40

TOWER OUTAGE

At first, the attack went exactly according to plan, rarely a good sign in my experience.

Several knight teams had invaded the homes of people who worked for the businesses—or business fronts—that occupied that tower, and Simon had gotten his hands on more than a few individuals who had some intelligence on what went on inside it. The prisoners had a tendency to die if they said keywords like School of Night, but the interrogators had gotten used to that while rounding up the School’s double agents inside the Templars. There was a risk that one of those abductions might send up a flag as someone who was supposed to go somewhere or call someone else didn’t check in, but it was worth the risk for the intelligence we’d gained.

For instance, we knew that a mysterious cunning man was staying at the top of the tower and hadn’t come out of the building for weeks.

Teams of knights moved through the various underground tunnels surrounding Rockwall Tower West and placed a series of Turn Away ward stones at precise locations that had been mapped out by merlins. It wasn’t really one massive spell but a system of many tiny enchantments overlapping and meshing together, kind of like small rings forming an entire set of chain mail. Once the stones were set, a number of apprentice merlins moved behind the knights, performing the rituals that would key them.

The end result was that Rockwall Tower West was encased in a sphere of magic. I pictured it like one of those snow globes with a cheap plastic building immersed in a transparent dome. Passersby simply stopped looking at Rockwall Tower and went out of their way to avoid walking near it without consciously thinking about it. Naked supermodels and pro wrestlers could have rushed into the pavilion at the base of the tower and started up a game of touch football using live cats for footballs, and no one would notice.

Unfortunately, magic on this scale disrupted a power conduit beneath the ground and caused a major power outage for several blocks. Rockwall West wasn’t using electricity anyway, presumably because its own magicks were already messing with the atmosphere, but another team of knights had to plausibly and severely sabotage another conduit farther away in order to conceal the real reason behind the outage from the rest of the city. This created an even larger power outage, but from a purely strategic point of view, any looting or riots would actually divert attention away from us, and the worst of them wouldn’t start until the sun went down.

And then things stopped going to plan.

There really was a second Reader X in that tower—our John Dee—and despite our efforts to be subtle, his imagination kicked in soon after the last Turn Away charm was placed. It got foggy around the tower, real foggy and real quick. In fact, it wasn’t fog so much as a descending cloud, and any plans of sending in a lone assassin through the sewer tunnels and up the air ducts went out the window, as did any backup plans of dropping knights onto the top of the tower via helicopter. Our ersatz John Dee could have walked out of the building with the book and gone past a knight four feet away without being seen.

But he didn’t. Knights and werewolves rushed out to form a ring around the tower the way peasant fiefdoms used to form giant rings to trap woodland creatures on hunt days. The guards came out of cars, out of shops, out of sewers, off sidewalks, out of alleys, and they didn’t draw their weapons until they were inside the boundary of the Turn Away wards. Some of them were dressed in full field armor, some of them as pedestrians, and more knights began driving toward the area from outlying posts.

Then things got ugly. Something very large materialized in that unnaturally dense fog. If I had to guess, it was the kind of large that went fee fi fo fum and smelled the blood of Englishmen. Whatever it was kicked one knight like a soccer ball, stepped on another, and uprooted a small tree planted in the pavilion to use like a club.

The giant was practically invisible in the fog. Its skin was horny and thick, its muscles were dense, and its bones were harder than any human’s in order to support that much weight. The giant took hits from a lot of bullets, but it was going to take lots of armor-piercing ammo chewing away at one spot or something explosive to take it down, and the knights were too disciplined to fire blindly when stray shots might hit surrounding buildings outside the Turn Away ward.

It was on.