by Myke Cole
“All right. Keystone, I need you and Prometheus on the far side of the ring. Can you sight it from here?” Fitzy asked.
Britton nodded. “I can get off to the side. We should be well covered by darkness. Who’s going to take care of you, sir?”
“Oh, I think we’ll manage,” Richards said, spreading his hands. About his feet, a small throng of jackrabbits, spiders, and snakes had already gathered in silent, ordered columns beside four coyotes. As Britton watched, one stepped forward, sitting back on its haunches and saluting smartly.
“We’ve got more inbound,” Richards said.
Britton smiled and opened a gate on the MAC practice tent. “Okay. I’ve got a good spot.”
Fitzy nodded, tapping the commlink in his ear. “I’ll radio when it’s showtime. Warn me if you see anything from that angle that I should know about.”
A moment later, Britton and Downer crouched behind a broken boulder covered with painted handprints, barely discernible in the darkness. A small crowd of Apache, mostly men, were dressed in jeans and T-shirts. They surrounded a circle of white canvas wickiups and were chatting amiably, with no evidence of ceremony. He pulled night-vision binoculars from his belt and sighted down them. In the distance, he could make out Fitzy, Richards, and Truelove approaching at a crouch. Richards’s small army of animals slunk along behind them. Slit-Nose must have bugged out. Britton’s stomach went cold at the thought, but there was no time to worry about it.
Britton and Downer jogged to crouch behind an abandoned car that offered a better view of the circle. They were getting close, and Britton could hear snatches of conversation. He couldn’t count the number of people around the canvas domes, but there were far more than thirty, talking in low voices around a raging bonfire. Downer paused, beginning to stand until he yanked her down.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.
“Something’s…can you feel that?” she replied.
Britton paused, focusing. The cold air made his shirt stick to him beneath his armor, his ball cap itching on his brow. The magical currents on the Home Plane were so much fainter than the Source that he had scarcely noticed them despite so many Selfers in one place.
But once he focused, he picked up one current stronger than the rest. And close.
He moved to open a gate as his magic rolled back, and an elbow crashed into his ear, smashing the commlink and sending him sprawling. Four men emerged from the car they had chosen as their hiding place. Two wore jeans and T-shirts, pistols in their hands. The other two were stripped to the waist, their bodies painted entirely black. Their heads were enclosed in horned wooden masks, carved surfaces painted with leering, fanged smiles. The magical current, now Suppressing Britton’s own, came from one of them. The other reached out to Downer, Suppressing her as well. The Selfer Suppressing Britton reached down and unsnapped Britton’s holster, retrieving his pistol. The other Selfer advanced on Downer, who had begun to backpedal.
Downer raised a hand to her commlink. “One, one, this is Prometheus,” she said.
One of the other men raised his pistol to her face. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. His English was flat and slightly accented as Slit-Nose’s had been. “Give me your gun.”
He turned to the masked Apache Selfer Suppressing her. “She’s got a current?”
“They both do.” The Apache started forward, the mask leering. “How many more of you are there?”
Britton scrabbled in the dust, groaning. Even if Slit-Nose hadn’t sold them out, he should have known that they would have lookouts on the perimeter. Downer’s commlink buzzed in her ear, but she didn’t dare answer, staring at the muzzles of the guns, fingers tensed on the triggers. The Selfer Suppressing Britton kicked him again and again, then leaned over and punched him in the temple. Britton’s head rebounded off the packed earth, and he saw stars, as he fought to cling to consciousness.
“You got nothing to say, white eyes?” the masked Selfer before Downer asked her. “Maybe I’ll fuck it out of you. Maybe you’ll scream loud enough for your friends to come. Your boyfriend here”—he paused to add his own kick to Britton’s stomach—“can watch.”
One of the men pinned her elbows behind her back while the second covered Britton at a gesture from the masked Apache.
He nodded to the Selfer Suppressing Britton, who gave him a final kick, then turned his current to Suppress Downer while the other Selfer dropped his Suppression. “Watch and learn,” he said to Britton, easing his manhood out of his trousers.
“That’s too small to make me scream,” Downer snarled, struggling.
“Heh. White eyes bitch. I’ve got something for you,” the Selfer said from behind his mask, bursting into flame below the waist.
Britton’s stomach was a mottled pit of agony. His own magical tide drifted far from him, hidden in a haze of agony. But he saw the Apache Selfer step toward her, his manhood and pelvis engulfed in fire, reaching for Downer. If I don’t do something, she’s going to suffer. Dig Deep.
Oscar Britton dug deep. His stomach twisted, he head swam from the effort.
But a gate snapped open through the neck of the Selfer standing closest to him. Blood fountained skyward, and Downer squinted as she felt the Suppression drop.
“Oh, you’ve got something for me all right,” Downer said.
Two elementals sprang from the fire around the remaining Selfer’s crotch. The first leapt at the man covering Downer, who dropped his gun, screaming, as his skin began to bubble. The second darted between her legs. The man behind her released her arms, uttering curses that quickly became screams.
The masked Selfer held up a hand, flames rocketing toward Downer. She held up her own hand and five more burning human shapes surrounded her. Britton rose to his knees, still too weak to work any magic of his own.
The masked Selfer ran for the circle, calling for help in Apache. The circle erupted in response, and Britton could see the Apache running in the firelight and yelling. A few jumped into the air and others burst into flame or began to sparkle with gathered ice.
And something else. From within one of the wickiups came a high shriek, guttural and hissing at the same time, a horrid mockery of the Apache being spoken around it.
The night lit with muzzle flashes as the first bullets began to smack into the dirt around them. They took shelter behind the car just as Richards’s animal army broke over the circle.
Britton held a hand over his stomach, willing the nausea to pass. “Go! Go!” He waved at Downer. “It’s now or never! I’m behind you!”
Downer sprinted toward the circle, her elementals spreading out before her.
Britton came close behind. He put on speed as one Apache Selfer collapsed under the weight of a score of biting jackrabbits. A snarling coyote dragged another across the ground by his throat. Another coyote yanked at his arm.
Several coyotes and stray dogs yelped as rounds tore through them, and a few of the non-Latent Apache began to dance, stomping through a morass of spiders and snakes. One of the Apache Aeromancers blazed lightning through the animals, scorching them in droves. Britton felt Downer’s current reach out, and that same lightning became a small pack of electric elementals, man-shaped and diving for the canvas domes.
Fitzy gestured at the Aeromancer, and he fell from the sky, shrieking. He turned his head and sighted Britton. “Let’s get this over with,” he shouted. He pointed at one of the wickiups. “Secure the goddamn target, Keystone!”
The wickiup whipped into the air, support poles snapping, swept skyward by the casual sweep of a slender black arm. The Mountain God crouched, ten feet tall, its twisted man’s body so dark that it absorbed the firelight. Its horned head reared, the real horror making a mockery of the Selfer’s mask. Its dagger teeth glowed wetly.
Behind it, the air shimmered slightly, as if heat were reflecting off hot asphalt. Britton’s eyes widened. There was no speeding helicopter to obscure his vision this time. There could be no mistaking the rippling in the
air. What the hell was that? Some strange magic? But there was no time to worry about it. Richards’s Whispered animals were recoiling from the thing, fleeing in a chorus of whines, barks, and squeaks. Richards frowned, focusing his ability with no result.
Fitzy knelt, drew his pistol, and fired three rounds into the gaping mouth; but the creature didn’t seem to notice. It lashed out, so fast that it blurred, and Fitzy was flying backward to skid in the dirt, the plates of his body armor shattering. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head.
“Damn it, Rictus! A little help here!” he shouted.
Truelove spread his arms and the ground all around them erupted.
The Apache turned their guns to their feet as gray corpses swarmed upward, snatching ankles and thighs and pulling them flat. Britton heard shrieks and snapping bones.
Downer gestured at the bonfire, which erupted into a fountain of elementals. At twenty, Britton lost count of the creatures leaping into the center of the camp to throw themselves at the Mountain God, which shrieked but did not burn. Its black skin seemed simply to absorb the energy of their attacks. It took another lurching blur-step toward Fitzy, gnashing its teeth.
Britton knelt and snapped open a gate in front of its face.
It shrieked again, throwing an arm across its face and turning away. Britton hauled the gate backward into its path, the edges slicing through its trailing heel and cutting it off. Tendrils of black mist escaped from the wound as the creature howled. It turned and fixed Britton with a hateful stare. Then its eyes flicked to the gate as Britton brought it around and slid it toward the creature.
In a moment, it was upon him. Britton threw himself sideways, parrying a raking sweep of the thing’s claws with his forearm. The collision made his shoulder shake, his teeth clicking together hard enough to make him grunt. He felt the bone fracture beneath the skin, and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. The Gahe’s flesh was sleek as satin, a layer of softness stretched over iron. Cold emanated from its flesh, burning him where it contacted, and traveling up the reverberation of his bones to numb him to the shoulder. He fell back, teeth chattering.
Britton’s eyes lit as a fire elemental darted across his path, but the Mountain God swept it away, gnashing its teeth with a sound like grinding metal. It leapt at him again.
Britton opened a gate between them as it snapped its jaws shut. The Mountain God cried out in horror, jerking back as Britton snapped the gate shut, but not before he severed one of thing’s horns, which vanished through the gate in a puff of black smoke. The creature stabbed forward with a clawed hand, overshooting Britton’s head and catching him with the crook of its elbow, sending him spinning. Britton’s head went numb from the impact, the cold spreading to his chest. He rolled over on his back just as the creature sprang after him, ignoring the bullets Fitzy poured into its side.
As its claws plunged toward him, Britton opened another gate, cutting off the arm at the shoulder, so that the black smoke of the wound, odorless, heavy, and unspeakably cold, covered him.
With a final shriek, the Mountain God turned and waved its good arm at the air behind it. The strange shimmering stopped, brushed over by the creature’s fingertips. Then it turned and bounded out of the circle so fast that it practically vanished, its cries suddenly trailing into the distance.
All around them, the Apache succumbed, dragged to the ground and strangled by their own dead ancestors or cooked beyond recognition by the legion of elementals surging from the bonfire. Fitzy stepped among the corpses, leading with his pistol, poking into each wickiup, looking for his quarry. “Spread out!” he shouted. “Don’t let anyone past you! Whisper those damned chickenshit bunnies back here and get a perimeter set up!”
But Britton didn’t move. He looked around the circle as the warmth slowly returned to his body, aghast at the field of corpses. There had been far more than fifty, closer to seventy, he guessed. The long hair had fooled his military-tuned mind. They weren’t mostly men at all.
There were women, at least a dozen girls. In a few places, Britton could see elderly couples who had clung to one another before one of Truelove’s zombies had covered them. The few fighting men had died grimacing, but they looked nothing like the monsters he’d watched summon a plague of scorpions against their own.
Did you think they’d all be men? he asked himself. Did you think they’d all be the snarling killers you’d seen in those videos? Get real.
A stab of pain brought his hand to his shoulder. His fingers came away wet from where a round had grazed him. In the rush of battle, he hadn’t felt it. As he recovered from the adrenaline, his broken arm began to throb with pain. He felt dizzy with revulsion as he looked back over the dead.
But horror competed with another emotion as Britton surveyed the carnage, and Fitzy emerged from a wickiup with Chatto, Suppressed and zip-cuffed.
Britton wrestled with this new emotion before finally giving in to it, blossoming as it did from having taken on a small army and a monster from the Source and emerging victorious.
Pride.
Chatto sat zip-cuffed in the chilly mud outside trailer B-6. Captain Day worked with two MPs, replacing the plastic with metal restraints before standing him up. Over his shoulder, two men in white lab coats were visible through one of Britton’s gates. They stood around the spot where the Mountain God had first appeared, taking samples of the air and shaking their heads over laptop computers.
Captain Day turned to Fitzy. “On behalf of the Department of the Interior, thanks. This is really going to help us peel the onion and get down to the root of this insurgency.”
“It’s my pleasure,” Fitzy said, smiling at the Coven. “I have to admit that even a stopped clock can be right twice a day.”
The rare compliment spread grins across all of their faces. Britton laughed, then felt instantly ashamed, recalling the faces of the dead.
“You laugh?” Chatto called to him, his voice old and careworn, as if sensing Britton’s conflict. “What have you done today? Killed men for the crime of wanting to be free? For using the talents given to them by the Creator?”
“Shut the hell up,” Day shouted, but Chatto ignored him, his eyes chips of flint as he glared at Britton.
“You’re a slave,” he said. “All you did tonight was cement your bonds. You will never know freedom. You think just because you can’t see your prison bars they’re not there? Pretty jail’s still a jail.”
Day backhanded the Apache into silence. The MPs threw him roughly forward and walked him into the trailer, leaving Day shaking his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “He won’t be laughing in a couple of hours, and the tribal council won’t be laughing when he rolls over on them.”
“That thing came from here, didn’t it?” Britton asked him, remembering the strange shimmering he’d seen behind the snarling black creature. “That’s the real reason we went after him. There’s some kind of link. That’s what you want him to tell you about.”
“Now it’s your turn to shut the hell up,” Fitzy growled. “You’ve got some scrapes on you. Much as it would amuse me to leave you here in agony, you are government property, and it’s my solemn duty to see you’re patched up. I’ll radio for a Physiomancer.”
But Britton wasn’t listening. He was thinking of men who were really just tools. He was thinking of pretty jails.
The Apache had tried to hurt Downer, but was that so different than Scylla’s reasoned murder? Or Swift’s senseless rage? The outpouring of anger from a powerless and desperate quarry? A mad revenge for the bodies of the women and children they knew they would soon be mourning? Were they so different from the Goblins, fighting for their land?
Selfer criminal or government tool. He had to find a better way. He looked at the pride and sense of belonging in the eyes of the rest of the Coven. He felt it himself.
But Scylla’s words kept returning to his mind. He would always belong to them. His magic would only be a tool for their purposes, for bringing people l
ike these to their end. Fitzy’s words followed Scylla’s. You remember one thing, contractor. I am not your friend. I am not your comrade in arms. I am here to make you into a righteous engine of war. Nothing more, nothing less. You’re paid to be a weapon, not a hero. Remember that.
Dead Goblins, dead women and children. Britton had been the tool the army gripped to bring about their end.
He realized with a sudden twisting of his guts that maybe he hadn’t meant it when he had told Fitzy that he got it.
Maybe it was time to run again.
CHAPTER XXVIII: OPLAN
Physiomancy is frequently credited as a healing art. This reputation is deserved, as its primary application is the knitting of broken flesh. But most students of the arcane do not fully appreciate that Physiomancy is merely a neutral manipulation of live flesh. As readily as it can be used to knit, it can be used to tear. Such offensive Physiomancy is commonly known as “Rending” and is among those magical practices specifically prohibited by amendment to the Geneva Convention and the McGauer-Linden Act.
— Avery Whiting
Modern Arcana: Theory and Practice
The screams kept him awake all night — high and shrill, almost childlike. He knew they were Chatto’s.
Britton, who now had no trouble sleeping through the Goblin’s magical attacks or the screaming return fire of the automatic defenses, was haunted by the tortured cries of this one man. He rolled back and forth in his hooch, pulling his pillow over his head. They hadn’t bothered to take Chatto far; they’d gone to work on him immediately. Britton’s schoolhouse by the P pods had temporarily become their base of operations.
This is the man responsible for the murders you saw in those videos, Britton reminded himself. This is the man who would have gladly seen Downer raped.
But the screams carried to him, and he realized that he didn’t care. We’re supposed to be the good guys. That’s what gives us the right to judge Selfers. Because our way is better.
The thought propelled him to his feet and sent him racing out of the hooch, pushing in the direction of trailer B-6. Idiot! What do you hope to accomplish? he asked himself.