“Don’t be patronizing,” Senin admonished him. “She once saved my skin by shooting someone in the head.”
“As you wish,” Geraint said mildly, Climbing out of the van, Like the others, he wore light body armor, and Serrin had already locked a bullet barrier spell around himself and Kristen. They raced around the side street and made for the front entrance, already opened by one of the trolls who had a supercharged taser hefted at the ready.
“Not much resistance,” the troll growled rather disappointedly as they approached Then the sudden chatter of handgun fire came from the basement of the building.
“You spoke too soon,” Geraint said as he made for the inside of the building, gripping his machine pistol more firmly with one hand while fastening his respirator with the other to ward off the effects of the trank gas billowing down the stairs. Passing through the hallway, he dimly took in the large reception room to his right, where the dwarf had three terrified clerks bent over a table while he toyed with the trigger of a Predator and began handcuffing them. Geraint made for the stairs where the elf with the integrated arsenal masquerading as a single weapon stood, casually dumping a grenade down the stairs and standing back to blow open the doors at the bottom. The explosion was less than Geraint anticipated, the door flimsy and easily blown apart, with debris mostly flying into the underground garage rather than back up toward them. By the time he reached the stairs, the elf was already through the shattered doorway, hunting the prey that had escaped and sought to flee by car.
The whir of a taser line hummed through the semi-darkness at the figure racing toward the parked vehicles. Geraint could just see the man duck and the line whiz over his head; the elf cursed and decided to dispense with precise targeting. A second gas grenade went flying into the parking lot, but the man pulled something up around his neck that looked to Geraint like a respirator. Then, from above them, it seemed for a moment as if the entire building shook and reverberated. Geraint had never been in an earthquake, but be imagined this must be what one would feel like. it really did seem like the entire place might fall down around their ears at any moment. He stepped smartly out of the stairwell behind the elf, who let off a burst of gunfire to scare his target, then began to run at him like a cheetah with a jalapeno enema up its tail.
A deep, grinding sound like two rock faces trying to sandpaper each other to dust came from upstairs just as their quarry managed to get into the car, start it up, and steer the vehicle toward the garage doors, with the elf still in hot pursuit. The SAS elf dropped to his knees and launched another grenade shot as the car veered crazily toward the exit. It didn’t look as if the doors would open properly before the car got to them, and even if the elf missed, Geraint judged that the driver would quite possibly get his head ripped off together with the roof of his Westwind.
The cacophony of Sound made the Welshman turn and take the risk of making his way back up the stairs, leaving the fleeing car and its passenger to their elven pursuer. Upstairs, it seemed as if half the roof had collapsed. Plaster, wood, stone, and a once-fine chandelier lay strewn in the hallway. Geraint gripped his gun again and advanced up the stairs. Of the others, save for the dwarf completing his work, there was no sign.
When he got to the landing, the scene was astounding. Every door leading off it was open, and in one bedroom that approached palatial splendor he could see one of the trolls laid out cold with a seeping pool of blood spreading from his back and neck. Incongruously, in the bathroom someone had seemed to take serious objection to avocado green bath fittings by blowing them into ceramic shrapnel, but it was the scene in the large sitting room that caught his eye. The place was filled with broken glass and smashed furnishings, and there were at least three prone bodies in it. Of the ones moving, Serrin and the other elf were engaged in what appeared to be a desperate struggle. Michael was lying slumped in a corner but there was no blood on him and it looked as if he were merely knocked out cold. Kristen had her Predator gripped in both hands, waiting for a clear shot.
Serrin was standing rock still engaged in a magical struggle with a bizarre figure, a human-like form that seemed to be shaped of muddied clay, trying to claw its way toward him and Kristen. The other elf was flinging himself, long serried knife in hand, at a suited, dark-haired man crouched across a table from him, his gaze fixed on the clay figure. Even as Geraint approached, the clay figure managed to force its way to Serrin and strike him with one of its limbs, knocking the elf to the floor. The other elf leapt over the table and buried his knife in his opponent’s right shoulder blade only a hand’s length from his heart. As Kristen and Geraint poured bullets into whatever it was that had struck Serrin senseless, the man screamed and the clay creature wavered and began to topple. As it fell backward, almost as if in slo-mo, its form dissolved into a wave of rolling, liquid clay, pouring into a huge puddle of formless, slimy mud that seeped over the Persian carpet.
A haze of blue static began to shimmer into form in the center of the room. What Geraint had taken for simply a design in the weave of the carpet he now sensed was some kind of magical design, a ritual inscribing, though he knew little of such things. The knife-carrying elf, however, knew a lot more.
“Get the frag out of here! Move!” he screamed, grabbing the inert form of the group’s leader as he retreated. Mercifully, the man seemed only stunned and was already able to move with the elf’s help. Geraint didn’t have to be told twice. He reached down and drew Michael up under the arms, dragging him back onto the landing, leaving the slighter form of Serrin to Kristen. The three of them struggled out with their burdens, the elf going back a second time to pull out his troll comrade as well. The static was forming into what looked like ball lightning and was beginning to spin in a crazily off-kilter orbit around the epicenter of the room. The man in the suit lay groaning, barely conscious, flowers of blood blooming down the front of his once-perfect white shirt. Geraint rushed to help the elf, and they managed to drag the heavy troll out of the room and slam the door shut in time.
The room exploded. Its contents spewed out over the length and breadth of one of the wealthiest, most exclusive, and generally quietest streets in all of London, and the detonation was enough to send them all flying across the landing. Geraint hit the door frame of the bathroom and just missed getting his hands sliced up on the porcelain fragments from the broken toilet bowl. Serrin managed to roll with the punches and came to rest a meter away from him, but not before hitting him hard and winding him. Up the stairs, the dwarf and the second elf were rushing to their aid, and after them the rigger- responding with amazing speed-was there too. Conscious, unconscious, and walking wounded managed to stagger into the street. Lights were beginning to appear from every building around them.
“Anyone dead?” Geraint said desperately.
“No, but that’s a minor sodding miracle,” the elf he had assisted said grimly. “We hadn’t expected so much magic in the place. Serrin and I had our work cut out just to bloody contain it all. Let’s get the frag out of this drekhole and worry about the details later.”
The group’s leader was just about conscious, and the ork from the security patrol was advancing on him with worry etched into his face.
“Frag it all, Jim, I said keep it quiet!” he complained bitterly. “How the frag am I going to explain this?”
“You know the drill,” Jim said, grunting with pain, and handed the ork a grenade.
“Fifty thousand,” the ork said. Geraint handed him a credstick, but the ork refused.
“Not now. The police will be round any minute,” he said. “Tomorrow. Jim’ll bring it round.”
“Fine,” Geraint shrugged, struggling to help everyone into the van. The first curious onlookers were just opening their doors. The ork marched off, summoned his group, and dumped the grenade. He and the other guards reeled away from the anaesthetizing gas and were all slumped on the ground within moments. Sirens were beginning to raise their howl of protest from the surrounding streets. The van’s rear doors shut, and the rigger raced the vehicle like a bat out of the abyss.