Warrior (The Key to Magic) (3 page)

Beltr stopped and saluted in the prescribed official manner. 

"Compliance Officer Dreal," he stated in strict observance of regulations, "I relieve you."

Dreal returned the salute, his blotchy face expressionless.  "Compliance Officer Beltr, you now have command."

Dreal immediately exited.  Another more gregarious officer might have taken the time to inform his replacement of any current significant investigations, but Dreal was a droll and non-social person.  Beltr did not personally care for the other officer, but Dreal was laudably competent in his duties and possessed the second highest violator detection rate after Beltr himself.

While he marched along narrow aisles to his own cubicle, Beltr took note of the increased rate of agitation in what he thought of as the
glass bee hive
, with the technicians often clumped in consulting groups and assistants running notes back and forth.  All of the modulation analyzers were in use, a somewhat infrequent event.

He had hardly settled into his chair before his assistant, Szck, a senior rhingyll, hurried into his office.  Though skilled and thorough, Szck had the sort of face that exposed his every thought and emotion.  Now, his expression was deeply troubled.

"Sir, we have detected reverberations in the ether that appear to be unauthorized wizardry." 

Szck had another feature that would betray his emotional state: he had eyes of different colors, one hazel and one light blue.  When he came under more than moderate stress, both, as they were doing now, tended to twitch in a disconcerting manner.

Beltr sucked in a sharp breath.  "Has this been authenticated?"

The rhingyll nodded with a nervous jerk of his head.  "Yes, sir.  We have confirmation from the Section stations in Ghaemeh and Pbgleond and from two mobile units."

Beltr got to his feet, trying not to appear to hurry, and walked around the desk.  "Do we have a location?"

"We're working on it, sir.  The disturbance was quite strong, but the afterimage is migratory.  I've ordered more mobile units into the area and we should be able to triangulate the original exit point within a quarter of an hour."

"Get me two apprehension teams and a support squad," Beltr ordered.  "I'll take personal charge of the apprehension." 

After Szck hurried away, Beltr removed his field gear from his top desk drawer.  With long accustomed movements, he snapped the comm and port bracelets on his wrists, clipped a portable skrying stone to his belt, and dropped his polished black cudgel into its holster.  Most Compliance Officers used disabling or immobilizing spells to attempt to restrain malefactors, but he had always preferred the visceral certainty of a sharp blow to the back of the head.  It had taken him some time to perfect the technique, but at this point he could knock a suspect unconscious with but a single blow at least ninety-nine percent of the time.  That was not to say that the other one percent eluded capture, but rather that their subsequent condition forestalled interrogation.  Most of his failures suffered brain injury, which was quite often a rapid fatal hemorrhage, but such a low breakage rate was safely within the guidelines mandated by his superiors.

After a moment's thought, he spoke the code phrase to unlock the lower drawer and removed the gold-trimmed dark wood case that it contained.  Placing his left palm on the top of this, aligning his fingers precisely with the spectral points on the carven peacock design, he said, "Ancestors, I live to serve."

This simple but ancient and powerful spell released the lid and he removed it with care.  Here he paused as he extended his hand to the interior, but he forged immediately through the instinctive hesitation and extracted the large silver and ruby pendant that nestled in the purple velour lined cavity.  A centuries' old legacy of his maternal line, the pendant had once belonged to the queen of a long vanished kingdom and was imbued with a plethora of unique, proactive defensive and protective spells.  Such ancient magics were deemed subversive contraband by the Faction and he had been permitted to continue in its possession solely due to his position in the Investigative Section.  On the first day of each quarter, regulations required him to resubmit a lengthy application for a temporary dispensation.  If he removed it from its authorized and remotely monitored container, he was obligated to submit twelve different forms to eight different senior Compliance Officers and to subsequently appear in front of a review board to provide a detailed justification.  Should the review board ever determine that his use of the pendant had been inappropriate, his career as a Compliance Officer would be over.

But if there was a wizard on the loose, he would almost certainly need it today.

The first step that the Faction had taken when it began to expand its control of the continent had been to arrest and execute the only two practicing wizards known to reside in the subjugated dominions.  Their laboratories, personal possessions, records, and apparatus had all been seized and in most cases subsequently destroyed.

Wizardry was the most powerful magic known, capable of disturbing past, present, and future.  While theory postulated that there was a considerable inertia to collective human action that even a master of time and space could not overcome, a wizard with sufficient ability that intervened in the right place at the right time could literally rewrite events, changing the established course of history.  

Given the famously disorderly inclinations and meddling proclivities of the discipline, it was an accepted Faction doctrine that an unrestrained wizard would be inclined to attempt to undo all that the followers of Oaurlervy had accomplished.  This, of course, could not be permitted.  

If some new practitioner had developed wizardry spells, then that individual was a supreme danger to the proper order and his or her capture and eventual elimination was obligatory.

 Beltr exited his cubicle and wound his way through the maze to what he considered the top end of the glass bee hive, the correlation hub of the grouped desks of the senior technicians.

Rhingyll Szck was there along with all the heads of the various technical units.  The senior technicians were mutely intent upon their instruments, but Szck and the other supervising rhingylls were standing in a tight clump, receiving paper reports and directing the vast magical detective machinery of the Investigative Section as it sought to pinpoint the location of the offender.

"The teams are standing by, sir, ready to port at your order," Szck reported as soon as Beltr arrived.  "We've pinpointed the individual that shows the wizardry trace and narrowed his or her location to a rural area at the southern end of the province.  In five minutes or less, we'll have the exact spot to within a hundred paces."

"You can't lock an identity?"

"No, sir.  The ether surrounding the individual is extremely convoluted, possibly a side effect of the wizardry.  None of the standard descriptive markers are clear enough to extrapolate."

"Could that be some sort of intentional masking?"

"We have technicians investigating that possibility, sir."

"Who are my team leaders?"

"Enforcement Officers Dlygm and Nhilsi, sir.  Rhingyll Zhaevyr commands the support squad."

"Excellent." 

Beltr had worked with both officers on several previous occasions.  Dlygm was a staunch, long-time Faction member and Nhilsi was young and eager.  Both were supremely competent, ruthless, and obedient.

One of the technicians waved at Szck.  The rhingyll went over to receive a note from the woman and then hurried back to Beltr.  He immediately read off a string of numbers to the Compliance Officer.

"Those are standard map coordinates?"

"Yes, sir.  It looks to be a hundred paces due north of the village of Bournegyll."

"Order both teams and the squad to meet me at the center of Bournegyll.  The perpetrator will likely try to go to ground in the village.  We'll set up a cordon and put him in custody in very short order."

"Yes, sir."

Beltr tapped his port bracelet, experienced an instant of vertigo, and then stood in the darkened main square surrounded by older, mostly stone and brick buildings.  Like many of the rural population centers, Bournegyll did not have street lights.  That would soon change under the enlightened leadership of the Faction, but for now, Beltr would have to make do with starlight and his own light enhancing spells.

He made a subtle arcane gesture with his left hand and to his eyes the scene became one of shadowed, pinkish outlines no worse for seeing than twilight.  

The thirty soldiers of the apprehension teams ported in almost simultaneously, their oversize, hulking armored forms suddenly filling the square.

His reinforced boots mutely clanking on the cobblestone pavement and his servos whispering, Dlygm, who was senior, approached and saluted.  "We have a lock on the perpetrator's signature, sir.  Shall we apprehend?"

"Yes, have your men move out, but emphasize that the perpetrator must wind up physically able to respond to questioning.  We need to make certain that this contagion is isolated and fully contained."

"Yes, sir." 

Dlygm snapped a curt order into his throat comm and the soldiers of the two teams vanished in pairs, dispatched to their pre-assigned locations to encircle their target.

Beltr remained where he was.  Standard procedure required that he stand by in a supervisory posture, monitoring the comm phases, and only intervene if the assistance of his sorcery proved necessary.

A few seconds later, the first sign that something had gone wrong was Enforcement Officer Nhilsi's terse message, "Perpetrator has evaded the cordon. Team Leader Dlygm is down."

Beltr flipped his comm to the private senior command phase so that none of the underlings could hear.  "Nhilsi, give me the exact status of Dlygm."

"Injured but conscious, sir," the enforcement officer replied on the same phase, a slight strain audible in his voice.  "All of his gear, including his weapons and servo assists, was fried by some sort of strong ethereal broadcast.  Also, the perpetrator used an unidentified spell to throw him through a building wall.  We think he has a broken leg -- can't really tell because the diagnostics are dead too -- and without magic, his armor is for practical purposes immobile.  He should be considered completely out of action."

"How did this happen?" Beltr demanded with an edge to his voice.

Nhilsi shifted to a flat, official tone, indicating that he believed -- correctly -- that his words were being recorded and that he would be called to be called to account for them.  "Per standard operations procedure, EO Dlygm confronted the perpetrator with two men as backup, while I and the remainder of our soldiers took support positions.  Immediately, all three were hurled through the air.  As we have not been given the Weapons Free command, I did not order my team to open fire.  The perpetrator does not have any sort of readily identifiable weapon.  Support Officers Trask and Bouldin suffered only minor abrasions.  A Repair and Recovery team has been called in for EO Dlygm.  Awaiting orders, sir."

Finding no immediately identifiable fault, Beltr ordered, "Shadow the perpetrator until I arrive."

He synched his port bracelet to that of Nhilsi, activated it, and arrived on the slight slope of a gabled roof, looking down into a dark, narrow alley.  Nhilsi and two men crouched nearby, all with their shoulder weapons locked in the firing position and all staring intently at the roof of the building on the other side of the alley.

Beltr instantly crouched down likewise, weaving a concealment glamour about the trio and himself that would shield their visual and audible presence.

"Status on the perpetrator?" he asked Nhilsi.

"Approaching due north, sir.  He's coming across the rooftops."

Beltr's enhanced vision allowed him to easily locate the perpetrator, a man of average height and build, moving swiftly.  From the confident way in which he traversed this unconventional route, it was clear that the perpetrator was well practiced in such clandestine travel.

When the perpetrator reached the edge of alley, Beltr stood up, raised his right hand palm out, and cast a globe of emerald ethereal flame.  He had restrained the intensity of the missile to a level that should be strong enough to disable but not kill.

Wielding raw primitive magic that drove a shock wave through the ambient ether with an ease that was unlike anything that Beltr had ever seen, the perpetrator dissolved the globe long before it reached him and then hopped off the edge of the roof to descend in a rapid but obviously controlled fashion to the street below.

Shaking off his amazement, Beltr turned to order Nhilsi, "Have all of your men close in. They are to seize the perpetrator.  Use of near lethal force is authorized."

Nhilsi relayed the order and in a flash, his and Dlygm's teams winked into existence in the alley below in a patter that completely surrounded the suspect wizard.  A lead squad deployed truncheons and charged across the short intervening space.

The perpetrator flattened the running soldiers with an apparently effortless cascade of flux, and then did the same for the ones blocking his escape as he bolted up the alley.

"Do not let him get away," Beltr immediately amended.  "Weapons Free.  Use all force necessary."

Well trained, to a man the soldiers went prone and unleashed a barrage from their shoulder weapons.  Rainbow fire lit the alley as the ethereal projectiles converged on the perpetrator in a dense mass.  None struck, however, deflected not by any conventional ward but by some unknown diversionary magic that individually changed the vector of each blast.

For a moment, this feat left Beltr stunned.  No magical practitioner that he had encountered in his entire life had such power.

Beltr touched his comm.  "Support, drop a full barrage on the perpetrator."

Questioning the man was no longer a priority.  Friendly casualties from the mortars were almost certain, but stopping this wizard before he could get away was the only relevant priority now.

"Wards to full.  Barrage incoming," Nhilsi warned over the team phase.