“Then they proceeded down this hallway, leaving three distinct sets of footprints, two large and one small.”
“Two for muscle and the cat burglar,” Kaldar guessed.
“Probably.” Erwin swept the length of the hallway with his pointer, causing sections of the image to light up. “They opened impossible locks in record time. They avoided all of the traps. They escaped detection and ended up here, bypassing both treasury here and armory here.” The pointer fixed on a small room, then lit up rooms to the right and left of it. “They took a wooden box containing the device and walked out of the pyramid the way they came. In and out in under twenty minutes.
“That’s impossible.”
“Our Egyptian colleagues are of the same opinion. Unfortunately, the facts have no regard for their collective sanity.”
Kaldar frowned at the pyramid. “Was this the shortest route they could’ve taken to the room?”
“Yes.”
An enterprising thief would’ve done the research and broken into the treasury. A terrorist would’ve gone for the armory and the weapons within. But these three went directly to the room, took their prize, and escaped. Someone had hired them to do this job and provided them with the plans of the pyramid. Only a heavy hitter would have access to this sort of intelligence. The Mirror. Or the Hand. That would explain why a thief with a talent of this caliber took a job for hire. The Hand’s methods of persuasion rarely involved money. Mostly they showed you your child or your lover strapped to a chair and promised to send you a piece of her every hour until you agreed to do whatever they wanted.
There it was, finally, his chance of a direct confrontation. He would make them pay.
Erwin was watching him.
“What happened after the thieves left the pyramid?” Kaldar asked.
“They disappeared off the face of the world.” Erwin fiddled with the console, and the pyramid vanished, replaced by an aerial image of a small town. “This is the town of Adriana, population forty thousand. Two hundred and twenty leagues north, across the border, in our territory. A small, quaint settlement, famous for being the first place Adrian’s fleet disembarked after crossing the ocean. It’s a popular destination for school tours. Six hours and ten minutes after the thieves left the pyramid, Adriana’s prized fountain exploded. The city crew, first on the scene, became violently sick. They reported catching ghost insects on their skin, hot flashes, freezes, temporary blindness, and vomiting.”
The reaction to Hand’s magic. Kaldar grimaced. The Mirror relied on gadgets to supplement their agents’ natural talents, while the Hand employed magic modification. Officially, all countries of the West Continent abided by an agreement that limited how far the human body could be twisted by magic. The Dukedom of Louisiana made all the right noises and quietly manufactured freaks by the dozen. Men with foot-long needles on their backs, women who shot acid from their hands, things that used to be human and now were just a tangled mess of fangs and claws.
Magic augmentation came with a price. Some agents lost their humanity completely, some held on to it, but all emitted their own particular brand of unnatural magic. If you were sensitive to magic, the first exposure made you violently sick. He’d experienced it firsthand, and he didn’t care to repeat it.
Erwin straightened. “The Egyptians believe the Hand hired the thieves to steal the object and scheduled the trade in Adriana, where things went badly for both parties. Your wyvern is on standby. With luck and good wind, you should be in Adriana in an hour. After you review the scene, I’d imagine you will have a better idea of the supplies you’ll need. Please stop at the Home Office, and we’ll provide you everything you require. This assignment is rated first priority. Should you be captured, Adrianglia will disavow any knowledge of you and your mission.”
“But you’ll miss me?”
Erwin permitted himself a small smile. “Kaldar, I never miss.”
Ha! “What’s the nature of the stolen device?” Kaldar asked.
Erwin raised his eyebrows. “That’s the best part.”
KALDAR surveyed the sea of rubble, enclosed by a line of fluorescent paint and guarded by a dozen undersheriffs. Before him stretched what had once been the Center Plaza: a circle of clear ground, which until this morning had been paved with large square blocks. The blocks had radiated like the spokes of a wheel from the tall round fountain in the shape of a pair of dolphins leaping out from the water basin. He’d picked up a tourist brochure on his way to the scene of the crime. It showed a lovely picture of the fountain.
Now the fountain lay in ruins. It wasn’t simply knocked down, it was shattered, as if the dolphins had exploded from the inside out. Not satisfied with destroying the fountain, the perpetrator had wrenched the stone blocks around it out of the ground and hurled them across the plaza. The brochure stated that each block weighed upwards of fifty pounds. Looking at the giant chunks of stone, Kaldar didn’t doubt it. A small tea vendor’s wagon must’ve gotten in the way of the barrage, because it lay in shambles, blue-green boards poking out sadly from under the stones.