The Conclave of Shadow (18 page)

Asha crouched behind the knight beside a toppled stack of crates. One of them had burst open, and a fortune in Argent's purified titanium bars rolled across the floor. She was digging in her bag, or possibly shoving the titanium into it. The knight didn't give me much time to worry about what she was up to. It picked its way towards me, off-balance thanks to a network of wrist-thick cables that ran from the generators at the far end of the room, past me, and out the open door. I could hear screams and howls from outside – the Lady's army?

The knight cleared the cables and charged me again. I dodged under its arms. So, big and armored, but not that bright.

A second knight rose up from behind the crates, blindsiding me with a running tackle. We rolled across the floor of the warehouse. I came out on the bottom, thick cable crossing under my back. The knight pressed down. I could barely catch my breath much less find any leverage to flip him off.

“Asha!” I dug my fingers into the crack between two of the plates. Impossible. If there was a weakness there, I wasn't going to find it before I was crushed to unconsciousness. “A-sha!”

A boot connected just below the plate I was scraping at. Not mine. The knight grunted and sagged to one side. Asha hopped over my legs, raising something black and gun-like. Light flashed strobe-fast with a frenetic ticking sound like a Tesla coil on speed. She shoved her hand against the shoulder of the reeling knight, and he went into convulsions.

Before I could reassess who was on whose side, the first knight roared and launched himself at Asha's back. I tangled his limbs with my legs, tripping him before he could reach her. The carapace covering him didn't offer much in the way of weakness, so I improvised. I snatched up the cable digging a groove into my back and flung a loop of it around his head. Glomming onto his back like an Atreides riding a sandworm, I dug my heels into his shoulder blades and pulled for all I was worth. My palms burned from the scrape of textured metal weave against my skin. I only loosed my hold when the knight flagged and fell to the floor next to his still-twitching friend.

I stumbled off him, wiping my burning palms on my trousers. Asha shook her taser, clicked the trigger a few times. It failed to emit even a faint tic-tic. She grimaced and tossed it aside. The clatter of plastic on cement echoed loudly in the cavernous room. “This place. Sucks power worse than a smartphone app hogging the GPS. Which makes me wonder,” she tapped one of the grey-cased generators. “What sort of juice is powering these lovelies?” She glanced over at the knights. “We should dispose of them.”

I backed up a few steps, nearly tripping over one of the cables. “I don't think–”

Asha huffed and drew a black-bladed combat knife from a back sheath, plunging it beneath the neck armor of both knights with surgical precision. She wiped the blade on her own thigh when the knights dissipated into pools of shadow. “We really don't have time for squeamishness,” she muttered and headed for a door half-hidden by the grey-cased machinery.

Right. Right. I tried to rationalize that they weren't people. They were shaped by the Conclave, possibly from remnants of the Voidlands. Probably using the same energy coursing through those generators and cables. Even so, I stepped around the spot where the knights had fallen. “I thought for a moment that you were going to–”

“Betray you? I know.” Asha laid a hand flat on the steel door, tapping her fingers over the metal and along the seam of the doorway, up to an electronic keypad. “Don't worry. I'm used to it.”

I pulled the shadows back around my face, using that to recover my equilibrium. “Even so, I apologize.”

“The amount of this purified titanium Argent is going to be giving me in payment, I can put up with a bit of suspicion.” She tapped the keypad. “The door, the generators. All of this is real. None of it is created from shadow. They brought it here from the real world.”

I studied the door, the generators and cables. “Perhaps it's part of the technology they've been stealing from Argent's facilities?”

Asha nodded. “Must be. We can't take it all.”

“We are here for Skyrocket. Can you get through?”

Asha opened one of the pouches in her combat vest and drew out several small tools that looked like no lock picks I'd ever worked with. She unscrewed the face of the keypad with a tiny screwdriver and covered the insides with a mist from a stainless steel can of aerosol. “Old Man, I've yet to meet the door I couldn't get through.”

I kept watch on the front door and the room behind us, trusting her to know her business better than I could. The sounds of battle from outside had faded, leaving only the howling of the wind in their wake. Other than the two oversized knights that had met us, the Conclave's warehouse seemed to have been left unguarded.

“There should be more resistance. The Lady can't have drawn everyone away,” I said. Asha's answer was the buzz-chunk of a pneumatic lock springing open and the click-sigh of a sealed door opening.

Another, more ominous, click followed.

“I'd say that's a yes,” Asha said, rising from her crouch and raising her hands. I turned to see a man on the far end of a long-barreled rifle. A man who looked vaguely familiar, and far younger than he should have.

“Frank Morris,” I said, stepping between the gun and Asha. Whatever her flaws, she hadn't signed on to get shot, and she'd already done more than I'd expected. And, of course, I needed her to attune the nodes to Alam al-Jinn. Pragmatic chivalry at its finest. “You are looking very well for an octogenarian. Though I suppose I can say the same for myself.”

“You!” Morris backed up a step when he spied me, but the room on the other side of the door was small, no place to run. A control panel covered the wall beside the door, blinking with lights like it was pulled out of Mission Control. More crates were stacked against the wall behind Morris, framing another steel door. He'd have to turn his back on us to use the keypad if he meant to escape via that route. He must have realized that even with the rifle, the odds were not in his favor. The barrel lowered slightly such that my kneecaps were in more danger than my gut. “You're working with
her
now? After what she did? After what she almost did?”

I chanced a quick glance back at Asha, who still had her hands raised and looked as puzzled as I was. She arched a brow and gave me a barely perceptible shrug.

“Beg pardon?” I faced Morris again. I hadn't been exaggerating. He looked much as he had in his mugshot from 1960 – dark hair cut sharp and square, equally sharp nose, jaw, and cheekbones. He wore a suit much like mine, black tie on white shirt under black tailored mohair that gave off the faintest sheen. We could have been brothers, for all that we'd never met.

“Clarence and John figured you for dead when you went missing a few years back, but I always knew it'd take more than a little dustup with that bitch to take down Mr Mystic. Never figured you for working with her.”

I breathed out and couldn't breathe back in again. It was worse than when the knight had gutpunched me. The hum of the generators became a high whine, and black shadows crowded at the edge of my vision. Frank Morris knew what had become of Mr Mystic. And so, it seemed, did the Lady.

I found my voice, or rather, I gave in and let Mr Mystic take over while the part of me that was Missy continued to reel. “Strange bedfellows, you might say,” I murmured. Behind me, Asha shifted, the hand obscured by my body sinking into her pack. “I could hardly come to you when you were stealing from old allies and working for new ones.”

“What, you mean the tiger? We don't work for him. He's obsessed with some China girl. Ling Bing Big Bang or something. What do you care about that?”

I let anger give me focus. “
Lung Bao Hu Zhe
,” I corrected softly. “And I care because she is… a friend. As is Skyrocket. Where is he?”

The rifle barrel came up. Morris sighted along its length. “You got shit taste in friends these days, Mystic. Demons and China girls and now that thing. You got any friends who're human?”

“It would appear not.” I dropped to the ground at Asha's signal, but she was already gone. One of the titanium rods clattered to the floor. The rifle went off over my head. Before Morris could fire again, the crates in the room burst open in an explosion of wood, packing material, and shining rods of metal. Asha lunged from the center of the explosion, smoke rising from her black body suit. She caught Morris' rifle when he spun to face her, slamming the butt into his nose with two brutal thrusts. Tearing it from his hands, she whipped it around so he was in her sights.

“Don't shoot him!” I scrambled to my feet and wrenched the barrel down and away. Asha glared at me, and for a moment I thought she might go for her combat knife instead, as she had with the knights.

She didn't. She wrenched the rifle from my grasp and rendered Morris unconscious with three quick, sharp strikes.

“Leaving him alive is a mistake,” she muttered, passing me the gun and stepping over the body. She dug out her tools and went to work on the next door.

“I am well aware,” I said. Gingerly, I set the gun aside and searched for something to bind Morris. After a quick scan, I gave up looking and used his tie. The silk knotted tightly enough that I wasn't too worried about him escaping. “If he has any information on what happened to my… on… Mr Mystic's disappearance…”

“Hey. I get it. I've done stupider things for family.”

I glanced up sharply, question on my lips, but the door locks clunked and Asha was already pushing it open. “There's our… well. Shit.”

“What is it? Is he hurt? Is he…” I pushed up behind her, shoving the door wider in case she was struck by some stupid impulse to protect me from whatever was in the room. And then I stopped, because what was in the room made no kind of sense.

There were more monitors, more cables, more generators. Tom was laid out on a table in the middle of the room, stripped to the waist like a subject in some mad scientist's lab experiment. The cables ran from his gut, his arms and legs, his head. There was no blood. No gore or viscera. Just shining metal bones and softly glowing fiber-optic muscles and skin-covered panels hanging wide open.

Morris' crack about my friends made more sense in the face of this. Skyrocket wasn't human. He was a robot.

“
D
id you know about this
?” I whispered, following Asha into the room. She was muttering, lifting cables, glaring at everything. At my question, she turned that glare on me.

“That the Conclave was using him as their personal Energizer bunny? No. How the hell could I have known that?”

“That is not what I meant, and well you know it,” I growled, picking my way towards the table. She'd known. Abby had known. They'd all known. And they'd chosen to leave me in the dark.

“Abby said… after he was trapped and drained in the Shadow Realms on your mission, they improved his power source with the most updated tech. So his ego identity wouldn't be endangered again.”

“His ego identity.” My nails cut into my palms.

“Meaning he ignores or misinterprets any stimuli that might make him realize… what he is.”

She couldn't say it either. I forced my fingers to relax. “So the only ones who didn't know about this are Tom and myself.”

Asha snorted. “And the rest of the world.”

I grimaced. I'd reached the table. “Tom?” I leaned over him, touched his bare shoulder. His skin was warm. It had color. But there was no animus to him. I found myself hoping this was some hoax, some elaborate decoy with the real Tom hidden behind yet another door, until those caramel brown lashes fluttered open and a hint of that famous Colgate grin curved those lips.

“Hey, Old Man. They put you in charge of the rescue mission?”

I was going to be ill. I looked away for just a moment, thankful for the shadows disguising my face. I was not nearly a good enough actor to hide my revulsion. I tried not to let it creep into my voice. After all, this wasn't Tom's fault. “As though I gave them a choice. Tom, can you… move?” I had to do something for him. But what? I was no master of technology. Hell, I was prone to strutting around if I managed to hook up my internet without mucking it up. “Can you help us disconnect you?”

Tom shifted, and the cables shifted with him, the lights on the consoles flashing yellow and red. They went back to green and white when Tom slumped back down onto the table. “Naw. They got me trussed tighter'n a Christmas goose.”

“Trussed?” I glanced up at Asha.

“I did warn you,” she said. “Don't worry. They must have suspected this might be a possibility. Sadakat gave me the keys to the car. Hey, flyboy.”

“Hey, pretty lady.” Tom turned his smile on Asha. “Now this is what I call a rescue mission. Almost don't mind being tied up if you're doing the untying.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I've received worse propositions. Skyrocket model T-301, executive override, enter safemode, authorization key Oskaloosa Rockets.”

All expression drained from Tom's features. His eyes closed. “Awaiting senior agent authorization,” he said in a monotone.

Asha poked me. “That's you, Old Man.”

Me? “Er. I'm Mitchell Masters and I authorize this safemode,” I said. There was no way it should work. I wasn't my grandfather, and I had no official status with Argent. And yet after a few moments of nothing more than digital noise, Tom's eyes opened again and he spoke with no trace of an accent: “Safemode engaged. How may I assist you, Mr Masters?”

Asha winked at me. “TC-301, we need you to run a class C diagnostic and walk us through how to safely uncouple you and get you going again.”

With Tom's guidance – or rather, TC-301's – we were able to remove all the cables rather more quickly than I'd expected. And a good thing, too. Whatever time we'd gained by traveling through Alam al-Jinn, we'd certainly lost it cutting Tom loose. Once he was free of the cables and his panels were all closed and sealed, Asha set him on a reboot cycle. She poked around the stolen machinery while I retrieved Tom's rocket pack from where it had been stashed in the corner.

“If you want Morris to live, you should drag him out of here,” Asha said, her voice muffled by the server cabinet she was digging behind.

“Why?” I asked. I'd given up trying to lift the rocket pack onto the table next to Tom. It had been all I could do to drag it across the floor, and I'd left long scrapes in the concrete with my efforts. The damned thing was heavy. Clearly, Tom needed a robot's strength just to stay upright while wearing it.

Asha held up a small black box with green blinking lights. “Fulfilling my contract. Nothing belonging to Argent stays in Conclave hands. Since we can't take it with us.” She crawled out from behind the server when I remained unable to do more than gape dumbly at her. “Alcatraz go boom.”

“You can't blow up Alcatraz!”

“Only on the Shadow Realms side of the veil.”

Ah. Right. Of course. I still didn't like it, but we were too short on time for me to argue. Who knew how much longer the Lady's forces could continue to distract the Conclave knights, or when Lao Hu might return, or where the Anglin brothers had got off to. “No damage to the other side?” I asked, laying Frank Morris out so I could lift him into a fireman's carry.

“Possibly a bit of crumbling masonry. Some broken windows. Nothing worse than any of the tremblors we've been having. Promise.”

“Fine. Is Tom...” I peered through the doorway into the lab. I could barely look at him for fear I'd start staring.

“Should be cycling up. Hey, flyboy.” She snapped her fingers above Tom's nose.

His eyes opened. He groaned and sat up, cradling his head. “Tell me there was another guy.”

“Yeah. And you should see him. Come on. You're going to sleep through your own rescue.” Asha shoved his leather flight jacket, buttondown, and undershirt at him.

He pulled the clothes on quickly, covering a physique that apparently owed nothing to nature and everything to science. “Sorry, ma'am. Shouldn't have had to see that.”

“Oh, I wasn't complaining,” Asha said, giving him a friendly leer. “Grab that hunk of tin you call a rocket pack and let's get out of here before the place blows.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Tom hopped off the table, energy already returning now that he wasn't being used to power half the island, including the lighthouse. He lifted his pack and strapped it on – the pack I'd barely been able to drag across the floor. On his way out, he took Frank Morris from me, shrugging the man over his shoulder like it was no matter.

“Bloody hell,” I muttered under my breath, jogging after Tom and Asha. I wasn't certain what amazed me more. Tom's inhuman humanity, his quick recovery, or the fact that we'd actually bloody done it.

W
e jogged
along the road past the Conclave's black-walled citadel, keeping low but meeting none of the Conclave's forces along the way. When Asha's windup kitchen timer dinged, we took cover behind a low wall. Moments later, the entire island shook with the percussive blast of the Conclave's laboratory blowing sky high. Heat washed over us, and light such as I hadn't seen in the Shadow Realms since we crashed the
Kestrel
on a rolling plain somewhere east of Shanghai. That was when Tom must have come to the attention of the Conclave.

Well, we hadn't left them much to salvage from the
Kestrel
's crash, and I doubted they'd salvage much more now.

“Well, damn,” Tom whispered, shifting Frank Morris' unconscious body to his other shoulder. “You weren't just kidding about the place blowing.”

“What can I say, flyboy,” Asha purred. “I'm thorough.”

Dear lord. I couldn't tell if she was serious with her flirting, if she was doing it to set Tom at ease, or if it was her way of taking the piss out of me. “Let's just hope the explosion draws attention so the Lady's forces may escape. We should move.”

I rose, and Asha, but Tom remained on his knees, grimacing.

“Tom?” I asked. His color was fading, his arms trembling. The last time I'd seen him this peaked was in his recovery bed in Jiu Wei's temple. Whatever surge of energy he'd enjoyed after we uncoupled him, it was fading fast.

Tom shook his head. “Just give me a moment, Old Man. Don't know what it is about this place, but it tuckers me out right quick.”

At the rate he was tuckering, I had my doubts that he'd make it to the lighthouse. “Tom, I'm going to send you across to the real world,” I said, thankful that the light of the explosion was bright enough to make it possible. “You'll probably startle a few tourists. Don't stop for photo ops. The Conclave knights might be able to cross over and drag you back. You get to Argent HQ in China Basin, you make sure they bind Mr Morris with everything they've got, including the shadow wards I showed them. I want to question him when this is all over.”

“You got it, Old Man.” Tom shrugged Morris higher and lurched to his feet. “This fellow really that dangerous?”

“Dangerous, maybe. Slippery, yes. He's one of the only men ever to escape Alcatraz.”

I don't think I'd ever heard Tom say a curse word stronger than damn. I blinked when he did so now. “Yes. Well. Go on, then. I'll see you on the other side.” Using the fading light of the burning laboratory, I opened the veil and shunted Tom and Frank Morris through. With any luck, Tom would recover as quickly as he'd been drained.

Which just left myself and Asha again, with half an island between us and where we needed to be.

“So. That's my contract fulfilled.” She rubbed her wrists as though they'd been sprung from invisible shackles.

I tensed. “Is this the part where you turn on me?”

Asha studied me in silence for longer than I'd have liked before a slow grin curved her lips. “Do you realize this titanium is so pure that I can carry it without worrying about resonance building up? That I could probably hop through it safely a good half dozen times? And do you know how much Argent agreed to give me?”

“As much as you could stuff in your bags before we blew up the Conclave's lab?”

“Oh, that's just extra. Come on, Masters. I'm capricious and a bit vindictive, but I'm not
stupid
. Let's get off this island.”

A
side from a few
lone shadow creatures – not even full knights, just half-shaped monsters that wouldn't last more than a few hours – Asha and I met little resistance on our run to the lighthouse. I realized why when we came around the far side of the citadel and nearly ran headlong into a sea of Conclave troops laying siege to the lighthouse tower.

“Shit,” I muttered, flattening back against the wall.

“You just had to send away our air support,” Asha said, peering around me to get a better look at what we were facing.

“Shut up.” We both knew Tom could not have carried a tune, much less the both of us to the top of the tower. But since when had pragmatism or facts kept Asha from her one true love: snark.

I studied the ebb and flow of the troops. “Right. Here is what we'll do–”

“Save it, Old Man.”

Another round of searing heat followed Asha grabbing my arm. Memory had dulled the incandescent edge of pain that ripped through me, making me think it had been more bearable than it was. We emerged into blessed cool, and I hit the floor, limbs twitching, dry heaving to try to expel the fire that had burned inside me, however briefly.

“Missy!” David knelt at my side, hands hovering over me as he looked for some ill to fix and found nothing wrong. He glared up at Asha. “What did you do to her?”

Asha leaned against the lantern. One glass panel hung open, and inside where the bulb should be, a fist-sized orb of titanium flickered with orange flames. “Her?”

David flinched and gave me an apologetic look. “Shit. I–”

“It's fine. She knows. She's just being an ass.” I let him help me up and fixed my glare on Asha. “A little warning would have been appreciated.”

“Didn't expect it to be that bad the second time.” She studied David and myself. “I don't think your kind does all that well in Alam al-Jinn.”

A soft tread sounded on the metal spiral of stairs. “Then it is a good thing that I will not be traveling through your realm,” said the Lady as she joined us. “Where is the rocket man?”

“Skyrocket. I sent him back over to the real world. This place was…” I ran a hand over my lower face to catch myself from making the same mistake David had. “He'd had enough of it. He took Frank Morris with him.”

“So it really was him. Them. The three?” David asked, looking up from the pack he'd been securing. It was then that I noticed the sigils ringing the lantern, a hard, silvery script sunk deep into the lighthouse platform.

“So it would seem.” I watched the Lady walk the circle, making a final check of the sigils that she and David had etched into the onyx-black stone. “He seemed to be under the impression that you and I should not get along,” I told her.

“Were you truly your grandfather, we would not.”

“Why?”

“He took something from me. They all did.”

I'd had enough with the cryptic. “What?” I snapped.

Asha cut a hand between us, breaking my glare. “I hate to interrupt, but perhaps we can have this riveting conversation after we're away from the demon army? Just a thought.”

“I need to attune this node to Shadow,” the Lady said. She pulled out the combat knife that she'd been wearing when we met at her camp.

David shouldered his pack of ritual supplies. “And I need to cross over so I can make the call to Professor Trent and the others.”

He fell still – we all did – when the Lady put her arm over the circle and ran the knife along her skin. Ichor black as coagulated blood oozed up from the long cut. I rubbed my arm as phantom sympathy pains shot up it.

David cleared his throat. “I'll need a… your name. For the summoning.”

“Yes, of course.” The Lady stared at her falling blood. “It is Anne.”