“Why so talkative, all of a sudden? You told me that you ask questions, not answer them.”
“Little man, you’re the first new thing to cross my path in over a century. I’d decided to open up before I invited you into my apartment, let you react to it. Then, hearing you curse with a tongue long dead, that was a breath of mountain air here in the lowlands. No one has dared curse me since that dying Badakhi. I hope you understand what you said.”
“I think so. Ali Akhbar Khan explained each word and the cultural meanings each carried.”
“Good. Never give offense without intending it.”
With that, they faced the door.
One of the dead weeds was broken, still hanging on its stem and drawing arcs back and forth in the gathered dust with each gust of wind. It hadn’t been broken when he looked before, a few hours ago. The slit between wood and dust looked different.
“Someone’s been through this since we were here.”
She nodded and waved him back. Nerves made him reach back and touch his knife hilt under the backpack, make sure it waited free. The dogs inside broke into frenzied barking and growling, he could hear claws scratching at the wood that blocked them from their lawful prey.
“It isn’t locked. Not even latched. Anyone could push this open. If they could see it.”
He remembered a pack of wild dogs, years ago under hot dry dusty sun in another land. Not a good memory. Don’t let them get behind you. He drew his knife and backed up until he bumped against the wall across the alley. Solid and reassuring.
She braced the shotgun against her side, finger inside the trigger guard, and nudged the door with one boot. It opened about eight inches, about one dog wide. She knew what she was doing, that was obvious. Albert flinched. Nothing happened. A splat of rain hit him at the same time he realized the dogs had fallen silent. She nudged the door again, half open now, and still no dogs. She kept the muzzle of the shotgun low, dog height. For a large dog, that is, not ankle-biting Chihuahuas.
Nothing but another gust of wind, another short burst of rain. Cold rain, with a hint of ice to sting his cheek.
He saw worn flagstone paving inside, a narrow view of a courtyard with galleries around, a marble fountain with a weathered green bronze maiden pouring water from an amphora in the middle. In sunshine.
No guard dogs.
She kicked the door wide. No dogs, no people, no rain. Four floors of galleries, white marble columns and Moorish-style marble pierced screen-work carved in floral patterns serving as rails between the columns, he’d seen something like this in a courtyard in Spain. Doors off the galleries were solid-looking dark wooden rail-and-stile doors with faded flaking varnish like the one into the alley.
He inched forward, seeing more of the same, following her through the door as she swept the corners with the muzzle of her shotgun, then scanned the galleries. Three doors per side on each level of the galleries. Red tile roof over the top level, courtyard open to blue sky and a hot sun. Open stairway with more pierced stonework for a rail, switch-backing up the rear corner to his right. He stopped in the doorway, staring back and forth between the dry courtyard and the spitting sleet of the alley. He moved one hand back and forth through the plane of the wall and could feel a line between the weathers, cold and wet to hot and dry in a razor’s edge.
He stepped all the way inside, and studied the place. Three doors times four floors equals twelve. Mirror image on the other side, twenty-four. No doors on the narrower front, one old casement-style double window, small leaded-glass diamond panes, on each floor instead, including the ground floor where the tattoo shop stood on the other side of this block. He moved out into the courtyard and checked the back wall. One door into the alley, one door on each of the three floors above. Where the hell did those go, through a blank brick wall?
One door in, twenty-seven doors out. Mystical numbers?
“Should I close the door?”
She kept sweeping the four sides with her shotgun, nervous. He couldn’t blame her. Hairs prickled on the back of his own neck.
A quick glance at him, one eyebrow up. Then a shrug and back to the sweep. “Go ahead and cut off our retreat. If we can’t get back out, well, that backpack you’re toting is my jump bag—food, water, basic camping gear.”
Jump bag. Emergency supplies for evacuation, recommended kit for hurricane or flood or brushfire country where you might have to cut and run on a few minutes’ notice, live on your own resources for a week or more until you could go home again. It figured that she would keep one, here in a city that fit none of those categories.
Of course, he had one too. In case he needed to leave town in a hurry, for a non-natural cause.
He closed the door, after checking that it had a handle on the inside. He opened it again. Alley still there. Still filled with gusts of rain, streaking the brick and turning the dust to cratered mud. The wind didn’t pass through the opening. But his hand could. He closed the door again. No reason to invite alley rats in, two-legged or four.
She’d been watching him. Nodded. Went back to threat assessment. Put her foot on the bottom step of the stairway. “I’ll go up and scout. You keep lookout down here.”
Words echoed down, a clear alto voice. “I’d rather you stayed down there, too, O Goddess of the Mountain Winds. I prefer to hold the high ground.”
He knew that voice.
Albert’s eyes searched the upper galleries but couldn’t see her. Pierced stone-work had been invented to serve as a privacy screen as well as decoration, and it was doing its job. There might be a shadow darkening it in the far front corner of the fourth floor . . .
Metal clicked behind him, and he glanced back. A shotgun barrel pointed at the same corner. A hint of police baseball cap and eye peeked over the railing of the stairway. Boots in the shadow underneath. Ms. Detective Lieutenant el Hajj, in full combat mode.
At least she hadn’t fired. Yet.
“Don’t shoot. That’s Mother.”
“Move away,” she whispered. “Split the target.”
Laughter above. “Simon, dear boy. Please introduce me to your girlfriend. I know what she is, but I don’t know who.”
He still couldn’t see her, and the voice seemed to jump from one corner to the other. Mother had tricks like that.
He stepped out into the courtyard, completely contrary to Official Orders. “Mother, this is Detective Lieutenant Melissa el Hajj of the city police’s arson division. She’s here to arrest you for abuse of a salamander.”
More laughter. “You always did have a sense of humor. How about if I promise to never do it again?”
He turned toward the shotgun barrel, still pointed comfortably upward. The blast would hurt, add to his long-term hearing loss from the forge and all, but nothing more damaging than that . . .
“Well, that gets Legion off our asses. We’ve solved your crime. We know who did it, and she says she’ll stop.”
Then he remembered the other thing and twitched, the thing Legion hadn’t ordered them to do. That Legion had dodged even mentioning, but had set up with great care. Demoniacal care, even. For whatever reason.
“Mother, you have to give that star back. I have to fix it.”
The laughter held an edge now, bordering on sarcasm and . . . insanity? “Fix it? Fix it? I spent a thousand years learning that the thing existed, fading a little with every minute of every day and never knowing why. Another thousand years finding it. A third thousand following its travels and waiting until the faith that guarded it died. Seven times seven years since they took the Torah out of that cabinet and left, leaving forgotten the last remaining relic from Solomon the Great. That long for the guard to fade, so I could enter. It still took all my power and the life-heat of a salamander to even crack the foul thing. And you want to fix it?”
So she had killed the salamander. No wonder Legion was pissed.
“No, little Simon Lahti, you do not want to fix it. That Seal was killing you as well as me. Killing y
our Mountain Goddess girlfriend. Even cracked and leaking its own power, it still holds your names, sucks power from you. Old Solly was a bastard, yes he was. ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.’ That’s all his God asked, admitting that other Gods existed for other tribes. But Solly had to be a hero, make his little tribal God supreme. He forged that thing in the fires of his own soul, subtle but strong, to drain us over centuries. And the sneaky little shit said that he loved me . . . ”
She broke off.
Albert felt movement beside him, glanced over, saw the . . . Mountain Goddess? . . . still holding her shotgun aimed at the corner of the gallery but out from behind the stair. He couldn’t read her face—no expression at all, except concentration.
“Who the hell are you?”
He looked back up. Mother had moved forward, stood just behind the screen-work railing. She wore something classic in gold cloth, a sari perhaps, but wrapped and draped across her dark skin so that right shoulder and right breast remained bare. Typical of her, style and casual body-sense that never paid much attention to whatever culture they were visiting. She made the rules. Everyone else obeyed them. Even in past centuries, when dark skin meant slavery in this land, no one had ever questioned her. She was what she was.
Like a goddess. A fertility goddess out of prehistory, short with big breasts and big hips and dark and beautiful. He’d forgotten how beautiful.
“Who am I? Balkis, goddess of Sa’aba am I. I heard of a human dabbling in our powers, and went to see. He acted nice. We exchanged gifts and knowledge and . . . other things. I left and returned to my own land and worshipers. I never knew how he took my secrets and betrayed me, until the Seal worked its evil through the years. By the time I knew that I should kill him, he was already dust.”
A snort of derision echoed in his right ear. “Forgive me for questioning your tale, O Goddess, but how do you know your name if the great Seal of Suleiman bin Dauod is sucking mine away? If we are all gods and goddesses together . . . ?”
Again the laughter, even wilder. “Solly was a bastard, like I said. He worked my name into the Seal, to hide what he had done from the only goddess who could have hunted him down and stopped him while there was still time. He left me enough of my powers that I wouldn’t suspect him. Like I told you, it took me a millennium to know what he’d done.”
Then her voice sobered. “Don’t bother trying to follow me. I don’t have the Seal. I hid it. When it leaks enough of its own power through that crack, I’ll destroy it and we’ll all be free once more. The gods will come again.”
She vanished. Albert heard a door open. Then her voice came again, hollow and echoing as if she spoke from a cave.
“Beware these doors, Simon Lahti! Your mother warns you! Half of them lead to places that will kill you if you don’t know where you’re going. Plus, they sometimes change. Will it be the Lady or the Tiger?”
A door closed.
He stood staring up. Mother? That “Balkis” thing wasn’t a joke? Gods and goddesses? The Seal had cried out to him, begging him to forge it once again, guard the way between the worlds.
Gods and goddesses loose in the world once more. That would fit Legion’s warning about the world changing. He didn’t like the bastards, even if he was supposed to be one.
Another metallic click echoed beside him. Probably the other goddess, setting the safety on her shotgun.
“Well, that raised as many questions as it answered. Should have tried to shoot her.”
Albert turned, shaking his head. “But that’s Mother.”
“Whoever or whatever that was, that woman isn’t your mother. Skin can lie, but no lifeline connects you to her. The winds tell me this.”
Goddess of the Mountain Winds.
XI
Goddess of the Mountain Winds—cold, thin, deadly, remote. You can’t keep secrets from the winds. You can’t hide from them. Even the strongest door can’t keep them out. They’ll find some way to sneak inside and chill you to the marrow.
And the killing will be just as cold and remote. Not passionate death, she’s not an avatar of Kali. The mountain winds just don’t care. Make one mistake and die.
They can touch you, but you can’t touch them.
Well, that explained a number of things. If he could believe Mother, which required a leap of faith at the best of times. The world-myth held a multitude of forge-gods, some even with a bum leg and “vertically challenged.” Smithing was the kind of work that people everywhere knew needed gods, and somehow involved dwarves. And spitting in the east corner before firing the forge.
Too bad he didn’t know his own name. If Mother could be trusted, he might yet remember it. Soon. As soon as enough power drained from the Seal.
“I don’t like gods.”
The Wind Goddess was staring at him, furrows of intensity above her nose. She shook her head. He couldn’t tell if that meant she agreed with his statement, or disagreed. Communications breakdown.
If all else fails, ask. “Do you believe Mother? That we’re gods?”
“She’s not your mother. Whatever else she is, she’s not that. But her life does stretch back out of sight. Which takes some doing. Yours disappears in fog. Hers goes over the horizon off that way.” She bobbed her head generally east.
An answer that wasn’t an answer. Mother could be thousands of years old without being Balkis, either Queen of Sheba or Goddess of Sa’aba. Without him and . . . Ms. Detective Lieutenant Melissa el Hajj . . . being gods.
“So what do I call you? What do I call her?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Call her Mother, if that’s what flows easiest off your tongue. Or ‘that bitch’ will do just fine. From what little I’ve seen of her. Me?” Another shrug. “The few people who don’t call me ‘Lieutenant’ or ‘Goddess’ call me Mel. ‘Noshaq’ is a mountain.” She thought for another moment. “I don’t think anyone alive today dares to call me ‘Mel.’ You may.”
He blinked at that. All of it. Including the regal graciousness of the last bit. It meant something important, but he had no idea what.
Or should he concentrate on the bit that no one left alive called her that? “Dare to call me Mel, you die!”
English was a slippery language. But “Melissa” wasn’t an English name—his chancy memory said it was Greek for “honey bee,” and he wondered where she’d picked that up. Alexander’s wandering army? Where and when had he learned Greek?
Anyway, she’d chosen a venomous insect for her name.
Her eyes had gone back to scanning the . . . building? The galleries, anyway. Over her shotgun sights, of course, although she held the gun against her hip rather than her shoulder.
“I want to talk to those doors. Not open them yet, just ask them what they hide. I think your Bilqis was telling the truth when she said some of them would kill you. Doesn’t have to open straight to Jahannam or a djinni lair—Antarctica will do. The center of Rub Al-Khali also comes to mind, before they mucked it up with oil wells. Or even underwater, if the sea level has changed since Allah created this place for His amusement.”
She was back to studying him, those disconcerting dark eyes narrowed and weighing him over the balance-point of her sharp nose. “Guard this door.” She cocked her head at the one leading to the alley. “I don’t want any distractions wandering in and interfering with my winds.”
Another stare, followed by a nod to herself. She laid the shotgun down and started to unbuckle her gun belt. “You said you knew how to handle a pistol. Looked like you meant it. Have you practiced recently?”
Valid question. Pistols are tricky tools, not like a rifle or a shotgun. You can’t lay off pistol practice for a year or so and still count yourself a gunman.
“Two hundred rounds on a practical pistol range, little over a month ago. I scored eighty percent lethal hits, including clean on the shoot/don’t-shoot section.”
Two hundred rounds plus range-time was damned expensive, on his limited budget. But, he couldn’t see any poin
t in keeping the guns if he wasn’t able to hit a barn from inside it.
She handed him the gun belt. Heavy—holstered pistol and four spare high-capacity magazines. Plus handcuffs and pepper spray and portable cop radio, the whole meghilla. He wondered just how many laws and department regulations she broke by handing it to him.
“I’m thin. That should fit you okay. Rather have someone at my back with a gun than with that knife and sword-cane, impressive as they are.”
“That leaves you with just the shotgun.”
She grinned, a hard smile with a touch of nasty in it. “Not on your ass, little man. I still have my Colts, the .45 and .380. What you have is just the duty gun. Chief says every cop has to carry the same hardware, interchangeable magazines and such, we’re a force, a unit, not a goddamn mob of individuals.” Her snarl told him exactly what she thought of that. “I’ve practiced with it, but a few thousand rounds downrange can’t make me like it. Different balance, bad grip, and it jammed a couple of times. My Colts never have.”
Great. Maybe she was an avatar of Kali.
He drew the gun from its holster, cleared it—round in the chamber, dammit—and examined it. Smith and Wesson 9 millimeter semi-automatic, double action, polymer frame and metal slide, he’d never handled one like it before. That double-stack magazine made the grip seem fat to him. He’d really need to use both hands for good control—he could understand why it felt odd to her as well. But he could live with it.
Or die with it, more likely, if it jammed in a situation where a knife just wouldn’t do.
Maybe he could talk to it about smooth feed and ejection, if they got a few minutes free. Safety came ready to his thumb, anyway, and it pointed where he meant it to point. Ambidextrous safety as well, he swapped from hand to hand, trying the feel. Mel watched his antics for a moment before issuing a curt nod of approval. Or, that’s how he chose to read it.
She grabbed the shotgun, stood up, and walked over to the nearest door, the first one on the ground floor on the right, and placed her left hand on one of the recessed wooden panels. He loaded the pistol, including the round in the chamber again—that was the way she carried it, and she was probably going to ask for it back. Besides, as a modern weapon, he assumed it had a firing-pin block and wouldn’t go bang if he dropped it on those pavers with the safety on.
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