19 - Shire

 

On the eastern side of the Atlantic is a country with royals Sullivan had never bothered to pay much attention to since arriving on this world, having had more than his fill of royalty as a child.  In that country is a county called something-or-other-shire that Sullivan paid little attention to the name of beyond musings about if old John ever had any idea how much those books of his would impact the collective consciousness and influence the sorts of worlds anchored to this one.  In that county is a quaint little village that Sullivan did pay enough attention to memorize the name of as part of an address on a slip of paper that burned after reading.  In that quaint little village is a picturesque little brick house surrounded by other picturesque little brick houses that Sullivan has been paying a great deal of attention to for the past week and change.  In front of that picturesque little brick house is a hedge that Sullivan is fairly certain no one else is paying attention to.  Inside that hedge, Sullivan is in the middle of a phone call.

“You’re still hung up on that?”  Sullivan says into his phone while keeping his eyes fixed on the house across the street.  “You’ve had two other jobs since then that went off without a hitch.”

“A child got hurt on my watch,” his friend’s voice says from the other end of the line.

“Not a child,” Sullivan corrects, “a thousand year old vampire necromancer who walked it off after a decent meal.  You’re being too hard on yourself again.  From what I read in the techie’s report, you stopped it from being worse than it could have been.”

“But it could have been better.”

“I doubt that.  I know you.  You did everything you could have done.”  Sullivan’s voice softens.  “You’re already the best, you don’t need to be perfect.  No one can be, so stop tearing yourself up for not meeting impossible standards.”

“But-”

“Hey.  Take the win and move on.  What’s done is done, so no point in dwelling on it.”

“Right.  Just got to keep moving forward down the road.”  His friend forces a laugh at their own pun.

“You got it, but maybe take a rest every now and then.  You have people working for you now.  Let them handle some of the cleanup every now and then.

“Sure,” his friend says in a tone at odds with the word.  “So, how’s the stakeout going?”

“Mind numbingly boring,” Sullivan says, adjusting his crouched posture inside the garden hedge.  “If no one takes the bait by the end of the week I’m calling it.”

Sullivan has been watching the alchemist Lachlan Whelan for over a week now, ever since getting the address on the safehouse the paranoid little man had holed himself up in.  Sullivan had hoped that leaving him untouched as bait for whomever Lachlan had faked his death and blown up his own lighthouse laboratory to run away from to come finish the job, but so far nothing.  

Sure, just asking Lachlan who was out to get him was technically an option, but Sullivan was fairly certain he would do something inconvenient like try to run again the moment he found out his hiding place had been compromised.  No, far more efficient to let the bait remain ignorant while on the hook.

Or at least it would be if the fish were competent enough to find the bait.

“If it took you this long to find Lachlan, maybe anyone else looking for him already gave up?  They might have even simply assumed he died when his lighthouse blew,” his friend suggests.

A reasonable conclusion, if not for the fact that Sullivan had intentionally leaked the location in certain circles likely to attract interest.  He’d left that part out of his regular check-ins with his friend.  They wouldn’t have approved.

Breaking into Lachlan’s safehouse and rummaging through his things without leaving a trace, however, was the sort of thing that Sullivan’s friend simply assumed he would do one way or the other.  This particular safehouse had been one of Eustace’s cheaper offerings, short on magical defenses and trying to make up for it by location; out of the way but in just populous enough of a mundane area that any flashy attempts at forcing entry would risk a masquerade breach.  Moreover, Sullivan had been practicing the fine art letting himself into places he shouldn’t since the tender age of seven (only two years less than he’d been practicing the fine art of letting lives out of bodies via knife wound), so that part had been easy enough even without the changes Carnette had made to him.

Not that doing so had yielded much more new information than watching the house from the outside.  The few alchemical supplies Lachlan had salvaged in his flight from his erstwhile home and laboratory had been locked in a safe and gone untouched.  The one notebook among those supplies was nothing but formulae and theorems.  Lachlan himself seemed to be going a little stir crazy without his work, but didn’t even have the good courtesy to talk aloud to himself for Sullivan to eavesdrop on while standing just outside of his peripheral vision.  He just spent every day pacing back and forth, distracting himself with the safehouse’s supply of yellowed books and degraded VHS tapes that hadn’t been updated since the nineties, and slowly eating his way through the supply of canned goods that might have been slightly newer.  After a couple days of interior observation, Sullivan had given up and gone back to hiding in the surrounding foliage to watch for visitors and/or hitmen.

“I’d like to think that anyone capable of a low-footprint large-group teleport and wiping out entire smuggling rings without leaving a trace would be a little more thorough,” Sullivan says.

“Assuming that it’s even the same group.”

“Yes, yes, assuming th- Gonna have to call you back.  Someone just showed up.  Take care of yourself.”  Sullivan hangs up without giving his friend a chance to respond.

It’s actually two someones walking up the sidewalk toward the unassuming safehouse, and they’re not any of the local residents that Sullivan now knows by sight after the length of his unsleeping stakeout.  The woman in front is of a middling height, similar to Sullivan’s own.  Auburn hair loose down to the shoulders, purple-framed glasses, beige knit sweater, red scarf, blue jeans.  Checking an old model flip phone as if verifying the address.  Some niggling familiarity about her appearance that Sullivan can’t quite place.  

The second woman, walking stiff-backed one pace behind and a shoulder-width to the left, towers head-and-shoulders over her companion - no, her superior, unless Sullivan misses his mark.  Silver hair pinned back in an elaborate bun, expressionless face, amber brooch pinned to a white cravat, dress of maroon so dark it’s almost black with so much frills and lace that it leaps out of the realm of antique and into the territory of gothic.

Sullivan blinks through his filters and the taller woman’s face takes on a porcelain sheen and the ball-jointed segmentation of her hands becomes apparent.  Another blink and the next filter reveals the leash of metaphysical strands linking the two women heart-to-heart.  A witch and her arcane doll?  Sullivan didn’t think they had those in this world cluster.  No, far more likely to be a superficial similarity born of convergent evolution.  More likely an unorthodox familiar bond with a construct.  Either way, he suspects that once the mage is dealt with (witch, wizard, or otherwise is hard to say without seeing her in action) then that should cut the puppet strings on the doll and make for easy pickings.

Sullivan produces a knife and licks the venom onto it that Carnette modified him for at his request.  The venom had been his idea of a gift for his friend; something to put their mind at ease knowing he had a less murderous option for dealing with problems.  And his own little joke about how often he’s been called a snake and a spider in his time.  One prick and the mage should fall into an easily manageable sleep while he drags her and her doll into the safehouse for a group questioning session with Lachlan.  Quick and quiet before the two of them even know what’s happening and before any nosy neighbors take notice.

Too bad he and his friend had had their falling out over what happened with Carnette before he could show the venom off for them.

But that’s in the past.  Now, in this present moment, Sullivan’s skin ripples and writhes from that which is beneath it.  The mage and her doll are nearly upon the doorstep.  He steps forward out of the hedge, warping space and crossing meters in a single step, ready for his knife to caress the front of the mage’s exposed neck ere his foot falls.

The world jerks sideways and suddenly his feet are dangling above the ground as porcelain fingers obscure his view and a glyph-etched glowing palm covers his mouth.  

The hand gripping his face then proceeds to brusquely introduce the back of his head with the ground.

He feels the pavement crack beneath him and knows that if he still had a skull these days it would have shattered.  From between the doll’s fingers he glimpses the surprised face of the mage above him harden into determination.  She claps her hands and the blue sky turns mauve, the concrete beneath him goes smooth, and water seeps up from the ground until it’s several centimeters deep.

The doll silently lifts Sullivan’s head just enough to slam it back down into the stone again before dragging him over grinding dirt, pebbles, and roots, scraping away skin and sending up a spray of blood-free water all the way.  The mage speaks a word he can’t make out through the water in his ears and the color of the glow leaking out between the doll’s palm and his mouth shifts to an angry red-orange.  Heat grows on his lips for a quarter second of warning before his head is engulfed in a jet of flame that instantly evaporates the surrounding water into a cloud of steam.

The doll releases its grip on Sullivan’s face and steps back from his unbreathing body while the rest of the interminably large puddle sloshes back in to fill the boiled-out space around him.

Sullivan counts the seconds to give the two of them just enough time to suspect he might be dead before standing back up.  He makes a show of it, letting his body go totally limp with the intent of being as unnerving as possible when he bends first one knee and then the other to get his feet flat on the ground before raising himself up simply by straightening his legs in defiance of the sort of leverage the human musculoskeletal system should be able to provide from that angle.  He allows his arms to hang and his head to loll back as he rises with deliberate slowness.

Six gunshots ring out in rapid succession just as his waist starts to bend forward again.  Six bullets trailing comet tails of brilliant green light tear holes in his chest and chunks out of his shoulders.  They fail to knock him back down.

The punch to his still-regenerating face from the doll doesn’t.

Rude.

Some people simply have no taste for the theatrical it would seem.

Sullivan rolls his punch-imparted momentum into a backwards somersault to return to his feet just on the other side of the dissipating steam cloud from where the doll’s foot stomps down just a little bit too slow to catch him on the ground again.  At this point he’s given up on drawing out the steam-shrouded sight of that which lies beneath his skin pulling his ruined head back together.  Just not the properly receptive audience for that sort of intimidation.  A pity, but a curious one.  Particularly when paired with his bullet wounds being just a hair’s breadth slower to close than normal.

He flicks his wrist to produce one of the bullets that went into his chest and inspects it while sidestepping the doll’s continued silent onslaught.  Silver and engraved with runes of divine blessing.  He searches his memory of Carnette’s infodumps, trying to match a tradition or magic system to the carvings and the light that had trailed behind them when fired.

And then the steam cloud fully disperses and he realizes that he’s in the middle of a forest clearing instead of in front of a picturesque little brick house surrounded by other picturesque little brick houses.  A forest beneath a mauve sky and uniformly sunken into a handsbreadth of water.

Curious.  He should have felt a teleport, even if he was distracted at the time.  But wait a moment; that great fallen log there is in the same place as the hedge and fence separating the safehouse from the street should be, just like the safehouse itself has been replaced by an oddly squared-off hillock.

Ah, that’s it!  A witch’s barrier.  A temporary small-scale phase shift for avoiding Masquerade breaches by staying out of mundane sight and limiting collateral damage to muted bleed-throughs into analogous structures.  The surrounding treeline is most likely the space’s border.  Cross it and he would be back in the “real” world.

Sullivan utters an understated “Huh,” that is all the acknowledgement he’s willing to give of being impressed.  Not many mages could manage a barrier more than a meter or two across with so short a casting time.  Even fewer could keep casting additional spells while maintaining it.

Additional spells?

Oh bother.

He turns his attention back toward the mage as she is saying the final words of an incantation in an eldritch tongue.  It’s an invocation, almost a prayer - definitely a witch then, not a wizard - to Ftagxurshagaalga’k.  Which one was that again?  Carnette had namedropped so very many of the more common and relatively safe eldritch to draw power from with over the years.

A spectral web weaves itself between the surrounding trees and the drowned ground beneath Sullivan’s feet and snaps into as much reality as everything else in the barrier, ensnaring him in place.

Oh right, Ftagxurshagaalga’k, the Spider Mother.

Sullivan tries to cut the web with the knife he still hasn’t dropped this entire time, but can’t quite get a good angle with his wrist bound as it is.  That which is beneath his skin stirs, space warps, and then the web snaps space back into its proper shape, leaving him where he started.  Void Without, he’s grown sloppy.  Was it these past few years of inactivity with both his friend and his wife gone, or the near-decade of being nigh-immortal?  Probably both.

He sighs and looks back to the witch who’s now standing with a glowing-chambered magnum revolver trained on him while speaking a new invocation, this time in one of the anchor world’s local languages (hardly worth the effort to tell them apart with translation magic in play).  Her flip phone from earlier is now hovering just below the gun’s barrel and projecting floating symbols around the witch as a digitized holographic grimoire.  Some of those symbols anchor themselves to the gun, acting as aiming reticle and enchantment both.  Others float around the witch’s head, keeping arcane runes and lines of text in view for easy focus and reference.

The thought crosses Sulllivan’s mind that Lacuna could learn a thing or two from this one.

“O Green World, answer this mere traveler’s call.  

Rise up so that we might bury this unclean thing.”

The doll backs off of Sullivan, keeping itself between him and its mistress as thorny vines sprout from the ground and begin working their way up and around his legs.

“A little overkill with the bindings, don’t you think?”  Sullivan chimes as recognition of techniques finally clicks.  “Say, is that Appalachian Greencraft blended with Rhode Island Esoterism?  What a deliciously counterintuitive syncretism.”

“She’s not a wizard,” the doll intones in a hollow monotone.

“I can see that,” Sullivan croons, “I know a witch of few peers when I meet one.”

“Then you should expect better,” the doll says, “than for her to monologue.” The slight tilt of its head and mid-sentence pause somehow gets across all the smug satisfaction that its emotionless voice fails to.

“Pierce and purify, be sweet and swift the fall.  

Even that which knows not death still may feel your sting.”

The vines grow higher, climbing his torso and ensconcing his arms.  If he still had a normal perception of pain the digging thorns would probably be agonizing.

“What, am I not allowed to pay my respects to one who’s gotten the best of me?  I would think one such as you would love to hear your mistress complimented.  I mean, a tradition of magic with a long history of binding and casting out the eldritch and blended with teachings from a school dedicated to calling upon it and drawing it in?  It would be a feat even if they both hadn’t fallen largely out of practice for the better part of a century.”

Suddenly the doll is gripping Sullivan’s wrist, crushing it through the layers of webs and vines.  In response, he drops both the second knife that had just appeared in that hand and the knife he’d been holding in the other since the beginning.

The doll leans in close to Sullivan’s ear. “Do not think you can distract us with your prattling.”

“O Green World, by my blood and breath forestall. 

Starlight of the Dark Forest nevermore must sing.”

The vines ascend Sullivan’s neck and wrap themselves around his head, leaving him almost completely encased and blinded.

“So, about that…” comes his muffled voice from beneath his living green bindings.

In the unnatural quiet of the witch’s barrier that follows the spell’s completion, the sound of a pin dropping into the shallow water may as well be another gunshot.

Sightless as he momentarily is, Sullivan contents himself with merely imagining the look on the witch’s face as she and her doll turn to look at the bulge in the vines where one of his hands is now making a fist around a round object.

“Fire in the hole.”

To the witch’s credit, her vines are a strong enough binding that the grenade only obliterates Sullivan's right arm, half his face, and a large chunk out of his torso where his lung ought to be.  Even still, what vines and webs aren’t burned off of him are blasted away.  The thought that, due to the cloud of vaporized water and kicked up earth and shrapnel, the witch and her doll won’t be catching more than confusing blurred glimpses of the inky shapes moving from within to weave back together what was lost pleases him.  Even back in the old days of lurking in shadows without a drop of magic to aid him, he’d always thought that a little bit of obfuscation went a long way towards dramatics.  Yes, so much better to let the darkest parts of their imagination fill in the gaps in their perception as they frantically try to keep track of him when he darts and leaps around the doll’s attempts to catch him again.  Better to keep them guessing as to if that was a third knife he just drew from somewhere and removed three of the doll’s fingers with or if he recovered one of the other two.  So much more fun that way to hear the gasp he finally manages to elicit from the witch as he emerges blade-first from the cloud of debris whole and pristine once more save for his clothes.

Really though, this was nothing.  Carnette had been far rougher with him than a mere mundane grenade ever could be.

Space warps in a familiar way once more but, for once, not around Sullivan.  The witch’s form blurs in front of him and with a pop and splash of displaced air and water she swaps places with the doll.  Sullivan drops his lunge into a slide to pass beneath the jet of flame spewing from the doll’s outstretched palm and come up behind it.  

Sullivan leaps up.  The doll spins around.  A rising slash of a knife towards the back is met with a descending chop of a hand towards the wrist.  The knife drops from the left hand to the right.  The right hand moves in an arc.  That which is beneath skin ripples and writhes.  Space warps.  The world jerks sideways.  Porcelain fingers grip a face.  The arc of the right hand completes.  Knife blade meets ball joint.  A hand of porcelain is severed.  A left hand of flesh rips it from the gripped face and flings it back toward its reeling owner.

Sullivan dashes across the sunken glade, spraying up water behind him as he bobs and weaves his way between the ectoplasmic tentacles rising from beneath the surface.  He slips through the curling grasp of the last tentacle, closes in on the summoning witch reading from her spellphone’s projections, and readies his knife with a smirk for what will be the final stroke of this invigorating little spat.

The witch blurs.  Space warps.  Air pops.  Water splashes.  The knife is thrown backwards.  The doll’s elbow comes down.  Sullivan’s faces crashes into the ground.  Six gunshots ring out.  Six comet tail impacts pierce the water and light up six points of a hexagon around his fallen form.  Water rushes inward.  Water rushes upward.  Sullivan is carried upwards.  The column of water freezes.

Everything goes still.

Sullivan, suspended in ice, most of all.

Through frosted eyes he can see the witch and her doll standing side by side in front of him.  The witch’s lips move but he cannot hear the words.  Focusing on her exhausted face, recognition tugs at the edge of his awareness once more.  Where has he seen this woman?  

Something - someone - else touches on the edge of his awareness but slides off, unable to find purchase.  Just as well that his face is already frozen into a bemused smirk.  The witch will have to try a whole lot harder than that to get inside his head.

After a few more failed attempts at mental communion the witch gives up.  The doll steps forward with a palm glowing red-orange and touches thumb and forefinger - its only two remaining digits - to the ice in front of Sullivan’s face and rotates them in a circle.  The ice melts away to form a window just wide and deep enough to allow him to speak once more.  Or rather, just enough to allow him to answer questions.

“What,” the witch pants, “and who are you?”

“Sullivan Bridgewood, nee Prince, nee quite a few other things,”  Sullivan purrs.  “The Golden Death, the Xanthous Reaper, or any other morbid epithet you care to name involving that slice of the color spectrum.  Beloved husband of the dearly departed sorceress Bridgewood.  At my service.”

The witch’s eyes that had been struggling to stay open shoot wide.  Good.  She knows his reputation.

“And… oh, Assassin In Yellow… were you here to kill me or… the man in that house?”

“Neither.”

“Neither?”

“Neither.”

That shocked look of surprise and confusion layered on top of tired eyes.  That’s it!  Oh yes, a most familiar resemblance indeed, now that he’s looking for it.

“Then why…”

“Did I attack you?  So I could ask you why you want Lachlan Whelan dead,” Sullivan lilts into a dramatic pause before adding, “Morgan Tucker.  And if I might add, you look considerably younger than your photos.  Nary a wrinkle or gray hair on you.”

“And how do you know her?” the doll interjects.  Clever toy.  Initial acknowledgment of a Name by a companion is a loophole around most nominal theft that leaves the owner relatively safe in the future.

“Oh, I do my research,” Sullivan answers.  “Although I may need to apologize for my overeagerness getting in the way of initial recognition.  Depending on your answer of course.”

“Stand down Stella,” the witch - Morgan Tucker - says.  “I’m not here… to kill... anyone.  But I do… have reason to believe… someone is after him.  And…”

“And you think that we’re both here for the same reason then,”  Sullivan finishes for her.  “Well, in that case, how about you let me out of here, I’ll get you that antidote, we’ll all go inside, and have a nice long chat with our alchemist friend to clear up this whole misunderstanding.”

Morgan slowly blinks at him, struggling to understand.  Or to stand at all for that matter.

“What antidote?”  the doll - Stella - asks.

Sullivan grins wide and gestures downwards with his eyes.  Morgan follows his gaze to the gash on the leg of her jeans and the cut on the calf below, barely deep enough to break the skin.

“Oh, f-”

The witch falls to the ground.  Sullivan drops to his feat.  The sky turns blue.  The forest, the water, and the ice are gone.

A picturesque little brick house remains.

 

*******

 

“Because I’m a both a witch and a marine ecologist,” Morgan explains, one antidote and one introduction to a very nervous alchemist later.  “When someone drops a parasite-infested kaiju-class dragon corpse into the ocean I take notice.  Once I found out that a presumed-dead potential witness was both still alive and in hiding, I couldn’t not follow up on it, especially after any enquiries through official channels got repeatedly stonewalled.  Although knowing now what you’ve told me I’m hardly surprised at that.  The powers that be in Crossherd always clam up about anything involving Culescu.  So, your turn Mr. Whelan.  Are you ready to share what you know about this supposed ‘pulse’ that happened right before the dragon and the ship appeared?”

The four of them, Lachlan Whelan, Sullivan Bridgewood, Morgan Tucker, and Stella Platina are seated around the safehouse’s dining room table.  A cheap chandelier buzzes overhead with old incandescent bulbs to make up for the cold iron shuttered windows.  Stella holds the severed pieces of her hands together, patiently waiting for the golden glue on them to dry.  Morgan looks expectantly at the alchemist while drumming her fingers on the table in a rolling motion.  Sullivan fusses with the tattered remains of his shirt and vest, wishing Carnette had given him clothes capable of regenerating as well as his body, but knowing full well why she didn’t.  Lachlan shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

The alchemist is another case of autogenesis being less than pleasant to those highly susceptible to it.  The dangers of embodying an archetype too fully, Sullivan supposes.  Whereas his three uninvited guests are all older than they look, he’s far younger.  Barely into his forties, according to Sullivan’s background checking, and he already looks like a parody of wizened age.  Deep wrinkles upon wrinkles.  Scattered wisps of white hair that barely even left him with the ghost of a beard, much less anything on top of his head.  A spine bent into an inverted J from countless hours bent over instruments, scrolls, and tomes.  Eye sockets grown cartoonishly large in his skull to better drink in the secrets of the universe only to be locked into a near perpetual squint from reading rare ancient formulae too fragile and precious to expose to anything brighter than a dim candle flame.  Frame shriveled and shrunken to gnomish proportions.  Only his teeth and the steadiness of his hands seem to have been spared the ravages of extreme conformity to a role he on some level associated with strange centenarian hermits.

“I’ve already told you,” Lachlan starts, “I’m not going to say anything about -” he practically chokes on whatever word he was about to say “- whatever it is you think you’re talking about.  You could ask me all day and it’s not -” he stops and seems to reconsider his words yet again, as he’s repeatedly done for the entire conversation up until now.  “Just don’t.”

“Then what about the people whom you’re hiding from?”  Morgan asks.  “Please, let us help you Mr. Whelan.  Whatever they have on you or whatever you think you have to fear from them, you’re in the presence of some of the few people who can almost certainly protect you.”

Well, someone thinks highly of herself.  Normally he would have gone for saying that he’s the one the alchemist should be more afraid of, but this is a job on his friend's behalf.

“And if it’s a matter of compensation,” Sullivan adds, “that can be easily arranged.  A new laboratory, perhaps, once this has all blown over?  Constructed assistants to lend extra hands that will never try to steal your secrets?”  He stops himself short of telling Lachlan to name his price.  Even implicitly putting anything of Carnette’s collection on the table is a last resort.  And it’s only even that for his friend’s sake.

“There is nothing.  Nothing at all.  That you could offer me to make me - to make me say what you want to hear,” Lachlan says, increasingly agitated.  “And threats won’t work either.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to collect what little is left of my things and activate this place’s escape hatch now that you two have compromised it.  Safehouse my arse.”

Sullivan leans over and puts a hand on the back of Lachlan's chair to keep it from scooting away from the table.

“Now now, Mr. Whelan,” Morgan says, “are you really so sure you want to be so dismissive about the efficacy of threats in front of an accomplished witch and an infamous assassin?”

Lachlan quails, shrinking back into his chair.  Sullivan stands up, steps behind him, and slides the chair in closer to the table, pinning the shriveled little alchemist between the two.

“You bleeding idiots!” Lachlan shouts.  Frustrated, not terrified.  How curious.  “I’m tr-”  More choking on words.  “That w-  You can’t -  Idiots, the both of you!”

Morgan and Sullivan look from Lachlan to one another, back to Lachlan, back to one another.

Stella looks up, staring at some spot on the white popcorn ceiling.

Morgan slaps a palm to her forehead.

“Goddesses, Green, and Void, we are idiots, aren’t we?” Morgan says.

“You said it, not me,” Sullivan replies.

“It’s so obvious.”

“A classic really.”

“Why didn’t we see it sooner?”

“I would have expected better from a witch of your calliber.”

“I would have expected better from Bridgewood’s trophy husband.”

“Touché.”

“The most annoying kind of curse.”

“Or contract.”

“The one you can’t talk about.”

“Even worse than the one you can’t remember.”

“Are you familiar with the telepathy loophole?”

“Invasive, but effective.”

“It’ll be for his own good.”

“And you’re not worried about inducing geas rejection syndromes?”

“Eh, he seems to be fine despite us figuring this much out from his hints.”

“This is why I love working with anchor world mages.”

“Hold him still for me, please?”

“Since you said please.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but why not have your doll do it?”

“Because someone broke her hands and the glue’s still drying.”

“And again, touché.”

“Want him unconscious?”

“It’ll work better if he’s awake.”

Lachlan looks up in what is finally fear at the two discussing him as if he weren’t there.

Stella continues to stare at the ceiling.

“What are you two talking about?” He tries to wriggle out of Sullivan’s grasp on his shoulders.  “What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m sorry Mr. Whelan,” Morgan says, flipping open her spellphone, “I really am, but you will literally be safer not knowing.” The phone projects a floating text display of an invocation to yet another eldritch being above the kitchen table.  “Normally I’d tell you not to resist in order to avoid accidental damage, but in your particular case you’ll be wanting to resist at least a little bit to avoid long term side effects.”

“You’ll just have to thread the needle on this one,” Sullivan suggests unhelpfully.  “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

Reaching across to place a hand on Lachlan’s forehead, Morgan continues, “Now, I really do apologize, but this next part is going to be unpleasant.”

 

*******

 

Five minutes later Sullivan and Morgan are standing over the unconscious body of Lachlan laid out on a couch with a pillow under his head and a blanket draped over him.

Stella is still staring at the ceiling.

“There, he’s all comfy after you’ve rifled through his brain until he passed out,” Sullivan says.  “Now would you be so kind as to share what you saw in there?”

“Men in suits,” Morgan says.  “Corporate, maybe government, or at least someone playing the part.  Nothing to identify who they worked for.  They showed up on his doorstep almost a year ago with a box, a briefcase full of geass-enforced NDA contracts, and an offer.  Sign the contracts, don’t ask questions, and allow them to install the device in the box in his lighthouse, and in return the people they represent would provide generous pay, delivery services for whatever he wanted to spend that pay on, and whatever ingredients and reagents he might desire for his experiments.”

“And of course the implication was that if he didn’t agree, he wasn’t someone that anyone would miss.”

“Exactly.  But when this device of theirs gave off that ‘pulse’ the guy you rescued described and made a ship show up and immediately wreck, his conscience caught up with him and he called your friend, Road.  While you lot were out playing coast guard - seriously, though, good work on that - he was already getting everything ready to bug out.”

“At least that corroborates that this mystery ‘pulse’ exists.  Any idea what it was?”

Morgan shakes her head.  “I wish.  Lachlan might have been a fairly talented alchemist, but he was no mage, and I’m limited to whatever he was able to sense about it.  I just know that it’s strange he was able to sense it at all.  Best as I can describe from his perspective is a cross between a deep soundwave and a static charge, but it definitely originated from that device, whatever it was.  And before you ask me to describe it to you, memory doesn’t work like a video camera.  It’s more impressions than true visuals and as far as Lachlan was concerned it was simply weird computery bullshit that he was getting paid not to think about or question and probably burned with his home.  Same goes for the men in suits.  If he were the kind of guy to pay attention to what people’s faces looked like, he probably wouldn’t have holed himself up where he’d hardly ever have to look at them.”

Sullivan rolls his eyes.  “Fine then, what impressions did he have of whoever it was that sent him running?”

“Later that night, after you all had left and he had watched the dragon and ship had fully sunk down into the ocean and become my problem, some two dozen paratech combat robots ported in through a temporary bridge outside his perception filter ward and started making a beeline for the lighthouse that they shouldn’t have been able to see unless they already knew it was there.”

“Robots?  That doesn’t make any sense.  You’re sure it wasn’t just people in armor?”

“Eh, they looked like robots to Lachlan, and local paratech’s catching up pretty fast to offworld imports these days and full magic constructs have been around forever.”

“No I mean I patched a monitor into the perception filter ward that detected them enter and leave.  The last I checked, no one in this world cluster had cracked the level of synthetic sapience required to have triggered that monitor; not that’s able to survive for more than a few days on this anchor world anyhow.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Morgan counters, “Stella’s definitely a person, metaphysically speaking, even though she didn’t start out that way.”

Just superficial convergent evolution then.  A pity, that.  Sullivan and his friend hadn’t spent much time passing through the empty spaces of that world cluster full of dolls on their way to this one, but the embracing of not-a-personhood that defined that cluster’s magic had always struck him as a potentially merciful end state if his friend’s condition ever truly devolved into a worst-case scenario.  Having a local dollmaker of that sort on hand would have made for a comforting insurance policy.

“Speaking of your doll, what’s she doing over there?” Sullivan asks, gesturing to where Stella is still staring at the ceiling.

She doesn’t respond to him.

“Stella,” Morgan prompts.

“There is a disturbance some distance up,” the doll answers in her hollow monotone.  “I am attempting to determine if there is something above us or if it is merely interference from the safehouse’s defenses.”

“As you were then,” Morgan says.  “Let me know when you make up your mind.”

“Doll,” Sullivan says, “when did you first notice that disturbance?”

No response.

“Stella,” Morgan prompts again.

More silent staring at the ceiling.

Morgan shoots Sullivan a sidelong glance.

“Stella,” Sullivan addresses the doll, slathering on politeness sweet as rotten honey, “would you kindly tell us when, precisely, you noticed this disturbance?  Please.”

“Shortly after Lachlan Whelan called you an idiot,” Stella answers without taking her glassy eyes off the ceiling.  “Roughly zero point one zero two five seconds before either of you made a verbal acknowledgment of your realization of his condition.”

Well, that’s not a good sign.

Sullivan spins around on his heel to face Morgan.  “Tell me,” he demands, “that you weren’t followed.”

“Excuse me?”

“Were you followed?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“Not good enough.  Yes or no.  Can you say for sure that know one else knows you’re here?”

Morgan’s lips start to form a “yes,” but she hesitates.  “No.  Not with how you got the jump on us.”

She was absolutely followed and any minute now, whoever followed her will probably make their move, and he has no idea what it will be other than most likely violent.  Normally he’d welcome the complication, but if the witch and alchemist get hurt his friend will surely beat themself up over not having been here to help and the techie would be devastated. 

Void Without, he hates playing the good guy. 

Sullivan grabs Lachlan off the couch and slings him over his shoulder.

“Leaving.  Now,” Sullivan says, already walking towards the safehouse’s kitchen where the stairway down to the basement bunker is.

Morgan, recognizing a red flag when she sees one blatantly waving, follows, but not without question.

“What did I miss?” she asks.

“Lachlan broke contract,” Sullivan answers as he passes back through the dining room, past Stella, “or at least came close enough when he clued us in to trigger an alarm.”

Morgan makes a gesture and Stella stands up to follow to the basement stairs, still keeping her gaze fixed on a point somewhere above the safehouse’s ceiling.

“That tip on Lachlan’s location you followed to get here was bait,” Sullivan continues.  “I leaked it to draw in whoever might want to find him and tie up loose ends, but instead I caught you.”

He fiddles with the lock on the vault door at the bottom of the staircase.  Lockpicking is so much more inconvenient one handed.  Morgan reaches over Sullivan’s shoulder into the unconscious Lachlan’s pocket and produces a key.  Sullivan takes it and opens the door to reveal the interior of a concrete-and-steel box nearly the size of the upper house itself

“But if our men in suits had the same idea,” Sullivan conjectures as he strides past cots, a freestanding shower, a safe, and a pile of canned goods stacked in a shape only the exceptionally bored could imagine towards another door on the far side, “then it would have been in their best interest to wait and see if someone else took the bait and then kill the two birds with one proverbial stone. Good thing all of Eustace’s safe houses come with -”

“Barrier!  Now!” Stella interrupts.

Morgan claps her hands and the bunker beneath the safehouse becomes a cave strewn with mushrooms and moss.  

In the same moment, Stella raises her hands, palms up, and a glowing purple dome forms around the four of them.

In the next moment everything is swirling dust.

The moment after that a sound that is to thunder what thunder is to a pin drop catches up with perception.  Only being both a half-step out of reality and behind a shield keeps Morgan’s and Lachlan’s eardrums from rupturing in a bloody mess.  Or the rest of their bodies for that matter.

The moment after that the golden glue holding Stella’s hands together melts away and so does the shield.

The following moment of stinging dust and falling stones is the longest yet, but the shield has already done its job.

Sunlight from a mauve sky begins to filter through the dust to reveal a crater where once there was a cave beneath a hillock.

“What the actual hell was that,” Morgan manages, more exclamation than answer.

“Figure it out later,” Sullivan says.  “As I was saying.  Single use, one-way self-collapsing emergency bridge to a secondary location comes with the safehouse.  If we are very lucky and you are very good at what you do, then you might be able to rip what’s left of it open and get yourselves out of here before whoever did this -” Sullivan waves an arm at the sudden lack of a safehouse - “realizes you three aren’t a fine mist.”

“You say that as if you are not joining us,” Stella observes while Morgan closes her eyes in focus.

“I’m not,” Sullivan replies and then thrust Lachlan into Stella’s arms.  “While you lay low, I’ll be reaching out to some contacts of mine to manufacture some convincing evidence that you definitely weren’t here today.  I’ve got my own methods of making sure things don’t trace back to me.”

“I’ve got it,” Morgan says, opening her eyes.  A point in space behind Sullivan that had also been behind a door a minute ago begins to twist, setting the dust about it into a swirling vortex.  Morgan bends down and picks up her doll’s hand and fingers from where they’ve fallen once again.

“Wonderful.  I already know where that portal leads, so I’ll be catching up with you later.”  Sullivan’s skin ripples and writhes from that which lies beneath it.  “Oh, and one more thing, give your niece a call once this all blows over.  I’m sure she’d love to hear from you and share what she’s working on these days.”

“How do you know about Lacuna?”

It’s difficult to keep a solid crescent of a cheshire smile when the rest of your flesh is writhing, but oh so worth it.

“She works for me.”

Space warps and takes Sullivan beyond the edge of the witch’s barrier.

 

*******

 

“In conclusion,” Sullivan says over the phone to his friend, “I’ll be back in a few days and in the meantime we don’t breathe a word of this to the techie.”

“She deserves to know.”

“Eventually maybe, but for now she has plausible deniability if anyone comes around asking questions.  I checked her phone and flight records, and the last time she had contact with her aunt was before you recruited her.  It’s the safest thing for her.”

“Since when do you care about keeping people safe?”

Since it’s for your sake more than hers.  Since anything tracing back to her means tracing back to you.  Since anything happening to her would mean you blaming yourself.

“Since you made her into an asset to preserve and invest in.”

“Promise me this isn’t just another one of your stunts of holding back vital information for the sake of a dramatic reveal.”

“I promise.”

“Thank you.”

“Always.  Now then, I’ve got documents to forge and paper trails to  obscure.  I’ll see you soon.  Take care of yourself.”