The most used equipment in the room, the tanks at various stages of soaking items, were balanced on the benches, bowing them in the process.
On the left wall were the fume hoods, the fans and vents above buzzing on autopilot. Interspersed amongst those were the sample tables fitted with special lights and microscopes to get a better look at, well, whatever it was you were looking at.
Now, where would I stick the Genghis exhibit? I spotted five crates, barely unpacked, on the far side of the rectangular lab, still stacked by the loading bay door. The computer tower and large monitor, however, were parked on a bench beside them.
Well, the computer and self-contained servers were up and running. At least they’d gotten that far. Saved me twenty minutes trying to get them up and running on my own.
I motioned Rynn to follow me as I headed over to see whether the rule of Genghis Khan had left any pertinent information on the Electric Samurai.
I jostled the screen and was met with a login window.
“Now what?” Rynn asked.
I checked around and under the monitor before looking behind the computer itself. Taped to the back of the tower was the operating manual and inventory manifest. I flipped open the manual. Login codes were on a yellow note that had long lost its stickiness and had been taped to the inside. I was hitting the jackpot today as far as time savers went.
I retrieved my jump drive from my jacket. I didn’t trust it with Captain, not after the phone incident. Speaking of which . . . I sat down and let Captain out of his carrier. He darted out to investigate what was around. Not that I figured on vampires showing up, but it paid to be careful. Besides, he needed the exercise.
Rynn pulled up a chair as I logged in and waited for the computer to grind on.
“Doesn’t sending the passwords with the boxes defeat the purpose of having passwords?”
I shrugged. “Well, only if you’ve actually got the computer. It can’t connect to the internet. The only way anyone is accessing these files is through this computer, and since the boxes and archives are almost constantly moving with the exhibits . . .”
“It’s a colossal problem if someone like you or Nadya wants access. Or what if some student or janitor decides to sit down and take a look? What if they pick up something dangerous?”
“First, Nadya just logs onto the Russian Archaeological Associations servers or gets a contact to deliver the information. She doesn’t burn her bridges. I do, hence the need to break in. As with regards to the janitor? Anything that dangerous is stored in some IAA vault, not passed around like a joint between research departments. And second, you’d need to know what you were looking for. To the uninitiated observer, this just looks like any old file system. Here, see for yourself.”
I let Rynn look at the screen over my shoulder. After a moment he said, “These are generic colored labels. It’s coded?”
“Give the incubus a prize.” I used the cursor to highlight the green series of folders with lettered names. “Green folders contain information that your most clever undergrad couldn’t find a supernatural element or reference under. They’re green because they’re considered clean—safe enough you could leave your volunteer students with the folders and accompanying items for a month and they still wouldn’t suspect there was a supernatural connection. Blue folders are iffy. If someone knows what to look for, or say you gave them to an astute third year, they might get suspicious by some of the text references that don’t quite match up. But the red ones”—I ran the cursor over one of the red folders labeled simply Alpha—“now, those folders will absolutely mention an artifact or text that’s related to the supernatural. Those the undergrads aren’t allowed to touch.”
“What if they open them anyway? Curiosity killing the cat and everything.”
“If you were them, would you believe there was such a thing as the supernatural?”
Rynn shook his head as he abandoned me to the computer in favor of opening one of the crate lids. “They’re as bad as the elves.”
“Think of it this way—no one knows the supernatural exists, so why would they look for it? Besides, if you added Fort Knox or CDC level security, someone would start looking. They’d figure we were hiding gold, jewels, a grow-op. Who knows what they’d convince themselves had to be inside.”
He furrowed his brow at me over the box he’d busied himself with. “That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not supposed to be. Remember? Bureaucrats. Look, Rynn—stop fidgeting and take a seat—I’m copying all of this, but we’re talking terabytes off a system that’s been upgraded in patches. It’ll take awhile.”
“I’d rather take a look around if it’s all the same to you.”
Rynn’s usual problem with being up close and personal to the thievery. I turned my attention back onto the file progress bars, watching as they ground along, copying onto my drive. All the images and papers that would never actually be published. Don’t break anything. And keep your eye on Captain.
The files were copying, slowly but surely, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t run a search. When starting from scratch, best to kick off with the bloody fucking obvious.
I typed magic armor into the search engine and waited as the computer spun its chips to churn out a list.
There was a lot—as in pages of mentions as far as the translations were concerned.
“Shit.” I mean, I’d expected Genghis and his ilk to have found some magic weapons and armor over the years. I’d assumed it had come down to a few pieces, but apparently that was not the case.
The Mongolian horde had created a massive empire. You didn’t do that back then without a little supernatural help. And Genghis, much like Alexander the Great, had assimilated everything in his path. The Mongols had found everything from an eleventh-century Russian cloak that allowed the wearer to turn into an animal to Korean demon hide armor.
It could take me months to sort through all of this, especially since the armor changed its appearance with each wearer.
Okay, let’s try this again. I typed in Storm Armor. No luck.
“Try Lightning Armor,” Rynn offered. I typed Lightning Armor in the search program. This time three references came up.
Now these odds I liked an awful lot better . . .
The first two I traced back to a blue folder. I opened the individual files, but they seemed to mention markings on the armor itself and the speed with which the user had been able to move. Magic, most likely, but I didn’t think that fit the description of the armor the elves wanted. I made a mental note of their location in the files anyway; I’d have a longer look later.
The third reference, though, now that was the doozy. I whistled. “Jackpot,” I said, and opened up the file, then waited for Rynn to join me.
Subatai Jebe, or General Jebe. “Now this one, this is interesting. Do you know much about Genghis Khan’s army?”
Rynn shook his head. “Northern Europe. By the time stories of the horde reached us they’d been muddled with the retellings.”
What people must have done in the days without cell phones and internet . . .hearing your news in stories and having no idea if it was real or if some asshole was trolling the unknown world.
“Well, Jebe was unique. He was one of Genghis’s four generals, or ‘dogs’ as they were nicknamed. He also was known as ‘the Arrow.’ Jebe wasn’t like the other generals. He started out on the other side and was recruited by Genghis after almost killing him with an arrow to the neck.”
“He made him his general?” Rynn sounded skeptical of the decision. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?”
I inclined my head. “Not quite. Jebe was good. Really good. Let’s face it, he was on the opposite side and almost managed to orchestrate an end to Genghis’s reign.”
“Most warlords would kill such an opponent to maintain order in an army like that.”<
br />
“Ah, but you’re thinking of a figurehead, like a king or a noble who is put in a place of power or inherits it from their forefathers. Genghis was the director of his own orchestra of mayhem and destruction. His horde terrorized the Asian continent and eastern Europe. He didn’t have anything to prove to anyone—and Jebe had the balls to admit he was the one who shot Genghis in the neck.” I shrugged. “Honesty and loyalty are hard to come by. Probably worth more to Genghis by that point than the fact that he’d been born on the other side.” Rynn didn’t look convinced, so I added, “Think of it like a corporate takeover. Jebe was the best up-and-comer on your rival company’s roster. You could take over the company and scuttle him, or do the smart thing and hire him. Genghis went the hiring route. This time,” I added. There were plenty of cases when he’d gone the marauding evil army route as well. Maybe he had a karma thing going—50 percent of the time kill everyone, 50 percent of the time let everyone live.
“Humans never cease to surprise me.”
“Why? Because we can occasionally put our own hate and indignation aside when we can see a use for something?”
“No. Because no supernatural I know of, except maybe a dragon, would be able to put its own passions aside to consider the alternative.”
I turned my attention back to the file contents. “What about incubi? You’re pretty even-tempered.”
“Not so much with other supernaturals. It can be hard to put aside . . .” He paused, as if searching for a word. “. . . past transgression. It’s complicated. It’s why we tend not to surround ourselves with other supernaturals for prolonged periods of time. It’s not often you see succubi and incubi traveling or working together for more than a few decades at most. In your words, we tend to piss each other off. If you’re smart, you part ways before that happens.”
“And if you don’t? Didn’t you say your cousin had a troupe of them or something?”
He inclined his head. “Then you end up like Artemis—with problems and well over a hundred years’ worth of hate and grudges built up.”
The more I gleaned about Rynn . . . half of me wanted to keep him talking, but the other half?
The file was a translation, along with the original documents that had been scanned in. “This is an account detailing General Jebe and two of the other dogs’ parts in the downfall of the Khwarezmian Empire.” Rynn shook his head, and I continued. “Ah, second Persian empires, Muslim dynasties? During the Middle Ages they held parts of Persia—Iran, Afghanistan. Basically they controlled the lower half of the Caspian Sea and a swath of the Persian Gulf. They were a silk road choke point between the Mediterranean and Europe and Genghis’s empire.” A trade route Genghis had wanted very badly.
“Brilliant general perhaps, but not a ruler. Why didn’t he barter for trade instead of razing an empire? It would have set trade back a century.”
“Because the shah sent back the head of Genghis’s ambassador in a bag. Apparently he took offense to Genghis sending a Muslim.” I scrolled through the document’s translation. “Takes two to be civilized, Rynn. This is one of the original accounts of the entire invasion into Persia written by one of the horde’s scribes—everything from the number of people killed to accounts of all the loot taken.”
I frowned. This was the kind of document that was usually on display in the museum’s public exhibit, meaning it had to list the supernatural items. I scrolled through until I found them—jewelry, sacrificial bowls, swords . . .
And there was my magic suit of armor.
“The scribe makes a footnote about the suit. Claims Jebe found it while they were sacking the capital, Samarkand, near the end of the campaign. It was mixed in with the shah’s treasures.”
I ran the time line through my head. The first Persian empire sacked Babylonia and parts of western Europe while the Roman Empire was still going strong . . .
Times like this I wish I had a photographic memory. “Okay, correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t Persia and Rome locked in battle for a few hundred years?—after and during Caligula?”
Rynn inclined his head. “I wasn’t around for the majority of it, though Artemis might have been—not that he’s in any state to answer questions about much of anything these days.”
“But the suit disappeared, and considering it has a mind of its own and a penchant for violence, what better place to run to? It’s got a pattern. The Storm Warrior legend first appears around 150 BC in Japan. My guess is it reached the continent through Korea, found itself a couple nice wars, got some traveling and sightseeing done across northern Asia until it fell into the hands of the early Vikings, again for who knows how long. It reaches Ireland, where you have your next eyewitness account from Boadicea. It falls into the hands of the Romans, where Artemis and you encountered it. From there, a few more battles lost to history and time, and it’s right on Persia’s doorstep. Persia enters a time of relative peace, so the suit has nothing better to do than sit around in a vault—that is, until Genghis and Jebe come along.”
“And the violence begins all over again.”
The scribes’ account of the suit as the invasion progressed read like a journal of sorts. It wasn’t a diary; you had to find the entries between accounts of sacking towns and cities for slaves, food, and gold and how it was all divvied up, but there were glimpses and comments about Jebe’s state of mind and the suit throughout.
Things started off fine. The horde continued their incursion and, with Jebe’s newfound armor, defeated one town after the other, collecting the spoils. His men began calling him the “Lightning Arrow” on account of the electricity that danced across the plates before battle.
I skimmed—I didn’t care about things going right, I cared about things going horribly wrong.
It didn’t take me long to find it.
As the war with the Poles and Russians progressed, the scribes began noting changes in Jebe, who was by all accounts an even, patient general, but who had become impatient and volatile. Little things at first—lapses of temper, punishing his men for small infractions, jumping into battle before all of his intelligence was delivered, not something Genghis and his men were known to do. At first it earned little more than a footnote, but as the army progressed north, that changed.
“The cracks start to show outside Kiev,” I said to Rynn. Rynn peered over my shoulder. “A battle with losses, more than Jebe was used to.”
I nodded. They’d come upon a walled city. The Mongols didn’t do well in close city quarters; their strength was being on horseback with ranged bows. Usually they put the town to siege, starved everyone out. But this time the general didn’t have the patience. They won—with heavy losses. “After that, Jebe’s temper only got worse, more volatile and reckless. He started to take pleasure in humiliating and torturing his foes.” The scribe noted he also stopped taking the armor off after that.
Bad tactical decisions, poor battle plans. He’d become so caught up in the killing that he’d stopped being a general. “The suit is its own worst enemy.”
Wait—that was it.
“It still doesn’t tell us where the armor ended up,” Rynn said.
I shook my head. “My point isn’t that this tells us where it is. My point is a question we haven’t asked. Why doesn’t it ever stay in one place? There was plenty of fighting in the Roman Empire for the next few centuries, not to mention northern Europe and the Celtic clans, yet the armor appears sporadically—sometimes hundreds of years apart. Why?”
Rynn arched an eyebrow at me. “You clearly have an opinion.”
“I think it’s doing more than looking for the next, nearest, biggest fight. If that were the case, it never would have left Japan and Korea. I think it needs the right wearer—so much so it had to propel itself across the entire ancient world.”
Another thought occurred to me. “We assumed it was evil from the start because it burns up its host. If th
e host is that specific, that rare . . . Back in the ancient world, wars would have been the easiest way to find a large pool of people.”
“And eventually the need for a host and violence entwined, warping whatever it started out as.”
“And unless there’s a war nearby, when it eventually kills the wearer . . .”
“. . . it has nowhere to go but a treasure room,” Rynn finished.
That was the problem with magic artifacts and supernatural weapons—they might be powerful, but there was always a price and always a weakness.
Rynn swore in supernatural and ran his hands through his hair. “I’m about ready to tell the elves and Lady Siyu where they can shove the armor.”
“There’s another option I’m thinking we have,” I said. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s always keep your eye out for the back door.
He gave me a skeptical look. I poked at the screen and the item inventory that went with the translated documents. “Jebe—he wore it, the suit picked him. And someone was nice enough to document the entire campaign until it either killed him or someone figured out a way past its defenses. Our other choice is to figure out what the hell it is the elves want with it.” Once you know what someone’s end game is, negotiations get so much more interesting. Regardless, the first concrete clues would be in here.
Rynn still wasn’t appeased. “And if we can’t figure out what it is they want? You don’t know them like I do, Alix. You know one of them, who by elven standards is semi-tolerable and apparently clueless to internal politics.”
“I thought they were neutral?”
“Exactly—neutral. They haven’t made waves during the past five hundred years that Mr. Kurosawa and his predecessors have been in charge, but mark my words, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a large faction of elves that enjoyed playing gods throughout Europe during the Roman Empire and Middle Ages as much as the other side did. If things hadn’t shifted, they’d still have human slaves underfoot, just like they used to, and they’d still be chasing after minor infractions and protocol violations. Just because on the surface they have a handful of traits your kind consider admirable doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of rotten ones running the show underneath.”
Owl and the Electric Samurai Page 13
