Cloak Games: Tomb Howl

by Jonathan Moeller

  “In essence, yes,” said Morvilind.

  “That is insane,” I said.

  “It will not be easy,” said Morvilind without the slightest hint of sympathy, “but you will have no choice but to succeed. Your life will be at stake. Your brother’s life will be at stake. If that is not sufficient motivation, you will have an opportunity to deal a severe blow to the Rebels, if you keep your wits about you.” He pointed at me. “That is your trial, then, to prove you are fit to continue in my service. You will either win, or you will die.”

  I let out a long, ragged breath. As ever, Morvilind had me boxed in neatly and elegantly. I could almost admire it. Hell, after what Arvalaeon had done to me, I could see the cold brilliance of Morvilind’s methods all the more.

  “Damn it,” I said. “I don’t have any choice, do I?”

  “I am pleased you can see reason,” said Morvilind. “Though you may have a challenge keeping Connor from shooting you on sight. How did you find out about him? Given that your hatred of the Rebels clearly stems from him, I doubt he recruited you.”

  I scowled. “I met him in Los Angeles three years ago when you had me rob those bank safe deposit boxes. That was expensive, and I needed money. We met on a job and started working together, and at first, I thought he was just a freelance thief.”

  “How much did you tell him about yourself?” said Morvilind.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t tell him anything about you, and I never used magic in front of him. I might have been an idiot with him, but I wasn’t a complete…”

  “An idiot with him?” said Morvilind.

  “Um,” I said. That was not a topic I wanted to discuss with Morvilind, ever. “Trusting him, I mean. I didn’t…”

  “He seduced you into engaging in sexual congress with him,” said Morvilind.

  “Um,” I said again. “Well. Yes.”

  “That was remarkably foolish,” said Morvilind. “And you called me an idiot?”

  “It wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” I said. “He’s very charming. And, uh, I was alone in a strange city, and…I was…”

  Morvilind gave an irritated shake of his head. “That was ever the risk of training a female shadow agent.”

  I scowled. “Like all your male shadow agents were celibate.”

  “They tended to deal with their reproductive urges in ways that did not create emotional entanglements,” said Morvilind. “Like your regrettable relationship with that Shadow Hunter…”

  That brought a lump to my throat. “We broke up.”

  “Good,” said Morvilind. “Perhaps you can yet learn wisdom. Go. You have your task, and I suggest you prepare.”

  “You realize,” I said, “that if I screw this up in the right way, that it might take you down with me? The High Queen wouldn’t forgive you for working with the Forerunner and the Rebels.”

  “That is correct,” said Morvilind. “It is also possible that the Rebels will track down your brother and try to use him against you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. If Nicholas got his hands on Russell…no, I really didn’t want to think about what he might do. I had been stupid to fall for Nicholas, but at least I had been smart enough not to give him all my secrets as I had given him my body.

  “The potential victory is worth the risks,” said Morvilind.

  “And we both might lose everything,” I said.

  “That is a possibility,” said Morvilind. “Then you will just have to win, won’t you?”

  Chapter 5: Rebels

  I was going to have to be very careful.

  Nicholas might need my help, but he had every reason to hate me. Hell, he had every reason to shoot me on sight. I had wrecked his plan and his Rebel cell in Los Angeles, and I had also screwed up his plan to assassinate Jarl Rimethur in Madison last year. For that matter, I had killed his lieutenant Sergei Rogomil, but I don’t think Nicholas knew about that. But from what he did know, he had more than enough reason to try to kill me.

  Nevertheless, he did need me to steal something for him. Three things, apparently. Which meant he couldn’t kill me until I stole those things for him. I wondered if he knew that I was coming. I wondered if the Forerunner knew about my former relationship with Nicholas, if he had warned Nicholas that his ex-girlfriend was coming to visit him.

  Maybe this was going to be a big surprise for Nicholas.

  I grinned mirthlessly at the thought.

  But Morvilind had a point. Nicholas and I were enemies who would be working alongside each other, and the moment that the bargain was ended, Nicholas would try to kill me. Nicholas was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them, and he would know that I hated him and would try to kill him if I could manage it.

  Which meant I was going to have to be exceptionally careful. One mistake and I was finished, and Russell would die with me. I have to admit I didn’t particularly care if I took Morvilind down with me, but I needed Morvilind to cure Russell.

  It would be all or nothing.

  And, God, I wasn’t ready for this kind of thing. I was a mess from what had happened in the Eternity Crucible, and this kind of thing required a cool head, careful planning, and bold improvising. I wasn’t sure I could manage it, not in my current state. Arvalaeon had sent me to hell, and I had come back broken.

  But Morvilind hadn’t left me any choice.

  And maybe it was for the best. If I couldn’t control myself, if I lost it and went berserk, I would be around a bunch of Rebels when it happened. I wanted to go back to the Marneys’ house. I wanted to go find Riordan and cry into his chest.

  Instead, I drove to my apartment and got ready.

  I had a ground floor apartment in a building not far from the medical college. I had never really lived there so much as I used the place for storage and overnight stays. The living room was full of equipment and a desk, and I had more stuff stashed in the bedroom. I stood in the doorway for a moment, staring at the living room. From my perspective, I hadn’t been here for a long, long time. One memory flickered to the surface of my mind. Riordan had spent the night here exactly once, back when Rosalyn Madero’s banehound had been hunting me down. We hadn’t slept together. God, but wished we had slept together.

  Suppose we would never have the chance now.

  I permitted myself one angry curse, and then I got to work. I started by forging various documents I would need once I got to Gary, Indiana. I wanted to establish as much of a false trail as possible in case Nicholas had any ideas about tracing me and finding family members to use as leverage. Fortunately, I had never given him my real name. He knew me as “Katrina Stoker,” so I produced false documents in that name.

  As far as I knew, Nicholas didn’t know about this apartment so I would keep it as a bolt hole if I had to flee in a hurry. I wrote checks to pay for the rent, the electric, and the Internet for the next six months, dropping them in the mail along with a letter explaining to the landlord that I expected to be traveling a lot for school and would appreciate it if he didn’t haul all my stuff into a dumpster.

  Once all that was done, I loaded all the equipment I needed into my van, locked up the apartment and drew the blinds, and then headed for the interstate.

  It was time to head for Gary, Indiana. I had never been there before, and I wanted to have a good look around and familiarize myself with the place before I contacted Nicholas. It would also be a good idea to set myself up in a hotel or a storage unit or a cheap apartment in Gary so I would have a place to retreat and hide out while I was preparing to steal whatever Nicholas wanted stolen.

  I got onto I-94 and headed south along the shore of Lake Michigan. I-94 would loop around the southern end of the lake, and I would follow it all the way to Gary.

  Except, of course, for the part where I-94 ended, and I had to get on I-294 to avoid the ruins of Chicago because anyone entering the ruins of Chicago would get killed by the dead things that walked beneath the burning sky.

  Yeah. I should probably explain.<
br />
  I don’t know the full story, and likely only the High Queen and the Elven nobles know the truth of what really happened. But after the Conquest, after the High Queen seized control of Earth, everything wasn’t all fun and games and happiness. There were a lot of revolts, and they were put down with brutal force. Various terrorist and insurgent groups arose, and I think some of them were the ancestors of the modern Rebels. One of the insurgent groups was more successful than the others, and they caused violent riots in Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis, assassinating a couple of high-ranking Elven nobles.

  The High Queen responded by destroying all three cities.

  I don’t know how she did it. Whatever she did in Chicago burned the city from I-294 to Lake Michigan. The sky above the ruined city was permanently cloudy, and the clouds seemed like they were burning above the dead skeletons of the ancient skyscrapers. Anyone who ventured into the ruins of Chicago was killed.

  Not from the lingering fire of the spell. No, the undead did it. When the High Queen destroyed Chicago, the spell that killed the people of the city also raised them as undead. Tens of thousands of undead things lurked in the ruins, dead flesh animated by the ancient magic. The creatures stayed within the ruins, but if anyone crossed the boundary of I-294, the undead attacked and killed the intruders.

  The intruders, in turn, rose again as undead, joining their killers as the guardians of the ruins.

  No one ever went to Chicago. At least no one who ever returned. Most of the suburbs of the old city still existed, though they had become small cities of their own over the years. A lot of the suburbs close to I-294 just withered and died, since no one wanted to get up every morning and see the corpse of a city on the horizon. I used to wonder why the High Queen and the nobles hadn’t decreed that I-294 needed to be moved, but maybe they liked so much traffic traveling past a reminder of their power. Perhaps the reminder had worked. As far as I knew, there had been no major revolts like Chicago since the Conquest, and the Rebels operated underground.

  On the other hand, how would I know? There could have been a dozen major revolts, and I doubt the Inquisition and the Department of Homeland Security would have let the information turn up on the Internet. Thinking about that, and looking at the ruins with the eerie burning cloud above them, I could understand why the Rebels hated the High Queen and the Elves so much.

  I scowled. Sure, they hated the Elves…which was why the Rebels had killed so many humans.

  Jerks, the lot of them. If I lived through all of this, if I stayed alive long enough and Morvilind kept his word and healed Russell, I think I wanted to go live alone in the desert someplace, somewhere where no one would ever bother me.

  Though realistically, I wasn’t going to live that long, but after one hundred and fifty-eight years in the Eternity Crucible, the thought felt like a relief.

  I brooded about that and breaking up with Riordan and hurting Russell as I left Chicago behind and headed into Indiana.

  So I was in a pretty dark mood when I got off the freeway and came to the city of Gary.

  I had driven through Gary a few times before, and I didn’t like it. I guess in the old days Chicago was a major port, but then the High Queen blew it up, and Gary had been rebuilt into a port and and industrial site. The port was crowded with big container ships carrying stuff out of the United States. From what I understood, the High Queen wanted each country to be as economically self-sufficient as possible and decreed high tariffs for that purpose. It could cost twice as much to buy a German car as it would to buy an identical car from an American manufacturer. But not every country could meet its own needs – I think I read somewhere that the United Kingdom could only grow something like a third of the food it needed. A lot of raw materials went out on the container ships from Gary, which meant that the streets were constantly clogged with trucks heading to and from the port.

  There were also numerous industrial sites in Gary since if you were going to make stuff to sell to people overseas, it made sense to make it right next to the port. The air constantly smelled of smoke and engine fumes. Most of the city was devoted to either factories or port facilities, and most of the workers lived in the suburbs instead of the city proper.

  I went to the suburbs first. Step one – find some lodging. There were a lot of cheap apartment blocks in the suburbs of Gary that took cash, and it wasn’t hard to find one. That said, while I felt like I was a hundred and seventy-nine years old, I looked like an attractive twenty-one-year-old woman, and those apartment blocks were not the sort of place a young woman ought to go alone. A lot of men who had been on Punishment Day videos but had managed to avoid getting sold into slavery wound up working on the docks because they couldn’t get hired anywhere else.

  Come to think of it, a place like Gary would be the perfect recruitment ground for Nicholas. There would be a lot of bitter people who hated the Elves.

  I cast the Masking spell to disguise myself as a weathered-looking middle-aged man. I had prepared fake documents identifying myself as a man named Travis McHale, and I had done a good job of matching my illusionary Mask to the pictures on the documents. In short order, I rented a shabby efficiency apartment from a sullen landlord who took my money without any questions, and I also rented a storage unit where I stashed my van. It had enough valuable (and illegal) things in it that I didn’t want to leave it sitting on the curb.

  Once my accommodations were settled, I went for a walk around Gary to take the lay of the land.

  I noticed two troubling things right away.

  The first was the slaves. Humans were forbidden from owning slaves, but Elves could own as many human slaves as they liked. People who couldn’t pay their Punishment Day debts were sold into slavery to pay their fines, and it looked like some of the local Elven nobles rented out their slaves to the port authority to supplement their income. I saw gangs of tired-looking men in the orange jumpsuits of slaves working at the docks. That was another potential source of recruits for Nicholas since the slaves would have no reason to love their masters. I had heard of human slaves who were devoted to their Elven masters, but I rather doubted slaves loaned out to the port authority would feel that way.

  The second thing I noticed was the local Homeland Security branch.

  Specifically, I noticed their blatant corruption.

  A couple of times I saw the blue SUVs of Homeland Security pull up in front of various businesses, and someone came out and handed off a folded bundle of twenty-dollar bills. They did it right in the open, making no effort to hide it. The local branch of Homeland Security was corrupt, and if Nicholas had enough money (which he probably did), he could basically control the officers. Martin Corbisher had done the same thing in Minneapolis before I had wrecked his life.

  All that meant Nicholas was essentially the ruler of Gary, right under the nose of the Elven nobles.

  That was a problem.

  I brooded on that thought as I walked to the address that the Forerunner had given me. Looking at Gary, I saw why people supported the Rebels. The hell of it was that the Rebels were worse than the Elven nobles. If Nicholas or someone like him actually won, he wouldn’t free humanity. He would build a miserable hellhole of tyranny like human dictators used to do in the old days before the Elves conquered Earth.

  Was that what life had been like before the Conquest? People could only choose between bad governments or worse governments?

  I shoved the depressing thought out of my head. I had a job to do, and I was going to do it. I would save my brother’s life and after that…hell, I didn’t care what happened after that.

  Either to the world or to me.

  I walked past Nicholas’s address, keeping my Mask spell wrapped tight around me. Nicholas’s secret base seemed to be a large container yard, with containers stacked high around a warehouse complex and office building. Four massive cranes stood on either side of the warehouse. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire encircled the entire place, and there was a security bo
oth manned by three scowling men who glared at me. I kept my head down and my hands in my pockets as I passed. I didn’t worry about them recognizing me since I doubted the guards had the magical ability to detect a Masking spell.

  I altered the spell as examined the yard, disguising myself as different men, even a Homeland Security officer, so if the guards saw me, they wouldn’t notice a pattern. The container yard was a big place, but the guarded gate was the only way in and out. I also saw security cameras fixed to the fence posts at regular intervals, and knowing Nicholas, I suspected he had a secret way in and out, probably through the sewers or an underground tunnel.

  The only people I saw coming and going from the container yard were the drivers of the semis that maneuvered through the gate and the crane operators when their shifts ended. It looked like the place was an actual operating container yard. I had pictured Nicholas holed up in an abandoned warehouse someplace, but a functioning business made for a better front. Corbisher had hidden behind the many functioning businesses of the Corbisher Group, and he and his father had kept themselves undetected for years.

  I remembered what Arvalaeon had told me, how the High Queen’s hand rested lighter upon Earth than most people thought, and how the Rebels had begun proliferating faster than the Inquisition and the various human security services could shut them down. I wondered how many other places like Gary and Corbisher Tower had sprung up recently, places quietly under the control of the Rebels.

  I spent the next two days watching the container yard and observing who came and who went. The security officers at the gate changed, but the man in charge always was a scowling, middle-aged guy with a graying crew cut. Trucks dropped containers off or picked them up, but I never saw any people go through the gate except the security guards and the crane operators.

  Despite my tension, I actually felt better while spying on the container yard and planning for my visit. I had done this kind of thing dozens of times before. Arvalaeon had sent me to hell, and it had broken me – but I was still a very good thief.