Cloak Games: Omnibus One

by Jonathan Moeller

  He looked absolutely identical to the disguised anthrophage I had killed outside the Silver Dollar. The man’s shadowed eyes met mine, and he started to change, his human guise dropping away to reveal the grotesque features of an anthrophage.

  I stomped the gas.

  The anthrophage’s yellow eyes just had time to widen.

  The creature hadn’t seen that coming.

  The van’s bumper hit him in the waist, and I ran right over him and kept going. I felt a nasty thump, and then I spun the wheel, the tires squealing as I slid onto the street and slammed my foot onto the gas. The big van surged forward, shooting past the Silver Dollar, and a short time later I was on the freeway, driving exactly the speed limit to keep from attracting the attention of Homeland Security patrolmen. Traffic in Los Angeles is horrendous, even at one in the morning on a weeknight, but about an hour later I was out of the city, past the suburbs, and heading into the desert.

  At last I found a rest stop and pulled over. Big recreational vehicles filled the parking lot, the sort veterans of a certain age purchased so they could tour the country before they died. My battered van stood out, but not by that much. I found an isolated parking spot, killed the engine, and sat back against the seat, breathing hard.

  I let my Mask dissolve with a groan of relief. Maintaining a Masking spell isn’t nearly as hard as a Cloak, but it’s still an effort. Sweat drenched my tank top, so I pulled off my jacket and threw it into the back of the van.

  Right then Morvilind decided to cast his summons again.

  Pain exploded through me, sharper and harder than before, and I bit back a scream, gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. I slumped forward, my forehead bouncing off the steering wheel with a little thump, a fresh wave of pain rolling through me. After a moment the pain subsided. I spent a couple of bad minutes shivering and sweating under my breath, then reached into my jacket and drew out my phone. I sent a text message to Rusk, Morvilind’s butler, asking him to tell Morvilind that I had received his lordship’s summons and would arrive at his mansion within three days.

  I sagged in the seat, clutching the phone. A moment later it chimed. Rusk had had received the message and would pass it on to Morvilind. Hopefully Morvilind would not use his summons spell again until those three days passed. It would serve Morvilind right if he sent the spell while I was trying to merge into traffic and got killed when I lost control of the van.

  But if I got killed, my brother Russell was going to die.

  A little chill went through me, and not just from my sweat-sodden clothes. Six years. I just had to hang on for six more years, until Morvilind had cured Russell’s frost fever. Until then, I had to stay alive.

  For now, though, I could have few hours of rest.

  I put up a sunshield on the windshield, blocking the view, and climbed into the back of the van. It had been built to carry fifteen people, but I had pulled out all the seats, converting the back into a poor man’s RV. I had a mattress and a blanket and a pillow, along with camping supplies and various other items that came in handy, all of them organized in plastic drawers. Fortunately, I secured everything with bungee cords, so my rapid maneuvers in the parking lot hadn’t knocked anything loose. I pulled the curtains on the back windows shut, stripped out of my sweaty tank top and jeans, and sprawled across the mattress, too tired to undress further.

  Something cold brushed against my left hand.

  I frowned, looked down, and picked up the golden medallion I had taken from the dead anthrophage. It felt very cold in my hand, and I had the strangest feeling the sigil of the Dark Ones upon the medallion was watching me.

  Suddenly I wished that I had left my clothes on.

  Curious, I focused my will and cast the spell to sense the presence of magical forces. It wasn’t a difficult spell, but I wasn’t particularly good at it. Yet I was good enough to sense the dark magic wrapped around the medallion, a crackling force that felt rancid and greasy at the same time. I couldn’t discern the nature of the spell. My best guess was that it was a…warding spell, perhaps? Maybe a binding? Perhaps it was what had compelled the anthrophage to chase me.

  That was a bad thought. That was a very bad thought. I thought I had gotten away clean from Paul McCade’s mansion and the secret temple to the Dark Ones, but if the cult of the Dark Ones had sent anthrophages after me…

  That was very bad.

  I couldn’t do anything about it tonight, but I didn’t want to touch the vile thing a moment longer. Some of the dark magical aura seemed to be soaking into my skin like a grease stain. I wrapped it in a chamois, threw the medallion into a drawer, and fell asleep.

  I had bad dreams. I couldn’t remember them clearly. I seemed to see my father, and he was disappointed, so disappointed, at the kind of woman I had become, while my mother wept silently in the background.

  Around dawn I awoke with a headache and foul taste in my mouth. I got dressed in fresh clothes and made my way to the rest stop proper, threading my way past the various retirees and pensioners to wash my face in the restroom sink. A few of the old women gave me suspicious looks, but I ignored them. So long as I stayed away from their husbands, I doubted they would call Homeland Security report a young woman washing her face in the sink.

  Or maybe the smell offended them. I really needed a shower.

  By the time I got back to my van, the little coffee maker in the back had finished churning out a pot of vile-tasting but strong coffee. I swallowed half of the first cup in one go, and then ate a flavorless protein bar designed as field rations for men-at-arms, washing it down with the rest of the coffee.

  Then I got underway.

  It took me about two and a half days to get from the desert outside Los Angeles to the suburbs of Milwaukee. I could have done it faster, but I kept away from the freeways and stuck the back state roads, keeping my speed three or four miles below the limit. Homeland Security’s traffic officers focused on the freeways, and I wanted to avoid them. I thought I had gotten away clean, but that was a dangerous assumption to make. It was also possible I might run into an overzealous Homeland Security officer who wanted to search my van, and I needed to avoid that.

  But, mostly, I didn’t see anyone.

  The United States is a big country, and save for farmers, miners, ranchers, and lumberjacks, most of the population lives in the cities. The government didn’t release census figures, but I had learned the population of the US was about one hundred and twenty million people. The last pre-Conquest census, taken three hundred years or so ago in 2010, had counted something like three hundred million people in the United States.

  What had happened to those extra one hundred and eighty million people? I didn’t know, but the spell-haunted ruins of Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit gave a clue. I expected they had gotten on the High Queen’s bad side.

  They didn’t teach about those bits of the Conquest in school.

  I stayed overnight in rest stop parking lots, sliding the old van alongside RVs and long-distance trucks. A young woman traveling alone through the rural countryside is the premise of a whole lot of bad horror movies, but I took precautions. I slept with my .25 next to my pillow (with the safety on, of course), and I had quite a few nasty surprises for anyone who tried to break into my van. I had learned a spell to conjure a globe of lightning, and while I wasn’t very good with it, I was good enough to unleash enough lightning to stop a man’s heart.

  But no one bothered me.

  I suppose I had dealt with things far more dangerous than rural rest stops.

  Such as my “employer”, for one.

  Two and a half days after leaving Los Angeles, I brought my van to a stop in front of Morvilind’s palatial mansion. Morvilind’s residence was built in the classical Elven style of his homeworld, which meant it looked like a combination of Roman and Imperial Chinese architecture. Hieroglyphics that looked vaguely Celtic but were in fact Elven adorned the walls in intricate, dizzying designs. I could read some of the hiero
glyphs, and knew that they marked the location of powerful wards Morvilind could activate if his mansion came under attack, though I couldn’t image anyone stupid enough to assault an archmage of the Elves.

  Much as I might fantasize about it at times.

  I climbed out of the van, wearing jeans, sneakers, and a tank top, my hair tied back in a greasy ponytail. I really needed a shower, and wondered if I should freshen up before seeing Morvilind. He might take offense if I showed up before him bedraggled and in need of a bath. On the other hand, he considered humans at best to be useful livestock, and making him wait would only irritate him.

  Best to get this over with.

  I squared my shoulders and headed for the door.

  Morvilind’s butler awaited me inside. Rusk was a paunchy middle-aged man who wore the formal garb of an Elven noble’s household servant, a long red coat with black trousers, the coat’s sleeves adorned with elaborate black scrollwork and a golden badge of rank upon the stiff collar. He gave me a look of irritated contempt. Rusk didn’t like me much. He considered me an intrusion into his orderly domain. I wondered if he knew the truth about what I did for Morvilind.

  “Miss Moran,” said Rusk. “I received your message and passed it to his lordship.”

  “Goody for you,” I said, starting down the entry hall. The floor was gleaming, polished hardwood, with airy skylights overhead. Various pieces of ancient art adorned the walls. Morvilind had a taste for the art of ancient Earth, and I had stolen quite a bit of it for him. “Doing your job and all. Do you want a cookie for it?”

  Rusk’s nose wrinkled. “Will you be attending to his lordship now, or will you…refresh yourself first?”

  I smirked at him. “Are you seriously suggesting that I keep his lordship waiting while I take a bath? I’m sure he’d love that.”

  Rusk’s scowl intensified. “His lordship awaits you in the library. I shall escort you there.”

  “Just what I wanted to do,” I said.

  Thankfully, Rusk said nothing after that. I enjoyed insulting him, but I didn’t feel up to it. I was tired, and fear churned in my gut as we walked through the opulence of the mansion. I wondered what Morvilind wanted me to do now. His tasks had grown more and more dangerous recently, and his last mission had almost gotten me killed several times.

  Morvilind’s library occupied a vast room at the rear of the house, with tall windows overlooking the bluffs and the turbulent waters of Lake Michigan. The floor was white marble, polished and gleaming. Books written in both Elven hieroglyphics and the common Elven alphabet covered the walls, along with countless volumes on ancient Earth’s history and peoples. Long tables ran the length of the room, holding books and scrolls and relics. An elaborate summoning circle had been carved into slabs of gleaming red marble before the high windows, a design intricate beyond my magical skill. I recognized maybe a quarter of the glyphs and symbols and runes in the design.

  There had been one addition since my last visit here. A glass display case stood to the left of the summoning circle, and it held the stone tablet Morvilind had ordered me to steal from Paul McCade. A ring of warding glyphs covered the case’s pedestal, likely to contain the dark magic within the thing.

  Before the summoning circle itself was a high table covered with computer equipment, complete with three enormous monitors arrayed in a semicircle.

  Lord Morvilind stood before the table, gazing at his monitors.

  He was tall and thin to the point of gauntness, his white hair closed-cropped, his skin so pale it was almost translucent, his blue eyes cold and ghostly, his Elven ears rising to sharp points. He looked old and frail and weak, but I knew that was a fatal assumption. For he wore the ornamented red cloak of an Elven noble, and beneath that he wore the gold-trimmed black robe of an Elven archmage. I had seen him use magic, and he wielded arcane force with a skill and power beyond anything I could achieve – beyond anything even most Elves could wield.

  If he felt like it, he could kill me as easily as I could swat a fly. Easier, really. Flies are agile, and he wouldn’t have to move to kill me.

  And if I didn’t do what he wanted, if I didn’t obey his every command, my brother was going to die.

  I went to one knee and waited. I could mouth off to Rusk all I wanted. I didn’t dare do the same to Morvilind.

  “My lord,” said Rusk. “Miss Nadia Moran to see you.”

  Morvilind nodded, not turning from his monitors. All three of them were showing news reports of some kind. The one on the right displayed world news. The Caliphate and the Imamate had gone to war over the city of Basra again. The High Queen let them go to war every few years, and then reined in the conflict when it started to spiral out of hand. The center and left monitors displayed American news, something about the High Queen’s war with the frost giants. The High Queen had been fighting an intermittent war against the frost giants even before the Conquest.

  Of course, after the Conquest, the High Queen had used human men-at-arms in her armies, my father among them. Which, in a roundabout way, was how I wound up kneeling before Morvilind.

  “You may go, Rusk,” said Morvilind, his voice a deep, resonant rasp. It always seemed strange to hear such a powerful voice come from such a frail-looking man.

  Rusk bowed and strode away, disappearing into the gleaming maze of the mansion. Morvilind did not turn around, and I waited. I would wait as long as necessary. I did not dare push Morvilind too far, not when he held Russell’s life in his hands.

  “It took you,” said Morvilind at last, “rather longer than I liked for you to respond to my summons, child.”

  “I was in Los Angeles, my lord,” I said. “I came at once.”

  “What were you doing in Los Angeles?” said Morvilind.

  There was no point in lying to him. “Selling some of the jewels I stole from the mansion of Paul McCade.”

  “Why?” said Morvilind.

  “Because I needed the money,” I said. My mouth kept going before my brain could stop it. That happens sometimes, and it’s gotten me into a lot of trouble. “If your lordship chose to pay me an allowance or a salary, I would not need to finance myself, and could answer your summons much quicker.”

  “I have no use for weakness,” said Morvilind, “or dependency. If I paid you a salary, you would become weak and dependent. Your wits would dull and you would grow complacent, and you would lose your edge. You would become useless to me…and that means your brother would die of frostfever. Would that not be tragic?”

  Hatred burned through me, and a dozen different barbed remarks waited on the tip of my tongue. Fortunately, this time my brain restrained my tongue.

  “Yes, my lord,” I managed to say in a neutral tone.

  The worst part was that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Morvilind granted me a twisted form of independence, but he kept Russell’s illness around my neck like a leash. One yank on that leash, and I came running. To survive, to save Russell’s life, I was willing to do almost anything…and I knew that had made me harder and smarter and more capable than I would have been otherwise.

  I hated Morvilind for that, too.

  “Frostfever, as it happens,” said Morvilind, beckoning for me to rise, “is part of the reason I summoned you here.”

  I crossed to his side. Morvilind tapped a command on the keyboard. The right monitor changed from a report about the High Queen’s edicts about the conflict in eastern Asia and instead displayed another report about frost giants. There seemed to be a lot on the news about the frost giants lately, come to think of it.

  “Tell me, child,” said Morvilind. “Have you seen the news recently? Some of the reports have even been added to the Punishment Day clips.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve been busy,” I said.

  That was true. I failed to mention that I thought the news was nonsensical bullshit, meaningless happy talk about the High Queen’s wisdom and beneficence. I also hated watching Homeland
Security’s Punishment Day videos, the filmed punishments of criminals broadcast as an encouragement to moral behavior in the High Queen’s subjects. That might be me on a Punishment Day video someday, screaming and helpless in front of a jeering crowd as the whip ripped into the bare skin of my back again and again.

  I had nightmares like that, sometimes.

  “Admirable diligence,” said Morvilind. “What do you know about the frost giants?”

  “Not very much, my lord,” I said. Morvilind’s various tutors had not mentioned the subject while I had been growing up, and I hadn’t dealt with them while stealing various things at Morvilind’s bidding.

  “Tell me anyway,” said Morvilind.

  I started to shrug, realized he might get offended, and thought for a moment. “They’re from a different world than Earth, like the Elves. Um…they have a king, they know how to use magic, and they can travel in the Shadowlands. They fought against the High Queen before the Elves found Earth, and after the Conquest, they kept fighting against her. They’ve tried to attack Earth several times, but the High Queen and the nobles have repulsed them every time.”

  “Quite incomplete, but essentially accurate,” said Morvilind. “More importantly, sufficient for our purposes. As you might recall, the Elven homeworld remains under the control of the Archons, rebels against the High Queen. Recently the Archons have been making war against the frost giants. Consequently, the Great King of the frost giants has decided to make peace with the High Queen Tarlia and ally with her against the Archons, and so has dispatched an ambassador to Earth to discuss terms.”

  “I see,” I said. A bitter thought flickered through my mind. If the frost giants had made peace with the High Queen fifteen years earlier, my father would not have been wounded with one of their weapons. The frostfever would not have claimed him and my mother. It would not have infected Russell, and I would not be standing here. Morvilind would not possess a vial of my heart’s blood, able to use it to inflict whatever magical torment he wished upon me.