Easy Money

by Rik Hunik

  I downed my beer and headed outside to a rain that felt colder than my beer.

  I turned to the right and started walking uphill, not really caring which street I was on or where I was going. I took Belita's comb out of my pocket and held it in my hand while I concentrated on her but I felt nothing, so I let my hand fall at my side and kept walking, gazing unfocused into the falling rain.

  I had a vague feeling that I was going in approximately the right direction, but when I tried to concentrate on that feeling I lost it. I emptied my mind, slipping into a trance, and when I walked faster the feeling grew slightly stronger. I didn't try to analyze it or force it, I just kept walking in what felt like the right direction without paying much attention to where I was.

  The rain kept most people inside and all those who were out seemed anxious to get somewhere, hurrying through the darkness to the feeble pools of light cast by the widely-spaced street lamps. Some light leaked from curtained windows but it didn't amount to much at street level and I stumbled quite a few times, but not badly enough to snap me right out of my trance.

  A narrow street, with only occasional broken paving stones showing above the mud, took me roughly north for three or four short blocks to a fork, where I hesitated for a few seconds, then took the street that curved to the northwest. The narrow street curved back to the north and I came out on Old Wall Street, the wide boulevard where the Old City wall used to be, hundreds of years ago.

  The feeling I was following had been so vague it disappeared when I paid attention to it, like a dim star from the corner of your eye that disappeared when you looked right at it, but now I looked north and saw a low hill a hundred yards ahead, with light showing through some trees part way up the slope. That it was my destination, or close to it.

  Not many people live near here because Old Wall Street is where light industry starts replacing commercial and residential buildings, so there isn't much traffic out here at night, which means fewer streetlights. I realized I had been walking blindly in a trance through dangerous territory, so I checked all around to make sure I wasn't being targeted. Fortunately the few people who braved the weather had better places to be than here.

  I crossed the boulevard and started climbing the overgrown slope. Even though it wasn't raining all that hard, every bush I touched seemed eager to dump all the cold water from it's leaves onto me at once, so I soon became thoroughly soaked. "No way she's paying me enough for this job," I complained to myself, but I had endured far worse while in the army, and the pay there hadn't been so great either, so I kept going. At this point it was more to satisfy my curiosity than desire to give my client her money's worth. I had come this far; I couldn't turn back now.

  The ground leveled and another road crossed my path. Across the road to my left a large building with a couple of yard lights emanated the rank smell of manure and rotten meat and I heard live cattle in stockyards on the far side of the building, so I guessed it must be a slaughterhouse.

  Straight across the street from me stood a stone wall in bad repair but still too high to see over. I crossed the street at an angle to a gate of rusted iron bars that hung open a couple of feet and looked like it had been in that position for years, with dirt built up and weeds growing around the bars. A long time ago someone had wanted to block access; access was no longer blocked but nobody cared anymore.

  What with the rain and darkness I couldn't really tell how much traffic had gone through the gate, so I reached out to touch an iron bar and briefly opened myself to a quick impression. Such a wave of bad vibes emanated from everywhere in front of me that it mostly drowned out any impression I got from the gate, and I reflexively closed myself for protection. All I could tell was that the threshold had been disturbed recently.

  I slipped through the space and took a couple of steps to the left so I wouldn't be silhouetted against the opening anymore.

  The lights from next door didn't shine into this yard, but even though it wasn't completely dark I couldn't see much with everything slick and shiny from the rain, and all I could hear was the steady susurration of rain on the overgrown grass and bushes. Straight ahead in front of the gate loomed the silhouette of a two-story house, not big enough to be called a mansion by today's standards. It seemed to be deserted but with my inconclusive impression at the gate I couldn't be sure, so I wiped raindrops from my face with a wet hand and drew my knife, wishing the law allowed me to carry a blade more than six inches long.

  When this house had been built, way back when, it had been part of a villa outside the city wall, and the windows all faced outward, not inward to a courtyard as in dwellings from other eras. Empty of glass, all the windows revealed a deeper darkness that gave me the creeps, but my talent, in it's vague way, indicated my goal was past the house. I was glad I didn't have to go in there tonight.

  The house appeared to be made of the same regular blocks of light colored stone as the front wall. I kept at least fifteen feet away as I negotiated a path through the weeds to the back yard, which turned out to be much smaller than I anticipated, ending at a stone wall twelve feet high. These stones were darker, grayer, with irregular sizes and weathered corners. When I touched the stones I got an impression of great age.

  I still hadn't reached my goal, whatever that was.

  With my left hand on the wall I felt my way along until the wall turned at a right angle away from me to the left. Four feet away another wall of ancient stone parallelled the first, creating a roofless passageway that led into deep, wet, darkness. Straight ahead, leading off to the right, was the old villa's wall of lighter, more regular stone blocks.

  The darkness between the walls where I had to go was impenetrable so I made a light on the end of my finger, a simple spell all magicians learn in their first year at R.I.M., but I never could get it quite right and it always made my finger go numb after several minutes. Not only that, but the energy for the light comes from my own body and I was already wet and cold, so if I made it much brighter than a candle I would soon be shivering. At least it didn't flicker with every breath of wind.

  Even with a my light I was disinclined to go in there but I pushed aside my fears and strode forward along the path between those two ancient walls. The path curved to the left and my talent told me that what I was looking for was inside the curve. Fingers of superstitious dread tickled my spine, or maybe it was just the cold rain, but either way I slowed and came to halt about thirty paces from the entrance.

  I knew where I was now, at a place I'd heard of, and even studied in school, but never actually seen, The Old Stone Labyrinth at The Minotaur's Mansion. The mansion was reputed to be haunted and the way it looked tonight I wouldn't take much convincing. The house had picked up the name because of the labyrinth, which had nothing to do with any minotaur. The old, long-abandoned mansion, though hundreds of years old, was recent compared to the labyrinth, which was ancient, possibly predating the city itself, though the city has been here since the Phoenicians started using the port a couple of thousand years ago. No one knew who had built it, why they built it, or when it was done.

  This far into the labyrinth I felt something evil hovering over it like a black cloud, darker than the night sky, but it wasn't a haunting, it was black magic that had been performed here not long ago. Right then I feared in my heart that I was too late for Belita, but I had to go in there, I had to know for certain, and despite a bone-deep reluctance to go any further I was too close to turn back now.

  The hovering evil wasn't menacing, it was just the foul, psychic residue that hadn't yet dissipated from a malevolent spell, lingering on like a bad odor. I took some deep breaths to calm myself, I steeled my nerves to carry on, then I stopped to think.

  Labyrinths and mazes are potent tools for some types of magic and I had studied them briefly in school. Because this one was named after the Minotaur I assumed it was a classic Cretan, seven-circuit design, with a single path curving back and forth around itself to the center. Judging by the width o
f the path I estimated it was hundreds of yards to walk to the center and the place was already creeping me out. I'm not a coward and I didn't sense any current danger, but I felt distinctly uncomfortable walking this path on this night. As a magician I'd learned not to ignore such feelings. If there was any alternative I would take it.

  I squatted down and with the tip of my knife I drew a cross in the dirt, drew a right angle in each quadrant, and put a dot in each corner. Then I started connecting angles to dots and dots to angles, working my way around in sweeping curves until I was finished with a crude drawing of a seven-circuit labyrinth. There was no straight side, like there was here in the back yard of the Minotaur's Mansion.

  Then I remembered that we had studied it because it wasn't typical. I eliminated the outer circuit, wiped out some long curves, reconnected some lines and there it was, straight on one side, round on the other, with the entrance at one end of the straight side. I studied the diagram for a while and saw my alternative.

  I exited the labyrinth and went to the middle of the straight wall. I held my fingerlight up to take a closer look at the wall. It had been constructed of flat stones without any visible mortar and the large gaps between the stones made the wall almost as easy to climb as a ladder. In half a minute I was up, standing on top of the wall, which was a good foot and a half wide and still solid.

  Spread before me, sweeping around in ever larger semicircles, were the circuits of the labyrinth. Directly below me was a straight section of the path. I brightened my light long enough to ensure that the space was empty, then climbed down to take a closer look. The sense of lurking evil was mostly gone, as if I had circumvented it by climbing over the wall instead of following the entire path.

  The path turned ninety degrees to the left, curved through a tight semicircle, then turned ninety degrees again into a A space about eight feet wide and twelve feet long, the wall at the far end matching the inner curve of the semicircle I had just walked.

  I didn't want to open myself very much because it could be extremely dangerous in an atmosphere like this, so I stood in the center of the space and tried to get a quick flash impression but the residual power of the black spell still overwhelmed my meager magic and all I saw was black mist.

  But my talent had led me in its way to this isolated spot so I was sure Belita was in here. I just needed some proof.

  I ignored the tingling that warned my finger was going numb and brightened my light again, long enough to take a good look all around. The floor of the labyrinth was close-set flagstones, almost completely covered with enough dirt to support weeds, but some of the weeds had been disturbed and some of the dirt looked more freshly packed than the rest, but the rain had long since erased any tracks that might have been left.

  I crouched down and pulled at the sod, which came away in big, loose chunks, until I cleared a flagstone a foot wide and two feet long. I used my knife to lever up one edge until I got my fingers under it, then I flipped it over and shone my light into the depression. My nose twitched at the hint of the stink of black magic and my stomach did a flip-flop at the sight of what looked like a slab of raw beef in there, with dirt packed tightly all around it.

  I was pretty sure it wasn't beef but I had to touch it to know so I reached out my hand and felt raw meat, colder than the rain. I jerked my hand away, but this was no time to be squeamish. I had to make myself more receptive.

  I took a couple of deep breaths to compose myself and reached out again, this time closing my eyes just as I made contact. For a long second I was just touching a skinless corpse crammed into a sixteen-inch wide hole, then I saw a pretty girl with blue eyes and thick, black hair, Belita, wearing a frilly, pale blue dress, lit by a small lantern, standing over the spot where she was buried.

  Then red filled my vision and a scream filled my head and the picture changed. My eyes slammed open and I snatched my hand away even faster than before but the vision was already burned into my mind, where I could study it like a painting.

  Even though I would have preferred to erase it I closed my eyes and scrutinized the image in my mind. Belita was spread-eagled, stark naked, flat on her back, with a thin, naked man on top of her. It looked like he was raping her, then I thought he was skinning her, and then I saw that he was somehow doing both, despite his awkward position. The knife, barely four inches long, with a very curved blade, appeared to be made of bronze.

  Murder most foul. The hackneyed phrase fit this situation more than any other I'd ever heard it applied to.

  I touched the corpse again, hoping to get a better picture of the man, some clue to who he might be, but all I got was redness and pain, and the disturbing knowledge that she had somehow remained alive until after her skin was removed. I flipped the slab of rock back into place to keep animals off and wiped my hand on a clump of wet weeds at the base of the wall, but it still felt soiled.

  It was time to get the police.

  Chapter 10

  My whole hand tingled from using my fingerlight too much but only the one finger was actually numb, so I managed to climb back out of the labyrinth the way I came in. I found my way back to the gate in the dark, shaking my hand in an attempt to get some feeling back in my finger. The house remained dark and silent but I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was in there watching me.

  Even though it meant a slightly longer walk I stuck to the streets as I made my way back into the heart of Old City, hoping to run into a cop along the way but I learned there is some truth to the old saying that the police are never around when you need them.

  Half a dozen wide steps lead up to the main entrance of the Northwest Quadrant police station, usually referred to as Old City Station. Two imposing stone columns of gray stone, four feet in diameter and twenty feet high, flank the doors, and rows of much thinner columns, with narrow windows between them, extend to each side, but the whole building has very little ornamentation beyond the police crest carved into the keystone of the arch over the main doors.

  I entered a dim expanse of desks, with a few gas lamps spilling random pools of light across the floor and ceiling, but access into the depths of the station was blocked by a long, waist-high counter. A thick, gray-haired man at a nearby desk stopped writing and looked up at me.

  "And what brings you in here at this time of night? Is it an emergency?"

  I wiped water from my face and shook it off my hand. "No. I'm afraid that what I found isn't going anywhere."

  The man sighed. "And what is it that you've found?"

  "A corpse." I looked at the hand that had touched the corpse and wiped it on my wet pants but it still felt unclean.

  "A corpse, eh?" He squinted at me with one eye.

  I nodded and said, "Yes."

  He grabbed a pen and paper, stood up and came to the counter. "Let's take it from the top. What's your name?"

  "Berk Halvorsen." I helped him spell it.

  "And how did you happen to find this corpse?"

  "I was looking for a girl, a young woman, actually, Belita by name."

  "Why?" the policeman interrupted, while continuing to write.

  "Her mother, Lucina Graccus, hired me to find her. She didn't want to wait for the police to start looking." He looked at me with narrowed eyes under his bushy brows. It took me a second or two to realize that what I had just said could be taken as a dig at the way the police worked. I didn't try to correct what I had said but I kept my expression bland as I continued. "I found her under a flagstone in the center of the labyrinth at the Minotaur's Mansion."

  His pen darted across the paper. "And she was dead when you found her?"

  "Oh yeah."

  He looked up at me. "How did you know?"

  He was beginning to annoy me but a magician doesn't lose control over such petty matters. I leaned forward and down until I was less than a foot from his face and said, in a calm, quiet voice, "Because she didn't have any skin and she wasn't screaming."

  His eyes narrowed, he put down his pen, stepp
ed back and studied me. "This is too weird, I better get the inspector." He picked up his notes and spun around. "Keep an eye on him," he told a policeman as he walked past.

  The man looked up from his desk, turned a bored, suspicious eye on me, saw that I wasn't going anywhere, said, "Sure Thaddeus," and went back to work.

  I watched Thaddeus make his way through a maze of mostly unoccupied desks, knock lightly on a door, then disappear inside. A few minutes later he reappeared, let me past the counter and escorted me to the door, which he opened without knocking, and closed as soon as I stepped through.

  A small, thin man with thin, dark hair tight to his scalp, introduced himself as Inspector Quintus, the thin mustache perched on his upper lip barely moving as he spoke. When we were seated in his little cubicle with his desk between us he said, "Sergeant Thaddeus told me you claim to have found a corpse."

  I felt my eyes rolling at the redundancy and stupidity this interview promised to be full of. "I did find a corpse."

  "Buried under a flagstone in the center of the labyrinth at the Minotaur's Mansion?"

  "That's right. The corpse of Belita Graccus."

  Inspector Quintus leaned back in his chair and turned his level gaze on me. I returned it as calmly as I could but I was wet and tired and getting low on patience.

  "And you just happened to be passing through?"

  I shook my head. "No, I was looking for her." I looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, then looked at the inspector. "Her mother came to me this morning and hired me to find her."

  "Hired you?"

  "That's right. My business is finding things." I dug out one of my business cards and handed it to him across his desk.

  He studied it, then sat up a bit straighter and surveyed me with a new attitude, like he was ready to take me more seriously. "Berk Halvorsen. Of course I know that name. I worked with your father a couple of times a few years back." He leaned forward a bit. "How did you find the girl?"