A Sewickley residential property under the ownership of Lyons, LLC was the site of a gas explosion. Columbia Gas representative Don MacCleod said, “This kind of thing happens a couple times a year…
I scanned the articles, and they were both useless. Local news reporting is the worst. Clearly, they were mundane understandings of what had happened at Stoneface’s and Brigit’s, but even from that perspective they were… worthless. Nothing actionable. So police say that they’re not ruling out foul play. How does that make the neighborhood feel? They should either be a little more descriptive or not say anything at all. Have there been other similar incidents?
And the gas explosion? It might be nice to explain what the most common causes of gas accidents are, or what it was about this that made it unique and not a general threat to other consumers of natural gas.
Would it kill the local news people to think like that?
Whatever. This is why I don’t read the local news. It’s less than useless.
I had hoped that it would give me some additional information, some kind of guide to action. But it didn’t. It was just a couple of facts (and not even accurate ones) stated in the least valuable way possible.
Not for the first time, I felt like there was a crushing asymmetry of information. Someone else was out there, and they knew a lot of things that I didn’t. It was making things difficult in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. It made it so I was here with Brigit, and Gwen was off with Dan. And who knew where Babd was.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not sure what we’re going to find over at Stoneface’s house, or if we can even get in, but I still think it’s worth going.”
“Did I say it wasn’t?” said Brigit.
“Maybe something will jump out at us.”
“This is your show, Lincoln. I’m just doing this because Dan said so.”
“Well, let’s head down to the basement for a second before we go,” I said. The Fox software had finished downloading. I unplugged the cable and fired it up.
“Ooooo,” said Brigit. “You’ve got your gun out.”
What was it with Dan and Brigit and the gun? Can’t a gun just be a gun? I was going to say something about how she could stay here, and I’d be fine by myself, but I figured that would earn me another round of comments.
I took Fox into the basement, where I’d baffled the walls and ceiling so I could run just these kinds of tests. Against the far wall, I had three layers of packing palettes standing on end, backed by a row of sandbags. I grabbed the stapler from the shelf and hung a new target against the frontmost palette.
“Is this where you hide the bodies?” said Brigit, her heels clicking on the wooden basement steps. “You’re the type, you know. Quiet. Keeps to himself.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“Performs illicit dissections on magical creatures after killing them.”
Touché.
“Stay behind me,” I said. I put on a pair of safety glasses from the shelf and handed a set to her.
I got in a triangle stance, raised Fox in front of me and brought up the right sight picture. Front site + target.
“Fox,” I said. “Safety round.”
There was a pulse in my hand.
I squeezed the trigger.
A safety round silently left the barrel and slammed through the target, palettes and sandbags like a .357 Magnum.
“Kinetic force, thin blade, three feet high.”
Another pulsation and I fired.
The force cut the target, splintered the pallets and left a gash six inches deep from the top to the bottom of the sandbags. Sand began to dribble out onto the basement floor.
“Holy shit,” said Brigit.
“Yeah,” I said. “Want to see something cool?”
“I just did.”
“Fox,” I said, “3cc’s of chocolate.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Brigit.
The handle pulsed. I tilted the barrel downward and gave it a shake. A small cylinder of chocolate fell out.
“Here you go,” I said.
“This isn’t poisoned?”
“Uh, no. Should it be?”
Brigit looked at it for a moment, then tossed the whole thing in her mouth. She chewed it.
“Not the world’s greatest,” she said.
“It’s just a nano factory with some molecular and mechanical templates, run by an artificial intelligence and powered by reverse engineered magic. So yeah. Not the world’s greatest.”
“Sounds pretty basic.”
“Okay then. I’m ready.” I went past her, up the stairs. “Hit the light when you come up.”
* * *
Stoneface’s house looked different in the daylight. I’m not sure what I expected, but there were no big cordons of police tape around the whole place. No cops hanging around outside. It’s almost like people die every day or something.
After driving past, we parked two blocks away, then found the alley that ran along the backyards of all the houses on the street. Most of them had detached garages back there, and people used the alley for getting in and out of them. It made the main street look nicer—no garage fronts and no driveways.
We took a quick look around before detouring into Stoneface’s back yard, and once we did, we just walked up to the back door like we owned the place. No use acting slinky and suspicious. Was someone watching us? Would a neighbor think it was weird? No way to know. We just had to act and be prepared. And I didn’t even know what to be prepared for.
The door was sealed with police tape, but only in two places. If we opened it, they’d know someone had been here the next time someone came by, and we’d have to worry about leaving traces or witnesses.
“Can you do anything about this?” I said to Brigit.
“You mean like when we tried to break into another building last night, and I couldn’t do anything?”
Right.
“Hey wait,” she said. She closed her eyes, said a few words. Smiled. “I’ve had that one hanging for a while.”
She grabbed the doorknob and turned. It was locked.
“No!” I said. “You have to cover your hand with your sleeve or something.”
She smiled and held up her hand, wiggling her fingers.
“I temporarily nuked my fingerprints,” she said.
“Oh. But the door’s still…”
And I’m an idiot.
I placed Fox’s barrel against the keyhole.
“Fox, make me a key.”
Pulse.
“Hold out your hand,” I said to Brigit.
She did. I shook a small key into it.
“Is this poisoned?” she said.
She put the key in the lock, turned it and the door opened.
Yes.
Yes yes yes.
It worked.
It. Worked.
“You coming?” she said and walked into the kitchen.
I went in. We walked around, carefully at first, mostly because I was ridiculously nervous. As I should be. I was an armed man walking around a crime scene who may or may not be identifiable as one of the last people to have seen the deceased alive. But like everything else, I got used to it pretty quickly. I was careful not to touch anything, and it really didn’t matter if Brigit did or not.
The couch was just a couch, even though that’s where he died. Nothing special about it. Dan had put the chair that he’d been using back in the dining room. It just looked like a normal house.
I walked upstairs. Nothing amazing there either.
“So… what exactly are we looking for?” said Brigit from downstairs. Loudly.
I didn’t know. Something. Anything. And please keep it down.
I wandered around for another ten minutes, and the longer I was there, the more my initial nervousness doubled back on me. It started to build, and parts of my head were screaming at me that we had to get out. That this was a terrible idea. And be that as it may, the actual odds of getting caught here
and having to explain ourselves or do something worse were almost zero.
But still. I could feel the part of me that was freaking out chiseling away at the math.
This was a stupid idea. It wasn’t very risky, but what risk there was had no upside to it. What did I think was going to happen? That I’d find some kind of hidden camera that had footage of what happened after we left? I’d found that last time I was here and destroyed it.
No. This was a bust. I didn’t have magical powers or finely honed detective skills. Not only did I not know what I was looking for, but I realized that even if there was something here that could help, I didn’t have the training or talent to recognize it.
Footsteps on the stairs. My heart pounded and a spike of adrenaline ripped through me. Which was stupid, because: Brigit.
She poked her head into the bathroom where I was standing.
“You had enough?” she said.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
We turned, and this time there was a sound from downstairs that shouldn’t have been there.
“Shit,” I said. I pulled Fox. At least I was already shaky from my first shot of adrenaline.
“If I can get close enough to touch them,” said Brigit, “I’ll make their lungs eat their heart.”
“How about we hold that in reserve,” I said.
Something was moving around downstairs. Maybe we should just stay where we were. Was there a roof outside the bathroom window? Could we scramble out? No one would have to get hurt. Or what if it wasn’t a person? What if it was another thing that someone had sent after us? Had whatever it was been waiting in the house for someone like us to return? I really should have thought of that. I suspected that I was getting dumber.
Brigit started to move into the hall, but I put my hand on her arm. I mouthed “wait”.
She made a snarling face but put up her hands.
We listened. After a moment, it was clear that it wasn’t a person walking around downstairs.
“Did you shut the back door?” I said very quietly into her ear.
She shrugged. Wonderful.
Whatever it was was fairly large, and it wasn’t trying to be quiet.
I had a momentary flashback to the Archywhatever, and I had to focus hard to avoid the nausea of the memory of my leg cracking in half.
I wished for Fox’s neural link to be working, but it wasn’t done yet. I held him to my lips.
“Fox,” I said, in the barest of whispers, “kinetic force, horizontal blade.”
Let there be another one of them then. I’d cut it to shreds.
Something on the stairs.
I moved forward, just inside the bathroom door. I got into a good stance, braced against the doorjamb.
“Lincoln,” Brigit said from behind me in full voice. It made me jump. “It’s safe.”
Really?
Oh.
A dog came up the stairs. Not the biggest one I’ve ever seen, but pretty freaking huge nonetheless. It was built like a husky, only taller, and its fur was a uniform glossy black. Ice blue eyes.
“Hey,” said the dog.
I don’t remember holstering Fox. Babd padded up the hallway, tail wagging like crazy. I was scratching her head.
“Hey girl,” I said. “Where you been?”
“I required an exchange,” she said.
New body. Got it.
“What happened to the old one?” I said.
“I do not know,” said Babd.
Well, at least she left her well fed.
“Lincoln,” said Brigit. “Take a look.” She held her phone out toward me.
The text from Dan read:
Located them. Shenley Park. ASAP.
Chapter 9
I don’t want to say I was speeding like crazy. Let’s just say that I had strong incentives to finish all of this as quickly as possible, and those incentives bled over into what my hands and feet were doing in the car.
Dan had sent us a map link to their location in the park, so they were easy to find. There was a lot of magic-looking stuff laying around, but my glasses didn’t show any residual magic.
Gwen came up to me. Babd was happy to see her. She was happy to see Babd.
“Okay, that?” she said, gesturing at Dan who was talking to Brigit, “Was pretty badass.”
“Oh?”
She handed me a little Ziploc bag filled with nastiness.
“Aertrix guts,” she said. “Now you get to hold them.”
“I’m not hungry, thanks.”
“Dan said on the way over that we wouldn’t actually be using a bunch of power to do the Identify and Locate spell, which is why we can pull it off at all within the city. All of the preparation is purely mundane. The actual magic that takes place is really small. It uses the focus to make a tiny tear in reality and sends a summons to a being of the Inner Regions.”
“Those guys again?”
“Yep, but all of the prep you do on this side forms the message that they get. Then, the Being goes out and does some kind of magic search from their side and brings the information back to you.”
Cool. I always figured that the ritual magic stuff actually helped with channeling power or something, but it seemed that at least in this case it was more like organizing atoms into a context filled with information, in the same way that writing a note on a piece of paper transforms random ink and wood pulp into something with greater meaning.
Dan and Brigit came up to us.
“So, you find All The Answers at Stoneface’s place?” said Dan.
Of course he knew that I hadn’t, because he’d just been talking with Brigit.
“You knew we’d come up empty,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “But you were committed. So why argue?”
Made sense, but it also made me feel kind of like a naive child who was in the process of being taught a lesson.
“So you figured it out?” I said. “Who are we dealing with?”
“Yeah, it’s actually worse than I thought,” he said. “But we’ll work it out.”
“Just tell him,” said Brigit.
“Just tell me,” I said.
“Okay. It’s Guster Grieshelgen.” He followed that up with a meaningful look.
“I’m supposed to know who that is?”
“He’s the current head of the Congress of the Pittsburgh Neutral Territory.”
“Okay, that’s bad how?”
Dan seemed a bit exasperated.
“What do you mean, ‘how’?” he said.
“Well, if he’s in charge of the Praecant society in Pittsburgh, he must be a law and order type, right? We should be able to get in touch with him, explain what happened, submit to some kind of magical lie detector and then get on with our lives, right?”
Dan started laughing. Brigit looked grim.
“You don’t get it,” he said. “Guster is not a nice person.”
“Stop laughing, asshole,” said Gwen. “You don’t tell us anything about anything, and then you make fun of us if we don’t know stuff.”
“Okay, then let me break it down for you. Guster Grieshelgen—not his real name, by the way, he’s born and raised in the Burgh and just thought a super German name would sound scarier—is a powerful Praecant, a through-and-through salesman and politician, ergo a congenital liar, and he has a habit of leaving his opponents and people he just doesn’t like in general as tiny little smoking bits of meat.”
“So you’re saying that trying to have a chat with him is a bad idea?”
“It’s the worst.”
Okay, that was pretty bad. All that I knew about the Congress, which was little more than its name and the fact of its existence, I’d learned from Dan. Was there law enforcement within the Congress that we could deal with? Some kind of auditing group or something? There had to be someone there that was reasonable.
“What do you think we should do?” I said. “And we’re not hunting him down and killing him.”
Dan recoiled
in mock horror. “Sir, I would never suggest such a thing.”
Brigit snorted.
“Here’s the thing,” said Dan. “Guster has his strong points, but Sentistry isn’t one of them. I think that if we can get close enough to him, maybe even subdue him, I can get in his head, mix some things around and make him forget about all of this.”
An idea started buzzing in my head.
“What if you didn’t have to actually get close to him to pull it off?” I said.
Sometimes complex things just get served up from the back of my brain on a plate, fully cooked. We’d need to do some prep, and we’d all have to work together to make it happen, but it could provide us with a way to get into Guster’s head without exposing ourselves and without having to actually get close to him. I was thinking about the way Dan had used the messaging capabilities of a simple spell to direct actions elsewhere, and about Internet Packet routing, and proxies and public key encryption.
I was thinking that it might be possible to craft a series of small spells at different locations that would create a very small, very real telepresence system. If we deployed it properly, we’d be able to get messages (i.e. sensory inputs) from wherever we aimed it (i.e. Guster’s location) and transmit information as well (i.e. Dan’s magical whammy). Dan could do a kind of remote psychic surgery on the guy, and it would be mostly untraceable. I mean, it was all theory, but my work with Fox and SparkleOS had showed me that things that sounded ridiculous with mundane tools were quite achievable this way.
So, if it didn’t use magic, and used, say, the Internet, any sysadmin worth their jock (or bra) would be able to trace it back pretty easily. But using magic… these Praecants had so very little sense of how their powers actually functioned that any kind of technical layer on top of it would render things untraceable.
It could actually work.
“Something has happened,” said Babd.
I looked around.
“She’s right,” said Gwen. “Everything just got… quiet. Kind of.”
I could hear traffic out on the main road although it was muffled. Gwen shook her head and pointed to her temple.
Oh.
Psychically.
“Shit,” said Dan. “Shit shit shit. This is bad. Get ready guys, I think we have incoming.”
Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Page 13
