Robert Charrette - Arthur 01 - A Prince Among Men

by Robert N. Charrette

  "Hi, Mom, I'm home."

  Marianne Reddy walked out of the kitchen, momentarily startled that John was not alone. "Who's that with you, dear?"

  "Oh. This is King Arthur. A mad sorceress just pulled him out of thin air, and since he's new in town, he needs a place to stay. I told him you wouldn't mind."

  "Not at all," she said, smiling. "I'm always happy to meet your friends and it's so lovely to have foreign guests. Do men wear dresses in your country, Mr. Arthur?"

  Arthur glowered at her.

  "It's a robe, Mom. We stole it from the museum."

  Neither Arthur's scowl nor John's admission of theft had any effect on her ebullient mood. "I see. Oh my, what's that in his hand?"

  "It's a sword, Mom. We stole that from the museum too."

  "How nice."

  From somewhere behind John a gun opened fire. Small black holes stitched up his mother's body. A ball of fire roared over John's shoulder, engulfing her in a blazing inferno. Marianne Reddy smiled through it all, the grin as frozen and foolish as John's fantasy. The scene dissolved, forcing John back to the cold dark of the alley that served the commercial strip of Rezcom 3.

  Not a good idea, John.

  Now you show up. And not so loud, huh. People will hear.

  Don't go home, John. It's not safe.

  Where else is there to go?

  Somewhere else. They know about you now. They will know to go there.

  Maybe going home wasn't a real bright idea. An awful lot of people seemed to- know who he was, while he had absolutely no idea who they were. Bennett, for one. Those two guys who said they were FBI, for another two. Wouldn't home be the first place anybody would come looking for him?

  His mind shifted into replay. Screams and gunshots. Scampering boggles. Flashing magic like a war of fireworks. Just fine in a vid or a game, but not the sort of thing you wanted to bring home to your mother.

  The "federal agents" were clearly capable of violence. Bennett, too. Who knew what that madwoman Nym was capable of? Magical spells, for sure.

  She's still out there, John.

  Yeah? How do you know?

  Trust me.

  She must have beaten Bennett, then. The feds, too.

  Nothing is settled yet, John. Don 7 go home.

  All that magic and all those gunshots. Surely something must have happened?

  Something has.

  What?

  All right, don't tell me. I don't think you know.

  I know you shouldn 't go home.

  John looked up at the building. This was Mitsutomo Keiretsu's Benjamin Harrison Town Project Rezcom Cluster 3, his home for as long as he could remember. It wasn't pretty. In fact, it was downright corporate ugly, but he'd always been safe here. Why should that change?

  Flash rewind; play. Gunshots! Coruscating light! Shadowy strangeness creeping around the edges of his vision. A naked man with a sword.

  He knew why he couldn't go home. If he wasn't there, they would have no reason to be there. If he avoided going home, they, whoever "they" were, might leave his mother alone.

  Still, Mitsutomo Keiretsu was a powerful force in the world. No one in their right mind would want to antagonize Mitsutomo Keiretsu by bringing violence into one of their < orporate buildings. Maybe he would be safe there. But at least one of the people John had met in the last few hours wasn't in her right mind. He looked over at where Arthur crouched staring out into the darkness, sword naked in his hand. Maybe two.

  He thought about what he'd seen. Or thought he'd seen. If it was all in his head, there was only one crazy person involved. Him. Dr. Block would like that; it'd mean more business.

  All of his senses said that it was real. His fingers and toes were just about solid ice, and the concrete of the rezcom was cold, rough, and scratchy where he rested his cheek against it The sounds of traffic on Route 190 whined in his ears. All real.

  The man beside him, shivering in the ratty old robe. The glint of light running along the sword blade as the man turned in his watchful survey of their surroundings. The sound of velvet rustling when the man moved. The smell of his sweat. All real.

  "Are you really King Arthur?"

  "Name is Artos," he said without looking at John.

  "Like in Mary Stewart's books?"

  This time the man looked at him. The sides of his mouth were drawn back. "Not Ar-tur, Ar-tos," he said in the tone usually reserved for small children and total idiots.

  "Right. Artos."

  That seemed to satisfy him, and he turned his attention back to the night.

  Artos, not Arthur. So John wasn't running around the project with a half-dressed, sword-toting King Arthur. He was running around with a half-dressed, sword-toting guy named Artos, who was, according to his own vehement insistence, not Arthur. There was a lot less glamour in hiding out with a sword-wielding brute than with a reawakened King Arthur.

  Without warning, Artos lunged forward, sword high, shouting, "Die, goblin!" John, his right foot on a fold of Ar-tos's robe, was pulled off balance. He landed on his butt, grazing his head on the concrete wall as he fell. By the time he stopped seeing stars and got his feet under him, Artos was rolling around on the ground with someone. Light sparkled around them, snowflakes caught in a whirlwind.

  John staggered toward them. The sword was nowhere in sight and Artos had his hands around the other guy's throat. He seemed intent on strangling the stranger.

  Bennett had said this guy was a murderer.

  The thrashing pair shifted, and light from the plaza illuminated the face of the person Artos was trying to strangle. It was Trashcan Harry!

  "Let him go!" John shouted. "The guy's just a janitor!"

  Artos ignored him.

  John threw himself onto Artos's back, slipping his arms under the man's armpits and bringing his hands back up beside his head. He locked his fingers behind the madman's neck and wrenched back with all his strength. The man on the ground heaved and swatted until, between them, they broke Artos's grip. Trashcan Harry scrambled to his feet. When Artos stopped struggling, John released him and got shakily to his own feet. Artos stood and glared at both of them.

  Satisfied that the man's mania had subsided for the moment, John looked over his shoulder. "You okay, Trash—ah, Harry?"

  "Been worse." Trashcan Harry massaged his throat and glared venomously at Artos.

  Artos stared back just as venomously.

  "He tried to kill me," Trashcan said.

  "Yes," Artos agreed. "Kill it. Very treacherous it. Kill now easier."

  John stepped between them. "Nobody's killing anybody."

  "Fool," Artos said disgustedly.

  "Maybe so," John said. Definitely so, he thought. "But I can't stand here and let you kill this man in cold blood."

  "Can."

  "No! Now look, I owe this guy."

  "He help you?" Artos sounded incredulous.

  "Yeah. And you're not going to kill him."

  Artos stared John in the eyes for nearly a minute. John felt I he power of the man's will and knew he couldn't stand up to l hat gaze for long, but something made Artos falter. After an awkward moment, Artos turned away and started kicking through the debris in the alley.

  Probably trying to find that damned sword.

  Definitely. Won't, though.

  Good girl.

  "Thanks, John." Trashcan's ugly face held what had to be a grateful expression. "I can help you now."

  "What makes you think I need help?"

  Trashcan's face scrunched up; he was thinking hard. Finally he said, "There was a death at the museum."

  John's throat went dry. "Who?"

  "Don't know. Know it's bad for you, though."

  Don't go home, John.

  A police car, its lights flashing, moved past the alley mouth. Harry tugged John against the wall. The car appeared again as it rounded the plaza road, pulling up before the residential entrance. The stink of Trashcan Harry in his nose, John watched the officers get out and
enter the building. Artos, having abandoned his search for the sword, stood frozen, staring at the flashing lights with wide eyes.

  "They looking, for you," Trashcan said to John.

  "How do you know that? You can't know that." John felt panicky. He wanted to believe the police car's arrival was coincidence, but he couldn't. Not after what happened at the museum.

  "We gotta go," Trashcan said. "Come on. I know a place."

  Go, John.

  John resisted the tug on his arm. "What about Artos?"

  Trashcan spat. "Don't need him. Come on. Gotta go."

  "We can't leave Artos."

  "Can, too."

  "Now you sound like him." John shrugged off Trashcan's grip and walked up to Artos. "They're looking for us."

  Without taking his eyes from the car, Artos asked, "Fight them?"

  "Are you crazy?"

  Artos shook his head.

  Yeah, right. "Come on."

  Trashcan Harry led them away from the rezcom.

  The buzz from her console woke Pamela Martinez. The office windows showed the sky to be lightening; she'd gotten a few hours of sleep, anyway. She checked to confirm the source of the call. Good. She'd have time to fix her makeup and otherwise make sure she looked ready for business before they cleared security. It wouldn't do for her to look as though she had been sleeping in her chair, even if that was the case.

  McAlister's late-night message had simply been the code word indicating that Sorli had initiated an action. The time between the strange little man informing his staff of the imminent action and their departure had been short, too short for McAlister to do more than launch the prearranged code message. Not knowing how long the action would take, she had returned to the office at once to await results.

  She wanted to be present when Sorli returned.

  Now her console was signaling that Sorli had tried to communicate with her and been informed that she was in her office. The origin point of the call was the helipad on the roof of building three. Time enough to get ready.

  She was groomed and seated behind her desk when the door to the outer office opened, revealing a handful of men in tight-fitting hoods and dark padded clothing festooned about with odd lumps of mysterious import. Some of their gear she recognized; Pamela knew very well what military-issue automatic rifles looked like. McAlister stood with the other men, explaining the lack of an update; Sorli must have kept her informer by his side the whole time.

  Sorli was dressed like his commandos, but his hood was pulled down into a baggy crumple around his throat, the end of his beard still tucked away inside. Dark smudges surrounded his eyes like the mask of a raccoon, and he looked grimmer than usual.

  He marched up to her desk and tugged a bag woven of metallic thread from the harness set into his vest. Without a word, he upended the bag, dumping an object slightly larger than a softball onto her desk. The thing rolled erratically about until it fetched up against her secondary monitor. Her gorge leapt to her throat when she saw that it was a severed head.

  Cold, blind eyes stared at her from the thing's hideous parody of a human face. But it was not human. Though child-sized, the head was not that of a baby. Its skin was wizened and had an odd gray pallor. The mouth was locked half open in a tooth-baring grin. And those teeth! Yellowed tusks, stained and runneled from unimaginable feasts.

  "What is it?" Her voice sounded weak in her own ears, adding embarrassment to her shock.

  "You asked for proof."

  Dropping the bag on her desk, Sorli turned on his heels and headed for the door. He was halfway through before she stammered out her next question.

  "What happened?"

  "We were too late. You'll get my report," he said without

  stopping.

  The door shuffed shut, sealing her in with his grisly present.

  She locked out her console, isolating herself from interruption, and sat contemplating the terrible goblin head in stunned awe. The light outside grew stronger, allowing her to see more clearly the awful face of magic made corporeal. Much as she wanted it to be a fake, it was too real to be something constructed to fool her. Its presence paralyzed her.

  As the morning sunlight crept over her desk, a change began to occur before her eyes. When the light touched it, the head transformed, slowly turning from its natural—no! unnatural—colors to chalky white. Greasy hair, pocked skin, dark stained teeth—all of it—shifted into a pallid, lusterless uniformity. The head might as well have been a repulsive sculpture of ash, fresh from the hands of a lunatic sculptor who had spent too long among the post-Froudites.

  Somehow, the new appearance of the head made it seem safer, less threatening. She reached out a finger to touch it. Her finger touched the cheek and for the barest instant she felt it, real and solid under her flesh, before it crumbled into a pile of ash and dust.

  Her Tidibot™ emerged from her desk and started sucking away at the debris. Its tiny vacuum whined in protest at the load. The little machine needed a dozen trips to take it all away; intended for keeping an executive's desk clean and shiny, it wasn't built for such a volume of dust

  Pamela watched the Tidibot's struggle and knew her own was just beginning.

  Part 2

  NOT OF THE

  SAME ESTATE

  CHAPTER

  II

  The police expected that it would take the museum staff at least two days to complete their inventory of the damage. Holger didn't waste the time. He got himself and Spae set up in a residential hotel on the south side of town, not allowing Spae to do anything until he had swept all the rooms of the suite. Finding it clean, he set up his counter-measures. When he was satisfied that their base of operations was reasonably secure from observation, he retreated to his room. The stuff she wanted to set up in the sitting room made him nervous. He left her to it.

  By the time he logged in to the Worcester police computer, Holger had all the necessary documentation to certify him as a member of the EC Commission of Antiquities, including a very official-looking diplomatic request that the local police force cooperate with Mm by allowing him access to their investigation. He dropped that note on the system operator, and she gave him access to the investigation files after only the most minimal of delays.

  The inventory was there, so he opened it. As Spae had suggested, although some artifacts from the Romano-Brithomc exhibit had sustained damage, all were accounted for. Holger wasn't sure how he felt about that. He didn't like having Spae's magical work made real; magic didn't belong in what, while it might have been chaotic, was at least a rational world. At the same time, he was supposed to be working with Spae, and partners were supposed to be familiar with each other's capabilities. She had shown that she was competent in one of the aspects of her specialty. But how could he have confidence in such an unnatural skill?

  The only things shown missing were a robe and a replica sword belonging to the museum's outreach program. Too bad something important hadn't gone missing. The nature of such an object might have held a clue as to the perpetrators of the incident. And stolen objects were real, physical things, things that could be traced.

  Holger switched over to Sergeant Willis's preliminary report. The missing objects weren't noted; Holger found them listed as missing, though, when he checked previous reports of petty theft at the museum. Curious. The night watchman—one John Reddy, a student at the university— was officially listed as missing. A patrol car sent to the rezcom where he lived with his mother reported that he had not returned home on the night of the incident. Mrs. Reddy had been asked to call the police if she heard from him, but no such call had been logged as yet. Willis speculated that the charred corpse was Reddy's, but noted that initial analysis of the corpse was inconclusive pending authorization of funds to do DNA matching. Willis offered no reason for the watchman's death or the shoot-out in the gallery. Clearly, the police were puzzled.

  So was Holger. By now the police should have realized from a simple comparison of physical d
ata that the corpse, whoever he was, was not John Reddy. Why hadn't they?

  Disconnecting from the police system, Holger placed a call to the museum. Once he transmitted his Commission ID, he received courteous and efficient service. The head of personnel herself transmitted him the files on everyone present at the museum on the day of the incident. Holger was only interested in one. He opened Reddy's small file, called up

  the biographical data, and saw immediately that something had changed. Reddy's height and weight were not the same as they had been two nights ago.

  Someone was working to make it appear that Reddy was the corpse.

  The woods out in back of the school weren't much, but they were al! Kari had. They were where she went to be nlone, to get away from the things she didn't like, to pretend that the world was all a forest and she was the keeper. Today was one of those days when she really needed the peace of her safe forest. She headed for her favorite place, faying not to think about any of the awful things that were happening outside her forest.

  Once she had settled into the hollow by the fallen tree, she knew today wasn't an ordinary day in her forest. Something was, well, not wrong exactly, but different. Maybe the birds were too quiet, or not quiet enough. Something, anyway.

  She sat quietly, listening. She thought that, if she was very quiet, she would hear what was different. Her eyes roved the brush and trees, searching.

  Slowly, she became certain that she was not alone in the woods today.

  She got that itchy feeling she got when Kevin Luckner was looking at her when he thought she didn't know. She turned her head, but not all the way. She knew how to do that. She did that when she got the itchy feeling, turned her head just enough that she could see Kevin there, watching her, but not enough that he'd know she was noticing.

  There was someone—or something—there. It wasn't Kevin Luckner, but she wasn't sure who or what it was. She turned her head a little farther and the watcher shifted warily. All she could see was a white shape among the trees.

  She knew she ought to be scared, but she wasn't.

  "Hello?"

  The watcher didn't answer her. But didn't leave either. Very, very slowly she tamed farther.