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“Now, Mr. Albrecht,” she said, her eyes hard. “I can’t hold this for long. Act now.”
And so I did. I sprang away from her, diving directly for Quilliam, my heart pounding, blood racing through my temples as the books encircling him began to resume their orbit in slow motion, pages fluttering and flapping. Rani’s magic was wearing out. I brought my sword down in seven slashes, cutting every one of Quill’s tomes in half as I struck. It made me wince, knowing how some of those books must have been so rare and valuable – but better than all of us going out in a glorious fireball.
Florian could handle himself, that much I knew. Skirnir might have been a god, but he was weakened, lacking influence in the modern world. And Wyatt – damn, poor Wyatt was a blubbering mess, the tears frozen on the end of his nose only just starting to trickle as time remembered its purpose. No, my priority had to be the Cube colossus. Kill that thing, or at least disable it, and we could focus our energies and attention on severing Loki’s connection to his precious stolen relics.
My sword fell from my hand, my arms aching from the fight, from the short burst of exertion it took for me to ruin Quill’s bookish battle strategy. I winced from a sudden twinge of pain. The wound from the blast Skirnir fired into my torso with Gambanteinn had healed over well enough, but it had picked a prime time to start aching again, maybe from the strain. My hand went over it, rubbing uselessly. God, that bolt of magic had felt like a cannonball slamming into my chest.
Huh. A cannonball.
“Then improvise,” Raziel had told me, all the way back in Artemis’s domicile. “You cannonball them right back.”
I looked up at the colossus. Could I even come close to injuring the thing? I had to believe that inflicting enough damage on the monstrosity would cause it to collapse back into its parts, if not destroy it utterly. The Cubes individually had clambered on top of each other, interlacing, interlocking into a single organism. So if I applied pressure at its center, just enough power to break those connections apart –
“Mr. Albrecht,” Rani shouted. “The stasis is failing.”
The Cube golem’s fist was moving through the air again, slowly, surely, as it aimed its massive knuckles directly for Sterling’s face.
“Fuck it,” I muttered under my breath. I parted my arms and reached in front of me, spreading my fingers, envisioning, uh – God, what did those things even look like? A long pipe, I guess, tapering at one end, with a place on the other for the fuse. Did I even have any matches? How was I supposed to spark the fire?
These doubts and more filled my mind as I thought about how absolutely ridiculous it was to come up with such a cartoonish solution to our problems. But even as I scoffed and grumbled inside my head, even with my eyes closed, I could detect the barest gleam of light and the telltale warmth of divine magic radiating from my palms.
No. It couldn’t be.
My eyes flew open, and there it was: a thick cannon, as long as I was tall, pointed directly at the colossus. My mouth moved on its own as I muttered in disbelief.
“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. Or done.” But it made sense, a little bit. I could be a loose cannon myself, too reckless, too gung-ho. It felt appropriate.
“Mr. Albrecht. The field.” Rani’s voice was more strained than ever. “Get on with it, you stupid bastard.”
Well. I wasn’t quite expecting her to go full expletive on me, but okay, understandable. I patted at myself, horribly aware of how unprepared I was, wondering if I should have ex nihilo created a machine gun turret instead – then briefly wondering if that was even possible – when I remembered that we had a smaller, less dangerous source of fire than Quilliam J. Abernathy’s fingers.
I sprinted over to Sterling’s side, reaching into his jeans pocket. His eyes swiveled slowly down as I did, his body breaking out of the time field. The look he gave me was halfway between “What the fuck are you doing?” and “A little to the left.” I grimaced, but closed my fingers triumphantly around the metal lighter in his pocket.
My hands trembled as I fumbled with the lighter on the way back to the thing I’d created out of thin air. I still hadn’t decided if I’d made it myself, or if heaven actually had its own storehouse of cannons somewhere in its armories. Flick, flick, and finally a flame held steady on the lighter’s wick. I lowered it to the cannon to light the fuse, ran like hell, then crouched behind a crate, eager to witness the fruits of my labor.
The cannon exploded with an ever-loving kaboom, a quick gout of celestial smoke and gunpowder issuing from its mouth as its payload rocketed out in a thunderous crash. Even the cannonball was gold, gleaming like a perfect metallic marble as it spun and bulleted straight for the center of the Cube creature’s body.
And the cannonball struck true. A wet, squelching noise I can only correctly describe as “splorch” filled the warehouse, along with the Cube golem’s innards as black goo exploded from its torso, spattering the walls, the crates, the pallets – and naturally, most of Sterling’s face and body. He yowled in revulsion as Maharani’s time magic wore off, but that wasn’t the only scream filling the building.
Far at the other end of the warehouse, Loki was standing on tip toes, his fists balled as he yelled “My babies!” at the quickly collapsing and disassembling tower of gelatinous Cubes. His frost giants shook their heads solemnly. I caught two exchanging dollar bills, fulfilling the terms of a bet.
The thud of knuckles on bone cracked as Skirnir and Florian beat on each other in an exchange of blows that was really just an extended standstill. Wyatt sniffled and groaned as he tugged in vain on his beloved Mistleteinn.
But the greatest cry of frustration came, of course, from Quilliam J. Abernathy himself. His eyes were huge as they flitted between the disintegrating Cube monster, the cannon, and my face.
“No! But how?” Quilliam wrenched at his hair, his face wrinkled with dismay. “How is this possible?”
I shrugged. “You’re not the only one who’s good at magic around here.” Hey, I knew I got lucky with the whole cannon thing – still stupid – but he didn’t need to know that. And then I added, for good measure: “You huge dork.”
“You’re going to pay for this, Albrecht. Ignis grandia – ”
Somehow, in his anger, Quilliam hadn’t noticed that his books were no longer spinning in an axis around him. With his foci gone, and with nowhere to channel such a massive concentration of his magic, his spell sputtered – then backfired. Clothes, skin, hair, all went up in flames. Quilliam screamed.
The cannon at my side disappeared, and again I reached out to the Vestments. A sword. I just needed to run him through while he was on fire, and that would be one less problem to deal with, forever.
But even through the flames, Quill’s eyes focused on my face with an infernal hatred. I dashed towards him, my hand prepared to accept the blade from the Vestments, but he backed away. Quil
l spun in a circle, going faster and faster like a whirling dervish, until he vanished.
