by Dan Willis
Two packed suitcases stood in the little foyer area by the door, next to a large portmanteau trunk that stood open. Before Alex could say anything, a man’s shirt came flying out of one of the room doors, swung itself around a hanger that leapt up out of the case, and then dropped down onto a rail with the other articles of clothing. A pair of socks followed, twisting together into a rolled-up bundle as they flew.
“Andrew?” Alex called, assured the sorcerer was present.
He stepped inside the room and had to dodge a flying suit coat and a pair of trousers that joined the white shirt and the socks in the trunk.
“Is that you, Alex?” the sorcerer’s voice preceded him into the main room. “Well, here you two are,” he said in the manner of a schoolmaster admonishing wayward students. “Do you realize what pains I had to endure without you? I had to meet with the President without anyone there to act as a buffer. It was frightfully dull.”
Alex turned to Sorsha with a sly grin on his face.
“Apparently our friend is in need of some excitement,” he said. “Should I tell him?”
“No, no,” Sorsha said, picking up on Alex’s game. “Let me tell him.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Alex protested. “Make you do all the work? That would be ungentlemanly.”
Both of them understood that the longer they kept Andrew on the hook, the more eager he would be to help.
“But I insist,” Sorsha said, pulling Alex close and leaning against him.
“Absolutely nauseating,” Barton said. “If you two are quite through being cute, perhaps you could tell me about this adventure you keep hinting at.”
“A dangerous group of runewrights is about to raid the government’s rune research facility in order to steal the lore books that are housed there,” Alex said. “They just learned of its location today, so the attack could come at any time.”
Andrew started to laugh, but when neither Alex nor Sorsha smiled, he did a double-take.
“You can’t be serious,” he scoffed. “How much threat could a gang of angry runewrights…” His sentence trailed off as he looked at Alex. “You are serious,” he said at last.
“You wanted adventure, Andrew,” Sorsha said with an arched eyebrow. “Here’s the kicker. No one will listen to us.”
“These people call themselves the Legion,” Alex explained. “They’ve been collecting all the rune lore they can get their hands on, and they’re sharing it among their members. They aren’t to be taken lightly.”
Barton put his hand to his chin, then stroked his pencil mustache as he considered what they’d said.
“We want you to contact the President and have him mobilize some soldiers to stop it,” Sorsha said.
“No,” Andrew said with a note of finality. “If you’re right about these Legion people being dangerous, then we need to move fast.”
“Isn’t the President in charge of the Army?” Alex asked.
“Yes,” Andrew said, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture, “but he’d have to issue orders to some general or other, then they’d issue orders to a colonel who would issue orders to a lieutenant who would call up a sergeant…and by the time it was all said and done, they’d be ready next week. Maybe. What we need is someone who can just order up some men on their say-so.”
“Do you know anyone like that?” Alex asked.
Andrew let a slow grin play across his face and he waggled his eyebrows.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “Where, exactly, is this top-secret rune library?”
“Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” Sorsha said.
“Is there a military base nearby?” Andrew pressed.
She shrugged in response.
“I have no idea. I had to threaten my government contact with frostbite in his nether regions to get that much.”
Alex managed not to chuckle at this serious moment. He would have given a lot to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
“That’s going to be a problem, then,” Andrew said. “I know a guy who will issue the order, but there needs to be soldiers nearby. I could teleport three or four, but after that, I’d be exhausted. I assume we need more troops than that.”
He looked at Alex and Sorsha, who could only nod.
“In that case,” Andrew went on, “we need to find out where the nearest military base is to Oak Ridge. I know a few people I can call, but if it’s too far away, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Sorsha said, turning to look up at Alex. “You’ll have to handle getting the soldiers from wherever they are to Oak Ridge.”
“How will Alex do that?”
“I’ll have to go with you to get them,” Alex said to Barton. “We’ll put the men in my vault, then once I’m in Oak Ridge, I’ll open the vault to let them out.”
“I’ve never been to Oak Ridge, Alex,” Andrew said. “I won’t be able to teleport there.”
“It will be Sorsha’s job to get me there,” he explained. “All we have to do is call the local sheriff and she can use his voice to teleport to him.”
The sorcerer’s face lit up like a kid on Christmas.
“You can do that?” he said, turning to Sorsha.
“I do more than make cold disks, you know.”
He clapped his hands and rubbed them together.
“That’s fantastic,” he said. “I’ll call George and get the ball rolling.”
He turned to the phone, and Sorsha leaned close to Alex.
“I’ve been thinking. I believe I can get the FBI’s help after all,” she whispered.
“How?”
“By using the branch of the Bureau that likes me,” she said.
Alex nodded, catching on. Sorsha had a team of FBI agents at her beck and call back in New York, not to mention that Director Stevens of the Manhattan field office liked her. She could probably round up a force of several dozen heavily armed agents without too much trouble.
“One problem,” she went on, “or rather the same problem Andrew has.”
“Have everyone meet at my office,” Alex said. “I’ll make sure the door to my vault is open, then I’ll just take your agents along with the soldiers.”
“How are you going to explain that to Andrew?”
Alex sighed and shrugged.
“I’ll have to show him how my vault really works,” he said. Alex didn’t particularly like that idea, because Andrew had a way of trying to utilize any of Alex’s abilities in his business. Still, he couldn’t just let the Legion make off with hundreds of unknown lore books. There was no telling what might be lost in the government’s collection.
As if sensing his inner conflict, Sorsha stood on her tip-toes and kissed his cheek.
“I’ll get going,” she said.
“Wait,” Alex said. “Save your strength. I’ll open my vault and you can just walk through and make your calls from my office.”
“All right,” Andrew said, hanging up the phone. “My friend George is at Fort Riley in Kansas. You ready to go?”
“You’ve been to Fort Riley?” Alex asked.
Barton’s face turned a bit smug.
“During the big war, the army had me visit quite a few of their bases to look for possible points of magical attack,” he said, reaching for Alex’s sleeve.
“Just a second,” Alex said, pulling his arm away. “Before we go, I need to get Sorsha situated, and you might as well come along.
“I’m shocked,” Andrew Barton said. He stood with his hands on his hips in Alex’s office on the twelfth floor of Empire Tower. “You’ve been holding out on me. What other miracles can you perform that I don’t know about?”
“That isn’t any of your business, Andrew,” Sorsha admonished him in a hard voice.
“It most certainly is,” he protested. “Do you know how many times a week I have to teleport back and forth to the relay towers just to check on things? Alex here could put a door in each tower and one in my office. I could just
walk there in seconds without expending any power.”
“I don’t know how many doors I can open at once,” Alex said. “One of my doors disappeared about the time I opened a fifth one. I don’t know if it’s related, but it might be.”
Andrew waved his hand dismissively.
“Nothing we can’t figure out, I’m sure,” he said. “Just imagine what this magic is capable of. You could have doors to warehouses all over the world and move goods almost instantaneously. Think how much travelers would be willing to pay to go to Hawaii, or Europe, or Australia by just walking down a short hallway. The possibilities fire the imagination.”
“I’m more worried about some government using it to send troops to attack other countries from inside their borders,” Alex said.
Andrew’s smile evaporated, then he sighed.
“They would use it like that, wouldn’t they,” he said with a sour expression. “Why must politicians and despots always ruin everything?”
Alex was raised by a man of amazing faith, yet he still didn’t have an answer for that particular question.
“The more people who know about my vault, the more chance there is for trouble,” Alex said. “We need to keep this quiet.”
“I suppose,” Andrew sighed. “But I still want doors to my towers, if you can manage it.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Alex said, glancing at Sorsha, who was deep in conversation with someone on her team. “Right now, though, we need to go to Kansas.”
“Right,” Andrew said, clapping Alex on the shoulder.
The next instant they were gone.
There was an old joke Alex once heard about Kansas, something about it being so flat you could stand on a fruit crate and see the back of your own head. Alex had never understood that until he and Barton appeared in front of the administration building on Fort Riley. To be fair, the surrounding land was made up of low, gently rolling hills, but they seemed to go on forever like an undulating, featureless sea of winter brown grass. Beyond the few decorative trees planted on the Army base, Alex couldn’t see anything sticking up in any direction.
“This way,” Andrew said, heading right through the front doors of the Administration Building. A startled solder inside leaped to his feet and ordered them to halt as Alex came in behind the sorcerer.
“At ease, son,” Andrew said, not slowing at all. “I’m here from Washington and I need a word with the duty officer.”
The man behind the front desk hesitated, but he’d clearly seen Andrew and Alex appear out of thin air. After a moment he sat back down, clearly deciding that whatever was happening was above his pay grade.
“George, you old horse soldier,” Andrew said as he opened the first door down the corridor. When Alex caught up, he found the sorcerer shaking hands with a hard-looking man in the uniform of a Lt. Colonel. “This is my friend, Alex,” he said, pointing to Alex.
“I understand you’ve got a problem on your hands,” the Lt. Colonel said, limping out from behind his desk. “And you want a few dozen men to take care of it.”
Alex noted that the Lt. Colonel kept his left leg straight, as if he couldn’t bend it, and there was a well-worn wooden cane in the corner.
“That’s it, George,” Andrew said. “If Alex here is right, a group of runewrights is going to attack the government’s rune research facility.”
“Runewrights?” the Lt. Colonel scoffed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Andrew said. “But you can take my word for it, these people are dangerous. Whatever they want at that research facility, it isn’t good.”
The Army man gave the sorcerer a hard, calculating look and for a moment Alex thought he was going to turn them down.
“If you’re wrong, they’ll be hell to pay,” he said.
“I’ll take the blame,” Andrew said. “You can tell whoever is above you that you owed me from that time I saved your life during that business with Pancho Villa.”
“As if they’d believe that,” George said. “I’m not worried about the blame,” he went on. “I can always play it off as a necessary precaution to persevere the Republic.”
Andrew’s face grew shrewd as he looked at his friend.
“Then what are you worried about?”
George leaned heavily against his desk and slapped his bum leg.
“This,” he said. “Damn horse kicked me six months back. If I’m not ready to return to full duty soon, they’ll…well they’ll retire me. Drum me out of the Army.”
“And you’d rather not be a civilian again,” Alex guessed.
“That’s exactly it,” the Army man said. “The Army won’t spring for a doctor with alchemy training. This leg will take a major restoration potion to fix.”
“And you can’t afford that on an Army salary,” Alex said.
“Your wife’s family has plenty of money,” Barton said.
“They want me out of the Army, too,” George said. “And things have been a little strained in that area lately.”
“All right,” Andrew said. “You get us the men and I’ll bring you the best doctor in New York to fix your leg, deal?”
He stuck out his hand and the Lt. Colonel took it.
“How long will it take you to get ready?” Barton asked.
“I got the men ready to go out back,” George said. He opened the drawer to his desk and pulled out a gun belt with a Colt Army revolver in a leather holster.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Andrew said, a look of amusement on his face.
George limped right up to the sorcerer and stood nose-to-nose with him.
“Those are my men,” he growled. “I’m responsible for them, and I won’t send them into harm’s way while I cower in my office like a schoolmarm.”
By the look on his face, Andrew wanted to argue, but he just as clearly saw no point.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
An hour and a half later, Sorsha took hold of Alex’s arm and sent them spinning through the clothes wringer that was magical teleportation. Feeling like his entire body had been compressed flat and then shaken violently, Alex staggered against a papered wall as he re-emerged into the world.
He felt like his long-ago breakfast would return, but a few deep breaths calmed his quavering stomach. Beside him, Sorsha clung to his arm and panted like a dog on a hot day.
“Well, that was pretty quick,” a portly man in a tan police uniform said, hanging up the phone receiver he had in his hand. He sat behind a plain desk in a little office with a door off to Alex’s left. It looked remarkably like the office Danny Pak occupied back in Manhattan, except the only glass was a frosted panel in the single door.
“Thank you, Sheriff Tibbs,” Sorsha said, finding her voice.
“Always happy to help the FBI, ma’am,” he said with a folksy smile. He had a round, grizzled face with a bushy mustache that grew out to the sides, like a furry handlebar. The hair on his head was black, but the mustache had begun to go gray at the roots, as had the Sheriff’s eyebrows.
“Now,” he said, standing up from his desk. “Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”
“Sheriff!” a woman’s voice interrupted from outside the little office. The door burst open and a short, busty brunette entered the office. “We just got a call from old man Whittaker,” she gasped, out of breath. “He says someone’s shooting guns over on the far side of his property, a lot of guns.”
“That wouldn’t be anywhere near the government building outside of town, would it?” Sorsha asked.
“Uh, yeah,” Sheriff Tibbs said. “What’s going on here?”
“Get your car, Sheriff,” Sorsha said. “I’ll explain on the way.”
32
The Blowup
By the time Sheriff Tibbs’ patrol car rounded the last bend in the long gravel drive there was no gunfire to be heard. Six large trucks were parked in front of three small, unassuming buildings and men in work clothes were busily hauling armloads of books an
d crates of files into the vehicles. When they saw the sheriff’s car, most of them dropped their burdens and pulled pistols from their belts.
Shots rang out, and the windshield of the car shattered. Alex ducked down in the back seat as glass flew everywhere and Sheriff Tibbs swerved off the road. Bullets pinged off the sides and roof, until Sorsha raised her hand and a glowing shield leaped up just outside the car.
“Get to cover,” Alex said as he reached up past the sorceress to open the car’s passenger door.
“My shield will hold,” Sorsha replied as Alex leapt out.
“Too late for that,” Sheriff Tibbs groaned, pressing his hand to his side where blood seeped through his uniform shirt.
“Lay down,” Sorsha ordered.
“No,” Alex said. “They’ve stopped shooting.”
“They realize they’re up against a sorceress,” she said, trying to lay the Sheriff on the front seat.
“They’re casting spellbreaker runes on their guns,” Alex hissed, grabbing Sorsha and pulling her from the car. Before she could protest, a shot rang out and her glowing shield cracked.
The Sorceress gasped and pressed her hand to her stomach as if she’d been punched. Spellbreaker runes caused feedback that manifested as physical pain for sorcerers.
“See,” Alex said, reaching past her to grab Tibbs by the shoulders and haul him out on the far side of the car from the gunmen.
“You’re very smug when you’re right,” Sorsha growled at him as three more spellbreaker shots slammed into her shield, causing it to shatter. Immediately the constant fire continued, and bullets tore into the side of the police car.
“We need to even the odds,” Sorsha said. She lifted her hand as if she were directing a church choir to rise and a blue mist came up from the ground between them and the now bullet-ridden car. In a moment, it solidified into a thick wall of ice. “Let’s see them dispel that,” she growled.