It was the increasingly familiar mix of despair and exultation that had him in its grip. For one so long used to unfeeling, mastering it had come slowly, learning to hold and focus the energies so that they poured into his mind and brain. He had two, three days of sleeplessness coming, a brilliant flash of utter self-absorption, when he released that energy. Luther also knew he had to hold it for longer than usual, and that irked him.
He had approached disposing of the elf with the same regret and determination as always. Knowing the bad karma this would earn him, he saw it as his own sacrifice when he fastened himself to the screaming body and leeched the life out of it, the hot blood pouring over his face and hands, the last agonies of his victim reverberating around the mausoleum in an echo that would be detectable forever. Luther knew the masking wouldn't last very much longer.
There had simply been too much blood and death here, too many pairs of eyes widening in the realization of a fate worse than death, too much sheer terror and horror for the magical background count not to be building and building beyond even his ability to mask it. Time grew short now. But when the Ascension comes, he thought, I will be a hero to my people. My sacrifice will not have been in vain.
He only half-heard Martin's words by the time he got to the east wing. Everything was here; all the samples he needed. He was desperate to begin his work, but he turned away from them, asking where the other material was.
Martin pointed to the flickering screen. His pawn had done well for him. Two locals, or some wretches drawn from further afield in Bavaria or across the border. A Moroccan, he judged, probably a Marseillais. Martin had done well to use that wretched and forlorn city for the victims he needed; even the Chinese might have come from there. The fate of these victims would be quite different from that of others brought here before them. A dozen of them stood, shackled, helplessly awaiting their fate.
"I could attend to it, Your Grace," Martin offered. "I can bring you the results."
"No," Luther said slowly. "I will be concentrating too strongly to see them then. We should do this together, Martin."
"Thank you, Your Grace. It is an honor," Martin said, feeling both humble and proud at the same moment.
"It is indeed. Poems and songs will be written in honor of this," Luther said, his sense of humor breaking through the blood-filled fire in his head. "Your name will be part of that."
Failing to see through the mockery, Martin took the leather case and began to fill it with some of the samples.
Luther wiped the last clot of blood from the side of his mouth and waited.
15
"It was so obvious," Michael lamented. "I was just daydreaming and it came to me. I was thinking about the one woman on the list. I just thought, hey, if all the non-mages were women, that would even up the numbers between the sexes well, almost which would be neat. Tidy."
"I don't entirely follow," Serrin admitted.
"I like things tidy. I believe the world is basically tidy, if only you can see it properly. But of course this isn't the time to discuss metaphysics." Michael was speaking so quickly that Serrin was glad the thread of his argument got lost now and again. It made it easier to pick up what mattered. But he was still waiting for the conclusion.
'Then it came to me. They're almost all men, right?"
"So?" Serrin waited.
"Then I realized these others haven't been kidnapped, but their spouses have been. They're all married. Oh, that applied to the woman too; her husband was taken eleven months ago. That's the coding digit; it's present for every case where the spouse has been kidnapped. So! Ridiculously simple. Just a decoy. One would hardly think it worth the bother, except for the fact that such a simple thing is so easy to overlook. It worked with me, after all."
"Fine. That links them together in one way. But why these people?" Serrin asked.
"Oh, that's something else. The kidnapped people aren't mages, so that doesn't do it. Indeed, we've even got a mage whose wife has been kidnapped and he hasn't been," Michael continued.
"Great. That sounds mystifying," Serrin said.
"Right. Now, let's look at this as a time series. It goes,
almost linearly, from non-elven non-mages to non-elven mages to elven mages. That tells me that these people have something else in common which must relate to this progression. Something which is more common in elf mages than in human ones, and least common of all in ordinary folks. Maybe."
"So why not go right to the best source of it? Why not go straight to the elf mages?"
"Yes, that's the interesting part. There are two possible explanations for that," Michael said smugly.
"One is that mages are too visible," he went on. "Pick off a dental technician and no one's going to go ape. Pick off a mage and people get interested. Too interested, maybe. I mean, look at us for a start." "Makes sense so far," Serrin agreed. "But that wouldn't explain why human mages go before the elves. No, we need something else for that. The answer's a negative, of course." "Don't speak in riddles," Serrin pleaded. "He means that there aren't any ordinary elves on the list," Tom said suddenly. "I seen it too."
Serrin stared at the troll. He still wasn't moving, and Serrin had taken him to be in some world of his own.
"No, don't worry. He hasn't had a vision or anything," Michael said excitedly, eager to continue with his remorseless dissection. "He means that when I showed him and explained it, it felt right to him. Now you've got my head and his heart saying we've got the answer. Can't argue with that."
"Would you mind explaining it to me, then?" Serrin asked grumpily.
"Sure. There are no ordinary elves. Whoever is conducting the kidnappings avoids taking elves. And there are no other metahumans involved. So we're dealing with something rare, something unknown outside of humanity and elves. And it's rare as hell. Otherwise, we wouldn't be going halfway round the world with this list."
"What is it? Do you know?" Serrin asked him, certain: hat Michael was about to regale him with the answer.
"It's an extremely rare allele of a blood grouping. Very " are classification. Forget OAB and Rhesus and all that
stuff. This is a one in a billion job. Well, not quite, but almost. Now, it so happens that this allele is tucked away on a chromosome segment very close to one of the major gene foci implicated in metatyping. The medical evidence suggests that the allele is incompatible with non-elven metatypes. Trolls, dwarfs, orks can't be born with it. There's a lethality effect. The fetus won't go to term.
"Every single person on this list has the RA-17 allelic form. Including you. The one unknown is Shakala. There is no medical data for him. Oh, and the Squeeze case. No data there, of course."
"So how could his kidnappers know?" The elf was beginning to take it all in, but very slowly.
"That, dear boy, is what could take us right to them. They couldn't have got the data from any available database. They must have had some direct contact. Once we know what that was, we've got a straight line to them."
"But what if they had a decker as good as you? Couldn't they have gotten the information then?" Serrin asked, his head still trying to keep up with Michael's brainstorms.
"Wouldn't do them any good. Look; Shakala has got to have the RA-17 allele. That's an obvious inference, right? All the others on the list do. But that information isn't on any available database. Hence no decker could have found it originally, when our kidnappers were building up their list of targets. It must have come from some direct source, some archive, hard copy maybe." The Englishman almost seemed to turn up his nose at the idea, as if it was a direct insult to the community of deckers generally and himself in particular.
"There is something else. Given that our kidnapper avoids elves, I'd guess that he is an elf. I don't doubt that the people abducted have been killed. He's squeamish about killing those of his own race. They're the option of last choice. The fact, by the way, that there are no ordinary elves is explained quite simply. There are no known cases of any elf with the RA-17 allele not having magical ability, not according to the medical sources I've been able to get at so far. It's postulated that RA-17 greatly increases the probability of being magically active. It fits