Chapter Six

In the beginning, there were thirteen Immortals. The combined efforts of them all were required to craft the earth from the Sea of Stars, and gift unto it its own realm. Back then, cooperation among the Immortals was common.

The Bard Rhennalus,

The 'Histories'


London,

England,

December 14th, 1843

Hans dashed into the street, leaping onto the cobblestones and starting to force his way through the crowd of fleeing citizens. Shoulders and elbows battered his sides as he fought his way through the tide. The building on the other side of the avenue was burning through a sizeable hole in the upstairs, thick gouts of smoke pouring into the cloudy sky. For a moment, he couldn't find Kariena, and then she was beside him, shouting in his ear.

"I see our perp!" She shouted over the din, pointing down the street. Hans glanced after her and saw a man wearing all black hurrying away from the scene of the explosion. "I'll get him!"

Without another word, Kariena broke away and started to sprint after him, disappearing and reappearing in little arcane bursts to get around throngs of people. Hans turned his gaze back to the burning building and shoved his way through the last block of people, finally coming out into the empty space just before it. Although the flames were confined to the second floor for the moment, the heat was still intense, almost overpowering. A lone woman and man stood apart from the crowd, staring up towards the conflagration with panic-stricken faces. Hans turned towards them and shouted over the screaming.

"Is anyone still up there?"

"Yes, our son!" Screamed the woman, voice hysterical. "Will and I panicked when the explosion happened, and we just ran! Somehow, we both forgot –"

Without waiting for her to finish talking, Hans started running towards the building again. He didn't bother opening the door, and instead he phased through it, using his powers to make himself momentarily incorporeal. It still felt odd to him, phasing out for a moment – his body seemed to know that it wasn't supposed to be able to walk through walls, and yet it did anyway. He came into the downstairs of the building, which looked to be a high-end haberdashery. The woman outside and her husband were the owners, far poorer than their clientele, living in the apartments above the shop. They had no reason to be the target of Everdark's violence.

Hans tried not to dwell on that long as he ran for the staircase at the back of the showroom. He took them two at a time, and with each step the air became thicker and darker with smoke. He started to cough as he neared the landing, but he didn't slow down. He ran through the door at the top, which hung open, into a little kitchen. Only one hallway split off from it, but it was thick with smoke and crackling flames. Hans knelt to look under the kitchen table, but there was no one underneath it. The little boy was trapped beyond the fire.

Well, at least I can say that I never get bored at my job, Hans thought to himself as he started throwing open the cupboards in the kitchen, looking for a tablecloth. Finally, he found a big white one in a cabinet with a bunch of fine china that looked unused, and he yanked it out, spilling the glassware to shatter on the floor. Then he tucked it underneath his arm and ran for the wall, phasing through it rather than try his chances with the hallway.

He came into the master bedroom, which was already on fire. The smoke was even heavier, and black, in here, instead of gray. Part of the wall was gone, and Hans could see out it onto the street below. The next room over, then, was probably the one where the explosion had gone off. Hans turned and ran through the wall into the hallway, bursting through the flames into the room on the other side.

This was the kid's bedroom. A smaller bed lay against the other side of the wall, the fires creeping across the floor to reach it. Hans could just see a small boy huddled underneath it, shoulders wracking with coughs.

He charged across the room, leaping over the lip of the flames, and landed beside the bed. He knelt down, coughing into his fist, and shouted to the boy.

"You have to crawl out from underneath there, for me! Come on, I'm going to get you out of here!"

He extended a charred hand. A far smaller one quivered as it reached out and took his, and Hans helped to pull the boy out from underneath the bed. He then set the tablecloth on the ground and started to wrap it around the boy, first once, and then again. Then he lifted the boy up and set him on his shoulder. He would be breathing in the smoke, which meant that Hans was going to have to be fast.

Also, he'd tried to phase through a wall while holding Kariena before, to see if he could pass his powers to other people. She'd hit the wall and stayed there while he went through to the other side. Apparently, his magic didn't work that way. So he was going to have to do this the hard way.

Hans gritted his teeth and charged back through the room, roaring with pain as clothes ignited when he passed through the flame. He twisted the boy away from his body and rammed his shoulder into the door. It gave inwards, and he crashed into the blazing hallway in a shower of splinters. He stumbled, briefly, then regained his balance and ran faster than ever, holding the boy above the line of flames as he leapt through them back into the kitchen.

He kept running, back into the staircase, and then down, gasping with shock when they hit clear air. He kept running, back through the shop and then he rammed his shoulder into the door again, once, twice, three times and it burst outwards, and he collapsed onto the street with the young boy still in his arms.

The parents screamed and ran over, the mother quickly pulling the charred tablecloth from Hans's arms and unwrapping it. Her boy lay trembling in a heap on the cobblestones, his exposed skin pink with burn, but alive. She immediately started to weep and buried her head into the boy's shoulder. Her husband, Will, knelt beside Hans and helped beat the flames out of his trousers.

"Thank you," he said raggedly. "Thank you. I don't know how to –"

"We need to get away from here," Hans said, coughing forcefully. "Burning timbers are going to start falling into the street. We need to get away from here."

Will helped Hans to his feet, and they crossed to the other side of the street, where the crowd of people had stopped, transfixed by the sight of watching the building burn. Hans collapsed onto the curb and patted at himself, amazed to find that his flesh hadn't burned badly. He'd made it.

He started to look around for Kariena, when he heard a scream from the restaurant behind him.

xxx

A few minutes before, Anna knelt behind her table, knocked over onto its side and facing the doorway. She felt very useless, but not particularly frightened. Most of the other people here were scared that the explosion had been a terrorist's attack, and they huddled behind or underneath their tables, waiting for the constables to arrive. Of course, Anna knew that Kariena and Hans were some of the most effective and skilled fighters that she knew. They would be able to keep her from danger. Still, these were exactly the kind of things that made her wonder what right she really had to be empress. It had always felt like a platitude to her, when Elsa said that people with magic were more susceptible to Everdark's control, so it was best to have a nonmagical person lead the empire.

At the end of the day, they would need to fight and kill their enemies to succeed, and those were two things that Anna just couldn't do.

There was a loud bang as the doors to the restaurant were thrown open. Anna gasped and glanced around the edge of her table. Several men walked over the threshold, calm despite the chaos in the street beyond them. The man at the head of the others was old and gaunt, and he carried no weapon, but the others held rifles.

"The empress is in here somewhere, boys," the man said, glancing around with a disinterested look. "Find her."

They immediately began to fan out through the chamber. Anna gasped again and ducked behind the table, wincing and placing a hand over her stomach. It seemed that there was no time like the present to test her belief that Hans and Kariena would be able to beat all the bad guys.

Trying not to panic, Anna started to search her own purse for something that she could use as a weapon as the sound of the soldiers starting to search drifted over to her. Inexplicably, she remembered Odette mentioning that she'd used a heavy hairpin as a weapon before. Anna reached up and pulled out her own, looking down at it and wincing. It was only two inches long, and not particularly thick metal. Maybe she could jam it in to someone's eye.

"Excuse me, brigand! Unhand me!" A posh woman yelled from somewhere startlingly nearby.

Anna glanced around the edge of the table and saw a middle-aged woman struggling against the grip of one of the soldiers as he dragged her out from underneath one of the tables.

"Identify yourself!" He yelled at the terrified woman.

Anna realized that they weren't stealing from anyone. Some of the patrons of this restaurant wore a hundred pounds of jewelry or more, but Everdark's people didn't care. Something about that chilled Anna.

"I am Lady Etienne Malone! Please, I no nothing of the person you seek! Please, let me live!"

The man lost interest in her and moved on, leaving Lady Malone whimpering on the ground. The soldier glanced in Anna's direction, and she ducked behind the table again, heart pounding. Had he seen her? He couldn't possibly know what she looked like if he'd been accosting a forty-year old woman, right?

"Well, hello, beautiful," the man said, stepping around the side of her table and grinning.

Anna clutched the hairpin to her chest and backpedaled against the table, realizing that she had nowhere to go. Her mouth moved but no sound came out, too frightened even to scream.

"Now, don't you go on talking nonstop like that, or I won't be able to get a word in edgewise," the man said, chuckling. He had a thick Cockney accent. His gaze roamed around her greedily, but he came to a stop at her head. Anna reached up towards the thin metal circlet she wore, but it was too late.

"Wait a second," he said, his grin widening. He reached down to grab her. "You're the one we're looking for, aren't you?"

Acting on instinct, Anna leapt up towards him, the pin held straight out between two of her fingers. She rammed the palm of her right hand over the man's eye, and he howled, stumbling backwards and dropping his gun and clutching at his bleeding socket. Instantly, shouting erupted and the other men charged towards her.

Anna panicked, and started to reach for the rifle, wondering if she had the skill to shoot it, but at that moment, the doors opened again, and Hans stepped over the threshold, his clothes charred and ragged.

"Ah, so it was a diversion," Hans said, reaching for his pistols and removing them from their shoulder holsters. "I should have suspected. Clever, of course, but ultimately cleverness is no match for the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time."

Anna peeked around the edge of the table again and saw that the four remaining men had stopped dead. They all looked towards Hans, and the three soldiers with guns had raised them to point at Hans. He looked calm and collected. Even casual, as he primed both of his pistols and raised them both to point at the older man who seemed to be leading them all. The man paled.

Anna was astounded. Why hadn't the soldiers shot Hans as soon as he crossed the threshold? Didn't they know how dangerous he was? It didn't occur to her, of course, that perhaps the reason they weren't shooting at him was precisely because they feared the danger that he posed to them.

"Well, I suppose that we can do this the easy way, or the hard way," he said, voice oozing confidence. "I'm always looking forward to a workout, but of course you men would like to hold on to your lives."

They faltered. They faltered! Anna couldn't believe her eyes. Was he really going to intimidate them into submission through sheer force of will?

But Anna knew that although Hans had once possessed the ability to send bullet awry with magic, he didn't any more. This was an extraordinary gamble – if even one of the men just decided to shoot, it would kill him. And here he was, dancing on a very thin wire, counting on the possibility that these men had only heard rumor of what he could do.

The soldiers glanced towards their leader, but he only seemed to be able to stare at the guns pointed at him. Several seconds stretched past. It felt like an eternity. Then all at once, everything happened. Anna didn't see what set them all off, and she could barely keep track of what was going on once it started, but there was a flurry of gunshots in quick succession. Hans fell into a crouch and his pistols blazed as he fired rapidly, and the wood around him was splintering from bullets, and then Kariena appeared in a burst of light and rammed a knife into the neck of one of the soldiers, taking him down.

Anna clutched at her chest and stared. It had taken no time at all. Seconds, maybe, and they were all dead. Somehow, Hans had made it. He got back to his feet and rolled his shoulders, putting guns back into their holsters and nodding at Kariena.

"Thanks. That was a well-timed arrival."

"No shit," Kariena said, smirking. "He had you! You were as good as gone!"

"Alright, alright," Hans said, placing his hands on his hips. "What happened with the masked fellow? You catch him?"

Kariena frowned. "Well, not exactly…"

"Ah, so it would appear that your chickens have come home to roost," Hans said, walking over and righting one of the tables and a few chairs, then sitting down at it.

"I've never lost someone in New York," Kariena said glumly, stomping over at sitting at the table as well. Anna noticed that there were blood spatters on her face and neck. It wasn't her own blood. "I just don't know this city well enough. I had him until we hit a poorer part of town, with a bunch of alleyways and bolt-holes. Then I figured I'd better come back, to see if you needed any help. Turns out, it was lucky that I did."

Anna slowly crept out from behind the table and walked over, still amazed that their enemies had been dealt with so quickly. The kind of power that these people wielded so casually…

"Ah. Empress. Good to see you alive and well," Hans said, motioning towards one of the seats at the table. She sat, shaken. Hans looked at her for a moment, and his brow furrowed, his voice becoming more serious. "You are well, empress?"

Anna slowly nodded. "Just a little shaken. I haven't had to fight for my life, well… ever, before."

Kariena smiled sympathetically and placed a hand over Anna's. "It probably won't make you feel any better if I tell you that it gets easier, but it does."

Hans was rubbing at his beard. "So are we content that the point of all this was to make a diversion to distract me and you while they try to capture the empress?"

Kariena shook her head. "I figured that they did it to send a message. About how vulnerable the minister is. Maybe they decided to gamble on trying to capture Anna at the same time, but at best it was a side venture. I just think they were trying to spread a little panic."

Hans nodded. "Okay, I'm willing to agree to that."

"So what now?" Anna asked.

"We should go to the minister's house," Hans said. "I'd like to make sure that there hasn't been a similar attack there."

Kariena nodded and bounded back to her feet. "Do you want to stay with us, Anna? It's probably going to be a long, dangerous day. If you like, I could escort you somewhere safer."

Anna tried not to feel affronted by the question. Of course that was the right thing to ask her. Hell, she really didn't want to be part of a warzone, but the question still stung. It sounded as if Kariena expected her to be cowardly.

"No," Anna said. "No, I'm the leader of our empire, and it's important that I meet with the minister myself."

Kariena smiled. "Sounds good. Let's get moving."