by Frank Hurt
“Roy, I never said I wouldn’t talk to him. I’ve got more pressing things to take care of right now. You called me up six times, making me think there’s some sort of disaster happening. Some sort of emergency.”
“This is an emergency. I need you to talk to the Deputy Viceroy. I demand that you talk to him.”
“Oh do you? You’re demanding it now, Roy?” It was Ember’s turn to laugh humorlessly. She clenched her jaw as her other hand balled into a fist against the steering wheel of the parked Ranger. “What’s with everyone suddenly demanding things from me, like I’m some sort of wish fulfillment vending machine? Did a memo go out that I missed? Is there an ad on the telly: ‘call Ember Wright for all your demands’?”
“Listen to—”
“Bollocks,” she said, cutting him off. “You listen to me, Roy. If you think your cousin is so reliable and in-the-know why do you need me to be an intermediary? Why don’t you call up the Deputy Viceroy and talk to him yourself? When are you going to stop playing the victim and start taking charge of your own life? You’ve been relying on the goodwill of the Schmitts—”
“I am not acting like a victim! I’m disabled! How dare you—”
“No, how dare you, Roy. Where’s Arnie Schmitt at right now, huh? I’ll bet he’s out working alongside his brother, taking care of his family. He’s no more disabled than you are, but he’s unwilling to sit at home and whinge while he waits for others to take care of him. Meanwhile, his own wife is putting her life on hold to cook and clean for you and the others, while you just mope around and blame everyone else for everything. You’re an ungrateful martyr, that’s what you are.”
Roy sputtered into the phone. Before he had a chance to translate his rage into words, Ember landed the finishing blow.
“I’m not going to stop helping you and the other Mandaree Scouts, Roy. But you had better start learning how to show some appreciation for those of us who are trying to help. You had better start taking charge of your own life and quit relying on others to prop you up.”
“Propping me up? I don’t—”
“And one last thing: next time you call me in a panic with demands, it had better be a legitimate emergency.”
She snapped the phone shut, disconnecting the call in the middle of Roy’s belligerent retort. Her fist pounded the steering wheel three times while she belted out her frustrations in the form of a long, unintelligible roar.
Several heartbeats later she muttered, “well that went well.”
Ember sighed, running her fingers through her hair as she calmed herself. She uttered an apology to her red Ranger, started the engine, and put the pickup into gear.
17
Some Explaining to do
Her temper cooled a little more with every mile she put between herself and the city. The red Ranger pickup carried her west on Highway 2, humming along as just one more vehicle in the parade of travelers to and from the oil patch.
It fascinated Ember to witness the traffic transform both in quantity and in composition as she drove deeper into oil country. Sedans and passenger vehicles became rare even as eighteen-wheelers and oversized pickups took over.
The divided highway served as the main westward artery through the northern half of the Williston Basin. Semi-trucks dominated the roadway, carrying all manner of supplies: drill pipe and production casing, pallets shrink-wrapped and stacked high with bags of barite, calcium chloride, and bentonite. Flatbeds loaded with building supplies and skid shacks. Low-boys with heavy earth-movers. Transit mixers, their rotating drums filled with cement slurry. Tanker trailers hauled hydrocarbons or produced water or fresh water.
It really was a parade, if the floats were sponsored by the energy industry. If, also, the parade was traveling at 75 miles per hour at a minimum, with most of the participants jostling for position by leap-frogging one another in a race against the clock. With traffic as dense as it was, the winners would arrive at their destinations only sixty to ninety seconds faster than those with more patience and a better sense of defensive driving.
It seemed, too, that nearly every state in the western half of the country was represented. License plates for North Dakota comprised barely half of the total, with the remainder from Minnesota, Montana, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and others she couldn’t identify as they flew past. Word had gotten out that there were generous-paying jobs to be had in North Dakota. The young and the ambitious were answering the call. For those who were willing to get dirty and put in long hours in uncomfortable conditions, they could earn six figures each year they endured the demands of the boom.
Ember thought of Alarik and Arnold, of their Schmitt Brothers Welding business. The two of them and their utility truck traveled from job site to job site, earning a premium for their jack-of-all-trades skills. If it could be welded, they could do it. Rik offered to take her along to the rigs, to see the massive machines up close. She had yet to take him up on the offer, but she thought she might like to do so, soon.
She stopped in Tioga, North Dakota, for fuel—both for herself and for the pickup. The surface around the gas pump islands of the local Kum & Go convenience store was an uneven sea of broken concrete and muddy gravel. Her tidy little pickup was out of place, surrounded by grubby-looking fleet trucks clad with dried mud as their armor over what would otherwise be white paint. Most vehicles bore the logos of oilfield service companies and were crammed with tools and equipment the purposes which Ember could only guess.
She, too, was out of place. The only woman as far as she could see, was her. Her hair appeared golden in the sunlight and was pulled back in a ponytail over her black leather jacket. She felt acutely aware of the imbalanced gender ratio as she noticed the rough oilfield workers watching her. One of the men held the door open for her as she stepped into the convenience store. She offered him a guarded smile but made a point of buying her supplies and not lingering. They’re all probably just harmless and friendly, but I don’t need to test that hypothesis.
Her lunch would be a bag of potato chips, a prepackaged ham sandwich of dubious freshness, and a bottle of water. The assortment rustled in a plastic bag on the passenger side floorboard as she continued her trek now due north.
The Motorola rang in her jacket pocket. She flipped it open without looking at the screen.
A gruff smoker’s timbre said, “Wright? You’ve got some explaining to do.”
“Duncan,” Ember said curtly.
“Where the hell are you? And why weren’t you at this morning’s staff meeting? You’ve not even set foot in the office, near as I can tell.”
She coiled up, preparing to fire back a restive rebuke. She was in the right, after all. He would still be a puppet to Elton if it wasn’t for her intervention with the Deference Spell. He was a stick-in-the-mud bureaucrat who seemed bent on being an obstacle to her. He was her supervisor in name only, as far as she was concerned.
Maybe it was the fatigue of too many sleepless evenings populated by variations of the same recurring nightmare. Maybe it was the regret she was feeling for the way she dismissed Nancy and Barnaby in the Archives, or the way she shrugged off Jackie’s eager but poorly timed good intentions. Perhaps it was the morning’s conversation with Wallace, how he urged her to stop pushing away potential allies.
Whatever the reason, Ember lacked the will to argue. So, she said simply, “You know what, you’re right, Duncan.”
“You insist on defying the chain of—”
“I said you’re right, Duncan.” She said it louder this time. She turned off the highway and onto a gravel approach where she stopped, shifting the pickup into park. “You’re right, I’m wrong. I’ve been an arsehole to you. You’re the department head, and I need to stop undermining you in front of the staff. No, not just then—I need to stop undermining you altogether. You deserve my respect. I apologize for my insubordination, Duncan.”
Duncan Heywood stammered, caught off guard by her response. “You’ve got t
o attend these meetings, Wright. They’re mandatory.”
“I know I do,” she sighed. “I’ll be there at tomorrow’s. Promise.”
“Where are you now? Why didn’t you clock in? Roberts said you took off in a hurry, said something about an emergency.”
“I kind of left Jackie hanging, yeah. I thought it was an emergency, but it wasn’t. I’m chasing a lead on the missing persons case.” Ember didn’t want to be too specific. “I’m near Tioga. I know I should’ve checked in before I left town.”
The fight seemed to have left Duncan. He said, “I was young and impulsive once, too. Believe it or not, I once was. I remember getting fixated on a case to the point of forgetting everyone around me. They may have cared about me, but I only cared about my case. It takes its toll, being a good Investigator.”
“I suppose it does,” Ember said.
“I was married once, Wright. Bet you didn’t know that.”
“Can’t say that I did.”
“She was a good woman. Too good for me. I never told her that, but maybe I should have while I could. This job saw to it that she wouldn’t stick around,” Duncan exhaled into the phone. “This job we share, Wright. It’s a calling. A curse. A way of life we can’t escape. We’ll sacrifice everything for justice, people like you and me. What makes for a good Investigator also makes for shitty social skills.”
“Yes, sir.” She didn’t know what else to say.
“You’re worse than I was, I think. Than I used to be. Nothing will get between you and solving your cases. Livingston is that way, too. I see why he chose you as his partner. He’s not a man to let people get in his way, either.”
A moment of silence followed, and then Duncan said, “this is the part where you say, ‘oh no, Director Heywood, you’re not in my way.’”
She allowed herself a chuckle, but only said, “yes, sir.”
“I’d tell you not to do like I did, but I know you won’t listen. Just be careful out there, Wright. I know you can handle yourself, but I wish you’d take Roberts with you.”
“Jackie’s a good Investigator,” Ember admitted. “I’ll not be so quick to dismiss her going forward.”
He cleared his throat awkwardly. Confession time was over. “Carry on. I expect you’ll have something interesting to report at tomorrow’s staff meeting.”
She made sure the connection was broken before she said aloud, “Right. That was unexpected.”
A memory of Barnaby Harrison’s sandpaper voice growled in her head, “an Inquisitor’s life is a solo existence.”
Ember shook her head, sending the memory away. It wasn’t in Ember’s DNA to cleave to fate.
Before exiting the vehicle, she turned the Ranger’s nose into the wind so it could serve as a break from the breeze. The mage sat now on the open tailgate, the topper’s rear window flipped up above her head as a crude shelter. Her satchel laid in the pickup box beside her, a water bottle propped up against it. The sandwich was half-eaten as were the accompanying potato chips. She was just hungry enough to find the c-store sandwich satisfying.
Around her, the fields were an amalgam of browns and tans, russet and ocher. The ditches along each road managed to remain mostly verdant, with wild rice swaying in the wetter spots. A meadowlark’s distinctive voice provided dinner music, the frequency of its song capable of penetrating windows and wind alike. The tall, dried prairie grasses rustled and swayed in the howling wind, experiencing their last stand before eventual snowfall would collapse their canopies into the earth.
She took a swig of water to wash down the rest of her sandwich. After she found the meth lab, she would need to figure out a way to set it alight without burning up half the countryside. Between the winds and the desiccated autumn landscape, she didn’t want her debut as an amateur arsonist to end up destroying some innocent rancher’s pastures.
The mage would need to actually find the lab, first.
Doug Demorrett gave her directions starting at the tiny settlement of McGregor. The only problem was that his directions were not street-by-street but rather overland: “as the crow flies,” he had said. The saying was a little too literal in this case.
She pulled her notepad free from the satchel so she could review those directions. The notepad decided to bring a weathered photograph along with. It was the sepia photo she had stolen from the Archives.
Ember held the photo with both hands, protecting it from the wind’s intended thievery. The portrait revealed details in the bright noon sunlight. The building in the background was scarcely a skeletal frame of timber scaffolding. It was unclear what the street was paved with, though she suspected it was dirt and rock.
The men in the photo were indeed smartly-dressed. She studied Barnaby Harrison. He looked grumpy even in the photo, just as she knew him to be in the afterlife as well. He may have been the oldest of the assembled figures, though it was difficult to say with the resolution.
Next to him was the man he had identified as Billy Colton. She brought the photo up to her nose, tilting it to avoid shrouding it with shade. Billy Colton did bear a strong resemblance to Viceroy Roth, now that the suggestion had been planted in her head. It was of course not the Viceroy—it couldn’t be, as Barnaby said. Not unless the man was an ageless immortal.
The other three men in the photo were anonymized by a crease across their faces, where the photograph had been folded by some careless handler before it had been pressed between the pages of that aged record book. These men also wore suit vests, their sleeves long and white. Peering closely at the crease itself, she could see part of the face of one man.
Unlike the others, this one man was smiling. No, not merely smiling; his teeth were showing in a wide, generous grin. There was something about that smile that gave her a sense of déjà vu. His face seemed familiar to Ember. His was a smile so distinctively toothy, so unnaturally broad, it reminded her of a shark’s grin.
18
Not the Solution We’d Planned
To Elton Higginbotham’s thinking, conversing with Geoff Shadbolt was like trying to talk to a chicken before it was fed alive to a pack of hungry, feral dogs. It was a pointless exercise of self-amusement.
Not that the Deputy Viceroy had ever been anything more than a poor conversationalist, to begin with. The musician was perhaps a genius when it came to his chosen art form, but Geoff was inept in nearly every other aspect of life. He didn’t have any deep philosophical perspective. He didn’t seem too bothered by the goings-on between people as exhibited by how little he paid attention to events around him. He was forever unkempt and had a peculiar odor that Elton found offensive.
“Geoff, I must ask you a personal question.”
“Oh. Anything, Elton.”
“Why in the world do you always smell like cheese? Don’t you bathe?” Elton’s nostrils flared as he sniffed the air.
Geoff shrugged self-consciously but without any hint of apology, his fingers thrumming the table in a nervous pattern to a song only he could hear. “Oh. I…I eat a lot of Cheetos. I guess that must be why?”
Elton frowned at the scraggly-bearded man whose rapidly-blinking absinthe green eyes seemed incapable of meeting the gaze of others. Even before the Deference Spell Elton forced upon the mage had taken root all those decades ago, Geoff was a timid little chicken. That personality quirk remained unchanged. Only now, it was joined with blind obedience.
“They should be here soon,” Elton declared as he glanced at the Rolex on his wrist. “Are you nervous, Geoff?”
“No, Elton. Should I be nervous?” The Deputy Viceroy’s fingers continued thrumming on the Eighth Floor boardroom table.
I’m about to pour gasoline on you and then toss you into a lit dumpster. Elton flashed a humorless grin. “I suppose not. You’ll tell them exactly what I instructed you to say. They’ll get all wound up, and you’ll be blamed. I’ll rush out for help, leaving you alone with them. It’ll all be over before you know it. No need to be nervous.”
“Oh. Th
en they’ll…they’ll kill the messenger.” Geoff made the statement so dispassionately, it was as if he was describing a character in a movie, rather than himself.
“That’s the plan.”
“I began writing a new song yesterday,” Geoff said. He continued tapping the pads of his fingers on the table’s surface. “I thought of it in the morning after I saw a maze someone drew. I felt inspired. I suppose I won’t get to finish writing the song now.”
“Not if everything goes to plan, no.”
“Oh. Do you suppose it’ll hurt when they kill me?”
“I’d be surprised if it didn’t,” Elton admitted. “You aren’t having second thoughts, are you Geoff? Are you going to disappoint me?”
The man shook his head so eagerly he was likely to give himself whiplash. “No, Elton. I’ll do as…as you instructed. I won’t let you down.”
“I would be truly amazed if you did. Now stop with that incessant table-tapping.”
Deference Spells were intriguing bits of sorcery. Elton observed that once he had instilled the seed of one such spell onto a target, the spell tended to grow on its own, overwhelming the individual and strengthening. In time, it would cure like concrete. The target would invariably fall further and further beneath Elton’s influence. Simple-minded NonDruws with weak auras were guaranteed to become lastingly obedient after a single dosing of the spell.
Higher-level Malverns, on the other hand, tended to benefit from a follow-up dose of the spell to ensure compliance. But as sure as night followed day, a good Deference Spell served as loyalty insurance like nothing else could rival.
A soft knock on the boardroom door broke the silence. A young woman opened the door and announced, “they’re here.”
“Very good,” Elton flashed a grin. “All of them?”
“I believe so, sir, yes.”
“Send them in.” He stood up, fastening a single button on his suit jacket. He ran his thumb across his salt-and-pepper mustache and affixed a broad shark-grin. Elton stepped over to the doorway, ensuring nobody could slip past without making contact with him. He adjusted the zaffre Leystone ring on his finger and began drawing mana from it.
