Not that this made them any less capable of killing.
“We’re going out tonight,” he advised, his eyes flicking left and right in a futile effort to find the other. “1 want you along.”
No response. Nothing moved. Findo Gask was tempted to have the whole house lighted from top to bottom just to expose this weasel to a clinical examination, but the effort would be pointless. The ur’droch was useful precisely because of what it was, and putting up with its shadowy presence was part of the price paid for its services.
Gask turned and walked back down the stairs and shut the door behind him. His mouth tightened as he stood in the upstairs hallway and ran his fingers over the cover of his book. Penny, Twitch, and the ur’droch. They were a strange and unpredictable bunch, but they were also what was needed.
He had learned that lesson in Salt Lake City.
-=O=-***-=O=-
The biggest of the five men he had hired bent close to the hotel room door, listening. The dimly lighted hallway was empty and silent at one o’clock in the morning. Findo Gask could hear the sound of his own breathing.
The man with his ear to the door straightened, shaking his head at the other two and Gask. No snores, no heavy breathing, no television, nothing.
Gask motioned impatiently. Go in. Get it over with.
The big man glanced at the two who flanked him, then down the hallway to where the other two were positioned, one each in front of the elevator and the stairway doors. Then he took out the Glock with the screwed-on silencer, stepped back a pace, and carefully inserted the key in the door.
Findo Cask’s search for John Ross had begun three weeks earlier with a summoning. He was in Chicago at the time, working the projects on the south side, stirring up dissension and playing on frustrations, an invisible presence in an intellectual and cultural wasteland where hope was a mirage and reality a hammer. The riots of summer had been his work, as had the tenement fires of fall. Winter brought freezing cold and no heat, good building blocks for the instigation of further carnage.
The summoning came to him in the middle of the night as a child’s wailing. It was inaudible to human ears, but perfectly clear to his. He knew at once what it was. He had been summoned before, and he recognized the feelings the call invoked. Hunger, blood-lust, fury, and a deep and pervasive emptiness. It was as if the Void were hollowing him out, dredging his insides, his heart and mind and soul, with a tiny metal scoop. The pain was excruciating, and he went quickly from his room in search of relief.
He found it in the basement of the abandoned project in which he had constructed his spider’s web of hate, a place where gangs carried out acts so unspeakable there were no names for them. The wail had its source in a dark corner where rats prowled and the detritus of expended human lives was discarded as casually as yesterday’s newspapers. There were no windows in the concrete-block walls, but gaps in the ceiling served the purpose. Streetlamps lent just enough illumination to the chamber for Findo Cask to pick his way to where the summoning originated.
The wail died to a rustle as he appeared, a voice speaking to him not from the shadows but from inside his head. The Void’s presence was unmistakable, cold, empty, and lifeless, a whisper of the passing of all things and the beginning of none.
Listen carefully, the rustle cautioned. A gypsy morph has been captured by a Knight of the Word at a place called Cannon Beach, Oregon. The Knight’s name is John Ross. He is a seasoned, dangerous veteran of our wars. He seeks to unlock the morph’s magic. He must be found and destroyed. Findo Cask. Findo Gask.
The words echoed and died into silence. The dark of the basement shifted and tightened about him as he waited for the rest.
Bring me the morph. Findo Gask. Findo Gask.
Something like an electric shock jolted him, lifting him clear of the floor, filling his vision with red fire, then retreating in a light as clear as glass. Within the light was a vision of John Ross and the gypsy morph on a day as hard and gray as slate. They emerged onto a beach from a cavern cut into the side of an embankment of stone and brush, the morph caught in a strange netting, all bright lights and speed, the Knight of the Word already beginning to check for the enemies he knew would be coming for him.