He ran for it. Faye Traveled after him, but he’d been ready that time. Her head map screamed in warning as a circle of magical energy exploded outward from his body. Her feet hadn’t even hit the stone before she Traveled straight up, launching herself at the roof beams. She caught hold, then had to step through space immediately as he blew a ten-foot hole through the ceiling.
The dust blinded her for a moment, but her head map warned her that he was trying to get away. He reached a small door at the back of the church, fumbled with some keys, got it unlocked, and yanked it open.
And Faye was there waiting for him.
She ran the knife across his throat, real quick, and it opened up like a bright new red smile. He stumbled back, surprised, nearly tripping in his clumsy robes. In Faye’s other hand was the .45. It came up spitting fire as fast as she could pull the trigger. Bullets him in the stomach, chest, chest, shoulder, then she missed, and again, and then in the teeth, and the last one hit him square in the right eye.
The Black Monk landed flat on his back.
The church groaned. The big brick stacks that held up the center were all broken now. His magic was odd, and she couldn’t tell by looking at it with your eyes, but her head map told her it was like the little tiny invisible bits that made up everything—Heinrich called them molecules when he Faded between them—were sloughing apart. The statue of Jesus was on the floor, and that offended Faye, because here was a man pretending to be a man of God, but he secretly wanted to help the Pathfinder that wanted to gobble up all of God’s green earth, and then she was glad she’d cut his throat and filled him full of holes.
Faye quickly looked around the little room that had been locked. It was some sort of study or laboratory. There were lots of vials and jars and beakers and things cooking over candles. There were magic spells drawn on all the walls and there were human body parts hanging from chains or placed on tables, mostly hands and feet, but there were a few heads and a big box of torsos. There were bits and pieces of guts and internal organs that she could identify from butchering pigs on the farm, because people parts really didn’t look that much different on the inside, and all of them were neatly stacked in pails or stretched out on workbenches where he could draw spells on them with needles. The spells written on the walls were keeping everything inside from rotting and stinking. The Black Monk had been experimenting, drawing new kinds of magic on the parts, and from the big, meaty lump of different folks stitched together lying on the table, he had been trying to stick them back together to make new sorts of living things.
It was sick, and gross, and it filled her with rage. These parts were fresh. They weren’t dug up from old graves. She wondered just how many poor innocent folks had disappeared from these quiet mountain valleys so the Black Monk could continue his experiments. In one way, though, it did make her really glad. She only liked to kill bad people, and this was one heck of a confirmation that he’d been bad.
And then the Black Monk got up off the floor.
“Killing you is hard,” Faye complained. It must have been something to do with being from the first ones magic had bonded with, because the Chairman had been the same way. Her head map could see what was going on, though. His magic didn’t just take the little bits apart, he could also put things back together, and that included flesh.
He couldn’t talk. He tried to, but only blood came through the hole in his teeth, and a bunch of air whistled through the gaping hole in his neck. He lifted one hand, gathering up a terrible burst of his dissolving magic, aimed it at her, and let it fly.
Faye knew what to do.
She Travelled around the magic, laid hands on the Black Monk’s robes, and then dragged them both back through space, reappearing right in the path of his magical attack. Faye let go and leapt aside at the last possible second.
The dissolving magic washed over the Black Monk.
His black eyes turned on Faye. Wide. Surprised. A little confused…
And then he simply came apart.
She could hear the cries of terror coming from the village and she could see them running around on her head map. They didn’t know what was happening. One minute it had been a quiet Sunday afternoon, and a minute later their church was falling down. The bell broke free of the tower, crashed through the beams, and landed on the stone floor with a terrible racket.
Walking over, Faye kicked at the pile of black robes and slowly melting pink sludge that had been a real live person only a few seconds before. He was melting like the candles that had been sitting on the altar. One eyeball turned liquid and ran down his cheek. The last of his air was coming out of his chest as white foam. Even his bones were melting. She’d have to tell Mr. Sullivan about this type of magic, because she didn’t think he had anything about it in his notes.
The Black Monk gurgled, spat out some pink fluid, and within a few seconds, melted flat out into a puddle on the floor. This time she was sure he was dead. There weren’t no coming back from turning into a blood puddle. And then Faye got her confirmation when she felt the Spellbound curse steal his ancient mighty connection to the Power. She’d not really felt the individual deaths before, but she certainly felt this one. It was a weird sensation, like she was now somehow more.
Nervous, she checked her Power. The river had grown deep and fast. Faye closed her eyes and found that her head map stretched for miles. It was almost too much information to process, and she began to swoon. Faye didn’t have time for that sort of nonsense, as she wasn’t the “fainting lady” type, so she wiped her knife on the curtains, put it away, reloaded her .45, picked out the spot where she’d hidden her clothing and Zachary’s art two and a half miles away, and Travelled there in a single hop.
Now she was ready to fight the Enemy.
UBF Traveler
The communication spell was severed. The ring of fused salt fell and shattered on the table. Sullivan stared at the fragments, trying to reason his way through the implications of the news. The ready room was totally silent as the last bits of magical energy bound to the mineral slowly dissipated into the air.
He raised his head and looked at the others. The feelings were easy to recognize on their faces; disbelief, anger, sadness, even resignation. They’d been worried that the Imperium might somehow detect the spell, so Heinrich’s report had been kept very brief. It hadn’t taken him much time to tell them that they’d been sucker-punched. Three of their four hideouts had been hit simultaneously. The only known survivors had been the four knights pulled out by the stolen patrol boat.
The Grimnoir had been gutted.
Sullivan couldn’t let his doubts show. They needed him to be the rock. He’d thought he’d left his soldiering days behind, but this was much the same. When you were in charge, you couldn’t ever let your doubt show.
Pang must not have known about the small place where Heinrich and a few others were staying. Most of the Traveler’s knights were unaccounted for and assumed dead or captured. The local Grimnoir were functionally gone, the entirety of their membership consisting now of Zhao, the badly injured man Yip, and a woman who had been serving as a guide for the knights stationed with Heinrich.