Dark Kingdoms

by Richard Lee Byers

  "Do you like him, then? I imagined otherwise."

  "I appreciate his virtues. I can't afford to like him just at present. He seems to think that his own place at court won't be secure until he drives a wedge between you and any other courtier in whom you've chosen to repose any trust. Which is to say, he's fallen victim to a case of the same envy and ambition that you believe afflicts your fellow Deathlords."

  "Perhaps I'm doing them an injustice," Potter said. "But it's hard to trust people when you don't even know their names and have never even seen their faces. I often wonder why the Emperor forbade us to reveal our human identities even to one another." He grimaced. "He probably figured that if we never became intimate, we'd never dare to conspire against him."

  Demetrius uttered a noncommittal grunt.

  "I often imagine that some of the others have broken the prohibition," Potter continued moodily. "I can see them, faces bare, whispering in some secret crypt. Sometimes I picture all six of them there, plotting the destruction of the only person they've elected to leave on the outside."

  Demetrius frowned. "Forgive me for saying so, my lord, but that is paranoid."

  "Probably so," Potter sighed. "Why don't you prophesy for me? With luck, your findings will reassure me. And then you can quell my Shadow. Perhaps it's responsible for my more troublesome fancies."

  As always, he felt somewhat sheepish making such a request. A quasi-divine entity like a Deathlord was supposed to be a supreme master of every conceivable Arcanos. He shouldn't require the talents of some other Oracle to interpret the weave of destiny for him, nor should he need the services of a Pardoner at all. But in Potter's experience, the old notion that a seer couldn't foretell his own future was absolutely valid. And while Charon had granted him reserves of willpower and spiritual strength that lesser wraiths could scarcely imagine, the ugly realities of governing the Hierarchy, the daily trafficking in war, execution, and slavery, nourished the dark parasite lurking inside him to an astonishing degree.

  Demetrius's long, thin-lipped mouth tightened. "As I've warned you before, my lord, that isn't a good idea."

  The advisor did indeed raise the same objections every time. An Oracle denied the opportunity to read the deathmarks graven in a supplicant's countenance stood a fair chance of misinterpreting that individual's karma, while a Pardoner ignorant of his client's history might conceivably strengthen his Shadow instead of weakening it.

  Potter felt a sudden, reckless urge to go ahead and fling his visor away. Establish a genuine intimacy with someone. What kind of bizarre joke had Charon played on him anyway, granting him the power of a god but isolating him from every other person in the universe?

  But he knew he wouldn't unmask, nor should he need to. Demetrius was one of the most gifted Oracles or Pardoners he'd ever encountered. That was one reason the Deathlord had welcomed him into his inner circle of lieutenants so rapidly, much to the chagrin of Montrose and certain others.

  "Please," said Potter. "You've always done an adequate job so far:"

  Demetrius grimaced. "'So far' is the proper way of putting it. Still, if my lord commands it..."

  Potter inclined his head.

  "Then I suppose we might as well sit over there." The two Hierarchs walked to an alcove occupied by a low, round table and three chairs. Demetrius extracted a pack of cards from the folds of his toga, sat down opposite his master, and handed the pasteboards to him. "You know what to do. Shuffle and then cut the deck twice with your left hand."

  "The hand closer to the heart," said Potter wryly, removing his steel gauntlets. The cards whirred as he riffled them. "Even though the Restless don't have hearts. And most people would say that Deathlords are even more heartless than most."

  "You aren't heartless," the Oracle said. "And in any case, the symbolism is still valid."

  Potter set the deck down Leaning forward, Demetrius turned the first card over and laid it face up on the table. The illustration depicted a high stone wall with a door set midway up. A figure standing on the ground, out of reach, gazed up at the portal in seeming frustration or perplexity.

  "The Rampart," Demetrius said. "You feel cut off. Friendless and alone. Vulnerable."

  Potter sighed. "I didn't need you to tell me that."

  Demetrius turned a second card. The new one depicted a man crouched over an open coffin in a mausoleum. Knife in hand, he was violating the corpse of a lovely young woman, cutting off her fingers to steal her rings. The Oracle stiffened.

  "What is it?" Potter asked.

  "The Tomb Robber," Demetrius said. "Sometimes called the Archaeologist or the Resurrection Man."

  "I know that," said Potter impatiently. "Tell me what it means."

  "There are a number of possible interpretations..."

  "Stop stalling and tell me what you see in it.now."

  Demetrius grimaced. "Betrayal, my lord. Someone, perhaps several someones, will try to do you grievous harm."

  Potter glared at him. "Why were you unwilling to warn me of that?"

  "Because I'm not at all certain I'm right, and I wouldn't want to alarm you needlessly, or turn you against some innocent person."

  "But this agrees with the visions from the statuette. It confirms what I feel every time I see the other Deathlords in council. How many validations do you need?"

  Demetrius shook his head. "Perhaps I simply don't want to believe such a thing. The Hierarchy can survive a lot of political maneuvering, but if you Deathlords Start trying-to assassinate, one another—"

  "I need to knovv who my enemies are, and precisely what they're planning," Potter said. "Turn the final card."

  Demetrius obeyed, revealing a picture of an ebony mask covered with upraised runes. Darkness seemed to shimmer in the left eye hole, almost as if it: were a Nihil. The pasteboard emerged from the deck upside down.

  "The Visor reversed," the Oraclesaaid. "All three cards are Greater Trumps. Your current situation is of the greatest possible consequence,/'

  "In other words, I'm in the greatest possible danger."

  Demetrius hesitated, then said, "That's certainly conceivable."

  "What more does the Visor tell you?"

  "Nothing," Demetrius said.

  Potter glared at him. "How can that be? I've seen you spend half an hour interpreting a three-card spread like this."

  "The Visor masks the countenance of fate. I can't see any more."

  Potter felt a surgficof fury, which energized the godlike persona resident in his mask. Springing up, he seized his halberd, whirled it over his head, and, despite the close quarters, effortlessly-poised the gleaming black blade for a thrust at his minister's head.

  "How dare you try my patience with lies and evasions?" the Deathlord thundered. "I can tell that you do see something more. What is it?"

  Demetrius quivered. "Forgive me, my lord. What I saw is simply what I warned you of already. It's your own mask, your own secrecy, which prevents me from helping you any further."

  Potter's anger and feeling of near omnipotence ebbed, giving way to a bitter Sense of frustration. Once again, he had to resist the temptation to bare his face and tell the Oracle his name. "We'll just have to keep trying," he said glumly, even though he suspected the effort would prove ijseless.

  Abruptly he felt his Shadow stirring inside him. The sensation wasn't truly physical, but it still conveyed a sense of frenetic activity,, as if the. dark side of his nature was dancing with glee. He could almost hear it taunting him with a kind of singsong chant. We're going to di—ie, we're going to di—ie, we're going to di—ie—

  He tried to block the Shadow from his awareness, but it was impossible. The spiritual parasite had waxed too powerful, battening on his distress;. He sat back down. "Thank you for the divination," he said to Demetrius. "Now give me your Pardon. And I'd appreciate it if you'd hurry."

  Eighteen

  After he finished his third drink, Nolliver zapped the TV off, hauled himself up off the couch, and trudged toward his st
udy. He left the liter of Johnnie Walker Black sitting on the coffee table. He always needed alcohol to fortify himself for the ordeal ahead, but he couldn't drink while it was actually occurring. It would have felt like a kind of sacrilege to do so.

  Stacks of professional journals sat atop his carved maple desk, while a shelf crammed with psychiatric texts ran along the wall above it. As he sat down, a little unsteadily, in his leather swivel chair, he thought, I don't have to put myself through this. But that wasn't true. There were evenings when he did have to look, and this was one of them.

  He fumbled his key ring out of his pocket, unlocked the bottom left-hand drawer, pulled it open, and removed the fat yellow folder lying atop the .38 Special, a weapon he'd purchased one drunken weekend when his suicidal impulses were particularly compelling. Leaning back, he began to review the file.

  Everything was there. The arrest and court documents, his interview notes, affidavits from social workers, teachers, and probation officers, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory profiles the psychologist had provided. His own recommendations that four vicious young criminals be released back into the community. And, of course, the newspaper accounts of the murders that Billy Cantrell had subsequently committed. Two men, a woman, and a tittle girl gunned down in the course of a carjacking.

  Nolliver's eyes ached, brimming with tears. Even after all these years, he wondered how it had all gone so wrong. The four offenders he'd lied for had only been boys! They'd deserved another chance, hadn't they, no matter how much trouble they'd caused in school, or how elevated their scores on the Psychopathy scale of the MMPI. What had been the alternative? Try them as adults and send them to prison? Surely that would have ended any hope of their ever adjusting to society. And in many ways, Billy had seemed the least malevolent in the lot. There'd been an underlying vulnerability—

  Nolliver grimaced, disgusted with himself. How pathetic that he could romanticize the little monster even after everything that had happened. Billy had been a sadistic, amoral punk with subnormal intelligence. Unfortunately, he'd also possessed an angelic face and body beautiful enough to seduce a shy, lonely pedophile into imagining hidden virtues where none existed.

  After the murders, Nolliver had waited, half in dread and half with a masochistic eagerness, for somebody to discover that he'd traded favorable evaluations for sex, or at least to question his competence. But no one ever had. The truth of the matter was that predicting criminal recidivism was such an inexact science that people rarely found it remarkable when a shrink or a caseworker made a bad call.

  Though Nolliver hadn't endured prosecution or professional disgrace, he hadn't escaped punishment either. He'd simply punished himself, with impotence and alcohol. Desperate to ameliorate his guilt, he'd joined the Bureau and VICAR He'd spend the remainder of his career helping to take murderers off the streets.

  And for a while, it had helped. He hadn't felt cleansed. He'd known he never would. But sometimes he'd managed simply to do his work and live his life for hours at a time without his guilt and self-loathing coming to the forefront of his mind.

  That had changed when Dunn came to him, revealed that, somehow, he knew the psychiatrist's sordid secret, and demanded cooperation in return for his silence. Nolliver had tried to tell himself that the arrangement was nothing he couldn't live with. He'd surmised—accurately, as it turned out-~-that the SAD agent would call On him only rarely. And then Nolliver would merely use his professional powers of persuasion to convince investigators that they hadn't really experienced any paranormal phenomena after all. How much harm could that do?

  Yet as soon as he capitulated to: Dunn's blackmail, he'd sensed his life spinning out of control again, hurtling toward a second disaster. And sure enough, in due time,; the catastrophe arrived. Once again he'd borne false witness, to discredit Bellamy, and now his every instinct warned him that as a result, another innocent person was going to die.

  Unless Nolliver prevented it.

  He could. Dunn had contacted him earlier today to say that his "people" had failed to apprehend Bellamy in Jackson Square, and that Nolliver should try to set up a rendezvous if the younger man contacted him. By escaping, Bellamy had given the psychiatrist another chance to reveal the truth to Hanson, who could then mobilize the resources necessary to locate, his subordinate and keep him safe.

  The catch, of course, was that Nolliver couldn't inform on Dunn without informing on himself as well. Then his life as he knew it would come to an end. Not that he truly enjoyed his existence, but still, to have his secret shame exposed to the world! To stand revealed.as a liar, a pederast, and, in effect, an accomplice to murder! He didn't know if he could bear it.

  He looked down at the papers rattling faintly in his tremulous hands. A black- and-white newspaper photo of a car with four shrouded bodies laid out on the ground beside it was on top of the sheaf.

  Hoiv will you feel knowing that Bellamy's dead, too? he asked himself. Will that be any better that losing this shabby little pretense of a life you have now, posing as a decent human being and drinking yourself to death?

  Abruptly he knew that it wouldn't. Eager to act quickly, before he lost his nerve, he made a grab for the phone on the desk.

  Clumsy with intoxication, he only managed to knock the receiver off the Cradle. The dial tone whined. And then the smell of tobacco that clings to a smoker's hair and clothing suffused the air.

  Nolliver froze. It's like the stench of the bodies from the morgue, he told himself frantically. It's all in my mind, Dunn couldn't just appear in my house out of nowhere.

  A large, rather hairy hand with slightly yellow fingertips reached from Nolliver and hung up the phone. "Hello, Doc," said Dunn. "I hope you don't mind me dropping by. You keep saying that it would be better if we talk away from the office."

  Nolliver jerked his chair around. "How did you get in here?" he demanded, his voice breaking in the middle of the question.

  Dunn smiled. "You've got pretty good home security, but nothing a real pro can't handle. Who were you about to call?"

  "I was going to have some supper delivered."

  Dunn gestured at the papers in Nolliver's hands. "Does reliving all this give you an appetite? Of course, I'm no psychiatrist, but that's hard to understand."

  Nolliver realized that he didn't like looking up at the other man. It made him feel vulnerable and subservient. But at the same time, he was afraid to stand up. "I have to eat," he said. "No matter how much I regret the past, life has to go on."

  "Not necessarily," said Dunn.

  Nolliver trembled. "What do you mean?"

  "That you might as well cut the crap. I know you were calling Hanson. I could smell it on you, even through the stink of the whiskey."

  "That isn't true!" Nolliver said.

  "It's a shame," Dunn continued, as if psychiatrist hadn't even spoken. "Hanson couldn't help Bellamy anyway. No one could. In the unlikely event that my friends in New Orleans can't throw a net over him, I'll go down there and catch him myself. But that's tomorrow's little problem. Right now we're focusing on you."

  "I'm telling you, I'm loyal!" Nolliver said.

  "I wish that was true," Dunn replied. "But you know, even if it was, you've been falling apart for months. Changing from an asset to a liability. A loose end I need to tie off."

  Nolliver's bladder felt swollen. For a moment he thought he was going to wet his pants. He realized that, despite his guilt, he wanted to live, if only to undo the harm he'd done to Bellamy. And ironically, his .38 seemed to represent his only hope of surviving the next few minutes. He dangled his arm beside his chair and stealthily began to move his hand toward the drawer containing the gun.

  Simultaneously, hoping that conversation would keep Dunn from noticing what he was doing, he said, "You haven't really been carrying out orders from SAD, have you? You're a rogue agent."

  "Sure," said the man in the suede jacket. "Deep down, you've known that for a long time. Although the term 'infilt
rator' might be more accurate, since I was never truly on the Bureau's side to begin with. My real job has always been to keep SAD or any other part of the government from finding out anything much about the paranormal."

  Nolliver's groping fingers brushed the cold metal handle of the drawer. Now, he realized, he'd have to pull it open, grab the .38, lift it, and shoot, all before the lithe, powerful Dunn could jump him. And a minute ago, he hadn't even been able to pick up a phone!

  Was there any chance at all that he could talk his way out of danger instead? "If you kill me, the Bureau will find out about you. I left sealed letters with a number of people, to be opened in the event of my death."

  Dunn smiled like a parent dismissing a child's transparent lie. "No, you haven't."

  Nolliver's fingers closed around the drawer handle. But he found he couldn't make himself open it, for fear of provoking Dunn into killing him now, as opposed to one or two precious minutes from now.

  "I beg you," the psychiatrist said, "let me live. I swear I'll cooperate. Think about it—if you murder me, there's a good chance that the Bureau will figure out who did it. Your work inside SAD will be over. Even if you manage to avoid immediate capture, you'll be on the run for the rest of your life."

  "That's an interesting perspective," Said Dunn, "but I'm afraid I can't buy into it. It would require me to trust you, which I don't anymore. Besides, I'm not worried about exposure. I can make it look like poor, troubled Dr. Nolliver committed suicide. Everybody in the Bureau will believe it, especially when the truth about Billy Cantrell comes out.

  "In other words, you can't talk me out of this. If I were you, I'd go ahead and make a try for that gun in your desk. It's your only chance."

  Nolliver gaped at Dunn, stunned to learn that the rogue had known about the revolver all along. Then he jerked around in his chair, tore open the drawer, and fumbled madly for the weapon.

  To his surprise, he was actually quick enough to snatch it up. But the instant he did, a hand gripped the back of his neck and jerked him into the air. Thrashing, he blindly pointed the .38 over his shoulder. Before he could squeeze the trigger, Dunn tore the firearm out of his grasp, painfully wrenching his fingers in the process.