Warbound

UBF Traveler

A few hours later, Heinrich floated down through the ceiling and woke Sullivan up. “It is time.” The Fade pulled the chain and the small room’s single lightbulb lit up. Despite this being considered the officer’s quarters, there were still five other bunks, most of which were currently occupied, and the men all began to grumble and mutter at the sudden light.

Sullivan maneuvered himself out of the tiny hole his cot sat in and managed to not hit his head. At least he’d gotten the biggest bunk aboard, which meant that it was still far too tiny for a man of his stature. The floor-level bunk beneath him was filled with equipment rather than a person, mostly because nobody was brave enough to sleep below a man whose magically augmented mass made him weigh in around four hundred pounds. Sullivan’s watch was sitting next to his .45. He picked them both up. “One in the morning. That didn’t take long…” He’d figured it wouldn’t, so he hadn’t even bothered to take his boots off before going to sleep. “Who is it?”

“One of the UBF men, Skaggs.”

Sullivan had only spoken to him once. He remembered Skaggs as a round-faced, gravel-voiced fella, one of Francis’ mechanics. “Where?”

“Aft rope room,” Heinrich answered. The Fade was excited. He enjoyed this sort of thing far too much. “Lance has eyes on him.”

“I’m glad you boys didn’t just pop him.”

“It was so very tempting.”

Their conversation was starting to wake up the others in the officer’s quarters. “Wha, huh?” asked Barns, sitting up in bed and automatically reaching for the shoulder holster hanging from a peg on the wall. “Wha’s going on?”

“Go back to sleep,” Sullivan ordered the pilot before he could pull his machine pistol. Pirates were a jumpy bunch. “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“Kill the damned light, will ya?”

Sullivan pulled the chain, then followed Heinrich out into the hall. Unlike most UBF vessels, the Traveler hadn’t been built for comfort, and the corridors were dimly lit, with bare metal walls. He had to duck every few feet to avoid banging his skull on a random pipe. The rope rooms were at the very bottom of the ship, so they’d have to hurry to catch him in the act.

Nabbing Skaggs alive meant that they’d be able to question him, and if you were going to question somebody, might as well do it with your human polygraph machine around. “You fetch a Reader?”

“Lance sent a mouse.”

“He’ll love waking up to that in his face. Best get the Mouth too, just in case our spy don’t feel like talking.”

“Way ahead of you, Jake. You forget how much more practiced at this treachery business I am than you.” Heinrich looked back, eyes wide as he thought of something. “The spy is an engineer.”

“So?”

“Skaggs knows the guts of the ship. If he gets orders back to sabotage us, who knows what he could harm?”

“I really don’t feel like crashing another one of Francis’ fancy blimps.” He was just holding Heinrich up, what with his having to walk around solid objects instead of through them. “Go. I’ll catch up.”

Heinrich nodded, then his features seemed to blur and turn grey, and then he sank through the floor and disappeared. It was a good thing too, because it then saved Sullivan the indignity of trying to maneuver his bulk down the narrow stairwell in front of witnesses. His feet barely fit on the steps. “UBF designed this thing for pygmies,” he muttered.

He reached the rope room a few minutes later, but judging by how Skaggs was lying in a crumpled heap with blood all over the side of his face, and Heinrich was standing over him with a pipe wrench in hand, Sullivan hadn’t needed to rush.

He nudged the fallen UBF engineer with his toe to make sure he was still alive. Skaggs groaned. “He give you trouble?”

“Nothing a wrench to the face couldn’t fix.” Heinrich answered. “But I suppose a wrench to the face solves most personnel issues.”

“Check this out.” Lance’s deep voice came from an empty corner of the room. “Down here.” Sullivan stepped over the piled coils of rope and spotted a small brown mouse running around in circles. The floor gleamed from shards of broken glass.

Sullivan knelt and carefully picked up one of the biggest pieces of glass. It was mirrored, and someone had scratched lines into it. “Communication spell?”

“Yep,” the mouse answered, impossibly loud for a critter that could fit in the palm of his hand. Since Lance Talon was a Beastie, and his Power allowed him to take control of animals, they’d made sure that the Traveler had a mice problem for occasions like this. Sure, they’d eventually make a mess of things, but then they’d just have to get a cat… Or he supposed Lance could just take over all the mice and have them jump overboard. Beasties probably didn’t really have trouble with pests. “That spell detector Fuller put together went nuts. I found our friend here telling somebody about how we were heading for Siberia.”

Heinrich had dragged the semi-conscious Skaggs upright and was patting him down, looking for weapons. A quick search wouldn’t matter if their spy had some form of offensive magic. “He an Active?”

“Not that I am aware of.” Heinrich paused long enough to slap Skaggs hard on the cheek. It caused a cascading ripple through the fat of his face all the way to his extra chins. “Hey! Hey, wake up, scheisskopf. You try anything, I even feel a bit of magic, I feed you into a turbo-jet.” Heinrich hit him even harder to make the point. “Do you understand?”

From the all the flinching as Heinrich slapped him around, it was obvious that Skaggs wasn’t used to that sort of rough treatment. “Okay, okay! Stop, please.” Skaggs was blinking his way back to coherence. Finally realization dawned as to just how much trouble he was in and the begging started. “Oh no. Oh no. I didn’t do anything! Please don’t hurt me. Please, I’m begging you.”

Either he was legitimately terrified, or he was a damn fine actor. Sullivan wasn’t in the mood for either. “You’re getting off this blimp. Only question is if you’re taking the fast way or the slow way.”

“This is all a mistake!”

Sullivan held up the piece of glass. “The mistake was you thinking you could rat us out and not get caught.” Skaggs’ eyes flew back and forth from the piece in Sullivan’s hand to the remaining bits littering the floor. He was done and he knew it. “Who’re you working for?”

Skaggs might have been tougher than he first let on, or he might have just been that desperate. “Go to hell.”

“Want to play it hard, huh?” Sullivan tossed the piece of glass back on the floor. “Your call.” There was movement in the hall, and Sullivan looked back to see a few Grimnoir waiting at the hatch, the Reader and the Mouth he’d asked for. They were men Heinrich recruited, so Sullivan didn’t really know them well yet.

“What’s going on?” the tall, thin young knight asked.

“Which one are you?” Sullivan asked.

“Mike Willis. I’m a Reader.”

“We got a spy,” Sullivan said simply. “Let me know when he’s lying.” He turned back to Skaggs. “This fella is a Reader. So I’m gonna have the truth from you even if they have to suck it right outta your brain.”

“Go to hell,” Skaggs repeated himself through gritted teeth.

Heinrich had picked up a rather stout length of rope. They were in the rope room, after all. He looked over at Sullivan and raised an eyebrow. Sullivan shrugged, so Heinrich began to beat Skaggs with it about the head and neck. The UBF engineer rolled into a fetal position and tried to protect his face.

“I’m a Mouth,” said the other knight. He was a short, downright skinny, almost frail-looking dark-haired man. “I can talk it out of him if you want, so that’s not really necessary.”

“You offended?”

“That depends entirely on who he’s working for.” The Mouth scowled. “If it’s Imperium I’ll want a turn beating him too.”

“What’s your name?”

“Genesse.”

“I like that attitude, Genesse.” Sullivan gave Heinrich a minute before holding up one hand. Heinrich stopped the beating. “My Teutonic friend here has very little patience for folks wasting his time. The only difference your attitude makes is determining how bad this hurts. So who were you talking to?”

Skaggs picked himself up off the floor, and tried to show a little dignity. He gave a bitter laugh. “I told them you were coming. You better let me go. The Japs will tear you apart.”

Sullivan looked to the Reader, who nodded. Skaggs was working for the Imperium. It never ceased to amaze him how many fools the Imperium managed to recruit in America. He could ask why, but that was pointless. The reasons varied, but they always came back to power, greed, or worst of all, the true believers who’d caught the Chairman’s twisted fevered vision of the future. The why didn’t even matter.

“You on your own?”

He spit a mouthful of blood on the metal floor. “As far as I know.”

Sullivan looked. Willis nodded.

“What was your mission?”

“Keep an eye on the traitor Toru. See what you were up to. Call it in.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. They don’t tell me much, okay?”

The Reader seemed to agree. “I’m getting a lot of thoughts about how this seemed like a good idea at the time.”

It was as Sullivan had expected.

“It wasn’t anything personal. I’m no Imperium nut. I’ve got debts. I’ve got problems. One of their boys, one of the scary ones with all the magic scars, he made me an offer. What was I supposed to do? They paid me a lot of money.”

“You think that makes it better?” Heinrich snapped.

“I get any last words?”

“Only if you manage to say them real quick,” Lance said through the mouse. “Heinrich, would you do the honors?”

“The fast way down?”

“Works for me.”

“Wait!” Skaggs screamed, but Heinrich had already put one hand on him. The two of them turned grey, drifted through the floor, and disappeared. There was nothing but a few thousand feet of open air beneath them and the mountaintops.

“Good Lord,” Willis whispered.

“That’s what he gets for falling in with the Imperium,” Genesse said without emotion. Now there was a man who was used to dealing with the Imperium.

Willis was horrified. “Just like that?”

“Just like that. When you’re at war, and you catch a spy, you don’t hold a trial. You execute them and move on.” Sullivan just shook his head. “If he’d got his way, we’d all be dead. Him too… The idiot.”

“It’s not like the Japs would have stopped shooting long enough to let him off. They have no loyalty to their snitches,” Lance said. Being a very long-time Grimnoir, he didn’t seem quite so moved over the death of an Imperium stooge.

Genesse was looking at the broken glass. “There’ll be an armada waiting in Siberia for us now.”

“Good thing we weren’t going there to begin with,” Sullivan said. There was a brass phone mounted on the far wall of the rope room. Sullivan went over, cranked the handle a few times to charge it, then picked up the mouthpiece to raise the bridge. “Captain? This is Sullivan. It’s done. You know what to do.”

“I was wondering why you were lying during your briefing,” Willis said. “Hey, can’t blame a guy for using his Power a little. I didn’t delve in or anything, but the idea that the whole thing was a setup was right at the surface during your talk.”

“Not bad.” Sullivan hadn’t felt any intrusion. The kid was good. He’d have to watch himself better in the future.

“Fuller never built a device that could spot the Pathfinder. Fuller’s brilliant. He can see magic and tweak most any design to get results, but he didn’t know near enough about how that sort of spell worked to even try,” Lance’s mouse said. “Once Fuller sees how their magic looks, maybe, but until then, he’s stuck.”

“But according to Toru, the Chairman’s Cogs have already built some sort of Enemy detector,” Sullivan finished. “That’s where we’re heading.”

Heinrich swam back up through the floor, alone. He solidified, then knocked his hands together, as if dusting them off. “I for one am curious to see how many more Imperium swine we have aboard.”

Lance’s mouse chuckled. “However many are left, you can bet your ass the next one will be a whole lot more careful.”

The Traveler creaked and swayed as they changed course.

The Reader was still confused, but was probably too scared of the other knights’ dangerous reputations to try and read their minds now. Curiosity was great and all, until you were palling around with the knights who’d fought the Chairman and lived to talk about it. “So where are we going?”

“Santa’s workshop,” Lance supplied, which just seemed to confuse the poor Reader even more.

Sullivan just shook his head. He was never much for secrets anyway. “The North Pole.”

Paris, France

Inside a little café in Paris, Faye sat impatiently across from the Grimnoir elder who’d voted to have her murdered, while he took his sweet time sipping a fancy little coffee and watching people walk by in the rain.

“Are you about done yet?” Faye asked him.

“You have asked me that five times already,” Jacques answered pleasantly.

“Six. Because we’ve been here forever.” A few of the other patrons seemed to have overheard her, but nobody seemed particularly curious about someone speaking English. Jacques had said that this part of town had lots of American tourists and ex patriots—whatever that meant. The staff all seemed to know Jacques, like he was a regular here. “All you do is sit around and watch stuff and drink coffee.”

“Watching stuff and drinking coffee is how I choose to spend my time, my dear. I am retired.”

Faye snorted. Retirement was a crazy European idea where you just stopped working when you got old. Who’d ever heard of such a thing? Grandpa had been older than Jacques and he’d still milked cows until the day he’d died. And if he hadn’t been murdered by Madi, she knew Grandpa would still be milking cows today. “Retirement… You guys are funny. You’re still Grimnoir.” She pointed at the black and gold ring on his finger. It matched hers. “Grimnoir don’t retire.”

“That is not my job. That is my life. It is different.”

“Come on. You promised to teach me to be the Spellbound.”

Jacques took another sip. “Now you are putting words in my mouth. I promised you no such thing. You nearly flung me to my death, and I was nice enough to say I would try to help you in your quest for knowledge. I gave you my word that I would keep your presence secret from the society, and that I would help you as best I could. That is what I am attempting to do. I am a kindly old man and you are a bossy girl.”

“Bossy?” By Faye’s standards she hadn’t even been particularly threatening. Jacques still had all his limbs. “You’re supposed to be the big expert on this thing.”

“Indeed. I am…” He let that hang, but after she stared at him expectantly for an eternity, he finally sighed and gave in. “I will tell you everything I know about the Spellbound. Since the elders have decided not to interfere unless you begin to make bad decisions, the very least I can do is help you comprehend what you are dealing with. However, I believe the spell’s results are a direct reflection of the character of the user. Thus, in order for you to understand the Spellbound, I must first understand you.”

Faye waited. Jacques took another sip, then watched a young couple with colorful umbrellas walk by outside. The pretty young waitress came back by and Jacques smiled at her. He was a flirty old man. Then he went back to drinking and watching.

“Well?”

“My, you really are an impatient little girl, aren’t you?”

Faye groaned. “That’s because y’all are so slow.”

He nodded. “Interesting…”

“What?”

“You say that often. You find everyone slow. Don’t you find that at all peculiar?”

“Don’t blame me if all your brains don’t go fast like mine.” Even the smartest people she knew, like Mr. Browning or Mr. Sullivan, made decisions like their heads were filled with molasses. “Nothing personal.”

“I find that fascinating. It isn’t like you have been consorting with anyone slow-witted. I am at least passingly familiar with Pershing’s American knights. They are an intelligent, driven, some would say too-decisive group. Yet everything I’ve learned about you suggests that they seem sluggish to you. Every report I’ve read about you has mentioned it. The astute have commented upon the speed of your intellect, while most have merely dismissed you as being odd.”

“Reports? What reports?”

“After you came to our attention, we learned as much as we could about you. Travelers who live to adulthood are rare enough as it is, but anyone who could survive the Tokugawa and the firing of a Peace Ray becomes a person of interest. I have been speculating about the return of the Spellbound for a very long time. Of course I asked for reports about you. Did you think that I would vote on someone’s fate without knowing everything I could about them first? I am no barbarian.” Jacques paused to eat a cookie, and then washed it down with more coffee.

“I swear Jacques that if you don’t speed this up I’m gonna Travel out of here and take your head with me.”

He raised a single eyebrow. “Like you did with the Chairman’s hands? Now that was quite the impressive feat.”

Faye blushed. It was nice to get some credit once in a while. “Yeah. That was pretty neat.”

“Did you know that trick would work?”

She shrugged. “It seemed reasonable. I guessed it would work. It wasn’t like anyone else was having any luck.”

“Yet, you had never teleported and only taken part of an object before. So how did you know you could do this, especially against one such as the Chairman?”

Faye scowled. “It’s hard to explain. I just looked at everything that was going on, and everything that I’d heard, and I sorta just put it all together real quick.”

“Define quick.”

“Maybe a second, I guess.” That sounded reasonable. Time just sort of seemed to slow down when she got to thinking real hard about stuff. “I don’t know.”

“That is the sort of report that crossed my desk that made me originally suspect you were the Spellbound. It sounded so far-fetched that many of my peers dismissed the idea that you had done it at all.”

“But I did do it! I beat the Chairman!” The last time she’d met with Grimnoir elders their disbelief had annoyed her to no end.

“Indeed. But you must understand their doubts. You were nearly untrained, you had never done anything like that before, yet you found a way to defeat the greatest wizard of all time. A man who had proven impervious to every assault, a man who had survived dozens of assassination attempts by extremely skilled Actives, yet you extemporaneously outwitted him. And then when you teleported the Tempest across the entirety of the Pacific, how long did it take you to decide you could do that?”

“You gotta think fast when you’re about to get burned.” Faye realized Jacques was staring at her intently and she was struck by how much smarter he was than he acted. It made her a little uncomfortable. “Okay… Well, I saw the Tokugawa getting blown up by the Tesla thingy, so I had to see how much the Traveler weighed, how much the folks on it weighed, you know, so I didn’t get them stuck together, where we were, how fast we were going, I even had to look at the wind and how everything was turning, then how fast the pillar of light was coming, and then I figured that I needed to take us further than I could see with my head map, so I just hurried and sorted it out and did it before the Tesla beam got us. But since I only had a second, I kind of messed up and pushed a little too hard. I’m lucky I didn’t just kill us all.”

Jacques was still looking at her, but now his mouth was open just a little bit, like he was kind of surprised. He quickly closed it.

“You doing okay, Jacques?”

“All of that… Before the pillar of light reached you?”

“Yeah.”

He drained his coffee in one quick gulp, pulled some money out of his pocket and left it on the table. “That concludes our lesson for the day.”

“Lesson? That was supposed to be a lesson?”

He picked up his hat and set it on his white hair. “Yes. It was your first lesson in mastering the most dangerous spell the world has ever known.”

“Well, I’m no expert on schoolin’ and such, but you’re not a very good teacher.”

“I never claimed to be. Meet me here tomorrow at ten.” And then Jacques quickly walked out of the café and into the rain without looking back. He didn’t even bother with an umbrella.

Faye sighed and polished off the cookies.