House of the Sun s-17

by Nigel D Findley

  I guess Pele, goddess of the earth and of volcanoes, got a mite ticked that nobody was placating her with blood anymore, but it took her a while to do something about it. (You know how it is with goddesses: never a free moment…) In 2018, Haleakala, a huge volcano on the island of Maui, blew its top. Well, not its top, really, more like its side. A ridge on the volcano's west side collapsed, and a massive lava flow obliterated the luxury hotels and tourist traps of Wailea and Keokea. (Tourist fluff still refers to the area-a lava rock wasteland-as "Pompeii of the Pacific")

  In any case, in the twentieth century Puowaina had become a military cemetery for the United States-the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a kind of "Arlington West." Predictably, it didn't stay that way after Secession. The government, under Gordon Ho's dad, exhumed all the bodies-more than 26,000 of them-and shipped them all back to the mainland, with appropriate honors. (That slotted off more than a few Americans, of course, but after the Thor shots at the Pearl Harbor task force, nobody really dared push the point too hard.)

  And that's where The Bus dropped me off in the middle of a baking-hot Hawai'i afternoon, Puowaina, now a public park. A pretty place, an ancient, eroded volcanic crater shaped something like a big bowl. Grassy and green-did that mean artificial irrigation? not necessarily, I supposed- with trees and flowers-forty or so hectares of peace just twenty minutes from the pressure of downtown. From the rim of the crater I imagined you'd get a spectacular view of Honolulu, in all its finery, but I didn't bother looking. More immediate things were attracting my attention.

  The Hawai'i National Police Force copmobiles-two of them-were crisp tropical white with rainbow logos on the doors, not the blue and gold of Lone Star Seattle. But it takes more than a flashy paint job to make a Chrysler-Nissan Patrol One look anything other than brutal and threatening. Only half the strobes on the two vehicles' light-bars were operating, but I still had to shield my eyes from the glare. A couple of cops-what had Scott called them? Na Maka'i, that's right-were squatting down, doing something vaguely forensic, near a little copse of flowering trees. Another uniformed officer was sitting on the ground, back up against a tree. He looked drugged or chipped out of his pointy little skull, but I knew better. I recognized that vacant expression; I'd seen it all too often on the faces of Department of Paranormal Investigations officers-"Dips," to street grunts like myself-who'd butted into some of my cases while I was with the Star. Okay, I thought, so at least one cop-kahuna was doing the old "ghost-walk" around the area, looking for astral evidence. There was only one more cop there, bringing the total up to four. He was one big boy-a human, but with a gut worthy of a sumo wrestler-and he was talking to a couple of shorts-clad local kids. Witnesses, maybe?

  Na Maka'i had cordoned off the crime scene much the same way we were taught in the Star. Where trees, picnic benches, and the like were conveniently placed, the cops had strung up that universal yellow police line tape between them. To cover open ground, they'd used the collapsible lineposts that every cop car on the planet has somewhere in its trunk. I ambled over, and when I reached the police line, I held up the yellow tape and ducked under it. I took another step toward the two cops crouching on the ground…

  And rapped my nose and forehead against an invisible barrier that was as unyielding as a concrete wall. "Frag," I grunted. Instinctively, I tried to step back.

  No go. There was an invisible wall behind me now, too. And one to the right and to the left when I checked. It was like I was in an invisible and slightly undersized phone booth. For a couple of seconds I did the old street-mime shtick, palms pressing flat against unseen walls. Then I cringed and covered my ears as a high-pitched siren shrieked from somewhere behind my left shoulder. Frag, why not? Invisible walls-why not an invisible burglar alarm, too?

  I watched helplessly as the sumo-gutted cop left the kids and strode menacingly across the grass toward me. "Mai ne'e," he barked. "Don't move, haole." I snorted at that. Like I could. "What you doing here, huh?"

  "Coming to talk to you," I told him calmly. And I pointedly pinned my deputy's badge to the collar of my tropical shirt

  The cop was good, I had to give him that. His look of absolute and total disgust lasted only a fraction of a second before he slapped an expression of polite eagerness on his face. "Aloha, e ku'u haku," he rumbled to me. Then he snapped something else, apparently to the empty air. I almost keeled over, off balance, as the invisible walls surrounding me were suddenly gone.

  "Thank you, Officer…?"

  "Constable Saito, sir. What can I do for you?"

  "Show me around," I suggested. "What's been happening here?"

  The sumo-stomached cop nodded and led me across the grass to where the two forensics boys were still poking around. One of them looked up at me and drew breath to kvetch, but Constable Saito shut him up with a foul glare. "Sacrifices again, sir," Saito said unnecessarily. He pointed at what looked like a makeshift altar, jury-rigged from flat rocks that had recently formed the border of a flower bed. Something had been burned on that altar-something that had left behind a pile of blackened, crumbling bones.

  "What was it?" I asked.

  "Pua 'a," one of the forensics types answered, then translated, "Pig, sir. Young pig."

  "Something more, too." The voice sounded from empty space, a meter to my right. I jumped, then tried to pretend I hadn't. Mages-they're always finding new ways to give me the fragging willies.

  "What do you mean?" I queried.

  "Something else was killed here," me mage's disembodied voice elaborated. "Not a pig."

  "A metahuman?"

  "Not sure," the voice said. I glanced over at the kahuna's meat-body, saw it frown. "Shielded."

  "What do you mean, 'shielded'?"

  This time the voice came from the kahuna's meat-body as he climbed to his feet. "There was a death here," he explained, "I can feel that much. I can't tell what it was that died… and I should be able to."

  I nodded as if I actually understood. "Only the pig was burned, though?"

  "Only the pua 'a," me shaman confirmed impatiently.

  The forensics people had finished collecting their samples of ash and bone and now were scanning the rocks of the altar with a low-intensity UV laser to bring out latent prints. Good luck, boys-the heat of the fire would almost certainly have obliterated anything usable.

  I turned my back on the altar and looked at the surrounding ground. Some kind of intricate pattern had been cut into the grass-no, not cut, I realized-burned in. The lines were sharply defined and surprisingly narrow. You couldn't do a job like that by pouring lines of gasoline and igniting them, the way I'd figured at first. You needed something that burned much hotter and faster. Hmmm, I thought-someone had gone to some effort here.

  I stepped back for a better overall picture of me pattern. Two concentric circles, centered on the altar, one maybe ten meters in diameter, the other maybe eleven. The half-meter-wide annulus between the two circles was divided into quadrants by radial lines. I checked the sun and guesstimated-yes, the radial lines seemed roughly aligned with the cardinal points of the compass. Around the annulus there were an even dozen strange, angular symbols. Not burned, these, but formed from scores of small, white pebbles carefully aligned. I looked around-no, as I'd suspected, there wasn't an obvious source for those pebbles anywhere in the Puowaina park.

  Finished with his ghost-walk, the cop-kahuna was now carefully photographing each of the arcane-looking symbols around the circle. I jandered over to him and waited for him to acknowledge me. His frown told me he didn't want to, but I saw his eyes flick down to my deputy's badge. "Yes, sir?" he asked at last. (The "sir" seemed to cause him physical pain.)

  I indicated the concentric circles with my toe. "What is this? A hermetic circle? A medicine lodge of some kind?"

  He wanted to roll his eyes, I could tell, but he managed to control the impulse. He shrugged. "Neither," he said. Then, less certainly, "Not really."

  "What, then?" Another shrug. "Is
it hermetic or shamanic?"

  For a moment he looked really uncomfortable. He shrugged once more.

  Which was interesting. Neither hermetic nor shamanic… or maybe both hermetic and shamanic, if that made any sense. Hell, at one time or another, everyone's overheard those airy-fairy philosophical discussions about the structure of magic-the hypothesis that magic is magic and that's it. That the distinction between hermetic and shamanic is entirely artificial, one made by (meta)human minds, but not innate to the mana itself. Was that what these symbols represented? Or were they just meaningless-some fraghead mage-wannabe copying something he saw on the trid?

  "What would you use something like this for?" I asked me kahuna.

  "I wouldn't use it for anything," he snapped.

  I sighed. "What would someone else use it for then? What might they use it for?" I corrected quickly, to forestall another case of literal-mindedness.

  "Don't know."

  I shot the kahuna a penetrating look. He was really uncomfortable now, and it was making him sullen. (Magicians of all stripes hate admitting they don't know everything-I learned that long ago.) "You've got to have some idea," I pressed. "It's got to remind you of something. What might it be?"

  For a moment he just glared stink-eye at me. Then I saw his eyes change as he surrendered. "Could be some kind of conjuring circle," he mumbled. "Could be."

  "For summoning spirits? You mean the mage or shaman or whatever stands in the circle-"

  "No," he cut in with a look that clearly completed the thought-you fragging twinkie. "Conjurer stands outside the circle, thing that gets conjured inside the circle… till kahuna lets it out. Okay?"

  "So what would you conjure using something like this? Elementals? Spirits? What?"

  Some unreadable expression flickered across his face. "Nothing," he said firmly. "Couldn't conjure nothing with this. Not elementals, not spirits, okay?" And-deputy's badge or not-he turned his back on me and strode away. I watched him climb into one of the Patrol Ones, shut the door, and just sit mere in a sulk.

  Interesting. What was it the functionary had told the Ali'i' Up until now, the magical mumbo-jumbo surrounding the sacrifices in Puowaina had been meaningless. This time, though, the kahunas hadn't been sure of that. That represented a pretty significant change in things, didn't it? The cop-kahuna's reaction had certainly fit with that analysis.

  So this ritual-circle drek was similar to the stuff the mystics use for summoning-similar, but not exactly right. If I'd known more about magic, maybe that would mean something to me. It's unfortunate, in a way. Unlike a lot of people I know, I'm not a magophobe-how the frag can you be magophobic in the Sixth World, tell me that?-but I'm certainly no spellworm. I guess the most time I've ever spent with a real-and-for-true practicing spellworm was when I worked alongside Rodney Greybriar back in Seattle… before he was geeked, of course.

  Well, magic or no magic, the laws of logic had to stay more or less the same, neh? Maybe all I needed was a little common sense.

  What must you do to summon a spirit, or whatever? No, take the question one step further back. Where do spirits and their ilk hang when they're not being summoned? Somewhere else, obviously. On the astral plane, maybe, or on one of the "metaplanes" (whatever the frag they are…). Bringing them across takes effort. It takes magical jam, and- from what I've heard-to drag the big boys, kicking and screaming, into the material world, it can really harsh a spellworm out.

  Why? Obviously-well, it's obvious to me, at least- there's some kind of barrier between the material world and the other planes. No, let's call it something pseudo-mystical-say there's a curtain between this world and the others, or maybe a veil. Okay, some kind of curtain. Sure, that made sense, otherwise people might just stumble from this world into some freaky metaplane without intending to do so, or even knowing it happened.

  So, to summon something, logically you'd have to break down that barrier-pull back the curtain-or it just wouldn't work, neh? Could that be what the weirdo circle was for? To open-or maybe weaken-the curtain between what we laughingly call the real world and those other places? An interesting hypothesis… and, now that I thought about it, not a particularly comforting one.

  Oh, drek… combine that nasty thought with another one that had just struck me. When the cop-kahuna said he wouldn't conjure anything using that circle, could he have meant that (meta)humans couldn't use something like that? Who could?

  How about the friends of Adrian Skyhill? The fragging insect spirits. They were involved somehow-if I was to believe Barnard, and I had no reason to disbelieve him at the moment.

  Great. Hadn't I read somewhere that certain sites on the earth-typically ancient "places of power"-had high mana "background counts" that made magical activity easier? Mount Shasta, apparently. Crater Lake possibly. Why not Puowaina?

  Could the insect spirits be trying to use the power of the Hill of Sacrifices to do to Hawai'i what they'd done to Chicago? To bring forth hordes of their kind from whatever hell had spawned them?

  Or was I a paranoid slot getting his exercise by jumping to really out-there conclusions? (Go back, go waaay back…)

  I shook my head. It was a dead fragging certainty I wasn't going to figure it out just by standing here and pummeling my brain. Who knew, maybe the kids-the ones that sumo-Saito had been questioning-had seen something relevant.

  But the kids were gone when I looked around. The forensic boys had finished their work, and were piling into the car with the still-sulking kahuna. Saito was standing by the open driver's door of his car, watching me-and almost concealing his impatience-in case the "deputy" might want to waste his time with more dumb-hooped questions. I waved to him and gestured that he could take off if he wanted. He wanted, and I was left to breathe in the dust of his departure. With a sigh I started walking to the Bus stop.

  I felt eyes on me, that creepy feeling that the academics say doesn't exist but that every nonacademic has felt many times. I stopped and looked around.

  He was standing, totally motionless, leaning casually against the trunk of some kind of flowering tree, watching me. Rapier-thin, he seemed to radiate a sense of pent-up energy, explosive movement. He was an elf, I was almost certain. From this distance I couldn't see his ears, but the morphology looked right. His eyes were hidden behind those radically styled shades that advertise they can stop a 12-gauge shotgun blast-reassuring only as long as the slag busting caps on you confines his aim to your sunglasses- but I could feel his gaze on me. I raised an eyebrow questioningly.

  He stepped away from the tree and jandered over toward me-slowly, casually-yet purposefully. (A contradiction, true enough. But that's exactly how he moved-with the lethal casualness of a predator.) I gave him the top-to-toe scan as he approached.

  Thin face, high cheekbones, a nose that an eagle would kill to possess. He wore his hair-red, streaked with silver gray-long, pulled back in a ponytail that reached the middle of his back. He was dressed in dark clothes-a slate gray synthsilk shirt, black pants wide at the thighs and tapering to the ankle. Expensive, high-quality clothing, but anachronistic in style. When was the last time you saw a shirt buttoned to the neck with no tie, and bloused cuffs? It was almost as if the elf had stepped right off the virtual pages of Gentlemen's Monthly Online, but from an issue twenty years old. Instinctively, I played "spot the heat." No luck-if he was packing anything larger than the smallest of hold-outs, he'd found a damn fine way of concealing it.

  He stopped a short distance away, and it was his turn to give me the once-over. It took no more than a second, and then he smiled.

  Suddenly, I realized I feared this elf.

  It was a disturbing realization. Hell, there was nothing overtly threatening about him. His smile seemed to be genuinely amused, not a power smile intended to impress or intimidate. His body language was, well, I didn't know quite what to make of it, but it wasn't threatening either.

  Yet the fear was real, chummer. For some reason, it chilled my guts like an ice-water e
nema. Some people you automatically like at first glance; others you automatically despise. Never before had I met someone to automatically fear. I think I managed to keep my thoughts from showing on my face, however.

  The elf nodded a greeting-a gesture with an Old-World formal air to it. "Mr. Montgomery," he said. His voice was a musical instrument, almost inhumanly perfect in timbre, tone, and resonance; any trideo personality would gut his mother for a voice like that. "I rather thought I might find you here."

  "Then you know more about it than I do," I told him truthfully.

  He found that amusing, and his smile broadened. "Well, there is always that possibility, isn't there, Mr. Montgomery? Or may I call you Derek?"

  "Why don't you call me Brian Tozer?" I said. Then- what the frag anyway-"But Dirk will do. Your turn."

  The elf nodded again, almost a bow, this time. "Quentin Harlech, at your service. But you can call me Quinn."

  I ignored the obvious opening.

  Harlech removed his bullet-proof shades-blue eyes, sharper than a monoblade-and looked pointedly around the area. "Quite fascinating, isn't it?" he remarked lightly.

  I shrugged. "If you understand it, I suppose."

  He laughed then, Harlech did. Not the sinister cackle that part of my mind had expected, but a full-throated, free rush of genuine mirth. "Oh, of course, Dirk, of course. Will you be returning with interesting reports?"

  "Huh?" Not overly witty, of course, but it was all that occurred to me at the moment.