“The data presented is from members of the Knights of St. Quintus,” Miller replied. “I believe they would have a basis for comparison.”
Again, the dots were color coded, this time by decade. There were five blue dots, representing the 80s, and six green for the nineties. The oughts hit with a splash of purple, and the teens were a rash of uncountable red, centered mostly in dense population areas, with a cluster in North Dakota.
“No way,” Jed said. “Fucking Fargo?”
“Yes. Apparently the werewolves there were fans of the film,” Miller replied. “That was also the first incident where a therianthrope lost their head before they could talk about what had happened.”
“How many of those have there been?” Sola asked from where he sat.
“Eighteen worldwide,” Miller replied, consulting his notes. “Not including Jesse decapitating the werebear in your basement.”
“It was her or me, and I chose me,” I said with a grin. “Vanity, I know, is a sin, but I’ll seek absolution at some point.”
Miller sighed before continuing. “You now have everything we know and conjecture about the ongoing attempt by the followers of Oeillet to return their primary to earthly form. Any questions?”
“Yes,” Diindiisi said, rising. “How is this tied to Abzu and Chaos?”
“The only connection we’ve been able to make between the two is Mother Shipton’s spell. It, through a series of cabalistic evolutions, is based on an older spell, originally in Akkadian,” Miller said. “That spell has never been found in complete form.”
“That we know of,” I said.
“What are you implying?” Julian asked.
“Nothing. As far as we know, that spell isn’t in a complete form. We do know, however, that the other side has an Akkadian expert working for them,” I replied.
“They do?” Julian asked.
“Yeah, the fish fucker with the painting that’s rotting in his attic,” I replied. “Speaking of which?”
“Yes, well, according to MU-P, he’s…missing,” Thomas said.
“Since when?” Goodhart replied.
“He disappeared while y’all were busy renovating the courthouse,” Thomas said.
We all turned to Sola.
“It is possible my spell might have released any geas imposed upon him by the college,” Sola said with a shrug.
“If that’s the case, shouldn’t my geas have released?” Thomas asked the elf.
“It would depend on the nature of the spell,” Sola replied after some thought. “Do you know the nature of the magic used on you?”
“All I know is, anytime I want to leave the county, I have to run down some damn gruagach and get him to approve the trip,” Thomas said, a look of disgust on his face.
“Celtic magic, then,” Sola said with a snap of his fingers. “The Celts didn’t draw heavily on Elven magic, so my spell wouldn’t have affected yours. If MU-P used an Elven-derived spell to lock this person to the location, however, my release spell would have broken it.” He shrugged.
“Is there any way we can track Professor?” Goodhart dug through the papers in front of him, “Professor Halybutt?”
“Several, with the proper ingredients. Do we have samples of his hair or skin?” Sola replied.
“No, but the university might,” Thomas said. “I’ll check with them and get back to you.”
“We can also contact the Department of Public Safety and request they notify local law enforcement that he’s a person of interest,” Henry said.
“Anything else?” Miller asked.
“I left you a message—we need to talk,” I said.
“Okay. About what?”
“I’m supposed to ask you about the Lance,” I replied.
“Who told you to ask?” Miller replied.
“Buschgrossmutter, while she was preparing socks for lunch.” I shrugged.
“There’s only one Lance I can think of,” Henry Keith replied. “It does belong to the Church.”
“Three, actually,” Miller said. “One is part of the Imperial Insignia in Vienna, one is under the dome at Saint Peter’s, and the third belongs to the Eastern Orthodox Church in Armenia. I’ll have to do some research.”
“I just love unclear instructions.” I sighed.
“Just like being back in the Corps,” Jed replied.
The only guy who might know the proper spell was in the wind. There was an unknown Chaos entity in San Marcos, and now we had to find out which spear and magic helmet I needed. I regretted getting up this morning.
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-Six
After a bit more discussion, the meeting broke up. The only positive I could see from the entire event was that Herself had agreed to loan us Fred and his dwarves for the foreseeable future. Since I’d been working with them, Goodhart attached them to my team. Between adding them and Singh, I decided it was time for another trip to the shoot house.
“Cease fire, cease fire!” I called from the overhead walkways. “Put ’em on safe and meet me in the start area.”
Dust was still falling from where Andre and Billy-Bob had fired through the tire and sandbag wall to take the target down.
Fred followed me down the stairs.
“You know, I think Herself would go for one of these,” he said as we went through the door into the start area.
“How do y’all train, then?” I asked.
“Normally?” he asked. “Range time and hand-to-hand practice. There’s times in a drift where you can’t see your hand in front of you and a grue comes a slitherin’ up looking for a meal, and you just have to hope your pick holds out.”
“Horseshit,” I replied. “Ain’t no such thing as a grue. Besides, I checked your operation out—y’all are fully mechanized.”
“You’d be surprised at the number of times humans buy that particular line of horse shit,” he replied, grinning. “Although there are things down in the deep dark that make grues look gentle. Blind worms twenty feet long with six-inch fangs, for example.”
The others trooped in from the house.
“Andre,” I started, turning to the dwarf, “why’d you shoot through the wall?”
“The wall was non-structural,” he said, semi-defensively. “Besides, I was on target.”
“Kinda sorta,” Diindiisi said, coming through the door. She had the target in her hands. “You took out the vampire, true, but you also got the maiden fair. Not exactly a winning situation.”
She held up what was left of the target. Sure enough, the blood bags in both the vampire and the victim had deployed.
“She’s a collaborator,” Andre said with a shrug and smile.
Fred walked over and knocked Andre on his ass.
“That shit might fly down in the drift,” Fred said, “and we’re probably going to do collateral damage whether we want to or not. However, if Jesse says, ‘Don’t shoot through the fucking walls,’ don’t shoot through the fucking walls, you daft bastard.”
“Yes, sir,” Andre replied.
“Anyone else want to question Jesse’s instructions?” Fred asked the dwarves, his hands curling into massive fists.
They shook their heads no.
“We’ll take lunch while the crew resets the house,” I said, “and then Fred and I will join y’all for the fun and games. I’ve got a couple of suggestions that might help.”
At least I didn’t have to teach the dwarves battle hand signals. Fred admitted, while we were working up the training sessions the night before, that the dwarves had stolen those from the US Army because they worked.
Lunch was standard cafeteria food—institutional bland. The dwarves offered to share their spices; we demurred. Dwarf spicing would make a Thai blush from the heat.
“Right,” Fred said, rising from the table. “Everyone back on your heads.”
We trooped back to the shoot house, collecting weapons from the lockers. QMG training was heavy on live fire, which the dwarves loved. The head
of the shoot house, a one-legged former hunter named Patrick, came over while we were going over our loadouts one last time.
There are things you can do in a tire house—move the target section, set traps, etc. ad nauseum. There are things you cannot do—moving walls and whatnot being the major one. So to change things up from time to time, the guys running the shoot house would change the entry point, or the ‘orientation’ of the building.
“Entry point four,” Patrick said.
Naturally. Four was on the opposite side of the facility. We’d have to run to make it before the exercise started.
“Restrictions?” I asked. I wasn’t giving him anything about the entry point, because he’d only make things worse, sadistic bastard.
“Six targets, all mobile. No known collaterals,” he replied.
The inflection on known told me the frigging house was crawling with non-hostiles. Just what I needed with a bunch of trigger-happy dwarves.
“Anything else?”
“Good luck,” he replied, slapping my shoulder and looking at a timer on the wall. “Go!”
We went. Nothing like a quick run around the shoot house carrying sixty-odd pounds of gear to start the exercise.
We made the entrance with a whole minute to spare, and the attendant grinned as he handed me the mission brief. Which was different, because fuck you, that’s why. Seriously. Mission parameters could and did change all the time, so the guys running the shoot house tried to reflect that.
“Lock and load,” I said. “Stack as follows—Team Malone, Team Tyrion, Team Torelli, and Team Grumpy.”
That got me looks.
“Hey, I told you to pick call signs or the assholes who run this place would assign them for you. Forge-related works in the field, but not here,” I said with a shrug.
The door opened and we went through, stacked in order. When Billy-Bob cleared the entry, it slammed shut, and the lights went out.
“Expected that,” I said to the darkness around me. “Night vision gear.”
Dwarves are born with darkvision. They just swapped out their eye protection for a set with different polarization.
“Rotate. Team Tyrion, take the lead; Malone, Torelli, middle; and Grumpy, you’re still on drag. Make sure of your targets before you fire,” I said.
“Mission?” Fred asked.
“Sweep and clear. Probable leech boys and their minions,” I said, listening to the feed from the briefer outside the door with one ear.
“Roger that,” Fred said before leading us into the dark.
Dwarven darkvision works somewhat like a cat’s—they can, up to a point, see in the dark. In the great evolutionary crapshoot, dwarven evolution favored dwarves with more rods in their eyes. They can also, to an extent, see infrared sources.
Which is why the fuckers running the shoot house chose vampires as a target. Unless they’ve fed recently, leech boys are room temperature.
Something moved ahead of us.
“Target,” Fred said.
I watched him raise his weapon to shoulder height and wait for the confirmation.
“I confirm target, no body heat,” Andre said.
“Weapons free,” I said.
There were three evenly-spaced THUMPS.
“Target down,” Fred said.
“Move up and confirm,” I said.
We shuffled forward. I looked up in time to catch movement as something dropped from the overhead.
“Going hot!” I shouted, firing upward.
Whatever I hit rained sticky goo all over us.
“Cease fire!”
“They’re trying to overload our infrared receptors,” Andre said.
“Can we work around it?” I asked.
“Roger that,” Fred said. “Y’all glow in the dark anyway. Oh, and target is down, confirmed kill.”
“Onward through the fog, then,” I said.
Four and a half hours of working in the dark. Whatever the shoot house had coated us with didn’t effect either the dwarves’ IR vision or our NVGs, but when it dried, it made any exposed skin itch.
“Last room,” Fred said, reaching for the door handle.
“Hold one,” I said.
So far we hadn’t found any non-targets. Which, again, fit with things that happened in the field.
“Wilson, mike the door,” I said.
He came over and applied a stethoscope to the door. Old school, but it works. Moreover, it’s easier to carry a stethoscope than a water glass. Sure, there are spells you can use. Problem is, the other guys know about the spells, and have spells to counter your spells.
He came over and we held a quick consultation.
“Rustling, some movement, that was it,” Wilson reported.
You can listen at a door. Interpreting what you hear, that’s the art form.
I rubbed my head through the straps on my mask. Wearing the damn things for four hours is an exercise. At least the models QMG used didn’t go through batteries as if we owned stock in Energizer. Not wearing them wasn’t an option, however.
“Fred, movement and rustling. You got anything?”
“Negative. I can see as far through a door as you can,” the dwarf replied.
“Open it up and watch your fields of fire,” I said.
“You want me to kick it in, or…?” Fred asked.
“Kick it,” I replied.
Fred reached up and tried the handle. The door opened, and we poured into the room. Patrick sat there in the center of the room, tied to a chair.
“Watch the floor!” Fred warned. “It’s booby-trapped.”
That brought our attention down, which was probably the reason the sadists running the shoot house had placed traps in the first place. I forced my head up…
“Contact!” I shouted as the first target dropped from the ceiling. “Watch the hostage!”
Targets were dropping all over the room. Unlike the simple targets we’d encountered earlier, these were a batch of R&D’s special targets—three-dimensional models with a limited ability to move on their own. Paper golems, essentially, that delivered a paralyzing, wicked sting if they made contact.
Andre and Billy-Bob rolled through the door and threw themselves on Patrick, knocking him over. They then covered his body with theirs, while the rest of us serviced targets. Singh got touched when he overextended himself, butt-stroking a target off Dalma. I went down under two of the paper golems and froze. Finally, it was over. Diindiisi, Fred, and Dalma stood there looking at the rest of us.
The lights came up.
“You mind telling these two to get off me?” Patrick asked from where he lay under the dwarves.
“I don’t think they can move until you release the spell,” Diindiisi said.
“Oh, yeah,” Patrick said, snapping his fingers.
The paralysis dropped, which hurt worse than the initial sting of contact.
“Never had survivors in the ‘House of a Thousand Vampires’ scenario,” Patrick admitted. “How’d you do it?”
Fred grinned, wiping down a wicked-looking gladius before sheathing it.
The paper golems leaked fluid to make them more realistic.
“This was nothing compared to fighting aptgangr,” he said with a grin.
“What the hell are aptgangr?” I asked.
“Zombies deep in the mines,” Fred said. “For some reason unknown to dwarven magic or science, the deep drifts are sinks of magical energy, and anything that dies and falls into the pool will reanimate. We try to monitor the known holes, but things happen. When they do, a number of zombies can collect in a deep drift, and then for some reason they decide to move on the living portion of the mine. Last attack in the Chisos Mine was what, a hundred years ago, Ozzy?”
“Yeah, I was ten, so about that. The zombie gnomes got into the crèche,” Ozzy replied. “I still have nightmares about those little bastards.”
“Zombie gnomes?” Dalma asked, grunting as she helped Singh to his feet.
“Yeah,
gnomes are a problem around the mine from time to time—they’re a bit clannish, and for whatever reason they hate dwarves,” Alfie replied. “The white outfits, coupled with woad…”
“Doesn’t sound too bad,” Dalma interrupted. “Sounds kind of cute, honestly.”
Alfie rolled his eyes at her.
“Trust me,” Andre rumbled, “cute those little bastards aren’t. Violent, rapacious, and sexually frustrated? Yeah, that’s gnomes.”
“Sexually frustrated?” Dalma asked.
“For whatever reason, there’s an imbalance in the birth rate of gnomes,” Fred said, helping Patrick to his foot. “They skew heavily toward male births.”
“How heavily?” Dalma asked.
“One or two out of every thirty births will be female,” Ozzy replied. “Now, a female can start breeding as soon as she reaches sexual maturity, which is eighteen months or so, and they’ll continue to have babies until they die, but most of the males are frustrated.”
“I can see that,” I said, fascinated.
“It also doesn’t help that only the dominant male gets to breed,” Billy-Bob added.
“How do they prevent inbreeding?” Padgett asked. “Seems like they’d breed themselves stupid pretty quick at that rate.”
“The little buggers aren’t that smart to begin with,” Alfie said.
“They swap females among the various groups to cut down on that, to an extent,” Ozzy replied, shaking his head at Alfie’s comment. “But in the absence of other groups of gnomes nearby, apparently they have the ability to reject young that would be a burden on the group as a whole due to genetic issues.”
“They usually have a struggle for dominance if they reach that level, as well,” Alfie added. “Then the new male takes on the red hat, and he breeds the females. Any males who don’t like the new leader have the option of leaving the tribe for a bachelor group. Most of the aptgangr come from these bachelor groups.”
“It’s an interesting discussion on the tribal and societal dynamics of gnomes,” Patrick said, “but you still haven’t answered my question about how you beat the ‘no-win’ scenario.”
Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2) Page 21
