“Define quick.”
“Maybe a second, I guess.” That sounded reasonable. Time just sort of seemed to slow down when she got to thinking real hard about stuff. “I don’t know.”
“That is the sort of report that crossed my desk that made me originally suspect you were the Spellbound. It sounded so far-fetched that many of my peers dismissed the idea that you had done it at all.”
“But I did do it! I beat the Chairman!” The last time she’d met with Grimnoir elders their disbelief had annoyed her to no end.
“Indeed. But you must understand their doubts. You were nearly untrained, you had never done anything like that before, yet you found a way to defeat the greatest wizard of all time. A man who had proven impervious to every assault, a man who had survived dozens of assassination attempts by extremely skilled Actives, yet you extemporaneously outwitted him. And then when you teleported the Tempest across the entirety of the Pacific, how long did it take you to decide you could do that?”
“You gotta think fast when you’re about to get burned.” Faye realized Jacques was staring at her intently and she was struck by how much smarter he was than he acted. It made her a little uncomfortable. “Okay… Well, I saw the Tokugawa getting blown up by the Tesla thingy, so I had to see how much the Traveler weighed, how much the folks on it weighed, you know, so I didn’t get them stuck together, where we were, how fast we were going, I even had to look at the wind and how everything was turning, then how fast the pillar of light was coming, and then I figured that I needed to take us further than I could see with my head map, so I just hurried and sorted it out and did it before the Tesla beam got us. But since I only had a second, I kind of messed up and pushed a little too hard. I’m lucky I didn’t just kill us all.”
Jacques was still looking at her, but now his mouth was open just a little bit, like he was kind of surprised. He quickly closed it.
“You doing okay, Jacques?”
“All of that… Before the pillar of light reached you?”
“Yeah.”
He drained his coffee in one quick gulp, pulled some money out of his pocket and left it on the table. “That concludes our lesson for the day.”
“Lesson? That was supposed to be a lesson?”
He picked up his hat and set it on his white hair. “Yes. It was your first lesson in mastering the most dangerous spell the world has ever known.”
“Well, I’m no expert on schoolin’ and such, but you’re not a very good teacher.”
“I never claimed to be. Meet me here tomorrow at ten.” And then Jacques quickly walked out of the café and into the rain without looking back. He didn’t even bother with an umbrella.
Faye sighed and polished off the cookies.
Chapter 5
UBF Traveler
The view out the front of the ship was green forests and blue rivers as far as the eye could see. Sullivan was leaning on the rail and making up for interrupted sleep with strong black coffee. The night watch was wrapping up and being replaced by their luckier day shift brethren. Barns Dalton entered the Traveler’s bridge, took one look around, scratched his head, and asked, “Are we heading north?”
“Yep,” Sullivan answered.
“Isn’t Siberia that-a-way?” Barns gestured out another window.
“Yep.” He took a drink of the nefarious liquid and let it burn its way down. Captain Southunder’s idea of coffee could degrease an engine. “Change of plans.”
“I’m only just the main guy that drives this thing,” Barns muttered. The marauder from the night shift gave up the helm, and Barns slid into the chair. “It isn’t like anybody needs to tell me anything.”
Sullivan had no idea how any of the complicated new navigational equipment on the Traveler worked, but Barns hadn’t seemed to have any trouble learning it. He’d been a biplane stunt pilot before falling in with the marauders, and according to Southunder there wasn’t anything Barns couldn’t fly, and with his Power being related to the manipulation of probability, nobody that he couldn’t outfly. The young man tapped the glass to make sure the gauges weren’t stuck. “Good to see my sense of direction’s not broken. Where the hell are we going?”
Captain Southunder returned to the bridge, sliding down a ladder like a man half his age. Put him on a moving airship and he was as surefooted as an Imperium ninja. “Eighty-two degrees north, eighty-two degrees west, Barns. Near the northern shore of Axel Heiberg.”
“Hmmm…” Barns had to think about that for a moment. “Sounds cold.”
“It’s a secret base on top of a glacier. Conditions shouldn’t be much worse than what everyone was already expecting in Siberia. Freezing cold, horrible winds, man-eating polar bears, and murderous Imperium bastards, all in one convenient location.”
“I should’ve stayed in the south Pacific,” Barns grumbled. “But hey, at least we’ve got a fancier blimp.”
“Indeed we do. The Traveler may be a technological marvel, but a man will always remember his first love with fondness,” Southunder said. “The Bulldog Marauder was a real beauty.”
“She was held together with baling wire and pitch tar.”
“She had soul.” Pirate Bob turned to Sullivan. “Winds are good. If you want me to manipulate them, I could have us there quicker, otherwise we’ll be there near midnight.”
Landing and making their way across a glacier in the dark would be dangerous as hell, but it beat being spotted and taking antiaircraft fire. They needed to capture this place, not level it from the sky. “Save your Power, Captain. We’ll do this at night.”
Southunder laughed at him. “You’ve never been this far north before, have you, Sullivan? Night is a relative term this time of year. There won’t be a lot of cover to work with.”
“No cover, eh?” He’d forgotten about that. That was the problem with book learning compared to practical experience. Facts were recalled a lot faster when it was something that made life harder. They still had a few weeks before the solstice, but even now, being a few hundred miles from the pole, there would only be a few hours of night, and none of them particularly dark enough to conceal an incoming dirigible. “Can you provide us some?”
“Of course.” The captain had to think about that for a moment. “But up here, that’ll test the limits of my magic. Thing is, I manipulate the weather enough to give us sufficient storm cover, there’s repercussions. Further out you get from where I twisted the system, the less control I’ve got.”
“What’re you getting at?”
“When I cause enough disturbance to hide this ship, there’s no telling how nasty the weather may get down on that glacier.”
Sullivan simply nodded and went back to his coffee. “I’ll tell the boys to wear their mittens.”
Barns shuddered. “I really should’ve stayed in the South Pacific…”
“We are ramp down in five minutes!” the marauder shouted from the catwalk. “Five minutes!”