“Likewise,” John said. “They gave you what, nine, ten days? That’s more than you deserve for exposing the Saint George. I cannot believe the level of stupidity . . . what could possibly have
been worth that?”
A wry smile formed on Calvin’s face. “There was something I needed to do. Didn’t have time to wait until you were okay with it.”
*
The teleportal deposited Godfrey onto a road that, while well-traveled, hadn’t yet been paved. It cut through a wooded area and eventually connected to an intercolonial thoroughfare. Fitz’s badge said that the surrounding wilderness had been favorable to traveling duffer spies in years past, which explained why Kalfu had detected Calvin moving steadily down this road for many hours now.
“Conceal yourselves,” Kalfu ordered, taking shelter in a thicket some yards off the path. Thierry and Godfrey hid on the opposite side of the path behind a stand of weeds, so as to ambush Calvin from multiple angles. He noticed Thierry rummaging through his pack of art supplies; the pictomancer was about to cast something.
Minutes passed, and Godfrey kept his eyes glued to a bend in the road, expecting Calvin to come limping into view any moment now. When the procession finally arrived, it was not what he had expected.
“Enchanted carriage,” he whispered to Thierry, who was mumbling to himself as he sorted through different pieces of magical charcoal sticks.
“Thought he was a duffer?” the pictomancer said, distracted.
“He is. I count three mages riding on the front, so maybe they
took him prisoner? Oh, bollocks!”
“What?” Thierry looked up from his work.
“That’s Birtwistle in the middle. Sod all, I thought he was dead!” Godfrey looked over at Kalfu, trying to get the sangromancer’s attention. Kalfu just sat there, legs crossed and arms folded, his staff resting on his knees. He might have been asleep. Godfrey clenched his hands into fists.
“Calvin was supposed to be alone! Bugger, this complicates things,” he said.
“Nope. It doesn’t.” Thierry unrolled a sheet of gator leather on the dirt and began sketching on it with an inexhaustible quill. His eyes were closed, and he used his pictomancy to illustrate the scene down the road where Birtwistle and his party were about to be. Godfrey watched Thierry work, intrigued.
The drawing had amazing detail, almost like a photograph cast in black and white upon the leather. It was a perfect match at first, but then Thierry drew the back of the wagon without a cover, so as to detail the occupants inside. Three were grown men, and the fourth was Adler.
“Seven in all,” Thierry said. “Three mages. Four duffers. That wagon’s charmed with a one-way screen all around. Stuff goes in but don’t come out ’less they say so.”
“Standard, for a prison transport. You’d know your way around one,” Godfrey said.
“Then let this impress you, peeshwank.” Thierry ran his quill in a flawless circle around the sketch of the road. Then he hastily illustrated three little figures outside the circle—near-perfect
approximations of Godfrey, Kalfu and Thierry himself.
“What are the rules for this?” asked Godfrey. Pictomancy was a very precise discipline, like drawing a story to life and watching it play out.
“Long as this drawing is intact, we’re the only ones who can move in or out of the circle. They won’t notice right away that they keep covering the same stretch of ground,” Thierry said.
“Good. First we dispatch the mages, then the other duffers. I’ll break the charms on the wagon, we get away with Adler, we square up, and we part ways. Let’s go.”
Across the way, Kalfu stood as if he’d been right there with them, conspiring at the same time. The trio spread out around the perimeter of the circle, equidistant from one another. Kalfu folded his arms and bowed his head, never taking his milky eyes off the approaching carriage, while Thierry shrugged out of his leather vest and closed his eyes, entering a trance. Godfrey coveted the way that the two mancers could so easily practice their magic without a focusing instrument; not for the first time, he missed his wand.
Thierry muttered a command in Cajun French. Two huge alligator tattoos swirled on his torso, writhing and twisting to life. Slowly they pushed against Thierry’s skin as if they were beneath it, thrashing harder and harder until they stood up and perched on his flesh like lizards. When they sprang off of him and belly-flopped onto the ground, they grew to full size, though they had a mildly translucent quality about them. Where the tattoos had been, Thierry now had unblemished flesh.
The massive gators sauntered down the road, seconds away from intercepting Hammond’s new crew. Thierry concentrated on summoning more monsters to go with them; a firebird sprouted from his back, eight wasps from his knuckles, and a huge serpent uncoiled from around one leg. The many constructs shoved their way into the brush and hovered at the edge of Thierry’s circle spell, waiting for a command.
Once, twice, three times the carriage passed through the circle charm, covering the same stretch of ground repeatedly. Godfrey had never been on the receiving end of such a charm and didn’t know how it looked from the inside; there must have been something to conceal the sudden shift as one walked through a portal that projected you thirty feet backward.
“C’est bon,” Thierry said. “Attaque!”
The picto-beasts launched their attack.
In shambled the gators. One of them threw itself bodily at the carriage and latched its massive jaws on the front wheel, stopping it fast, while the other gator reared up and lunged at the mages up top. To their credit, the mages rapidly constructed their own shield charms and repelled the beast before it could do them in.
One mage fell off the carriage, hit the ground, and tried to run for the woods, but Thierry’s circle spell kept him contained. The picto-python slithered after him and soon had him in its coils.
“Don’t kill him,” Godfrey urged.
“He is only a mage,” Thierry spat, eyes still shut.
Godfrey stayed crouched, waiting for the right moment to join the fight. Thierry’s wasps had engaged the other new wizard, who tried to swat them away, but they were too many and they stung him over and over. Birtwistle uttered a repellent spell with his wand to drive them away, only to be struck in the back by a pictomantic firebird. The collision knocked his wand loose, and the slight contact set fire to his robes. As Birty panicked and swatted at the flames, Godfrey stole forth into the circle and seized the fallen wand.
“You and yours hold tight, and this don’t have to get worse than it is!” he shouted.
Birty momentarily forgot his smoking robes, jerking his head
around at the sound of Godfrey’s voice. His eyes lit up with recognition and hatred. “You! You deserted!”
“It’s a touch more complicated than that, mate. Give me your prisoners and it’ll all make sense in a couple of days.” Godfrey raised the wand to show he was serious.
“I’ve got a better idea!” Birty reached into his companion’s robes and swiped his wand, leveling it at Godfrey with a curse on his half-burned lips.
“What? Wait, don’t!” Godfrey shrieked.
“Heofonfyr!”
A white-hot geyser of flame issued forth from the wand. Just as quickly as it had formed, Thierry’s picto-phoenix flew between Godfrey and the fire curse, absorbing the full brunt of it into the center of its body. The phoenix hovered in the air, its innards churning, and then it belched the fire back at Birtwistle three times stronger.
Birty screamed as the inferno reduced him to ash in seconds.
“No! Why’d you do that!” Godfrey roared at Thierry. The pictomancer edged closer to the circle, directing his creations with subtle movements of his hands. The snake and the gators held the other two mages at bay, smothering them so that they couldn’t speak.
“He was going to burn you,” Thierry said.
“I can deflect a heofonfyr curse! Bloody hell, man!”
Thierry shrugg
ed his big shoulders. “Didn’t want him to melt that badge.”
Birtwistle . . . he was dead! Just like that!
“Come now, mon fils,” Kalfu said, walking past Thierry to the
rear of the wagon, the butt of his staff thudding against the ground. “Let’s finish our work.”
Struck dumb by Thierry’s actions, Godfrey just shook his head and went after Kalfu. He couldn’t wait to rid himself of these two.
“What’s happening out there?” Calvin asked. Screams and shouts jostled the four prisoners out of the drudgery of their voyage. For the hundredth time Calvin tried to shake the feeling back into his hands.
“They’re under attack. Damn, this could be bad.” Penn shifted onto his knees, trying to peer through the smallest hole in the wagon canvas.
“Is it technomancers?” Daniel asked.
“I don’t hear any motors. Or gunshots,” Griff said.
“If anyone’s been sitting on a special secret cure for these wrist charms, now’s the time!” John Penn said.
Footsteps crunched outside, coming to the open rear of the wagon. A man with a dark face appeared there, framed in a mess of gray-and-white dreadlocks, his eyes as white as snow. He wore messy robes of shredded cloth and woven fish nets. He smiled wide, the smile of a predator, and his teeth and gums were a bright white. The stench of blood filled the air.
“Oh, hell! Sangromancer!” Griff shouted.
Calvin didn’t know what to do, and even if he had, he doubted
he could have done it in his current state. The sangromancer raised a gnarled hand and pointed a finger at the dial in Calvin’s chest. In deep, ominous tones he began chanting in a language Calvin didn’t know.
Invisible needles pricked his chest, hot and sharp, wringing sweat from his skin. A burning pain shot into his very core, along with a sick feeling that made Calvin want to vomit. Whatever the sangromancer was doing, it was bad. He found himself swatting at the dial with his limp fingers, a purely instinctive defense that had no hope of working.
“Stop!” he screamed, thrashing about, his muscles seizing.
“Hold on to yourself, Calvin! He’ll try to take your soul, just hold on!” John said as he tried to shove the back door open.
A deluge of foreign images flooded Calvin’s mind, like water bursting through a dam, carrying memories that were not his own—memories that belonged to the sangromancer.
Kalfu LeVeau.
Yes, that was his name. A master manipulator of blood who’d prolonged his unnatural life by consuming the life force from valuable specimens—people of relentless passion, people whose hearts beat wildly with love and knew many shades of pain and dread. Kalfu was old, very old, and had done this many times before to keep going.
Calvin was next. As he succumbed to a mental fog, he slumped to the floor, the world spinning about in a dizzying spiral. His mind reeled the way it had upon first contact with Karahkwa the
thunderbird.
Exactly like that.
Wait . . .
That familiar sensation bubbled up in Calvin’s consciousness, identified neither by image nor word, but by impression. At first the sangromancer’s curses smothered it, but the impression grew stronger, more fervent, powerful enough to break the bravest heart. Was that . . . love?
“Non! C’est impossible!” the sangromancer roared. Then the connection between them shattered, seemingly for no reason at all, and Calvin’s senses slammed back into him like a mimic at full speed. Gasping and blinking through a sudden sweat and fever, he recognized the deep, earth-shattering sound of a thunderclap at close range.
The roof of the wagon tore away to reveal the still waning light of dusk. A tangible burst of sound had shredded the canvas, leaving the wagon’s four occupants staring upward in stunned alarm. Outside there came a panicked cry.
“Kill them! Kill them now!”
Of all the rotten luck, Godfrey had to run into a brace of thunderbirds.
Two of them dropped out of the sky—no warning, no provocation—and unleashed their shrill cry with pinpoint precision on Thierry’s magic circle. The first thunderclap tore off the wagon’s roof and put Kalfu flat on his butt; the second blast sidelined Thierry’s beasties. Even with a wand, Godfrey had little means of defending himself; shield spells couldn’t repel sound.
“Ne bougez pas!” Thierry roared. “Stay in the circle! I can fortify it.” He fumbled with a small pencil and a sheet of parchment from his back pocket. Before he could draw anything, the larger of the two birds—a red male—fired off another thunderclap at the drawing Thierry had left beside the road.
The gatorskin canvas burst into a thousand pieces, and the circle spell collapsed like a broken glass.
“Bollocks!” Godfrey ran for cover beside the wagon.
Thierry abandoned the parchment. He ordered his beasties to finish off Birty’s companions, then steered them toward the incoming predator birds. With a final utterance in French, the magical constructs morphed and twisted together to form an unnatural monstrosity with scales, wings, claws, and poison.
It almost looked like a match for the thunderbirds.
“Kill them! Kill them now!” Godfrey said.
Behind the wagon, Kalfu pulled himself to his feet with his staff, shaking his head. Blood trickled from his ears and eyes. Godfrey crawled over to him.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“Look out!” Kalfu tackled Godfrey to the ground just as a thunderbird passed overhead. This one, a blue female, raked her hellish talons through the spot where Godfrey’s head had been. Somewhere on the other side of the wagon, Thierry bellowed orders to his new monster willing it to attack the red male.
“We have to go!” Godfrey said.
“Not yet!” Kalfu looked back at the wagon, its protective charms nullified by the damage. The technomancers piled out, flexing their fingers as if feeling them for the first time. Godfrey’s heart sank—Birty and his companions would have put paralysis charms on them, and now that they were dead the magic was null. As feeling returned to the duffers’ hands, they scrambled to freedom. One of them was fiddling with the contraband locker on the opposite side.
“Don’t let them get their weapons!” Kalfu said. Flecks of
blood and spittle flew from his lips—the thunderbird had not gone easy on him.
Godfrey pointed his new wand at the prisoner by the locker. He had only formed the first syllable of a curse when the female thunderbird circled back and hit him with something akin to a targeted shriek, a tightly focused stream of air and sound that hit like a strong man’s punch. The force lifted him off his feet and hurled him into a tree several yards back.
The world spun. He grimaced against the pain as the clearing came back into focus: Kalfu still leaned on his staff, uttering a healing spell, while the prisoners retrieved several duffer weapons from the contraband locker. The hated Calvin Adler appeared, bearing a frosted iron knife, looking intently at Kalfu with severe intent in his eyes. Off to Godfrey’s left, Thierry held his ground, feet planted wide as he spun his arms in exaggerated motions, guiding his picto-monster in some semblance of a cockfight with the male thunderbird.
Try as he might, Godfrey couldn’t form words. He pointed his wand at Calvin and tried some generic offensive spells, waving the tip this way and that, yet nothing came of it. He was too weak, too breathless to inflict any real damage.
One of the technomancers appeared with a recovered firearm and fired it four times at Kalfu—thrice in the heart, and once in the head. The force laid Kalfu out on the dirt, where he instantly became still. With the sangromancer down, the blue female rejoined her mate, and they struck at Thierry with a double-blast of thunder so powerful that it left a small crater in the ground. Even over the noise, Godfrey could hear Thierry’s bones shatter and grind to dust. All of his pictomantic constructs faded, dispersing like fog before the rising sun.
And then there was only Godfrey. Panting, mind racing, he tried to figure out what to do
next . . . where to go . . . where to hide . . .
“Wait a minute! You again?” Calvin pointed his iron blade at Godfrey. Any of his lingering hesitation over Kalfu’s presence faded away, replaced by a look of sheer hatred. “You cut off my friend’s hand!”
Right! Good idea. Godfrey tightened his quaking fingers around the wand and tried to summon up the energy for a ceorfan curse, but he was still too hurt from the thunderclap. Calvin Adler charged at him and batted the wand aside, then plunged his dagger directly into Godfrey’s sternum. Godfrey howled as a pain like fire burned through his heart, spreading outward from the knife the jutted out of his chest. The poisonous metal extinguished the dregs of his magic, making his skin prickle and pull tight. An abrupt sensation of cold settled all the way to his core.
Calvin’s fingers were still wrapped around the handle. He leaned in close and snarled, “This time do the smart thing and die.”
There was little Godfrey could make in the way of a counteroffer.
CHAPTER 15
Calvin willed himself to release the knife one finger at a time. The mage—Godfrey Norrington, your personal headhunter—slumped to the ground and gave up the ghost. As much as Calvin wanted to keep his knife, he couldn’t bring himself to pull it out, as if doing so would revive him and they’d start this all over again. He bit his lip and turned his back to his most recent kill.
With the fighting over, the thunderbirds landed beside Calvin with a grace that he would not have attributed to creatures of their size. Karahkwa perched at a distance, standing upright in the presence of his mate. Ehnita, who was smaller with feathers of a bluish complexion, cautiously approached Calvin, head bobbing.
Calvin held still as she lowered one eye to his face.
“Hello,” Calvin said, fingers still shaking.
Ehnita’s consciousness penetrated his mind, filling Calvin with duplicates of her own emotions—gratitude, admiration, even affection. They were appendages of a love truer than Calvin would have been able to describe with words.
Suicide Run (Engines of Liberty Book 2) Page 11