It was too low, though, and the great blades slashed the ground, sending up sparks as the metal hit the roadway’s stone surface. One of the chasing sedans was caught by the whirling scimitars, which sliced off the car’s nose and sent the helichopper-copter spinning over a harvested corn field where it crashed, tail-first, and exploded so powerfully that it almost drove Nerak’s car into a ditch.
Kansas had been enjoyable.
Nerak slipped a fresh clip into the 9mm and returned the weapon to his waistband, then grinned and spat a mouthful of foul brown juice out the window. He wasn’t surprised to find the house he was seeking had been razed to the ground: Myrna had known, so Nerak learned of the disaster moments after taking the young woman’s soul. But it wasn’t the house he was interested in; he got out and strode confidently across the vacant lot, casting a magic net aloft to search for the stone. He was a few paces across the level expanse of frozen ground that had been Steven and Mark’s front porch before he saw footprints in the snow.
Nerak bent to touch a print. Splaying Myrna’s fingers, he murmured, ‘You have been here this morning, Steven Taylor.’ He closed the woman’s eyes and reached out again for the stone key. Nothing. It was gone.
‘Where is he?’ he asked Myrna, but she was dead now and didn’t respond – no matter, the Eldarni dictator knew everything she had ever known. He concentrated for a moment, then smiled. ‘The city dump. Won’t that be lovely this morning?’ He shook his head, a gesture that was faintly reminiscent of Myrna. For a minute he considered incinerating the rest of Idaho Springs, sending a tidal wave of fire rolling from peak to peak across the canyon. That would teach the meddling foreigner a lesson.
‘Anyone you love live here, Steven Taylor?’ Nerak spat a stream of tobacco juice at a grey squirrel that had wandered too close and added, No… no need. I know where you’ve gone.’
Instead of returning to Mantegna’s battered car, Nerak sat down, cross-legged, on the snow, facing south through Clear Creek Canyon. He pulled out the pistol and placed it at his side. ‘Are you up there, my young sorcerer? Digging in the mud and shit for my keystone? Gilmour is far away, Steven, and you will spend a very long time regretting this little journey.’ The dark prince closed his eyes and began searching the distant canyon.
The Idaho Springs City Dump was located south of town on Chicago Creek Road, a two-lane highway that wound its leisurely course through the Arapahoe National Forest towards Juniper Pass and the Mt Evans Wilderness. Steven looked up at Devil’s Nose on his left and Alps Mountain on his right, feeling intimidated, as though he were driving beneath the twin shoulder blades of a sleeping god.
He parked Howard’s Thunderbird beside a chain-link fence with a large green sign on the locked gate reading:
City of Idaho Springs Landfill and Recycle Facility
Hours of operation: Tues. – Thurs. 6 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Sat. amp; Sun. 6 a.m. – 12 noon.
Or by Appointment
A phone number at the bottom had the words leave message after it in small block capitals crookedly affixed, the kind often stuck onto mailboxes.
Steven looked around to make sure he was alone, then leaped as high as he could and grabbed the chain-link fence. He hung there for a moment, then pulled himself up and over, landing hard on the other side. Huffing from the exertion, he muttered, ‘Man, you need to get back into shape!’ He brushed the snow off his legs and started up the unmade road to the landfill site, checking signposted turnings to the right and left: Plastic Recyclables, Aluminium Recyclables and Paper Recyclables respectively. As he jogged past Appliances And Used Tyres he saw a rickety overhead arch bearing the words Idaho Springs City Dump – obviously erected in less politically correct times, he grinned to himself.
He stepped over a knee-high chain that ran across the road and heard the thin wail of a siren echoing up the canyon. ‘God, I hope I’m right,’ he said under his breath. The dump stretched out before him: a mountainous landscape in miniature. The rolling hills of rubbish might have looked tiny next to the Rockies that towered overhead, but Steven felt his heart sink: the tapestry – and Lessek’s key, of course – could be anywhere… and there was a hell of a lot of anywhere to search.
He needed a strategy. Mel Fisher’s discovery of the treasure ship Atocha in the 1970s had fascinated him: Fisher had used a grid to map the ocean floor around the wreck… the mathematician in Steven took over and he altered his perspective, looking at the garbage hills as a topographical calculus problem.
There were three hummocks in the foreground about thirty feet shorter than the six or seven hills flanking them. This dump had served Idaho Springs for as long as he could remember, and the fact that there were only ten or eleven hills in the entire valley meant either the landfill was much deeper than it looked, or it took the city a long time to generate a two-hundred-foot-high mountain of trash. But whichever assumption was true, the end result was the same: something dumped as recently as October would be close by.
‘Close by is, of course, entirely relative,’ he grumbled. ‘I bet everything else since October is sitting on top of my house right now and I’m about to spend the better part of the next five years digging around in here looking for a rock. And I didn’t even have the sense to steal a shovel. Am I quite mad? There has to be a better way.’
Nothing immediately sprang to mind so he decided to root around until he found some dates: franked letters, maybe, or old utility bills. Using those as a guide, he could chart a rudimentary map through the mountains based on the passage of time. If he ignored areas where the rubbish came from before October 15, or after the previous week, he hoped to zero in on the final resting place of his and Mark’s charred possessions.
‘Let’s get going!’ Steven said briskly. He took a few steps towards the hill on his left when his toe caught on something solid beneath the snow and he cursed and flailed his arms in a desperate effort to regain his balance. ‘Speed bumps?’ he yelled, ‘Why the hell do we need speed bumps at the damned-’ As his foot landed he felt a shock of pain fire through his leg and he tumbled to the ground. Ah, shit, my knee,’ he groaned, and rolled onto his back, clutching it with both hands.
Anticipating the dull throb of soft tissue damage, he sat up and gingerly straightened his right leg, the one that had nearly been bitten off by the injured grettan in the Blackstone Mountains south of Meyers’ Vale. But though he expected another blast of pain, Steven found to his surprise that he was able to flex and extend his leg with no problem.
‘Huh,’ he said, his voice bright with relief, ‘I must have come down on it crooked or something.’ He stood up carefully, putting a little weight through the leg until he was certain there were no injuries. ‘Thank God! I’d be flat-out screwed, trapped here with a blown knee.’
Below, the siren’s cry came again, and as Steven stepped over the disfigured snow angel he had made another explosion lanced through his leg, spilling him to the ground once more. ‘What the hell is this?’ he shouted up towards Alps Mountain. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ He clutched at his knee with one hand and rolled into a sitting position. Grimacing, he started to straighten the leg – and once again, it was as if nothing had happened. Swearing, he took off his gloves and stuffed them in a pocket, then carefully rolled his trouser leg above the knee so he could see if it had swelled up – maybe he had torn a ligament or something and the cold was numbing it.
‘I’ll bet it was coming over that rutting fence,’ he said, not noticing the Eldarni profanity. ‘Just my bloody luck.’ But the leg looked perfectly healthy. Steven, at a loss, put his clothes to rights and heaved himself back on his feet. He tested the leg again, gingerly at first, then stamping both feet hard, but it felt fine.