Rogue (27 page)

He can receive, but he doesn't know where it's coming from.

I will now politely endeavor to avoid making fun of our muscle-bound friend and change the subject.

Very decent of you.

Anyway, I just sent my mind…which is interesting, because since I'm also able to simultaneously still be present here while conversing with you, I believe this puts me well on the way to another arcane ability often referred to as “bilocation.” More on that later.

Will glanced back and noticed that Elise was staring at the two of them. She appeared to be sensing their conversation, if not actually able to hear it.

As I was saying, I just sent my mind's eye ahead along the wall and unless I'm very much mistaken—unlikely—there is a second entrance less than half a mile ahead on our left. It's nowhere near as grand as the one we just saw out front, which I think we can safely characterize as largely for show, but it is almost as tall and wide as the other and it appears to be fully functional.

Why didn't you say so in the first place?

Forgive me, you're absolutely right. I should have mentioned that straightaway.

Show me where,
Will said.

He kicked up into a canter and Jericho kept pace right beside him, with Nick and Elise right behind. Thinking he'd see it when they arrived, Will was surprised when a series of images appeared in his mind as they rode.

He realized that Ajay was “uploading” a mind's-eye survey of what he'd seen.

And when, five minutes later, they arrived at a particular spot along the bluff where Will knew to stop, having seen the images already, he looked down at exactly the location Ajay had just shown him.

The drop from the bluff to the wall was much shorter here because the ground had risen gradually as they traveled along the wall toward the mountains. No more than thirty feet down, while the wall here was no more than fifty yards from the base of the bluff, where a well-traveled road paralleled the wall.

The passageway, double hinged gates, was neither as tall nor as wide as the one they'd seen in the front, and the road led straight inside.

It was also wide open.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #15:

AN OPEN DOOR IS EITHER A GREETING OR A TRAP. BEST TO DECIDE WHICH BEFORE YOU ENTER.

Elise ordered the horses to stand back in a group and keep quiet. The five of them crept forward on foot to the edge of the bluff and looked down at the gates. The road that entered between them immediately reached an intersection where it branched off to the left. It also continued straight up the rise, where they were stationed, and branched off to the north along the wall, toward the mountains. As they watched, a small train of wagons rolled into view from the north side and passed between the gates into the Citadel. They appeared to be fully loaded with black rocks or coal.

“Raw materials,” whispered Jericho. “From the mountains.”

“They must have some mines up there,” said Will.

“So this must be the service entrance,” said Ajay. “I would hazard a guess that the construction project we saw in the photos must be nearby.”

The wagons were driven by beaten-down-looking subhuman figures in ragged clothes, and they were waved inside by a platoon of guards at the gates geared up in the same black armor they'd taken off the soldiers at the bridge garrison.

“Dudes, this is like a gift,” said Nick, cracking his knuckles.

“Let's do this,” said Will.

“Time to bang some heads,” said Nick, and then turned a somersault toward his horse, where he pulled out a spiked mace from his saddlebag.

“Or if you'd prefer to take a more rational approach and put Plan B into action,” said Ajay, “under these more manageable circumstances I'm quite willing to volunteer my services.”

“That's the spirit,” said Jericho, patting him on the back.

“On foot or horseback?” asked Elise.

“Horseback,” said Will.

Elise turned to the horses, and they immediately trotted forward. Moments later they were mounted up and slowly making their way down the hill to the gates. Looking ahead, Will saw the first two guards outside notice their approach and call to their superior, a larger grunt who came out of a kiosk on the inside of the wall.

“How would you say the dudes in the armor are different from the freaks camped out back there in front of the gates?” asked Nick.

“They're probably bred for more intelligence and discipline,” said Ajay. “Military prototypes.”

“Then I say we ride in hard like we belong there and ignore these bozos,” said Nick.

“No, they might outrank us,” said Will. “We need to talk to them.”

“But we don't talk monster,” said Nick.

“We'll handle it,” said Will; then he turned to Elise and Ajay. “I'll take the big one; you distract the others.”

Once they reached level ground, Will led them forward at a trot over the final stretch to the Citadel. By then the sergeant had closed ranks with four other grunts, barring their passage, and he raised a hand to stop them before the gates.

Will raised his hand in greeting and sent words right into the sergeant's mind:

There's no need to stop this party. They're the ones we've been waiting for, the important ones we're supposed to let right through.

The sergeant's eye had immediately gone to Ajay on the back of Jericho's horse, but when Will's message hit him, his brain locked up before he could even ask his first question.

Ajay and Elise looked at each other, nodded, then looked at the guards. Two of the grunts behind the sergeant turned immediately and went for each other's throats. The other two grunts jumped into the fight, while the sergeant tried to break it up. Will was about to ride past, when a crowd of soldiers ran out from a barracks toward the melee.

I'll handle them,
Ajay sent to Will.

Ajay pointed a finger at the leader of the second group; he stopped immediately and broke into a strange dance; then the one next to him started dancing along right next to him.

Do you recognize it?
Ajay asked Will.

Three other guards started performing exactly the same strange, convoluted, synchronized dance steps, and it spread until twenty of them were moving along, when Will realized:

Thriller?

Correct!

“Welcome to Soul Train,” said Jericho.

Suppressing a laugh, Will snapped the reins and calmly led their party through the gates. Between the free-for-all and the bizarre dance number taking place around him, the sergeant never even gave them a second glance.

They turned a corner past the cluster of soldiers into the Citadel. The grounds were muddy and cluttered here, piled high with stacks of supplies, barrels, crates, and various building materials on pallets.

Workers from the wagons they'd seen enter minutes earlier were unloading their cargo of rocks into the maw of a gigantic iron-plated machine that vibrated violently, some kind of pulverizer by the look and sound of it. A steady stream of coal and dust passed out the other end of the machine on a rickety conveyor belt, depositing the end product onto a mountainous pile. From there, a crowd of minions, dusted almost a solid black, shoveled the coal into smaller carts on tracks that then rolled off somewhere deeper inside the complex.

Like the soldiers they'd seen, these workers appeared to be subhuman hybrids, some kind of rudimentary humanoid stock crossed with various beasts of burden and possessing qualities of both. They were apparently bred for strength and stamina, for their misshapen faces looked blank and their eyes cold and vacant. Whatever intelligence they might have once possessed had been bred out of them. As he watched them scurrying fearfully around, Will felt a surge of horror and pity—a slave labor force, in seemingly endless supply, created in some foul factory, treated like animals. There was no reason to treat them in any decent or humane way. If one broke down, you just made another one.

He glanced over at Elise and Ajay. When they looked back, he knew they were thinking the same thing:

They're not all that different from us,
she sent.

No,
sent Ajay.
They were just designed for more menial work.

What were
we
made for, then?
asked Elise.

As they moved along, sounds of heavy construction filtered toward them: the bang of hammers, rhythmic earth-shaking stomps, and the screech of grinding gears. Will signaled the others forward and they followed the tracks of the coal carts deeper into the Citadel, past storage yards and huge stone, glass, and ironworks. Through the partially open doors of a tall building they saw the red-hot glow of a foundry. Inside it was an immense cauldron filled with molten iron that ran out of a chute. Will looked up and saw choking black smoke billow out of one of those mammoth chimneys they'd seen in the photos. It burned his eyes, and gritty particulate matter cascading through the air choked his lungs.

No one else wearing the black armor seemed to be in this area, and not one of the legions of workers paid them the slightest attention. They rode past the foundry, around the corner of a line of huge sheds, and as the clouds of smoke thinned out, the area opened up in front of them, a vast stretch of empty, desolate space that Will also recognized from one of the photos. They dismounted, Elise instructed the horses to wait for them, and they crept around the corner, hiding behind a pile of supplies to take a closer look.

This was the active construction site they'd spotted, large patches of dirt around it tainted by the black smoking soil that Will had reacted to in the photograph. In the center of that spread of despoiled ground, about a half mile in the distance, hundreds of workers swarmed around a gigantic slab of rock or concrete that appeared to be roughly the size of a football field. Rising from the slab was the central object they'd seen in the photo, which had been impossible to identify from the overhead angle of the drone. But they could see it now.

Two huge and graceful arcs, like crescent moons, rose from two solid, rectangular chunks of hard metal to which they were attached or embedded. Will guessed that the arcs stood at least as tall as a ten-story building. They appeared to be fashioned from the same smooth black adamantine material as the Citadel walls. The arcs were facing each other. Their bases were already connected together, forming the bottom of a circle, and the tops of the arcs were within a few feet of touching each other.

Both arcs were completely contained within a network of scaffolding that was filled by a milling workforce attending to various tasks on them. Most of the effort seemed to be concentrated near the very top, where materials were being continually raised up on long platforms by block and tackle pulley systems. They saw sparks falling and flashes of light from up near where the points of the arcs were about to converge.

As they watched, one of the workers tumbled off the highest scaffold and hit the concrete pad below with a sickening thud. Not one of the other workers around it paid the slightest attention, walking right past the body where it landed and lay motionless.

“Geez Louise,” said Nick.

“So much for a worker's comp claim,” said Jericho.

“What is that thing?” asked Elise plainly. “What are they building?”

“It's so obvious. I know exactly what this is,” said Nick, squinting at it. “They're building a huge honking big gargantuan…circle.”

“It's a lot more than just a circle,” said Ajay, staring at it intently.

Will noticed another workstation off the right of the concrete slab, under a bank of bright lights. There were a couple of large tents in the area, and inside one of them a group of workers huddled around a large hunk of round metallic housing, attending to some kind of finer, more precise work.

“They're building a Carver,” said Will.

“I believe you're quite right, Will,” said Ajay.

“That's ridonkulous,” said Nick. “You said you had the only one.”

“I said I had the only one that we knew about.”

“And you also said that Franklin told you that was the only one.”

“Franklin probably doesn't know about this one,” said Elise.

“But they…they can't hold that one in their hand, so how does…” Nick was staring up at the arcs, dismayed. “How could they build one that…? How could they…?”

“It's quite a simple plan, Nick. First they built an army,” said Ajay, gesturing back toward the valley. “Now they're building its delivery system.”

“But how is this thing supposed to work?” asked Nick.

“Look closely at both sides and you'll notice they're installing a metallic track around the inside edge of the circle,” said Ajay, pointing to the arc.

“Yeah?” said Nick.

Will looked closer and noticed the metal tracks for the first time. Then Ajay pointed toward the workers inside the tents.

“Over here they're assembling a sophisticated motorized unit designed to revolve or ride around that track. I believe that within it will be contained the same cutting or carving element yours possesses, and as it travels around the circumference of the circle, it will carve the portal.”

“And open the gates of hell,” said Will softly.

“And hundreds of thousands of these things show up without warning,” said Elise. “All over the planet.”

“Blitzkrieg,” said Jericho. “Surprise attack.”

“Hold on, this bunch of skeevy creepos versus the full might of the U.S. military? Sorry, I'm just not that freaked out about it.”

“They don't have only brute force on their side,” said Will. “As we've seen, they can go stealth mode, and we're not just talking about our country; the attack could be worldwide. There's a whole lot of damage they could do.”

“Destroy communications, take down power grids,” said Ajay. “They would undoubtedly go after leadership targets. Influence and control their minds from a distance. The result could be total chaos.”

“So you're saying like a battalion of invisible armed yetis could show up on the White House lawn,” said Nick, thinking it through. “I guess that wouldn't be good.”