Cursed av-2 Page 23

  A sound from behind made me look up in time to see Sonder returning. He was shivering. He really should have taken me up when I offered to lend him a coat. “Belthas started his ritual.”

  I nodded. “Time to go.”

  Sonder hesitated. “I-”

  I sighed. “For us, not for you. You’re not going, Sonder. This isn’t your kind of fight.” I reached into my backpack and pulled out a radio, a donation from one of Garrick’s men. I tossed it to Sonder and he caught it awkwardly. “I want you to stay up here and pull lookout. Tell me if anything changes. I’ll call you when I’m in position.”

  Sonder looked down, then up at me. “Don’t beat yourself up over it,” I said. “There’s a time to play white knight and this isn’t it. If everything goes to hell, get out the way we came and follow the valley down. You’ll get to a village in about five miles.”

  Sonder opened his mouth and I saw him thinking about what to say. “Good luck,” he said unhappily.

  I grinned at him. “Luck’s for Luna. See you in an hour or two.”

  The grin vanished about two seconds after I was out of sight. I put on my mist cloak, pulling down the hood so that it concealed my face. Belthas would know who I was, but there was no point giving the cameras a free show. It was time to get to work.

  Up close, Belthas’s manor was solid and imposing. It had been designed to look like a traditional English country house, but there was a blocky quality to it that made me think of a castle or bunker. The lower-level windows looked accessible but I knew they were reinforced and sealed. The only ways in were the front and rear doors.

  I’d put the time I’d spent waiting in the darkness above to good use and I had a pretty good idea of the building’s weak points. Any kind of security system that can keep out people you don’t want can also keep out people you do, and rather than solve the difficult problem of attuning his wards, Belthas had elected to leave two openings over the doors. After some consideration, I’d picked the front one. It was watched over by one guard and a pair of security cameras.

  The cameras were easy. There was a slight gap in the coverage and I waited for them to pan away before slipping through to come up against the manor’s west wall. I could feel the presence of the defensive spells through the stone: a gate ward and some kind of nasty ice-based attack that would trigger if anyone attempted to force entry. Luckily, I wasn’t intending to.

  The guard outside the front door was obviously bored and cold. Peering around the corner, I could see him shivering, his hands shoved into his armpits and his MP5 hanging from its strap. There were a few steps leading up to the door and he was standing on top of them, visible in the reflected light of the windows. I walked silently along the edge of the building towards him, pausing from time to time when I got too close to his peripheral vision. The front of the building was bare with no cover, but in my mist cloak I was just one more shadow in the night.

  By the time I was up against the steps I was close enough to see the stubble on the guard’s face and smell the cigarette smoke on his clothes. Looking into the future, I saw that if I got the guard out of the way and went in now, I’d run into two more in the front hall. All I could do was wait. I stood not ten feet from the guard, listened to his teeth chattering, and checked my watch. Thirty-five minutes until Belthas completed his ritual.

  Five minutes passed. I was getting cold but didn’t let myself move, tensing and relaxing muscles to stop myself from stiffening up. Ten minutes. Looking into the future, I saw that the guards inside were gone. I pulled a pebble from my pocket, waited for the guard to glance away, and threw it into the darkness.

  One of the funny things about divination magic is you can know something will work without having the first clue why. The pebble clinked off the rock and the guard snapped his head around as I’d known he would. He stood motionless for ten seconds, then crept down the stairs and slunk left along the wall, trying to blend into the shadows.

  Why did he go that way, along the line of the wall, rather than towards the noise? I don’t know. I just knew that had been what I needed to do to make him turn his back. I moved quickly up the stairs, opened the door, and slipped inside.

  The air inside Belthas’s manor was warm, the entrance hall panelled in wood with pictures on the walls. It looked expensive but rarely used. The murmur of voices echoed through the hallway-the doorway to my left led to a front room with four of Belthas’s men inside but I knew that for the next few seconds none would be looking at the door. I walked quickly past and up the stairs.

  There were cameras inside too, and this time I didn’t try to avoid them. In stillness and darkness my mist cloak makes me all but invisible, but moving in the light is another story. Speed was my best chance now. The security station was on the first floor, and as I came up to the top of the stairs I drew my silenced pistol. The door to the security room was open, light glimmering from inside, and I went in with the gun up.

  The room was filled with monitors, arranged in an arc around the room’s single desk. I could see the approaches to the house, the rooms inside. Pale electronic light bathed the man sitting in the chair. He had a red baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and his arms were clasped over his stomach as he slept. He wasn’t holding a weapon.

  I aimed the pistol at his head, hesitated, then lowered it again and looked at the camera feeds. I counted at least ten guards plus the one in front of me and the two outside. There were views of a set of four reinforced metal doors in the basement level that looked a lot like cells. No inside view but if Luna and Rachel were here, that was where they’d be. There was a guard down on the basement level too … along with a slimmer figure whom I recognised by his hair as Martin. I narrowed my eyes. When I met Martin, he and I were going to have words.

  There was a feed showing guards on the stairs leading up but the cameras on the second floor itself were blank. I guessed Belthas didn’t want anyone else watching his ritual. I looked under the desk but saw nothing except a bunch of cabling from the monitors feeding into the right wall, and I walked quietly out, keeping my gun ready. The man in the red baseball cap didn’t wake up.

  The next door to the right opened into a small room full of humming computers. Perfect. I shut the door behind me, slipped off my backpack, and pulled out a block of an off-white, funny-smelling material as well as a pair of detonators.

  I really don’t know anything about explosives, but being able to see exactly what will and won’t cause something to go boom makes demolition work a lot less stressful. I stuck the detonators into the block, tucked it behind the computer banks, backed off to the door, and looked into the future to see what would happen if I pressed the button on the detonator. Ouch. Okay, it was working. Mental note: one pound of plastic explosive makes a really big bang.

  The next job was to find a way for Cinder to get in. The front door was still too crowded but as I moved to the rear of the building I saw that the back door was deserted except for the solitary guard outside. I stacked my other two blocks of plastic explosive against the door frame, set the detonators, then covered the whole thing with a coat someone had left on a stand. It would take out the door, the guard, the wall, and pretty much anything else.

  I could hear voices from the front of the manor; the outside guard had come in and was talking to the ones in the front room. Couldn’t go back that way. Getting dangerous now-too many people, too many variables. I couldn’t predict everything. There was a back set of stairs and I moved down it away from the explosives, fumbling out my radio as I did so. “Sonder?” I hit the Transmit key. “Sonder!”

  There was silence for a moment, then a hiss and Sonder’s voice came through, scratchy but audible. “Alex?”

  “I’m about to be blown. Tell Cinder to go. I’ll open the back door.”

  “Okay. Are you-?”

  I shoved the radio back in my pocket and looked out along a ground-floor corridor. As I did, I heard someone call out, questioning. Damn, he’d heard me. I duck
ed into what looked like a dining room. The chairs were pulled out but no one was there.

  Footsteps in the corridor. A guard was approaching. His gun wasn’t up-he wasn’t expecting a fight yet. Looking into the future, I saw that he wasn’t going to check this room … but he wasn’t going to leave the corridor either and in less than sixty seconds a bunch more guards would come down from the first floor. If I hid here I’d be trapped.

  Time to give up on stealth. I waited for the guard to walk past, then stepped out into the doorway with my weapon up and sighted on the back of his head. I looked into the future of me pulling the trigger, saw that nothing would happen, flicked the safety off, looked into the future again, saw the burst going up and left, corrected down and right, looked into the future again, saw the burst hit, pulled the trigger. My divination isn’t as quick with guns as with thrown items-not as practised, not as intuitive-but it still took barely a second.

  Garrick’s submachine gun was louder than I expected, a chattering ba-ba-bang! that made me flinch, and the second and third rounds went high as the recoil kicked my shoulder, but I saw the red puff as the first bullet went through the guard’s head, and that was all she wrote. The body crumpled and as my ears adjusted I heard shouts. The stairs down to the basement were on the west side and I ran for them.

  I nearly made it. Would have made it, if three guards hadn’t decided to get smart and cut me off. I was less than thirty feet away when they came round the corner.

  Most people think combat’s about attacks and weapons but it’s not. It’s about movement and information. Belthas’s men were just as skilled as me and just as tough as me but I knew where we’d meet and they didn’t. I was already crouching with my gun braced against my shoulder as the first one came around the corner, and I fired before he’d even spotted me. One burst to bring him down, another to finish the job. The other two guards could have rushed me if they’d attacked together but they’d just seen their friend killed in front of them. They backpedalled and started screaming into their radios for backup.

  I had an open run to the basement but I’d just be boxing myself in. I could sense more guards closing in and I knew I had about fifteen seconds before they pinned me down. I ducked into the nearest room, pulled out the detonator and braced myself against the wall before pushing the button.

  I felt the wall shudder behind me and there was a deep boom and a rush of air, followed a second later by a tearing, crashing sound. The lights flickered but most came back on again and the building steadied. I kept going through the room and out the other side into the main hall. Dust and smoke were billowing down the staircase, and I could hear screams from above; some of Belthas’s men had been near the second bomb when it went off. I took the right door and headed for the corridor where the two men were hunkered down, coming around from the other side. They’d heard me coming and were waiting with their guns trained on the corner, but it didn’t do them any good. I took a grenade from my pack, pulled the pin and let the lever spring free, waited two seconds, then threw it around the corner, bouncing it off the wall to roll next to where I knew the men were crouching. The bang was a lot louder this time. I moved past the torn bodies to the stairs leading down to the basement.

  I heard Sonder’s voice over the radio as I trotted down the stairs. They were concrete, and narrow. “Alex? Alex!”

  I pulled the radio out, listening carefully to the sounds above. There were shouts and orders but it sounded like I’d bought myself a little more time. “Make it quick,” I said into the radio.

  There was a burst of static. “-did you say?”

  The stairs ended in a metal door on the left-hand side. The guard in the basement was on the other side with his weapon trained, ready to fire. I shoved the door open and stepped back as a burst of automatic fire chipped fragments from the wall. “Not the best time, Sonder.”

  “Cinder’s on his way,” Sonder said, his voice tense and excited. “Getting to the manor right about … now!”

  Right on cue, I heard the familiar whoompf of a fireball from above followed by an agonised shriek. The guards on the ground floor who’d been heading for me changed direction. “Perfect,” I said absently, wedging the radio between ear and shoulder so I could bring up my gun.

  “He’s burning the whole back wall!” Sonder’s voice rose a few notes. “He- Holy crap! That thing just-”

  Another burst of fire drilled the wall next to me. I poked the muzzle of my gun around the corner and fired a short burst, the ba-ba-bang! deafeningly loud in the corridor, then pulled back fast to avoid the return fire.

  “The wards are going off! They’re firing back, they’re-”

  “Sonder, this really isn’t a good time,” I said absently. “Can I call you back?” Thirty-round magazine, bullets weren’t ricocheting … too difficult to land a hit. I sent another burst blind around the corner, then shrugged off my pack and rooted through for the last grenade.

  The return fire was longer this time, bullets slamming into the wall to my right and embedding themselves in the soft stone, the noise drowning out Sonder’s reply. I twisted the pin from the grenade and waited for the guard’s magazine to run dry.

  Click. The guard dropped, fumbling for a reload, and I leant out. I got a brief view of an open room with an overturned desk, shadows flickering as a light swung from a cord overhead, then I lobbed the grenade to bounce off the far wall and ducked back. There was a brief scream from behind the desk before the explosion cut it off. “Great,” I said into the radio. “Keep me posted.” I dropped it into my pocket.

  The grenade had made a mess of the room and I searched it quickly, trying not to look at what was left of the guard. From above I could hear the roar of fire spells, muffled through the concrete. Cinder wasn’t having it all his own way and the chattering bursts of automatic weapon fire were answering him. I couldn’t sense any ice attacks, which meant Belthas wasn’t joining the battle. If he hadn’t come by now, it meant he was close to finishing; we didn’t have much time. I spotted a ring of keys beneath a splintered piece of desk and snatched it up, hurrying forward. “Luna!” I shouted.

  A faint voice echoed from down the corridor. “Alex! I’m here!”

  I was already running towards it, passing a side corridor along the way. Just before the corridor bent to the left were a set of four metal doors, two on each side, solid metal with heavy reinforcement. They didn’t have any windows, but each one had a narrow metal hatch at eye level. I flipped the catch and slid the hatch open with a rattle.

  Luna was inside and as I saw her I felt a wave of relief that made me weak at the knees. For all that I’d seen her in Elsewhere, for all that I’d known Belthas wouldn’t have her killed without a reason, seeing her in the flesh made me feel a hundred times better. Luna looked a little pale, her hair was untidy and her clothes scuffed and torn, but as she saw me she gave one of her rare smiles. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said, and I realised I was smiling too. “How’s things?”

  “Been better,” Luna said. “Any chance you could get me out of here?”

  “Just waiting for you to ask.” The room was a prison cell, crudely furnished, and the door had bolts at top and bottom. I drew them back with a scrape of metal. “Where’s Deleo?”

  Luna shook her head. “They took her away a couple of hours ago.”

  I was just about to start going through the keys when something flickered on my precognition. I looked at what was coming and rolled my eyes. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

  Luna sighed. She’s been with me long enough to get used to this. “I’m guessing that’s not good news.”

  “Here.” I pushed the keys through the open hatch, hearing them clink on the concrete, and stepped away. “Be right back.”

  Martin was about forty feet down the side corridor when I leant round the corner, my gun lining up to sight on him. “Martin,” I said. “Give me a reason not to shoot you.”

  Martin was wearing a set of bla
ck combat gear, probably borrowed from Belthas’s men, along with a webbing belt that was slightly too big for him. He looked like an action movie actor trying very hard to pretend he was the real thing. He flinched as he saw the barrel of the gun, then shook it off and grinned. “Oh, hey, Alex. Thought it was you.”

  The laser sight was steady on the black fabric covering Martin’s chest and my trigger finger itched. “I’ve just killed a half dozen people whom I had less reason to want dead than you,” I said quietly. “You’ve got a gun behind your back. Drop it.”

  Martin’s grin widened and he lifted the gun. I fired before he got halfway.

  Tendrils of shadow whipped out, thread-thin, and there was the crack of ricocheting bullets. Martin’s gun finished coming up and I fired another burst. Still nothing. I emptied the rest of the magazine into him. Black shadows flickered and I saw sparks flash but Martin stayed standing until my gun clicked empty. I stared at Martin. No wounds, no blood. What the hell?

  “My turn,” Martin said and fired.

  Martin was firing an automatic, a fairly powerful one from the sound. Luckily his aim sucked and none of his shots would have hit even if I hadn’t ducked behind the corner. I ejected the empty magazine, pulled out a spare, and snapped it into the handle as Martin’s shots bounced uselessly round the corridor. While my hands worked automatically, I tried to figure out what was going on. Martin didn’t have any magic of his own so how could-

  Oh, God damn it.

  The bang bang bang of fire from around the corner ended, and as the echoes died away I heard Martin laughing. “Figured it out yet?” he called. “You can’t touch me!”

  “What is wrong with you?” I shouted. “Could you be any more annoying?”

  “You have no idea what this thing can do, do you?” Martin’s voice was mocking. “Come on, take a look.”

  I glanced carefully around the corner. Martin was holding the gun in his right hand and in his left was the monkey’s paw. “Second wish,” he said, grinning at me. “First one gave me protection from magic. Now I’m protected from everything else.” He shook his head at me. “Seriously, man. You had this thing all this time and never used it? How stupid are you?”