Diellan_

Chapter XLI
In Which A Greeting Goes Poorly

I woke up with a serious hangover. I couldn’t remember any drinking, which meant that I’d either hit it really hard, or it was just the aftereffects of that weird vortex thing that had sucked everybody up when that Herr Auer guy used the key.

Speaking of…

I looked around and confirmed pretty quickly that I was alone. I was in some kind of field that looked like wheat, except that it was all green. I’d only seen wheat on tv and for some reason, they always show wheat fields right around harvest time and they’re brown. I was pretty close to the edge of the field, and there was a muddy dirt road. There weren’t any mountains around, but I could see a village or something in the distance.

I reached up and slid my goggles over my eyes. Got to love these babies, let ya record almost everything. I took a look around, letting the goggles process light in multiple bands – not just the visual spectrum. They turned up very little, even in terms of electromagnetic and radio (really, really trippy to look at this way), which I found really strange. The whole world is pretty much up blanketed in the stuff.

I turned back to the city in the distance and zoomed in. The houses were all a brown-red earthen color with flat tops, and they surrounded a single incredibly large building, which looked like some kind of ziggurat. Or temple.

I dulled the image, inserted a green filter, and inverted the colors, trying to replicate what I had seen via nightvision of the excavated Temple and it seemed to sort of fit. Kinda. It’s hard to say, though, since the previous one had been destroyed, covered in dirt, and then haphazardly dug up by a bunch of Nazis straight from a bad action flick. Though I don’t recall any time travel in those…

I wracked my brain trying to remember what Lorenzo had said about the temple. The stupid thing hadn’t been in Wikipedia at all, so I never got any good descriptions or anything in writing and my pocket computer with its dump of the wiki couldn’t help. He didn’t say when it was built, but that it was destroyed some 4300 years ago, so I knew I was at least that far back. That meant no internet, no cell phones, no refrigerators, no microwaves, not even indoor plumbing.

The past is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

At least I had the stuff I brought with me. The pistol alone made me top dog over the natives, though I had to watch out – magic was still pretty strong in those days. Stronger, maybe, if you asked certain people. These people couldn’t have been that good, though, if they let their temple get destroyed. Of course, the Fifth might be running around here, too.

Where was everybody, anyways?

Waitaminute! I dug into the vest of my homemade body armor that I wore under my clothes and pulled out the radio and cued it up to our emergency frequency. I waited a bit to see if I picked up anything, then started making requests for contact in code. I got nothing but silence in response. It didn’t really mean much, though, since the darn thing only operates in line-of-sight. Wish I had cell phones…

Well, I didn’t really have many options, and it was pretty obvious that I was on my own, which made me a bit nervous. The only thing I could really do was go to the temple and wait for the others there, since they would be doing the same and it looked pretty tall, and there weren’t any mountains around, so it’d also be the best place to broadcast from.

I took a step forward and fell over.

What the hell?

I got up and immediately stumbled again, feeling really nauseous, too. The third time I was more careful, took the step slowly, and went fine. It was then that I realized that ever since I’d woken up, I was moving slow, acting slow, thinking slow! I’d lost my speed!

I looked around frantically, once again looking for signs of electrical activity. I’ve been hit by Nullifier Guns and other nasty toys that have slowed me down before, but I couldn’t find any signs of that. Besides, they never messed with the way I thought. Now it felt like I was in slow-motion. Worse, even! One of those old stop-motion film monsters!

But what about my other powers?

I concentrated and tried to summon a ball of flame, but only got a small fire that disappeared almost immediately after I released it. And my magic didn’t seem to work at all – no Mu electric armor, no dark mist, nothing! Was it because of this place? Was it a side effect of the time travel? After all, the time travelling Menders claimed that one’s super-powers diminished in inverse proportion to the distance travelled, which had been true when I used their portals to travel. I’d never lost my speed and fire, but admittedly I’d never gone back more than 40 years. This was a hundred times that…

Suddenly, that pistol Ros gave me seemed a whole lot more important. And the body armor. Oh, and the grenades, the goggles, the computer, and the combat knife. I was wishing I’d brought my robot snake with me, but he was home having some bonding time with Alex’s robot Blinky.

I flipped on the rangefinder and groaned. It was a whole seven-point-four-three miles to the temple from where I stood, and without super speed or flight it would take me forever to get there. Like a whole hour and a half! This place sucked.

It actually took a few hours, since the road was crappy and I kept on having to hide whenever somebody would walk past (or ride past on some donkey or another). Who knows what these native folks would think of a man decked out in combat gear – let alone with hi-tech goggles on; for all I know, zippers are witchcraft! It would suck pretty hard to go back over four thousand years just to get burned at the stake. Besides, I think Sofia would be pretty upset if I messed with the time stream.

Spoilsport.

Getting into the village itself without being seen was an interesting task, since I didn’t have my mist to hide in anymore. There was a big wall circling the place, with guards walking around periodically, carrying bows and axes and weird curved swords. Not a lot of guards, though, since they usually just hung around the gates and would do a sweep of the walls only every hour or so. It made sense, since the city was sitting on a mound of dirt amongst a big, fat plain and you could probably see any armies or bandits for miles away. The wall was still kinda big and I’m not the best climber around (and it’s not like I had rope or pitons or anything), so my only real option would’ve been to go through one of the gates. I wasn’t sure how I’d pull it off.

And then I reached a gate and saw who was standing guard: a ******* 5th Column soldier!

I snickered a bit. I had to be careful interacting with regular people so as not to screw with the timeline, but that didn’t include Nazis from the future! So I waited until he was sufficiently distracted talking to one of the natives – well, more like accosting than talking, though I have no idea what they said in crazy language – and ran silently to the gate. The native saw me approach and opened his eyes wide; the 5th Columnist turned to look what was so interesting.

“Hi!” I said happily and threw the combat knife into his eye socket.

The soldier slumped. The native stared. I pulled the knife out and wiped the blood off on the soldier’s uniform. The native said something, so I smiled at him. “Did you see that? Even better than Steven Seagal! Even if I was aiming for his chest…” More gibberish. “Um, hi there. My name’s Vic, what’s yours?”

The native turned and ran screaming. Murder probably wasn’t the best way to introduce myself. And, in retrospect, as I saw the commotion start, letting a witness run away shouting an alarm was probably not the best way to silently infiltrate a city.

I turned to the side, saw an alleyway between some buildings, and took off running. The alleys in this city turned out to be narrow and crazy convoluted, winding every which way and dumping you out randomly onto the street (sometimes looping around enough to dump you out right back on the street you entered from). I started to see more and more Nazis wandering the streets and after about ten or fifteen minutes, they got calls on their little radios and started organizing themselves for a search. I wouldn’t be able to run all day… I needed to find a place to hide.

“Halt!” I heard a shout as I passed through a street from one alleyway to another, and I turned my head. Three soldiers had seen me and were running in my direction. I entered the next alleyway, made it about ten meters, then hit a dead end. The alley was filled with a bunch of bags, which I quickly piled on top of each other, and then climbed up to the roof of the building and resumed running.

Running along the rooftops was complicated, since the buildings were of varying heights, and even though they shared walls, they all seemed to be built in a kind of donut shape, with the central gap being a kind of courtyard. Really weird. Also, I wasn’t the only one who thought of this, as the regular people were milling about on the roofs, too – hanging laundry and things like that.

I saw a soldier climbing up a ladder ahead of me, so stopped, drew my pistol, and fired. My little shout of excitement as he fell was drowned out by a loud howl, like from a dog or wolf.

I swallowed nervously, since I knew it for what it was. A warwolf. My pistol would only be kind of helpful there and I couldn’t really blow him up with a fireball or… Wait! I reached under my jacket and pulled out a grenade. It would totally give away my position, but that would be the least of my worries if the warwolf found me.

There was a crash behind me and the roof top trembled. I span around and fired the pistol, but the gigantic half-man-half-wolf beast darted to the side and I hit nothing but air.

“Dang it, Fido, stay still!” I shouted, firing until I exhausted the magazine. I gripped the grenade tightly, then turned around and ran.

I saw a large shadow on the ground just in front of me, and I threw myself to the side, narrowly avoiding a huge piece of wall that had been thrown at me. It crashed through the roof and neatly took out part of the building I was now laying on. I looked up and saw the warwolf leap over and onto the far side of the building.

It, too, fell through the destabilized roof.

I laughed, scrambling to my feet, and pulled the pin from the grenade. “Fetch, boy!” I tossed the grenade through the hole and ran once again.

The explosion knocked me off my feet. I flipped through the air in a shower of clay brick, crashed into one of the little parapet things they used as railing on their roofs, and flipped over it. I hit the ground on the other side hard and got the wind knocked out of me. Probably broke some bones, too.

I heard frantic footsteps and the sound of rifle butts slamming shoulders as the 5th Column soldiers surrounded me and aimed down. I opened my eyes and saw the warwolf hurdle through the air and land at me feet. It walked forward slowly, glowing yellow eyes searching me for any more tricks, and then put a foot down on my chest possessively, in triumph.

I lifted my head to see where my pistol had landed before grinning at the creature, and then promptly passed out.

Chapter XL
In Which Old Friends Appear

I was awoken from my sleep by the sound of gunfire.

Madam Rabinovich and Mister Ward were both asleep, oblivious to the bone-rattling rapport echoing off the mountains. I knelt down to wake them, then thought better of it and instead headed in the direction of the pitched battle; after all, if they were in too deep asleep to awaken from the sounds, I reasoned that they were exhausted enough to need that sleep. I decided to leave my swordstick behind in the off chance that Madam Rabinovich would need some kind of weapon, and drew Rostov Kushan’s pistol.

The nearly full moon gave me enough light to see by, and the adrenalin pumping in my veins seemed to override the pain in my knee, and I quickly approached the crest of the hill. Not wanting to give anything away, I dropped down to a crawl, and peered over.

The brothers Kushan stood back to back on the valley floor, guns raised and blazing, accompanied by Rostov Kushan’s small mercenary force. I could make out the grim determination on their faces, accented by the flashing light of the rifles they were carrying. They were surrounded by bodies of the dead and dying 5th Column soldiers that had apparently attempted to ambush them. Or were ambushed by them.

The gunfire came to a halt and I saw that none of the enemy remained standing. The two brothers let out howls of triumph, and cautiously walked through the casualties. I was amazed that they had done so well, had managed to defeat dozens of enemy soldiers without any injury and wondered, with twinges of jealousy, if they had not been affected by the loss of magic.

Regardless, I was exulted by their appearance – together no less! – and shouted a greetings.

“Lorenzo?” Rostov Kushan yelled back, somewhat suspicious. He waved his rifle in my direction, unable to find me on the hilltops.

“Indeed, Mister Kushan!” I replied as I slowly rose to my feet. “It is good to-“

“Good to what?”

I could see across the gap to the next hill and beyond it. Black shapes, man-sized, moved with deliberate slowness, their weapons glinting in the moonlight. The hill beyond was covered by the silent stalkers, and the hilltop beyond that, off into the horizon. I looked back down at the Brothers Kushan, then up at the incoming ambush, and raised my hands to my mouth to sound the alarm.

There was a crash of thunder and the sound of bullet flying by my ear and I dropped down to the ground. The ground around me exploded in a hail of bullets and pushed myself away and back, quickly protecting myself with hill’s bulk and a moderately sized boulder. Bullets whizzed by, keeping me from peeking out to watch my comrades, to see if they were going to survive, and I knew the pistol wouldn’t have the range to be of any use. I could do nothing but sit and wait, and pray.

The praying should have struck me as odd and should have been my first warning. As I mentioned earlier, my faith abandoned me a long time hence, and I trust in nothing but skill and luck. But somehow, for some reason, it seemed natural to pray for their safety. Not just natural, but… necessary.

The gunfire and the screaming stopped, and I worked up the nerve to carefully peek out over the top of my rock. The soldiers had formed up in a half-circle around my companions, who were in various stages of injury: some were on the ground; some were standing with their arms raised in surrender. Rostov Kushan was clutching his shoulder with one hand, and the other was held behind his back. His brother was among those lying on the dirt.

“Surrender!” I heard one of the soldiers shout. “Arms up!”

Rostov Kushan shook his head, still keeping one arm behind his back, clenching something fiercely. I leaned forward, trying to see what he was holding, but it was too dark and his own bulk hid it from the light of the moon.

One of the soldiers nodded to the other, who stepped forward cautiously. Rostov stared at him, slipped the object into the waist of his pants, and raised both hands. The soldiers relaxed slightly, and the one that had stepped forward was motioning for him to get down on the ground. He nodded, bent his knees, then leapt forward with incredible speed and strength.

I stared in horror as the torrent of gunfire combated his forward moment, flipping him backwards in the air, crashing him face first into the ground just in front of the line of soldiers. One of them, stepped forward, and flipped him over with his foot. He, like me, was wondering what Rostov had been trying to hide, and knelt down to examine his pockets.

He didn’t even have time to scream before the grenade detonated.

I instinctively ducked behind the rock. I was too far away for the explosion to be a danger to me, but shrapnel could be… treacherous. Only after a few seconds had passed and the sound of raining debris ended, did I stand to witness the devastation before me.

I saw that not a man remained standing, and I charged down the hill, pistol in one hand, crucifix in the other, unsure whether or not I would be saying the last rites over my friends or exacting swift justice on surviving enemies. It didn’t take long for me to reach the crater the grenade had created, and the dismembered remains of my comrade-in-arms.

I froze. I hadn’t worn a crucifix in over a hundred years.

I opened my clenched fist and stared in amazement at the ancient symbol. It had been given to me by Beppe Giordano, his last spoken desire before his lungs collapsed. I carried it with me for only two weeks before it was deformed by the mine explosion that crippled my leg. After the war ended, I gave it to Beppe’s widow.

I looked up, and I was on the Alps once more, surrounded by dead and dying Austrians and Italians. My focus slid down, amongst the remains of Giustino Ennio, whose “valiant sacrifice” would be praised by his own widow’s hollow voice, all while her eyes stared at me accusingly. I had been his officer. It was my duty to bring him home. To watch over him and keep him safe from ambushes. To protect him from idiotic orders and idiotic plans made by incompetent generals. Why had I lived?

“Mon… Mondavi?”

I whirled, my eyes searching. The voice called again and I darted through the bodies, seeking out my man. It didn’t take long to find him. The top half, anyway.

“I… I’m sorry.”

“Be quiet, Schirru,” I ordered, kneeling down beside him. “Keep your strength.”

“For what?” He started to laugh, but it quickly became a cough. Blood dribbled down his chin. “I’m dead.”

“Not yet. Not if I can-“

“You couldn’t, remember?” His face grew hard and accusing. “You waved your hands, did your thing, and I still died.”

I swallowed. “I tried, Schirru, but it was beyond my abilities. I need time for those things, those rituals. I couldn’t bring back your legs. I couldn’t stop the infections or the fluid in your lungs.”

“Ha!” Raul Shirru spat blood on the ground. “You could’ve sheltered us, protected us. You kept yourself alive!”

“It was all I could do just to keep the Austrians from interfering!” I shouted back, feeling the old anger returning. “They had occultists, too, Schirru. If I sacrificed any concentration, they would’ve scryed and found us, destroyed us.”

“They did anyway!” He lifted himself up onto his hands and started crawling. “You failed.”

“I wasn’t strong enough…”

“Excuses. Worthless justifications.” He thrust a finger at me. “You could’ve brought us back afterwards. You know how! But you didn’t even try. You failed us, just like you failed her.”

I took a step back and felt a presence behind me. I froze. I couldn’t face her, not now, not after what I’d done. What I’d seen. I had tried so hard to learn how to cheat the Reaper, how to remove its stench from those whose purity demanded vibrant life. But now I reeked of Death. It clung to me and I reveled in its power. How could I ever show myself to one who had adored life so much?

Besides, I told myself for the millionth time, hating myself as I did so, if there is a Heaven, she is in it.

“Lorenzo…” Her voice called. I closed my eyes and swallowed, frozen and entranced.

“Lorenzo…” The voice fluctuated, shifted. “Lorenzo!”

I blinked in recognition and confusion. It wasn’t her after all. “Madam Rabinovich?”

The scenery melted away.

My eyes snapped open. Madam Rabinovich was leaning over me, her hands on my shoulders, her eyes betraying the worry that her face hid so well. We had agreed to take shifts of sleep until morning, and after much debate over the matter, it was decided that I would go first. I had been worried that I could not ward my dreams, but I had figured that all my enmities would be in the future, and I would be safe here. That, perhaps, my sleep would be safe.

“You looked like you needed waking up.” I never told her of my haunted sleep, but I had surmised that, somehow, she had deduced it a long time since. It is not uncommon amongst the survivors of the wars.

“I’m fine, madam.” I reached up and mopped the sweat from my brow while beginning a series of breath exercises to get my racing pulse back in control. The images of the dream were starting to fade, but it did not matter if they disappeared entirely; the substance would remain. “Just a dream. Nothing more.”

She frowned, and I could tell that she did not believe it. “It neither looks nor sounds like ‘nothing’,” she said drily. “It wasn’t the Morrigan again, was it?”

“No, no.” I gave her a small, fake smile. Shortly before my imprisonment, I had tracked down and killed an avatar of the Morrigan, an immortal terror that had been stalking the streets of Port Oakes. She refused to forgive me. “It lacked her… flair. I think I have been blessed with my first normal nightmare in seventy-one years.”

“Small favors,” she replied. Her voice was coated with honeyed sarcasm, somehow maintaining the warmth and concern. She licked her perpetually dry lips and I could see the curiosity and unanswered questions in her eyes. It was all she could do to keep propriety and not probe, to receive neither confirmation nor denial of all her suspicions regarding me and my psyche.

I felt I had to tell her something of them… at least in the abstract. Too much of the content was too personal.

“It was the usual, madam,” I explained, ignoring my dry throat. “Old deaths and old fears. Old problems.” I snorted. “Old me.”

She raised an eyebrow at that. ‘How old?’ it asked.

“Too old.” I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Things I’ve long since put behind me but still lurk deep in my subconscious. I mean, I haven’t thought of Ennio in decades, but there he was.”

“Ennio?”

I sighed. “One of the men in my command during the Great War. We were ambushed by Austrians and he managed to get among them with a live grenade. He died a hero.”

She caught the mocking tone of the last word and shook her head in wry agreement with the sentiment. Heroes were people who did brave and foolish things, and invariably died with great fanfare and little impact. So many more lives – on both sides - would have been saved if we had simply surrendered that day.

People think in victories, not lives, and the world suffers.

The glade was suddenly illuminated with a bright light. With tangible eagerness, we tore our eyes up to the night sky, which was suddenly devoid of any stars, all of them washed out by the glaring orange signal flare. Our previous conversation was forgotten.

Chapter XXXVIII
In Which a Bet is Offered

I examined my pocket watch and glanced up at the sun, shielding my eyes with my free hand. Four hours had passed since our arrival, and the brilliant orb had covered more than half the distance to the horizon. I found this comforting, since it meant that we could probably expect a normal twenty-four day in this place – wherever it was.

I noted the time to Madam Rabinovich and she withdrew her cell phone from her bag to confirm that my watch was accurate. I have always found it odd that neither she nor her husband kept a watch (wrist, pocket, or otherwise) with them at all times. She claims that she has no need, since her phone is perfectly capable of telling her the time. I have yet to point out to her that her phone’s battery will only last the week.

She calmly returned the cell phone to her bag and took the tube of sunblock in its place and passed it around for reapplication. We had the misfortune of traveling in the same direction that sun was setting (west?), so were forced to climb with our eyes lowered and our faces exposed to the burning rays. Madam Rabinovich’s umbrella, which had been such a good parasol in the past, was now serving as a walking stick for Mister Ward, and nobody besides myself had the foresight to bring a hat. Of the three of us, the Russian Jewess was the most sensitive to the harsh effects of the desert sun (Mister Ward was not bothered by the bright light, for obvious reasons, and I’m Sicilian), so I had loaned her my fedora.

Besides, I had far worse in Abyssinia.

I let my gaze wander over the hills around us and to the plains beyond, marveling at how varied this planet can be, how two deserts can look so different. Different soils. Different rocks. Different plants. Same rainfall. This place, like many of the areas of the Middle East it so closely resembled, looked far more inviting than the wastes of Africa that had swallowed up so many of my countrymen. It helped that the hills weren’t teeming with Menelik’s soldiers.

I shivered at the memory and glanced back at Madam Rabinovich, who was, thankfully, busy taking Mister Ward to task for not putting on enough sunscreen and thus did not notice. I rarely spoke to anyone about my wartime experiences, and even then, most people were far more interested in the Great War than Italy’s ill-advised attempt to conquer Abyssinia. Even Madam Rabinovich, my most trusted confidants, knew very little about the experiences that forced a young, arrogant Italian playboy to grow up.

I prefer to keep it that way.

I calmly returned to my hike along the top of the hills, toward what appeared to be the crest of the ridge. They were, all in all, quite shallow and none too tall, no more than a hundred meters above the base, but our hike was slow and uncertain. Mister Ward was completely incapable of guiding himself, so Madam Rabinovich had to assist him with every step. This was mostly done through the weak telepathic link that they had set up. After seeing him stumble several times in a row, his face understandably torn with frustration, I realized that he was not actually seeing through her eyes.

“Yes, the link is meager,” she elaborated. “He picks up subvocalizations and echoed conversations.”

“Echoed, madam?”

She gave a small smile, probably secretly relishing the fact she knew something I didn’t (not to say she is not a genius, herself, merely competitive). Neurology and linguistics are her fields of expertise, and my knowledge in those areas is both lacking and outdated. “Whenever you listen to someone else speak, your brain replays the words in order to store them into your short term memory. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch yourself thinking everything you hear in your own voice.”

I grunted my acknowledgement. It was a curious thing, and I had often wondered if it was merely a byproduct of my eidetic memory. “And he reads these from your mind?”

She nodded. “And I subvocalize directions for where to put his feet. But he says it’s like I’m speaking through glass, and sometimes he doesn’t catch it.”

They had already seemed to have worked out a system, where all of her directions and assistance was silent and thought-based, but their other conversations were spoken. I didn’t ask about that, since I was already feeling embarrassed for pointing out Mister Ward’s stumbling, and immediately performed a mental facepalm: Madam Rabinovich was trying to keep things as normal as possible – speaking her directions would be a constant reminder of his disability, and keeping their conversations hidden as well would lead to an awkward silence that would, likewise, be a reminder.

Madam Rabinovich is a very wise woman.

When we finally crested the top of the ridge, the sun was dipping dangerously low on the horizon. We had, at most, two hours of daylight left. The landscape below unfolded like a map; the hills dropped quickly down to a valley floor, then rose again on the other side, even higher than where we currently stood. The base of the valley was verdant and green, and in the middle, sparkling in the sun, was an enormous river.

“I think we found your water, madam,” I announced as the others caught up with me. “It’s a good ten or twenty kilometers away, but seeing as it appears to still be Spring here, it is likely that we’ll find a stream that feeds the river.”

She looked up at the setting sun and frowned. “We had better; we won’t make it there by nightfall.”

“Can we make it to a stream?” Mister Ward asked. “Can we see any from here?”

I started to shake my head, then caught myself. “No. We need to remain here, where we can keep an eye out for the Kushans. If he gets dropped off somewhere, we need to know.”

“How?” Madam Rabinovich put her free hand on her hip. “There won’t be any light pollution and we have nothing to see by except the flashlight in my bag. And we need water and food.”

“If only we had Rostov Kushan’s flare gun…” I murmured.

She gaped at me. “He has a flare gun?”

“Of course,” I replied. He had taken it for the purpose of signaling his men in case things went south, but it would adequately serve as a light source or beacon if necessary.

“Men!” She groaned. “Why didn’t you tell me this? If he keeps any of his sense, he’ll fire it the first night he’s here and stay put.”

“What if we’re wrong and he appeared here first?” Mister Ward, the only one to ever point out the flaws in our plans – something he took great pride in – added. “He might have fired the flare last night and we missed it.”

There was a long silence.

“He has a few of them, so maybe he’ll space them out…” Madam Rabinovich gave me a nervous glance. “Or he might be sitting and waiting for us, then eventually give up and start exploring.” That option looked rather bleak. “Let’s hope we’re right and he appears at some point over the next twenty-four hours.”

“Do we wait here for it then?”

Madam Rabinovich shook her head and pointed down the slope. “Take a look at that patch of green over there; those trees are much thicker than they should be. And then there’re the shrubs around it… I’d be willing to bet that they’re occluding a small stream or spring.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I never knew you to gamble, madam.”

She gave me one of her looks. It is in the unique nature of women to express any number of thoughts, desires, or intentions, using no more than their eyes. Each woman has their own style of Look, and as much as they expect men to immediately know what she means by it, it is only through trial and error that they can be deciphered. This specific one said, “I was being facetious and you know it, but I’m going to make a quip in reply anyway.”

“Not in a long time, no.” Her eyes flashed with laughter. “People stopped betting against me.”

Mister Ward groaned. Madam Rabinovich smiled and immediately began the descent towards what we hoped was a source of fresh water.

This side of the ridge was significantly steeper than the eastern, and combining that with the pull of gravity meant that we travelled faster and far more dangerous than before. Small falls were common amongst all three of us, accompanied by many cries of frustration and annoyance, and it is only with a good deal of luck that we survived with nothing more than scratches and bruises. Madam Rabinovich’s bag was beginning to show its true worth with antiseptics and bandages, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be enough to last us through the endeavor, since the supplies Mister Ward had stored were in a small pocket dimension that could only be reached via magical means.

Once again, I cursed myself for my reliance on magic to supply me with all my needs. Now all I had was a watch, Rostov Kushan’s pistol with a single clip, my cane-sword, and a set of survival skills that I hadn’t used in over a hundred years.

I didn’t even have my own source of light, which became an ever-growing complication as time passed and we lost our race with the sun. When we finally reached the trees - and the brook that sustained them - we had only a flashlight and a rising moon to direct us.

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Well, time alone will tell, but I'm fairly sure CP will be replaced with something. Though I'm doubtful of whether that will be a straight out heal. Elec has such great end recovery abilities that I could see that being overpowered by Castle and co. Something like Drain Psyche probably makes more sense, as the regen could be a help. Or maybe a Dull Pain type power. *shrugs* I could be wrong, of course, Fiery Aura does get Consume and Healing Flames, of course. Though I'd be foolish to argue that Consume is better than Power Sink (other than the fact that you can get it much, much earlier).

And maybe it will all just stay the same, heh. You never know.

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I agree that on the surface, a fast recharging direct heal might seem over powered and yeah a regen ability would make more sense from a balance standpoint although functionally I don't think it'd help unless it gave WP/Regen levels of regen in short bursts (i.e. a ghetto version of Fast Healing).

Dunno ... should be interesting though.

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The real question is how much Castle values Endurance Drain as a mitigation ability. This is something I've been wanting to ask him forever, since it affects both Electric Armor and Electric Blast, both of which tend to get ranked at the bottom except for a few staunch defenders.

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CP has to go and on /EA too, I like to have CP added on a PPP(Scricco) for other brutes can enjoy.


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Mu Mastery is the only Brute epic with only 4 powers, so this would be perfect.

Chapter XXXV
In Which Absences Terrorize

I found myself laying on my back on a rough and uneven surface, opened my eyes and immediately regretted it. Bright light seared my vision and I turned my face away from the overhead glare and to my right, squinting while my eyes adjusted to the abrupt change from dimly lit underground tunnel to noon desert sun.

Midday sun? Was I unconscious that long? Or at all? I did not recall any loss. And how did I get out here? The swirling vortex that Auer had created must have been some kind of portal. To another place? Another time? Another dimension?

I pushed myself up to a sitting position, ignoring the stiffness of my neck and back muscles, and took stock of my surroundings. I lay in a small valley between several hills, all of them verdant with the green shrubbery and grasses that were common during the spring in the desert areas of Pales- Israel and Jordan, I corrected myself. A cold wind rustled the sparse trees that lined a small trail that wound through the base of the valley, and I quickly realized that between the cloud coverage and cool, lightly humid air, I was no longer in Iraq.

To my left, Madam Rabinovich stirred slightly, still apparently unconscious and, thankfully, uninjured.

I wiped the dirt off of my clothing, and tried to stand up, but I was rewarded for my effort with an unexpected sharp pain through my leg. I stared down in shock and dismay at the betrayal of my right knee. During the Great War, my platoon had the misfortune of passing through an unexpected minefield, killing many and injuring most. I survived a barrage of shrapnel with a lost kidney and a permanently bad knee. Every day I renew a small enchantment which removes the constant pain and bolsters the functionality of the joint. The enchantment had faded completely, without a trace.

In fact, all of my wards had disappeared. A side effect of the vortex, perhaps? I put my hands over my knee and murmured the ritual incantation, but felt no surge of power and saw no flows of energy. I tried a second time. Nothing. With desperation, I mentally reached for the nascent mana that flowed through the world, but felt nothing, saw nothing.

My mind raced and I could feel my heart pound in my chest. I’ve been through anti-magic fields, had my power shackled by malevolent entities, and purposefully suppressed all magical connections in order to avoid attention, but in all cases, I could hear the pulse of the mana flow between the leylines and smell the energies in the air.

It was as if magic didn’t exist at all.

“Lorenzo! What’s wrong?!”

I turned to Madam Rabinovich, startled that she was awake and surprised by the worry and concern in her voice. I swallowed slowly and attempted to regain my composure. I was tempted to tell her that nothing was wrong, that I had suffered worse, but that would be a foolish deception; the loss of my magic was mission critical knowledge. “Many things, madam.”

She was sitting up, wiping the dirt from her skirt and blouse and giving me a critical look. “I know: that vortex has made me nauseous, and I might have a migraine coming up. Do you know where we are?”

I shook my head, my worry about my own condition muted by her own. She is one of the poor souls who are plagued with chronic and debilitating migraines, and regardless of how much her husband and I reminded her, she regularly neglected to pack any medicines with her. “Do you have any pills with you?”

“Thankfully, yes.” She opened her bag and began to look for them.

I pulled out my watch and frowned. It said that it was 11:45 in the evening. “We’ve gone from midnight to midday in a matter of moments. And the flora is out of place for central Iraq.”

“Mm. It makes me think of the Shomron.” She watched with no small measure of curiosity as I took off my trench coat and put the watch into the pocket of my trousers. The trench coat, like many pieces of my clothing that I wore on a regular basis, including my fedora, had been enchanted so many times over the years that it was a surprise that it had not spontaneously developed sentience. These enchantments included (but were not limited to) increased durability, resistance to dirt and stains, physical and magical protection for the wearer, weatherproofing, and assurance of proper stylish billowing in any wind. The enchantments had all disappeared.

“The vortex seems to have had an unexpected side effect,” I answered the unasked question, grimacing. “My wards are gone and I am unable to perform even the simplest of magical conjurations. The coat no longer protects me from heat and cold… And it is rather heavy.”

She blinked, then waved a finger, whispering to herself. Over the last year or so she had taken an interest in magic herself, though she has thus far limited herself to theoretical knowledge and a hodge-podge of minor spells of convenience (like how to summon a book from thin air instead of having to carry it in her shoulder bag). She frowned when nothing happened. “Not just you. Maybe we’re trapped in an anti-magic field?”

“I find that oddly comforting, madam,” I mused openly. “I would be most distressed if something had happened to my sorcerous abilities.”

“I’m sure.” She gave me an ironic smile.

“I do have to ask a small favor.” She raised a querying eyebrow. “Could you return my cane?”

“Of course! Silly man…” She started to laugh, then caught herself and stared down at my knee. She was one of the few people aware of the injury; with the enchantment I was able to walk normally enough that most people did not catch the slight awkwardness of the joint’s movement. “All of your enchantments are gone?”

I nodded wearily and started to pull myself up on to my feet, when Madam Rabinovich made a small tsking sound and put a hand on my shoulder to stop me. She stood up, reached down, and helped me up.

“I must apologize, madam.” I shifted my weight around until I could comfortably lean on the cane. “The pain is not really that bad, I am simply unused to it after so long. In a little while I will adjust.”

“It’s not the pain that I’m worried about, Lorenzo.”

I sighed heavily. “It is not painful, this loss of magic, but it is highly disconcerting, along the lines of being in pure silence or darkness – the kind that sucks at the eyeballs and drowns you in the abyss. Highly disconcerting.”

“I see…” she muttered darkly. I could see the thoughts running through her mind as she tried to build a psychiatric profile of what I was going through – or would be going through shortly, once the impact of what was happening had time to sink in and the absence began to take its toll. She’s like that.

I shook my head. “Do not worry about me on this, madam. I lived without magic for a long time, and I do believe I can ignore the distractions of this set back sufficiently for us to accomplish our task and find our way home.”

She looked like she was about to say something in response, but decided not to, for which I was thankful. Instead, she changed the subject by reaching into her shoulderbag and pulling out a cell phone, then punctuating the movement with a sigh. “No reception. Of course. And…” She pressed a few buttons, waited a short bit, and added, “And no signal from the GPS satellites. It’s safe to say that we’re trapped here and have no way of knowing where here is.”

“Or when here is,” I grumbled. “We could be in the distant past or future, where Iraq’s climate is different. Or we could be in an alternate dimension. Or we could just be on the other side of the planet. Or we could actually be in Israel. Or…” I sighed. “The possibilities are endless. We need to find more evidence.”

Madam Rabinovich unstrapped her umbrella and opened it up, using it as a parasol. The hat she had received from Mister Kushan’s supplies was only barely sufficient to protect from the sun. “What we need to find, first, is the others. We’re here, but where’s Auer? Or Garent? Or Victor and Rostov?”

“It does seem odd that you and I would appear together, but the others would be out of sight.”

“I think we only remained together because you kept a firm grip.” She gave a despondent look. “I tried to keep a hold of Garent, but I wasn’t strong enough…”

“The winds of the vortex were tremendous, madam,” I replied soothingly. She was always a rock of emotion stability, a beacon that everyone around her used to keep themselves oriented, but I was one of the few people who knew that this merely a public affair. Deep within her psyche, she was full of self doubt and was always quick to blame herself. “Perhaps it simply scattered everyone over a large distance. We truly have two choices here: we can climb one of these hills to get a vantage point for our search…” I pointed up, then towards the trail. “Or we can follow this trail and see if it takes us to any sort of civilization. It is entirely possible that the others will do the same.”

“The trail isn’t going anywhere, so as much as I hate to say it, we should scale one of these hills.” She scrutinized the offending mounds for a short while before continuing: “That one over there looks like the easiest. Neither of us is really capable of any serious mountaineering right now.”

I glanced down at my cane and nodded.

It was a long, slow, and steady climb. Madam Rabinovich had chosen well, as the slope never got so steep that we were forced to stoop, and there was some evidence that this particular hill had been conquered many times before by herd animals of some kind, which kept the path smooth. I was silently thankful, for my cane would provide me with the traction that severely rocky terrain might have given, and without any of the treacherous steps that my knee could not afford.

About two-thirds of the way up the hill, Madam Rabinovich stopped.

“Madam?” I called out.

“It’s happening again,” she choked out. “Or something like it… I can feel it.”

I was curious as to what she meant by being able to feel it, and was about to ask, when a sudden wave of nausea passed through me and the air shimmered. A black wind ripped across the side of the hill, and I saw that there was no way we could avoid it. Immediately, I grabbed Madam Rabinovich’s wrist and she mine, in order that we might not get split up by wherever the vortex might decide to take us.

It passed through us without effect. We watched it travel for a few seconds, when the wave rippled and the sound of thunder echoed through the hillside. Out of the darkness, a figure appeared and fell to the ground, covered in wisps of obsidian mist. Moments later, the black wind was gone.

The figure groaned and rolled over.

“Garent?” Madam Rabinovich whispered. The mist fell away. “Garent!”

Mister Ward sat up on his knees and stared at the top of the hill, then up at the sky. She and I both called his name and began moving in his direction – she in a stilting jog and me hobbling behind.

“Is… Is somebody there?” Mister Ward asked, his voice shaky and tremulous. “Somebody?”

We called out his name again.

“Guys? Where are you? It’s really dark…”

Madam Rabinovich froze. “Oh god…”

“Madam?”

She looked back over her shoulder, her face completely drained of blood and filled with dread. “You don’t know… almost nobody else does. Garent was born blind and deaf. He uses magic to see. And now magic is… gone.” She turned back and started running to him.

Suddenly, my worries seemed so minor and stupid; so I couldn’t walk without a limp and a cane, and I couldn’t ignore the heat and the sun. Here I was, making silly analogies to darkness, to blindness, but Mister Ward… I swallowed nervously, images flashing through my mind. Many friends and fellow soldiers had seen such injuries in the wars, sent home with a medical discharge and a small pension and a “sorry you can’t see anymore”. I was always thankful that I had avoided such fate, had gotten off so easily with my own minor incapacitation.

“Madonna mia…” I murmured.

Mister Ward clutched his head between his hands, and screamed.

Chapter XXXIII
In Which The Future is Discussed

I must admit that I was taken aback by this turn of events. I certainly did not expect to see Herr Auer here, amongst the Fifth Column. My mind was ablaze with possibilities to explain this: was he kidnapped and forced to assist them, and the explosion meant to cover it up? Was this a clone or twin brother or some kind of shapeshifter and the previous one had been murdered in order to replace him?

In all likelihood, I was merely reaching for such strange conspiracies because the most obvious and probable explanation would mean that I had been fooled: Herr Auer had been working with the Fifth Column all along, and had faked his own death in order to remove any suspicion on my part.

“Herr Auer,” I replied to his greeting and gave him a small nod. “I see that reports of your demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

He barked his hacking laughter in response. “Clemens. The only good thing to come out of America besides, maybe, Poe. You didn’t happen to meet him, did you?”

I shook my head. He had died before I ever set foot in America.

“A pity.” He looked to his left and right, at the soldiers that had leveled their rifles at us, and gave them a quick order, in English. He gave me a dark look and elaborated, once more in German. “They call themselves descendents of the master race, these colleagues of mine, but they’re all damn Americans. Some of them don’t even speak a second language, let alone the Father tongue!”

I glanced at my own companions – namely the two young men, Victor Kushan and Mister Ward – and gave Auer a sympathetic grimace. Madam Rabinovich winced. “I understand that to be normal.”

“You should know, having lived amongst them for so long…” He sneered. “Exiled by Mussolini, right? Long time ago.”

“You forget, Herr Auer, that I spent the last seventy years trapped in the Spirit World. My experience with Americana is merely two decades.” And even then, those decades were the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. “I’m used to a different America.”

He raised a hand triumphantly. “We’re anachronisms, you and I, Mondavi. Men from bygone eras who examine the current world through our own dogmas and, in the end, find it lacking in critical ways.”

I swept my eyes over my comrades, daring them to make any motion of agreement with Auer’s statement. They mostly looked confused, and I remembered that only Madam Rabinovich had any decent handle on German. She looked… amused.

“Injustice. Tyranny.” Auer sneered. “A world with no vision, no focus. The corrupt and the depraved lead a society of hedonists. The elite are trampled by the least common denominator, and honor and dignity have been replaced by arrogance and hollowness.” He leaned forward slightly, once more turning all his focus onto me. “I know that you agree with me on this.”

It was an annoying little debate trap, an old one, where you try to prove your point by proving a different one altogether while insinuating that the two are the same. Somehow, he expected that because I shared some amount of dislike towards the modern culture, that would mean that I would approve of a return to Fascism and National Socialism.

“I think you misunderstand my position, Herr Auer.” He gave me a skeptical look. “I have my ways and my upbringing and my culture, and they are mine. In fact, in this time, they are mine alone. I may mingle in the affairs of others, but I am content to let their culture be just as they leave me my own. Time marches on. I am an endangered species.”

“Not that endangered…” Madam Rabinovich murmured. She has always considered herself something of an anachronism, and outside of a few feminism issues, seems to wish that she could live in Victorian England. As it were, she lived a modest and polite life in Modern America.

“How very zen of you, Mondavi.” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “Perhaps that is because you are a transient, a man lost from his own time, living in a future he did not write. But this is my time, and my future is yet to come.”

“Perhaps.” I looked across the room, counting the soldiers. They were all standard 5th Column supersoldiers, no obvious vampyri or warwolves or anything else that might be a substantial threat. “But from where I am standing, you have no future at all, Herr Auer.”

“A threat? You wound me.” He feigned a swoon. “And here I thought we were playing nice and friendly.” He added in English, “If you make any motions, Mondavi, my men are under orders to fire.”

The tension increased as everyone – both friend and foe – realized exactly what situation we were in. Strangely enough, the same air of confidence surrounded both parties; they saw us as a handful of academics with a bodyguard or two. We knew better.

I tried not to give away Madam Rabinovich’s vulnerabilities by not looking nervously at her. Once the bullets started flying, she would need to duck behind one of the rock outcroppings that lined the tunnel. In the meantime, Mister Ward had offered his magical protection. Sadly, my own magics tend more towards personal protection and active defenses, and aren’t quite a sure thing.

“That would be a grave mistake, Auer,” I replied, also switching to English. “We’ve done more with less. You should ask Requiem.”

“Requiem?” He gave nervous glances at his men. “Certainly you haven’t-“

Looks of satisfaction crossed all of our faces.

Auer took a few steps back, and to the side, moving behind one of his men. “Kill them. Kill them all.”

The room filled with the deafening roar of automatic weaponry. I thrust one hand forward and the other downward and felt the crackle of electricity as the protective shield of the Mu came into effect. The others also hopped into action – Victor dashed over to one side and one of the soldiers exploded in a spectacular fire ball; Rostov pointed at a spot on the ground between the Columnists and black tar spread from it, ensnaring their boots; Mister Ward had leapt in front of Madam Rabinovich, who was kneeling on the ground and rummaging through her bag. He held his palms out, and a wall of water – the air suddenly felt even dryer than it was before – sprang forth between him, the crouching woman and the soldiers.

I crossed the distance to the soldier at the very center with a single step. He reacted by trying to slam his rifle into my chest, but the red Mu lightning coalesced into a single point, absorbed the kinetic energy of his attack and redirected it to a retaliatory bolt of lightning. I lifted a palm and a small pool of liquid shadow appeared at the man’s feet. From it, a series of black tentacles sprouted up and wrapped around him, quickly crushing the life out of him.

I turned to the next soldier, only to see him collapse to the ground, riddled with bullets. Beyond him, a swirling whirlpool of water had formed, tossing three soldiers about and slamming them into a rock wall. Victor took advantage of Mister Ward’s attack, bathing the three men in fire. A fourth ran over to help his comrades, only to get impaled from behind by the blade of my swordcane, which Madam Rabinovich (complete with bright yellow earplugs) welded deftly. Satisfied that they were being dealt with, I turned to the other direction.

Rostov Kushan had dropped for cover behind the remains of an ancient pillar and was clutching his blood soaked shoulder. I raised an eyebrow in silent query and he shrugged – as good a response as I could expect. I turned my focus to the four soldiers that had pinned him down and made a series of intricate gestures, then thrust both hands forward. One of the 5th Columnists grunted for a moment, then flew apart as I ripped his soul from his body, then used its energy to generate an explosive wave of negative energy. The dark material slammed into the other Columnists, knocking them off of their feet.

One of the soldiers convulsed and went pale, a small trail of darkness connecting him to Rostov, who was back on his feet, his wounds healed by the stolen life energy of the Columnist. The other soldiers were getting back on their feet, so I took a few steps forward and began throwing Oranbegan and Mu based magics about, alternately draining the life force and electrocuting the soldiers.

Within moments, the roar of combat fell to silence and I span around, counting the bodies and looking for casualties. The Columnist soldiers were all dead or incapacitated, and our injuries seemed to have all been handled by the magics at our disposal – Mister Ward and Victor Kushan had avoided any harm whatsoever, and Rostov had healed his own injury. My wards had successfully kept me safe, and Madam Rabinovich-

I took another look around the large chamber and saw that she was not present amongst the standing or the wounded. Neither was Herr Auer.

“Where’s Auer?” Rostov asked loudly.

“Forget him,” Mister Ward replied, his voice slightly tinged with worry. “Where’s Sofia? Sofia!”

I frowned. If Auer had managed to capture her, then we would need to be careful… Though I would not envy any person who made the mistake of trying to turn Madam Rabinovich into a damsel-in-distress; he would need far more sympathy than her.

“Over here.”

We all turned towards one of the corridors and Madam Rabinovich haltingly skipped into view, the blade once again confined within the cane and providing her with needed support. She beckoned with her free hand.

“Auer ran this way.”

The power description says that you open up a wormhole and then push all the targets through it, so I guess the KB is to simulate this pushing effect. They could just change it to knockup and get the same effect.

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<---See? I'm not being serious.

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I hope the new forums have a "responses have been made while you were writing your post" feature, like SMF. I hate when that happens.

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Yeah, pretty much.

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Not really.

Huntsman can take a lot more team oriented powers without sacrificing anything.

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Meaning a Crab has a bunch of more worthwhile powers?

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Well, Single Shot is better than Channelgun and Burst is miles better than Longfang. The grenades are now exactly the same, except for one small factor: Frag Grenade on the Huntsman has a smaller magnitude of Knockback than the Crab version, such that until a certain level (30-something, if I remember correctly), it does knockdown instead of knockback. And Crabs don't get Wide Area Web Grenade. You can mix and match and go with a Crab-based Huntsman instead of a Bane-based Huntsman, but if you take any Crab powers, you get to deal with redraw. Then it becomes a trade-off between having greater passive defense, passive HP buff, a Stealth power with good suppressed defense, a hold (which requires mace redraw), and the super fun Surveillance debuff, or stronger armor (as an endurance cost toggle), greater +HP and heal on a long recharge, and some more pets. Oh and the Crab arms.

Really, the only "bunch more worthwhile powers" that the Crab has is Omega Maneuver, since a Bane-based Huntsman can always dip into Bane powers for Build Up, Placate, and the like, if they are so inclined.

Well, it's made me move Single Shot into my build and put it in early, since it's no longer the red-headed stepchild of the set.

Chapter XXVII
In Which What Goes Up Must Come Down

Unlike our previous flights, getting into Iraq was going to be a complicated and dangerous affair. The country itself has limited and restricted airspace, with a series of bureaucracies that must be navigated in order to obtain permission. Like other countries in the region, the government is something of a kleptocracy, so the “navigation” must be done by a series of bribes and favors in order to do it with any reasonable passage of time. Since we were talking about needing permission to land at some point within twelve hours after leaving Luxembourg, Rostov Kushan was required to place a long series of phone calls in order to find which people to bribe and with what. There was also a matter of getting permission from the United Nations or certain other affiliated countries, since we were not part of an Arab airline, but Mister Kushan insisted that this would be no problem.

I was quite pleased to leave the matter of such logistics to him and his international network of contacts, while I spent the flight to Turkey with a detailed topological map of Mesopotamia and the journals, calculating the region of the dig site.

“You don’t know where it is?” Mister Ward asked skeptically. He and Victor had been hovering over my shoulders as I traced lines and distances on the map.

“No.” I marked the location of Nippur – the location of the Mountain Temple of Enlil which had been destroyed by Naram-Sin and heralded the Curse of Akkad – which had been found some one hundred and fifty years hence southeast of Baghdad. According to the manuscript, Shubat Anshar would be located north and west of it.

“So why didn’t we just ask the ghost?” I looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. “Since the 5th have already found it.”

“And would it be able to rattle off GPS coordinates or would it just say ‘we’ve got it on a map back at base’?” I shook my head. “Besides, we don’t know if they have found it, only that they have a dig site set up. Since they were still seeking these relics, I can hope that they had not yet.”

“I thought they needed these for the Key,” Victor Kushan chimed in. “To know where to find it, like Auer needed them.”

“Apparently not,” I replied, “since they knew that Bertram had the Key.” I placed another spot on the map to represent Shubat Enlil, the sister city of Shubat Anshar, that had only been discovered thirty years ago, and was actually so far north as to be located in the far northeast corner of Syria, less than a hundred miles from the Iraqi border. Shubat Anshar would be somewhere southeast of it. I had narrowed the location down to a rectangle, using Shubat Enlil and Nippur as opposite corners.

“Congratulations,” Mister Ward gave a pair of small, sarcastic handclaps, “you’ve narrowed it down to a space three hundred miles wide and six hundred long. We should find it in no time!”

I gave him a long, irritated look. “The distances were given in measurements of days and weeks, so we can easily narrow this down.” I pulled out a compass and ruler and measured the rectangle. “The distances from each city are given as being more or less equal, with it being only a short bit closer to Shubat Enlil. Ten percent closer, to be precise. That narrows it down to being somewhere, roughly, along this line.” I drew a diagonal line through the rectangle, perpendicular to the straight line between the two cities.

“Okay. Better. But still…”

“Yes, but still.” I pulled out the journals and the small pad of paper where I had made notes during the car ride in Luxembourg and placed a small smattering of dots on the map. “According to these journals, Shubat Anshar will be somewhere within about one hundred kilometers” - I gave the two Americans a weary look - “sixty miles from De Sarzec’s dig sites.”

Victor gaped. “Well why didn’t you put that one first? That’s much more specific than your gigantic rectangle.”

“This way he gets to show off,” Mister Ward answered drily.

“The choice was not deliberate,” I interjected, not rising to the bait. He was generally suspicious of my methods. He was a child of the new school of magic, which considered the mages of the past to be mostly charlatans who dolled everything up for the show of it, trying to fill gaps in their knowledge with psychological manipulation. He was not far wrong. “Extreme paranoia is unhealthy, Mister Ward.”

He simply snorted.

I took the compass and made circles around the dig sites.

“There, gentlemen,” I announced, “we should find the Temple somewhere where these circles overlap the line, just northwest of Lake Tharthar.”

The plane landed in Istanbul and we woke Madam Rabinovich just long enough for us to make the plane switch. She and I shared a laugh when we saw the cargo plane and the large blue letters and globe painted on that were part of Rostov Kushan’s solution to the UN issue.

“Nice plane.”

“You like?” Rostov grinned at her.

“It’s perfect,” Madam Rabinovich answered sleepily.

Rostov Kushan beamed. “A little blue paint and some fun with license and registration numbers, and you can drive or fly anywhere in the world, hehe. It won’t pass close scrutiny but, eh, nobody looks too close with a little money waved in their face.”

We boarded quickly and took our seats. Once Madam Rabinovich returned to her peaceful slumber, the Brothers Kushan took Mister Ward and me on a small walk through the plane, so they could show off the gear they had brought with them.

“We’ve got enough stuff to hike and search for your dig spot,” he announced as he gestured some of the large crates, “and enough rations to last us a couple months – though I hope it won’t be that long before we get another good steak, hehe. Also: enough weapons and ammo to supply a small army just in case we need one.”

I looked back towards the front of the plane, where a half-dozen of Rostov Kushan’s mercenary company were chatting, not counting the two more who were piloting. “I think you already have one, Mister Kushan.”

He laughed and moved past the boxes, to where a large vehicle sat completely occluded by a tarp. “This little baby will be our ride through the mean deserts of Iraq. Light, high-tech, comfortable and, thank god, air conditioned. The US Army will be replacing their Humvees with these things in a few years.”

Mister Ward gave the machine a critical look. “I don’t want to know where you got this, do I?”

“Probably not, no.” Rostov Kushan patted the machine lovingly. “I got it from Crey Corp as a bonus for some work I did. Nothing you need to worry about, Garent, unless you’ve got some relatives in the Uzbekistani government.”

He groaned and we returned to the front of the plane. It was already getting fairly late and would be well into night by the time we would land in Baghdad, so even though we would be flying near the area that we would be digging, we would not be able to do any kind of aerial reconnaissance of the site. Thus, I decided to take a short nap.

Which didn’t last for quite as long as I anticipated, as I was awoken by an extremely loud noise and the heavy shaking of the airplane.

“Mister Kushan?” I rose from my seat and entered the cockpit, where Rostov was staring furiously down at one of the many electronic displays.

“Not good.” He tapped a display a couple times, as if it might make the reading change. “Somebody just tried to shoot us down with some kind of really long distance SAM. Countermeasures got it, but it was close.”

“Countermeasures?” I raised an eyebrow. “On a cargo plane?”

“Not just any cargo-“

The cockpit lit up with the light of an explosion.

“How did they do that?!” Rostov Kushan shouted. “There was nothing on the radar!”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Were we hit?”

“Yeah, but it didn’t get through the armor.” He hit some buttons and turned to the pilots. “Lower altitude and speed for a cargo drop. We’ll hop out here. You try and make it to Baghdad.”

I stared. “Hop out?”

His teeth glinted in the light from the instruments. “Never parachuted before?”

“After my time, I’m afraid.”

Rostov Kushan and I returned to the passenger area and met up with his brother and Mister Ward. Surprisingly enough for someone who was well known to be a light sleeper, Madam Rabinovich had not moved from her seat.

"I, uh… used a little spell on her,” Mister Ward admitted, somewhat sheepishly. “She needed sleep badly, and I didn’t want her to wake up just because we hit some turbulence or something. Sadly, though, it’s a little one-sided.”

“I see.” I leaned down and shook her arm gently. “Madam, we need to go.”

“Hmm?” she asked incoherently and opened her eyes barely. The haze of sleep was still present, putting her just on the edge of consciousness. “Go? Need my stuff…” Specifically, her medic’s bag, without which she wouldn’t make a step in dangerous situations.

“We won’t leave anything behind, madam,” I reassured. “Now come with me to the back of the plane.”

“Okay,” she murmured softly. “Are the stairs broken?”

“No, of course not.” When we entered the cargo area, the ramp had already been lowered. “Somebody is trying to shoot us down so we’re going to have to drop our equipment and jump down.”

“This stuff is all fitted with beacons,” Rostov Kushan explained as he and the others slid crates down the ramp and watched as they plunged into the darkness below. “We’ll be able to pick it up once we’re down. Hopefully, we won’t be too far from the APC.”

“Never used a parachute before…”

“We won’t be using any.” I took her hand in mine and led her to the edge of the ramp. Her skirt and my longcoat flapped menacingly in the strong winds. “The Brothers Kushan will but Mister Ward and I will use magical means for the drop. I am more than capable of supporting a simple free fall spell for more than one person, so as long as you don’t let go of my hand, we’ll be fine.”

“Oh.” She swept the room with a lazy, half-asleep stare. “That’s nice. Parachutes always seemed so dangerous.”

“Quite.”

We took a step forward, off solid metal and into the night sky.

((Whoops. Edited the above post because this forum doesn't have UTF-8. The Hebrew and Russian are transliterated now.))

Chapter XXVI
In Which Someone Speaks in Tongues

Madam Rabinovich sat on the edge of Bertram’s desk, stocking-ed but shoeless feet dangling over a pool of blood, while she waited for the others to leave the office. Only moments after the door clicked shut, she let down her standard mask and sagged visibly, then grimaced and began rubbing her temples – a telltale sign that she was nursing a strong headache. She, like myself, was accustomed to keeping indications of weakness or emotional turmoil hidden from the general public and, especially, her friends. She rarely made exceptions.

“I am distressed, madam, that you were so quickly able to trace my activities and catch up with me,” I began, not wanting to embarrass her by commenting upon her poor state; she does not like people worrying about her.

“I had help,” she replied briskly, “in the shape of the letters on your table, Garent, and a great deal of luck.” I was rather surprised to learn, as the short version of the tale unfolded, how she traced us first to the Louvre, then to Vienna, Geneva (though she did not travel to the latter herself), and finally, to Mister Bertram. She is a modest woman, and did not attribute her success to her own mental acuity. As she is also rather abashed at compliments (perhaps moreso than expressions of concern), I refrained from pointing it out as well.

Instead, I commented upon the somewhat more obvious by voicing my fears of the needless time sink of dealing with an impending police raid.

“Distressing, but impossible,” she smirked, reaching into the pockets of her long coat, and extracting out several folded papers which she held triumphantly aloft. After a few seconds' scrutiny, I recognized the letter which I left her as well as the printed letter from the late Mssr. Benveniste. “Since the evidence has, so to speak, grown legs and absconded.”

At that point our conversation wandered into territory which is, frankly, a private matter, and will be discussed no further.

Madam Rabinovich held the door for me when we returned to the others, who had been rapidly cleaning the crime scene of our personal effects and traces. There was little we could do to stop anyone else examining the scene from realizing that a third party was here (who killed the Columnists, after all?), but at least we could leave them without any solid evidence outside of, perhaps, some form of retrocognition.

“How long do we have until they show up, anyway?” Victor Kushan asked, while he was idly passing an object – later revealed to be one of the high-tech communications gadgets of the Columnists – from one palm to another.

“The police?” I gave Madam Rabinovich a questioning glance but she shook her head, indicating that she had not warned them. “I doubt they’re even aware of anything happening here. The 5th Column would not have given Bertram time to use the phone.”

Madam Rabinovich winced. “No, he was on the phone with me at the time they arrived… I tried to warn him but, too late. When we leave I’ll call Fischer and ask him to inform the police. He’ll want to know we’re safe, too.”

“Uh, I don’t know if that’ll be necessary,” Rostov Kushan chimed in, and pointed back over his shoulder. “I saw stripping and wires on the windows, so a silent alarm probably already went off. Standard procedure would see the police or the security company calling to double check, and if there’s no answer…”

“Lovely,” she groaned.

“We’re not just going to use our IDs again?” Madam Rabinovich’s close friend and former co-worker, Mister Ward, asked. His tone dripping with liquid sarcasm and a dash in irony as he referenced, I suppose, some inside joke. They had a strong friendship – stemming from several years of working close together as part of the leadership of their group – that wandered between metaphorical aunt-nephew and sister-brother. This is standard practice for us INTJs: a small number of incredibly strong friendships.

She shook her head. “I don’t think we really have time to deal with the police right now…”

I nodded. “We have no way of knowing just how much progress the 5th has made in their search for the Temple, only that they have suddenly and inexplicably moved to take De Sarzec’s work and kill everybody who might interfere with them.”

I took a look around the room, at its state of disarray, and felt the various pieces of the puzzle nudge the dark recesses of my mind. The 5th had thoroughly searched the house, so they were looking for something, but what? They currently had all of De Sarzec’s work, and were only missing the manuscript and journals, which are in my possession, not Mister Bertram’s. Besides the journals would only help with finding the spot to dig, and they apparently already had an idea. Likewise, the manuscript was mostly useful for the Key…

I turned back to Bertram’s corpse and stared in disbelief. I had inklings before that he had known far more than he had told me, and had known about the Key itself, but I had never guessed how.

“So, you think he actually had the Key this whole time?” Rostov joined me in staring down at the dead body.

“It would explain why he would want the manuscript and journals, which are the only places that describe it. It is very well possible that he purchased the artifacts found by the German archaeologists in the 19th century.” I silently cursed myself for not checking earlier.

“We killed all the 5th here, though,” Mister Ward pointed out, “so either one of them is holding it, or it’s still wherever Bertram left it.”

“Did we?” Madam Rabinovich looked around nervously. “What about the Warwolf?”

I shook my head, and the others did as well. Nobody had seen the large half-man half-wolf beast that was a result of 5th Column tampering with human and alien DNA. While some of the more advanced breeds are capable of temporarily regaining human form for a time, they generally revert upon massive trauma or death, and none of the soldiers had changed.

Victor scratched his head. “But we got six, and the spirit dude said there were only six.”

“Six people,” Sofia corrected, stressing the second word. “We asked how many people there were, and the spirit might not have considered Warwolves to be people.”

“Who would?” Rostov snorted.

We immediately split up to find the missing creature, searching in small groups instead of individually, since a Warwolf can be a dangerous opponent when faced alone, especially if it has the advantage of surprise. The precaution was unnecessary, though, as Mister Ward found a second set of paw prints leading away from the house after some significant searching.

They led straight into the nearby woods and were lost.

“Along with the Key,” Madam Rabinovich added with a grumble.

Victor grimaced. “Those things can run pretty fast; not as fast me, of course, hehe, but with that head start and all the area of these trees… I don’t think we can catch him here. What about magic?”

“Track it? Certainly. But…” I sighed heavily. “I think it would be better for us to not waste the time. We should leave immediately.”

We returned to our vehicles and agreed to meet up at the airport. I decided to travel with Mister Ward and Madam Rabinovich in her rental vehicle so that I could fill the pair of them in on all the details of our journey.

“I guess that explains it,” Mister Ward said when I finished and ran his fingers through his hair. “This whole time we’d thought you’d been doing it.”

I gave him a critical stare. “I would not be so sloppy, Mister Ward.”

He returned my critical stare with one of his own for a moment, then looked away. Mister Ward has never trusted me and cannot understand why Madam Rabinovich does. He sees me as some kind of dangerous beast that only allows others within its presence on a whim, and is worried that at any moment I’ll murder him and begin a process of world domination. Given my history, that isn’t particularly unreasonable, so long as you only look at the act and not the motive. Besides, I wouldn’t waste my time with him: his grasp of magic is far too rudimentary for him to ever be a threat to any plans I may have.

“Rostov might’ve been, though,” Madam Rabinovich pointed out from the driver’s seat. “And framing the Circle for Benveniste’s death is the kind of thing you would do.”

“I stand corrected, madam.”

“And Vic definitely would’ve been,” Mister Ward added. “Like maybe he sneezed and accidentally blew up Auer’s house or something. We didn’t know he was there though.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You saw the Louvre guestbook, surely you saw his signature.”

“That’s what that horrible scribble was?” Madam Rabinovich howled in laughter.

“Penmanship is a lost art, I am afraid.” I grimaced. With the proliferation of computers and mobile messaging – and recent developments in electronic paper, of all things! – it would not be long before handwriting would be lost entirely.

“So what would the 5th want with this temple, anyway?” Mister Ward asked, suddenly changing the conversation. I couldn’t help but wonder if his own penmanship fell into the gap between horrible and non-existent.

“I admit that I am rather perplexed by this, myself.” I twisted in my seat so as to face him more directly. “While their founding organization was known for pursuing such strange artifacts to help win the war, and we have seen them pursue ancient Roman artifacts before, to see them involved here instead of groups like the Circle or the Mu leaves me perplexed. The temple was used to keep their gods allied with them, receive prophecy from them, and prevent the negative influence of other gods.”

“What would they want with ancient Semitic gods?”

“That is an important question, yes,” I replied to Madam Rabinovich. As a Jewess, she had legitimate concerns about their activities in the region. “I could see them compromising if it was something particularly powerful, but the draught of prophecy would be unreliable, at best, and the only thing the Gem of Etnekhsa was associated with was keeping the climate favorable.”

Mister Ward coughed. “Controlling the weather is a pretty powerful weapon, Lorenzo.”

“We’re talking regular rainfall over an entire subcontinent, Mister Ward, not tsunami summoning.” Which was exactly where his talents lay. His control over the weather was very powerful, but very limited in scope – for example, creating a whirlpool of incredible force but spanning no more than a dozen meters. “Breadth, not depth, of power.”

"Turning a continent from a wasteland into fertile ground is bound to appeal to half of the governments in Africa. Assuming that it doesn't have some other creative uses." He shrugged. “Or maybe they just want to do some extensive gardening.”

"Zor'im kaas v'kotzrim machloket,” Madam Rabinovich murmured, amused.

“Madam?” I raised an eyebrow and gave her a scrutinizing stare. Her mastery of languages is second to none, but she loses her hold on them when she reaches the extremes of waking hours. Suddenly the dark circles under her eyes and the red in their corners stood out.

She reached up and rubbed her forehead. “Which language was that in?”

“Hebrew, madam.” I glanced nervously between her hands on the steering wheel and the road ahead of us. “Perhaps you should pull over and let someone else drive.”

Mister Ward raised a hand. “Uh, not me. I can’t.”

“No, certainly not.” Madam Rabinovich snorted and pointed a finger at me. “And you, dear man, vy ne vodili mashinu let semdesat, ne menshe.”

“What was that?”

“She pointed out that I haven’t driven a car for seventy years, Mister Ward.”

She sighed and pulled the car to the rightmost lane. “I’ll just pick up some coffee at the next stop. It’s not that much farther to the airport…”

It wasn’t, thankfully, and we arrived without incident. Rostov Kushan’s jet was ready and waiting, prepped with a flight plan to Turkey, where we would swap it for a cargo plane laden with supplies for an expedition in Iraq – and possible combat with the 5th Column.

“Waitaminute.” Victor looked around curiously as I was helping Madam Rabinovich onto the aircraft (she had been swaying on her feet alarmingly and I did not trust the iron steps). “So they’re coming along?”

We all shared surprised glances, as it had never occurred to us for a moment that Madam Rabinovich and Mister Ward might return to America, satisfied in the knowledge that we were safe. We had worked together so long that we had all fallen into the normal routine with nary a word or consideration of the alternative.

“Of course,” I replied, matter-of-factly, and led Madam Rabinovich to a window seat. I had phoned ahead to Rostov Kushan, so the seat already had a blanket and pillow waiting. She gave murmured protestations (“No, no, I’m okay”), but she went out like the proverbial lightbulb the moment she had settled. Barring the short transition period in Turkey, she would sleep all the way to Iraq.

None of us felt it necessary to wake her.

Chapter XXIII
In Which There’s An Unexpected Reunion

We arrived in Luxembourg well rested and well prepared, with nary a sight nor sound of anybody following us or laying in ambush for us. This was an almost disappointing fact, since I would be adequately prepared for such an event, having taken extra time in the morning to prepare my more powerful and extensive combat magics. If anything, I'd had the distinct feeling that I would need them later in the day, especially if Bertram did, indeed, try to betray me.

In a sharp contrast to the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Amann and the metropolitan lifestyle of Benveniste and Auer, Donald Bertram chose to live on a large estate in the rural countryside, isolated and distant from the teeming throngs of the cities. I felt a kinship with the idea of retired solitude and the concept of living the life of the hermit, but the stark realities of the world – along with my own cosmopolitan leanings – prevented such silly notions from ever taking root.

Luckily, the combined travel time of airplane and automobile allowed me to peruse the journals we had acquired from Amann. They were, as Herr Auer had suggested, filled with meticulous detail and various minutiae regarding the expeditions, with precise dates, times, and measurements of every event, encounter, and exploration. The various sketched maps drew the most of my attention, as they would be invaluable later for finding the location of the dig; in fact, I was certain that if I were to cross reference this with the details of De Sarzec's more recent expedition – helpfully provided by the Louvre's internet faculty – I would be able to narrow down the location of Shubat-Anshar.

Not to say I'd be able to get it right the first time, of course, unless Fortuna was on my side (or Gad, as the case may be).

As we approached the small township he called home, Victor Kushan suggested that we phone ahead and check on his safety, having gotten close enough that he'd be unable to mysteriously disappear. I agreed, but the line rang several times and then switched to voice mail.

“Perhaps he's in the shower?”

I gave him a doubtful look and tried again, to no avail.

“How much do you want to bet he's dead?” Rostov asked.

I sighed and set the phone to dial once more, while I stared out the window to where, within a few more minutes, I should be able to see Bertram's home. “I am not sure whether to hope that he is alive,” I replied, “or dead.”

“What?”

I glanced back at Victor then returned to staring out the window, ignoring the voice mail message once again. “You see, if he's alive, then he has probably run off and we'll be walking into an ambush.”

“It also means that poor Lorenzo's been fleeced this whole time,” Rostov added in his usual helpful manner. “Better some poor chap get knocked off than him being manipulated.”

I thought the additional sentence was unnecessary.

“That should be the place.”

Bertram's house stood tall and expansive – and, thus, expensive – among the trees and hills that made up his estate. It was all very well kept and maintained, and had the look of the wealthy, retired homestead that it was. I could even see the small barn and stable where, I am told, he had a small collection of horses. It being broad daylight, I was unable to see any evidence for or against current occupancy, and a closed garage door tells no tales.

“Can we circle around back?” I asked. “Or just park somewhere behind the barn... Let us play it safe.”

Oxford nodded and pulled the car off the nicely paved road and into a small dirt one that appeared to loop around. He slowed down, letting the car switch from petrol to the silent electric engine, and slowed to a near halt as the road curved to side of the barn.

“Looks like someone else had the same idea.” Rostov pointed to a pair of black sedans which were parked over here, hidden from the main road and the house. “Surprise visitors?”

I frowned. “For him? Or for us?”

We piled out of the car and approached the sedans carefully. They appeared empty, but we were taking no chances; Rostov had his hands low, ready to draw his pistols if need be. Victor dashed ahead and put his hand on the hood of one of them, and turned back.

“A bit warm,” he announced in a stage whisper. “No people in them, but, uh...”

“'Uh'?” I queried.

He leaned into the open passenger window and pulled out a long, black, sleek object, which I quickly recognized as an ultramodern assault rifle. “Uh, yeah.”

“Two possibilities: these people are here to harm either Bertram or myself, or they are unknown allies.” I turned to Rostov. “Knowing our luck thus far, I shall assume the former. Do you have a spare pistol?”

“A pistol?” Rostov blinked, then pulled back his jacket and drew two silvery sidearms. “Sure. I didn't picture you to be the gun type, though.”

“I'm not,” I replied as I took the pistol from his hand. It looked like a heavily modified Desert Eagle .45 with an expanded clip, one of the few common pistols that did not exist before my disappearance. “But I would rather that, in case of ambush, our enemies think that I am, so that they will assume that it is possible to disarm me.” I saw Victor start to speak and quickly cut him off: “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Alright, uh, then you need to flip the sa-”

I rolled my eyes and flipped the safety, checked the cartridge, and readied the pistol. “Mister Kushan, I know how to work a pistol. I would not have survived all my years in the Italian Army if I couldn't handle such trivialities.”

“Oh, right.”

We carefully hugged the wall of the barn as we crept towards the house, having left Oxford behind to guard the car, while cloaked in a mystical shadow – a spell that all three of us knew and could thus combine for near invisibility. The house itself was raised in the back, with a deck, so we could not get a good angle to see through the windows until we had claimed up a small set of stairs and approached the back door.

Which lay in shambles on the floor.

“No...” Victor whispered. “They're after Bertram...”

We cautiously passed through the back and into a veritable minefield of canned foods and dry goods. A glance to the right revealed the open door to a pantry, whose shelves had been unceremoniously emptied. We stepped gingerly through the mess, taking care not to make any traitorous noises and into the kitchen, when a loud crash alerted us to motion in one of the adjoining rooms.

At this point, there were two exits, and thus two paths to take and two areas to cover at once. I gestured for the Kushans to go left, while I went right, in the direction of the sound.

A man in worn civilian garb, much too young and far too athletic to be Mister Bertram, was staring down at the remnants of what appeared to have once been a very expensive, very old vase. I winced as he shoved the pieces of priceless Xuande porcelain around with the butt of his rifle, another of the same model as that found in the car outside.

I took a step forward, sliding my finger over the trigger. He froze.

“Jakob?” The man asked in German, one of the official languages of Luxembourg, and turned to look back over his shoulder.

I waved my free hand and activated an enchantment I had placed on my shoes shortly after purchasing them, and took a quick step across the entire four meter space between us. It was not quite the fabled Seven League Boots, but it served its purpose. I jammed the pistol into his side and grabbed him by the shoulder, then leaned forward and whispered, “No. Now be quiet, or you will die.”

The young man stiffened a moment, and seemed to acquiesce. He swallowed.

I heard footsteps behind me.

“Turn around,” a voice commanded. German, so not the Brothers Kushan.

I knew that if I turned to look, the man would take that moment to attack me, so I did the simplest thing short of killing him, and squeezed his shoulder. Dark energies passed from my body to his, and he started shaking as his mind was opened up to the blacker portions of the spirit world. Somewhere, within his skull, his brain was under onslaught of his deepest fears and nightmares and a small hint of what I had experienced for the last seventy years.

Confident in his subdual, I started to turn.

“Uh uh. The gun.”

I raised both hands in the air, gun pointed at the ceiling, and faced another man in shirts, slacks, and steroids. Both of them had the look of military men, which would not be surprising, given the firearms.

“Who are you?” He asked.

“A friend of Herr Bertram,” I replied.

He frowned. “Name?”

It was, perhaps, still possible that these were not agents of my mysterious entity, though, admittedly, it would be highly embarrassing to have subjected a poor child to mind numbing horrors over a misunderstanding. Nevertheless, I went along. “Lorenzo Mondavi.”

His eyes widened in recognition and he pulled the trigger.

A very long time ago, I was an associate of a young Russian magician and the small cult of personality he had cultivated. They, like the Golden Dawn and numerous other such organizations, seemed an innocuous pursuit for young Victorians and aging authors, though I had grown aware that they had had plans for much more. They introduced me to the lost civilization of the Mu and its splinter society, the Oranbegans, who had been persecuted and eventually wiped out in a full scale magical war over their beliefs. The cult, whose name was changed to the Circle of Thorns after the ghosts of the Oranbegans tricked the leader and his followers into ramming Spirit Thorns into their hearts and thus allowing themselves to be possessed, had stumbled upon an ancient storehouse of Oranbegan knowledge and had learned a great deal of potent magics, including one that caused bullets and other projectiles to pass harmlessly through the caster.

I ignored the cacophony of screams and splatters emitting from the poor man behind me, and casually lowered my pistol and put a bullet through the forehead of my would-be murderer.

The gunshots faded away, leaving the house again in silence, save for a dull static from the earpieces of the gunmen. With the element of surprise lost, I edged my way out of the open and to the side of the entryway where “Jakob” had arrived from, cloaking myself in magical shadow once more to see if any more gunmen would appear to investigate.

I heard a rustling sound approaching from the kitchen and whirled around, just in time to see Victor hurtle into the room, brandishing a pistol and cloaked in dark mist. He glanced down at the two bodies, then swirled around, spotting me on his second pass.

“You okay?” he asked unnecessarily, and took my level gaze as an affirmative answer. “I didn't see anything upstairs, but I didn't get much chance to-”

Gunfire rattled in the distance – the cacophony of an automatic rifle punctuated by several rounds of a high caliber pistol, interrupted briefly by the shattering of glass.

“Ros,” Victor declared. “Should we check it out?”

I grimaced. “That would negate the purpose of splitting up in the first pl-”

“Oh [censored],” came a cry in the distance. “Lorenzo!”

“Or,” I corrected, “perhaps we should investigate.” Victor nodded and took off down the hallway, leaving small friction burns in the well-polished wooden floors; I followed right behind, taking impossibly long steps across the intervening space.

Rostov Kushan stood with his back to us, leaning out a small window with shards of glass in a pool at his feet. Thick black oil was spilled over the floor, catching Victor and I and adhering to our shoes, making movement difficult. Rostov took a step back and closed the shutters to the window, then glanced at us over his shoulder and smirked; the magical tar evaporated, leaving no trace of its presence.

“You're not going to like this, Lorenzo,” he said. “There were two guys in here when I got here; I nabbed one – he's the guy to your left – but the other made it out the window.”

I glanced to my side, at the cooling corpse of another military looking young man in civilian clothes, and raised an eyebrow. “Not a worry. He can't escape without Oxford seeing him.”

“That's not what I meant...” He nodded to his left – my right – to a large oaken desk, one of many such items that filled this room that was, apparently, Bertram's home office. I cautiously approached the desk, which was covered in blood and paper; what random note could be on the desk that would upset me? A death threat? A ransom letter? A letter from Bertram announcing his betrayal?

I saw an object sticking out from the opposite side of the desk, something which I quickly deduced was a foot. I knew immediately who it was, and dashed forward, around the desk, and knelt beside the body of Donald Bertram, putting my fingers to his throat to check his non-existent pulse.

Victor appeared beside me and gasped. “I guess we know he wasn't the murderer now...”

I nodded gravely and stood up, and immediately crouched as a bullet hit the wall beside me. Even with my nigh invulnerability to conventional firearms, I had encountered magical enchanted and dimensional anchored rounds, both of which were capable of bypassing that particular protection; I generally played it safe. Besides, I might be immune, but Victor most certainly wasn't and I wasn't sure about Rostov. So long as I ducked, the shooter would still consider me a target and I could draw the fire.

“Out the window!” Victor shouted, and pointed to a pane of glass with a bullet hole in it. Rostov sprang into action, knocking over one of the desks and dropping behind it. Victor and I quickly followed suit, hastily erecting a small barricade. I peered over the top and out the window, but there was no sign of the shooter.

A sound caught our attention; a door at the far end of the room swung open, and a woman entered. She stopped in front of a thick beam between two large windows, making it hard to identify her until my eyes adjusted. At first I thought it a trick of the light or maybe some hallucination; what would she be doing here, of all places, and now?

I caught movement in the trees behind her, and I felt the bottom of my stomach fall out. Madam Rabinovich's powers had been lost – or, at the least, in remission – for some time, and even then she had no tricks to ward off bullets; a stray shot from a gun fight would make things incredibly... depressing.

“What is this?” she said softly.

“It doesn't matter now, madam,” I replied, catching the same movement outside; I could make out a figure hidden with them. If she took a single step to the side, she would obscure the target entirely. I raised my pistol and took aim. “Remain still,” I warned, “or you will be shot.”

END OF PART II

Chapter XXII
In Which Loyalties are Examined

We were encountering a very disturbing trend: every person who knew about the Temple of Anshar was being murdered, almost immediately after we spoke with them. At this point, it would be silly to conclude that their deaths were coincidental, so there were only two general areas of possibility: either the timing was mere happenstance, or there was some reason to kill them immediately after my involvement. As I said before, I do not trust coincidences, but why would my mysterious opponent murder these people when he does? And why not kill me, while he is at it?

The only person who might know was fleeing, somewhere, with a sniper rifle.

“LetmeseeifIcanfindhim!” Victor shouted in a burst of syllables and dashed out the door, leaving a small rush of air in his wake. Rostov and I stared across the street to the offending rooftop, doubtful.

“We could track him magically,” Rostov suggested.

I frowned. “I'd have to get back across the roof and conduct the ritual there, since I have nothing to go off of... Not even a mental image.” Rostov nodded in agreement; he knew the limitations of a scry-on-the-fly as much as anybody else.

Meanwhile, my subconscious mind had further traveled along the areas of probability for the issue of timing and I had come to the conclusion that either this enemy of mine was spooked into action by my activities, or that this enemy was purposefully letting me talk to these people first. I greatly preferred the first option, since it meant that he was losing his advantage; the second was far worse, as he not only maintained it but needed me for some nefarious purpose. He had already acquired De Sarzec's work, but I had the manuscript and the journals... If he had just wanted those, he could have killed Auer and Amann for them days before I was even contacted by Bertram.

Unless he was trying to frame me for their deaths, of course. Depressingly enough, once the police investigations start really moving, I will probably become the primary suspect, like Rostov had pointed out. Death followed in our wake, and explosions and bullets to the back of the head would fit into any profile of my mercenary companions.

Wait a minute. Could Rostov Kushan have been behind these deaths?

There was the night Benveniste was killed, where we split up and Rostov said he had “business” to conduct, which would have been a perfect opportunity to murder the curator (if only I had looked into the hows of Benveniste's slaying!). Likewise, he had left a man behind to watch Auer, just after Victor had gone and performed some mysterious side job. And for all I knew, Oxford or some other henchman was the one pulling the trigger, and Victor was over there having a laugh about how they were pulling the wool over my eyes.

As far as conspiracy theories go, it seemed quite plausible. The Kushans are honest men – once bought, always bought – but that did not mean they could not have their own agendas. Or that they could not be working for multiple people at the same time. Maybe my enemy (or even Bertram!) had hired them to find the Temple and murder anybody who knew about it, and being hired by me to assist me in my hunt for the Temple allowed them to get paid twice for the same job. Up until they tried to kill me, of course, but I doubt they would ever try.

I gave Rostov Kushan a wary look. “When I left that message on your machine, you showed up rather quickly. Didn't even call back. And you took the job immediately. Why?”

He return the look. “I told ya, I wouldn't want to miss all the inevitable excitement.” He pointed demonstratively at the corpse on the floor.

“I'm afraid to say that I'm developing something of an alternative theory in that regard.” If he had just been hired to pursue the Temple, then he probably would not have shown up at my door at all, because he'd be busy in Europe. That meant he knew in advance. “So, tell me, who told you to take my job?”

His eyes widened for a moment in surprise, but he quickly replaced it with his normal sardonic grin. “What's this about, Lorenzo?”

“Suspicion, Kushan.” I gestured to the bullet hole in the window, to divert his attention from my other hand, which was briefly in the middle of a small conjuration. One which I would need to use if he truly was involved. “You have been coincidently absent during the previous murders, and the spot you and I just used to spy on Amann has now been utilized in this one. Now it appears that you were aware of my pursuit of the Temple before I called you. So I want answers, and I want them now.”

“Whoa.” He held his hands up in surrender. “Look,I wasn't involved in this, I promise you. And I didn't know about the Temple thing but I knew – Dammit!” He bared his teeth, exposing a pair of abnormally long and sharp canines, a mark of his pact with the demon, I'm sure. “I can't tell you. I wish I could, but...”

“But?”

“But I promised not to. It's a, um, clan thing.” He licked his lips and paused as he tried to figure out exactly what to say. In any other person, I would suspect he was trying to come up with a good lie. Knowing Rostov Kushan, though, it was more like he was trying to find a way to tell me as much as he could without telling me anything. “Another Hunter told me to take the job.”

“Pardon me?” I didn't like the sound of that.

“Oh, the Hunters are this group that Vic and I are a pa-”

I waved my hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, I know. I recognized the symbol.”

“Really?” He stared at me for a bit. “Sure, I mean, you know just about damn near everything, so yeah, sure you do.” I didn't reply to that little barb and just waited for him to continue, which didn't take long. “I got some instructions that something big was about to go down in Europe and the Middle East, and then you called me up saying you had a job for me... I just figured that you might be involved.”

I frowned. “Something... big?”

“Yeah.” He looked around nervously and then lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I don't know what, and I can't tell you which of the Hunters knew about this or how. I'm not allowed.” As annoying as it was, this last part I understood; I was not a member and, thus, could not be trusted with their methods.

“You'll have to trust me on this one, Lorenzo: I'm not working for anybody else; I don't know anything about these deaths.” He held up his hand with his thumb crossed over his little finger, the middle three fingers standing up straight and together. “Scout's honor.”

I raised an eyebrow, dubious. “You were a Boy Scout?”

“Wasn't everybody?” He grinned again.

“I wasn't,” I pointed out. It was invented about thirty years too late, to be exact, but the movement was popular enough in England and, later, America and Italy, for me to recognize the salute. “After my time.”

“Ooh, so you can trust me but I can't trust you.” He leveled an accusatory finger. “How do I know it wasn't you?”

“That's easy,” I replied, “I'd have had no reason to hide it from you. I would have probably just hired you to do it.”

“Oh. Good point.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out an old coin, which he started turning – as was his habit – end over end between his fingers. “So are we done being suspicious?”

Amazingly enough, I was satisfied with his explanation, so I nodded and dispelled the conjuration I had begun. It was a strange story he had given, full of vagaries and, likely, half-truths, but it fit. That meant I was back to my earlier reasoning.

“SorryguysIdidn't-” I snapped my head to the side; Victor had come in so quickly I hadn't noticed his arrival. He coughed. “Sorry, nothing. Whoever it was disappeared.”

“Lovely.” I turned back to the window. “If we have enough time, we can try to scry-” I was interrupted by the sounds of sirens in the distance and sighed heavily. “Nevermind. We must go quickly.”

“Should we call that Bert-guy now?” Victor asked. “I mean, couldn't he be next?”

“Bertram,” I corrected. “And I suppose we-” I hesitated at the realization came that he, like Amann, was a suspect. Perhaps he had been unable to get the items himself, so he had me do the dirty work, then killed off his competitors afterwards. In that case, he would probably be setting a trap for my arrival; alternatively, if I showed signs of realizing his involvement, he would try to coax me in or, perhaps, just have a hit squad come after me. And, of course, if he was simply another target, like Amann...

A short while later, we had successfully crossed several city blocks undetected and were driving back to the airport.

“Hello.” The voice on the other end of the line sounded tired. Not a surprise, given the late hour. I could hear the sound of a television in the background.

“Mister Bertram?” I asked.

“Yes. Who's this?”

“Lorenzo Mondavi, Mister Betram. I would like to meet you tomorrow. I have acquired both items you requested.”

“So soon?” He sounded genuinely surprised. And eager. “Great! Tomorrow would be great. What time?”

“I will arrive in Luxembourg some time in the early morning.” I gave Rostov a querying glance, and he nodded confirmation. We would have a small problem with the increasing police activity, and it would not be long before the police started making connections between our travels and the numerous deaths, so we were flying out as soon as possible. Bertram replied that this would be perfect and asked me if I had his address; I told him I did not, and he rattled off the location.

Victor leaned over and whispered: “Aren't you going to warn him? He might need protection...”

I nodded. “Have you seen the news, Mister Bertram?”

“I watch it religiously.”

“So you've seen about the deaths, today?” I asked cautiously, trying not to give away anything. “Benveniste, Auer...”

“Horrible things, yes.” He sighed. “Good men. They really loved history. Though, maybe the next curator will let me at De Sarzec's work...” So he didn't know about Auer's involvement, or was hiding this. “You don't think it has to do with it, do you? Somebody else is after the Temple and is willing to kill?!” He sounded panicked.

“I wouldn't rule it out, Mister Bertram.”

“Do you think we should call the police?” He asked, nervously, then quickly added, “Oh, no, if we do that, they'll want to know why, and I'll have to tell them about De Sarzec and then I'll be a suspect and, even if not, it'll all become evidence! It'll be weeks or months before I get them back and whomever this is will already be there and beat us to it! No, no, definitely don't call the police.”

It was an odd line of reasoning, though I admit I had gone through something like it a bit before. The important bit here was his insistence not to get the police involved, which would be the last thing he'd want if he was the murderer.

“Yes, just wait there until I arrive tomorrow,” I suggested.

“I will do just that. I will see you then, Mister Mondavi.”

“Farewell, Mister Bertram.”