Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles

by Larry Correia

  Sullivan studied it. It was a horrible picture, full of death and carnage, and Faye was some sort of monster ripping out people’s souls. “What’s this nonsense?”

  “A possible future. You know about the Spellbound curse?”

  “Not much. I learned more about it from Bradford Carr’s testimony than anything. The elders were mighty tight-lipped on that subject.”

  “That’s because they like it secret, hoping nobody else was dumb enough to mess with it.” Faye spent the next few minutes explaining what she’d learned. When she outlined Sivaram’s genius schemes, Sullivan felt his jaw drop open. It was crazy, but it made a sick sort of sense, and as Faye spoke, Sullivan thought of Fuller and his stolen shoelaces. The Spellbound was one step removed from the Enemy, if not in overall strength, in potential for chaos.

  Poor Faye.

  “I can beat the Pathfinder, but it might change me. I need you to live, Mr. Sullivan. Please, do everything you can to live through this, because if this goes wrong, and I’m not strong enough, and I get corrupted and turn evil, you’re the only one who may be tough enough or smart enough to kill me. Promise me, if I start to change, if I’m not in control, you’ll put me out of my misery.”

  Sullivan swallowed hard. Faye was deadly earnest. “Faye . . . That’s . . .”

  “Please, Mr. Sullivan.”

  “Don’t you worry. I swear that I’ll do whatever I have to. But this?” Sullivan reached into his shirt and fumbled around until he found a book of matches. He took it out and struck one. He lit the picture on fire. Faye tried to snatch the drawing back from him, but Sullivan gently blocked her hand. “No, Faye. This is bullshit. This is not you. This isn’t set in stone. This isn’t real. You decide your future. No person, no magic, not Power or Enemy, God or the Devil, they just offer you paths. Only you choose which one you take. Got it?”

  Faye folded her arms, like she was hugging herself, but she did manage to nod in the affirmative, and then she started crying again.

  “Fire is serious a safety violation in this area!” Buckminster Fuller shouted from the other side of the cargo bay.

  Sullivan put the burning paper on the floor and smashed it flat with a steel boot. “Come here.” And he hugged Faye again and gave her a minute to sob. The poor girl had been through far too much in her short life, and now they were going to go fight the toughest army in the world. If he could talk to the Power, he’d tell it just what he thought of it picking such a gentle soul to put through this kind of hell. “You okay?”

  She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “Yeah.”

  “Good. Now go over to that locker and pick yourself out something nice. John filled it with guns for us.”

  Faye was still rubbing her eyes when she opened the locker. Her face split into a wide, malicious grin. Maybe gentle soul was the wrong choice of words after all. “Can I take the bazooka?”

  “Knock yourself out, kid.”

  Free City of Shanghai

  First Shadow Guard Hayate could not resist the temptation to see his brother one last time. It had been decreed by the Chairman’s personal guard that no one should speak to the traitor before the duel. They were calling it a duel, but that was a misnomer. Challenging the Chairman was an execution.

  It was a violation of an order, but Hayate was Shadow Guard. He had learned long ago that orders were often given by those who lacked imagination. Certainly, a chained Brute was no physical threat, and Toru’s poisonous words would be meaningless to a man of honor and conviction such as himself. Hayate justified his disobedience by telling himself that there were still Grimnoir out there. They had cost him two full teams’ worth of young Shadow Guard. Perhaps Toru would tell him their locations as a form of death-bed repentance.

  But in truth, Hayate was simply curious. How could a son of Okubo Tokugawa fall so very far?

  Reaching Toru without being seen was a simple enough matter. Hayate was, after all, the greatest living assassin in the Imperium. The torture chamber beneath the palace was warded with all manner of clever spells, but nothing that he could not easily circumvent. There were many guards, but Hayate was nearly invisible when he wished to be, and these guards seemed oddly content and still.

  His brother was chained to a wall. A temporary kanji of paralysis had been scrawled on his forehead with blood and ash. Toru’s head was lowered. His chin resting against the armored neckpiece of the Nishimura, yet he did not sleep. Hayate drew closer. Toru’s eyes were closed, but he was not sleeping. He could see the rapid eye movement beneath the closed lids. Toru was panting, occasionally grimacing in pain.

  Something was off. It was enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck. A Shadow Guard learned to trust his instincts, and Hayate’s instincts demanded that he flee, but he had come too far to be timid now. “Toru?” Hayate whispered.

  His brother’s eyes snapped open. They were crazed. Wild. The eyes of a lunatic.

  “It is in my head,” Toru growled. “Kill me before it wins.”

  “What manner of torture is this?” Hayate asked, genuinely curious. Unit 731 was always coming up with vile new methods.

  “The Pathfinder lives! The imposter has exposed me to it. It seeks to possess my body and claim my soul. You must kill me before he can use me.”

  Hayate stroked his chin thoughtfully. Toru truly had gone insane. His mother must have been of particularly weak stock, as he was aware of no other of the thousand sons having such a frail mind. “I would like nothing better than to take your life, but that is not my place. Our father has claimed this right for himself.”

  “I can hear their plans. The schools . . .” Toru’s face contorted as he ground his teeth together. “This corruption is in the schools. Concentrated . . . So the Actives there can be harvested. You must find and eliminate the infiltrators quickly. Or else when they receive the signal, they will feed, and the Enemy will come.”

  Hayate was saddened by the piteous display. Brutes were so strong, but Toru’s madness was overcoming his own body. It was as if he was at war within himself. Veins stood out on his forehead. Sweat rolled down his face in fat beads. Toru was fighting something. He screamed in agony, and then his head flopped forward, limp and unconscious. Blood came trickling from his ear.

  That was not blood.

  The First Shadow Guard leaned in closer. Close enough to feel Toru’s breath. The substance coming out of Toru’s ear looked more like demon’s ink than blood. Curious.

  And then the substance defied gravity and crawled back up to disappear inside his brother’s ear.

  Hayate swore like a burakumin dung shoveler and leapt back across the prison cell. What new Unit 731 butchery was this?

  Curiosity satisfied, and completely unnerved, Hayate decided he had seen enough, so he Traveled from the dungeons.

  Like most Imperium military affairs, the ceremony had begun with a great deal of flourish. It was a rare treat for the local officials to be visited by any members of the high command, let alone the greatest luminary in all of the Imperium short of the Emperor.

  The Imperium Section of Shanghai had been scrubbed and polished until the whole neighborhood gleamed. This was the richest, most prosperous, most advanced part of the city anyway. An example to the other cultures gathered in the city of the inherent superiority of the Imperium way of life. It was normally beautiful, but it had been taken to a new level for the Chairman’s visit. Every tree, bush, and flower had been carefully tended. Servants had cut the lawns with scissors. There wasn’t so much as an errant leaf or cigarette butt cluttering the ground within six blocks.

  Flags and banners were strung between the buildings and hung from every light pole. The buildings surrounding the Imperium compound were all new, between twenty and forty stories each, and every sparkling window on them had been cleaned until there wasn’t so much as a fingerprint. If a pigeon shit on a ledge, Hayate was certain that there would be a servant out there scrubbing it with a toothbrush a moment later or somebody was
getting beheaded. The center of the Imperium Section was the ambassador’s palace. It was only a few years old, but it had been built to look like a castle. Hayate found it a bit ostentatious, but that just meant it fit Shanghai. The parade would end on the palace grounds.

  The Chairman’s parade was impressive, five hundred soldiers, all marching in perfect unison. The only reason there weren’t any tanks was because their tracks might damage the pavement and make things ugly, and it was felt that the loud engines might disrupt the natural tranquility of the area. Instead, a pair of Gakutensuko marched, awing the crowd with their gleaming metal bodies and Cog superscience. After that came one hundred fearsome Iron Guard, and in the middle of all those perfectly pressed uniforms was the Chairman himself, riding on a magnificent white stallion.

  Every Imperium citizen in Shanghai had turned out for the event, and they packed the sidewalks. Most of the lesser people and non-people had been banished from the Section for the day. The only foreign eyes that would be allowed to behold the Chairman’s magnificence were the very highest ranking of the Chinese, French, British, Russian, and American diplomats in the city. Thousands bowed and stayed bowed as the Chairman rode past.

  Hayate watched all of this finery from the windows of the military command center on the fourth floor of the palace. He was still distracted, troubled by his brother’s words . . . No . . . Not his words, because to say that would be to imply doubt.

  Several Iron Guards and Imperium military officers were also watching, taking reports from functionaries, and giving orders. The lieutenant governor of the Imperium Section was in charge of the events. “First the Chairman will present the medals. He wishes to give a speech. As soon as he is done, then the traitor and the Grimnoir prisoners will be brought into the courtyard for all of the crowd to witness. Are the executioners ready? Excellent. I don’t care if their blades are dull. The more squealing and begging the better . . . Good, good. Then the Chairman will duel the traitor, and once he is dispatched, behead the prisoners, and then we will serve dinner. Have all the mats been changed? Splendid.”

  Hayate, who had no patience for courtly matters, went back to scanning the crowd. His men were among them, mingling, ready to strike down enemies should the need arise. Nobody paid much attention to the Shadow Guard. They were not flashy like their Iron Guard brethren. He went back to being a unremarkable part of the command center, like a particularly dangerous chair.

  And while he stood there, being unremarkable, he could not help but wonder about what he had seen in Toru’s ear . . .

  A soldier rushed into the room and saluted the leader of the Iron Guard. “Forgive my interruption, Master Goto, we have an aerial contact along the coast.”

  “What is it?”

  “Unidentified dirigible. Multihulled and extremely fast, climbing to a high altitude. Thirty miles to the south and heading this way. The Navy has moved to intercept.”

  The Iron Guard grunted. “They’ll handle it. Keep me apprised.”

  A few minutes later, another obviously flustered functionary came into the command room. This one went right to the head of the secret police and gave a whispered report. The fact that it was whispered probably meant that it was something embarrassing enough to cause the Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu to lose face. Hayate had magically augmented hearing, so eavesdropping was no struggle.

  “I am sorry, sir. A riot has broken out.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “It began in the old Chinese district, but has already spread across three other sections. We are not sure of the cause of the disturbance, but they are attacking our officers, and the Chinese police have fared no better. Some of the looters have been shot, but that only seemed to awake more anger.”

  “Ah. Damn it.” The police chief pinched the bridge of his nose. “Dispatch every military unit that is on ready status. I want this quashed. This will not cloud the Chairman’s visit.”

  “Should I order the naval vessels to shell the affected neighborhoods?”

  “Do you wish to mar the Chairman’s journey with the rumble of artillery? Do you wish to wrinkle his nostrils with the smell of smoke?” The police chief hissed. “Get out of here, fool.”

  Hayate suppressed a smile. Ah, the Grimnoir. They were such clever foes. He was curious to see what manner of mischief they had planned this time.

  Chapter 20

  Like most self-proclaimed grand visionaries, Bradford Carr was an imbecile. He filled this office with toadies, flunkies, and bullies. One minute after you put my name on that door I am firing the lot of them. The stated mission of the OCI is to keep America safe in all matters pertaining to magic. That’s noble. That’s something I can stand behind. But Actives are Americans too, and they’ll be treated like Americans. There will be no more flouting the law under my watch, so help me God. The OCI man should respect the Constitution, understand magic for good or ill, and be tough enough to get the job done no matter what. You want to know how I’d run the OCI? The ideal OCI agent is a PhD who can win a bar fight. Bradford Carr made an enemy out of Jake Sullivan. I would have offered that man a job.

  —William Donovan,

  Closed door confirmation hearings for the

  office of the coordinator of information,1933

  UBF Traveler

  The clear blue sky had gotten darker and darker until it had turned to night.

  “Seventy thousand feet,” Barns stated as he carefully adjusted a knob. “And still climbing . . .”

  People had never been meant to go this high. Faye stood at the rail, staring out the armored window, marveling at how clearly she could see the curve of the blue world from here. For once, Faye could actually admit she’d found another interesting way to get somewhere other than Traveling.

  “Mr. Black, how many contacts?” Captain Southunder asked the man sitting behind the fancy teleradar machine.

  “More returns than I can count. They’ve scrambled the entire navy.”

  Faye hooked her legs around the rail so she could lean way over. The glass went clear past the catwalk and on down so she could see directly below. Even though she was mostly all bundled up, she really didn’t want to get her forehead stuck to the freezing glass. That would have been embarrassing.

  She couldn’t even see the Imperium ships below, but when she checked with her head map, she could pick them out. Engines pumping, magic surging, thousands of soldiers looking for a chance to shoot them down. She knew that they’d already tried, and she could sense the friction and the hot bits of matter as projectiles were futilely lobbed in their direction. There was no use distressing the Marauders with this information, she figured, since the odds of them actually getting hit were about two thousand, five hundred to one. They were a tiny, nearly invisible spot in the sky to the Imperium airships and fighters. Of course, those odds would change the higher the bad guys climbed and the more lead they threw.

  Captain Southunder was biting one knuckle. “Engines?”

  “Still functioning,” answered one of the crew. The board in front of him had nothing but green lights on it.

  “Pressure compensators?”

  Faye looked over. That board had several lights flashing yellow and one that was red. “Fifty percent, Captain.” The pirate thumped the panel with his fist a few times and the red one turned yellow. Now that was engineering that Faye could understand. “Back up to seventy.” The light went red. “Hell. Fifty.”

  She didn’t know what was going on, except there wasn’t any air up here at all, it was freezing, stuff was starting to break, and if certain specific things broke on the machine that was pumping in heated air, they’d all pass out and choke to death or have their blood boil off before they even had a chance to fall to their deaths. Her head map was feeding her information that even the Captain didn’t know. Barns was Lucky, and he was using his Power hard. The tremble in his hands and the sweat on his face wasn’t from flying the ship, it was f
rom the physical stress of unconsciously burning his Power to manipulate probability in their favor. He was better at it than he knew, and Faye got a little mad at herself when she realized how jealous she was of that particular Power, and just how much better she would be able to put it to use. Meanwhile, a few things had snapped from the cold and the stress deep inside the ship. There had been a spark, and it had immediately ignited the fuel in a machine, but Lady Origami had forced the fire out from here merely by getting stern with the unruly fire.

  Faye was impressed. She wondered if the Captain realized just how many times those two Actives had saved his ship. Probably not, since he was so distracted. The man who could control weather was probably feeling extra uncomfortable, since for the first time in his long life, he was in a place that didn’t have weather as he knew it. He was trying not to show it, but Faye could tell. The energy and currents that existed up here for him to manipulate were too alien for him to understand. Poor Captain Southunder.

  In the hold, the genius Cogs were using their magic to make sure Buckminster Fuller’s contraption was going to work, and she could see how they were folding and unfolding bits of the Power to grant themselves flashes of extra wisdom. That type of magic was starting to make more sense to her, and, in fact, it even seemed familiar for some reason. Not too far away from them was Mr. Sullivan, all suited up in steel, his body made extra dense to keep out the cold. He was impervious as stone, waiting, thinking . . . About what, she didn’t know, but heaven help anybody who got in Mr. Sullivan’s way after he’d had a chance to think through how to get them.

  Now the Captain was addressing her, so Faye had to pull out of her head map and snap back to reality. “Faye, can you reach the Imperium target from here?”

  “Yes, Captain,” she answered with what surely seemed like no hesitation to everyone else. In reality, she’d had to think it over hard, for nearly one-eighth of a second. She’d be falling through the air, carrying a thousand pounds of steel and Mr. Sullivan, but even then she’d be able to Travel up to forty times to correct her trajectory and get them in the right place before she built up too much speed and hit the ground and went splat. Once again, it wasn’t the distance, but the view, and if you were going four hundred miles an hour, it sure made landing challenging. “No problem.”