by Dan Koboldt
He worked slowly through the brush, placing each foot carefully. Kiara and Chaudri were back-to-back, watching the road, with the extra horses between them. She tracked his progress on the scope. “Another ten meters.”
Logan saw him then, a crumpled form at the base of a large boulder.
“Man down,” he whispered. “Stand by while I sweep the area.”
He raised the crossbow and sidestepped, working around the boulder. This was a perfect situation for a trap, and one he’d seen before in jungle countries, Earth-side: position an enemy soldier—wounded or dead—in plain view, and pick off his comrades when they came for him.
That didn’t seem to be the case today.
“All clear,” he said. He approached the fallen man, trying to ignore the cold tightness in his gut. “Ah, O’Toole. Damn it.”
Charles O’Toole was the youngest member of Bravo Team. Twenty-six, with two tours in the Middle East under his belt when he came to work for the company. He loved fishing; the facility’s location in the South Pacific had been what sealed the deal.
Bravo’s tech specialist still clutched the portable comm unit in one hand. The thing was in pieces, and with a small screwdriver on the ground nearby, it looked like he’d been trying to make some repairs. That began to explain why Bravo had been out of touch. Logan didn’t need to check the man’s pulse. At least it had been quick. He knelt close to him and got a look at the wound. “Lieutenant, you’ll want to see this.”
“Already behind you, Logan,” she said. She had her crossbow out and was covering his six. He hadn’t heard her approach at all.
She knelt beside him. “Christ, that’s a gunshot wound.” He saw Chaudri come into the clearing behind her, leading the horses.
O’Toole used to tinker with ham radios, back on the island. Gods, the kid could get any scrap of electronics to work. No. He couldn’t think about that now. Logan crouched beside Kiara. “Double tap, small caliber,” he said. “Might be an MP5.”
“How would that have gotten past the gate security?”
“Don’t know. How did they even know about it in the first place? None of this makes sense.”
“Maybe it’s been a little bit off since Holt disabled it,” Chaudri suggested.
She shook her head, either in disagreement or because she didn’t like what it implied. “Fully automatic weapons on this side of the gateway. God help us.”
“His mount’s gone, too,” Logan said.
“Maybe the rest of the team took it.”
“Let’s hope so.” But it was clear from her tone—and the lack of signals on the isotope reader—that she didn’t really believe it.
“Think I might be able to pick up their trail, at least,” Logan said.
Business first, though.
He went to a packhorse for the shovels, and then he and Chaudri dug a shallow grave. They laid O’Toole into it. Logan said a quiet prayer. They buried him and piled rocks over the grave. An hour lost, but none of them suggested leaving him.
There was a certain understanding among the people who braved this side of the gateway. Everyone got to return home, one way or another.
Kiara set a pulse-transponder on top of the pile. The company would send a retrieval team here, disguised as priests who cared for the dead.
They picked up the trail and followed it northwest. An hour later, Kiara tried her isotope scanner out again. “We’re getting a couple of signals. I think they’re together, and moving.”
Jackpot.
“Bravo Team,” Logan said. “We find them, and we’ll find the infiltrators.”
“Let’s finish this.”
They remounted and rode north, not pushing the horses any more than they had to. The isotope scanner gave a decent signal, but they were in unfamiliar terrain, with possible hostiles waiting in ambush. Logan made a number of forays to scout ahead, and to check their backtrail. When they made camp at night, they did so under a full security protocol. Decoy tents, proximity sensors, hobbles on the horses, everything. Logan wasn’t taking any chances.
The isotope signals for Bravo Team grew stronger. Two days later, they found two more of its members. Their position hadn’t changed at all, based on the isotope scanner’s readout. The signal led them away from the road to the lip of a narrow defile. Kiara and Chaudri held a covering position between it and the road, along with Logan’s mount, while he crept forward to investigate. There was some risk of an ambush here, so he kept his eyes up.
The sky was overcast; dark clouds and lightning threatened on the western horizon. Between that and the late-afternoon hour, twilight shrouded the bottom of the defile. Logan crawled up to the edge to hazard a glance down. Once his eyes adjusted, he could make out the bodies. Four of them, and not a one moving. One was on a shelf perhaps twenty feet below; the rest were at the bottom.
“I’ve got four bodies,” he said over the comm unit.
“Only two on the scanner,” Kiara replied. “Any sign of the raiders?”
“It looks clear. I’m going to climb down.”
“I want your safety harness on,” Kiara said.
He made a face but complied; the last thing he needed was a broken bone. He wished he’d thought to test the new paracord the tech team had put together under happier circumstances.
He secured one end to a large tree trunk and clipped the carabiner to an alusteel ring at the waist of his custom armor. The sides of the defile were some kind of porous rock, possibly volcanic. It allowed a good grip, so he reached the shelf without incident.
“Status, Logan,” Kiara said. There was tension in her voice.
“I’m at the first body,” Logan replied. “It’s Keene.” The man’s tar-black hair and thick beard were unmistakable. Kiara made a noise over the comm unit; it sounded like a muffled curse. Keene was the Bravo leader. He and Logan had served together on a couple of tours. Logan had recruited him once he got out. He’d have been with the first retrieval team, if the executives hadn’t sent Bradley. Keene’s crossbow lay in two pieces on the rocky shelf; his quiver was empty. His body was riddled with bullets.
“More gunshot wounds,” Logan said. “I’ll check the others.”
He left the man to belay to the floor of the defile. He reached the nearest body, facedown in a puddle of blood. He rolled it over and recognized another Bravo Team member, Hank Magrini. He was the weapons specialist, an ex-tank-gunner. “It’s Hank the Tank.”
Hank’s body had numerous wounds. His combat knife was nearby. It was bloody.
Logan stepped over him to the others. These appeared different from the others; they didn’t have Alissian clothing. They wore black tactical vests over dark fatigues, and both were strapped with MP5 machine guns.
“You’re not Bravo,” he said, and that explained the lack of an isotope signal. They were dead, though. Each man had a company-issue crossbow bolt in his chest.
“Who are they?” Kiara demanded over the comm unit.
“Two of the hostiles,” he said.
“Good,” Kiara said.
He searched them, but found no identification. Just ammunition and tactical gear. He hadn’t really expected to find anything, but he was trying to be thorough. The men had the short hair favored by ex-military, but he didn’t recognize them. He cut the straps of the MP5s and tied them to his pack. He took the clips as well. The rest of it might seem strange to an Alissian, but didn’t represent an advance in technology. He snapped their photos and scanned fingerprints.
He climbed out to give Kiara the good news. Two of the MP5s were in hand.
More importantly, the last member of Bravo Team might still be alive.
They buried Keene and Magrini as the sun set on the Landorian plateau. Logan tried to say a few words about the fallen men, but his tongue felt numb. He took only a little bit of solace in
the fact that they’d managed to surprise the raiders, and kill two of their number, with the very weapons he’d trained them to use.
He made them a silent promise that he’d finish the job.
It was a better prayer than anything he could have said aloud anyway.
They walked the horses for a bit, until the rim of the defile was out of view. No one had the energy to press on in full darkness. They made a quiet camp without a fire and slept ten hours.
Logan woke just after sunrise, feeling strangely rested. These past few days had been draining on all of them, but they seemed to have bounced back. The horses, too—and now they snorted, their breaths making frost in the chill air. Logan strapped on their feed bags of grain while they stamped impatiently. They were eager to get moving. Kiara was awake already, fiddling with the isotope scanner. Even Chaudri was stirring, and before the coffee was made.
I bet Bradley would still be asleep.
“I’ve got the signal,” Kiara said. She frowned. “It’s strong. Almost looks like two signals.”
Logan hurried over for a look. The fourth member of Bravo Team was Julio Mendez, their scout. He was a young kid, twenty-seven, but tough as alligator skin. He’d come over from Cuba at age five, on a raft his family made out of inner tubes and plywood. They had to swim the last half mile . . . something little Julio had had to figure out in the moment. He was a survivor.
Mendez had gone into the foster care system, a childhood only marginally better than what he’d have had in Cuba. At eighteen he signed up for the Marines. Company recruiters had lured him away only after promising to help get the rest of his family out. Apparently they thought it might be a handful of aunts and uncles. The last Logan heard, it was forty-one Mendezes and counting. There were jokes that CASE was one of the biggest lobbyers in getting the US to normalize relations with the island country—it would be cheaper than bringing over more of Julio’s family.
The signal from the isotope was unmistakable: north across the plateau. And close. Chaudri had made coffee—she might have woken up before it was made, but she wasn’t going to function without it. She brought Logan and Kiara each a cup.
“I feel like I slept for two days,” she said.
“For once, that’s not true,” Logan said. “I do feel strangely rested, though.”
She pursed her lips. “Dr. Holt used to talk about stumbling upon anomalies like this. Where wounds heal faster, and sleep counts more. He called them ‘rejuvenation zones.’ ”
“That’s exactly how I feel. Rejuvenated.”
“Let’s hope we were the only ones to get this advantage,” Kiara said.
There was a natural spring nearby; the water looked clear. Logan took a sample and ran it through their chemical/microbe test kit. The readouts were almost too good to be true; the water was incredibly pure. He refilled their canteens, and then let Chaudri bring the horses down. They drank heavily. Saddles were tightened; weapons were checked.
“Ready, Lieutenant,” Logan said.
Kiara hadn’t moved her eyes from the isotope scanner. “Mount up,” she said.
“I want the same thing anyone else in entertainment does. I want access.”
—ART OF ILLUSION, JUNE 8
CHAPTER 17
OLD MAGS
Quinn hadn’t been executed yet, which he took for a good sign. The council meeting that had featured his trial had dissolved into an impromptu social gathering. Magicians lounged in their seats, mingled with one another. He took that time to work the crowd, a part of the business that Vegas magicians had to learn early. Something felt different about the way the islanders spoke to him now. They shared a common bond, accepted him as one of their own.
He had the distinct feeling that life here would be a lot more tolerable.
Moric had conferred quietly with the magicians, tolerated Quinn’s schmoozing with the islanders, but was plainly waiting for him. Once the crowd thinned out, he ambled over.
“Well done, Quinn,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your quarters, if you don’t mind.”
“Wow. You make it sound as if I have a choice in the matter.”
Moric smiled. “You’ve always had a choice. You could tell me to go jump in the ocean.”
Quinn looked at him sidelong. “Something tells me I shouldn’t do that.”
“Well, I would advise caution when it comes to council members. I’m told we can be a bit on the grouchy side.”
“Duly noted.”
“Besides, you’re likely to need rest. Magic takes a toll on the body.”
“I am rather tired,” he said, remembering Moric’s nap when they first arrived. It wasn’t exactly true—he was tired, but it was more the exhaustion of coming down from the high of a show, and not because he used up some sort of internal reserve of power. Knowing he’d need to keep up the charade, though, he asked, “How much sleep are we talking about?”
“An hour or two, for most enchantments. You’ll need to pace yourself, though. The more powerful the spell, the more rest you’ll require.”
Quinn noticed a pack of giggling children had swept much of his foam-snow into a large pile. Moric looked upon them fondly, smiled with a sort of indulgent pride. They built it up to about waist-high, and then took turns running and jumping in the stuff. The best part about this foam was that it was biodegradable. The next significant rainstorm would wash it all away.
“I grew up with a lot of snow, in Pirea,” Moric said. “I remember it being heavier. And colder, too.”
“I did the best I could,” Quinn said.
“It wasn’t bad, for a novice. Our art is much harder than it looks.”
You have no idea.
They strolled away from the amphitheater and the tower that loomed above it, back in the general direction of Quinn’s guest quarters—which was starting to feel a bit less like going back to prison. The breeze had picked up into a steady wind; it looked as though they might have a storm. Idly he wondered how well the islanders could withstand a typhoon, if it happened to come to that. Hadn’t Moric said something about a threshold? Perhaps that shielded the island from the worst of it.
“Strange that you were so adamant about not having the gift, only to use it so compellingly, when pressed,” Moric said.
“I suppose I just got lucky.” He felt a little guilty for pulling one over on this crowd. Magic was clearly a precious thing to them.
Moric pursed his lips. “Perhaps. But I believe I may understand what’s going on here.”
That worried him. “Oh, yeah?”
“Some magicians who are just learning their art aren’t able to call upon it easily. Often it requires a desperate situation.”
“I tend to do well under pressure. That much is true.”
“You’re an unusual man, Quinn. And I certainly hope that won’t change, now that you’re a member of our society.”
“It’s official, then?”
Moric nodded. “You’ll no longer be locked in your guest quarters, and we won’t have someone shadowing you at all times.”
“I didn’t think there was. I spent a lot of time alone, if memory serves.”
Moric shrugged. “You were never truly alone. In any case, you may go where you wish on the island.”
“Can I leave the island if I want?” Quinn asked.
Moric’s lips curled, as if made unhappy by the question. “Yes,” he said. “We have means of getting back to the continent. Nothing so disorienting as the way you were brought here, either. You need only say the word, and we’ll get you on a ship to the mainland.”
Back to Valteron. He wondered what the others would be doing now. Surely the mission had continued, even after he was taken. He seriously doubted they’d drop everything to track down their missing entertainer. Then again, the fact that he wasn’t able to use his comm unit had pro
bably made them fear the worst. They might even have left, and headed back north without him. If he got back on the main continent, he’d probably be able to make contact. There was no way to know for certain—and he definitely couldn’t ask Moric about it.
It occurred to Quinn that he had little to contribute to the primary mission, now that Richard Holt was the Valteroni Prime. No doubt Logan and Kiara would still try to haul him back to the gateway, but they didn’t need a magician for that.
They needed a miracle.
Besides, wasn’t the company’s principal goal to learn as much about Alissia as possible? Chaudri had admitted that they knew very little about the magic here. None of his briefings had mentioned the guild or the island or anything.
Here he was, right in the thick of it. Surrounded by people who were capable of real magic, and accepted as one of their own. Free rein of the island might even let him get down to the shipyard for a better look at that ship.
“I’d like to remain in the Landorian tower, if possible,” Quinn said.
Moric smiled; he seemed genuinely pleased. “Excellent. I’m sure you’ll enjoy staying here a while longer.”
“I want to learn everything that I can,” Quinn said.
“I know just the place to start,” Moric said.
The guild of magicians kept its library in the central spire. More accurately, its library was the central spire. It contained, if Moric was to be believed, the most extensive collection of scrolls, books, and written documents in Alissia. The magician had offered to accompany Quinn for his first visit; he seemed unusually excited about it.
“How long has it been here?” Quinn asked. Maybe that would give him some idea of how long the island community had been around.
“Two hundred years, give or take,” Moric said. “It’s grown considerably since my time here.”
“I’m surprised it all isn’t crumbling into dust,” Quinn said. Alissian paper was rather primitive, made from the fiber of a cotton-like plant grown mostly in Valteron.
