Ten minutes later, a nondescript Knight Errant security man knocked at the door of Michael's Soho apartment. When a second loud knock brought no reply, the man took a wafer-thin metallic card from an inside pocket and clipped it to the side of the retinal-analyzing maglock. After a second or two, the lock registered a positive ID and the door clicked open.
He hadn't been able to disengage all the alarms; even
just the attempt to do so would have been impossible, and would have alerted security. The motion sensors detected him in the doorway and the wailing alarm howled in protest.
"Drek," he said in a voice that gave him away as an elf rather than a man. He made it to the service elevator in seconds and bypassed its deactivation with another gizmo, using it to speed down to ground level. When he got there, three large security guards had LMGs trained on the door.
"For chrissakes get up there," he yelled. "There's some fraggin' mad ork with a bomb. Says he's going to blow the top floor off. Tox, I'm outta here, man!" He ran for it. The security men were uncertain just long enough for him to get to the corner before a spray of gunfire told him they thought it would be more convenient if he halted in his tracks.
He made it to the autopark before they did and leapt onto his bike. He was away and down the ramp before they had time to shoot, which they couldn't risk doing anyway, not with the possibility of incoming traffic. He saw the barrier coming down, and the metal wedges coming up out of the road surface. He took a chance and hit the bump, crouched so low on the bike that he was able to shoot through with his head a few centimeters beneath the barrier.
As he made his way into the anonymity of downtown Manhattan traffic, Magellan was angry at himself. He'd botched it, and now the elf would know that someone was watching, after all. But he also knew the birds had flown the coop. He set his mind to figuring out how to discover where they'd gone. They might be able to change their names, but not their metatypes. Airlines had to list passengers by metatype; a plane designed for a capacity of four hundred humans couldn't get off the ground with four hundred trolls on it. One elf male, one human male, one troll male, and let's hope they didn't take some patsy along for a free trip just to make up the numbers. But it was going to take time, too much time. He didn't want Jenna to know, and he had a horrible feeling she was going to call for an on-the-spot report before too long. Time to make sure my telecom develops a problem, he thought.
Luther looked at them on the endless bank of screens. By now, the drug was in every one of them, coursing through their veins, through the blood-brain barrier. Its infiltrations would already have reached every part of their bodies.
"The orienting reflex data," Martin said appreciatively. "Entirely normal. But the voluntary element of the late OR completely flat. It looks perfect. Muller's initial data can't be faulted. This is a straight replication. It's incredible. It works for all of them. There are no racial differences."
"Show me the burn test again," Luther said simply. The video replayed before his eyes, the people withdrawing their hands from the hot iron, expressions devoid of any fear. That couldn't be faked.
"Purely reflexive. The distance of retreat is proportional only to the degree of burn damage. There isn't any emotional response at all. Look at the steroid and sympathetic outputs," Martin urged him. Flowing lines with rising and falling curves were superimposed on the film of blank faces.
"It looks right," Luther agreed. "This leaves only the scanning work. Set them up, Martin." He was fighting to control himself now. It would take at least two or three hours to conduct the sensitive NMR and PET scans of the brains of his subjects, precious time he begrudged before he could take this chemical and weave it into life. He couldn't waste effort preparing them for the scanners himself. He kept his pawns for just that kind of donkey work.
16
The mages who usually patrolled the site had long since retreated from the coming storm. Safe in the warmth of the mansion, they would be a mile away from the stones and rock of Rathcroghan in the howling winds of the night. Niall was alone save for his ever-present guardian.
He felt Mathanas' cloak spreading around him, the powerful masking of the spirit hiding his presence from any scrying. Soon, the storm would be so strong that the sheer power of it would hide him anyway.
He lashed a length of rope around one of the smaller, pillar-like rocks and knotted it around his waist. The physical force of the storm was threat enough in itself. It might be calm only a few miles away, but here the hurricane-force winds would be capable of knocking him over like a feather if he didn't take this simple precaution.
Niall had always dreaded this time, just as anyone of his Order would. A mage who died trying to take into himself the uncontrollable energies of the storm would be lost in limbo. None knew what fate he might meet, what unknown plane he might be flung into, what eternal ordeals he might suffer. He had not expected to have to face this for many, many years; perhaps never in this lifetime.
He had taken every precaution possible, cast every spell of defense and contingency he could call upon without draining himself. Now he could only wait for the surge and hold onto the enchanted golden vessel as tightly as to life itself.
The shrieks growing in the wind were as tormented souls, felt as much as heard, ripping right through him. He hardly felt the rain driving into him in the teeth of the gale as the sounds grew louder and nearer. It was as if the
Wild Hunt itself had been raised in all its implacable madness.
As the force of it grew, lightning forked above him and the rocks began to glow with a blue nimbus of energy, pure power flowing into and through them. Wisps of raw magical energy drifted lazily between them, a ghostly spider's web of power weaving itself around him. He summoned every last ounce of will and determination and drew the pattern toward himself.
As he held the cauldron, it felt as if razor blades were being driven under each fingernail, into the bones of his fingers, carving deeply into every sinew and ligament of his wrists. The pain was unbelievable, unimaginable, unbearable. He'd never dreamed that a body could hurt like this. There was no habituation, no release, no swooning, simply an overloading of sensation that grew and grew, ripping into him, tearing now into muscle and the long bones of his arms, rippling across his shoulders. As the elf bit hard into his tongue, trying to keep from screaming, blood dribbled from his mouth. His useless hands clung to the little gold cauldron and he tried to force the power down into it, out of the agony of the body and into the vessel, driving down this anguish.
The searing sensation arced down his spine, through every vertebra. He felt himself forced back against the rock, knobbles of rock sticking into his spine and ribs, fighting for every breath now. The spider's web grew white, pulsing, filled with wild, crackling energies.
Then he saw it. Nothing had led him to expect anything like this. An amorphous cloud of mist, blown together within the shrill whiteness, began to form into a larval, writhing form many meters in length. The worm-like thing struggled with its absurd, grotesquely under-sized arms to drag itself toward him, a great sucker-like mouth opening and closing in a grisly peristalsis. It radiated despair to him, wretchedness, the impossibility of what he was trying to do, the infinite release of abandoning the struggle against overwhelming pain and allowing the spirit to flee the tortured flesh.
For a split second it almost overcame him. But Niall's despair changed within his own mind to an image of an