American Craftsmen (3 page)

Little enemy probes of my power prickled my nerves, but like gunfire, they also guided me to their point of origin. A voice in my head: “
Allahu akbar
…?” Then, “Greetings friend, in the name of Allah, the compassionate and merciful.” Shit, the fucker could think in panglossic, and with an annoying British accent. I preferred not to have much time for talk.

“Pretty pagan surroundings for ‘Allah,’ friend.”

“Necessary for my little trap.”

“You’d better spring it soon. I’m just about there.” I cocked the hammers of three spells in my mind: a parry, an external thrust, and an internal one. I would have to improvise the specifics.

“We practitioners should not kill each other,” said the sorcerer. “We should stay in our own land, our own power.”

“Right,” I said. The tarp rippled in the night breeze. I came to an L in the maze, turned right, and found myself at the lintel. I used a small mirror to peer into the room beyond.

Through the doorway was a long hall that had once been a temple. The sorcerer sat in a beat-up lawn chair where the altar to Assur-Marduk should have been. His head was framed by a back wall bas-relief of the god’s bull horns, symbols of the long gone Taurean Age. Amidst priceless objects, the sorcerer wore a Red Sox jersey and shorts. His teeth were mostly gone, his eyes stared up at the sky and seemed half-blind. Unarmed? Probably preferred craft-on-craft action.

I raised the MP5, prepared to turn and shoot.

A cold hand of craft squeezed at my lungs. “
Break hand
,” I said, using my first spell.

Another hand of force reached for me and made my gun feel too heavy to aim. With the MP5 dangling from my right arm, I spun around the corner and drew a circle around the sorcerer with my left forefinger. “
Move air
.”

The laws of thermodynamics are funny things. They don’t forbid most of the air from moving away from one’s head; they just say that it’s more likely the universe will expire before that happens randomly. A weatherman can put a spin on the forces and probabilities of nature. I was good at tweaking the improbabilities and making them happen.

The sorcerer gasped, but he could still think up mischief. I pointed my left hand straight between my target’s eyes. “
Short sharp shock
.” The sorcerer jerked rigid. A lot of these backwoods magi had trouble thinking of their minds as mechanisms. They wasted time on hallucinations and ignored the raw synapses.

I moved closer to the sorcerer. That hadn’t been too bad. Now to kill him.

I could not take him prisoner. Confining such a man, much less putting him on trial, was prohibitively difficult. My orders might violate the law, but the law didn’t know about the craft, which was a damned good thing, given what the law used to do to craftspeople.

I held my MP5 inches from the old man’s head.

The sorcerer ceased convulsing and sat bolt upright, eyes fixed on me. I sought a protection to employ. The sorcerer cackled at me like a dirty old farmer at Internet porn.

I didn’t shoot. No further malevolent energies sought me; I could afford to grant a few seconds. “If you’ve got any prayers to say, say them now.”

The sorcerer closed his eyes and spread his arms wide, palms out. “You are here to take me out. Fine, I am old and ready. But I am going to take you out too. Not kill, just stop.”

Threats were not the prayers I had in mind. I leveled my gun and shot the sorcerer between the eyes.

The report echoed down the ancient hallways; in a red burst of craft, the sorcerer’s spirit left. Mission accomplished, I considered my exit.

No exit.
The cool night air rustled the tarp, carrying the sound of automatic weapons fire and a crushing sense of dread. My gun shook in my hand as I waved it in the dead sorcerer’s face. “What have you done?”

A voice like a recorded message played in my mind.
Feel that,
ferangi
? We know your family, your country. Your Left-Hand ancestors were an abomination before God. You can violate our land, parade your filth in front of us, even take our lives, but you will not take our magic. You will not take our souls. Feel it,
ferangi.

I felt it. Successive explosions of fear, then pain, then a gaping, aching nothing.

A bearded man, hands outstretched, stands as a human shield in front of his house and a veiled woman; then hands and body are ripped with agony, and both man and woman fall into the dusty doorway.

A mangy dog bares its teeth, then whines in final, crippled terror.

A little girl wearing only a “Hello Kitty” T-shirt runs and screams down the street, then her heart bursts as two rounds pierce her chest, and my own heart screams.

I felt the curse. Driven by the power of the sorcerer’s self-sacrifice, my team saw enemies everywhere, and killed every man, woman, and child they saw. The sorcerer’s own death spared him the karmic consequences of his heinous magic. Each murder instead became a cancerous part of my own mind.

In the dungeon of my skull, a voice like my own laughed at the curse, and the murders. The voice of the Left Hand, trying to get out.

Part of a wall tumbled stones at my feet. The dig started to slowly cave in—a dead man’s craft switch. Nothing that I couldn’t have outrun, if I cared to. I didn’t care. I was dying inside, over and over again.

A rip like a Little Bird’s guns. At the other end of the room, the point of a KA-BAR slashed open the tarp. A soldier peered through the newly created gap. “Captain. Where are you?” It was Master Sergeant Zanol.

“Sergeant, I ordered—”

Zee jumped down to the floor. He dashed toward me and pushed me out of the way of another cascading stone. “I don’t give a fuck, sir.” Zee pointed his rifle at me. “They’re … I … you’ve got to help them.”

After that, my memory was a jumbled slide show. Zee gave me a lift up and out of the excavation, then scrambled up after as I ran across the tell for the town. I hurtled down the mound’s side and screamed into the
snap-snap
of bullets,
“Cease fire! Cease fire! Goddamnit, cease fire!”

Far too fucking late. Night vision showed me the cooling bodies of women and children everywhere. My team was staggering around, covered in the sacrificial blood, starting to realize what they had done. I couldn’t let that realization sink in. “
Valkyrie
, immediate pickup. That’s ASAP. Over.”

Like someone half-asleep, Doc protested on the com. “Captain, I think there’s some wounded civvies here. Should I treat?”

“Negative, repeat negative. Withdraw.”

“You heard him,” yelled Zee, voice nearly breaking with rage and despair. “Move out!”

We jogged to the pickup point. We climbed back in our ground-hovering copter and started home.

I grabbed the chopper’s transmitter. Duty still compelled me; I mouthed the necessary words to base. “Ike, this is MAC-66. We need immediate steam vac, MC 9146 4211.”

“MAC-66, this is Ike. We’ll need to clear that with Mamie.”

“Negative, Ike,” I said. “I’m calling this, priority Alfa, Last Best Hope.”

“Roger that, 66. Wilco. Over and out.” It would be easier to explain a mistake from the air than what we had done. I would be destroying a town and ten thousand years of history to do it. I didn’t care.

I clamped my jaw shut until it ached. Each death exploded in my head. If I opened my mouth without something to say, I’d start screaming and never ever stop again.

I had to maintain appearances, if only for my men. But they wouldn’t leave me alone. “Captain, what happened back there?” asked Doc.

“Nothing. Understand? Nothing happened,” I said. “You fired at some bad guys. We withdrew. That’s your report. You’ll speak of this to no one else.”

But it would have taken more craft than I had left to convince my sergeant. Zee’s face was in his hands. He was sobbing.

*   *   *

We landed back at the base. Dawn was coming up over the dead land like an interrogator’s lamp on my soul.

As we left the copter, Colonel Hutchinson was already on the tarmac and moving right into my face. “Captain, what the hell is going on? Where do you get off calling in an air strike? We aren’t even supposed to be there!”

I gestured over my shoulder, like a drunk at a bar passing the bill. “Colonel, my team…”

“Oh, of course.” One of Hutch’s supernatural talents was to calm and reassure in a crisis. “
Good work, men.
Get your gear stowed. I’ll debrief you myself at 0800.”

But my team didn’t look calm or reassured as they left me. Some looked back at me with silent questions and confusion. Sergeant Zee’s red eyes never left the tarmac as he crossed it.

The colonel spoke in a low voice. “Now, Morton, what the fuck happened out there?”

I held at attention, silent and steady, until the last member of my team was out of sight in the hangar. Then, my legs buckled, and I crumbled to the ground, retching, trying to be sick, but nothing was coming up.

Hutchinson put her arm on my shoulder. “
Dale, I’m sorry.
” But her craft couldn’t reach me. “Dale? Captain Morton!”

The dungeon voice in my mind said,
Kill her. Kill them all.

I struggled back to my feet.
We know your family. Cease fire!
“I’m stopped,” I said, my mouth like a computer reading a speech. “Done.”

“Good. Now, what happened?”

“No, ma’am, I’m done with this. All this. The military. Life. Done.”

Hutchinson smiled, shook her head. “Some R & R…”

“Done done done.”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“No, right this fucking minute.” Cold fire flew out from my hands. “I resign. Discharge me now.”

Hutchinson said, “Sword.” As if they were expecting this, two men ran across the tarmac and tackled me. The craft fizzled in my hands. With nothing more to say, I screamed into the face of one of the men. I hated that face, but had forgotten why.

Hutchinson nodded, a sedative went in. I roared, but didn’t care enough to fight it. Being knocked out just made it official. I was done.

All the way back to the U.S., every time I woke up, I screamed until they knocked me out again.

CHAPTER

TWO

Major Michael Endicott gave the high castle a glance and thought of trivial injustice. Prague, beautiful bullshit Prague. Prague’s old-world occult irritated him. Every assignment turned noir here. Like foreign movies, Prague missions tended to end badly and absurdly.

Endicott played the gaping tourist and waited for his call. To his right and above loomed Prague Castle, locus of alchemy and occult practices until the Thirty Years’ War. The old European aristocracies had attempted to monopolize spiritual power in their realms, but the New World’s openness to new Families had helped to put an end to that. To Endicott’s left, a picturesque rabbit warren of streets and alleyways led back down to the town, every shadow potentially filled with Central European nasties who sought his demise. Further up the road stood the old monastery, site of tonight’s rendezvous.

Lovely Slavic women passed to and fro, irritating in their own way. A wife or girlfriend back home was overdue, but a Christian relationship took time, and in his position he couldn’t have any other kind. He had his doubts that God cared much about his sex life, but his superiors and family did.

In response to these insubordinate thoughts, his satphone finally rang—General Dad calling. Other branches of the military could afford to move family members to separate chains of command, but not spiritual ops. Endicott answered.

“Sir?”

“Sword, the target has moved up your rendezvous. You’ll proceed directly to the site. Operate under Moscow Rules.” This precaution meant nothing; in spiritual ops, almost anywhere overseas was hostile territory.

Endicott’s irritation got the best of him. “Sir, why am I here?”

To Endicott’s relief, his father seemed to view this question as legitimate. “Pentagon PRECOG wanted you in the desert, but that freakshow Sphinx vetoed it, and that Hutchinson woman concurred on the ground, so we’ve given you Casper’s milk run. Try not to screw it up.”

“Yes, sir.” Dad didn’t think much of Hutch and Langley’s Sphinx, but it was PRECOG’s Chimera that always gave Endicott a queasy feeling. An H-ring joke had it that the motto of Pentagon farsight was “We know, but we don’t care.”

The general’s voice lowered into a confidential, wily tone. “Remember to ask about the Left Hand and the Mortons.”

Lord, would he never cease on that? “Roger, sir. Wilco. Sword out.”

Left-Hand
: the craft relativistic euphemism for “evil.” Endicott hated the word almost as much as the fact. In spiritual ops, evil was Evil.

Endicott strode up the cobbled road. He carried a long and narrow box that enlarged at one end, as if he were a professional pool player with a bridge cue slung over his shoulder. Perhaps he shouldn’t have bothered hiding his thirty-inch sword; in this town, carrying an archaic weapon with a decorated hilt wasn’t so unusual. Endicott’s weapon was the source of his code name. He bore the blade of the first American of his ancestral line.

Endicott was proud of his family, whatever its excesses, and Old John of Salem was the most excessive Endicott. John had used this sword in May 1628 to hack down Thomas Morton’s maypole and drive away his drunken followers. John had brandished this sword during the trial of Ann Hutchinson, ancestor of the colonel. In America’s first declaration of independence, John’s sword had sliced the red cross of Saint George the Dragon Slayer from every flag he could find.

Major Endicott could laugh at a man who had wanted veils for women. But Old John had been right about the things that mattered: faith, discipline, and freedom.

Old John took a distant second place in Endicott’s heart to his later ancestor, Abram. At the siege of the House of Morton, Abram had carried this sword. With it, he had defeated Roderick, leader of the Left-Hand Mortons, the man who had taken the name and guise of the Red Death. Abram had slain the greatest evil in the history of the Fighting Families. Just thinking of Abram gave Endicott an electric feeling of pride.