“The who?”
“How can you have lived so long and be so ignorant?” he asked tetchily.
“The ?sir were the lords of battle,” Radu put in.
The beetle glanced at him approvingly. “Quite. Said to love war more than the very air they breathed—Odin, Thor and the like. They displaced the Vanir, the older fertility gods, and banished their followers, the Blarestri, from Eluen Londe—”
“What?”
“Eluen Londe.” I looked at him blankly. “Faerie!” he clarified impatiently. “They gave its rule into the hands of those who pledged themselves to their service—the Svarestri—who ruled it until the ?sir departed.”
“Departed for where?”
“But that’s the great mystery, isn’t it?” Radu asked excitedly. “No one knows. One day, poof. They simply weren’t there anymore.”
I raised an eyebrow but didn’t question it. I really didn’t care where some probably mythical beings had gone on vacation. “Okay, how about more modern history? What’s the situation now?”
The beetle looked vaguely perturbed. He hemmed and hawed for a while, but the upshot was that the vamps didn’t know squat. There were rumors of turmoil in the Fey capital, and no one had seen the king for weeks, but whether that signified a coup, no one could say. I’d sat through that whole history lesson and learned absolutely nothing useful.
“All I want to know is why a party of Fey wanted to kill me,” I said heatedly.
The beetle’s lips twisted enough to show fang. “Doesn’t everyone?” Radu hustled me out the door before I could find out if the vamp’s plump little carcass would fit into his overstuffed desk.
Radu escorted me back to Marlowe’s digs, then made his excuses and disappeared into his lab. He closed the door, waited a few seconds to see if I’d follow, and continued toward the blank wall he’d been facing when I’d stopped him. I knew this because I’d left an Eye of Argus charm looped around the back of a nearby chair. As soon as Radu disappeared through the wall, I slipped back into the lab, retrieved my little eyeball cluster and put it back on my key chain. Time to find out what had Uncle so jumpy.
The hidden entrance to a corridor carved out of the local sandstone wasn’t warded. I stopped at that realization, more than a little worried since where the Senate doesn’t have wards, it tends to have even nastier things. Most wards are designed to keep something or someone out of an area, or to set off an alarm when an intruder passes through them. Booby traps are used when the Senate doesn’t care about interrogation, and only wants any snoopers dead, usually in a very unpleasant way.
It took me a long time to get down that corridor, because I was convinced that a trap lay waiting somewhere along it, and had to test every foot before I dared to move ahead. I have a charm that makes any magical traps in a two-foot area become visible, but it takes twenty seconds or so to kick in every time a new reading is needed. I had to move ahead two feet, stop, let the charm do its thing, get a negative reading and start all over again. It was the sort of thing that made me want to scream.
I could tell from scent that Radu had entered the left of two doors at the end of the hall. Oddly enough, since he hates the ocean, Radu always smells like a day at the beach: salt and ozone. Today, that was overlaid with something else, an odd, musty air that I couldn’t place. Since my brain’s scent catalog is pretty extensive, that should have worried me more than it did. But the nerve-racking pace had made me impatient, which in turn caused me to be more reckless than usual, although things would probably have played out the same way in any case.
As soon as my charm read negative on any surprises, I opened the door and slipped inside. I flashed on that old story about the lady or the tiger, and had time to think that it figured I would pick the latter, before the thing was on me. I smelled the fetid breath of something that had been snacking on raw meat recently and hadn’t bothered to floss, felt claws on the front of my jacket and heard the familiar rushing sound in my ears that precedes a period of dhampir-induced madness.
When I came around, it was to find Radu swatting at me with a stick. “No, no, no!” he was chanting, and from the rough state of his voice, it sounded like he’d been screaming it for a while. Weirdly enough considering the noise level, no one else had joined us, unless you counted the various strange things cowering in the corners. It was difficult to see them because a prehistoric-looking panther the size of a small horse was sprawled across my chest, its body limp in death. Since my hands were still buried in its throat, I didn’t have to ask what had killed it.