Dominion

NINETEEN

Being out on the street wearing jail issue was better than walking around town in that damned flowered gown; but it really wasn’t, when you came right down to it, a whole hell of a lot better. In the shadowed mouth of an alley, Hawk leaned against a dingy brick wall, considering things.

He’d had to wait around in his tiny VIP cell until nearly midnight, when things at headquarters started to get really busy, as he’d surmised they would. As soon as that happened, surveillance necessarily slackened. He had remembered to turn the lock in the cell door open before he left, which he thought would perhaps make his disappearance at least a little less memorable. There was still going to be trouble for the guards in charge of seeing to it that cell doors stayed locked, but Hawk wasn’t running any charitable organization. He hadn’t asked anyone to arrest him in the first place.

He considered that he’d managed his departure very smoothly, for a magician long out of practice. He’d appeared on the street not many blocks from headquarters, got his bearings at once—Chicago was an easy city to do that in, with its logical grid of street numbers—and then he’d started walking, heading without any conscious plan back toward his old stamping grounds on Skid Row.

If any of the passersby he encountered on the first leg of his hike had recognized his clothing as jail issue, they weren’t about to make an issue of it. HaHaa, A wise decision on their part.

He couldn’t help noticing as he began to walk that physical movement was a lot easier for him now than it had been a few days ago, before Carados picked him up. Involuntary defensive powers, long dormant, had been mobilized. It would seem that Carados had actually done him a favor. He paused before a darkened plate glass window, to look at himself in the half-mirror inside its steel grill. Yes, his figure was straighter than it had been for some time—for a long time. His pants were zipped. Danger and abuse had served as tonics. It puzzled him that he had been so terrified a few days ago, cowering away from the hunters of helpless old men. He didn’t have to take that kind of crap. Not from the likes of them, at least.

No good answer suggested itself. Next question, obviously: Where did he go from here? But he didn’t want to try to think that through just now.

Hawk had walked on until he’d covered half a mile, then ducked into the mouth of this alley, as if to take a leak. Actually he just wanted to be able to close his eyes and concentrate for a minute or so. If he couldn’t answer questions at least maybe he could do something about his shirt. He figured that the shirt was the clothing item most conspicuously identifiable as jail issue; the shoes were plain, the pants could be any new workpants of medium blue.

He spent a couple of minutes with eyes closed, leaning against the dirty brick wall, mumbling. After a couple of tries (this kind of thing had never been his specialty) Hawk’s plain blue jail shirt was a muddy brown, crisscrossed by an ugly pattern of thin pink stripes. Not quite what he’d been aiming for. But, come to think of it, just the kind of inelegance that would fit in perfectly on Skid Row.

Hawk left the alley and moved again along the midnight street, borne quickly by his new, healthy walk. The shirt was all right. Actually he felt a little proud of it; and anyway it felt good just to have done something again. Maybe later, if he felt like it, he could work on the colors a little more. Meanwhile…

Meanwhile what was he going to do now? He had been putting off making a conscious decision, but the Street, Skid Row, was drawing near. It appeared that by default he was going back to his old haunts, but what was he going to do when he got there?

…anyway if he made the shirt look too good, somebody would try to roll him, no, mug him was the proper word, now that he was standing up on his two feet again. By bloody hell, he wished they’d try. He wished he had that vampire, the stalking butcher, in front of him for just five seconds now. He wished he had that smirking, contemptuous kidnapper, Carados.

Now if he were to go and collect Carados somehow, and deliver him to the cops, that would get the cops off his own tail. But Hawk didn’t really want to go after Carados, because…

Because if he did…

Because, because. He just got a train of thought going, starting to make sense, and then it stalled. Every time. There had to be, there had to be, a damned good reason.

He had the feeling that his life was being steered, controlled, by some will not his own, to some hostile purpose. It was not a good feeling to have.

At one o’clock in the morning, with his mental state increasingly perturbed, the man who now called himself Hawk (and how long would that name be usable?) was leaning against a streetlight not two blocks from where Carados had picked him up. He craved wine, there was no doubt of that. But somehow while he was off Skid Row the craving, like so much else, had altered. The animal urge to drunken oblivion had become entangled with older and nobler things—wine as symbol of elegance, wine as rare privilege, wine as a way to spiritual (no pun intended here) enjoyment.

And even as Hawk thought of wine, and of how he might provide himself with some, he was gazing at a half-dead wino stretched in the gutter just a few paces away, and he knew in his heart without having to argue the point with himself that there was no way in the goddam world he was ever going back to being that. God, how could he ever have—?

Just because, that’s why. Why he’d been condemned to spend most of his life lying in a gutter. A thousand years of gutter, just because. And he mustn’t ever try to find the underlying reason, because—

This because was hammering him to death, with every mental step he tried to take. He couldn’t move an inch now without colliding with it, and at the same time he knew he had to move. What made his situation all the more desperate was the fact that until this moment it had never come really clear to him what bad shape he was in.

Looking up into the starless city sky, Hawk gasped a few deep breaths. He clung fiercely to the thought that he was making progress against… against whatever was oppressing him, whatever had kept him in the gutter for a millennium. At least he now understood that there was a fundamental question that cried out to be answered. And experience assured him that when something like this had a man in its grip, when a life was totally screwed up as his was, for no visible reason, then the invisible reason most likely involved…

It involved…

It had to do with…

He couldn’t make it. He could grunt and groan, struggle any way he liked, but he could not complete that simple thought. He was gasping, on the point of fainting, ready to kill someone for just one drink. But he wasn’t going to drink. So, if he couldn’t go after Carados, then how about the vampire? That would be fine, that would be fun. Already he had tentatively planned on bouncing the bloodsucker around from one century to another, as long as that game could be kept going; but that was more prank than serious punishment. And sooner or later the victim of the game was more likely than not to wind up back in present time. Where Hawk would be able to get at him in earnest… or, indeed, where he would be able to get at Hawk.

That thought was enough to somewhat curb Hawk’s yearning for a drink. Not that the prospect inspired him with anything like the terror it would have a few days ago; Hawk no longer felt particularly afraid of anyone or anything. Still the probability of being confronted by an angry vampire, one as tough and smart as that old one had been, tended to clear the mind and concentrate the attention.

Before he could really concentrate, though, there were other nagging questions to be thought about. Example: That young cop, hopelessly mundane if anyone ever was, had asked Hawk if the castle contained a sword. Imagine a question like that, just asked out of the blue. Where would a mundane young Chicagoan have got hold of that idea?

Until now, Hawk had managed to keep himself from thinking about the Sword at all. It wasn’t forbidden him to do so, it was just too painful, it was rooted in memories that he didn’t dare stir up for fear of the anguish they would inflict upon him. But it was possible to think about the Sword, at least as an alternative to that subject about which he could not think at all.

And once he had allowed himself to start to think about the Sword, why then he knew right away just where it had to be, at least its general location. It was right in Nimue’s way, interfering with whatever it was that she was offering blood sacrifices to accomplish.

In his mind’s eye, now probing his own dark future to the extent that he was able, Hawk could see himself beginning to be surrounded by swords. From them flowed danger, and breathtaking opportunity too, possibilities not quite visible as yet…

First a small plastic blade, held in the unknowing fingers of Carados, juxtaposed unwittingly with the clear liquid held up inside a vodka glass, so that the hilt seemed to project above the surface ready to be grasped. By one who dared… and then the other Sword, the great iron cross-hilt held up in a dream, throbbing out of concealment with a beneficence of power…

Swords… and there were pentagrams too in the future to weigh upon him. There for a long, long time he’d been sure that all the business of magic was in the past for him. But it was not to be.

Tears gathered in his eyes, spilled slowly into the upper furrows of his aged cheeks. Lord God, Lord God, so this world is not yet through with me. But I am crippled, have been crippled for a thousand years. Bound and deformed by… some… great…

Enchantment.

There. His uglified new shirt was soaked with sweat, and he was gasping. But he’d got that far, at last, at least. Now weariness and awe were transmuting slowly to fresh rage. The damned bloodsucker must be even older than he looked. He was the enemy. It was all his fault from the beginning.