Maud pondered it as if it were a diamond.
“Thank you.”
Arland inclined his head and went back to his armor.
The inn’s magic chimed in my head. The Draziri were on the move.
I rose. “We have visitors.”
It started as a single ping, an intruder brushing against the boundary. It touched the boundary and burst into half-a-dozen intruders moving fast. The Draziri weren’t playing. Good, because I wasn’t either.
I crossed the threshold into the war room and stepped onto the wood. Wing was in his room and Helen in hers. Maud must’ve taken her upstairs. Perfect. A deep chime sounded through Gertrude Hunt, a clear high sound impossible to ignore. External shutters and walls clanged, locking down. My voice carried through the inn, echoing through every room.
“Gertrude Hunt is under attack. We are under lockdown until further notice. I apologize for the inconvenience.”
Thin flexible shoots spiraled from the edges of the wooden limb on which I stood, forming a two-foot-tall lattice. I held out my broom. It split into a thousand glowing blue threads that streaked into my robe, adhering to my skin and to the lattice of the inn. It would make Gertrude Hunt and I faster.
The walls around me faded, presenting a 360-degree view of the inn grounds. In the distance, from the north, six orange-sized spheres floated about two feet off the ground, slowly making their way into my territory. A quick scan told me they were rigged to explode.
Magic shifted within me, announcing another intrusion. Ha! He thought I wouldn’t notice. Dear Draziri Commander had a lot to learn about the capabilities of innkeepers.
Caldenia walked through the door, carrying a glass of wine. I smiled at her and let her usual chair rise from the floor. She sat and grinned back at me, flashing her inhumanly sharp teeth.
My sister and Arland reached the doorway at the same time. They would’ve collided, but years of politeness ingrained in Arland took over and he smoothly halted, letting Maud burst into the room. My sister carried her sword. The Marshal of House Krahr was wearing armor.
Maud looked at Caldenia. “Your Grace? Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in your rooms?”
“Nonsense, my dear.” Caldenia’s eyes gleamed. “I love watching her work.”
“He deployed scout spheres,” Arland said, watching the handful of robotic scouts meander their way into my territory. “He’s trying to map your range. An expensive way to do it.”
“Expensive and pointless,” Maud said. “They’ve been in range for the last six meters. She isn’t just going to destroy them the moment they touch the boundary.”
I concentrated on the depiction of the grounds. An area from the west side rushed at me, zooming closer and closer. The brush grew to mountain size, the individual blades of grass became a forest, and within that forest a chain of ten ants hurried toward the inn.
I’d scanned the ants when I first felt them crossing the boundary and now I tossed the results of the scan onto the screen so the others could see it. One individual ant expanded, rotating, the analysis rolling next to its image, listing the complex readouts. I was looking at a masterpiece of cyborg technology: a living insect carrying within it roughly a million nanobots. Silent, virtually undetectable by all but the most advanced scanners, the ants were meant to reach Gertrude Hunt and let loose their horde of tiny robots, capable of everything from surveillance to sabotage. The Draziri had no idea the architecture of the inn was fluid and changed at my whim. He was trying to map out Gertrude Hunt, looking for weak points.
Arland bared his teeth. “Clever bastard.”
“Not as clever as he thinks,” I murmured.
Magic tugged on me. I opened a second screen in the wall. The Hiru appeared on it.
“How may I be of service?” I asked.
“I realize… this time is not the best.” The Hiru’s voice sounded strained. “The first Archivarian has arrived on Earth.”
Not good. “Where?”
The Hiru raised his right palm. A small map of Red Deer appeared, a tiny glowing dot marking one of the streets. Walmart parking lot. Well, at least the first member of the Archivarius wouldn’t stand out.
“What does it look like?”
The Hiru touched his palm and a projection appeared of a man in his mid-thirties, brown-skinned, with a bald head and an intelligent face. His features were off somehow. Something about them telegraphed alien so loudly, it practically slapped your senses. It took me a moment to figure it out. His face had no pores. No wrinkles, no small imperfections, and no variations in tone troubled his skin. He looked plastic. The effect was freakish. But in darkness he would pass for a human.
“The Archivarian must be retrieved,” the Hiru said. “Immediately.”
No pressure. The ants were still a good two hundred yards away. The spheres drifted perilously close to the point where they would become a problem.
“The retrieval may have to wait.”
The Hiru leaned forward, his voice gasping. “The Archivarian cannot maintain its form in your planetary conditions. He must be submerged in inert gas to contain himself.”
Inert gas meant an argon chamber. A piece of cake, but only on the inn grounds.
“What happens when he loses his form?” I asked.
“He is a being of energy.”
Not good. So not good. The release of energy could mean anything from explosion, to bright light, to complete disintegration of the local space-time continuum.
“He must be retrieved. We have risked everything.” Desperation vibrated in his voice.
This information would’ve been excellent to have had earlier. “How long?”
“Thirty-four minutes.”
Damn it. I tossed a counter on the wall, seconds ticking back from thirty-four minutes to zero.
“Very well,” I said. “How will the Archivarian know my people?”
“Take this.” The Hiru’s left forearm slid open, revealing a small pen-like transmitter. “He will hunt your signal.”
And so would the Draziri, if they ever put two and two together. Arguing about it would waste time we didn’t have. After we dealt with this initial assault, the Hiru and I would have to sit down and talk.
I nodded and cut off the communication.
“I’ll take care of it,” Maud said.
I loved my sister so much. “Take my car. It’s bulletproof. Walmart is only seven or eight minutes from here.”
“My lady,” Arland said, and it took me a second to register that he wasn’t talking to me. “I would be honored to assist.”
“I can handle it,” Maud said.
“Take the vampire, my dear,” Caldenia said. “You never know when you may require muscle.”
Maud’s eyebrows knitted together.
I pulled the feed from the Park Street. At first glance everything appeared normal. Fortunately, the inn had been recording the street for the last four hours. A comparative analysis took only a few fractions of a second and the contours of four Draziri lit up on the screen, each wrapped in a high tech camo cloak. The cloak mimicked the surroundings the same way a chameleon would, replicating the fence and the bushes with painstaking accuracy. They must’ve had some way to block their body heat as well, because they didn’t show up on the infrared scan.
The Draziri waited in the shadows, two by Mr. Ramirez’s fence and two on the other side of the Camelot road leading into Avalon subdivision. They caught a lucky break—Mr. Ramirez had left for his weekly bowling meeting and took his dog with him.
“How much cover can you give me?” Maud asked.
“I can do Mom’s Take Care,” I said.
“That should be good enough.”
“Exit won’t be a problem,” Arland said. “But the return may present a slight difficulty.”