by Dan Koboldt
“Ordinarily they would be, were it not for our arts. Old Mags has a particular knack for the preservation spells.”
“What’s Old Mags?” Quinn asked. It sounded like the name of a tavern, which he really hoped it was.
“She’s the head librarian, and a fellow council member.”
“How old did she have to be to get that nickname?”
“You should ask her,” Moric said. His face was carefully neutral.
“Maybe I will,” Quinn said. Granted, asking any woman about her age seemed unwise in Earth or Alissia. “If I do, I’ll be sure to tell her it was your idea.”
Moric folded like a card table. “Don’t do that! I’m in enough trouble with her as it is.”
“Romantic trouble?”
“Ha! Don’t be foolish.” Moric looked around, as if he feared Old Mags might be lurking somewhere nearby. “I may have borrowed a few parchments. Old treatises on a topic dear to my heart: the art of forced disappearance.”
“That sounds a lot like what you did to me in Valteron.”
“What? Oh, not exactly. I’m talking about causing things to disappear. To cease their existence entirely.”
“I’ve done that, actually. Made things disappear,” Quinn said.
Moric’s eyebrows went up. “Permanently?”
“Not quite.” Just long enough to be convincing.
“That’s the tricky part. I had made some progress on it, though I’m sorry to say that it came at the tangible expense of the scrolls themselves.”
“Is there any way to get them back?” Quinn asked.
“Yes. Unfortunately, the instructions for that particular bit of magic were, well . . .”
“On the scrolls, too?”
“Exactly.”
They skirted around the amphitheater, where remnants of Quinn’s performance danced and whirled in the gusting wind. The base of the central tower was massive, probably fifty or sixty yards in diameter. Despite its size, there was only a single entryway not much wider than a man. The iron-banded wooden door was shut firmly from the inside, too. The tower itself was supposedly stuffed with papers and other flammable items.
These people clearly didn’t understand much about fire codes.
Moric didn’t try the door. Instead, he pulled on a rope cord dangling beside it. There came a faint sound of bells ringing from somewhere inside, muffled by the thick wood of the door. Quinn stole a glance at the tower wall; it seemed to be of brick-and-mortar construction, but polished nearly as smooth as glass. He brushed his fingers along it and could barely feel the edges of the bricks. The building itself felt cold, almost icy.
“Feels cold, doesn’t it?” Moric asked as if reading his mind. His voice sounded an octave higher than usual. “It’s a side effect of the preservation spells.” He was fidgeting while they waited.
He’s nervous . . . and he can fly.
Quinn couldn’t wait to meet this librarian.
A grating noise came from the far side of the door. Someone was unbarring it. The door opened wide enough to reveal an ancient woman with a graying bun. Her eyes were bloodshot.
“Hello, Mags,” Moric said.
She grunted at him.
“This is Quinn, the newest member of the Enclave.”
“I know who he is.” She looked Quinn up and down. “I’m still picking your snow out of my hair.”
“Now, Mags,” Moric said.
“Don’t you even start,” said Mags. “I’m missing three parchments. Some of the same ones you were asking after, just last week.”
“I’m sure they’ll turn up,” Moric said. A bit too quickly.
She stared at him, unblinking. Almost like a fish.
Moric cleared his throat. “In the meantime, I was hoping to show young Quinn here what it looks like.”
Quinn jumped in to help. “I’m told you’ve done wonders with the place.” He flourished with both arms and produced a white-and-yellow flower out of nowhere. This he offered to her with a bow. “For you.”
She looked at it like it was a dead animal. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. No time for foolishness.”
He let the flower tumble from his fingers. It disappeared in a puff of smoke, just before hitting the ground. No reaction.
Tough crowd.
“Moric, I’ll be needing to search you on your way out, so keep that in mind.”
“I’m sure we’ll both enjoy that.”
She turned to shuffle with agonizing slowness down a narrow hallway just as wide as the door.
“I think she likes you,” Moric whispered.
“I think she likes you, too.”
Moric smiled ruefully. He gestured, so Quinn followed.
The hall led to an open chamber several stories tall. Lamplight shone on a great spiraling staircase that wound up the core of the tower. The walls around it were lined with shelves, and every shelf crammed with books or papers. There were thousands in view, and likely even more in the floors above. A dusty but faintly sweet smell permeated the air. The smell of old books. Here was a wealth of knowledge about Alissia and its history. Chaudri would have been salivating over it.
“I don’t suppose there are any maps?” Quinn ventured.
“Fourth floor,” Moric said. He gestured at the staircase in a mock imitation of Quinn’s bow. “After you.”
Quinn ascended without hurry, still marveling at how much the library contained. He’d always had the impression that there simply wasn’t a lot written down in this world. Yet the first three floors alone contained more parchments, more stacks of papers, and even more leather-bound books than he imagined could exist in Alissia.
The fourth floor, the map room, was even more impressive. The map of Alissia was a hand-painted mural that dominated the entire fourth-floor wall. The mountains and forests and coastlines were sketched in painstaking detail. The company’s map of Alissia had ports and capital cities, as well as a few dozen other settlements.
This mural had hundreds.
And the details! Even down to simple hamlets represented by a cluster of tiny cottages. Without thinking about it, Quinn’s eyes flew to the area in north Felara where the gateway was located. This, to his great relief, was one thing the map was missing.
There was something else, too, that the map might have contained. He searched the waters and the coasts for it, but came up empty. His disappointment must have been obvious.
“You were hoping to see something here,” Moric said. “Perhaps the very island on which we stand?”
Quinn shrugged. “I know you said I could leave, but I’d still like to have some idea of where we are.”
“You won’t find the Enclave marked on any maps, I’m afraid,” Moric said. “Revealing its location might bring unwelcome visitors, of the sort who would try to exploit our arts for personal gain. Or worse.”
“I can’t imagine that you’d let anyone catch you by surprise here,” Quinn said.
“Oh, we wouldn’t make it easy. But should one of Alissia’s more powerful nations take an interest, we could be in trouble.”
“Like Valteron?”
Moric smiled. “We don’t need to worry about Valteron, as long as I’m on the council.”
“Because you’re friends with Richard Holt.”
“Something like that,” Moric said.
Quinn laughed, suddenly nervous. “You didn’t, ah, have anything to do with his rise to power, did you?”
Moric did not answer.
“Alissians have much to teach us about loyalty.”
—R. HOLT, “UNDERSTANDING ALISSIAN ETHICS”
CHAPTER 18
CONFRONTATIONS
Logan was in a dark place. The faces of the dead Bravo Team members played over and over in his head. He’d been a soldier for all his adult lif
e. He’d lost brothers before. But when you recruited and trained them yourself, you felt more than just a loss. You felt the guilt. It was just as bad as that shit-storm in Caralis years ago.
No—worse.
Kiara motioned for him to scout ahead. The isotope signal had remained strong. They were in Landor still, though closer to the Felaran border. That made everyone nervous; it seemed their quarry had given up all pretense and were making a straight shot back toward the gateway.
Now, suddenly, the source of the isotope had gone still. If Bravo’s last surviving member was tracking the infiltrators, it meant they’d stopped somewhere. Maybe to set an ambush. Kiara had ordered silence on the comm units; the raiders might be listening in. One of the fallen men had been missing his earbud.
Logan dismounted and slipped forward for a look over the ridge ahead. He rested a hand on the stock of the MP5. Bravo Team had managed to put them on close-to-equal terms with the raiders, though at great cost. She and Logan had the guns; Chaudri now carried Logan’s crossbow.
Kiara estimated the signal was about a quarter mile ahead. As he looked now, he could make out a dense cluster of evergreens on a rocky outcropping. Distance looks about right, too. It was slightly uphill from his position, and his field glasses couldn’t penetrate much into the dense wall of trees. Anyone hidden there, however, had a view for miles around. He scooted down the ridge and jogged back to confer with the others.
“Are they up there?” Kiara asked.
“That’s where I’d be,” he said. “You could hide a small army in those trees, and they have good visibility. There’s no way we’ll approach without being seen. In daylight, at least.”
“What if they have night-vision equipment?” Chaudri asked.
“Then we’re at a major disadvantage,” Logan admitted. He hoped they wouldn’t have it, though. That kind of gear was heavy, and they’d had no reason to suspect they’d need it when they raided the island facility.
“We’d better proceed as if they do,” Kiara said. “It’s about four hours until nightfall. As long as they stay here, we’ll hit them tonight.”
They gave the horses their feed bags to keep them quiet, and began to draw up a plan.
Logan hid behind a boulder twenty yards south of the tree line. It was almost midnight. They’d seen no movement in the evergreens before darkness fell, other than a thin curl of smoke. Someone had built a campfire. He doubted it was Mendez; the scout wouldn’t risk revealing his position. Either the remaining raiders had grown lax, or they meant to lure someone in.
Kiara was working in from the east, to try for a better fix on the isotope scanner. Chaudri had taken a position to the west, fifty yards from the trees. She wouldn’t move in unless called; her job was to make sure that no one slipped away north or west. Logan had found a suppressor on one of the bodies in the defile; he screwed it into the muzzle of his MP5 now. It would hide a muzzle flash and muffle the sound, but cut the effective range of the weapon considerably. If he used it, he’d better be close.
Which he damn well intended to be.
A tiny signal flashed to his right. Their beacons were small LEDs, matched to the fluorescent green of the Alissian firefly. From a distance, it was hard to tell the difference, except that these flashes happened to be Morse code. She had a fix just inside the wood line. Thirty yards. He sent back three dashes, then dash-dot-dash. OK. A cloud drifted in front of the Alissian moon; the wind provided some cover noise. He rose and sprinted for the trees.
Fifteen yards, ten yards, five. He rolled in under the foliage of the evergreens. The mat of fallen needles made no sound. He came up into a crouch, MP5 at the ready. No movement. Mendez shouldn’t be far in. He might be asleep, or unconscious. Kiara flashed an update. Ten yards. He crept forward, closing the distance. Something clicked ahead. Logan tensed. It was a cigarette lighter; the man was lighting up.
“Hey!” Logan whispered. “Mendez!”
The man paused. He looked over, clicked the lighter again. Then Logan realized something.
Mendez didn’t smoke.
The cigarette had been a distraction. With his other hand, he’d raised the dark shadow of a handgun.
Shit!
Logan dove over and down as the suppressed muzzle spat bullets at him. He rolled prone behind a fallen tree. The man was up and walking toward him. He was wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit. He fired again, splintering the wood in front of Logan’s face. And he kept coming.
Logan lifted the muzzle of the MP5 just over the wood. The man reared back in surprise, trying to scramble away. I guess he didn’t expect to face a gun. Logan didn’t take any chances. He aimed for center mass and put four in the man’s chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. Logan stood and hurried forward, still covering him with the MP5. The fallen cigarette smoldered in the leaves. He stamped it out, then rolled the man over.
“This is interesting,” he whispered.
“What?” Kiara’s voice asked.
“It is the goddamn janitor.”
A hundred yards to the east, Kiara watched Logan sneak into the woods. She had the isotope scanner trained on a source just inside the wood line. Presumably that was Mendez, hiding in the deep cover. Hopefully he hadn’t come this far just to bleed out. It was critical that Logan reach the last member of Bravo Team alive. Not only would he have priceless intel on the infiltrators and their movements, but his survival would offer some consolation, some payoff, for the lives taken from the other three.
Logan had been trying his best not to show it, but their deaths had hit him hard. Yes, he was a professional soldier; he’d seen killing before. But it didn’t stop these things from hurting. It just meant he covered his emotions. He focused on the task at hand.
And the moment he got close to those responsible, he’d be like a tiger off the leash.
She’d specifically ordered him to try to take one of them alive, but that was unlikely to happen. Not that Logan wasn’t capable. He was a brawler and always had been, from the day she’d recruited him out of the service. But losing soldiers under your command was the most devastating thing that could happen to an officer. These were men and women you trained, gave orders to, felt responsible for.
On a mission, no one obsessed more about security than Logan did. Half of the equipment that the prototyping lab designed for Alissian use—such as the perimeter stakes—were things that he had dreamed up. None of it had saved Bravo from the raiders. Logan would kill them to a man if she let him.
And he might even if she didn’t let him.
They’d cross that bridge if and when they came to it, though. For now, Kiara scanned the tree line for any hint of movement. As she did, she reconsidered their tactical options. Judging by the curl of smoke they’d seen earlier, the raiders had made their camp another few hundred yards north. They were surrounded by dense forest on three sides, and a rocky drop-off to the north. It was a fairly defensible position, with the advantage of elevation and visibility. Two or three raiders remained, and they’d proven themselves dangerous.
She looked back to Logan just in time to see the gunfire. Christ! What’s going on? She heard a faint sound, like the pfft-pfft of a silenced handgun. The suppressor covered most of the flash, but not all of it. A moment later came the soft putts of Logan’s MP5. She cursed and ran for the woods, praying that Logan wouldn’t accidentally shoot her.
Chaudri crouched in the long grass to the west of the wooded outcrop. The stock of Logan’s crossbow felt clumsy and uncomfortable in her hands. She tried her best to concentrate on the mission and her orders, but there were so many distractions. She’d spent the better part of her career studying Alissia. Poring over manuscripts, reading reports, studying maps and histories. The prospect of an entire new world, one for which new data were constantly pouring in, thrilled her as nothing in archaeology had. And Richard Holt had inspired her as
no one else could. He didn’t just read about something to study it. He inserted himself into the experiment. Studied it inside and out. Almost got married, just to understand what it was like.
Meeting him in the palace of the Valteroni Prime . . . that had been something. Holt had been as confident and calm as ever. He showed no remorse for what he’d done; if anything, he was even more self-assured. Chaudri was beginning to understand why. There was an enchantment to this place. Even now, when she placed her palm against the hard, rocky earth, she imagined she could feel its pulse.
Movement from the trees broke her out of her reverie. A man hurried through the woods, south toward Logan’s position. No, two men. It looked like they were carrying machine guns, and moonlight glinted off of some gear on their heads.
Are those night-vision goggles?
Chaudri reached for her comm unit, but remembered that Kiara had confiscated it. Knew she’d be tempted. If she could get close enough, she might be able to warn them with the flash signal. Her Morse code was a bit rusty, though; she began running through it, just in case.
Kiara hadn’t really told her what to do in this situation. Her job was to watch and report if men fled. How I’m supposed to do that without a comm is still beyond me. At this range, she wouldn’t be able to hit either man with the crossbow, so she was useless. She started working her way south, keeping behind the grass or bushes whenever she could. Shadowing the men in black clothing. Her boot snapped a dry twig; the noise seemed to echo in the night air. She froze. The men in the woods paused. They’d heard it, of course.
Will they come this way? That was the real question.
If they did, she gave herself very little chance of killing them both. The crossbow would give her a good chance at one, but the second man probably wouldn’t come within sword range.
Then again, it had slowed them, which gave her an idea. She shadowed their movements for another few minutes, then found a stone and hurled it into the woods behind them. They certainly heard that. Both of them crouched low, half turned to look for a threat behind them. Chaudri remained completely still. In low visibility, movement gave away more than anything else. She was a stump, or a stone. Nothing more.