Broken Hero (2 page)

I often assume that to gain his magical aptitude, Clyde made some Faustian bargain that involved him giving up the ability to end sentences. Nothing in my experience working for MI37 has really made that seem unlikely.

“Oh piss off, Clyde,” says Ephie. Which is a touch uncalled for.

“Hey,” Tabitha and I both say at the same time.

Tabitha shoots me an annoyed look. Whether it’s because I stole her line or because I drew attention to her demonstrating mild compassion for another human being is difficult to say.

“You know,” says the bartender, possibly the biggest of all the men in the pub, “I don’t honestly give a fuck for your troubles. All I know is you have plenty, and I don’t want any of them in my pub. And you’ll all be leaving now, and not taking the girl with you, and then I’ll be calling the police on you all.”

I would have thought he would have been more intimidated by the sword. The folk north of the border seem to be made from pretty sturdy stuff.

That said, I have been in fights with people and things far scarier than the bartender. All of MI37 has. Hell, we’re in a verbal fight with one now. The problem is it’s harder to justify the violence when it’s a man trying to defend a small girl.

“Oh,” snaps Kayla, who I sense is not really taking the time to think through all the possible outcomes, “she’s perfectly feckin’ capable of taking care of her wee self if she feckin’ wants. Can’t help but tell me all the time, can she?” This last bit is spat back at Ephie.

Three of the men rumble off their stools.

“Jimmy there told you to get out,” says the one on the left. “I suggest you do as you’re told.”

I think it is the politest invitation to a beating I’ve ever received.

“Look,” I say, as this is becoming what could be categorized as a field expedition, and my role at MI37 is to be in charge of those, “I think there’s a lot of misunderstandings going on here.” The men look doubtful. I can’t really blame them. “Kayla is clearly not going to stab her
daughter
.” I put emphasis on the last word, hoping it will help bring a certain level of sanity to the discussion.

“I feckin’ am.”

Kayla and I are not really on the same page at all, I think.

“That fucking does it,” says a fourth man at the end of the bar. He heaves himself to his feet. “I’m going to knock some heads.”

Oh crap.

“That really isn’t necessary,” Felicity starts.

And then the man throws his glass at her.

And then a lot of things happen at once.

Felicity darts to the side, stabs out with a flat palm, and sends the glass spinning away through the air to smash against a framed vintage print of several racehorses.

Kayla becomes something of a blur and slams into the glass thrower. She’s a short woman, with a lean narrow frame largely hidden in the billowing folds of a red flannel shirt, a few shades off her hair. She comes up to the glass thrower’s nipples. The palm she throws up under his chin lifts him off the floor and sends him flying backwards over the bar.

Tabitha sweeps her laptop off the table and starts to shove it into a waterproof bag. Priorities and all.

Clyde pulls two AA batteries from his pocket. It’s the whole magic thing. When Clyde violates reality he does it by pulling something out of another parallel reality. To reach between realities he needs electricity. Apparently it acts as some sort of inter-reality lubricant. Without electricity there is inter-reality friction, which tends to result in the person reaching into realities being transfigured into a detonating pile of organic matter.

I go for shouting. “Stop!” seems like a good place to start.

We are, for better or worse, considerably more lethal than we look. And, as the evidence clearly states right now, we are not good at restraint. The last bloody thing I need is for us to accidentally murder a good Samaritan. Well, a Samaritan. I’m not so sure about the good thing. One of them did just try to bottle my girlfriend.

Anyway, that’s around the time when one of the men gets across the room and lands his fist in my stomach.

I sit down with an “Ooph,” try to inhale, fail, and for good measure, stab my heels into the man’s knee caps.

While he sits down hard, I get my breath back long enough to clamber to my feet.

Kayla has the bartender’s hair clenched in her fist and is repeatedly bouncing his head off the bar. Felicity is tracing an invisible circle with a man who looks like he’s carrying twice her weight, mostly across the shoulders and chest. I don’t feel good for his odds.

Tabitha, however, is in a headlock. Her assailant is attempting to drag her to the door. Clyde is starting to mutter the nonsense gibberish that will help him shape his thoughts so he can punch into the correct reality to pull out a six-pack of whoopass.

“No!” I snap at him, with as much breath as I can get into my body. “We are not doing this. We are a government department. We are paid for by taxpayers like this. We do not savage them with spells!”

“What Arthur said,” Felicity snaps as the man opposite her stops circling and lunges. She side-steps his charge neatly, and does something complicated looking with her body that results in him plowing headfirst into the floor. “Except that guy,” I hear her mutter.

She is not the only one subvocalizing. I can see Clyde still working his jaw. Tabitha is still in a headlock. “He’s not going to hurt her, Clyde.”

“Well,” says a thick Scottish voice from behind me. “I’m certainly going to fuck you up.”

Ah. The man whose knee caps I savaged has recovered. I was rather hoping he wouldn’t. He grabs my shirt with a meaty fist, cocks the other.

Without warning, a massive crash reverberates throughout the pub.

The fist that is about to beat the literal snot out of me hesitates. Despite the imminent danger of my situation I twist around as best as I am able, trying to determine who was responsible. Was it Ephie? I have rather lost track of her in the fight. I still can’t see her.

I look for Clyde. Did he unleash his spell, send someone spinning across the floor? But there is Tabitha still with her head locked between torso and elbow. But she’s not moving either.

Another crash. The walls visibly vibrate. Dust erupts from between the floorboards in narrow plumes. Several pictures fall from the walls. A pint glass tumbles from a table edge, shatters.

Kayla is holding onto the bartender’s rather bloody head. She shrugs at me, then smacks him into the bar again. He groans, but the thud is nowhere near the gravity of whatever just shook the pub.

Still clenched in my attacker’s large fist, I reach out a hand toward her. “Stop th—” I start.

I don’t finish.

The floor of the bar erupts. A monumental explosion of wood and cement and steel. Pipes and wires, unmoored, slam around the room. I am thrown from my attacker’s grasp, over a table, crash backwards, as
something
emerges.

At first I can’t really make it out. My vision is shaky, and I’m half upside down, and whatever is at the explosion’s heart is obscured by billowing dust and dirt. One of the men from the bar is yelling, deep baritone bellows of fear. A bare wire is snapping and crackling across the floor. I can hear water gushing out of a pipe, down into the basement.

And there, beneath that, another sound. Something mechanical. An irregular ticking, a grinding like rusty metal on rusty metal. An angry whir. It makes me think of a thousand grandfather clocks all quietly breaking down at the same time.

And then the dust clears.

The man bellowing stops so short, it’s like his legs have been taken off at the knees.

It is massive, hulking, vaguely humanoid but hewn in shades of copper and bronze. Vast curving sheets of metal define its hunched shoulders, its barrel-thick arms. Fists the size of arm chairs but with little of the implied comfort, press dented steel fingers into the floor. Its chest is a massive mesh of exposed gears, all twitching and whirling.

It stands. The gears scream. A piercing metallic cry for help. Perched between the massive shoulders, a vaguely insectile head swings back and forth. It is all round glassy eyes and broad chattering mouth. Key-like teeth piston up and down and it emits an odd string of harsh syllables. “
Da va ga sca, shna, gick.
”

It shudders, then with abrupt and terrifying speed slams its fist into a wall that looks like it probably enjoys the responsibility of some important weight-bearing duties. Bricks turn to dust.

“
Da sha va!
” it howls.

The man starts bellowing in terror again, twice as loud and twice as fast, whimpering hyperventilations making an odd backbeat.

And you know how you can be fairly certain that the agency retreat has gone awry? When the giant mechanical robot smashes through the floor and starts to destroy everything in sight. That is exactly when.

All in all, it seems to me like a good moment to be upright. I heave myself back over the table, find my feet. I even go the whole hog and pull my gun.

The man who was, moments ago, considering a little light reconstructive surgery to my face via the medium of his fist, backs into me hard.

“Would you mind?” I ask.

He spins, fists up, sees the gun, and decides to cower instead.

“Thanks,” I say.

Then I start shooting.

I’m not even the first one to that party. Felicity has assumed a shooter’s stance, feet squared, gun held out in front of her in both hands. She empties a magazine into the mechanical robot’s churning guts. Things ping and whine, metal screams.

I have a worse angle. My shots smash against its massive shoulder, denting metal. They achieve little else.

“
Ma da ga ma!
” the robot yells, and it starts to move.

Its first step leaves a crater in the floor. The second almost punches a new hole into the basement. By the third it’s starting to accelerate beyond human speeds.

It’s heading for Felicity.

She flings herself aside, rolls over the shrapnel-laden floor, ripping her suit, hair whipping around her face. The robot’s massive foot plows into the floor inches from her, then she is gone from its path. It crashes into a wall, sends plasterboard spraying across the room.

“
Damak ma shnek!
” it bellows as it turns.

“Clyde!” is my response.

Magic is a subtle and nuanced tool. With near infinite realities to reach into, magicians have a near infinite array of tools with which they can carefully manipulate the situation to their advantage. Typically Clyde goes for something that resembles hitting things with a large invisible hammer.

“
Meshrat al kaltak
,” Clyde gibbers as nonsensically as the robot. Then he flings his arms forward. One of the robot’s vast, round shoulders abruptly becomes its vast, crumpled, and vaguely rectangular shoulder.

Technically, I believe, Clyde is summoning the kinetic energy from a reality where a lot of things are traveling very fast all the time, but it still definitely looks like he’s hitting things with a large invisible hammer.

“
Da ga ba!
” the robot howls and starts to accelerate again. The arm below its injured shoulder hangs limp. The other one whirls around in perfect circles, for all the world like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Assuming, of course, that the toddler in question is ten feet tall and made of metal.

I keep firing. My bullets keep cracking off the metal plates down the robot’s flanks. The ricochets are barely audible over the destruction wrought by its titanic footsteps.

Kayla flings herself over the pub’s bar, slides across the floor toward the robot’s wildly flying legs. She ducks smoothly beneath its dangling arm. Her sword lances out, smashes into a seam between two metal plates on its leg. She leaps, heaves on the sword. The blade bends violently. Then with an enormous crack, two rivets fly across the room like bullets. They smash through the bar, shred bottles, embed themselves in the wall. A metal plate catapults out from the leg at a forty-five degree angle to the rivets. It skims past the nose of one of the men from the bar, embeds itself in the ceiling with a concussive blast of plaster dust.

Kayla flies free, curled up on herself, an angry Scottish pinball. She smashes into a wall, but somehow has her feet beneath her, even if beneath her is at a distinct right angle to its usual position. Her legs bunch, and she springs back into the fray, executing another perfect tumble in midair, landing with a grace that would make Olympic gymnasts proud.

For all this finesse, the robot continues to blunder on in much the same way a steam roller would if someone hit it with a pea shooter. Another important-looking column is turned to matchsticks. Men dive left and right. The robot buries itself into a second wall with a scream of “
Shna ka vich!
”

I pivot around, try to angle a shot at the exposed mechanics of its foot. I find myself abruptly shoulder to shoulder with Felicity. Our guns point out in parallel.

“I’m going to go with: what the fuck?” I tell her.

She shrugs and lets off five shots in rapid succession. They ping off the metal plating.

“No clue,” she says. “Shoot first. Questions later.”

As much as that is the tactic of movie villains since 1945, it does seem like sound advice. I keep firing while the robot extracts its head from the wall and shakes it free of debris. Above it the ceiling creaks ominously. I do a quick tally of beams and internal walls.

“We’ve got to get it outside!” I shout.

“Yeah,” Kayla says. She’s holding her sword like a javelin. “You feckin’ do that.”

She launches her sword. It sails across the room, a steel lightning bolt, smashes into the mechanics she exposed in the robot’s leg.

The robot goes to take a step. There is a hideous grinding sound. It strains. And then the sword flies free with a burst of bronze cogs, tumbling end over end, until it too is buried in the bar. It lands about an inch from the head of the dazed bartender.

“We’ve got to clear the civilians!” That thought probably should have occurred to me before one of them was almost forced into doing a unicorn impression.