Hammer of the Witches Read online

  “Me? Navy,” Pete replied.

  “You’se a psion, too?”

  “Nah.”

  “The Navy teaches you to handle shorts, too?”

  “Well, I handled boats a fair bit in my old job.”

  It was an oblique reference to the Special Boat Service.

  “Boats, eh? I’m sure.”

  We exchanged knowing smiles.

  “How did an Army and a Navy guy come to work together?” Junior asked.

  “We worked a couple of jobs together,” I said.

  “Same ‘friend of a friend,’ eh?”

  “Yup.”

  “Small world, innit.”

  I picked up more conversation over the holobuds. Eve must have finished. Pete drove the conversation with the bodyguards, letting me concentrate on what they said.

  “You’re wearing too much,” Nasir said.

  “Wouldn’t you like to take them off yourself?” Eve said suggestively.

  “Of course. Come here.”

  “Oh? We’re barely getting started. Thought you wanted a massage?”

  “Just your top. For now.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  Clothing rustled.

  Listening in felt… wrong. I knew she was a honeypot, but I’d never seen her at work. I breathed deeply and regularly, keeping myself stable. Despite the act, she was still a pro. I had to be one, too.

  “Ooh, with one hand?” Eve remarked. “You sure know your stuff, don’t you?”

  “I can show you more.”

  “Of course. But let’s get you nice and loose first, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Lie down on your tummy. That’s it. Give me a second while I get my stuff.”

  As Pete continued talking, Eve hummed to herself, telling us that she was fine. Plastic rustled. I imagined her retrieving an autoinjector and walking over to Nasir. The autoinjector didn’t hold epinephrine, of course; it was filled with ketamine.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  “Always ready.”

  “Excellent. Let’s get started.”

  She continued humming to herself. And stopped.

  “Nasir, what’s that?” she asked. “Is it a daimon?”

  My blood went cold. We had not expected one. Nothing in our files indicated he was a covenanter, too.

  “Wha– What did you do?” Nasir demanded.

  “Crash,” she said, slowly and clearly.

  “BITCH!” Nasir yelled so loudly I heard him through the door.

  SMACK.

  The bodyguards jolted, turning to the door.

  My hands darted to my waist. I had a kitchen knife in a paper sheath there. Left hand cleared the jacket, right hand grasped the handle—

  No.

  The bodyguards were not terrorists. Just two working stiffs with the misfortune of working for the wrong client. And more importantly, knives were messy.

  “Did you hear that?” the senior bodyguard asked, turning to me.

  And seeing my hands.

  I lunged for his eyes.

  He flinched, bringing his arms up. My fingers raked his elbow. I kicked him in the groin. He sucked in a deep breath. Drew back. Threw a right hook.

  Elbows up, I crashed in. My forearms smashed into bone and biceps. Grabbing his arm with my left hand, I reeled it into my armpit, pulling him into me. Drove my elbow into his chin and knee into his groin. He grunted.

  I fired a slap to his right temple. My palm struck his left hand. He had his guard up. I latched on to his wrist, snaked my left hand under his right arm and fed his left hand to mine.

  Another slap, chambering my right arm across my neck. I lashed out, grabbing his face and smashing his head against the wall. His eyes rolled up and he went down.

  Pete had Junior in an over/under clinch. Junior struggled. Pete went with the flow, slamming an elbow into his head. Lights out.

  A muffled explosion rippled through the air.

  “What the hell?” Peter asked, dropping Junior to the floor.

  “Get his keycard,” I said. “Right breast pocket.”

  I unfurled my charagma and opened my voidsight.

  Two worlds collided in my mind. The first was my regular vision. The second was a fuzzy black-and-white backdrop filled with semi-translucent lumps. Voidsight allowed me to see through walls and visualize density, gravity, electromagnetic fields and even the quantum foam if I tried hard enough.

  Eve was in the bedroom, holding a shimmering longsword. Her forehead blazed painfully bright. A dazzling cone of light extended from her eyes, showing me everything she was perceiving at this moment.

  Her attention was locked on a huge black cobra coiled in front of her, poised to strike. White fire bled from a wound down its side.

  Daimon.

  “Got the card,” Pete said.

  He shoved it into the reader. The door unlocked. We stormed in.

  Eve dashed into the living room, a blazing white longsword in her hand. The light of Creation spilled from the charagma on her forehead.

  “Luke!” she called.

  The snake burst into the living room. She yelped, barely dodging it. The snake reared up.

  I extended my hand.

  “Return to the Void!”

  Dark motes spilled from the charagma, striking the cobra. The daimon hissed, trying to fight me. I pushed harder, impressing my will—and the will of al-Hakem al-Dunya, the Lord of the World—into the creature.

  “Begone!” I demanded.

  With a pop, the daimon vanished.

  Eve glared at me. “I could have handled it.”

  “We don’t have Antirad,” I replied.

  Her longsword was made of aetherium, the raw stuff of Creation. Manifest daimons came from the Void, composed entirely of nythium. On contact, the two elements annihilate in a burst of hard radiation.

  That was the blast I had heard earlier. Like all psionic close combatants, Eve would have had a radiation shield up. Pete and I weren’t so fortunate.

  She sighed. “Fine. Thanks.”

  I nodded and glanced at the sprinklers and smoke alarm. They remained passive. Eve must have contained the blast, directing the energy into the floor.

  Pete cleared his throat. “You should wash up and get dressed.”

  Eve was wearing her boots, a pair of lacy black panties and matching tights. And a coat of blood.

  Covering her chest, she nodded. The sword shrank, melting into her palm. It was her soulblade. Most psions could only forge one after imbibing aetherium. Eve, on the other hand, had covenanted with Sol Invictus, and the Roman sun god had granted her the power to transmute part of her soul into pure aetherium and back again.

  “Pete, SSE,” I said. “I’ve got the bedroom.”

  Sensitive Site Exploitation was the gentle art of robbing your target of potential intelligence materials. Preferably when he was no longer around to object.

  “Gotcha.”

  A gory tableau greeted me in the bedroom. Nasir had been bisected from shoulder to hip. Half his body lay at the foot of the bed. The other half flopped against the wall.

  “What the hell happened here?” I asked.

  Eve climbed on the bed, avoiding the worst of the blood. “I tried to hit him with ketamine. His guardian jinni appeared. I tried to sweet-talk him. He slapped me.”

  She paused, retrieving the autoinjector from a pillow.

  “I got up. Threw this at him. Drew my sword. Cut him. The jinni went berserk. The rest you know.”

  I grunted. “Wash up. You don’t have long.”

  She stumbled into the bathroom. The shower ran.

  I scanned the room. Nasir had a holophone on his dresser. I swiped it.

  “Pete!”

  “Yo!”

  “Got his slate?”

  “Yup! It’s on the kitchen table!”

  Wrapping my hand in a handkerchief, I opened his drawers. Socks, underwear, wallet. I pocketed the last. I rifled through his closet. Shirts, pants, brie
fcase.

  I cracked open my voidsight and asked myself, Which of these items will provide useful intelligence material for the Nemesis Program?

  Voidsight can show you the future utility of an item if you know what to ask and what to look for. The briefcase glowed a dazzling white. I picked it up and looked about. Nothing else caught my eye.

  Eve got out of the bathroom, dabbing at her hair with a towel.

  “You ready?” I asked, closing off my voidsight.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Okay.”

  She dropped the towel and grabbed her handbag.

  “Hey!”

  Her face soured.

  “What?”

  “Get your towel. It’s got your DNA on it.”

  Shapeshifting changes a person at the genetic level. But the effect is temporary. Once the aetherium burns out, the DNA reverts to its original form.

  Sighing, she wrapped the towel around her neck.

  Pete was waiting in the living room. Eve tried to cram the towel into her bag. It didn’t fit.

  “Just hold it in your hands,” Pete said.

  Grunting, she did. The moment she zipped her bag, I declared, “We are leaving.”

  “What about the bodyguards?” Pete reminded me.

  “What about them?”

  “They’ll wake up soon. Or someone will find them.”

  After dragging the two unconscious men into the room, then gagging and zip-tying them, we slipped out of it, keeping our heads down. Pete hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the handle. We stayed cool, although once we were at the lift lobby, Eve fairly sprinted for the elevator.

  “Eve,” I warned her.

  She ignored me. Hit the call button. Looked up.

  “Locked down,” she reported.

  “Fire escape,” I said.

  The closest was next to the elevator. I barged through the door with my hip. An ear-splitting siren filled the air. Fire alarm.

  Inside the stairwell, no cameras were on us. I held out my arms.

  “Take my hand,” I said.

  Eve wrapped herself around my right arm.

  “What?” Pete asked.

  “Take my hand,” I repeated, holding out my left hand.

  He took it.

  Closing my eyes deep breath, I reached within myself, visualizing a small golden pearl. It was a mental image of my soul. Beneath it was a whirlpool, twisting and roiling. It sucked everything down to its depths, twisting the fabric of reality. Within the darkness I saw a multitude of red eyes and ephemeral shapes. Here was my anchor to the Void, the true form of the charagma.

  I touched the Void directly. A small stream of light bled away from the orb, disappearing into the maelstrom. I visualized the stream growing larger, faster, more powerful. The Void eagerly gulped it all down, and the whirlpool grew larger.

  I directed my mind down, down, into the basement. I searched about, seeking clear space. Found it.

  I touched the Void again and pulled.

  The world shrank into a tiny mote of light. Sentient lightning crawled around me. Ten thousand eyes winked in and out of existence every moment. An enraged howl echoed in my brain. I felt myself stretching, expanding, the spaces between my constituent atoms yawning wider and wider, reaching the limit of the strong nuclear force—

  POP

  We tumbled out into reality on the basement landing. Eve held me up. Pete let go, staggering against the railing.

  “Luke, what the hell was that?” he yelled.

  “Warping.”

  “What the hell? What was that, that, those eyes, that howl, that…”

  “The Void.”

  He got to his feet, visibly shaken. “I am never doing that again, you hear?”

  Eve chuckled. This was probably the first time Pete had seen the face of the Void. To be fair, most people had similar reactions the first time they crossed the Void like that.

  “He’s gotten better at it,” she said.

  Warping was usually limited to line of sight. If you had to warp into a place blind, over a long distance, carrying over twice your body mass, it became exponentially harder—even if an archangel had granted you his powers.

  But over the last three months, I’d played with the charagma, testing its limits and how to boost its powers. I’d stumbled onto this trick entirely by accident. Hakem hadn’t said a word about it, but I had no doubt that the charagma caused me to consume far more aether than I had previously without it. And more of my soul.

  We emerged into the parking lot and dashed for our car. As we left the parking lot, police sirens wailed all around us.

  Pete drove slowly, blending in with traffic around us. An Armed Response Vehicle dashed past, quickly followed by an ambulance.

  Ten minutes later, when we were clear of the police dragnet, Pete finally spoke.

  “Ya know… Will is going to be pissed.”

  I groaned.

  “Don’t remind me.”

  2. Not A Career Highlight

  We hadn’t anticipated the daimon. But we had anticipated the possibility of the op going wrong.

  Once we were clear of the scene of the crime, we split up. Pete and Eve went their separate ways. I stashed the loot in a trash bag and dropped it off at a dead drop. Returning to my hotel, I changed clothes and persona, becoming a jetsetting corporate executive wrapping up a quick business trip and heading to another, which wasn’t too far from the truth.

  I crossed the Channel into Gallia, caught a series of trains to Madrid and then took a plane to Columbus.

  The morning after I arrived, I headed into Carrera Coffee Club. It was an indie coffee house, one of a hundred just like it in the capital. It was a two-story brick-mortar-wood-glass construct, painted in warm brown tones and artificially aged. I peeked through the glass. Business was slow, but it was only ten o’clock on a Monday morning. The important part was that nobody I didn’t recognize paid me more attention than necessary.

  I headed to the second floor, where there was a pair of private rooms at the back. I entered the left-hand one.

  O’Connor waited inside at the table. Dressed in an impeccable gunmetal gray suit, he could have been a corporate high-flier stopping by for a business meeting. His coffee stood untouched. His clunky metal holophone lay on the table, projecting screens at eye level. Through the transparent windows he frowned at me.

  “What the hell happened out there?” he demanded.

  Good question. The answers I had weren’t.

  “This job was supposed to be low vis,” he continued. “Now the media won’t shut up about a murder-robbery that left a CEO dead and his bodyguards in the hospital. What do we pay you for?”

  “No one knew the target was a covenanter.”

  “That’s not acceptable. You’re paid to account for all possibilities.”

  “Before we start pointing fingers, we should wait for Eve and Pete to arrive and get their side of the story.”

  “Pete and Eve are already in-country.” He raised an eyebrow. “I thought the three of you would come together. Or at least you and Eve.”

  “They made arrangements without me,” I said.

  “Oh, did they now?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was too busy suppressing the urge to hit him.

  Eve and Pete entered a couple of minutes later. Pete wore a bright smile and a fresh black suit. Eve had changed into a conservative green dress and swapped her face for one with sharper bones and fuller lips.

  “Yo,” Pete said. “Morning.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  O’Connor plastered on a sour expression.

  “You guys screwed up in London.”

  “Yeah, yeah, mea culpa,” he said, sitting next to O’Connor.

  “Didn’t know you were in the Roman Church,” I said.

  “Me neither,” he said.

  Beside me, Eve stifled a giggle.

  “Get some drinks,” O’Connor said. “We’re going to be here a w
hile.”

  There was a slate wired to the table. Pete woke it up, and it projected the menu on its surface. Pete got an espresso with milk. Eve fussed over the customization options, tossing chocolate, cream and cinnamon into her brew. I ordered a cup of Blue Mountain, no toppings.

  As we waited, we walked through every step of the operation with O’Connor. Planning, insertion into Anglia, infiltrating the hotel, the execution, the exfiltration, our less-than-glorious homecoming. We paused only once, long enough for the waitress to deliver our orders and for O’Connor to cover the bill.

  “So nobody expected that Nasir was a covenanter?” O’Connor asked.

  “He wasn’t one,” Eve said.

  “Eh?” O’Connor said.

  “He was not a covenanter,” she said. “He did not have a charagma.”

  “How did he get the daimon then?” Pete asked.

  “Where did it manifest in the room?” I asked.

  She tapped her chin. “It came from behind me. Must have been the closet.”

  “His briefcase,” I said.

  “This reminds me of the sheikh,” Pete said. “He wasn’t a covenanter, but he had a pet marid, right?”

  I suppressed a shudder. Dueling a marid was not a career highlight.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He had bound the marid to a sigil carved into a tile and mounted the tile on his desk. Maybe you’ll find something similar in Nasir’s briefcase.”

  “I’ll write it up,” O’Connor said. “What kind of daimon do you think it was?”

  “It was a jinni. An a’mir,” I said.

  The Near East used “jinni” to describe what a Westerner would call a daimon. The differences between the two terms were mainly theological as far as I know.

  “What’s that?” O’Connor asked.

  I sipped my coffee, feeling the caffeine supercharge my brain.

  “A guardian spirit that takes the form of a snake. It specializes in home protection. It doesn’t grant its covenanter any special powers, but if someone threatens its covenanter or his property, it will manifest and attack the intruder. However, it’s usually bound to places, not people.”

  “But if you can bind an a’mir to a tile, you can carry it around like a personal bodyguard,” Eve mused.

  O’Connor pursed his lips. “Sounds to me DW is rolling out a new jinn deployment technique.”

  “Quite the opposite,” I said. “It’s old tech. Just not commonly seen in the West these days.”