“I’d already figured that. What should I do?”
“What’re you driving?”
“A blue 2118 Spinner compact.”
“Pass the place we were to meet, slowly, and call me three minutes later.”
“Hope I can make it.”
“Me, too.”
Drum glanced back and up over his left shoulder to where the Elshie beast seemed to hover. He turned right onto a wider thoroughfare. A red sedan passed him. A half mile and two turns later, when he was preparing a sigh of relief as the creature dwindled and vanished to the south, he turned a corner to see it swooping toward him out of the east. He accelerated immediately. Link was speaking into the back end of a pencil mike.
“In violation of every principle of aerodynamics,” he dictated, “it comes on, dropping toward us like an avenging angel out of Old Testament Babylon.”
“If you don’t mind,” Drum said, wrenching the wheel suddenly and turning up a side street, gyros squealing in protest, “you’re a little distracting.”
“If we die I’d at least like the byline,” Link protested, though he lowered his voice thereafter.
Drum opened his window, removed an oddly shaped pistol from within his jacket, leaned partway out, and began firing at the impossible beast. The weapon made a small hissing sound each time he discharged it. The bull in the sky jerked slightly as the fourth round was fired and veered off suddenly at treetop level.
“…even now mounting on high for its second pass,” Link went on.
“Cut that out!” Drum ordered.
The figure soared, turned. The next intersection was too busy to crash. Drum turned his head from side to side now.
Ahead and to the right, a large man stood beside the road, hat pulled low over his eyes. He leaned upon a tree to his left; his right hand rested atop a cane.
Drum braked for several seconds, then accelerated again. It seemed as if he might make it through the intersection legitimately…
A soft explosion occurred overhead, a muffled popping sound. A flash of red-and-yellow light passed through the car. The vehicle rocked on its cushion of air. Drum sped through the intersection.
“…only to vanish in an inexplicable burst of fire,” Link dictated.
Drum slowed, departed the roadway, drifted through a park. Link, silent now, shifted uneasily. “Uh, it was probably me it was after, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Probably.”
“It means they had someone with a Virtu power back at the office, and the veeper got a look at me somehow.” He ran a hand through his sandy hair. “Might not have been sure at first which car I was in.”
“Sounds right.”
“Circled a bit, then decided to try this one. Became certain when you took evasive action, when you shot at it. Came on strong then. I’m wondering how heavily it might have come down on us. I’ve a feeling it wanted blood.”
“It did seem pretty intent.”
“I don’t understand what happened back there, though.” Link gestured to the rear, in the direction of the road. “I’m sure it didn’t combust spontaneously. You led it into some sort of trap involving that guy you were talking to on the phone, didn’t you?”
“Good guess,” Drum said.
“But I don’t see how you could have anticipated something like that and set it up.”
“Good,” Drum said, pushing in a number. “Omniscience bothers me.” Several seconds later, it was answered, and he said, “Drum here. What now? And by the way, thanks.”
““That meeting’s off,” came the reply. “But I still want to see you.”
“All right. Where?”
“You still know how to find the place where we first met?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me there in two hours.”
“Yes.”
Drum drove across the park and out onto a narrow thoroughfare. He moved slowly along it.
“Who is this guy we’re going to see?” Link asked.
“We shall refer to him as ‘the client.’ “
“Whatever he likes—especially if he’s the one who got rid of the bull in the sky.”
Drum nodded, driving slowly, conservatively now.
“He did, didn’t he?” Link said after a while.
“Maybe.”
“How?”
“If I knew that, I’d’ve done it myself.”
“Obviously, he’s got you working on something involving the Elshies.”
“Reasonable guess.”
“You think there might be a big story in it?”
Drum shrugged. Then he smiled.
“Sell me whatever you’ve got to sell and I’ll take you home,” he said.
“No, and no.”
“I don’t think the client is going to give you a story.”
“I smell one.”
“Smell all you want. I didn’t really have dinner and we’ve a little time now. I’m hungry. How about you?”
“I could use something.”
“I hope it’s sauerbraten, then, because we’re near a German place I like.”
In Deep Fields he dwelled. Upon his Throne of Bones within the hall that was called Desolation, he looked into the shattered video monitor that he held in one skeletal hand. By the power that was in him, was of him, he conjured an image. Fragmented and flecked with static, it rose in the hollow between the monitor’s broken glass edges. Something bulked within the image—a mountain, he knew, for it was this mountain he wished to look upon. There was motion, also, but he could not determine what walked or crawled or otherwise made motion on the mountain’s slopes. He permitted the image to fade.
“Phecda!” the Lord of Deep Fields called, voice low and even.
“Master?” Tarnished sunlight falling from the dark-shadowed beams overhead, the copper serpent dropped from where she had watched.
“Fetch me the red cable.”
There were many red cables in Deep Fields, thousands would be too small to number them, even millions would feel the strain, but Phecda knew there was but one red cable that would interest the Lord of Deep Fields at this time. Into the thin line where segments of two equally impossible columns joined, Phecda slithered. Defying the continuity of space, she came forth from a roughly triangular hole in the ulna of one of the many bones that Death was using as a footrest. The red cable that had been one of Mizar’s tails slithered after her, moving in the fashion of a snake by grace of Phecda’s small power.
As Death did not deign bend to pick up the cable, Phecda set it to entwining its way up the throne, making art of the interplay of dry white and plastic red against the contrast of the lord’s black robe. When the cable came even with the left hand of the Lord of the Lost, he plucked it from the eye-socket out of which it was emerging. Instantly, Phecda withdrew her power and the cable drooped, plastic encasing monofilaments and wire, nothing more.
“Thank you,” Death said, the courtesy surprising the serpent, who flickered her tongue out in silvery acknowledgment.
Whether or not the Lord of Deep Fields noted this would be hard to say, for he had returned his attention to the shattered monitor. Once again the picture grew—outline discernable, but detail indistinguishable, too few pixels to the centimeter. At this juncture, Death snapped the length of red cable in his hand and it stiffened into a wand beneath half a meter in length. Death tapped this upon what remained of the screen, breaking away a few jagged teeth of glass, but contrary to all logic, the picture grew sharper.
Now it showed him a vista of Mount Meru, the primal mountain at the center of the universe. It stood stark as the idea of a mountain, holding something in its lines of Fuji, the Matterhorn, Kilimanjaro, and a child’s crayon triangle with a jagged line drawn at the top for snow. Nor was it unfitting that it inspired such thought, for it was all of those things and more. Some would argue that the other mountains took their shape and their power to inspire dreams of divinity within humanity from this mountain; others would argue that Mount Meru was the synthesis of all dreams of mountains. Death cared not.