I took more valerian and went to bed again. The doorbell rang; this time it was Captain Baer in black overalls, smelling horribly of smoke and breathing heavily. I said, “You stink,” and closed the door.
I went to bed again, the bell rang again, and Uncle was at the door, smiling, wanting to enter. I screamed and woke up. What an eerie dream!
Chapter 23
The infamous College of St. Johan Femm burned vigorously and for a long time.
Locomotive went there for the second time: two years ago, when Larkes was in charge, a few young scumbags castrated a kid—an uninitiated white—and were killed by the elemental curse, first and last in the short life of the white boy. Sixty-four students and attendants were slaughtered along with them, all of whom the dying wizard managed to douse with his rage. Who says that the white magic is harmless?
Firefighters poured nearly half of the river on the island, but if it had not been for the sake of the investigation, Conrad Baer would have let the fire frolic freely. It was a place nobody wanted to buy. Being a privileged school not long ago, the college was completely abandoned now. Sooner or later, the abandoned buildings always become infested with some yuck. Though Locomotive did not expect that it would be the warm-blooded yuck.
In the yard flooded with water and trampled by firefighters, healers calmed down a heavily burned white. He did not want to leave and assured everyone that he had lost his soul “here, exactly right here”, and begged to help him with the search.
“Another fool got hit by a beam,” the healer said to Locomotive with cynicism, typical for the police practitioners. “Perhaps, it will be better for him that way.”
“Dragon tears?” the captain pointed to the injured white.
“No, more like a lobotomy. I will give more details after the examination—if he stays alive until then.”
Locomotive nodded and went inside the building blackened by soot. It smelled disgustingly of smoke, water squelched under his feet and dripped on his head.
“Yours are there,” a firefighter stowing a tarpaulin sleeve waved in the direction of the hall.
He found the senior coordinator in the hall that had clearly been an epicenter of the fire. The floor boards were burned through to the rocky foundation there, and Locomotive moved via flimsy footbridges, thrown by the firefighters over the structures that survived the fire. Everybody’s attention was focused on the crumpled skeleton of a surgical table: around it, buried in black trash almost to the elbows, magician-experts and Mr. Satal personally crawled on their knees in search of evidence. All were unhealthily agitated.
Locomotive came up closer, expecting to see the charred remains.
“The same style as last week,” Satal sighed, straightening up. “But there is a difference.”
The captain looked at the ashes with understanding, but the dark magician smiled: “No, it’s not about them. The artisans performed the shackles ritual last night, likely successfully, because this time their victim was an initiated dark.”
Locomotive got a nasty sucking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“The pump-sign stayed for eight hours, but then something happened,” Satal gestured around the walls, gnawed by fire. “This couldn’t be done by a human being. The channel is very different from the standard one; a magician with such a Source would not live through the Empowerment.
“A dark mage,” Locomotive stated.
“Rather, an otherworldly creature. A mature one, rich in energy, confidently orienting itself in the material world, affecting the environment with rare strokes, not wasting its power. Perhaps it has a material carrier.”
Captain Baer tried to picture such a horror walking along the streets of his city and failed.
“I don’t understand another thing: how did those two men survive? They were injured later and only because they didn’t get out of the fire in time,” Satal mentioned and nodded to an expert that had dug some crumpled round piece out of coal. “Send it to the lab and let me know the result!”
“Couldn’t that be the armory curse work?” the captain asked with an inner shudder.
Satal frowned. “I doubt it. The pump-sign broke up from an external impulse, but not due to the release of energy of the Source. The perturbation was extremely local, at least this time.”
Baer realized that he had not seen typical human remains in the mud: “Where is the victim?”
“Obviously, he or she woke up and ran off,” the dark shrugged indifferently. We haven’t seen any belts; the victim was held onsite only by the pump-sign. Rather thoughtlessly on their part.”
“Crazy psychos!” the captain could not resist shouting. “The third case. What do they want to accomplish?”
“Probably the same thing as Melons, had she not been arrested.”
“One more artisan?”
“Not likely,” the coordinator nearly spat on a pile of evidence, but managed to restrain himself. “That bitch seemed to coach a follower; he didn’t make the grade by just a bit. He knew what to do and how, but wasn’t sufficiently accurate, so the first two victims died during the ritual. And he was not explained how risky it was to put the pump-sign on an initiated mage. Here’s the result!”
The coordinator looked again at the blackened walls.
“And the white bastard is still at large,” Baer added gloomily.
“Then go back to work!” Satal soared. “Look for witnesses; he didn’t get here by air, did he? And I’m not done with evidence yet!”
Locomotive did not quarrel in response, although his patience was stretched to the limit. He was the head of Redstone’s NZAMIPS, there were four hundred men under his command, and he wasn’t going to lisp with a milksop—even if the latter was a dark magician. He wouldn’t be a scapegoat! None of the emotions raging in his soul reflected on Captain Baer’s face. He turned around and walked to the door in silence, habitually pondering whether he should immediately quit. Yes, five more years remained until his full pension, but he had already surpassed the length of service for an officer, and an old bachelor like him wouldn’t need a lot. Numerous relatives would welcome an uncle from the city; he wouldn’t be bored. Locomotive saw only one obstacle: if he left, he would completely lose the chance to influence events.
A young policeman in motorcycle goggles and gloves trampled on the steps of the college. He got agitated, seeing the captain, and started waving his hands. Not a moment of rest! Baer pushed his way through scurrying firefighters and approached the policeman. The guy’s face expressed embarrassment.
“Eh, sir…”
Locomotive looked down and cursed in a fit of anger.
“Damn, it’s all dirty here, too! What else do you have for me?”
The motorcyclist handed him a piece of mail, and Baer realized that shit was about to hit the fan. What could happen in the town that the chief of NZAMIPS had to be notified by courier? Locomotive pulled out of the dense envelope a letter, read it, and wished he carried a poison: in full compliance with the statute, the team of instrumental control informed the authorities about a powerful surge of magical activity around Quay Barco. Had they missed the alpha and omega?
“Pass it to Senior Coordinator Satal, okay?”
The policeman saluted and briskly splashed through the water on the sodden floor. He didn’t know what a mine he was carrying.
While a striped NZAMIPS car was making its way through the crowd of firefighters, Locomotive intensely pondered the situation; none of his subordinates would guess that behind his usual mask of calm was carefully suppressed panic. Not without reason the artisans hid on the river: the magic activity in Redstone was traditionally tracked well, mainly because of the presence of the university. Amulets scattered around the city were officially regarded as protection against the supernatural, but they could also fix any spike of magic background, regardless of its nature. On a daily basis the monitoring team recorded dozens of small flashes, but there were plenty of magic artifacts on the streets that could cause them; records of the place and time of the outbursts assisted in NZAMIPS investigations from time to time, and that was it. The magic surge was very serious, if the magicians on duty recalled the statute and decided to play it by the book.