But she was bureau. She was an agent of the United States. She was supposed to follow orders, not initiate missions that fell far outside the parameters of her assignment. What she had done so far today would probably be illegal if anyone knew it was possible. And what she was planning to do was even worse, unless she could come up with an alternative.
“Are we sure there isn’t another way to stop them?” she asked. She was getting out of breath. They were nearly to the top of the ridge, unless there was another ridge behind this one.
“This plan of yours isn’t going to stop them,” said Lutrineas. “It’ll give you a reprieve and that’s it. A few weeks, perhaps, while they find the second-best duelist in all of their worlds and bind them to the land. If I were you, I’d use that time to run.”
“We can’t evacuate the earth in a few weeks.”
“Of course not,” said Lutrineas. “Gather up the people you love, the people you are doing this for, and take them all with you. You may not make it far. But you’ll live longer than you would if you stayed.”
“What about the other seven billion people on earth?”
“Leave them behind.”
“I’m still having some difficulty with the idea that order, capital-O Order, is the bad guy here,” Joy said. “The Emissary told me that the worlds of order don’t have murder. No slavery, no war, no hunger. Order means safety, fairness, stability.”
“Also coercion, oppression, incarceration. By the time you kill, exile, or conscript everyone who would upset the social order, everyone else is too afraid to do so. Without chaos, there is a vacuum, and order expands to fill that vacuum. It becomes its own extreme. It can’t help but do so.”
“So why can’t you fight it? You’re a god of chaos!”
“I am a trickster,” Lutrineas said. “I am hubris and hunger, lust and greed. I am the most human of gods, the bridge between you and those who created you. I am made to balance the calcifying instinct of the divine, just as my brethren are made to see that the reach of mortals should always exceed their grasp. I am the god who holds immortality hostage one day, and shits his pants in terror the next. I am not built for war; I can neither lead one, nor take orders in one.”
“You’ve been following me,” said Joy.
“Ah, but this is no war. It’s a skirmish at best, and I’ve only been allowing you to lead because you are yourself an anomaly.”
They reached the top of the ridge as he was speaking. The road was just a couple hundred yards beyond it, a small two-lane highway running north and south parallel to the river. There were a few silver vehicles traveling along it, but they weren’t like any car or truck Joy had ever seen outside of concepts at an auto show. The larger ones were high and ovoid, like egg-shaped busses, and the smaller vehicles were sleek and pointed, with one wheel at the front and two bulkier ones in the back, where the seating was.
Joy coughed. “That looks sort of…”
“Like a penis?” said Lutrineas.
“Never mind,” said Joy. The truth was that she was relieved not to be the only one who thought so; she was a little worried that she had penises on the brain now that she was…wearing one.
A convoy of the larger vehicles appeared, followed by trucks hauling trailers. Some of them hauled flatbeds bearing monstrous tanks. Stubby twin barrels poked out of their turrets, with longer, narrower projections sticking out of the main body below. Their outlines flickered blue, silver, beige, and green—not an aura, but some sort of camouflage field.
“Still having trouble seeing order as the bad guy?” Lutrineas asked.
“Not as much,” said Joy. “You said something about getting a vehicle?”
“The work of a moment.” Lutrineas turned himself into a rabbit and lolloped toward the road.
“You’re going to kill someone, aren’t you?” Piper asked.
Sweat broke out on the surface of Joy’s skin. “What?”
“You’re talking about something you don’t want to do. Something to do with a duel; something that would force order to put their second-best duelist in place. Duels only end when one party disengages or dies. Ergo, you are going to find this duelist and kill them.”
Joy was acutely aware of the weight of the body she was wearing, the body of an assassin. “I don’t want to do it. But I don’t see another way.”
“Don’t do it.”
“I have to. Unless you’re going to do it for me.”
“I can’t. I wouldn’t in the first place, but I can’t. The things I can do…one of the conditions is that I never take a life. Which I wouldn’t do anyway, because it’s wrong.”
“You don’t understand. You don’t know all the things I know.”
“I’ve picked up on a lot, despite your efforts to keep secrets,” said Piper. “This shape-changing guy is a god. The old folks are plotting things. You aren’t sure Flood is a good guy.”
The convoy passed, and for a moment the highway was empty. Then a lone silver car appeared, headed northbound, and pulled over to the side. A trio of men emerged from the car and walked toward something on the shoulder. All of them wore blue-and-yellow coveralls, and every single one of them had a dark-blue aura.
They were afraid. Dark blue meant fear of expressing oneself, of speaking or confronting truth. To see a person with such an aura was not that unusual, but to see three of them together was something Joy had never experienced.
“These people are terrified,” she said.
“I don’t mean to be callous,” said Piper, “but how is that our problem?”
“Terrified people are desperate,” said Joy. “They’ll fight hard. We can’t win against them, not as things stand. You’re an amazing bodyguard, but can you protect the world from an invading army? Can you fight off tanks? Can you take on thousands without taking a single life?”
Piper didn’t answer.
The three men gathered around something at the side of the road, and that something became Lutrineas, who swiftly knocked the three men down and dragged them into the tall grass along the road.
“I guess that’s our ride,” said Joy.
Joy drove. The silver car was a stick shift, or something near enough to one that she was able to figure it out. She turned the car around and drove as quickly as seemed reasonable.
“Why am I an anomaly?” she asked Lutrineas.
“Pardon?” Lutrineas was next to her, in the passenger’s seat. In the backseat, Piper was putting on one of the blue-and-yellow jumpsuits the men in the car had been wearing.
“Before, when you said you were listening to my ideas, you said it was because I was an anomaly.”
“Ah, yes. Because when one of the Sons of Order attacked you, you survived.”
“I got lucky,” said Joy.
“It should not have been possible for you to get lucky against one of the Sons of Order,” said Lutrineas. “Not alone. Not unaware. My sister makes use of them because she prefers to leave nothing to chance.”
Joy remembered the Emissary’s aura, the deep red. “Why didn’t she kill me in Chicago, then? She had me completely under her power. Why not kill Ken a week ago or a year ago?”
“She’s afraid of you. She’s afraid of what you might mean. She’s afraid that if she tries to kill you again, she’ll fail again. She’s afraid that if she tries to make you serve her, you will be a catalyst that disrupts her plans. She’s afraid that you are like me.”
“How am I anything like you?” Joy asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” said Lutrineas. “I suspect it’s hubris, though. I’ve yet to detect any hunger, lust, or greed in you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“As to Kango, I suspect that she was just waiting until she was ready to move. And I suspect that time is now.”
“If she’d tried to kill you in Chicago, she would have failed,” said Piper.
“Speaking of hubris,” said Lutrineas.
“How long has this been going on?” Joy asked, to keep them from
starting up their argument again.
“What do you mean?”
“On your world, I mean. How long has your sister been fighting this war?”
“Ah. Thousands of years,” Lutrineas said. “I’m afraid I’ve never kept a calendar. My sister is…well, they call her the Emissary for a reason. She doesn’t live in places like this; she places agents and scouts ahead. She’s an exception in that regard. The gods of order are, for the most part, homemakers—but then, in every good homemaker there is a conqueror. The gods of order prefer to shape their homeworlds into an ideal of their own limited imaginations.”
“But not your sister?”
“There’s nothing left to rule where we came from. She scorched the earth until the earth surrendered.”
They were approaching the bridge, and Joy concentrated on guiding the car on the correct ramp to get across. There was more traffic on the bridge, and the sun shone off the rows of racing, gleaming silver. Joy took the first exit north after they crossed, following a quartet of transports. The silence in the car had become tense. Joy glanced into the backseat, where Piper sat alert. Her aura was the same, but Joy was having even more trouble with her face than usual, and after a moment she realized why—she had removed her piercings.
Joy reached under her tie again to grasp her crystal. “Abel Bouchard.”
“Joy?” the crystal squawked, and both Piper and Lutrineas covered their ears.
“We’re across the river,” she said. “What can you tell me?”
The first part of Abel’s answer was drowned out by the crystal’s trill. “—confident that Ken’s opponent is in the president’s office.”
“Inside the school?”
“Yes.”
“OK,” said Joy. “I’ll call you again when we need an exit.”
“That was bracing,” said Lutrineas, removing his hands from his ears.
“Yes,” said Joy. “Piper?”
“Yes?”
“We’re going in. I’m not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. But I have a problem. The auras here are all basically the same; I’m kind of flying blind. I need you to be my eyes and tell me if you see anyone you recognize.”
“All right.”
Joy drove into what should have been Gooseberry Bluff, but there was nothing along the waterfront except for a large pier where tanks were being unloaded from a massive riverboat. She followed the road that should have been Stagecoach Trail around the bluff, to where it branched. A road sign identified the rightmost branch as STAGING AREA, so Joy turned left, toward HEADQUARTERS. At the top of the hill, at the front of the building, was a traffic circle. A man in blue-and-yellow coveralls stepped toward the car.
“Sir,” he said when Joy opened the door, betraying almost none of the fear that flooded his aura. “Will you be needing the car, or would you like me to return it to the motor pool?”
“Take it to the pool for now,” Joy said, and stepped out.
As she waited for Piper and Lutrineas to follow, she looked out to the west. The quad where Hector’s ravens resided was missing, and the tree-lined neighborhood where Joy’s rental house and the McMonigal Arms stood was gone. The ground on the other side of the bluff had been excavated and graded flat, paved, and turned into a massive parking lot for tanks, personnel carriers, and cars towing artillery. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them, and they were swarming with men and women in the ubiquitous blue-and-yellow coveralls, loading them, repairing them, lining them up.
Below, at the back of the building that was so familiar and yet so wrong, the outline of a concrete tunnel was visible. A squat, heavy vehicle was idling in front of it. It was studded on its front and sides with drill-like attachments. It looked like an excavator. They would gate through to her dimension, dig through the hill under the school, and drive right through.
Piper came up beside her. “OK, I believe you,” she whispered. “It’s a war.”
Joy nodded and led them to the entrance. There were armed guards in dress uniforms posted at either side of the doors; they wore metallic silver suits with yellow caps and sky-blue piping at the seams. Joy wondered if she should salute, but settled for just approaching them with authority. After all, she was wearing the form of one of the Sons of Order; that should be all the ID she would need.
It was—the guards saluted as she and Lutrineas approached, and did not challenge Piper. The doors slid open at their approach, and Joy barely held back a “Whoa.”
The building’s atrium appeared to be a massive command center. Concentric semicircles of workstations faced the doors, but no one sitting at the desks even glanced at the three of them as they entered. They were all looking at the massive holographic projection of a planet that hung above them. It was rotating, full color, and tagged with dozens of indicators projecting from it. Above it hung the words OBJECTIVE: EARTH 156.
Joy kept walking, turning left to detour around the command center. Suits and skirts with dark-blue auras gave them a wide berth as they passed to the back of the room, to the hall where the administrative offices lay. Joy tried to sift through the chatter around her, but it was all just noise. She concentrated on walking like a man, one with confidence and authority.
She turned into the hall of the administrative offices and walked toward the president’s office. With some hesitation—and thoughts of Edith Grim-Parker in her head—she turned into the outer office and saw a young man with the now-familiar dark-blue aura seated at the desk.
“Sirs,” he said, and stood. “How can I help you?”
Joy was about to speak when she saw the nameplate on the desk: ANDREW RUIZ: ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR..
“Oh,” she said. She couldn’t hold it back. She supposed she had the testosterone in her system to thank for the fact that she did not burst into tears. To see Andy’s calm, caring mix of waves and lines turned into dark-blue fear—to see him in a gray suit and a blue tie rather than some mod skirt-and-blouse ensemble—was an unexpected punch in the gut.
“Is everything all right, sir?” Andy’s voice quavered.
“Yes. We need to see the director,” said Joy.
“I’m sorry, he’s in final preparations,” said Andy.
“This can’t wait,” said Lutrineas. He crossed to the door beside the window and knocked.
“Sir?” Andy backed up against the wall. “I don’t understand. Why would you—”
The door opened. The man who answered it was the first person in this dimension that Joy had seen without a dark-blue aura. Instead, it was red.
Another Son of Order.
And there were four more behind him.
Joy wondered if they spoke a language of their own. Maybe they were telepathic. She made eye contact with the man in front and nodded.
But Lutrineas spoke. “Say there, brothers. We just need to—”
Joy saw the first man’s eyes narrow, but she didn’t see the blow that dropped Lutrineas to the ground. Hands shoved her against the window, and then Piper was between her and the assassins. The first one lunged, and Piper caught his outstretched arm, twisted it, and brought him to the ground. The second one threw a kick, and Piper caught his leg and threw him against the doorjamb. She dived past him and rolled into the office, where Joy could not see what was happening. She took out her Beretta and trained it on the two men on the ground. When she glanced up, Piper stood in the doorway.
Joy estimated that the entire fight had taken five seconds.
“You need to see this,” said Piper. She leaned down and used what must have been some sort of pressure-point move on the men on the ground; they both fell unconscious. “I’ll take care of them. And him.” She motioned toward Andy.
“Don’t hurt him,” said Joy. “Anyone else is fair game.”
Joy helped Lutrineas to his feet, and they stepped over the bodies of the Sons of Order and into the director’s office.
The office was painted sky blue with buttery-yellow trim, the exact reverse of Philip Fit
zgerald’s office worlds away. In nearly every other way it was similar. The desk was placed in the same spot, but the balding man was not sitting at the desk, but cross-legged on the floor. He wore a suit, but his tie had been loosened and hung low, giving him a casual appearance. His eyelids flickered, and occasionally he twitched. His aura was dark blue, but with bursts of bright yellow. Sweat stood out on his brow.
There was something else to his aura, however. The face of the Emissary hovered over it, ghostly but easily discernible.
Joy walked to his side and put the barrel of her Beretta to his head. He didn’t react. Joy snapped her fingers in his ear.
The man licked his lips but didn’t open his eyes. “I told you I was not to be disturbed,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“I’m disturbing you anyway,” said Joy. “I want you to stop what you’re doing and take me to Carla Drake.”
The man’s eyes snapped open and flicked back and forth between Joy and Lutrineas. “Who are you?”
“Just think of us as the Daughters of Chaos,” Joy said in her deep voice.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Lutrineas, and executed a deep curtsy, managing to make it look elegant even without the skirts.
“Do you recognize him?” Piper asked from the doorway. “That’s Benjamin Flood.”
Piper tied the Sons of Order up in Flood’s office. Andy stood in a corner, watching. Joy had to look away from the expression of terror on his face. Her eyes kept coming back to the man Piper had identified as Benjamin Flood. His hair was gray like Flood’s, and he was the right height, but otherwise Joy could not have picked him out in a crowd. She was trying to avoid looking at his aura, at the Emissary’s face behind it.
Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib Page 34
