Dominion

by Fred Saberhagen

  DOMINION

  Fred Saberhagen

  ©1982 by Fred Saberhagen

  ISBN: 978-1-937422172

  ePublished by: JSS Literary Productions

  PROLOGUE

  All yesterday’s dead men, and the dead horses too, were slowly becoming visible in the predawn light that came staining slowly across the field. Instead of blackness, the sky was the color of nothingness now. The leader realized that he hadn’t slept at all, hadn’t even taken off his armor. No matter; his next sleep was likely to be long enough.

  Out of the mist on his right a figure materialized, and he turned to face it, donning out of habit a leader’s confident smile.

  “When’ll we fight again, sir?” the man asked after a silent pause. A useless question, of course. But something to say.

  “As soon as the sun’s well up.” A useless, unnecessary answer, too, though in his practiced leader’s voice it sounded like some decision that he’d just confidently taken.

  “There’s a many of ’em, sir.” Through the opaque grayness that still hid the enemy camp, some hint of their numbers could now be heard in morning stirrings.

  “Aye, and few of us.” Thank all the gods, he had no need to make a rousing speech now. He and the men who still remained with him were past all that. Any who were not bedrock firm in loyalty had long since gone. He’d say a few words of thanks to them, if he was given the chance. “Go rouse the men. It won’t be long now. Stay—see that the wounded are all armed. We can retreat no farther, with the lake behind us, and none will choose to be taken prisoner, I think. Not by Comorr, and Falerin, and … and

  then bring up my horse.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Now, for a little while, the leader stood once more alone. His own wound, he thanked the gods, was in his left arm and not his right. He’d still be able to use his sword to good effect when the time came. Soon now, probably no time for even a speech of thanks. No speeches and no agonizing over plans. Planning, along with hope, had vanished sometime yesterday. No, days ago, when the man who was his true right arm had … gone away.

  No, he thought again. Months before that, really. There had been no real hope since that same man had been disabled, since—as he’d put it himself—the great stone had come down upon him.

  Over there beyond the mist, across the field, men were shouting, taunting, laughing confidently. They knew he hadn’t managed to get the remnant of his army away during the night. Their own skilled magicians had seen to that. Now they were already mounting horses over there, ready to begin what would be a slow, confident advance.

  That great, damned stone, months past, had crushed all hope. Now the leader had nothing to do but wait …

  ONE

  The dead man centered in the pearly glow of the two portable spotlights sat slumped against an interior angle of the wall behind him, as if he had got his back against those dingy bricks, and had then died fighting. This minor peculiarity of position aside, the scene really held nothing out of the ordinary, Joe Keogh thought. Not for a blind turn in a dark alley off this particular street in this particular neighborhood of Chicago. So far, Joe was not impressed. In his current assignment, the Pawn Shop Detail, corpses were no part of his day to day routine; still, in a dozen years with the CPD, he had seen violent death more than a few times, and in a variety of forms.

  “I don’t know ’im,” Joe now repeated patiently. He was standing with hands on hips as he continued to gaze at the victim’s waxen, gray-stubbled face.

  It was the beginning of a warm night in June, and Joe was wearing his suit coat open, shoulder holster barely out of sight. Up and down the alley air conditioners and exhaust fans howled softly or whined shrilly behind grilled windows, gasping a mixture of smells out into the city twilight: incongruous innocent pizza, the fumes of stale beer, and who knew what else besides. In some room behind some section of these ageless bricks some instruments were maintaining a steady, muted pounding that to someone must be music. Another sound offstage somewhere, this one evidently passing for laughter, kept phasing in and out of audibility. There was, as everywhere and anytime in the city, background traffic noise.

  “Is that what you wanted to know?” Joe inquired, when Charley Snider still didn’t answer him. “Or am I here for something else?”

  Snider, Lieutenant of Homicide, was occupied at the moment with lighting a cigarette. Match flame glinted orange on his dark black face, pale on the pink of his cupped palms. There were a couple of patrolmen in the alley also, one standing just on either side of the bright circle cast by the lamps that had been brought in to help with the photography.

  “There’s no blood, you see,” Snider commented at last, words modulating a long puff of smoke. He threw the match down carelessly; nobody was going to crawl around on the floor of this alley on hands and knees, trying to figure out what brand of match the killers might have dropped. Charley was a big man, now going a little bit to gut and jowls, but having in reserve a lot more speed, mental as well as physical, than showed on the surface.

  “No blood,” Joe repeated, after a short delay. His own reaction must have sounded slow, but deep inside him something had been very quickly triggered. Memories, no more than a few years old, but with an ancient feeling to them. Now it begins again …

  “His throat’s been cut, you see,” Charley informed him. “I think it opened the jugular, the carotid artery, the whole shmear. The M.E. just got through commenting on what a neat surgical job.”

  The expressionless, ageless countenance of the dead man certainly did look paler than most faces Joe had seen, but he had thought that might be only an effect of the lights. Now he bent closer, trying for a better look at the throat. The head of the victim had sagged forward, but now Joe could make out the wide wound compressed under the gray-stubbled chin.

  On the shabby shirt collar, just one blood spot was visible, of a size that might have resulted from a nick while shaving.

  Standing just behind Joe, Charley Snider cleared his throat. “See, the uniformed people who were first on the scene didn’t just call for a meatwagon and load ’im in. They looked him over a little first, and what they saw struck ’em as odd.” Charley paused. “I been alerting some of the uniformed people around here on what to look for.”

  “Oh. So there’ve been more like this?”

  “Three or four. I think enough to make a pattern. The people downtown don’t agree with me, not yet anyway. They say people are always getting cut up, there’re always stiffs in alleys. Well, shit, I know that. They can’t see the pattern. I can see it, though.”

  Joe had only briefly removed his gaze from the body, and now he was again studying it intently. “What sort of pattern? No blood spilled around—what else? ”

  “Some of ‘em, I got to admit, showed a little more blood than this man does. But not the amount there should be. And there’s always multiple wounds, including the cut throat, made with something very sharp. All derelicts, like this guy. When I mention the lack of blood to the M.E.’s people, they scratch their heads and say yeah I guess you’re right. Nobody wants to see the pattern, though. Nobody wants to see a bunch of Skid Row stiffs starting to make the news media, especially when there’s no suspects in sight.”

  Joe shifted his lithe frame forward a little, now squatting close beside the corpse. “Okay if I touch? ”

  “Okay.” Charley’s voice was neutral, waiting.

  The clothes, Joe thought, were just about what you would expect to find on a stiff lying in this alley—old, mismatched, ragged. Maybe they were a little cleaner than you would have expected—or maybe, again,

  that appearance was due to the purity of the light. Despite the evident violence of the victim’s taking off, he did not appear to have fouled himself from
bowels or bladder. The smell of cheap wine came from the body, as seemed only appropriate. But, Joe noted, the smell was of wine only. Absent was the usual inimitable death-on-Skid-Row blend of wine and old sweat and helpless excretions and defeat, as if someone had accidentally left open a nearby door that led down to some anteroom of hell.

  Earlier Joe had noted without surprise that there were a number of small holes in the victim’s shirt and trousers both. Now he discovered that through a number of these holes he could see wounds: small sharp

  cuts, red and raw but almost bloodless.

  Joe sat back on his heels, puffing out his breath. That a man should have been killed in this alley was hardly a surprise. Though most winos were harmless, on streets like this there were always a few people about who would kill for a dime, for an argument, for the last mouthful of muscatel. But this was different. Obviously calculated, somehow arranged. And Charley had said that there were others.

  Sighing, Joe got to his feet. He ran a muscular hand, not the same hand that he had used to touch the body, slowly through his unruly sandy hair. “He was killed somewhere else,” he offered at last. “All the

  blood spilled somewhere else. And then … ”

  “I figured out that much,” said Charley patiently. “Then—?”

  “Then he was … dressed in these clothes, I guess, and dumped here. Holes made in the clothes, to match the holes in him? I dunno. Dumped here, anyway, with the idea that one more stiff in this neighborhood wasn’t going to get a whole lot of attention.”

  “This lad’s been living on the street around here for quite a while,” said Charley, anticipating Joe’s next question. “I managed to get a make on him from a couple of the other winos. ‘Dusty’, they called him.” Snider made an economical gesture, which was understood by the two patrolmen. They started hoisting the star of the show out of his spotlit corner and onto a rubber-sheeted stretcher on wheels that waited nearby. The body had stiffened. It was going to make the trip in a comic posture, rump sticking up.

  “Why’d you bring me here, though?” Joe asked as the spotlights were turned off, one after the other. “Were there pawn tickets on him?” Joe was already sure that he wasn’t being brought in on the case by reason of his current official specialty. Charley’s summons had come to him over the phone, a personal request very informal and completely outside of channels. And still very much unexplained.

  “I just thought I’d let you have a look, man,” said Charley now. He and Joe had each started to wrap up one of the portable spotlights on its own cable, while the working uniforms were busy trundling their loaded stretcher on around the corner of wall, into the stagey glare of the streetlight that shone there from the alley’s mouth.

  There sounded a faint burst of demonic laughter, probably from the beer joint that had to be somewhere behind one of these walls.

  “Okay, “ said Joe. “I’ve had a look. But I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve told you I don’t know him.”

  “Never said you might know him, man.” Charley’s face, dark in dark, was hard to see. His cigarette glowed in his moving fingers as he wound cable. “And I’m not sayin’ you have to do nothing. I’m just offering you a look at what my problem is, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” said Joe. His suspicions were now confirmed. Charley’s motives were about as he’d thought; but he’d had to make sure.

  Now, Charley trudging beside him, Joe carried the spotlight on its folded tripod on around the bend of the alley, where he handed it over to one of the patrolmen. Then he got into Charley’s unmarked car, which was waiting beside the police van, and shut the door. Now he would get a ride home, and maybe Charley would come in for a beer, and possibly somewhere along the line Charley would be more explicit. Quite possibly not, though. Almost certainly the subject they were almost discussing would not be brought up by Charley in front of Kate.

  Joe had just been confirmed in a suspicion that had been growing in him for some time. He himself had acquired a reputation, which by now perhaps ran through the whole department, for having at least one super-exotic informant on the string, for being able now and then to come up with information a thousand miles beyond the reach of anyone else. This reputation, he knew, must rest on only two cases that had touched Joe’s professional and personal life during the last few years. Both cases had been weird and spectacular, though on the surface they were unconnected. Neither had been an experience he wanted to repeat. Nor did he want the reputation he seemed to have gained from them. It was quite accurate, as far as it went, but it was hardly even an iceberg-tip of truth.

  He wondered now just how much more of the truth Charley Snider might suspect. And then he dismissed the wonder. Charley was street-smart, but he wasn’t imaginative to the point of craziness.

  After Charley had come in for his beer, and had talked some about the chances of the Cubs, and had then gone on his way, Joe stood at his living room window which was open to the cool breeze, and looked down at the usual evening processions of headlights crowding their way along. The apartment was a fancier one than you would have expected an honest cop to be able to afford, a two-bedroom condo just off Lake Shore Drive on the reasonably far north side. Kate’s family had money.

  “Charley seemed tired tonight,” Kate said. Blond and pretty, she was pacing back and forth in her new housecoat, with the baby over her shoulder, trying to get it to go to sleep. She had regained her slenderness quite nicely after the birth.

  “He’s got a tough case. Series of cases. He was talking to me about it earlier.”

  “Oh?”

  “Hinting around, that I might be able to dig up some information that would help.”

  Kate uttered a barely audible shh, and turned gracefully away; the kid was nodding off. She left the room, to return in a few moments unburdened and in utter silence, her eyebrows lifted to ask a question.

  Her husband, arms folded, was now leaning with his back to the window. He told her: “I know who they want me to talk to.”

  It took Kate only a moment to understand. “I see.”

  “They don’t know who they want me to talk to.” Joe made a grim sound, like a poor actor trying to get off a laugh. “Honey, you know what I’m thinking? Maybe I’ll just pack it in. The job, the badge.”

  Kate sat down on the sofa, whose rich fabric was blanket-covered now in defense against the baby. She patted the spot beside her where she wanted Joe to settle. “And what,” she asked, “will you do then?” Understanding had left her calm, and made her sympathetic; if she hadn’t actually heard this talk of quitting before, perhaps she had been expecting to one day hear it.

  “We wouldn’t starve. There’s your money.”

  “Of course we wouldn’t starve. But what would you do?”

  Joe put down his empty beer can and sat down beside his wife. “What’s new with Judy?” he asked.

  Kate accepted her younger sister’s relevance to the discussion. “She’s still going with that young man from the University of Chicago. I think things may be getting serious. If you’re planning to get in contact with someone, I don’t think asking Judy for help would be the way to go.”

  “All her involvement with you-know-who is pretty well over, huh? Well, that’s good, anyway. That’s something. All right, how would I go about getting in contact now?”

  “There is a certain emergency procedure, “ Kate said doubtfully. “But I doubt we ought to use that unless we’re having a real emergency.”

  “If you doubt it, I sure as hell do too.”

  Next day, driving through a more or less routine round of pawnshops, helping irate or discouraged robbery victims try to identify their stolen merchandise, Joe had his mind more often than not on Charley Snider’s problem. He heard no more today from Charley, who, Joe suspected was working overtime along with a lot of other people. There was a tip that a mass murderer, a crazed cultist wanted in New Orleans, might have come to Chicago. Anyway Charley had already passed along just a
bout everything that was known or suspected about the Skid Row killings, and now he, Joe, was expected to come up with something helpful if he could. Expected at least to try. Where and how he got his information would be considered his own business if he wanted it that way. All good detectives cultivated informers whenever they had the chance, and the more valuable the source of information the more likely they would try to keep it secret. If Joe preferred to say nothing at all about his source, the whole department

  would understand.

  So there was no reason at all for him not to try to help, except he didn’t want to.

  Joe spent a miserable day. He always gave himself a hard time when he did something other than what he thought a good cop should.

  When he talked to Kate as usual on the phone in the middle of the afternoon, neither of them mentioned the problem. But when Joe got home that evening his wife greeted him with a faintly knowing smile.

  “We had a phone call,” she announced as she plumped the baby down on the changing table. “Message for you.”

  “Oh?” Having read her tone and expression accurately, he sighed. At the same time he felt more than half relieved. “Let me guess who.”

  “He says he’s fine, thank you for asking.” Still smiling gently, Kate might have been speaking of an eccentric uncle. “You’re to meet him out at O’Hare Field tonight at eight. That fancy restaurant, you know, the one up on top of the terminal. Ask for Mr. Talisman.”

  “Talisman, huh?” Joe looked at his watch and grimaced slightly. He would have to jump right back in his car and drive. “What if I don’t want to?”

  “He didn’t seem to consider that possibility. You know what he’s like.”

  “God, yes.” And yet there was an enticing excitement in the evening’s prospect. Suddenly Joe wanted to go. He tried to hide it.

  “Oh, Joe. It was really a very courteous invitation. Would I ask you if you would be so kind, and so on. Why don’t you want to meet him?”

  Joe looked at Kate.