by Kevin Hearne
Gunfire erupted. It was aimed at us, sure, but primarily aimed at the branches of the tree that Cowslip was sitting in. Bullets shredded and splintered the wood, and Buck cursed creatively the entire while. When they had emptied their clips and had to reload—yes, I purposely say clips instead of magazines, to make pedantic American gun nuts froth at the mouth—Nadia checked on the pixie.
“Cowslip?”
“I’m okay!” she squeaked, though I couldn’t see her anymore. She had taken shelter behind a trunk or bough. Pixies were extraordinarily small targets.
[How many shooters?] I asked, not caring who answered as long as someone did. I couldn’t see anything in the gathering darkness and needed a sigil to fix that.
“Lemme check,” Buck said. He popped away, leaving his bag behind, and returned shortly thereafter. “Two. Up near the wall of rock that Cowslip told us about. Can ye see it without stickin’ yer head up tae get shot off?”
“Stay down!” Nadia yelled, just before the shooters began spraying down the hillside again with their fresh clips.
I had questions. The CIA had obviously sent out someone to check on their loss of camera surveillance, but why had they initially gone after Cowslip instead of us? After going to all the trouble and expense to develop an asset like that, why did they decide to terminate?
The only possible answer was that they had the area wired for sound as well and heard her giving us everything. Since she was more likely to be taken out in the surprise first volley, they had targeted her first. But we couldn’t be allowed to live either. We knew too much.
Bullets were hitting the hillside now. We had minimized our target silhouette, but they were going to keep us pinned down at the very least if not perforate us multiple times.
It clarified my thinking and resolve. When it comes to beings that are on earth without permission, my license to kill is absolute. I have no such license to kill other humans.
I do, however, occasionally run across the need. As in this situation, a self-defense scenario where it appeared that there would be no opportunity to negotiate. A minimized silhouette and the legendary inaccuracy of automatic weapons would not save us forever. We must either kill or be killed.
And rarely—yet always to my eternal shame—I actually wanted to kill. I’d never acted on such desires before, because other solutions were available to me that would let me face the mirror in the morning, and I supposed so long as one possessed a sense of shame, that was a weak moral code of sorts: In the morning, and every morning after that, can I live with this shite I’m about to do, without self-loathing?
But this was an extraordinary situation in which my wants and needs overlapped. I needed to survive this and get into that lab, and, pinned down as I was, I couldn’t do that without a spoonful of lethal violence. That was enough to proceed. However, I also wanted these people who enslaved other beings yet sang of the “land of the free” to pay for their unforgivable cruelty and hypocrisy. They had literally created man-eating monsters but were no less monstrous themselves.
When they stopped to reload again, I leapt to my feet—leapt being a relative term for a man in his sixties—and pulled out the ancient Sigil of Unchained Destruction. I didn’t see the gunmen, but I could dimly make out the miniature rock cliff in the hillside that hid the secret entrance to the lab. It was a darker slab in the deepening darkness.
One hand aiming the sigil and the other poised above it to break the seal, I held the sigil carefully still and hoped that it would work after all this time. If it didn’t, I’d probably hear Nadia tell me to duck an instant before a bullet tore through me. I broke the seal, raising the flap and pinching it aloft so that nothing blocked the sigil, and counted:
One Ecclefechan.
Two Ecclefechan.
Three—
The Sigil of Unchained Destruction is not quite like taking off and nuking a site from orbit just to be sure, but it’s close. It’s less wanton, more targeted, yet utterly irresistible. The aftermath looks like what you’d see if a helicopter news crew surveyed the path of a tornado through a trailer park. It’s a cone of raw kinetic force that obliterates everything for approximately two hundred meters before deciding that’s quite enough and it’s time to fuck off and go to the pub.
It’s a true cone of force, however. Aim the center at a point slightly aboveground, like I did, and you’ll get a whole lot of that force scooping up the ground underneath the center. Or at least pushing it forward until it has nowhere else to go but up because that’s the path of least resistance.
The resultant impact created a percussive boom and shockwave and threw up a whole lot of earth into the sky. It knocked me back on my arse. That would bring someone to investigate eventually, so we couldn’t wait long before getting in there ourselves.
I looked over at Nadia and raised an eyebrow in question. Okay to proceed? She looked up at the expanding cloud of debris, clambered to her feet, and slapped at her clothes to get the mud off.
“Don’t want tae get too wild here, but I think ye might’ve got ’em, Al.”
“I’ll say! Bloody hells!” Buck said.
“Did you kill them all?” Cowslip’s tiny voice asked.
[The two shooters, yes. Don’t know how much damage it did inside the facility.]
“Can ye imagine if William Wallace had been packing one of those?” the hobgoblin asked.
A keening noise made me think I’d sustained hearing damage from the detonation, until I realized the sound was coming from behind me rather than internally, and it was growing into a chorus. Cowslip squeaked in alarm as I turned around and she flew down to us.
“The bean sídhe are here!”
They were indeed. They had shifted in through the bound tree and were now spinning in slow gyres about the trunk, their glowing but vacant eyes staring at nothing, their open mouths wailing and ululating nonsense in a rising wall of teeth-grinding sound. There were no recognizable names being called. But I cast a worried glance at Buck. He had his hands over his ears and a wince on his face.
I walked over and gave him two sigils. “Agility and strength. You be careful.”
“Are they gonnay have at us, then?”
I shook my head. Clíodhna wouldn’t have sent them to do battle after we’d made such an amicable agreement. They were simply here to fulfill their function and herald the deaths of the Fae. [No. They’re just telling us someone is going to die.]
“Incoming from the crater,” Nadia announced.
I hurried over to give her the same two sigils and then popped the seal on the last pair for me, plus a Sigil of Feline Vision to help me see in the dark. I spread out to the right side, leaving Nadia in the center of our trio. Three shadowy figures silhouetted in the cloud of debris took shape, and I recognized two of them. The leprechaun’s small stature was unmistakable, and the unsteady weaving of the clurichaun was a calling card. The other was of a height in between the two, perhaps four feet tall, and was most likely the fir darrig. They were rat-faced and rat-tailed bipeds who preferred to wear red coats redolent of hot rubbish juice. Temperamentally they were like football fans who didn’t wait for an excuse to get into a brawl. They had an impressive vertical leap, and they liked to lay about them with a club-like shillelagh.
As the ol’ cat eyes kicked in and the figures sharpened and brightened, the leprechaun leapt at me, the fir darrig bounced toward Buck, and the clurichaun stagger-charged Nadia in the center. I noticed that he was armed with something besides a gun this time—a hatchet in his right hand and a dagger in the left. (Did he bring the aioli?) Both the fir darrig and the leprechaun had shillelaghs cocked in their hands, which they brought down for an opening strike, and while I’m sure Buck and Nadia successfully dodged their opponents, I didn’t. The burl on the end of the shillelagh smashed into my left cheek—the same one the barghest had shredded—probably because I
was worrying about my companions and not paying full attention to the leprechaun.
But that got my attention.
Pain exploded underneath my eye, and I nearly fell over but managed to keep my feet by staggering back. The leprechaun landed on the soft turf and spun around, twirling his shillelagh as a manic grin split his face.
“Evenin’, squire! Hee hee hee! Will ye be havin’ some more?” And he came at me again, on the same side since he could no doubt see that I had my left eye closed and it would probably swell shut soon anyway. I rotated my left side back so I faced him with my right foot forward and my cane held defensively, and when he swung at me I pivoted to the left on that right foot to make him miss but whipped my fist down in that direction at the same time, my cane trailing along the line of my forearm until the end of it caught him high on the left cheek also. An eye for an eye. His appetite for cheery banter evaporated, and he growled at me instead.
“Oh ho,” he said. “Bad move, me boy. I’ll be eating your liver in a few minutes and feeding the rest of ye to the village dogs.”
Judging by what Cowslip had told us about the corrupted Fae’s new dietary preferences, that had probably been his plan regardless of whether I fought back or not, so if I was going to fall to this Irish blighter, I might as well go down the hard way.
I wondered where Cowslip had gotten to but didn’t dare take my eyes off the leprechaun, even to check on the others. I heard some grunts and yelps of pain but had no idea who was making them.
The leprechaun was watching me move, trying to spot weaknesses, but it was still my left side where he’d initially tagged me. I was showing him nothing but my right side and a cautious defense. I’d opened a gash on his cheek and he had some blood sheeting down there, but his vision hadn’t been damaged.
My long topcoat did me a service in the sense that it hid my hips and legs; he couldn’t look at them and predict where I’d move next. But he was fast. Even sped up and stronger than usual, I had trouble fighting off his next attack, which involved him leaping at my face and then dropping his shillelagh mid-jump to latch on to my arm and lock up my cane with it.
I supposed I did not, in fact, fight it off, because he held on tightly to my arm and then swung a chubby and dirty foot at my chin and tagged me. My teeth closed on my tongue and I tasted blood, and the wee bastard cackled. Rather than try to shake the leprechaun off my arm, I simply went horizontal and dropped on top of him. The air whooshed out of his lungs as my full weight plowed him into the turf and the cane pressed into his diaphragm, making sure he was empty. I didn’t want him to refill, so I shifted my weight, dragged the cane across his throat, and pressed down.
The leprechaun kicked me savagely enough in the ribs that I nearly rolled away, and he socked me good a couple of times in the ear so that I probably did sustain hearing loss after all, but this was going to be my best shot, so I endured it and kept up the pressure until the mad light in his eyes snuffed out.
The wailing of the banshees changed with his death. It didn’t cease, but the mindless gabble altered to a slightly different mindless gabble. And it changed again as Buck Foi threw up his hands in victory over a still form and said, “That’s right, ya bastard!”
But Nadia was still locked in combat with the clurichaun and having serious trouble with him. There was blood on her shirt from a stab wound—the first time, to my knowledge, that anyone had ever wounded her. How had he managed that? I hadn’t thought it possible.
“Do ye need any help?” Buck asked, saying what I was about to say myself.
“Naw, piss off, both of ye!” Nadia snarled. “I’m gonnay leather this wee dick.”
I scanned the hillside and the forest and then the sky to make sure reinforcements weren’t incoming. The bean sídhe were circling around the bound tree still, screeching and ululating, and Cowslip was hovering high in the air behind the clurichaun, carefully keeping some distance between herself and the bean sídhe but also wary of what else might emerge from the mountain.
The clurichaun was cackling and barely upright but still keeping Nadia off-balance and defensive with wild swings of his hatchet and dagger. She kept giving ground, dodging his swings and neglecting to take advantage of several opportunities when his drunken follow-throughs left him vulnerable to a counterattack. Had she lost her gift, I wondered? If so, she could be in serious jeopardy, because she wasn’t an accomplished or disciplined fighter otherwise.
Taking a few steps closer, I searched my inner pockets and fished out a Sigil of Knit Flesh that she could use on that stab wound. My face throbbed and my left eye was functionally useless due to swelling, but I didn’t think it was time to look to my own relief.
“I’ll catch y—urp!—eventually,” the clurichaun said, feinting with the dagger and then swinging the hatchet instead, which Nadia ducked. “Ye look delicious, ye know.”
He swiped again at her, this time a backhand, which left his torso open, and he raised his dagger to parry an anticipated strike from Nadia’s sword. She did begin a swing that would have been blocked by his dagger, except that she rotated her wrist and dropped her arm, pointing the sharp end up, and then lifted it straight up his middle, opening a gash from his belly to his collarbone and even nicking his jawline. He instinctively curled in upon himself at that, and now he was open to attack from the sides.
Nadia turned her wrist again with the sword high in the air and caught him on the side of the neck with a downward chop. It lodged in his flesh and she let it go.
“Hurrk,” the clurichaun said, sinking to his knees. He dropped his dagger to grab the sword and keep its weight from making the cut any worse.
“Looks like I caught ye instead,” Nadia said. He threw his hatchet at her, feebly, which she easily sidestepped, and she hawked up a nice phlegm globber and spat it expertly at his face once he toppled onto his side in the grass. “May Lhurnog eat yer pissed and poxy corpse in the afterlife.”
I handed her the sigil and she thanked me for it, popping the seal and waiting for the stab wound to close.
[How’d he get you? I didn’t see it happen.]
“He was so drunk I couldn’t predict his movements. He didn’t know what he was going to do, so I didn’t either. The agility boost saved me. Thanks for that.”
The clurichaun gasped and died in the turf, and the howling of the banshees changed once again. This time, however, they were synchronized and singing the same nonsense syllables, a chorus of madness.
“Can ye do anything tae make them stop?” Buck asked. “That really gets on my nerves.”
I shook my head. [One more member of the Fae to die here yet, if I’m interpreting their behavior correctly. That’s either you, or Cowslip, or the undine hiding somewhere in the hillside there.]
Buck’s mouth drew into a tight line, and his eyebrows knit together as he thought about it.
“We’re all changed, is what ye’re saying tae me now. Because the bean sídhe can’t call out our old names anymore.”
[Aye. It worries me.]
“Well, it’s fated, in’t it? The bean sídhe have the sight, like Nadia here, but different. If I’m gonnay croak and shite my drawers in the next few minutes, it doesnae matter if I stay here or go inside. Sumhin will get me either way. And if I am gonnay get got, I don’t want it tae be out here tryin’ tae keep ma shorts clean with cowardice. So let’s go, old man. Once more untae the breach, as that English bastard Henry said.”
I blinked at the reference. [You know Henry V?]
“Brighid’s a goddess of poetry. We’ve been over this. And ye know I like Shakespeare, except when he killed Rosencrantz.”
[Okay, if you’re ready, we’ll go. Nadia?]
“It stings and itches and I’m a bit light-headed, but it’s sewn up, I think. What’s the plan?”
[If Cowslip is right, there are at least three and maybe up to eight armed agents
inside, plus the undine.]
A low roll of laughter bubbled out of Buck, and we regarded him warily.
“We can use some evenin’ of the odds, am I right? I’ve got just the thing.”
He fairly pranced away to where he’d left his bag on the ground and slung it over his shoulder, then waved at us as he jogged toward the cliffside.
“Come on, it’s time for mayhem and that!”
Nadia and I shrugged at each other and followed. I’m not an excellent cross-country jogger, but the sigils hadn’t worn off yet, so we were able to make it uphill as the dust cloud settled down. I got my first good look at the entrance to the CIA facility.
The Sigil of Unchained Destruction had punched a yawning black hole through the outer defenses, through which one could walk over pulverized rock. None of it was cement, which Nadia commented on.
“Shouldn’t there be cement and steel rods and that?” she asked.
[Clíodhna probably built it all with the help of the local elemental. The rock was reshaped internally. No construction needed except for the electronics and security.]
There were steel doors, however, bowed and misshapen now and through which we’d have no trouble walking—no retinal scans or swipe cards needed. But there were most likely gun barrels in that darkness, waiting for us to step into their line of fire.
“That’s a death trap right there,” Buck said, jabbing his finger at what looked more like a mine shaft full of rabid bats than a secure intelligence bunker. “Nae chance in all the hells I’m gonnay walk intae that without knowing what’s in there. So it was nice of Hatcher tae provide us with a bag full o’ disposable minions, in’t it?”
He upended his bag on the ground, and a mess of painted miniatures tumbled out. There were green-skinned goblins, as he’d remarked upon earlier, but many others as well. Trolls and dwarfs and elves with various swords and hammers and axes. They made a tinkling noise as they crashed into one another.
“Are those metal?” Nadia asked.
