“My name is Mr. Cane,” he said.
“I bet it is,” I said.
He blinked, as if unsure of what to make of that, and then smiled again.
“You smell nice,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, nonplussed. “I showered right before I came here.” He had to be mentally ill. “Listen, you shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, I know,” said Mr. Cane. “There are all kinds of rules against it, but other rules have superseded them, so here I am.”
“Um,” I said. “Right.” It belatedly occurred to me that if he was mentally ill, he might be dangerous. A human would need a very good reason to visit the mansion of Kaethran Morvilind. Hell, even an Elf would need a good reason. Mr. Cane might decide to attack me for no reason at all, though his suit looked too nice for him to be an escaped mental patient.
This was all kinds of weird.
“Yes,” said Mr. Cane. “It is right. I am sure of it, but else I wouldn’t be here. There are rules, you know, rules about this kind of thing, and someone like me has to follow them.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Rules.” I wondered if I could get Rusk and some of Morvilind’s retainers to escort him off the grounds. If Morvilind saw Mr. Cane, he would kill him out of hand. He had no patience for weakness. “Look…um, you shouldn’t be here. Seriously. It’s not safe. I…”
His nostrils twitched, and I had the distinct impression that he was sniffing me, even though he stood a dozen yards away. Getting sniffed by a random guy in public was all kinds of creepy, but having someone do it from a dozen yards away was both creepy and disturbing.
Actually, it was alarming. I had just bathed. My clothes were clean. He shouldn’t have been able to smell me from that far away.
“Who are you?” I said, fingers tightening against my revolver.
“Mr. Cane,” he said, and an expression of delight came over his face. “Oh! I understand now. I am relieved.”
“What?” I said.
“That’s why I couldn’t smell you from far away!” said Mr. Cane. “You can employ magical forces. I didn’t think humans could do that.”
I started to slip the revolver from my pocket.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” said Mr. Cane. “Wait, what am I talking about? Of course humans can use magical forces! That’s why I’m here. They just can’t do it all that often.” He shook himself. “Anyway, now that I’ve found you, I have to kill you. I’m sorry about that, but it’s just what I do.”
“Try it,” I said, sliding my gun out of my pocket.
“Oh, no, I don’t try to do things,” said Mr. Cane. “I do things.”
He stepped forward, and I yanked the gun from my pocket and pointed it at him.
It was the only thing that saved my life.
Mr. Cane changed.
One instant he was a cheerful-looking man in a suit. The next his body swelled, and the instant after that he had transformed into a huge black dog the size of a horse. At least, he sort of looked like a dog. Most dogs did not have legs as thick as my waist, fangs that looked like steak knives, glowing red eyes, and a row of bony spikes running down their backs.
It was as if God had seen a junkyard dog, decided it wasn’t vicious enough, and made some upgrades.
“Holy shit!” I said, and the thing that had been Mr. Cane rocketed at me, those massive jaws yawning wide to rip off my head.
I started shooting. I emptied all six cylinders at Mr. Cane as fast as I could pull the trigger. Shooting something the size of the dog-creature with a .25 was like trying to shovel snow with a spoon, so I tried to aim for his head.
If Mr. Cane was a creature from the deep Shadowlands, bullets wouldn’t work on him. Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case. I think I hit him with all six shots, though some just bounced off his thick skull. Mr. Cane’s charge came to a sudden halt, and the dog-creature shook his head with irritation. I had shot him right between the eyes, and I saw the blood leaking from the wound, but it hadn’t killed him.
The revolver clicked empty. I saw the gunshot wounds on the creature shrinking, and Mr. Cane shook himself again, red eyes falling on me. I hadn’t killed him. I hadn’t even hurt him very much. If anything, I had only made him angry.
Maybe if a gun wouldn’t stop him, magic would.
I dropped the revolver into my pocket and raised both my hands, calling power and forcing it through the patterns of a spell. A gout of fire burst from my fingers and raked across Mr. Cane’s face, and the big creature flinched back. I wasn’t very good with the spell, and I don’t think I did more than singe his fur. Yet it did distract him. I drew on more magical power, as much as I could hold, and cast the Cloak spell.
I vanished from sight while Mr. Cane recovered from the fire. Using the Cloak spell made me completely invisible and undetectable by any form of magic. It also blocked my scent, which would keep that dog-thing from tracking me with its nose.
Mr. Cane rolled through the snow, extinguishing the fires on his fur, and got back to his feet. For a moment, he remained motionless. I gritted my teeth and strained to hold the Cloak spell, sweat trickling down my back beneath my clothes. My plan was for Mr. Cane to look around, assume that I had fled into Morvilind’s mansion, and then wait until he departed.
Belatedly, I realized that this was a bad plan.
The problem was that I couldn’t move while Cloaked. After years of practice with the spell, I had gotten good enough that I could move my arms while Cloaked, but I still couldn’t move my legs without causing the spell to collapse. I also had overlooked the fact that I had left footprints in the snow. Whatever Mr. Cane was, he couldn’t miss the fact that I had failed to leave any footprints towards the mansion.
He started towards me, moving with slow, deadly grace, his clawed paws making no sound against the snow. The Cloak concealed me from sight, but it wouldn’t stop Mr. Cane from walking into me.
I needed another plan, a better plan, right now.
I glanced to the side, gauging the distance to the doors of the mansion. From the curb a half-dozen shallow steps led up to the doors themselves. Like the rest of the mansion, they were seriously impressive doors, built of polished red wood and banded in black steel. I knew Lord Morvilind had defensive wards over his entire mansion.
Those wards were my only hope.
I took a deep breath, preparing myself for the magical strain to come, and released my Cloak spell. At once Mr. Cane’s massive head snapped around to stare at me. I suspected I could fit my entire head inside his mouth at once, and I feared he was going to try to do that right now.
He surged towards me with terrifying speed, and I gathered all my magical strength and cast another spell. A spitting globe of blue-white lightning leaped from my fingers and shot towards Mr. Cane, and struck his right shoulder in an explosion of sparks. For an awful instant I was sure that the spell had done nothing, that he would shrug it off and kill me, but fingers of lightning shot up and down his body as the power discharged, and Mr. Cane went into a twitching, jerking dance.
I ran for the doors to the mansion as fast as I could. I bounded up the stairs and grabbed at the door handles.
They were locked.
“Oh, come on!” I said.
I turned just as Mr. Cane shook off the spell, his claws rasping against the ice on the driveway. He was barely six yards away. I watched as the muscles bunched under his dark fur like steel cables, watched his claws dug grooves into the asphalt.
He hurtled forward, paws reaching for me, jaws yawning wide. I screamed and threw myself to the ground, and Mr. Cane slammed into the wooden doors. I think he expected to bounce off the doors, land on me, and kill me.
Instead, symbols of harsh blue fire blazed to life on the doors, so bright they looked like the arc lights at a stadium. There was a sound like someone striking a massive gong, a brilliant flash of blue light, and something hurtled Mr. Cane back with terrific force.
Unfortunately, the wards hurled him right into my Vaquero. He struck the front of the car with enough force to collapse the hood, bounced off the engine, and slammed through the windshield and into the passenger seat. He was big enough that he didn’t fit into the car, so he ripped the roof off, coming to a halt on his back atop both the back and front seats.
I grabbed the door handle and pulled myself up, watching him.
The impact should have killed him, whatever he was, but the dog-creature seemed only stunned. He snarled and growled, his paws raking at the air, and after a moment of struggle, he managed to get himself flipped over and out of the wrecked car.
“That hurt!” he said. He sounded offended, as if I had cut in line in front of him at the grocery store.
“You can still talk?” I said, astonished.
“Of course I can still talk,” said Mr. Cane. “What a silly question.” His glaring eyes swept over the mansion. “I am very sorry, but I will have to kill you later.”
He raced away, running with terrific speed down the driveway, and vanished from sight.
I stared at him, trying to catch my breath, my limbs shaking a bit from the aftermath of so much adrenalin.
“What the hell?” I said.
The doors boomed open behind me, and I turned.
The first thing I saw Rusk, Morvilind’s middle-aged butler. He wore the formal livery of a servant of an Elven noble, a uniform of red and black that looked like something a soldier might have worn in the eighteenth century. He was always pompous, and he didn’t like me very much, but after the Archon attack he had grown subdued, and I suspected he had lost someone in the fighting. After him came a half-dozen hard looking men in body armor, all of them carrying modified M-99 carbines. Morvilind had a lot of retainers who had skills of dubious legality, and sometimes he employed them as guards. Vladimir, my old firearms instructor, led them, and he scowled at me.
He didn’t like me, either.
Lord Kaethran Morvilind walked behind them.
He was tall, even for an Elf, and wore the gold-trimmed black robe of an Elven archmage. His hair was white, and his eyes seemed like chips of blue ice in his gaunt, emaciated face. He looked ancient and feeble, but while he was ancient, I knew firsthand that Morvilind the Magebreaker was anything but feeble. Those Archons who had challenged him outside the Marneys’ house had found that out the hard way…and I suspected they were only the latest in a long, long line of foes he had crushed.
The cold eyes fell upon me.
“Nadia Moran,” said Morvilind, his voice deeper and more resonant than seemed possible from such an old man. “What is going on?”
Chapter 4: Your Next Task
I fell to one knee and bowed my head.
“My lord,” I said. “I…don’t actually know what just happened.”
Morvilind looked at me without blinking, without expression. His face was unreadable, but I had known him for three-quarters of my life, and I knew him well enough to tell that he was irritated. Likely he was annoyed by the interruption.
It only remained to be seen if he would blame me for that interruption.
“There is a wrecked car in the driveway,” said Rusk. He sounded affronted, as if I had just committed some grievous breach of social etiquette. “Why is there a wrecked car in his lordship’s driveway?”
“It is hers,” said Vladimir. He spoke English with a heavy Russian accent. He had been some kind of special operative for the Okhrana, the czar’s equivalent of Homeland Security for the Russian Imperium, and had suffered a career-ending scandal that had brought him to the US and Morvilind’s service. “She has been driving a Lone Star Motors Vaquero since the Archon attack. Several times she has attended to his lordship in that vehicle.”
“A Lone Star Motors car,” said Rusk. He sounded even more offended. “They make an inferior automobile. It is appalling that she attends to his lordship while driving such a…vulgar car.”
“Hey, Rusk,” I said, irritation slipping through my fear. “It’s all I could afford. You want to buy me a nicer car?”
“You should hold yourself to a higher standard,” said Rusk.
“If it makes you feel better,” I said, gesturing at the wrecked car, “I kind of have to find a new car.”
Rusk looked at my smashed Vaquero again. It seemed to remind him of something, and then he sighed and lapsed into silence.
During this discussion, Morvilind had ignored us. He reached into his cloak and produced something that looked like a large pocket watch about the size of his palm. Unlike a normal watch, it had a dozen different dials, some of them swinging back and forth wildly. I knew the thing wasn’t a watch, but an Elven device called an aetherometer that measured the currents of magic around us. I didn’t know how it worked, but I wanted one. I could think of a few times when a machine that measured the currents of magic would have come in handy.
“Did you hit something, Moran?” said Vladimir.
“Um,” I said. “No. Something sort of hit my car while it was parked.”
Vladimir knew who I really was. So did Rusk, but I didn’t fear betrayal from either of them. No one in Lord Morvilind’s service would go to the Inquisition about me because they all feared our mutual master too much. On the other hand, if Morvilind ordered them to torture me to death here and now, they would do it without hesitation.
Vladimir scoffed. “You should learn to drive better, Moran.”
I snorted. “This from a Russian? You ought…”
“Silence,” said Morvilind.
At once we all shut up.
Morvilind reached into another pocket and drew out a crystal vial filled with dark liquid. My mouth went dry. It was the vial holding the heart’s blood he had drawn from me fifteen years before. With it, he could cast any spell he wished upon me, could kill me from anywhere in the world with only a thought.
Was he going to kill me now?
He cast a spell with the vial, and a familiar buzzing, clenching sensation went through me. I had been subjected to this spell before. While under its influence, I couldn’t speak a lie. He didn’t use it on me often, but when he did, I knew things had gotten serious.
“Rise,” said Morvilind.
I got to my feet, my knees aching from the chill.
“What happened here?” said Morvilind, the cold eyes sinking into me like knives.
“I came at your summons, my lord,” I said. “I parked my car, and I was approached by a man calling himself Mr. Cane.”
“What did he look like?” said Morvilind.
“Unremarkable,” I said. “Somewhere in his thirties. Curly brown hair and brown eyes. Tall, about six foot two, but skinny. I don’t think he was more than a hundred and fifty or a hundred sixty pounds.”
“What happened after he approached you?” said Morvilind.
“He said he was going to kill me,” I said. “Then he turned into this…big dog creature. Like, a dog the size of a horse. Glowing red eyes, teeth like knives. I shot him six times, but it didn’t seem to do more than annoy him. I ran to the doors and ducked, and he hit the doors. Your wards activated and threw him backward, and he landed in my car and wrecked it in the process.”
“What did the creature do then?” said Morvilind.
“He fled,” I said. “He promised that he would kill me, and he ran for it.”
Morvilind frowned, tapping one finger against the vial. Fear dragged at my chest, making me even colder. I wondered if he would decide that I had somehow betrayed him.
“Have you ever visited Venomhold?” he said at last.
I hadn’t expected him to ask that. Venomhold was a demesne in the Shadowlands, ruled by the Knight of Venomhold. The Knight of Grayhold was spooky and powerful (even if he was handsome and had a nice smile) but the Knight of Venomhold had apparently allied herself with the Rebels and the Dark Ones. I had arrived at Venomhold once by accident and barel
y gotten out alive.
“Yes,” I said.
Morvilind sighed, and the buzzing sensation of the truth spell ended. I let out a shaky breath. My head ached, and my stomach churned. The spell always left me feeling hung over. At least, I thought that was what it felt like since I had never actually been hung over. Morvilind did not use the spell on me often, and I suspected it was because prolonged use would kill me.
“The human women,” said Morvilind in a quiet, annoyed voice. “The human women always cause problems.”
I blinked in surprise, while Vladimir chuckled before he caught himself.
“Vladimir,” said Morvilind, and Vladimir straightened. “Take your men and sweep the grounds. You will likely not find anything, but the attempt must be made. Look for the tracks of a large dog or wolf-like creature. Once the tracks are out of sight of the mansion, note the direction they went. Report to me once you are finished.”
“My lord,” said Vladimir. He gestured, and his men fell in around him, and they marched into the driveway.
“Return to your duties, Rusk,” said Morvilind. “Have the wreckage cleared away.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Rusk. “I shall call a tow truck.”
“Um,” I said. “You should probably have the car left at a junkyard. I didn’t…exactly buy it under a legal name.”
“Do as she says,” said Morvilind. “Be sure to charge the cost of the tow truck to Miss Moran.”
I sighed.
“Nadia Moran, come,” said Morvilind. He strode back into his mansion.
I followed him into the main hall. Like most Elven architecture, it was light and airy, with lots of open space and red-painted walls, the wooden floor polished to a mirror sheen. Morvilind had a taste for the art of ancient Earth, and so Roman and Egyptian and Greek statues stood in niches or upon plinths. I had been here hundreds of times before, and so knew where the cameras and infrared lasers and pressure plates were hidden. I would not have wanted to rob this place, not even with the aid of magic.
It was chilly. Cold never seemed to bother Morvilind.
“My lord,” I said. “A question, if you would permit it. The knowledge might allow me to serve you better.”
Cloak Games: Shatter Stone Page 5