by Carl Sargent
He was confident, Serrin realized. Maybe too confident. And didn’t even seem to be packing a weapon.
“Trouble?” he asked.
“Well, let’s put it this way,” Magellan said, pouring himself a glass of red wine from a bottle sitting next to the ashtray on the small table, “you’ve been trotting around the globe a lot lately. Which, I’d guess, must have something to do with that business back in Heidelberg,”
“Why don’t you just ask me what you want to know?” Serrin said, then wanted to kick himself for being so dumb. He should be playing for time, but the after-effects of the drug were playing havoc with his ability to think straight.
“It’s more a question of my finding out what you do know and what you don’t,” Magellan said evenly.
“And what depends on that?” Serrin asked.
"Stop playing games, fool. Somebody tried to snatch you, but you got away first. So now you want to find out who called the hit, and get revenge on him.”
“Right on time,” Serrin said. Things weren’t really as simple as all that, but Magellan seemed to have everything so scripted that he decided to go along to see where it would all lead.
“You got the troll for muscle and Sutherland for brains. The decker does some investigating into missing mages. Clever but predictable. You start putting pieces together and find someone else who escaped a snatching. You make it to the Zulu Nation to talk to him. Tell me why you hit Cape Town first. I want to hear that.”
Serrin judged that Magellan didn’t actually know, and his heart skipped a beat. This elf wasn’t one of the original kidnappers, he was sure of that. He was working for someone else. It also meant he genuinely needed to know some things.
“Michael said we should go there first because he knows the city. We picked up some weapons and some medikit stuff. We needed that out at Umfolozi.”
“What about the girl?”
“Look, Michael knows this brothel, says no one would ever find us there. The girl, well, she’s a little bit of a looker, right? I enjoyed myself.” Serrin hated himself for those words, but it was a story Magellan might just buy.
If Serrin could keep some of his cards close to his chest, he might yet have a chance in this poker game after all.
Magellan looked at him intently. Serrin met his gaze and didn’t flinch.
“So you jazzed around a little,” the other elf said. “That doesn’t explain why you took her along to the Nation? If Sutherland’s been there before, he knows that her Xhosa face would make her about as popular as a garlic pizza to a vampire.”
The analogy was deliberate, Serrin was sure. He gave a slight start, deliberately, to clue Magellan that he knew that part of the puzzle.
“She said she knew about the local critters. Button spiders, poisonous snakes, that kind of thing. Said that would be useful to us.”
“Hah! What would a kaffir know about the wilds of Umfolozi?”
“You got me,” Serrin said, “but that’s what she told us.” He spoke with a forcefulness based on the fact that he was actually speaking the truth. “Guess she liked the money and thought it might be a kick to go along for the ride.”
Magellan looked long and hard at him, then nodded. “All right. So you find Shakala. What does he tell you?”
“He saw enough to describe one of the kidnappers. The description matched someone who’d also come after me. Guy with a scar.”
Magellan nodded again. He poured a glass of wine for Serrin and the mage took it, sniffing it suspiciously.
“Didn’t I already tell you that if I wanted you drugged—”
“And I heard you, loud and clear. But what I ate played hell with my guts back at the club and I don’t think either one of us wants to see me zooking it all up right now.”
Magellan leaned back slightly and laughed. “Serrin, I like you. I really wouldn’t want to kill you unless I have to.”
“Thanks,” Serrin said, risking a sip of the wine.
“I mean it,” Magellan insisted. “Not someone like you. But it all depends on where we go with this conversation.”
Someone like you. The other elf gave those words a peculiar emphasis that made Serrin wonder if his survival would depend on figuring out exactly what Magellan meant by that. And he’d have to be figuring it out at the same time he was thinking hard about every word he uttered. A bead of sweat formed on his brow and trickled down to his eyebrow.
* * *
Michael had barely jacked in to begin his work before the sound of the girl frantically hammering at the door forced him to jack out again double-quick. Sobbing uncontrollably, she ran in and flung herself into Tom’s arms. It was several long minutes before they were able to get the story out of her.
“Try to think, Kristen. Please." Michael said exasperatedly, ignoring Tom’s hostile glare. “We can’t help Serrin unless we know exactly what happened. Listen to me. Think carefully . ., who followed him into the men’s room? Did you see anyone unusual, anyone you might be able to recognize again?”
She shook her head and started to cry once more. Michael was desperate to keep her talking, but had to back off and leave her weeping in the troll’s arms. By the time he’d poured a drink and got the urge to shout at her under control, she was finally managing to mumble some more details in response to Tom’s gentler queries.
“So you’re sure he didn’t come back into the club? That probably means they went out a back door from the men’s room. And if you didn’t see anyone unusual follow him in, they must have hired locals to do the job. And that means, almost certainly, that someone at the club knows what went down. We’ll have to ask some questions.”
“What about the police?” Tom asked.
“Not an option. We’re traveling on fake IDs, remember? That plastic got us through immigration, but we can’t risk anyone looking too close,” Michael said. Then something occurred to him.
“Tom, that spell lock of Serrin’s. Have you ever handled it? Could you trace him, astrally?”
The troll shook his head. “Slot, man, you don’t go around handing out your locks for another magician to play with. Besides, I don’t have the skill to trace him.” Tom shook his head sadly again. “I just can’t do it.”
“But you’ve got to try. There are lots of his things here. You’ve got a link.”
“Even if I could, it would take many, many hours. Face it, chummer. I just can’t do it,” the troll said wretchedly. He knew only too well his own limitations as a shaman.
“Tom, you’ve got to try,” Michael pleaded.
Tom breathed in hard and cast his eyes down at the floor. “All right . .. I’ll try, I’ll do what I can. But it ain’t gonna work,” he said. He let go of the girl and plodded slowly toward the door. “I need to be alone. Peace and quiet,” he said, then shut the door behind him.
“Kristen, you’re going to have to take me back to that club. But first I have to ask you something,” Michael said, not sure how to ask the question without offending her. “Did you get looks from people? For being a Xhosa?”
She nodded.
“Then it will be better if you don’t come inside with me. I’ll have to go in alone. If I spread enough money around, I might learn something. They may be hostile to Serrin if seeing your face reminds them too strongly of who he came in with, right?” He tried to say this gently, then added, “It’s just a fact of life, kid.”
“Don’t I know it,” she said miserably.
“But if it wasn’t for the description you’ve given us, we’d have nothing to go on. You’ve already done your bit.”
* * *
They took the elevator down to the street and hailed a cab, which Kristen directed to the club. Michael got out, then paid the driver and told him to take Kristen back to the hotel. Too agitated to sit quietly as they rode along, Kristen began to search through her bag for the key card to her room, coming up with two instead of one. She sat looking at them blankly for a moment, then suddenly remembered that Serrin had give
n her his to carry in her purse.
By the time she got back to the Imperial and was riding the elevator up to her room, a plan was already beginning to form in her mind. Sure, it was crazy, but she’d seen where Serrin kept his things and if there was enough money and if she could just figure out how to make the transfers . . .
* * *
Michael was back from the club within an hour. Money had bought memories. Of four men, members of a known street gang, and the part of town they claimed as their turf. He was puzzled, though. This wasn’t how the previous snatchings had been carried out against Serrin, or even Shakala in this same country. A gentle knock at Tom’s door told him the troll was still deep in reverie, trying to trace the elf. He was contemplating disturbing him, since he’d gotten his own trace of a kind, when Kristen suddenly burst out into the corridor.
“I think I know where he might be,” Michael told her. “Trouble is, there could be an entire street gang around him.”
“That won’t be a problem if you can find ten thousand nuyen,” she said cheerfully, sashaying past him into his room with a grin. He closed the door behind her and lounged against it, looking at her intently.
“What have you done?” he asked.
She told him.
* * *
“You don’t seem to like Humanis much,” Magellan probed. “I hear you helped out in a few paybacks.”
Serrin tried to work out where this sudden change of subject was leading. And he was also still cogitating over that phrase: someone like you. An elf. Me. Him. The kidnapper at the top of the pile. Elves.
“Got to protect your own,” Serrin growled.
“Damn straight,” Magellan said, with just a little too much wine in his voice. Then he again made an abrupt shift.
“Let’s see what else you know. Sutherland’s identified the ownership of the Umfolozi plant by now?”
“Ninety-nine percent,” Serrin lied. “It was the British connection. The medical databases not on official computers. That’s what helped him narrow down who had ready access.” Another point scored. Another way of tricking Magellan into believing he knew much more than he did.
“Clever. I hadn’t thought of that,” Magellan mused. He got up from his chair, stood up as if to pour another glass of wine and suddenly whipped around, grabbing Serrin by the lapels of his jacket.
“Who else knows?” he hissed.
Serrin had expected that. “We’ve made arrangements,” he said coolly.
“Which are?”
“Do you honestly think I’m going to tell you? Suffice it to say the information is filed away for transmission to interested parties should anything unforeseen happen to us.”
Magellan spat, muttering something that sounded like “drek.” He’d bought it. For the first time in this long night, Serrin believed that he was actually going to get out of here alive.
“Who? How?” The red-haired elf shook Serrin bodily.
The mage faced him down. “So I’m supposed to sign my own death warrant by telling you? Michael isn’t just good. He’s brilliant. You won’t find any trails. Anyway, what makes you think we’re foolish enough to leave it only in electronic form?” he said calmly.
Magellan let go of Serrin and it was obvious he was thinking hard. Probably thinking it was worse than he’d feared. That Serrin knew almost everything—and maybe even did know everything. Killing him—even killing all of them—would be futile now. What Serrin had told him was enough. Them searching through non-official databases—that was Sutherland’s brain at work. Magellan had only one card left to play now. But he would take a long time working himself up to being able to do it.
“Well, then, let’s talk about our people, Serrin.”
* * *
The plex was just so fragging big, and the troll had no idea where to search as he roamed astrally through the sprawl. Sure, he knew what he was looking for, but the haystack was so huge and the needle would be well-hidden. To find the elf, Tom’s astral body would actually have to enter the very room where Serrin was. He couldn’t just try to magically assense his location through whatever walls were hiding his friend from view. With a million buildings in the city, that would take forever.
There had to be a trace, he knew. From the spell lock Serrin used for detecting enemies. But, try as he might, hovering inside Serrin’s hotel room attempting to pick up a trace of the locked spell got him nowhere. Serrin was simply a far more powerful magician and his masking hid the trace from the despairing troll.
An astral visit to the club had been equally useless. The auras of the people there were the same unpleasant mix the troll would have expected in a similar place anywhere in the world; aggression, lust, violence seething under the surface. That was never all, of course, and so Tom tried to seize the rare good energy; excitement, joy, a little love here and there, but there was nothing of Serrin. He began to work his way around outside. Still nothing.
Serrin, where are you? Tom felt a bleak sadness come over him. It wasn’t just that the elf was gone, lost to him. The troll had also sensed the bond between the cynical, troubled spirit of the mage and the forlorn girl. He saw that they loved each other, but just hadn’t figured it out yet. That Serrin might be dead, dying, that the possibility of love would be destroyed before it ever blossomed hurt Tom deep, deep down.
In the midst of these mournful reflections, the troll suddenly—and to his utter astonishment—suddenly felt a bite at the nape of his neck and he remembered Shakala. His astral body froze. He let himself become completely empty, just waiting, not feeling anything much except an awareness of himself.
It was pure instinct that led him now, led him straight to the dead zone.
22
Michael was just about to knock on Tom’s door, which opened even before his knuckles made contact with it.
“I know where he is,” the troll said, but he didn’t look particularly elated or pleased with himself.
“Me too,” Michael said slowly. “We're on our way downtown now. To pick up some heat.”
From the way the girl was smiling, Tom knew she must have been the one to fix it. He wasn’t going to ask how any more than Michael had demanded details of him.
“You guys take more rides than Karoo jockeys,” the ork driver said as they piled into his cab. Then he studied the address written on the scrap of paper Michael shoved in front of him.
“Hey, I get triple rate for going there,” he growled. “And you pay for any damage done to the engine, right?”
“You got it,” Michael said and waved some money at the driver as the cab sped off into the night.
* * *
“You know our people are special,” Magellan urged. “You were born knowing that.”
“Depends on exactly how you mean it,” Serrin said, still playing for time.
“Come on. You’re a mage. You know perfectly well that magical talent is more common among our people than any other race on earth.”
Serrin nodded. He also knew that in some places the percentages were even higher; the ancient lands of Tir na nOg, for one. But by now he’d figured out where this train of thought was heading. To get out alive, he would have to tell Magellan what he wanted to hear and then figure out a way to feed it back to him later as his own opinion.
“And the places we control . . . they work. The Tirs, right here in the Zulu Nation, and everywhere else where our people are running the show. We protect the land, the environment. We’ve even used our magic to restore it from the ruin in which humans left it in so many places. Our technology’s cleaner, safer, better. We know how to do all this for everyone’s benefit. Everyone, right?”
“It would be hard to argue with that,” Serrin said.
“And we elves have been here before, and most of all, we know that. Or some of us do. We take care of the world better because we know we’re coming back. Not like humanity. They think they can poison the water, poison the air, dirty everything up because they don’t care about the future. Jus
t the here and now. They figure they’ve only got this one time around and so they’ll use and abuse everything they can and frag everyone else, frag the future.”
Magellan was practically shouting now.
He’s obsessed, Serrin realized. He won’t be able to tell illusion from reality, lies from truth, at this point. All I have to do is agree with him.
“It’s true. You see it every day,” Serrin said with some feeling, though he didn’t think any particular race had a monopoly on thinking the world was made for them and the rest of creation be damned.
“Just think, Serrin, if we elves had control of the whole business. The whole wide world. We could really start cleaning it up, really make it work right. Like it used to be. Serrin, it’s what the world needs and, and as elves, it’s our destiny.”
"I've always wished it was so,” Serrin lied, knowing it was what the other elf wanted to hear. Magellan was kneeling on the floor beside him, virtually seeming to beseech him.
“You don’t have to wish for it anymore, brother. It is. It is.” No trideo evangelist had ever sounded more convinced.
That left Serrin with only one final thing he needed to know.
* * *
The streetlights had been shot out long ago and most of the buildings had collapsed into rubble. The place, which looked like the forgotten ruin of some war zone, was utterly unlike anything they’d seen in Azania until now, and the contrast was shocking. The cab crunched to a halt.
“I’m not going any farther,” the ork driver told them. “I ain't replaced the bullet-proofing on my front side yet. Look, why don’t you just let me take you somewhere nice, okay? Chips, dope, girls, boys, you name it. I know where it is. You’re crazy fraggers to come down here.”
“Are you absolutely sure about this?” Michael asked Kristen, drawing his Predator. She nodded.
“I don’t know why I do this,” he said distractedly, handing the driver his money. “Look, chummer, will you wait somewhere reasonably close? A bonus of five hundred if you’ll wait for one hour. If we don’t come back, check the Imperial tomorrow morning. You get half that just for being here, even if you don’t pick us up.”
