Dragons & Dwarves (65 page)
Authors: S. Andrew Swann
Ragnan becomes an authoritarian regime—human only—led by a god-king called the Thesarch, who seemed to have more authority than your average Pharaoh. He was helped in part by the fact that he was at the apex of the mana pyramid and could muster spells that could waste entire cities.
The last Thesarch was named Valdis, and he seemed particularly nasty and long-lived. Many of the nonhuman societies surrounding Ragnan crumble before Valdis and his enchanted human armies.
Then, a dragon named Aloeus throws a monkey wrench into the works by blowing open the Portal, opening the way between here and there. Out pours a tidal wave of magic and refugees, and— among other political maneuverings—Aloeus manages to broker a deal that has the Ohio National Guard send a unit of armor and air cavalry through the Portal.
Valdis had a blind spot, not seeing the unenchanted, thoroughly mundane troops as a threat. Apparently, no one had shown him that things could be blown up very well without any mana at all. So, thanks to Aloeus, Mayor Rayburn, and the governor of the great state of Ohio, a coup ended the reign of the Thesarch, and started a rat’s nest of political ramifications on our side of the Portal that was still working itself out.
So far, so good, from Hephaestus’ point of view.
But there was more to it.
There always was.
“The explosion of the nation of men across the continents took generations in mortal eyes,” Hephaestus opened a large atlas, showing alien lands in scripts I couldn’t read. However, as he turned the pages, it was clear what was happening as the maps became dominated by a single color. “But for most immortals—dragons, elves—the pace of change came too fast to react. I watched many die.”
“What about dwarves?”
“Mortal as well, but they lacked man’s ability to master mana, and fell too often before it.”
“I know of Ragnan’s conquests—”
“Do you know of her ally?”
“Ally?”
Hephaestus walked over to a dark grimoire, bound in black leather that seemed to show remnants of facial features in the grain. He drew it off the shelf and placed it on the table between us.
“Not all immortals fought the Thesarch’s rise.”
Hephaestus opened the book and flipped though pages of arcane symbols until it opened on a full-page illustration. I wasn’t really surprised to see—sitting on a stony throne, before a background of fire—the Devil from the tarot card.
“Shit . . .”
Mazurich, or what was left of him, was right. What I was dealing with was Satan himself. Or, at least as close a manifestation as the Portal could conjure up. The reign of the Thesarch was based on a literal deal with the Devil.
Or
a
Devil.
a
Devil.
Appearance aside, Hephaestus wasn’t describing Judeo-Christian metaphysics. He described a race of beings, few in number, older and more powerful than even the dragons. Beings that were so much of the mana they swam in that they often could forgo a physical form. The mana itself was a sense organ for them, making them near omniscient.
Demons and angels . . .
Their limited physicality, at first, made them little more than shadows in the conscious world. Creatures of dream and spirit, little known and little seen.
Until one of their number discovered a vulnerability in the mortal mind, a vulnerability that allowed him to cohabit the brain and the senses of a man—to give himself form . . .
And lust . . .
And desire . . .
“The vulnerability was two-way,” Hephaestus said. “Its spirit could infect the body of a man, but it, in turn, became infected with the basest material drives.”
“This thing allied with the Thesarch?”
“This thing
was
the Thesarch. It fed its human host with unimaginable powers, and in turn, human armies slaughtered immortals whose existence might drain the font of mana it now wanted solely to consume.”
was
the Thesarch. It fed its human host with unimaginable powers, and in turn, human armies slaughtered immortals whose existence might drain the font of mana it now wanted solely to consume.”
“Couldn’t someone stop it? Others of its kind . . .”
“Were the first to die, consumed in rituals to extend the life of the first Thesarchs.”
“But Valdis was killed . . .”
“And it infested the neighbor most convenient to it.” Hephaestus shook his head. “Valdis was a host, nothing more. The latest in a long line.”
“But the Thesarch was overthrown over ten years ago . . .”
“Do you know how long that is to ones older than I?”
Valdis, apparently, wasn’t the only one who was surprised by machine guns, rockets, and high explosives. Our demonic spirit saw in the National Guard hints of powers that had never been conceived within the boundaries of Ragnan. So, instead of taking the mantle of Valdis’ successor, it found someone anonymous to take it on its way to the other side of the Portal.
Why settle for one world, when two were available? And one was so much more interesting.
I shook my head.
“As powerful as this thing is, it can’t live without mana, can it?”
“It is almost mana personified. It is as if you asked: ‘Could matter exist without mass?’”
“Then how can it expect to take over this planet? The portion with mana is geographically infinitesimal.”
“It has patience, and servants.”
“What do you . . . ?”
I remembered my vision, the mountain of salt, the dwarves shoveling it while chained to the Devil’s throne.
“They’re smuggling salt.”
“Spreading mana,” Hephaestus said. “Every ritual that frees the mana trapped in those crystals, will leave some to sink into the earth. Every time, pulling the boundaries of the Portal outward.”
I nodded, “He’s holding the dwarves by the short hairs. They’re living in what’s got to be the place where he has the most powerful influence.”
“And he’s using them to spread that influence.”
Patient bastard . . .
“What do you think I can do?”
“What do you think I can do?”
“I’ve been watching for his reappearance.” Hephaestus folded his hands. “He is vulnerable on this side of the Portal while it is mana-poor. Until now, I was unsure that he was even here. Now I am.” Hephaestus caressed the spines on one of his shelves. “Originally, I intended to shut off the Portal itself.”
I swallowed.
“But the geology beneath your lake means that there may be enough mana to self-sustain now,” Hephaestus frowned. “So I must change tactics. If these plans are disrupted, along with the distribution of mana, he may not be able to recover. Merely publicizing what is happening, the dwarves’ smuggling ring, may be enough to cut him off from the mines, and weaken him enough to be defeated.”
“You said you’d help with my daughter.”
“Agree to this, and I can open a route to wherever she is. After which, you should both leave the area, go somewhere free of his influence.”
I nodded.
“Do you agree?”
“There’s one problem, Hephaestus.”
“What is that?”
“That is exactly what he wants me to do.”
I had managed to leave the dragon speechless.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I
FOUND myself back at the Superior Viaduct and Reggie’s Town Car with little sign that anything had happened at all. It was four in the morning, and I only had my footprints going toward the end of the bridge and back to show that what I’d witnessed was more than hallucination.
FOUND myself back at the Superior Viaduct and Reggie’s Town Car with little sign that anything had happened at all. It was four in the morning, and I only had my footprints going toward the end of the bridge and back to show that what I’d witnessed was more than hallucination.
It actually helped my sense of reality that my footprints passed through a locked and warded gate.
“What now?”
I asked the chill night air.
I asked the chill night air.
Hephaestus/Shafran might be a powerful ally, but I didn’t trust him entirely.
Actually, I didn’t trust him at all. The dragon, like all dragons, was in it for himself. The fact that he so offhandedly mentioned shutting down the Portal was testament to that. That wasn’t just shutting down the economic engine for the whole region. That would be condemning hundreds of thousands of creatures—including his fellow dragons—to death.
Someone about to throw away that many lives wasn’t really that interested in Sarah. No way I could trust him to come though on any sort of promise to rescue my daughter. As far as I knew, there was only one being who had that power.
I let myself back into Reggie’s car and pulled away into the Flats.
Before I quite realized where I was going, I found myself on I- 77 heading toward Columbus. I think I was moving faster than I was able to think. At least faster than I was able to rationalize. The one thing I did know was that I was the only person I could trust to have my daughter’s interests at heart. Not Hephaestus, not Blackstone and the Feds, and certainly not Old Scratch, the force behind what seemed to be going on.
And what was it that seemed to be going on?
Smuggling for one. The dwarves were mining salt out of their caves under Whiskey Island, salt that apparently was something akin to magic plutonium, a mana battery so rich in the energies coming out of the Portal, that it allowed the dwarves themselves to play against type and actually cast spells. A mineral potent enough that the Feds were worried about it being smuggled out of northeast Ohio.
If the salt allowed spell-casting of any sort outside the direct influence of the Portal, no wonder Blackstone and company were so panicked. Federal policy number one regarding the Portal was containment. There wasn’t any nightmare scenario, from rampant counterfeiting to terrorism, that couldn’t be made worse by mixing magic into it. In theory, given the plans and enough mana, a mage with the proper incentive could reproduce a nuke.
The idea that kind of power could spread elsewhere, not just do mestically, but overseas, would give a lot of people in Washington sleepless nights.
That’s not even addressing the political problems if nonhumans decided to leave the state where they had legal recognition. A dwarf might pass without much notice, but a dragon?
That was the first part of it . . .
Then there was Mazurich, who orchestrated placing the dwarven clans in the place they were currently exploiting. Nothing about his history implied anything other than a working-class alliance that would have made sense just about anywhere with any immigrant population. Mazurich became a dwarven advocate . . .
But somewhere Old Scratch got involved. I wasn’t sure exactly when, but from Hephaestus’ history I saw two possibilities. Old Scratch must have been drawn to the area of the salt mines from the start. Coming through the Portal to this “mana-poor” world, the way the salt mines apparently became a mana battery would have drawn his attention as soon as he arrived.
So he found the dwarves in residence, and somehow took over, infecting them as he had the rule of the Thesarch.
Or there was an even more sinister possibility—
If Old Scratch comes here very early, as Valdis is falling, or perhaps even before, he might be responsible for Mazurich’s deal for the dwarves. Perhaps his intent was to have a captive population, tied to the mines, the labor needed to refine and distribute the mana he wanted spread across this new planet.
If Mazurich discovered this, that one of his greatest humanitarian achievements was at the behest of the Devil himself, the guilt may have driven him to kill himself.
This piece fit everything that had happened to date, except possibly the most important part, from my point of view—
Why did Old Scratch want me to run an exposé on the dwarven operation?
From every indication, he wanted me to blow the whole story wide open. Hephaestus wasn’t the only one who was dumbfounded. I couldn’t see any angle that made sense. All I knew was that whatever was going on, Old Scratch was manipulating things so I would make the situation public.
Then there was item number three . . .
Magetech.
It was part of the story, but beyond the financial conflict-of-interest story about Mazurich, I didn’t know how.
It was becoming imperative that I know the whole story, because without it I was not going to know what was motivating Old Scratch. And I knew that, until I found out what the Devil wanted, I wasn’t going to have much hope of getting my daughter back.
There were three sources I knew to go to for information on Magetech. The first, Magetech itself, had an evil effect on me the last time I visited. I had a feeling that it was a dangerous place, and the simple fact that it was saturated with mana meant that it was probably a hangout for Old Scratch himself. And, if I was avoiding concentrations of mana, directly approaching Dwarf Central at Whiskey Island was flat out, not to mention that—if I took Hephaestus at his word—it was Old Scratch’s base of operations.
Last was a Dr. Pretorious, who had moved to Columbus, safely outside the influence of the Portal—also safely out of reach of Old Scratch.
It was after dawn when I had reached the southern outskirts of the state capital, and pulled up to Pretorious’ house. Nothing much distinguished it. It was one large house in a development full of large houses. The only thing that might have marked it as odd was the fact that every window was shaded from the outside world. Even the vast windows marking the great room were shrouded.
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