“Wipe your feet when you come back,” Banjo yelled. He settled back against the recliner and focused on his newspaper again, a pen poised in his hand. “What’s a seven-letter word for ‘mask’?”
The potion took that moment to demonstrate its effect. I ran for the bathroom. After a half hour, I could see why Moke recommended waiting. I finally showered, the water sluicing trails of grime off me and onto the glass tile floor. Reaching up to turn the shower faucet off made me smile at the strangeness of standing in an oversize shower room. When I dressed, I went back into the living room to find Banjo asleep in front of the TV.
I shook him. “Sorry, got to go.”
He frowned and shifted himself out of the recliner. He led me past the bathroom where a long hall ran on for several dozen feet with a series of closed doors. I could smell Moke more strongly. Banjo didn’t go any farther than the second door, which led to a stark utility tunnel.
“So, what likely potential future did you see me in?” I asked to the back and top of his head.
He didn’t turn. “I get paid good money for answers like that.”
“But it’s good, right?”
He didn’t answer right away. We turned a corner and began ascending a flight of stone stairs. Every so often another hallway would branch off, or the stairs would split in different directions. “I wasn’t looking for your future. Moke asked me to do a little looky at C-Note. All I know is, with you dead, business didn’t look good for us. With you not dead, it looked fifty-fifty.”
Moke dealt drugs. He made money on other people’s needs, sure, but that didn’t always mean the same thing as trading on addictions. Whatever his dietary habits or his line of work, I wasn’t going to complain that keeping me alive kept him in business. I was willing to cut him some slack. This time, at least.
The great oxymoron of scrying is its unpredictability. Dwarves were good at it, though druids would debate that. Seeing into the future had complications and ramifications. You never see exactly what will happen, but what could happen, based on certain circumstances. The most you could do with a particular vision was to make a choice to try to set it in motion. But the moment you made that choice, new permutations arose that did not necessarily lead where you’d hoped. For that reason, it was nearly impossible for the scryer to see his or her own future. “What did you see?”
He shrugged over his shoulder. “It wasn’t about you. I only figured out you were the wild card at Carnage by what was going on around you. There was something odd about you in the visions. They slipped around you like they didn’t know you were there. Never saw anything like that.”
That gave me a cold feeling. Several months earlier, Briallen had done a scry and failed to see anything. A disaster almost occurred. Whatever was dancing around in my head liked to keep its secrets when it came to me and the future.
Banjo stopped on a wide landing and pointed up another long flight of stairs, dimly lit. “This is as far as I’m going. I have to start dinner; otherwise, he’s going to eat something that’s bad for him. Up there, through the door, and you’re out. It closes behind you. Make sure you’re on the other side when it does, ’cause I’m only priming it for one opening, and if I have to come let you out again, I ain’t gonna be happy.”
I nodded. Angry dwarves are almost as bad as angry trolls. “Thanks. I don’t plan on hanging around.”
He tapped his forehead and bowed. “Nice working with you.”
I went up, and he went down. At the top of the flight, I came to a standard wooden door that opened into a small vestibule. I could feel a warding spell snap into place as soon as the door closed behind me. I opened another door opposite the first and found myself standing under a flight of brownstone stairs, daylight streaming in from the sides. I stepped out from under the steps onto the sidewalk in front of a boarded-up building.
A prickling sensation swept over me. I held up my hand to see fine swirls of earth-toned particles radiating essence. I rubbed the back of my hand, feeling a resistance layered over the skin. I allowed my sensing abilities to open to check it out. I didn’t have much experience with stonework, but I recognized silica and calcium embedded into my hands. I pushed my body essence at it, and the layer moved. I pushed harder, and a fine layer of dust rippled up on my hands. Moke’s spell had wrapped me in stone at Carnage, and I could see how it worked now by attracting stone particles to bond with my own essence.
I recognized Fargo Street, just south of the Tangle. It wasn’t a long walk from my apartment. As I started up the street, Joe appeared so close to my face with his sword drawn that I jumped. His fierce look quickly turned to relief. “Where the hell were you?” he asked.
“I went underground. Literally.”
He narrowed his eyes and hovered in close. “Are you okay? You’ve got troll essence all over you.”
I nodded. “It’s a long story.”
He looked up and down the street like he expected a horde of Visigoths to charge at him. Seeing none, he sheathed the sword.
Where are you? Burst into my mind so sharply I stumbled. “Tell Meryl I’m fine, Joe. Is she okay?”
He paused a moment. “She says you owe her a new pair of Doc Martens.”
I smiled. Whether she realized it or not, I could tell she was concerned enough to be upset. “Tell her I said ‘deal.’ Where did you go last night, Joe?”
Joe looped and dipped around me as I walked. “I couldn’t get in. They had awesome security on that place. Tell me what happened.”
He circled around me as I gave him the rundown, peering at passersby with suspicion. His head whipped around to face me as I got to the end of the story. “You took a shower in a troll’s bathroom?”
“Uh, Joe, did you miss what I said? I met a drys, almost died, and found out C-Note is going to attack the Guild.”
He nodded. “No, I heard that. How bad did it smell?”
“What?”
“The bathroom.”
I decided not to argue. “Actually, it didn’t. It was very clean.”
He nodded in puzzled consideration. “Really. I wouldn’t’ve thought. Were there dead things?”
We turned onto D Street and made for Summer. “Not obvious, though I did smell something not very fresh as I was leaving.”
Murdock cruised up on the left and stopped. I cocked an eyebrow at Joe. “Just how many people did you do a sending to?”
He smiled. “Just two. We thought you were dead, you know. Meryl saw you fall before the whole building went down. That woman should go into demolition. You should have seen her tear into the place looking for you.”
I had a recollection of someone screaming when I fell. “She did?”
He nodded. “I had to force her to leave. I couldn’t see you at all. I thought you were dead, but she didn’t.”
I opened the car door and tossed a paperback novel and some newspapers off the passenger seat and sat down next to Murdock. Joe fluttered into the backseat and began rummaging through the mess. “Hi,” I said.
Murdock pulled away from the curb. “So you’re not dead,” he said.
“You either.”
He smirked. “I run fast.”
I smirked back. “I fall slow. What happened to you?”
“I ran to get Meryl, but we couldn’t get back up because the whole back of the building was in flames. Then it started falling apart.”
“Your essence got pretty strong in there,” I said.
He turned onto Summer Street. “I don’t feel any different.”
“Murdock, think about the other night at Yggy’s. Didn’t you notice how fast you were moving? Hell, you laid out an elf with one punch.”
He pursed his lips. “I guess I did. I still don’t feel any different.”