“Now... what the fuck?”
Gwen pointed at the man, who sat on a bunk, bound and gagged.
“Remember when I told you how some freaks stabbed me about a month ago? Well, this is the guy that did the actual stabbing. We're going to question him and find out who else was involved. Then... well, what happens then depends on what his answers are, I guess...” She planned to kill him herself, which worried her a lot, having never actually killed anyone before. It wasn't that she had cold feet about the death, that pretty much just had to happen, regardless of how. She just didn't know exactly how to kill someone cleanly. Hack them to death or shoot them, sure, but simply execute? That had only lightly been touched on in any of her martial arts classes and then only behind closed doors. In most of her classes she'd been a bit of a second string student, because of her looks. A few of the instructors seemed to intuitively understand her situation and gave her extra lessons and information, getting that she, of all their pupils, would probably have to use what they taught. Simply killing a person hadn't been in those sessions. Not stripped from defending yourself at the same time.
Since he could use magic to mesmerize a person, if he could talk, they had to leave the gag on him. Given Beth's abilities, that turned out to not be a big problem. When he tried to block Beth out, Gloria jumped forward and hit him in the head suddenly with her open palm, then asked the question again, during the distraction.
“Who organized the sacrifices?” She yelled, inches from his face. The action surprised Gwen, but she watched the older woman and picked up the basic idea. No one could concentrate that well if suddenly hurt. A master of mind control might manage it for a while, but enough sudden and changing kinds of input would force them into having lapses that someone like Beth could use.
They had to do this over and over again, beating the man to keep him off balance, never really hurting him, just distracting him enough for Beth to pick up his immediate responses. Finally they got an answer though. Gwen couldn't believe it, but Beth assured her that it wasn't a mistake.
“Debussey? As in our Doctor Debussey? Erin? The one that helped us disable their teleportation devices? What the fuck! That can't be right, is he trying to use some Jedi mind trick to throw us off or something? Debussey helped finger the guy!” Gwen blurted, causing everyone in the room, including Mathews to give her a funny look.
“I mean, is he trying to trick us, to throw us off the real trail or something?” She added this in her fake accent, trying to cover her slip.
He shook his head, more than a bit sadly, followed by Bethany a moment later.
“He's disciplined and has magic of his own, but he can't hide something like that, not while being hit repeatedly. No one could really. Not and still be sane anyway – which he is. He just really believes that these sacrifices are worth it to open the communications to the old gods or whatever they are. As if that kind of information would be useful to the average person or even an academic... I don't know what convinced him, but he believes it. Now... I need to go back in his head and get the rest of the names.”
Gwen sat in shock for a second.
Debussey? Well, she had volunteered to help, and wanted to meet her, but that all made sense, didn't it? After all, Gwen would be interesting to her, both magically and psychologically, right? How many times did you get to meet someone that had been ripped from another world? Hadn't she been around when Beth had been in telepathic mode at least once?
The Westmorland grimaced and turned her palms up.
“If I was too focused on someone else, I may not have gotten what she was thinking, not if she took pains to hide it. We'll have to have a talk to her, when we get back. If she hasn't already taken off.”
Baron Mathews just gave them what names he knew after that, since they'd already gotten a few of them and he didn't know they had them, they were able to tell that he simply told the truth. After a few hours of this, they knew everything he did about the sacrifices. Who'd been involved, and why they'd done it.
On the last name they got, he gave up, but Beth and Gloria winced, then looked shocked and possibly horrified. It meant nothing to Gwen in particular.
“Who's that, Scott Phillips? Is he related to Jonathon Phillips? ” Gwen asked, making Gloria stare at her again, as if she had just asked who Jesus was or something. Bethany just answered without inflection.
“He's the Duke of Aubry. I don't know about Jonathon, we'll have to check that. It does sound rather too coincidental to be happenstance. Even if he's the only one at that level involved in this... It makes everything much harder to deal with. I'll have to get some of my relatives on this and take it through back channels. For now, both of you just forget you heard anything about it, understood?” Beth's voice had gone cold, almost brittle.
Gloria nodded.
It amazed Gwen that she'd been living here for a little over a month and didn't know that they had dukes and stuff. She'd just assumed that their political system would be similar to the way it was back home, a democratic republic, with voting and all. Maybe the women wouldn't have voting rights yet, which she'd guessed based on how they all dressed, not any real information, but still similar. She shrugged. Whatever worked, she figured. Her concerns were about the matter at hand.
“We need to deal with Baron here. Any suggestions?”
Both Gloria and Beth had some and both ended with the man going over the side of the deck at five thousand feet over the ocean. The only thing that differed turned out to be how dead he would be when going over the side. After a minute of debate, Gwen broke in, her voice making the other arguments stop suddenly.
“We kill him first. Drowning is a horrible way to die for one thing, and even if he's a killer, he at least didn't torture his victims first. No need to do it to him. But I want to see he's dead before he hits the water with my own eyes. No last second telepor... teletransporting or levitation or anything like that. I don't want him showing up in three months looking for vengeance or anything.”
They took him to the third deck, the one that wrapped around the airship, it was still dark out and Gloria asked them to wait while she got some things. She came back with a large waterproof canvas tarp, and Groundling. Before either of them could protest, the man sized the situation up and simply started laying the tarp out on the hardwood, he didn't ask questions or even look at anyone in particular.
Then he walked the old man to the center of the tarp and stomped on the back of his right knee, hard, making him kneel with a thump.
The voice that came out of him sounded dead, without inflection or mercy.
“If you don't want to see him die, I suggest you look away now.”
He waited a beat, Beth and Gloria both closed their eyes, and Gloria covered her ears with her hands but Gwen swallowed, hoped she wouldn't get sick over this, and nodded to him.
“Take the head all the way off please. I need... I have to make sure he's all the way dead.”
The movements were fast and practiced, a knife appeared in Groundling's hand and he killed the older man with a single stroke, then with about a minute's work he took the head all the way off. He held it up by the hair briefly, showing it to her, waiting for her to nod that she was satisfied, then tucked the head under the dead man's right arm.
The whole thing felt surreal to Gwen, but not that much blood came out, for a beheading, and Mathews hadn't screamed in terror or tried to beg for his life at the end, since they'd left the gag in. He just looked sad about the whole thing. Probably because the link to all that information wouldn't be coming now, rather than his own death. Bethany had said that he was sane, several times in fact, but how could a person justify murder like that if he was really sane?
Then again, as cool as Bethany was, she may not know what counted as sane or not clinically speaking. That the guy wasn't, hadn't been, a schizophrenic was clear to Gwen. That wasn't the only kind of crazy possible though. Maybe he was just delusional? Well, clearly he was that, mentally coherent or not. Elder gods as pets... Yeah, that was sane.
Then they wrapped the body in the tarp, Groundling surprised when Gwen helped him roll the body up and throw it over the side. He looked at her strangely for a while, both Beth and Gloria still stood with their eyes closed. She felt she owed the man an answer, since she wouldn't have been able to kill the old man like that. Not to execute him. Not as well as it had been done. In a fight? Sure. Tied up and put on his knees? She didn't think so. Ultimately the decision had been hers, so it was her that killed him, even if Groundling had done the work, but the skill made a difference in the end.
“He was a killer and tried to kill me personally. Knife to the chest. I can show you the scar if you need, later. He even confessed before and escaped... This had to be done. It was the right thing to do. Again if you need to know, I can get the evidence for you that proves it. Thank you.”
Looking amazed, he shook his head and his normal smile came back.
“Three wars, forty-two executions, and only one person ever bothered to explain why, much less thank me for it. Probably just as well, I doubt most of them had as good a reason. Heh. Oh, it's safe to look now,” he added for the other two. Beth jostled Gloria to let her know it was over, her hands still being in place to block sound.
They all looked out into the night for a minute not saying anything, a moment of silence Gwen guessed, instead of prayers for the dead. Then Groundling asked if he'd be needed anymore, figuring he still had nearly four hours of sleep left, if he could get it.
Beth went off to set up Debussy's capture, using the Peregrine's telestator, leaving Gwen and Gloria standing on the deck together. The bigger woman moved over to her and patted her on the back.
“Revenge... It doesn't make things better, not really.” This came out quietly from the Engineer.
Gwen smiled and raised her eyebrows. “You know... this wasn't about revenge. He had to be stopped from doing more... I probably could have forgiven him for stabbing me, with just a few more ass-kickings and the knowledge that he understood and would stop. I've had nearly as bad happen to me before and let it go. But, he's killed a lot of people already. If we let him go, he'd just do it again, trying to fulfill his dream or whatever crazy shit he thought him and his group had going on. Groundling surprised me... He always seems so normal, but he didn't blink did he? Not that I'm judging him. I ordered this, the death's on me, not him. I'd have made a mess out of that whole thing if I'd tried it, you know? Thank goodness he was here. I owe him, that's for sure.”
Gloria didn't argue the point, she just nodded and suggested they both get some sleep if they possibly could. Since their next watch came at the same time regardless of how little rest they'd gotten.
“I know, I set the schedule and I'm a hard ass when it comes to that kind of thing. Start letting people have extra over something like this and the next thing you know everyone's lying around drunk, whining because the cots are all in use.”
The next day Gwen and Smitty worked recharging the crystals in the thrusters, since they hadn't been switched out in Paris, due to lack of time. Gloria decided that she'd check each of the steam rockets with them each time, so that Smitty could get an idea of what to look for, as far as worn seals and clogged water lines. This gave the other two something useful to do while Gwen recharged each crystal, something she'd found tiring by the time she'd finished with each of the sixteen by the end of the day.