Thursday, June 21st, 2012
Della
opens the doorway to the trophy room, nodding to the two bloodkin standing
guard. They regard her disinterestedly;
along with the stables and the dojo, the trophy room has become part of her
nightly routine.
She
walks through the windowless tangle of climate-controlled halls, housing all
manner of trinkets that look like they belong in a museum. Here is a painting, here a sword; there a
book, there a pendant; a scroll under glass, made delicate by age; a device of
unknown purpose, corroded almost to dust.
Unlike a museum, there are no explanatory placards declaring the name
and origin of each item to all passersby – Della can only guess at what was
acquired when, to say nothing of the how of the matter. That would have to wait for another
conversation with Thomas, some other night.
Her
first time in the trophy room, just a few nights ago, Thomas had walked her
through to the central chamber without a word.
Her senses had sharpened – yes, sharpened
was the word, as though ground against a whetstone until keen and raw. Her reflexes had quickened, not smoothly and
all at once, but in fits and starts, a macabre echo of puberty. One night in the dojo, it came to a
head: Della was restless, anxious,
itching for some action as she had been just a few nights earlier, but not even
an “advanced” lesson from Jamie could calm her down. Jamie saw it, then, in Della’s eyes – Della
had been feeling it all night, but Jamie already had a name for it:
“Ahh,”
she’d said, “You need to hunt.”
“Hmph. You should ask Thomas about magic one night,”
Jamie replied. “This is just biology.”
And
so she had, when the Elder had had a free moment to spare. He
brought her up to the trophy room, the very top floor of the building,
silent the whole way. He walked her
briskly through the tangled halls, heedless of the wonders that raced off from
every intersection, arriving at last at a large and vaguely cross-shaped
chamber at the center of the floor.
There
were but three items on display in this room, each upon its own pedestal
beneath a skylight that let the waning crescent moon shine meekly in. At Della’s left, there was a simple
sword: a longsword, simple in its
construction but showing the telltale signs of much use. The steel cross-guard was battered, the
pommel ‘s decoration worn nearly smooth, the blade stained and chipped from
forte to foible in a testament to battles beyond counting. The leather grip, worn and aged, matched the
scabbard displayed beneath.
To
the right was a medium-sized wooden box, not quite a chest, covered with
intricate carvings worn nearly smooth from age and handling. The carvings were a pattern, not a picture,
but Della felt as though she could trace those knots for hours without coming
back to where she’d started.
The
center pedestal held an hourglass in a simple three-legged stand. It alone in this room was under glass, and
Della saw many keyholes recessed into the pedestal beneath. She stooped to examine the hourglass at its
own level, careful not to smudge her nose upon the glass but otherwise getting
as close as she could. White grains of
sand fell like snow from the top, while black grains rose like ash from the
bottom, twisting and billowing among each other as they passed. Now it was a cloud, now a tornado, now a
wave; the endless swirling of the sands was hypnotic.
“So
you want to know about magic,” Thomas asked.
“There you can see a fair bit of it on display.” He let her gawk a few moments more before
continuing. “Can you see what is magical
about it?”
“Well,”
Della said, wanting to state the obvious but fearing she was missing something,
“For one thing, the black sand goes up.
That seems magical. For another
thing, the sand never piles up anywhere – it just keeps going from one end to
the other.”
“Look
closer.”
“Ah,
there’s a – a mirror at the bottom. One
at the top, too. So they – hmm…” Della squinted, focused all her attention,
tried to watch the individual grains as they ran into the – no, it couldn’t be. And yet, there it was – disbelief held her
rapt for a long moment, then she found her words again. “So a white grain falls down, it touches the
mirror, then it turns into a black grain and starts floating up. And then – yeah, at the top, the reverse
happens.” She stood, looked back at
Thomas, screwed up her face in confusion.
“How does it do that?”
“How
should I know,” Thomas asked with a
shrug. “You wanted to see
magic. There it is. Now you ask me for an explanation? Explanations must invoke mechanisms. Mechanisms imply replicable results. Replicable results are the stuff of
science.” The condescending tone in his
voice was unmistakable, but there was a challenge beneath it.
“But
it has to work somehow,” Della
protested.
“Does
it, now?” Thomas arched an eyebrow.
“Well,
yeah,” Della exclaimed, grasping at straws.
“Otherwise – if it worked a different way, it wouldn’t work this way, and if it worked no particular way, then it wouldn’t be
so – so – so regular about it all!”
Della looked back at the hourglass, then back at Thomas, flustered. “It is
always like this, right?”
Thomas
nodded. “For at least the last several
hundred years. Every moment we’ve cared
to look at it.”
Della
looked back at the hourglass, trying to divine some new insight. After some seconds, Thomas sighed.
“You
have the long and the short of it,” he said at last, “It has to work somehow.
It works one way, and not any other way. Yet it does so by mechanisms we cannot
comprehend. And so we call it
‘magic.’ But this is really a misnomer,
isn’t it? For it was made, and it was
made by someone who clearly did
comprehend the mechanisms behind its function.
And so, for this unnamed maker, it was no magic, but technology: a known principle, exploited to some
purpose.”
“And
what purpose would that be,” Della asked, her eyes fixed on the mirrors at the
hourglass’ bulbs.
“As
far as we can tell,” Thomas said with a sigh, “To look pretty.”
The
conversation had wound down from there, with talk of Clarke’s third law and the
naturalization of the supernatural.
“Magic,” on Thomas’ view, was simply a covert way of saying, “I give up
trying to understand this.” Della would
not give up, and so she came to the trophy room every night since, trying to
divine some hidden truth that had previously eluded her. She took a different route each time, walking
a unique approach through the various oddments collected throughout the ages,
but always wound up staring at the Sandstorm Hourglass.
Tonight,
the moon is a waxing crescent, the same thin sliver it was just four nights
ago, but mirrored like the grains in the hourglass. The gentle spotlights from the winding halls
are blocked out by the doors at the end of the four corridors leading out of
this central chamber; Della’s vision, keen as it is, is reduced almost to black
and white. The sky is clear, though, and
the stark contrast accentuates the glint of the blade, the shadows on the box,
the grains of sand in the hourglass, the shadow passing above her –
Della
instinctively darts for the shadow of the hallway. She can feel her heart pounding in her chest
– she can hear it, coursing through
her ears – there it is again, in her
abdomen, the rhythmic thump-thump
threatening to burst through her skin.
She looks up at the skylight: no,
her eyes were not playing tricks on
her – there’s someone there. Someone
feeling at the glass. Della can see the
tiny detectors near the corners of the skylight panes, even from a dozen-odd
yards below.
The
intruder – female, shoulder-length black hair, white blouse and a black choker
– reaches for the detector on the pane.
Something in her hand arcs – no, in the split-second before she is
flash-blinded, Della can see there was nothing in the intruder’s hand. The smell of burnt circuitry and ionized gas
descends from on high. Della watches as
the intruder lays her hands over the glass, pushes, and – her fingertips reach through the glass. She pulls at it, molding it; the moonlight
distorts into ripples through the now-pliant glass, and Della can smell the
warm city air wafting in from the expanding hole in the skylight. A knotted rope, not much thicker than Della’s
thumb, drops down through the hole; the intruder soon follows, in jeans with a
black bag over one shoulder. Della can
smell her: dust, roses, something
citrus-y that Della can’t quite place.
She
can’t hear her heartbeat, though.
It’s
something that Della had grown used to:
being able to hear a cacophony of heartbeats underscoring a roiling din
of conversation. Now, in the
near-silence, the only heartbeat Della hears is her own. Jamie said something about being able to
quiet one’s heartbeat, though – a nifty trick, though she hadn’t taught it to
Della yet. Now the intruder is pawing at
the casing over the Sandstorm Hourglass, pulling it back in ripples and
gobs. If she doesn’t do something –
“I
can’t let you take that.” Della steps
out from the shadows, summoning all the presence she can muster. The intruder turns on her heel, her athletic
shoes making a slight squeak on the
polished hardwood floor. In the second
she takes to size Della up, Della sees her face clearly: a young face, but worn; her skin is pale and
waxy in the moonlight; her cheeks are hollow, but not with hunger. There’s a placid emptiness behind her
startled eyes; then, recognition.
“You
again,” the intruder says after a moment.
Now Della takes another turn at being startled.
“I’ve
never seen you before in my life.”
“Ah,
but I have most certainly seen you,” the intruder replies, now at ease. “And now I am seeing double.” She glances pointedly over Della’s
shoulder. Della turns, quickly; nothing
is there – she turns back, and the intruder is reaching for the hourglass
again.
“Hey!” Della reaches for her left shoulder – the
intruder swings her arm around in a circle, breaking Della’s grasp, but takes a
step back anyway, to Della’s right. “I
said, I can’t let you take that.”
“Then
it seems we are at an impasse.” The
intruder shrugs. They regard each other
for a moment. Della is positively itching for a fight, but she can’t read
anything from the intruder’s stance.
She’s just… standing there, just out of reach. “You can run and fetch your dogs, but I will
be gone. Or I could try again for your
trinket, but you would strike. So. Here we are.”
Yes, Della thinks, Here we are. She drops into
a combat stance. The intruder takes
another half-step back, tosses her empty bag at the foot of the hourglass’
pedestal. Della circles to her right,
around toward the wooden box, trying to pin her quarry between pedestals. The intruder stands, fecklessly upright, only
her eyes following Della. Della keeps
her distance, hoping she can out-bluff her opponent’s nonchalance –
It
doesn’t work. Right as Della would
achieve a position of advantage, the intruder smoothly steps wide away from
her, arcing toward the sword. Uh-oh.
But she makes no move to grab it.
She just – stands there,
looking imperious and unassailable. Her heartbeat. Of course.
Gotta minimize that activity.
Can’t give away a heartbeat.
Della focuses, formulates a plan of attack. “No plan survives contact with the enemy,”
Jamie told her a few nights ago in the dojo.
Nevertheless, any plan was better than no plan at all – Della thinks three
moves deep, then moves in: a right feint
to the jaw.
As
expected, the intruder dodges ever so slightly – a half-step to her right, a
drop of her center of gravity. Della
follows up with a left jab, again at her opponent’s jaw – the intruder shifts
her weight, brings her own left hand up to deflect the blow. But she is slow, slower than Jamie during
practice – Della easily slips her right hand back in, her fingertips aligned to
deliver a pinpoint strike in the hollow of her opponent’s armpit.
She
doesn’t see it coming at all – Della connects, the intruder staggers – Della lunges
past her, grabs the longsword from its stand.
She has no formal training with weapons, but she imagines it as an
extension of her arm, swings it around to get a sense of its weight, then
balances it as she would her own fist, had it been extended a yard. Her stance is dropped comfortably back,
though her opponent has recovered and now faces her.
The
intruder gives nothing away, though: a
smile, a nod, a half-heard “hmph.”
Still, Della is satisfied – not first blood, but maybe first contact. And now she has the advantage of a weapon.
Three steps ahead worked last time, let’s
try five this time. Della bobs
about, watches her opponent’s gaze, then moves in – a feint with the tip of the
blade toward the intruder’s eyes. She
peels away to Della’s right, away from the hourglass; good. Withdrawing the blade, Della telegraphs a
haymaker with her left hand; as the intruder raises her right for the obvious
block, Della withdraws again, a left roundhouse kick already on its way. The intruder’s left forearm comes up to
block, even as her right elbow comes down – Della pulls back once more,
twisting just a bit out of stance to deliver a final feint with her left –
No –
no good. The intruder has seen through
the ruse, slams her left palm into Della’s sword arm. The blow connects, sending Della
off-balance. She shakes her head,
readies for another round – but the intruder is upon her, right fist leading
toward Della’s face. A swift, straight
punch – but Della sees it coming, dodges to her own right while she lifts the
tip of her blade toward the intruder’s heart.
No
deflection. It connects.
Della
plants her right foot, raises her center of gravity, and drives the blade
home. A cry – “Augh!” – a heartbeat – thump-thump – There it is! The intruder’s heart beats erratically,
fades, and goes silent once more as she falls to the floor. Della draws out the longsword, flicks the
blade to empty the fuller, wipes it on her jeans and replaces it in its stand.
“I
told you,” she says in triumph. “I can’t
let you take that.”
She
walks out of the room to fetch the guardsmen.
The halls wind before her; she traverses them with easy confidence.
“Hey,”
she says. The guards look up at
her. “Someone tried to break in.” The men look at each other in disbelief, look
back at Della. “Don’t worry, I got
her. C’mon.” The men gather themselves and follow her to
the central chamber of the trophy room.
But
the intruder is no longer there.
“No,
no, no,” Della says, “I stabbed her with that fucking sword. She was just here.”
The intruder
isn’t all that’s gone.
“What
is that awful smell?” Thomas wrinkles
his nose as the elevator opens. He steps
out to the trophy room’s foyer, rage and intrigue practically brimming upon his
face.
“I –
” Della sniffs, recoils at the scent of decay, and looks down at herself. Her jeans.
Of course. The intruder’s blood
stinks to high Heaven, but Della hadn’t noticed it in all the confusion of the
fight. “Look, that’s not important! You need to see this,” she says, turning to
the trophy room. Thomas follows, the
guards in his wake.
“She
came in through there,” Della says, pointing at the wrinkly hole in the
skylight. “She disabled the alarm, and
then just – pulled the glass
apart. I don’t know how. We fought, and I ran her through with the
sword, and then I came to get the guards.
When we came back, she was gone, and so was the Sandstorm Hourglass.”
Thomas
paces across the room, staring at the blood spatter, the skylight, the casing
that until recently held his greatest treasure.
He glances about the room, eyes narrowed.
“And
you were here the whole time,” he asks Della.
“Yes,
I fought her myself!”
“Did
you, really?” He stares at Della. She shrinks under his gaze.
“Yes,
I swear it! I can’t – I don’t know how
else to tell you – I tried to stop her!”
Her desperation is palpable, her honesty unquestionable. Thomas is satisfied. He withdraws.
“Very
well. I believe you.” He shrugs his shoulders and breathes
deeply. “We need to talk to someone
else, now. Come with me, Della.” He starts for the exit, then stops in
consideration. “You two,” he says to the
guards, “Forget the rest of the trophy room.
Stand guard here until we get this fixed.”
On
the way to the garage, Thomas pages Herman and fills him in on the
situation. Glass and sensors need to be
replaced. Extra sentries must be
posted. Thomas rattles off names, Herman
acknowledges. Della follows behind him.
They
walk through the garage, Della a step or two behind. He stops behind a fire-engine-red 1978
Porsche 911 SC. He nods, and gestures to
Della to sit inside the vehicle. The
keys are already in the ignition. Thomas
stomps on the clutch, fires the ignition, slams the Porsche into reverse, and
slides out of the parking space. The
vehicle spirals down a floor and screeches to a halt just short of the kiosk’s
guard lever. The attendant recognizes
Thomas, nods him through, and lifts the lever.
Thomas drives into the night.
“So,”
Della says, “I take it my sequestration is over?” She cocks an eyebrow at her driver.
“Absolutely
not,” he says, popping the clutch and slamming the shifter knob home before
accelerating once more. “But another
concern has superseded it.”
“And
what might that be,” Della asks.
“That
smell,” Thomas says. “It’s not
blood.” Della sniffs again.
“Decay,”
she says. “So this wasn’t a vampire.”
“You
have the right of it,” Thomas says, “But once more, that’s not the whole
picture.” He is intent is upon the task
of driving; still, Della senses a mote of approval sent her way. She takes the bait and tries for more.
“So
someone was able to send a corpse our way,” she says. “That explains why our intruder smelled of
roses and citrus.” Thomas nods, his
mouth curving slightly up at the corner.
“Indeed,”
he says, slaloming between cars in the midnight traffic.
“And
now,” Della guesses, “We’re going to see someone who would have the power to
send such a creature our way.”
Thomas
nods, engine-braking to stop at the red light.
He takes a deep breath, looks crosswise into traffic, and puts the
Porsche into gear as he pops the clutch once more. “Good work.
But we are not visiting an enemy.
Alice is an ally, and we simply have a few questions to ask her. Follow my lead, don’t talk out of turn, and
observe carefully. You may learn a thing
or two.”
Before
Della can respond, their light is green; the Porsche accelerates, slamming
Della against her woolen seat; her shoes dig in to the carpeted mats covering
the floorboards. She takes a moment to
consider, but already they are sliding into a great glass pyramid, slowing to a
stop before a man who looks pleased to park a rare vehicle from a bygone
era. Thomas slides a bill of unknown
value from his coat into the valet’s hand, and takes Della by the fingertips as
they walk into the Luxor.
Hallways
and elevators later, Della is looking at a classy young lady, trying to ignore
the stench emanating from her jeans where she wiped an ancient blade not thirty
minutes before. The young lady taps a
finger against her chin, sizes Thomas up, and speaks:
“So,
Tommy. You here to settle a debt, or dig
yourself deeper?”
Thomas
sighs. “I’m afraid it’s the latter. Unless I’m right.”
Her
eyes go wide. “Oh?” Her chin spins a low half-circle, sending her
eyebrows into a wild arc.
“Did
you send someone to steal my Sandstorm Hourglass?” Thomas stares at Alice, cold and even. She meets his glare, seems to read a layer
deeper, and glances at Della.
“No,”
she says at last. “But your young cohort
is here to set the matter straight, isn’t she?”
Thomas
nods. “Della was present at the theft. It was less than an hour ago. I’d like you to scrye it, if you please.”
Alice
takes a deep breath. “Very well,” she
says after a beat. “But you must
understand – you’ll be thrice indebted to me after this.”
Thomas
nods again. “Believe me, I’ve got
currency to spare.”
Alice
chuckles under her breath. “Very well,”
she says. “Just a moment.”
The
frail woman, all blond hair and blue eyes, tugs briefly at the collar of her
white-on-black paisley blouse as she opens a drawer in her desk. She pulls out a waxy substance, pinches a
quarter-sized ball between her fingers, and rolls it ‘round and ‘round.
“What’s
that,” Della asks Thomas.
“We
call it tallow,” Alice responds. “It’s
the stuff of magic,” she says with a wry grin.
“You
told me,” Della says, folding one leg over another, “That magic was simply
misunderstood technology.” She cocks an
eyebrow at Thomas, doing her best to look condescendingly studious.
“Oh,
it is,” Alice says, sparing her friend an awkward moment. “And you’re about to see a fair deal of
it.” The waxy ball in her hands has
begun glowing, and now it rises from her hand into the air. Alice pulls at the edges, stretches it into
an oval, and ignites a fiery blue halo about it. She slides her chair around her desk, to sit
beside Della and opposite Thomas. “Young
Della, and the Sandstorm Hourglass,” Alice asks. Thomas inclines his head, his expression mute
as a mime.
The
waxy ring fills in, a fly-on-the-wall view of the trophy room’s core
chamber. Shapes and figures resolve into
an over-the-shoulder view of Della as she faced off against the unknown
intruder.
“And
now I am seeing double,” the intruder says, her eyes shooting right at Della
through the scrying window. Before Della
can react, her own apparition says,
“Hey!”
The
phantasmal Della reaches for the intruder’s left shoulder, but she swings her
arm in a wide circle. “I said,” Della’s
shadow says, “I can’t let you take that.”
“Then
it seems we are at an impasse,” the intruder responds with a shrug. They regard each other for a long
moment. “You can run and fetch your
dogs, but I will be gone. Or I could try
again for your trinket, but you would strike.
So. Here we are.”
Della,
Thomas, and Alice watch the fight. They
see Della run the intruder through the heart with the sword, they watch Della
flick the black ichor from the fuller, they observe Della’s departure from what
seems to be a victory. And then they
watch as the intruder rises from the floor, gives a wink to the scrying window,
and pulls the Sandstorm Hourglass from its pedestal.
Then
something very strange happened: a door to the left of the scrying window
opened, and two sets of footsteps ran across the floor. A woman shouted, “Safe passage! We got safe passage!” The intruder smiled and nodded, her head
tracking the footsteps as they passed behind the scrying window, out of view of
Alice and the bloodkin. A door at the
other end of the corridor opened, and the footsteps disappeared as it shut.
The
intruder climbs back up the rope on which she had descended. The rope itself is pulled up less than a
minute later, and then Alice closes the scrying window.
“Well,”
Alice says after a beat. “I can say for
certain that that wasn’t any of ours.”
“How
can you be so sure,” Thomas asks.
“Necromancy
has been forbidden since the setting of the seven seals,” Alice says without
missing a beat. She inclines her head
toward Thomas. “Anyone who would do such
a thing would set off seven different alarms in any of our headquarters. It would be –“ she stammers. “We would have bigger fish to fry than your
tiny little trinket.”
“So
she wasn’t a vampire,” Della interjects in the ensuing silence.
“No,”
Alice says, pulling her chair back around to sit behind her desk. “You fought a revenant. Which is, in a word – worse.”
“How
worse,” Della says, drawing out the syllables with her mounting confusion.
“Worse,”
Alice says, “Like finding out your fever isn’t due to garden variety flu, but
Martian Death Flu.” She cocks her eyes,
unsatisfied with the analogy. “You got
infected in the hospital,” she continues.
“It’s not a regular bug, it’s a super-bug. And now you’re not sure what the prognosis
is.” She stares knowingly at
Thomas. “Now you need a wide-spectrum
antibiotic.”
“But
we don’t know whether it will work or not,” Thomas finishes. He breathes deeply. “We just roll our dice and take our
chances.” Alice smiles grimly and nods,
her point driven home. Della looks
between the two of them.
“But
wait,” Della says after a moment. “I
thought I killed her. But – what’s a
revenant?”
Alice
nods, props her elbows upon her desk, and steeples her fingers in rapid
succession. “A revenant is a reanimated
corpse,” she says at last. “You fought
one. She let you win. You, by rights, should have thought you’d
won. Nevertheless,” Alice shrugs her
shoulders and rolls her eyes, “You got played.”
“And
so she took the hourglass,” Della finishes.
She grits her teeth. “While I
wasn’t looking.”
“That’s
right. So now the question is, what did
she want with it?” Alice looks pointedly
at Thomas.
“Don’t
ask me,” he says with a shrug of deniability.
“I don’t even know what it was for.”
He and Alice regard each other for a moment, then Thomas shakes his
head. “This is all beside the
point. We know that she’s a puppet, but
we need to know who’s pulling the strings.”
Alice
thinks for a moment before responding.
“Well,” she says, “There are two possibilities.” She lets Thomas nod in comprehension before
continuing. “Either one of ours has
worked around the seven seals,” and Alice rolls her eyes to communicate how
seriously she takes that possibility,
“Or someone is working from beyond
the seven seals.” She narrows an eye at
Thomas to let him know how serious this possibility is.
He
takes a deep, deliberate breath before replying.
“Your
alarms have not been triggered,” he says.
“Not
a one,” Alice replies.
“So
that leaves us with the matter of who could work from beyond them.”
Alice
nods. Thomas leans his elbows and
steeples his fingers upon her desk.
“Narrow it down for me,” he says, narrowing his eyes.
Alice’s
eyes glow brightly for a moment, seem to stare beyond Della and Thomas. “There’s not much to narrow it down from,”
she says, her eyes darting along invisible threads. “We’re looking at either a godlike mage, or
the god of death himself.”
“Wait,”
Della says, shaking her head. “You’re
telling me,” she says to Thomas, “That there isn’t just magic that works
however and whyever, but there are also gods who bring zombies into the world
to do their bidding?”
Thomas
and Alice sigh, almost in unison.
“Listen,” Alice says, “You don’t know much of the world. That’s fine.
We’ll give you a crash course in metaphysics, then. The world exists in three planes,” and
Alice’s fingers draw sparkling horizontal lines across Della’s field of
view. “We’ve got the Mortal Coil, where
you and I live,” and the middle line sparkles and swirls. “Then there’s the Ethereal Stream above, and
the Howling Void below.” The other
sparkling lines brighten and darken, respectively.
“Now,”
Alice continues, “You, and I, and rocks and trees, and all living things and
every bit of the world, we all call down the Stream to be what we are.” Tiny sparkles stream down from the upper line
to the middle, what Alice had dubbed the Mortal Coil. “We do the things we do, and that’s that, as
far as it goes.” The sparkles flow down
into the darker line. “There’s waste
energy, though, and that’s claimed by the Void.
It’s the force of entropy, as your physicists tell it: the ‘tax’ on existence.”
Figures
in the illustrative Coil spark and dance about, gesturing hither and yon. “We all call down the Stream in bits and
pieces,” Alice continues, “But some of us are able to call it down more than
others.” One of the Mortal figures
shines blue, and the stream flowing through it shines brighter as it passes
through to the Void. “We are able to
work our will upon the world, but at a price.
Even as we call down the Stream to force our will upon the Mortal Coil,
the Void reaches up and takes a piece out of us.” The shining figure loses a substantial chunk
of its luminosity, and widens its own stream to the Void.
Della
stares in rapt attention.
“Light
shows like this are child’s play,” Alice says, dismissing the apparitions with
a swipe of her hand. “But calling down
material effects, such as, oh, a window on the world –” Alice gestures to the
space where the scrying window once floated, “Or a trade of short-term luck for
long-term fate, these require a bit more… substance.” She absently taps the tallow on her
desk. “The Void can reach up and pull
quite a bit out of us, if we don’t pay close attention.” The light show fades.
A
moment passes.
“So
our hourglass was stolen,” Thomas says, after letting Della digest Alice’s
lesson. “I want to get it back.”
“Well,”
Alice says, tapping her chin, “There are easy ways, and hard ways.” She regards the bloodkin Elder for a
moment. “You’ve already increased your debt by having me scrye the
theft itself. You really ought to look
into video security.”
“We
don’t register on camera,” Thomas says, shaking his head. “You know that.”
“It’s
not for you or your kin,” Alice responds, rolling her eyes. “It’s for situations like this.”
“And
if we’d had video cameras,” Thomas says, rolling his own eyes, “Then our thief
would presumably have disabled them as she disabled the shock detectors on our
safety glass.”
“Fair
point,” Alice says after consideration.
“I’ll talk to Jennie. She’ll
doubtless have someone who can turn you on to another lead.” Thomas eyes her skeptically. “No charge,” Alice says with a wave of her
hand.
“Very
well,” Thomas says through his teeth.
“You know how to get a hold of me for whatever you need.”
Alice
nods. “And for whatever you need,” she says with a wry smile. “Those crazies at the end? Any idea who they were?” Thomas furrows his brow. “No?
All right. I’ll look into it.” She leans back in her chair and steeples her
fingers before her face. “You need
anything else?”
“No,”
Thomas says. “I think we’re done for
now.”
“Righty-o,
then,” Alice says as Thomas and Della walk out of her office.
“So,”
Della says, back in the Porsche. “That
went well.” Thomas sets his jaw. “She seems to be a real asset. Not, like, a liability or anything.”
Thomas
looks Della in the eye as he pops the clutch, waiting to peel out from where
their valet has left the vehicle. “You
will find, if you live long enough,” he says.
Thomas’ limbs jerk furiously, and the Porsche accelerates swift and
smooth into the flow of street traffic.
“That a favor owed to a mage is weighed not by the debt incurred, but by
the knowledge gained.”
No comments:
Post a Comment