Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (12 page)

“They’re creatures,” Gard said, “actual mortal beings, though like none
you’ve seen before. The fomor twist flesh to their liking and sell the results
for favors and influence. It was probably the fomor who created those
cat-things the Knights of the Blackened Denarius used.”

I twisted my mouth in displeasure at the name. “If they’re mortal we
can kill them.”

“They’ll die hard,” Gard warned me.

“What doesn’t?” I looked up and down the hallway outside the panic
room. “I think the primary defense plan will do.”

Gard nodded. She had attired herself in an armored vest not unlike my
own over a long mail shirt. Medieval-looking, but then modern armorers haven’t
aimed their craft at stopping claws of late. Hendricks, standing watch at the
end of the hall, had on an armored vest, but was otherwise covered in modified
motorcyclist’s armor. He carried an assault shotgun like mine, several hand
grenades, and that same broadsword.

“Stay here,” I said to Justine. “Watch the door. If anyone but one of
us comes down the stairs, shut it.”

She nodded.

I turned and started walking toward the stairway. I glanced at Gard.
“What can we expect from Mag?”

“Pain.”

Hendricks grunted. Skeptically.

“He’s ancient, devious, and wicked,” Gard clarified. “There is an
effectively unlimited spectrum of ways in which he might do harm.”

I nodded. “Can you offer any specific knowledge?”

“He won’t be easy to get to,” she said. “The fomor practice entropy
magic. They make the anti-technology effect Dresden puts off look like mild
sunspot activity. Modern systems are going to experience problems near him.”

We started up the stairs. “How long before he arrives?”

From upstairs, there was the crash of breaking plate glass. No alarm
went off, but there was a buzzing, sizzling sound, and a scream—Gard’s
outer defenses. Hendricks hit a button on his cell phone, and then came with me
as I rushed up the remaining stairs to the ground floor.

The lights went out as we went, and Hendricks’s phone sputtered out a
few sparks. Battery-powered emergency lights flicked on an instant later. Only
about half of them functioned, and most of those were behind us.

Mag had waited for nightfall to begin his attack, and then crippled our
lights. Quite possibly, he assumed that the darkness would give him an
overwhelming advantage.

The hubris of some members of the supernatural community is astonishing.

The night vision scopes mounted on my weapon and Hendricks’s had been
custom made, based off of designs dating back to World War II, before night
vision devices had married themselves to the electronics revolution. They were
heavy and far inferior to modern systems— but they would function in
situations where electronic goggles would be rendered into useless junk.

We raised the weapons to our shoulders, lined an eye up with the
scopes, and kept moving. We reached the first defensive position, folded out
the reinforced composite barriers mounted there, and knelt behind them. The
ambient light from the city outside and the emergency lights below us was
enough for the scopes to do their jobs. I could make out the outline of the
hallway and the room beyond. Sounds of quiet movement came closer.

My heart rate had gone up, but not alarmingly so. My hands were steady.
My mouth felt dry, and my body’s reaction to the prospect of mortal danger sent
ripples of sensation up and down my spine. I embraced the fear and waited.

The fomor’s creatures exploded into the hallway on a storm of frenzied
roars. I couldn’t make out many details. They seemed to have been put together
on the chassis of a gorilla. Their heads were squashed, ugly-looking things,
with wide-gaping mouths full of shark-like teeth. The sounds they made were
deep, with a frenzied edge of madness, and they piled into the corridor in a
wave of massive muscle.

“Steady,” I murmured.

The creatures lurched as they moved, like cheap toys that had not been
assembled properly, but they were fast, for all of that. More and more of them
flooded into the hallway, and their charge was gaining mass and momentum.

“Steady,” I murmured.

Hendricks grunted. There were no words in it, but he meant,
I know
.

The wave of fomorian beings got close enough that I could see the
patches of mold clumping their fur, and tendrils of mildew growing upon their
exposed skin.

“Fire,” I said.

Hendricks and I opened up.

The new military AA-12 automatic shotguns are not the hunting weapons I
first handled in my patriotically delusional youth. They are fully automatic
weapons with large circular drums that rather resembled the old Tommy guns made
iconic by my business predecessors in Chicago.

One pulls the trigger and shell after shell slams through the weapon. A
steel target hit by bursts from an AA-12 very rapidly comes to resemble a
screen door.

And we had two of them.

The slaughter was indescribable. It swept like a great broom down that
hallway, tearing and shredding flesh, splattering blood on the walls and
painting them most of the way to the ceiling. Behind me, Gard stood ready with
a heavy-caliber big-game rifle, calmly gunning down any creature that seemed to
be reluctant to die before it could reach our defensive point. We piled the
bodies so deep that the corpses formed a barrier to our weapons.

“Hendricks,” I said.

The big man was already reaching for the grenades on his belt. He took
one, pulled the pin, cooked it for a slow two count, and then flung it down the
hall. We all crouched behind the barriers as the grenade went off with a
deafening crunch of shockwave-driven air.

Hendricks threw another one. He may disapprove of killing, but he does
it thoroughly.

When the ringing began to fade from my ears, I heard a sound like raindrops.
It wasn’t raining, of course—the gunmen in the building across the street
had opened fire with silenced weaponry. Bullets whispered in through the
windows and hit the floor and walls of the headquarters with innocuous-sounding
thumps. Evidently, Mag’s servitors had been routed and were trying to flee.

An object the size of Hendricks’s fist appeared from nowhere and arced
cleanly through the air. It landed on the floor precisely between the two
sheltering panels, a lump of pink and grey coral.

Gard hit me with a shoulder and drove me to the ground, even as she
shouted, “Down!”

The piece of coral didn’t explode. There was a whispering sound, and
hundreds of tiny holes appeared in the bloodstained walls and ceiling. Gard let
out a pained grunt. My left calf jerked as something pierced it, and burned as
though the wound had been filled with salt.

I checked Hendricks. One side of his face was covered in a sheet of
blood. Small tears were visible in his leathers, and he was beginning to bleed
through the holes.

“Get him,” I said to Gard, rising, as another coral spheroid rose into
the air.

Before it could get close enough to be a threat, I blew it to powder
with my shotgun. And the next and the next, while Gard dropped her rifle, got a
shoulder under one of Hendricks’s, and helped him to his feet as if he’d been
her weight, instead of two hundred and seventy pounds of muscle. She started
down the stairs.

A fourth sphere came accompanied by mocking laughter and when I pulled
the trigger again the weapon didn’t function. Empty. I slapped the coral device
out of the air with the shotgun’s barrel and flung myself backward, hoping to
clear the level of the floor on the stairwell before the pseudo-grenade
detonated. I did not quite make it. Several objects struck my chest and arms,
and a hot blade slipped across my unscarred ear, but the armor turned the truly
dangerous projectiles.

I broke my arm tumbling backward down the stairs.

More laughter followed me down, but at least the fomor wasn’t spouting
some kind of ridiculous monologue.

“I did my best,” came Mag’s voice. “I gave you a chance to return what
was mine. But no. You couldn’t keep yourself from interfering in my affairs,
from stealing my property. And so now you will reap the consequences of your
foolishness, little mortal…”

There was more, but there is hardly a need to go into details. Given a
choice between that egocentric drivel and a broken arm, I prefer the latter.
It’s considerably less excruciating.

Gard hauled me to my feet by my coat with her spare hand. I got under
the stunned Hendricks’s other arm and helped them both down the rest of the
stairs. Justine stood in the doorway of the safe room, at the end of the
hallway of flickering lights, her face white-lipped but calm.

Gard helped me get Hendricks to the door of the room and turned around.
“Close the door. I may be able to discourage him out here.”

“Your home office would be annoyed with me if I wasted your life on
such a low percentage proposition,” I said. “We stick to the plan.”

The valkyrie eyed me. “Your arm is broken.”

“I was aware, thank you,” I said. “Is there any reason the
countermeasure shouldn’t work?”

Mag was going on about something, coming down the steps one at a time,
making a production of every footfall. I ignored the ass.

“None that I know of,” Gard admitted. “Which is not the same answer as
‘no.’”

“Sir,” Justine said.

“We planned for this—or something very like it. We don’t split up
now. End of discussion. Help me with Hendricks.”

“Sir,” Justine said.

I looked up to see Mag standing on the landing, cloaked in random
shadows, smiling. The emergency lights on the stairwell blew out with a
melodramatic shower of dying sparks.

 
“Ah,” I said. I reached
inside the safe room door, found the purely mechanical pull-cord wrapped
unobtrusively around a nail-head on the wall, and gave it a sharp jerk.

It set off the antipersonnel mines built into the wall of the landing.

There were four of them, which meant that a wash of fire and just under
three thousand round shot acquainted themselves with the immediate vicinity of
the landing and with Mag. A cloud of flame and flying steel enveloped the
fomor, but at the last instant the swirling blackness around him rose up like a
living thing, forming a shield between Mag and the oncoming flood of destruction.

The sound of the explosions was so loud that it demolished my hearing
for a moment. It began to return to me as the cloud of smoke and dust on the
landing began to clear. I could hear a fire alarm going off.

Mag, smudged and blackened with residue, but otherwise untouched, made
an irritated gesture and the fire alarm sparked and fizzled—but not
before setting off the automatic sprinklers. Water began pouring down from
spigots in the ceiling.

Mag looked up at the water and then down at me and his too-wide smile
widened even more. “Really?” he asked. “Water? Did you actually think water
would be a barrier to the magic of a fomor lord?”

Running water was highly detrimental to mortal magic, or so Gard
informed me, whether it was naturally occurring or not. The important element
was quantity. Enough water would ground magic just as it could conduct
electricity and short-circuit electronics. Evidently, Mag played by different
rules.

Mag made a point to continue down the stairs at exactly the same pace.
He was somewhat hampered in that several of the stairs had been torn up rather
badly in the explosion, but he made it to the hallway. Gard took up a position
in the middle of the hallway, her axe held straight up beside her in both arms,
like a baseball player’s bat.

I helped Hendricks into the saferoom and dumped him on a bunk, out of
any line of fire from the hallway. Justine took one look at his face and
hurried over to the medical station, grabbing a first aid kit. She rushed back
to Hendricks’s side. She broke open the kit and started laying out the proper
gear for getting a clear look at a bloody wound and getting the bleeding
stopped. Her hands flew with precise speed. She’d had some form of training.

From the opposite bunk, the child watched Justine with wide blue eyes.
She was naked, and had been crying. The tears were still on her little cheeks.
Even now, her lower lip had begun to tremble.

But so far as anyone else knew, I was made of stone.

I turned and crossed the room. I sat down at the desk, a copy of the
one in my main office. I put my handgun squarely in front of me. The desk was
positioned directly in line with the door to the panic room. From behind the
desk, I could see the entire hallway clearly.

Mag stepped forward and moved a hand as though throwing something. I
saw nothing, but Gard raised her axe in a blocking movement, and there was a
flash of light, and the image of a Norse rune, or something like it, was burned
onto my retina. The outer edge of Gard’s mail sleeve on her right arm abruptly turned
black and fell to dust, so that the sleeve split and dangled open.

Gard took a grim step back as Mag narrowed his jaundiced eyes and
lifted the crooked stick. Something that looked like the blend of a lightning
bolt and an eel lashed through the air toward Gard, but she caught it on the
broad blade of her axe, and there was another flash of light, another
eye-searing rune. I heard her cry out, though, and saw that the edges of her
fingernails had been burned black.