Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (15 page)

“Kind of lights up the place like the Vegas strip, huh?” Bradley whispered back. “But classier.”

“Mr. Dave seems likely to possess an arsenal,” Pelham said. “I believe you came provisioned against that eventuality, Mr. Bowman?”

Bradley fished a handful of chains with dangling shell casings in place of pendants from his pocket. “These necklaces are pretty much just magical Kevlar, all right? If somebody shoots you, that kinetic energy still has to go somewhere. You’ll feel the impact, and it’ll maybe even knock you down, but the bullet won’t penetrate your body. The charm makes you stab-proof, too, so being hit with a sword won’t hurt any more than getting hit with a baseball bat.”

“That is nevertheless extremely painful,” Pelham said.

“Yeah, but better blunt-force trauma than having your limbs lopped off.” He handed a charm to Pelham, then Rondeau, and then put one on himself. “Come on. I’ll lead.”

He clambered over the gate, and Rondeau and Pelham followed, the latter leaping over it as adroitly as a gymnast. Pelly looked like a fussy clerk, but he was probably the most physically fearsome of all three of them. He’d been a master of bartitsu when he joined Marla’s service, and since then, in his world travels, he’d picked up a few other martial skills, too. Rondeau had seen him toss a three-hundred-pound, six-foot-eight biker through a window once, without the aid of magical strength augmentation; it was all just the practical application of physics and biodynamics, Pelly said. With his physical expertise and Bradley’s well-trained brain-powers, Rondeau was pretty comfortable taking the rear.

The dirt road narrowed until it became just a track through the woods, barely wide enough for one person to walk at a time. “Wait,” Bradley said. “Is that a tripwire?”

Pelham wasn’t looking at the ground, but up into a tree. “Indeed. There is a large log, studded with spikes, balanced above us.”

“Old-school.” Bradley stepped over the wire carefully. “Better than land mines, I guess.”

“Thanks for that cheerful thought,” Rondeau muttered.

They avoided two more booby traps on the way, and then Bradley noticed more of the luminous trails that indicated recent human passage, some distance off in the woods. They picked their way through the trees and found another, much less obvious trail, running roughly parallel to the first, about twenty yards away;
that
one seemed comparatively free of murderous surprises, and was probably how Dave and any of his patriotic compatriots went to-and-fro without risk of death by stumbling.

A short time later, the trail ended at a walled compound... though “compound” was probably overstating it a bit. The walls were roughly eight feet high, made of sheet metal nailed to wooden posts, and there was a “watchtower” on the wall that was actually just a deer stand with delusions of grandeur. The air stank faintly of diesel, and a generator grumbled somewhere behind the walls.

Pelham pointed to some protrusions studded along the wall. “Motion-sensitive lights.”

“Do you have any super-spy stuff that can short out electronics?” Rondeau whispered.

“Regretfully, I do not.”

“Bradley? Magic us invisible?”

Bradley shook his head. “My invisibility magics are less about actual real deal
invisibility
and more about clouding the minds of observers, so, not much good when it comes to lights.”

“Well, fuck it, then.” Rondeau walked out of the trees, over the protests of his friends. There was a stretch of bare dirt maybe thirty yards wide between the woods and the wall, doubtless so the survivalists could see the inevitable ATF agents begin their future raid. Once Rondeau had taken a few steps from cover, the lights came on, blindingly bright, and he shaded his eyes. “Hey, Dave!” he shouted. “My name’s Rondeau, I have a briefcase full of money, and I want to buy some weapons!”

•

Bradley groaned and sank back into the trees. “He’s going to get himself... well, maybe not killed, but certainly hurt.”

“He hopes to draw out our target,” Pelham said. “We should be prepared to take action. When this Dave appears, you will be ready to render him unconscious? Then we may explore his headquarters and search for the sword at our leisure.”

“Oh. Right. I guess that’s not the worst imaginable plan.”

They crouched and watched from the trees. Rondeau swung his briefcase back and forth, whistling, then shouted, “Yo, Dave, seriously, who has all night? I do not have all night. I am running out of night.”

The gate in the wall didn’t open... but a figure appeared on the watchtower above the wall. To someone with conventional eyes, he would have been a shadow behind the floodlights, but Bradley’s enhanced vision revealed him clearly: he was tall, broad-shouldered, hugely bearded, dressed in Army-surplus camouflage, and holding a large and ridiculous sword in both hands. The sword was so elaborate it looked barely functional, the sort of thing cosplayers would wear to a comic book convention; the kind of sword characters with outlandish pastel hair wielded in anime. The Blade of Banishment had a curved blade etched with meaningless runes, a jeweled hilt, and a crossguard that curved and swooped and had enough spikes and pointy bits to offer more danger than protection to its wielder.

Rondeau shaded his eyes and looked up at the man. “You’re Dave? Oh, hey, you’ve got the sword, too. Just what I wanted. Let’s start the bidding at five thousand dollars, what do you say?”

“Perhaps it’s best if we send Mr. Dave to sleep now?” Pelham murmured.

Bradley reached out with his psychic senses... and struck something that felt like a wall, smooth as glass, hard as diamond. He could
see
Dave’s consciousness, an untidy swirl of shiny black and pulsing red and wet pus-green, but he couldn’t
reach
it. “Uh oh,” he said.

The man lifted the sword over his head. “I!” he bellowed. “Am! Not! Named! Dave!”

Then the man jumped off the watchtower, screaming, sword raised over his head. When he landed before Rondeau, he brought the sword down in an uncomplicated and inelegant overhand strike, like a man splitting a piece of wood—with Rondeau as the wood.

When the sword touched the top of his head, Rondeau disappeared.

Out on the Edge

The swordsman crouched for a moment, breathing heavily, then rose and looked at the spot where Rondeau had been. “Why do people keep calling me
Dave
,” he muttered before turning toward the wall and trudging to the gate. “I’m Drew.” He thumped himself hard on the chest. “Drew Drew
Drew
.”

“Shitting shitty shit fuck,” Bradley said.

Pelham fished around in his bag. “Yes. My sentiments precisely. Where did Rondeau
go
? Do you think... did the sword send him to the underworld?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Dave, or Drew, knows. But he’s psychic-proof, Pelham, I mean
seriously
protected, some kind of magical force field wrapped right around his brain.”

“We will see, then, if he is
everything
proof.” Pelham drew a pistol from his bag.

“Whoa, wait, are you going to
shoot
him?”

“Tranquilizer dart.” Pelham fired at the swordsman before he could reach the gate. Drew spun around, then groped at his shoulder, fingers touching the dart. He snarled, took a step forward, and then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed, falling on top of his sword but, fortunately (or unfortunately) not impaling himself.

“There,” Pelham said. “We will disarm him, and then question him regarding Rondeau’s whereabouts.” He put the pistol away and walked toward the prone man, Bradley following close behind.

When Pelham got within a foot of Drew, the man rolled over and jabbed the sword into Pelham’s right leg. Pelham vanished instantly. The swordsman got to his feet, grinning. “Tried to put me to sleep, but I don’t sleep any more. The sword sleeps
for
me. I keep watch all the time. All the time. Who sent you? The Vatican? The UN Security Council? The Denver Illuminati?”

Bradley backed away, though it didn’t help much, because Drew advanced to match him, step for step. “Uh... A woman named Elsie Jarrow sent me, actually.”

That made the swordsman stop, and even lower the sword. “Elsie? I never knew her last name, but... Of course she sent you. She called me Dave, too. She’s the one who gave me my sword.”

Of course she did
, Bradley thought.

The swordsman pressed the flat of the blade against his cheek, closed his eyes, and smiled... but then his eyes snapped open again, and he pointed the absurd blade at Bradley. “You can’t have my sword back.
She
can’t have it back. You won’t take it from me!”

“Yeah, I get that.” Bradley held up his hands in pointless placation. “Just, before you do your thing, can you tell me, where do people go when you hit them with the sword?”

Drew frowned, a look of genuine bafflement crossing his features. “Go? They go
away
.”

“Gotcha. But... where is
away
?”
A look of sly delight appeared on Drew’s face. “I don’t know. But you know who’s about to find out?”

“Oh, no,” Bradley said, and then Drew hit him with the sword.

•

“Hey, hey, the gang’s all here.” That was Rondeau’s voice, so he wasn’t dead, at least.

Bradley groaned, opened his eyes, and stared at the sky. Apparently he was on his back. Okay then. The sky was... black. Blacker than black. There were stars, bright and sharp, in unfamiliar configurations. He sat up and looked around. Rondeau sat on the gritty gray sand a few feet away, and Pelham sat beside him, sorting through his bag. There were four other people sprawled in the vicinity, all obviously dead, all dressed in the same sort of camouflage the swordsman had worn. Some of them had ice and blood crusted in their beards, and there was a general blue-ness to their skin that made Bradley think of death by exposure.

He looked farther away, and saw... gray, rippled ground. Low hills in the distance. This didn’t look like any place he’d ever been on Earth.

Bradley got to his feet... and almost floated, rising up until his head bumped against some invisible barrier. He felt around as his body slowly settled back to the ground, and his fingers touched something smooth and curved overhead, like an invisible dome. “Wha—where the fuck are we? Why am I so
light
?”

“Pelly thinks we’re on Pluto,” Rondeau said. “Which, you know. Kind of makes sense. ‘Plutonian Sword.’” He closed his eyes. “Man, this barely-there gravity is messing with my equilibrium.”

Pelham didn’t look up from the bag. “It is difficult to see how the sword would be of any use to us, as it sends its victims to the planet Pluto, instead of to the underworld. Perhaps Miss Jarrow is simply amusing herself.”

“Pluto’s not a planet anymore,” Bradley said.

Now Pelham looked up. “It will always be a planet in my heart. Ah, here.” He removed a handful of candles from the bag and set them gently on the cold ground.

“Why are we not dead?” Bradley said. “I mean, obviously: there’s a dome, some kind of magical habitat, though not a very big one, judging by how I banged my head. But
those
guys, the dead friends of Dave, don’t look like they had this kind of protection.”

Pelham said, “I assume this dome is Miss Jarrow’s doing—that she foresaw this eventuality and preferred to spare us from death.”

“She gave Drew-Dave the sword, apparently, too,” Bradley said. “This is
all
her way of amusing herself.”

“More fun than tearing the legs off spiders,” Rondeau muttered.

“All right, she kept us from dying, but how do we get
back
?” Bradley said. “I can teleport, but the odds are pretty good I’ll get torn apart by the monsters that dwell in the in-between on the journey, and I can’t drag you guys along with me anyway—group teleportation is an advanced skill I never learned. Normally I’d say, wait here while I go get help, but, well.” He shrugged. “It’s a long trip for a rescue helicopter.”

“There is another way.” Pelham brushed away the soil beside him, uncovering the corner of something flat and man-made. “Miss Jarrow left this, too.” He lifted the edge of the obejct, revealing a large mirror turned face-down. Bradley helped him stand the mirror upright, propping it against one invisible wall of the dome. The mirror’s frame was elaborately carved to resemble a lion’s head, the reflective surface held in its jaws. “I have candles,” Pelham said. “Can you prepare the ritual?”

“You guys made traveling by mirror sound so
fun
,” Rondeau said. “Do we have some other alternative? Like, say, waiting for major advances in space travel and hitching a ride home on the eventual manned mission from Earth?”

“Unless the air in this dome is somehow magically self-replenishing, we have rather less time than that,” Pelham said. “And if we travel by mirror... we may be able to take Mr. Drew by surprise.”

“We’re still finishing the mission?” Rondeau didn’t bother to hide his disgust.

“Given that Elsie Jarrow sent us to Pluto when she
wasn’t
mad at us, do you want to see what she’d do if we pissed her off?” Bradley said.