Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles (54 page)

—
Toru Tokugawa, May 1933

Free City of Shanghai

Ian Wright
was incoherent with pain. His leg had been destroyed by the Iron Guard. Everything below his knee was flopping uselessly at an odd angle, a bone was sticking through the skin, and there was blood everywhere. He couldn’t even put his hands on it to stop the bleeding because they were shackled, and those same chains were being used by the others to drag the lot of them back toward the tunnel and the torture chambers beneath the mansion. It wasn’t a safe place, but it sure as hell had to be a safer place than out in the open.

He was in so much agony that he had a hard time wrapping his brain around what was going on. It was like the Iron Guard were throwing a civil war. He’d never imagined Iron Guard slaughtering each other before, but then he realized what was happening.

Some of the Iron Guard weren’t Iron Guard at all. They weren’t even human . . . Everything Sullivan had said was true.
Absolutely true.
These were soldiers of the Pathfinder, and now they were
eating
people. He’d been a fool to doubt, and now it was too late.

“They’re consuming magic!” Doctor Wells shouted from the far end of the chain. “Now that they’ve been found out, they will go on the offensive. They must consume as much Power as possible so they can summon their master!” And there were five powerful Actives here chained together, wounded and nearly defenseless. “Summon a demon. Hurry!”

That was a good idea, but they’d been marked with some sort of spell to keep them from using their Powers. Ian reached for his forehead and started scrubbing hard. It had been put on with some sort of thick demon grease, so he’d probably have to rub all his skin off to cancel it out . . .

An Iron Guard was coming their way. His skin had been burned off, and beneath it was a mass of bulging purple muscles. He looked hungry.

Ian started scratching wildly at the mark.

Suddenly the skinless man turned grey like a fade, sank into the ground, flailing, and disappeared. A moment later, another grey figure crawled out of the grass and became solid. Heinrich Koenig gasped for breath as he rushed over. “Hello, my friends. Busy day, no?”

“You’re a master of fucking understatement!”

Heinrich grabbed Ian, and suddenly he felt insubstantial. When he reformed, his shackles were lying on the ground. Heinrich repeated that with the next knight in line. “You must flee while they are paying attention to Sullivan. Carry those who cannot walk. Cross the south wall. Zhao is by the river waiting for you in a patrol boat.”

An Imperium soldier rushed them, long rifle and bayonet aimed at Heinrich’s back, but he was knocked aside at the last instant by Wells. The alienist was still shackled, but he threw the chains over the soldier’s head and twisted until his neck snapped. Wells didn’t have access to his magic, either, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. “Just like a Rockville prison riot,” he explained after Heinrich freed him.

“Herr Doctor, get these men out.
Schnell!
Hurry!”
Once the last of the knights had lost their shackles, Heinrich turned toward the mansion.

“What’re you doing?”

Heinrich bent over, picked up the dropped Arisaka rifle, and kept walking. “Making a difference, I hope.” He worked the bolt action. “Go!”

* * *

The Chairman, or the guy that looked exactly like the Chairman but really wasn’t, tried to escape by Traveling.

Faye didn’t find that very sportsmanlike at all.

The real Chairman could Travel too, but what Faye had learned was that there was Traveling, and then there was really
Traveling
. Any Active could pick a nice safe spot in clear view and hop on over there, but it took an artistic touch and a whole lot of practice to do better than that. The Chairman could do darned near everything, but he wasn’t a specialist like Faye, and he’d paid for that sloppiness with his hands.

This Chairman wasn’t even nearly as clever as the old one. Sure, he had buckets of Power and a horrible little monster helping him, but he’d never really worked for it, he’d never had to struggle and figure it out on his own. It had been given to him by the invisible octopus riding on his shoulders with its tentacles stuck in his eyes and ears. Faye simply could not abide that.

That critter was the Pathfinder everybody had been talking about, but they couldn’t see what it really was. They had been expecting a giant, indestructible beast because that was what it had grown into last time. This thing was just a tiny little part of a great big whole spread all over the place. There was what was in our world, but the great big dangerous rest of it was still in another world, right next to this one, where it couldn’t help. The little part had to figure out how to open the door to let it in, and it had been letting humans do all the hard work for it, gathering up all the magical folks into one easy bucket to dump into its mouth hole.

Now that its plans were all messed up, all those little bits were on the move. The rest of the folks didn’t realize it yet, but a war had just started. There were going to be battles now in every single part of the world the skinless men were hiding in, but Faye couldn’t worry about that right now. She had to stop this big part of the monster from getting away.

The new Chairman Traveled away just as Toru swung his big club. The club whistled through the air where the Chairman had been and a big lion statue got turned into gravel instead. Even though Faye’s head map was filled with thousands and thousands of moving people she easily picked out the spot where the new Chairman moved to. He thought he was quick, jumping seven times in just over eight seconds, but she was right behind him.

She intercepted him on the roof of the castle.

He saw her the same time she saw him. The invisible monster that was steering him opened its parrot beak and hissed at her. The new Chairman’s mouth opened in surprise. He could see magic as clear as she could, and she knew he’d never seen anything close to her before. “What are you?”

“I’m the Spellbound. The Power picked me. So now your time has come.”

He raised his hands and a sickening wave of destruction came at her.

Even as the energy surged through the air faster than a bullet, Faye was processing the information. It was the same type of magic as the Black Monk’s. She quickly changed her link, folding and refolding it until it connected to a new section of the Power. The destroying magic washed harmlessly past her as the roof began to disintegrate. He changed tactics, and the air around her began shedding energy, trying to freeze her solid and make the water in her body turn to ice to rip her cells apart. Faye merely switched to Whisper’s magic and heated everything back up.

They went back and forth, he’d try to hit her with magic, but she’d change things and hit him right back. He tried to electrocute her, but she thought of George Bolander’s magic and deflected it. Lightning bolts shot into the sky. A current of fire formed between them, which rapidly spun into a tornado, and when they let go of it, the fire crawled down the castle wall and drifted across the panicking crowd. He tried to command her, like a Mouth, but she just laughed at him while their fire tornado crashed into the high-rise next door and the whole thing exploded.

Demons sprang into existence beside her. She slugged one in the face and it exploded, took control of the other one, and ordered it to go eat the Chairman. He blasted it into chunks of black ink, which Faye then gathered up with her mind, hardened the droplets into bullets, and launched them into the Chairman’s flesh. He hardened his body and absorbed the impacts, started to Heal himself, but then Faye appeared before him and drove the stolen sword through his heart. He used Mover magic to knock her away, and he grimaced and yanked the sword free. It hit the roof with a clatter, and she immediately focused on it, made it spring into the air, and impaled it into his leg.

He roared, gathering the energy from the air, focusing it for a mighty destructive release, but Faye snagged it from him and shoved it aside. The Boomer magic was diverted and another of the high-rise building’s lower floors was hit instead. The explosion rocked the entire city. The forty-story building fell, slowly thundering its way down into the escaping masses. Instead of soaking up that freed magic like it was used to, the Pathfinder was shocked as Faye took it all instead.

Faye was fueled by death and Power.

In all of its millions of years chasing the Power, the Enemy had never met anything quite like her.

Hopelessly damaged, the roof collapsed. He tried to Travel away, but she was much faster at that, so she reached the part of space he was trying to smoosh together and
smacked
his hand away.

“How—”

The roof came apart around them. The Chairman simply turned himself into a Brute to take the fall. Faye went back to what came natural and Traveled off to the side.

They fell inside the mansion. Mr. Sullivan and Toru were there, on the ground floor, completely surrounded by Iron Guard. The two of them were moving from room to room, shooting, bludgeoning, stabbing, kicking, smashing their way through enemy after enemy, leaving a pile of broken bodies behind them.

The Chairman landed with a crash in the middle of a group of Iron Guard, scattering them.

Faye landed perched, on the balcony railing high above on the third floor.

The Chairman got to his feet and spoke to her, only she quickly realized it wasn’t the Chairman speaking at all, but rather the monster which had been hiding inside of the imposter for so very long.

“You may beat me here, but the spores have settled across the entirety of your world. All you have done here today is speed up the inevitable harvest. I am everywhere.”

Faye felt a sudden alarm. Her pulse quickened. Her head map was spinning. It was as if the Power itself was trying to warn Faye of something.

She opened her head map, couldn’t find the problem, then used up more Power, and more, burning the energy of some of the hundreds who had just been killed around her. It was further than she’d ever dared push before, but she fueled it with a battleship worth of dead connections. Her head map expanded outward until it seemed to cover the whole world. The information was too much, it screeched against the wall of her sanity, but Faye could see everything, every connection to the Power, natural and unnatural.

The unnatural was easy to spot. The monster was not lying. It really was
everywhere
. It had been planning for this moment since long before Faye was born, even before Sivaram had shown the Power how it could defend itself, and now that it had been exposed, it was making its move. There were thousands of infiltrators spread across the world, and all it would take would be one bunch of them consuming enough magic in one place to anchor the big Enemy to this world forever.

There were patches of death in the world as the skinless men began their harvest. Faye watched her head map with horror as the blackness began to spread.

“I am everywhere.”

“Well so am I!” Faye shouted back. She picked a location, threw caution to the wind, and stepped through reality.

UBF
Traveler

“We’re going down!”
Barns shouted. “We’ve lost half our major systems.”

“Keep us in one piece, Mr. Barns,” Captain Southunder responded.

There was a terrible clatter, a tearing of metal, and another one of the small demons came crawling up out of the instrumentation. “Gremlin!” the teleradar operator shouted.

Captain Southunder calmly drew his .45 auto, centered the front sight on the screeching beast, and blew its head off. The operator was splashed with sizzling ink, but better that than being rent by their razor claws. The creatures were only the size of small dogs, but they had certainly made a mess of his fine new airship.

“Losing altitude fast,” Barns said, having ignored the gunshot. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Very well, Mr. Barns.” Southunder went over to the nearest phone, spun the charger a few times, and picked it up. “Cargo hold. Mr. Schirmer, are you there?”

“Schirmer was attacked by a demon. He cannot come to the phone right now.”

“Ori. Listen, we’re in trouble. I need you to keep us from going up in a ball of fire. We’ll be in range of the entire Imperium navy in a few minutes.”

“Yes, Captain. I will not let us burn.”

Southunder glanced out the front window. They were out of the unnatural night and back in the blue skies he knew so well, and that meant he could fiddle with the weather. “I might be able to get us out of this, but it’s going to get choppy. Have the eggheads aim that device back at Shanghai. Let’s give Mr. Sullivan our full support. I have a sneaky feeling he needs it.”

“Covering,” Sullivan shouted as he fired the BAR through the doorway.

“Moving!” Toru charged forward through a wall, plowing into the soldiers on the other side. The war club rose and fell, and two more died. Toru picked up a submachine gun in the other hand. “Covering.” And he opened fire into the next room.

Sullivan rushed past Toru and took up a position behind a marble pillar. “Reloading.” He dropped the spent mag and pulled another from his chest. His magic was overheated and exhausted. He hadn’t pushed this hard since the Second Somme.

Hundreds of troops had converged on the mansion. It was falling apart around them. Bullets were competing to fill every free bit of air space. Iron Guards were everywhere. Sullivan had been shot so damned many times he couldn’t even keep track. The Spiker armor was being pulverized and picked apart by the sheer volume of impacts. He was bleeding from an unknown number of cuts, punctures, and burns, and his Healing spells were barely keeping up.

Toru wasn’t faring much better. His fancy samurai armor was missing a horn, and one big impact from a recoilless rifle had nearly put him through the foundations. He was limping and leaving a blood trail behind them. “Where is Saito?”

Sullivan pulled the bolt back on the BAR. “Lost him.”

“The coward has fled!” Furious, Toru kicked a couch across the room.