finish the project, he was almost pleased that the minor emergencies that had cropped up in his absence took him away from it for a time. He needed to get some distance from it.
There were message sprites lined up against the office window, bored out of their little minds, all of them clamoring to be the first to deliver its message and disappear. He took them all in turn, scribbling little notes to himself. A dinner invitation from a love-struck female colleague; a meeting request from the dean that could certainly wait. And a simple message from Lord Everess.
'He says he wants you to come over to his office and talk and so on and so forth,' said Everess's sprite.
Ironfoot took the tiny creature in hand and said, 'Maybe you could just tell him I'm busy.'
The sprite's face took on an air of abused hospitality. 'Well, he's not going to be too pleased with that, I can tell you. He's a lord, you know. Very fancy. He wears a hat and smokes a pipe. I don't see you with a hat or a pipe, so I guess he wins. Ha!'
Ironfoot had a soft spot for message sprites, though he wasn't quite sure why.
'You think so?' he asked. 'You think I don't have a pipe and a hat around here someplace?'
The sprite sniffed. 'I know you don't because yesterday I got really bored and I rifled through all of your stuff.'
'Clever sprite.'
'You think so? You really think so? Because nobody else thinks so, that's for sure. Do you have any roast beef?'
'Excuse me?'
'I like roast beef. I like the smell of it, and I like people who like it. But I can't eat it myself because sprites are herbivores, and it's the greatest tragedy of my life except for when my family died that time.'
'Sorry,' said Ironfoot. 'No roast beef.'
'Darn,' said the sprite.
'Go on,' said Ironfoot. 'Send back my message. I think I have some parsley somewhere around here. You can have that.'
'Uh, yeah, funny thing about that parsley,' said the sprite, flitting up toward the open window. 'Remember what I said about rifling through your stuff.?
Ironfoot had done every errand he could think of, returned every message, even cleaned his apartments and straightened the papers in his office. What was he trying to avoid? He'd been so impatient to get back to the city, and now that he was here, he couldn't stop stalling.
The map loomed from the corner of his office. It was rolled up and stored in a tube that was taller than he was, sealed with his own university signet. It called to him, and part of him wanted to answer it, but part of him wanted to set fire to it.
Why? Was this guilt? Was he worried about working on a weapon, about providing the key to re-creating the thing? He didn't think so, to be honest. As much as it might bother him intellectually, it didn't spur this gut reaction. Was it the eeriness of it, the smell of death and tar and gray dust that seemed to emanate from it, even though it produced no actual scent? No, that wasn't it, either.
He knew what it was, but couldn't admit it.
The next morning he awoke early, poured a strong cup of coffee, and forced himself to face the map. He unrolled it in the small parlor of his apartments, where it took up the entire floor, requiring him to lug the settee into the kitchen. He had the final measurements from the intensity gauges stacked neatly on a small stool next to his mug. He took quill and ruler in hand, and began working.
Once the data were entered, there were calculations to be done. These he did on lined sheets of linen paper that he ordered specially from the campus stationery. With each result, a new line appeared on the map. A web was emerging, a pattern. That was good. But still, that unsettling feeling would not leave him. The feeling was linked to that tar smell that he couldn't quite place, the memory it spurred that he could not recall. As the pattern grew, so did the feeling of dread inside him.
When he next looked up, the clock on the mantel read after midnight. The fire had died down in the fireplace, and he realized that he was cold. He stoked the fire, poured himself a whiskey, and went back to work.
He finished the formulaic interpolations around dawn. He'd lost count of the pots of coffee he'd drunk, now measured only in the level of queasiness in his stomach and the frequency with which he'd had to visit the privy. The web was complete, more or less. Some of the data had been lost. Some of the measurements, he was certain, had been faked. One region in particular was a total loss, the readings totally inconsistent with any of the others. It had been handled by the son of a lord whose father had pressed him into the
