Landslayer's Law (11 page)

“You’ve worked with maps?”

(Stupid question.)
“Sure,” Scott replied, instead. “Actually, I work in the cartography lab right now. It’s kind of a holdover from…before.”

“Landsat?”

“You got it.”

Mims reached into the folder and drew out a packet of photographs, which he slid over to Scott. Scott examined them numbly. Basic amateur mountain shots, he determined at once; Myra was an expert photographer and had taught him (tried to, anyway) everything she knew about composition, lighting, and framing. That aside, he supposed he was expected to assess the subject matter, with a probable eye toward commentary on same.

The first had been shot straight down a dirt road, with low forested ridges to either side, looming above fields of broom sedge. A clump of woods ran in from the right in the midground, and behind it, he could make out the shimmer of water, with a bit of mountain rising beyond: a mountain with startling white outcrops crowning its summit.

The next shot showed that same lake, but from the edge, with mountains probing its blue-gray waters and the stone-capped peak dominating the center. A near-perfect cone, he noted: lower than most of the surrounding ridges, but no less impressive—rather like Spirit Island in Crater Lake.

There were several more shots of the mountain, a couple clearly done with a telephoto lens. The next batch depicted the nearby shore, which showed flat shoals of stone shelving down to the water’s edge. Those were followed by more of the mountain—double exposures—or something—for the peak had a vaguely nebulous quality, as though it were out of focus, or…transparent, or simply not quite there.

At which point he recalled with a shudder the work he had done last night. “Does this place have a name?” he managed, through a sip of coffee he hoped masked his sudden apprehension.

“Locals call it Bloody Bald,” Mims admitted offhand. “They seem to have a hard time remembering it.”

Scott’s heart skipped another beat.
Bloody Bald
—that was the name that had popped into his head earlier that morning. A chill raced over him.

“It’d be hard to forget a sight like that!” Green observed beside him.

“That’s what we’re hoping,” Mims agreed. “See, Mr. Gresham, we at Mystic Mountain Properties have been scouring that area for months in search of the perfect place to build the perfect mountain resort. Something with completely controlled access and completely remote from the rest of the world as well. Something from which there are absolutely no reminders of external civilization except one road and contrails overhead.”

“So…where do I fit into all this?” Scott finally dared, swallowing hard.

Mims stabbed the topmost photo with a stubby finger. “Would you believe this mountain has never been surveyed?”

Scott took a deep breath. “Actually, yes. As a matter of fact, I was lookin’ at the Landsats of this area last night and noticed it in some of them, but couldn’t find it on the Geo. Survey master—or anywhere else.”

“Here there be dragons,” Green commented wryly. “But that’s actually not that surprising, not really. That area’s damned remote, for one thing; and what with assorted wars, courthouse fires, and so on—that county can’t
keep
a courthouse—well, all their records are pretty sketchy. Anyone wants to buy property up there has to chase down the neighbors and take what they say about the corner markers on faith. Only thing you can really count on is stuff that’s been surveyed postwar, and that lake predates it.”

“How do you know so much?” Scott inquired.

“Went to college up there—didn’t you know? MacTyrie JC, class of 1963. I don’t remember that mountain either.”

“Small world,” Scott muttered. “But as I was sayin’, where do I fit in?”

Again Mims tapped his photos. “You know how to survey, don’t you?”

Scott nodded dubiously. It was grunt work, but you didn’t major in geography (as he had briefly done) and avoid exposure to that. So was this Mims’s big offer? A summer spent
surveying?

“I see what you’re thinking,” Mims said—having paused to catch the eye of a passing waiter so that food could actually be ordered. “And yeah, you’d be doing some surveying. But we also know you like to tromp around in the woods, so we thought that might sweeten the drudgery a little. And there’s always the small matter of the gemstones.”

“Gemstones?”

“One of the largest star sapphires in the world was found one county away. Scads of amethyst and other quartz variants from up there, never mind gold. We need you to check out the whole shoreline a mile to either side of that road in the picture, which is how much we hope to lease from the state, which appears to own it. I’d hate to try to build a resort when I ought to be building a gold mine; on the other hand, a little recreational prospecting on the side wouldn’t hurt attendance. Needless to say, anything you find on your own’s yours to keep.”

“Uh, how long would I be doing this?” Scott ventured. “I’ve still got a dissertation, and all.”

“Given that these can be construed as extraordinary circumstances,” Green broke in, “I can probably get you one more extension. Frankly, though, I think you ought to take it. Ralph here tells me they’ve other projects afoot and could use a staff geologist.”

“We pay well,” Mims added helpfully. He wrote down a figure on the napkin that had just arrived with his Bloody Mary, and turned it around to face Scott.

“Better than Barnett’s, anyway,” Scott managed, trying hard not to be too impressed—though he was.

Mims stretched a plump arm across the table, offering Scott his hand. “Fine, then; you’re on.”

Scott shook the hand mechanically, feeling as though these two men had completely hijacked his life, and wondering whether he liked it.
(And what was that gnawing away in the back of his mind, telling him he
shouldn’t
do this?)

Oh well, it solved some problems and postponed others. It seemed the thing to do—for the nonce. And frankly, he did as well acting on impulse as after careful deliberation, most of the time. “Thanks,” he murmured, trying to sound grateful and low key all at once.

Mims cleared his throat. “What’re you doing this afternoon?”

Scott glanced at Green. “I, uh, had some stuff I was supposed to turn into you…sir.”

Green shrugged. “It’ll keep.”

Mims fairly beamed. “Fine, so you’ve got time to ride up there with me?”

Scott shrugged in turn. “Have hikin’ boots will travel.”

“Good!” Mims crowed, slipping him a hundred dollar bill. “Buy yourself a new pair. You’re gonna need ’em.”

Scott paused before pocketing the cash, but Mims waved it aside. “Now that that’s settled,” he proclaimed primly. “I think I know what I’d like to order.”

“Champagne,” Scott told the waiter, who had finally reappeared. “And… Oysters Rockefeller.”

“That a pun?” from Green.

“Huh?”

“Rockefeller. Rocks. Geology.”

Scott felt very foolish, “Oh, right. I see.”

“Oysters, hell!” Mims roared, shutting his menu with a snap. “Let’s have caviar!”

“But sir,” the waiter began. “We don’t have—”

“Well, get some!” Mims shot back. “Cost be damned!”

Chapter VII: Reunion

(Athens, Georgia—Friday, June 20—midafternoon)

David wasn’t sure what he’d expected when he eased through the door to Myra’s studio, with his brain half fried from an anthropology final he’d likely aced, but it wasn’t Wainamoinen, Lemminkainen, and Ilmarinen.

Yet there they were: arrayed in perfect tableau on a low pedestal beneath the skylight: three of his buds frozen in place in the guise of the three great Finnish heroes. Actually, identification hadn’t been quite that easy—they could’ve been any number of archetypal macho men. But it happened that Myra had some months back won a very lucrative commission to paint covers for a new edition of classic myths, and had already mentioned several times that the
Kalevala—
the Finnish national epic—was next on the agenda.

He propped himself against the doorjamb, watching.

Myra had certain rules when she worked. One was that though she didn’t mind having folks around, they were expected to remain silent unless she instigated conversation; thus Liz (who was a decent artist herself) was curled up on the sofa reading the latest issue of
Graphis.
Another was that she always required music—generally a high-energy film soundtrack, such as
Conan the Barbarian
or
The Last of the Mohicans,
though in this case she’d yielded to the obvious and was shaking the walls with the strains of Sibelius’s
Finlandia.

A final quirk was that she insisted on using her friends as models. God knew he’d posed enough himself, clothed and sky-clad alike (that was another tendency, though generally only for pencil studies). Most recently Liz herself had stood for the previous volume in the myth series: Queen Maeve of Connaught in the
Tain bo Cuailnge.
His own time was yet to come—there wasn’t a ready market for short blond heroes, though he suspected Myra was eyeing him for Sigurd the Volsung.

As for the tableau—well, she was clearly making the best use of available resources. With his impressive muscles and acceptably heroic height, Gary had been the obvious choice for Ilmarinen, the master smith. Stripped to the waist, he loomed behind a cardboard box that she had already transformed in her sketch into an anvil. One brawny arm was upraised, brandishing a very real five-pound hammer; “to get the muscle tensions right,” was her standard line about such things. The other gripped a pair of salad tongs containing the stereo remote—a very odd Sampo indeed.

Beside him, Darrell had assumed the role of Lemminkainen, the warrior—risky, given Darrell’s perpetually foolish mien and spare frame. Or maybe not. Warriors were often fools of a sort, so perhaps she was sending a subtle message; certainly one who went a-venturing in the frozen north could quickly acquire a thin physique. (Besides, she’d draped him in skins, so his prominent ribs didn’t show
that
much.) His role in the tableau seemed to be that of anxious client, to judge by the way he was glowering while fingering a sword he might well have brought for repair.

As for Wainamoinen, the shaman-mage, Myra had lived up to her threat of the morning and cast Calvin in that capacity. Like Gary, he was shirtless (and also like him, showing some waistline pudge David hadn’t noted earlier); like Darrell, he was contemplating something in his hand. No, actually (as a closer look determined), he was contemplating the hand itself—if you wanted to dignify what far more resembled a cougar’s paw with that term.

David frowned at that, and not for the first time that day, either. Cal was a shapeshifter, that was a fact. He had a talisman—a scale from an uktena, a serpent-monster from a nearby World—that let him change form, at certain risk.

David knew he’d been working hard at learning how to shift without it, and to control the change either way—as now, when he’d altered only part of his body.

Still, it made him angry. For one thing, it was using magic frivolously, which wasn’t smart in principle, and which David happened to know Calvin’s mentor, Uki of Galunlati, had banned in the most explicit terms. And for another thing, if he
was
using the scale to effect the change (you primed it with your own blood, generally by closing your fist around it and wished to be whatever beast whose shape you would assume), he was running a second risk, for each scale carried a finite but nonspecified number of charges, and there was always a chance (especially with an oft-used scale) that you could get stuck in some alternate body. Having a friend with cougar claws permanently attached to his right hand was not a notion David relished, never mind the effect it would have on that friend’s musical endeavors.

He’d ignored the matter earlier, first from surprise, then from genuine delight at seeing his friend, and finally from the assumption that apparent frivolity or no, Cal usually knew what he was doing—that last borne out by the way his friend had tried to second-guess him upon arrival, with all that cryptic talk of things having “changed,” coupled with a host of warning looks and whatever. And if truth were known, he was a little pissed at himself for having left with the matter unresolved, given the way it had haunted him throughout the final he’d just completed.

But he’d waited long enough, dammit, and had just started to address the situation, in spite of Myra’s ban, when she sighed, laid her pencil down, and turned the stereo off with a snap. “Okay, guys: break time. Good job, so far, except Darry you really do have to learn how to scowl—oh, and Cal, you can have your old hand back. I’ve drawn the paw in special detail, and there’re always the photos, just in case.”

Gary exhaled expansively and lowered the hammer, reaching up with his other hand to massage what was obviously a very tired shoulder—not that he’d ever complain, not Mr. Testosterone Man. For his part, David grimaced in dismay. What Myra had done was not cool, if she had indeed photographed Cal in mid-shift. Christ, hadn’t they all agreed long ago not to risk such things? In paper, print, or paint, alike? The dratted enfield was bad enough (and he suspected Aik was about to make good his threats about enfield X-Rays, if he hadn’t already), and now to provide yet more hardcopy!

“You look like a blond stormcloud,” Myra informed him calmly—having evidently noted his glare in one of the studio’s many mirrors. “A small one,” she added with a smirk.

David bit his lip to keep from snapping at her. There was too much chaos circling already; he didn’t need to inject more tension. On the other hand, he really had sat on his anger long enough. “Been
practicing,
Cal?” he hissed, as he helped himself to a Guinness from the fridge before flopping down beside a very sleepy Liz.

Calvin shrugged. “Always. And since you seem disinclined to wait until we’ve got time for the long tale, the short form is that, first of all, it’s a new scale, fresh from Galunlati. And second, I’ve figured out how to keep track of the number of ‘charges’ left in it, and let me tell you, that one’s got plenty.” At which point Gary offered him a Guinness of his own—which he refused politely. Some bans, it seemed, Calvin still observed.