Chapter 27
“Get up.”
Peter opened his eyes, blinking in confusion until the figure leaning over him resolved into Morse. Everything came back in a terrible rush. He stumbled to his feet, looking for Martinelli and not finding him.
“Cast,” Morse said, jerking him forward with one hand and pressing leaves at him with the other.
They were standing in interlocking Vow circles.
This was it. He would fail. Beatrix would die.
“Now,” Morse said.
A door slammed. Martinelli came running. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
“None of your business,” Morse said repressively.
“Yes, it is! This idiot can’t afford to take another Vow without risking immediate brain damage. He took ten in school—ten!”
Peter, heart swooping, tried not to look as if he was filled with wild hope. “Surely—surely just one more isn’t so—”
“Which of us wrote his dissertation on Vows, you or me?”
Peter managed a frown. “You.”
“Which of us saw men sent to dementia wards because they thought nothing of taking multiple Vows?”
“You.”
“Exactly!” Martinelli shoved him out of the demarcation circle. “Don’t even think about it.”
“He will take a Vow,” Morse said.
Martinelli fixed him with a look that Peter doubted he would use if he knew half of what Morse had done.
“Oh? He will, will he?” Martinelli stepped between them.
“You want to tell your boss that we can’t finish the job because the best weapons developer the Pentagram ever had is now unable to put on his clothes or write his own name? ”
Martinelli was holding one hand open behind his back. Peter pressed two of his leaves into it, then said with feigned irritation: “All right. All right. Can I cast a different spell, Martinelli? May I please have your permission for that?”
“Sure, boss. Knock yourself out.”
“Listen,” Peter said to Morse, “I’ll prove I can still cast. And then …
” He tried to think of what he could say to keep Beatrix out of jail on a false attempted murder charge.
“I’ll live up to the promises I made in the contract I signed, but only if the vice president lives up to his. Do we have a deal?”
Morse considered him through those dark glasses. Seconds ticked by, hideously. Then: “Levitate your cot.”
“Right.” He had to force himself not to look at Martinelli. “Sure.” He took his time assuming the position, concealing the leaf in his fist—a less common spellcasting grip but one that suited his purposes. Sucking in a breath, he bellowed, “āhebban!”
The cot leapt up as if jerked on a string, hitting a respectable seven-or-so feet. He turned toward Morse, stuffing his hands in his pockets, heart making a racket in his ears. “See?”
Morse crossed his arms but did not argue the point.
Knowing he was pushing his luck, Peter said, “I’d like the contract the vice president signed, please. He’s got mine—I want his.”
“No.” Morse lowered the cot to the ground and fixed Peter with that blank, unsettling stare. “Keep your promise. Or else.” And he strode out.
Peter sank into one of the chairs set up beside a table. Or else. How was he supposed to produce a blast as big as they wanted?
But Morse wasn’t rushing off to kill Beatrix. That alone was a miracle.
“Eat,” Martinelli said, spooning scrambled eggs onto a plate, and under the cover of that clatter he whispered, “Sorry, I was in the bathroom.”
Peter had the sudden urge to laugh—he couldn’t believe Martinelli’s crazy gambit had worked. He clasped his friend’s arm, the only way he could communicate what he owed him while the cameras looked on.
“So,” he said after he’d wolfed down two helpings and was dishing himself thirds, “I hear we’re expected to produce a five-mile blast radius.”
“Those are the marching orders, yes.”
“Our record, if I recall, was a quarter-mile,” he said, not mentioning, of course, the test he wasn’t supposed to know about that the magiocracy ran behind his back with a typic as fuel.
Martinelli downed the dregs of his coffee. “Your recollection is the same as mine.”
“Did you have more luck after I left?”
“Well …” Martinelli caught his eye, face studiously neutral. “The answer’s no, with one exception.”
A horrible possibility made Peter’s heart lurch. “Yes?” he whispered.
“That particular blast radius was 4.9 miles.”
He stared at Martinelli, waiting for details—dreading them. Could that be the explosion set off by Miss Draden with his own life force?
“Seemed like a routine test. Same time in the morning as always, same number of chimps—we were just trying out a variant rune pattern. Boom. Then—an instant later—it ka-boomed again like it had gotten a second wind.”
Exactly as it would have if, by some terrible chance, Beatrix had managed to put his payload stone outside the blast radius for the Pentagram’s stone but close enough that they assumed it was theirs all along.
In fact: She’d known where they usually dropped the stone—she’d been there dreamside. Little wonder if she ended up nearby when she went in real life.
“So … the variant runes worked?” he said, trying for casual.
“Nope. Whitaker insisted on another test within the hour, but that was back to the usual radius.” Martinelli shook his head. “I have no earthly idea what happened.”
“When was this? Do you remember?”
“Oh, sure. January 26.”
Peter suppressed a bitter laugh. Of course. Of course. God damn it!
Four-point-nine miles of destruction stretching out every direction from the epicenter. Too horrific to contemplate. And now Whitaker and Draden, knowing it was possible, wouldn’t accept anything less.
“It just so happened that I’d given my two-week notice when I got in that morning, right before the test,” Martinelli said. “I was getting ready to go home at the end of the day and they wouldn’t let me leave. Thanks ever so much, fellows,” he added, voice raised, glaring at the nearest camera.
Peter stared down at his empty plate. His bad decisions had set all this in motion. It was such a relief that he hadn’t gotten Martinelli killed, but what actually had occurred was horrible enough.
Somehow, he had to free Martinelli from this prison. Both of them, preferably, but at least Martinelli.
“Anyway,” his friend said, shrugging, “I haven’t managed anything above a quarter mile since then.
In fact, lately I can’t even do that. Down to three hundred fifty-ish yards instead of four-forty.
I figured the foundational spellwork was fading, but reapplication didn’t help.
And I haven’t the foggiest idea why,” he said, again raising his voice and looking at a camera, “despite stupid accusations that I’m ‘doing it on purpose.’ Show some sense!
Don’t you think I want to finish and get out? ”
Peter sipped his coffee, now lukewarm. He knew why the blast radius shrunk.
He’d carefully layered spells on the Pentagram’s transmitter so its destructive power would hold for a while but eventually weaken, and he’d falsified the blueprints so anyone re-upping the spellwork would get the same results.
He was surprised that Draden’s people were doing the tests with chimpanzees instead of humans—they would definitely get more than three hundred yards, otherwise, and they clearly had no problem killing.
But he supposed they understood that a typic would just proportionally increase the underlying explosion they could get from chimps.
Why go through the hassle of snatching prisoners and disposing of bodies?
His stomach gave a nasty flop as he considered that at some point, they probably tried detonating the weapon with a pair of typics, a trio, perhaps even a larger group. But there was a cap on every fuel source after which more of it made no difference. Apparently, the limit on humans was one.
“Anyway,” Martinelli said, “any bright ideas about what to do?”
“I’d better take a look,” he said heavily. “Where is it?”
Martinelli snapped his fingers toward the camera. “Ho, there! Overseers! Might we possibly have the transmitter so we can do the work you kidnapped us for?”
Peter swallowed the snort this produced. Only Martinelli could make him want to laugh at a time like this.
The door opened. A different wizard this time, wearing a red coat and levitating the transmitter. He set it carefully on the floor. The click of the door shutting as the man left was rapidly followed by the sound of heavy locks sliding into place and the murmur of spells.
Peter stared at the device he’d thought he’d never see again.
He now knew exactly how to make it produce the blast Draden demanded—how to keep the vice president’s men from carrying out their threat against Beatrix.
And he no longer could avoid the question his mind had been skittering around since he first realized what they wanted him for: Who would authorize murder, kidnapping and forced labor for a huge explosion they had no intention of setting off?
Draden meant to use this weapon. That much was clear. He wanted destruction in the blink of an eye that the world had never seen before. But why? To demonstrate strength in an unpopulated area—or to kill an unspeakable number of people?
Peter had no idea. But the longer he failed to accomplish what Draden wanted, the higher the likelihood that Beatrix would pay the price. Maybe an arrest on false charges. Maybe something even worse.
He crouched beside the transmitter, skin crawling, mind made up. He would delay as long as he could. Then he would rework the blueprints to give the magiocracy their quarter-mile back.
He didn’t want to think about what he might be willing to do after that.
In the end, the only halfway plausible strategy they came up with was Ella catching her father at breakfast and trying to glean some clue to Peter’s whereabouts.