Gambit: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Solumancer Cycle Book 1)

by J. C. Staudt

  I watch the speed limit on every road and stay five miles per hour beneath it. We’re getting close to the cemetery when I cross through an intersection where a silver Mercedes sits on the left-hand stop line ahead of several other cars. Occupying the front seats of the Mercedes are a pair of men with shaggy goatees and short curved horns. Their eyes widen when they see me drive past.

  The Mercedes squeals its tires and hangs a left into the oncoming stream of funeral cars, bypassing the stopped motorcycle cops and merging into line. They’re six cars back, weaving side to side in the lane and tailgating the person in front of them. Feeling for my belt, I confirm that I am indeed still in the guise of Arden Savage. They recognize me. They recognize Arden.

  My heart is pounding. I maintain my speed and concentrate on the road, hoping my pursuers aren’t intent on doing me harm. Their horns bring back memories of Calyxto the half-fiend, but these are no half-fiends. Their horns are longer, ribbed, and curled about their skulls. Their slender faces and billy-goat scruff are a clear indication of their species. Satyrs. Ersatz would call them depraved creatures if he were here.

  The Mercedes maintains its position in line until I pull into the intersection across from Mount Elliott Cemetery. There’s some kind of holdup at the entrance gates, where a bunch of vehicles from another funeral are trying to exit. The police cruiser ahead of me stops dead in its tracks.

  When the traffic light changes, I’m still sitting in the middle of the intersection. The funeral procession trails behind me down St. Paul Avenue, blocking traffic in both directions. I watch in horror as the Mercedes jounces up onto the curb and rolls forward, half on the sidewalk and half on the street, edging around the other cars.

  A police officer kickstands his bike and steps in front of the Mercedes with his hand raised in a stop-sign gesture. The officer signals the satyrs to roll down their passenger-side window, then leans on the roof and strikes up a conversation. He’s gesturing, laughing. Around me, horns are honking. Policemen are getting into traffic, trying to resolve the jam. We’re not moving.

  The cop talking with the satyrs is having a grand old time, and I get the distinct feeling they’re going to get out of this—if not by pure charm, then with magic. Presently the officer circles around behind the Mercedes to wave them backward. The vehicle travels in reverse until it reaches the end of the line. Then it swings a U-turn and takes off down the street to disappear around the next corner.

  I breathe a sigh of relief, but not too big a sigh.

  The jam clears, and I guide the hearse through the cemetery gates, referencing Mr. Montague’s map on my way to the burial plot. It’s a huge cemetery, and I take a wrong turn along the way. Everyone follows me, of course, but luckily the road loops around and I can get away with calling it the scenic route.

  I park at the burial plot and stand at the tailgate to wait for the pallbearers. One of them comes rushing up to me in a huff to tell me the mayor’s brother is feeling faint due to the heat and they’re looking for another pallbearer to replace him. Probably a good idea. Two heart attacks in the same family within a week sounds like bad news.

  After a few minutes they find a stand-in for what I imagine must be a god-awfully heavy casket. Arden Savage wasn’t a fat guy, nor was he particularly tall, but he was no slouch in the muscle department. The pinch hitter is a young buck with spiky bleached hair, a chinstrap beard, and the kind of sunglasses some guys spend half a week’s pay on so they can look rich when they’re not. A douchebag rite of passage.

  I’d like to hang around and make sure the mayor’s casket goes in the ground and stays there, but it’s already a quarter past three o’clock. As the pallbearers are sliding the casket out the back, the distant revving of a luxury automobile engine breaks the cemetery’s tranquil atmosphere. I whirl as the silver Mercedes careens around a bend in the cemetery road at high speed. The passenger hangs out the window while the driver leans into the steering wheel, fishtailing into the grass and chewing a muddy skidmark through the manicured lawn. The satyrs have found another way in, and they’re steering their two-and-a-half-ton German automobile into a head-on collision course with mine.

  Chapter 25

  I forget about the pallbearers, forget about closing the hearse’s tailgate. For a split second I even forget the mayor’s casket, with the corpse of Arden Savage stuffed into the hidden compartment, as I dash for the driver’s-side door. Clusters of funeral-goers begin to notice the runaway vehicle. People flee their vehicles and duck into the graveyard, knowing even a tank like the silver Mercedes won’t make it that far if it veers off-road. It doesn’t, though. The satyrs aren’t gunning for the funeral guests. They’re gunning for me.

  I slide into the hearse and fumble the key into the ignition. No sooner has the engine turned than I’m flooring the gas pedal, casket be damned. The six unfortunate pallbearers are hoisting the Mayor-and-Arden-Savage-Sandwich onto their shoulders as I peel out and flog the wheel to send the hearse spinning into a tight U-turn. The satyrs adjust their trajectory accordingly. I have no idea why I’m running from them, except that everything in their behavior says I should.

  Men throw themselves against their cars in brand-new suits to avoid me as I push the hearse down the funeral procession’s long line of parked vehicles. One such man, to my utter surprise, is my surrogate stepfather Jerry. I pass so fast I almost don’t notice him, and I’m pretty sure he’s so busy dodging the hearse he misses me altogether. The other funeral-goers watch in bewilderment as I hurtle past them with the silver Mercedes close behind.

  I hug the asphalt around the next curve while the silver Mercedes charges into open grass and chugs through a stand of shrubbery like it’s the finish-line tape in an old-timey footrace. They’re trying to cut me off. It’s going to happen, too, unless I do something about it. Too bad I left my magic—and my dragon—at home.

  The satyrs are setting a new land speed record through the field, outpacing me on their shortcut. I wait until the silver Mercedes hops onto the asphalt ahead before cutting the wheel to the right, narrowly missing their rear bumper and dipping into the grass myself. I’m expecting the next sound I hear to be the blast of a machine gun. Instead it’s the fizzing zip of magic.

  As the hearse bobs through a field of scattered trees and headstones, something strikes the roof and douses the vehicle in a purple film which fades as it washes down the windshield. They’ve hit me with a tracing spell; the same kind Ersatz employed to lift Arden’s recent keystrokes off his computer. They’ll be able to track me wherever I go for the next several hours.

  Tires chirp as the silver Mercedes grips the bend, trying to make up the distance and block my shortcut. When gravestones start popping up around me, I know I’ve wandered too far off the road. I round a copse of trees and head for the entrance gates, only to find myself staring down a minefield of headstones. There might as well be a roadblock standing in my way.

  I swing left toward the road. The hearse’s tailgate slaps open with a metal clunk I swear might rip the door off its hinges, then bangs shut. The silver Mercedes accelerates as I pull alongside the road and attempt to rejoin it before the first headstone arrives. With the graveyard hurtling toward me and the Mercedes coming up fast in my sideview mirror, there’s a narrow window of opportunity. I take it.

  I floor the gas and lurch onto the road as the Mercedes zooms up beside me. Our vehicles bump flanks and separate with a grind. The satyr driver’s face darkens. He jerks the wheel and bashes me halfway off the road. Headstones blur past as the hearse veers dangerously close to the graveyard. The passenger-side mirror explodes off its mount and disintegrates in a cloud of glass.

  I spin the steering wheel left to avoid a head-on collision with one of the gravestones. Our cars collide, and the Mercedes pitches away long enough to let me retake the pavement. The satyr in the passenger seat closest to me casts a spell and flings it out the window. I duck, too late. The spell shatters my window and crashes into my face. When my vision
starts going fuzzy, I know I don’t have much time.

  I floor it and pull half a car length ahead, but the Mercedes creeps forward and keeps me from cutting in front. There’s a white truck lumbering around a branch in the road ahead, moving slow and merging into our path. Seeing my opportunity, I pull left to railroad the Mercedes into the path of the oncoming truck.

  The truck driver doesn’t notice us until the last second, and by the time he floors the brakes his front bumper is sticking six feet out into the road. I jerk the wheel and slip past, inches from the truck’s grill. The Mercedes isn’t so lucky.

  Brakes screeching, the Mercedes slams into the front corner of the truck with a thick crunching sound. It glances off and continues down the road with its driver’s-side headlight and half its front bumper mangled.

  Even as my vision blurs, I risk a glance in the rearview mirror. I smile with satisfaction, but my gloating is short-lived. Next thing I know, I’m dipping off the road and trying to right myself again. I slam into a headstone and knock it flat. The vehicle bucks into the air, wheels spinning. I come down hard and hit my forehead on the steering wheel. The hearse’s undercarriage catches on an adjacent headstone, jerking the car to a sudden halt.

  My head hits the steering wheel a second time and slams back against the headrest. I fumble for the seatbelt buckle, but my fingers are numb and listless. Someone opens the door and clicks the buckle open for me. I look over, expecting to find a cop or a paramedic. No such luck.

  The satyr shoves me bodily into the hearse’s passenger seat before taking the wheel and shifting into reverse. The tires spin mud. The hearse slides as if on ice, undercarriage scraping the headstone beneath it. The satyr changes gears a few more times; forward, reverse, forward, reverse.

  The third time through, the hearse slips free of the headstone. The satyr revs onto the road and exits the cemetery gates behind the silver Mercedes. We take to the streets, our short cavalcade an insurance adjuster’s nightmare. The satyr grabs my arm and casts another spell. Everything dims, as though a new layer of mesh is being added to my vision each time I blink. I reach out for the satyr, aiming to use his othersider-ness to cast a spell of my own, but my arms don’t want to function. I sit and stare out the window, my body numb and limp, forgetting everything I see seconds after I see it.

  After a series of turns down streets unfamiliar even to me, we arrive in a deserted industrial section of town. The silver Mercedes trundles through a sliding chain-link gate topped with barbed wire, entering an asphalt parking lot nestled between two tall brick buildings. Two identical corrugated-tin hangars stand abutted to a brick wall, looking like either a warehouse or the backlot of some secret movie studio.

  I’d like to check Arden’s cell for our GPS location, but my limbs are still numb. There’s an immediate smell to the place; an animal smell, like a farm. Byzantine music wafts from the closer of the two hangars, a cursive sound rife with harps, lyres and pipes.

  After parking the two vehicles side by side, the satyrs pull me from the hearse. I happen to catch the license plate number on the Mercedes, which strikes me because it’s a vanity plate that reads NITEC4A. That rings a bell, but unfortunately my bell’s already been rung, and it’s not doing so well at the moment.

  They drag me through the hangar’s front door into a broad, low-ceilinged room where lanterns throw stained-glass patterns across plush couches and velvet floor cushions. There’s a haze of smoke in the air. It isn’t tobacco, and it isn’t marijuana, yet somehow its scent is familiar. As the satyrs guide me toward a door in the back, I become aware that at least a dozen satyrs are copulating with members of various species around the room.

  I’ve just walked into some bizarro-world orgy. If I weren’t so delirious with my captor’s spell, I’d be appalled and disgusted. As it stands, I’m too bleary to care. Next I know they’re pushing me down a narrow carpeted hallway past a set of offices and into the big corner room at the end.

  Seated in a deluxe leather armchair, glistening with sweat, is a naked satyr, his clothes lying on the floor beside him. There’s an action movie playing on the wall-mounted flat-screen he’s watching. Above the waist, the satyr is muscled and tan. Cloven hooves jut from his furry ungulate legs, but those are nowhere near as arresting as the erect penis between them. He’s sporting massive wood, and he’s not even worried about it.

  I’ve heard about satyrs and their legendary sexual prowess, but I’ve never met a naked one in person before. Apparently he’s just finished prowessing with some of his guests, yet there’s no hint of a slump in his stump. I wonder how he sits down for meals without punching a hole through his dinner plate.

  “Pull him out of it,” says the satyr.

  One of my captors touches my arm and speaks a brief spell.

  The haze clears from my mind. I blink it away, suddenly more aware than ever of my surroundings. I’m about to ask them who they are when the satyr in the chair speaks again.

  “Arden Savage.”

  “Yeah. Uh, that’s me.”

  “You are behind on your promises.”

  “My… promises.”

  “You were tasked with bringing us the prince. Why have you failed to find him?”

  “I… I haven’t failed. I know where he is. I was working on it, in fact, when these two goons showed up and tried to kill me.”

  “They were not trying to kill you. Only to stop you from running.”

  “There are nicer ways to invite a guy over. Like sending a text. I don’t mean to be impolite, but there’s somewhere I really need to be right now.”

  “Jerry Douglas told us you possessed a very special set of skills. Like Liam Neeson, from the movies.” The satyr gestures toward the TV, where a grimy Neeson is fist-fighting some guy in a ruined building. During a pause in the fisticuffs, Liam looks his opponent in the eye and says, ‘I didn’t forget everything. I remember how to kill you, asshole.’

  “You like action movies, huh?” I ask. “Ever seen Von Ryan’s Express? Old Sinatra film. Sinatra’s my favorite. Not really an action hero. More of a singer—”

  “You are good at finding people. Is this true?”

  “Okay, so no small talk. Got it.”

  “Is it true?” he repeats.

  “Yep. It’s true. I find people. Liam Neeson might as well be my middle name. Or one of the two. Either way.”

  He leans back in his chair, stroking his thick wiry beard. “Then why have you not brought us the prince?”

  “I had a little setback. I’ll get him, though. Easy peasy lemon-squeezy.”

  The satyr frowns. “The revel is Friday night. You bring us Prince Cadigan by Friday, or we will have a problem. I do not like problems.”

  “Me neither, sir. Let’s not have a problem. I’ll get you that prince. No worries there. I’ll have him with me when I show up. On Friday. Where, again? Here?”

  “At the club.”

  “The club. Right. I mean, obviously.”

  “Get him out of here.”

  “Wait—”

  The satyrs grab me roughly about the arms and drag me out through the room they’re using as a hookah bar and orgy parlor. If that’s even a thing. That smell again; sweet, bitter, and familiar.

  Outside, one of the satyrs hands me Arden’s keys and points to the hearse. “Go. Bring us the prince.”

  I unlock the battered vehicle, as woeful about its damaged exterior as I am happy about the gorgeous Mercedes I wrecked in exchange. Something tells me the satyrs aren’t filing an insurance claim anytime soon. I get into the hearse and pull out Arden’s cell. The satyrs watch me for a minute, then lose interest and go inside.

  Now that my head is clear, I’m starting to put the pieces together. These must be the Disciples Jerry mentioned, and the satyr I just met must be Krydos. It’s 3:44 p.m. I’m way late for the probate hearing. I have no idea how long they typically last; for all I know it could be over, or Lorne and Carmine could still be waiting for me to get there.


  I check out my location on the cell phone’s GPS. There’s a map marker here. It says Kingdom’s Keepe. I remember Jerry saying he wanted to be at the keep when I brought Prince Cadigan here. Talking about myself in the third person is weird, as is referring to myself as a prince.

  This must be the Disciples’ headquarters. A quick internet search pulls up no valid results, though the directory listing categorizes Kingdom’s Keepe as a ‘place of worship.’ It has four-and-a-half stars on seventeen ratings. No reviews. There’s no other information about it that I can find. Sounds like a place worthy of further investigation.

  Never one to quit while I’m ahead, I step out of the vehicle and close the door quietly, then sneak into the gap between the two hangars. I peer through one of the small lower windows in the second hangar. The interior consists of a single gigantic room with a high catwalk wrapped around the wall, overlooking a series of penned enclosures in which hundreds of goats mill restlessly, bleating, munching on straw and pounding circles into the hard dirt floor. That explains the smell.

  The catwalk is connected to a covered vestibule running between the two hangars. I duck back around the corner as the two satyrs who brought me here exit the first hangar and traverse the vestibule into the hangar filled with goats. I watch through the window as they descend a set of metal steps from the catwalk to join the herds. When they each choose a goat and begin unbuttoning their trousers, I turn away. I’ve seen enough. And I should be on my way to the hearing.

  Chapter 26

  Traffic is not my friend. The courthouse is all the way across town, and I spend the half hour it takes me to get there pondering all the questions running through my mind. Like what Jerry was doing at the mayor’s funeral, and whether he made it to the hearing afterward. And why the Disciples are so interested in having me at this party of theirs on Friday. And how I’m going to find out which club is hosting said party. It makes my gut lurch to think about what their plans might be.