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Sleepless Streets: The Most Dangerous Hobby
[Yes, that's right, it took me most of a week to get this finished. I was working on some other stuff. However, it's here and the next one should be sooner than this one.]
The thing about having been somewhere nice and cold is that you actually notice the heat when you get back. As we stepped out of the tree into the druid section, the damp heat wrapped around us like a particularly unpleasant blanket.
"I have an idea," Argos said. "I'm going to go home and work on it."
"I want to see if I can find that daughter of Joab's in the archives, and talk to the elves about Mahala," I told him. "We can meet up in a couple of hours. Electra, what are you up to?"
"I'll come with you," she said, giving Argos a dubious look. She and I headed to the elven district, and talked to Alberga, the jail warden. We explained what we'd learned from Sigwald, that Mahala was still working with Dada even though she was imprisoned. Alberga got a worried look on her face, told us that she'd take care of it, and then headed into the prison.
"She's probably going to go knock her out," I said to Electra as we left the jail.
"Is that even going to work?"
"Probably. Usually does, at least as far as I've heard."
Electra and I headed towards the human district's archives, which were open to the public and free to access. (Of course, if you wanted an archivist's help, you'd need to pay a coin or two, but the human archivists are good at what they do and nobody minds paying too much.) I found an archivist and told her that I was looking for a family line, starting with a woman named Sondra Icelorn who had married around four centuries ago.
"Oh, this is going to be fun," the archivist said, smiling. "Icelorn, that's a village up north. Do you know if she was a recent immigrant when she married?"
"I don't know, I think she may have been born here."
"That helps," she said. "I can check in the birth index first, that'll tell me when she married. Give me a few minutes."
She disappeared into the back rooms that hold a labyrinth of ledgers. The archivists ruthlessly corral all of the information that they get. Everything is indexed to within an inch of its life, tabulated, cross-referenced, and ruthlessly kept neat and tidy. The archivists have help from magical constructs that fetch and carry for them, things with altogether too many limbs and not quite enough eyes. They call them spiders, because that's the only earthly creature they bear any resemblance to.
The archivist came back with a ledger, and thumped it down on the table. "Sondra Icelorn, born on Themi Street, mother Concha Icelorn, registered father Joab Icelorn. Sound like your girl?" I nodded. "She married a bit under four hundred years ago, to someone named Gaspar Uronis."
"Can we trace the line from there?"
"If all the children were registered, sure." She turned and spoke to a couple of spiders who had folded themselves up into fuzzy black balls on the floor next to her. They unfolded, stretching out long chitinous limbs, and scurried into the back rooms.
It took a while, but we found the connection I'd been thinking we would find. One of Joab's descendants had married Marco Highgarden about two centuries ago. Marco was recorded as head of the Highgarden family at the time. "That's the connection to me, then. Strange."
Electra was giving me a strange look. I shrugged and closed the ledger I'd been looking at, and paid the archivist for her time.
The Highgardens are the oldest and most prominent family in the human district. Not too many of the people I knew now knew that I'd been born one of them. Few people in the social circles I traveled in these days would have any reason to remember Tomas Highgarden, black sheep scion of the Highgarden clan. Emily was far too young to remember it, and besides, the scandal had been quickly and quietly covered over. As far as I knew, most people I'd known probably figured I was dead, had drunk myself to death sometime in the years after Inge had died.
"That's strange, still, that I look so much like Joab. I'm related to most of the humans in the city living right now more closely than to him," I said. There was something else going on here, and I didn't like it even one bit. Any time you get stuff like this happening, it's usually either someone monkeying around with things only the gods ought to fool with, or a god trying to set something right and generally missing the mark entirely.
Either way, it was monkey business that I wasn't really willing to deal with. I pondered the possibility of heading out on a river drive tomorrow morning, I thought I should be able to find something. River drives are hard and dangerous, but I'm guessing that none of Dada's people would be willing to follow me up the river.
I glanced at Electra beside me, and sighed. Damnit. Too responsible for my own good sometimes.
We met back up with Argos, shared what we'd learned, and picked up some pickaxes and started towards the entrance of Sigwald's lair. I probably ought to have known that our day was going to be more complicated than that, though.
There was a commotion down one of the streets we were passing. Of course we stopped to look, who doesn't? "Those are the cops. Looks like they're looking...at a hole in the ground?" Electra said, shading her eyes.
We wandered towards the commotion, and I spotted Jasper among the group of cops who were looking down at the hole. I waved, and he came over to talk to us. "We're bringing the bodies out now," he said. "Nasty business. Cave-in, it looks like, but there's...something weird about it."
"Weird how?" I asked.
He opened his mouth, closed it, and made a wry face. "Just...weird. You'd have to see it. After we've got the bodies out, you can go down if you want."
Now I was curious. We turned to watch the bodies being dragged out of the hole in the street. It looked like an access hole for either a sewer or a tunnel under the street. The bodies were two humans and two dwarves. All of them looked like something heavy had fallen on them, but something wasn't quite right, and I couldn't quite tell what right away. The humans were a male and a female, both about twenty years older than me, wearing these silly helmets of the kind they sell as souvenirs in the dwarf district.
The other two were dwarves. One was an older male, the other younger and after a bit of investigation we determined that she was female. "They were evidently on an underground tour with the dwarves, you know those things they like to run. Weird that they're here instead of under the dwarven district. Come on, I'll show you what's below."
We went down a ladder that had been put down the hole. There were magelights hung around the room, and we could see boulders in the center of the room with blood under them.
Not enough blood, though. Really not enough blood at all. There were four big boulders there, and not a whole lot else. "This isn't the weird thing. Come over here," Jasper said.
there were two corridors leading away, and Jasper led us a short way down one of them. On the wall where the corridor turned, there was a place that looked burned somehow. In white, where the scorch marks were not, was the image of a woman. It was solid white, and it certainly felt like gypsum chalk.
The silhouette had outstretched arms, and we could see little details like a wedding ring on the left hand and two rings on the right, an outline of waist-length hair which was waist-length, as well as clothing. There was a skirt, about knee-length, and a loose-fitting shirt.
It could be just about anyone. It looked a little like the everyday regalia of the priestesses of Eldath, but it was hard to tell. We took samples of the chalk for later. Jasper was right. This was weird.
"There's residual magic here," Electra said.
"We should look at those bodies," I said. "I don't know what's going on here, but maybe the bodies will give us more of a clue."
We climbed up the ladder again and began to go over the bodies. What was pretty obvious was that they'd been crushed after they'd died. What had actually killed them, in the case of the humans, was a blow to the back of the head with something pointed, like maybe a pick. The fatal wound on the male dwarf had been a blow to the front of the head, almost obscured by the crushing wounds he'd been given after death. From the calluses on his hand, he usually walked with a cane, but the cane was missing.
The female dwarf, on the other hand, had been wearing armor, and it looked like she'd fought back. She had leather armor on, an empty shortsword scabbard on her belt, and a knife wound through the armor into her chest.
As I was feeling around the wound, I found a hard lump beneath her armor, between her breasts. After getting the armor loose, I pulled out a chunk of rock, a fist-sized, lumpy crystal. It was a dull green color, and it was semi-translucent.
Some of the dwarves who lived in the area had wandered over, and the two dwarves had been identified as Suffield and Mansi, grandfather and granddaughter, who ran a tour business. One of the dwarves identified the crystal I'd found--it was olivine, a kind of crystal that holds a magical charge very well. Electra had taken the crystal from me, and was studying it. "It's got magic on it, something like a treewalk but not quite," she told me and Argos.
"Let's go look in the hole again," Argos said. "Maybe we missed something."
We did find a couple of interesting things. We did a little digging in the chalk, and found that there was another olivine crystal in a hole where the silhouette's bellybutton would have been. The small crystal was attracted to the larger one, and when Electra touched them together, the smaller one was absorbed into the larger.
All right, that was a little strange. What was also strange was the blood trail that we finally found. It was very faint, and the blood drops were quite far apart. It led down the tunnel that led away from the chamber where the people had been found in the opposite direction from the silhouette on the wall.
We followed it, and the trail ended at a metal ladder that led to another manhole. The smell told us where we were before we even saw it--the meat market at the edge of the human district. When we asked around, the vendors nearby said they'd seen nothing. The only one who had seen something was a young butcher's assistant, who said he hadn't seen anyone carrying bodies, but he had had a customer come through who'd bought some blood. "We usually don't get people buying blood unless they're making blood sausage, or there's a baby vampire who needs it. He didn't look like the type."
"What did he look like?" Argos asked.
"That was the weird part. He was a dwarf...I think. He kept changing size. He had blue eyes, though." Passing strange; dwarves almost always have black or brown eyes. "Anyway, he bought some blood, and left down that hole you just came out of."
We all looked at each other, thanked the butcher's assistant, and left. The blood on the rocks was animal blood, and someone had gone to some trouble to hide the fact that this was murder. They hadn't done a very good job, and I'd bet whoever it was had been in a big hurry.
Our next lead was the dwarves' office, which were in the dwarven sector. The bodies had been carted off into cold storage while the investigation continued. "We have a lead on identifying the humans," Jasper told me. "I can come with you to check out the office and confirm."
So we all hoofed it over to the dwarven sector, to a sturdy stone house with an elaborate compass carved over the door. Jasper got us in, and we looked around a bit, finding the ledgers that kept track of their appointments.
"This is weird," Electra said. "Morela and Linford Littleton had an appointment for a tour at seven in the morning, and it got pushed back to four. Says they were going looking for olivine in the cavern of Mateus."
"Ever heard of it?" I asked. Nobody had. There was a map out on the table, with a section of the troll quarter outlined. But if they'd gone there...how had they managed to be found in the human district?
We went back in the ledgers a bit, and discovered that the unfortunate Littletons had gone on a similar trek every three months for the last three years. Only once was a success noted, and they said they'd found a piece of olivine embedded in a wall in the elven district.
"They lived on Flessa Street, according to this," Electra said.
Jasper made a bit of a face. "That's where all the Littletons live. Clannish folk. All right, let's go see if we can find next of kin."
Back to the human district. I was almost getting used to all the walking, but I did sort of hope we'd stop for the midday meal soon. The cobbles were hot enough to fry eggs on, and something to drink and one of those cold meat rolls they sell near the docks in the gnome district would have really hit the spot around then.
If this was police work, I preferred the barge. It might be harder work, but at least you didn't have to walk everywhere. We did get to Flessa Street, and after asking around, we found their son. Jasper broke the news to him, and it took him a few minutes to pull himself together after that. When he did, he readily agreed to let us look at their house.
They had been relatively well-to-do, and had a house too large for just two people with a garden out back. We started in the basement, since the son said that his parents had been rockhounds. "Mostly my dad," he said. "Mom went along with him, but because she liked exploring. They had a servant who went with them on those tours a couple of time, but he left, I'm not sure why."
"Does he live nearby?"
"He's a Jureyin," he said as if that explained it, and it actually did. The Jureyins were another large and clannish family, mostly in the import business, and they tended to cluster around Nikodemo Street, not far from here. "Garton Jureyin."
We nodded and went to look at the basement. We found racks upon racks of different kinds of rocks, some valuable, some less so. There was a whole rack of olivine-bearing rocks next to a workbench that held some tools and a flask of red liquid. Behind the rack, hidden, was a place in the wall that held another piece of pure olivine. It tried to join Electra's sample, and she prevented it by grabbing the small piece, wrapping it in a cloth, and sticking it in her other pocket.
After a bit of trial and error, we found that by dropping a bit of the red stuff on one of the adulterated samples of olivine, it would eat away everything that wasn't olivine, and leave only the olivine behind. The resulting sliver of rock immediately tried to join the larger sample.
We looked around a bit more. Everything was normal until we took a look in the bedroom. And almost everything was normal there...until we saw the four locks on the closet door.
Okay, then. We found out that the walls had steel panels in them, reinforcing them. We managed to drill through the wall, finding a gap between the steel, and I cast light on a rock and tossed it through the hole.
Nothing was moving inside. There was a pallet, some books on a shelf, a table, a pitcher, a bowl of fruit, and a rack that seemed to have some cloth hanging on it. Nothing living inside, as far as we could tell. The son had no idea what this was all about, unsurprisingly.
We found the keys in a bedside table and carefully unlocked the door. The closet was a very large one, and we found inside exactly what we'd seen from outside. The cloth turned out to be filmy garments, very much like the priestesses of Eldath wear in their rites, but these were somehow different. They were very low-cut, in one case almost to the navel. The son told us that his mother had been a follower of Eldath, but not a priestess.
Argos was inspecting the pallet in the corner. He lifted something small up from the pillow. "Grey hair. Long." Morela's, very likely. Well, so much for the question of what this room had been built to contain. But why?
We decided that Garton Jureyin might have some idea, so we thanked the son and wandered off to Nikodemo Street. Garton was relatively easy to track down. He invited us into his back garden, under the shade of an arching tree. The man himself looked almost sixty, and he moved stiffly. "The Littletons?" he said, surprised. "I haven't worked for them in almost three years."
"They're dead, and we're hoping you might be able to shed some light on why," I said. "They were killed while hunting for olivine."
"I went on one of those," he said. "Once was enough. I quit soon after."
"Why?"
"Morela," he said, grimacing. "I'm only forty, believe it or not. I think she's the reason I've been aging so quickly. It's some sort of disease that the clerics can't figure out."
"Why don't you start at the beginning?" I asked.
Garton nodded. "Well, five or six years ago, Morela started sleepwalking. She'd get up and be a totally different person, pretty much. She'd wear clothes that didn't leave much to the imagination--the gods of little apples alone know where she got them--and she, ahem, acted differently. The first time, we found her at a bar nearby, dressed in mostly transparent clothes, draped all over two guys who looked completely stunned. Elves, strangely enough. She'd wake up at three or four in the morning from it, and not remember anything about where she was or what she'd been doing. I was, ah, woken up by her a couple of times."
He'd gone a little ruddy at that admission. "It wasn't often in the beginning, but after a while it was several times a week. Then, about three years ago, people started dying. Male elves, mostly. Linford believed Morela had something to do with it, so he made the closet in their bedroom into a secure place for her. It was the only way to keep her from walking." He sighed. "He had to reinforce the walls with steel after she went through them once, as well."
Well, didn't that throw some new light on the question. "And what was the olivine about?"
"Linford believed that enough of it could make a psychic barrier. He was convinced she was being possessed somehow. He wanted to line the room with olivine, to protect her."
I frowned. "She wasn't a psioniscist?"
He shook his head. "She had a knack for telling truth from lie, but that was about it. The knack didn't always work, but it did often enough that the kids learned to never lie to her. Anyway, she did always claim she was Morela, and if you were male she was very, very friendly. But if you turned her down...look out. She got very angry and very violent, and everyone around her would get these massive headaches."
Elven males dying. Possession of a woman who had a weak psionic talent herself. Olivine, to make a psychic barrier.
Mahala, an elf who was only physically imprisoned.
This was starting to add up to something that I really didn't like one bit. We said goodbye to Garton, and Jasper said he'd look up those murders while we went to talk to the mage university about olivine. The mage university told us, after hemming and hawing some like they're paid to do, that olivine was a psion's bane, blocking their talent. The specific chunk we had had been enchanted to be a key to some sort of lock, and to attract more olivine. The chunk was also keyed to a place called the Cavern of Mateus, which had been sunk a number of years ago by some psions who knew that it was dangerous to them. The mages were very unhelpful about what a lock might look like for this stone, but it was more than we'd known.
We met up with Jasper, who told us that the murders had been of seven male elves, all in the same family--brothers, cousins, and sons. The only surviving member of that family was an elven woman named Alberga.
Alberga, the keeper of the jail in the elven section that Mahala was staying in.
So we knew where the Littletons had been before they died--under the troll district. It was miles to where they had been found. There must have been some transportation magic involved. Probably something to do with the olivine.
Which meant that the lock we were looking for had to be somewhere close to where they had been found. But before we went back, I wanted to follow up on a hunch at a nearby Temple of Eldath. We lucked out; there's only one Temple of Eldath of any size in the human district, and we were near to it.
Argos decided to go talk the police into lending him one of their bloodhounds while Electra and I talked to the priestesses. We found a priestess who was in charge of greeting visitors to the Temple. Well-organized, these Eldath people. They're one of the few Temples who don't always look at River Brothers, current or former, like they're three-day-old fish. Nice folks, though their eternal "we must all achieve inner peace" thing wears on the nerves. Eldath is the goddess of still places, of rest and recovery, a goddess worshiped by gentle souls who like their religion with soft edges, candy-colored. They're nice without slipping too far into self-righteousness. Those of us with rougher edges aren't big on Eldath, but I can see her appeal.
When we asked if they were missing a priestess, the woman we were talking to got a very worried look in her doelike eyes. "Niobe hasn't checked in yet today. We were about to send someone over to her house."
"Does she wear a wedding ring, and a couple of rings on her other hand?" The priestess nodded. "I hate to ask this, but can you see if this is part of her body?" I asked, holding out the vial of chalk we'd taken from the silhouette.
"I'll need a few minutes. Come inside, sit down, someone will bring you something to drink. It's too hot to be standing around outside today." We did so, and I watched young women dressed in quite abbreviated versions of Eldath regalia flitting around the Temple, as well as some older ones who were honestly more to my taste. The weather having gotten so hot all of a sudden did have a few nice side effects. Eye candy was one of them.
A few minutes went by, and the priestess we'd been talking to came back. "Niobe's alive," she said. "This isn't her. It is, though, the aftereffect of a troll stonewalk spell. Goddess be good, what is that thing?"
I'd almost forgotten all about Poi, who had been sleeping away the morning in his pouch, curled around the diamond pendant. He was stirring now, poking his head out of the pouch. I scratched him a bit behind the ears. "This is Poi," I told her. "A friend of mine."
The priestess looked a little ill, then swallowed and soldiered on. "Anyway, Niobe's not really your usual run of priest. She's...angry, I guess. She was trying to join the druids, but they turned her away. The druids strip everything from you, make you leave your old self behind, and I think she wanted to hold on to her anger. She tries to hide it, tries to meditate it away, but it's still there, and she still wants revenge."
"What for?"
"Somebody killed all of the male members of her family about three years ago. She has some issues around her family anyway. Her mother, she says, was only twenty and unmarried when she had her, and won't acknowledge her. She was raised as her sister in the same household."
"Only twenty?"
"Niobe's elven." Well, that explained it; elves don't generally have children until they're over a century old. "I put two and two together about those murders--I think Alberga, the warden at the elven jail, is her mother. Or sister, I guess. Anyway, Niobe's mad at her mother for not doing anything, as well as the person who killed her family. She wanders the tunnels under the city a lot." The priestess was still looking very worried. "If you find her, please tell her we're worried about her, and we want her to come home."
"I will, I promise."
"Thank you. River Brother." Her smile was genuine, and I returned it. I suppose being a River Brother leaves a mark on you, even after you've grown your hair back.
We joined up with Argos and the bloodhound, a doleful-looking creature if I ever saw one. Poi sniffed at it, interested, and then lost interest and curled up and went to sleep again. "The bodies arrived in here," he said to us. "So that means--"
"The lock has to be in the room," I finished. "But where?"
We found it, finally, on the underside of one of the boulders that had been pulled down on the bodies. Electra had been experimenting with the olivine, and found out that she could convince it to go to a putty-like consistency and pull off little bits of it. She gave us all a couple of these. Then she put one piece into the lock.
The olivine flashed green, then flew out of the lock and into the center of the wall that the silhouette was on, embedding itself into the same hole we'd found a piece of olivine in before. The silhouette faded out as the wall began to look like heat-wavy air.
I decided to give it a shot, and stepped into the wall. It was a very strange feeling as I was pulled through stone that felt like soup. About a minute later, I was dropped out into a narrow corridor. I stepped to the side, and Electra came out behind me, then pulled her to side while she was getting her bearings and let Argos through.
Invisibility potions? I mimed. They nodded, and we all took them, then went exploring.
To the left, we heard the sound of picks. I noticed that the walls were streaked with dark green. Looked like we'd found our place. The left corridor opened out into cavern a couple of hundred feet across in every direction. The picks we'd heard were being wielded by dwarves who didn't look like they were having any fun at all, which was pretty strange since dwarves generally consider getting rocks out of the ground an activity ranked right up there with sex and food fights on the fun scale.
They were surrounded by boulders that didn't quite match the stone around them. Trolls, probably, very likely taking a nap. Odd. We walked down the corridor the other way to see if any explanation was forthcoming.
The corridor widened out into a proper tunnel, which split into a Y. One branch appeared to have been tried and abandoned due to water problems; I could see a pool of water at the base of the wall. The other way broke out into a tumbledown section of sunken troll district, which ad evidently been sunk along with the cavern.
At the fork of the Y was a stone door. Opening it very carefully, we saw a pair of dwarves, male and female, asleep on a bed. The female looked like she'd read herself to sleep. The room was quite luxurious, covered in stiflingly rich hangings, with a curtain covering the back wall. We slipped in and discovered that the curtain covered several shelves of bottles that were the same red color as the bottle we'd found in the basement of the Littletons' house.
With some simple hand signals, we reached a consensus that we needed the dwarves to talk. I went after the female, and Electra and Argos went after the male. Sleeping, they were extremely easy to take. We tied them up and then mostly stripped them, taking a bunch of jewels off of the woman and a bunch of knives off the man.
When we talked to them, the woman said her name was Vivica, and the man's name was Macy. It had to be a strange experience--we were still invisible, thanks to the angel blood, so we were disembodied voices coming from the air.
They claimed that they were here destroying the olivine, working so they wouldn't be killed by Dada. The dwarves were captured prisoners who had gotten too close. They admitted to killing the two dwarves and two humans, saying they'd gotten in somehow.
I stood back and watched them for a moment. "The male keeps on trying to reach for his thigh," Electra said warningly. She laid a knife on his hand, and he stopped.
"Hold his hand," I told her, and then went poking around on his thigh. There was something hard under a well-healed scar on his thigh. Carefully, I slit open the scar, finding what had been placed inside--a long shard of diamond.
Checking the female, who I was doubting more and more was named Vivica, I found two shards, one in each thigh. "You might want to stop lying to me," I told the woman. "You're not a very good liar, you know."
She clammed up at that point, like I thought she would. We secured them better than they had been and went out to take care of a little troll problem.
We armed ourselves with the potions that destroyed rock. Trolls are usually made of rock. A vial thrown at them had a rather predictable result. The dwarves who'd been working on the olivine, not quite understanding their fortune but also not questioning it, ran off.
It took a couple of minutes for them to get clear. "Niobe?" I called out once they were gone. "Are you here?"
"Who are you?" came an echoey voice.
"Name's Martin, we're friends. We have the folks running this outfit tied up. We're about to start really questioning them."
"I take it the questions are going to involve pain?"
I shrugged. "They're going to have to."
There are some things one thinking being should never have to do to another. I did a lot of those things over the next hour or so. The thing about being a cleric is that knowing how to take pain away means we also know how to inflict it.
It was necessary, but that didn't mean I didn't feel about three inches tall by the time I was done. I did, however, get some more information out of the dwarves.
The female's name was Yoko, and one of the shards in her was used to contact Dada, and the other Sigwald. Dada had a stable of pet psioniscists prepared to take over most of the leaders of the elven district, and the olivine needed to be destroyed so nobody would be able to use it against them. Mahala still needed to teach them the trick of it, which she'd been perfecting over the last several years on a woman named Morela. They knew that it was Morela they'd killed earlier that day.
Half of the gems on her were simply walking-around money. The other ten were keys to gates all over the city, to various places like Emrou street, the druid quarter, the ruined fortress under Southgate Manor, and the inside of Mahala's cell.
Right. We picked them up and used the stone she'd told us about to get ourselves to the druid district. I'd cleaned up the dwarves a bit, healed them up a little, and when we got there we dumped them unceremoniously on the ground. The druid we usually spoke to showed up posthaste.
We told him what we'd found, and about the fact that Electra had experimented with the olivine in the cavern and found that if she held the large chunk to the wall, it would suck up the olivine in the wall, making the stone larger and larger. The druid nodded and vanished to go consult. He came back, and his mouth was set in a straight line.
"Do you need these two?" the druid asked. We said no, and he waved. Yoko and Saul faded out into nothingness. "If we can have some of that olivine, we will go harvest the rest from the cavern," the druid said. "We are in negotiations with the elves to turn Mahala over to us, since she's a clear danger to the city."
Amazingly enough, about fifteen minutes later, two extremely cranky-looking elves showed up, dragging an unconscious Mahala between them. Without comment, they dropped her on the grass, turned, and left. "Who pissed in their oatmeal?" Electra muttered.
"You'd think they'd be grateful to us for saving their asses," I said. "But they're elves. Two thousand words for qualities of light and not one for I'm sorry."
Electra hmphed beside me. I just wondered exactly how much trouble we'd just landed ourselves in. The druid leaned over Mahala, laying a hand on her head and speaking what, at a guess, were about three spells. On the last word, she woke, and sat up, blinking. "She has no powers now," the druid said to us. "She will answer everything you ask of her truthfully, and in a quarter of an hour she will fade out and be no more. Ask your questions."
We got names and locations of her contacts, the interesting one of which was Page, the son of the elven queen, who kept them apprised of the queen's movements. When asked why she'd killed all those elves as Morela, she said that her son had been caught in a raid that Alberga had led, and her people had actually killed him. "Besides, I needed the practice, and it was funny that all of these elves had been killed by one grey-haired human woman."
Joab, according to her, would always visit the place where his wife had died on the first of every month, the house he kept in the human district.
The purpose of the nonexistent house in the demon district, she said, was partially a trap--going through it without a gem would land you in a very nasty deep plane. It was partially a door to Dada's cavern. And it was partially a prison for angels, a place that existed partially on this plane and partially on another. The angels were being kept as backup plans in case the elves or the druids didn't give in to Dada's commands. One killed high above the city would destroy either district.
Nasty, that. We kept Mahala talking, but she didn't say much of anything we didn't already know. after a quarter of a hour, a very strange expression crossed her face, part startled puzzlement, part fear, part pain. Her eyes sought ours, and I flinched at the knowledge in them. Then she, too, faded.
One more down, more names of people to round up, and one very dangerous serial killer still on the loose.
I had a bad feeling I knew where we were going next.
The thing about having been somewhere nice and cold is that you actually notice the heat when you get back. As we stepped out of the tree into the druid section, the damp heat wrapped around us like a particularly unpleasant blanket.
"I have an idea," Argos said. "I'm going to go home and work on it."
"I want to see if I can find that daughter of Joab's in the archives, and talk to the elves about Mahala," I told him. "We can meet up in a couple of hours. Electra, what are you up to?"
"I'll come with you," she said, giving Argos a dubious look. She and I headed to the elven district, and talked to Alberga, the jail warden. We explained what we'd learned from Sigwald, that Mahala was still working with Dada even though she was imprisoned. Alberga got a worried look on her face, told us that she'd take care of it, and then headed into the prison.
"She's probably going to go knock her out," I said to Electra as we left the jail.
"Is that even going to work?"
"Probably. Usually does, at least as far as I've heard."
Electra and I headed towards the human district's archives, which were open to the public and free to access. (Of course, if you wanted an archivist's help, you'd need to pay a coin or two, but the human archivists are good at what they do and nobody minds paying too much.) I found an archivist and told her that I was looking for a family line, starting with a woman named Sondra Icelorn who had married around four centuries ago.
"Oh, this is going to be fun," the archivist said, smiling. "Icelorn, that's a village up north. Do you know if she was a recent immigrant when she married?"
"I don't know, I think she may have been born here."
"That helps," she said. "I can check in the birth index first, that'll tell me when she married. Give me a few minutes."
She disappeared into the back rooms that hold a labyrinth of ledgers. The archivists ruthlessly corral all of the information that they get. Everything is indexed to within an inch of its life, tabulated, cross-referenced, and ruthlessly kept neat and tidy. The archivists have help from magical constructs that fetch and carry for them, things with altogether too many limbs and not quite enough eyes. They call them spiders, because that's the only earthly creature they bear any resemblance to.
The archivist came back with a ledger, and thumped it down on the table. "Sondra Icelorn, born on Themi Street, mother Concha Icelorn, registered father Joab Icelorn. Sound like your girl?" I nodded. "She married a bit under four hundred years ago, to someone named Gaspar Uronis."
"Can we trace the line from there?"
"If all the children were registered, sure." She turned and spoke to a couple of spiders who had folded themselves up into fuzzy black balls on the floor next to her. They unfolded, stretching out long chitinous limbs, and scurried into the back rooms.
It took a while, but we found the connection I'd been thinking we would find. One of Joab's descendants had married Marco Highgarden about two centuries ago. Marco was recorded as head of the Highgarden family at the time. "That's the connection to me, then. Strange."
Electra was giving me a strange look. I shrugged and closed the ledger I'd been looking at, and paid the archivist for her time.
The Highgardens are the oldest and most prominent family in the human district. Not too many of the people I knew now knew that I'd been born one of them. Few people in the social circles I traveled in these days would have any reason to remember Tomas Highgarden, black sheep scion of the Highgarden clan. Emily was far too young to remember it, and besides, the scandal had been quickly and quietly covered over. As far as I knew, most people I'd known probably figured I was dead, had drunk myself to death sometime in the years after Inge had died.
"That's strange, still, that I look so much like Joab. I'm related to most of the humans in the city living right now more closely than to him," I said. There was something else going on here, and I didn't like it even one bit. Any time you get stuff like this happening, it's usually either someone monkeying around with things only the gods ought to fool with, or a god trying to set something right and generally missing the mark entirely.
Either way, it was monkey business that I wasn't really willing to deal with. I pondered the possibility of heading out on a river drive tomorrow morning, I thought I should be able to find something. River drives are hard and dangerous, but I'm guessing that none of Dada's people would be willing to follow me up the river.
I glanced at Electra beside me, and sighed. Damnit. Too responsible for my own good sometimes.
We met back up with Argos, shared what we'd learned, and picked up some pickaxes and started towards the entrance of Sigwald's lair. I probably ought to have known that our day was going to be more complicated than that, though.
There was a commotion down one of the streets we were passing. Of course we stopped to look, who doesn't? "Those are the cops. Looks like they're looking...at a hole in the ground?" Electra said, shading her eyes.
We wandered towards the commotion, and I spotted Jasper among the group of cops who were looking down at the hole. I waved, and he came over to talk to us. "We're bringing the bodies out now," he said. "Nasty business. Cave-in, it looks like, but there's...something weird about it."
"Weird how?" I asked.
He opened his mouth, closed it, and made a wry face. "Just...weird. You'd have to see it. After we've got the bodies out, you can go down if you want."
Now I was curious. We turned to watch the bodies being dragged out of the hole in the street. It looked like an access hole for either a sewer or a tunnel under the street. The bodies were two humans and two dwarves. All of them looked like something heavy had fallen on them, but something wasn't quite right, and I couldn't quite tell what right away. The humans were a male and a female, both about twenty years older than me, wearing these silly helmets of the kind they sell as souvenirs in the dwarf district.
The other two were dwarves. One was an older male, the other younger and after a bit of investigation we determined that she was female. "They were evidently on an underground tour with the dwarves, you know those things they like to run. Weird that they're here instead of under the dwarven district. Come on, I'll show you what's below."
We went down a ladder that had been put down the hole. There were magelights hung around the room, and we could see boulders in the center of the room with blood under them.
Not enough blood, though. Really not enough blood at all. There were four big boulders there, and not a whole lot else. "This isn't the weird thing. Come over here," Jasper said.
there were two corridors leading away, and Jasper led us a short way down one of them. On the wall where the corridor turned, there was a place that looked burned somehow. In white, where the scorch marks were not, was the image of a woman. It was solid white, and it certainly felt like gypsum chalk.
The silhouette had outstretched arms, and we could see little details like a wedding ring on the left hand and two rings on the right, an outline of waist-length hair which was waist-length, as well as clothing. There was a skirt, about knee-length, and a loose-fitting shirt.
It could be just about anyone. It looked a little like the everyday regalia of the priestesses of Eldath, but it was hard to tell. We took samples of the chalk for later. Jasper was right. This was weird.
"There's residual magic here," Electra said.
"We should look at those bodies," I said. "I don't know what's going on here, but maybe the bodies will give us more of a clue."
We climbed up the ladder again and began to go over the bodies. What was pretty obvious was that they'd been crushed after they'd died. What had actually killed them, in the case of the humans, was a blow to the back of the head with something pointed, like maybe a pick. The fatal wound on the male dwarf had been a blow to the front of the head, almost obscured by the crushing wounds he'd been given after death. From the calluses on his hand, he usually walked with a cane, but the cane was missing.
The female dwarf, on the other hand, had been wearing armor, and it looked like she'd fought back. She had leather armor on, an empty shortsword scabbard on her belt, and a knife wound through the armor into her chest.
As I was feeling around the wound, I found a hard lump beneath her armor, between her breasts. After getting the armor loose, I pulled out a chunk of rock, a fist-sized, lumpy crystal. It was a dull green color, and it was semi-translucent.
Some of the dwarves who lived in the area had wandered over, and the two dwarves had been identified as Suffield and Mansi, grandfather and granddaughter, who ran a tour business. One of the dwarves identified the crystal I'd found--it was olivine, a kind of crystal that holds a magical charge very well. Electra had taken the crystal from me, and was studying it. "It's got magic on it, something like a treewalk but not quite," she told me and Argos.
"Let's go look in the hole again," Argos said. "Maybe we missed something."
We did find a couple of interesting things. We did a little digging in the chalk, and found that there was another olivine crystal in a hole where the silhouette's bellybutton would have been. The small crystal was attracted to the larger one, and when Electra touched them together, the smaller one was absorbed into the larger.
All right, that was a little strange. What was also strange was the blood trail that we finally found. It was very faint, and the blood drops were quite far apart. It led down the tunnel that led away from the chamber where the people had been found in the opposite direction from the silhouette on the wall.
We followed it, and the trail ended at a metal ladder that led to another manhole. The smell told us where we were before we even saw it--the meat market at the edge of the human district. When we asked around, the vendors nearby said they'd seen nothing. The only one who had seen something was a young butcher's assistant, who said he hadn't seen anyone carrying bodies, but he had had a customer come through who'd bought some blood. "We usually don't get people buying blood unless they're making blood sausage, or there's a baby vampire who needs it. He didn't look like the type."
"What did he look like?" Argos asked.
"That was the weird part. He was a dwarf...I think. He kept changing size. He had blue eyes, though." Passing strange; dwarves almost always have black or brown eyes. "Anyway, he bought some blood, and left down that hole you just came out of."
We all looked at each other, thanked the butcher's assistant, and left. The blood on the rocks was animal blood, and someone had gone to some trouble to hide the fact that this was murder. They hadn't done a very good job, and I'd bet whoever it was had been in a big hurry.
Our next lead was the dwarves' office, which were in the dwarven sector. The bodies had been carted off into cold storage while the investigation continued. "We have a lead on identifying the humans," Jasper told me. "I can come with you to check out the office and confirm."
So we all hoofed it over to the dwarven sector, to a sturdy stone house with an elaborate compass carved over the door. Jasper got us in, and we looked around a bit, finding the ledgers that kept track of their appointments.
"This is weird," Electra said. "Morela and Linford Littleton had an appointment for a tour at seven in the morning, and it got pushed back to four. Says they were going looking for olivine in the cavern of Mateus."
"Ever heard of it?" I asked. Nobody had. There was a map out on the table, with a section of the troll quarter outlined. But if they'd gone there...how had they managed to be found in the human district?
We went back in the ledgers a bit, and discovered that the unfortunate Littletons had gone on a similar trek every three months for the last three years. Only once was a success noted, and they said they'd found a piece of olivine embedded in a wall in the elven district.
"They lived on Flessa Street, according to this," Electra said.
Jasper made a bit of a face. "That's where all the Littletons live. Clannish folk. All right, let's go see if we can find next of kin."
Back to the human district. I was almost getting used to all the walking, but I did sort of hope we'd stop for the midday meal soon. The cobbles were hot enough to fry eggs on, and something to drink and one of those cold meat rolls they sell near the docks in the gnome district would have really hit the spot around then.
If this was police work, I preferred the barge. It might be harder work, but at least you didn't have to walk everywhere. We did get to Flessa Street, and after asking around, we found their son. Jasper broke the news to him, and it took him a few minutes to pull himself together after that. When he did, he readily agreed to let us look at their house.
They had been relatively well-to-do, and had a house too large for just two people with a garden out back. We started in the basement, since the son said that his parents had been rockhounds. "Mostly my dad," he said. "Mom went along with him, but because she liked exploring. They had a servant who went with them on those tours a couple of time, but he left, I'm not sure why."
"Does he live nearby?"
"He's a Jureyin," he said as if that explained it, and it actually did. The Jureyins were another large and clannish family, mostly in the import business, and they tended to cluster around Nikodemo Street, not far from here. "Garton Jureyin."
We nodded and went to look at the basement. We found racks upon racks of different kinds of rocks, some valuable, some less so. There was a whole rack of olivine-bearing rocks next to a workbench that held some tools and a flask of red liquid. Behind the rack, hidden, was a place in the wall that held another piece of pure olivine. It tried to join Electra's sample, and she prevented it by grabbing the small piece, wrapping it in a cloth, and sticking it in her other pocket.
After a bit of trial and error, we found that by dropping a bit of the red stuff on one of the adulterated samples of olivine, it would eat away everything that wasn't olivine, and leave only the olivine behind. The resulting sliver of rock immediately tried to join the larger sample.
We looked around a bit more. Everything was normal until we took a look in the bedroom. And almost everything was normal there...until we saw the four locks on the closet door.
Okay, then. We found out that the walls had steel panels in them, reinforcing them. We managed to drill through the wall, finding a gap between the steel, and I cast light on a rock and tossed it through the hole.
Nothing was moving inside. There was a pallet, some books on a shelf, a table, a pitcher, a bowl of fruit, and a rack that seemed to have some cloth hanging on it. Nothing living inside, as far as we could tell. The son had no idea what this was all about, unsurprisingly.
We found the keys in a bedside table and carefully unlocked the door. The closet was a very large one, and we found inside exactly what we'd seen from outside. The cloth turned out to be filmy garments, very much like the priestesses of Eldath wear in their rites, but these were somehow different. They were very low-cut, in one case almost to the navel. The son told us that his mother had been a follower of Eldath, but not a priestess.
Argos was inspecting the pallet in the corner. He lifted something small up from the pillow. "Grey hair. Long." Morela's, very likely. Well, so much for the question of what this room had been built to contain. But why?
We decided that Garton Jureyin might have some idea, so we thanked the son and wandered off to Nikodemo Street. Garton was relatively easy to track down. He invited us into his back garden, under the shade of an arching tree. The man himself looked almost sixty, and he moved stiffly. "The Littletons?" he said, surprised. "I haven't worked for them in almost three years."
"They're dead, and we're hoping you might be able to shed some light on why," I said. "They were killed while hunting for olivine."
"I went on one of those," he said. "Once was enough. I quit soon after."
"Why?"
"Morela," he said, grimacing. "I'm only forty, believe it or not. I think she's the reason I've been aging so quickly. It's some sort of disease that the clerics can't figure out."
"Why don't you start at the beginning?" I asked.
Garton nodded. "Well, five or six years ago, Morela started sleepwalking. She'd get up and be a totally different person, pretty much. She'd wear clothes that didn't leave much to the imagination--the gods of little apples alone know where she got them--and she, ahem, acted differently. The first time, we found her at a bar nearby, dressed in mostly transparent clothes, draped all over two guys who looked completely stunned. Elves, strangely enough. She'd wake up at three or four in the morning from it, and not remember anything about where she was or what she'd been doing. I was, ah, woken up by her a couple of times."
He'd gone a little ruddy at that admission. "It wasn't often in the beginning, but after a while it was several times a week. Then, about three years ago, people started dying. Male elves, mostly. Linford believed Morela had something to do with it, so he made the closet in their bedroom into a secure place for her. It was the only way to keep her from walking." He sighed. "He had to reinforce the walls with steel after she went through them once, as well."
Well, didn't that throw some new light on the question. "And what was the olivine about?"
"Linford believed that enough of it could make a psychic barrier. He was convinced she was being possessed somehow. He wanted to line the room with olivine, to protect her."
I frowned. "She wasn't a psioniscist?"
He shook his head. "She had a knack for telling truth from lie, but that was about it. The knack didn't always work, but it did often enough that the kids learned to never lie to her. Anyway, she did always claim she was Morela, and if you were male she was very, very friendly. But if you turned her down...look out. She got very angry and very violent, and everyone around her would get these massive headaches."
Elven males dying. Possession of a woman who had a weak psionic talent herself. Olivine, to make a psychic barrier.
Mahala, an elf who was only physically imprisoned.
This was starting to add up to something that I really didn't like one bit. We said goodbye to Garton, and Jasper said he'd look up those murders while we went to talk to the mage university about olivine. The mage university told us, after hemming and hawing some like they're paid to do, that olivine was a psion's bane, blocking their talent. The specific chunk we had had been enchanted to be a key to some sort of lock, and to attract more olivine. The chunk was also keyed to a place called the Cavern of Mateus, which had been sunk a number of years ago by some psions who knew that it was dangerous to them. The mages were very unhelpful about what a lock might look like for this stone, but it was more than we'd known.
We met up with Jasper, who told us that the murders had been of seven male elves, all in the same family--brothers, cousins, and sons. The only surviving member of that family was an elven woman named Alberga.
Alberga, the keeper of the jail in the elven section that Mahala was staying in.
So we knew where the Littletons had been before they died--under the troll district. It was miles to where they had been found. There must have been some transportation magic involved. Probably something to do with the olivine.
Which meant that the lock we were looking for had to be somewhere close to where they had been found. But before we went back, I wanted to follow up on a hunch at a nearby Temple of Eldath. We lucked out; there's only one Temple of Eldath of any size in the human district, and we were near to it.
Argos decided to go talk the police into lending him one of their bloodhounds while Electra and I talked to the priestesses. We found a priestess who was in charge of greeting visitors to the Temple. Well-organized, these Eldath people. They're one of the few Temples who don't always look at River Brothers, current or former, like they're three-day-old fish. Nice folks, though their eternal "we must all achieve inner peace" thing wears on the nerves. Eldath is the goddess of still places, of rest and recovery, a goddess worshiped by gentle souls who like their religion with soft edges, candy-colored. They're nice without slipping too far into self-righteousness. Those of us with rougher edges aren't big on Eldath, but I can see her appeal.
When we asked if they were missing a priestess, the woman we were talking to got a very worried look in her doelike eyes. "Niobe hasn't checked in yet today. We were about to send someone over to her house."
"Does she wear a wedding ring, and a couple of rings on her other hand?" The priestess nodded. "I hate to ask this, but can you see if this is part of her body?" I asked, holding out the vial of chalk we'd taken from the silhouette.
"I'll need a few minutes. Come inside, sit down, someone will bring you something to drink. It's too hot to be standing around outside today." We did so, and I watched young women dressed in quite abbreviated versions of Eldath regalia flitting around the Temple, as well as some older ones who were honestly more to my taste. The weather having gotten so hot all of a sudden did have a few nice side effects. Eye candy was one of them.
A few minutes went by, and the priestess we'd been talking to came back. "Niobe's alive," she said. "This isn't her. It is, though, the aftereffect of a troll stonewalk spell. Goddess be good, what is that thing?"
I'd almost forgotten all about Poi, who had been sleeping away the morning in his pouch, curled around the diamond pendant. He was stirring now, poking his head out of the pouch. I scratched him a bit behind the ears. "This is Poi," I told her. "A friend of mine."
The priestess looked a little ill, then swallowed and soldiered on. "Anyway, Niobe's not really your usual run of priest. She's...angry, I guess. She was trying to join the druids, but they turned her away. The druids strip everything from you, make you leave your old self behind, and I think she wanted to hold on to her anger. She tries to hide it, tries to meditate it away, but it's still there, and she still wants revenge."
"What for?"
"Somebody killed all of the male members of her family about three years ago. She has some issues around her family anyway. Her mother, she says, was only twenty and unmarried when she had her, and won't acknowledge her. She was raised as her sister in the same household."
"Only twenty?"
"Niobe's elven." Well, that explained it; elves don't generally have children until they're over a century old. "I put two and two together about those murders--I think Alberga, the warden at the elven jail, is her mother. Or sister, I guess. Anyway, Niobe's mad at her mother for not doing anything, as well as the person who killed her family. She wanders the tunnels under the city a lot." The priestess was still looking very worried. "If you find her, please tell her we're worried about her, and we want her to come home."
"I will, I promise."
"Thank you. River Brother." Her smile was genuine, and I returned it. I suppose being a River Brother leaves a mark on you, even after you've grown your hair back.
We joined up with Argos and the bloodhound, a doleful-looking creature if I ever saw one. Poi sniffed at it, interested, and then lost interest and curled up and went to sleep again. "The bodies arrived in here," he said to us. "So that means--"
"The lock has to be in the room," I finished. "But where?"
We found it, finally, on the underside of one of the boulders that had been pulled down on the bodies. Electra had been experimenting with the olivine, and found out that she could convince it to go to a putty-like consistency and pull off little bits of it. She gave us all a couple of these. Then she put one piece into the lock.
The olivine flashed green, then flew out of the lock and into the center of the wall that the silhouette was on, embedding itself into the same hole we'd found a piece of olivine in before. The silhouette faded out as the wall began to look like heat-wavy air.
I decided to give it a shot, and stepped into the wall. It was a very strange feeling as I was pulled through stone that felt like soup. About a minute later, I was dropped out into a narrow corridor. I stepped to the side, and Electra came out behind me, then pulled her to side while she was getting her bearings and let Argos through.
Invisibility potions? I mimed. They nodded, and we all took them, then went exploring.
To the left, we heard the sound of picks. I noticed that the walls were streaked with dark green. Looked like we'd found our place. The left corridor opened out into cavern a couple of hundred feet across in every direction. The picks we'd heard were being wielded by dwarves who didn't look like they were having any fun at all, which was pretty strange since dwarves generally consider getting rocks out of the ground an activity ranked right up there with sex and food fights on the fun scale.
They were surrounded by boulders that didn't quite match the stone around them. Trolls, probably, very likely taking a nap. Odd. We walked down the corridor the other way to see if any explanation was forthcoming.
The corridor widened out into a proper tunnel, which split into a Y. One branch appeared to have been tried and abandoned due to water problems; I could see a pool of water at the base of the wall. The other way broke out into a tumbledown section of sunken troll district, which ad evidently been sunk along with the cavern.
At the fork of the Y was a stone door. Opening it very carefully, we saw a pair of dwarves, male and female, asleep on a bed. The female looked like she'd read herself to sleep. The room was quite luxurious, covered in stiflingly rich hangings, with a curtain covering the back wall. We slipped in and discovered that the curtain covered several shelves of bottles that were the same red color as the bottle we'd found in the basement of the Littletons' house.
With some simple hand signals, we reached a consensus that we needed the dwarves to talk. I went after the female, and Electra and Argos went after the male. Sleeping, they were extremely easy to take. We tied them up and then mostly stripped them, taking a bunch of jewels off of the woman and a bunch of knives off the man.
When we talked to them, the woman said her name was Vivica, and the man's name was Macy. It had to be a strange experience--we were still invisible, thanks to the angel blood, so we were disembodied voices coming from the air.
They claimed that they were here destroying the olivine, working so they wouldn't be killed by Dada. The dwarves were captured prisoners who had gotten too close. They admitted to killing the two dwarves and two humans, saying they'd gotten in somehow.
I stood back and watched them for a moment. "The male keeps on trying to reach for his thigh," Electra said warningly. She laid a knife on his hand, and he stopped.
"Hold his hand," I told her, and then went poking around on his thigh. There was something hard under a well-healed scar on his thigh. Carefully, I slit open the scar, finding what had been placed inside--a long shard of diamond.
Checking the female, who I was doubting more and more was named Vivica, I found two shards, one in each thigh. "You might want to stop lying to me," I told the woman. "You're not a very good liar, you know."
She clammed up at that point, like I thought she would. We secured them better than they had been and went out to take care of a little troll problem.
We armed ourselves with the potions that destroyed rock. Trolls are usually made of rock. A vial thrown at them had a rather predictable result. The dwarves who'd been working on the olivine, not quite understanding their fortune but also not questioning it, ran off.
It took a couple of minutes for them to get clear. "Niobe?" I called out once they were gone. "Are you here?"
"Who are you?" came an echoey voice.
"Name's Martin, we're friends. We have the folks running this outfit tied up. We're about to start really questioning them."
"I take it the questions are going to involve pain?"
I shrugged. "They're going to have to."
There are some things one thinking being should never have to do to another. I did a lot of those things over the next hour or so. The thing about being a cleric is that knowing how to take pain away means we also know how to inflict it.
It was necessary, but that didn't mean I didn't feel about three inches tall by the time I was done. I did, however, get some more information out of the dwarves.
The female's name was Yoko, and one of the shards in her was used to contact Dada, and the other Sigwald. Dada had a stable of pet psioniscists prepared to take over most of the leaders of the elven district, and the olivine needed to be destroyed so nobody would be able to use it against them. Mahala still needed to teach them the trick of it, which she'd been perfecting over the last several years on a woman named Morela. They knew that it was Morela they'd killed earlier that day.
Half of the gems on her were simply walking-around money. The other ten were keys to gates all over the city, to various places like Emrou street, the druid quarter, the ruined fortress under Southgate Manor, and the inside of Mahala's cell.
Right. We picked them up and used the stone she'd told us about to get ourselves to the druid district. I'd cleaned up the dwarves a bit, healed them up a little, and when we got there we dumped them unceremoniously on the ground. The druid we usually spoke to showed up posthaste.
We told him what we'd found, and about the fact that Electra had experimented with the olivine in the cavern and found that if she held the large chunk to the wall, it would suck up the olivine in the wall, making the stone larger and larger. The druid nodded and vanished to go consult. He came back, and his mouth was set in a straight line.
"Do you need these two?" the druid asked. We said no, and he waved. Yoko and Saul faded out into nothingness. "If we can have some of that olivine, we will go harvest the rest from the cavern," the druid said. "We are in negotiations with the elves to turn Mahala over to us, since she's a clear danger to the city."
Amazingly enough, about fifteen minutes later, two extremely cranky-looking elves showed up, dragging an unconscious Mahala between them. Without comment, they dropped her on the grass, turned, and left. "Who pissed in their oatmeal?" Electra muttered.
"You'd think they'd be grateful to us for saving their asses," I said. "But they're elves. Two thousand words for qualities of light and not one for I'm sorry."
Electra hmphed beside me. I just wondered exactly how much trouble we'd just landed ourselves in. The druid leaned over Mahala, laying a hand on her head and speaking what, at a guess, were about three spells. On the last word, she woke, and sat up, blinking. "She has no powers now," the druid said to us. "She will answer everything you ask of her truthfully, and in a quarter of an hour she will fade out and be no more. Ask your questions."
We got names and locations of her contacts, the interesting one of which was Page, the son of the elven queen, who kept them apprised of the queen's movements. When asked why she'd killed all those elves as Morela, she said that her son had been caught in a raid that Alberga had led, and her people had actually killed him. "Besides, I needed the practice, and it was funny that all of these elves had been killed by one grey-haired human woman."
Joab, according to her, would always visit the place where his wife had died on the first of every month, the house he kept in the human district.
The purpose of the nonexistent house in the demon district, she said, was partially a trap--going through it without a gem would land you in a very nasty deep plane. It was partially a door to Dada's cavern. And it was partially a prison for angels, a place that existed partially on this plane and partially on another. The angels were being kept as backup plans in case the elves or the druids didn't give in to Dada's commands. One killed high above the city would destroy either district.
Nasty, that. We kept Mahala talking, but she didn't say much of anything we didn't already know. after a quarter of a hour, a very strange expression crossed her face, part startled puzzlement, part fear, part pain. Her eyes sought ours, and I flinched at the knowledge in them. Then she, too, faded.
One more down, more names of people to round up, and one very dangerous serial killer still on the loose.
I had a bad feeling I knew where we were going next.