Labyrinth, page 3
So, Dan kept his peace. Stewey was a pretty good driver, and the air outside wasn’t going to be hot enough that they’d fry if the AC died, like it occasionally did.
Stop for gas, coffee, and the best pastries in the universe at Cle Elum. Cross the Gorge and take a hard right instead of staying on the interstate. Othello. Washtucna. Colfax before dropping down into Pullman and then crossing over into Idaho.
Wasn’t the fastest way to do it, but one of the prettiest. Almost as nice as walking across the bridge from Clarkston into Lewiston, further south.
They drove in companionable silence past the university itself, site of so many hijinks that probably shouldn’t be discussed until the statute of limitations ran out, to the Battersby’s house on D Street.
The house was old but loved. Two stories and a big yard planted with a variety of herbs and stuff Iliana grew for her potions and such.
Everybody who did magic did it a little differently, depending on their strengths. Stewey was grounded in physicality, so he could make circles and enchant physical items as well as anyone Dan knew. Dan was more sensitive to the flows of power, seeing them as colors almost and able to work with them like flows of tides.
Cole Battersby was more like Stewey, building himself little items that he used to focus power when he needed to do things. Iliana’s potions helped her establish little wards and ripples around her.
It wasn’t like the movies, or bad television, where some punk could just wave his hands and hit somebody with a lightning bolt. A really powerful warlock might knock you on your ass, but Dan wasn’t anywhere near that strong and didn’t know many who were.
Stewey relied on a Colt Python with silver bullets. Hit just as hard as lead and did bad things to people with the right allergies.
They parked the beast on the street and climbed out. Dan had a bag of goodies from Cle Elum for Cole and Iliana, who met them at the front door with smiles.
Cole was English in heritage. Brown hair finally turned gray. Brown eyes. Fair skin.
Iliana, on the other hand, was Russian aristocracy if you went back far enough, the granddaughter of a duke that had managed to get out just before the Revolution and eventually migrated all the way to America. Blond hair that was vaguely fading to gray. Piercing blue eyes. High cheek bones.
Inside, they settled in the living room, surrounded on every bit of wall with books. Dan and Stewey were on chairs, with Cole and Iliana on the couch.
“So what are these things that have brought you two all the way out here?” Cole asked.
Stewey handed the man a leather satchel marked with various protections, and Dan watched him unwrap it, placing the six artifacts on the coffee table. Dan wasn’t surprised that the six went down in the same relative locations that they had had when binding the circle.
“And nobody has any clue who the homeowner really was?” Cole asked.
“A corporation had owned it for the last thirty years,” Dan spoke up. “There were a number of donations to various museums and libraries when he died a year or so ago, but I haven’t had a chance to track any of them down to see if they had enchantments, as opposed to just value.”
“I will presume you’ll find some,” Cole said. “This disk had power, and you say that was the only thing left?”
“We didn’t tear the joint apart,” Stewey said. “The new owners will probably remodel the hell out of the place, so it is possible we’ll get a call if they somehow find a door that leads into a pocket plane where the man might have stored other things, but I didn’t smell anything when we were there.”
“And if he knew he was dying finally, without students of any kind, he probably collapsed that as well,” Cole observed.
“Then why leave the circle?” Dan asked.
They might be Cole and Iliana’s peers, but he and Stewey had only gotten their PhDs as a cover for their magical studies a few years ago, and these two had been studying and practicing for fifty years.
“Maybe he had visitors regularly through it?” Iliana asked in turn. “Do we know if the death was natural? Perhaps an enemy snuck in and killed the man but didn’t want most of the stuff? There could be any number of theories.”
“What can you tell me about these?” Dan pointed at the bronzes.
“I agree with Stewey that they only resemble Spring and Autumn Period coins,” Cole said. “But without doing a lot of work, I can’t tell you where they come from. Most intriguing.”
Iliana picked up the last one now, the one that had anchored the rest. She studied it closely enough that Dan could feel the quiet surge of magic as she did something beyond just opening her senses.
She sat the coin down and rose silently, walking to one of the bookshelves and pulling a tome out to crack open.
“You have something, dear?” Cole asked.
“Perhaps,” she said absently, bringing the book back and resting it on the coffee table, open to a pencil sketch of several arcane symbols Dan didn’t recognize.
She rested the sixth coin on it, and Dan could see the resemblance now.
“Stewey, your theory about it perhaps being Erlitou is probably closer than you realized, but not far enough north,” she smiled at the blushing redneck. She always had that affect on him when he showed off being smarter than he wanted to admit.
“Meaning?” Dan asked, picking the book up carefully and reading the spine.
Except it was in Cyrillic, which was one he didn’t know.
“My grandmother brought exactly one thing with her, besides all her jewelry,” Iliana said. “This book. There might have been a dozen copies of it in existence, back when she was a powerful warlock within Russia, more than a century ago. This might be the only copy remaining. These coins are a Bronze Age culture, yes, but I think they are Siberian, rather than Chinese.”
“Is that good or bad?” Dan asked. “My exposure to folks from the Northeast is all the times they swept over Late Rome and most of Byzantium. And Stewey’s is from a later period and further south, I’m guessing.”
“I’ll need to translate chunks of the book for you, Dan,” she looked at him with serious eyes. “But it’s probably worth me taking the rest of the summer and fully translating the book anyway, after that. It’s not a slice of esoteric studies that many Americans or Chinese are all that familiar with, since those scholars keep largely to the depths of the forests and don’t talk much to outsiders.”
“Who don’t?” Stewey asked.
“Followers of the Baba Yaga,” she said.
“The?” Dan pressed, catching slight Iliana’s emphasis. “She’s not a goddess legend that modern warlocks like us invoke?”
“I haven’t read this book in probably twenty years, Dan,” she blushed. “But I seem to remember that she’s an immortal being, and just flavored so many folk tales when the Europeans crossed the Urals and entered Siberia proper.”
“She might still be around?” Stewey asked, surprised.
Dan could see the man’s hand flex as he wanted to reach inside his jacket and just touch the butt of his pistol right now, but he refrained.
“After dinner, you two will stay here tonight in the spare bedrooms,” Cole announced. “We’ll dig into our library and see what all we can find. When do you need to be back in Seattle?”
“Technically, we should drive back tomorrow after lunch, because I’ve got a meeting with a new customer to investigate her genealogy on Wednesday morning,” Dan said. “Easy money, because she’s a cousin of another customer, and wants to determine what ancestors she should invoke for good luck.”
He caught the benevolent smiles on Cole and Iliana’s faces. Most warlocks hid themselves away in other jobs, like teaching history at a university somewhere while watching for promising students.
In ancient times, others had been scholars of the arcane for hire, or simple adventurers. Dan and Stewey were still scholars, but most of their clientele was Chinese, either newly-immigrated, or perhaps ABC, American-born Chinese, who tried to keep to the old ways.
Dan was the front, but he didn’t mind. The half-Chinese kid from the trailer park had always been something of an outsider but had been smart enough and lucky enough to avoid being beaten up. Or maybe his gifts had given him enough of an edge, even before he learned how to use them effectively.
Stewey was the specialist, behind the scenes. Dan read enough Chinese, both classical and modern, to get by, and could speak Cantonese well enough and Mandarin passingly.
Stewey knew every dialect and could read everything anyone could hand him.
And no, Dan had no idea what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he knew that Cole wouldn’t say anything. Just be available to former students working in the other field that had questions and strange needs.
That was part and parcel of the business of being a warlock, after all.
Chapter
Five
Dan smiled. At least his Mandarin was getting better, a result of all the Northerners slipping out of the Peoples’ Republic as the structure got more and more unstable. Most of the Southerners these days had managed to wrangle UK citizenship, or shift across the Commonwealth, with a huge cluster up north in Vancouver.
“Lǐ nǚshì, wǒ huì liánxì,” he greeted her, rising and offering his hand.
Mrs. Li rose as well and shook in the Western style, her other hand clutching a scroll Dan and Stewey manufactured for her to start filling in family details. It had just enough enchantment on it, like a light glaze, to show up if you had the right senses, and to maybe extend its life by a century.
Then Dan bowed to her in the traditional manner of a hired scholar greeting a wealthy patron. That threw her off-base even worse than shaking hands had, because he still probably knew the old Chinese cultural styles better than she did at this point.
Her husband, if he remembered the other chart correctly, had been a manager of a factory in the Nineties, when the Great Opening made its way past Shanghai and into the North. The Communists weren’t supposed to turn themselves into billionaire oligarchs, but enough of them had.
The Party was starting to take exception, and an amazing number of folks had all decided to join their families in America as a result. Seattle had grown tremendously over the last generation, at least in that culture.
And they paid well for a Westerner who could understand their needs as they tried to get back in touch with life before Sun Yat Sen, and the old Chinese Empire he had overthrown more than a century ago.
They talked briefly, before she finally departed, mostly recovered from being flustered, and Dan sat back down and took off his professional scholar face. Grabbed his cooling coffee and decided that he was too tired even to try to focus on warming it back up.
Speaking Mandarin drained him. Caffeine only slightly helped.
Plus, something had touched him while he talked to the woman. Mrs. Li was a past-middle-aged Chinese woman, finally on the back side of that zone from thirty to sixty where they never seemed to age, just before they suddenly showed their years again. And she was utterly mundane.
In fact, he’d had to dive deep with her cousin, just to find any warlocks or beings of power in their combined ancestry.
It was almost like magic itself was slowly drying up in the world. That made no sense, but the rightness of the thought grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shook him inside, so Dan made a note to dig back into all those genealogical records and see if there was any truth to it.
Right now, however, he needed to make sure he was safe. Even in a city the size and complexity of Greater Seattle, there were only perhaps four dozen active warlocks of any power that he was aware of, with the assumption of at least that many again hiding for one reason or another.
Call it one hundred people with the talent and the training to enchant things and detect others. Warlocks of any power. Out of nearly four million people, when you added Pierce and Snohomish Counties to King. Throw in maybe five hundred or a thousand more with some shard of talent that had never been trained or wasn’t all that powerful to begin with.
Something had touched him while he had been talking to Mrs. Li.
Just a brush. More a feather than a poke. Just trailed by and brushed against the shell of defensiveness he kept around him at all times. Wouldn’t stop a bullet, or even a spell more powerful than a first-year student learned, but let him know when someone power nearby.
Stewey might have missed it, unless he had placed four enchanted coins on the table when he first sat down. Then one of them might have glowed, but his friend wouldn’t have been that obvious in public.
Someone had recognized Dan for what they thought he was, and perhaps politely said hello. Or wondered if he would even notice.
Dan sipped some more coffee and looked around, letting his senses expand as far as the walls in this coffee shop. Power was inversely proportional to distance on the square, so three times as far was nine times weaker, but he just wanted to reciprocate.
There. Not even looking at him, but she turned now and smiled in his direction.
What the hell. Dan was single. She was a petite blonde with high cheekbones. Cute.
And she smiled directly at him as he let his senses return to mostly normal.
He got up and grabbed his cup, walking slowly but deliberately in her direction, over into a corner booth she had to herself.
Dan stopped at about two paces away and smiled politely. Extended his senses again but focused them on her.
Got exactly as far as the little barrier she was holding and stopped, like mist on a windshield. Not even the little pop of a raindrop.
So, more powerful than he had expected. Way more powerful than him. Or Cole.
Top rate warlock of some sort. And completely unknown.
The woman cocked her head up at him. Dan felt her probe coming back.
He didn’t try to parry it, unsure if he even could without turning this into full-bore combat, which was just about the dumbest thing you could do in a coffee shop.
It was almost impossible to hurt a mundane with magic. You had to open yourself to the power in the first place to be affected by it. But him stumbling backwards and tripping over a table was a sure way to send someone to the emergency clinic down the street.
And she didn’t probe him hard.
Dan was reminded of the time he had met a date at her apartment and let her dog sniff him imperiously and expertly, before the little furball climbed up on the sofa and flopped into his lap for scritches. Dogs and horses had always been like that with Dan.
Dan indicated the booth silently.
“Join me,” she offered in an accent that Dan couldn’t place.
Dan sat, clear across the booth from her and right at the edge, so he could get up and walk away quickly if he needed to.
She had pretty green eyes. Blonde hair a little past her collar, thick and straight with a slight curl at the end. High cheekbones. Wide eyes.
Not Chinese, but not Russian like Iliana, either. Maybe a mix of the two.
Dan felt his stomach go ice cold.
Midway between Beijing and Moscow was Siberia.
Consciously, he set all his barriers harder now, not that it would do him any good if she was serious, but he had no idea what this woman wanted.
Maybe it was coincidence.
And maybe Stewey would buy a sports car tomorrow and start dressing in white linen suits, swapping his battered cowboy hat for a stylish Panama.
“Dan Holt,” he said, feeling like a kid that had just been dragged kicking and screaming to the dentist. He didn’t bother holding a hand out to shake.
Strangers in the industry didn’t touch, as a rule. Too easy to do someone wrong.
“Khulan Zima,” she replied, again with an accent that told him English was her eighth or maybe tenth language.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Dan nodded.
He would have remembered a woman this beautiful. Or a warlock with that much power at her fingertips. It was almost like being back home when he was a kid, watching the storm’s hammerhead rise and start charging the air.
Right before the mushroom broke over and started to hammer the dust.
Rather than answer, she smiled at him. Dan had no idea how effective she’d been probing his defenses. Or how much she might have learned about him.
“Chance meeting?” Dan asked, hoping against all hope. “New in town and just happened into the shop?”
He’d been speaking English. She replied in a language he didn’t understand. Guttural and clenched-jaw, so he supposed Russian.
Dan shook his head. If he was in a better mood, and not tired from dealing with Mrs. Li for an hour, he could probably cast a little something that would make her words understandable, but he was tired.
And she was a complete stranger whose behavior might be verging on rude.
Khulan smiled and switched to Mandarin instead. Her accent was still weird, but Dan could follow. Glancing around, they were mostly surrounded by Anglo hipsters, so the chances of anyone else in here following her words were pretty low.
“I’m following up on a mystery,” she said.
At least that was what his brain wanted to translate it to. Several of the words and intonations had layers of meaning. Stewey could fence with her all day.
“I occasionally solve mysteries,” Dan offered, still on edge, tired, and starting to get a little grumpy.
Cute or not, he felt like she was being a little brusque. Maybe that was just who she was.
“I sought you out,” she said, face smiling even as those pretty, jade eyes got cold and hard.
He didn’t think she was casting anything, and he couldn’t feel any stir in the currents around him.
Stewey would have put a hand on a pistol right now, but he was like that when people got pushy. Part of the reason Dan did most of the client interactions. Angry customers don’t refer their cousins.
Still, he could play rough, if he wanted to.
That even sounded nice about now, as well.
