Promise: Caulborn #2

by Nicholas Olivo

  Lotholio led the Urisk through a hymn to me, and the congregation filed out of the cathedral. “Loth, kindly summon four priests to the Shallar Chamber. Meet me there in five minutes.”

  “Of course, Lord,” he bowed.

  I went up a spiral staircase until I came to the fifteenth floor. One of the great things about being on the Bright Side is that I never get tired or winded here. Sprinting up fifteen flights of stairs back in Boston would’ve been enough to make me wheeze for ten solid minutes, but here it was no trouble at all.

  I pushed through the chamber’s heavy double doors and snapped my fingers. White spheres of light flashed to light in each of the room’s eight corners. The room was clear of furnishings and decorations. A small basin the size of a kiddie wading pool sat dry in its center. I waved my hand and conjured water to fill the pool. Then I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pant legs, and waded in.

  The Shallar Chamber was a room dedicated to a special ritual called, creatively enough, Shallar. I’d developed it a few days into my godhood here. It allowed me to see into the Bright Side’s past so that I could better understand its people. The ritual required five Urisk priests to chant while I focused my powers on looking back through the past. Lotholio and the priests came in a minute later and took seats around the basin. Lotholio nodded to them and they began their chant.

  I closed my eyes and sent my sight backward. I watched life in the Urisk city move in reverse, like watching a movie on rewind. Events flashed by until I came upon a time when the Urisk were encased in what looked like amber sleeves. I slowed down the rewind, but kept going. An eclipse occurred, sending deadly radiation down upon the Bright Side. Those fae who lived above ground were vaporized. The hobgoblins and trolls, who normally terrorized the Urisk, fled to caves or were incinerated. Other fae went below ground too in order to escape the eclipse’s wrath.

  But the Urisk, who were horrifically afraid of the dark, could not go below ground for safety. Instead, their bodies excreted a liquid that formed a hard chrysalis that protected them from the radiation. Once the eclipse was over, the chrysalis would dissolve. I drew deeper on the collective memories of the Urisk, and found something else. This eclipse happened every two hundred years, and upon emerging from the chrysalis, some Urisk developed new psychic powers.

  I had to admit, part of me was very excited for this. Any new power that an Urisk could manifest became a new power that I’d be able to use over in Boston. In a way, this eclipse was like Christmas for me. Once I knew what to look for, I sent my mind back in time searching for other occurrences of the eclipse. I found several times where only one Urisk gained a new talent. Other times, all did. Once or twice, no one did. I couldn’t find a rhyme or reason to it, but I didn’t give it much thought, as the prospect of getting a new power was making me giddy. Given how tough things had been for the Caulborn lately, any new talents I could add to the fight would be great.

  I let Shallar fade and looked at my priests. They had their eyes closed, their chanting quiet and calm. “You have done well,” I said as I stepped from the water. “Your service is appreciated. Go now in peace and health.” A quick blessing restored the small amount of energy they’d expended during the ritual. They bowed to me and filed out of the room. I beckoned Lotholio to remain behind.

  “Did you see what you needed, Lord?” he asked.

  “Indeed, Lotholio. When is the eclipse?”

  “Soon. Three days. Once the liquid appears,” he rubbed some that had begun to bead on his brow, “the chrysalis forms quickly.”

  “Why’d you tell the people that I was causing that?”

  The light in Lotholio’s eyes shimmered, the Urisk equivalent of a smile. “Sometimes, the people fear that because you are not always present, that you are not watching over us. This was a way to reinforce your compassion for the people.” His eyes flickered mischievously. “Perhaps it was a bit misleading, but I feel it was justified.”

  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Lotholio is my high priest.

  “Any sign of Treggen?” I asked. Treggen was a warlord who ran the hobgoblins and trolls. He’d caused problems for me lately both here and in Boston. This eclipse might be the perfect time for him to attack the Urisk, when they were completely vulnerable.

  “Those who follow Treggen are making their own preparations, Lord. They cannot withstand the rays of the eclipse; if they remain above ground, they will be burned to cinders.” Okay, so the Urisk were probably safe during the eclipse. “Our spies say that large forces of hobgoblins and trolls have been moving into mines in the north. No attacks or aggressive action has been taken toward the Urisk in several weeks.”

  That could be good, or really, really bad. I nodded to Lotholio and sighed. I needed to hunt down Treggen. I needed to keep Megan safe. I needed to figure out who was vandalizing graves, and I needed to deal with my PITA pseudo-mother-in-law. One thing at a time, Vincent, I thought. I sent out one last comforting blessing to my followers; hopefully that’d help ease their minds with the coming eclipse. Treggen could wait for the time being. It was time to go back to Boston. I took my leave and headed back through Aviorla. Blue lights flashed in the alley behind the Children’s Museum. Crap. Two cops were taking statements from people on the street. Lucky for me this wasn’t a residential area; the only people who would’ve heard or seen anything would be late night office workers or the museum’s custodial staff, and there weren’t too many of those.

  I considered telekinetically tossing a soda can away from my current location and using that as a distraction when I recognized one of the cops. Built like a linebacker and radiating an aura of confidence, Frank Grady was conferring with a uniformed officer. I stepped out from the alley and approached him.

  “—make sure you bang on all the doors,” Grady was saying. “Dumpsters and cars don’t just crash themselves.”

  “Evening, Frank,” I said. A few years back, I saved Frank Grady’s daughter, Katrina, from a cult of shadow men. Ever since then, he’s been my go-to guy on the Boston PD.

  Grady turned to me and his eyes widened. “Mr. Corinthos,” he said, his voice suddenly taking on an air of respect. He turned back to the uniform. “What, are you on a coffee break? Move.” The other officer hastened away as Grady gently took me by the arm and led me away from the car.

  “There were reports of giant blue men throwing cars into the buildings here tonight, Mr. Corinthos. Are you here because of that?”

  I hated to be less than honest with Frank, but he’d just given me an easy way to not incriminate myself. “I’d caught wind of something, Frank. What do you know so far?” He referred to a small notebook as he filled me in. A couple of people on the upper floors of one of the nearby buildings had seen two blue men in mist throwing cars at the building. The eyewitnesses’ accounts didn’t mention who or what they were throwing them at. “Thanks for the info, Frank,” I said when the big detective finished. “I’ll see what I can turn up.”

  “Do you know anything about what happened at the Museum of Science, Mr. Corinthos?”

  I blinked. That had come out of left field, and suddenly I was worried that maybe I hadn’t disabled all the security cameras. But no, if that were the case, Frank would’ve just come out and said something. Best to play dumb for now. “No, what’s going on?” I said.

  “A couple of security guards got beaten up pretty bad,” Grady said, flipping again through his notebook. “They said that these two big blue guys jumped out of the Viking exhibit and beat the ever-living crap out of them. They busted up some of the exhibits and then fled the scene. We found two empty sarcophaguses at the exhibit, and one of the guards swears the mummies that were inside were what beat him up. Eyewitnesses here,” he gestured to the alley, “saw two large blue men throwing a car, so I think the incidents are connected.”

  I nodded, relieved that no one knew I’d been in the museum. “I’ve got someone I can talk to about this,” I said. “Let me make some calls and I’ll ge
t back to you.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “Thanks as always for your help, Mr. Corinthos.”

  I suppressed a twinge of guilt as I shook Frank’s hand; I hated being less than honest with the man. But it’s for the best, I thought as I pulled out my phone to call a cab. I wanted to go home, but there was something I needed to take care of at HQ first. I phoned Petra to let her know I’d be late, then called Megan. “Hey, Meg,” I said when her voicemail kicked on. “Could you ask Herb to call me when he’s got a sec? I ran into some nasty undead tonight and would appreciate his professional opinion.” I hung up and thought that maybe the reason my call had gone straight to voicemail was that Megan and Herb were spending some quality time together.

  After a short cab ride, I was back in my office. Sure, the night had a few rough spots, but I was upbeat. With the Keepers handling the promise, I could finally relax. And there was a chance that I’d be gaining new powers from the Urisk. What other psychic powers might they develop? It was an exciting prospect. I absently scratched at the cross-shaped brand on my forearm; strange that it hadn’t healed or faded after I’d visited the Bright Side. Normally, any injury I sustain is automatically healed over there. I decided I’d talk to Mrs. Rita if it gave me any trouble.

  I thought back on my talk with Laras. He’d been friendly, forthcoming, and convincing that the Keepers would fulfill my obligation to Megan. Still, that page in the Keepers’ language gnawed at me. I grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper and Glimpsed back. I began sketching out the page, the swoopy characters of the Keepers’ language looking like a cross between Korean, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and D’Ni from the Myst video game series. After about fifteen minutes, I had an accurate copy of the page in hand and was on my way to Gearstripper’s workshop.

  To say the shop was a mess would be like saying the Titanic had a small leak. Bare light bulbs hung from their housings, snippets of wire and bits of electrical tape were everywhere, and overall, it had the feel of a giant flea market that had been raided in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. There were several tables littered with electronic equipment in various states of disassembly, and the place smelled like WD-40. Gears stood on a workbench halfway across the room, connecting wires from the back of a computer into a cardboard box. “Hey, Gears,” I called. “Got a sec?”

  “C’mon in, Vinnie.” He waved me in without looking up. “Be with you in a jiff.”

  I picked my way over various electronic components that littered the floor. The walls of the room were covered with cabinets and shelves, canisters and components spilling from them. An autographed poster of Jewel Staite was proudly framed and hung above the main worktable. A second photo of her was tacked up on a corkboard, next to a photo of Petra and me. I wondered what Ms. Staite would think of having a gremlin as her biggest fan.

  Gears turned to me once I reached the workbench, his yellow eyes bright. He’s a lovable little guy once you get to know him, but he always reminds me of a Jim Henson creation gone horribly wrong. Coming in at just over eighteen inches tall with green skin, three-fingered hands, and ears that stick way out, Gears wasn’t going to win any beauty contests. But under that is a technological genius the likes of which the world has rarely seen. And when he’d done something really clever, his sharp-toothed grin split his face in half, like it was right now. “You look like the cat that just swallowed the canary,” I said. “What are you working on?”

  Gears pulled a fun-size Hershey bar out of his front coveralls pocket and tore into it. “Remember back when Treggen had those cameras installed in our office?” I nodded. Treggen had influenced another gremlin, a late friend of Gears named Axlesnapper, to put cameras in the office to spy on us. “Well,” Gears continued, “I ran a bunch of simulations trying to figure out how security had been breached.”

  “And you found out how Axlesnapper bugged us?”

  “No,” Gears said. “Every scenario I ran said it was absolutely impossible for her to get in without being detected.”

  I rubbed my chin. “You seem excited by this.”

  “Are you kidding?” His voice squeaked as he said this. “Of course I’m excited! This means that Axle might not have been working for Treggen.” He pulled up a new window on his computer. It showed a blueprint of the building. “This is every entrance and exit to this office, traditional or otherwise.”

  “What do you mean, ‘or otherwise’?”

  “Heating vents, sewer and water pipes, that sort of thing. When I first joined the Caulborn, I crawled through the entire heating system and mapped it out. I also put sensors throughout the ducts to let me know if we had surprise guests. None of them went off.”

  “No offense Gears, but wasn’t Axle as smart as you? Wouldn’t she have known to disable them?”

  “If she’d seen them, sure. But it’s not like they’re flashing little baubles that screamed out ‘Hey, I’m a sensor!’ I have vibrational and pressure-sensitive stuff running through here. If anything was out of place, those would’ve gone off. The only way she could’ve gotten by them is if the power had been cut to the building.”

  “We had a power failure around that time, didn’t we?” I asked, thinking back to that night.

  Gears’s ears drooped a bit. “Yes, but you and Megan found Axle’s body before that blackout.” He looked down for a moment, probably thinking about how painful Axle’s death had been; she’d been dissected as part of an experiment to create a new breed of gremlins. Gears gave himself a shake. “But don’t you see, Vinnie?” he looked me in the eyes, his grin returning. “This means that Axle didn’t do it. I went through everything, all of her notes and journals, and I didn’t find anything that implied she’d broken into our office.”

  “Maybe she just destroyed the data?”

  Gears shook his head. “No. If she was going to break into the office, it meant she’d have to outsmart me. And while we were equals, she knew I didn’t mess around when it came to security. She would’ve spent months gathering intel, tools, and gadgets to get her into the building. It couldn’t have been her.”

  “Well, that’s good, but it still leaves us with the question of who planted the cameras. Do your simulations take things like teleportation and dimensional jumping into consideration?”

  Gears frowned. “No, but that’s not stuff she would’ve had access to. I thought about those phasilion things that Treggen uses, but you told me it takes weeks for them to move, so it’s unlikely one got in and out without us knowing.” He gestured to the cardboard box with the wires coming out of it that he’d been working on when I came in. “I’ve got some new equipment here. It’s going to help me run some additional tests and try a few new theories out.”

  “What’s under here?” I asked, lifting the corner of the box.

  “Gah!” Gears shot forward and slapped my wrist. I dropped the box and yelped, both in surprise and pain. His glowing yellow eyes were huger than normal, and his chest puffed in and out faster than I’d ever seen before. “Sorry, Vinnie, but that’s some very sensitive equipment under there. It is literally one of a kind, and I can’t let anyone know what it is, let alone tinker with it.”

  “Okay, Gears, no problem.” I looked at the tiny red welts on my wrist where Gears had hit me. That could’ve been a lot worse; Gearstripper’s claws can shred metal like those knives they show on late-night infomercials. “I came up here to see if you can run this through a translator,” I said as I handed him the page.

  Gears screwed up his face as he looked it over. “Weird. I’ve got a few things going on now,” he gestured around him, “but I should be able to start this up a little later tonight.”

  “Good enough, pal,” I said. I looked at the box again. “Gears, let’s say for a minute that Axle didn’t plant those cameras. That means that someone else did.”

  Gears nodded. “Like you said, my simulations don’t account for certain things. I’ll adjust for those in the future, but it seems that Treggen got someone else inside.” He gestured to a second
monitor, this one with dozens of mug-shot-style images. “This is every non-Caulborn who’s visited the office in the last twelve months: delivery people, repairmen, those caterers that Leslie brought in during Thanksgiving. They all check out.”

  “Keep digging, Gears. We need to figure this out.”

  He nodded. “By the way, Petra just texted me and said she wanted me to do some work on your oven. Is something wrong with it?”

  “She probably wants you to give it a tune up. Aphrodite’s coming for lunch on Saturday.”

  “Aphrodite’s coming?” Gears asked. I nodded and his expression became concerned. “I’ll make sure to bring more Twinkies for Petra.”

  “As many as you can carry,” I said as I waved goodbye and headed back to my office.

  I’d just sat down when my desk phone rang. “Ah, Vincent,” Mrs. Rita said. “I am glad you’re here. I have something in Medical you’ll want to see.” I jogged down to Medical and found Mrs. Rita standing over a steel table, dark wooden chopsticks poking out of her iron-gray bun. She beckoned me over and splayed out the fingers of her left hand. “See this?”

  The light caught on spindly threads wrapped around her fingers. “Looks like you’ve got fishing line wrapped around your hand,” I said.

  “I suppose it does,” she agreed. The she picked up a lighter from the table, flicked it open, and stuck her left hand directly into the flame.

  “Jesus!” I cried as I bent the flames away from her flesh with pyrokinesis.

  She just smiled at me. “Relax, Vincent. Release control of the fire.” I looked her square in the eyes. Her eyes crinkled as her smile broadened. “Petra is lucky to have one so chivalrous,” she said. “But trust me.”

  After a moment, I released control and the fire played up along Mrs. Rita’s aged, outstretched fingers. It took me a second. “It’s not burning you,” I said stupidly. “How is that possible?”

  “The fishing line, as you put it, is actually very fine silk, woven by the worms Joseph and I discovered.” Mrs. Rita is the only person I know who calls Doc Ryan by his first name. “They began weaving it a few hours ago and have already produced several meters of it.”