Last Merge Read online

"Shit." Burned Mustache eyed the dust cloud. "Boys, help the man."

  They set to with a will and Eldon sent them off with a good three miles start on the troops. He was just clearing the last rocks when the officer pulled rein beside him.

  "You have any trouble with those fellows?" The man was bald, riding a handsome bay stallion. His uniform, such as it was, suggested company security.

  "Laughiler?" Eldon guessed. "No, not much, but I didn't have enough control to hold them once they saw you coming."

  "Old Gods. What, are you another one of these damned wizards. Who are you, where from?"

  "Elk Denison, from Gemstone."

  The man looked disgusted. "Another damned Deni whelp. I should have known, just looking at you." He shifted in the saddle and his horse headed up the hill on the track of the bandits. Eldon funneled a bit of wind to keep the dust off himself and his horses.

  The dog trotted in from wherever he'd been. Mottled black and gray he was hard to spot when he was still.

  "I dunno why you keep hanging around me. Scat!" The dog ignored him. Eldon climbed back into the wagon and let off the brake.

  A Hell Hound followed me home, Mom! How do I get rid of him?

  He supposed he ought to have held the bandits, but then what sort of Bad Guy would he be? He was still wondering a day later when he rattled into Southern Hell and pulled up at Tivo's Gold Traders.

  Tivo Harryson took his security seriously, and his guards stepped out beyond the wagon to make sure no one approached as the handlers, assayers and accountants got to work. A fair amount of cash went into his pockets, then Eldon took the letters of credit across the street to the Bank of the West and deposited them, distributing the money among their seven accounts.

  Then he sauntered out to see if the quality or quantity of entertainment had changed since his last visit.

  The dog had galloped into town ahead of him off, and with luck would find someone who wouldn't be running for his life at a moment's notice.

  The hosteller managed to squeeze his foursome into the stable of the Peacock, and he found a pretty lady with a bit of glow who was delighted to help him spend money. They had a decent show with dinner, and then got down to some serious gambling. He eyed the garish vest of Phillip Michaelson, and gambled recklessly. Jilly was careful, and cheated a few times and lost money. But she perked up when he headed for his room and showed him just how much she'd enjoyed the evening, and left in the predawn with every penny he hadn't stashed in a bubble. Which was enough for breakfast and a bit of grocery shopping, then he headed back to Cliff House.

  The dog jumped into the wagon a mile from town.

  Eldon shook his head. "Bad choice, dog. Really. You need to find a new home."

  By late summer they had respectable bank accounts, both corporate and personal, and were keeping a lot of their gold on hand, for cross dimensional trading.

  And getting tired of breaking rocks, however much easier it was with magic.

  Eldon thumped his head on the dining room table. "Stop looking so bored, Heso."

  "It's almost football season."

  "Not here. But I suppose there's millions of worlds where it is. Geeze." He looked over at the witches, all sitting around with their new babies. "Maybe we could get them to . . . umm. We really, really can't attract attention to here. How about we sneak through Embassy?"

  Heso thought it over. "But do they have Gates to Worlds we like? Those year 2000 to 2200 Earths are my favorite."

  Rior looked over his, err, her shoulder at them. "There's one to the World where we raided that Senator's party. I wonder what Rivolte is doing, these days? Could be dangerous though."

  Eldon and Heso nodded.

  Falchion snorted. "I'll open one to the place were we had the Baldness cure place. Far away from all your girlfriends, though."

  "We'll just rent an apartment and watch football." Heso promised.

  "And take that dog with you."

  ***

  Selling the gold was easy enough. Renting the apartment just took a bit of magic persuasion to skip the tedious credit check parts. And objections to large pets. Buying the sports car ditto. The big screen TV they bought new, to be sure it complied with all the fiddly details of the broadcasts, or in this case, cable. The rest of their furniture they'd brought along in a bubble. They were ready for the pre-season a week early, and spent that mostly at the apartment complex's pool, trying, without success, to pick up babes. At least the ladies liked the dog.

  Eldon gave up trying to get his computer to understand the gibberish coming over the cable, and bought a new one. It made researching what had happened after their last visit easy.

  "Has it really only been a year and a half?" He muttered.

  "Yeah. Seems like we were robbing banks for longer than six months, doesn't it?" Heso wandered over and grinned at the pictures he was downloading. "Hey, look! There's Julia! Twins! We had twins. Cool, eh?"

  "Yep. Bet they'll be damn fine witches in a few years. We ought to come back every year to check on them, you know?" Eldon found another site with a complete tally of the "Stranger" Babies. "What the heck? Denver? I didn't do anything in Denver."

  "That's where Rior pulled the jewelry heists that got us in trouble. I think he had Mag and that lot along."

  "Ah. All right. I guess that makes sense. Those guys were hornier than us, hands down." Eldon scowled at the screen. "Eight babies up there have been identified by our genes. Huh. Advertisements for genetic screening all over the place. 'Find out if your baby is a Stranger.' What kind of rot . . . Well, I suppose it makes sense from their point of view. They don't know when we came and went."

  "Yeah. You're back to blonde, and you've lost weight, haven't you? I suppose I ought to change how I look too." Heso wandered off. Eldon stared at the computer uneasily. What if it had been the collective subconscious, influencing him? Was he going to start prowling around in animal form, raping women again? He decided to start sleeping in, not going anywhere near early morning joggers.

  "Hey! The Highlights show is on! We can see what we missed last year."

  ***

  Houston beat Kansas City in the first exhibition game.

  "Probably the last win they'll see for a month. Houston teams always suck." Eldon grabbed another nacho and settled in to watch the after game wrap up.

  "It's a hell of a lot more fun to lie around watching football when someone comes by and say you ought to get to work." Heso burped and put his heels up on the dog. The dog farted.

  Eldon opened a window. "Yeah. This doesn't even count as goofing off. But we really can't get jobs. I suppose we could open up our own place again. But curing baldness is boring." Eldon crushed his empty beer can and lobbed it at the garbage can.

  "Maybe we should open a shop of fun stuff."

  "We could make like Susto, and sell magic potions that no one knows what they'll do." Eldon grinned. "Of course, we'd get sued. How about if we do everything the old shop did, but we act like it's dangerous and criminal and charge huge amounts for it."

  "The problem is getting started. Word of mouth has to start somewhere." Heso looked interested, though.

  Eldon grinned. "Well, if this place works like Houston, people will try anything to cure baldness. We just need to be sure to offer other stuff."

  "Or get laid." Heso pulled out a bottle of the joy juice. "This is the stuff we ought to sell."

  They went through all their stuff. Eldon had some cheap jewelry from Aunt Susto's, so they dissected it into a heap of little trinkets and started putting charms on them. 'Notice me', 'Don't Notice Me', 'Love,' 'Clumsy,' 'Confidence,' all the little things they'd learned as teenagers, just grasping power. Little bottles, and wine, and Eldon going carefully, step by step, through the spells he knew for anti-baldness, and various colors of hair and eyes. Lose weight. That was a good one.

  “Love . . . I don’t think I’ll do that. Don’t want the . . . complications.”

  Heso snorted. “Really? I thought you
liked being the Demon of Jones Creek.”

  “Yeah, then. But I’m not doing it again. Besides, just a whiff of rumor and the police will be all over us.”

  Heso shrugged.

  Eldon experimented with his abilities, and was able to slightly change the shape of bottles. It wasn't up to what a witch could do, but it turned all sorts of scavenged pickle and jam jars into funny shapes, and he carved sections of wood for plugs. He imagined they looked very magical, and got a gallon of cheap skin lotion, added spoonful of normal wine and turned it into a cure for baldness and put it in wide mouth jars, to be rubbed on the scalp. Heso got creative with labels on the computers, and by the time they'd rented a tiny room off the side-alley door of a used book store they had plenty of stock for their magical store.

  "I dunno if this is going to do the trick." Heso grumbled as Eldon painted the sign for the shop.

  "Of course it is. I've filed a DBA, we've got a bank account, all we need are customers."

  "I don't believe you and I are doing this. I mean, we're lazy bums, right?"

  "Right. That's why we got a big screen TV for here too. We can goof off while we're on the job." The dog woofed. Eldon turned and eyed the young man peeking around the corner.

  "What can I do for you, kid?"

  "I'm not a kid. My name is Shane."

  "So, whatcha need, Shane?"

  "Can you make a girl fall in love?"

  "No, but with a confidence charm and a notice me charm, you'll have a lot better luck doing it yourself."

  The boy hemmed and hawed, looked askance at the dangly charms. "I can't wear those, everyone will think I'm gay. Don't you have magic rings? Something a guy could wear?"

  Eldon and Heso exchanged looks.

  "Rings. Right, why didn't I think of rings? Rings are so easy." Heso grabbed a crushed beer can out of the garbage and flowed aluminum into a smooth shiny ring. They checked it on the boy's hand, shrunk it and widened it a bit, then Eldon put his Notice Me, Happy, and Confident charms all intertwined around it and sent the kid off twenty dollars lighter in the pocket, but also wide-eyed by what he'd seen.

  "We'll have to do a bunch of that." Heso formed more rings, dropping them on the desk as the can shrunk. "People will really believe in the magic if they see it performed."

  "Yeah. And metal is so easy to form."

  That was their only customer for the day, so they pulled the sign in, locked the door and headed home.

  The next day . . . well, almost afternoon . . . Eldon opened the door of the magic shop, set out the sign and kicked back to watch a really great gory movie while waiting for customers. And actually got some. And more as the week went on

  Teenagers mostly. Amazingly naïve and giggling as they read the labels, and frequently bought several.

  The dog wandered in—he was getting really good at doors, and since they hadn't gotten any complaints from the apartment manager, he must be good at sneaking as well.

  And as word that his charms worked circulated, he got so busy selling charm rings to teenagers he had trouble keeping up with football. Halfway through the season he put his foot down. The shop was only going to be open late on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Monday, Thursday and Friday, until five. Period.

  Rings with a spell to prevent ovulation and menses, activating every quarter of the Moon, were amazingly popular. Almost as much as the orgasm intensifier. He resisted all requests for compulsion spells. Love spells. The amounts offered often left him gawping.

  "Old Gods! I don't do love potions. Why don't you just offer her that much? Sheesh."

  "She won't talk to me."

  "So go find someone else. Women are all pretty much the same."

  "But she's special. She's the only one I want."

  "Right. What you need is a plan. Like maneuvers before a war. Start with anonymous notes. Love letters, you know? Poems? Then find out what she likes to do, and start doing it yourself, so you sort of meet now and then. Let's see, then it might be about time for flowers and candy. Then you let one of her friends know that you're the fellow who's been doing it all. And by then she'll probably talk to you."

  "That's a awful lot of work."

  "Guess she's not that special, eh?"

  The boy bristled, and bought some of his anti-acne cream.

  Then a couple of men stopped in, and by the holiday they called Thanksgiving he was doing a steady business in anti-baldness lotions.

  And practicing all the other little things he'd been picking up, that he hadn't wanted to let the others know he could do.

  If he could do them.

  To make a Gate, Falchion had grabbed an oddly shaped bubble. So he sat and looked at the bubbles, and the more he looked, the more irregularities he spotted. Bubbles of different sizes and toughness. Cone shapes, spinning madly. Cylinders, doing nothing much at all, although they occasionally touched and stuck on those crumpled sheets-of-paper looking things.

  He looked closer at the crumpled paper . . . the intricate structure of stars, no, whole galaxies . . . sucking him in closer for a dizzying glimpse of a globe, the Earth, some other Earth . . .

  A lightning flash of brilliant yellows slashed through the fizzing blue. A tornado of power struck the planet.

  Eldon flinched back. What did I do? I didn't mean to . . .

  But the tornado was going from that membrane over to . . . a tiny sheet of paper . . . ragged torn edges, shreds flapping as if it were move swiftly across the current of the bubbles fizzing madly about, blown away from the tornado of raw power.

  Eldon retreated, watching . . . whatever it was writhed like a snake . . . and disappeared.

  Then it snapped out again. From the ragged paper to yet another world. This one so distant he could barely see it . . . could see a bright thread, and then another from that distant world.

  Eldon retreated altogether from the inbetween. Shook himself.

  "So . . . maybe those were powered gates? And I just spotted some place, some multidimensional empire, with at least two worlds with gate mech. Earth, or the One World? Something different?"

  It was a couple of days before he nerved up to look again. But there were no electric tornado snakes to be seen.

  So he meditated, and remembered what he'd seen, when Falchion made gates.

  When Falchion had made that Gate, she'd grabbed a bubble and rammed it into a spinning cone to slow it down. Eldon spotted a cone and grabbed the nearest bubble. He bumped the cone with it, got knocked back a bit, bumped it again, braced himself mentally and kept bumping it until it slowed. Then he reached out and grabbed the cone pulled it around, shoved it large size up to the nearest sheet of paper. There it sat. Whoop-de-do. Doing nothing. All right. Falchion had pulled the tail into that wild energy, the breach in the Universe. So that couldn't be what she usually did. So, how about another cone? He tracked one down, bumped it until he could handle it and pulled it over closer. The narrow tails swung past each other, twisted together and the large end turned toward him and pounced. It sucked down right on top of him and he found himself dumped into long grass full of stickers. The dog landed on him. He jumped up, cussing. The whirling white mouth of a Gate was directly above him. He landed hard on the floor of the magic shop.

  "Wow, how did you do that?"

  He eyed the pack of teenagers. Two packs of kids, light and dark. "Magic. Excuse me, I need to straighten this out a bit. He managed to shove one end of the Gate down, and the other up, then jumped through. This time he stayed hunched down and slithered through the stickers until he was out from under it. He look a long look around. Tall grass, thin woods. Nothing dangerous in sight. He tipped the Gate upright, and the teenagers poured through.

  "Hey, don't you lot go getting lost or killed or anything! Just because there's nothing dangerous in sight doesn't mean there isn't anything dangerous out there."

  They laughed and turned around, eyeing the empty hills.

  Eldon eyed the dark pack. "At least you lot have some weapons. Pistols. What do
you want to bet the pale pack hasn't got a single gun among them all?"

  The head of the dark pack eyed him. "What are you, anyway? Mexican? I never heard of a blonde Mexican. You bleach your hair?"

  "No. I started out blond. And where I come from, everyone's sorta tannish. I'm maybe darker than average. There aren't many as dark as you, and nobody that horrible fish-belly white like them. I dunno why we keep finding people like that all over the Multiverse."

  "Multiverse! Where are you from?" The pale boy, Shane, had walked up behind him.

  "Yeah. Multiverse. Lots of parallel universes, except they aren't really parallel. I'm from the one they call Comet Fall."

  "What do they call ours?"

  "I dunno. I'm not an explorer, I'm a Bad Guy. You know, steal stuff in one Universe, sell it in another. Stuff like that."

  The dark leader laughed. "You're one of the Strangers. That's what you are. Lost weight since you were changing into a deer, haven't you?"

  Shane backed away and eyed him. "Geeze. Take note, for once in the history of our Universe, Coltrain Newhouse is correct."

  A sudden cacophony of yells and running kids drew their attention. What charged out of the woods behind them looked like a cross between a ostrich and a baby T-rex. It had lots of feathers and a huge beak. Eldon loped down the hill, as several guns started firing behind him. He toughened up his back shield, and threw a slice as soon as he was in range. The bird's head dropped and the body ran around a bit pumping blood.

  "Dang."

  "Mo Fo!"

  "Wow, must have a lot of actions coordinated off the spinal cord."

  Eldon and Coltrain stared at Shane. Coltrain shook his head. "There oughta be a law about smart boys like you. Keep 'em ona leash or neuter them so they can't multiply and blow up the World. Again."

  Shane straightened indignantly. "We didn't. It's pretty much accepted that the Kamchatka attack was actually a meteorite. Well, okay, everyone overreacted. But that was a hundred years ago."

  Coltrain rolled his eyes. "Fifty-five years. How did you get into college?" He walked over to where the oversized roadrunner had collapsed.