Gaby continued to work on her Gift. She was able to spend more time each day in Gabrielle's room without developing headaches. But each day she found she needed to be closer to the talk-box for her Gift to work. Finally, she found she had to keep her hands on it.
Yet even as the range of her Gift dwindled, she learned how to do something Gabrielle had long known—to force open the "eyes" of talk-boxes at specific addresses rather than just wait for voices to alert her to their presence. She could call direct to Doc's talk-box whether or not he was there, or to any other talk-box she'd already visited; she could explore, sensing unknown talk-boxes as eyes, and force them open. Her growing versatility pleased her.
That, and Harris. Things were finally working out. The recent change between them kept her happily distracted.
Doc put her in charge of the private grid of talk-box cameras set up throughout his headquarters—his version of a closed-circuit security camera network. With the turn of a tuning dial, she could change her talk-box viewpoint to throughout Doc's floors, including the basement levels, the exterior of the Monarch Building, even the distant Gwaeddan Air Field hangar.
And when she was within the Sidhe Foundation grid, working from Gabrielle's little room, she was able to flit from view to view with the speed of thought.
She also continued her research into Duncan Blackletter . . . and, for that matter, into Dr. Desmond MaqqRee, and the feud that had erupted between the two men more than thirty years before.
Doc wouldn't help; as always, he just shook his head and told her it wasn't relevant. "I've made him my responsibility. That's all you need worry about. Stop prying."
But she didn't. She pored through old newspapers from Novimagos and other nations. She consulted birth records, sometimes calling civic halls as far away as Cretanis. She sought homelords who had owned properties rented by either man.
She could find no birth record for Duncan Blackletter. That was hardly surprising; it was commonly believed that his name was a false one. But neither could she find a birth record for Doc. Though the fair world was not as crazy for paperwork as the grim world, she was already learning that it was unusual for someone to be given as important a task as building bridges for the throne of Cretanis without having a lengthy paper trail pointing to his family and education. She couldn't even find out where Dr. Desmond MaqqRee had received his degree.
Doc arranged for the painting of conjurer's circles throughout the four stories that served him as headquarters. By the time he was done, every room was decorated with four or five of the things, none quite touching another, arranged to occupy the maximum possible floor space. Harris spent days carefully stepping between freshly painted lines and symbols, then helped lay concealing rugs over the circles, brown wrapping paper over the ones in the hangar.
"Your cleanup bill is going to be amazing," he told Doc. "Even if they don't attack."
"Yes. But in the likely event Duncan uses another of his rockets to launch a conjurer's circle into our mist, this should spoil some of his plans." Doc sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Assuming, that is, that I find enough time to study, correct, and activate every one of these damned things."
"There's no need to curse, Doc."
A false gas-line scare engineered by Doc allowed him to evacuate the ten floors beneath his. The Sidhe Foundation provided the inconvenienced businesses with temporary accommodations in an unfinished skyscraper. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Galt Athelstane and a unit of his Novimagos Guard took possession of the topmost of the abandoned floors, the same floor from which the Changeling's men had fired their rocket many days before.
Caster accepted Doc's thanks and the offer of a boat trip back to Cretanis—accompanied by Foundation bodyguards. "I would be delighted to help you at any time," he said. "But next time, let's keep it to something I can solve over the talk-box, shall we?"
At the end of the third day, Doc announced, "We move to step two."
The room cost four pennies a day and was almost worth it. The floor sagged. So did the bed and exhausted-looking chair. Even the radiator was bowed in the middle. Fergus Bootblack, sitting on the bed, looked at the bottle of potato liquor in his hand and decided that it was the only thing with straight lines in the entire room. He took another drink. It even burned a straight line down his throat.
"I was surprised to learn—"
Fergus jerked in surprise, banging his head on the wall behind. He almost dropped the bottle.
Doc stood in front of him. Harris Greene closed the door to the hall and leaned back against it.
Doc waited for Fergus to regain his composure. He started over. "I was surprised to learn that you were living in a place like this."
Fergus stared at his visitors. They had to be here to shoot him, finally.
He said, "Can't afford anything better. No one will hire me because you fired me." He offered the bottle to Doc.
Doc shook his head. He sat in the chair—and sat farther down than he apparently expected to; his rear nearly met the floorboards. "No one will hire Fergus Bootblack, no. You could have left and changed your name. You didn't."
"I'm used to my name."
"And it seems to me that Blackletter would want you. You're good at what you do and have served him satisfactorily in the past. He'd pay you enough to live better than this."
Fergus carefully capped the bottle and set it aside. It wouldn't do to have something bad happen to it when he was shot. That would be unfair to a decent bottle of liquor. "His men offered."
"And you refused. Checked in here under your true name. A stupid thing to do if you've recently disappointed someone like Duncan Blackletter. Why did you do it?"
He mumbled something inaudible.
"Why, Fergus?"
"Because I'm sorry." Fergus covered his eyes. That way the sudden tears wouldn't show. His drunkenness and weakness revolted him. "I'm sorry. Enough? Will you go now? Or at least shoot me?"
"I could do that. Or I could give you a chance to make it up to me."
Fergus looked up without meaning to. Doc's expression was calm, serious. Compromised, Fergus just wiped his eyes. "I don't understand."
"I want you to do something for me, Fergus. You might die doing it. But if you don't—well, you'll never work for me again, but I'll give you a letter of recommendation from the Foundation. Worth gold in any profession. You'd be able to keep your name, maybe make it worth something again."
Fergus licked dry lips. "What do you want me to do?"
"Go to Blackletter's people. Tell them you've reconsidered. Tell them I denied you the last pay I owed you, so you broke into my floors to take what you were owed. And you saw some things you're sure they'll want to know about. Things that have driven up your asking price." He considered. "Of course, they'll want you to prove yourself. Harris had some ideas about that."
It was the quietest bell of the night, the time when the milkmen begin their rounds, and the three men sitting in the car fidgeted in the third hour of their surveillance.
Then one came alert and pointed. "Here he is."
Fergus looked up. Alastair Kornbock walked the final steps to the stoop of his building. The man's step was brisk, his face merry. The bottle in his hand was still half-full.
He was to the top of the stairs and reaching for the front door handle when Fergus called his name.
He turned and saw Fergus and the other man as they emerged from the parked car. The driver remained in his seat and started the vehicle.
Alastair smiled drunkenly. "Grace, Fergus. Who is your friend?" Then his expression changed. "Wait, you're—"
"Do it," said the tall man.
Fergus gulped and brought up a short-barrelled revolver, aiming the iron sights at the center of Alastair's stomach.
Alastair dropped his bottle and reached under his coat. He had his pistol in his hand before the bottle shattered.
Fergus squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked. Alastair staggered back, slamming into the doorway, breaking glass. Redness appeared over his heart. He slid down to sit against the door. His expression was shocked, pleading.
Fergus fired at Alastair's heart. More redness erupted from the downed man's stomach.
Alastair slumped to the side and his eyes closed.
"Not bad," the tall man told Fergus. He took the gun out of Fergus' hand. "Let's go."
Fergus stood there and shook. Idiot. He'd gotten the order wrong.
Clouds gathered before dawn and stayed to block the sun. Doc opened the hangar landing door to look up at them through his good eye.
Traces of green Gift-energy shot through them like lightning. He closed the landing door.
Alastair, beside him, asked, "Was I correct?"
"With your depressing regularity, yes. It's a summoning. I don't know what harm it can do, though. The building is shielded from lightning strikes."
Alastair brought out his pocket watch and consulted it. "I hope they don't wait too long. My stomach's a bit twitchy."
"It's simply sore. Wearing the vest just makes being shot akin to being hit with a sledgehammer. Plus the explosives you had packed on it—what did Harris call them? Squibs."
"Next time, you get to be shot."
By noon, two bells, the sky was almost as black as night. The clouds hung heavy with rain. But not one drop fell on Neckerdam.
Doc's windowless communications center was one floor up from the laboratories. A big room, it was nonetheless cramped with talk-boxes of every variety, shelves of partially disassembled electrical devices, tables, chairs, coils of copper wire. It smelled to Gaby of dust and ozone.
Gaby and Alastair sat side by side at the main table. She stared into her talk-box while he indifferently watched a panel of unlit lightbulbs.
"It would've been nice to have a few more days," he said.
"Why?"
"We'd have to keep the deception up. Announce my death in the notices. I want to know who'd show up for my funeral."
"Oh, you'd just want to pop out of your casket and scare everyone. How's your chest?"
"Not bad. And I think I'm trimmer for hauling that monster of a vest around all those hours."
The talk-box beeped, signal of an incoming call. Gaby frowned; the pitch of the beep said that it had not come through the Monarch Building switchboard, but was a direct call to one of the Foundation's private numbers. She switched over to it.
A woman she vaguely recognized—middle-aged, rather faded-looking, friendly. "Goodlady Donohue?"
"Yes?"
"Grace. It's Essyllt Tathlumwright."
"Oh, yes. From the Beldon Hall of Records." Gaby looked aside at Alastair. She wished he weren't here to take this call, but she was on duty; she shouldn't leave to take it on another talk-box. "What can I do for you?"
"Quite the reverse. I found the information you were looking for. All very public, just not where I expected it."
"Wonderful." Gaby dug out her notebook, ignored Alastair's puzzled glance. "Please, go ahead."
"Desmond MaqqRee, born One Sixteen M.X.R. Father unknown, mother Rowena Redcliff. Wed Dierdriu Legarra One Forty-Five M.X.R. They had a—"
"Father unknown?" Gaby tensed. She'd half-expected that answer but had hoped to be wrong.
"Well . . . technically, yes. Practically speaking, no."
"What does that mean?"
"I did a little reading on Rowena Redcliff. She was the mistress of Prince Correus, Queen Maeve's husband and consort. And `MaqqRee' is a dialectal variant of High Cretanis; it means `son of the king.' I think Goodsir MaqqRee's paternity is probably well established . . . in the court of Cretanis, at any rate."
"You mean he's the son of this Correus." She relaxed.
"Yes. As far as anyone can tell, Goodlady Redcliff remained true to the prince until her death. But it's not uncommon to cut down on the numbers of eligible claimants to a throne by not recognizing the issue of affairs.
"Where was I? Oh, yes, education. Took his doctorate in engineering in One Thirty-Eight M.X.R." She looked apologetic. "That's all I have for now. But it gives us a place to start."
Gaby lay her pencil down. "It certainly does. I really appreciate it, uh, Goodlady Tathlumwright."
"Essyllt."
"Gaby. Thanks a lot. I'm kind of in the middle of things right now, but I'll call back soon."
The older woman smiled and faded from the screen.
Gaby turned and winced when she saw Alastair's disapproving expression.
"Checking up on Doc?"
"Well . . . Yes. I've been trying to figure out this whole Doc-Duncan thing. I'd been wondering around if Doc were maybe Duncan's son." She saw Alastair's guarded look and felt a little satisfaction. "You wondered about that, too, didn't you?"
"Once or twice."
"I mean, it would help explain why their paths seemed to keep crossing. Why Doc claims some sort of personal responsibility for Duncan. But if Doc's father was the King of Cretanis—"
"Prince Consort. Yes, that probably rules your theory out. But not necessarily. We'd have to look into Goodlady Redcliff's history."
"Did you know any of what she was telling me?"
"No, Doc's always been close-mouthed about this sort of thing. I knew that he didn't get along with Maeve the Tenth, but not why. This would explain it, if she considered him a pretender to the throne, a threat to her children. His half-brothers and half-sisters, that is." Alastair shut up as a green bulb lit on the console. He glanced at the handwritten tag beneath it. "Garage. King's Road entrance."
Gaby physically dialed her talk-box to the viewer that watched the garage. The screen remained full of static. "That's odd." She dialed it a notch further. A ceiling-corner view of the garage swam into focus.
A new panel truck was parked in the mechanic's bay. Men poured out of it—fairworlders, plus a couple of men large enough to be grimworlders. Most carried grim world assault rifles and bags of gear; the fairworlders all wore gloves. Fergus Bootblack, not armed, was the last man out and immediately moved over to the elevator door.
Gaby dialed up to the hangar, where Doc had said he and Alastair would be for a chime or two. The rotorkite swam into view. "Doc."
He wasn't visible, but she heard his voice: "I'm here, Gaby."
"They've arrived. In the garage. I count fourteen of them. Fergus is with them. They seem to have screwed up the old camera, I mean viewer, but they missed the new one you put in."
"I'm coming down. Alert the others."
She dialed the room up eighty-nine and informed Lieutenant Athelstane.
Then Harris, in the laboratory. She felt a stab of worry as she repeated her message to him, and added, "Don't you dare get hurt."
"I promise."
"I mean it. I love you."
"I love you." He forced a smile for her.
She switched off and returned the view to the garage. The men were clustered around the elevator.
Alastair said, "If Fergus is as good as he always thought he was, getting around the blocks on the elevator should pose no—ah." On a different board, another green light, near the top of a long column of them, blinked off; the one beneath it immediately blinked on. The glow descended, mirroring the progress of the elevator. "There it goes."
"Alastair, why do you carry an autogun?" She switched to the view of the elevator interior. It showed nothing but empty car, floors gliding by outside the cage.
"To shoot people."
"I mean, doesn't that get in the way of the Hippocratic Oath? Or whatever you have on the fair world?" She began switching back and forth between garage and elevator views.
"You mean the Oath of Diancecht? Not technically." He shrugged. "I can't intentionally harm my patients. But the sort of men I point the gun at can't even be my patients until I shoot them. Not so?"
"Alastair, you're weird."
The elevator glided to a stop in the garage. The men waited as Fergus entered. Gaby watched as Fergus reached up for the elevator viewer. After a moment, that view winked out. She returned to the garage view and saw the men board the elevator car.
Gaby switched the set over to the laboratory view and took another look at Harris. "I want to listen," she told Alastair. "I have to go in."
"Gods' luck to you. I'm going to join Doc in the stairwell." He rose.
She closed her eyes and opened them almost immediately. Gabrielle's face stared solemnly back at her from the mirror.
She opened an eye beyond it and looked down on the hallway outside the laboratories. She saw the elevator rise into view of her camera and stop. The men inside drew open the cage and spilled out. Their faces were now covered in gear that gave them an insectile look.
Gaby hissed and opened another eye. The laboratory swam into view. Harris was there. "Harris, they're here—"
"Right. Masks on, everybody. Thanks, Gaby—"
"Harris, they've got gas masks, too."
"Shit!" He turned to look out of frame. "Welthy, forget the gas bomb. Everybody, get behind the barricades." Gaby saw him pull the bulky tan-colored mask and breathing unit into place.
It wrenched her to do it, but Gaby left him and opened another eye. Lieutenant Athelstane was already looking at her. "They're there," she told him.
She didn't wait for a reply. She knew his job as well as her own; he was to lead his men in a charge up the stairs to hit the laboratory intruders from behind while Doc led the other pincer above.
She reopened the laboratory eye. Or, rather, she tried to; but it wouldn't open. And the eye felt strange—not absent, as a destroyed talk-box would feel, but as though it were resisting her.
The men with Fergus followed him out of the elevator.
"Main laboratory," Fergus said. His voice wasn't muffled by a grimworld gas mask; they hadn't given him one. He nodded toward two of the doors. "At this hour, they'll probably be there. That's where I saw the new grimworlders and the devices Doc was building to shield them." He gestured toward another door, farther down the hall. "Valence laboratory. Doc might be there instead."
Costigan, the taller of the grimworlders, waved his men into place. They flanked the three doors, ready with the miraculous rifles that shot explosives like mortars and bullets like autoguns. Costigan pulled out one of the tracer devices and turned it on. "That's a big signal," he said. "They're in there, all right." He raised his hand, a `stand by' signal for his men.
Fergus glanced at Dominguez, his guard. The dusky grimworlder's eyes narrowed. Dominguez said, "Almost over, little boy. Behave yourself and I don't get to kill you."
Costigan shouted "Go go go!" His men kicked the doors open, threw in the special grenades.
Fergus heard noises like big cans crumpling and saw smoke spreading through the laboratory. Costigan's men charged in, firing.
The resistance abruptly vanished and Gaby opened the eye into the laboratory.
She saw the smoke canisters fly into the lab and detonate. Harris and the others were already behind the reinforced barricades Doc had set up behind several of the tables. Smoke obscured Gaby's vision as men poured into the room, shooting as they came. She saw return fire erupt from behind the barricades.
The scene riveted her. She couldn't afford that. She opened another eye. The stairwell. Doc, Ish, and Noriko were there; incongruously, Ish was the one of the three carrying an autogun. "Doc, they're in the lab."
"We're on our way."
Gaby switched away from him. She flickered as fast as she could among all the viewers of Doc's system, channel-surfing. Smoke, rotorkite, two garage views, Athelstane's men racing up the stairs, elevator interior, ropes swinging by in the cloud-dark skies outside the Monarch Building—
She froze in sudden confusion. Something was very wrong.
Harris fired a long burst into the smoke. His Klapper autogun seized up. Alastair had warned him that the complex weapons were prone to do that. He cursed and yanked the bolt back. A deformed brass casing resisted him, then popped free of the chamber. He pulled the bolt the rest of the way back and released it, racking another cartridge into place, then raised the gun and fired again, blindly. No friends were set up ahead of him—he could only hit enemies.
Gunfire hit the front of his table. He crouched down and waited for the lethal rain to end.
The fear was there again, but it didn't cripple or slow him. It no longer embarrassed him.
He heard a sudden whirring and felt the air pressure change. Welthy had activated the air-blowers from her position.
There was a sudden crackle of electricity. Harris faintly heard something—bootheels, he thought—banging the wood floor. He smiled. One of the intruders had to have charged up to a table in the first row and touched it . . . and been felled by the electrical current coursing through it. The outermost of the traps Doc had arranged for the lab.
Gaby flicked back to the last of the confusing views. Ropes dangling outside one of the ledge cameras. The south—she could tell by the buildings in the distance. The same facing as the laboratory.
She switched to the lab view. It was all smoke and gunfire. She shouted Harris' name but there was no answer.
Stairwell views. Nobody was visible in the east; Athelstane's force must be beyond the viewer, perhaps already to the doors leading into the hallway. But in the west view she saw Ixyail and then Alastair flit by and out of frame. "Alastair!"
She waited a long, breathless moment, then Alastair came back into view. "Gaby, there's no time—"
"Tell Doc there are ropes outside the building. From above. Something's going on out there."
Alastair turned. Doc came back into view. "I hear you," he said. "Tell Athelstane he's on his own. We're going back up to the hangar. We'll go up on the roof to have a look."
She switched back to the east stairwell—or tried to. The eye there stubbornly resisted her. Why?
Back to the elevator interior, then the main garage view. She'd seen Fergus disable both cameras. Now they worked again. Why?
Either they fixed themselves, not likely, or Duncan had arranged for them to come back on. Meaning that he needed them.
He had to be using them. Maybe just the way Gaby was. Exposed to the grim world's uses of communications gear and surveillance equipment, Duncan must have figured out how to do artificially what she did naturally. That probably accounted for the viewers she couldn't peer through; he had to be using them just then.
So it was up to her to stop him.
Time to die.
Fergus lashed out with his elbow and took Dominguez in the throat, under the mask.
Dominguez fell back against the wall. Fergus wrenched the magical rifle out of his hands and shot him with it, a short burst to the face, where his grimworld armor would not protect him. The rifle kicked less than an autogun.
Costigan and the others looked at him in slow-motion surprise.
Fergus held the trigger down and traversed the weapon left to right, firing low, at thighs and knees. Costigan shrieked and fell backwards, his legs ruined. On the floor, he kept yelling as he bled. Another man joined him. Four men left.
Barrels swung in Fergus' direction, so slow, so slow. He traversed the weapon right to left and continued firing. Two more collapsed. Two got behind cover, one behind the stairwell door, one leaping to take cover behind a hallway bench.
The man at the stairway leaned into view and brought his rifle up. Fergus aimed the roaring weapon at him. Bullets took the man in the chest, where the armor protected him, but sheer impact was enough; he fell back anyway.
The magical rifle ran dry. Fergus dropped it. It took forever to fall.
The man behind the bench brought his own weapon up. Fergus spread his arms wide as if to embrace him, as if to welcome the bullets.
Something dark appeared on the gunman's forehead and his head jerked back. His rifle fired a short burst into the ceiling. He fell forward onto the bench.
Someone behind Fergus was shouting, "Hold your fire, it's Fergus." Lieutenant Athelstane, an automatic pistol in hand, moved past Fergus, not glancing at him. He waved men past. They charged forward to flank the lab doors just as Costigan's men had done. "Fergus, are you hit?"
Fergus only understood that his name had been spoken. That no more bullets were coming.
He looked down at himself. There was no blood. He felt a vague sense of disappointment.
He fainted, following his rifle to the floor.
Joseph batted the table. It took no more effort than swatting a fly. More than a manweight of hardwood and lab equipment flew out of his way, leaving nothing between him and the grimworld mercenary.
The man fired at him with another of those hurtful rifles. Joseph felt the bullets tear into him. Enough damage and he knew that he might die.
But they had done nowhere near enough.
He grabbed the barrel and yanked. The man, trying hard to hold on, came off his feet, then fell to his knees as the weapon was wrenched from his grip.
The air was starting to clear. He liked that. Seeing the enemy was much better than groping around blindly for him. He tossed the gun aside.
Joseph picked the man up around the torso. He squeezed—carefully, carefully. The man's air emerged in a helpless gasp. When Joseph felt the ribs begin to give, he let go. The man hit the lab floor and lay still.
Beyond, Joseph saw Novimagos guardsmen appear in the doorway. They pointed rifles and autoguns at the intruders. Lieutenant Athelstane shouted, "Surrender or we open fire!"
The three men not already felled by bullets, electrical traps, or Joseph's bear hugs looked back at the guns aimed their way. They carefully set their assault rifles aside and raised their hands.
Gaby opened the eye into the hangar.
There was nothing going on there. She prepared to switch views again.
But she saw the ceiling shudder and a hole open in it. A trail of fire stretched to the floor, leaving a silvery missile driven into the concrete.
Black paint issued from the missile, spraying out in a sloppy circle.
Gaby smiled. The missile had landed on the brown paper covering one of the conjurer's circles. Doc had explained their purpose to her and the others: the circles waited to be struck with energies unique to displacement, summoning. Such power would fuel their counter-devisements, which would exert power over whatever appeared within them, damaging the sturdy, twisting the living. Meaning that anything that appeared within them would be racked with pain, helpless and useless.
The paint circle sprayed by the missile overlapped two of Doc's defensive conjurer's circles. Gaby watched as the missile's second tier of sprayers laid down the crude symbols just within the ring.
There was a crackle of energy and men appeared—four fair world gunmen and Adonis. They stood in a circle, facing out, just as the attackers disguised as musicians had done.
The men brought their guns up. Then, as one, they doubled over as pain from Doc's defensive devisement hit them. Most of them were throwing up by the time they hit the floor.
Adonis lost height and gained girth as if it were a putty man squashed by a child. Its face registered surprise. Then it stretched up to its accustomed height, shook itself, and looked impassively at the fallen men.
One of them, his face twisted with pain, tried to talk to him, words that were so low Gaby couldn't hear them.
Adonis looked around, scanning the hangar. It focused a moment on the talk-box, looking straight at Gaby, then turned away. It spotted what it wanted on the wall near the rotorkite and headed that way.
A switch on the wall. Adonis threw it, and in the top of the picture frame Gaby saw the hangar roof shudder as the overhead door began to lift.
Uncoiling ropes snaked down in to the hangar, and dark-armored men rappelled down beside the rotorkite.
Gaby grimaced. If men just came physically through the roof hatch, the conjurer's circles would do no good.
She went looking for Doc.
The voice buzzed through the speaker in Duncan's ear. "Sir? This is Greencoat." The man sounded uncertain; he'd been uncomfortable with the new grimworld equipment.
"I'm here."
"The missile team isn't answering because they're all sick. But Adonis did find the switch. We are in and we have the hangar."
"Sick. Some trick of Doc's." Duncan hissed his frustration. "Very well. The laboratory team has stopped answering. We have to assume they've been beaten. Don't send any men down the building exterior; we need to concentrate our forces. Send the entire force in through the hangar and kill everyone."
"Yes, sir."
Duncan leaned back, irritably drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair. The signal still showed a large number of grimworlders alive on one of Doc's floors. Whoever these men were, they had managed to break the first wave of Duncan's attack.
But only the first. He had more in store for them. The thought made him smile.
Gaby first tried the topmost viewer in the west stairwell, only a floor or two below the hangar—and there Doc was, Ixyail beside him, racing up the stairs, in sight only for a moment.
That was only a viewer; Gaby couldn't talk through it, couldn't warn him.
Wait. Maybe she could.
She lashed out at the viewer in anger.
Alastair flinched as the viewer above his head burst and rained sparks down on him. "Gods!"
Above, at the landing, Doc skidded to a stop and looked back. Ixyail and Noriko barely slowed in time to keep from running into him. Doc said, "I wonder what it did to make her mad at it."
But with the four of them stopped, their clattering footsteps no longer obscured the noises from above—cries of orders over the cries of pain and sound of men being sick.
There were men up there, and they were active, not brought low by Doc's conjurer's circles.
Gaby reopened the eye into the laboratory. Athelstane's men were shackling captured gunmen; most of the attackers, though badly hurt, appeared to have survived, saved by their grimworld armor. Harris was in view, talking rapidly with Athelstane. Gaby heaved a sigh of relief. "Athelstane."
The lieutenant and Harris turned to look at her.
"There's a problem in the hangar. Doc's going there. I think you and your men should join him."
She heard one of the guards, a woman, say, "Gods, not more stairs."
Athelstane shot a dirty look at the woman. "Quiet, you. Very well, goodlady, we're on our way." He waved a hand at his guards and trotted out of frame.
Harris moved to follow.
"Harris, don't!"
"Gaby, if there are problems—"
"Listen . . . " He'd survived one encounter already. There had to be some way she could convince him to stay behind now, not to charge into another dangerous situation. The answer came to her in a burst of enlightenment. "I think Duncan's in the talk-boxes. Using them to track our movements. I want you to make like Mister Actor Guy. Stay in front of this one and talk to Doc and everybody else as if they're still in the room with you. It might screw him up."
Harris looked after Athelstane and grimaced. "Dammit. All right. But wait a second. Let's see if we can do to him what he's doing to us." He ran out of frame.
He was back in a moment with a radio headset. "This was on one of the grimworlders. Check it out." He put it on, fiddled with it. "Testing, one, two, three . . . "
Gaby switched away from the laboratory talk-box and listened. Then she heard Harris again, two voices; one was crisp and clear, the other distant and fuzzy. She went looking for the fainter signal.
The first of the soldiers descending the stairs rounded the turn, coming into view on the landing. Alastair and Ixyail opened up with their autoguns. The attack caught the first two men by surprise. They fell; those behind brought up their guns to fire. Alastair and Ish ducked behind the cover of the banister and backed down the stairs.
"This will not work," Doc shouted over the gunfire. "We can't hold here long against those weapons. And if they have any sense, they're covering the other stairways and elevators."
"We could perhaps lure some of them ahead of the others," Noriko shouted back. "Take their weapons and use them against the rest. When the enemy is stronger, you must use his strength against him."
Doc nodded. "That's partly correct." He clapped Alastair on the back. "Fighting retreat," he told the healer.
Alastair nodded without looking back. Doc gestured for Noriko to follow him. Together, they trotted down three stories, past a set of armored doors that normally kept people from lower floors from reaching Doc's floors. Then Doc sat cross-legged in the center of the landing. Above, the gunfire went on and on.
Doc used his bronze penknife to prick his wrist. He drew a conjurer's circle around him in his own blood, took a moment to assure himself that it was unbroken. "I may be gone for a few beats," he told Noriko. "If I can't defend myself—"
"Don't worry," she assured him.
He closed his eyes and sank within himself.
And spoke. To a god. To the worst of them, the war-bringer, the conqueror.
"Hear me," he pleaded. "Weapons beg to be wielded. Grant me knowledge of them. Power over them. I will use them, and entertain you with noise and pain and blood."
It was a loathsome bargain. But he sent it out into the void like an outstretched hand, and when mad laughter began bubbling up within him he knew that it had been accepted.
The mirror remained a reflection, but suddenly Harris' second voice was much clearer: "—two, three. Testing—"
She switched back to the lab for a brief moment. "Got it." Then she returned to the new eye she'd found.
She extended her perceptions. She could feel other eyes not far away, a direction she'd never felt before.
She opened one of them and heard: "— heavy resistance in both stairwells, and they have the elevators locked off. But it should not take more than part of a chime."
Duncan's voice: "Very well."
But she couldn't see anything; this was a sound-only place.
A moment later, she found an eye that provided sight as well as sound. It looked out on a huge room. It was a vast metal framework crowded with what looked like rigid, upright bags attached to metal cross-braces. It all looked like steel, a shocking amount of bare steel for the fair world.
She opened another eye—and did not have enough time to see what lay beyond. She was suddenly swept away in a tidal wave of words and thoughts: dry, emotionless knowledge that tore through her with such force that it left her no strength to think.
She yelled in sudden fright, unable for the moment even to remember her name or purpose, and tried to extend herself around the vastness that carried her along.
Names, hundreds of names, grimworld dates and grimworld money transactions, personal details, embarrassing facts that could twist men to the will of another, crimes of the past, evaluations of the psyche, technical specifications, techniques of industry, construction, history of the fair world, history of the grim world, comparisons and contrasts, projected trends, structure of the stock market, mountains of knowledge on physics and chemistry, biology and geology— She couldn't see anything; the knowledge was without form. Its cold impersonality numbed her. Its immensity crushed her. She gave one final cry and winked out of existence, conquered by the force she had encountered.
The mind-wisp that was Doc floated up to the first of the attackers in the stairwell. The man looked through him, could not see him.
Doc looked at the man, seeing not a human being but a machine made of meat and blood, carrying more machines and devices designed to make him more powerful, more lethal.
With just a glance, he understood all there was to know about the man's long gun, the M16, with its monstrous rate of fire and grenade launcher. More grenades in the man's belt pouch, tear gas and smoke. Ammunition. Body armor. Gas mask hanging unused in its case. Satchel charge in the backpack.
And they all cried to him, begging to be used.
He smiled benignly at them and began granting wishes.
He reached out to the smoke and tear-gas devices, imparting a bit of his strength to them. Then he moved on to the next man up the stairs and granted his blessing again. A third man, more wishes granted—
Behind him, there was a sharp bang as the devices in the first man's belt went off, flooding him and his immediate surroundings with black smoke and stinging fog. Doc laughed and flew on, touching another half-dozen men before he reached the top of the stairs.
Adonis he left alone. Adonis carried nothing that called to him, no weapon that begged for his attention.
More grenades went off behind him. Men cried out. Doc swept across the hangar, touching the men writhing on the floor; he reached the men standing at the elevators and granted his loving touch to their grenades. Then he floated on to the far stairwell, smiling at the music made by the men behind as their weapons erupted in smoke and pain.
More men on those far stairs, firing down at someone else.
It was getting harder to grant the wishes of the implements of war. Each one he touched took a little out of him. He could barely see his surroundings and knew there was not much more of him to give. Still he swept down the stairs, speaking approving words to the tools of destruction, giving them the power to act. Behind, there were more explosions and cries.
He travelled down a long stretch in which no weapons clamored for his attention. Then he met a new group of men.
He recognized the first of them. Athelstane of the Novimagos Guard. The lieutenant's weapons, too, begged for his attention, but Doc looked in vain for grenades. It was hard to think, so hard—and then his vision swam and he could see no more.
"Doc, Gaby, is there any word on those additional troops?" Harris felt like an idiot, talking to an unoccupied corner of the room. Not that he hadn't done it before, dozens of time, in college stage productions and rehearsals—but Ladislas and Welthy, guarding the door, kept smirking at him.
Harris reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the device there. Doc's device, the new one. Until this morning he'd been carrying a device that masked his signal, the telltale energies that marked him as a grimworlder. This recent replacement did just the opposite: magnified those signals so that anyone with a tracer would read him not as a single grimworlder but as a whole pack of them.
He left it on. Until Doc pronounced the building clear of enemies, Harris got to be the decoy for Duncan Blackletter.
An interesting role. He wondered if he'd get to see the old man again. He wondered what he'd do to the sick son of a bitch.
Then Ladislas' expression changed to one of surprise. Harris followed the man's gaze.
There, on the talk-box, Duncan Blackletter smiled benignly out at him.
Harris set the device down. "I don't have time for you, Duncan."
"Nor I for you. But I'm delighted to find you are all together." Duncan turned to the clay man. "Joseph, I really have to insist that you kill Doc and Goodsir Greene here, and any other grimworlders you find. Except Goodlady Donohue. I do need to study her before I have you kill her, too. Oh, yes, and smash everyone who tries to stop you."
Joseph flexed his fingers. "I will smash you instead."
"Oh, I forgot. By your making, by your name, I command you to remember your master!"
Joseph shouted and staggered back. Letters of the old script of Cretanis appeared on his forehead. Smoke rose from him as the letters seared themselves into his flesh.
Harris scrambled across bodies and grabbed up his autogun. He fired at Duncan's face, taking the talk-box to pieces with a stream of lead.
He looked at Joseph.
The clay man was upright again. The letters were charred black on his forehead. He looked stricken. He turned to Harris, his eyes full of dismay.
"Oh, Harris," he said. "I am so very sorry."
He advanced, his hands outstretched.