Stranger Souls

by Jak Koke

  "Darke, my friend," Roxborough said. "What can I do for you?"

  "Cut the drek, Roxborough. Where's Mercury?"

  "Dead."

  Darke narrowed his eyes. "Are you certain? My sources tell me he escaped."

  Roxborough sighed. He had never been able to root out Darke's informants. "Your sources have not misled you," Roxborough said. "But my security forces have destroyed their vehicle, and my mages could not locate him with their ritual magic. He is dead, as much as it saddens me to say so."

  "I'm sure your sec forces are top-notch, and I know Meyer and the others are powerful mages. I fragging trained them." The intensity of Darke's stare nearly made Roxborough draw back.

  Roxborough held his ground. He couldn't let himself back down or show fear. He couldn't let himself feel fear. That would mean admission of defeat, and long ago Roxborough had vowed never to give in.

  "But," Darke went on, "we're dealing with someone who specializes in undercover work—infiltration, disguise, and escape. Mercury is far more dangerous than you realize." Darke's black eyes seemed to look into Roxborough's mind, measuring him molecule by molecule. "Mercury doesn't tit into the statistical models, Roxborough. He lives in the extremely slim margin outside the numbers. I told you he worked for Dunkelzahn. Did it occur to you that a dragon's lair might have a protective circle powerful enough to block the ritual detection?"

  "Dunkelzahn is dead."

  "Yes," Darke said. "But his lairs have not been destroyed. They still may provide protection to those who were close to the wyrm."

  "Okay, so he might have survived," Roxborough conceded. "I don't like it any more than you do. What do you want me to do? Meyer used up the ritual tissue sample we had. Where should I tell my people to look?"

  "Do nothing. I'm tired of your incompetence. I will assign a small team to locate his body, and if he lives, they will eliminate him."

  With that the line went dead.

  Roxborough tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't. Darke had no right to ridicule him like that. The man held no official position in the corp. Darke was merely a lackey for Juan Atzcapotzalco, the president of Aztechnology. Or, more accurately, Atzcapotzalco's puppeteers; the man hadn't been fully functional for years. But Roxborough also knew that he risked everything if he went counter to what Darke wanted. The man had too much power, and until Roxborough had a body, there was little he could do to undermine that power.

  Slowly, Roxborough drifted into a fitful sleep. Nightmare images came to him, and the clinic's speakers and monitors sounded with his howling. His ghost image contorting with his screams.

  21

  Ryan stood on the stone floor of the enchanted chamber, watching the liquid silver surface of the dracoform statue. A spirit had come to life inside the flowing metal sculpture; Ryan sensed its presence. It must be a trapped guardian spirit of some sort. White track lighting kept the room bright around him as he stepped back away from it.

  The spirit spoke to Ryan in a voice that was both familiar and alien. It must be Dunkelzahn's voice, he thought. And yet that could not be. Dunkelzahn did not speak the same way that people did.

  "I have created a magical item called the Dragon Heart," the spirit said. "The item is a large, heart-shaped object made from pure orichalcum." The spirit gave an eerie laugh. "It is quite powerful, and you might be able to use it to augment your abilities. But that is not its purpose, Ryanthusar.

  "You will find the Dragon Heart in a warded chamber off the central passageway on sublevel 5. The door is marked with an astral sigil. You will be able to pass through the ward without hindrance, but do not let anyone in with you or you will both be struck down.

  "Your mission is to take the Dragon Heart to the meta-planar site of the Great Ghost Dance and give it to the one whose song protects the spike. She is called Thayla. I will repeat this once, Ryanthusar, because it is so important. Retrieve the Dragon Heart and deliver it to the metaplanar site of the Great Ghost Dance—the bridge that must not be finished.

  "In order to complete your task, you must enlist the service of a powerful mage who knows the ritual that can carry you and the Dragon Heart into the metaplanes. This mage must also be absolutely committed to this endeavor. Of all my friends, only two fit these criteria—my old friend Harlequin and Ehran the Scribe. Harlequin would be my first choice; he knows Thayla and has vast experience, albeit tainted by his own hubris. Finding Harlequin might be difficult, however. Jane-in-the-box may have some ideas about how to find him. Ehran is competent and will be easy to find. He is one of the Princes in Tir Tairngire. But help from him will be harder to win.

  "And you must win. Accomplishing this task is paramount. I have taught you of the cycles of magic, but no one has dared manipulate them as they do now, bringing this age to the brink of destruction so early in the mana cycle. The discovery of a Locus by Darke may be the single most devastating event in all of history. If the metaplanar chasm is breached before we are ready, we will all suffer. All beings will die. All beings."

  "My fellow dragons are overconfident, thinking they can hide in their lairs as they have always done. But when the Enemy comes, the monsters will be able to use the technology of our own time to locate and breach our lairs. No sentient creature is safe this time. When the mana level gets high enough, the chasm will grow narrower and narrower until the Enemy can cross without any bridge. But there will be no hiding this time. Technology changes everything. No magic can protect against it.

  "There will be no hiding this time. There will only be war. We must build up our defenses; we must gain the time we need to build up our technology so that we have the ability to fight the Enemy when it can cross. But to gain that time we must protect our natural defenses. They must not be allowed to fail, and the Dragon Heart will ensure that they don't. Thayla will know how to use it. Get it to her before it is too late.

  "Goodbye, Ryanthusar. And good luck. You have always had it, and you will need more than your share for this mission."

  The spirit flickered inside the enchanted statue, then disappeared when it was done speaking for Dunkelzahn. Message delivered, it was set free.

  Ryan merely sat in stunned silence. What have I stumbled into? Who was I that I should be entrusted to complete such a mission ?

  Do I even care?

  Ryan sat thinking about that for a few minutes, and had just realized that he didn't know whether he cared or not when the large stone door swung open. He had cared, before his ordeal with Roxborough, he was sure of that. But now? Now he wasn't sure. Now he wondered if it even mattered. Dunkelzahn was dead. Perhaps the whole mission was pointless.

  Nadja entered the chamber, followed by four guards. "Rhamus, our head mage, tells me that he has detected a ritual sending from the location of Roxborough's clinic. It should be safe for you to leave the chamber now, hopefully."

  "Good."

  Nadja started to say something, but stopped herself. Instead she said, "Now what?"

  "You mean the mission?" Ryan asked, then understood instinctively why she had stopped herself; she wasn't always privy to knowledge of his activities.

  "Yes," she said flatly.

  Well, Ryan thought, things are different now. How could he expect to begin such an undertaking without his memory? He needed help, and he knew no one he could trust better than Nadja. He didn't need to tell her everything, just enough to make her feel included. Just enough to get her help on some important things.

  "Do you know of an item called the Dragon Heart?" Ryan asked.

  Nadja stared at him for a minute, a barely discernible expression of suspicion on her face. She seemed surprised that he was telling her about his mission. Then it passed and she said, "Yes. Only recently we had a security breach connected with that item."

  "What?"

  "A team of burglars stole it from one of the chambers near the treasure." She paused, thinking. "The warding and protection on that room was very strong. They obviously came well prepared for it."

&n
bsp; "They got away?" Ryan found it hard to believe that anyone could steal something from a dragon's lair.

  "I'm afraid so. But something else strange happened that you should know about. During the burglary, when security was trying to track down the infiltrators, a free spirit of some sort came to me. It possessed one of my security men, telling me that it had been sent by a being called Thayla and talking about something called the Dragon Heart. Insisting that it must deliver the Dragon Heart to a barren place of light and song. It sounded like lies at the time, and then the spirit killed my sec man, burned him up before my eyes." Her voice cracked at the end; she obviously cared for the dead man.

  "It's true," Ryan said. "My mission involves the Dragon Heart, and I must find it."

  Nadja's eyes went wide. "Oh, that's what it means," she said.

  "What?"

  "There's a line in Dunkelzahn's will," she said. "To Ryanthusar, I leave my heart. . ."

  "Oh," was all Ryan could say.

  "He must have meant the Dragon Heart, don't you think? And now, I've let it slip through my fingers. I'm so sorry, Ryan."

  "It's not your fault," Ryan said.

  "But it's obviously very important. What do you think this spirit wanted with it?"

  "If he wasn't lying to you," said Ryan, "then the spirit's mission is the same as mine."

  Nadja's face went slack. "I'm sorry, Ryan," she said. "I wish I'd known that spirit was telling the truth."

  "Would it have helped you get the Dragon Heart?"

  "No."

  "Then don't fret it," Ryan said. "The Dragon Heart will turn up. What I don't understand is why Dunkelzahn included it in his will?"

  "He was a bizarre old wyrm," she said. "And perhaps a bit paranoid. The will was updated constantly, just in case. He left you some other things, too, not mentioned in the public will, including Assets, Incorporated."

  "What?"

  "The corporation that employs the runners who got you out of Aztlan." Nadja frowned. "I wonder why Dunkelzahn never mentioned the Dragon Heart to me."

  Ryan knew that last was a rhetorical statement, but he responded anyway. "Did the dragon tell you everything?"

  Nadja smiled at him. "No, but I believe I knew more about his agenda than anyone else. Except maybe Jane-in-the-box. I was his voice, his connection to the public. It's just a little surprising to learn about another aspect of his plotting, and to discover that he kept me totally uninformed about it."

  "I'd like to talk to Jane," Ryan said. "She might be able to track down the Dragon Heart."

  "Yes," Nadja said. Then she smiled broad and full, beaming at him.

  "What?"

  "Nothing really," she said. "It's just that you're so motivated, so driven. You haven't changed at all."

  But he had changed; he didn't feel driven or motivated. He felt lost and out of control. As far as he could tell, he had almost nothing in common with his rapidly growing picture of his previous self. His physical adept abilities were mostly gone, only a fraction of his magic remaining. His connection to Dunkelzahn, which supposedly had made him an unques-tioningly loyal minion, no longer existed.

  He admired the dragon, but he didn't idolize him like the previous Ryan supposedly had. He would no longer blindly follow orders; that was for robots and automatons. Ryan's dedication to this whole quest was waning. Even though it was obviously very important, he couldn't find any reason of his own for putting his life on the line. He just didn't care that much. He couldn't care until he'd figured out who he was.

  In fact, the only thing he seemed to have in common with his former self was an affection for this attractive elf, Nadja Daviar. She had hired people to save his life. She was warm and open, and so damned sexy it nearly drove him to distraction, clouding his judgment. But there was more than all that, or at least he thought so. Nadja and he were alike in some basic way that separated them from others.

  And that is why, after a medical exam proclaimed him to be well and fit, he made arrangements to travel back to DC with her. She had important business, what with the Will reading, the Scott Commission hearings, and preparations for becoming Vice President of the UCAS. But she wanted Ryan to come along, to be her temporary companion. He was inclined to oblige her.

  Ryan had no home. Even the room in the lair that he used was temporary, and was occupied by someone else now. His previous self had led a transitory existence, always on the move. He had never collected memorabilia.

  For Ryan, now, that meant there were no clues about who he had been. Who he was. It seemed that his previous self had been a chameleon, a mimetic creature able to adapt to any situation and environment. That helped him infiltrate and spy on corporations and governments. That had been his most distinctive trait, versatility.

  Now, however, it left him nothing to latch onto, no distinctive characteristics. Nothing except the elf who loved him. Nadja was the closest thing to an anchor in his life. And there was no way he was going to let her get away.

  22

  Burnout stood, alert and focused, scanning the darkened room of the rundown restaurant where Ryan Mercury had been tortured. Musty blue wall-to-wall shag carpeting, patterned with gray diamond patches. Old curtains the same color, hanging from threads. Tables and chairs of rotting wood scattered like defunct cyberware. Bone-dry aquarium, filled with spider webs.

  Burnout concentrated hard to keep his attention on what the people around him were saying. There were three others close by, talking and planning. They weren't speaking to him directly. In fact, they spoke about him as though he weren't there.

  He was used to that, and he didn't care. Because much of the time, he wasn't aware of them anyway.

  Two others stood inside the room's perimeter. Burnout had catalogued them by their heat signatures, had isolated their weaknesses and was ready to destroy them if it became necessary. They held weapons and therefore they might need to be neutralized.

  "Burnout! Pay attention!"

  The voice of Slaver came as if from a great distance, like a cry from outside, even though the man stood right next to him. Burnout turned his head, feeling the nagging itch in his neck again. Psychosomatic, he'd been told. None of his original neck muscles or nerves remained, all of it replaced with synthetic tissue and microhydraulics. He nodded to Slaver to indicate that he was listening.

  Slaver was his commander, someone he knew he had to protect. Someone he had to obey. Slaver was a mage and short for a human. Much shorter than Burnout, who no longer thought of himself as human. Burnout was easily the size of a large ork and weighed more than a troll.

  Slaver's head was bald, covered only by an elaborate tattoo of a coiled snake that began at the apex of his scalp and spiraled out in greens and blacks and blues. He wore a loose-fitting jumpsuit of tan silk, ridiculous clothing that offered no protection against ballistics but let him move freely, which Slaver insisted was important for his spell-casting. There was a Jaguar Guard shoulder patch on the jumpsuit, and for a moment Burnout lost himself in the filigree detail of the jaguar design on the patch.

  Burnout had been a powerful mage like Slaver. In a past so distant, so alternate and removed from his current state that Burnout remembered it not as part of himself, but as a history of someone he knew well. It was like channeling the spirit of another person, or a past life. Burnout had loved the mojo, had lived for astral conduit, the electric thrill of pumping all that juice through a tiny circuit to blow the living drek out through some poor slot's nostrils.

  Then one day, his edge had dulled. He was a step too slow.

  He'd gotten some cyberware installed to compensate. Mistake. Slowed his magic even more. The after-spell drain started taking its toll, and soon he found himself spending a week recovering from a two-hour run. That wasn't for him; he never took a back seat. He'd always been the best of the best, and so he got more and more cyber. He got training, learned how to kill people. He became a street samurai, one of the best. Until the Azzies gladly accepted his indentured servitude in
exchange for state-of-the-art cyberware and top-of-the-line training. A career in killing in exchange for his soul. And finally, ultimately, that's what they took. His soul.

  He couldn't remember when his past died and he became this incarnation. Two months earlier? Two years? His internal calendar would show it, but he didn't care. Now he was more machine than man; he was like a rigger for his own body. It was a thing of terrifying beauty.

  He couldn't stand to see his own reflection. And the awful thing was that he still loved the magic, and he could sense it when it was near, like the smell of good food—subtle and alluring. He was drawn to it instinctively.

  That was why he put up with the heaps of drek Slaver piled on him. He hated Slaver, and one day the human mage would push him too far. One day Slaver would go the way of all Burnout's opponents—straight to Hell.

  Burnout finally managed to snap his concentration back to the conversation. The human with the black hair and beard spoke to Slaver in a commanding tone. "Mercury is alive," he said. "My sources in Lake Louise report that he's there. You will find him and destroy him. Is that perfectly clear?"

  Slaver bowed obsequiously. "Of course, Señor Oscuro."

  "I have provided a rigger and a diplomatic Aztechnology rotorcraft to use as you need."

  "Thank you, Señor."

  The other being, which stood next to Slaver on the opposite side from Burnout, was not metahuman even though it looked vaguely like an elf. It had skin the color of dried blood, covered with large black pock marks that moved across the surface. Its head was bald, and the cartilage of its nostrils had been flayed into strips and peeled back where Slaver drew blood from it for some of his spells. Very gory, though Burnout was not affected by that. Its name was La Sangre, and it was a blood spirit. Bound and allied to Slaver. Like Burnout, the spirit was not allowed to speak.

  Then the conversation was over and Burnout had missed most of it. Not that he cared one way or the other. He'd recorded it on his cybercamera so he could replay or search any section of it if necessary.