Dragons & Dwarves (50 page)
Authors: S. Andrew Swann
“That’s okay—”
“Somehow I cannot get through to the students that the presence of ‘magic’ does not invalidate the scientific method. Ten years of students, and how many have a solid science background? Three! A waiting list I have, and all astrologers, pagans, devotees of the Golden Dawn. From all over the country. And can I even get a basic physics prerequisite written into the course descriptions? Pheh.” The elevator arrived and he turned toward me. “That is not what you want to discuss, is it, Mr. Maxwell?”
“No.”
“Come, then. Share a cup of coffee and let us discuss the subjects of future news articles and research papers.”
He took me to a refreshingly rectilinear cafeteria with a set of tables and vending machines. It was an odd hour, and we were the only ones there.
I made an effort to back myself up and act like a journalist. I sipped machine black coffee as I gave Dr. Shafran background on my dead dwarf, and where he had led me to date.
Dr. Shafran steepled his fingers and nodded in the right places and prodded me with the occasional monosyllable.
I paid particular attention to the oddities about my visit to Magetech, and the rumors Nina had passed on to me. The moment I mentioned Magetech, he seemed more interested.
“Really? I was offered a position there, a long time ago.”
“You?”
“My expertise, you see. I was uncomfortable, however, with their—” I noticed a pause, as if he was deciding how much to tell me. “Their nondisclosure arrangements. It is hard enough to publish as it is, to conform to some corporate bylaw as well would be intolerable. At the university I study as I see fit and publish as I see fit.” There was a pride in his voice that sounded almost familiar. “But I’m acquainted with the man you mentioned that they did employ.”
“Dr. Pretorious?”
“Yes, a great mind. It’s a blow to my own vanity to admit that he was the first to begin the scientific quantification of the phenomenon we call the Portal, at this university in fact. You might say I inherited his position. He joined that private enterprise at the beginning, and I understand the decision has been quite kind to him—in the material sense.”
Knowing the figures I had jotted down for Mazurich, that had to be an understatement. And Pretorious had the added benefit of not having to keep things under wraps to protect a public position.
“So do you know anything about what he worked on for Magetech?”
Dr. Shafran shook his head. “Like me, he is—or he was—a scientist, a theoretician. The information the public sees coming out of Magetech is in the form of patents and end-user products. From that, you can see their engineering but not their research—and that is what would possess him. And anyone in my position will tell you that the time from pure research to practical applications is measured in decades.”
“Could they be developing something like my zombie?”
“They could be developing anything, especially if they are employing black market mages. That begs the question, why would they?”
“Can you think of a reason?”
“There seems to be little chance of seeing a legal market for such an abomination, and I don’t think the black market here is either wide enough or deep enough to support that sort of development.”
“But someone did develop it.”
“Which means that one of us is operating on a faulty assumption.”
I looked into my coffee.
“Now,” Dr. Shafran said, “your mention of dwarves is interesting.”
“You think so?”
“Well, as you’ve been told, dwarves, in a sense, are antithetical to mana. Where mana pools into areas of ritual and pattern, both physical and cultural, the presence of dwarves tends to push it away. I’ve had no opportunity to study the effect closely. Dwarves seem too wary to volunteer for any experiments.”
“I wonder why.”
“My guess is that there’s some inherent biological or mental an tipattern that affects the collection of mana. It makes them unique as far as intelligent nonhumans go. They don’t need mana to exist.”
“You mean they can leave the influence of the Portal?”
Dr. Shafran nodded. “They like to remain close to their clan, but I have heard of dwarves traveling as far afield as California.”
“Now why would a dwarf go to California?”
“Disneyland?” Dr. Shafran smiled.
“About Magetech—” I looked down into my coffee again. I was uncomfortable leaving the realm of journalism for the personal. I barely knew Dr. Shafran. I didn’t know if that made it easier or harder to tell him about my blackout.
“I’ve never blacked out like that before. Could someone have cast something on me?” I asked him after describing my interview with Lucas.
“Certainly someone could have, but you describe unease before you even entered the building.”
“What does that mean?”
Dr. Shafran leaned back. “The mechanisms by which human beings perceive mana are not fully understood. Just as a camera or a telephone without filtering software can pick up signals from the mana force itself, so does your brain. But while the brain of a living creature is an infinitely better filter than any microchip, signals can and do sneak through. I suspect that you passed close to an intense source of mana you’re particularly sensitive to.”
“Why would it make me black out?”
“That may be a medical or a psychological question. But I might suggest there is some slight evidence that such static is not wholly random, and is responsible for what some New Age victims refer to as the Oracle.”
Please, tell me he didn’t just say that . . .
I rubbed my forehead. As much as I wanted Dr. Shafran to be pulling my leg, he didn’t look like it.
“You’re saying that I had some prophetic vision?”
“I am saying that you might have seen something you were not physically or mentally capable of absorbing at the time. I won’t say much more than that, since far more people claim to see the future than I can credit.”
I tried to grasp a little rational reassurance. “I would think fortune-telling and soothsaying is outside your scientific purview. Mana or not.”
“Such things are unproven and untested in the lab. We have, however, conducted very interesting experiments that demonstrate that these energies can violate our commonsense notions of causality, just as they mangle our not-so-commonsense notions of physics, matter, and energy.”
Well, that isn’t very reassuring.
I stood up, shaking my head. I wasn’t absolutely sure I had learned much . . .
“Are you all right, son?”
“This whole thing is making me uneasy.”
“Is there anything else you would like to ask?”
I paused, and realized there was.
“What about salt?”
“Salt?”
“Salt. The dwarf sent me a sample of salt. What could be the significance of that?”
Dr. Shafran reached over and grabbed a saltshaker and sprinkled the white crystals on the table. “When you speak of salt, you speak of possibly the most potent mineral symbol in human culture. Physically, it is crystalline, and it is a longtime symbol of purity taking part in rituals millennia before the Portal existed. Its crystal structure, and the cultural significance surrounding it, makes it a perfect matrix to absorb the mana flow out of the Portal.”
“What would that make the salt mines under Lake Erie?”
“Possibly the most potent concentration of mana on either side of the Portal.”
It started making sense. So much mana in one place, no matter how dull someone was, the sheer force of all of that would leak through their mental filters. God help anyone who was sensitive or naturally adept. Of course, the mines became a disaster when the Portal opened.
“If dwarves are immune to the effects, they might be the only ones who
could
go down there.”
could
go down there.”
Dr. Shafran nodded.
Christ, what happened when you refined the stuff?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
T
HAT disturbing sense of urgency kept me moving after I had talked to Dr. Shafran. My world felt out of joint, and I had the feeling that things were laughing at me from behind the reflection in my rearview mirror.
HAT disturbing sense of urgency kept me moving after I had talked to Dr. Shafran. My world felt out of joint, and I had the feeling that things were laughing at me from behind the reflection in my rearview mirror.
Be rational, damn it.
It was tied to the salt. The salt that I had given to Kawata, the salt that Ossian had given to me.
“This was why he killed himself.”
Mazurich had led the dwarves into the salt mines. Mazurich and the dwarves had formed Magetech. The point of Magetech was to exploit the influence of the Portal, to apply twenty-first century science and engineering to it, or vice versa . . .
What kind of resource would that salt be?
I thought back to when I received the package. How my satellite and phone reception went, despite the filters for normal background mana. How Dr. Kawata complained about his brand-new spectrometer failing. The camera on my phone failing at
Thor’s Hammer
, and at the
Nazgûl.
Thor’s Hammer
, and at the
Nazgûl.
The white circle around Ossian’s remains.
Potential.
Implication.
Nothing solid . . .
I wanted to talk to Dr. Pretorious.
The man I called was a private investigator of a rather specialized variety. His name was Quintin Valentino, and he didn’t stake anyone out, didn’t take incriminating pictures, didn’t even own a gun. As far as I knew, the guy lived in his office. But you could give him a first name and where the person worked, and he could come back with a credit report, tax records, arrest record, and résumé.
“Quint?”
“Kline, darling. How long has it been . . . ?”
“Too long. Can you look someone up for me?”
“On your account? Anyone you want.”
“Name’s Pretorious. Dr. Eric Pretorious.”
“Please tell me you can spell that.”
I gave him the spelling from my notes.
“Any other identifiers?”
“Worked at, probably part owner of, a company called Magetech.”
“Well, that won’t be too hard. Tomorrow soon enough?”
“Yes, fine.”
I hung up my cell phone as I drove up one of Solon’s snaking industrial pathways. Solon was one of the outer suburban nets that caught a lot of the industry shaken loose from the Cleveland metropolitan economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was the closest of a cluster of suburbs whose combination of undeveloped acreage—read “farms”—and attractive real estate taxes attracted large box warehouses and factories like a presidential campaign attracted unreasonable promises.
I drove by windowless boxes made of concrete and corrugated steel, squatting in the midst of floodlit asphalt. Semi trucks backed into loading bays—industrial young sucking the teats of their mother. Every few moments, a tractor trailer would drive past me, going in the opposite direction. The side panels advertised kitchen cabinets, soft drinks, or auto parts.
At the end of the road sat my destination.
The Magetech factory/warehouse complex wrapped around the end of the street so completely that it was able to build its massive logo into the island in the center of the cul-de-sac.
I pulled into a small visitor’s parking lot under the watchful eye of a security camera. I sat in my car and looked around, trying to get a sense of the place. The scale was huge. Easily several hundred acres. A half dozen separate buildings were immediately visible, each marked with standardized runes which could be wards, or could simply be some form of building markers. I could also see runes on the plowed surface of the main parking lot.
The lot was down a long driveway from the five visitor spots, wrapped in chain-link, and protected by a guard shack where a single uniformed dwarf sat, eyeing me suspiciously. The lot was mostly empty except for a quartet of charter buses, all bearing the Magetech logo.
As I got out of the Volkswagen, I saw thirty or forty dwarves dressed in overalls and hard hats exit one of the buildings and head toward one of the buses. I heard their guttural conversations drift my way, and slow to a stop as they reached the bus and more of them saw me.
It felt as if they all stared at me as they queued up to board the bus.
Okay, I’m out of place here. We’ve established that.
I wanted to see more of Magetech, and I was holding the hope that Mr. Lucas’ uncharacteristic openness would filter down to the factory floor. Seeing the dwarves react to me made me second-guess that idea.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” I whispered in a puff of fog.
I managed to shock myself by voicing such an unprofessional thought. I was still suffering from the aftereffects of my visit to the corporate office. I was expecting some evil premonition, some sort of nasty mana overload to raise the small hairs on my neck.
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