by Steven Brust
“Does it matter?”
“Fuck yes, it matters. My friend is dead. Her name was Susan Kouris; she had a mother, a father, and a little sister. She was funny. She was smart. She called me Laughing Boy and I never got around to asking her why. I kept meaning to. She did her job, and she saved my ass at least three times. She’s dead because of you. I want to know why.”
Leong popped the lid on his Diet Coke and drank some. He put the can down, wiped his mouth, and said, “I’m not fond of evil. I don’t care for it. But it’s part of life. There are greedy people in the world. But magic—those few who can feel the grid lines. The things they—used to be ‘we’—could do for the world. Do you have any idea what those things are? So how can you just watch people use these skills to line their pockets and ruin lives? How can you?”
“It gets easier with practice,” said Donovan.
“Maybe for you. I put up with it as long as I could. When I couldn’t, I acted.”
“You and Becker.”
“Yes.”
“So my friend is dead because you want to fight evil.”
“Not all evil. I’m pretty specific. I heard my friend managed to kill Whittier.”
Donovan saw no reason to enlighten him. “Nick? Yeah, well. Good work on that.”
“He ruined Nick’s life.”
I know all about it. “I figured it was something like that.”
“The world is better with Whittier out of it. Not to mention all the others.”
“And you don’t think you’re taking a lot on yourself, making decisions like that?”
“I suppose.” He shrugged and took another drink from his can. He frowned and looked at it. “Did you put something in this?”
“No,” said Donovan. “No need to. Marci.”
Leong nodded. “Well, you asked why I did it; I answered. You want to argue about it, or do we move on?”
“I dunno,” said Donovan. “I got nothing going. How about you?”
“No, I’m good.”
“You sure? Because you seem to be in a hurry. Expecting company?”
“Alas, no.”
“Then let’s talk philosophy.”
“You think I haven’t gone over this in my head? You think, the first time, with Becker, that he and I didn’t go around and around on it before we decided to act?”
“Jesus Christ, you fucking psycho. How am I supposed to know what you were thinking?”
“You’re calling me a psycho? What about those—what was that?”
“What?” said Donovan. “That little chiming sound? I didn’t hear it.”
As he spoke, Matt and Marci stood up. Marci picked up her crutches, and went to the back door, Matt to the front.
“This way,” said Marci. “Just one.”
“Two coming this way,” said Matt. “You’re sure there’s no invisibility out there?”
“I’m sure.”
“What if there’s a time-stop?”
“Then we’re fucked.”
“You guys got this?” said Donovan.
“Yeah.”
“Yes.”
Donovan pulled a pistol from his coat pocket—a Colt Python .357, four-inch barrel. He cocked it, pointed it at Leong, aiming for center mass, elbows braced on the table, supporting hand firm but relaxed, finger off the trigger, just as Uncle Gary had taught him. “If you want to live through the next five minutes,” he said. “Don’t move.”
“What’s going on?”
“That’s him,” said Matt. “We’ve got him.”
“Not yet we don’t,” said Marci. “Switch.”
“Right.”
They exchanged doors, Marci moving noticeably better on her crutches.
It was only then that Donovan noticed out of the corner of his eye that Matt had drawn his other pistol, and was holding it two-handed down and to the side.
“What the fuck?” said Leong.
“The chime,” said Donovan, “was to let us know someone had violated the perimeter of the house.”
“Who is it?”
“Who do you think?”
“I swear to Christ, I have no idea.”
“Then I hope you like surprises.”
Marci said, “That’s Shveta.”
“Okay,” said Donovan. He kept the gun pointed at Leong while he dug the car keys out of his left-hand pocket. “We knew she might be here.”
“I know.”
“You got this?”
“Yeah.”
Someone kicked open the front door.
* * *
Matt thought of combat operations as the working of a machine full of parts with unknown failure modes and unpredictable breaking points. The big advantages were, first, a reliable team, second, a flexible plan, and third, communications—whether by radio, hand signal, or even significant looks—that were dependable enough to keep everyone together as events developed.
He stood facing the doorway, carefully out of Donovan’s line of fire. Behind him were two people he’d never trained with and didn’t know, counting on magic—literally magic—to make things work. The possibility of the whole thing going south was so high that his only option was to fall back on the most basic, fundamental lesson: Do your job and trust your team in spite of everything.
The dark-skinned woman and the skinny man came through the doorway. Matt had been told he wouldn’t see or hear anything when—if—the spell worked, so he had to take it on faith. His problem was the armed man, and nothing else.
All right then.
This, at least, was something Matt understood. The guy was holding a semi-auto, a SIG, with both hands, pointed down and away: his pose a mirror image of Matt’s own. The man’s training was, if not the same as Matt’s, at least similar. The man raised his pistol at the same time Matt did. A certain distant, disconnected, unacknowledged part of Matt’s brain idly wondered which of them was better.
The report was very loud in the tiny room.
* * *
Stay focused.
Donovan had no way of knowing if Marci’s spell had worked, so he just had to assume it did. He kept the gun on Leong, but turned his attention away, hoping the man wouldn’t take the opportunity to jump him.
He just had time to recognize the woman Shveta—it was only later he registered how she looked when she came in, her confidence, her air of command. Everything about her ought to have screamed, Do not mess with this one! and he might have frozen, if he’d had time to think.
Afterward, he also remembered—or thought he did—her eyes widening as the spell above her went off.
There was gunfire—he always forgot how loud gunfire is indoors.
He pointed the keys to the 1955 Dodge at her, and said, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
Then he hoped for the best. They said it would work—that there was incredible power packed into those keys, power that could insinuate itself into the mind, the heart, the spirit—that soul-crushing guilt, self-hatred, acute and instant depression would cocoon and envelop the unprotected target.
Unprotected, that was the issue—was Marci’s spell sufficient to remove, or at least significantly reduce, Tyaga’s protections? If not, a spell would be coming back at Donovan, and whatever the spell was, he was very unlikely to survive it.
Either it had worked or it hadn’t, and, in the meantime, there was Charles, a couple of scant feet from Donovan, with a pistol between them. Donovan had steeled himself for this moment, rehearsing it in his head, but it was still the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life: Still not knowing the result, he looked away from Tyaga. He turned his attention back to Leong and said, astonished at how steady his voice sounded, “Oh, right. That spell I mentioned. It wasn’t actually for you.”
* * *
Roughly three-fourths of the way through her training, Marci’s interests had changed from research to fieldwork. She was never entirely certain why, but from the time she mentioned it to William her instruction had changed. One of the
differences she gradually noticed was an increased emphasis on formal precision—on doing everything exactly right, not taking any shortcuts to get an effect. She asked about it one day, and William said, “When you’re casting a spell in the field, and your life depends on it, speed is more important than perfection. It doesn’t help to get a perfect, one hundred percent conversion water-breathing spell up just after you drown, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“The more precise your technique, the more effective your spell will be on those occasions when you just have to make do with whatever you can cast right now. So we work on ingraining perfect. Speed will take care of itself.”
“Oh. I think I see,” she’d said.
If Susan had still been alive, and the subject had come up, Susan would have told her she’d been given exactly the same instruction by every one of her teachers.
William had given her one more tip: “If you know in advance what spell you’re going to cast, of course, it helps a great deal.”
When the door opened, he stepped inside, hand raised. Marci hadn’t fully believed it would be him. But she’d already found the grid line, two hundred feet north, and had let it flow into and out of her until she had nearly vanished into it, so
Picture them as gray wavy spiky lines with a sour salty taste and make them thin, thinner, thinnest passing beyond the body deeper than the heart where there is space between the pieces, empty, like a lonely foghorn on a thick moonless night so nothing else exists but sound within mist holding sound the way a painting holds colors, and like draws to like so the very essence of her casting finds the essence of his and they commune and touch and tangle and gray wavy spiky thicker now thicker until it is all there—that’s how you can find the grid, just like me, I’m wrapping my hands around it as if around my own, and then—pullpullpull and it is horrible that it is so easy and sad that it is done.
Marci fell to her knees and a sob burst out of her as she looked up; there he was, shock and horror only starting to register on his face, because she had understood first, because she’d been ready, because he told her to be.
“I’m sorry, William,” she said, or maybe she only thought it; she couldn’t tell.
* * *
Becker answered his cell phone on the first ring. “Becker,” he said.
“Longfellow. We got them.”
“Leong?”
“And his boss.”
“His boss? Who—”
“William Fauchaux, from Recruitment. He was the one behind it. He—look, there’s no time right now. I have a body, a wounded guy, and two prisoners. Get us home.”
“On it,” said Becker. He clicked a button on the computer, sending the necessary message.
“On the way. What happened?”
“They got a bit rowdy. Matt had to put one down, and we have Shveta Tyaga for you.”
“And you?”
“We’re all fine.”
“I’ll see you here.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
The receptionist behind his desk in front of the elevator managed to look like everything was normal, which impressed Donovan a great deal. They were grouped in front of the desk.
“Hello, Mr. Faucheux.”
“Hello, Mr. Becker.”
“I confess, I’m surprised to see you like this.”
“You mean, with my hands tied behind me and a gun at my head?”
“Excuse me,” said Donovan, “but would it be all right if we put this guy somewhere? Guns are heavy.”
“I got it,” said Matt.
“You got Faucheux. I got Leong, and my arm is getting tired, and if someone wants to see to Shveta, I think she’s going to recover soon, and this could get ugly if you don’t get her somewhere safe.”
“Maybe we should all get comfortable,” said Becker.
“If your idea of being comfortable involves me still holding this thing, we’ll have to talk about comfortable.”
“I have it,” said the receptionist, and a shimmering field grew up around Leong, who shrugged; then another occurred around Shveta, who didn’t react.
Donovan lowered his weapon.
No one spoke for a moment, and Donovan realized that Becker was staring at Faucheux’s face, and put together that Becker was recognizing on it what his own face must have looked like, back when it happened to him. It was an intuitive leap, but not for a very long distance.
Becker seemed to catch himself, and turned to Donovan. “When did you begin carrying a firearm, Mr. Longfellow?”
“Today.” He handed the weapon back to Matt. “Also stopped today.”
“As a rule,” said Becker, “we do not issue them.”
“Yeah,” said Matt. “I took these off a drug dealer in New Jersey.”
“I see. Well, if you’ll come this way, Ms. Morgan wishes to speak to you.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” said Faucheux, “I’d as soon not.”
“And I,” said Leong.
“We will have you escorted to cells,” said Becker. “The rest of you, this way,” and led them toward the elevator.
* * *
“So, you had this prepared?” said Morgan. They sat in her office, Donovan on one side, Marci in the middle, then Matt. Becker was behind them, standing.
“Yes,” said Donovan. “I sent an email to William Faucheux, asking him for an interrogation specialist, as we had captured the dangerous Mr. Leong. I may have implied that we felt confident we’d break him eventually anyway, but that it would be faster with a specialist. I gave him the address, then waited.” Donovan shrugged.
“How,” said Morgan, “did you know Faucheux was the one behind it?”
Donovan nodded to Matt, who said, “He didn’t want to hire me.”
“That was it? Because he didn’t want to hire Mr. Castellani you decided he was behind it?”
“Well, that’s what made us look at him,” said Donovan. “Once we started looking, it was kind of obvious. He was perfectly placed to recruit for his own purposes. He could hire accounting and computer people from outside, and as a department head he had access. And Marci gave me a few details about some conversations she’d had with him that, in retrospect, were efforts to discover if she was suitable for recruitment. And the fact that Leong knew about Vasilyev, and Faucheux was well placed to find that out. It seemed to add up.”
“I didn’t know,” said Becker.
“No,” said Donovan. “You wouldn’t have. He wouldn’t have trusted you, after you joined the Foundation, and especially since you worked for the Ranch. And of course, you, Camellia, passed on the information about Young, which proved to be the key to figuring out what the endgame was, which in turn helped us find Faucheux.”
“Endgame?” said Becker.
“Sure. Destroying the board of directors of the Mystici. He wanted them wiped out and replaced with people willing to take some degree of moral responsibility for what their group did.”
Morgan frowned. “That makes too much sense. But what about Whittier?”
“He was the price Leong paid Nagorski for being his dancing monkey—doing the killings Leong couldn’t do himself. He convinced Nagorski that they were all evil—which I guess they were, to one degree or another—and showed him how they connected to Whittier so he had a reason to kill them. The last one—Leong’s actual target—I suppose Leong killed himself, probably with a bullet; I don’t know.”
“Actual target? Who was that?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure if you check police records somewhere there will be a mundane murder, or maybe an accident, of whatever Mystici board member was responsible for North America. Whoever that is, it’ll turn out, was protected by Young. That death is what alerted what’s-her-name, the head of the Mystici. Elsa Merriweather.”
“Can you verify that?” said Becker.
“I could. I won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t give a shit. It didn’t work, right?
We cut the proverbial head off the proverbial snake. Done deal. They got one in North America, and then we stopped them before the next one went off. End of problem.”
“So, then,” said Morgan, “Faucheux had people lined up to replace the board members as they were killed?”
“Yeah, something like that. I’m pretty sure of it.”
“We should question Faucheux, find out who they were.”
“Yeah, you do that. I’ll be counting up all the fucks I don’t give.”
Becker said, “Mr. Lo—”
“Oh, just leave it, Mr. Becker. They’re a bunch of pricks. If you want to help them clean their house, do it. But leave me out of it.”
“Your work,” said Morgan after a moment, “is not unimpressive.”
“I speak for my team,” said Donovan, “when I say that we’re just tickled as shit that you’re impressed.”
“Actually,” said Marci, “I’m pretty happy about it.”
“There’s loyalty for you,” said Donovan. “So, what will happen to the prisoners? I assume Faucheux’s dealt with, what with Marci’s sorcelectomy. What about Leong and Tyaga?”
“You are correct, William Faucheux would have faced S.R.P. if it hadn’t been done already. We may decide to question him; I must consider the matter. Tyaga will certainly be given that treatment—a rogue sorcerer with that much skill is like mercury fulminate. Mr. Leong, as you suggest, is a more difficult problem.”
“Removing his abilities didn’t seem to help much,” said Becker.
“No,” said Morgan. “I’m afraid we’ll have to execute him.”
“I’d like to volunteer for that job,” said Donovan.
“Truly, Donovan?”
“Yeah. Truly. And I’d like to talk to him first.”
“Talk to him?”
“We were arguing philosophy when things got hairy. I want to continue the conversation.”
“I must review the decision with the board. I can let you talk to him, but you must promise not to kill him. Wait for our decision.”
“I promise.”
“Then I’ll arrange it.”
“And afterward, you’re serious about wishing to be the executioner?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll get back to you after the board meets.”
“Thanks.”
