robert Charrette - Arthur 02 - A King Beneath the Mountain

by Robert N. Charrette

  He couldn't stand by and let the bastard kill any more people.

  And he didn't have anything substantial enough to bring in the Department. Not yet anyway.

  They took him to security central for their Brookfield operation; the place was going to serve as the command center for the cleanup. He sat in the back of the room, too busy trying to figure the angles to watch the techs do their work. He left that to Hagen; like a lot of short guys he seemed to need to prove he was in charge.

  The wallscreen came to life. Joel Lee had left the Brook-field facility.

  "We're running," Hagen announced.

  On the fast track to hell, Charley thought.

  "Dr. Spae?"

  Faye's voice was faint, almost a thought, but it startled Spae; she'd been half-asleep. On the verge of bad dreams.

  The Faery girl sounded worried. What did her kind worry about? Spae tried to sound kindly and concerned, rather than clinical.

  "What is it, Faye?"

  "You sounded disturbed."

  Sounded? Had she been talking in her half-awake state? She must have been. "What did I say?"

  "You're worried about the darkling mage."

  "Quetzal?"

  Spae sensed affirmation.

  "Yes, I'm worried about how we're going to deal with him."

  "Do you know where he is?" Faye asked.

  "I wish. I was going to try a scrying with John tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow may be too late."

  Too late? What did she know? "What do you mean? Do you have some source of knowledge, some kind of elven sense?"

  "I—I'm not an elf, Doctor." She sounded embarrassed. "I know I'm not important, so you don't really want to talk to me, but I just have a feeling that there will be trouble. Soon. I think you should look for the darkling mage now."

  "Why now?"

  "I don't know."

  Spae didn't like the fear she heard in Faye's voice. A creature of Faery would have to have senses people didn't; Faye might not understand what she was feeling, but the feeling couldn't be discounted because of that. There was little that was coincidental when magic was involved.

  "All right. I'll go wake John and we'll get started."

  As she started to stand, Spae felt the lightest of touches on her arm, little more than a breeze plucking at her shirt sleeve.

  "John's not a seeker, Dr. Spae. He won't be much help. Besides, he needs his sleep. Please, Doctor, do not disturb him. I will help you."

  A thousand questions tumbled through Spae's brain, but the ones that fell out were, "Can you do that? Are you a seeker?" Whatever a seeker was.

  "I think I can help once you are in trance," Faye said.

  "All right. Let's give it a try." Remembering to be polite, she added, "Thank you."

  "You are a good person, Dr. Spae."

  What brought that on ?

  Faye started to croon a song, so softly that Spae couldn't make out any of the words. Still, she had a sense that they were not English nor any other language Spae knew. The song was soothing, relaxing, almost soporific. Spae drifted into it.

  She sat down, too unsteady on her feet to remain standing. The song went on. Spae noted distantly that she had unconsciously adopted a full lotus position. Faye was still singing, more clearly now, but the words remained elusive. Spae followed the melody, slipping into trance state.

  Faye became a somewhat more palpable presence. Spae could see her as a gossamer image of smoke. Spae, a glowing image herself, stood. They joined hands and flew into the sky to search for the darkling mage.

  CHAPTER

  27

  Quetzal stood at the corner of Hopkins and Benefit Streets, contemplating the house there. A bronze plaque proclaimed it to have been the residence of one Stephen Hopkins, a man of some historic import locally. The white clapboard colonial structure was considered old for the city, and the city itself was old for this continent. He had slept through almost all of their existence.

  He continued up the hill, taking George Street. After a block he was walking along the great black iron fence that separated him from his goal. He passed four of the great brick pillars into which the iron was set before stopping to gaze at his destination.

  Headlights swept over him. He flinched before he realized that the light contained little to disturb him. The light's influence was fleeting in any case. A local resident, a student, a visiting family member, a campus patrol? No matter. None of them had any interest in him. He was just a pedestrian, coated and hatted against the wind and cold. No one of consequence.

  He let the car pass.

  The well-tended green on the other side of the fence sloped up to a row of buildings. Most were old—for this city—but not so venerable as the Hopkins house. He only had eyes for one of them, the nearest, a small, pseudoclassical monstrosity of concrete. Van Dieman had provided him with much information about this building, its history, the city in which it resided, and its history. Useful information. He was about to use some of that information.

  He lifted himself over the fence on the etherometric lines. It would have been easier to walk to the gate and open it, but he had no desire to; not when he was so near. He walked up the slope.

  The building had a door facing toward the city, which was situated on the river plain below, even though the building's principal door was on the far side, facing the main college green, where the students would pass. The student traffic on this side went only down the hill and through the gate, to the great library and other less important facilities outside the fence.

  That principal door might still be unlocked—the graduate students here were supposed to be forgetful—but again he had no desire to deviate from the most direct route. He placed his hand on the lock. It was more complicated than those with which he was familiar, but no more an obstacle; still less the heavy bolts securing the top and bottom of the door.

  He entered the building.

  The hallway ran straight to the front door. Despite the darkness, his mage sight allowed him to see that the door's locking mechanism was engaged. Faint light leaked around the curve of the stairway to the upper floor. Someone was up there. No matter. He was interested in the basement, not the upper floor. He took the stairway down.

  The lower hallway was as narrow as the upper but more cramped, because of the boxes and crates and loose specimens shoved haphazardly against the walls. This building had once been the home of the geological sciences department of this university. For truth, it still belonged to the department, but the center of activity had moved away to the more spacious and modern facility on the eastern side of the campus. Unlike some of the other departments, geological sciences understood time and tradition; chairman after chairman had refused to part with the old hall even when it was clear there was little use for it. Offices that had once housed eminent professors were now shared by groups of lowly teaching assistants. The building was now a repository of the unimportant and the neglected.

  Neglected, yes, but unimportant?

  Not if what Quetzal suspected remained here was truly here.

  He found the room he sought, knowing it by the feel of the air. Only a mage would have known that this office was different from any other.

  There had been a writer of fiction who had once lived in this city, a man who had known much that he should not have known. For truth, he'd had a part in exposing some of the followers. But mostly the writer had hidden the terrifying truths under the cloak of his tall tales. One of the things that the writer had so disguised was the history of a university expedition, a trek to the south polar wastes. Much had been discovered in those frigid wastes that the university's rational scientists could not understand. Someone had whispered of those things to the writer. Afraid to speak the truth, the writer had couched what he had learned in a fictioneer's lies, going so far as to invent a fictional university to sponsor the fictional expedition.

  But the expedition had been real. What they found had been real. And this room—this room h
ad once been the office of a young professor who had gone on that expedition and was still carried on the university's rolls as a Professor Emeritus. The young professor had made wise investments and grown rich—rich enough to endow a chair at the university. The holder of the chair was supposed to maintain this office as his own. Dust on the furniture and books said that the current holder did not take his responsibilities seriously.

  The false wall behind which the young professor had hidden his secret things would have fooled any ordinary visitor, but Quetzal was no ordinary visitor. What would be hidden from a mortal eye could not escape his magesight. It took but a few minutes to clear a space so that he could open the hiding place.

  The compartment was small, no more than a closet, and filled with shelves. Quetzal looked over their contents. One shelf held an assortment of ritual implements, suggesting that the young professor had been a student of more than geology. The rest of the shelves held objects of carven stone, wood, bone, and ivory. Most were irrelevant, mere fetishes, born of superstition rather than knowledge. A handful were something more. Sharing the shelf with those objects were a linen-wrapped book and another object—wrapped in dried rawhide, and bound with strips of hide whose loose ends were gathered and embedded in a hardened clay seal. The signs and sigils of the opposition had been cut into the clay of the seal while it had been still wet.

  What had drawn Quetzal here lay beneath those wrappings and bindings. The seal had masked the object well enough to hide it from the followers, but not so well that Quetzal had missed it. He could feel the power in it.

  He took it up. It was weighty, doubtless of stone. Eagerly, he smashed the seal. The latent power of the piece bloomed. Breathless, he clawed at the rawhide bindings until the last strand released its grip and fell to the floor. He pried back the wrappings.

  He knew that the object was what he sought even before he uncovered it, but even so he felt a thrill upon first seeing it. It was a telesmon of vermetid form. It had been made from a dark but translucent stone, each coil shaped in sinuous curves and cut with cunning facets that made strange angles where hidden surfaces were visible through the smoky stone. Had there been light, it would have flashed reflections around the room more wildly than a hundred prisms. Its beauty took his breath away.

  Faint, so faint that touch could not discern their presence, he saw marks on the surfaces of the telesmon. He recognized some of the sigils at once. This was not just a thing of power, but a thing dedicated to the power he followed.

  The key to the Key.

  Had they not fallen farther than the followers, the opposition would have mobilized all their forces to bar Quetzal from this treasure. They had not. They had failed their self-avowed duty.

  He was elated.

  He placed the unwrapped telesmon back on the shelf and, heedless of the dust, sat in the chair to admire it. The key to the Key! This was what he had sought, what he had wanted— the heart to the web of resonators. With this telesmon he could open the Glittering Path.

  Had they known, they would have destroyed it.

  Or had they, in their pride, thought they need not destroy it, that they could hide it away forever?

  He took down the linen-wrapped book; it would be the professor's diary. He did not have to read much to ascertain that the young man and his cronies had not understood what they had found. They had known that the telesmon was powerful, hence the masking, but they had not had the slightest clue to its true importance.

  But Quetzal understood.

  He tucked the diary away in his coat and fell to staring at the telesmon, dreaming of the new age he would begin.

  CHAPTER

  28

  John woke from a dream in which the world was shaking itself to pieces, to find himself still being shaken. Dr. Spae had a grip on his shoulder and was making like a terrier.

  "Come on, John. Wake up!"

  He felt as if he'd hardly gotten to sleep. It was still dark; he couldn't have been asleep long. His head still hurt from the exercises Dr. Spae had made him practice over and over. The doctor had said she'd let him sleep till morning. So why was she here yelling at him to get up? He mumbled a protest.

  "We've run out of time. He's here."

  John's head was still out of focus. "Who's here?"

  "Quetzal."

  His sleepiness left him, his mind hitting racing speed from a dead stop. "What?" Had he heard right? Quetzal was here? "How?" Had he tracked them through astral space or something? Shouldn't they be doing something? "Where?" If Quetzal was here, what was the doctor doing standing around? "We've got to do something!"

  "Exactly."

  "Why are you standing around? What's he doing? Where is he? You said he was here." "Calm down, John. I meant here in the city," Dr. Spae said. "Which is bad enough. Faye and I discovered him on the East Side. He's found something terrible."

  John barely heard her last statement. "Faye? Where is she? Is she all right?"

  "As far as I know. I left her to watch—"

  "You didn't leave her to face Quetzal alone?"

  "She's not a child, John. She'll stay out of his way." Dr. Spae bent down, picked up John's pants, and tossed them to him. "But we can't leave her holding the fort alone. Get dressed."

  "What are we going to do?" John asked as he dragged the pants under his blanket.

  "What we have to do. We'll talk about it on the way."

  "But you haven't shown me any combat spells." He struggled to pull his pants on underneath the covers. "How can we fight him?"

  "I've shown you how to link. It'll have to be enough."

  "Car's out front," Beryle said breathlessly as he appeared in the doorway. He gave John a disgusted look. "Jesus, kid, aren't you ready?"

  "Let's go!" John tossed off the blanket and leaped up. His flashy move was undermined by his unfastened zipper; his pants started to slip.

  Beryle shook his head. "You sure we need this kid, Elizabeth?"

  "Leave him alone, David. He'll be fine."

  Embarrassed, John snatched up his shirt. His boots. His jacket, too; it was going to be cold out.

  Beryle led the way down the stairs. He started past the landing on Bear's floor. John stopped.

  "What about Bear?"

  "Gorshin will watch him," said Dr. Spae.

  "You haven't told him?"

  "He's in no shape to fight." Beryle was staring up at John. He looked annoyed. "He'll be a liability if we have to watch out for his ass as well as our own. Better he stay here."

  "He won't like being left out," John said. "We may need his help."

  "Not tonight, John," the doctor said. "The world may have a greater need of him if we fail tonight."

  She started down the stairs. John looked down the hall to Bear's room. They were right about Bear not being in any shape for a fight. Besides, what could he do against a mage? So why didn't John feel good about leaving Bear behind?

  John caught up to Beryle and the doctor as they reached the ground floor.

  Dr. Spae explained her plan as Beryle careened through the streets toward the East Side. They were going to wait outside the building where Quetzal was. She was confident that he wouldn't be staying there, because she thought that he'd want to get back to wherever he made his lair before dawn. If so, he'd have to leave soon; there was less than two hours till sunrise.

  They would ambush him when he came out. For the ambush Dr. Spae, John, and Faye would link, sharing their thau-maturgic power. The doctor would anchor the ritual chain, directing their combined power in an effort to draw out and envelop Quetzal. The doctor showed John a cord woven of her own hair.

  "You will hold one end and I'll hold the other," she told him. "We will use this instead of holding hands as our physical link; it'll be less obvious that we're linking. We'll have a better chance if he thinks we're operating separately, since he's already beaten us that way before."

  It was an awfully slim thread to hang a victory on.

  "Almost there," Beryle
announced.

  The Hernando labored up College Street with such difficulty that John wasn't sure that the junker would make it to the top. Apparently Beryle wasn't sure either; he cut down Benefit Street and tried the less steep slope up George Street. He turned onto Magee and pulled over.

  "I don't think we ought to take the car closer," he said.

  "Where are we going?" John asked.

  Dr. Spae pointed out the back window toward the first building inside the university's fence. It wasn't big, just two stories, and it wasn't fancy. What did it have that would attract an ancient wizard?

  Beryle was already out of the car. "Don't close the doors all the way. Just in case we're in a hurry when we get back."

  The three of them walked quickly back to George Street and crossed it. The tall fence stood between them and the building. The nearest gate was shut.

  "How do we get past the fence?" John asked. "I'll bet all the gates are locked at this hour."

  "Faculty card," Beryle said, holding up a thin rectangle of plastic. How had he gotten that? Beryle slipped the card into the slot by the gate. The lock released and he waved them through. He came through and closed the gate behind him.

  "Why not leave that open, too?" John asked.

  "Security timer."

  Though insufficient, it was all the answer John got. Beryle headed toward the building that Dr. Spae had pointed out. The doctor took John's arm and directed him toward the open lawn in front of the building. About forty feet from the door, she pulled him down. The grass was wet and cold, but because of the slope of the ground, they were mostly concealed from the door.

  Not that anyone seemed to be looking for them. The building was dark, apparently deserted for the night.

  "Why isn't Beryle out here with us?" John asked.

  "He needs to stay out of the line of fire."

  Not a comforting answer.

  Dr. Spae spoke to the air. "Faye?"

  "Here," Faye answered. "It has been very quiet. Someone left, but it wasn't he."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Very."

  "Then he's still in there," John said.

  "Probably," the doctor agreed. She didn't sound convinced. "Faye, would you check?"