A Gathering Evil

by Michael A. Stackpole

  A left turn, then a right put us in front of a thick steel door. A periscope built above the door surveyed us, then a buzz sounded. The door unlocked with a click and Bat ushered me into a narrow spiral stairwell that led down. He had to duck his head to avoid scraping it against the low ceiling, and his broad shoulders brushed against the hole's edge as he went down.

  "Bat, I thought the ground in Phoenix was too hard to make underground construction common."

  "It is. These are old tunnels. This was once inPhoenix's Chinatown district. Opium dens."

  Bat remained half-hunched as we came out into a place that appeared, to me, to be a bunker more than any sort of shop. The walls had been covered with pegboard so they could hold up the inventory of weapons but, other than that, they were as unfinished as the ceiling. Old boards covered the floor and plywood sheets had been laid down where the original flooring had rotted away. The flooring had completely collapsed beneath a Chrysler Combat Exoskeleton in the corner. I had no idea how they'd gotten it into this hole. The former opium den had electricity and phones, but all the wiring remained exposed on thick wooden beams.

  A dwarf came waddling out from behind a counter. "Dzien dobry, Chwalibog."

  "Dzien dobry, Bronislaw." Bat's huge hand swallowed the smaller man's normally sized one, then Bat looked over at me. "Tycho Caine, this is Bronislaw Joniak."

  I offered the dwarf my hand, and he shook it. I found his grip strong and his hand rough with calluses. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Joniak. Bat thinks you can meet our needs for some weaponry."

  The little man smoothed back brown hair and folded his arms. "I deal in quality weapons, Mr. Caine. If you're looking to take down a Circle K or a7-Eleven I have what you need upstairs."

  I shook my head. "I am a bit more ambitious than that. I need to outfit an expeditionary force of eight individuals. We will be looking at a substantial purchase—fully automatic weapons, personal side arms, ammunition, communications devices and sundry explosives. I can pay cash or gold, your choice."

  A smile slowly crept across the man's face and had taken up residence there before I mentioned money. "I like seeing someone who knows what he wants." He walked back around the counter and clambered up onto a high stool. Pulling a steno pad into his lap, he flipped to a new page and picked up a pencil. "Shall we start at the beginning?"

  I nodded. "I will need eight portable radio units with earpiece microphones, complete with batteries."

  Bronislaw scribbled. "Possible, though I may have to buy Japanese."

  "Whatever. I will need two kilos of Semitek or C-4 with 12 radio detonators, 24 unburned PROMs and the equipment needed to burn them with a voice command for detonation. I'll return any chips I don't use, as well as the burner."

  The little man looked up at me with dark eyes. "Next?"

  "Assault rifles, eight." I looked at the section of pegboard to which he pointed. On it he had mounted two dozens different models. "Bat, does Natch shoot?"

  The big man nodded. "We all do."

  "Good, let's make it easy, then. Give me eight Colt AR15 A2 carbines. I want six full 20-shot clips loaded with duplex shells. I'll want another 2000 rounds of loose ammo for the guns, duplex as well. Possible?"

  The dwarf shrugged. "Duplex rounds are a bit difficult, but I can do it. You'll want them full-auto, correct?"

  "I'd prefer a selector that allows for single, trey-burst and full auto."

  "Done. Next?"

  "Personal side arms." I pointed to Bat. "You probably know our compatriots' tastes."

  Bat turned to study a pegboard section of the wall when the phone started to ring. Bronislaw and Bat both ignored it, which struck me as odd. What struck me as odder still was that I had an overwhelming desire to answer it. Without thinking, I snatched up the heavy receiver and held it to my ear. "Caine here."

  "It's me, El Espectro. I need to see you immediately." I recognized his voice, then a mental picture of where he was blasted into my brain, just as I had seen Loring's location in my dream. "Hurry."

  "Give me a half hour."

  "This is important."

  "So is this."

  "Very well. Hurry."

  "Later." I returned the receiver to the blocky black base. I looked up and saw both men staring at me strangely. "Well, neither of you made a move toward it."

  Bronislaw slowly shook his head. "It didn't ring."

  "Sure it did." I looked over at Bat. "It was for me."

  Bat narrowed his eyes. "Never should have gone to Sedona."

  I frowned at the phone. "Maybe I got it before it rang."

  Bat grunted. Bronislaw consulted his list. "That's two Colt .45s, four Beretta 9s and a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum for you, Bat." The dwarf turned to me. "What would you like?"

  I started to tell him that I thought my Kraits would be enough, but the image of Leich having survived as much as he had stopped me. "I want a gun that shoots a heavy cartridge that will bore a big hole. What I really want is an automatic pistol that can handle a rifle cartridge. The .44 Mag is probably the best I can do, right?"

  Bronislaw slid off the stool wearing a grin that meant the phone incident had all but been forgotten. He wandered deeper into the armory, dug around behind the Chrysler Exoskeleton, then returned bearing a rosewood box like it was a gift of the Magi. He set it up on the counter, resumed his seat, then opened it reverently.

  "This, my friend, is the answer to your desire. It is a Wildey Wolf with a 10-inch barrel. It shoots a .475 Wildey Magnum shell which is a wildcat round mating a 250-grain bullet to a rebated-rim .284 Winchester cartridge. You get seven in a magazine. The pistol, because it's gas operated and weighs just over four pounds, has less recoil than Bat's Desert Eagle. Muzzle velocity is 1750 feet per second with foot-pounds of energy coming in at 1725. If it can die, this will kill it."

  "And if it can't?"

  "One of these rounds through it, and it'll hurt enough that it will wish it could."

  I picked up the Wolf and smiled. The grip and weight felt good in my hand. Double action, ribbed barrel in a brushed steel finish, it felt and looked like a rifle in pistol-clothing. "Sold." I returned it to the box and closed the lid.

  "Anything else?"

  "Only if you can supply close air support."

  The dwarf smiled. "Not in Eclipse." He ran down the list, checking items off as he went. "I have everything you need in stock or available for immediate delivery. You can have the complete kit tomorrow."

  "Good, I'll arrange payment..."

  The little man held his hand up, cutting me off. "You pay Bat. He brought you, he trusts you and, more importantly, I owe him."

  "I will do that, Mr. Joniak." I shook his hand again. "A pleasure doing business with you." I slapped Bat on the shoulder. "See you back in the conference room this evening—two hours. See if Jytte can get everyone there. We have some planning to do."

  The building on the northeast corner of 12th Street

  and Roosevelt looked very out of place for a number of reasons. It sat nestled in a little box canyon carved out of City Center. Unlike the area near it, this building had somehow avoided decoration by graffiti artists. Likewise the urban decay in evidence all around it had somehow passed it by. Dirt and grime and litter stained the neighborhood and even the walls of City Center, but left this place inviolate.

  The two-story building had been constructed of brick, with a plantation-style front including a double-deck porch with thick pillars. The pitched roof looked unusual amid a bed of squat, mushroom colored houses with flat roofs, and the building very much gave the impression of having been transplanted here from another place and another time.

  I opened the gate in the wrought-iron fence and traversed the circular walkway to the front steps. I mounted them and crossed the porch, but before I could knock on the glass-paneled door, it opened for me. I stepped into a small foyer, and the door closed behind me, leaving me alone with two animals that looked like Doberman pinschers but possessed the bulk and height
of Irish wolfhounds. Their sheer size combined with their low growls and an ugly red glow in their eyes to make me wish I'd not left the Wildey Wolf behind.

  "Kara, Amhas," I heard El Espectro's voice call from elsewhere, "Bring Mr. Caine to me."

  One of the dogs approached and took my left hand gently in its mouth while the other circled around behind me and leaned against the back of my legs. Given a choice between moving forward or becoming kibble and bits, I went with the animals. The lead dog, Kara, let go of my hand and mounted the stairs on the right side of a narrow hallway leading back into the house. I followed up the steep stairs and found the dog waiting in the doorway of a darkened room.

  An antique four-poster bed dominated the slant-ceilinged room. A man I took for El Espectro lay on the bed in a dressing gown with his left arm in a sling. He had been propped up on a whole stack of pillows, and the light on the nightstand beside his bed sank half his face into impenetrable shadow. A thick book with yellowed pages lay open on his lap and reading glasses sat perched on the end of his nose.

  I noticed two peculiar things about him that surprised me very much. The first was that he wore pearl-gray gloves. That was odd, but I'd heard of people who had an obsession with cleanliness—which, combined with the dogs, went a long way toward explaining the immaculate conditions outside his house. That was a personal quirk and nothing I couldn't live with.

  The second and far more startling thing, to me, was his age. When I had seen El Espectro in my dreams and in the Draoling dimension, he had only been a black silhouette, but it was a silhouette of a much younger man. The El Espectro lying on the bed had white hair on his head and in his goatee and moustache. His green eyes still had plenty of fire in them, but his body had thickened, and dark bags underscored his eyes.

  He gestured toward a chair at a small writing desk in the corner, and it slid across the hardwood floor toward the foot of the bed. "Please, be seated."

  I accepted his offer, and the two dogs flanked me. They laid down, but I had no doubt that at a single command they would rise up and tear me to pieces. "I'm here."

  "So you are." He smiled at me in a most curious manner, then removed his glasses and set them on the night table. "Permit me to introduce myself."

  From the nightstand a small white rectangle floated toward me. I accepted the card and read the name aloud. "Damon Crowley."

  The man smiled weakly. "Actually, the last name rhymes with 'unholy,' but that is a tired and old joke begun by my grandfather. Forgive my rudeness in not having mentioned my name earlier to you, but we seldom had the time for polite chatter."

  I shrugged and slipped the card into my jacket pocket. "How are you doing?"

  "The Draoling's blade was clean, which was a miracle in and of itself. More annoying than the cut is the rib another of them cracked. I'm getting too old for this."

  I leaned back in the wooden chair, and it creaked. "What, exactly, is 'this'?"

  "I do what your Coyote does, but, as I said before, I do it in realms he cannot access. In this particular case, I have managed to unravel what Nero Loring has been seeking. To solve his problem, however, I will need your aid, and the aid of others as well."

  "What's going on?"

  He eased himself up a little taller in bed and winced with some pain. "We need to backtrack a bit. When Nerys Loring was born her father was deathly concerned that she might suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Like any concerned parent, he took precautions. In his case, being an engineer and inventor, he hitched up an EEG machine to his daughter and recorded her brainwave patterns. He did this again at age four when it was believed she might have a rare form of epilepsy. She did, and it made her EEG rather distinctive, but she controlled the condition with medicine. Nero's actions might seem a bit obsessive perhaps, but he was merely doing what he could with the means he had at hand."

  My mind raced ahead of Crowley. "So he had a baseline EEG reading for when his daughter came out of the coma. He mentions it to the doctors and even notes the discrepancies. The doctors tell him not to worry about it, that it's a miracle and he should be happy, right?"

  "Exactly. And he was, especially when Nerys began to follow in his footsteps. He found her help on Frozen Shade and the maglev system most useful, but her quick distancing of herself from him during the implementation phase of the maglev project allowed old anxieties to resurface." Crowley's head came up. "Do you know what a changeling is?"

  I shook my head.

  "In the old faery tales there are stories of elves and other fey folk stealing human newborns and substituting their own offspring for them. It is akin to the cowbird or European mockingbird laying its eggs in another bird's nest. The old stories concentrate on what happened to the purloined child and often chronicle attempts to return those children to their human parents. The old storytellers did not dwell upon what benefit the faery folk would get from placing one of their own as a human.

  "Nero came to believe that his daughter went under the water of the family pool, but she was not the one who resurfaced. He decided that in an alternate dimension where time flows far more swiftly than it does here, creatures monitoring our world could have the time to create and substitute a changeling for his daughter within the time it took for her to go down."

  I chewed on my lower lip. "Had I not seen the Draoling dimension I would think of this as paranoid ravings, you know."

  "Quite so. Nero thought the same thing, so he began to work on his dimensionscope. He linked it in with the equipment on which he had recorded his daughter's EEG. He used her brainwave patterns to search the dimensions for a match. Just before he was ousted from Lorica, he found it."

  "What?"

  Crowley slowly nodded. "He found a match for his daughter's brainwave pattern. Chances of a match like that are millions to one."

  "Where is she?"

  El Espectro smiled slightly and closed his book. "In 1924 Valdimir Obrutcev published a book titled Plutonia that detailed the journey of a Russian expedition to what they believed was the center of the earth. They found a land they named Plutonia. At its center they found a giant volcano surrounded by black rocks and sand. They called it the Black Desert and in it, in a vast forest, they reported finding giant ants building vast, skyscraperlike nests. From what I have been told, Nerys is there."

  "You aren't saying this expedition actually took place over a century ago, are you?"

  Crowley shrugged. "Whether it did or did not is immaterial, really. Obrutcev's description jibes with what Nero has described to me. I believe, as I do with Poe or King or Donaldson, that there are individuals empathic enough to pick up impressions of other dimensions that they fully describe or embellish as best they can. Obrutcev's only failing was in not ascribing more than rudimentary intelligence to the creatures he called 'ants.'"

  "What is important is that we get into Plutonia, get Nerys and get her back out again."

  I frowned. "Why?"

  "Because, if you don't save my daughter, this world will be opened to the greatest invasion it has ever seen."

  I turned in my chair and saw Nero Loring leaning heavily on the door jamb, only barely able to keep himself upright. I quickly vacated my chair and offered it to him. He staggered over to it and sat down. He looked feverish and defeated, yet the energy in his eyes told me sheer willpower was driving him. He covered his hands with his face, then wiped them off on the striped pajamas he was wearing.

  "I realized, belatedly, that I had unconsciously incorporated pieces of the maglev system design into my dimensionscope. That is what allowed it to see outside this dimension and into other places. When I began my reevaluation of the maglev project, I realized that those bits of design had been things Nerys had insisted upon including. She always had good reasons for her changes, with many of them being that such things would facilitate expansion in the future. I took this as a sign she would continue our work and that Lorica would live on forever. I did what she told me to do, gladly, because I saw her as my gat
eway to immortality."

  The little man trembled as he spoke. If not for the even tone of his voice I would have thought him a madman. Everything he said was insane, but I weighed the words carefully and, allowing for the existence of other dimensions, everything he said remained consistent.

  "I decided my daughter had been taken, and I wanted her back. I put in a software patch that uses her brainwaves to key the energizing of the dimensional gateway. I knew they would have to bring her here to operate the device, and I had thought, while still controlling Lorica, I could wrest her away from them. Now I know I can't, not without help."

  I shook my head. "I'm missing something here. They need your daughter's brainwave pattern to allow them to stabilize a dimensional gate's energy pattern?"

  "Yes. Maintaining a viable gate is simple, but opening it very difficult. The power has to cycle properly or the thing can be thrown off. This gate needs an incredible amount of power and only by drawing off the energy of Phoenix and combining it with the power of a lightning storm can they hope to do what they need to do."

  "Okay." Something still wasn't adding up in my head. "Where's this gate, why can't we destroy it now and who is 'they'?"

  Loring turned and clutched at my arm. "The gate is not a 'where.' It's too big to blow."

  "Nothing is too big to blow, Mr. Loring."

  "Haven't you heard anything I've said?" Loring tore at his hair. "The dimensional gate is surrounding us. It is part and parcel of the maglev line!"

  My jaw dropped open, and I looked at Crowley. "They?"

  Crowley nodded. "Fiddleback."

  The image of Estefan's giant spider perching over Phoenix in the middle of a lightning storm exploded in my brain like a bomb. I could see gigantic arachnoid creatures invading Phoenix through the hole created by the dimensional gateway. They would descend on Frozen Shade from above, using silken parachutes they themselves extruded. They would punch through the solar panels like fishermen chopping ice in the dead of winter. They would descend and attack or perhaps just sit up top and dangle sticky lines of silk to catch passersby.