Science and Sorcery (39 page)

“We don't know,” O’Kelly said.  He had years of experience and he sounded scared.  This was something completely outside his experience.  “Dispatch doesn't know either...”

They rounded a corner and came face-to-face with another mob.  This one advanced towards them, trapping the two police officers between two fires.  O’Kelly drew his pistol, looking for targets, but there were no obvious leaders.  Instead, he motioned for her to run to the nearest fire escape, hoping it would take them out of danger.  Leila started to run, just before the mob suddenly lunged forward and closed the trap.  Strong hands grabbed her and shoved her to the ground.

Desperately, she curled up into a ball, knowing that she was likely to be crushed to death, or at the very least seriously injured.  Police officers – and civilians – had been hurt or even killed when they’d been caught up in mobs and shoved to the ground.  Instead, the mob just surged around her, thousands of pairs of feet slamming down alarmingly close to her head.  And there was a voice, right at the edge of her awareness, boosted by the sheer presence of the mob.  The voice offered peace through surrender and servitude to her betters...

No
, Leila thought, trying to crawl out of the maddened crowd.  It was a mistake.  The mob suddenly turned in on her, punching and kicking, slamming her back down to the ground.  Her pistol was lost somewhere in the chaos; she reached for where she thought it was, only to have a foot come down on her hand.  And then the pain grew worse and worse until she blacked out completely. 

***

Harrow smirked as she monitored the chaos running through the modern city.  It was still a mystery to her how the city worked – the city government seemed designed to confuse outside observers – but certain truths were universal.  Her mental influence had swallowed up countless minds, creating a mass that in turn swallowed up more and more minds.  Those who were too strong to fall easily were eventually isolated and killed by the mob, which helped to break resistance.

She loosened her mind from the overall mob and sought out those she’d identified as potential leaders.  Many of them were stubborn enough to make it hard to break them through nightmares, but the mob could bring them to her and she could bind them with proper spells, putting their knowledge and experience to work on her behalf.  Once they were her slaves, they would take control of the mob as it expanded out beyond her mental range and seal off the city.  The national government might have had the power to destroy entire cities – or so Calvin had insisted – but they’d have to decide if it was worth slaying millions of their own people just to destroy Harrow herself.  And if they did, she could simply teleport away and leave them with nothing more than a ruined city.

Locating the Mayor in the dreaming had been surprisingly easy.  He didn't seem to be very strong, for someone who ruled a city larger than anything Harrow had ever imagined before she’d been imprisoned.  In fact, he seemed more corrupt than she had expected, although most of the corruption didn't seem to make sense.  There were concepts in his mind that puzzled Harrow, even as she ordered him brought to her.  Unlike the useful slaves, there was no point in putting him to work in the city, but he could still serve a purpose.  Someone would have to take Harrow’s message to the rest of the country. 

She smiled as she reached out with her mind, sensing the growing fear and panic among those who were unaffected by her control.  They’d be brought into the mob, perhaps even broken once they were within its influence, or eventually killed.  And if they killed a few mob members along the way, who cared?  There were plenty more where they came from.

This society was fantastic in many ways.  And yet it couldn't really hope to defend itself against a trained magician.  They weren't even ready to grovel properly, or to recognise her superiority.  But they would still fall.

And there was nothing that Enchanter’s servant could do about it. 

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Washington DC, USA

Day 36/37

Years ago, during her training, Caitlyn had studied under an FBI agent who had been acknowledged as somewhat eccentric, although very definitely an expert in his field.  He’d told his trainees about how different cultures accepted different standards of evidence, and about some of the strangest fallacies that had popped up over the years.  One of them had been Spectral Evidence, witness reports from the newly departed, as reported by those who had seen the ghosts.  It hadn't taken much imagination to see how the system could be abused, particularly as the ghosts never seemed to show themselves to the entire world, and the entire concept had been declared nonsense hundreds of years ago. 

And now she was looking at a ghost, and
talking
to a ghost.

Calvin’s form was translucent, barely visible in the lighted room.  When she’d reached out and touched his chest, she’d felt nothing apart from a faint tingle and a vague sense that the ghost was as cold as ice.  Certainly, the monitors had picked up nothing, even if the WAND had detected a very faint shift in the
mana
level surrounding the ghost. 
Mana
, it seemed, was keeping him visible.  Absently, she wondered why Calvin was wearing clothes, or even why he was still in human form.  Could it be that a ghost’s appearance was purely determined by its own concept of how it should look?  Calvin looked like himself because he
thought
he should look like himself?

“All right,” she said, trying to remain calm.  If they’d been trying to put Calvin – or Harrow –on trial, any competent defence lawyer could probably have managed to dismiss the evidence.  On the other hand, Calvin was very definitely dead...how could they imprison a ghost?  Perhaps they could starve it of
mana
and see if it winked out of existence.  “What happened to you, right from the start?”

Calvin’s voice was strange.  His lips moved and the words appeared in Caitlyn’s head, but she couldn't
hear
anything.  It might be some form of telepathy, which raised worrying questions about ghosts and mind-reading, or perhaps it was just something else to puzzle over later.  Bit by bit, his story came out, starting with the death of Moe and his cronies.  As Caitlyn had expected, Moe had bullied Calvin to the point where he’d snapped, drawn on powers he hadn't known he’d had and incinerated them.  That, at least, might have been forgivable.  Calvin had panicked and lashed out in self-defence. 

Harrow had come to him that night in his dreams and started training him in how to use his powers.  An older and wiser person might have suspected that something was very wrong, but Calvin had been in a state of shock and besides, she
was
offering him a chance to put the world to rights.  He’d swallowed her bait and started to corrupt himself, pushing against the line until he finally stepped right over it.  The ghost’s confession – he’d spied on his female classmates, wrecked a fellow student’s career and eventually raped a girl he’d lusted after for years – left Caitlyn shaking her head in disbelief.  How could someone be so smart and yet so stupid?

But it wasn't really unprecedented.  Very few drug addicts set out to become drug addicts – and the pushers never told them that they might end up addicts, stealing from their parents and friends to fund their habits.  No, they took a small taste – which might well be free – and then were sucked under gradually, unless they found the strength of will to say
stop
.  Something similar tended to happen with internet porn addicts.  Caitlyn had been marginally involved in a FBI probe to track down a collector of child porn who had turned out to be a twelve-year-old boy.  The post-arrest interviews with the child had revealed that he’d been disgusted, at first, but the porn had slowly grown on him until he’d become an addict.  As horrible as it was, Caitlyn could see how Calvin had been slowly corrupted until he’d murdered one of his classmates in cold blood.

Golem loomed forward when Calvin had finished talking.  “Why didn't she release the other members of her group at once?”

“I don’t think she had the power,” Calvin admitted.  “I had to kill five people to gain the power to release her,
and
do it at a place of power.”

Caitlyn and Matt exchanged glances, sharing the same thought.  It wouldn't take long for Harrow to murder another five people, if she intended to release her comrades.  On the other hand, Golem had pointed out that Harrow wouldn't have been able to pull that much
mana
out of the pocket dimension and she’d be very low on power after her teleport.  Indeed, it was even possible that she would have run out of power mid-teleport, although Caitlyn doubted that they would get that lucky. 

They’d spent hours studying maps of the United States, trying to identify other possible places of power.  Battlefields from the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War, were quite likely to be places of power; they’d certainly had plenty of ghosts reported there over the years.  Or famous buildings, or graveyards; Arlington was hardly the only graveyard in the continental United States.  And then there was the World Trade Centre, destroyed on 9/11.  There were just too many possibilities for them
all
to be secured, and Harrow might be able to simply brush her way through any military cordon anyway.  Everything depended on coming up with a combination of science and magic that would catch the bitch by surprise before it was too late.

“Right,” Caitlyn said.  She changed tack, thinking hard.  “And why are you still here?”

“I’m not sure,” Calvin said.  “I think...I saw myself, right after she destroyed my body.  I realised what a fool I’d been and somehow I found myself still here, but just as a ghost.”

“Those who are separated from their bodies often see the world more clearly than those who are still alive,” Golem rumbled, “but the spirits are often...strange by human standards.  They can no longer hide from themselves.”

Caitlyn shot him a sharp glance.  Necromancy didn't just involve sacrificing an unwilling victim to gain
mana
; Golem had outlined a hundred different uses for the act, including summoning back the dead to ask them questions.  A forensic necromancer, she had decided, could actually ask the murder victim who had killed him, if he had access to part of the victim’s body.  But the longer a person remained dead, the harder it was to summon him back to the living world...and the less useful their answers were likely to be.

The real question was simple; did she trust Calvin the Ghost?  Caitlyn honestly wasn't sure; Mindy seemed to trust him, but Mindy was his sister, the only one who had ever stood up for him.  And she was only eight years old, no matter how old she acted, too young to make any proper value judgements.  If Calvin were to be believed, it might make it easier to track Harrow, but if he were lying...he could be trying to mislead them.

But Harrow might not see the need to bother
, she thought, grimly. 
Why should she try to trick us when she has so much power at her disposal – and an easy way to gain more
?

She looked over at Matt and inclined her head towards the door.  Matt followed her outside into the corridor, nodding to the Navy SEAL on duty outside Mindy’s quarters before they walked into a side room, out of earshot.

“Do you trust him?”  She asked.  “Because I don't know if I do.”

Matt considered.  “You know I can tell if I’m being lied to now,” he said.  Caitlyn nodded.  It seemed that Hunters could detect lies, no matter how skilled the liar was at concealing his emotions.  They’d tested the ability extensively and the only way anyone had found to fool Matt was to have the speaker unaware that he was telling a lie.  “I don’t
think
he’s lying to us.”

He hesitated.  “And all of the physical evidence backs him up,” he added.  “I don't think we can disprove anything he’s told us.”

“I hope you’re right,” Caitlyn said.  The entire country was on a knife-edge, not least because the President had yet to speak to the nation.  He was too busy trying to warn the rest of the world about the Thirteen, which meant explaining Golem’s existence, among other things.  “And what if you’re wrong?”

“We’re even more fucked than we were the moment she broke free,” Matt said.  He’d barely avoided speaking Harrow’s name.  “I think we don’t have any choice.”

Caitlyn nodded, and then led the way back to Mindy’s room.  “Tell me,” she said, “do you still have a connection to Harrow?”

“Yes,” Calvin said.  “I can still feel her with my mind.”

Golem shifted uncomfortably at Caitlyn’s questioning look.  “The Queen of Nightmares will have established a link between herself and anyone she wanted to influence,” he explained.  “That link will still be there, I believe.  She may be unaware of it now that she has destroyed his body, but a door, once opened, can swing in both directions.”

“So you can step into her mind?”  Matt asked Calvin.  “See through her eyes?”

“If he did,” Golem said, quickly, “she would become aware of his...current existence.  I would suggest attempting to locate her instead.”

Caitlyn nodded.  “Calvin, can you tell us where she is?”

Calvin shook his head.  “I can point in her direction, if you like, but I don’t
know
where she is...”

“That will be enough,” Matt said.  “We’ll have you do it in two places and then use the bearings to fix her position.”

Caitlyn’s cell phone began to ring.  “Crap,” she said.  “Hang on.”

She listened grimly to the message.  “I think we don’t need to bother trying to triangulate her position,” she said.  “She’s in New York.”

***

Golem would have cursed himself, if he had been human.  He'd known what Harrow could do and yet he’d never considered the possibilities of her abilities matched with the sheer population density of the modern world.  Given time and enough
mana
, she could walk into the dreams of countless people and start bending them to her will, the same thing she’d done to Calvin, only on a much larger scale.  Worse, there were probably enough people within the city she’d infected who had magical talents of their own, people who could help to spread the infection further.  Or, for that matter, serve as a source of additional
mana
. 

“The reports are still coming in,” Caitlyn said.  “Half of New York seems to have become a giant flash mob and is intent on hunting down the other half.  We have reports of rioting throughout the suburbs...what the hell is going on?”

“She reached into their nightmares and pushed something of herself into their minds,” Golem informed her.  Something about the reports seemed odd, as though there was something
wrong
with Harrow’s powers, but he couldn't place his finger on it.  “Those who surrendered to her influence are now fighting those who were unaffected.”

Matt looked down at the ground in despair.  “How do you even
fight
something like that?”  He demanded.  “Hell, why doesn't she just overwhelm Congress and the President and declare herself our Queen?”

“Even the slightest protective rune would provide a shield,” Golem said, patiently.  Despair was something he only knew in the abstract, thankfully.  Gibbering panic would not help the situation.  “And her power has very limited range, even without protection.  I would doubt that anyone outside a few miles of her current location is truly threatened by her influence.”

“That only leaves a few million people under threat,” Matt pointed out, bitterly.  “How the hell do we stop something like that?”

Caitlyn had a more practical question.  “How long is it likely to take her to consolidate her power?”

Golem allowed himself a moment of cold amusement.  He’d discovered what he’d been missing.  “Days, perhaps weeks,” he said.  Harrow was the undisputed Queen of Nightmares, one of the few magicians to use the dreaming as a conduit for her magic, but she could never have imagined what it was like to touch so many minds at once.  The chaos breaking out along the edge of her influence suggested that she was already losing control.  “No mortal magician can hope to control so many minds at once.”

“She certainly seems to be succeeding,” Matt said, savagely.  “How long did it take her to overrun New York?”