Eddie Mayne Chases a Lead

A hail of aether.  Glass breaking in slow motion. Eddie Mayne rolled through the wreckage and came up firing.

“Fucking cover me!” he shouted, and the small man cowering behind the brick wall winced in terror as he fired a few wan bursts over Eddie's head. 

“You fucking coward!” Eddie noted. 

“Sorry!”  The apology ended with a wet grunt as the man's head was neatly destroyed by a pulse.

“Shit!”  Eddie rolled over to a thing he could hide behind and hid behind it.  It turned out to be an easily vaporized bit of wood, which was easily vaporized a second later, leaving Eddie exposed.  A pulse burst way too close for comfort, and Eddie rolled toward a thing in the corner that looked like a good thing to crouch near, and crouched near it.  He was able to pull off a few pulses of his own, and a satisfying squeal of pain told him his aim had been true.  The firing stopped.  Eddie caught his breath for a second and assessed the situation.  He'd been grazed by one pulse, leaving a nasty burn line along one of his arms, but otherwise he was unharmed.

His antagonist, a four foot tall dwarf named Simon, rolled in a ball of pain five feet away, his gun and the hand he'd been holding it in lying in a bloody puddle nearby. 

“Now that was an extremely dumb move, wasn't it, Simon?”

Simon's response was a gurgling noise, which roughly translated as “Owwww you shot my hand off” in a dialect of eastern Dwarfish more commonly known as Flugh.

“Yes I did, but you know why I did, right?  You know why I had to shoot your hand off?”

“Mmmmgggrrrrrr,” Simon pointed out. 

“You were a naughty boy, Simon,” said Eddie.  “A very naughty boy.”

“Nnnnnnnnghhh,” Simon argued.

“There's no sense trying to explain yourself.  You're going to bleed to death in a second, and you should probably know why.”

The ragged stump at the end of the dwarf's arm pumped more blood into a growing puddle on the concrete floor of the warehouse.  Simon gurgled.

“You've been leaking state secrets to the Gray Sisterhood, haven't you?”

“Snnnnnrrrrfffgggrrrh,” Simon complained.

“Yes, you have.  And that's not something you should be doing, is it?”

The dwarf’s eyelids fluttered and then closed.  Eddie tsked his tongue.  He bent down and felt for a pulse. Feeling none, he stood back up.    

“Are you quite finished, sir?”  It was Eddie's valet, a thin gray man called Garreth, who had been waiting patiently with Eddie’s Flear while Eddie dealt with this particular unpleasantness. 

“Yeah.” 

Eddie took a deep breath and walked to the black Flear, the contacts glowing green as they repelled away from the aethically charged surface of the road.  He drew a rectangle in the air and imbued it with a mirror, checking his face for injuries he might not have noticed.  A minor scratch on one cheek from some flying debris, but he appeared to be otherwise unharmed.  Although, staring at himself like this, he was as usual reminded of his own mortality, wondering where the salt in his sideburns had come from, the dark streaks under his blue eyes, and was his black hair actually running away from his already high forehead?

He winced.  Yeah, he wasn’t a kid anymore – there were teenagers between himself and the teenager he once was. 

He folded himself into the comfortable luxury of the Flear and signaled Garreth to drive north, toward headquarters. The Flear slid away on a pocket of air. 

“He knew better, didn't he?”

“Yes, sir,” said Garreth.

“God damn son of a grinth.  Now I've got to get back to the High Mage himself and report that I killed Simon.  That bugger won't be happy.  He'll blame me for all of this.”

“That is an unfortunate outcome,” said Garreth.

“Yeah it is,” said Eddie. 

He pulled out his Scroll, unrolling the flexiglass screen and accessing the call function. 

“Call Boron,” he said.

The pulpy face of Hans Boron, Eddie’s immediate supervisor in the Internal Intelligence and Information Agency of Chelandia, appeared on the screen.

“Hans, need a cleanup crew at the warehouse.”

“What happened?”

“Bunk’s dead, and so’s that useless Gumphrey you sent me with.”

“Damn.”

“I’ll have a full report, but believe me when I say it was unavoidable.”

“All right, well, good luck with Pertucken.  All honor and all that.”

Eddie disconnected the call and pressed the button to roll up the flexiglass screen.

The central core of the City-State of Chelandia slid past the Flear’s windows, a narrow quiver of impossible skyscrapers poking arrow holes into the sky, glittering virescent in the twilight.  At the fringes of the downtown core, the eastern edge of the Goshen Mountains framed the Peak of Thrall, that mountain fortress built a thousand years ago by a secret order of mages, now preserved as a historical site.

The Gray Sisterhood had been causing him no end of trouble, and had made precarious Eddie’s position as top Agent at Intelligence.  

The fact that they’d managed to recruit Simon worried Eddie most of all.  Simon had been a decent agent - for a dwarf, anyway - and Eddie had never suspected anything was happening with him.  Nobody did, until they’d traced some communications from Simon’s Scroll back to a known associate of the Gray Sisterhood.  After that it had been a simple matter to connect the dots and figure out the dwarf was doing double agent duty. 

Ahead, the complex of slim buildings that made up the Magehood Center loomed like teeth, sharp and inevitable.  The Flear headed toward the High Mage's audience chambers.