Hard Magic (44 page)

And it was a nice view. If he hadn’t been on a mission of revenge and murder, all those funny trees swaying in the wind would be downright peaceful. But he hadn’t traveled halfway around the world for peace. He’d come to smash the Geo-Tel and then wait for his brother to come looking for it, even if he had to call Madi up and give him the coordinates himself.

Behind the trees the land rose into black rocks. The whole east side of the little island was an old volcano that had fallen in on itself. According to Pershing’s memory, there was a little village in the cove created by the volcano, and that was where he’d find Southunder. Supposedly the natives were friendly enough. There were some missionaries, and traders used this place to refuel and tie up in bad weather. That was about it. So he didn’t figure he’d end up on a head-hunter’s necklace like what always seemed to happen to the folks who wandered the South Pacific on the radio serials. On those shows there was always a hero to come along to rescue the damsel from the cannibals’ stew pot.

Too bad I ain’t no hero. If I were a hero, then my leading lady wouldn’t have died in a hole in the ground.
He scowled, picked up the backpack, wished he’d bummed a smoke off the crew, and started inland. The Silverado revved up its engines and headed back out to sea, driving up a plume of salt mist as it leapt into the air. The trees were thick, but he figured the fastest way across the island would be a straight line, the whole thing wasn’t even a mile across. It felt good in the shade but after fifteen feet of clomping through the bushes, he realized that he didn’t know if there were poison snakes in all that ground cover, so he backed out to walk along the beach. At least the snakes where’d he’d grown up had the common decency of having a rattle on them.

Either the island wasn’t as sparsely populated as the General had remembered or somebody had seen the Silverado and come to check it out. Within ten minutes he could hear the kids in the jungle watching him. He waved, and tried to smile, real friendly like. He hadn’t shaved in days so his face was dark with scratchy new beard, and he wasn’t exactly the nicest to look at to begin with, but he didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with these folks. They were his key to finding Southunder. That’s why his shirt was untucked to conceal his .45.

“Hey, you guys speak English?” The kids were little and brown, or at least the ones he saw were before they squealed and ran away. There was no way he could have kept up with them on their own turf. A minute later he found a narrow footpath and turned inland. Weird, colorful birds shrieked at him.

The village was bigger than Pershing remembered. Where there had been a handful of tiny huts on stilts with big leaves on top, there were now several wood buildings with tin roofs. The missionary’s shack had turned into a white house with a little steeple. He could smell meat cooking on the smoke coming from the largest building and his stomach rumbled involuntarily. An unseen dog started barking.

The kids had raised the alarm. There were several adults watching suspiciously from the steps and doorways. The men were dark-skinned, with curly black hair, and contrary to the radio, nobody was wearing a grass skirt. He noted that half of them happened to be armed. The guns were old, but looked to be in good working order. The only woman he saw was busy herding kids inside and he took that as a bad sign.

Sullivan waved slowly. “Hello.” Nobody answered. One of the men spit on the ground. Another one had been interrupted in the act of butchering a hanging pig. He wiped his machete clean on the grass. “Nice place ya got here.” There was a rustle in the underbrush to his side.

“What do you want?”

Sullivan turned slowly, glad to hear somebody speaking his language, but not liking that he’d walked right past somebody who’d probably been waiting in ambush. The man was young, surprisingly white, with reddish-brown hair and a goatee.

“You sound like an American . . .”

“Yeah, I’m American,” he answered, coming out of the jungle, and calmly pointing a pistol at Sullivan’s chest. “The gun’s Belgian.”

He nodded. “Yep, I can see that . . . Saive GP32 9mm machine pistol. Nice piece.”

The young man smiled a little, but the gun didn’t move. “Yeah . . . It was based on Browning’s last design.”

Sullivan would have loved to whip the machine gun out of his bag and show the kid that he was wrong, but he had no doubt he’d catch a bullet if he tried that. “I’m looking for somebody.”

“Strange place to be looking.” The kid stepped onto the volcanic rock, still covering him. Sullivan knew that little buzz gun had a cyclic rate that could rip an entire magazine into him before he could even move, so he was a very obliging guest. “I’m guessing you came in on that PBY Silverado.”

“You know your planes.”

He nodded. “You know your guns. Who’re you looking for?”

Might as well cut to the chase.
“Bob Southunder.”

“Never heard of him,” he answered. “So you best go away.”

He was obviously lying. “You sure?” Sullivan put his hand out at about shoulder height. “About yea tall. He was losing his hair. Probably in his fifties now. Controls the weather. Hates the Japanese.”

There was a click as a hammer was cocked behind him. Sullivan felt the steel of a barrel press against the back of his head. “My friend said he don’t know nobody by that name.”

The second had come up from the jungle on the other side of the path. These boys were good and quiet. “Two Americans . . . Boy, I must have landed at the embassy by mistake.”

“Naw, that’s five hundred miles thataway.” The kid jerked his head.

“Best start swimming,” the other one said.

Sullivan wasn’t in the mood. “Listen, assholes, I didn’t fly around the whole damn world to get turned away. Take me to Southunder before I get mad.”

“Can you believe the nerve of this chump?” the one behind him said in a deep voice. “Pirate Bob Southunder ain’t real. He’s a story that Jap sailors tell to explain whenever one of their ships don’t come back. He’s like a . . . a . . .”

“Sea monster,” the first one finished.

“Yeah.”

“So you two ain’t pirates?”

“Of course not. We’re . . . legitimate businessmen.”

Sullivan snorted. “Oh good, for a minute I thought you were going to try and convince me that that was your church.” He turned and waved nonchalantly toward the little white building just enough to remove the gun from the base of his neck. “But y’all didn’t look like priests, either.”

He could feel the gunsel at his back automatically follow his pointing finger, and then Sullivan Spiked outward. The Power left him in a circular wave, bending gravity away violently. The kid went into the jungle, almost like he was flying. The other dropped straight back, hit the end of Sullivan’s range and tumbled, off balance, into the sand.

Sullivan followed him. Gravity returned to normal and the pirate struggled to his knees. The thing that had been pressed against his neck turned out to be a British Webley .455 revolver and Sullivan kicked it right out of the man’s hands. The kid had bounced off a rubbery tree, and was coming back up with that Belgian buzz saw, so Sullivan concentrated, reversed gravity, and dropped him into the air in a cloud of white sand.

The villagers were interested now, and several were heading his way. The one with the machete was in front, looking pissed. Behind him was a man with a rifle that had been ancient before the Great War, and Sullivan got ready to Spike the whole damn village into the ocean. “I need to talk to Southunder. Don’t make me hurt you.”

The native with the old rifle said something fierce and Sullivan didn’t need to speak the language to know that he’d just been told to go screw himself.

“That’ll be enough,” a calm voice called from the largest building. Immediately the villagers stopped and lowered their weapons. A man walked out onto the porch, shielding his eyes from the sun. “What do you want, Heavy?”

Sullivan recognized the Grimnoir from Pershing’s memories, though he was more than twenty years older now. He was a little thinner, had lost the rest of his hair, but the main difference was that he’d gotten a better tan. “Pershing sent me.”

For a legendary buccaneer, he wasn’t much to look at. No big hat, no beard, no parrot or even a wooden leg. He was a completely average-looking man, small of stature and wearing simple work clothes stained with engine grease. Southunder paused to take a drink from a cup made from half a coconut. His manner was deceivingly mild. “I figured that from the way you were beating on my men . . . You hurt, Barns?”

The younger one came out of the jungle, glaring at Sullivan. “I didn’t know he was a Mover,” he said, shoving his machine pistol into a shoulder holster. It was a dual rig, and he had a matching gun under his other arm as well.

“Gravity Spiker,” Sullivan corrected.

“Mr. Parker?”

“I’m good,” the other pirate answered as he picked his Webley off the ground and blew the sand from the cylinder. He was dark-skinned, probably a mulatto, and was a big man, not fat but bulky through the chest and arms, though not nearly as large as Sullivan. “Only thing hurt’s my feelings.”

Southunder sighed. “Sad day for pirates everywhere. So Pershing sent you, huh? How is the old coot?”

“Dead,” Sullivan answered. “Killed by a Pale Horse.”

Southunder didn’t seem surprised. “And the others?”

“The Portagee was murdered by an Iron Guard, same with Jones. Christiansen got torn apart by a demon. The Chairman got their pieces.”

“So ends the knights of New York . . .” Southunder thought about it for a long time. He tossed the coconut off the porch and into the bushes. His men exchanged confused glances. Apparently this was all new to them. “Well, I figured this day would come.” He turned and walked back into the building. “You ate lunch yet?”

***

Sullivan consumed all the fish they put in front of him, and figured he would keep doing so as long as the Japanese girl kept putting more on the table. She batted her eyes politely when he thanked her for the fifth plate, and returned to the kitchen. He’d told his story quickly and quietly, and now he was just plain hungry.

Bob Southunder studied him with cold blue eyes. Sullivan could tell that he was a calculating and intelligent man, the kind of man who’d grown impatient with governments and secret societies and had decided to make war on the Imperium by himself, but he was also a friendly enough host. “You sure eat a lot.”

“So I’ve been told,” he answered.

He watched Sullivan’s hands. “Where’s your ring?”

“Don’t have one. Never took the oath.”

Southunder nodded. “I would’ve figured otherwise. You’ve got Grimnoir written all over you.”

He didn’t know whether to take that as compliment or not, so he just grunted and kept eating.

The building was mostly an open space, sort of a village common room, and a long rectangular table made of planks filled most of it. More people had poured in after he’d arrived, taking up the other spots, and then filling in along the wall once the chairs were taken. Apparently his arrival was interesting. The people were made up of every race he could imagine, and were aged from teenagers to old men, but most of them looked to be of fighting age and in fighting shape. The only women present were the ones who kept bringing food from the kitchen. Apparently piracy was man’s work.

Southunder hadn’t lived this long in the shadow of the Imperium by trusting strangers. “I’d of figured Black Jack would have sent at least a knight . . .”

“John Moses Browning was supposed to have given me the oath, but he got hurt, and I had to leave in a hurry.”

“
The
John Browning?” the kid named Barns asked from a few seats away.

“Yep,” Sullivan said. The serving girl refilled his cup with some pungent rice wine. He kept catching her staring at him.

“You’re pulling my leg.”

Southunder waved him away. “He’s not. We’re old friends. How bad was he?”

Sullivan told them the story of the Peace Ray. The other conversations in the room tapered off to nothing, and soon everyone was listening in. When he got to the part about Isaiah Rawls trying to Read his mind, a look of disgust crossed Southunder’s face. “He was one of the knights of New York too, but . . .” he paused. “Never mind, it isn’t right to speak ill of someone who isn’t around to defend himself. Let’s just say that I’m not surprised he ended up in the leadership. He was a sneaky one. The Society always liked doing things in the least straightforward way possible. Maybe that’s why they never liked me much. What was the other one’s name?”

“Harkeness,” Sullivan answered. “Why?”

“The name’s familiar. I think he was one of the European Grimnoir that argued with Black Jack when he wanted to just break the cursed thing and be done with it. There were a bunch of them. They were one of the founding families. Leave it to them to be too proud to listen to reason, thinking that they were smart enough to use Tesla’s mad device.”

“How about we go smash the damn thing right now then,” Sullivan suggested. “Everybody wins.”

Southunder smiled. “Because I don’t know if I believe you yet. For all I know you’re an Imp spy, trying to get me to take you to it, so you can cut my throat and take it back to your master.”

He wasn’t the easily offended type. “Fair ’nuff.” Sullivan looked around the crowded room. There were a few Japs within earshot, and he had no doubt the Chairman would pay a fortune to anybody who ratted them out. “You want to talk about this alone?”

Southunder chuckled. “This is my crew. We’ve been through hell together. I trust these men much more than I trust you, stranger.” He turned in his chair, looking for someone. “Ken, come here, please.”

A young Jap leaning against the far wall set his food on the windowsill and came over. His face was creased with scars and half of one ear was missing. “Captain,” he answered gruffly.

“Show Mr. Sullivan here how much love you’ve got for the Imperium.”

The Jap bowed his head a bit and unbuttoned his shirt. When he opened it, even as hardened as Sullivan was, he still cringed. Despite all the things he’d seen, he hadn’t seen anything like this before. Every inch of his chest and stomach had been burned or cut, and was now covered in twisting black and grey scars.