Guardian Glass

by Christopher Nuttall

  I stepped through a heavy door and into a different corridor, one running towards the rear of the building. It was decorated with animal heads, trophies of Maxwell’s hunts, including several that were definitely on the Endangered Species List. I saw a tiger and a lion, before stopping dead as I took in a troll and what looked like a very ugly cousin to a dragon. I felt a moment’s pity for the troll – it might have looked human, but it was really nothing more than a caveman – although not that much. Trolls were known for their cruelty and their taste for human flesh. I walked onwards, checking each of the heads carefully, and shook my head inwardly. Maxwell would probably have an alibi, of course; it wasn’t illegal to own the trophies, merely to hunt the poor creatures. I wondered if Maxwell himself had hunted them, or if he had merely bought the trophies afterwards. His record suggested that he was not a man of action.

  Dear God, I thought, as I took in the final trophy. It was a stuffed centaur. The creature might have once looked magnificent – there is far more to them than a man’s head and a horse’s body – but in death, it was merely morbid. I don’t like centaurs very much – very few people do who have to spend time with them – but I doubted that the stuffed one had deserved such a fate. Who would go hunting a centaur? They might not have been as dangerous as dragons, but they weren’t easy prey either. Hell, there was only one lure that humans could use…

  I pushed that thought out of my mind as I found the library. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see several volumes of the same magical book I’d discovered back at the school, before Cecilia had been kidnapped. Maxwell certainly had the knowledge and intelligence to write it, although I hadn’t had him on the list of suspects. Like all alchemists, he’d developed long-standing habits of secrecy. If anyone had known how he did what he did, his monopoly on certain types of magic would come to an end. It was one of the reasons he – and others like him – disliked Faye. He had managed to convince dozens of wizards to share their ideas and, by doing so, had built an empire.

  Could Maxwell have written it? I asked myself. I had come hoping to solve one case, but instead…I had found a clue to another. It looked, at first glance, more as if Maxwell had been studying the book himself, but that could be an illusion. I had known more than a few writers in my time – there are several writers who made the jump to becoming magicians – and they had all been obsessed with their own work. They would often admire it in private…and could Maxwell have been the same?

  I checked the shelves out of habit, but saw nothing else that stood out. Maxwell, it seemed, had collected quite a library on mundane chemistry and other fields of study that an alchemist would have to know, but there was little unique or rare on the shelves. Magical chemistry is as much about tempering the person involved as it is about producing the result and Maxwell would have known that there was little to know from those books. It still suggested an enquiring mind. He’d started out as a chemist, after all.

  The library door closed behind me as I slipped onwards to the stairs. The designers had placed a single large stairwell in the building, one made in a rather gothic style that I suspected appealed to Maxwell’s sense of humour, and it was illuminated. I lurked back in the shadows, trusting in my glamour to conceal my presence, as I felt around for someone else. It was dangerous, like turning on a flashlight in a dark room, but there was no sign of a possible threat. The lights merely glowed all the time. I checked the stairs – magicians are fond of using stairs as a place for traps and other surprises – before I started to walk down them, step by step. I was going right down into the basement.

  A dull red glow greeted me as I reached the bottom of the stairs…and, I saw, a shadowy creature standing there, waiting for intruders. I could barely make any details out against the red glow – which might have been why the glow was there – but it was big and nasty. I probed ahead, feeling magical chains that held it to the spot, but little else. It wasn’t a beast that was defined by its own magic. It reminded me more of the dark creatures that lived in caves deep under the mountains, preferring to stay away from humanity…although most of them liked a human snack from time to time. I didn’t want to think about what they might be breeding with. A thought struck me and I drew the Faerie weapon. This time, it took on the shape of a tiny whistle.

  Here goes nothing, I thought, and started to play. The weapon did the rest, playing a haunting tune that seemed to echo out ahead of me towards the beast. It made my limbs feel leaden and heavy; the beast seemed to sigh, before settling down and falling asleep. I gazed at the weapon with new respect. I hadn’t known that it could do that, or even that it would work. I had heard that a farmer up near the mountains had indeed used music to soothe the savage beast, but I hadn’t known that it would work on a tamed and charmed creature. It had been a stroke of luck. Up close, the beast looked strong enough to tear a man apart; it was as if someone had been cross-breeding dragons, trolls and humans. The dragons would probably consider it an abomination.

  Cross-breeding magical creatures is illegal, I reminded myself, as I stepped onwards. I would still have to prove that Maxwell had actually done it – instead of capturing the beast somewhere himself, perhaps up in the mountains – but it was something hopeful. I hoped it would remain asleep as I stepped into the next room and stopped dead. I had found Maxwell’s place of work.

  It looked, at first, like a fairly normal chemistry lab, but it was decorated with very personal items. A handful of Witch Bitch pornographic magazines caught my eye and I smiled. It confirmed some of my opinions about Maxwell’s sex life. The Witch Bitches – yes, they call themselves that – cater to the extreme sadomasochist crowd, the men who want to be degraded and humiliated by women, and then keep coming back for more. I once read an article that claimed that their customers wanted to put aside their normal lives and let mother give them a good spanking, before the hug that made it all better. That might have been true, but the Witch Bitches were truly unpleasant. To walk into their world was to grant them total power over you.

  I wonder if Maxwell used them or merely look at the pictures, I thought, as I examined the remainder of the lab. It was largely beyond my comprehension. Maxwell had been trying to do something, but what? It would need an alchemist equal to Maxwell to sort out order from the chaos, but alchemy wasn’t my strong suit. It looked, to my untrained eye, as if Maxwell had been trying to summon something, but what? A set of chains made of cold iron on the wall caught my eye. The only reason for using chains like that was to restrain a supernatural creature…

  The inner door looked like the way into a cell, I realised. I stepped forward, convinced that there was something – maybe even Cecelia – alive in there, and opened the door. It wasn’t complicated. There weren’t even any binding spells on the door, just a set of bolts. It opened at my touch and I peered inside. Despite the night vision spell, for a moment it was as black as night…and then my vision cleared suddenly. There was a body lying within the room. As I watched, it opened pale yellow eyes and peered at me.

  Zombie, my mind screamed. I readied a spell to vaporise it, but it just looked at me before closing its eyes again and going to sleep. That was…odd. A zombie normally wanted – needed – to eat brains, just to starve off its inevitable decay. It would have quite happily have broken out of its chains by tearing off its hands to get at me, but instead…it had just gone back to sleep. I stared, wondering just what Maxwell had done to it to make it like that, before I realised that it could have been Cecelia. It wasn’t, thankfully, but it had definitely once been a young girl. Now, of course, it was just a zombie. My duty was to destroy it at once, but that would have revealed my presence.

  I went back through the lab, checked that the beast was still sleeping, and checked the next room. It looked more like an office than anything else, but I could smell the faint taste of absolute madness in the air. This was where Maxwell had dreamed his perverted dreams. The desk was covered in papers, some of them barely legible and all of them disorganised. Mrs Pringl
e would have had a heart attack if she had seen how badly Maxwell had treated his paperwork. I bent down to examine it and blinked as I realised I was looking at a journal. I checked quickly for any security charms and then bent down to read them…

  And, slowly, a pattern began to emerge. Maxwell, like all magicians, was a supreme egoist. He hadn’t bothered to worry about security so far down in his house. If someone had broken in and seen everything else, particularly the zombie, he was dead anyway. The papers were confused and badly out of sequence, but they told an odd story. Maxwell had been hired by someone – he didn’t know who; they’d hidden themselves behind powerful glamour spells and he hadn’t been able to see though them, which grated – to obtain magical ingredients, including some that were illegal or very hard to obtain. Money had been no object, somehow, and Maxwell had been paid millions for obtaining Unicorn Horn, Basilisk Blood, Dragon Skin and – I smiled when I realised what he’d done – tons of Pixie Dust. It hadn’t been easy, but he’d complied…and the demands had just gotten more and more extreme. Reading between the lines, I wondered if Maxwell had started to wonder just what he was actually becoming involved with…

  A noise caught my eye and I looked over at a small cage. It was crammed with Pixies, tiny humanoid females with long gossamer wings. I felt like a pervert even looking at them. It was like looking at naked children. There was something unpleasantly voyeuristic about the entire sight, but I couldn’t look away. They were perfect in every detail. I’d heard that there were men who fell in love with Pixies – they were certainly winsome enough – but there was no hope of a normal relationship.

  And, of course, ground-up Pixies produced Pixie Dust.

  I felt the magic spike again and I stepped back as…something began to materialise in the room. I hadn’t felt anything like it before, but it didn’t seem to be malicious; it just seemed to be forming a haze of magic in the air. I drew my shadows around me and watched as a spinning ball of light shimmered into existence. It became a circle, hanging in the air, one large enough to admit a man. I realised, with a flicker of excitement, just what I was looking at. It was a direct link to the Hole in the Wall.

  Two people stepped out of it. The first was Maxwell. I had seen enough pictures to recognise him without any bother. The second was a woman wearing a black garment that completely enshrouded her and hid her features. I shivered helplessly. I’d been called to a scene where a supernatural creature had worn an Islamic veil and walked out in the daylight. When it had been challenged, it had torn the challengers apart, leaving nothing, but blood on the ground. It might not have been a woman. It might easily have been a man, or even a Faerie.

  “I have done everything that you asked,” Maxwell said. It sounded as if I had stepped into the middle of a conversation. I hoped that it kept distracting them. I was sure that I could hide from Maxwell anywhere else, but in the middle of his house? The woman was an unknown quantity as well. “Are you now going to tell me what you promised in return?”

  “You have done well,” the woman agreed. She was using a vocal modulator to alter her voice, stripping it of all traces of femininity. It would also make her impossible to identify in real life. “You will get your reward.”

  Before I could do anything, even if I had been able to do anything, she stabbed him through the heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The key to being a successful criminal is to leave as few loose ends as possible. Given time, a careful policeman will take that loose end and pull the entire ball of string out into a nicely-comprehensible ball of string…and find the criminal at the end.

  -Anon

  Maxwell staggered back with shock, his face twisting in disbelief. I stared in equal disbelief. I hadn’t expected that! The alchemist kept trying to wave his hands and chant a spell, but he was dying too fast for him to say a word. He finally gurgled a curse – I thought – under his breath and died. His killer turned sharply as a roar echoed down the corridor. The beast had broken free and was coming to kill.

  He must have freed it with his final moments, I thought. I wanted to step out and arrest his killer, but I hesitated just a moment too long. As the beast leapt towards her – it was as ugly in the normal light as it was in the red glow – she snapped out a word in a language I didn’t recognise. I felt it though; reality twanged, like a broken harp string, and the beast vanished in a flash of light. The woman’s black robes seemed to fade into shadow, and then she was gone.

  “Hellfire,” I swore aloud, cursing my own stupidity. I had had a chance to catch his murderer – and an extremely powerful sorceress – and I’d lost it before I even realised what I’d had. The woman – if she was a woman – was long gone already. She’d teleported out through his wards – a depressingly familiar sight – and she could be in China or Australia by now. “What about you, then?”

  I bent down over Maxwell and examined him carefully. His body was already cold. I didn’t understand it until I touched the blade of the knife…and then snatched it away as a shock ran through my body. It was an evil weapon, a blade carved from stone and decorated with unpleasant-looking runes. I wasn't an expert in runes from the various civilisations that had known magic before it faded away, but the blade was cursed with darkest magic. Anyone who was even slightly cut by that blade would die very quickly. Maxwell should have seen it coming.

  There was no longer any point in trying to hide. I opened my Sixth Sense and probed the house, looking for signs of magic. There was actually very little beyond the wards themselves and the artefacts in his lab – I guessed that Maxwell wouldn’t have wanted to run the risk of an accident in his house – but what there was looked dangerous. The wards were still intact, which meant trouble. I could probably bring them down now that Maxwell was dead, without even needing to exert much effort, but they looked as if they were going to fade away already.

  I touched his body, remembering Didi and her necromancy. I could call her and bring her to the house and she could try to summon Maxwell’s ghost…except it probably wouldn’t work. Maxwell had had too much to hide. The odds were that he had bound his own soul to prevent any necromancer from calling him back to the world of the living, just to spite his enemies. The Guardians weren't the only ones who used necromancy. If one of his rivals got their hands on his body, they could have used it to learn all of his secrets…and, perhaps, trap him as a ghost on Earth.

  “Silly bastard,” I said. I meant both of us. We’d both failed, in our own way. Maxwell’s commissions for the mystery woman were too good to be true. The payment was far too high, even for the rarest items and materials, and that suggested that the woman had never intended to pay the final commission. “What did you get yourself involved with this time?”

  It was odd. Maxwell, to our fairly certain knowledge, had had dealings with the Mafia, the Tongs, the Brotherhood and various other criminal gangs. He had never worked exclusively for any of them, but he had bound himself not to reveal any of their secrets to anyone else. It should have kept him fairly safe – his status might have granted him a certain leeway – but someone had casually disposed of him as soon as he had outlived his usefulness. What the hell had he been doing?

  I went back to the desk and studied the documents thoughtfully. Maxwell himself, I was surprised to find, hadn’t known whom he was working for, although she was clearly a powerful sorceress. I was tempted to take her outfit at face value and decide that she was linked to one of the feminist groups from the Middle East – they use magic to combat male misogyny – and indeed Maxwell had speculated that that might be the case, but there was no real proof. The woman’s identity was a mystery. Her requests, it seemed, had been more of a challenge than anything else; he’d been delighted by some of them, enjoying the thrill of solving her problems. He still had no idea just what she wanted the materials for…and if an experienced alchemist like Maxwell had been unable to solve the mystery I didn’t know how I could. The whole house really needed the benefit of a forensic team…
>
  But that would raise it’s own problems. Legally, there was no proof that Maxwell was dead. Even so, we couldn’t search the house without a warrant, which we still might not get. I was tempted to take the matter to Wilkinson, explain what I’d done and ask for a team, but he might not feel that it was worth the risk. If we explained to the world that Maxwell was dead, every would-be magic-user would descend on his house, hoping to recover – steal – his artefacts, components and books. He had been a rich and powerful man. They would think that he owned hundreds of books of magic, and perhaps even magical artefacts.

  “Damn it,” I muttered. I opened my magic satchel and started to shovel in the documents as quickly as I could. It took me several minutes to unlock the drawers and examine the smaller files inside, but once I had realised that they were accounts and other documents, I started to add them to the pile. If nothing else, I could take them away and examine them in private, while the wards would keep other scavengers out of the house. I might even be able to solve the mystery before morning.

  On impulse, I opened my senses again and scanned the house for life. There was nothing above the level of small insects and rodents, apart from the Pixies in their cage. There was definitely no sign of Cecelia, or of anywhere that might be shielded to hide her from my senses, although I had to remind myself to keep watching for possible holes. The essence of a good magical shield is that it remains hidden from a casual scan. The girl might be in the room now and I couldn’t even see her. I might have to go through the house room by room.