Herald of Ruin, page 14
part #2 of The Sanford Files Series
Tillinghast leaned across the counter again, a twinkle in his eye, and beckoned Sanford close. The magus leaned in, though drawing so near to the man felt like putting his face next to a poisonous snake. “You don’t get to know,” the proprietor whispered in his sand-on-scales voice.
Sanford drew back, as if slapped. “Tillinghast. I assure you that I always find out what I want to know.”
“Not all secrets are meant for your apprehension, sir,” Tillinghast replied, standing again at ease. “Some I must keep for my own. I’m sure you understand. Secrets shared are secrets spilled, after all, as we discussed earlier.” He touched the side of his nose and winked. “I hope we’ve come to an understanding. I don’t intend to leave Arkham until my business here is done, and you don’t intend to leave Arkham at all, and so we must learn to coexist. What other choice do we have?”
War, Sanford thought, but he hardly needed to say it. Tillinghast knew. “What other choice, indeed.”
“Before you go, could I interest you in any of my little trinkets? I don’t know if I have anything to attract the eye of a connoisseur of your stature, but–”
“The grail.” Sanford did his best to keep his voice calm. “You are correct. You got the best of me on the deal. But since we are businessmen, let us do business. I want to purchase it from you. Money is no object.”
“I agree,” Tillinghast said. “Money is no object to me at all. But, alas, I’m afraid the grail is not for sale. I am holding it in reserve against certain potential eventualities. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do business. I understand you possess many items, the most valuable of which is doubtless the gem known as the Ruby of R’lyeh? I’d be very interested to purchase that, and for more than it’s worth. Would you consider, perhaps…” He punched a button on his cash register, reached into the drawer, and removed a ten-dollar bill. “This much? I won’t even ask you for change.”
Sanford quivered with rage. “You – you cur. I will be the end of you. All that you have, I will take from you, until you are left only with ashes.”
“Spoken with the weight of prophecy,” Tillinghast said. “Albeit from the wrong mouth.” He put the money back in the drawer and closed it. “I’m sorry we weren’t able to reach an accommodation. Do come back if you change your mind.”
Sanford started to reach out, meaning to seize the man’s throat, but there was something in those half-lidded, lizardlike eyes that gave him pause. He wants me to do it, Sanford thought. He’s goading me.
Carl Sanford could not be goaded. He chose his own path. It was ever thus. “Good day to you, sir. I would advise you to stay clear of my operations in the future.”
“I would advise you to stay clear of mine, too,” Tillinghast said, “but I’m afraid before long they’ll be too vast and all-encompassing for anyone to avoid. But we’ll deal with all that as and when the time comes.”
Sanford turned stiffly and marched toward the rear door, Altman trailing after. He refrained from slamming the door on his way out, but it required great effort.
“Did that go the way you hoped?” Altman said when they were back in the car.
“It was… informative,” Sanford said. “The opportunity to size up an opponent in person is always welcome. He’s very sure of himself, isn’t he? Smug. Arrogant, even.”
“He is that,” Altman agreed.
“He certainly has resources.” Sanford gazed out the car window at the bustling shoppers. “But I suspect they are chiefly financial. He has wealth. But I have wealth, too… and I also have an organization. Perhaps Tillinghast has made inroads with local law enforcement, but we know plenty of people who work the other side of the street. I think it’s time we reach out to some of our less savory contacts.”
“What did you have in mind?” Altman asked.
“The usual sorts of things,” Sanford said. “Theft. Arson.” He smiled faintly. “Assassination. In that order, I think. I want Tillinghast to see that I’ve taken everything he has, and burned everything I didn’t want, before I consign him to the ultimate darkness.”
“You don’t usually jump to murder so soon,” Altman said.
“People are often more useful alive. Even one’s enemies can be tools, in the right circumstances. But Tillinghast…” Sanford shook his head. “When you have rats in the walls, you don’t try to tame them, and you don’t relocate them to live peacefully in the country. You kill them. Reach out to the O’Bannions. They can find us a talented firebug, and a professional killer.”
“You don’t want me to take care of the pest removal?” Altman said.
“We were just seen emerging from the man’s shop. It’s better if the two of us steer clear of him, visibly at least, until this… unpleasantness is taken care of. Ruby can handle the theft, though. I want that goblet. And sending her on that errand will serve as a loyalty test.”
“She’s only loyal to her pocketbook, I think,” Altman said.
“You misunderstand Ruby,” Sanford said. “She’s motivated by money, yes, but she’s also sentimental, in her way. She has a romantic view of her profession, and thus of herself. We were comrades in arms against a shared threat, not so long ago, and that buys me a modicum of extra grace from her… but she knew Tillinghast before she knew me, and if there’s more to their relationship than I realize, I’d like to find out before it’s too late. Head back to the Lodge. We have preparations ahead.”
They drove away from the Merchant District, and Sanford gazed out the window, at the familiar buildings and the bustling shoppers. He recognized several of them, because he knew everyone worth knowing in this city, and numerous others besides. They were his people. Not his family, but more like… his flock. The shepherd protected his flock, defended them against thieves and wolves at great personal risk, and rounded them up when they strayed… because to do otherwise would be a waste of their wool and meat.
A woman emerged from a millinery, adjusting a blue hat with a large feather in the brim, and Sanford squinted at her. She was the very image of Sarah Van Shaw, but wearing a more fashionable dress than the warden ever would, and of course, Van Shaw only left the Lodge in rare instances, under Sanford’s orders – certainly not to buy a fancy hat. Where would she even wear such a thing? He almost told Altman to stop the car… but then he saw the woman’s face, and her warm smile, and decided he must be mistaken.
He couldn’t remember ever seeing the warden actually smile like that.
Chapter Thirteen
Null-Time
Tillinghast had assured Ruby that the hounds guarding the Lodge wouldn’t notice the magic in her watch and devour her the second she stepped through the gate, but she’d still approached with trepidation. In the end, the warden had waved her past without a word, seemingly distracted by greater matters, and the hounds hadn’t even shown themselves.
Now Ruby was down in the basements, though she wasn’t supposed to go there without Sanford, and didn’t much like going there with him. She knew the secret routes, though, and no one had ever been able to keep her out of places where she didn’t belong. A few higher-level members of the Lodge were down there going about their inscrutable business, but there were no shortages of dark corners and side passages to duck into when they came too close.
She followed a familiar path along wood-floored corridors, past indifferently whitewashed walls. Some of the deeper levels of the basement were more changeable, even labyrinthine, but this level was relatively stable, and she knew which turns to take. She made her way past the empty cell where the Scholar from Yith had once been held. Sanford had moved her, apparently, and the unsettling sigils of binding on the walls had been painted over. Ruby didn’t mind missing out on a reunion. Talking to that alien mind wearing a human face profoundly disturbed her. Ruby only stole property. She’d never stolen someone’s entire life.
In time, she reached the corridor that led to Sanford’s vault, but instead of a stretch of hallway, she encountered a solid wall. Ah ha. Sanford had mentioned improving his security after last year’s unpleasantness, and this must be part of the change: he’d cut off access to the vault entirely.
Or… had he merely pretended to cut off access? Ruby moved her hands over the wall, inch by inch, knocking with her knuckles, and found no hidden doors. Something more mystical, then? Was it a real wall, or a mere bafflement of the senses? She’d come across a few security measures like that, in her past exploits as a cat burglar of the occult, and knew a trick or two that might serve her here.
She closed her eyes and felt her way across the wall again, and this time, her hand went right through a patch of empty air. She opened her eyes, and saw her arm seemingly reaching into the wall, her hand vanishing up to the wrist in the plaster. Ruby tugged, and her hand even felt trapped by wood and lathe – that was a potent illusion. She closed her eyes, pulled her hand free without difficulty, and then felt around, discovering a rectangular opening about four feet high and three feet wide.
Sanford had put in a false wall, with a small opening off-center to allow passage, and then cast a glamor to hide the portal. Clever. Ruby crouched and walked through the tunnel, keeping her eyes firmly closed – having her hand trapped in a wall was one thing, but her head? She waved her arms around cautiously as she went, encountering close walls and a low ceiling for longer than she would have expected – Sanford had put in a passage of some length. She just hoped there weren’t traps, but surely he used this route himself and wouldn’t want pits or spikes in his way? Her calves were cramping from her unnatural posture by the time her flailing limbs ceased to make contact with the tunnel walls, and she risked cracking open one eye.
She was in the familiar corridor, the gleaming metal vault door at the far end, with open doors standing halfway down the passage on either side of the hall. She looked behind her to see a seemingly solid wall. She closed her eyes, reached back, and found the opening was accessible from this side, too. Ruby breathed a sigh of relief, but when she opened her eyes and saw the closed-off corridor restored to illusory solidity, a prickle of claustrophobia touched her heart anyway. Her mind knew she wasn’t trapped in here, but her body didn’t know it.
Ruby sniffed the air. She picked up the faint chemical whiff of the guardian shoggoth she knew protected this vault and listened for the slurp of the creature rousing itself in one of the rooms on either side of the corridor. Nothing. Was the hideous thing sleeping? Could it sleep? She’d fled the assault of that loathsome blob of eyes, mouths, and gooey pseudopods before, and had no desire to reunite with it, either.
So she set her watch back an hour, and stopped time. Or, more accurately, sped herself up, so that everything around her seemed frozen – at least, that was how the New Accelerator in the Wells story had worked. Though in the story, rapid motion had caused the user’s clothing to catch fire, because of the friction of cloth against the air, and the accelerating agent had taken the form of an elixir, not a watch. A chronometer was more suited to that other Wells story, The Time Machine. Did Tillinghast have a trinket that allowed you to move through time, too? Such a thing didn’t seem possible, but then, she’d seen a lot of impossible things. Hadn’t the Scholar from Yith claimed to hail from some distant era?
Ruby was wasting her hour of perfect freedom on idle thought. She took a step forward, gingerly, wary of the shoggoth, and couldn’t resist peering into the dusty storerooms on either side of the hallway that served as the creature’s lairs.
Both rooms were empty, apart from a broken crate in one and some shards of glass in another. Was the shoggoth inside the vault, then? Surely not. Its slimy bulk would damage the valuable relics Sanford kept there. She investigated, looking for trapdoors and secret hatches, but the only sign she found of the monster was a puddle of sticky black residue in one corner of the left-hand room. Maybe the creature had died. Maybe Sanford didn’t know what to feed it; perhaps it required a diet of more than interlopers and acolytes of the Order who failed to pass their tests for advancement.
She approached the vault door, as impressive as any bank’s, shining steel and seemingly impregnable. But she’d broken into this vault once, and been ushered in as a guest another time, so she knew how to overcome its defenses. There was a combination dial, but there were also pressure points hidden on the door, and Sanford had changed the pattern since her last visit… but she had time, and after fifteen minutes of pressing her ear to the metal and examining the residue of minute finger-smudges, she unlocked the door, and swung it open.
The interior was lushly carpeted, the walls lined with shelves, with a single chair sitting in the center. Nothing else. The shelves should have been full of objects of power or value or both, jewels and scrolls and statuary, a magic mirror on the wall, a sea chest on the floor that hid access to a secret escape tunnel…
But the shelves were bare, the mirror was gone, and the false chest had been removed, the access hatch beneath it filled in with concrete that formed a rough, ugly rectangle in the midst of the beautiful carpet. “You sneaky bastard,” Ruby muttered, turning around in the empty space. Sanford had increased the security around his vault, but it was all misdirection, because he’d emptied the vault anyway.
She had no idea where he might be keeping his relics now, including the Ruby of R’lyeh. She had a very fine replica of the jewel in her pocket, left on her doorstep last night by Gloria Dyer. Ruby had planned on doing a straight swap, since Sanford seemed reluctant to hand the real thing over willingly, despite Ruby’s persuasive arguments. Now she’d have to report her failure to Tillinghast, which wasn’t a conversation she relished the idea of having. She was sure she could track down Sanford’s new hiding place, in time, but extracting information from the magus was going to be a delicate business, what with him so (justifiably) paranoid lately.
What a waste of her magic! She’d expected to dodge a shoggoth and commit a daring daylight robbery, and instead, she’d just taken a boring tour of a basement. Ah, well. That was the business, wasn’t it? Brief intervals of excitement punctuating long stretches of waiting, watching, and wool-gathering. She made her way back through the illusory passageway and on to the upstairs areas of the Lodge, checking her watch as she went.
She had another half hour of acceleration… so she might as well ransack Sanford’s office and see if she could find any useful information. She made her way to his study, pausing to admire the statuelike Initiates frozen in mid-bustle on the upper floors. The big chair behind Sanford’s desk was awfully comfortable, and she was able to pick the locks on his desk drawers and rifle the contents easily enough. She found a calendar of appointments, all marked up with initials and notes so cryptic she couldn’t decipher them, and a bank book that showed the inflow of Lodge dues (vast) and the outflow of Lodge expenses (somewhat less vast, but still impressive), and some reports from Sanford’s financial advisers (now those were thieves), but no diary, nothing about the construction of a new vault, and no notes that gave away any juicy secrets. The man didn’t seem to write down anything important. Either he kept all his secrets in that overstuffed mind of his, or he had a real office hidden away in the depths below the Lodge.
She sighed and spent the remainder of her hour of null-time weaving among the frozen cooks in the kitchen, helping herself to snacks. The last five minutes she spent in the foyer, sitting on a bench and staring into the unmoving flames of the fire. That was by far the eeriest thing she’d seen in null-time: the fire gave off no warmth, and the tongues of flame didn’t flicker. She couldn’t take her eyes off the strange sight.
Then sound and motion rushed back: the tick of the clock, the crackle of the flames, the distant barking of a dog, and the movement of the Lodge occupants beyond the door. Ruby shivered. Next time, she’d take better advantage of the miracle. She just needed to figure out how.
The front doors opened, and Sanford and his pet thug Altman walked in. The magus did a double take when he saw her. He must have been having a rough day, to let his mask slip enough to show actual surprise. “Miss Standish. I was just going to call for you.”
She shrugged. “I thought you might, so I decided to make myself available.”
“You mean you decided to avail yourself of a free breakfast,” Sanford said.
She shrugged again and paired it with a grin this time. “There’s also that.”
Sanford turned to Altman. “You can go make those… arrangements we discussed.” The other man nodded and headed into the Lodge, head like a block of wood and an expression to match. He sure was a bundle of fun, wasn’t he?
Sanford offered Ruby his hand, and she accepted, rising from the bench. He frowned. “New watch?” he commented. “A Gruen Tank, if I’m not mistaken? Quite chic.”
Ruby snorted. “A gift from a gentleman who misunderstood my level of ardor. I was going to sell it, but I tried it on first, and I rather think it suits me, don’t you?”
“Your taste is always impeccable, Miss Standish.”
Ruby caught his gaze lingering on the watch for a moment too long, and she imagined his calculating, suspicious thoughts: of Tillinghast’s free hand with gifts, even checking to see if the watch face flickered with eldritch light, and that paranoia was as dangerous as carelessness, in its own way.
Well. Perhaps she was projecting her own thoughts on him to an extreme.
Sanford inclined his head toward the door. Clearly, he’d decided the item was perfectly ordinary. “Let’s talk in my study. I have a new job for you.”
They reached his office, and Sanford sat in his chair, his frown deepening, and then minutely adjusted a few of the items on his blotter. “The Initiates know they aren’t meant to disturb the contents of the desk when they clean.”
Ruby had been careful during her snooping, but not careful enough, apparently. The man had eyes like microscopes. “It’s so hard to find good unpaid labor these days.” If the lowly Initiates were allowed to tidy up in here, no wonder Sanford didn’t keep anything interesting on the premises. He probably did have a secret office where he kept the real ledgers and minute documentation of all his schemes, but how would she ever find it? The deep basements sprawled beyond any rational understanding of space.
