“Could you wait here for a few minutes?” I said. “I’m picking up danger loud and clear.”
“Of course!” Jan said. “Nathan, you might need your agent’s best friend.”
Ari smiled and brought out the Beretta.
“I’ve got my communicator,” Ari said. “I’ll call you when we’re about to leave.”
“Or if you’re not leaving, I’ll be here.” Jan drew his own gun. “Just in case.”
Ari led the way on a narrow dirt path into the trees. We put Willa in the middle, and I took the rear guard. As we walked, I began to gather Qi. I wrapped it into a loose skein, but I stayed ready to tighten it into a sphere in case I had to ensorcell someone—or something. The path led us through a pair of stone lions, half-broken and covered with graffiti and a pair of rusty iron gates. Overhead, the remains of an iron arch dangled like a threat. We walked through into waist-high weeds and scraggly second-growth saplings. For the first twenty yards or so, I heard birds chirping and calling, but just as we were about to come clear of the trees, they fell silent. I could hear the nearby ocean muttering on the beach at high tide. Ari held up one hand to signal a halt.
Ahead, on the other side of a long stretch of low-growing grass, I could see our goal, a marble statue of the goddess Diana, beautifully caught as she pulled an arrow from the quiver on her back. Beside her, a marble hunting dog leaped up in anticipation of the chase ahead. All around the grassy strip stood trees and banks of weeds. Nothing moved; nothing made a sound. Overhead, the yellow dust clouds glowed orange and magenta in the lowering sun. The ASTA turned me cold enough to shiver.
“We don’t want to go much farther,” I murmured.
“Very well.” Ari spoke just as softly. “Do you know why?”
I was about to answer that I didn’t when a second statue materialized about ten feet away. To be precise, I only perceived him as a statue, carved from the same white marble. He actually was an angel, St. Maurice in his after-death translation, a tall slender figure with huge wings. He wore a Roman tunic and armor, and at his side he carried a short sword. The ASTA ceased as soon as I identified him. When he beckoned to me, I started forward. Ari caught my arm and stopped me.
“What are you doing?” he snapped.
“St. Maurice is here,” I said. “I forgot you can’t see him. It’s safe now.”
“Neither can I,” Willa said. “Who? What?”
“Nathan can explain,” I said.
When Ari let me go, I trotted out onto the grass to meet the angel. Maurice greeted me in the Roman manner, one hand up, palm outward.
“Salve, filia,” he said.
“Salve, magister,” I said. “Si vales, valeo.”
“Valeo, sed obstat periculum vobis, periculum magnum.” He pointed at the statue. “Fractus est. Ponte nolite uti! Ducet vos a nihil—nihil per aeternitate.”
“Crud! I mean, gratias tibias magnas.”
He smiled and disappeared. I turned around and jogged back to the others.
“He says the bridge is broken. If we use it, it’ll lead us into nothingness. Permanent nothingness.”
“Oh kay!” Willa drawled the “okay” into two words. “Always good to know! I’ll be glad to take your invisible friend’s warning, but I’d also like a look at the gate. I guess that’s what he meant by bridge.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Makes sense. The names are only metaphors anyway.”
“It’s safe to cross the lawn now. I don’t see any sign of the old tunnel collapse.” I glanced at Ari. “The grass is a lot shorter than it was the last time we were here. Do you think someone’s mowed it?”
“Goats,” Ari said. “It’s been grazed. I recognize the cropping pattern. The little people who live out here must have acquired some livestock.”
“I keep forgetting that you started life as a farm boy,” I said. “Let’s go.”
As we walked across the lawn, I was intent on avoiding what the goats had left behind, but Ari kept looking around him. Although he carried the Beretta with the business end pointing down, he never holstered it. When we reached the statue, we found tribute laid on the base at Diana’s feet: a chipped white bowl of red wine, an orange, peeled and splayed on a little plate. Willa rummaged through her mesh bag and brought out a small black orb.
“I’ve never seen a black one before,” I said.
“It’s just a diagnostic,” Willa said. “Won’t take you anywhere.”
She held the orb chest high and began to walk around the statue. Every now and then the orb beeped, but it was a plaintive little sound. She’d gotten around to the other side when she called out to us.
“Come look at this!” she said.
I hurried around to join her. Ari followed more slowly, Beretta raised, his head turning as he scanned for possible enemies. On the statue’s base but behind the goddess, someone had left another offering—an unsealed white envelope, about six inches square, decorated with three Japanese characters in brushstrokes of black ink. My hands itched, as they always did when I saw or heard information I needed. When I picked up the envelope, something metal slithered around inside. I looked in and saw six coins and a thin detached braid of black hair.
“Something fell out.” Willa pointed at the ground.
I retrieved the narrow slip of rice paper. It had been inscribed—and misspelled—in the Roman alphabet: sayanara Scotty yer sakura.
“Whoa!” I snapped. “This could be raw coincidence, but Ash and Co. know about this gate. It’s how they got away from us, and I’m willing to bet they’ve used it since then.”
“Um,” Ari said, “what—”
“Six coins to cross the rivers in the land of the dead,” I said, “and a farewell note to someone named Scott. In a white envelope. White’s the color of mourning in Japan. An ironic gesture, maybe, if our arrogant murderer left it here to sneer at him and us. Maybe not ironic at all, if Izumi actually loved Trotter or, at least, liked him.”
“If so,” Ari said, “she’s the only person in the multiverse who did.”
“What I wonder,” I continued, “is why she’d leave it here instead of on Six.”
“So Ash wouldn’t find it, perhaps?” Ari said.
“Very good point. I bet it’s unhealthy to show any sympathy for one of Ash’s victims.”
“I’d expect so, yes.” He turned to our world-walker. “Danvers-Jones, what’s your diagnosis of the gate?”
“Dead as a doornail,” Willa said. “O’Grady’s invisible friend was right. I wonder if your suspect spiked it as she left?”
“That would be a logical move on her part,” Ari said. “Keep us from following.”
“It was unstable the last time we were here,” I put in. “My father said he wouldn’t trust it. The suspects must have been desperate enough to try with TWIXT moving in on them.”
“Then they got real lucky.” Willa paused for a shudder. “I don’t even want to think about where a broken gate would dump you. Permanent nothing, yeah. The big question is, would your wave packet spread fast enough so you’d never know what was hitting you? Let’s hope so.”
Ari holstered the Beretta. He pulled the silk handkerchief out of his suit coat’s breast pocket and handed it to me. “If you’ll wrap that envelope up without getting any more of your grubby fingerprints on it, we’ll take it with us. If it’s not relevant to the case, then my apologies to the spirits of the dead and all that, but it’s too interesting to leave behind.” He took out his communicator. “I’ll tell Hendriks we’re coming back.”
Jan drove the three of us back to the office. Willa used the trans-world router to contact the Guild about other possible gates or overlap areas to Six only to be told there were none in SanFran. The nearest lay several hundred miles to the north.
“Our best bet,” she told us, “would be to go back to Four and the overlap area there. Assuming it’s still open. I don’t like this, gates up and closing on us for no good reason.”
“A
good many people have been using stolen orbs,” Ari said. “Would that be having an effect?”
“Possibly, if they were using all of them at the same gate. Otherwise, no. I’m going to consult with the head of the Guild about this.” Willa turned to Jan. “How about a ride down to the overlap?”
“That’s why I left the car out.” Jan stood up. “We’d better leave before someone steals it, or parts of it, anyway.”
We returned to South Park on world level Three. The Dodger rally had ended some time before, though a drift of trash marked where the fans had gathered. An old woman, wearing three different calico housedresses, was searching through the trash and gathering the beer and soda bottles left in the litter. She could probably return them to a store for a few pennies each, I figured. When we walked past, she looked up and scowled at Willa as if she feared a possible rival.
Instead of fighting over the bottles, Willa took us straight back to world level Four and the clean, well-kept version of South Park. Before we left the overlap area, Ari decided to phone Spare14, and a good thing he did. The orders from TWIXT HQ had changed. Thanks to Willa’s report of the dead gate, Ari and I were being instructed to stay on our own world level until further notice.
“I’m to check with Spare14 first thing tomorrow,” Ari told us. “Danvers-Jones, the Guild wants you back at your HQ.”
“Tell Sneak to tell them I’m on my way.”
While Ari did so, Willa brought out her violet orb. She took a few steps away from us. I never saw her fade or vanish in a pool of light. All at once she simply wasn’t there.
CHAPTER 9
WE STARTED TO WALK the couple of blocks to the exorbitantly priced parking lot where we’d left the Saturn. We were passing through a neighborhood of warehouses and semi-industrial businesses. Large, faceless buildings, most white or gray, sprawled on either side of the wide streets. Loading docks and trucks filled the alleys that crossed the middle of the blocks. By then, rush hour had clogged the approach to the Bay Bridge which, in that location, around Third and Brannan, ran over the street on huge concrete pylons. I could smell the traffic jam in the drift of exhaust from the trapped cars above us. A good many drivers had given up and managed to return to ground level at the last exits. Honking, snarling traffic crawled along beside us.
We’d just turned off Brannan onto Third—I could see the baseball park looming in the distance ahead—when I heard an animal growl directly behind us. It sounded like a mix of lion and bear, loud and threatening. I glanced at Ari, who smiled at me. He’d heard nothing.
“I need to look behind us,” I said. “Let’s stop for a minute.”
He obliged. I swirled around and saw a monster. A large green reptile, red eyes, slavering mouth, huge teeth, and about the size of an SUV, crouched ready to spring. With another roar, it raised a nasty-looking clawed paw. I drew a Chaos ward and threw. It exploded in a rain of green crystals.
“Was anything there?” Ari said.
“Yes and no. An illusion or a Chaos critter. I don’t know which, but it’s gone now. Y’know, if I weren’t used to crud like this, I might have screamed and run right into the traffic.” I looked at the street, where large metal machines streamed by us at about fifteen miles an hour. “Squashed Nola all over the street would have been the result.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t joke about it.” Ari fixed me with a mournful stare. “And I also wish these apparitions were something I could shoot.”
“That’s one reason why I love you.” I slipped my arm through his. “Let’s go redeem the car from bondage. I want to go home.”
As we drove back to our flat, I tried to apply some logic to these illusions that kept threatening my life in their oddly indirect manner. Thinking helped me ignore Ari’s driving, which threatened my life directly. I finally decided that of my list of suspects, the psychic squid criminals from the alternate Venus were the most likely candidates. Ash and the Axeman would have come right after me with a knife. The Maculate leopard-woman from Terra Two had good reason to hate me but great difficulty in traveling in our world. She had three pairs of breasts, skin marked with rosettes like leopard spots, and ears at the top of her head. Other than at science fiction conventions, she would stand out too much in any crowd to be an effective assassin.
Could she have hired the cephalopods, that evolved mixed race of squid and cuttlefish, to take me out? An ugly possibility, but a real one. Worse yet, would she have put this hypothetical contract out on Ari instead of me? He’d shot and killed her lover. An even uglier possibility, but one that I needed to keep in mind, assuming that she knew what had happened to Claw, the mate in question. He’d died on a different world level than hers only a few weeks previous to this barrage of squid. It was possible that she still had no idea he was dead.
The cephalopods hated me because I’d broken up their ring of human allies and then arrested Belial, the leader of their advance squad. Belial had controlled enough power to try to murder me in a tentacles-on way, but apparently the current lot lacked his talent. Until they managed to find new human allies, their aquatic nature kept them from simply shooting me or running me over with a truck. They did have the means to act through images and illusions, because they possessed a machine, a form of trans-world router that allowed them to send psychic projections from their world to mine. I could assume that Bissop Keith had access to similar technology, though I doubted if he were in league with the cephalopods.
Add to this the Chaos critters in the form of squid—spies, probably, trying to pin down my exact location so their operators could focus their trans-world apparatus. It was possible that through these spies, their controllers had learned enough about our world to choose suitably frightening images to send. The recent reptile, for example, looked like something from a bad movie about cavemen and dinosaurs.
Once I started thinking about the squiddish critters that had appeared in our flat, it occurred to me to wonder how they knew where to find me. A red light had just forced Ari to stop his mad careen through the traffic.
“Ari,” I said, “does your mother know our mailing address?”
“Yes. I assumed it was safe to send it to her. After all, she is my mother.”
“I wonder if Flowertree has it, too, now.”
Ari swore in Hebrew. The light changed, and he laid on the horn in order to intimidate a large delivery van. The Saturn sprang ahead. I tried not to panic. When no crash occurred, I opened my eyes again.
“Sorry,” Ari said, “I never should have sent it to her. Actually, I did tell her—” He paused to swerve into the right lane in a blare of other people’s horns. “—not to give it to the husband. But I wouldn’t put it past him to go through her things when she’s out shopping or some such.”
“If we live to see home and my computer, I’ll ask her about it.”
“Of course we’ll live. Don’t be silly!”
I restrained myself from saying unladylike things in a loud voice. I murmured them to myself instead.
“Why are you worried about the address?” Ari said.
“Because Flowertree could be an ally of the psychic squid from the alternate Venus.”
When Ari made no reply, I glanced his way and ran a quick SPP. He was concentrating on his driving to suppress his memory that such cephalopods existed. I said nothing more rather than break the spell.
We stopped and had dinner on the way, but we did live to get home. Like the normal modern couple we pretended to be, we both went straight to our respective e-mail accounts as soon as we’d changed out of our business clothes. Ari retrieved his laptop and took it into the kitchen to work at the table there. Since my desktop was running its security routines, I joined him.
“Ari, darling, my beloved,” I said. “If you’ve received more information on Ash and the Axeman, please remember that I have need to know.”
“I will. The question is, will HQ allow me to share the intel?”
I set my hands on my hips. He squirmed in his c
hair, a good sign. I glanced at the laptop screen—filled with Hebrew letters.
“Ari, come off it!” I said. “You’re willing enough to pipeline everything you think they’ll want to your deep cover agency in Israel. Why not give me what I need?”
He actually blushed. “Oh, very well!” he said, and while he sounded surly, at least he was talking about the problem. “I’ve pointed out to Spare14 as well as to HQ that, without you, we’d have precious few leads in the Agent Trotter murder case.”
“You’ve got a handler at HQ already? Huh. Interesting. They really want you onboard.”
He snarled at his slipup. I grinned. In a moment he sighed and smiled himself, albeit sheepishly.
“The real problem,” Ari continued, “is the Agency. As long as they keep you on observer only status, HQ will wonder why and not trust you. You very much need to convince Y that you absolutely must have full freedom to act during this case.”
“I’ll send him a stiff e-mail tonight.”
Before I did so, I checked my non-Agency e-mail because I knew there would be less of it than the official business. In that queue I found only two messages: some pictures of her infant son from my old buddy Mira Rosen and a letter from Ari’s mother. Shira Flowertree was planning on visiting her friend Barbara, the woman who owned the videoconferencing equipment, the next afternoon. Afternoon, that is, London time. Her suggested hour worked out to seven AM in San Francisco. Since Ari had to be up early, anyway, to see what Spare14 and HQ had decided for our next move, I agreed.
I switched over to TranceWeb. I found a long queue of routine Agency mail to work through after I sent off my blistering missive to Y. As I answered bureaucratic queries, I found it harder and harder to concentrate. I kept turning around in my desk chair, expecting to see Chaotic squid images or critters floating around the living room. None were. Slowly my unease crystallized into a Semi-Automatic Warning Mechanism, as the Agency terms them. I logged out and left the computer to walk into the hall. I could see through the kitchen door that Ari was still working with the laptop. I noticed he’d changed over to English.
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