Tempt the Stars

Page 21

“—and attempt dangerous experiments that are almost certain to end in disaster!”
“—while our enemies get stronger! Yes! Cut off your nose to spite your face, war mage!” Roger snapped. “But don’t doom the rest of us to go down with you. There are those who would prefer a fighting chance!” And the mug came crashing down.
Daisy and I jumped. The colonel’s mustache twitched. Pritkin and Roger glared at each other. And I jumped in while I had the chance, since I might not get another.
“How are ghosts more powerful than demons?” I asked. Because if it was true, I really needed to have a chat with Billy Joe.
Roger sent me a glance, like he knew what I was doing. But after a moment, he answered anyway. “Well, for one thing, they’re less vulnerable. Take the colonel. Do you see a control gem in his forehead?”
“He doesn’t have a forehead,” Daisy said, looking disapproving. “Doesn’t even have a head—”
“I have a head, woman!” the colonel said indignantly.
“I meant on your new body.”
“So did I! The whole point was to leave ’em empty above the neck so our own heads would have a place to go!”
“But nobody sees our heads,” Daisy pointed out. “And they look so . . . odd.”
“They’re not the only thing odd around here.”
“My point,” Roger said, talking over them, “was that the colonel doesn’t have to worry about someone erasing a spell on his forehead or pulling a scroll out of his mouth—”
“Which would be easy enough since it’s usually open,” Daisy put in.
“—or any of the other typical ways of immobilizing a construct like a golem. Because they’re not constructs; they’re just using them.”
“Like driving a car,” Daisy told me. “It gets totaled, but you walk away.”
“Can’t a demon walk away?” I asked.
“Yes, but it’s not going to come back, then, is it?” Roger countered. “Once the golem—its prison, essentially—is destroyed, its sentence is over. And it doesn’t usually waste any time getting out of there. Unless it decides to get . . . testy . . . with its former master. But either way, you’ve lost your servant.”
Pritkin glowered at him, but he didn’t refute it. Which I supposed meant Roger’s account was pretty accurate. He enjoyed an argument even when he liked someone, and I didn’t think he liked Roger.
“And then there’s the way they feed,” Roger continued, oblivious. “Ghosts and demons are both spirits, yes?”
“Well, some demons . . ”
“And they both gain strength by feeding off living energy.”
I nodded.
“The difference is that demons can only hold so much. They’re like humans that way, or vampires. They feed to satisfy their current needs, and to store up power for later. And, of course, with the elder demons, the amount they can hold can be very, very large. But even they have limits, although they don’t like to admit it. Whereas ghosts . . ”
“What about ghosts?”
“They’re eternal sponges: they never get full. You can feed them and feed them and feed them, and they just . . . soak it up.”
Daisy nodded her substitute for a head, and the eyelash fell off again.
I frowned. “How do you know? No ghost has access to that kind of power.” For most of the ghosts I’d known, the problem was finding enough energy to keep going, not in seeing how much they could store up.
“They do if someone provides it.”
“But why would anyone—”
“You’re making indestructible soldiers!” Pritkin accused.
I looked at him, faintly surprised, but not as much as Roger. Who seemed amazed that a magical jock could put two and two together. But he shook his head.
“Not indestructible. You discovered that much tonight. Not that that model was designed for combat, mind you, but any of them can be destroyed under the right circumstances. But that isn’t really the issue.”
“Then what is?”
Roger looked thoughtful. “I suppose the best analogy would be your Spitfires in the Second World War.”
Judging by his confused expression, that didn’t clear up much for Pritkin. It didn’t for me, either, but I was a little distracted by the sick feeling that had opened up in the pit of my stomach. Because it wasn’t the why of Roger’s weird hobby that interested me.
It was the how.
“During World War Two, the Nazis planned to invade the British Isles,” he told me. “But to do so, they first needed control of the skies, and that meant wiping out the RAF—that’s the British Royal Air Force.”
I nodded numbly.
“But the RAF held on, mainly because their airplanes, the Spitfires, were damned good little planes, and because their factories could churn them out in a seemingly endless supply. Every time a plane went down, there were two more waiting to replace it. There was just one problem.”
“Factories couldn’t churn out pilots, too,” Pritkin said, narrowing his eyes at Daisy. Who was poking around in her apron for the lost lash.
“Exactly,” Roger said. “The RAF kept running out of pilots, and couldn’t train more fast enough to meet the demand. They only held out because of an influx of qualified personnel from abroad. And even then, it was a close thing. But imagine if you could train someone once, yet use him over and over. Imagine if, when one’s vehicle was destroyed, one’s body remained unharmed and could merely flit back and pick up another. And another after that, and another after that—”
“You’d never run out,” I said, watching Pritkin. Who’d started out angry and was closing in on furious.
Roger nodded. “Think of it: an army of soldiers who can’t die—they already did. Or be captured and forced to answer questions by their enemies. Or be prevented from returning to base. After all, what can trap a ghost?”
I could think of something, I didn’t say, because Pritkin had reached apoplectic. Maybe he was thinking about the destruction such a force could wreak on the Corps. Or maybe it was Roger’s attitude that bothered him. It was like he’d forgotten who his audience was and was happily holding forth on his favorite subject.
“Of course, there were problems,” Roger told me. “Most annoyingly that the ghosts said the bodies didn’t feel like theirs.”
“I kept drifting up out of it,” Daisy said. “And that was before I tried to move the thing!”
“And practice didn’t help much,” Roger added. “I finally realized that I had merely created a vehicle, when what they needed was a body. So I did some research and discovered that the binding spell for a golem has similarities to the way zombies are made, and once I understood that, well, things began popping.”
“I’ll say,” Daisy put in.
“Of course, I still had to figure out an enchantment to lighten the weight of the bodies, so they weren’t burning through power like a 747. And ghosts can’t do magic. Therefore all their spells had to be transformed into a potion form that could be carried—”
“But you managed,” I said, because obviously.
“Well . . . more or less.” He patted Daisy’s massive thigh. “And unlike living soldiers, mine don’t get tired. They can’t be wounded. They don’t need sleep. As long as there are bodies to house them and energy to supply them, they can go on and on and—”
He cut off because Pritkin had finally had enough. A wash of power suddenly filled the room, reminding me that Pritkin didn’t need weapons. He was one. He was a war mage.
But then, so was Roger.
Pritkin launched himself off the table and into the air, with something in his hand I couldn’t see but knew damned well he couldn’t use. It’s over, I wanted to yell. He can’t hurt anyone! He’s already dead!
But I never got the chance.
I was half out of my seat, hand outstretched and words forming on my lips, when Pritkin suddenly wasn’t there anymore. But a second later, something hit the far wall with a crack. I looked over to see him peeling off the paint behind the table—and the plaster and the bricks—having been knocked across the room and partly through the wall by something that had moved so fast it had been only a blur.
And still was, because I was too busy running to look for it. I shoved a chair aside and knelt by the crumpled body, the one with an unexploded potion grenade falling out of one hand. Pritkin must have stayed conscious long enough to steal one off Big Red while being carried back, and shoved it down his boot.
And damn it! I should have thought of that. But I hadn’t thought it necessary to frisk a naked man.
“That’ll teach him not to bother with shields!” someone said, and I turned to see the creature itself standing in the doorway. The rain was blowing through a ghostly image of the colonel’s head rising out of the neck and looking smug.
“It won’t teach him anything if he’s dead!”
“Would you prefer your father dead, girl?” the colonel demanded.
I picked up the golden grenade and threw it at him. “He was going to trap him—not kill him!”
The colonel dodged back out the door, avoiding the sticky strands that hit the jamb and spread over the opening, like a giant web. “Well, how was I to know that?” he demanded, glaring at me through a gap. “And what good would trappin’ him do? This isn’t your time!”
“It might force him to tell the truth! How many of you does the Black Circle have? Where are they keeping you—”
“I should have anticipated that,” Roger said testily, coming over. He glanced at the colonel. “Next time, allow me to ask for assistance before you intervene.”
“He’s a war mage. You wouldn’t have had time to ask,” the colonel protested—to no one, because no one was listening to him anymore.