Hard Magic (42 page)

“It’s more than we’ve got now,” Francis spat.

“No wonder the elders sent me out here. Pershing’s lack of caution has trickled down. You think it’s wise to throw away the lives of an entire cadre of knights on a hunch? Listen to me carefully, Francis. We will get your Healer back, but we need to be smart. An overt attack on the Imperium’s flagship would be war.”

Francis didn’t care who heard. He threw his hands wide and shouted. “Look around you, Rawls. This is war!” Dozens of eyes turned toward them. “Yes, it was the Imperium who did this!” The other patients and hospital staff began to mutter.

The senior Grimnoir appeared ready to explode. His voice was a barely audible hiss. “Calm. Down,” Isaiah ordered, and Francis could feel the matching thoughts inside his head. “You will
not
go after that ship. That is an order. You took an oath, and part of that is that you’ll follow the elders. There are plans within plans, and your half-cocked actions will have repercussions.”

Francis was seething. “What are you so scared of?”

“The
Tokugawa
must not be harmed. There are bigger things afoot than you understand, young man. You need to trust me.”

Before Francis could respond there was a commotion at the main desk. A group of men in suits and surgical masks were pouring into the waiting area, and in their midst appeared a fat, bellowing, bull of a man, sputtering and swearing. “Who’s in charge of this fiasco? I demand to speak with the head!” He pulled down his surgical mask revealing a face that was red and sweating and shouted at the top of his considerable lungs. “Bring me my
grandson
!”

“Grandfather?” Francis asked in bewilderment. He turned back to Isaiah, but the Grimnoir elder had his head down and was retreating down the hall. “Grandfather Cornelius?”

“Francis!” Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant lumbered down the hall, past startled onlookers, and engulfed Francis in a hug. His belly was so large that his arms wouldn’t close around Francis’s back. “You’re alive! Thank God, boy.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked in disbelief, taking in the wall of surgical masks that were watching him. “I don’t—”

“I’ve come to take you home, Francis,” he said. “Oh my, look at that awful wound. What are you doing, getting stitches like a commoner? Howard!” He snapped his fingers. “Heal this man!” One of the masks stepped forward.

Francis grabbed Cornelius by the lapels and jerked him forward. Francis was much taller and stronger, and he swung the fat man around so hard that the security men reached into their coats for their pistols. “You’ve brought a Healer?”

His Grandfather was shocked by the rough treatment. “Of course. When I’d heard of the tragedy, I gathered all of my staff into my fastest prototype airship and came straightaway.”

“Fastest . . .” he let go of Cornelius. “You have this ship here?”

“The
Tempest
is docked at the city terminal. It will need to be serviced but we could be on our way back to New York within a few hours. I—”

Francis pointed at the Healer. “Howard, right?” The man nodded. “Follow me. Grandfather, I’m going to need to borrow that dirigible.”

***

Faye found Heinrich Koenig in the morgue. The room was empty of live people except for him, sitting the wrong way on a chair with his arms folded on the backrest, though there were plenty of dead people lying around. She was a little taken back by the number of shapes under white sheets.

Heinrich had heard the boots hit the floor when she’d Traveled in. He turned to regard her. The young man appeared very tired, with dark circles under his eyes. “Hello, Faye.”

“Everybody else is getting patched up . . . I . . .” She hadn’t wanted to be alone with a bunch of strangers, so she’d found the man who’d shot her in the heart instead, because at least she kind of knew him, but saying that out loud seemed silly. “Whatdoing?” she blurted.

Heinrich turned back to the sheet-covered body. Long dark hair hung loose from one end. “One last vigil, I suppose . . . I promised Sullivan I would see to her.” He gestured at Delilah. “I know that there are more pressing matters, but there is something I must do.”

Faye was confused. “Like what? We’ve got to start looking for Jane, so we don’t really have time for a funeral or nothing.” The arrangements for Grandpa’s funeral had seemed to take forever, and that was even after he’d been burned to near nothing with the haystack.

He gave a sad little shake of his head. “Nothing like that. We must see to the living first, though I’m afraid that it is too late for Jane. No, afterward, I will dig Delilah’s grave myself. I have much practice at digging graves.”

She leaned on a big porcelain sink and waited for him to continue. There was a rusty drain hole in the floor and the idea of what it was for made her uncomfortable. Heinrich rubbed one hand over his face and she saw that he had his Luger sitting in his lap. “Why the gun?”

“Because sometimes when a Lazarus creates undead the effect can linger for awhile. Sometimes if the Active is strong enough, it can last for hours, and anyone who dies in that place could have their spirit trapped . . . When I followed the orderlies down here with her body, I thought that I felt a tingle of magic.”

“You think Delilah could be a . . .
zombie
?” she asked, incredulous.

He shrugged. “Probably not, but if she is, I will deal with it on my own and spare her dignity. It is a terrible fate, and one that I would never willingly have fall on another. I have known of people waking up as much as twenty-four hours after their death, and they do not even realize it.”

He sure does know a lot about zombies.
“I heard that you grew up in Dead City.”

The silence was long and uncomfortable. A sink was dripping. “I do not wish to speak of it . . .” he said.

“Okay,” Faye answered, not really knowing what else to say. “Would you mind if I helped you . . . keep watch?”

Heinrich didn’t answer then. Seconds passed into minutes and he had a faraway look in his eyes. Faye grew bored, and started counting the drips coming from the faucet, but Lance and Francis were busy, Mr. Browning was medicated asleep, and Mr. Rawls had had to leave to place a telephone call.

“It wasn’t always Dead City. It used to be called Berlin,” he said finally, sighed, and then it was like a ditch had broken and memories spilled out. “It seemed like a magical place to a young boy. My family lived on the outskirts. Father fixed pianos, and he would often bring me along with him into the city. Many of the pianos were in old churches and schools, and while he worked, I would play. I would climb the towers, find the crawl spaces in the walls. Those places became my kingdom, and I was the valiant knight that defended them. There were so many people, always moving about, and then the war came, and all of the men went to fight, including my father.”

“In the Great War?” she asked.

“
Ja
. We did not know to call it that then. To a little boy, I only knew that I missed my papa very much, and there was not so much happiness anymore. Many of the other boys received letters, saying that their fathers had died, but I knew that mine would come home. Food was scarce, and we were often hungry. It got worse, but I got older. I took care of my family, even if it meant stealing the food we ate. Finally so many of our soldiers had died that the government could not keep up with the letters, and all of us wondered if the war would ever end.”

“But it did end . . .” Faye said. She was no student of history, but she listened to the radio. Everyone knew the brave Allies had beat the dastardly Kaiser.

“Ah, yes, it ended in a flash of light. When I woke up, my home, my town, was rubble. Berlin was ruined, all of the old places crumbled, and in the center was nothing but a smoking hole. I spent days searching for my family, but they were all dead.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He chuckled. “Do not be sorry. They were the
lucky
ones. Were you ever taught in school what happened next?”

“I never went to school.”

“Good, you’re not missing anything . . . History is mostly lies. The Kaiser had grown so desperate that he had used his wizards to keep his soldiers alive. As they were killed, he had their spirits chained to their bodies, so that they could continue to defend the Fatherland. When the war was over, there were still nearly a million of these poor wretches. They could not die, but the process of this false resurrection had left most of them too dangerous to send back to their homes. The treaty left us bankrupt and unable to care for them. But the Kaiser had a perfect solution. He had a dead city, so why not fill it with his dead subjects? A great wall was raised around the ruins, and the undead were herded inside.”

“What about the alive people, like you?”

“The survivors were supposed to rebuild. It was our duty. We were to be caretakers for these poor soldiers. When the wall went up, there were several thousand of us . . . at first.”

Faye was aghast. “That’s terrible. They just left you?”

Heinrich fingered the Luger. “Do you know what happens to the
untotten
? The undead? The pain of death is upon them still. They never heal from the wounds that sent them there. The pain never lessens. It only grows as does their hunger. Most of them keep their wits, for a time, but soon it becomes too much to bear. They lash out in a rage at anything available, including each other . . . We were caretakers at first, then we were merely . . .
food
.”

She covered her mouth, but a little yelp slipped out anyway.

“Koenig is not my real name. It means
King.
That’s what they called me after a while, because I was the last man alive in Dead City. I was the King of the Living. I survived by my Power, by my cunning, by my stealth. The old places where I’d hid and played as a child became my sanctuaries. I spent my days in the walls, in the tunnels, hunting for food, killing the undead that tried to hurt me and my friends. Then after several years, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I Faded through the Berlin Wall and never looked back. I was fifteen years old.”

And I thought that I’d had it rough . . .
An Oklahoma shack might as well have been Francis’s mansion in comparison. Faye reached over and touched Heinrich gently on the shoulder. “Why’d you stay so long?”

He watched Delilah’s sheet for movement, but there was nothing moving there except bad dreams. “Because not all of them were mad. Many of the dead remained true to who they were in life. My family never got a letter from the front, but . . . he did come home, most of him. Together, we found a working piano in an old school. He played it every day. The sound gave the other sane ones hope. Finally, I made him stop, because the sound attracted the hungered. After that . . . he had nothing to survive for . . . but I stayed with papa until the end.”

***

“Son of a bitch . . .” Harkeness said, peering through the corner of the window into the hospital room. “What’s he doing here?”

If he links us to Pershing’s death, it could ruin everything.

The Pale Horse watched Cornelius Stuyvesant as he followed his grandson, still shouting useless orders at his functionaries. He had come as soon as he had heard Isaiah’s panicked voice inside his head.

Stuyvesant brought a fast blimp. Francis intends to go after the
Tokugawa
with it. It must not be delayed.

“I will not let him ruin everything,” he muttered under his breath. Harkeness awoke his Power. To him it was a dark, malevolent cloud that swam in his lungs. He could still feel the connection to Stuyvesant, lips under poison fingertips, the beating of his heart, the electrical firings of his brain, the pumping of blood. They were inevitably connected by death magic. He’d never thought that he would need to do this to the pathetic old man, but they could not afford the interruption. Not now. The Healer might slow him, but nobody could stop the full focus of his Power at this range. “Reap the whirlwind, you bloated fool.”

***

Dan Garrett moaned as the hole in his arm hissed and steamed. Visible bone was coated by rolling muscle and sprouting veins, then finally by bright pink skin. The Healer’s hands were glowing as he took them away. He paused to wipe his sweating brow on his shirt. “Next?”

“Browning is on the third floor,” Lance said. “Come on.”

“That’s the one with the punctured lung?” the Healer asked. “Very well.”

“Hold on there, Howard,” Cornelius ordered. “How much Power do you have left?”

The Healer was a surprisingly tubby man with bushy sideburns. “Truth be told, not much, sir. After this I’ll need to rest for a few hours before I give you your daily checkup, especially after I help this other man.”

“Then you will do no such thing,” the richest man in the world commanded.

Francis had known that this moment was coming. He could only keep up the momentum for so long before his grandfather’s inherent stubbornness was sure to raise its ugly head. He looked around the room to see who was going to be witness to the coming argument. He had the surly Lance, and the semiconscious Dan, neither of which would be of much assistance, one hospital doctor, and then six of his grandfather’s functionaries, hangers-on, and bodyguards. It was standing room only.

“Grandfather, could we speak in private?”

He thought about it for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Everybody out!”

“But I work here,” the doctor said, but a guard grabbed him by the arm and yanked him effortlessly through the door. Lance helped Dan from the room. His friend was obviously disoriented. It was too bad, because he sure could have used Dan’s Influence right then. The last one out was the Healer. He closed the door behind them, leaving Francis with his grandfather. The only remaining witness was a white skeleton that was bolted to the wall.

“Why are you here?” Francis asked.

“I told you. I was concerned for your safety. You are family.”

Francis shook his head. “That’s not what you said the last time we spoke.”

Cornelius lowered his gaze, studying the shine on his shoes. “What would you have me do? Apologize? That’s not my way.”