The truck’s engine rumbled to life again, and it was time for me to move.
I got to my feet and jogged to the back of the trailer. I dropped off the side, hanging from the edge. Thanks to all the exercise I had done over the last year I was strong enough to hang there comfortably, and I could have pulled myself back up with the strength of my arms alone. (In my line of work, pull-ups tend to have frequent real-world application.)
But right now, I wanted to go down, not up. I dropped my Cloak spell and cast my levitation spell, which cushioned my fall as I landed on the gravel road. Vernon’s truck was rolling forward, and I cast the Cloak spell before he moved far enough that he could see me in his mirrors.
I turned and jogged back down the road, dropping my Cloak spell as soon as I was out of sight of the gate. Best to conserve my magical strength. I was certain I would need to call a great deal of fire and lightning soon.
About three minutes later, I saw Murdo’s SUV rolling up the road. He was driving slowly to avoid creating a dust cloud that might be visible from the hidden Rebel base. The SUV slowed, and I walked around the front bumper, opened the passenger door, and got inside.
“Good timing,” I said.
Murdo grunted. “Hope you didn’t blow anything up without me.”
I grinned. It was a real smile and not the usual grim rictus that had been my attempt at smiling for the last year. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Also, you have all the explosives.”
Rory Murdo nodded. He looked…well, there was no polite way to say this, but he looked thuggish. He was a big man, with thick arms, a thick neck, and a big chest. His knuckles looked as if he hit people often. He was about forty, with close-cropped black hair and flat black eyes. He usually wore a three-piece suit, but since it was so freaking hot, he wore a black polo shirt and khaki cargo trousers. His arms were heavy with muscle and marked with old scars.
He looked like a violent, dangerous man. Which, technically, I suppose he was, but there was a lot more to him than met the eye.
“I think we’ll take the overlook road,” said Murdo, pointing at the hill. “There used to be a weather station up there before the mine closed. The slope should obscure our dust cloud, and from there we’ll have a clear view down into the mine area.”
“Good thing we found those maps,” I said.
“Thorough preparation is the key to a successful combat operation,” said Murdo. He did a Y-turn and started back down the access road.
“Also, lots of explosives,” I said.
“That too.”
A narrow track climbed into the hills, and Murdo changed gears and started up the slope, the gravel rasping and rattling beneath the tires.
“How many of them did you see?” said Murdo.
“Three,” I said. “Vernon, and two soldiers. Don’t know how much of a fight Vernon will put up. He’s not in great shape. The two Rebel soldiers had AK-47s.”
“We’ll have to assume there are at least two more at the mine,” said Murdo.
“Yeah,” I said. “They’ll be there to guard the transfer point. Probably have a forklift, too. Five men aren’t going to unload an entire semi by themselves. Well. Four men. Vernon looks like he isn’t going to be doing any heavy lifting.”
That had partially been a joke, but Murdo nodded. “Good point. We can assume when the rift way opens, more Rebel soldiers and some of the Knight of Venomhold’s orcish mercenaries will come through to help.”
“Then,” I said, “they can get caught in the blast radius with everyone else.”
The top of the hill came into sight, and Murdo brought the SUV to a halt. Too much higher and anyone in the valley or the mine complex would see us. The road ended a few yards away at the abandoned weather station, a squat cinder block building with a corrugated steel roof that was turning to rust.
We got out, and Murdo went to open the back of the SUV. I took a moment to fix my hair. Not out of vanity, but so it wouldn’t get into my face at a critical moment. Truth be told, I really needed a haircut. My hair had gotten long and shaggy and now hung down to the middle of my back. I should have gotten a haircut months ago, but I didn’t trust my self-control enough to let a stranger near my head with scissors. It might remind me of the Eternity Crucible, and if something reminded me too much of the Eternity Crucible, I could freak out and lose control and hurt someone.
I bound my hair into a tight ponytail and donned a ball cap, sticking the ponytail through the back of the cap and behind my coat.
By the time I had finished that, Murdo had gotten my gear ready.
“Got them all?” I said as he handed me a satchel.
“Yes,” said Murdo, and I opened the satchel and looked inside. Five pipe bombs rested inside. Murdo knew how to make a good pipe bomb. The bombs were eighteen inches long, capped on either end. Each bomb had been wired to a detonator and a short-range radio, and all the radios were fully charged.
I slung the strap over my shoulder. Murdo passed me a short-range radio that clipped to my belt, and I ran the wire up to my ear, where I put an earpiece with a microphone. It wouldn’t work while I was Cloaked, but if I needed to call for help, I could use it.
“Ready?” said Murdo.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Got your targets selected?” said Murdo.
“Any explosives in the truck,” I said, “and any explosives already there. Probably Vernon’s truck as well. Serves him right for working for the Rebels.”
“Guns?” said Murdo.
“Loaded and ready,” I said. “Both of them.”
Someone else might have found Murdo’s double-checking condescending, even insulting. I didn’t. Murdo had been in the Wizard’s Legion, the High Queen’s own elite military force, and the Legion insisted on high standards in all things. Granted, I did have much more experience of violence than Murdo did - I was nearly a hundred and eighty years old, though I didn’t look it. That said, nearly all that experience was fighting alone against the creatures of the Shadowlands and getting killed over and over. Murdo had more experience fighting as part of a team.
I had spent years fighting to take out my rage and madness on the creatures tormenting me. Murdo had spent his time in the Wizard’s Legion learning to win and survive.
I preferred his approach.
“I still don’t like sending you in alone,” said Murdo.
“I can Cloak and you can’t,” I said. “Also, I’m not alone. You’re with me.”
His black eyes met mine, and a weird tangle of emotion went through me.
Nope. Not the time to think about that.
“All right,” said Murdo. “I’ll be here. Good hunting.”
“See you soon,” I said. “You can buy me some coffee after I blow up on the Rebels’ weapons.”
With that, I stepped back and cast the Cloak spell.
I jogged past the abandoned weather station, reached the crest of the hill, and looked down into the valley.
And down, and down, and down.
The valley had initially been shallow and broad, but the copper mine had dug a giant tiered crater into it. It must have extended four hundred feet into the ground. If the desert hadn’t been so dry, it would have become a heck of a lake by now. I saw the gravel road leading to the mine, and the crumbling ruins of a few warehouses and an office building at the edge of the pit.
At the end of the road, I saw a makeshift Rebel base.
They had parked a construction trailer there for the use of the few Rebel soldiers who guarded this transport point. Past the trailer, I saw dozens of pallets of wooden crates. Vernon had parked his truck with the trailer facing the pit, and two forklifts worked in tandem, unloading the cargo.
I had to assume that all those crates held ammunition and weapons.
That was a lot of ammunition. Just what the hell was Nicholas planning to do?
I wish I knew.
Maybe I could find answers here.
I headed towards the construction trailer, and ha
lfway down the slope I ducked behind a boulder and dropped my Cloak spell. I wanted to take a few moments to recover my strength, and to check in with Murdo.
I tapped my earpiece. “Rory?”
“Here,” said Murdo. “I can see you. I’m next to the weather station with a sniper rifle and tripod. Looks like…forty-five pallets of weapons, ammunition, and explosives. The pallets with explosives are closer to the edge of the pit, and they have red hazard signs on the side.”
“I’ll focus on those,” I said. “I’m also going to visit that construction trailer. If they have any computers or hard drives, I want them.”
“Acknowledged,” said Murdo. His voice was calm and hard. I bet he had sounded that way when serving with the Wizard’s Legion. “I’ll keep an eye on things up here.”
“Cloaking again,” I said. I took a deep breath and cast the Cloak spell, and then jogged down the rocky slope to the trailer. Ahead of me the forklifts rumbled and beeped as they unloaded pallets of ammunition and weapons from Vernon’s truck. The remaining two Rebel soldiers kept watch, AK-47s in hand.
I walked to the front of the trailer and slipped through the door. It wasn’t locked, and the trailer’s interior didn’t smell good. Four cots lined the walls, and empty food wrappers and soda cans littered the floor. I wondered where the Rebels stationed here relieved themselves and decided I didn’t want to know. A cluttered workbench held tools for maintaining firearms, and a table against the wall contained a couple of notebooks and a laptop computer.
I glanced at the windows, but the shades were drawn, and the soldiers couldn’t see inside. I dropped my Cloak spell to conserve strength and walked to the laptop table. I checked the notebooks first. They contained records of deliveries, which could prove useful. The laptop was unlocked and unencrypted (idiots!) and connected to a scrambler that allowed at least a measure of anonymity on the Internet. I took both the laptop and the notebooks, shoving them into the satchel with the pipe bombs.
That made it heavier, but it wasn’t a problem.
The satchel was going to be lighter soon.
I checked under the desk and found a safe. A simple spell unlocked it, and I located the Rebels’ petty cash – several bundles of hundred-dollar bills, no doubt earmarked for bribing local officials and buying supplies. I helped myself to the money, tucking the bundles into the satchel. Waging covert war on the Rebels is expensive, and I financed my efforts with their own money whenever possible.
I Cloaked again and eased out the door. The unloading had finished, and Vernon and the four soldiers stood at the back of the truck smoking cigarettes. I jogged to the cab of Vernon’s truck and tucked the first bomb against one of the diesel tanks on the side. Once it was secure, I hurried around the back of the truck, passing within a few yards of Vernon and the Rebels as I did. With the Cloak spell, I could have walked up and shot each of them in the back of the head before they realized something was wrong.
So why didn’t I?
I could have killed them easily. So easily. The Cloak spell blocked radio waves, and I couldn’t cast other spells while Cloaked, but I could operate a firearm just fine. All I had to do was stroll up, shoot them each in the head, and that would be that. If I did it fast enough, they wouldn’t even realize what was happening. Even if I dropped my Cloak and challenged them openly, I would still probably win. I could cast spells of fire and lightning and ice and telekinetic force and kill them before they killed me. There was always the risk they might shoot me first, but if I was fast enough, that wouldn’t be a problem.
And it wasn’t as if I had never killed anyone. I had killed people in self-defense or the heat of battle. I had never killed anyone in cold blood, though I had come close.
I didn’t want to start.
It wasn’t that I was afraid to kill Vernon and his friends.
I was afraid I might not stop with them.
I know that wasn’t totally rational, but, well…try getting killed fifty-eight thousand times, and see how well you keep your sanity.
I was keeping myself together, but if I’m honest with myself, my sanity was held together by masking tape, glue, Murdo’s kindness, my hatred of the Rebels, and the fact that if I screwed up my brother Russell was going to die. I was so powerful now. If I started killing people, I might not stop. Arvalaeon had sent me to hell, and I had died again and again and again. Arvalaeon had sent me to hell, and it had broken me.
But I didn’t think it had turned me into a monster, and I didn’t want to become one.
It seemed to me that if I started killing lots of people, that would be a great way to turn into a monster.
Anyway, I didn’t need to kill them. The Inquisition would do that for me. If I killed them all and blew up their stuff, it would be a big mystery. Nicholas would wonder what had happened, but he would never find out, and he could hush it up with the rest of the Rebels’ rank-and-file. But if I blew up Vernon’s weapons and let him and the others live, they would escape to tell their tales of woe. Whatever horrible thing Nicholas was planning would be disrupted that much more, and the tale would spread to the rest of the Rebels.
Nicholas knew that I was screwing with him, and I knew that he knew. But he wouldn’t take action against me until he had completed the Forerunner’s deal with Morvilind and until I had stolen the final item Nicholas needed.
Once that happened, Nicholas Connor and I were going to have it out, and only one of us would walk away alive.
But until then, I was going to disrupt his efforts as best as I could.
And I admit that I enjoyed it. I knew what Nicholas and the Rebels were really like. I remembered all the civilians his men had killed in Madison, all the pregnant women who had died at the Ducal Mall in Milwaukee. When we had first met, Nicholas had almost bombed a soccer stadium in Los Angeles to get at Duke Wraithmyr, and tens of thousands of people would have died in the explosion.
That was what the Rebels really were. And whatever Nicholas was planning, whatever this Sky Hammer thing was, it was likely the same thing on a far larger scale.
Once Morvilind’s deal was done, I was going to stop Nicholas.
Until then, I would settle for hampering his efforts.
I strode towards a pallet holding cases of explosives, and I listened to Vernon and the Rebels talk as they smoked their cigarettes.
“When’s the next purchase coming?” said Vernon.
I tucked the second bomb into a pallet of explosives. A quick look revealed that the crates held rockets intended for shoulder-mounted launchers. I seemed to get rockets fired at me a lot, so it was only fair that I would blow these ones up.
“Hell if I know,” said the oldest of the four Rebel soldiers. I assumed he was in charge. The Rebels didn’t exactly have standardized uniforms, but he looked the oldest, and he had a sergeant’s patch sewn onto the chest of his jacket. “Nothing on the schedule.”
Vernon grunted. “But someone just wired thirty thousand dollars to the payment account. I saw it. Come on, Vogel. That will buy a lot of ammunition from our usual sources.”
Vogel shrugged as I slid a third bomb into place. “I don’t know. Lorenz doesn’t tell me anything.”
That caught my attention.
Lorenz? He probably meant Victor Lorenz, one of the Gatekeepers who could open the rift ways into the Shadowlands and Venomhold. Lorenz was a vain, preening former actor who had joined the Dark Ones cults and the Rebels after destroying his career by forcing his attention on his various female co-stars, some of whom had been underage at the time.
He was also smart and ruthless. Lorenz had figured out that I had been the one who had blown up his base in Wyoming, and I was certain he had also helped arrange the attempts on my life in Colorado and Washington DC earlier in the year. I didn’t want to kill anyone, but I thought I could make an exception for the Gatekeepers, who were the key to Nicholas’s plans. I could definitely make an exception for Lorenz, who would kill me in a second if he could find a way to do it that wou
ldn’t get him in trouble with Nicholas.
Oh, and another reason I didn’t mind killing the Gatekeepers? They were possessed by Dark Ones and used them to fuel their magic. And the only way a human could be voluntarily possessed by a Dark One was to offer up a sacrifice. In other words, an innocent human victim killed in a ritual murder.
Killing a Gatekeeper would be less of a murder and more of a just execution.
“Lorenz spends too much,” said Vernon. “The Overseer’s going to get on his ass.” That was the title the Rebels used for Nicholas.
Vogel snorted. “The Overseer knows what he’s doing. Besides, Lorenz isn’t the kind of ass that the Overseer prefers.” They shared a laugh. All the Rebels knew about Nicholas’s womanizing, with the possible exception of his current girlfriend, Hailey Adams.
I placed the remaining pipe bombs on the explosives.
“Suppose you’re right,” said Vernon. He flicked the stub of his cigarette away and lit another. I wanted to smack him. Smoking cigarettes around explosives was a terrible idea, and he hadn’t even bothered to grind out the previous one with his boot. “Better to stay out of the way if Lorenz and the Overseer are fighting.”
Nicholas and Lorenz had fallen out? Interesting. Though I doubt anyone would repeat accurate gossip to someone at Vernon’s level in the Rebel hierarchy.
“That’s smart,” said Vogel. “We just do our jobs and keep our heads down, and then when the Revolution comes, we’ll get our rewards. All the women we want. The Overseer will have to kill all the collaborators, but what about their women?” He grinned and dropped his spent cigarette. At least he was smart enough to grind it out. “We’ll have to make them into good daughters of the Revolution.”
Vernon laughed. “You just like the women at Venomhold when they're drugged up and chained up.”
Vogel shrugged. “Well, if they don’t want to become good daughters of the Revolution…carrots and sticks, you know?”
Yeah. The Rebels are charming sorts.
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