There was a table at the bottom of the stairs holding sets of ear muffs and protective glasses. Gaugin gestured to them silently as he put on a set of each himself.
Properly muffled and protected, we continued to the firing line.
Dmitri was standing on the other side of a bulletproof glass wall, at a table. The remainder of the room was mostly dead space terminating on a set of targets at the far end. He was with a young goblin I didn’t recognize. The goblin was the one firing the gun. Dmitri was offering instruction.
We stood at the door that would admit us to the live gunfire side of the room and waited as the goblin fired his rounds. He appeared to be having trouble with the sensitivity of the trigger and the severity of the kickback, as the bullets were ending up high and to the left of the target.
Gaugin pressed a button next to the door, which flashed a light on the ceiling above the firing line table. Dmitri saw it, turned, nodded, and then took the gun from the young goblin, said a few words we couldn’t hear, and dismissed him.
Soon, I was standing in front of a mobster who was holding a sub-machine gun, alone, in a basement.
Sometimes I really don’t understand how I end up in these situations.
“Adam,” he said, less gregariously than in our last encounter. “Welcome. I’m glad you’re here. We will need all of the experienced hands we have at our disposal. I trust you know how to fire one of these?”
* * *
After about a half an hour of thoroughly unnecessary target practice, we went upstairs where a table could be found so as to facilitate a proper conversation.
I know how to fire most guns, including ones that only exist now as antiques. It isn’t something I do for pleasure. It was evident, though, that I had to do it for at least a little while before Dmitri was ready to discuss why I was actually there. It was kind of a dick-measuring thing, really. Annoying, but basically impossible to avoid.
We were sitting outside, at a patio table. It was still early in the morning and cool enough that a cabana, and the shade it provided, weren’t necessary. Weather-wise, it was shaping up to be a very nice day. Good weather right after a natural disaster is pretty common, for some reason.
The patio faced the downhill side of the mountain, and I was pretty sure were it not for some tall trees we’d be able to see all the way down to the town. Or, where it used to be.
“That is quite the story,” Dmitri said, once I finished the explanation for how I ended up at his secret back door. “I’m glad you met Grundle. Terribly misunderstood, his kind.”
“I’ve only known them as imbeciles,” I said. “For me, it wasn’t a lot different than having Buster start to talk, to be completely honest.”
“I’ve heard Buster talk.”
“Mimicry, though, yes?”
“Well, yes. He’ll say his own name sometimes, but it’s not clear he knows he’s saying his own name.”
“So what’s with the guns?”
He laughed.
“So direct! But you should know exactly what they are for, you’ve met one of those things. Call them what you want: mermen, banshees, that other word, it doesn’t matter. What they are is an invading army. This island is our home and we have to defend it, and we must act quickly.”
“Why quickly?”
“Before the rescue operation commences. There are people trapped down there, our people, and we can’t get to them. When the medical transports arrive, they won’t be expecting a hostile force. We have to make sure they don’t encounter one.”
“Who is we?”
He laughed. “Oh, you, me, the boy Vincenzo you just met. Us three, down the mountain to wipe out an army.”
“You forgot Go-Go.”
“Yes, yes, him as well. No, Adam, I mean us as in the residents of the top of the island. We’re working out the details, but the plan is for an assault beginning as soon as we are sure the waters have receded enough for vehicular travel on the lower island.”
“You’ll forgive me, I hope, Dmitri, but combat experience isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think about most of your neighbors.”
“Largely so, yes, but some are quite skilled, and there are a few you don’t even know about. You didn’t know we had a troll and a dragon until yesterday.”
“Fair point.”
I could think of at least two species that would be fantastic to have on my side in a fight like this, but neither played well with others. I’d probably try and swim to the mainland if he had one of them.
“You have doubts,” he said.
“I do. You don’t know the size of the enemy.”
“How many of them could there be? The island is not that large.”
“Yes, Dmitri. But the ocean is huge.”
He sighed, and gestured something to Gaugin, which Go-Go apparently understood the meaning of. A moment later, a bottle of scotch and two glasses were on the table. Things were looking up.
“Drink with me, Leewan Sean,” Dmitri said. I made a conscious effort not to respond to the name choice.
He poured us some scotch, and we drank. It was very, very smooth, and probably wildly expensive.
“I am not what you would think of as a particularly evolved man,” he said. “I understand what violence is and I’m willing to respond with greater violence, and I sleep well at night despite the commission of that violence. I also understand diplomacy, and if I don’t recognize when a circumstance calls for that instead of violence, I surround myself with people I trust who do recognize it. In life, this has gotten me far.”
This was an understatement.
He continued: “I suspect the only man on this island, and possibly on the planet, with a greater appreciation of the applicability of violence than myself, is you. If I were to interpret the legends surrounding the great Leewan Sean accurately, I would also have to conclude that three of us—four if we bring Go-Go—actually is sufficient to eradicate this menace from our shores.”
“Never believe a legend if your life depends on it,” I said.
“An excellent piece of advice, thank you. They’re untrue, then?”
“They’re exaggerations. It would take too long to explain exactly how.”
“Well, that is a shame.”
What he was talking about had to do with a specific set of myths known to elves—and to a lesser extent, goblins—regarding me specifically. These aren’t exactly like the ones you hear from time-to-time about Dionysos (most of Greece knew me by that name for about five or six hundred years) because a lot of those were originally about different gods. The Leewan Sean—or Lixian Xian depending on where you’re from—myths all came from stuff I actually did.
What that stuff was, I won’t get into right now.
“How about your legendary wisdom?” he asked. “Aside from the wisdom of not accepting the legend of your wisdom.”
“My wisdom isn’t too bad, but I’m only one drink in, so don’t expect it to improve. I say an assault of any kind probably won’t end well, but I don’t have an alternative right now.”
“You want to find these people you think are hidden in our jungle.”
“Yeah.”
“Because you think they have Dr. Cambridge.”
“Basically.”
“Why do you want the doctor?”
“There’s a decent chance he knows more about mermaids than anyone else on the island.”
“There are eight year olds who could claim extensive knowledge of mermaids, that doesn’t make the information valuable.”
“Right, but this feels more concrete. Look, attacking a non-human enemy you know nothing about is a bad idea. If you want to do this right, you have to figure out why they’re here, how many to expect, and what it will take to kill them.”
“Rapidly moving projectiles have proven effective, historically.”
“Not always. Ever tried to shoot a demon? Or a vampire?”
“I’ve shot a vampire. But yes, it was less effective than
tying his wounded body to a fence post and waiting until morning. I see your point.”
“So can you help?”
“Let me reach out to the neighbors and see if we can figure out where these squatters are located. I can’t promise we’ll find them, and I can’t guarantee if we do, the owner of the property they’ve claimed won’t act badly. But we can start there. In the meantime, possibly we can get you another set of clothes, and some shoes? You’re a sight, and as my guest I can no longer abide it.”
* * *
I thought a decent shower and the rest of what was in the scotch bottle was just about all I really needed, but a change of clothes was pretty nice too. What I ended up with was a guest bedroom with an attached shower to go along with the change of clothes, plus a pair of shoes that fit. But I didn’t get the scotch bottle, and while that was probably for the best I would have traded all of the above for it. It had been that kind of day.
After using the shower, I drifted off on the bed for long enough that Go-Go had trouble waking me when it was time to do so.
“Does he have something for me?” I asked, sitting up slowly. I had dressed, thankfully, before deciding the bed looked soft.
“He thinks so, yes,” Gaugin said, in the midst of a particularly unpleasant stare. “Why are you here?”
“Is that what he wants to know? Because I thought he knew.”
“It’s what I want to know.”
“You mean, why am I here instead of wandering around the jungle shouting for Mirella and banging a steel drum or something.”
“Yes.”
“I appear insufficiently concerned, to you?”
He didn’t respond, which was an answer.
I was pretty sure whatever happened while I was sleeping included him either receiving or overhearing a description of the cult, which would have included a description of the succubus I heard about it from. He undoubtedly arrived at the most unsavory conclusion imaginable. As I said, some goblins look down on human-goblin relations, and I’m sure this information only fed into that.
“I could gnash my teeth and rend my garments,” I said, “but I like my teeth the way they are and I’m only borrowing these clothes, and it won’t help me find her any faster anyway. Better to work on what I can control and hope she turns up alive.”
He gave a humph and walked out of the room, almost faster than I could follow.
The shoes in question were a new pair of running shoes, and I nearly fell just trying to re-accustom myself to the idea of them. They went well with the loaned tracksuit, though. I thought maybe all I needed to complete the whole “extra in a mafia movie” look was a gold chain or two.
I followed Go-Go down the stairs and into a study that was one of the rooms I’d not yet seen in Dmitri’s little mini-mansion. He was at his desk—an expensive-looking slab of polished oak—and examining what looked like a map of the island.
“I’ve made some calls, and Mr. Grundle has performed a few environmental searches, and I don’t think we’ve found them,” he said.
“You brought me down to say you have no news?”
“No, Adam, I brought you down to receive the news that I believe you’re mistaken, and they are not where you think they are.”
“I think you’re underestimating the ability of a future seer to find a part of the island where it’s safe to hide.”
“But where would that be?”
He gestured to the map. I’d never seen a map of the island before from this particular perspective: a bird’s-eye with the top of the island in the center. The property lines were drawn out precisely along the elevation contours, with gaps indicating public pathways. Each of the buildings, swimming pools, tennis courts, treeless lawns, gazebos, artificial ponds, mini-golf courses, and so on were clearly visible and easily identifiable. It looked like there was plenty of room to spare.
“The property lines aren’t marked by fences in all instances, are they?” I asked. “I mean, you have a nice big one, but most of these places don’t.”
“No, they don’t. There are three fences: mine, Reginald’s over here, and Lady Tzu on the other side, here.”
He identified each with a thump of his index finger. The property lines for these sections were slightly thicker, denoting the fence.
“That leaves several without fences,” he said.
“Right. Do you have proximity alarms or something?”
“Yes, after a fashion. Nothing electronic; it seems they’re too easily tripped by naturally occurring jungle events, or by a certain freely-roaming pet dragon, or a few other things that would legally constitute an incursion on private land but which we’re generally okay with. We want to keep out squatters, overly curious tourists, and any assassins that might drop in, but pets and wild animals are all right.”
“If not electronic, then what?”
He smiled a clever sort of smile that made me think the next thing out of his mouth was something he thought of personally.
“Pixies,” he said. “Trained pixies. We each have a few dozen. As a matter of course, they’re sent out to survey the respective properties and to report back on what they’ve found. They are quite helpful in recognizing the overstepping of all manner of species.”
“That is clever,” I said, and I meant it. I’m the only person I know who’s in the habit of taming and employing pixies, or I was until this moment. Clever, then, because it was actually my idea first.
“So they’ve seen the banshees, haven’t they? The last time we talked about them…”
He was nodding.
“I know you’re thinking I kept things from you that day, but I did not. We sent pixies out to identify the source of the howling, but they came back with no useful information. No intruders. An animal, they said, but the descriptions didn’t make sense so we stopped asking. My point is that I’ve contacted each of my top island neighbors and asked them to perform a pixie sweep. All reported back that there is no evidence of squatters. And as you can see, there’s hardly any other place to look.”
I stared at the map for a while, trying to find a hole in his argument. It must have been because I was still groggy from the nap, or maybe I’d lived on the island long enough to ignore the obvious because everyone else did, but I didn’t see it right away.
“How about here?” I asked. I pointed at the center-most part of the map.
“The summit?”
“Did you look there?”
“No of course not, it’s terrible up there. No tree cover, relentless winds. Why do you think nobody put a house on the top?”
“I know all that, I’ve visited it.”
“Well there’s your answer. Tours hike up there all the time. This cult has supposedly been in hiding for weeks, and you mean to say they’re living on the most visible part of the island?”
“It’s only the most visible from the air, and there are ways to camouflage from an aerial survey. And I’ll bet there hasn’t been a tour of the summit recently.”
“Maybe there hasn’t,” he said, still not convinced. “But how could they be so lucky as to choose to live there for a stretch of time in which there just happened to be no tours?”
“As I said, never underestimate the ability of a future seer to hide.”
* * *
As it happened, the wealthy residents of the top of the island were notified well in advance of any authorized incursion to the actual top of the island. The tours were planned at the hotel, with local guides walking however many people wished to go, on the long hike that didn’t actually start at the bottom of the mountain. This would take too long. Instead, a carload of intrepid persons was driven to a small parking area well above the mid-point and just below the private estate property lines.
From there, the expedition followed a well-worn and clearly marked narrow uphill path that wound its way to the very top. The trip up took most of the day, invariably exhausted everyone involved, and generally discouraged participants from ever doing it again becaus
e it just wasn’t all that interesting of a hike.
Since so many people living near the top responded poorly to strangers, someone saw the wisdom of establishing a notification procedure to make sure there were no unpleasant surprises for anyone involved. It would have worked a little better if these notifications were widely shared, but at least someone was trying. The important thing was, there was a schedule, and once Dmitri reached out to Grundle—the de facto tech support for the top of the island—we had that schedule too, and were able to verify that from the time the wrecked hotel room was discovered to the day of the tsunami, there had been no official visits to the summit.
I was convinced I was on to something, but Dmitri wasn’t swayed.
“I should continue with the preparations,” he said. “Scheduling an operation like this, it has many moving parts. I can’t stop and restart so easily.”
“You also don’t believe me.”
“Not that I do or I don’t, I don’t see how your path can alter mine at this time. You should keep to yours, and I will help, and hopefully you’ll prove me wrong before I’ve ended up dying for the arrogance of not having listened to your advice.”
“It’s solid advice,” I said.
“I don’t doubt this.”
“Attacking an enemy without a grasp of their strengths and weaknesses is a really bad idea.”
“I understand. But premature action is all we have when inaction isn’t an option. So tell me, how I can help you complete your quest?”
“Some clothes more appropriate to the outdoors, maybe some hiking boots. Oh, and a guide.”
“I can’t spare a man, but I can get you a map.”
“I wasn’t thinking of a man.”
* * *
A little while later, I was trying out a pair of boots and cargo shorts, while getting to know a pixie named Ha.
Pixies are more or less exactly what you think they are: tiny flying women with gossamer wings that look approximately like Tinkerbell from the Disney cartoons, only without the clothing. They’re nearly impossible to find and catch, but if you know how to find and catch one, they’re remarkably easy to tame and very loyal once they’ve been tamed. They’re also intelligent enough to be self-aware, but not too smart, and they’re terribly naïve.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 22
