Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [37]
“I want you to check it out,” the client told her, ignoring her question as though she hadn’t even spoken. “Make sure nothing went wrong in the transport.”
“That wasn’t in our original contract,” she told him, leaning backward in preparation for a prolonged bargaining session. But instead, he reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a small brown paper-wrapped packet. He placed it on the desk surface, and pushed it across to her. Her eyes never leaving his, she reached forward and picked it up.
“Half the amount of our original fee, simply for ensuring that the magic within the stone remains inert.”
She gauged the weight of the packet, then nodded, tucking it into a pocket of translocation energy she used instead of a pocketbook. It took more maintenance than the convenience was worth, but it impressed the clients when you made things seemingly disappear into thin air. Anything sent there ended up in a safe in her own home, actually. She had been taken advantage of—read that as robbed by her own client—early in her career. Never again.
“All right. Let’s get this over with.” It was already evening, and there was no way she was going to stay overnight in the place, even assuming he would offer. She stood, waiting for him to lead her to wherever he had stored the object, but he reached into his desk again, and came up with a length of black cloth.
“You can’t be serious—” But she could see from his expression that he was. Deadly serious.
More control games. It didn’t matter—any half-trained mageling could retrace their own steps, blindfolded, drunk and half-asleep. But if it made him happy…
She submitted to the blindfold, but couldn’t help a shudder when the client took her arm to lead her out of the office. Now she knew why she had always resisted touching him. Her clients rarely came to her pure of heart or deed, but this man exuded some of the slimier emotions—avarice chief among them—so strongly that it was almost a tactile sensation. And underlying it all was a distasteful sense of something dark and ugly, like sludge in a sewer pipe, that made her deeply uncomfortable. Her client, she realized suddenly and for the first time, wasn’t what most psychologists would call stable. But freelancers couldn’t be choosers. Especially at these pay levels.
He led her down a hallway that echoed their footsteps off the hardwood flooring, then into an elevator that muted their steps with plush carpeting. There was a faint odor in the air which hadn’t been there before—orange? No, but definitely citrusy. Something familiar…wood oil. The walls of the elevator were wood, and had been polished recently. God, it was good to have money, wasn’t it? She doubted very much he had ever touched a dust rag in his entire life.
They rose one story, then got off and walked down another length of hallway, this time carpeted. The smell of the oil faded under the onslaught of a colder smell—recirculated air. They were in a part of the house that was sealed off from the outdoors. His collection rooms. She had known that he liked to own things—rare things—he shouldn’t; had in fact gotten him some of them herself, but not the sheer number he possessed, to require this much space. As they walked, she could feel things tugging at her, faint sparkling touches as appealing as the client was distasteful, and she felt a moment of honest astonishment when she realized their source. Some people collected antique glass, or Impressionist paintings or Pez dispensers. In addition to everything else, the client collected Artifacts.
No wonder he had assured her that he had the proper containment facilities for the cornerstone! But if so, why…and what damage was being done, putting them all in together, where their current might scrape and rub against each other…Was that why the cornerstone was behaving oddly?
Not her business. Not her problem. Do