Authors: S. Andrew Swann

Dragons & Dwarves (32 page)

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves

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“Nesmith wants ‘Faust,’” I said to Ysbail. “She’s pegged you as the prime suspect. And that’s why Caleb Washington was assassinated by the police.”

My choice of words got the biker’s attention.

Bone Daddy was a mole for the cops. He was looking for “Faust” and had been for along time. Everyone here probably had two things to thank for the fact that a squad of SPU elves weren’t breaking down the door right now.

First was, I assumed—and Baldassare confirmed that I assumed correctly—that the network I was looking at was formed of independent cells like any sane guerrilla organization. Bone might have made it high in the echelons, but he hadn’t got far enough to have real contact with the leadership. No Faust.

Second, and more important, Bone was a
real
cop. He wasn’t into what O’Malley referred to as “Gestapo tactics.” Caleb Washington wasn’t going to go out of his way to report details on an organization that wasn’t breaking any laws. Instead he spent his time giving the SPU any black market necromancer and two-bit mage who was dealing with illegal shit.

The biker, as I had thought, didn’t take well to this.

“You ain’t telling me he’s no fucking cop . . .”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

“I should fuck you up for saying that.”

Ysbail held up her hand toward him. “Allow Mr. Maxwell his say.”

“Of course, when Nesmith lets on to Bone that Aloeus’ death is less than an accident, and that Faust is suspect number one, Bone Daddy is off on his own investigation. He has a major advantage over everyone. He’s pretty damn sure, judging from the reactions he’s seen within the Faustian community, that ‘Faust’ is the
least
likely suspect. Especially since—if he hadn’t known beforehand, he would realize now—Aloeus was, in at least some important sense, ‘Faust.’

“Going into his investigation, he questions yours truly and finds a fact that really doesn’t sit well with him.

“Adrian Phillips was present while they dredged the dragon out of the water. Adrian Phillips was present during the medical examination by Egil Nixon. A medical examination that was falsified to show the death was an accident. Falsified by order of someone other than Nesmith, since her later comments showed she believed the report the honest opinion of the late Coroner Nixon.

“Unfortunately for Bone, Nesmith didn’t believe Nixon.

“Unfortunately for Nixon, Phillips couldn’t allow him to disclose exactly what went on aboard the Coast Guard cutter.

“I don’t know what Bone discovered on his own, but I suspect it was whatever had killed Nixon. Phillips had already shown himself to be an imperfect tactician. Everything from the dragon’s death onward showed no planning, just reaction. It seems quite likely that during the examination Phillips let slip something that identified him as the person behind the dragon’s death. It could have been a mistake as simple as ordering the murder covered up before Nixon gave him his actual findings . . .

“Whatever Bone found, he didn’t count on O’Malley being Phillips’ creature.

“Unfortunately for O’Malley and Phillips, the snowball was already rolling downhill. Cutler was checking on Bone Daddy’s movements before his death, and had got too close.

“I suspect that the real reason that Cutler got the CD was because the SPU handed it to him, right after putting that bullet around his neck. Something about that CD made the SPU think it was meant for me, and since it was from Bone, Phillips wanted it cracked. It could hold damaging information. After I opened the CD, they could finish me off in a righteous shooting once Cutler’s chest blew open.

“I think it might have been less luck that saved me then, than the fact that Caledvwlch was already disillusioned with his liege at this point. The elf had worked with Bone for a long time; being ordered by O’Malley to kill him was enough to shake the foundations of his belief system. Not enough to ignore orders at that point, but enough, maybe, to miss.

“By this point Phillips was panicking about what Bone Daddy might have known and when. When the Feds nabbed me for questioning, it had to be the worst of all possible worlds. He had gone to the mat to ‘protect’ Rayburn. Letting the Feds pick my brain could be a disaster. He set up ‘Faust’s’ attack on the safe house, and when that didn’t finish things off for me, he had O’Malley pick me up when Blackstone tried to take me out of the city.”

“Then why didn’t the bastard take your sorry ass out right there?” quipped the biker.

“He seized me from a Federal Agent in a public place. They might have been becoming more reckless, but not
that
reckless.” It must have been nerve-racking for Phillips during that triumvirate meeting. He probably had a near stroke when I asked about the Coast Guard cutter. Lucky for him that Rayburn was willfully blind.

“O’Malley was setting my death up as another one of ‘Faust’s’ victims. He probably had his evidence all lined up.” I shook my head and chuckled. “It’s ironic really; you gave Phillips the best evidence he could want, with O’Malley’s corpse.”

“That was unavoidable,” Ysbail said with the barest tinge of regret.

“I’m not complaining,” I told her. “That gargoyle probably saved my life.”

“Fat lot of good it’s done us,” said the biker. “They got O’Malley’s death to dump at our feet, along with Aloeus and that reporter. And fuck if they ain’t right this time. We
did
kill O’Malley. For what? So we can listen to exactly how we’ve been screwed?”

“He’s gong to help us,” Ysbail said flatly.

“Yeah, right. How?”

Baldassare looked uncustomarily grave. I suppose he had a lot invested in the success of this enterprise. “Lady Ysbail, I am afraid I do have to agree. While he has given a laudable analysis of the situation,” he nodded in my direction, “I fail to see exactly how he is supposed to help.”

“What you going to do? Write about it?” I got a sneer from the biker that was acid. It was an expression I knew. Two of the most lauded virtues in the old school of my profession were objectivity and detachment. We do not become part of the story. The point is not to right wrongs, but to illuminate them.

It wasn’t Ysbail who spoke, it was Friday. “Caleb Mosha Washington was why we saved him.”

“Bone didn’t know this guy from Adam.”

“His gift knew,” Friday said. “It knew when he saw this man.”

“There ain’t no fucking savior. Not for the elves, not for us. He’s a goddamn reporter, for Christ’s sake.”

“It is him,” Ysbail said quietly.

Baldassare shook his head. “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

This had gotten cryptic enough for me. “What conclusions?”

“Don’t worry, you ain’t him.”

“Show him the message,” Friday said.

“While we’re at it why don’t we just tell him our life’s story?” The biker looked back across at me. “That’s what all this is to you, an effing story.”

Of course.

I didn’t say it, though.

Baldassare walked out of the library, leaving me alone with five rogue mages. I didn’t realize until then how reassuring his presence was, the one player in this drama who I knew, who I thought I understood.

Ysbail sat, caressing the brow of one of the elves, the one who had defended her from the biker. The biker walked up to her and lowered his voice. His bearing suddenly had a trace of deference to it. “Lady, look I ain’t subtle, and I ain’t polite, and I sure as hell don’t pretend to know all this shit. But, damn it, what the
hell
is the point of all of this? We’ve been keeping ourselves under wraps, and for damn good reason. We’re just supposed to spill everything to this guy? What’s he got at stake?”

“He is Caleb’s man,” Ysbail replied.

“Uh-huh? And what if he isn’t? You’re just going to let him splatter our secrets, our
names,
on the front page of his rag?”

“If he isn’t, what reason have we left to hide?”

Baldassare returned with a notebook computer in tow. I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. He set it on top of the desk next to the large incomprehensible tome. He flipped it open, the blue LCD screen glowing ominously.

He struck a couple of keys and the CD player whirred.

“He left this with a lawyer,” Baldassare said. “It was delivered the day after he was shot.”

The blue background switched to black, which suddenly changed to an extreme close-up of a blinking eye. The eye backed away until we saw a shirtless Bone Daddy standing in a living room that was all too familiar to me. I noticed that the coffee table and all the broken glass was gone. He also looked a little less strung out. The arcane tattoos rippled across his back as he walked away from the camera and sat down on the couch.

“Greetings from the great beyond.” He even smiled somewhat as he said it, but his voice was flat and carried little in the way of emotion. He probably blew most of it on making the previous movie. At the very least, he had blown most of his inebriation. “I thought a lot about not making this tape. You should know that I
am
severely pissed off. That comes from divining that a good friend of mine is going to betray me. The fact that one of you all might be the one to off me sort of chilled my enthusiasm for trying to help you bastards out.”

He leaned forward toward the camera. “Of course I kept trying to find out who the bad guy is, but you all know the Oracle. Can’t let me know that, it might keep me from getting killed. So I did find out a few things you can’t do anything about either.” He held up his index finger. “Your great plans for a homeland are pretty much doomed. Sorry, I would have told you, if it could have done any good. Sometime in the week they bury me the whole thing is going to fall apart. Death, destruction, evil deeds, betrayal, the whole en chilada.” Second finger. “A man of great temporal power holds your existence—I mean
all
of you—in his hands. He can destroy you or not, at his whim. This man is connected with the man who killed me, and may be responsible for my death. He is male, human, and is—big surprise here—involved in the political leadership of this city.” Third finger. “There is another man, someone of great honesty who is threatened by the same forces. He is the one person I see who can get your butts out of the fire. Again, don’t ask me who he is, I just know that he’s got the best chance of sticking it to the shits who killed me off.”

He lowered his hand and stared in the camera. I felt as if he was looking directly at me. “Call him Will.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

M
Y instincts wanted me to leave, told me I was too close to this little band of revolutionaries. Looking at the biker and Ysbail after Bone Daddy’s last self eulogization, I knew that it wasn’t altruism that prompted them to pull me out of a life threat ening situation.

However, at this point, my options were limited. I faced the same Hobson’s choice that I had been given in front of Rayburn’s triumvirate, though no one here explicitly stated so. I could go along, or I could go out alone to face a threat that had shown no reluctance about violently dispatching people with too much information. Phillips could have every mage in the city’s employ hunting me down. My only reprieve right now was the fact that Baldassare’s estate was very seriously warded against magical intrusions.

I needed Phillips stopped as badly as anyone did.

But as badly as anything, I needed to rest. I felt as if I hadn’t slept in weeks.

Baldasarre led me to a bedroom bigger than the living room in my condo, and I collapsed on a mahogany four-poster king-size bed. My body screamed for sleep, but my mind kept spinning along out of sheer momentum.

I lay on Baldassare’s sheets and tried to think of how Bone Daddy’s Oracle thought I was supposed to save the idea of an elvish homeland.

Call him Will.

“Bastard,” I answered my mental image of Bone.

With that one phrase he tied me inextricably to his little prophecy. Even if I’d kept quiet about the CD that had been sent to me, word of it had made its way ahead of me. Apparently a familiar gargoyle had salvaged my hard drive from the dumpster I’d stashed it in. And there was enough decrypted data on it for Ysbail and company to scry the passphrase, and Bone’s home movie.

The Oracle’s second message to me:
Your path has been chosen for you by forces you’ve known and have not seen . . .

That fit well. I had known a lot of players here—in Baldassare’s case, years—without “seeing” the whole. And, according to Ysbail, it was Baldassare who pressured the
Press
to put me on the dragon story.

. . . they fear your allegiance because the masters you serve are not theirs . . .

Again that made sense. Probably more so than it did with the Feds. In the elves’ case I had no doubt that they had a literal “master,” possibly in Ysbail.

. . . The alliance they offer will not be an easy one.

I closed my eyes and whispered, “You pegged that one, brother.”

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves

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