by Karen Chance
But powerful?
“Oh yes,”Roger insisted. “Take demons, for example. Everyone always talks about how strong they are, how difficult to control, how dangerous.” He did little finger motions around the last word, as if mocking the idea of anybody being afraid of a lowly creature like a demon. “When if they only knew—ghosts are far more so.”
“You’re mad,” Pritkin said, as if he’d finally come up with an explanation that satisfied him.
Roger sneered. “Oh yes, do let’s trot out the hoary old stereotype—”
“Which you’re currently doing your best to uphold.”
“—of the mad necromancer—”
“Is that what you are?” I asked, feeling my stomach fall. Jonas had said as much, but I’d been hoping he was wrong.
Roger shot me an impatient look. “Despite what you may have been told, it isn’t a bad word. It’s merely a name for a magic worker who specializes in the dead—all sorts of dead. The only reason it has an evil connotation is that the Circle has gone out of its way to give it one.”
“And because so many of the breed end up having to be locked away,” Pritkin added.
“Yes, I always wondered about that,” Roger said sweetly. “If we’re so powerless, why bother?”
“It’s not your power anyone questions, mage. It’s your principles.”
“Principles.” Roger huffed out a laugh. “As if the Corps would know anything about them.”
“As opposed to the Dark Circle, which has such a record for altruism.”
“Yes, let’s pretend those are the only two options.”
“The Corps is the only option that keeps the magical community safe!” Pritkin said, flushing.
“From everything but itself.”
“From those who would recklessly ignore the experience of centuries—”
“From those who resent the absurdity of stagnant magic that gets weaker every year—”
“—and attempt dangerous experiments that are almost certain to end in disaster!”
“—while our enemies get stronger! Yes! Cut off your nose to spite your face, war mage!” Roger snapped. “But don’t doom the rest of us to go down with you. There are those who would prefer a fighting chance!” And the mug came crashing down.
Daisy and I jumped. The colonel’s mustache twitched. Pritkin and Roger glared at each other. And I jumped in while I had the chance, since I might not get another.
“How are ghosts more powerful than demons?” I asked. Because if it was true, I really needed to have a chat with Billy Joe.
Roger sent me a glance, like he knew what I was doing. But after a moment, he answered anyway. “Well, for one thing, they’re less vulnerable. Take the colonel. Do you see a control gem in his forehead?”
“He doesn’t have a forehead,” Daisy said, looking disapproving. “Doesn’t even have a head—”
“I have a head, woman!” the colonel said indignantly.
“I meant on your new body.”
“So did I! The whole point was to leave ’em empty above the neck so our own heads would have a place to go!”
“But nobody sees our heads,” Daisy pointed out. “And they look so . . . odd.”
“They’re not the only thing odd around here.”
“My point,” Roger said, talking over them, “was that the colonel doesn’t have to worry about someone erasing a spell on his forehead or pulling a scroll out of his mouth—”
“Which would be easy enough since it’s usually open,” Daisy put in.
“—or any of the other typical ways of immobilizing a construct like a golem. Because they’re not constructs; they’re just using them.”
“Like driving a car,” Daisy told me. “It gets totaled, but you walk away.”
“Can’t a demon walk away?” I asked.
“Yes, but it’s not going to come back, then, is it?” Roger countered. “Once the golem—its prison, essentially—is destroyed, its sentence is over. And it doesn’t usually waste any time getting out of there. Unless it decides to get . . . testy . . . with its former master. But either way, you’ve lost your servant.”
Pritkin glowered at him, but he didn’t refute it. Which I supposed meant Roger’s account was pretty accurate. He enjoyed an argument even when he liked someone, and I didn’t think he liked Roger.
“And then there’s the way they feed,” Roger continued, oblivious. “Ghosts and demons are both spirits, yes?”
“Well, some demons . . ”
“And they both gain strength by feeding off living energy.”
I nodded.
“The difference is that demons can only hold so much. They’re like humans that way, or vampires. They feed to satisfy their current needs, and to store up power for later. And, of course, with the elder demons, the amount they can hold can be very, very large. But even they have limits, although they don’t like to admit it. Whereas ghosts . . ”
“What about ghosts?”
“They’re eternal sponges: they never get full. You can feed them and feed them and feed them, and they just . . . soak it up.”
Daisy nodded her substitute for a head, and the eyelash fell off again.
I frowned. “How do you know? No ghost has access to that kind of power.” For most of the ghosts I’d known, the problem was finding enough energy to keep going, not in seeing how much they could store up.
“They do if someone provides it.”
“But why would anyone—”
“You’re making indestructible soldiers!” Pritkin accused.
I looked at him, faintly surprised, but not as much as Roger. Who seemed amazed that a magical jock could put two and two together. But he shook his head.
“Not indestructible. You discovered that much tonight. Not that that model was designed for combat, mind you, but any of them can be destroyed under the right circumstances. But that isn’t really the issue.”
“Then what is?”
Roger looked thoughtful. “I suppose the best analogy would be your Spitfires in the Second World War.”
Judging by his confused expression, that didn’t clear up much for Pritkin. It didn’t for me, either, but I was a little distracted by the sick feeling that had opened up in the pit of my stomach. Because it wasn’t the why of Roger’s weird hobby that interested me.
It was the how.
“During World War Two, the Nazis planned to invade the British Isles,” he told me. “But to do so, they first needed control of the skies, and that meant wiping out the RAF—that’s the British Royal Air Force.”
I nodded numbly.
“But the RAF held on, mainly because their airplanes, the Spitfires, were damned good little planes, and because their factories could churn them out in a seemingly endless supply. Every time a plane went down, there were two more waiting to replace it. There was just one problem.”
“Factories couldn’t churn out pilots, too,” Pritkin said, narrowing his eyes at Daisy. Who was poking around in her apron for the lost lash.
“Exactly,” Roger said. “The RAF kept running out of pilots, and couldn’t train more fast enough to meet the demand. They only held out because of an influx of qualified personnel from abroad. And even then, it was a close thing. But imagine if you could train someone once, yet use him over and over. Imagine if, when one’s vehicle was destroyed, one’s body remained unharmed and could merely flit back and pick up another. And another after that, and another after that—”
“You’d never run out,” I said, watching Pritkin. Who’d started out angry and was closing in on furious.
Roger nodded. “Think of it: an army of soldiers who can’t die—they already did. Or be captured and forced to answer questions by their enemies. Or be prevented from returning to base. After all, what can trap a ghost?”
I could think of something, I didn’t say, because Pritkin had reached apoplectic. Maybe he was thinking about the destruction such a force could wreak on the Corps. Or maybe it was Roger’s atti
tude that bothered him. It was like he’d forgotten who his audience was and was happily holding forth on his favorite subject.
“Of course, there were problems,” Roger told me. “Most annoyingly that the ghosts said the bodies didn’t feel like theirs.”
“I kept drifting up out of it,” Daisy said. “And that was before I tried to move the thing!”
“And practice didn’t help much,” Roger added. “I finally realized that I had merely created a vehicle, when what they needed was a body. So I did some research and discovered that the binding spell for a golem has similarities to the way zombies are made, and once I understood that, well, things began popping.”
“I’ll say,” Daisy put in.
“Of course, I still had to figure out an enchantment to lighten the weight of the bodies, so they weren’t burning through power like a 747. And ghosts can’t do magic. Therefore all their spells had to be transformed into a potion form that could be carried—”
“But you managed,” I said, because obviously.
“Well . . . more or less.” He patted Daisy’s massive thigh. “And unlike living soldiers, mine don’t get tired. They can’t be wounded. They don’t need sleep. As long as there are bodies to house them and energy to supply them, they can go on and on and—”
He cut off because Pritkin had finally had enough. A wash of power suddenly filled the room, reminding me that Pritkin didn’t need weapons. He was one. He was a war mage.
But then, so was Roger.
Pritkin launched himself off the table and into the air, with something in his hand I couldn’t see but knew damned well he couldn’t use. It’s over, I wanted to yell. He can’t hurt anyone! He’s already dead!
But I never got the chance.
I was half out of my seat, hand outstretched and words forming on my lips, when Pritkin suddenly wasn’t there anymore. But a second later, something hit the far wall with a crack. I looked over to see him peeling off the paint behind the table—and the plaster and the bricks—having been knocked across the room and partly through the wall by something that had moved so fast it had been only a blur.
And still was, because I was too busy running to look for it. I shoved a chair aside and knelt by the crumpled body, the one with an unexploded potion grenade falling out of one hand. Pritkin must have stayed conscious long enough to steal one off Big Red while being carried back, and shoved it down his boot.
And damn it! I should have thought of that. But I hadn’t thought it necessary to frisk a naked man.
“That’ll teach him not to bother with shields!” someone said, and I turned to see the creature itself standing in the doorway. The rain was blowing through a ghostly image of the colonel’s head rising out of the neck and looking smug.
“It won’t teach him anything if he’s dead!”
“Would you prefer your father dead, girl?” the colonel demanded.
I picked up the golden grenade and threw it at him. “He was going to trap him—not kill him!”
The colonel dodged back out the door, avoiding the sticky strands that hit the jamb and spread over the opening, like a giant web. “Well, how was I to know that?” he demanded, glaring at me through a gap. “And what good would trappin’ him do? This isn’t your time!”
“It might force him to tell the truth! How many of you does the Black Circle have? Where are they keeping you—”
“I should have anticipated that,” Roger said testily, coming over. He glanced at the colonel. “Next time, allow me to ask for assistance before you intervene.”
“He’s a war mage. You wouldn’t have had time to ask,” the colonel protested—to no one, because no one was listening to him anymore.
“Do something!” I told Roger, who had knelt beside Pritkin and was checking for a pulse for the second time that night.
He looked up at Big Red. “Flashlight.”
The giant snagged one out of a tool belt with one of the hooks it used for hands, and pushed it through a gap in the net. From the look of what else was hanging around its waist, it was plain that Red’s primary use wasn’t gardening. He could have hit Pritkin with something far worse than the flat of his hand, although that might have been enough.
Roger retrieved the flashlight and pried up Pritkin’s left eyelid, careful not to move the head. “Normal dilation,” he told me, after a second. “And his heartbeat is strong. He should be all right, but we won’t know for certain until he comes around.”
“If he comes around!”
“You worry too much. He’s half demon—”
“He’s half human, too!”
“Well, what would you have me do?” he asked impatiently. “I’m not a doctor and he isn’t a vampire. I can manipulate dead flesh any way you like, but I don’t have power over the living.”
Maybe not, but I knew someone who did.
He caught my arm as I jumped up. “She isn’t there. She—”
“Like hell she isn’t!” I broke away and ran for the stairs.
Chapter Eleven
There was only one flight, which let out onto a small hallway. There were two doors on either side, with the first opening onto a junk room, piled high with old furniture, and the next onto a tiny bath. But the door across the hall led to a bedroom, with a big brass bed, a window cracked enough to toss the sheers around, and an old-fashioned wardrobe. And another door—
Leading to a nursery.
There was no one in it except for a baby in a crib, who had somehow slept through the storm outside and the fight downstairs. But who woke up when I slammed in the door. Woke up and started screaming.
“All right, that’s enough,” Roger said, coming in behind me.
For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to her.
Not that I guess it mattered.
He hurried past and picked up a small thing in a yellow onesie, with a mop of downy blond curls and a scrunched-up face. “Your mother is in the forest,” he told me, feeling frantically around in his jacket for something. “Dealing with the mess you two made before it consumes half the state!”
I didn’t say anything. He finally came up with a pacifier that he stuck in the wide-open mouth that was emitting all the noise. That worked for a couple of pulls, until she promptly spat it out. He sighed.
“I always wonder about babies who can be fooled by those things,” he said, jiggling her up and down. “She—you—never is. A few pulls and when nothing comes out . . ” He shrugged and put her head on his shoulder, doing the please-shut-up baby dance all parents seem to know.
I sat down.
There was a rocker underneath my butt, but I’m not sure I’d known that. Right then I wasn’t sure I knew anything. I was looking at a concerned father gently tending his fussy child, the dim moonlight from outside flooding in a small window to halo their blond heads, one straight as a pin, the other a mass of curls. And nothing made sense.
“You killed hundreds of people,” I said numbly.
He looked up. “What?”
“Ghosts don’t work for free. All that power . . ”
“What power?”
“To fuel your army. It had to come from somewhere.”
He frowned. “Are we back to that again?”
I stared at him, wishing he looked like the picture I carried around in my head. The crazed mage shooting at me and Agnes in a dank dungeon; the manic, stumbling idiot, barely staying ahead of the Spartoi on a desperate flight through London; the sarcastic, angry man downstairs. Any of them would make this easier.
Instead, I got a frazzled-looking guy with spit-up on his shoulder. I got a hand desperately clutching a diapered bottom, with the please-don’t-let-her-need-changing-while-her-mother-is-out look of men everywhere. I got a ridiculously goofy grin when he realized she was dry.
I didn’t get easy.
“What did you offer your legions?” I said, deliberately making it harsh.
“My what?” He looked confused for a moment, maybe because he’
d started trying to fish a bottle out of a dorm-type fridge stuck under a table while also holding a squirmy baby.
“The ones you were telling Pritkin about!”
He finally snared the bottle. “The war mage, you mean? We never got around to introductions.”
“Yes! The one your creature almost killed! You told him—”
“What he wanted to hear,” he said, sticking the bottle on the table. And then muttering something and waving a hand at it. And then trying to test it on a wrist, but that’s a little hard with an infant drooling on your shoulder. “Here,” he told me, pushing her at me.
I shied back, but he just thrust her at me again.
I took her.
She didn’t look like me. She didn’t look like anything in that distinctive way of babies and half-baked loaves of bread. Until she got bored staring at the pocket on Pritkin’s shirt, and a familiar pair of baby blues met mine.
They didn’t appear impressed.
“Son of a—” Roger cursed.
I looked up to find him with a red welt on his wrist, courtesy of the now steamy hot and curdled contents of the bottle. I waited while he fished out another, tried whatever spell he was using again, and finally managed to get the temperature right. “I don’t usually do this,” he explained. “I’m not, that is, I drop things, and her mother said—”
“Your. Legions,” I repeated, because I had to. I had to know.
“Oh, for—” He broke off, looking like he wished he could still stop my mouth with a pacifier. “My legions consist of an ex-marine who died in the Spanish-American War and a bag lady who expired under the Forty-fourth Street Bridge! And I never drained anybody to keep them. It’s quite the contrary—they usually end up draining me!”
He took the baby back, popped the bottle in her mouth, and glared at me.
“But . . . you made an army for the Black Circle. You just said—”
He shrugged. “I’ve always been good at telling tales. And your war mage . . . well, he deserved a few bad moments. He gave me enough tonight!”
“Are you trying to tell me that wasn’t true? That you just made it all up?” I didn’t believe it for a second. The evidence to the contrary had just thrown Pritkin halfway through a wall.