“To either party!”
The fat little vamp blinked. He did not appear to be used to hearing that tone from the Senate’s senior diplomat. “One moment,” he said, and started stabbing about with the pen again.
I risked another glance at the cabinets.
They were ugly old things, steel gray and slightly beat up along the bottom where too many feet had closed them too hard. They were the sort of catchall pieces that could be found in any office—well, any office that didn’t care about impressing clients. Hell, they could have been found in plenty of garages, holding old paint cans and half-used bottles of motor oil.
But that wasn’t what they were holding at the moment.
I knew that because I’d raided them once.
At least, I was pretty sure I had. They looked the same, but the old ones had been at the Senate’s former headquarters. Which was currently little more than a scorch mark on the desert due to having been an early casualty of the war. And considering how that had gone down, I hadn’t expected anybody to have waited around to rescue some old metal cabinets.
But then, they hadn’t had to wait, had they? They hadn’t had to empty and then repack them like a human, because they weren’t human. All a vamp had to do was snatch one onto his shoulder and walk off with it, which made packing in a hurry a whole lot easier, didn’t it?
And left me with a dilemma.
Because, if they were the same ones, they contained stuff the Senate had been squirrelling away for centuries. Like potent weapons they’d confiscated from other people so they could use them themselves. And ancient relics with powers they thought might come in useful someday. And old enemies trapped in magical snares . . .
And a potion called the Tears of Apollo.
“Hm, it’s all very vague,” the little vamp was saying. “A good deal about altering the course of fate . . . traveling in spirit form throughout the Nine Worlds . . . seems to have originated with the Vanir, the old Norse fertility gods. They taught it to the Æsir, the gods of battle, who eventually communicated it to the Scandinavian covens . . .”
“Can it be removed?” Mircea asked.
“Oh, certainly. The caster would merely have to—”
“Not by the caster. By one of the other people involved in the spell.”
“Oh, well, then. No.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mircea said mildly, but the vamp flushed.
“I simply meant—that is to say—well, you did ask about dangers earlier—”
“And?”
“And, well, that is the main one. In fact, it is the only one, at least that I can find so far. I can check the Edda, and of course I will, although frankly it’s not likely to be very useful in this case. The Vanir weren’t well liked, you know, by the Christian scholars who wrote most of the accounts, long after the fact, of the old Norse religion. The Æsir were the strong, manly, warlike types that the scholars’ own culture valued. But the Vanir . . . well, their association with fertility was considered a bit . . . effeminate . . . and therefore their magic—of which seiðr was a prominent part—is not well documented. It was considered somewhat beyond the pale, if you follow me.”
“No.”
The vamp blinked. “No?”
“No.”
“I—well, that is to say, I thought I was being rather plain—”
“You were mistaken.”
“I—I merely meant—that is to say—”
“For Christ’s sake, man!” Marlowe exploded. “Stop saying ‘that is to say’ and just say it!”
“Well, I’m trying to!” The little guy had more backbone than I’d expected. “I am trying to point out that seiðr wasn’t named after a snare for nothing! It is said that the gods would establish a link with someone they didn’t like, and then . . . hang up the phone. So to speak. And leave that person forever in a dream world, all alone, to eventually wither away from starvation, thirst, or madness . . .” He trailed off.
“The gods were a lot of fun,” I said.
Mircea ignored that, but his lips tightened. “But that is not the case here,” he pointed out. “No one has ‘hung up’ anything. That is the problem.”