Hard Magic (26 page)

Jimmy stretched out his hand as Matt Sullivan crawled the last few feet toward them. Matt’s right eye was nothing but a globe of blood. He grabbed his dying brother’s hand. “I’m here, Jimmy,” Matt gasped. “I got you.”

Jimmy had been the simple one, the good one. “We’re gonna be okay . . . okay . . . Brothers are here. Nothing hurts us when we stick together. Right, Jakey? Right, Madi?
Sullivans stick together
. . . .” Then he was dead.

“Your brother, Matthew, serves me now,” the Chairman said, walking between the deadly shrapnel to kneel beside Sullivan’s only surviving blood. “He relived this same moment with me as well, and he came to understand how our race has been mistreated. I showed him the way of the strong. Under my tutelage, he has been born again, stronger than you can imagine, a champion of righteousness. Never again will he allow the weak to soil
our
world. He has become one of my finest Iron Guard. He has taken the name Madi in honor of the fallen.”

Sullivan began to cry.

“Serve me and I will help the Grimnoir’s feeble magic successfully link to the Power. You will soon join one brother or the other. Your decision.”

The battlefield was frozen in time. In real life he’d gotten up from this trench, thrown Matty over his shoulder and carried him back to the lines. Then he’d gone back out and ended so many lives that he lost track. Fueled by rage, he’d reached parts of the Power that other Actives only dreamed of. He’d broken the wall between Powers, and had gone beyond being just a Heavy. In a fever driven by blood and hate, he’d killed and killed until he began to not just feel the Power, but to actually
see
it, until he could reach out and take it for himself.

Sullivan looked up through the land of the dead ones’ dreams, and saw the Power itself, a great glowing world that filled the center of the real world. It was divided into sections, each one a geometric shape, all of them linked together into a seamless whole. He could tell that the spell markings he’d seen were just representations of those geometric shapes.

“You can see it . . .” the Chairman said, following Sullivan’s gaze upward from the battlefield. “Fascinating. It has been so very long . . . I thought that I alone could behold its beauty.”

There was a faint line leading from the center of his chest where his own Power connected to the great mass above. It linked directly to one point of a shape that Sullivan understood was where the Power interacted with the laws of gravitation. He followed the shape to other sections—mass, density, velocity—until they formed one tip of a triangle. He rose from the mud, coated in his brother’s blood, and
knew
.

Thousands of other glowing connections linked the Somme to the magic above, each line attaching a different Active to a different geometric area of the Power, until the thing draped down over the real world like a cloud of Spanish moss made of pure crackling energy. Sullivan could see the triangle he’d been born linked to. His line led to the gravity point. The next point pertained to the realms of electromagnetism, while the final point represented nuclear forces far beyond his comprehension.

There were other shapes inside the triangles, hundreds of them, each tied inexorably to the fabric of reality, all of them working together in a tight seamless mass. An artist’s interpretation of all the laws of the universe, only this art wasn’t imitating life, it was influencing it.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” the Chairman asked softly, standing at his side.

Sullivan’s link was stronger, brighter, than almost all of the others at the Somme, and it was then that he realized that it wasn’t a one-way street. Energy wasn’t just coming down from the Power. It was also rising up in great clouds from the Actives that died. As they lived, exercising its energy, the energy grew, and when they died, a greater sum returned to its source. More links descended to the world, touching others, creating more Actives, increasing the cycle.

It’s eating. That’s how it grows . . .

“It’s alive, ain’t it?”

The Chairman nodded. “Yes. It came here from somewhere
else
.” He saw that the Chairman’s link was the brightest of all, and it played about, choosing between several of the geometric patterns as he saw fit. “I was the very first it chose,” he said wistfully. “It learned about humanity through me.”

“Why’s it here?”

The Chairman smiled and held out his hand. “Follow me and I will show you, my child. It wants us to cleanse the world and make it pure.”

Sullivan returned to the Power and knew that the Chairman lied. The Power wasn’t good or evil. It wasn’t God or Satan. It was a symbiotic parasite. It lived through them, and in return, they got magic. “You don’t get it,” he said. “You actually believe what you’re shovelin’.” Sullivan laughed in the face of the most powerful wizard in the world. “It doesn’t want anything, you idiot. You
moron
. You’ve killed millions . . . for this?”

Then pain beyond anything he’d ever experienced tore through his ribs. He crashed into the mud next to his dead brother. A circle of fire ignited on his chest. This link was different, wrong, somehow misdirected, not to the Power, but to something else entirely, beyond what he could see. The Grimnoir trying to save his life had just failed.

“I am afraid you have died,” the Chairman said sadly.

***

“Heart’s stopped,” Jane said. She put her gentle hand on the big man’s brow. Her white bathing suit was stained with blood. Lance had blood up to his elbows. He and Browning were doing something to the big man’s chest.

“It ain’t working!” Lance shouted. “The healing ain’t taking.”

Faye was lying on her back, too weak to move. “I’m sorry . . . I thought he was—”

“Shut up, Imperium bitch!” the man with glasses shouted, pointing a gun at her face. “We’ll deal with you in a second.”

Her first instinct was to Travel, but something was burning on her forehead, and the magic inside her was all strange and fuzzy. Francis was looking down at her. “I’m sorry . . .” she whispered. “I was trying to help.”

“Hush,” he said. His eyes were sad.

She wished she could help. This was all her fault. It wasn’t Madi at all, though the big man looked
exactly
like him. Faye closed her eyes. If only she had a useful Power, like Jane, she could do something, or if she were smart like Lance or Mr. Browning. Instead all she could do was Travel. She’d never thought of it as a stupid thing before, but it was.

She hadn’t prayed since Grandpa had died.
Please, God. Don’t let this man die because of me. I’m so sorry. It was a mistake. I was only trying to save my friends.
She concentrated as hard as she could, just like she was about to Travel and she needed to check to make sure the space was clear so she didn’t get killed by a bug lodged in her brain or something. Her mind spun, went ahead, and she saw the dead man and all her friends from above, but it wasn’t clear. Something was wrong. Something angry and red was stuck to the man’s chest, a bad piece of magic.

Faye knew that she had to knock that bad magic out of the way so the good magic could work. She couldn’t Travel with her whole body, but she could use her brain.

Sure, God. I figure I can do that. Thanks! Amen.

***

Sullivan was fading away, turning into smoke on the wind exactly how the Summoned died on Earth. The red link was tearing him apart. It came from behind the Power . . . from whatever mysterious place the Power had fled from.

“You should have come with me,” the Chairman said as he leaned on the side of the trench. The mud didn’t get on his suit. “Think of what we could have learned together—” He stopped, puzzled, as a brilliant light erupted through the mud at Sullivan’s side. “Remarkable.”

It was the purest link to the Power that he’d seen yet. While the Chairman’s was bigger and broader, this one was just simple, and shot in a beam as straight as a Tesla cannon. It actually had an audible hum like a high voltage wire.

Excuse me, mister. Sorry about shooting you and stuff.
Then the failed design on Sullivan’s chest quit burning. The red link was severed. He gasped as his senses returned.
I hope that helps.

The Chairman was nodding in appreciation at the display of raw strength. “This has been a most interesting day. Unfortunately your body is already dead.”

Come back with me, mister, please. Everybody is gonna be real mad if I murder you too. Follow me home, please.

Sullivan scanned the Power. Time was short. There was his area of expertise, his triangle of gravitation. If he could follow that link, he could follow others. He reached out with his mind, searching the dreaming dead of the battlefield. The Menders he’d carried Matty back to had been . . .
there
. Finding that clump of lines, he followed it up to a second shape. Their odd triangle connected primarily to laws concerning biology and two other unknown sides, and the Healers landed near the middle. The two triangles superimposed into a sort of hexagram and he memorized the shape.

He found that purest line of Power and grabbed hold.

“See you ’round, Chairman,” Sullivan said.

“Farewell, Mr. Sullivan. I have enjoyed our most enlightening conversation. When we meet again, I will destroy you.”

***

“He’s gone,” Jane pronounced.

Browning slowly sank to the ground. The old man was totally spent from the effort. “We did our best . . .”

Lance stood up with a pained grunt. He was covered in blood. “Wasn’t good enough. How! How can those Imperium bastards do this and not us!”

Faye closed her eyes. She knew that she’d been able to touch the big man with her brain, but she didn’t know if he’d been able to follow her home. She hoped he had, because being a ghost here was sure to be a lot nicer than in that scary place with the mud and bodies and barbed wire, and the big glowing jellyfish thing in the sky. She knew what jellyfish looked like because Grandpa had once shown her a picture of one because it was called the Portuguese man-of-war, and he’d thought that any animal named after the Portuguese had to be pretty neat. That scary place was probably hell, and that’s where she was going because she had just murdered somebody, so she had probably better get used to that big jellyfish because she was going to spend the rest of eternity there.

Delilah was crying her eyes out. This had to be the man she’d said she’d been close to. That made Faye feel extra sad, because she didn’t think Delilah had ever had very many people who loved her.

The man who’d shot her came over, grabbed her roughly by the arm, and jerked her violently to her feet. He stuck his pistol hard into her face. “Start talking, Shadow Guard.” He was hurting her arm bad, but she knew she deserved it. Francis rose and grabbed the man with the goatee, but he just turned around and punched Francis right in the nose. Francis fell down, holding his face.

“It was an accident,” Faye pleaded.

“What were you thinking, John?” the man with glasses was shouting. “Why’d you save her instead of him? Jane . . . How . . . How could you?”

“I did what I had to . . .” the blonde stammered, then looked down at the big man’s body, puzzled. “Wait.”

“No, you wait, damn it—” the bespectacled man stopped and took a few steps back. The big man sat up and looked around, confused. Delilah shrieked. “Great, you turned him into a zombie!”

“Hang on . . .” the big man grunted, looking down at the bloody mess on his chest. He held out his hand. “Knife.” Lance hesitated. “Please.”

Lance hurried over and gave him the knife. The big man studied the mangled gashes for a second then cut a new line. He thought about it for a second, then made one more adjustment, grimacing in pain the entire time as he cut. He studied his work and nodded. “There . . . that’s better.” Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the ground like a sack of wet grain.

Chapter 13

I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, by magical gift a Cog, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.

—Albert Einstein,

Letter to Alfred Knesser,
1919

Detroit, Michigan

The United Blimp
& Freight Michigan facility was the size of a small town, and it did actually have a company town in it. UBF provided housing to its workers, and despite that, communist agitators had still managed to get them to strike the previous summer. Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant could not understand the sheer ingratitude, but then again, he wasn’t in debt up to his eyeballs to the UBF company store. That was his workers’ fault for being greedy. Debt was a tax on the stupid.

His arrival had surprised the management, but they had learned over the years that he liked to drop in on his properties unannounced. He could tell from his manager’s reactions that this visit was slightly off-putting. It was probably because he couldn’t stop
itching
.

Ever since the Pale Horse had touched him, he’d felt an unbearable creeping sensation. Spending a fortune in the process, he’d exhausted five Healers, and still he was certain that he was ill. He’d banished his mistresses, afraid that he might catch something terrible from them, since his immune system was in such a weakened state. He had taken to wearing an antiseptic scarf, and had made all twelve of his new security men do the same. The only reason he’d ventured out from the safety of his private floors atop the Chrysler Building was to fulfill the damnable Pale Horse’s mission.

The Cog engineer in charge of this project was the only other person in the drafting room when Cornelius unfolded the new blueprints. He’d made the Cog wear a face mask as well. “You can see the necessary changes here,” he said, stabbing his fat finger into the diagram. “This is your number one priority. You will do this with the fewest possible employees, in the utmost secrecy. Make sure they are hand-picked men. Hand-picked!”