Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles - eARC by Larry Correia
“Fuller never built a device that could spot the Pathfinder. Fuller’s brilliant. He can see magic and tweak most any design to get results, but he didn’t know near enough about how that sort of spell worked to even try,” Lance’s mouse said. “Once Fuller sees how their magic looks, maybe, but until then, he’s stuck.”
“But according to Toru, the Chairman’s Cogs have already built some sort of Enemy detector,” Sullivan finished. “That’s where we’re heading.”
Heinrich swam back up through the floor, alone. He solidified, then knocked his hands together, as if dusting them off. “I for one am curious to see how many more Imperium swine we have aboard.”
Lance’s mouse chuckled. “However many are left, you can bet your ass the next one will be a whole lot more careful.”
The Traveler creaked and swayed as they changed course.
The Reader was still confused, but was probably too scared of the other knights’ dangerous reputations to try and read their minds now. Curiosity was great and all, until you were palling around with the knights who’d fought the Chairman and lived to talk about it. “So where are we going?”
“Santa’s workshop,” Lance supplied, which just seemed to confuse the poor Reader even more.
Sullivan just shook his head. He was never much for secrets anyway. “The North Pole.”
Paris, France
Inside a little café in Paris, Faye sat impatiently across from the Grimnoir elder who’d voted to have her murdered, while he took his sweet time sipping a fancy little coffee and watching people walk by in the rain.
“Are you about done yet?” Faye asked him.
“You have asked me that five times already,” Jacques answered pleasantly.
“Six. Because we’ve been here forever.” A few of the other patrons seemed to have overheard her, but nobody seemed particularly curious about someone speaking English. Jacques had said that this part of town had lots of American tourists and ex patriots—whatever that meant. The staff all seemed to know Jacques, like he was a regular here. “All you do is sit around and watch stuff and drink coffee.”
“Watching stuff and drinking coffee is how I choose to spend my time, my dear. I am retired.”
Faye snorted. Retirement was a crazy European idea where you just stopped working when you got old. Who’d ever heard of such a thing? Grandpa had been older than Jacques and he’d still milked cows until the day he’d died. And if he hadn’t been murdered by Madi, she knew Grandpa would still be milking cows today. “Retirement . . . You guys are funny. You’re still Grimnoir.” She pointed at the black and gold ring on his finger. It matched hers. “Grimnoir don’t retire.”
“That is not my job. That is my life. It is different.”
“Come on. You promised to teach me to be the Spellbound.”
Jacques took another sip. “Now you are putting words in my mouth. I promised you no such thing. You nearly flung me to my death, and I was nice enough to say I would try to help you in your quest for knowledge. I gave you my word that I would keep your presence secret from the society, and that I would help you as best I could. That is what I am attempting to do. I am a kindly old man and you are a bossy girl.”
“Bossy?” By Faye’s standards she hadn’t even been particularly threatening. Jacques still had all his limbs. “You’re supposed to be the big expert on this thing.”
“Indeed. I am . . .” He let that hang, but after she stared at him expectantly for an eternity, he finally sighed and gave in. “I will tell you everything I know about the Spellbound. Since the elders have decided not to interfere unless you begin to make bad decisions, the very least I can do is help you comprehend what you are dealing with. However, I believe the spell’s results are a direct reflection of the character of the user. Thus, in order for you to understand the Spellbound, I must first understand you.”
Faye waited. Jacques took another sip, then watched a young couple with colorful umbrellas walk by outside. The pretty young waitress came back by and Jacques smiled at her. He was a flirty old man. Then he went back to drinking and watching.
“Well?”
“My, you really are an impatient little girl, aren’t you?”
Faye groaned. “That’s because y’all are so slow.”
He nodded. “Interesting . . .”
“What?”
“You say that often. You find everyone slow. Don’t you find that at all peculiar?”
“Don’t blame me if all your brains don’t go fast like mine.” Even the smartest people she knew, like Mr. Browning or Mr. Sullivan, made decisions like their heads were filled with molasses. “Nothing personal.”
“I find that fascinating. It isn’t like you have been consorting with anyone slow-witted. I am at least passingly familiar with Pershing’s American knights. They are an intelligent, driven, some would say too-decisive group. Yet everything I’ve learned about you suggests that they seem sluggish to you. Every report I’ve read about you has mentioned it. The astute have commented upon the speed of your intellect, while most have merely dismissed you as being odd.”
“Reports? What reports?”
“After you came to our attention, we learned as much as we could about you. Travelers who live to adulthood are rare enough as it is, but anyone who could survive the Tokugawa and the firing of a Peace Ray becomes a person of interest. I have been speculating about the return of the Spellbound for a very long time. Of course I asked for reports about you. Did you think that I would vote on someone’s fate without knowing everything I could about them first? I am no barbarian.” Jacques paused to eat a cookie, and then washed it down with more coffee.
“I swear Jacques that if you don’t speed this up I’m gonna Travel out of here and take your head with me.”
He raised a single eyebrow. “Like you did with the Chairman’s hands? Now that was quite the impressive feat.”
Faye blushed. It was nice to get some credit once in a while. “Yeah. That was pretty neat.”
“Did you know that trick would work?”
She shrugged. “It seemed reasonable. I guessed it would work. It wasn’t like anyone else was having any luck.”
“Yet, you had never teleported and only taken part of an object before. So how did you know you could do this, especially against one such as the Chairman?”
Faye scowled. “It’s hard to explain. I just looked at everything that was going on, and everything that I’d heard, and I sorta just put it all together real quick.”
“Define quick.”
“Maybe a second, I guess.” That sounded reasonable. Time just sort of seemed to slow down when she got to thinking real hard about stuff. “I don’t know.”
“That is the sort of report that crossed my desk that made me originally suspect you were the Spellbound. It sounded so far-fetched that many of my peers dismissed the idea that you had done it at all.”
“But I did do it! I beat the Chairman!” The last time she’d met with Grimnoir elders their disbelief had annoyed her to no end.
“Indeed. But you must understand their doubts. You were nearly untrained, you had never done anything like that before, yet you found a way to defeat the greatest wizard of all time. A man who had proven impervious to every assault, a man who had survived dozens of assassination attempts by extremely skilled Actives, yet you extemporaneously outwitted him. And then when you teleported the Tempest across the entirety of the Pacific, how long did it take you to decide you could do that?”
“You gotta think fast when you’re about to get burned.” Faye realized Jacques was staring at her intently and she was struck by how much smarter he was than he acted. It made her a little uncomfortable. “Okay . . . Well, I saw the Tokugawa getting blown up by the Tesla thingy, so I had to see how much the Traveler weighed, how much the folks on it weighed, you know, so I didn’t get them stuck together, where we were, how fast we were going, I even had to look at the wind and how everything was turning, then how fast the pillar of light
Jacques was still looking at her, but now his mouth was open just a little bit, like he was kind of surprised. He quickly closed it.
“You doing okay, Jacques?”
“All of that . . . Before the pillar of light reached you?”
“Yeah.”
He drained his coffee in one quick gulp, pulled some money out of his pocket and left it on the table. “That concludes our lesson for the day.”
“Lesson? That was supposed to be a lesson?”
He picked up his hat and set it on his white hair. “Yes. It was your first lesson in mastering the most dangerous spell the world has ever known.”
“Well, I’m no expert on schoolin’ and such, but you’re not a very good teacher.”
“I never claimed to be. Meet me here tomorrow at ten.” And then Jacques quickly walked out of the café and into the rain without looking back. He didn’t even bother with an umbrella.
Faye sighed and polished off the cookies.
Chapter 5
Facing the heroes’ band
Devil in the Oklahoma sand
Let it rain, let it rain
In that place so dry
He made the angels cry
Let it rain, let it rain
Lighting strikes, feel the pain
Hey Grimnoir, let it rain
—Author Unknown,
Lyrics from the Ballad of the Hero George Bolander, 1933
UBF Traveler
The view out the front of the ship was green forests and blue rivers as far as the eye could see. Sullivan was leaning on the rail and making up for interrupted sleep with strong black coffee. The night watch was wrapping up and being replaced by their luckier day shift brethren. Barns Dalton entered the Traveler’s bridge, took one look around, scratched his head, and asked, “Are we heading north?”
“Yep,” Sullivan answered.
“Isn’t Siberia that-a-way?” Barns gestured out another window.
“Yep.” He took a drink of the nefarious liquid and let it burn its way down. Captain Southunder’s idea of coffee could degrease an engine. “Change of plans.”
“I’m only just the main guy that drives this thing,” Barns muttered. The marauder from the night shift gave up the helm, and Barns slid into the chair. “It isn’t like anybody needs to tell me anything.”
Sullivan had no idea how any of the complicated new navigational equipment on the Traveler worked, but Barns hadn’t seemed to have any trouble learning it. He’d been a biplane stunt pilot before falling in with the marauders, and according to Southunder there wasn’t anything Barns couldn’t fly, and with his Power being related to the manipulation of probability, nobody that he couldn’t outfly. The young man tapped the glass to make sure the gauges weren’t stuck. “Good to see my sense of direction’s not broken. Where the hell are we going?”
Captain Southunder returned to the bridge, sliding down a ladder like a man half his age. Put him on a moving airship and he was as surefooted as an Imperium ninja. “Eighty-two degrees north, eighty-two degrees west, Barns. Near the northern shore of Axel Heiberg.”
“Hmmm . . .” Barns had to think about that for a moment. “Sounds cold.”
“It’s a secret base on top of a glacier. Conditions shouldn’t be much worse than what everyone was already expecting in Siberia. Freezing cold, horrible winds, man-eating polar bears, and murderous Imperium bastards, all in one convenient location.”
“I should’ve stayed in the south Pacific,” Barns grumbled. “But hey, at least we’ve got a fancier blimp.”
“Indeed we do. The Traveler may be a technological marvel, but a man will always remember his first love with fondness,” Southunder said. “The Bulldog Marauder was a real beauty.”
“She was held together with baling wire and pitch tar.”
“She had soul.” Pirate Bob turned to Sullivan. “Winds are good. If you want me to manipulate them, I could have us there quicker, otherwise we’ll be there near midnight.”
Landing and making their way across a glacier in the dark would be dangerous as hell, but it beat being spotted and taking antiaircraft fire. They needed to capture this place, not level it from the sky. “Save your Power, Captain. We’ll do this at night.”
Southunder laughed at him. “You’ve never been this far north before, have you, Sullivan? Night is a relative term this time of year. There won’t be a lot of cover to work with.”
“No cover, eh?” He’d forgotten about that. That was the problem with book learning compared to practical experience. Facts were recalled a lot faster when it was something that made life harder. They still had a few weeks before the solstice, but even now, being a few hundred miles from the pole, there would only be a few hours of night, and none of them particularly dark enough to conceal an incoming dirigible. “Can you provide us some?”
“Of course.” The captain had to think about that for a moment. “But up here, that’ll test the limits of my magic. Thing is, I manipulate the weather enough to give us sufficient storm cover, there’s repercussions. Further out you get from where I twisted the system, the less control I’ve got.”
“What’re you getting at?”
“When I cause enough disturbance to hide this ship, there’s no telling how nasty the weather may get down on that glacier.”
Sullivan simply nodded and went back to his coffee. “I’ll tell the boys to wear their mittens.”
Barns shuddered. “I really should’ve stayed in the South Pacific . . .”
“We are ramp down in five minutes!” the marauder shouted from the catwalk. “Five minutes!”
The Traveler shook hard as a strong gust of wind hit. Ian Wright had to hold onto one of the cargo nets to stay upright as the dirigible careened to the side. They said that landing was the most dangerous part of any dirigible flight, so doing it in a storm, especially one that you’d inflicted on yourself, was completely reckless. Another gust struck and took them in the opposite direction.
Twenty-five Grimnoir were going on the raid. Most of them were clustered in the cargo bay, dressing in incredibly bulky winter clothing and doing last minute checks of their equipment. The wind changed again, spinning the Traveler sideways. An open ammo can toppled, spilling rifle cartridges everywhere. One of the knights stumbled to the side and vomited on the floor.
A red bulb began to flash off and on. The marauder on the catwalk shouted orders to some of the other crew, but he was cut off by a terrible grinding noise.
“What’s going on?” Ian asked the knight next to him nervously. After all, Chris Schirmer was a Fixer and a protégée of the great Cog John Moses Browning, so he had more experience with mechanical goings on.
“How would I know?” he answered, busy stuffing loaded magazines into pouches on his belt. “I was a gunsmith, not a blimp builder.” But then he watched the running crewmen, analyzed where they were going and what tools they were scrambling for. “I think one of the landing skids is stuck.”
“Isn’t that bad?”
“It’s not good. I better go see if I can help.” Schirmer got up and made his way across the wildly tilting deck.
Ian closed his eyes and concentrated on everything but his growing nausea. “I volunteered for this? Why the hell did I volunteer for this?”
“To fight an outer-space monster,” answered someone. Ian opened his eyes to see that it was Steve Diamond, one of the knights he had fought alongside against the OCI at Mason Island. The Mover was cheating and using his Power to gather up all of the spilled cartridges. The .30-06 rounds rolled across the floor like they were being swept, and then the pile floated up and neatly into the ammo can. Diamond used his real hand to close the lid. “That’s something special.”
“Come on, Ian. Not this again.” Diamond sighed. “This is an adventure.”
Another knight looked up from his cleaning his rifle. They’d been told to rub down their bolts with powdered graphite, since the temperature outside would freeze grease or oil and cause their weapons to malfunction. “Hey, are you the Summoner who was trying to talk the elders into stopping this mission?”
“Yeah. I’m the Summoner.”
“Genesse,” the knight introduced himself. “Mouth. Easy . . .” He must have caught Ian’s flinch. “I’m not trying to sway you.” He was a short, thin man with an olive complexion. Ian thought he might be Italian, but he sounded like an American. Then again, Ian was a Scot who talked like an American, since he’d spent so much time there. Grimnoir tended to be well travelled. “If you don’t think it’s real, why volunteer?”
“I changed my mind.” Ian didn’t elaborate. He’d had this out with the others before. There was no need to rehash old arguments five minutes before an attack on the Imperium.
Jake Sullivan was persuasive for a Heavy, or maybe it was because he was a Heavy. The man just would not move on an argument. It was like arguing with a boulder. He was so adamant about what he perceived to be the truth that he’d convinced many of the Grimnoir of the existence of the Pathfinder. To Ian, that information had come from the Chairman, and was thus tainted. Only a fool would believe anything that came from a madman, and it was even worse when it came from a madman’s ghost.
To Ian, they didn’t need to look out into space for an enemy. There were plenty of real enemies right here at home. While a big chunk of the society’s best wasted their time on a wild-goose chase, the OCI was registering Actives in America, and registration was sure to lead to camps or pogroms. While they were attacking a useless Imperium installation on an iceberg in the middle of nowhere, real Imperium schools were torturing and killing innocents all over Asia.