There was a crackle of energy and men appeared—four fair world gunmen and Adonis. They stood in a circle, facing out, just as the attackers disguised as musicians had done.
The men brought their guns up. Then, as one, they doubled over as pain from Doc’s defensive devisement hit them. Most of them were throwing up by the time they hit the floor.
Adonis lost height and gained girth as if it were a putty man squashed by a child. Its face registered surprise. Then it stretched up to its accustomed height, shook itself, and looked impassively at the fallen men.
One of them, his face twisted with pain, tried to talk to him, words that were so low Gaby couldn’t hear them.
Adonis looked around, scanning the hangar. It focused a moment on the talk-box, looking straight at Gaby, then turned away. It spotted what it wanted on the wall near the rotorkite and headed that way.
A switch on the wall. Adonis threw it, and in the top of the picture frame Gaby saw the hangar roof shudder as the overhead door began to lift.
Uncoiling ropes snaked down in to the hangar, and dark-armored men rappelled down beside the rotorkite.
Gaby grimaced. If men just came physically through the roof hatch, the conjurer’s circles would do no good.
She went looking for Doc.
The voice buzzed through the speaker in Duncan’s ear. “Sir? This is Greencoat.” The man sounded uncertain; he’d been uncomfortable with the new grimworld equipment.
“I’m here.”
“The missile team isn’t answering because they’re all sick. But Adonis did find the switch. We are in and we have the hangar.”
“Sick. Some trick of Doc’s.” Duncan hissed his frustration. “Very well. The laboratory team has stopped answering. We have to assume they’ve been beaten. Don’t send any men down the building exterior; we need to concentrate our forces. Send the entire force in through the hangar and kill everyone.”
“Yes, sir.”
Duncan leaned back, irritably drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair. The signal still showed a large number of grimworlders alive on one of Doc’s floors. Whoever these men were, they had managed to break the first wave of Duncan’s attack.
But only the first. He had more in store for them. The thought made him smile.
Gaby first tried the topmost viewer in the west stairwell, only a floor or two below the hangar—and there Doc was, Ixyail beside him, racing up the stairs, in sight only for a moment.
That was only a viewer; Gaby couldn’t talk through it, couldn’t warn him.
Wait. Maybe she could.
She lashed out at the viewer in anger.
Alastair flinched as the viewer above his head burst and rained sparks down on him. “Gods!”
Above, at the landing, Doc skidded to a stop and looked back. Ixyail and Noriko barely slowed in time to keep from running into him. Doc said, “I wonder what it did to make her mad at it.”
But with the four of them stopped, their clattering footsteps no longer obscured the noises from above—cries of orders over the cries of pain and sound of men being sick.
There were men up there, and they were active, not brought low by Doc’s conjurer’s circles.
Gaby reopened the eye into the laboratory. Athelstane’s men were shackling captured gunmen; most of the attackers, though badly hurt, appeared to have survived, saved by their grimworld armor. Harris was in view, talking rapidly with Athelstane. Gaby heaved a sigh of relief. “Athelstane.”
The lieutenant and Harris turned to look at her.
“There’s a problem in the hangar. Doc’s going there. I think you and your men should join him.”
She heard one of the guards, a woman, say, “Gods, not more stairs.”
Athelstane shot a dirty look at the woman. “Quiet, you. Very well, goodlady, we’re on our way.” He waved a hand at his guards and trotted out of frame.
Harris moved to follow.
“Harris, don’t!”
“Gaby, if there are problems—”
“Listen . . . ” He’d survived one encounter already. There had to be some way she could convince him to stay behind now, not to charge into another dangerous situation. The answer came to her in a burst of enlightenment. “I think Duncan’s in the talk-boxes. Using them to track our movements. I want you to make like Mister Actor Guy. Stay in front of this one and talk to Doc and everybody else as if they’re still in the room with you. It might screw him up.”
Harris looked after Athelstane and grimaced. “Dammit. All right. But wait a second. Let’s see if we can do to him what he’s doing to us.” He ran out of frame.
He was back in a moment with a radio headset. “This was on one of the grimworlders. Check it out.” He put it on, fiddled with it. “Testing, one, two, three . . . ”
Gaby switched away from the laboratory talk-box and listened. Then she heard Harris again, two voices; one was crisp and clear, the other distant and fuzzy. She went looking for the fainter signal.
The first of the soldiers descending the stairs rounded the turn, coming into view on the landing. Alastair and Ixyail opened up with their autoguns. The attack caught the first two men by surprise. They fell; those behind brought up their guns to fire. Alastair and Ish ducked behind the cover of the banister and backed down the stairs.
“This will not work,” Doc shouted over the gunfire. “We can’t hold here long against those weapons. And if they have any sense, they’re covering the other stairways and elevators.”
“We could perhaps lure some of them ahead of the others,” Noriko shouted back. “Take their weapons and use them against the rest. When the enemy is stronger, you must use his strength against him.”
Doc nodded. “That’s partly correct.” He clapped Alastair on the back. “Fighting retreat,” he told the healer.
Alastair nodded without looking back. Doc gestured for Noriko to follow him. Together, they trotted down three stories, past a set of armored doors that normally kept people from lower floors from reaching Doc’s floors. Then Doc sat cross-legged in the center of the landing. Above, the gunfire went on and on.
Doc used his bronze penknife to prick his wrist. He drew a conjurer’s circle around him in his own blood, took a moment to assure himself that it was unbroken. “I may be gone for a few beats,” he told Noriko. “If I can’t defend myself—”
“Don’t worry,” she assured him.
He closed his eyes and sank within himself.
And spoke. To a god. To the worst of them, the war-bringer, the conqueror.
“Hear me,” he pleaded. “Weapons beg to be wielded. Grant me knowledge of them. Power over them. I will use them, and entertain you with noise and pain and blood.”
It was a loathsome bargain. But he sent it out into the void like an outstretched hand, and when mad laughter began bubbling up within him he knew that it had been accepted.
The mirror remained a reflection, but suddenly Harris’ second voice was much clearer: “—two, three. Testing—“
She switched back to the lab for a brief moment. “Got it.” Then she returned to the new eye she’d found.
She extended her perceptions. She could feel other eyes not far away, a direction she’d never felt before.
She opened one of them and heard: “— heavy resistance in both stairwells, and they have the elevators locked off. But it should not take more than part of a chime.”
Duncan’s voice: “Very well.”
But she couldn’t see anything; this was a sound-only place.
A moment later, she found an eye that provided sight as well as sound. It looked out on a huge room. It was a vast metal framework crowded with what looked like rigid, upright bags attached to metal cross-braces. It all looked like steel, a shocking amount of bare steel for the fair world.