I staggered over to the Lonely Mountain a few blocks away.
The building was a hulking thing made of craggy gray stone, which might’ve been transported out of the Arthurian era—part mountain, part castle. Jagged merlons ran along the top parapet, while narrow windows bled orange light and otherworldly moans and orgasmic groans of pleasure and pain. The Lonely Mountain was mostly a bar, but it also doubled as a high-class brothel.
Brothels in general are a no-go in my book—real men shouldn’t pay for women—but this place carried an extra dimension of grossness … I’d seen some of the ladies and gentlemen working this place. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
I marched through an open portcullis and pushed through a pair of frosted double doors that read The Lonely Mountain, followed by a stern warning, No Fighting, No Trouble, Violators will be Incinerated.
The Lonely Mountain was such a popular and happening joint due, in large part, to the fact that the proprietor was a fierce and unforgiving man named Firroth the Red. Firroth wasn’t actually a man at all, but a Red Dragon—hence the Red part. Like most dragons, Firroth was ferociously jealous of his treasure, which happened to be his bar and brothel, and would, literally, incinerate anyone who threatened its safety. It made the Lonely Mountain a great place for business meets, though, since no one wanted to put a toe on the wrong side of the line where Firroth was concerned.
It also made it an absolutely fantastic spot to get fall-down wasted, since no one would murder you outright—at least not if you remained in the bar proper.
Gritty blues poured through the open doors.
I caught sight of a single guitar player—bent and wrinkled—hunched over a beat-up acoustic, with a smoldering cigarette poking from the edge of his mouth. The song was a low, gritty number and mean as a junkyard dog. “Bring me my Shotgun,” by Sam John Hopkins, better known as Lightnin’ Hopkins. The Lonely Mountain wasn’t a blues joint, not by any stretch. They had musicians of every stripe and variety—from punk and techno to classic Beethoven and classic rock—cycle through, so it was always a coin toss what you were gonna get.
But today?
Today, some cat was beltin’ out Lightnin’ Hopkins, the perfect tune to drink yourself into an early grave to. This was a soundtrack to die to, and that suited me fine. A lucky break, which God knew I needed.
Smoke, both the tangy aroma of tobacco and the musky, sulfurous stink always hanging around dragons, loitered in the air. Muted red, orange, and amber illuminated the cavernous interior with pockets of seedy light, though overall the bar remained a dark and foreboding place, a cave dimly seen. Hanging stalactites and jutting stalagmites littered the space, each filled with the ever-shifting light of enslaved, winged creatures.
I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring the dirty looks I attracted from all manner of offended creatures, elbowing my way to the bar proper, always and forever presided over by Firroth himself. I pulled out a lone stool and eased my weight down onto the rough wood, which groaned beneath me. On my left, a ridiculously short man with a ruddy complexion—his feet dangling comically above the floor—drank beer directly from an oversized pitcher. Clurichaun. The lesser-known, drunken uncle of the leprechaun.
No pots of gold with the Clurichauns, they mostly just broke into unguarded houses and drank gallons of wine, like underage, snot-nosed high school kids, but they were great drinking buddies. Told the wildest yarns, assuming you could understand ’em through the inebriated slurring.
To my right lurked a gangly woman with warty red skin and stringy black hair. Didn’t know what she was, a halfie maybe, but it didn’t matter, so long as she stayed an arm’s length away. Putting the red-skinned freakshow from mind, I shot up a hand, catching the bartender’s golden eye.
Firroth the Red stalked up to me from the far end of the bar.
Though he was a dragon’s dragon, he wore the guise of a man—a huge and dragon-ish looking man. He must’ve stood at eight feet and had a swath of fiery-red hair, which shimmered gold and orange in the light. The guy was also built like a straight-up brick shithouse—his muscles had muscles large enough to lift weights at Venice Beach. Scrolling tribal tattoos of blues and blacks snaked up his arms and around his neck, so delicate and finely worked they looked like artful scales.
A cigar—fat, black, and reeking of dragon stink—jutted from the corner of his mouth at a rakish angle, always burning but never diminishing.
Instead of growling at me or threatening me with murder and dismemberment—pretty much a standard greeting from him—he pulled out a fat, streaky Old-Fashioned glass, then retrieved an unmarked bottle filled with something so dark and sludgy it looked closer to oil than alcohol. He uncorked the bottle and poured me a generous three fingers. The stuff seemed too thick and smelled faintly of apples, cinnamon, and old paint thinner or maybe battery acid. Hard to say exactly.
“My private stock,” he growled, immediately reminding me that Firroth was not the kind of bartender you came crying to after a rough day. “From the special lady at the end of the bar,” he said after a moment, then hooked a thumb, capped with a curved talon, to the right. I leaned out, looking past the stout Clurichaun and a few other bar-goers to a woman cooling her heels at the very last stool available.
I let out a groan as the lady cast a warm, overfriendly smile in my direction, then headed over.
She was kind of a plain Jane, thin and petite, with shoulder-length brown hair hanging down in a loose sheet. She wasn’t beautiful, everything about her was just a little too severe and professional for that, but she could pass for handsome. She wore casual business attire: a pair of dark slacks, a silky blouse, a navy suit jacket that stopped short at the elbows, and a pair of thin black glasses, framing her angular face.
Lady Luck, the living incarnation of Fortune. My boss. She had a black leather briefcase in one hand, which would surely contain a dossier with some murderously dangerous assignment.
I looked away from her, refusing to meet her eye, grabbed the dirty glass Firroth had offered me, and upended the thing, slugging down the rancid drink in one long pull. The cinnamon burned, the apple flavoring tasted spoiled and sour, and the alcohol hit like a friggin’ mortar round, exploding in my gut. I upended the glass and slammed it down on the hardwood bar top, then pushed to my feet, ready to turn tail and leave. Fortuna’s hand landed lightly on my shoulder, her fingers pinning me in place with only an ounce of pressure.
“Please stay,” she said, her voice sad, devoid of the usual quirky sense of humor I’d come to expect out of her.
“Get your hand off me, bitch,” I spat.
She flinched at the insult as though it’d been a physical blow. A pang of regret reared its head inside me, but I stomped it down as I worked to pull away from her. This was her fault, all of it. She’d first approached me in this very bar—gave me a bit of information about Harold the Mange in exchange for favorable consideration toward her should she ever need help in the future. And that little, innocuous request had been the beginning. That request had led to this, all of this.
“You have a right to be angry,” she said softly, gently gripping my other shoulder and turning me toward her so she could look me in the face. Once more she flinched away when her gaze landed on the strip of blood-soaked cloth running over my missing eye.
“Why didn’t you help me?” I growled, the words a chore to force out. “You’ve got the power. You can go where you want, show up where you want, do what you want. You knew this was gonna happen, didn’t you?” I stared at her, searching her eyes for answers, then nodded my head. She’d known alright. It was written in every inch of her face, every line of her body.
“Believe me, Yancy, I did want to help,” she said. “You’re right that I do have power, but it’s power tightly constrained by forces even more powerful than I. This”—she reached a hand toward my face—“was always a part of your future. Lady Fate and I knew from the outset that this step was always a necessary one. Doesn’t make it any e
asier, not for either of us. Believe it or not, you’ve actually engendered a certain fondness in my heart. You’re like a mangy, disgruntled puppy. At first, you were unsightly and distasteful, but after having fed you day in and day out, you’ve managed to worm your way into my heart.”
“You. Let. It. Happen,” I said, my lips curling away from my teeth. “You let all of this happen.”
“Sometimes, doing the right thing makes all of us into monsters, Yancy. The monk, he offered his life so you might have a chance at living, and I allowed your suffering so the world might have a chance at living. Everyone pays a price.” Then she did something completely unexpected: she leaned in and pulled me into a hug, her arms wrapping behind me, her head leaning into my chest. “I would do anything to save this world, Yancy. I’d let you die in a blink. I’d feed Ferraro to Firroth if that’s what it took. I’d unmake the Guild of the Staff if that was the cost.”
She paused and pushed away from me, slipping her hands down onto mine. “For what it’s worth, though, I’m sorry. So sorry.”
She squeezed my hands once, lips drawn into a tight, sad line. “I know you’ve had a rough go of things, Yancy—”
“What the hell do you know?” I spat, a slight slur in my words—though whether from the pain, exhaustion, or dragon liquor I couldn’t tell—and yanked my hands away. “You’re an immortal. You show up in the aftermath with your briefcase, your shitty assignments, and throw a few meaningless platitudes at me. You talk about what you would give for the world, but it’s all lip service. What the hell do you know about anything? About sacrifice or pain?”
She sniffed, set her briefcase down, and folded her arms in disapproval. “I wasn’t always immortal, Yancy. Lady Fate made me what I am, shaped me into this creature, but I had a life and a family once, my oikos, though they’ve all been dead since long before Christ—murdered back in the Greek Dark Ages. I know pain. I know sacrifice. But all of that is immaterial, and though you have every right to give up, you can’t quit. Not yet. Ferraro is out there and if you stop, She. Will. Die. So, do for her what I couldn’t do for you—save her.” She reached into my coat pocket and lifted out the cell, flipping it open and handing it to me.
“How’d you know?” I asked, eyeing the phone as if it were a poisonous snake ready to bite.
“My Lady sees many, many things,” she replied. “Some of those things you need to see as well”—she bent over and picked up the briefcase, tapping it with one slim hand—“but first, you need to make the call. Make it before it’s too late to save her.”
With a scowl, I tentatively accepted the phone and glanced down at the screen. Fortuna had already pulled the number up, and I even had full signal, despite being Hub-side.
“How lucky,” Fortuna said, almost reading my mind. “Now make the call as we walk—time is short, I think.” She turned and slipped an arm through mine, giving me a quick tug to get me moving, pulling me toward the exit. Although the club was crowded with all brands of creatures and critters, they parted for Lady Luck without thought or comment, leaving an ever-empty pocket of walking space, surrounded on all sides by the press of bodies.
Against my better judgement, and with butterflies doing aerial acrobatics in the pit of my stomach, I pressed the call button and lifted the brick phone to my ear.
Brrr … Brrr … The call picked up on the second ring.
TWENTY-EIGHT:
Demands
“Yancy.” To my surprise, it wasn’t the Prophet who answered, but Ferraro. “I don’t have long to talk, but I’m alive. They haven’t hurt me yet.” She sounded frayed, tired to the point of exhaustion, and scared. Not panicked, but I could hear the hard edge of fear in her words.
“How many, who, and location,” I rattled off, knowing the Prophet wouldn’t keep her on the phone for long.
“At least ten,” she said, the words tripping over themselves to escape, “several people in brown robes—”
Whomp-smack, the sound of a hand walloping skin, followed by a muffled grunt from Ferraro as the phone clattered to the ground.
“She’s a feisty one, that Ferraro,” came the Prophet’s icy voice a moment later. “Full of piss and vinegar. I like it when they have spirit, makes breaking them more interesting. Seeing how long they can last before they give up. Before they curl in on themselves. I’m sure you can relate, considering you’ve recently gone through something remarkably similar to what she’s about to endure.” He paused, a rustle of movement in the background. “Or she could be fine. If you cooperate, nothing needs to happen. If you choose not to cooperate, though, you can spend the next year signing for packages full of fingers and toes. We clear?”
The threat hung between us, a sizzling spark ready to ignite a powder keg.
“Don’t hurt her, dickhole,” I finally said, the words more of a concession than I intended them to be. “I’ll play ball. Just leave her be, alright? I’ll give you what you want.”
“And what do I want?” he asked, sounding pleased as a house cat that’d just managed to trip its owner down the stairs.
“The location of Ong and the Fourth Seal,” I replied through gritted teeth.
“Almost there,” he said. “I want the location, but I also want my crook, Yancy. The Crook of Winter. The one you stole from me. I want you to meet me at the location, I want you to have the crook in hand, and I don’t want any funny business. My boss wants you alive and kicking for the time being, but I swear if you pull anything, Ferraro’s dead. No evil villain tricks. I’m not gonna suspend her above a shark tank on a fraying rope. I’m not gonna sacrifice her in some elaborate ritual. I’m just gonna put a bullet in her skull. It’ll take two seconds.”
A shiver ran down my spine.
I know bad guys and I know bad guy bluffs. This? This wasn’t that.
The way he said it, so casual and colder than a Yeti’s butthole, told me everything I needed to know. Despite his momentary help in Haiti, this guy was as bad as they came. He would absolutely torture her to get what he wanted—wouldn’t even bat an eye at the prospect—and if he didn’t get what he wanted? He would kill her the way a farmer kills a chicken: quickly, efficiently, without losing a wink of sleep.
“Bhogavati,” I said. “It’s some sorta sacred Naga city deep in Outworld. That’s where the Fourth Seal is. Don’t know what kind of defenses we’re looking at, but that’s where you can find Ong. According to Beauvoir, there’s an axis mundi that connects directly to Bhogavati, some shrine called Sala Keoku, near the Thailand-Laos border.”
“Good dog,” the Prophet replied. “We’ll meet at Sala Keoku in”—he paused, as though looking at a watch—“let’s say eight hours?”
“Eight hours? Are you kidding me, buttclown? I’m working off two hours’ sleep, I need to make a visit to the hospital, and I need to get your friggin’ crook and make it to Thailand. How am I gonna swing that in eight hours?”
“Not my problem.” I could almost hear the eye roll-shrug combination through the phone. “Besides, I know your history—I know you have a knack for pulling victory right out of your ass, and I don’t want to give you a second longer than necessary to rally the troops or come up with some plan. You have eight hours to get me what I want before I start cutting.”
The line clicked, then buzzed. Dead. Just like Ferraro would be if I didn’t get my shit together. Crap. I flicked the phone shut and dropped the weight back into my coat pocket as Fortuna guided me from the bar, through the portcullis, and onto the sidewalk outside the Lonely Mountain.
“Eight hours,” Fortuna said, more as a statement of fact than a question. “That’ll cut things much closer than I’d anticipated.” Her eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment; she stared longingly into the distance as though peeking into the future that might be. “No, not enough time,” she muttered with a shake of her head. Her gaze snapped back to the present and honed in on me once more. “Well, that settles it. I was going to give you the brief myself”—she held up her briefcase and dru
mmed her fingers along its surface—“but you need direct intervention. You need an audience with Lady Fate. Do you have the token I gave you? The one from the Hinterlands?”
I remembered the stone, a smooth little river rock carved with an ancient rune that shimmered like a trapped moonbeam. Fortuna had given it to me after sending me off to a future version of Seattle. The stone was some sort of insta-portal that connected directly to Lady Fate’s personal realm.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, “it’s at the Farm with all my other supernatural doodads.”
She frowned, bottom lip protruding just a little, one hand massaging her temple. “You know,” she said, throwing up one hand, “it doesn’t matter. The stone can only be used three times—we give them out to our agents as a failsafe mechanism to ensure you don’t accidentally visit the Lady Wyrd more than three times. I can take us there directly, but this is important, Yancy, so pay attention.
“No mortal may see the Wyrd more than three times, it isn’t permitted by decree of the White King. The consequences are …” She faded off. “Well, extreme. Your life-string will be cut from the Tapestry of Fate. There are no work-arounds to it, no way to avoid it. Visit her four times and you’re irrevocably dead.”
“Gotcha,” I said, too tired to come up with anything more brilliant.
Fortuna nodded in satisfaction, then wedged herself in next to me, jamming her shoulder up under my armpit, pulling some of my bulk onto her narrow frame. She lifted her free hand and slashed at the air, a backward flick of her wrist. A subtle ghost of power—almost too slight to sense—rushed out of her, and a vertical slit rotated and stretched until an opalescent doorway, seven by four feet, hung suspended before us.
Neat trick.
We stepped through the portal and into a cavern with rough stone walls, illuminated by sparse torchlight. The trip took all of a heartbeat. No hoofing it through the Hub. No traversing the pitch-black, formless landscape of a custom Way. This was an instantaneous portal, a direct flight, with no layovers and no hassles. Mega-cool. I’d seen the Crook of Winter pull off a similar trick while in my possession, but it was too dangerous to use, even if it was supremely convenient.
Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) Page 25
