I helped Riordan get Nora settled in the guest bedroom.
It didn’t show, but I knew my husband well enough to tell that he was really upset. I didn’t know how long he had been friends with Nora Chandler, but it was a long time. Twenty-five years? Thirty? Given how a Shadowmorph slowed aging, it was hard to tell, and I had never asked.
“She’ll be fine,” I said, looking at Nora’s face. She didn’t look fine. The dark brown of her skin now it had an ashy, gray undertone, and her eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into her skull. “She’s too stubborn to die. She’ll want to wake up and make a smartass remark and call me a tigress or something.”
“We’ll see,” said Riordan. He looked at the wound in her stomach. It was filled with swirling darkness as the Shadowmorph labored to heal her. “But her Shadowmorph will be ravenous when she wakes up, and she might lose her self-control to it…”
“If that happens, I’ll zap her with a lightning globe,” I said. “Just enough to shock her nervous system. Then you can tie her up or dunk her head in the bathtub or something until she gets her wits back.”
Riordan stared at me for a second and then nodded, some of the tension easing around his eyes. “Thank you. That’s a good idea.”
I knew why he was so afraid. The woman he had been with before me had been a Shadow Hunter, and she had lost control of the impulses of her Shadowmorph and had become an increasingly insane serial killer. Riordan had wound up killing her, which had to have been a hideous experience.
He was afraid he would have to do it again with Nora.
“Well, it’s only fair,” I said. I wanted to distract Riordan from his fears, and we had to decide what to do next anyway. “I mean, I brought an unconscious dragon and her retainers to your condo without asking first. It’s only fair that I help you with your friend.”
Riordan snorted. “Technically, it’s our condo.”
“Yeah, but if we’re gonna have houseguests, seems like I should mention it to you first,” I said. “Just to be polite and all.”
“That goes for me as well. We should decide what to do next,” said Riordan.
I nodded. “We can include Helen and Shawn on that.”
Riordan frowned. “Can we trust them?”
“To a point, I think,” I said. “They’re both devoted to Della and will do whatever she tells them. They won’t leave until she wakes up.”
“If she wakes up,” said Riordan.
“That burn on her shoulder has already disappeared,” I said. “I think dragons can heal a lot faster than humans or Elves. If we wait long enough, she should wake up.”
“Maybe she knows what’s going on,” said Riordan.
“I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on except Max Sarkany and the guy with the blaster,” I said. “And Malthraxivorn is dead in the basement of the John Doe Hospital, and the guy with the blaster isn’t going to answer any questions.” I ran a hand through my hair. “But maybe between us, we can figure it out.”
Riordan nodded, and we walked to the living room. Helen still sat at the end of the couch, watching her unconscious mistress. Shawn stood guard over them both.
“Any change?” I said.
Helen hesitated. “The wound on her shoulder is gone, and her breathing and pulse are better. I think she’s recovering.”
“Thank you for your assistance, both of you,” said Shawn, looking from me to Riordan. “That assassin would have killed our mistress without your intervention.”
“I think we’re all in the same boat here,” said Riordan. “That gunman tried to kill your mistress, and he almost killed my friend and me. I think we had better pool our information. We might be able to figure out where this gunman is hiding and why he tried to kill Delaxsicoria.”
“And why he killed Malthraxivorn,” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure he’s the one who killed Malthraxivorn.”
“All right,” said Riordan. “You go first.”
I told him about my investigation into Sarkany’s death, how Della had found me, and how we had driven to Malthraxivorn’s warehouse together. Riordan told me how he and Nora had backtracked Paul Ricci’s copy of the Summoning Codex, and how the man who called himself Neil had tried to kill them outside of Malthraxivorn’s building.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “Malthraxivorn shipped a bunch of stuff from Russia. Specifically, five crates from Chel…Cheer…”
“Chelyabinsk Oblast,” said Riordan.
“Yeah, there,” I said. “These five crates apparently have something to do with Catalyst Corporation, an old business that the High Queen shut down a hundred and eighty years ago. These crates came with copies of the Summoning Codex. Someone, possibly Malthraxivorn himself or one of his employees, sold those copies to Anthony Watkins, who then sold one to Paul Ricci. Both of them got killed for it. Meanwhile, our friend Neil the Blaster Boy killed Malthraxivorn, and then followed Della to the warehouse and almost killed her.”
“Do you think he was there to kill Lady Delaxsicoria?” said Riordan. “Or was he guarding Malthraxivorn’s warehouse? He only opened fire when we approached.”
I thought it over. “He was probably there to kill Della. He didn’t talk at all when we approached. And I think he was smoking that cigarette so she wouldn't smell his machine parts from a distance. When you ran into him, I think he was guarding the warehouse. You said he only attacked when you mentioned you were investigating Max Sarkany’s death?” Riordan nodded. “I bet that was what set him off. If you had told him you were there to inspect the gas lines or something, maybe he wouldn’t have cared.”
Riordan sighed. “Hindsight is always clear.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I squeezed his arm. I looked at Shawn and Helen. “Do you guys have any idea why Neil went after Malthraxivorn and Delaxsicoria?”
“None,” said Shawn with a shake of his head. “If you had asked me if Lady Delaxsicoria had any enemies, I would have said she had rivals within the music business. But the worst they could do is make up false stories and leak them to the press. They wouldn’t be able to send an assassin with some sort of superweapon after her.” His eyes drifted to the blaster, which Riordan had set on one of the end tables. “I’ve never seen a weapon like that.”
“Neither have I,” said Riordan.
“We don’t know much about Lord Malthraxivorn’s business, sir,” said Helen. “We mostly attended to Lady Delaxsicoria’s concerns. All we know about Lord Malthraxivorn’s business is what our lady mentioned to us in casual conversation, or what we happened to overhear them discussing.”
“A man with a metal arm,” said Shawn, shaking his head. “Neither Lord Malthraxivorn nor Lady Delaxsicoria ever mentioned that.”
“A metal arm,” murmured Riordan. “Where have I heard that before?”
I blinked in surprise. “You’ve seen men with metal arms?”
“No,” said Riordan. “But I’ve read about them. Where was it?”
“Let’s find out,” I said. I walked to the dining room, retrieved my laptop, and synced it to the TV mounted on the wall. I sat down on the empty couch, opened a web browser, and for lack of anything better, I typed “man with metal arm” into the search engine. Text results and pictures came up, and one of the pictures caught my eye.
“What the hell?” I said.
The image showed a bald man with dark eyes wearing a black jumpsuit. Machine parts had been grafted onto the side of his face, including a red laser that pointed towards the camera. His right forearm had been replaced by some sort of cylindrical machine that looked like a combination of a manipulating claw and a multitool.
“Is that guy real?” I said. “He sort of looks like a cruder version of Blaster Boy…no, wait.” I read the caption. The picture was of a British actor who had lived before the Conquest. According to the caption text, he had starred on a TV show about a spaceship, and in a few episodes, he had played something called a cyborg.
“A…cyborg?” I said, trying to pronounce the word.
“That’s where I heard it before,” said Riordan. “Some science fiction books. A cyborg.”
“What the hell is a cyborg?” I said.
“It’s a contraction of two terms. Cybernetic organism,” said Riordan. “The idea was that a living person would have some of his organs or limbs replaced with superior machine versions. I don’t think it happened in real life, but it turned up a lot in some pre-Conquest fiction.”
I frowned. “But it’s not that big a deal. People replace body parts with machines all the times. James Marney has an artificial hip and an artificial knee. Half their neighbors have pacemakers.”
“I’ve got a steel plate in my skull,” said Shawn. I gave him a startled look. “Orc clipped my head with an axe when I was still a man-at-arms.”
“Real life gets exaggerated in movies,” said Riordan. “Fiction plays on people’s fears to create memorable villains. You’ve all seen movies. Every evil factory owner or Congressman somehow always turns out to be a Rebel saboteur who’s plotting a terrorist bombing.” Russell enjoyed thriller movies like that, so I had seen a lot of them. “In the last few decades before the Conquest, people were afraid of computers and technology, of how they would change society and the world. The fiction reflected that.”
It did make sense. I didn’t pay much attention to popular culture in general, but I had picked up some by osmosis. Generally, the bad guys in contemporary movies and TV shows were Rebels, violent criminals, elfophobic discontents, or orcish mercenaries, things people feared in real life. If the people of the pre-Conquest world had been afraid of computers when computers were still new, it made sense they would make up these cyborg monsters.
“Wait,” I said, reading more of the caption. “What the hell is science fiction?” I’d never heard the term before. “A soap opera about a bunch of scientists?”
“Not quite,” said Riordan. “It’s an extinct genre of fiction that was popular in the last century before the Conquest. It was stories about the future, about how technology would change people’s lives. Stories about building a spaceship and flying it to Mars, that kind of thing.”
I frowned. “Why the hell would you want to build a spaceship and fly it to Mars? If you go to the Shadowlands, you can walk to Mars in a couple of hours.” Which Riordan and I had done a few months ago. Though we had almost gotten killed and eaten several times during the process. And if you didn’t open a rift way in the proper place to access the subterranean azatothi ruins, you would appear on the Martian surface, where you would promptly asphyxiate from the lack of air.
“Most people didn't know about the Shadowlands back then. About forty-five years before the Conquest, the US government built a spacecraft and landed several men on the moon,” said Riordan.
I blinked. “Seriously? Why bother?”
Riordan shrugged. “Why did the man climb the mountain? Because it was there. And the US government was in competition with the Soviets at the time.”
I shook my head, and a sudden wave of affection went through me. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“I had a lot of time to read when I was a man-at-arms and in the Wizard’s Legion,” said Riordan.
“So did I when I was a soldier. But what does science fiction have to do with the man who killed Lord Malthraxivorn?” said Shawn. “You think this ‘Neil’ person is a cyborg?”
“I do,” said Riordan.
“But I thought cyborgs were fictional,” I said.
Riordan nodded towards the image of the bald actor on the TV screen. “But science fiction inspired a lot of technological advancements in the last century before the Conquest. Touchscreen technology didn’t really come along until the final decade before the Conquest, but that TV show helped inspire some of the designers and scientists who worked on it.”
“So you think Neil is a cyborg?” I said.
“Or something like it,” said Riordan. “Based on what you said, his arm is likely a cybernetic prosthesis. That shield he can create isn’t magic, but some kind of magnetic forcefield. You, Mr. Brewer, emptied an entire clip into his back.”
Shawn nodded. “I didn’t miss once. Put over a dozen shots into his back, and he ran off like it was nothing.”
“I kicked him in the stomach, and it was like kicking a steel plate,” said Riordan. “I think he must have armor beneath his skin, or his bones have been hardened and strengthened somehow.”
I grunted. “Then Lord Malthraxivorn…found this guy, turned him into a cyborg?”
“No,” said Riordan. “I think Neil was already a cyborg when Malthraxivorn found him. You said that Catalyst Corporation was involved in medical technology?”
“That’s right,” said Helen. “I looked it up for Lady Delaxsicoria. They were founded in Conquest Year 42 and disbanded by the High Queen’s direct order in 121 for crimes against humanity.”
“Medical technology?” I said. “These Catalyst people turned Neil into a cyborg?”
“That seems probable,” said Riordan. “I wonder if Catalyst Corporation went too far in their medical experiments and created cyborgs, and maybe those blaster weapons. That would have been too much for the High Queen, and she would have shut them down. Or maybe Catalyst was actively planning to overthrow the High Queen and the Elven nobles.”
Helen frowned. “But Catalyst was shut down in Conquest Year 121. Even if Neil was turned into one of these cyborg things in that year, he would be at least two centuries old by now.”
“True,” said Riordan. “But there are ways that magic can extend life, though they’re not at all pleasant.” I started to think of the Eternity Crucible and shoved that idea out of my head. “Technology can extend life, too – antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs, transplants, all manner of techniques. Maybe Catalyst Corporation figured out a more advanced method.” He grimaced and looked at the image of the bald actor. “I wish there was a way to find out more about Catalyst Corporation, but if there’s not much about the company in the online encyclopedia, there won’t be much about it in many other publicly available records.”
“I might have a way,” I said, my fingers closing around the authentication key in my pocket. “I’ve got access to UNICORN.”
“Unicorn?” said Helen. “Like, a horse thing with a horn?”
“No,” said Riordan. “The Homeland Security database.” He looked at Shawn and Helen. “Best keep anything you learn here to yourself. Homeland Security isn’t fond of anyone outside their department having access to that database.”
“We will not betray our lady’s secrets,” said Helen.
“Smart,” I said. “Let’s see what Homeland Security can tell us about Catalyst.”
I accessed the UNICORN web page and logged in using the credentials and the authentication token Exeter had given me. The page ground away for a moment, and then a stern warning appeared, admonishing that improper use of UNICORN information incurred severe criminal penalties. I dismissed the warning text box and spent a minute or two familiarizing myself with the interface. It was simple enough – for all that Homeland Security had spent on this thing, it had a standard database interface, one I had seen many times before.
Then I entered a query for any and all information relating to Catalyst Corporation.
A lot of results met my search, and I scrolled through them as Riordan, Shawn, and Helen watched. The initial results matched what I had learned already. Catalyst Corporation had been founded forty-one years after the Conquest and had been dissolved eighty years later. Their focus had been medical technology and research.
Then the results got more interesting.
Catalyst had been an international corporation. Generally, the High Queen and the Elven nobles did not allow too many international corporations to exist, since they could become too powerful and too influential to control. But Catalyst Corporation had conducted business in nearly every country on the planet. Their annual revenues had been enormous, especially in the last few decades before their dissolution, and the corporation had held a vast number of patents for medical devices.
Then in Conquest Year 121, it had all fallen apart.
Arrest warrants had been issued for the CEO, the board of directors, and most of the high-level managers. There was a long list of Catalyst facilities that had been seized, and any technology found there had been confiscated. Most of Catalyst’s upper management had been executed, though it seemed like some of them had disappeared. Maybe they had seen the writing on the wall and had fled, buying new identities elsewhere.
“I’m not sure I’m reading this correctly,” said Helen, frowning at the TV, “but aren’t there a lot of sections missing?”
“You’re not wrong,” I said. “Big parts of all the reports have been redacted. You’d need a higher level of access to see the redacted portions. It’s probably restricted to the Inquisition.”
“Go back to that list of closed Catalyst facilities,” said Riordan. I complied, and he scanned the list. “Do you know what I’m not seeing?”
I looked over the list. “No mention of a facility in Chelyabinsk Oblast?”
“That’s right,” said Riordan. “We can hazard a theory. Catalyst Corporation was huge. Millions of employees worldwide and trillions of dollars in assets and technology. When the High Queen destroyed them, something might have fallen through the cracks. Maybe the Chelyabinsk facility was secret, or everyone who knew about it was killed during the crackdown.”
“Aw, geez.” I rubbed my face. This sounded a lot like how the Sky Hammer nuclear weapon had been forgotten until Nicholas Connor had dug its location out of the dust of the past. “Any stuff in this facility was forgotten until Max Sarkany found it.”
Shawn frowned. “You are saying that Lord Malthraxivorn was disloyal to the High Queen?”
“It is within the realm of possibility,” said Riordan, “but I doubt it. Malthraxivorn appreciated Russian art, so I think he spent a lot of time searching the Russian Imperium for artwork and cultural relics. One of his treasure hunters must have found the Chelyabinsk base and sold its contents to him. I suspect that Malthraxivorn didn’t fully realize what he had found. He and Delaxsicoria came to Earth thirty or forty years after Catalyst Corporation was destroyed. Maybe he thought to sell the technology to the High Queen, or to give it to her in exchange for trade concessions or favors.”
“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. But Ricci and Watkins got their copies of the Summoning Codex from Dragon Imports. Why would a medical technology company have copies of the Summoning Codex sitting around their base?”
Riordan shrugged. “I don’t know.” God, he really was tall, which was especially noticeable since I was sitting and he was standing. “But you remember those automated summoning circles we saw?”
I shuddered. “Yeah.” In the Last Judge Mountain base, a black ops division of the US government had built automated summoning circles to pull creatures from the Shadowlands. The end result was that three hundred years after the Conquest, Last Judge had been crawling with anthrophages and wraithwolves and worse things.
“Maybe that was why Catalyst Corporation was shut down,” said Riordan. “Maybe they were working on ways to combine their medical technology with Shadowlands creatures.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s just what the world needs. More scientists doing dumbass things because it seems like a good idea.”
“The High Queen must have agreed with you,” said Riordan, “which is why she shut down Catalyst Corporation.”
“What do we do about it?” I said.
“We find Neil and make him talk,” said Riordan.
“Finding him shouldn’t be hard,” I said. “He was guarding Malthraxivorn’s warehouse. If we try to break in again, he’ll probably show up and start shooting.”
“Mr. MacCormac took his blaster,” said Helen.
“I bet he has more than one,” I said. “Probably a whole crate of the damn things.”
“Neil said he was acting under orders,” said Riordan. “I think someone realized what Malthraxivorn had found and took control of Neil. They sent him after both Malthraxivorn and Delaxsicoria, and if we can find that person, we’ll have found Malthraxivorn’s true killer.”
“Okay,” I said, “but how the hell are we going to overpower Neil? I might’ve been able to take him in a one-on-one fight, but I could just as easily have lost. We…”
With a gasp, Della sat up, her green eyes wide with surprise and confusion.
***