I took my motorcycle across the island of Manhattan and came to the Upper West Side, a long rectangular neighborhood sort of wedged between Central Park and the Hudson River. It was a fancy sort of place, with a college campus and a lot of museums and art galleries and places like that. I bet the condos here cost a small fortune, and I was reasonably sure that a cup of coffee at any one of the little shops I saw would cost twice the minimum hourly wage.
Let’s just say it was the kind of neighborhood that made me want to go to Milwaukee. Rich people tended to get on my nerves. Though, to be fair, I suppose I was a rich woman now. Of course, if I was rich, then why the hell should I spend a ridiculous amount of money on overpriced coffee or some stupid painting of a forest?
I glanced at the college campus as I rode past it. A few weeks after we had gotten married, Riordan asked if I wanted to go to college. The last time I had been in formal schooling had been kindergarten, when my parents died, and Morvilind found me. I’d missed out on grade school and high school, and Morvilind’s retainers had taught me everything I needed to know.
I had been so baffled at the thought of going to college that I had said something flippant in response, something about how since so many people with college degrees seemed stupid that I was better off staying away. The real reason was that I didn’t see the point. I mean, if I needed to learn how to do something, I either taught myself or found someone to teach me. I didn’t see any point in learning a bunch of random things for the sake of getting a fancy overpriced diploma. Well, Riordan and Russell did. They both liked history. But reading about history gave them pleasure, didn’t it? It wasn’t as if they were just choosing it at random.
I put that entire train of thought out of my head and focused on the road. Now was not the time to let my mind wander. If I was going to figure out who had killed Max Sarkany and why, I couldn’t stand around contemplating the foibles of the American education system, especially since I had so little actual experience of it.
To my mild surprise, I found a parking spot only a block and a half from the Dragon Imports Art Gallery, and I eased my bike into the space. It was a little after noon, and the sidewalks were full of people heading to lunch or visiting the ubiquitous food trucks that lurked near every office building in Manhattan. I climbed off my bike, clipped my helmet to my backpack, and joined the crowds as I headed towards Sarkany’s art gallery. I drew a few admiring looks – I guess a motorcycle jacket and tight jeans really does it for some men. I could have Masked myself, but I didn’t want to quite yet.
That would come later.
The Dragon Imports Art Gallery occupied the bottom two floors of a forty-story building. According to the files the High Queen had given me, Max Sarkany owned the entire building and used the bottom two stories for his business. He lived on the top floor in the penthouse, and I wondered if he had chosen that place because it would be easy for a dragon to fly to a high-rise penthouse under cover of night. The rest of the building was divided between office space and ridiculously expensive condo units.
I walked past the art gallery. Sarkany’s building had a small lobby with elevators, and the art gallery sat on the north side of the lobby, with glass windows overlooking the sidewalk. The lights inside were dimmed, and a sign on the front door said that due to unforeseen circumstances the gallery was closed until further notice. I pulled out my phone and pretended to talk into it as I walked around the building once, and I noted the location of the fire doors in the alley.
Then I ducked into the alley and cast the Mask spell. I thought about disguising myself as a Homeland Security officer but discarded the idea. No one would bother an officer, but that would be too conspicuous. Plus, someone might come up to me and try to report a crime or something. Instead, I Masked myself as a fortyish man in a suit and tie, indistinguishable from countless others on their lunch break.
Wrapped in my disguise, I walked up to the fire door. I glanced over it. It was a standard steel door with a crash bar, a lock, and an alarm. A good lock, though, and a high-quality alarm system. I summoned magical force and cast the spell to open locks, splitting my concentration. The spell was basically a focused, applied telekinesis spell, and I eased open the lock even as part of my mind held the pin for the alarm in place. I pushed the door open a few feet, slipped through, and then let it click closed behind me.
I released my spell and waited, but the fire alarm didn’t go off.
Satisfied, I turned and found myself standing in what looked like an employee lounge. There were a half-dozen round tables, folding chairs, a row of vending machines, and a long counter with a pair of coffee makers. Good coffee machines, too. I suppose Sarkany hadn’t gone cheap for his employees’ coffee.
I decided to cast the Cloak spell instead. The gallery was closed, and no one would recognize my Mask. But I couldn’t Mask myself as someone who was supposed to be here, at least not yet. The Cloak spell was more effort to maintain than a Mask, but I didn’t want to draw any attention to my presence here.
Silver light flashed as the Cloak spell wrapped around me, and I opened the lounge door. Next was a room with a concrete floor that looked like both a loading dock and a locker room. I crossed to the far door, opened it, and stepped into the art gallery.
I froze in surprise, looking around.
The art gallery…well, let’s just say it looked expensive.
Really, really expensive.
The floor was gleaming, polished marble and all the interior walls had been knocked out, creating a wide space. The square concrete support columns remained in place, and they had been painted brilliant white. Subdued lighting glowed from recesses in the ceiling.
The ozone-like scent of dragon blood filled my nostrils.
There was artwork everywhere. Paintings had been hung on the pillars and the walls. More paintings stood in freestanding glass cases, accompanied by velvet ropes and little signs admonishing guests not to touch the artwork. Here and there I saw sculptures, some of which I recognized as quite valuable. I suppose it was just the luck of the draw Morvilind had never sent me to rob this place in the bad old days. Most of my missions from him had helped his quest to destroy the Archons, but sometimes he sent me to steal cultural and historical artifacts because he liked that kind of stuff.
I headed towards the smell of dragon blood.
It looked as if about half of the gallery was devoted to American artwork, and the other half had been set up as some sort of special exhibit. I wondered what it was, then I found a large sign explaining the theme of the exhibit. It was entitled “The Knight-Errant: Then And Now” and was devoted to Russian artwork, specifically Russian artwork about something called a bogatyr. The sign helpfully explained that a bogatyr was a sort of semi-legendary Russian knight-errant, like King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, who had wandered the ancient Russian countryside fighting giants and ogres and evil witches. Artwork about the bogatyrs had been popular in Russia two centuries before the Conquest, and in the modern Russian Imperium, the image and story of the bogatyr were often used to inspire men-at-arms fighting for their Elven lords.
Huh. Russell would have loved this stuff.
A flicker of melancholy went through me. My mom had been Russian. After the Archons had destroyed Vladivostok, some of the survivors had gone to the United States, and that was how she had met my father, who had been a soldier of the Wizard’s Legion. I wondered if my mom had known about all this cultural stuff. I had no way of knowing. I only had dim, hazy memories of my parents dotted with a few vivid recollections, but I was sad thinking about them.
Would they had been proud of me? Even after all the things I had done? On the day they had died, I had vowed to do whatever I could to save Russell, and I had done it. It had taken me a century and a half, and I had walked on the face of different worlds, but I had done it. For an instant, I wondered what my life would have been like if my father hadn’t contracted frostfever. Maybe I would be the housewife of some former man-at-arms now, pregnant and happy, all my concerns domestic.
On the other hand, if I hadn’t become what I was, I never would have met Riordan, and maybe Nicholas would have destroyed New York with the Sky Hammer.
I shook my head and kept walking.
My eyes fell on a painting of a knight on horseback facing a carved standing stone. The knight looked weary, his head bowed, and there were bones scattered around the base of the stone. Something about the knight’s weariness spoke to me, and I had a disquieting memory of the Eternity Crucible, of repeating the same endless death over and over again.
I shoved aside that train of thought before it could get up to steam.
The accompanying plaque said that the portrait was a reproduction of a painting called “Knight At The Crossroads,” and the original had been painted about a hundred and thirty years before the Conquest by some guy named Viktor Vasnetsov. There were quite a few paintings by Vasnetsov throughout the exhibit, most of them showing either bogatyrs or figures from pre-Conquest Russian history.
Max Sarkany had been killed before one of the paintings.
The smell of ozone grew stronger, and I spotted the dried bloodstain on the white floor. I recognized it from the pictures I had seen of Sarkany’s corpse. It hadn’t been disturbed, which meant it had dried out by the time he had been found. The bloodstain was a few yards from the wall, right in front of another Vasnetsov painting…
I blinked in surprise.
The painting was entitled “Dobrynya Nikitich and Dragon,” and it showed an armored knight fighting a flying dragon with multiple heads.
Max Sarkany had been murdered in front of a picture of a man fighting a dragon.
Jeez. Either that was a hell of a coincidence, or someone had a wicked sense of irony.
I looked over the bloodstain and the surroundings, but nothing jumped out at me. I suppose it would have been too much to ask to find a blood-covered dwarven power hammer hidden under a bench or something. I did notice some important things, though. The gallery was airy enough that there was little cover in here, and it was difficult to walk silently upon the polished marble floors. I could just imagine the racket a pair of high heels would make. That meant that either Sarkany had known his killer, or his killer had moved with inhuman stealth.
Or, come to think of it, the killer could use the Cloak spell with my level of proficiency.
I resolved to search the gallery’s offices next. I had seen cameras everywhere, and presumably, those had to link to a server somewhere on the premises. Though whoever had killed Sarkany might have been smart enough to destroy or take the server. There might be other clues in the office, something that could give a hint as to who had done this.
There was an elevator and a stairwell marked STAFF ONLY on the far side of the gallery. I left the Russian exhibit, passed through the American section, and was halfway to the stairs when I heard voices raised in anger.
I came to a stop, looked around, and then sat on the end of one of the observation benches scattered around the gallery. From here I would have an excellent view of anyone who came through the stairwell door, and I would have no trouble overhearing anything they said. Additionally, while I could only stay Cloaked around eleven minutes or so while moving, I could stay Cloaked indefinitely if I remained motionless.
The door burst open, and a stunning woman stalked into the gallery.
She stood at least six feet tall, her height further enhanced by the spiked-heel shoes she wore. She somehow managed to look both well-endowed and lean and fit at the same time, a feat that usually required obsessive diet and exercise, surgery, and fortunate genetics. The woman wore a knee-length skirt of bright red and a button-down white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She had a thick mane of black hair that hung to her shoulders, and brilliant green eyes so intense that they looked like a special effect. Her skin was pale, and it looked flawless.
Come to think about it, everything about her appearance looked a little too perfect to be real.
I wondered if her appearance was an illusion…or if she was a dragon shapeshifted into human form.
After all, if you’re going to shapeshift into human form, why not take the form of a human of stunning beauty? It’s not as if that would make the spell any harder.
I really wish I could have gotten my aetherometer out and checked, but the Cloak spell blocked the instrument.
The tall woman stalked forward, and as it turns out, high heels did indeed make a sound like successive hammer blows against the floor. Two people followed the woman. One was a woman in her middle twenties wearing formal business attire – black pencil skirt, black jacket, white blouse. She had glasses, and her hair had been done up in a bun. A laptop bag hung from her shoulder, and she had a phone in her left hand. The second person was a burly-looking man in his middle thirties wearing a suit that strained against the heavy muscles of his chest and arms. His balding hair had been cut down to stubble against his dark skin, and he had hard black eyes. If the twenty-something woman looked like a personal assistant, the man looked like a bodyguard. I thought of Tarlia’s disguise this morning, how Tyth and the Royal Guards and I had looked like the entourage of a wealthy or powerful person.
The door swung open again, and another man came out.
He was in the latter half of middle age, and shorter than the tall woman and the bodyguard. He wore a gray suit with a gray tie, and everything about him looked mousy, timid. Almost like a caricature of an accountant or a tax lawyer. He had watery blue eyes and a graying fringe of hair clinging to the back of his head.
“Miss Sarkany,” said the man in an upper-class New York accent. “Miss Sarkany, please wait.”
Miss Sarkany? Tarlia had mentioned that Malthraxivorn had a niece named Delaxsicoria. Given the uncanny perfection of the tall woman’s appearance, I had a suspicion that I was looking at a real live dragon in human form.
The tall woman whirled to face the balding man. “Why are you still chasing after me, yapping like a dog, Edina?” She had a beautiful voice, rich and strong, and right now it all but vibrated with anger.
But Edina? That name sparked a memory. I had seen in the files that a man named Charles Edina was the general manager of Dragon Imports Art Gallery.
“I am sorry, Miss Sarkany,” said Edina, “but I simply cannot hand over the gallery’s accounts to you without…”
“My uncle was murdered!” shouted Delaxsicoria. Tears sprang into her green eyes, and she took a shuddering breath. The anger and pain seemed to roll off her in waves, almost as if I felt them pressing against my forehead. “My uncle was a great and noble man, and he was murdered! And you wish to bother me with this…this nonsense, with these forms and paperwork and other useless rubbish!”
“Miss Sarkany,” said Edina, his tone gentle. “I know this is a legal fiction, but it is a necessary one. I know that you are Delaxsicoria, heir to my noble lord Malthraxivorn. But to the world, you are Della Sarkany, singer and musical artist.” I blinked. Hadn’t I heard a song on the radio sung by someone named Della something-or-other? That was what I got for not paying attention. “These things must be done according to the legal customs of humans and the United States. I am sorry for the delay, but if you are to continue to dwell on Earth, then some of the customs must be observed.”
“You weary me with your talk,” spat Della.
“She’s right, ma’am,” said the personal assistant in a quiet voice. Della’s furious glare turned to her. The personal assistant seemed to tense but stood her ground. “If the legal forms are properly observed now, that will save you a lot of trouble later on. Your uncle was a rich and powerful man, and some people might try to take a chunk of his estate now that he is dead.”
“Well, we know your opinion, Helen,” said Della. Her vivid green gaze swung to the bodyguard. “And what do you think, Shawn?”
“I think you ought to listen to Helen, ma’am,” said Shawn, his voice a deep rumble.
Della’s lips thinned, and she looked at Edina.
“Please, Miss Sarkany,” said Edina. “Your uncle appointed me the executor of his will for a good reason. He knew that if the unthinkable happened, I would carry out his instructions faithfully. Mr. Sarkany left you everything, and you will have control of the gallery and all his other properties. But it will take some time to arrange everything.”
Della’s nostrils flared. “Time, time, time! That is all that anyone can say. I reported my uncle’s murder to the Skythrone and demanded the High Queen’s justice, and her minions can only say it will take time.” I remained motionless within my Cloak spell. “Delays and excuses!” She drew herself up, her impressive bosom straining against the fabric of her shirt. “While you scurry about with your legal papers, I shall compose a dirge of such sorrow and grief in honor of my uncle that the apes of this world shall still sing it a thousand years from now, just as they still play the music of Beethoven, Mozart, and Dvorak!”
“Perhaps they shall, Miss Sarkany,” said Edina. “Perhaps they shall.”
“Come,” said Della to her bodyguard and assistant. “We shall return to my condo, and I will devote myself to the composition of my uncle’s funeral dirge.” She turned a baleful stare upon Edina. “And see to it that you attend to these legal matters. My uncle labored hard to build all that he possessed, and I will not see his work fall into the hands of unworthy interlopers.”
With that she spun on her heel and stalked away, her footsteps echoing through the gallery. Helen fell in beside her, and Shawn took the lead. Edina stared after them, and for a moment his calm mask cracked, and I saw bitter loathing and icy contempt there.
He didn’t like Della Sarkany, not even a little bit.
Edina yanked a chunky, obsolete-looking smartphone from his coat and tapped a few commands into it.
Then the calm mask returned, and Edina turned and walked to the doors leading to the lobby. He waited until Della and her entourage left the building, then let himself into the lobby, locked the gallery doors behind him, and left.
I let out a long breath, thinking over what I had just seen.
It was clear that Edina and Della were the prime suspects for Malthraxivorn’s death. Della was the more likely one, frankly. Her tears and grief for her uncle had seemed genuine, but I can start crying on cue, too, and she might have the physical strength to inflict a wound like the one that had killed Malthraxivorn. Edina obviously hated Della, and he might have hated his late employer. He wouldn’t be able to inflict the wound that had killed Max Sarkany, but he might have found a way to do it. I mean, Paul Ricci had been just a restaurant owner, but he had gotten his hands on a copy of the Summoning Codex.
And the departure of Della and Edina meant that I was likely alone in the Dragon Imports Art Gallery, which gave me an excellent opportunity to look through the office area.
I got up, crossed to the STAFF ONLY stairwell, and checked the door handle. It was unlocked, so I eased it open and started up the stairs. The second floor opened into a room that was just as lavish as the gallery below. The floor was covered in white marble, with the wall-sized windows looking towards the greenery along this part of the Hudson River. A long desk was large enough for five different receptionists, though God only knew why an art gallery needed five receptionists. Maybe dragons measured wealth in the size of the entourages they gathered around themselves. I looked down the hallway behind the receptionists’ desk. I expected to see a long row of office doors, which I did, and I decided to investigate both Max Sarkany’s and Charles Edina’s computers and files. Sarkany might have owned the gallery, but it was clear that Edina did a lot of the heavy lifting.
I did not, however, expect to see a damaged door lying on the floor of the hallway.
Curious, I walked towards it. It was a steel security door, thick and heavy, and it had been wrenched loose with such force that the metal hinges had torn. The door had come from a frame a few paces down the hallway, and I peered through it. A blast of cold air hit me in the face, and I looked into a small server room. Probably Sarkany kept all his data here. There were a pair of server racks loaded with blinking black boxes, but one of the machines had been smashed.
I stepped into the server room and looked closer. The smashed computer was a WTS Corporation camera control server, capable of capturing and archiving tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage. It was a boxy cube of a computer, about the size of a small refrigerator.
And someone had smashed a hole through its heavy metal casing at precisely the right angle to crush all the hard drives. I peered at the drives through the hole in the chassis. The server held dozens of hard drives, and every single one had been physically shattered into pieces. Not even the experts at the Inquisition would be able to pull any data off those drives.
I looked at the door, at the broken server, and then back at the door.
It was simple enough to reconstruct what had happened. Someone had ripped open the door, strode inside, and crushed the server’s hard drive array. I had the uneasy feeling that whoever had destroyed the server had done so with one blow. I could probably crush the server’s drives like that, but it would take me multiple castings of telekinetic spells. I couldn’t do it with one hit.
Just as I couldn’t kill a dragon with one blow.
I straightened up and dropped my Cloak spell, taking a few moments to catch my breath from the strain of holding it. There was no reason to keep the Cloak up. Until that camera server was replaced, the cameras scattered throughout the gallery and the offices were just wasting electricity. Some versions of WTS Corporation servers stored their video footage off-site, but not that particular model.
Which meant that any recording of Sarkany’s murder was gone as well.
Whoever had killed him had thought things through.
I reached into my coat pocket, pulled on a pair of thin gloves, and stepped into the hallway again. If I couldn’t find Sarkany’s killer, the Inquisition was going to go over this place with a fine-tooth comb, and better that I didn’t leave any fingerprints behind. I walked down the hall and let myself into Sarkany’s office.
I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to see that Sarkany had given himself the corner office. I hesitated when I saw the enormous windows looking at the street below, fearing that I would be visible from the sidewalk, but then I remembered that the windows had been tinted. No one would see me unless I stood right in front of the glass, and even then, I would only be visible as a silhouette.
The office’s furnishings screamed that Sarkany had money and a lot of it. The carpet was thick and green and probably larger than my first apartment. All the furniture was dark, polished wood. There was a small wet bar with a variety of expensive alcohol, a ring of leather chairs around a low table, and a desk the size of a car. There were a few small sculptures around the room on stone pedestals, the largest of which was a statue of a bronze dragon in flight.
I wondered how many of Sarkany’s employees had known that he and his niece were dragons. Edina did, obviously, and so did Shawn and Helen, though they worked for Della. Well, I suppose it wouldn’t be any different than working for an Elven noble, and millions of people worked for the Elven nobles in the US alone. Working for a dragon had to be like that, except with more secrecy.
I crossed to Sarkany’s desk. Despite its size, its surface was still mostly covered with neat stacks of paper. Likely Sarkany wanted to keep a close eye on his fortune, like a dragon coiled in his lair and brooding over stacks of gold coins. Except instead of gold coins, to judge from the documents on the desk, most of Sarkany’s vast wealth was in his artworks, real estate, brokerage accounts, stocks, bonds, and investments in various companies and enterprises.
Oh, and he did own some actual gold and platinum coins held at the Royal Bank in Washington DC.
Maybe Malthraxivorn had been a traditionalist.
One document caught my eye. It was a shipping invoice from a transnational shipping company, along with a customs form from the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. A freighter from St. Petersburg in the Russian Imperium had put in at New York in September, and Sarkany had taken possession of five crates from the vessel. It didn’t seem significant. Likely the crates had contained some of the Russian artworks on display downstairs.
I turned over the document and froze.
An old, old piece of paper was next in the stack, thick and yellowing. All the other papers on Sarkany’s desk were crisp and orderly and looked as if they had just come off a high-end laser printer. This looked much older, and the printed letters weren’t nearly as crisp.
Also, it was in Russian.
I didn’t read or speak Russian, and I didn’t know the Cyrillic characters. That said, I did know how to read dates in Russian. Long story short, I had needed to steal some documents for Morvilind, and the documents were in Russian. But Morvilind only wanted me to steal documents from a specific day, so I had memorized how to read Russian dates.
The old document was dated July 12th, Conquest Year 109.
“What the hell?” I muttered. Maybe it had something to do with the artwork downstairs, or maybe it was a document that had come with those five crates on the freighter. But it looked out of place, and I wanted to know what it said.
I started to reach for my phone and its translation app.
Then Della Sarkany appeared out of nothingness in front of the door.
I flinched in surprise.
She had just come out from underneath a Cloak spell. Her face was a mask of livid rage, her lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl of fury. How the hell had she known that I was in here?
Her nostrils flared, and I realized that I had made a serious mistake.
Dragons would have keener senses than humans and Elves. The Cloak spell would hide me from all senses, including scent. But it would do nothing about the odor trail I left behind me. And apparently, Della had been able to smell the trail I left behind and had realized that someone else had been in the gallery. She had thrown that raging fit in front of Edina and then returned after he left.
She had a cooler head than I had realized.
Stupid, Nadia. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“So!” snarled Della. “My uncle’s murderer dares to return to the scene of the crime? You will burn for his death!”
She thrust out her left hand as she cast a spell, flames blazing around her fingers.
***