Hard Magic: Book I of the Grimnoir Chronicles Read online

  “You presume much,” Cornelius said defensively.

  “If you just wanted to merely curse someone and make their hair fall out, or to give them boils, fits, or incontinence, there are far easier Actives to reach than I.” Harkeness’s smile was unnerving. “People come to me when they desire something . . . epic.”

  The industrialist swallowed and placed his briefcase on the table. He unlocked it, then turned it so that Harkeness could see inside. It was filled with neatly stacked and meticulously counted bank notes and a single newspaper clipping. Cornelius quickly snatched his hand away before the Pale Horse could touch the contents, as if his Power might somehow be transmitted through the leather.

  The Pale Horse did not seem to notice the money. He gently removed the yellowed clipping, took a pair of spectacles from his breast pocket, set them atop his hawklike nose and began reading. After a moment he removed the glasses and returned them and the clipping to his pocket. “An important man. Very well . . . What will it be? Bone rot? Consumption? Cancers of the brain or bowel? Syphilis? Leprosy? I can do anything from a minor vapor to turn his joints to sand while his skin boils off in a cancerous sludge. I am an encyclopedia of affliction, sir.”

  Cornelius bobbed his head in time with the litany of diseases. “All of them.”

  “I see . . .” Harkeness seemed to approve. “Very well, but first, I must know . . .”

  “Yes,” Cornelius answered hesitantly. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up.

  “Why? A man such as you has no shortage of killers to choose from. Why not a knife in the back? A bullet in the head? You yourself are a Mover, why not just invite him to a balcony such as this and shove him off? It would even look like a suicide, which would be particularly scandalous in the papers.”

  “How—” Cornelius sputtered. His Power was a secret. “Me? A Magical? Who told you such slanderous lies?”

  Harkeness shrugged. “I have a trained eye, Mr. Stuyvesant. Now answer my question. Why do you need me to curse this man?”

  Cornelius felt his face flush with anger. No matter how dangerous Harkeness was, Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant was not about to have his motives questioned by a mere hireling. He pushed himself away from the table and rose, bellowing, “Why you? I do not want him dead. That is far too good a fate for one such as he! I want him to suffer first. I want him to know he’s dying and I want him to pray to his ineffectual God to save him as his body rots and stinks and melts to the blackest filth. I want it to hurt and I want it to be embarrassing. I want his lungs to fill with pus. I want his balls to fall off and I want him to piss fire! I want his loved ones to look away in disgust, and I want it to take a very, very long time.”

  Harkeness nodded, his face now an emotionless mask. “I can do this thing for you, but first, I must ask, what terrible thing did this man do to deserve such a fate?”

  The billionaire paused, pudgy hands curled into fists. He lowered his voice before continuing. He had planned this revenge for years. It was only the purity of the hate for his enemy that drove him to this place. “He took something . . . someone . . . from me. Leave it at that.” Cornelius tried to calm himself. He was not a man given to such unseemly outbursts. “Will that do?”

  “It is enough.”

  Cornelius realized he was standing, but it did make him feel more in control, more in his element. He gestured at the open briefcase. “I was given your name by an associate. I believe that this is the same amount that he paid for your services.” Rockefeller had warned Cornelius about how expensive the Pale Horse would be, but it would be so very worth the money. “Take it.”

  The other man shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “What!” Cornelius objected. Was he going to try and shake him down for more money than Rockefeller? The nerve. “How dare you!”

  Harkeness leaned back in his chair, puffing on the cigar. He took it away from his mouth and smiled without any joy. “I don’t want your money, Mr. Stuyvesant. I want something else.”

  Cornelius trembled. Of course, he’d heard the odder stories about the Pale Horses, the rarest of the Actives, but he had paid them no heed. He was a man of science, not superstition. Sure, he had magic himself, nowadays one in a hundred Americans had some small measure, but it didn’t mean he understood how it actually worked. One in a thousand had access to greater Power, being actual Actives, but men like Harkeness were something different, something rare and strange, themselves oddities in an odd bunch. Hesitantly he spoke. “Do . . . do you want . . . my soul?”

  This time Harkeness really did laugh, almost choking on his cigar. “Now that’s funny! Do I look like a spiritualist? I’m certainly not the devil, Mr. Stuyvesant. I do not even know if I believe in such preposterous things. What would I even do with your soul if I had it?”

  That was a relief, even if Cornelius wasn’t particularly sure that he had a soul, he didn’t want to deed it over to a man like Harkeness. “I don’t know,” Cornelius shrugged. “I just thought . . .”

  Harkeness was still chuckling. “No, nothing so mysterious. All I want is a favor.”

  That caused Cornelius to pause. “A favor?”

  Harkeness was done laughing. “Yes, a favor. Not today. But someday in the future I will call and ask for a favor. You will remember this service performed, and you will grant me that favor without hesitation or question. Is that understood?”

  “What manner of favor?”

  The Pale Horse shrugged. “I do not yet know this thing. But I do know that if you fail to honor our bargain at that particular time, I will be greatly displeased.”

  He was not, by nature, a man who intimidated easily, but Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant was truly unnerved. The threat went unsaid, but who would want to cross such a man? The industrialist almost walked out on the absurd and frightening proposal, but he had been planning his revenge for far too long to turn back now. If the favor was too large, Cornelius knew he always had other options. Harkeness was deadly, but he wasn’t immortal. It would not be the first time he had used murder to get out of an inequitable contract.

  “Very well,” Cornelius said. “You have a deal. When will he get sick?”

  Harkeness closed his eyes for a few seconds, as if pondering a difficult question. “It is already done,” the Pale Horse said, opening his eyes. “Isaiah will see you out.”

  ***

  Isaiah joined his employer on the balcony a few minutes later. Harkeness had gone back to admiring the view. “Could you Read him?”

  “He’s very intelligent. I had to be gentle or he would’ve known. He’s got a bad tendency to shout his thoughts when he gets riled up.” The servant leaned against the concrete wall and folded his arms. “He even thought I might be a Torch. Can you believe that?”

  Harkeness chuckled, knowing that Isaiah was far more dangerous than some mere human flame hurler. “Was he truthful?”

  “Mostly. He absolutely despises this man.”

  “For what he did to him? Wouldn’t you?”

  Isaiah sounded disgusted. “Stuyvesant is utterly ruthless.”

  So am I, Harkeness thought, knowing full well that Isaiah would pick that up as clearly as a high-strength radio broadcast. “You don’t get to such lofty positions without being dangerous. I’ll have to curse him quickly. Arranging a meeting should be easy enough. Stuyvesant will be expecting immediate results now.”

  Isaiah left the wall and took one of the cigars from the table. “I liked your little show, with closing the eyes and just wishing for somebody to die and all that. That’s good theater.”

  Of course, even he had his limits. He would actually have to touch the victim, and it took constant Power thereafter to keep up the onslaught against the ministrations of Menders, which he already knew this man would have. This would be an extremely draining assignment. “Whatever keeps Stuyvesant nervous,” Harkeness shrugged. “I do like the new term though. It suits me.”

  Isaiah quoted from memory as he clipped the end
from the Cuban. “And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts, and I looked and beheld a pale horse, and the name that sat upon him was death . . .”

  “And hell followed with him,” Harkeness finished, smiling. “Appropriate . . .”

  “If the favor you ask of him is too difficult, he’ll have you killed.”

  Harkeness had suspected as much. “He could try. Wouldn’t be the first.”

  “The man’s got a phobia about sickness. The Spanish flu near did him when it came through, been worrying him ever since.” Isaiah said as he lit the cigar. “He’s scared of you.”

  “Good,” the Pale Horse muttered, watching the people moving below, scuttling about like ants, ignorant little creatures, unaware of the truth of the world in which they lived. The Chairman was about to change the world, whether any of the ants liked it or not, and that meant war. Many ants would be stepped on, but that was just too bad. It was unfortunate to be born an ant. “He should be . . .”

  Billings, Montana

  Every day was the same. Every prisoner in the Special Prisoners’ Wing of the Rockville State Penitentiary had the exact same schedule. You slept. You worked. You got put back in your cage. You slept. You worked. You got put back in your cage. Repeat until time served.

  Working meant breaking rocks. Normal prisoners were put on work crews to be used by mayors trying to keep budgets low. They got to go outside. The convicts in Special Wing got to break rocks in a giant stone pit. Some of them were even issued tools. The name of the facility was just a coincidence.

  One particular convict excelled at breaking rocks. He did a good job of it because he did a good job of everything he set his mind to. First he’d been good at war and now he was good at breaking rocks. It was just his nature. The convict had single-minded determination, and once he got to pushing something, he just couldn’t find it in himself to stop. He was as constant as gravity. After a year, he was the finest rock breaker and mover in the history of Rockville State Penitentiary.

  Occasionally some other prisoner would try to start trouble because he thought the convict was making the rest of them look bad, but even in a place dedicated to holding felons who could tap into all manner of magical affinities, most were smart enough not to cross this particular convict. After the first few left in bags, the rest understood that he just wanted to be left alone to do his time. Occasionally some new man, eager to show off his Power, would step up and challenge the convict, and he too would leave in a bag.

  The warden did not blame the convict for the violence. He understood the type of men he had under his care, and knew that the convict was just defending himself. Between helping meet the quota for the gravel quarry that padded the warden’s salary under the table, and for ridding the Special Wing of its most dangerous and troublesome men, the warden took a liking to the convict. He read the convict’s records, and came to respect the convict as a man for the deeds he’d done before committing his crime. He was the first Special Prisoner ever granted access to the extremely well-stocked, but very dusty prison library.

  So the convict’s schedule changed. Sleep. Work. Read. Sleep. Work. Read. So now the time passed faster. The convict read books by the greatest minds of the day. He read the classics. He began to question his Power. Why did his Power work the way it did? What separated him from normal men? Why could he do the things he could do? Because of its relation to his own specific gifts, he started with Newton, then Einstein, finally Bohr and Heisenberg, and then every other mind that had pontificated on the science related to his magic. And when he had exhausted the books on science, he turned to the philosophers’ musings on the nature of magic and the mystery of where it had suddenly come from and all of its short history. He read Darwin. He read Schuman, and Kelser, Reed, and Spengler. When that was done, he read everything that was left.

  The convict began to experiment with his Power. He would sneak bits of rock back into his cell to toy with. Reaching deep inside himself, twisting, testing, always pushing with that same dogged determination that had made him the best rock breaker, and when he got tired of experimenting with rocks, he started to experiment on his own body. Eventually all those hours of testing and introspection enabled him to discover things about magic that very few other people would ever understand.

  But he kept that to himself.

  Then one day the warden offered the convict a deal . . .

  Chapter 1

  We now have over a thousand confirmed cases of individuals with these so-called magical abilities on the continent alone. The faculty has descended into a terrible uproar over the proper nomenclature for such specimens. All manner of Latin phrases have been bandied about. Professor Gerard even suggested Grimnoir, a combination of the old French Grimoire, or book of spells, with Noir, for Black, in the sense of the mysterious, for at this juncture the origin of said Powers remains unknown. He was laughed down. Personally, I’ve taken to calling them wizards, for the very idea of there being actual magic beyond the bounds of science causes my esteemed colleagues to sputter and choke.

  —Dr. L. Fulci,

  Professor of Natural Science, University of Bern,

  Personal Journal, 1852

  THREE YEARS LATER

  Springfield, Illinois

  There were twenty local bulls, ten state coppers, and half a dozen agents from the Bureau of Investigation, and every one of them was packing serious heat. Jake Sullivan approved. Purvis wasn’t screwing around this time. Delilah Jones was going down.

  The lead government man was pacing back and forth in front of the crew assembled in the warehouse. “You don’t hesitate. None of you hesitate even for a second. She’s a woman, but don’t you dare underestimate her. She’s robbed twenty banks in four states, and killed five people.” He paused long enough to jerk a thumb at his men. “When you see her, nobody makes a move until me or Agent Cowley says the word.”

  A second government man raised his hand. Sam Cowley’s suit was cheap, but his 1928 Thompson was meticulously maintained. Sullivan knew he was a man who kept his priorities in order, so at least he’d been roped into working with an experienced crew this time.

  There was a wanted poster stuck to the wall. Sullivan had known Delilah back in New Orleans. She was a dish, a real looker. He had to admit that the ink drawing was actually realistic, unlike his old wanted poster, where they had uglied him up for dramatic effect, but in the sketch artists’ defense, somebody that could crush every bone in your body should look scary.

  “How many men in the gang?” one of the locals asked.

  Melvin Purvis paused. “I’m not expecting a gang. Just her.”

  The room got quiet. It normally didn’t take thirty-seven men with rifles and shotguns to take down a lone woman, bank robber or not. They all realized what that meant about the same time, but nobody wanted to say it. Finally the same local slowly raised his hand. “She got big Powers then?”

  “Yes, McKee. She does,” Purvis responded. “She’s a Brute, and she’s Active. Probably the toughest I’ve heard of.” McKee lowered his hand. The sea of blue and brown uniforms all looked at each other, grumbling and swearing. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Listen, boys, when I got here, I asked your chiefs for hard men. I know you’re all up to it, but if any of you want out, there’s no shame in leaving.”

  “Is that why he’s here?” McKee asked, since he’d somehow become the leader of the uniforms, gesturing to where Sullivan had been trying to remain unnoticed in the back of the room.

  “He’s with me,” Purvis said. “We let Sullivan do his job, and none of you have to worry about dealing with a little lady who can toss automobiles at you. You got a problem with that?”

  “He’s a murderer,” McKee pointed out.

  “Manslaughter,” Sullivan corrected, speaking for the first time. “And I done served my time. J. Edgar Hoover says I’m reformed.”

  There were no more questions forthcoming. Somebody coughed. Purvis folded his arms and waited until the count of ten. Nobody st
ood up to leave. “Good. We try to take her alive. My men go in first with Sullivan. The rest hang back outside and get the bystanders out of the way. Nobody shoots unless she goes Active.”

  “Then don’t miss,” Agent Cowley suggested.

  They’d be moving out in a matter of minutes and Sullivan sensed the room was nervous, kind of bouncy and tense. It reminded him a little of the Great War, in those few awful seconds before the whistle blew and they’d jump out of the relative safety of their muddy trenches and run screaming into Maxim gunfire, barbed wire, and the Kaiser’s zombies.

  ***

  Jake Sullivan had gotten the call from Washington two weeks before, telling him to report to Special Agent Melvin Purvis in Chicago. The assignment came at a good time. His regular business as a private dick was floundering, and he had been reduced to pulling the occasional security gig, standing in as muscle during some of the labor strikes. He didn’t like it, but just being special didn’t pay the bills. At least he hadn’t had to hurt anyone. Just his reputation kept the strikers peaceful. Nobody wanted to cross a Heavy, especially one that had served time in Rockville.

  The government jobs barely paid a decent wage, but more importantly, this was the last of the five assignments he had agreed to upon his early release. The warden had appealed to his patriotism when he had transmitted the offer, telling Sullivan that it would be a chance to serve his country again. He had found that amusing, since his only desire at that point was to get out of that hellhole. He’d already served his country once, and had the scars to show for it.

  As had been agreed upon, every single other Magical he had assisted in capturing had been a murderer. Jake still had some principles left.