office. A gray-haired woman in jeans, t-shirt, and an apron who I suspected was Gail stood at a computer desk, visibly upset, surrounded by four young women all wearing polo shirts with GAIL’S GREENHOUSE ARRANGEMENTS stenciled across the front.
“Yes, dear?” said Gail, blinking as she tried to pull together her composure. “What can I do for you?”
“Hi,” I said, drawing out the word into a nervous drawl, making my fingers pluck at each other. “I know this is totally the last minute, and I don’t know if you guys do this kind of thing or not, but…um, do you make centerpieces? Because I’m getting married, and I really need to find some centerpieces, and…”
Gail blinked, and shared a look with her workers.
“I think,” said Gail, “we might be able to work something out. I just had a customer cancel an order, and I think we can get something ready for you just as slick as sugar.”
About twenty minutes later, I paid several thousand dollars for one hundred and fifty centerpieces, specifically glass vases each filled with colored beads and potpourri and a small candle that I guessed looked artistic or something. They even helped me load the centerpieces into my van, which would have been a nice gesture had I not just paid three thousand dollars for the stupid things.
“Oh, my fiancée is a contractor,” I said as we finished. “He let me use his van for this. He’s usually got all kinds of tools and stuff in there. I think he and his veteran buddies even use it for camping sometimes.”
I endured another fifteen minutes of polite chitchat about my wedding dress, the venue, and a dozen other imaginary details of my imaginary wedding, and then I drove off, the centerpieces rattling in the back. After twenty minutes, I parked at a shopping center and plugged the burner phone back into my laptop, firing up the spoofing program once more.
Then I sat in the back, wedging myself between the centerpieces in their cases, took a deep breath, and cast the Masking spell over myself.
I made myself look like Gail, with the same sun-seamed face, the same apron, the same dusty jeans and shoes. The Masking spell would also make me sound like her, which was the point. I held the spell in place and then dialed Alexandra Ross’s number on my phone. This time my spoofing program would make it look as if the call originated from Gail’s Greenhouse Arrangements.
Someone picked up on the third ring. “Ross speaking.” The woman’s voice was calm and collected, as perfectly controlled as the picture I had seen on the Duke’s website.
“Hi, dear, this is Gail from Gail’s Greenhouse Arrangements,” I said, the Masking spell imitating Gail’s voice. “I just wanted to call about the one hundred and fifty centerpieces I’ve been putting together for you.”
“Why?” A note of caution entered Ross’s voice. “Is there a problem?”
“Oh, not at all, not at all, everything is slick as sugar,” I said, wondering vaguely how sugar could make anything slick. “They’re about done, and we’ll be ready on time. I just wanted to call and say that one of my new employees will be taking them up. Nice young girl named,” I decided on one of my aliases, “Irina Novoranya. Hired her on because I’ve been so busy. All the weddings this time of year, and I…”
“Ah,” interrupted Ross. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Well, these are the centerpieces for his lordship the Duke!” I said. “I wanted make sure that everything’s all right. Also that Irina doesn’t need a special security pass or anything.”
“Oh, I see,” said Ross. “Good thinking. Yes, she will need a security pass. Homeland Security will be cordoning off the area around the Capitol and Battle Hall. Have her come by my office at three today. I’ll print off her pass. Make sure she brings the usual documents.”
“Will do,” I said. I had the necessary fake documents for a woman named Irina Novoranya. Birth certificate, conscription registration card, and a few various other fake credentials. “Thanks for understanding. Crazy time of year, and…”
“Not at all,” said Ross. “Thank you for calling ahead. These centerpieces are for the reception, and everything must be perfect. Two Dukes and a score of other nobles. A member of the High Queen’s court at the Red Palace might even see our work.”
“I agree,” I said. “I’ll send Irina up tomorrow.”
###
I had to rent a hotel room. I didn’t mind sleeping in my van, but the smell got a bit ripe after a few days, and those damn centerpieces took up all the space. Besides, Irina Novoranya could not show up at the Duke’s offices smelling like she had slept in a van for a week. So I found myself a cheap hotel, Masked myself as a middle-aged man with the look of a traveling salesman, and rented a room.
I did a quick check for bugs. Sometimes Homeland Security liked to plant bugs in hotel rooms to catch any Rebel sympathizers dumb enough to do their plotting in hotel rooms. Or random perverts, though that sort of thing earned its perpetrator a ruinous fine and a number of lashes on Punishment Day. Satisfied that the room was secure, I showered off and got dressed i
n the sort of clothes a worker in a Duke’s office would wear – black pumps, black pencil skirt, white blouse, black blazer, earrings, and a touch of makeup.
After getting all dressed up, it was amusing to Mask myself as a dumpy middle-aged salesman again.
I drove across town to the Duke’s offices. Madison had been destroyed twice in the last three hundred years, but at no point during any of the rebuilding did anyone think to construct adequate parking. Finally I parked the van in a parking structure six blocks away, paying an exorbitant fee for the privilege, and then I had to hurry to keep my appointment. The skirt and the heels made it hard to hurry, but I managed.
Duke Carothrace’s offices took up two blocks across the street from the Wisconsin State Capitol, which had somehow survived both the Conquest and the Archon attack. The Duke’s offices were a gleaming pile of steel and glass, and before it stood a bronze statue of Duke Carothrace in full battle armor, gazing determinedly at the horizon, flanked by six of his human men-at-arms carrying swords and spears. I noted with amusement the little camera sitting atop the building’s doors, ready to capture any acts of elfophobia directed at the Duke’s bronze likeness.
I clacked my way into the lobby, one wall of which displayed an enormous mural showing the Duke leading his men-at-arms to victory over a band of orcs in the Shadowlands. It was disturbingly accurate, showing the strange, dead terrain of the place between the worlds, the twisted trees, the ribbons of fire in the starless void of the sky, the wraithwolves prowling at the edges of the dark trees…
I froze for an instant.
An anthrophage stood below the wall, staring at me, black spines rising from its gaunt, gray limbs, its yellow eyes digging into me…
I realized it was part of the mural, and I rebuked myself. I couldn’t afford to start having freakouts in public, not now.
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