Free Advanced Mythology by Jody Lynn Nye

scanned graphic and multiple language transmissions as well, and it excerpted the surrounding text of any reference it found.
    It turned out to be money well spent. Omnivore had detected e-mail messages containing that alphabet rocketing back and forth across the Atlantic. The gateway servers turned out to be of no help. They were supposed to provide the source location of messages, but his people were unable to discover the senders. They pinned down a part of Europe as the most likely point of origin. It was far easier to try and trace the American side of the correspondence.
    They had been lucky. The coding on the e-mail showed that both sides were using a smaller server gateway instead of one of the huge services. Ming had turned Omnivore to search for the name across all e-mails being sent. The closest she had come so far to pinpointing its location was somewhere in central Illinois. But here was Maria saying that the source wasn’t in the center of the state at all. Beach was frustrated.
    “Are you certain you aren’t sensing any magic?” he asked Maria again.
    The woman deployed her pendulum once more, swinging it out on its chain over the section of map. It reacted as though it had a mind of its own, though. Instead of describing a circle or oval, it leaped and hopped erratically. Maria captured it in her other palm, hiding it from the keen eyes of the two men. “There is nothing.”
    “Try again.”
    “I cannot,” she insisted. “The powers have stopped speaking to me. I must try again later.”
    Beach regarded her with exasperation. “We’re not here just to chase some linguist’s wet dream of a lost language. We’re here for the goods, if there are any.”
    “We will find it,” Stefan assured him. “When Maria finds it, she will know. She will be positive.”
    “Good! Then we will take our … advantage home with us.”
    “Be careful,” Stefan cautioned him. “You don’t want the U.S. State Department knowing what you are doing.”
    “Why?” asked Beach humorously. “It is not illegal for us to be in this country. We are tourists. It says so on our visas. Besides, they think you are Bulgarian.”
    “Perhaps we can go shopping,” Stefan said. “Since Maria must rest, I would like to look for things for my wife. She has given me a list of many things she has seen on the Internet. It would be good to bring her at least one of them.”
    Bourgeois. Beach rolled his eyes.
    ***

Chapter 6
    Keith was almost buzzing with nerves by the time he followed Dorothy into the boardroom. He was excited to be back at Perkins Delaney Queen. The suite of offices hadn’t changed much since Keith’s last day as a student intern several months before, except perhaps to replace the modern art sculpture made of tiny pieces of brass and steel in the glass-walled foyer with another equally weird abstract construction of colored aluminum cut into elongated zig-zags. Keith thought of the graceful, curved lines of the Little Folk’s carvings and thought how well they could do in the mass market. Perhaps later he could drop in on a few galleries and feel them out. He had a few photographs in a portfolio of some of Enoch’s and Tiron’s latest creations. The works would sell themselves; all he would have to do is hold up the pictures and take orders. At the moment, though, Keith felt his mind sliding into “ideation” mode, ready to pop creative notions out one after the other. He hoped he could come up with something that would stick. Dorothy was counting on him.
    Dorothy Carver, her chic suit-dress of coral-red picking up warm highlights in her medium-dark complexion, introduced Keith to the men and women around the table. She deferred to the plump man at the head of the table. His very black hair was tousled, and his small mouth was framed by a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard. “Bill Mann, president of Gadfly Technology Corporation. Jennifer Schick, vice-president in charge of sales,” was the slender,