Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles (32 page)

The group froze. “What’ve you got?”

“You want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Good news, I suppose.”

“Our big-eared gangster friend didn’t sell us out.”

Zhao seemed upbeat for once. “I hoped my cousin would keep his word.”

Heinrich laughed. “And now, of course, the bad.”

“One of his underlings sold us out. Du and his boys left in a convoy of trucks. They’re still counting money and having a good time, but one of those serving girls of his walked down the street from the warehouse and started talking to a policeman. I don’t speak the lingo. Way she’s standing there listening, she’s not a snitch or getting a bribe, she’s one of them, undercover. Now the policeman’s talking into a radio. Wish I spoke Chinese . . .”

“Don’t need to.” Even though the floor was damp and slick, Sullivan took a knee. It was easier on his back than standing all hunched over. He looked over to Zhao, who was thoughtful enough to keep the hand torch pointed down the other way so as to not blind everybody. “They’ll be waiting for us.” Sullivan pulled the Webley from inside his coat. They had passed several forks in the smuggler’s tunnels. “You got another way out?”

“Yes. There are many places to exit in the ruined quarter.”

“Got a rat following the girl. She’s gone back into the warehouse with a bunch of those secret police. There’s a diesel engine . . .”

“What does it do?” Heinrich prompted.

“Hard to get an angle from the floor . . . Wait, it’s a water pump. She’s killed it. Now she’s trying to turn a big valve on the floor.”

“She’s flooding the tunnels,” Heinrich snapped.

“They’re not rolling us up.” Sullivan put the Webley back. “They’re flooding us out.”

“The whole system fills very quickly,” Zhao said. “We will be taking the closest exit. Hurry.”

The knights set out. Lance was all distracted trying to steer more than one body with only one brain, so Heinrich grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him along. Sullivan brought up the rear, mostly because he was too damned big to go fast all hunched over, but it beat crawling. He’d done enough of that in France.

“That valve’s heavy. She’s having to fight it. I’ll distract her . . . Okay, lady. Say hello to my little friend.” Lance began to laugh maniacally.

“What’d you do?” Heinrich asked.

“Had a rat crawl up her dress to bite her on the ass. Ha!” Then Lance grimaced, stumbled, and crashed into the wall. He fell on his face, moaning.

Heinrich dragged him up. Their Beastie had been floored, sure as a punch to the head. “You okay?”

“Getting stepped on always hurts.” Lance was rubbing his temples. “Yeah . . . But we’ve got problems. She had more secret police with her. The valve was rusted stuck, but they’re working on it.”

“How much further, Zhao?” Sullivan asked.

“A few minutes.”

“Keep them busy, Lance. I don’t feel like drowning.”

“Looking . . . I’ve got to collect my Power . . . Here we go, there’s like two hundred rats in this warehouse . . . Can’t control that many individuals . . . Hell. They’ve unstuck the valve. I can only provoke a couple of strong emotions in that many minds.” He closed his eyes and concentrated hard. “I’m going with rage and uncontrollable hunger.”
   

Sullivan didn’t know if Lance was really going to sic a swarm of giant, vicious wharf rats on the secret police, but he was fresh out of pity. “Do it.”

“Already on the way.” Lance struggled to his feet. “Too late. The floodgate’s open.”

There was an odd sound in the distance, not quite like anything Sullivan had heard before. It sounded more like thunder than anything. The atmosphere in the tunnel changed as air was forced past them.

“We’re not going to make it in time!” Zhao shouted.

They only had a few seconds. “How close are we to the river?” Heinrich asked.

The flashlight beam bounced toward the right. “I don’t know. Maybe twenty feet.”

“Oh . . . That’s nasty . . .” Lance said through clenched teeth, his mind divided between here and the warehouse. “
So
much blood.”

Serves them right
, Sullivan thought to himself, but that was just out of spite because they were about to drown. Drowning was preferable to being devoured by rats.

Heinrich still had Lance by the arm. He looked to Sullivan. “Hold your breath and hang on. I’ll come back for you.” Then Heinrich turned grey and hazy. A split second later Lance did as well, and then the two of them disappeared through the rock.

Sulivan looked around. There was nothing to hold on to. The rumble had grown into a much bigger noise, like they were about to be hit by a train. Sullivan flexed his Power, using it to see the world as it really was, interconnected bits of matter under constant forces, and he could feel the incredible spike of energy heading their way. He instinctively did the math. His Power would be sufficient to anchor himself in place, and then all he’d have to do is hold his breath until Heinrich got back.

Then he looked to Zhao, who was staring at him in wide-eyed terror.
Aw hell.
Every time Sullivan had ever forced a significant increase of gravitational power onto somebody else, it had either severely injured or outright killed them. His body was trained to deal with it. Sullivan was a Gravity Spiker. Everybody else was fragile in comparison. Zhao would either be swept away to be battered to death or drowned, or Sullivan could anchor him in place, but if he screwed up even the slightest bit, half of the kid’s internal organs would rupture under the pressure. If the water was solid, he might be able to slow it, but fluids worked differently under gravity. They’d still rush past him and get the kid anyway. Fluids were
complicated
.

“Get behind me,” Zhao shouted.

It was usually Sullivan that said that to others in crisis situations. He was not used to hearing it from somebody else. Zhao roughly pushed past Sullivan,
toward
the onrushing wall of water. The kid dropped the flashlight on the floor, extended his hands, palms open, and squinted into the darkness. He began muttering in Chinese in what Sullivan could only guess was either a desperate prayer or angry profanity. It really could have gone either way.

The surge of magical energy could be felt even before the sudden drop in temperature. Sullivan had one hand against the slick, wet wall, but he snatched it away, as the stone froze so quickly that it burned his flesh. He even left some skin behind. Ice crystals formed and spread, and within seconds, the tunnel was covered in gleaming white. The dirty ice reflected and bounced the flashlight beam. The cold hit Sullivan like a hammer and his breath shot out in a burst of steam.

Zhao shouted something, but Sullivan’s ears were too cold to hear it. Either that or the blast of air pushing ahead of the water took all the sounds with it. Then somehow it got even colder. The storm at the North Pole was a summertime walk in the park in comparison. Sullivan’s exposed skin felt like it was on fire. His eyes didn’t want to move in their sockets. His teeth felt like they were about to shatter, and the worst part of all was that Sullivan was on the warm side of the tunnel. He was only catching the aftereffects radiating off of Zhao’s body. The real force of his magic was being directed the opposite way. The kid was using so much Power, so fast, that it was liable to kill him. The cold ate the batteries in their flashlight, plunging the tunnel into darkness.

When using their magic, Spikers could
see
gravity, because everything was just matter and force after all. The whole universe was simply little bits, seen and unseen, constantly moving against each other and creating energy. In all of the many years since Sullivan had begun to truly understand the nature of his Power, he had never seen the world deprived of that energy, until that one brief moment in time, when he got to see Zhao suck every last bit of heat from that tunnel. Sullivan had never seen matter be so perfectly
still
before.

And then the water was on them.

It roared down the tunnel, ready to smash them flat, but then the angry water molecules hit the impenetrable cold, and then it was energy bleeding into the complete absence of it. The top layer turned to ice and the layer behind it turned to slush, but still behind that was a million gallons of pushing death, and Zhao pushed back even harder. Thicker and thicker, the wall turned into a plug of ice with the density of a prehistoric glacier, but it still kept on coming. Releasing that much magic at once threatened to tear the kid apart, but he kept it up. The ice thickened, hardened, cracked, exploded, and reformed, slowing, but still driving onward.

So now they were about to get steam rolled by a giant ice cube.

All of his Power exhausted, Zhao collapsed. The temperature immediately began to rise as molecules began moving again. Sullivan tried to lift a foot and realized that his boots had been stuck to the floor, so he pulled harder until his soles cracked free. He was so cold he could barely think, but ice was solid. Sullivan understood
solid
.

Lumbering down the tunnel, he stepped over the fallen kid, gathered up all of his considerable Power, magnified his density, lowered one shoulder, and absolutely chained himself to the center of the Earth. The ice flow was moving about as fast as a truck on the highway, and it hit him equally hard.

Sullivan flinched, partly from the impact, and partly from the sheer, unbelievable cold. It shattered around him, and despite his magically amplified mass, it shoved him, his feet turning the stone of the tunnel floor into gravel. The cold was killing his flesh. The moisture in his skin was freezing and rupturing his cells. The Healing spells he’d carved into his chest were burning like suns, trying to repair the damage. Sullivan drew as hard on his Power as he ever had in his life, increasing his density even more, and now the cold could not penetrate as fast, though it just kept on pushing.

There was motion in the shadows behind him. Heinrich had returned.
Take the kid!
Sullivan wanted to shout, but he was so locked under the pressure of a multitude of gravities that hisß vocal cords couldn’t vibrate. Heinrich grabbed Zhao and they were gone.

The ice cracked. It was like the plug on a pressure vessel. The edges let go. The friction lessened. Water began to spray past. The ice split again, harder this time. Water was spraying him in the face. The tunnel was filling. The iceberg was breaking apart. The unstoppable force had met the immovable object. The ice cracked, spreading out around him, and then it exploded.

Water was blasting past him, surrounding him. The current would have torn any normal man away, but Sullivan planted himself there and waited. At least the river water was warm in comparison to the Zhao’s ice, but compared to that hellish freezer, everything was warmer. The pressure lessened, so Sullivan was able to ease up on how fast he was burning through his Power. He could feel the reservoir of magical energy stored up in his chest. The air in his lungs would run out long before his magic would.

Today would be nice, Heinrich.

The pain was in his lungs. How much time had passed? He really needed to breathe. No matter how dense he could make himself, there was still the delicate balance of allowing the blood and the air in it to flow to his brain. Cut that off and he was out, just like anybody else.

Come on, Fade.

A hand landed on his shoulder. Sullivan let go of his magic, and suddenly they were both being swept away.

The world was already pitch black, so he couldn’t see when it turned grey, but he felt it as Heinrich pulled him through the tunnel wall. Despite the pain and the danger, his analytical mind couldn’t help but marvel at the feeling of Fading. Sullivan had expanded his original magical connection with gravity into the adjoining areas of force and density, but so far the flip side of the coin, making himself insubstantial enough for his own molecules pass through solid objects had absolutely eluded him. Maybe Fade magic just didn’t work with his mentality. Nobody would ever accuse Jake Sullivan of being flighty.

They passed through the solid earth. It was an uncanny feeling, but Sullivan trusted that Heinrich knew what he was doing, though for such a supposedly short distance, this did seem to take forever . . . Luckily, they hit the river and he felt himself become substantial again. Immediately his body began to be effected by the currents, and not being buoyant, he began to sink like a stone.

Desperate for air, Sullivan kicked toward the sunlight.

Yao Xiang had been scribbling furious notes for an hour. It had been a long time since he had personally conducted an interview, and he found that all of the writing was making his hand cramp badly. He had suffered from arthritis ever since the Imperium torturers had broken all of his fingers during questioning, but despite that, he could not stop, because what Toru was telling him was either the most important story in the world or utter lunacy.

“That is all, Xiang. Print that in its entirety.” Toru placed his teacup gently on the table. “The Imperium needs to know the truth.”

“But the censors—”

“They will deny you. That is to be expected. However, the important thing is that my words have been recorded, and will fall into the hands of Imperium intelligence to be analyzed. In a short time the truth of my story will be demonstrated, and they will have the testimony necessary to sort out the reality from the lies. If not, by next week the Imperium censors will have more important things to do than to monitor your little paper, and you can print it for the masses then.”

“I would never violate the censor’s orders.”

“Do not bother trying to lie to me. We all know that there is plenty of underground propaganda printed in this city. I used to believe it was a problem when Imperial citizens would read such subversive things, but now I see the value.”

Xiang was frankly shocked by this development.
Was this all some sort of elaborate trick to test my loyalty to the conquerors?
Yet it seemed too bizarre for the normally extremely direct Iron Guard to do something of that nature. Unless this whole thing was some elaborate form of entertainment for them, which would inevitably end with Xiang getting his head chopped off and hung on a fence for decorative purposes. “You would revolt against the Imperium?”