Free Night & Demons by David Drake Page A

hair with his free hand.
    “Hey!” Howard said. There was a bank of equipment between him and the Stranges. As gracefully as if he’d been practicing all his life, Howard took two running steps, planted his right palm on the rack, and leaped over with his legs swung off to his left side. Even the Thief of Baghdad would be impressed—
    Until the caftan’s billowing hem caught the chassis full of plug-in circuits on top of the rack. As Howard’s legs straightened, the tightening cloth spilled him like a lassoed steer. Strange looked at him without expression.
    Howard sprang up. The torn caftan, bunched now around his ankles, tripped him again.
    Strange lifted Genie’s head, avoiding her attempts to bite him. He poised the curved dagger in his right hand over her throat. Howard grabbed the sides of the rug on which he’d fallen and jerked with all his strength, snatching Strange’s feet out from under him.
    “You . . . !” shouted Strange as he toppled backward. Genie’d tossed her short hair free of his grip, but he didn’t lose the dagger in his other hand. It was underneath when the Wizard of Fast Food hit the concrete.
    The chassis that Howard’d dragged to the floor with him was popping and spluttering, but he wasn’t prepared for the flash of violet light that filled the interior of the lab. It was so intense that Howard only vaguely noticed the accompanying thunderclap. He heard Wally cry out and turned.
    Wally wasn’t there. His clothing, from brown shoes to the pair of reading glasses he wore tilted up on his forehead, lay in the middle of the hexagram. The hundred and twenty-three pounds of Wally Popple had vanished.
    Except for an image in the mica window.
    Howard lifted Genie before he remembered that her stepfather and the dagger might be of more immediate concern. He looked back.
    He’d been right the first time. Strange’s face was turned toward Howard. He looked absolutely furious. He’d managed to thrash into a prone position while dying, but the silver hilt projecting from the middle of his back showed that dying was certainly what he’d done.
    The transformer on the far left of the line shorted out. The one next to it went a heartbeat later, and when the third failed it showered the room with blobs of flaming tar. One of them slapped the mica window, and shattered it like a bomb.
    “Can you please untie me, Howard?” asked the girl in his arms. “Though the way things are starting to happen in here, maybe that could wait till we’re outside.”
    “Right!” said Howard. “Right!”
    He paused to shrug off what was left of the caftan; it had started to burn as well. Somehow he couldn’t get concerned about what the guards thought of him now.

    Because he and Genie were going to be gone for at least three weeks and a fourth besides if the Chinese authorities agreed to open Tibet to Strangeco—which they would; Howard Jones wasn’t called the Swashbuckler of Fast Food for nothing—Howard stopped by the mansion’s former garage for a moment. He liked to, well, keep an eye on how things were going.
    He’d had the big room cleaned and nearly emptied immediately after the wedding, but he still smelled the bitterness of burned insulation. He supposed it was mostly in his mind by now.
    Genie’d wanted to tear the garage down completely since it held nothing but bad memories for her, but she’d agreed to let Howard keep the room so long as he’d had the door into her old suite welded shut. She wasn’t the sort of girl to object to the whim of the man who’d saved her life; besides, she loved her husband.
    Howard went to the skeletal apparatus on the one rack remaining in the room. Three hair-fine filaments were still attached to the top edge of a piece of mica no bigger than a quarter.
    Howard bent to peer into it. If you looked carefully at the right times, you could see images in the mica.
    The focus wandered. Howard hadn’t tried to adjust the apparatus himself or let anybody else