“Naw.” Sullivan shook his head. That sort of crushing weight didn’t belong on a teenager. It was Sullivan’s to bear. If there was anything he was good at, it was not being crushed under a lot of weight, and he’d gathered a lot over the years. Zhao was new at this. Sullivan had lots of practice. “You were lied to by a snake. Happens to the best of us. I brought us here. This was my plan. My responsibility. Got it?”
Zhao didn’t respond. It would have to do.
Schirmer returned to his point. Apparently Fixers were compelled to tackle all problems, not just the mechanical ones. “Every last knight you pulled out of the river is injured and in no shape to fight, and our Healer’s dead. Even if the new Chairman’s one-tenth what the old Chairman was, you’ll need more men to confront him. I can go with you.”
“I need you here to make sure Fuller’s device runs right. Exposing the Pathfinder is first. Killing its stooge is second. We have to wake the Iron Guard up. That’s all that matters.”
“All right.” Schirmer was a brave knight, but he knew Sullivan was right. Some problems just couldn’t be fixed. “I’ll shine the light so everybody can watch the roaches scatter.”
“I can go, burn many Imperium,” Lady Origami offered.
“You’re going to keep this ship in the air when it starts getting shot at. I got this myself.”
“You hide it, but I see your sadness. You think this is your fault. Being killed will not bring them back! It was too much danger when there were many of you!” Ori was getting upset. “Alone, you’ll die!”
“Maybe…” There was one other, drastic, final option. He hadn’t wanted to use it, because frankly, it scared him. He’d already figured it would come to this, even before they’d heard from Heinrich, so he’d retrieved the sheet he’d hidden in a compartment beneath his bunk. Sullivan reached into his coat and pulled out the folded sheet of paper that he had meticulously copied from the personal spell book of Anand Sivaram, when he had taken it from Bradford Carr. Sullivan carefully unfolded it and placed the paper on the table amidst the fused chunks of salt. “Maybe not.”
It would just look like complicated scribbles and lots of weird geometric designs to most folks. Sullivan had succeeded in binding several spells to his body over the last year, but those had all been child’s play compared to this thing. He’d thought of those as an intellectual, magical, and physical challenge, an opportunity to even the odds against Iron Guard. And even then each of those had been incredibly risky, with each one taking him right up to death’s door before he’d forced himself to come back. This thing was a monster in comparison. It was doomsday. Buckminster Fuller scanned over it and then let out an audible gasp.
“I know of only two men this spell’s been carved on. Giuseppe Zangara and the OCI man Crow. Zangara was a no-account weakling, and this turned him into the scariest Boomer anybody’s ever seen. And you all know what Crow the Summoner unleashed on D.C.”
Fuller swallowed hard. “It drastically magnifies the user’s Power, that much is clear, but there is so much there… I would think that there could be terrible side effects.”
“Don’t matter…” Of course there would be side effects. You didn’t screw around with this level of magic without dire consequences. Bradford Carr had been a fool. Zangara had already been crazy, but this thing had gradually pushed Crow right over the edge. Sullivan had studied Sivaram’s book, and though the actual Spellbound curse the Grimnoir elders were so scared of hadn’t been in there, this thing had been. He figured it was a sort of early prototype of the Spellbound curse. The elders would surely come apart if they learned what he was about to do, not that it mattered, since this was more than likely a one-way trip. “All I need to know is, can you carve this spell on me?”
Fuller was shaking. The others didn’t get it, but Fuller did. The Cog could read magic, simple as most folks could read letters. One slip and Sullivan was dead. He understood exactly what Sullivan was asking, and God bless him for it, he manned up. “Yes. Yes, I believe I can do that.”
As Toru had said back when they’d first embarked on this quest: they’d defeat the Pathfinder, or they’d die trying.
Chapter 18
Dear Miss Etiquette,
My boyfriend is a Mover. Is it still considered opening the door for a lady if he does it with his mind powers instead of with his body? And if it is not, how should I broach this subject so as to not hurt his feelings?
Signed,
Dear Confused,
It most definitely is not proper to use magic of any kind around a young lady, especially telekinesis. It is difficult enough for boys to keep their hands to themselves, let alone extra invisible hands. If he is a proper gentleman he will get the door for you with his actual physical hands and never use his ghost hands in polite society.
Somewhere in Russia
It had taken what seemed like forever to find them and the nice new airship that Francis had so thoughtfully named after her, but Faye tracked them down eventually. She’d hoped for a pleasant reunion, but instead she’d damn near scared the hell out of everybody. They were jumpy, and it hadn’t helped that everybody thought she was dead.
Her magic was a boundless torrent of energy and limitless potential, but her body was still human, so after she’d squared off against the Black Monk, she’d had to get some sleep. Being the most powerful wizard ever was great and all, but she wasn’t stupid. If she got tired and careless, she’d still be every bit as dead as anybody else if she accidentally Traveled and wound up with a bumblebee stuck in her heart or a tree branch in her brain. As marvelous as Traveling was, it still had some limitations, but it sure beat walking like a normal old boring person.
She’d found a Russian fur trapper’s cabin with nobody home. Faye figured that sleeping in a bed made out of bearskins was much comfier than sleeping in some hay loft or open field. And she was about to go fight the Pathfinder anyways, and sometimes a girl just had to treat herself to something nice. She’d eaten some old potatoes and a whole bunch of jerky made out of who knew what kind of animal which had been stored there, and left a big handful of money to make up for it. There was a bag of salt there for treating the game they killed, so she’d used that to fashion some communication spells.
Faye knew she was a danger to be around. All the time these poor Grimnoir had the Spellbound around was like keeping a rattlesnake in the living room, and they’d never even realized it. But Sullivan’s expedition was surrounded by rattlesnakes, so what was one more? Besides, she knew they’d have no chance at all without her.
She was still rather bad at spellbinding. Sure, she had more magic than anybody else in the world now, but that still didn’t mean she could draw it very well. She was still clumsy at making the designs, nothing like Lance or Mr. Sullivan. It took her several tries, but she finally got one to connect. She tried to reach Francis’ Grimnoir ring first, but hadn’t gotten a response. That worried her to no end, but she figured he was just busy. She had wanted to warn him about what she’d seen in the pictures about the skinless man in disguise who was whispering to the president. She didn’t know who that skinless man was pretending to be, but Zachary’s pictures told her that back before his body had been taken over he had built lots of fancy buildings.